Don’t Conform: Going Along to Get Along Will Only Make Matters Worse
Conformity and a “go along to get along” mentality are one of the many reasons we find ourselves in this uneven and dysfunctional season of American life. Of course, it’s propelled by fallen man and sin, but if nobody steps up or speaks out, the abnormal begins to be seen as normal.
It’s an old adage: The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Writing in his diary in 1845, the French writer and politician Victor Hugo chronicled some advice he gave to Abel Francois Villemain, a teacher and fellow French public servant.
“You have enemies?” he asked him, somewhat rhetorically. “Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything which shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats.”
Winston Churchill famously echoed Hugo’s sentiment, once saying, “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
It seems both the Old British Bulldog and the beloved author of Les Misérables ran up against, if for different reasons, the tension many Christians feel in today’s culture.
As believers in Jesus Christ, we strive to maintain a pleasant posture that lives up to the Apostle Paul’s admonition to believers in Rome to “if possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.”
You have to have something of a sadistic or masochistic streak in you to want enemies, but their inevitability seems to be a foregone conclusion for Christians who remain committed to maintaining and living God’s ways in an increasingly secular world.
Charlie Kirk, who heads up Turning Point USA, recently weighed in on his frustration with Christians who stand down when it comes to cultural discussions out of fear of turning off others or appearing intolerant to the world.
“We as Christians are not called to be tolerant,” he said. “We shouldn’t be tolerant of sin. We shouldn’t be tolerant of rebellion from God.”
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The Proof is in the Patterns: How Typology Demonstrates the Trustworthiness of the Bible
One aspect of Scripture that has repeatedly born witness to its reliability, unity, and even its divine authorship is typology—namely, the way that types and shadows, patterns and persons (in their public actions and offices) are repeated and fulfilled throughout the Bible.
In a few weeks, I will be teaching a class on Scripture at my church, followed by teaching Systematic Theology at Indianapolis Theological Seminary. In preparation for those classes, I have begun thinking through many of the facets related to the doctrine of Scripture, especially as it pertains to Scripture’s trustworthiness.
For those who question Scripture and its veracity, they often make claims regarding errors in the manuscripts, discrepancies in the text, or immoral teachings in the Law or Paul. Each of these must be and can be answered by a careful reading of the text. But one aspect of Scripture that has repeatedly born witness to its reliability, unity, and even its divine authorship is typology—namely, the way that types and shadows, patterns and persons (in their public actions and offices) are repeated and fulfilled throughout the Bible.
Most recently, I encountered this in the book of 1–2 Kings, where Solomon is presented as a new Joshua. Previously, I had seen Solomon as a new Adam, but in reading again from Peter Leithart’s commentary on 1 and 2 Kings, I found his observations compelling, in that the author of 1–2 Kings presents Solomon as a new Joshua. Here’s what Leithart observes from 1 Kings 2,
David’s charge to Solomon is one of several key farewell speeches in Scripture (e.g., John 13-17), but the closest analogy is Moses’s speeches to Joshua, Moses encouraged Israel, Joshua especially, to be “strong and courageous” as it entered the land (Deut. 31:1-8), and Yahweh repeated this exhortation (Josh. 1:7-8). David says the same to Solomon. Hence: Moses is to Joshua as David is to Solomon. Solomon is a “new Joshua,” who spends the early part of his reign wiping out the “Canaanites” that remain in David’s kingdom, bringing rest” to the land, and building a sanctuary for Yahweh, recapitulating the sequence of events in Joshua (which climax in Josh. 18:1). Because building the temple completes the conquest, replacing the Canaanite shrines with the house of Yahweh, that project in particular demands a Joshua-like strength, and determination. (p. 36)
So, if Leithart is correct, we should see Solomon as a better David, just as Joshua was a better Moses. Indeed, Joshua fulfilled what Moses began (leading Israel into the Promised Land), and so too Solomon fulfilled what David longed to begin (the building of God’s house). Similarly, 1 Kings 4 shows in Solomon other Joshua-type attributes.
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Asbury Sermon on ‘Therapeutic Self’ Prompts LGBTQ Twitter Rage
The result of these shifts has been the elevation of sexual satisfaction to the apex of our culture and making sexual identity our deepest source of self-knowledge. He concluded with an account of how Christianity enables a proper sense of identity; one rooted in the transcendent law of God instead of authentic individual expression.
Asbury Theological Seminary President Dr. Timothy Tennent is facing a social media backlash for preaching a solidly orthodox sermon at Asbury’s convocation for the 2021-22 academic year.
Titled “The Restoration of Personhood”’, the sermon referenced a conversation between Tennent and the late Asbury theologian Dr. Dennis F. Kinlaw. Tennent, as he explained, asked Law what the most pressing theological issue of the age was. Kinlaw, instead of a long-winded answer, responded with one word: personhood.
Tennent proposed that the overarching problem with the spirit of the age is that it has a severely misguided notion of what it means to be a human being. In particular, he referenced the work of Grove City College professor Carl Trueman, author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.
Trueman wrote Triumph of the Modern Self out of curiosity at statements like “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” going from nonsensical several generations ago to being “not only regarded as meaningful and authentic, but to deny it is stupid or immoral or an irrational phobia.” As Trueman argues, the 1960s saw the rise of a new kind of individualism, one radically different from what has come before. Canadian Philosopher Charles Taylor, called this shift “expressive individualism.”
The Asbury Seminary president described some features of this new individualism. Firstly, “this new vision of human personhood has created a seismic dualistic separation or fracturing of the human will from the physical body. In this twist of Neo-gnostic dualism our bodies become moldable, like plastic contingent instruments which must be conformed to the intuitions, feelings and what other social constructions we may dream of in order to conform to our understanding of ourselves.”
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An Evolving Situation…
God is necessary to the reality of conscious sentient beings that survive death but also make evolutionary presumptions irrelevant. When God creates he makes development of biological kinds through billions of years irrelevant. They are necessary posits of materialistic atheism or pantheism but have no place in a Christian philosophy.
In Christian thought, non physical, sentient, conscious and personal being pre-existed the physical universe and so that is how we find the answer to the problem.
Personality is eternal and the universe is not.
Personality never had a beginning and has no ending and the material universe and everything in it is a thing created by God to serve a specific purpose.
It is a practical thing for the manifestation of the glory of God.
Modern philosophy (science) and ancient religion both tell us that essentially, living things and non living matter are the same thing. Being alive or a living being is a trick of perception. You only think you’re different from the dust and the coffee tables. We are in their philosophy reducible to physics and chemistry, predicable cause and effect relationships in space and time.
The universe came into being from and through unplanned, non consciousness material causes and all things are pre-determined and inevitable.
Theistic evolution is another form of this mythology that posits a being responsible for the imposition of the human animal in the history of the universe but is not itself fundamentally distinguishable from the universe itself.
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