To be counted as truth, facts should be tentative when new information is forthcoming. He who answers a matter before he hears it, It is folly and shame to him (Proverbs 18:13). A lot of information is coming out. Don’t tout as final what may be contradicted tomorrow. Medical findings and statistics, particularly, should be held only with the kind of certainty that belongs to very early data.

It is crucial for Christians to understand that underlying what seem like objective facts, there are some competing worldviews. Covid-19 has particularly revealed these competing worldviews. Let me sketch two opposing ones for you in broad detail.
One worldview is agnostic about whether there is a God, and so does not consider His hand in Covid’s existence, its prevention or its cure. It does not believe in Christ, nor in salvation, nor in the afterlife. Therefore, it believes that biological life must be preserved at all costs. For that reason, it is willing to give up, suspend, or prohibit the human aspects of life: worship, social interaction, eating together, and so forth. Put simply, its counsel is: wear a mask, stay home, don’t touch anyone, and wait till this crisis is over. On top of that, it believes that it can control this virus if everyone submits to a central authority. If everyone listens and does what they’re told, we can have the world we want. Driving this is a false view of man and sin. We can all have a utopian post-Covid world if we all toe the line. We must trust the interpretations of medical experts and politicians, because they will get us back to a normal society.  This is not very far from the ideas of the utopian leftists. They believe we can have a utopia on earth if everyone submits to a centralised power who will tell everyone what to do.
The second worldview believes there is a God, believes He is in control of this disease and has allowed it. It believes in Christ we are safe from Hell and can live life joyfully in the face of death. It believes life is always worth preserving, but not at all costs. Specifically, it believes worship and gathering is required, so is human friendship, relationship, and interaction. It believes that self-protectiveness can cross the line into sinfulness. It believes the human freedoms of movement, assembling and dignity of person can only be suspended for very temporary periods, when the threat to life is severe, such as in wartime, or an extremely deadly pandemic. It believes that the human heart is sinful, and that it is not unlikely that evil people can exploit a crisis for purposes other than the improvement of the health of the population. It also keeps a special eye on what can become tyrannical abuses of power.
What is important to understand is that both worldviews will hear the same facts, but will very likely arrive at different interpretations, and different responses. That is also what creates animosity between people who are hearing the same ‘facts’. People with different worldviews assume that different responses to Covid are the wrong responses.
What then does it mean to live by truth, and not by unfiltered facts? Make sure you have a Christian worldview to filter the facts and the recommendations of medical experts. Do you believe that God is the Lord of life? Do you believe that death has lost its sting, that to live is Christ, and to die is gain? Do you believe that the body is to be protected, but not at all costs? Do you believe that sickness and health are in God’s hands? Do you believe God calls us to face risks for His name?
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Sin in any relationship is serious, but since marriage is a unique covenant that represents Christ and the church, betrayal from a spouse is particularly devastating. Sexual unfaithfulness can shatter a wife’s sense of identity and worth. Her husband has not only gone outside the marriage but has actually brought pollution and idolatry into their union. Wives feel this intensely, even when they’re not the ones who pursued sexual unfaithfulness.

If your husband has sinned sexually, you might be surprised at how deeply you feel ashamed. Shame can be a vague, haunting, smothering feeling in our hearts. It may hover the way a low-grade physical ache emerges with the flu. Or it can suddenly fall over us, collapsing our hearts inward as if a heavy, water-soaked blanket was dropped on us.
The Bible connects shame and guilt, yet also distinguishes between them. Guilt communicates, “I’ve done something wrong.” Shame communicates, “Something is wrong with me.” Ed Welch, a biblical counselor, makes the distinction in his book Shame Interrupted:
Shame lives in the community, though the community can feel like a courtroom. It says, “You don’t belong—you are unacceptable, unclean and disgraced” because “You are wrong, you have sinned” (guilt), or “Wrong has been done to you” or “You are associated with those who are disgraced or outcast.” The shamed person feels worthless, expects rejection, and needs cleansing, fellowship [community], love, and acceptance. (11)
Note what Welch says about shame coming not only from our own sin but also from association with those who are disgraced. Just as you’ve perhaps been troubled by your troubles or anxious about your anxiety, maybe you’ve been carrying the shame of your husband’s sin as your own.
But your husband is guilty of sexual sin, not you. Regardless of how either of you (as sinners and sufferers) may have contributed to brokenness in your marriage, your husband chose to act on desires and pursue his own sexually sinful behaviors. Yet the intimacy of the marriage covenant does closely associate you with his guilt and the shame that comes with rebellion against our holy God. Why is this, and how does it happen?
Marriage, Sexual Sin, and Shame
Marriage creates a powerful opportunity for a husband and wife, in covenant before God and witnesses, to enter into a oneness-of-life relationship. Traditional Christian wedding vows usually include the following components.
Will you have this woman/man to be your wife/husband, to live together in holy marriage?
Will you love, comfort, honor, and keep her/him in sickness and in health?
Will you forsake all others, being faithful (relationally, mentally, sexually, emotionally, physically) to her/him as long as you both shall live?
 In response to all of these questions, the man and woman both promise, “I will.”
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, April 22, 2024
This points to their value in today’s debates. One of the striking lacunae on both the right and left wings of the Christian political spectrum is the general absence of any reference to the transcendence of God and the supernatural nature of the church. Immanent concerns rule the day. The pundits on both sides seem more concerned with making sure that no criticism goes unmocked, and no critic’s character goes unsmeared than with relativizing the affairs of this world in the light of eternity.

I recently revisited a book that I had not read for many years: Robert P. Ericksen’s Theologians Under Hitler. It is a study of how three intellectuals, Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch—scholars of the Old Testament, Luther, and Kierkegaard, respectively—came to support Hitler in 1933 and ultimately be identified with an evil ideology that cost millions of lives, both in the death camps and in the war that German expansionism precipitated.
It is a troubling book because, while Hirsch was always a nasty anti-Semite and remained so after the Third Reich collapsed, Kittel and Althaus started as what we might call orthodox, patriotic conservatives. The story of their corruption by Nazi ideology is a sad and disturbing one. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, they succumbed step by step; each step they took made sense to them, given the exigencies of the time, but the end result was catastrophic. There was a logical line from voting for Hitler to, at a minimum, standing silently by as Nazi behavior became more outrageous and systematically murderous. While I was working on Luther for my PhD, I was particularly dismayed to discover the attitude of Althaus. He was one of my scholarly heroes. How could he have been so wrong?
It is an interesting thought experiment to wonder how Christians today might have voted in Germany in the early 1930s. Hindsight grants great privileges. It not only gives us all 20/20 vision, but also exempts us from the difficult moral trade-offs and compromises that all voting booths contain in a manner unavailable to those at the time. We should not be so certain that we would have necessarily acted as we might like to imagine. It was a world where it seemed that either the Nazis or the Communists must triumph and where the full evil of both was as yet not fully visible. But even as we can acknowledge these difficulties, it is important to note that there were still theologians who did see the problem in 1933 and who refused to strike a deal with the devils on either side of the political spectrum.
The most famous example is that of the Barmen Declaration of 1934, signed by, among others, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. What is disappointing about that document in retrospect is its failure to address the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, something Barth later regretted. But there was an earlier and better document that is today all but forgotten: the Bethel Confession of 1933, which Bonhoeffer had composed along with another Lutheran, Hermann Sasse…The Bethel Confession has recently been reprinted and is well worth study and reflection.
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