Audio Transcript

Welcome back to this new week on the podcast on this Monday. Well, 2023 ended with two huge declarations that got a lot of attention online and led to a pile of emails for you, Pastor John. First, and most talked about, the pope said Roman Catholic priests can now “bless” (so-called) same-sex couples, which is a move that confused and angered many Catholics and non-Catholics alike, as you would expect.

According to the Vatican’s statement, this blessing is “for couples in irregular situations and for couples of the same sex, the form of which should not be fixed ritually by ecclesial authorities to avoid producing confusion with the blessing proper to the Sacrament of Marriage.” This so-called divine blessing is for “those who — recognizing themselves to be destitute and in need of [God’s] help — do not claim a legitimation of their own status, but who beg that all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit.” The pope is trying very hard to thread a needle here.

More bluntly, two weeks after this, Reuters reported that Burundi president Évariste Ndayishimiye called on his citizens to respond in a different way. “If you want to attract a curse to the country, accept homosexuality,” he told journalists. Then he said, “I even think that these people, if we find them in Burundi, it is better to lead them to a stadium and stone them. And that cannot be a sin.” This was a statement made to his predominantly Christian nation, perhaps drawing from a text like Leviticus 20:13. So, Pastor John, how would you respond to the pope and the president of Burundi?

Well, let me preface my thought with the fact that I’ve tried very hard to understand the pope and that needle that you said he’s trying to thread. I can’t quite make sense out of it. It just seems contradictory. But let me take it for what I do see.

I think the New Testament directs us away from the kind of blessing that the pope is endorsing and directs us away from the mob rule or the official capital punishment that the president of Burundi is endorsing. In other words, the New Testament is pushing us away from both of those steps.

And I think the New Testament also gives Christians another way to disapprove and another way to love those that we think are walking in behaviors that are ultimately and eternally destructive. So, let’s start with the Old Testament and the threat of the president of Burundi to stone those who practice homosexuality.

Excommunicate, Not Execute

Do the laws of capital punishment in the Old Testament — for things like adultery, dishonoring parents, having sex between two men or two women — define the way that the Christian church is to deal with those sins? And the answer is clearly no.

We’ve had several podcasts in which we try to unpack how the Old and the New Testament relate to each other. And I say that without denying the authority of the Old Testament — with its validity for Israel at the time and its ongoing authority for Christians, with an awareness of how the coming of Jesus the Messiah has changed things.

“When you curse others, you want them destroyed. When you bless others, you want them saved.”

When the New Testament deals with immorality like adultery or incest, which would have been a capital crime under the old covenant, the way it handles that sin — for example, in 1 Corinthians 5 — is to excommunicate the sinner from the church rather than execute the sinner. In the church, the new people of God (which is not a political or ethnic or civil body), excommunication has replaced capital punishment in cases like this.

Blessing Sin?

When we turn to the instructions of the pope that faithful Catholic priests may bless same-sex unions, we need to be very careful how we are understanding the nature of blessing.

I’ve tried, like I said, to understand the wording of the pope’s proposal, and I have listened to a Catholic priest defend the pope’s proposal, and I cannot escape the impression that even though the effort is being made not to consecrate the so-called “irregular situations” as marriage, nevertheless, the very effort to provide an official way for there to be a blessing on a kind of same-sex togetherness, which the Bible warns is evil and eternally destructive, inevitably communicates that the pope does not hold that biblical view, at least not with the same ultimate seriousness that the New Testament does.

And the reason I say that we need to be careful how we understand the nature of blessing is that the New Testament does tell us several times, very clearly,

“Bless those who curse you” (Luke 6:28).
“Bless those who persecute you” (Romans 12:14).
“Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called” (1 Peter 3:9).
“When reviled, we bless” (1 Corinthians 4:12).

Now, none of those uses of the word bless is intended to signify an official or unofficial gathering in which you bring people together who in their hearts are celebrating sin. That’s not what blessing means. Whether it’s two men having sex or people celebrating fraud or celebrating witchcraft or celebrating slander or celebrating devil worship, whatever the sin is, the biblical commands to bless our adversaries, our opponents, our enemies are not a command to hold a service in which you extend a hand of blessing over those who are celebrating behaviors that lead to their own destruction and which God calls an abomination.

That gathering will not communicate the biblical truth of heartbreak and danger and warning. If you made those dangers and those warnings part of the service of blessing, we know the so-called couple would reject it. They would reject it. If the warning of hell were made part of the service of blessing, if the sin were called an abomination in the service of blessing, the couple would not have the service.

Longing for Another’s Good

The meaning of blessing in Luke 6:28, Romans 12:14, and the others is that we seek the temporal and everlasting good of our enemies — or those we disagree with; they don’t have to be just enemies, but just anybody we disagree with. That’s what blessing means. We seek the temporal and everlasting good of our adversaries, both with words and with deeds, even if it costs us our lives. We are not eager for the destruction of anyone. Blessing is the opposite of cursing. When you curse others, you want them destroyed. When you bless others, you want them saved.

We want our words and our actions to count for their good. It’s not a blessing to give the impression of treating lightly something that God treats dreadfully. It feels kind — it’s not kind. It feels tender, but tenderness is not love where clarity and firmness are needed to save life.

The form the blessing takes in Romans 12:20 is this: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” In other words, the aim is not affirmation but contrition and repentance and salvation. We want them to be our brothers or our sisters in the presence of God forever, forgiven and transformed into the likeness of Christ.

Final Warning

And before I go, I think I should conclude by warning Roman Catholics that they need to be especially concerned about this pope, Pope Francis, because this is not the first time he has gone astray. He has espoused unbiblical thinking in other ways, not only on this matter.

I watched him in a video counsel a child — about a six- or eight-year-old child — who had lost his father in death. The child said that his father was an atheist — never went to church, didn’t believe in God — and then he asked where he was. And the pope said that his father was in heaven. The pope said that that was the case.

“It’s not a blessing to give the impression of treating lightly something that God treats dreadfully.”

Now, that’s very contrary to what the Roman Catholic Church and all other Christian churches have taught. I doubt that this pope believes anyone will suffer eternally in hell. I could be wrong about that, but if so, then the warnings of 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 — that those who practice homosexuality will not enter the kingdom of God — lose their ultimate seriousness for him. That’s the direction our culture has moved for decades, and that’s where the pope appears to be moving as well.

So, by all means, let us bless those who curse us — but not extend a blessing over a same-sex union.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14744655/how-does-christ-fill-all-things

Audio Transcript

As Thursday’s episode ended, Pastor John, you had just begun to talk about the joy of learning. We’ll never understand your model for lifelong learning or education if we leave the affections and emotions out of the equation. This explains why joy and feeling — terms of emotion and affection — are terms we see all over your older book Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God. In that book, you mentioned those terms — joy and feeling — 110 times, closely linking proper thinking with proper feeling. Think is twelve and a half years old.

I was eager to see how often you used the joy or feeling language in this new book, and they dominate even more! The words joy and feeling appear 357 times in your new book, Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy. They’re all over this new book — to the point you make this claim explicitly: “Some people think that emotions are marginal in the task of education. We regard them as essential.” Unpack this. What essential role do joy and feeling play in Bible-learning and in all our learning?

This is so, so important for understanding the nature of true education. When I try to help people understand what we are doing at Bethlehem College & Seminary, or what I am doing in my life, I regularly mention the following six habits of mind and heart that we’re trying to build into the lives of our students or that I’m trying to build into my own life. They apply both to college and seminary students and to everybody else who will listen.

“Education is the formation of a mature disciple of Christ who can go on learning for a lifetime.”

At Bethlehem College & Seminary, we don’t think education is mainly the imparting of information or mainly the training of a technical skill. Mainly, it’s the formation of a mature disciple of Christ who can go on learning for a lifetime of wisdom and wonder in whatever vocation God calls them. So, when I’m trying to help folks understand what we do, I mention these six habits: observation, understanding, evaluation, feeling (alarm bells go off), application, and expression.

The order is really important because these habits are governed by a Christ-exalting, God-centered, Bible-saturated worldview. First we observe accurately — we’re honest people. Then we understand truly what we’ve observed. Then we evaluate fairly on the basis of accurate observation and true understanding. Then we feel appropriately. Then, in all the ways of wisdom, we apply what we have observed, understood, evaluated, and felt. Then we give expression with our mouth (and in writing) in compelling ways that glorify God and bring blessing to people.

Why Feel?

What I find is that it’s the fourth habit of mind and heart that puzzles people. It causes them to have a kind of question mark on their face. It’s the same one that you are asking about, Tony. Feeling or joy — or whatever appropriate emotions — should arise as one is observing and understanding and evaluating. We observe, we understand, we evaluate, and then we feel appropriately, I say.

And people wonder, “Really? Really? I mean, one of your six aims of a college education or a seminary education is feeling?” The answer is a resounding and unashamed yes. When all is said and done in education, this may be the one habit of mind that distinguishes true education from artificial intelligence.

At one level, computers observe, understand, evaluate, apply, and express, but no computer will ever love or hate or admire or hope or rejoice or sympathize. No matter what emotional words the computer speaks out, and it doesn’t matter what a computer says, it’s not going to happen. These are distinctively human acts of the God-created image of God’s soul.

Not Optional or Peripheral

And these emotions are all-important in the Bible. The number one commandment in the Bible is not “know the Lord your God,” but “love the Lord your God with all your heart” — all of it, all your heart (Matthew 22:37). Then Paul said, “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed” (1 Corinthians 16:22). He also said that the whole Old Testament was written that “we might have hope,” an emotion (Romans 15:4).

Over and over, we are commanded to “rejoice” in the Lord (Psalm 70:4), to “serve the Lord with gladness” (Psalm 100:2). We are commanded to “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). We’re commanded to “be . . . tenderhearted” (Ephesians 4:32). “Tenderhearted” — that’s not a thought; it’s a feeling. We’re also commanded to feel compassion (Colossians 3:12).

These are not optional. They’re not peripheral in the Bible. They are essential to being a whole human being, an educated human being. They are essential to being a Christian. Nobody is saved by thinking true thoughts about God or even by believing true things about God.

The devil believes more true things about God than we do because he knows more than we know about God, but he hates these things that he knows about God. That’s a feeling — he hates them. It’s not what he thinks that’s the problem, but that he feels all the wrong things. That’s what makes him the devil.

Shall we neglect in education the very thing that sets us apart from the demons, the very thing that fulfills the Great Commandment? Shall we neglect the very thing that shows we’re not mere walking computers? We are humans created in the image of God.

That’s why we seek to build into our own lives, and the lives of our students and our APJ listeners right now, the habits of observing accurately, and understanding truly, and evaluating fairly, and — I wish I could scream it from the housetops — feeling appropriately, and applying wisely, and expressing compellingly.

‘Men with Chests’

When we say “feeling appropriately,” we mean that there are healthy, mature, and virtuous emotions in response to different realities. Then there are unhealthy, immature, and evil emotions in response to different realities.

It’s evil to rejoice over the spreading of a lie. It’s a sign of mental unhealth not to feel empathy for a fellow Christian languishing in prison for his faith. It’s a sign of emotional immaturity to giggle at a slipup in a public communication. This is the real stuff of education. Knowledge is good; knowledge is necessary. Love is better. A critical mind is a gift; a well-formed soul with deep and virtuous emotions is a greater gift.

C.S. Lewis — we love Lewis — wrote about education in The Abolition of Man. Alan Jacobs, in his biography of Lewis, sums up Lewis’s point in The Abolition of Man like this: “Lewis passionately believed that education is not about providing information so much as cultivating ‘habits of the heart’ — producing ‘men with chests,’ as he puts it in his book The Abolition of Man.”

Then here’s his explanation of men with chests: “People who not only think as they should but respond as they should, instinctively and emotionally, to the challenges and blessings the world offers to them” (xxiii). To which I say, “Exactly. Exactly.” Education aims at right thinking about the world and right emotional responses to the world.

What Makes a Feeling Virtuous?

Now of course, once we say and believe that, we are launched into the massive question of what makes a feeling virtuous. This is why secular colleges and universities cannot state the aims of their education the way we do. They cannot say that their aim is to build into their students’ lives the habit of forming virtuous feelings because there’s no consensus in the universities about what makes a feeling virtuous.

When it comes to a feeling about sex outside of marriage, a feeling about trying to change your sex, a feeling about killing unborn children, a feeling about certain economic strategies, or a feeling about Jesus Christ and the way of salvation, secular institutions have no way that they can agree on what is a virtuous feeling in response to those massive realities. This is a tragedy when you think about it, that our kids are being educated in institutions that cannot state their goals that way.

“We are not well-educated people until we can respond to reality in healthy, mature, virtuous ways.”

The fact that in this new book, Foundations of Lifelong Learning, I include an entire chapter on the lifelong educational goal of appropriate or virtuous feelings only makes sense because I believe in radically Christian, Bible-saturated, Christ-exalting education. This podcast, that book, Bethlehem College & Seminary, all of this, all my life, aims at cultivating the mental and emotional habit of experiencing virtuous feelings. A virtuous feeling in response to an accurately observed, rightly understood, truly evaluated object is a glorious thing.

Educated for Joy

Yes, a virtuous feeling is a glorious thing. A virtuous feeling is an authentic overflow of the good treasure of the heart of faith. A virtuous feeling is shaped and intensified and limited by the fruit of the Holy Spirit. A virtuous feeling is an expression of love to God and people, even when it is hatred of evil. A virtuous feeling is a Christ-exalting feeling.

We are not well-educated people until we can respond to reality in healthy, mature, virtuous ways, as we feel appropriately. That will include abhorrence of what is evil (Romans 12:9). It will include sympathy for the suffering (Romans 12:15). It will include fear of any hint of unbelief rising in my heart (Romans 11:20). It will include overflowing joy in response to the gospel of the grace of God (2 Corinthians 8:2).

That’s why the subtitle of the new book is “Education in Serious Joy.” Joy will be the dominant feeling for the Christian in this life, but in a world like ours, it will be serious, even sorrowful, joy.