In the Shadows of Grief
At the darkest moment, she ran her fingers across the grain of the wood bench. The beauty of its intricate veining and brown tones began to sing gently. He used to love working with wood and always said it was one of God’s finest creations. That is when she felt the warmth of the sun and the cool summer breeze work together to remind her of old pleasures. It caused her to breathe in deeply.
As she sat at her desk, the thought of her husband’s death stole the air from her lungs. She wanted to carry her weight, but gravity had multiplied seven times. She might as well have been physically ill, for the bodily fatigue was overwhelming. She barely had the strength to lift her arms to the keyboard. Somehow, the shadow of death had embedded itself within her heart. It eviscerated her, left a void nothing could fill, and it swallowed everything.
Every moment lingered. Grief had delayed the minutes. It wanted to make sure she slowed down to feel every pang. Every sense was heightened except those that experience happiness. A panic of sorrow began to envelop her.
She needed to get out of there. The luxurious furnishings of the corporate office, once symbols of her success, had turned to dust. She walked out as several finely polished coworkers looked on. She avoided their gaze, trying to hide the tears.
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The Liberty Christ Hath Purchased
Written by J.V. Fesko |
Monday, March 11, 2024
In our sin-fallen, law-cursed state, all people are in slavery to sin and in bondage to Satan, the prince of the power of the air (Eph. 2:2). Of course, all who sin are subject to death, since “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23), or as Paul elsewhere writes, “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law” (1 Cor. 15:56). Blessedly, God does not leave us in our cursed state but has sent His Son to redeem us: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal. 4:4). Christ became a curse for us so that we would not have to bear the law’s awful load (3:13).The liberty which Christ hath purchased for believers under the gospel consists in their freedom from the guilt of sin, the condemning wrath of God, the curse of the moral law; and, in their being delivered from this present evil world, bondage to Satan, and dominion of sin; from the evil of afflictions, the sting of death, the victory of the grave, and everlasting damnation; as also, in their free access to God, and their yielding obedience unto him, not out of slavish fear, but a childlike love and willing mind. All which were common also to believers under the law. But, under the new testament, the liberty of Christians is further enlarged, in their freedom from the yoke of the ceremonial law, to which the Jewish church was subjected; and in greater boldness of access to the throne of grace, and in fuller communications of the free Spirit of God, than believers under the law did ordinarily partake of. —Westminster Confession of Faith 20.1
The French novelist Victor Hugo (1802–85) writes of the fall and redemption of Jean Valjean, the chief protagonist of his popular book Les Misérables. Valjean found himself released from prison after serving nineteen long and arduous years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his famished family. After his release, he eventually found shelter in a local church. Desperate for money, Jean stole the bishop’s silverware and plates but was promptly captured by the police. When the police came to the bishop to verify that the stolen property was his, the bishop told Valjean: “Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to what is evil but to what is good. I have bought your soul to save it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.” This little vignette provides glimmers of what Christ has accomplished for us in our redemption through the price that He paid in His life, suffering, and death on the cross. Westminster Confession of Faith 20.1 explains this as “the liberty which Christ hath purchased for believers.”
Out from under Satan, Sin, and Death
To appreciate our freedom in Christ, we first need to contemplate the nature of our previous bondage to Satan, sin, and death. Our captivity is writ large across the canvas of redemptive history in Israel’s slavery in Egypt. The book of Exodus tells us that “the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery” (2:23) as they were in a state of affliction and suffering (3:7). As Israel was in slavery, so we are enslaved to sin. What Pharaoh was to Israel, Satan is to sinners. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul describes our sin-enslaved condition in blunt terms:
You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath. (Eph. 2:1–3)
In his famous diagnosis of fallen humanity, Paul describes us as those who do not seek God, who have become worthless, who do not do good, whose throats are open graves, and who use their tongues for deception (Rom. 3:11–13). As we survey the people whom we see in our day-to-day lives, we certainly observe wicked people doing sinful things, but so many people give the appearance of being decent and moral. Beneath the veil of respectability lies the pallor of death wrapped in the chains of sin and guilt. Because all humans are guilty of both Adam’s first sin and their own personal sins, all humans justly fall under God’s wrath and condemnation (Rom. 1:18–32; 5:12–14).
There are several consequences of our sin-fallen condition. All humans bear the burden of the guilt of sin. Every time we commit sin against God and His law, we incur legal guilt. There is a subjective side to guilt, for we sense that we do wrong as our consciences accuse or excuse our conduct (2:15). Yet guilt is not simply a feeling but an objective legal debt that all sinners incur for violating God’s law. A powerful image of guilt comes to us from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, where the main character, Christian, carries a massive burden on his back that weighs him down. Given that we are guilty of sin, this means that God’s wrath hangs over our heads. As Paul writes, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18, KJV).
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Why the World is Running Out of Babies
An essay by Louise Perry at The Spectator, entitled, “Modernity is making you sterile.” Perry, a maverick feminist and author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, argues that the so-called “progress narrative” cherished among the elites of the developed world, along with the technologies that have enabled it, is keeping us from having babies. Like a slow-acting poison, modernity and its values have eaten away at the fabric of society, though imperceptibly so to those focused only on the present.
In his 1929 book The Thing, G.K. Chesterton warns social reformers to be cautious about changing institutions, laws, or customs:
[L]et us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or a gate [is] erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away.”
Chesterton was illustrating the often-subtle importance of structures and ideas that moderns are so eager to deconstruct. Before setting longstanding traditions aside, we should first understand these things and understand why previous generations were committed to them. Otherwise, even well-meaning reforms can incur serious consequences, not all of which are immediately obvious, and which fall on future generations.
Chesterton’s analogy came to mind while reading an essay by Louise Perry at The Spectator, entitled, “Modernity is making you sterile.” Perry, a maverick feminist and author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, argues that the so-called “progress narrative” cherished among the elites of the developed world, along with the technologies that have enabled it, is keeping us from having babies. Like a slow-acting poison, modernity and its values have eaten away at the fabric of society, though imperceptibly so to those focused only on the present. This, she writes, is the real reason that most of the developed world is currently running out of people:
[W]hat we are now discovering is that, at the population level, modernity selects systematically against itself.
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The Religion of Progressivism
It is no exaggeration to say that the Western church is as much in need of reformation today as it was at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Roman Catholicism still needs drastic reforms, having largely rejected what was offered in the Reformation. Protestantism has drifted from its roots and to a very great extent lost its catholicity. The Evangelical movement has tried to revive nominal Protestantism since the 1730’s but it has failed to maintain a firm hold on the reformation era confessions and thus has drifted theologically. We are losing our grip on the Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy symbolized in the creeds of the undivided church of the first five centuries. The situation today, like that of the late medieval era, is ideal for the rise of heresies of all sorts.
Satan lacks the ability to create anything totally new, so all heresy is parasitic on the truth. Heresy always involves twisting, eviscerating, or adding to true doctrine. As the Preacher observed three thousand years ago, there truly is “nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Heresy is usually constructed out of whatever building materials happen to be available in each cultural situation. Elements of the pagan religion of Egypt aided Aaron and the people of Israel in the construction of the first idol at the base of Mount Sinai (Exodus 32). The Baal worship of the Canaanites was combined with Israelite religion in the time of Elijah (1 Kings 18:21). The trendy, Eastern cosmology from Persia was used by Marcion and other gnostics in the early church to create gnostic forms of Christianity. Heresy usually involves drawing in ideas, symbols, doctrines, practices, or deities from the religion of the surrounding culture and combining them in some novel fashion with biblical truth to form a new kind of religion.
If this is true, how does heresy take form in a secularized Christendom? It seems that even though non-Christian forms of religion exist in the late modern West, moderns view themselves as post-religious and thus are unlikely to be drawn into a new form of religion constructed out of non-Christian and Christian elements. Do we not live in a post-religious age?
We should not to jump to conclusions on this point. The secularization thesis has fallen on hard times over the past forty years and what seemed obvious to secular-minded observers in the 1960’s is now uncertain and unclear. What is clear is that Western culture is increasingly hostile to catholic, orthodox, Christianity. But it is less clear to what degree the late modern West is really secular. This ambiguity is evident in talk of the “secular religions” such as Communism, Nazism, and Fascism.
Liberal democratic nations, rooted in Christianity, defeated the totalitarian ideologies in World War II and the Cold War, but since 1945 the national religion of western European countries and the anglosphere has undergone massive changes. The best way to describe what has emerged is to speak of it as a new Christian heresy. An heretical form of Christianity has become dominant in the West and pushed catholic orthodoxy into the background as a continuing minority, which is able to exert less and less influence on the culture. The so-called “culture wars” are the imperialistic wars waged by this Christian heresy against the forces of tradition, catholicity, and orthodoxy within both the Roman Church and Protestant churches, and also within Evangelicalism. There are pockets of resistance to this heresy within certain segments of Roman Catholicism and Evangelicalism, but the “mainline” Protestant denominations have been almost totally corrupted by it.
It is easy for conservatives to sneer at the declining numbers of liberal Protestant churches and assume that their cultural influence is negligible. Yet, the law and public opinion keep changing in lockstep with the pronouncements of the liberal clergy and conservatives keep losing court cases, legislative battles, and public opinion polls. It must not be overlooked that many Roman bishops, having noted which way the wind is blowing, have aligned themselves with the growing heresy in order to keep up to their flocks. Liberal theology is as much a problem in the Roman church as it is in any of the Protestant ones. It is difficult to see much difference these days, in practical terms, between the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Both espouse the new heresy and work tirelessly to see it triumph.
The Heresy of Progressivism
So, what is this heresy? It is, quite simply, the heresy of progressivism. Progressivist Christianity is the new post-catholic, post-protestant, and post-biblical form of Christianity that has swept to power in the late modern west. Like the Golden Calf cult, Baal syncretism, and the Gnostic churches of the early centuries, this new heresy is a synthesis of elements drawn from the surrounding culture and fused with elements of biblical teaching in such a way as to contradict biblical orthodoxy. The key point is not that the new doctrine draws in ideas and practices from outside of biblical faith, but rather that it does so in ways that fundamentally corrupt biblical faith.
There was nothing wrong with the Israelites borrowing from Egyptian religion. God himself copied the portable worship centers, which existed in Egyptian religion, in commanding Israel in Exodus 25-40 to build a tabernacle for Yahweh worship. The floor plan was a design common in temples throughout the ancient Near East. Israel’s tabernacle, however, had no idol in the holy of holies in accordance with the Second Commandment. The creation of the Golden Calf in Exodus 32, on the other hand, was a violation of the Second Commandment and thus is an example of a borrowed practice that could not be reconciled with the Law. The point is that sometimes borrowing non-Christian elements of religion fundamentally corrupts the Christian faith, and results in heresy.
It is, therefore, of crucial importance that theologians clarify for the church what cannot legitimately be borrowed from the culture, but must instead be opposed steadfastly by the church. Many elements of the culture are good or neutral and can be incorporated into the Christian faith. But not all. Discerning where is the line between assimilating and being assimilated is one of theology’s most important tasks.
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