Newton realized that sometimes we engage in controversy professedly “for the glory of God” but are blind to the ways in which our own motives impact and play out in our speech and actions. The rubric “for the glory of God” must transform how Christians respond to controversy. “For the glory of God” does not call for a monolithic response to every controversy. Circumstances alter cases. We do not cast pearls before swine.

John Newton (1725–1807) is best known today for his great hymns (including “Amazing Grace” and “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken”). But in his own day, he was perhaps more highly prized as a letter writer—“the great director of souls through the post,” as someone described him. Such was the value of his correspondence that he published several volumes of his letters (including one of his letters to his wife, which called forth the comment by one reviewer, his friend Richard Cecil, that wives would be in raptures reading such love letters while “we [husbands] may suffer loss of esteem for not writing them such gallant letters”).
In several of his letters, he comments on the subject of controversy. He had a distaste for it. (It would be an unhappy thing to have a “taste” for it, would it not?) He also had a sense of being unfitted for it. He remarked that it was “not only unpleasing to my taste, but really above my reach.” But lack of experience is not necessarily an obstacle to one’s ability to give biblical counsel. Newton constantly sought to give such counsel. (Did he not encourage William Wilberforce in the great public controversy of slave trading?) In a day when only a paltry number of Anglican ministers were evangelical, he was particularly conscious that Calvinists, being much in the minority, might feel pressed into controversy too frequently.
It is surely for this reason that one of his chief concerns was that if we are to engage in controversy, our perspective needs to be dominated by the issue of the glory of God. “If we act in a wrong spirit,” he writes, “we shall bring little glory to God.” The first question of The Westminster Shorter Catechism is relevant here as everywhere: How do I speak, write, or act in situations of controversy so that God may be most glorified?
This is the principle. But it needs to be particularized. Newton realized that sometimes we engage in controversy professedly “for the glory of God” but are blind to the ways in which our own motives impact and play out in our speech and actions. The rubric “for the glory of God” must transform how Christians respond to controversy.
“For the glory of God” does not call for a monolithic response to every controversy. Circumstances alter cases. We do not cast pearls before swine.
Here are three illustrations of controversy. In the first, silence is the appropriate God-glorifying reaction; in the second, confrontation; and in the third, patience. Why such different responses?
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Depending upon the State to instil these virtues of morality, self-reliance, personal responsibility, and respect for others is a pipe dream. Sure, not every parent will be an ideal role model in these areas, but I would far rather trust them to ‘train up a child in the way he should go’ than rely on government bureaucrats and politicians pushing radical ideological agendas to do so.

One thing that is now crystal clear is that the radicals and militants are fully and ferociously targeting our children. No wonder we hear so much today about grooming and the like: it is all part of the war on children – and parents. The aim is to separate kids from their mothers and fathers and let others with nefarious agendas take over.
These folks have made known their dislike of the traditional family, and how children must be ‘freed’ from the ‘harmful’ values, convictions and beliefs of their parents. They are quite open about all this. And this has been going on for quite some time. As Anthony Esolen wrote in Defending Marriage (Saint Benedict Press, 2014):
It is not the State that defines what marriage is; nature has done that. It is not the State that determines the good of the family; nature has done that, too. It is not even the State that creates the village or the parish. Households have done that. Before there was ever a gross national product, there was economy, the law of the good of the oikos, the household. The ancient Greeks, who bequeathed to us both the term and the reality of democracy, understood that the individual as such was something of an abstraction. You belonged to a family, a household, a clan….
Totalitarian regimes since Plato penned his Republic … have always been aimed against the family, and for good reason. The family is the single greatest bastion against the power of the State. That’s not because of ‘individual’ rights. It’s because the family claims precedence in being and in nature. It is itself a society anterior to the greater society.
We are aware of the old African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” It means that the surrounding community has a role to play in the development of a child. In its context, it is quite true, and it refers, for example, to other male adults teaching a boy how to hunt. Obviously in a small African village such communal help in training and nurturing children makes perfect sense.
There are several problems when we seek to replicate that wisdom in contemporary Western society. One, we of course do not live in small, close-knit communities. Instead, we may be scattered many miles from extended family members and friends. Letting complete strangers have a role in raising our kids is just not a useful option.
But more importantly, those who most often use this mantra today have something much different in mind when it comes to the raising and socialising of our children. What they almost always mean is having the State take over the role of mum and dad in parenting, educating and training our children.
The classic example of this of course is found in the 1996 book It Takes a Village by Hilary Clinton. Unaware parents might have thought she was giving us some helpful parenting tips, but more savvy readers instantly knew what the real agenda was. For example, a year after the book appeared radio talk show host Dale O’Leary discussed the book.
In The Gender Agenda: Redefining Equality (Vital Issues Press, 1997) she looked at the feminist activism and those pushing the androgyny agenda (men and women are fully interchangeable) and warned of its consequences. Toward the end of her book, she asked what can be done to stop the gender agenda. She said this:
The first step is obviously exposure. Gender feminists have left a paper trail, and they must be made to eat their words. Gender feminists who hid behind family language need to be exposed. A perfect example of this kind of deception is Hillary Clinton’s book, It Takes a Village, which is full of wonderful, apparently profamily wisdom. Underneath, however, one finds the gender feminist ideology.
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Growing up in a churchgoing family, Kate had been taught that maintaining her sexual purity for marriage was of “utmost importance.” She had been taught many rules and regulations, but without being given any reasons for them. Having sex outside of marriage was a sin, but she didn’t really know why, and she got little help from her mom and dad either by teaching or example.
Entering puberty and the middle school years, Kate’s interest in sex was growing through what she saw on television, discussions with her friends, and her own natural curiosity. “Often,” Kate said later, “I felt ashamed and unsure what to do with these thoughts except to push them aside and move on. I was so sure they were sinful.”
As she entered high school, those normal thoughts and desires turned into temptations. “At times, I was ashamed to even like a boy or think he was attractive, because my legalistic background told me that this was sinful,” Kate recalled. Eventually, however, she yielded “almost daily” to both fornication and an addiction to pornography. Such habitual sins made her doubt her salvation and left her feeling isolated from her sisters, who seemingly didn’t struggle with such things. Throughout her teenage years and into her early twenties, she vacillated between living a life of godliness and falling back into sin. She pressured herself, made vows, and prayed, repeatedly asking God to make her obedient and rid her of sexual sin. All to no avail. Human effort in a moral cause was not enough.