Merry Christmas from The Aquila Report Staff
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The Rise of Gender-Affirmation and the Silencing of Dissent
There is a new darkness, and that is the silencing of criticism when it comes to the future health of our children. Australia doesn’t have a voice in this debate — that has been silenced by the legislation of our premiers — so we must wait to see if legal action in other countries is able to give those harmed by gender-affirmation a voice.
The rise of the so-called gender-affirmation industry and its relationship with children is one of the most important stories of our time.
Under the guise of science, we are being told that toddlers can know that they have been ‘born in the wrong bodies’.
Under the guise of healthcare, we are being told that it is harmful and cruel to do anything other than affirm a child’s belief that they are a different gender.
Under the guise of medicine, we are being told that it is perfectly fine to treat children with drugs that stunt their natural development.
And if you dare criticise any of this, you run the career-ending risk of being labelled transphobic and turned into a social pariah.
In reality, this remains both an open social and medical debate which is being pursued across the West.
Government Censorship
Not in Victoria, however, where the Victorian Education Department’s LBGTQ Support Policy, available on its website, encourages teachers to assist minors to transition genders without parental approval, or even their knowledge.
There is to be no debate after the Victorian government made it a criminal offence — under threat of fines and/or jail time — to attempt to counsel a child out of transitioning genders.
Other Australian states are considering similar legislation.
This runs contrary to decades of accepted best-practice which treated gender dysphoria primarily with therapy, as most children grow out of these feelings.
The previous federal Liberal government allowed bureaucrats to embed transgender ideology into our health services by mangling language against the wishes of — particularly — women. Even medicare forms referred to ‘birthing parents’ until an outcry led the incoming Labor government to correct it.
Lamestream Media
It is very much a one-sided conversation in which the media, particularly Australia’s national broadcaster, runs a steady stream of pro-transgender stories, while typically ignoring any negative news, such as the tragic stories of de-transitioners seeking to sue for their lifelong injuries.
The ABC was silent when the UK’s main gender clinic, Tavistock, was closed down, with 1,000 families threatening to sue the NHS for harm done to their children.
Meanwhile, you are more likely to find trans puff pieces about a teenage girl who had a double mastectomy.
Hollywood is increasingly pushing LGBTQ+ representation and the idea of gender fluidity onto children and young adults — from Buzz Lightyear’s gay kiss to a transgendered character in The Umbrella Academy.
Disney featured its first transgender character in July.
Labelled and Dismissed
Schools and local councils, particularly in America, continue to integrate Drag Queens into the lives of children despite public backlash against what are traditionally adult performers in sexualised attire performing for toddlers.
A doctor friend of mine who dared to suggest, in a very well-written and calm email, that his local council should not be promoting a highly sexualised all-ages drag show, received a curt response from his local member suggesting he was an ‘overly zealous’ religious ‘bigot’ whose ‘wrongheaded’ ideas were ‘harmful to society’.
Whack!
Consider the dilemma Victorian parents now face. If you complain that your children ought not be exposed to gender ideology, you will be labelled a bigot.
So you keep quiet.
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Love, In the Church
Paul’s great list is a bit like the Law of Sinai. A wonderful revelation of what is right and good, but beyond our ability to keep. And so, let 1 Corinthians 13 not only confront your struggle to love like Jesus. Let it also point you to Jesus. We can only love at all because God has first loved us. May our hearts be so captivated by his love that our churches increasingly look like the body of Christ! We can only live this life in the flesh by faith in the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us.
The most famous literary description of love is surely 1 Corinthians 13. It has been read aloud at countless weddings, and yet, it was not written for a wedding. It was written for a church. Actually, it was written for a struggling and divided church in Corinth. This was a church that was splintered by factions, by immature Christians flaunting their supposed superiority, and by a whole host of interpersonal tensions and issues. This was the church into which Paul unleashed “the love chapter!”
The chapter sits at the heart of a section addressing the right use of spiritual gifts in the church. It begins by underlining the necessity of love (v 1-3) and ends with the never-ending reality of love (v 8-13). And at the heart of the chapter, in verses 4-7, we find a familiar and poetic depiction of the nature of love. In just four verses, Paul offers fifteen descriptions of love.
Their world, like ours, was a confusing melee of ideas when it came to love. There was romance, passion (appropriately marital and many harmful alternatives), family, and friendship. I don’t know whether they used “love” to speak of food and sport, quite like we do in English, but let’s not imagine their culture was any less confused than ours. In the face of that confusion, Paul offered a confrontation with God’s kind of love.
What do we do with a list like this? Our tendency is to see it as a behavioural checklist and to consider it as a suggestion for greater effort on our part. The problem is, not only do we all fall short of God’s perfect love, but we are unable to self-generate genuine godly love. We can only love, John tells us, because God first loved us (1 John 4:19). So, while it may look like a list of descriptions, actually, Paul wrote it as a list of verbs. This is love dressed up and going to work!
So, as we consider this love in action, we should let it confront our own areas of lack, but also point us to the only one who perfectly lived out God’s love in this world. Let this list point you to Jesus, and then let his love flow more freely in your local church setting. As we look to Christ’s love, it will stir Christlike love in us. And when the body of Christ starts to look like Christ, we can pray for the church to have an impact like Christ!
1. Paul begins with a basic foundation: Love gives. He begins his list with two positive statements: love is patient and love is kind (v 4a). Patience here speaks of having a long-fuse with other people, giving them space and time, instead of flaring up at the first opportunity. Patience is partnered with kindness, which gives of our own usefulness for the higher good of the other. A loving church is a place where grace infiltrates every relationship. Grace for the weaknesses of others, and grace that gives of ourselves to build them up. Love gives.
2. Paul zeroes in on the Corinthian core issue: Love is not selfish. His list shifts into a sequence of nine points, most of which are negative.
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The Reformation of Worship
With the NT, God no longer has to condescend and enter the fabric of the physical universe to manifest Himself to his people; he can now allow his people to ascend into Heaven itself to worship him, which the author argues is superior to the former worship. This is possible because of Jesus’s mediation on the behalf of his people (12:24), and thus Christians can now approach God with full confidence in worship.
The immediate causes for Reformation in various regions, as well as what caused divisions among various Reformation figures, are diverse. However, much of what lay at the core of what both unified Reformers in their reaction against the Roman Catholic Church and what ended up dividing them in the end, involved theology and practice of worship.
Yet what is remarkable is that some of the very same problems with worship that the Reformers criticized with medieval worship have appeared again in contemporary worship. No, the contemporary church has not denied the five Solas or submitted once again to Rome; rather, the practices of contemporary worship suffer from some of the same fundamental problems that Rome’s worship did at the start of the sixteenth century.
Core Problems with Medieval Worship
Although much of the development of worship during the Middle Ages was originally rooted in biblical prescription, example, and theology, heresy did grow, and several aspects of how many Christians worshiped by the end of the fifteenth century made significant reformation necessary.
Problems specifically with worship can be summarized with the following categories:
Sacramentalism
One of the first significant errors in late medieval worship was sacramentalism, attributing the efficacy of an act of worship—especially the eucharistic elements—to the outward sign rather than to the inner working of the Holy Spirit. Christians during this period came to believe that just by performing the acts of worship, they received grace from God, whether or not they were spiritually engaged in the act. Along with this belief came the idea of ex opera operato (“from the work worked”), the belief that the acts of worship work automatically and independently of the faith of the recipient.
Necessity of Faith
Martin Luther stressed the need for personal faith in those who wished to participate in worship. The mass is not, Luther insisted, “a work which may be communicated to others, but the object of faith, . . . for the strengthening and nourishing of each one’s own faith.”[4] Martin Bucer’s most significant work on the subject, Grund und Ursach (“Ground and Reason”), called the Roman view of the Table “superstition.” He insisted that worship that is “proper and pleasing to God” must always be based upon “the sole, clear Word of God.”
These Reformers insisted that the sacraments were limited only to the two Christ himself commanded and were considered visible signs of spiritual realities. Though the sacraments are means of grace given from God, then are not effectual in and of themselves; rather the benefits of the means of grace to sanctify a person necessitate the sincere faith of the worshiper and were brought about ultimately by the inner work of the Holy Spirit.
Sacerdotalism
Medieval worship also developed the error of sacerdotalism, the belief in the necessity of a human priest to approach God on the behalf of others. As a result of the drastic increase of church attendance in the fourth century, a strict distinction between clergy and laity had developed wherein the clergy did not trust the illiterate, uneducated masses to worship God appropriately on their own. Thus, the clergy offered “perfected” worship on behalf of the people. The pronouncement by the Council of Laodicea in 363 illustrates this: “No others shall sing in the church, save only the canonical singers, who go up into the ambo and sing from a book.” While this was a local council, it illustrates what became common among most churches in the Middle Ages.
The quality of worship became measured by the excellence of the music and the aesthetic beauty of the liturgy, and while this facilitated the production of some quite beautiful sacred music during the period, it resulted in “worship” becoming mostly what the priests did in the chancel, which eventually was often distinctly separated from the nave by high rails or even a screen. This clergy/laity separation was only exacerbated by the continued use of Latin as the liturgical language despite the fact that increasing numbers of people did not understand the language.
By the end of the fourteenth century, members of the congregation rarely participated in the Lord’s Supper, and even when they did, the cup was withheld from them lest some of Christ’s blood sprinkle on the unclean. Roman worship had moved from the “work of the people” (leitourgia) to the work of the clergy. As even Roman Catholic liturgical scholar Joseph Jungmann notes, “the people were devout and came to worship; but even when they were present at worship, it was still clerical worship. . . . The people were not much more than spectators. This resulted largely from the strangeness of the language which was, and remained, Latin. . . . The people have become dumb.” The people became mere spectators of the worship performed by priests on their behalf.
Congregational Participation
Luther criticized this very reality in the Preface to his German Mass: “The majority just stands there and gapes, hoping to see something new.” The Reformers countered this mentality by insisting that each member of the congregation ought to be an active participant in worship, including praying, singing, receiving the sacraments, and hearing the Word. Martin Luther stated in the Preface to his Latin Mass:
I also wish that we had as many songs as possible in the vernacular which the people could sing. . . . For who doubts that originally all the people sang these which now only the choir sings or responds to while the bishop is consecrating?
Preoccupation with Sensory Experience
Medieval Christians likewise became enamored with sensory experience in worship. Church architecture deliberately kept the nave dark and the elevated chancel bright and included ornate, elaborate decorations. Liturgy included rich vestments, processions, and other elaborate ceremonies that included bells and incense in order to create a mystical experience.
The Reformers Rejected Visual Images as Essential to Worship
Even Luther considered them “adiaphora”—“things indifferent.” He said of worship in The Babylonians Captivity of the Church, “We must be particularly careful to put aside whatever has been added to its original simple institution by the zeal and devotion of men: such things as vestments, ornaments, chants, prayer, organs, candles, and the whole pageantry of outward things.” In On the Councils and the Church (1539):, Luther said, “Besides these external signs and holy possessions the church has other externals that do not sanctify it either in body or soul, nor were they instituted or commanded by God; . . . These things have no more than their natural effects.”
The Reformed wing argued that if they were adiaphora, they should be eliminated. For example, Ulrich Zwingli was committed to church practice being regulated by Scripture alone, leading him to advocate much more radical reforms than even Luther did. He insisted that worship practices must have explicit biblical warrant, causing him to denounce images, other ceremonial adornments, and even music from public worship since he could find no warrant for them in the New Testament.
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