Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments

Grateful for Your Support

On behalf of the staff of the Fellowship of St. James I thank the many readers of Mere Comments, Touchstone and Salvo who have sent in support in the last six weeks. We have received $633,304 total over the course of the last twelve months, exceeding our annual goal by $13,304 (don't worry, we will only spend it on publishing and advertising the magazines). You have been very generous, and we are deeply moved by your kind support. We ask for your continued prayers for us and support during this next year, as we continue in our labors for Christ, Creed and Culture. The letters and messages we have received have been humbling and encouraging. It is by God's grace that we continue. May God bless you.

A Day & a Half

That's how much remains in our current fiscal year. Please consider a donation at this time, as we are set to begin a new fiscal year for the first time in twelve years without our usual major quarterly grant on July 1. Anything you can donate at this time will help us end the year strong so that we can pay our bills this month and over the summer. Many, many donors have contributed so that today we are within just a few thousand of our goal for June 30. Thanks so much! You can donate on-line here, or mail a check to Touchstone, P.O. Box 410788, Chicago, IL 60641. Thanks!

"Gay" Bishop Prophesizes Collapse of Anglican Church in North America

New North American Anglican grouping won't last says gay bishop
By Chris Herlinger
New York, 29 June (ENI)--A new North American group claiming to embrace "traditional Anglican values" will not last long, the Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop has predicted.

V. Gene Robinson, an openly homosexual man living openly with a partner, whose 2003 consecration as bishop of the diocese of New Hampshire created a backlash among traditional believers within the U.S., church, told Ecumenical News International he does not believe the new Anglican grouping has long-term viability.

"A church that does not ordain women or openly gay people - I don't see a future for that," Robinson told ENI after delivering a sermon on 28 June at the First Presbyterian Church in New York City during the city's annual gay pride festivities.

Court Overturns Sotomayor

Uh, oh, will this come up in confirmation hearings? The Supreme Court finds that white firemen were denied their rights in promotion, contrary to the view of nominee Sotomayor, who ruled on the case earlier.

The Gospel of Mark (Driscoll) & His Critics

By Justin D. Barnard

June 26, 2009 - Mark Driscoll, pastor of Seattle-area Mars Hill Church, has continued to draw fire for his frank discussions of sex, both from the pulpit and on his church’s blog. Both John MacArthur and John Piper have criticized his exegesis of Song of Solomon; many have been critical of the “unwholesome talk” that is unbecoming one charged with the proclamation of the word of God. Still, some (including John Piper) defend Driscoll’s ministry for its faithfulness to the Gospel.

Sadly, most of the discussion about Driscoll is reflective of a deeper problem that infects not only evangelicalism writ large, but Driscoll’s views on sex as well. Typical criticisms of Driscoll suggest that his preaching style and methods “go too far.” He’s “coarse” or “vulgar” – or so Driscoll’s detractors allege.

What is striking about this critique is what it assumes about sin and the Gospel. Sin and redemption are, on this view, principally, if not exclusively, matters of the heart or soul. The effect of the Gospel is primarily about having a “clean heart” (not a sanctified, embodied life). Unwholesome talk despoils sanitized hearts. Hence, it is to be avoided in order to maintain the pristine condition of a soul that’s been washed by the blood.

Meanwhile, the life that believers lead in the flesh bears little to no relation to the life they possess in the spirit. Ironically, this is what enables Driscoll’s defenders to argue that his verbal faux pas is excusable since overall, Driscoll’s ministry has reached hundreds of “souls for Christ.” Moreover, by focusing their critical efforts exclusively on his lack of circumspection in speaking about sex (which, for the record, is clearly problematic), Driscoll’s critics disclose their tacit agreement with this dichotomized Gospel that undergirds Driscoll’s very teaching about sex. Specifically, (within marriage, of course) we can do whatever we’d like with our bodies; let’s just not talk about it publicly, since that might corrupt our souls.

Even if he were as circumspect as the most sanctimonious of Puritans in how he spoke of it, the content of Driscoll’s teaching about sex (even within marriage) is inexcusable. Driscoll seems to think that traditional marriage is the gateway to the license of mutual consent. Thus, like the world, he fails to grasp that human sexuality might be ordered toward ends to which even husband and wife might be subject. Rather, just like your garden variety advocate for moral legitimacy of homosexual behavior, Driscoll views sexual activity (of course, within traditional marriage) as subject to nothing other than the mutual desires of the participants.

Driscoll’s teaching reflects an impoverished understanding of the Gospel. For it presupposes that the moral boundaries expressed in Scripture have no internal order. They are, in that respect, effectively arbitrary. Thus, in Driscoll’s view, provided that we remain within the arbitrary boundaries expressed in God’s word, God’s saving grace in Christ gives us license to follow our desires. In practice, this means for Driscoll that a husband and wife may do things in their marriage bed that a gay couple may not since the former, having had their souls saved from the disembodied stains of sin, are doing such things within the essentially arbitrary boundaries that God has given.

Such a view is deeply mistaken. The Gospel does not free us to give license to our desires; it orders our desires aright. In ordering our desires, it guides and governs our behavior – to wit, the very acts of the body. Yet, this aspect of the Gospel is apparently lost not only on Driscoll, but his critics as well. For by and large his evangelical critics fail to call Driscoll to account for the fact that the things of which he speaks publicly should not merely not be said; they should not even be done.

The furor over Driscoll’s teaching about sex within marriage should be an occasion for evangelicals to reflect deeply on their understanding of the Gospel. If the Gospel is nothing more than fire insurance for the soul, then both Driscoll and his critics are right. We can do whatever we’d like (Driscoll), as long as we don’t talk about it in “dirty” ways in public (his critics). But if the Gospel has genuine implications for the conduct of our embodied public lives, then we must one and all repent of the dialectical quagmire that we’re currently in over Driscoll’s pillow talk from the pulpit. For it reflects a Gospel eviscerated of its power to transform human life - body and soul.

Justin Barnard teaches philosophy at Union University, where he also serves as Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Intellectual Discipleship. 

Pseudogamy 108

     Two observations, from Canada, where we spend the summer.  Down the road from me live an elderly couple who have been married for 62 years.  They are utterly comfortable with one another, and that means, as anybody knows who observes happily married people, comfortable in their skins, with his being a man and her being a woman.  He runs a perpetual yard sale out of his garage, selling anything from salt shakers to new bicycles, a generator, a washing machine, and so on.  She rolls her eyes at this habit of his, but indulges him in it, because he has put that same habit of pottering to good use in the home, turning a trailer into a snug ten-room outfit that seems, in the finished basement, to go on forever.  And it could go on forever, too; when the island is without power (as it was, over and over last winter), he just turns on his generator.  He has all kinds of backups down there, so his wife will never have to worry about anything; a regular dugout a la French Family Robinson.

     If you drive up the highway from his house, you will see a neat patch of land, apparently in the middle of nowhere, mowed and trimmed, with a white picket fence surrounding a large white cross.  He erected that cross in honor of his wife's father.  In the old days, the highway that runs round the island was a mud road, impassible when it snowed in the winter.  So the father of that family would lead his wife and children up to the road to pray.  This they did whenever they could not make it to the church, four miles away.  Because that place was sacred to his wife and her family, it became sacred to my neighbor too, even though he himself never worshiped there, and never even grew up on our island.  He just considers it a good husband's thing to do, as evidently his father-in-law considered what he did to be the fatherly thing to do.

     Meanwhile, stuck indoors one day on account of rain, I caught a few minutes of a Canadian fashion show televised every afternoon.  The hosts are named Steven and Chris, and they are too absurd to watch; walking parodies of the mincing, lisping, girl-mimicking, louche gay man.  Chris, who appears to be a desperately insecure fellow, told a story about how he had waited an hour to get into the hottest nightclub spot in Bangkok, only to find when he got to the door, dressed to the nines, that they didn`t allow anyone in with flip-flops.  And he'd been dying to make his killer appearance in there.  So he ran out into the street and bought the first pair of shoes he could find: expensive orange crocodile shoes.  (I have no idea what crocodile shoes are; I guess shoes made of crocodile leather; I don't know why anyone would want them, but then, I have no idea either why anyone would want to visit a nightclub in Bangkok rather than, say, have dinner with an ordinary family on one of the floating houses.) 

     It occurs to me that the pseudogamy of the male homosexual is essentially related to the need to put on an act, an act that the man not burdened with same-sex attraction can hardly understand.  Suppose that because of the neglect of your father or brothers, or because their cruelty, or because of some episode of molestation or seduction, you find it difficult to identify yourself as a male.  You might then compensate by the practice of a campy and exaggerated masculinity, such as is to be found in the gymnasium among weight lifters; or you might become what you see, usually by caricature, as girlish; or you might flit uneasily between the male and the female roles, but you will always see what you are doing as something donned and doffed.  Of course, in the very act of sodomitical relations there is a pretense of being the male or being the female; while all along the relations are with someone like oneself.  The narcissism of the attraction -- one is attracted to what mirrors oneself -- is at the same time expressed by means of an act, that one is not oneself, one is actually a girl in disguise, or a hyper-man, or whatever the idol-making machine of the mind can suggest.  Hence among male homosexuals the self-advertising, the exhibitionism, the camp, the grim unseriousness, the childish fascination with bodily functions, and the other fascination, akin to the former, with death.  Of all such things the old fellow up the street is wholly innocent, because he is no more aware of his manhood than he is aware of his skin, which is as it should be.

Summing Up Michael Jackson

I don't think I can do it better than Justin Taylor:

He is dead at the age of 50. He had everything the world offered--but no Jesus.

I remember once looking at the liner notes from an album of his, and he quoted the final lines from William Ernest Henley's famous poem, Invictus:
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Those are not the words you want written on your tombstone.

It is hard to think of a sadder public figure in recent years. A black man who never found his identity as one created in God's image, and who never experienced the identity of being conformed to the image of Christ. Black and white, male and female, rich and bankrupt, genius and punchline, private and public, innocent and deceptive--everything seemed to be jumbled up.

The one thing that comes to mind about Jackson is how bad he was at hiding his brokenness. Even while living in a literal fantasy land, it was obvious to everyone that this was a person--enormously gifted--desperately seeking a mask to cover, in futility, who he was.

May God use even this to increase our compassion and ministry to the lost, broken, and confused.

Sorry for the gigantic block quote, Justin, but it was too fitting to cut down to size.

Persecution of Indian Christians

The on-going persecution of Indian Christians underscores the complex elements of securing religious freedom throughout the world. Despite India's secular constitution, state-based anti-conversion laws, combined with Hindu fundamentalism and  the weak economic status of many Indian Christians, who frequently come from low-caste communities, encourage a most unjust status quo. 

Still, it was good to learn today that an Indian Catholic nun who had been sexually assaulted last year was finally able to identify her attacker. It has taken a long time to achieve a measure of justice, but it only came after Indian Christians throughout the country registered their outrage at the slow pace of the investigation into the crime, part of a much broader wave of attacks against Christians in the state of Orissa. 

I have written on this subject for my own blog and for Touchstone, and would like to direct readers to the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom, which has hosted press conferences and presentations by Indian Christian leaders over the last year. 

Last week, I also heard a very interesting presentation by Georgetown University's  Thomas Farr, author of "World of Faith and Freedom," a 2008 book that evaluates the connection between U.S. foreign policy and religious freedom and suggests Washington can do more, proactively to promote the rights of religious minorities, rather than merely adopting a reactive posture to the on-going problem of religious persecution. 

Salvo Number 9

The Summer 2009 issue of Salvo is hot off the press. The cover image in the upper right of our home webpage will link you to subscription information, while the main page has posted several articles from this new issue, including Marcia Segelstein's "Blindsided Kids: Thanks to the Internet and the Supreme Court, Pornography is Now Available in Every Home in America (Did you know that the largest group of viewers of on-line porn are between the ages of 12 and 17?)

The Salvo print edition includes Judith Reisman's  "Meddle of Dishonor: Why Isn't Congress Hysterical About Adult Porn and Kids?" among  other things in this new 64-page quarterly.

Subscribers will also discover the name of the organization advertising on our back cover that is "Ensuring that the sexual revolution leaves no child behind." Subscribe here today!

President to Meet with the Pope

VATICAN CITY, JUNE 24, 2009 (Zenit.org).- The Vatican confirmed today Benedict XVI will receive in audience U.S. President Barack Obama next month.

The meeting, set for the afternoon of July 10, will be the first between the Pontiff and the new president.

Obama's Vatican visit will take place within the context of his participation in the Group of Eight summit, which will be held July 8-10 in L'Aquila, Italy.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, said to reporters today that "Benedict XVI is open to receive the president of the United States during the afternoon of July 10."

The decision to set the meeting for the afternoon, which breaks protocol for papal audiences, is due to the president's tight schedule.

It is hard to imagine that the issue of abortion will not come up. Francis Cardinal George met with the President as well. On the matter on abortion and natural law, he noted, the President just doesn't get it. I had lunch with a very godly older man on Tuesday who said he prays every day for President Obama's conversion. July 10 would be an especially good day for that prayer.