Making things difficult for the working classes
‘The absence of the working class in the church has been going on for centuries and the problem isn’t with attracting the working class – the gospel does that, look at Jesus he was surrounded by the poor! The problem lies with us, the church, it is us and how we do church, that has been repelling, rejecting and confusing the working class for years.’
WWJD – about transgender?
David Robertson answers the trope often thrown out as a knock-down argument against Christians; what would Jesus do? Here is what he probably would do on one of the major cultural issues of our day.
The LGBT false dichotomy between love and hate
On a similar note, there is this. ‘Christians, it turns out, are given a choice. One option is to approve of people satisfying same-sex desires through sexual contact. If Christians do that, they are believed to love LGBT people. The other option is to affirm Jesus’ teaching that sexual activity is reserved for a married man and woman (Matt. 19:1–4). If they do that, then Christians are allegedly hateful towards LGBT people. It’s a tiresome, false dichotomy.’
When your partner is down and can’t get up
This is helpful from Glen Scrivener. My wife has had to suffer with my self-destructive depressive bouts (see here and here). I can only view this from the other side of the coin, but I suspect my wife would find much with which to agree here.
We are upheld in the arena of pain (video)
Here is RC Sproul on the topic of suffering. ‘We don’t rejoice that we have a headache. We don’t rejoice that we have cancer eating away at us. What we do rejoice in is the presence of God in the midst of our pain.’
The apparent injustice of penal substitution (video)
If you don’t have any grounding in philosophy of religion at all this may be difficult to follow. William Lane Craig addresses the claim that God was unjust to punish an innocent person (Jesus Christ) for the sins of others. His fourth point comes with a fairly heavy dose of Molinism but, as he makes clear, the argument for the justice of penal substitutionary atonement is made long before he gets into what amounts to Molinist speculation. Craig’s point contextualising penal substitution into a wider discussion of divine command theory is well worth your time on its own though.
From the archive: EDOs, British values and whether we’ll keep our church buildings
‘Threatening prosecution and the removal of buildings for stating views that do not accord with state orthodoxy is a return to medieval rule whereby the governing religion is not Protestant or Catholic but a secularism that isn’t fully realised and still hides behind a veneer of the more palatable facets and labels of Christendom.’