Until I repent in dust and ashes, my original Twitter account has been locked (don’t worry, I’ve respawned without a word of remorse). Why you ask? There is a man living in Canada who has made a name for himself by attempting to legally compel female spa-workers to wax his genitals. But aren’t female spa-workers protected from this kind of male aggression? Isn’t stopping this kind of sexual assault what the me-too era is all about? Yes of course, but you see this man identifies as a woman. So when real women are told to apply hot wax to this pretend woman’s genitals and they refuse, they, the real women, are not victimized. They are victimizers, haters even.
So I toddled over to this man’s Twitter page and deposited the following comment:
“@trustednerd You are a man pretending to be a woman trying to force real women to touch your testicles. It is perverse and sickening. It has nothing to do with love. But you can be forgiven if you will forsake yourself and turn to Jesus who bled and died for sinners. He can heal you.”
It wasn’t the most brilliant tweet nor the most fulsome Gospel presentation but the essentials were there. Now, in a sane world, if a man should try to force women to touch his genitals he would be arrested and imprisoned or institutionalized. In an even saner world, apart from some kind of incapacitating mental illness, such an act would be grounds for the removal of said genitals.
But we do not live in a sane world. In our world those who object to pretend women forcing real women to touch their genitals are the abusers of the innocent, the oppressors of humankind.
Evil, as many great theologians have pointed out, is parasitic. It has no inherent capacity to be. It is simply the corruption of what is. Good can exist apart from evil, evil can only thrive so long as there is a good upon which to feed. Those who have given themselves over to evil are insatiable, ravenous in their desire to invade and corrupt, and then consume what they have corrupted.
Some were surprised at how quickly the forces of the left shifted after the Obergefell ruling from their demagogic quest for so called marriage equality to their totalitarian quest to eliminate the objective measures by which human beings identify themselves as male or female. But why bother with marriage anymore? Marriage has been consumed and corrupted. The parasite must feed. And what delicacy could be finer than this: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” And so, here we are.*
But where was I? Oh yes, Twitter and my banishment from it. This all happened to me several months ago and so it is, I suppose, old news. But it came to my mind afresh today when I read the recent events in Australia. Speaking at his Diocesan Synod, Archbishop Glenn Davies said,
“I fear for the stability of the Anglican Church of Australia. These developments have the potential to fracture our fellowship and impair our communion. I have stated this on numerous occasions at the annual National Bishops’ Conference, but sadly to little effect…My own view is that if people wish to change the doctrine of our church, they should start a new church or join a church more aligned to their views – but do not ruin the Anglican Church by abandoning the plain teaching of Scripture. Please leave us.”
To what developments does the Archbishop refer? He speaks of Australian bishops of the left who seek to corrupt the Christian doctrine of sexual union. In, once more, a sane world, the Archbishop’s comments would hardly merit attention. The Christian faith is grounded in God’s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ who speaks directly to us in the scriptures he breathed out. And since these scriptures reveal that God created marriage to be one flesh union between a man and a woman; and that sexual relationships outside this union are abominable in God’s sight; and that God instituted marriage in just this way so that it might refer typologically to the love between Christ and his Bride, the church, you should expect that when purportedly Christian leaders promote beliefs and practices in direct conflict with the aforementioned revelations, actual Chrsitian leaders will tell them to shove off.
If you want to create a religion where men have sex with men and women with women and pretend that it is holy, well, I suppose you are free to do so. I pray you repent and seek the gracious mercy of Christ who died for such things, but it is your own soul after all. In any case, whatever you choose to call this new thing of yours, it is not Christianity. It certainly isn’t Anglican Christianty which holds scripture to be the word of God and forbids the Church from ordaining anything contrary to it.
The Archbishop’s words have been received with the predictable Victorian swoons by people of the lie across the poor Australian continent and beyond.
To give just one example, here’s the Guardian quoting the Archbishop of Perth:
“Archbishop of Perth, Kay Goldsworthy said all members of the LGBTIQ community were welcome in the Anglican Church in Perth and said it is, ‘troubling that the welcome is not universal.’ ‘The Perth Diocese of the Anglican Church has long been a strong supporter of the LGBTIQ community and it is an appropriate time to reiterate and emphasise the message of a 2017 resolution of the Perth Diocese,’ she said. ‘It affirmed that ‘all people are made in the image of God regardless of their race, sex, economic background and political affiliation …’ and offered a heartfelt apology to, and sought forgiveness from, the LGBTIQ Community ‘whom we have hurt by words and behaviour that have not displayed the love of God’.”
Troubling indeed that an Archbishop doesn’t grasp the basic tenets of the Faith. Or, more likely, she understands them well enough but hates them even more. Archbishop Davies would no doubt be delighted to find his pews stocked with adulterers, homosexuals, thieves, drunks, prostitutes, self righteous prigs, and other nefarious sorts. You know, people like you and me, along with people from every race and political persuasion. His pews most likely are so stocked. And to them he would no doubt say something like, “Welcome, come in and rest. God made you in his own image but you and I have together rebelled against him and twisted that image so that we have become corrupt. But God loves you so much that he has sent his Son, born of a Virgin, to die for your sins and he has risen again for your justification. So now you must forsake yourself, repent of your sins, and place yourself into the merciful hands of Jesus Christ, trusting in him and his work alone for your salvation.”
And there’s the rub: the forsaking of the self, the repenting of sin, the trusting in the work of Another. These are things the Evil One hates. And those who have given themselves over to evil hate these things with him. You cannot tell little gods and goddesses that they must give themselves up and expect to walk away unscathed.
The Gospel, Jesus and the Message of his saving work for sinners, is the most wonderfully good thing God has given to this fallen world. And so it must be penetrated, corrupted, and consumed. The language of the Gospel, “welcome”, “inclusion”, “tolerance”, “love”, the “image of God” must be adopted, redefined, and turned against the substance of the Gospel. The ramparts of law, truth, grace, repentance, transformation, death to self, substitutionary atonement, must be torn down. Those who, like Archbishop Davies, defend them must be shamed and destroyed. The Australian church must become a church without walls so that the parasite might feed. So that was a mixed metaphor, but this is a blog and I imagine you get the point.
*You may have noticed that I have not so subtly equated the ‘forces of the left’ pushing the LGBTQ agenda with those who have, ‘given themselves over to evil’ in my previous paragraph. Good catch.
