Last night I stayed up until after 1am watching the annual General Assembly (GA) of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). The debate went into the wee hours of the night because the assembly had several measures before it relating to sexuality and gender identity. The most controversial measure was Overture 4, which is titled “Declare the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood’s ‘Nashville Statement’on Biblical Sexuality as a Biblically Faithful Declaration.” Overture 4 is remarkable not only because it affirms the Nashville Statement, but also because it calls on the PCA to use the Nashville Statement in discipleship materials produced by the denomination. Here are the relevant lines from…
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LGBT Pride Month as Religious Observance
Joe Carter has a really important article about LGBT Pride Month as a religious observance. You need to read the whole thing, but here is the heart of it: Because the LGBT agenda of normalizing homosexuality and transgenderism conflicts with Christianity (at least in its non-apostate forms), to “eliminate prejudice” requires anathematizing the beliefs of Bible-believing Christians. In the future the celebration of LGBT views will likely be compelled. But for now, every American is simply required to choose a side. This is why LGBT Pride Month is also, as my colleague Betsy Howard says, a form of Passover. In the original Passover, the Israelites put the blood of a…
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The First Sin of the Day
O LORD OF GRACE, I have been hasty and short in private prayer, O quicken my conscience to feel this folly, to bewail this ingratitude; My first sin of the day leads into others, and it is just that thou shouldst withdraw thy presence from one who waited carelessly on thee. Keep me at all times from robbing thee, and from depriving my soul of thy due worship;
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The Heart and Sin
Sin is an issue of your heart long before it is an issue of your deeds. “He did evil because he did not set his heart to seek the Lord.” –2 Chronicles 12:14
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Divine Discipline
Better to learn in the gentle classroom of God’s word than in the hard chambers of his discipline. “So the princes of Israel and the king humbled themselves and said, ‘The Lord is righteous.’ When the Lord saw that they humbled themselves, the word of the Lord came to Shemaiah, saying, ‘They have humbled themselves so I will not destroy them, but I will grant them some measure of deliverance, and My wrath shall not be poured out on Jerusalem by means of Shishak. But they will become his slaves so that they may learn the difference between My service and the service of the kingdoms of the countries. They will…
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The Sexual Revolution in a Nutshell
If you want to understand the sexual revolution in a nutshell, read Nathaniel Frank’s Washington Post column from a few days ago. He argues that the gay rights movement has been at the forefront of decoupling sex from procreation and of establishing sexual liberation as a driving norm. Frank writes:
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A Prayer against Anger
HOLY LORD, How little repentance there is in the world, and how many sins I have to repent of! I am troubled for my sin of passion, for the shame and horror of it as an evil;
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Complementarianism? What’s in a name?
Over the last several weeks, the evangelical interwebs have been astir with debates about women preaching and complementarianism. I have noticed in much of this discussion that there seems to be much confusion about what complementarianism is. As a result, some of us have been trying to address this confusion in hopes of shedding some light on the matter (see here, here, and here). But that is not my purpose in this short post. Rather, what I would like to do is make a brief historical point about the origin and referent of the term complementarian. While it was common for older commentators to point out that Adam and Eve…
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A Clarification about a New Book on the Trinity
Mike Bird and Scott Harrower have recently edited a new volume of essays titled Trinity Without Hierarchy: Reclaiming Nicene Orthodoxy in Evangelical Theology (Kregel, 2019). One chapter in the book engages with an essay I wrote many years ago on Philippians 2:6. The chapter is titled “There Is a Method to the Madness: On Christological Commitments of Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son,” and it is written by Jules A. Martínez-Olivieri. I am not going to engage the whole essay, but I do want to offer a brief clarification regarding the following paragraph from Martínez-Olivieri’s chapter. Consider Denny Burke [sic], for example, who evaluates the will-of the Son simpliciter without…
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Confronting Purity Culture or Christian Sexual Ethics?
Katelyn Beaty has penned an Op-Ed for The New York Times with a provocative title and subtitle: HOW SHOULD CHRISTIANS HAVE SEX? Purity culture was harmful and dangerous. But its collapse has left a void for those of us looking for guidance in our intimate lives. I won’t rehearse the whole argument of Beaty’s piece. I simply encourage you to go read it for yourself before pressing on with my comments here. I read Beaty’s op-ed with great interest and was genuinely grateful to see her confront the consent-only ethic of the wider culture. Her personal story of disillusionment with this approach to things is actually gut-wrenching to read. It…
