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September 20 - October 19, 2022
sin is really society’s fault, not ours.
expressive individualism, the notion that I am most truly myself when I am able to express outwardly what that voice of nature says to me inwardly.
Everyone else is first and foremost a potential threat to my authenticity.
We are most ourselves AS CHRISTIANS when we think and act as the new creatures we are in Christ. We are naturally dependent individuals
The modern self is not simply one that sees inner feelings as authoritative; the modern self also largely rejects the idea that human nature has any intrinsic moral structure or significance.
full human nature as something emerging over time, as something to be realized by a historical process that would terminate at
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.
Deconstructing one’s faith in order to embrace progressive Christianity is an attempt to be happy rather than disillusioned with a religion that doesn’t work. “Demolition of false hope.”
Whatever makes us feel good about ourselves, that is what we should do.
as soon as one side in the cultural conflict politicizes an institution, the other side has no choice but to engage on those terms. We are all, in a sense, Marxists now.
there is little or no moral structure to human nature. To be human is merely to be an intentional thinking agent. What we think and what we do is our business, as we are not answerable to any higher power or even to the authority of our own bodies.
sexual desire has emerged in the last one hundred years as a primary category for understanding our identity.
our identities as human beings are in a very important sense fundamentally defined by our sexual desires.
As the abolition of the prepolitical makes us all Marxists now, so the assumption that sex is happiness makes us all Freudians.
Freud essentially says yes, religion is childish nonsense, but if people believe it, then it does at least offer a speciously transcendent basis for the sexual morality that keeps society civilized.
That the family is a microcosm of an authoritarian state is wrong only because the authoritarian state is put in the place of the God of all authority.
The point is clear: sexual codes must be shattered if human beings are to be truly free.
the very concept of modesty is now considered to be repressive, an oppressive assault upon individual authenticity.
it is not enough to say to David that society will allow him to behave as he wishes in private without fear of prosecution. That is mere tolerance. Society must also affirm that his identity is as valid as that of anybody else, lest he feel marginalized through psychological oppression.
Sex is no longer a matter of behavior, of what we do; it is a matter of who we are.
institutions are no longer authoritative places of formation but of performance.
As with the collapse of the authority of church, nation, and family, this creates a vacuum of moral authority that is filled with the competing voices of a myriad of new identities and no objective way of adjudicating between them.
Arguments based on the authority of God’s law or the idea that human beings are made in the image of God no longer carry any significant weight in a world devoid of the sacred.
The biblical view of sex is that it involves PERSONS made in the image of God with the potential/responsibility to procreated PERSONS in the image of God—all for the glory of God
a basic respect for the past characterized their role.
It is not the past, but the eternal that should inform the home, church and nation. The past and present and future are all temporal, but God and His Word are timeless.
When identity is grounded in psychology and the internet allows for the indulgence of any and all means of thinking about that identity, the concept of community lacks any real solidity.
People can now pick and choose their communities, and that means that they can pick and choose their identities.
No longer are we presented with powerful, fixed narratives such as that of nation, family, or even bodily sex.
freedom without belonging is a grim burden to bear.
Indeed, the body is an instrument or the raw material for realizing or expressing identity as determined by the will.
This should alert us to the logic of the argument upon which trans ideology depends: because it assumes that the body is not of primary relevance to gender identity, it consequently excludes bodily considerations from the definition of what it means to be a man or a woman. But notice: This is a circular argument. Its conclusion is already contained in its premise.
the idea of sexual orientation really has no content. It is simply defined by subjective desire.
trans ideology now has a grip on the law in such a way that it is going to be impossible to avoid.
Trans rights are now civil rights, and those with principled objections have no obvious recourse by which they might protect themselves.
Victimhood has an intrinsic virtue
to it; and anything that can lay claim to the vocabulary of the victim has unlocked a major, even irresistible, source of cultural power.
the church needs to be the strongest community to which we each belong.
a large part of the church’s witness to the world is simply being the church in worship.
we need first to know what the Christian view of the self is in order to address them.
And as the Bible teaches that the human self is made in the image of God, we need a good grasp of the
it does help to show that biblical teaching is not an arbitrary imposition on nature but instead correlates with it. In other words, it assists us in showing that God’s commands make sense, given the way the world actually is.
