Category: Political

Racism and Christianity are Incompatible.

Does racism work with Christianity? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

With today being MLK Day, we think about a man who said he wants people to be judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin. The dream was to see black and white boys and girls playing together and being friends. There was to be no advantage or disadvantage to race.

Sadly, the church hasn’t had a perfect track record here. It could be a natural human tendency to look with suspicion at the other. We often treat slavery as if it was the worst evil and also uniquely American. It is a great evil indeed, though I think some are worse, such as mass genocide, but it is also not uniquely American. Most every other culture has enslaved a group and been enslaved themselves. Many groups have enslaved their own people and sold their own people to be slaves.

There were too many Christians who were defending slavery in America. I recognize that my own denomination’s history has a black mark here, one that I am thankful we have recognized the error of. I have a professor here who has said if he could ask Jonathan Edwards one question, it would be “Why did you keep slaves?”

Generally, we recognize racism as wrong today, but why? What makes it wrong? We can’t just take these ideas as if they are a given. After all, if you went back 2,000 years ago and asked the average person in the Roman Empire if slavery was wrong, they would look at you puzzled. Of course not. Why would you think such a thing? Oddly, many of the slaves could think the exact same thing.

As Tom Holland argues in his book Dominion, even as an agnostic, he finds his values are really Christian ones. Our culture has been so shaped by Christianity that we don’t see it. We tend to think “This is the way everyone thinks.” No. It isn’t. Our beliefs on morality are something that have been tinkered out over a long period of time. I also suspect we’re about to see how important they are as the major movement today is to avoid any idea of morality in many areas, especially sex.

In Christianity, mankind is created in the image of God. There is no distinction in that regard between male and female. Both are said to be equally in the image of God, despite them both being very different. (Hallelujah that women are so different, might I add.) Too many of us have this idea that if there are any differences between two things, then one is superior and the other is inferior. Not always.

Are men superior in any way? Yes. Absolutely. So are women. Men are superior at being men. Women are superior at being women. (Something our culture is trying to destroy the idea of. It’s amazing women are complaining about the patriarchy all the while supporting the transgender movement.) There are benefits to being a man and there are benefits to being a woman and there are downsides to both.

The same can apply to races. Can there be differences between the races besides appearance? Absolutely. Does this mean that any one race is superior or inferior? Not a bit. (I cannot recommend enough Thomas Sowell on these kinds of questions.)

What racism does is it treats the image of God, the main aspect of man in Christianity, as if it was of lesser importance than race. Taking any secondary characteristic of a person and treating it as a primary characteristic is demeaning. This is also the same when we treat the most important aspect of a person to be any of the aspects I mentioned above.

This does not mean that these secondary qualities are unimportant, but they should not be ranked above the most important. Each person you meet is in the image of God. If they are, then you are to love them as yourself. You can speak all you want against what a person does, because that can be wicked and evil, but humanity is a good still, a good regardless of any of the secondary characteristics.

Also, this racism is not just treating as someone lesser because of a secondary characteristic. It’s also treating them as greater because of it. James had a problem with special privileges being given to the rich. He would have just as much problem with special privileges being given based on the secondary characteristics as well. If you want to see racism die in a society, you have to get rid of privileges as well as disadvantages.

A truly Christian society will be a society that is without racism.

Let’s aim for that.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

Reply To Honestly By Tom Copeland Part 5

Are all relationships sinful? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Paul writing to the church in Corinth.

So guys, I hear you’ve got a case where you have a man who’s sleeping with his stepmother. Gross! Am I right? But hey, all relationships are going to be hard in life. All relationships have struggles. I want to suggest that all of you just show your love and support to them. Don’t judge them by any means! God can redeem any relationship and He will redeem this one!

Or at least that’s what Copeland’s friend would likely say if he was in Paul’s shoes.

Copeland has a friend who grew up very conservative and now is an Anglican with no condemnation of same-sex relationships. This friend is described as someone who takes Scripture very seriously and knows the Bible very well. His proposal is that instead of looking at same-sex relationships as fine and wonderful, just realize all relationships are sinful. All of them have all of us acting in sinful ways. All of them are used to sanctify us.

Copeland uses an example of him being married to his wife for thirty years, and yet he has been a sinful man many times in that relationship. Anyone who is married can attest to that and anyone who has been married can be. Even if Jesus was married, He wouldn’t have had a perfect marriage because He would have been married to a sinful woman.

Except Scripture doesn’t say all relationships are sinful. It says all people in all relationships are sinners, but the relationships themselves are not always the problem. If all relationships are fallen and we just need grace in all of them, Paul would not have written what he wrote in 1 Cor. 5.

Copeland goes on to say to people in a same-sex relationship that:

The good news here is that even if the scripture does condemn your relationship (and as I’ve said, I’m not sure it does), it doesn’t condemn it any more than any other, and God redeems it.

Copeland, Tom. Honestly – A Book About Sex for Christians . Tom Copeland. Kindle Edition.

Because we know of all those passages that condemn opposite-sex relationships.

Now someone could say “Well what about the situation in 1 Cor. 5? Isn’t that such a relationship?

Indeed, it is, but the problem wasn’t it was opposite-sex. The problem was it was highly incestuous. Not all opposite-sex relationships are approved by Scripture, but not a single same-sex romantic relationship is. I would love to see Copeland try to back the statement he has made here.

Ultimately as Christians though, if Scripture condemns it, we have to as well. Now how we could do that could be wrong. We should realize that a person with same-sex attraction is experiencing a real loss and if they are willing to sacrifice this for the good of the kingdom, we should support them in that and praise them and help them with the struggle, just as we help a single person who is not married.

The rest of this section in this chapter is about the scientific research, which I cannot comment on. On the ethical, I find it all weak. Copeland does not interact with the best Scripture and violates on the ways he says liberals violate. It’s a shame because really, much of the rest of the book is quite good.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Reply To Honestly by Tom Copeland Part 4

What about wealth and divorce? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In this part, Copeland decides to have us look at two different issues that he wants to use to draw an analogy to how we treat same-sex relationships. These are wealth and the question of divorce and remarriage. Let’s see how he fares.

At the start, he says we should not condemn rich people or divorced people. I agree. I would have said the same thing even before my own divorce. So what does he say instead?

In looking at wealth, he cites many common verses such as not laying up treasures in Heaven and no man can serve two masters. There’s examples of giving generously and of the early church in Acts and Luke 6 supposedly saying to not ask property back from the one who robs you.

Unfortunately, none of this is with any context whatsoever. In the last case, the ones who were doing this were likely the Roman soldiers themselves who were essentially the police force in this context. Rome, the biggest empire in the world, has a soldier who takes something from you. Who are you going to go to?

In the early church, there was certainly the case of people giving, but also we see in Acts that Ananias and Sapphira had sold their land and they had all right to keep some of it for themselves if they wanted. Instead, they lied and acted like they were giving it all away. Note also that if some people were selling, that means private property was existing. (Also, if you believe Jesus has pronounced doom on Jerusalem, why hold on to the land anyway?)

As for other warnings, having money is not the problem. Money having you is the problem. Money can indeed too easily become an idol and I do believe that if you have been blessed financially and know how to make money well, you should be giving some of that money away. See below on this blog if you want to consider this work as a means of giving.

Copeland goes on to say the Bible must not be really saying what it sounds like it’s saying, and indeed, to an extent, that’s true. Copeland is reading it apart from the social and historical context. He says the passages are easy to interpret, but we ignore that. Not really. We don’t need sermons condemning wealth, but greed is another thing altogether.

Now when it comes to the passages on same-sex relationship, those are also quite clear and even with the social and historical context, the meaning doesn’t change. Are we to brush that under the rug? Unfortunately, Copeland’s position looks to be that we should.

Copeland isn’t all down on wealth. He does think we need to look at questions we ask about retirement and are we really saving up just so we can live easily later on in life? I have no problem asking such questions. Do we give preference to rich people in our churches instead of poor? We do need to consider that. The problem is none of these make the analogy work.

With divorce, Copeland says that Jesus is clear. If you divorce your spouse for a reason other than adultery and you remarry another, you are guilty of adultery. I agree. I think this could also include reasons such as desertion as in 1 Cor. 7 and abusive relationships as these are people who have also betrayed and broken the covenant.

He says that divorced people walk down our aisles and sign our cards and join our churches without a question about their past sexual behavior. Unfortunately, this is not so. I know whenever I have talked about doing any ministry, I have had to explain my divorce and its circumstances and relive the pain all over again.

Copeland says that this should concern us because divorce and remarriage have done a lot more damage to the church than same-sex relationships have. I disagree. I contend that making divorce easy was the stepping stone to another redefinition of marriage. This in turn is the stepping stone to all the chaos resulting from transgenderism.

If marriage is not meant to be permanent, then that is the first step. Then after that, it can easily become just another relationship and hey, why not let same-sex attracted people marry one another? With that, the male-female requirement is gone. If that is gone, well, why not do away with male and female altogether? I have no idea what comes next, but we’ve already descended into insanity.

What happens along the path? The further breakdown of the family unit. We have lost the meaning of sex, marriage, and family. Copeland’s approach will just keep us going further.

Copeland goes on to say that if we want to teach that same-sex relationships are wrong, he wants us to condemn just as much the accumulation of wealth and the divorce culture every time. Well first off, many people do condemn that. Second, Copeland doesn’t set the rules. Third, it’s interesting the conservatives have to change their ways, but the ones on the left do not.

Anyway, next time, we’ll look at what a friend of Copeland has to say about relationships.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

 

Reply To Honestly by Tom Copeland Part 3

What about interpretation? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In this part of the book, Copeland starts with examining the biblical data. He admits upfront he’s not a biblical languages scholar. That’s fine. Neither am I. We’re not going to get into any fancy use of Greek or Hebrew here. So let’s see first off what Copeland says is the standpoint of the positions.

He says that conservatives point to Sodom and Gomorrah, Leviticus, Romans, 1 Corinthians, and 1 Timothy mainly to offer passages they say offer indisputable proof that the bible condemns same-sex sexual behavior. Liberals dispute these and sometimes say that some of these passages could be about pederasty instead. They say that the Bible gives no condemnation of loving and consensual same-sex relationships.

Okay. Both sides could have some nuance, but they are generally a fair assessment. This is certainly something that is written about back and forth. So how does Copeland respond to these?

So which side is right? I’m not really sure, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter that much.

Copeland, Tom. Honestly – A Book About Sex for Christians . Tom Copeland. Kindle Edition.

I’m sorry. What?

I mean, this is only Scripture which we say is our authority. This is only what we say could be about the fate of countless souls for all eternity. This is a question that doesn’t matter that much?

Last time, I wrote about how the liberal side is reluctant to deal with passages if they think they hurt them or someone they care about. We have already seen that take place. I would have preferred at least some reason for thinking that the conservative side is wrong rather than a dismissal of the issue altogether.

He instead goes with an approach from Tillich saying that we are all dealing with our own interpretations and all sides have claimed biblical sanctions on various issues. It is certainly true that all sides have, but one side has been wrong and the other has been right, at least if you hold to a conservative view of Scripture. If we go this route, then we could easily say anything is okay. Moral relativism wins out.

He also says Rich Mullins said God knows what it means. The rest of us are just guessing. To an extent, but some guesses are also better than others. God knows what the disease is someone has, but odds are if they go to a doctor, he has a better guess than they do.

He also quotes Donald Miller and says we are more interested often in a propositional claim than a relational one. Interesting to note that that itself is a propositional claim. They’re unavoidable. We should make sure ours are rooted in truth. He then asks what if we’re wrong?

This is followed by asking if Christians should be passing radical anti-abortion laws to protect unborn children like the one in Texas.

Okay. This book was published in 2013, so I’m guessing that law was HB2. I looked up the measures of this radical law. I did find something from the UK on it here.

So what is so radical?

– Abortions doctors were required to have admitting privileges to a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic.

– All abortions clinics were required to upgrade to become ambulatory surgical centres (ASCs).

– Abortions after 20-weeks were prohibited, except in the case of “severe fetal abnormalities” or to “avert the death or substantial and irreversible physical impairment … of the pregnant woman”.

– Women who take abortion-inducing pills, must do so under the supervision of a physician, requiring two trips to the clinic for each dosage.

– After the administration of the abortion-inducing pills, a woman must set a follow-up visit with the physician 14-days after the dosage.

In addition to the three visits required of those seeking abortions under HB2, Texas passed a law in 2011 requiring women to undergo an ultrasound procedure 24 hours prior to getting an abortion – resulting in a minimum of four visits to the clinic.

The article says that if this were upheld, 10 or fewer clinics would have served the state.

On that last part, might it not be best to say that if so many clinics can’t handle these requirements, maybe they shouldn’t be open? What is really so radical? Is it wanting an ultrasound so a woman can make an informed decision? Is it being near a hospital in case something goes wrong? Is it that except in cases like a fetal condition that could cause death to the woman abortions weren’t allowed after 20 weeks?

And this is radical?

Copeland asks if we should instead have healthy choices for women, particularly in cases of rape and incest.

The hugely overwhelming majority of cases of abortion are not for rape or incest.

Should Christians be in favor of the death penalty or opposed to it? He speaks no further on this, but I say, yes, we should be.

Should we be in favor of second amendment rights, even having people allowed to have concealed handguns at church? Well, considering how many bad guys with guns have shown up at churches, yes. I don’t live in fear of the majority of citizens having guns. Bad guys having guns without the majority having them? Yes. That’s fearful. Even more fearful, the government being armed while we’re not.

This goes on to questions of war and wealth. Copeland asks who we usually say is right. The answer is us. Of course, that’s not a major claim. If I did not think my position was right, why would I hold it? However, if I hold a position, I have reasons for it.

He goes on to say that he doesn’t know and he has this thing called faith which requires not knowing. I have written on faith more here. Based on this, you might as well say that we should strive to know less so that we can have more faith. This doesn’t fit anyway. “I don’t know which side is right, so I have faith?”

He then says he can’t make life-altering decisions for someone else based on passages that only show up in the Old Testament and Paul and are mentioned nowhere in the Gospels or any other New Testament writer. (Ignore for the point Jude could say something about it.) Unfortunately, Copeland has already done this. Saying he won’t condemn the behavior is itself making a life-altering judgment and if he is wrong, then his advice could condemn numerous souls for eternity.

Never mind that James 3:1 says teachers will be held to greater account. Will he stand before God and say “I decided it really didn’t matter what your Word said about the issue.”? As for Jesus, Jesus never said anything about the death penalty or abortion or guns either, but yet Copeland sure asks about those. Jesus talked about questions that were relevant debate topics in Israel. We have no reason to think same-sex relationships were one of them.

After this, Copeland says:

The stakes are real. The stakes are people. Depending on the research you read, between 25-40% of non-heterosexual teenagers have attempted suicide and as many as 75% report having had suicidal thoughts. The rate is as much as five times higher for teens who identify themselves as gay than for heterosexual teens. For the church to do anything that could possibly contribute to that is unacceptable.

Copeland, Tom. Honestly – A Book About Sex for Christians . Tom Copeland. Kindle Edition.

I agree that the stakes are real and are people and we need to do something, but notice this. If someone is having suicidal thoughts based on whatsoever issue, the first thing to deal with primarily is what in them is making them have suicidal thoughts. Having gone through divorce, I sometimes pondered the question of suicide and I understand that most people who go through divorce, particularly those wrongfully divorced, do. Now if I was at a point of acting, is the thing to do to change everyone else and force my ex to take me back, or is it to change my own thinking on how I see myself regardless? Wouldn’t it be best to deal with the underlying mental health issue?

In the end, Copeland might say he doesn’t want to really take a side, but the reality is he has. He can say he doesn’t want to make life-altering judgments, but he has. He can say he doesn’t want to make judgments on the holiness of certain actions, but in reality, he has. They are unavoidable.

I think he’s wrong entirely.

We’ll each have to stand before God and give reasons for our answers someday.

I hope we’re both prepared.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

Reply To Honestly by Tom Copeland Part 2

What mistakes can liberals make in interpretation? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Tom Copeland’s book Honestly, like I said yesterday, is for the most part quite good, but I really disagreed with his statements on sexual orientation. Last time, I discussed his concerns with a conservative schema for interpreting Scripture. I appreciate that he was fair and said liberals have some problems as well. Let’s look at those and then when we get to what he says, I will see if he does fall under any of those concerns.

The first one is that liberals can be reluctant to deal honestly with difficult passages if they think they hurt them or someone they care about. In many cases, that’s something all of us are prone to. “Well, the Bible doesn’t really say much about my sin here, but check out everything it says about my neighbor’s!” Michael Brown wrote a book on overcoming a food addiction and noted how many pastors are obese and that you never hear a sermon on gluttony. I wonder why.

The second danger is like this. If an interpretation doesn’t match how we think God is or how Christ is, we discount it. Surely a God of love would never do XYZ! Well, there’s a lot of things a God of love would do that we don’t understand. This is also something common with internet atheists and others. “Look at what God did! That’s not loving!”

The next is a lack of consistency or structure in interpreting Scripture. If much of our interpretation of Scripture is based on experiences and on what is going on in culture at the time, it is easy to get caught up in an idea because it is new. This is something that happens regularly in politics where people will suddenly show up and embrace what is obviously true despite it not being believed by anyone for thousands of years beforehand.

The last he mentions is a focus on tolerance and grace at the expense of truth. I had Gregory Quinian on my podcast once who describes himself as an ex-homosexual and he has said that we are to speak the truth in love, but if it’s not the truth, it’s not love. There are too many in our society that will not tell someone the truth for fear that it will hurt them. Many Christians often talk about loving someone into the kingdom. You can also love someone out of the kingdom.

I definitely appreciate all of these as I want to give the benefit of the doubt and think that Copeland is trying to give both sides of the coin to the best of his ability. In the end as you will see, I do not think he has made a really strong case from the Bible for his position. If you are one who doesn’t hold to Scripture, that won’t matter to you, but as I said last time, this is a book by a Christian for a Christian so we are seeing how it stacks up with a Christian worldview.

We shall continue next time.

 

Do We Believe In Magic?

Is our society more involved in magic than we realize? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

No. This isn’t really about the New Age movement or about witchcraft. This isn’t about reading Harry Potter or watching Sabrina: The Teenaged Witch. This isn’t really about fantasy as fantasy.

In our day and age, we like to think we are a scientific people. We have abandoned the ways of magic and religion. We only believe in that which can be empirically verified, and by that, we mean scientifically verified, even though the two aren’t identical. All scientific verification is empirical, but the reverse is not so.

If anything, today we see science as a new priesthood. I do not say this to demean science in the sense of the study of the material world. That is wonderful and that needs to continue. What I do demean is the idea that because someone is a scientist, they are qualified to speak on areas outside their expertise. However, there is also the danger that something can supposedly fall under science, but like scandals of bought priesthood in the past, so a scientific person can be bought off as well.

The Covid “pandemic” really brought a lot of this to light. At the time, I was not at all worried about it. It was a virus. It would come and it would go like any other virus. I never got caught up in mask hysteria and when I was required to wear one, I took it off as soon as I could. I never practiced social distancing for the virus. If I was doing it, it was generally just because I don’t like being close to people in general. I am also one of those people who never got a vaccine at all.

And yeah, I’ve never had Covid.

My parents also never got the vaccines and they’re in their 70s. They each got Covid earlier this year and then within a week of each of them getting it, they were both fine. My rule has been to never get caught up in hysteria where everyone is panicking.

Many of us now look back and realize that a lot of mistakes were made. The lockdowns were a mistake. Pulling kids out of school was a mistake. Plenty of people are questioning the vaccines and it used to be a conspiracy theory to say the virus came from a lab in Wuhan. Now it’s pretty much established fact.

A number of us also don’t support climate change hysteria either. When I take any kind of online survey, I can easily answer questions when it comes to environmental claims. It’s not that I don’t care about the planet, but I think that many of our solutions are harmful in the long-term even if we think there are short-term benefits. I would like to see us using nuclear power more and I would like to see the Keystone pipeline open.

As soon as I say any of this, there are people out there getting their proverbial pitchforks ready. After all, I have questioned the reigning dogma. We have seen that people who do go against whatever the reigning dogma is, particularly today on climate change, are quickly castigated and they are the new heretics.

“The difference though is science is evidence-based and religion isn’t!”

Which is entirely a straw man. The evidences are different, but all sides use evidence. Religions tend to use history and philosophy more as well as interpretation of sacred texts and analysis of it by believers and skeptics. Of course, some dogmas can be right, just like in science, and some can be wrong, just like in science.

One area that this comes to an interesting place is in how we use words. Magic is the idea that one can use words to somehow alter reality. Properly, this isn’t always the case. When a minister says “I now pronounce you husband and wife”, he is doing something his words have the power to affect. There are times when this is not the case.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson has referred to seeing men’s and women’s bathrooms as segregation. Don’t believe me? Go take a look here. (Warning. This is something unedited so there is language in the video.) It starts around 2:50. Shortly after 4:00, NDT says he sees men and women bathrooms and thinks “Colored and white”.

Go back twenty years, maybe even ten, and this wouldn’t be being questioned at all. Now NDT acts like it’s segregation. Why? It’s the spirit of the age. It’s where the politics lie.

I recently shared this picture on my Facebook.

One of the first replies I got was “Transwomen are women.”

What is this said today but a mantra? Repeat it enough and it will become true?

The next worth talking about is I just asked the question “What is a woman?” and got told that the idea of a woman is a societal construct. To which, I gave the reply that the idea that the meaning of woman is a societal construct is itself a societal construct.

We live in an age where we believe if we declare it to be so, it is. What is it called when someone goes in for a transgender operation? “Gender-affirming care”, when it is really the exact opposite. We have said that we should include couples of the same sex under the label of marriage, but did we stop to ask what marriage is and what it means? Consider also a group like Black Lives Matter. So if you don’t support the group, which is about many many things besides black lives, then you don’t think black lives matter?

This isn’t science. This is magic.

Too many of our leading scientists are also leading the way in this. The basic reality of biology would not have been denied until the political climate rolled around and then all of a sudden, we think we know something that no one else before us in history knew. We live in a society where we want to erase differences between men and women, do economic Russian Roulette and think only our intentions matter, and think that if we say the words, we can change reality. We can’t.

Reality will always win in the end.

For those in the scientific establishment also, this has only hurt them in the long run. There are more and more people unwilling to trust science when we think that there is a political side to it. If anything, we are not a scientific society. We are anti-science.

That doesn’t make us like religion in the past. Religion in the past still tried to tether itself to external reality by basing their conclusions on the idea of a supreme being outside the cosmos that created a rational universe and thus made the universe rational. Now, the basis for how we see reality is not without, but it is within. How someone feels about themselves and society determines reality.

The good news is, this path cannot last long. It will destroy itself.

The bad news, I have no idea how much it will take out with it when it collapses.

Let’s be prepared.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

A Prayer For Our Country

What is part of my prayers every night? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I pray every night before signing off of my computer and going to bed, and part of that prayer every day is a prayer for my country. I love America. I just don’t love what has happened to her. I still think that this nation can be a city on a hill once again.

When Israel was in the promised land, they were meant to be a kingdom of priests for those on the outside. They were meant to intercede for their pagan neighbors. When the nation was in exile, we see in Daniel 9 that it is Daniel who repents on behalf of the nation of Israel. There is a precedent of the righteous interceding on behalf of the wicked, especially shown in the cases of Jesus and Stephen.

Because of this, I pray every night for our country and it includes the following, which is centered on our children.

First, we have killed our children.

Wednesday while listening to the radio, and I only listen to talk radio, I heard someone talking about the massacre of the people at a concert in Israel and how that was the greatest act of evil he could think of in our times. I get what he was saying. It was a hideous act of evil, but I could easily think of a worse one.

Every day in abortion clinics across our country where hundreds if not thousands more are murdered every day in the name of freedom and reproductive rights. I have often said that we’re worse than the pagans were in the past. When they sacrificed their children, they did it for the good of the harvest or for the welfare of the nation. We sacrifice our children at the altar of convenience.

Pray for our repentance and forgiveness.

Second, we have mutilated our children.

More and more children are claiming that they are transgender and at a young age are being told they have such authority to say who they are. We have people having their bodies destroyed and letting themselves be sterilized for this purpose. it is an irreversible decision in many cases and don’t be surprised if within a few years, there are major lawsuits against “health-providers” for this. Even more amazing, we call it “gender-affirming care” when it’s exactly the opposite.

Pray for our repentance and forgiveness.

Third, we have groomed our children.

We have Drag Queen Story hours where we are normalizing children to sexual behavior they shouldn’t be normalized to. We have children celebrating Pride events at schools. Florida was blasted for a bill called by the media the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when all it said was sexual matters should not be talked about with children who are third grade or less.

Pray for our repentance and forgiveness.

Finally, we have indoctrinated our children.

We have a generation of people growing up who know next to nothing about the history of our country. They sit on laptops with their smartphones drinking at Starbucks and complaining about how evil capitalism is. They repeat cliches so much so that now in light of events in the Middle East, you have them saying “From the river to the sea” and talking about “There is only one solution” not even realizing where these terms come from. They are growing up to be more and more narcissistic and basing their lives on social media.

Pray for our repentance and forgiveness.

Then after this, I pray for something else.

I pray that the church rise up and be the church and change our society once more.

No. This is not a Catholic prayer in the sense of the Roman Catholic Church, but it is a catholic prayer in the sense of the church universal. It is the prayer that we who are Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox, will rise up and unite together in this cause. I have areas where I disagree with Catholics and Orthodox, but I have plenty more where I agree with them on and that’s where I choose to focus. I am blessed to meet regularly with some Catholics to study Aquinas and when I am asked what I believe about certain passages of Scripture, I speak freely. I doubt that I am agreed with, but I think they know I try to be as fair as possible. I am not antagonized. If anything, the joke I make is I am there to make sure everyone has their doctrine correct since I’m one of the ones asked about hard questions on Aristotelian thought.

It’s not about my being recognized as an authority in something. That’s nice, but the primary thing is I am recognized as a fellow Christian regardless of differences. Our country is at war fighting for the soul of our country and I want that to be our main emphasis.

I recommend that you join me in this nightly prayer for our country, but at the same time, don’t just make it a prayer and do nothing. Act. Do something to be the salt and light you need to be.

We can change this country. More accurately, Christ can change this country through us.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Do We Remember?

Do we remember 9/11? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I normally write these blogs now a day ahead of time. That’s just the nature of the beast with working a job on campus and with having classes as well. Sunday night, I’m writing and when I schedule the blog, I see that the next day is 9/11. I’ve already written a blog. I don’t want to change it.

That kind of saddened me. I wonder if it’s natural with the passage of time. It could be like remembering the anniversary of the death of a loved one. It gets harder and harder to deal with. I remember when the day came that would have been my 11th anniversary, I was dreading how I would handle it. Nowadays, it doesn’t even register a lot of times.

At the same time, there is an awkwardness on campus around here. I know many students here that have no memory of 9/11. Some of them were too young when it happened. Some of them weren’t even born when it happened. These people have never lived in a world where the Twin Towers were standing. Naturally, I don’t fault them for it, but I realize these are different times.

My parents grew up in the generation that saw Kennedy assassinated. I can’t relate to that at all. I don’t know if they still remember that every time when that day comes around. Maybe not.

When the Challenger exploded, I was five years old. I really don’t remember much about that experience. There’s no doubt for me that politically, 9/11 was the defining moment of my generation. Yes. I can still remember where I was when I first heard the news. Nothing else really comes close.

I do know I lost sight for a time and thus am writing this blog late. That again leaves me wondering if that means the impact of it is lessening. In some cases, it has to. How would it be if the impact of negative events in our lives never lessened? I tell people that my divorce still hurts every day, but it sure is a relief it doesn’t hurt as much as it did then.

We cannot expect any emotion to last forever, which is a good thing, even for a good emotion. Lewis once wrote that it’s a good thing the feeling of falling in love doesn’t last or else we would never be able to function in our lives. Many people have an ecstasy come over them when they come to Christ, but that also doesn’t last or else we would never learn how to walk through struggle. People could likely become Christians only because they want good feels.

Despite that, we can remember the lessons regardless. I can lose a loved one and not feel the pain and still remember the good times and the lessons that I learned from them. I no longer have the pain from scoliosis surgery, but I sure can remember the times that I couldn’t walk and how I shouldn’t take those for granted. The problem is, learning lessons does require more effort. It takes more to work on those and practice them. It takes virtue.

Let’s hope this generation coming up learns that, or else we could repeat history again.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Is The Parable of the Workers Socialist

Are we being taught economic theory in this? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Sometimes, people present the parable of the workers in the field in Matthew 20 as if Jesus is espousing socialism. After all, everyone gets paid the same. Right? There’s no differentiation in wages. I was reading that recently and started looking at it and yes, I have heard other people bring out these arguments, but I figured I needed to as well.

First, let’s look at the parable.

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. 2 He agreed to pay them a denarius[a] for the day and sent them into his vineyard.

3 “About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. 4 He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ 5 So they went.

“He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. 6 About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’

7 “‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.

“He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’

8 “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’

9 “The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. 10 So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. 11 When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. 12 ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’

13 “But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? 14 Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. 15 Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’

16 “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

At the start, for one thing, this parable is not meant to teach business practices or economics. Seriously, if any business worker did this, he would find himself out of business quickly. After all, if I knew this guy did this, I would wait until the last hour to get hired, put in an hour’s work, get a day’s pay, and I would have spent the day prior and after just doing what I want. Word would get out.

However, that being said, the parable doesn’t even have a socialist background in any way. We can say the workers all got paid the same. No one was greater and no one was lesser in pay. Right. But why? The owner tells us.

“Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money?”

So in this, the owner owns the money himself. If he wants to pay the last workers that much, he can do that. Not only that, if anything, the ones who worked all day sound like the socialists in the parable with them saying, “We worked harder. We are owed more money.”

I don’t support minimum wage laws. No one is owed a job by anyone. What you are owed is what you agree to work for, in this case, a denarius. The people in this story think they are owed more than they agreed to. They think they have the right to tell the landowner what to do with his money.

They don’t. He tells them it is his money. He can spend it how he sees fit. If he wants to give to the last workers a denarius, he can do that because it is his money. Now if he did pay the workers who worked all day less than a denarius, they could have gone to the courts with him breaking a contract, but he didn’t. There was no basis for such a charge.

Ultimately, the point of the parable is not to teach economics. It’s to teach about grace in the Kingdom of God. Still, from an economic perspective, this is not a socialist story. It is a capitalist one.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Is This Quote Marxist?

Does the Bible line up with Marxism? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

So there’s this collection of memes going around the internet where you’re supposed to play a game and decide if the quote comes from Marx or the Bible. Naturally, there’s no citation given. I can understand that during the “game”, but one would hope that at the end, all the references would be given.

Alas, such is not the case.

So let’s go through these quotes which all turn out to be from the Bible.

No reference of course, but yes. Don’t rob the poor. That’s not only Christian, that’s capitalist. Capitalism is the free exchange of goods without force, theft, or fraud. If any system robs the poor, it’s Marxism. Economic controls make it harder for the poor to earn and have income in the long term and taxation doesn’t hurt the rich nearly as much as it does the poor.

Quote #2:

This is Proverbs 22:16 and again, what’s the problem? Proverbs give general principles and this is one of them. God has a special heart for the poor in Scripture and so mistreatment of the poor is not allowed. Giving to the rich would be a way of trying to buy the favor of a rich man and get his honor. Now if you had a friend who was rich, this doesn’t mean you can’t buy him a gift of some sort, but it would mean you should be giving to the poor too.

By the way, conservatives typically do give more to charity, as is shown in Arthur Brooks’s The Conservative Heart. There’s less emphasis to give to the poor if you just think the government will do it for you.

#3:

This is from Proverbs 29:7. The righteous care for the poor. The wicked doesn’t. It would be a mistake to read the Constitution into this as it was not written with an American Republic in mind, but again, what’s the problem here? We should care about the poor. Most capitalists would agree. We’d even say that’s why we’re capitalists. The best way to help the poor is to enable them to rise up out of poverty. Thomas Sowell has repeatedly stated that few people stay in the same income bracket their whole lives. Those at one point in the bottom 20% will not always be there.

#4

This is found in James and is a way of warning against trying to buy the favor of the rich. Big shock. Rich people can be evil. For that matter, so can poor people, but rich people often have greater means to do evil.

This is why it’s important to realize that before Adam Smith ever wrote a book on capitalism, he wrote one on ethics. Capitalism is not meant to be done apart from ethics.

This is a general principle and yes, the rich do tend to have power over the poor and if you borrow money from someone, you are their servant to an extent.

How this is supposed to be something Marxist is not explained.

I am quite sure the person who shared this has not sold their computer and given it to the needy yet. At any rate, this was said to one person in particular, the rich young ruler, since money was his idol. After all, if everyone did this, eventually, we would have new needy and new rich people. It would just be a reversal.

This is also true. If you desire to be rich above all else, that is a path of destruction. There is nothing wrong with wanting to have money in itself and wanting to be financially secure, but if you blur ethical lines to do that, you have a problem. Rich people with good hearts can do a whole lot of good. Rich people with wicked hearts can do a whole lot of bad, such as someone like, I don’t know, Engels, regularly giving of his wealth that he had to finance someone named Marx. His philosophy has been one of the most destructive of all.

It is. It is not the root of all evil, but much evil is done because of the love of money. This can even include if you’re the government and think you need to take away money from other people and give it to others. If I empty out your bank account in theft and give all the money to the poor, I have used the money for something good, but I have done an evil because it was not my money to use in that way. Somehow though, if the government does that, it’s okay.

This is Hebrews 13:5 which also says to be content with what you have. Again, what is the situation here? As a capitalist, I agree with this.

This is from Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, which is giving a reversal. In the day of Jesus, it would have been thought that the rich had the blessings of God, since, well, they were rich. Jesus says it is otherwise.

Ultimately, the problem with all of these is the assumption that if you are someone who cares for the poor and doesn’t glamourize wealth, you should be a Marxist. It doesn’t work that way. Too many leftists think that if you don’t agree with them on the ways to help the poor, then you don’t care about helping the poor. If I care about treating your hiccups and my suggestion is to get an axe and cut off your head, it would be silly to say if you disagree that you don’t care about solving the problem. You just don’t think that’s the most efficient way. (Although to be fair, if I did do that, you certainly would no longer have hiccups!)

Capitalists are in favor of helping the poor. We just don’t think the government is the way to do it. That doesn’t mean we oppose all government safety nets, but we much more support private individuals giving freely of themselves to help those in need. If all Marxism meant was caring for the poor, no one would really object. It is how they think we should care for the poor that is a real issue here.

I really think most people should just read at least Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in one Lesson. 

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)