WORLDVIEWS IN CONFLICT - #2
GOD’S WORD
Genesis 1:26-27; 2:21-25; 1 Thessalonians 4:4-5; 5:22; Isaiah 5:20; 2 Corinthians 13:5
Devotional By
Major Wayne Ennis
Salvation Army Officer from Down Under
Box Hill South, Victoria, Australia
We believe that our first parents were created in a state of innocency, but by their disobedience they lost their purity and happiness, and that in consequence of their fall all men have become sinners, totally depraved, and as such are justly exposed to the wrath of God. Doctrine 5.
We value and include people of all cultures, languages, abilities, sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions and intersex status. We are committed to providing programs that are fully inclusive. We are committed to the safety and well being of people of all ages, particularly children. (TSA Australia Inclusion Statement).
Genesis 1:26-27; 2:21-25.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s was a social and cultural movement that resulted in liberalized attitudes toward sexual practices and morality. What required approval included sex before marriage, then without marriage, now against marriage, sex with the other, then with the same entered the public domain. This in turn has seen the acceleration of a deeper revolution that was already taking place in what it means to be an authentic, fulfilled human being. The impact on the church from this revolution was significant particularly in the loss of the younger generation but even with that loss the church maintained its traditional teaching around sex and morality (male and female) marriage (male and female) and the importance of family (husband and wife).
The impact on the church from the sexual revolution is pale when compared to the “gender” revolution, fuelled by societies wide acceptance of the modern authentic expressive self and at how swiftly society and the church has accepted its ‘gender’ revolution and same sex marriage as a legitimate alternative to Biblical marriage. same sex marriage as a legitimate alternative to Biblical marriage.
Many Salvationists are stunned by the rise and triumph of this gender ideology and by how swiftly society and the church and The SalvationArmy, has succumbed to the pressure the world has exerted, how easily we have been squeezed into that mould. The consequence of this squeezing challenge is a total loss of confidence in the credibility of biblical anthropology together with means to be human, and to live an ethical and holy life.
What the Inclusion Statement seems to have missed is something quite basic: Christian acceptance and pastoral strategy cannot be developed in isolation from a biblical anthropology. The question of the authentic self and sexual identity along with the politics that surround it are not primarily concerned with sexual behaviour, but with an unhindered exercise of will, especially through self-realization and self-creation. What it means to be human today implies an imperative freedom to continually push back humanities natural limits in order to become our own gods. The first question in the Bible “has God said?” Our answer “NO! We hear the command ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” We answer, “We surely will not die”! “We will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
There is far more at stake in this debate than the question of which sexual acts or gender identities are moral and which are immoral or who or what is included or excluded. Once we believe that human dignity exists in the unhindered exercise of human freedom to detach the self from the body and see ourselves as our own invention what it means to be human has fundamentally changed.
Consequently, the anthropology of modern Western society is profoundly contrary to the biblical doctrine of man. Failure to see that we are‘created not creators’ and that what it means to be human while believing codes of sexual morality are negotiable coupled with the idea that God loves us unconditionally (no wrath to face) we have created ourselves and the central tenets of the biblical faith are contradicted.
The emergence within the Salvation Army of voices prepared to identify Christian teaching and practice as the problem in this area may seem edgy and prophetic to those involved. But what is happening is that unlike the prophets and writers of the New Testament who saw their task as calling the people away from the idolatrous anthropology and ethics of the wider world back to God our prophetic call is away from God back to the ethics and practice of the world. In doing so bring about a condition whereby we are complicit with the world’s moral ideology.
The rhetoric of those within The Salvation Army who blame the biblical theology, anthropology and the ethics contained in our doctrines for what they see as an unwelcoming non-inclusive message and who see their task as being religious mouth pieces calling The Salvation Army away from a biblical anthropology in favour of the priorities of the wider culture will likely become louder and more influential fashioning a rhetorical and pastoral position that will serve only to further marginalize those who seek to minister faithfully to this generation within The Salvation Army.
Perhaps at times our track record in terms of who and how we included and excluded has not been managed well but that experience that should cause us to examine how we act and not to re-write and so refashion our biblical theology, anthropology and ethics and place the ideologies of the day at the heart of our pastoral and theological strategy to gain a tick of approval from the world.
I believe the witness of Scriptures has a good deal to say about who we are as human beings, and as members of God’s people, not least that we are made in God’s image. Our underlying dignity and what it means to be human is to be found in that idea that we are first and foremost are begotten not made in the image of God.
Thus, our primary life-giving relationship is with God and this means we are morally responsible to God and not the world. Being in and not of this present age requires having an unflinching confidence in the credibility of the Bible’s conviction that God, not humanity, is Creator and that our very being is a gratuitous gift which places our dignity outside of ourselves. Therefore, we are not free to use our bodies to satisfy even our strongest desires or the accepted values of our culture (1 Thessalonians 4:4-5; 5:22). In so doing we find ourselves stepping into the cultural abyss of ‘calling evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!’ (Isaiah 5:20).
As the world’s list of what we are required to approve grows longer, we do have a choice in all this. We either have ears to hear, and accept what it means to be a God image-bearing human being who is faithfully living a moral, holy life, or we can choose to the calamitous effects of orienting our gender and sexuality via the primacy of our subjective desires rather than God’s revelation in Christ. By not seeing the contradiction lurking in the world’s combination of ideas and become complicit in the world’s dark desecration of what it means to be human milieu that only makes us unlike ourselves.
Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test! (2 Corinthians 13:5)
OUR CORPORATE PRAYER
Father God we come boldly before Your throne standing before You as a people who are in deep need of Your forgiveness and a fresh dose of Your Holy Spirit to fall upon us in such a way that causes us to call upon You as individuals and corporately, to create in each of us a clean heart and to renew within us a right spirit. Help us to seek You moment by moment, every day, as we seek to know You more today that we did yesterday. It’s in Your amazing grace we make this prayer, amen.