Truth is the one essential element of life beyond the here and now. In answer to Jesus’ claim that he is the Truth, Pontius Pilate asks sarcastically, “What is Truth?”

He may have meant that to say, “Can truth ever be known? I doubt it!”, but that’s a question whose answer is the difference between life and death.

I am retired and thus, by definition, I have too much time on my hands! I listen to NPR (because I despise advertising) and read several newspapers almost daily. As I listen and read, that one overarching question I ask is, “Who is this who is telling me these things? And why should I believe him/her?”

The longer I live the more convinced I become that no one is an objective witness or dispassionate observer. We all come to every event, every fragment of information, every word spoken and every letter written with the filter of our life experience and education, the influence of friend, mentor, and, yes, foe fixed firmly in place. When life presents us with a series of either/or-s, we are forced to choose either – or, and that choice is the product of every experience we have had prior.

So, when I listen or read, I really want to know what filters the reporter/commentator has in place. I want to know if he/she is married (biblically speaking) and how frequently does she/he change beds, and does he/she have children. I want to know if he/she is same sex attracted. Where was she/he born and what was the structure of the family of origin? Where was she/he educated and what major (if any) was pursued? Does he/she attend church/synagogue/mosque/temple regularly, and if so, what denomination or theological orientation? (I really should just follow traditional language usage and use the male pronoun as the collective pronoun for humanity just as the Hebrew text uses “adam” as both the name of the male and the name of the race. This he/she stuff gets old quickly and using plural pronouns when the singular is required is a violation of the very principle of truth I wish to uphold!)

Now the Washington Post doesn’t have a chart on the contributor to its pages showing us WHO that person really is. It doesn’t answer any of my questions that will enable me to determine the believability of the writer. So I have to look at the literary structure and word choice to get an inkling of the writer’s prejudices. Does he confuse the language using terms like cisgender, or does he call a man in drag a transwoman and use feminine pronouns when referencing him? Does he call the lesbian partner of a woman her wife? Does he differentiate between rape and a pat on the butt, or is everything called, “sexual assault”? Does he call a murder an incident of gun violence when the instrument of death is a gun, but does not call a murder where the instrument of death is a knife an incident of knife violence?

If a reporter wants to focus on the evil of the weapon rather than the evil of the perpetrator, we should know that that reporter is not telling the truth and indeed may not even know what truth is. It is true that a high velocity projectile was used to kill someone, but neither the projectile nor its launcher is responsible for the death resultant. The cause of death is the evil in the heart of the murderer and not the instrument used to murder.

We can apply the same principles to anything the papers’ owners/editors want us to believe. Are they telling the truth about the President? Brexit? The French Yellow Vests? The Climate? Afghanistan? Syria? Ocasio-Cortez?

What is Truth? I don’t think any of us know with absolute certainty – none of us possess the divine attribute of omniscience, but if we are to be honest with ourselves and our fellow travelers on life’s journey, we should seek diligently for an objective standard by which to measure our beliefs and then strive to bring our thoughts into line with that standard. And I believe that standard to be the Word of God both inscripturated in the Bible and lived in Jesus Christ. And that’s the TRUTH!

I don’t know who first made the accusation, it had to have come from the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, that those who listened to Luther and Zwingli and Calvin had exchanged the Bishop of Rome for a “Paper Pope.” They had traded the ex cathedra dictates of popes and councils for a new religious authority: Sola Scriptura, the bible alone.

Sola Scriptura is the uniquely Protestant Christian belief that there is no rule of faith and practice for humanity other than the uniquely inspired, God-breathed writings of the prophets encapsulated within the bindings of that unique book, the Bible. (Yes, I used “unique” or “uniquely” three times in that sentence. I wanted to emphasize the “only-ness” of the Reformation Sola.) Now this doesn’t mean that the bible can be used as some divinely bestowed rule book – yes, there are rules within it: Don’t Murder; Don’t Worship Your Genitalia; Don’t Take What’s Not Yours, and so forth – it is a record of God’s dealings with the human race during a long period of time in this distant past. We are to bring every facet of learning and reason to bear as we study it. But our learning and reason cannot come to a rightful conclusion contrary to what it plainly reveals.

Please note, I did say, “Plainly reveals.” There are many things in the bible that are not clear. Some things are clouded by the changes of language and culture. We ask, does this word mean this or does it mean that? And sometimes the answer is, no one knows for sure. But for the really important things, things like: Is there a Supreme Being who created all things? Why is there evil in the world? Why do we die? Can we live again? How am I to treat my neighbor? Who is Jesus? You know, the really important questions that keep us awake at night, for those questions there is clear revelation in the bible. (By the way, in case you’re wondering, the answers are: Yes; Because our first ancestors chose to listen to a creature rather than the Creator; Because life is conditional on staying connected to its Origin; Yes; As I would like to be treated; and, God who became one of us so that we could become one with him.

So, for me, a Protestant Christian, I was caught by surprise this morning when the secular thought leaders in the media got all ecstatic that the Pope had changed Roman Catholic dogma to state that execution for capital crimes was contrary to Roman Catholic belief. (They do get giddy when some religious “authority” says or does something that comports with current secular thought. And they declare him starkraving mad when he goes the contrary.) Now there is nothing intrinsicly wrong with changing your mind on a doctrine. You can have firm beliefs on something that given time and further study you come to conclusion that your first thoughts (or second thoughts, or third thoughts) on the subject were wrong and now you have a better understanding and a different opinion. But where the scripture is clear there can be no deviation or change.

The bible says God created the universe. I can’t say he didn’t. We can discuss all day and into next year what the text means when it says he created everything, but when someone steps outside the text to say he did not create, then the discussion ceases and we go our separate ways. So, where the bible is clear, so must I be. We can talk, even argue over the meaning of the text, but never over the truthfulness of the text.

God gave a universal command for all of humanity recorded in Genesis chapter 9, verse 6, that those who take another human life (with the implication of “for either profit or pleasure”.) must have their lives taken from them – no exceptions. Murderers must die at the hands of the living. So the Pope is wrong. We can have a reasonable and rational discussion on the application of the death penalty in modern society, and I would agree that the American system of execution is an abomination, but the text is the text and it is irrevocable.

Everyone knows the the metaphor of The Frog in the Pot. It has been said (falsely, I am informed) that a frog placed in hot water will immediately jump to safety whilst one placed in tepid water and gradually warmed will linger in the froggy jacuzzi until its strength is sapped and it perishes. Well, true or not, I like the metaphor because it accurately describes the human condition as we can observe it.

Acceptable decline, be it physical, intellectual, economic, influential, or moral, does not happen overnight. Sudden change is noted, and if seen as threatening, reacted to. We call those events, “wake-up calls.” 9/11 was a wake-up call. Islamic assaults on western civilization have been going on since Mohammed. America’s first experience with them was the Barbary pirates capturing American merchantmen in the Mediterranean shipping lanes in the early 19th century. In fact we date the birth of American naval policy to those assaults. We even get the phrase, “the shores of Tripoli,” in the Marine Corps hymn from our battles there. But 9/11 did what scores of earlier incidents had failed to do: it shocked Americans into action. It is a perfect Frog in the Pot analogy: a slow rise in Islamic activity produces no response; a swift rise produces all-out war.

The last American election was in large part a response to a rapid change in our national understanding of morality and its place in public life. There is nothing new under the sun; what was will be. We have not experienced a single social change that has not been in process for generations. A brief historical survey can place the seeds of change in our own revolution from British rule. Our forefathers, physical or otherwise, WERE revolutionaries. It wasn’t just the oppression of king and parliament they were casting aside. They were creating a new society based on new views of individualism rather than oligarchy and collectivism.

Now this new freedom from state control was checked by a strong religious community. A protestant Christianity rooted in the English Reformation set the moral standards for the new Americans beyond which but few, and then only in secret, dared violate. Oh, there were the artists and entertainers who flaunted society’s standards, but their social status was but slightly above whores and innkeepers, and when they got too flagrant in their flaunting of social restraints, they were punished. Yet each flaunting of social norms raised the temperature of the pot ever so slightly. Their writings and actings put the “I wonder?” into the minds of the standard bearers of society.

With nationhood came the push west and its consequent separation of the more free-thinking pioneers from their more settled east coast relatives. New utopian experiments cropped up all over western New York and on into the territories. They tried everything from the celibacy of the Shakers to the group marriages of the Oneidans. New religions cropped up to replace the stagnancy of the old. The Mormons, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Dispensationalists, the Christian Scientists, the Pentecostals, and many others, trace their origins to this new-found freedom in this new nation.

Then came the American Civil War, the bloodiest and most heartless conflict America has ever experienced. It overturned the entire American social order. It ended a century of southern state dominance of American political life. It devastated the southern states, reducing them to a level of poverty from which they are yet emerging even now, 150 years later. Many veterans of that war fled the devastation of their homes and headed west. We can only imagine the level of what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in those war veterans! Those men and that army that overwhelmed the Plains Indians and massacred them when they “got in the way”; those violent men who formed the legend of the American West with their hard drinking and hard fighting were the men who, many of them yet boys, had stood almost toe to toe and fired volleys of minie balls into the other’s ranks. (BTW, I loved Gunsmoke as a kid. I was well into adulthood before I realized Miss Kitty was a prostitute and a madam! 😦 )

That Civil War also reduced the religious certainty of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-merciful God to a smoldering wick. How could one believe in a Sovereign God who rules all things in accordance to his divine will and yet experience this devastation of home and body? It should come as no surprise that from this questioning despair we get the rise of modern theological liberalism. The church’s answer was, “You can’t!” The book that teaches that certainty must certainly be false.

I hope you’re not tiring of this little historical sketch because there is more to come. We get the incomprehensible horror of the War to End All Wars. What the American Civil War produced on a national level, WWI produced on the international: Nation states created and abolished; millions of young men massacred by industrial warfare and incompetent leadership; the mass migration of peoples; despair, disillusionment, and a collective abandonment of all certainty by thinking people everywhere.

Now you take the catastrophe that was this war for so many, couple it with the rise of modern psychology and psychiatry, the continued dominance of religious liberalism, “modern” economic theories like communism, and the atheistic origins theories of Darwin and others, and you get the disillusionment of the Roaring 20’s, the abandonment of reality in art, harmony in music, truth in literature, and moral certitude in society.

This is the world that gave us the death-dealing -isms we know so well: Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and Feminism. Every one of them is a reaction to the failure of the old ways of thinking and doing. If there is no God-way, then it’s every person for him/herself. If you don’t like the old norms – cast them aside! Your ways are as good, as right, as true as any other.

And so we have the rise of the LGBTQ movement and its demand to be, not just treated with tolerance, but treated as just an equally valid expression of human identification as the old, pre-modern, religion-based view of human identity and origins. What I believe myself to be is what is regardless millennia of thought and experience.

And this brings us back to the last election.The Obama administration, the Supreme Court, and the media moguls raised the temperature in the pot too quickly. The vast hinterland of America had not completely absorbed the radically changing views of the urban dwellers. Oh, they had absorbed quite a bit: they love Ellen and Elton, George, the soft porn of the Kardashians and Victoria’s Secret, the harder porn of Games of Thrones and Orange Is the New Black, and the hard-core porn free and private on the internet. (If you don’t believe that to be a problem, just look at the rise of sexual impotence in Teens and 20’s men.) The mindless pursuit of pleasure is as common in flyover country as elsewhere. The opioid epidemic doesn’t grow out of despair, it is just a side-effect of pleasure’s pursuit. But, middle America wasn’t quite ready to publicly embrace their secret sins. Their candidate was by no means a righteous knight in shining armor! He was a boorish lout who was about as far from being a paragon of virtue as one could be, and the Christianity he was espousing was that modern parody of biblical Christianity: the Prosperity Gospel of name it and claim it. But at least he said he was going to turn the heat down on the pot and Make America Great Again.

Politicians are a generally ignorant bunch who assume the American people are even more ignorant than they. And because they manage to get elected and re-elected, Scott Adams, the cartoonist, must be close to true when he said, “You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public.” This is especially true in matters of war and peace. The Pols reduce complex issues to sound bites and yell, “Ban all Muslims!” and “Islam is a religion of peace!” Only the deluded or disinterested would believe either the Trumps or the Bush/Obama/Clintons of this world to be giving them a rational, well-examined explanation of the current state of world affairs.

Now, for the purposes of this essay, I am going to assume the statistic that 80% of all Muslims just want to get along and that only 4% (with 16% in their amen corner) are eager to kill or reduce to dhimmitude the non-believers as the guarantor of approval by their god is correct. So you can take comfort, if you are a secular or a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu, only 64 million Muslims out of a population of 1.6 billion what to either kill or convert you. (In America that figure would be only 160 thousand out of our Muslim population of 4 million.) These figures strike me as a bit on the high side, but then they probably include those young children who are being indoctrinated by their mothers and fathers to grow up to be jihadis as well as those who are too old to be much of a threat.

We’ve got to step back and take the long view if we’re to understand the who, what and why of the current Islamist threat to civilization as we know it. Modern Islamism can be traced back to the demise of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. The Ottomans, for all their weaknesses and failings, were the Kingdom of Islam on earth – they were, if you will, the Muslim version of the Holy Roman Empire (which was holy and roman in name only). The Ottomans provided a sense of place for Muslims throughout Asia and southern Europe. In them, Muslims had their proof of being “someone.”

Yes, I know I am simplifying history. Yes, there was a second caliphate that ruled the Iberian Peninsula 711 to the time of Columbus when the Spanish and Portuguese drove out their Muslim conquerors. And, yes, there were Muslim empires to the east in India and as far as Indonesia, but these are not central to our modern predicament.

Anyway, the Ottomans chose the losing side in WWI. They sided with the Germans in the hope of regaining their European territories, and with the defeat of the Axis came the death of their empiric hopes. The Ottoman Empire collapsed and was fractured into the pieces we now recognize at the Balkans, Turkey, Armenia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, etc. And a number of those pieces were claimed and ruled under League of Nations mandates by the victorious European powers, namely France and Britain.

The caliphates, for all their excesses and failings, were believed by their subjects to be of divine authority. They traced their right to rule to the Koran or to Mohammed and the people accepted that to be legitimate authority. The end of the caliphate meant the end of legitimate rule and the authority of the occupying governments and their totalitarian successors was never recognized as being anything other than a “might makes right” type of rule that needed to be replaced with a new and legitimate caliphate.

By now you are asking, “What does any of this have to do with Zionism and the Jews; that being the first part of this essay’s title?” Well, I have been searching to find an analogy that fits the present situation with understanding the relationship between Islam and Islamism and the best one I can find is the birth and advancement of modern Zionism in all its expressions.

Identifiable minority groups within a population are always pitched upon the dilemma of assimilate or separate. Such was the state of the Jewish people in Europe in the late 19th century. In much of western Europe Jews were losing their identity as Jews. The had become, for the most part, secular, and found themselves marrying into the larger population and being accepted as members of the community. Yes, there was always an undercurrent of antisemitism as some within the broader population resented their social ascendency, a resentment that was always being fueled by exploitive politicians. And there were always those Jews who did not want to assimilate, who wanted to maintain their distinctive identity, and who maintained that distinctiveness by living in self-imposed ghettos, dressing in readily identifiable ways, wearing their hair and beards in certain styles, and naming their children in ways that would keep their identity clear to all.

The Jews living in eastern Europe did not have those options. The predominant ethnic groups would not allow the Jews to assimilate, and enforced their differentness by rule and regulation – along with occasional pogroms to keep them in their place.

So, to address the European situation for Jews in the late 19th century, the modern zionist movement was born. Zion is an alternate name for Jerusalem, and zionism is a “back to Jerusalem” movement. The leaders of zionism feared both the assimilation of secular Jews into the larger society (and the consequent loss of their Jewishness) and the persecution of Jews when they identified as such. They wanted to establish secular Jewish communities in the land of Palestine, their ancestral homeland, a Palestine that was then a part of the Ottoman Empire.

This tension between assimilation and exclusion intensified in the early 20th century and the Zionist voice became more strident in the Jewish community. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the defeat of the Axis in WWI, the aforementioned mandates came into play. The British got Palestine and Egypt, and Palestine became the focal point of tensions between the occupiers, the residents, and the migrants. As the pace of Jewish immigration picked up after the war and after the British published a position paper acknowledging the right of return for the Jewish Diaspora to Palestine, the locals began to resent the prosperity and industry of the newcomers. The Jews were transforming a desert waste into an oasis and displacing the Arab population in the process.

The Arab rose up in armed revolt against the British and against the Jewish settlements in the later 1930s. The anti-semites were pounding the drum throughout Europe with major movements not only in Germany, but in Britain, France, Poland, and elsewhere across the continent. This anti-semitism brought pressure to emigrate from Europe, and the flood of immigrants into Palestine exacerbated the tensions there.

In response to the Arab uprising and the subsequent British restriction of Jewish immigration, the Jewish settlements formed self-defense units. The largest of these was the Haganah, the establishment armed force made up mostly of secular, western Europeans. The Haganah cooperated with the British in keeping the peace in Palestine, and even though British anti-semitism and interests kept them from fully embracing the Haganah, they did not see a need to suppress it.

Then came World War II and the wholesale slaughter of the Jews in Europe. This slaughter convinced many within the Zionist movement that it was not sufficient to have Jewish settlements in Palestine. What was needed was a Jewish State, Eretz Israel, a place for Jews to call home. Zionism had already birthed what we would call terrorist groups under the umbrella of self-defense. Principal among them were the Irgun (The National Military Organization in the Land of Israel) under Menachem Begin who later became Prime Minister of Israel, a group principly focused on the defense of the Jewish settlements against the Arabs, and  Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), commonly known as the Stern Gang, a leader of which, Yitzhak Shamir, became Prime Minister as well, which was fighting to overthrow the British mandate in Palestine and to establish a Jewish state. With the Holocaust and European (and American) Jew-hatred even after the war (the British kept the Jews of the concentration and extermination camps imprisoned even after the war in order to placate their Arab constituents). As the British turned away shiploads of Holocaust survivors from landing in Palestine and interning many of them in concentration camps in Malta (and as the United States restricted Jewish immigration), Irgun and Lehi began making war on the British in the Mandate. Given the power differential between the British and the Jewish self-defense forces, they resorted to unconventional warfare. They terrorized the British to encourage them to allow Jewish immigration into Palestine, to release their fellow Jews interned in Germany and elsewhere, and ultimately to decide holding onto Palestine was not worth the effort.

Irgun bombed British military headquarters in the King David Hotel, and Lehi assassinated the British Minister Resident in the Middle East, and both organizations hit the British military whenever they could identify a weak point. Finally, in 1948, the British agreed to withdraw (having heavily armed their Arab clients) leaving Palestine to its war between Arab and Jew. To the shock of the British and the Arabs, the Jews won and the Nation of Israel was established.

Now let’s draw the parallels. By no means were all Jews Zionists, in fact only a minority were and they were often actively resisted by the so-called mainstream of Judaism, but all Zionists were Jews. They felt they had a legitimate claim on a Jewish homeland, and given that the land of Israel was their ancestral bequeath, they felt they had the moral high ground in reestablishing the state of Israel in territorial Palestine. Not only did they think it right to have a homeland under Jewish rule, they believed it to be an imperative. Without a Jewish homeland, they stood in constant risk of future Holocausts.

It appears to me that the current Islamist thrust is strikingly similar. Not every Muslim is an Islamist, but every Islamist is a Muslim. The goal of Al Qaeda and ISIS (the Muslim equivalent of Irgun and Lehi) is the establishment of a legitimate Islamic caliphate in their historical homeland. And their terrorist acts, be they in New York on 9/11, Paris, San Bernardino, Boston, London, or wherever they can find a weakness and a public relations opportunity, are designed to convince those powers that are maintaining what the Islamists consider illegitimate governments in the Middle East that it is not worth their while to continue doing so. They are a threat to the West only in so far as the West finds it in its economic interest to impose its will on that region of the world.

I have a Facebook friend who, whenever I make a comment about the devolution of morality in America, always responds with the obvious fact that America is not now, nor has it ever been, a Christian nation. He’s right.

The issue is not whether America should be a Christian nation or not. The issue is whether America (in her citizenry) recognizes the sovereignty of the Lord GOD over the affairs of all the nations be they atheistic, Islamic, secular, or whatever. To say (and believe) that God is sovereign is to believe that the Creator of the universe has established immutable laws by which his universe is governed. So we have laws of gravity, laws of thermodynamics, in fact laws that govern even the minutest aspect of the physical universe. And what applies to the physical applies to the arena of right and wrong, good and evil, righteous and sinful.

A nation that recognizes God’s sovereignty is NOT a theocracy. In this present age, only the Church is or can be a theocracy. Theocracy implies that there are nations that have a special status with God, and we know where that has gotten us in history. Be it the abuses of the Papacy during the centuries from the “Christianization” of Rome in the early centuries AD to the Reformation, or the present Islamic Republic of Iran, theocracies that are lacking the Theos are really just autocracies in theocratic drag.

So, no, no rational thinker is trying to turn America into a theocratic Christian nation. What I and others are doing is simply stating the obvious: if there is a sovereign God, he has the absolute right to set the standards for behavior both public and private, and that he can and does impose rightful penalties for the disregard of those standards, up to and including eliminating from the roster of nations those peoples who attempt to overthrow the not-overthrowable sovereignty of God.

When a people, through its legislative, executive, and judicial processes says, “Do murder, Do commit adultery, Do steal, Do bear false witness, or Do covet, lust, and desire that which is not yours,” they are attempting the impossible and exposing themselves and their posterity to the dire results of disregarding natural law. This is not Christianity which is salvation of sinners by grace through faith in the Christ who died for our sins and was raised for our justification for the glory of God alone – this salvation revealed to us through the scripture and the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. This merely living Coram Deo.

Every once in awhile it is good and right to think about what you believe and why. This is what I believe.

I believe in the God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. My belief structure is build directly upon my knowledge of God. I recognize my knowledge is incomplete. There is so much more to know about God than either nature or scripture reveals. But nature reveals enough about God for me (and you) to know that he is and that he is of awesome power and benevolence. And the scripture reveals enough to know how he who made all things orders his universe and our lives.

I believe in Jesus Christ, God, the Son of God, the Son of Man, my savior. I don’t have to look any farther than my own brokenness to know I am in great need of One to stand in my place: a Kinsman-Redeemer. And it is in Jesus, God’s Christ (Messiah), that mankind has one who rightfully takes his place as the head of the race and mediates between a broken humanity and a perfect God. If I would be delivered from “the body of this death”, I need look no further than to look to Jesus, for there is none other who can deliver my soul from hell.

I believe that God the Holy Spirit (blessed Trinity) applies both the saving grace of God at the cross and the transforming power of the new birth to my broken and rebellious soul making me both a member of his family and one who delights in his presence.

I believe God made us male and female and that any variation from that pattern is not an expression of our individuality but of our brokenness. I further believe that the celebration of that brokenness is merely a further revelation of humanity’s rebellion from the rule of God in this world – thank you, Adam and Eve.

I believe the life-long marriage union of a man and a woman is a sacrament, a divine ordinance, through which God’s creative power is expressed. God made Adam and Eve perfect but incomplete. He made them to be completed only in union one with the other. In the physical and spiritual union of marriage God has given us a power akin to his own: the power to create other human beings. And just as he created Adam and Eve in his image, we create children in our own. And, alas, because of the brokenness given to us by Adam and Eve’s rebellion, we create broken people. But in those broken offspring, even though the image of God has been defaced by our sins and the sins of our ancestors (thank you A & E), the image of God is still present in the human race. Any other marriage union, be it the serial polygamy commonly practiced in western nations, or the more modern homosexual marriage, while legal under the laws of the nation, cannot participate in the sacrament of marriage under God.

I believe the world we see and enjoy is temporary. It will pass away.

Even though I know this world is not permanent, I believe it is important to not disengage from the world and retreat until its destruction. Hence:

I do not believe modern-day Israel is a restoration of the covenant people of Israel. That status is reserved to the Israel of God: Jesus Christ, and by extension, the Church. Thus I believe politicians who believe our national safety before God lies in protecting Israel at all costs to be a delusioned threat to our nation.

Neither do I believe that America holds a special place in the affections of God. God does have a special people: those who constitute his Church in America and around the world. Yet it is true that a nation’s prosperity and longevity depend upon its allegiance to the General Revelation of the sovereignty of God declared in nature: Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people. Nation’s that willfully reject God’s rule will in turn find themselves rejected and cast upon the trash heap of history. The clearer the revelation of God’s character and rule that a nation enjoys, the quicker its demise when rejecting that revelation.

Well, that’s a start. I believe many other things – some rightly, some in need of revision or rejection – but first and foremost, I believe God loves his creation to the extent that he was incarnated in the man Jesus, lived for me the perfect and sinless life of which I am incapable, bore my sins upon the cross, took me in himself in a manner beyond my comprehension into heaven itself, and will return to give me a perfected and sinless nature in a perfect and sinless body. Solus Christus!

Sign me,

Dale, Contra Mundum

The American church is lazy. For far too many years it has rested on the power of the State instead of the suasion of the gospel message to enforce its morals and standards. That worked just great (outwardly at least) as long as the State saw eye-to-eye with the church on matters of human sexuality and sexual expression, marriage and family, abortion, Christian prayers (as if there is any other God upon whom one could call) in the public square, the education of children in the public schools, and so forth.

But something happened after World War II. Actually that war, and the one before it, changed just about everything in our culture. After a war that killed upwards of 50 million people and destroyed countless lives and entire cities, is it any wonder that many men and women emerged from that war disillusioned with all things religious?

The mainline churches had been proclaiming for years that we were about to enter the millennium of human peace, progress, and prosperity, and then the world experienced back-to-back world wars where the blood of the young, especially young men, was poured out on the soil like water, or like the drink offerings of ancient sacrificial rituals.

And the evangelical churches were little better. They, for the most part, sat in their churchly tombs licking the wounds they had sustained in their conflicts with the mainline ones. They did very little in the way of scholarship (look at what all that learning did for the skeptics of the mainline and for the Germans in general), They interacted cautiously if at all with other evangelicals (the risk of contamination you know), disdained the public square (they were all going to hell in a handbasket), and generally just sang the hymns of a more vital past, congratulated themselves on their doctrinal purity, and waited for Christ’s return when he would destroy everyone but themselves.

Into this vacuum created by a moribund mainline church and a fearful evangelical one stepped a defiant secularism. Religion had proved a failure, philosophy a ruse. The secular would create a new society based on two seemingly opposed concepts: radical individualism and collectivism. Radical individualism: my body, my choices. Abortion, birth control, sexual expression, music, dress, Anything and everything that restricted my individual choices will be rejected as old-fashioned, hegemonic, oppressive. Let Freedom Ring!

At the same time, ideas like nationalism, patriotism, ethnic identification and pride (on the part of majorities), were all seen as threats to the very survival of the race. War is hell, and no one knew it better than those who emerged from the shelters of WWII. So they created, on a grand scale, international institutions designed to restrict national identity for the greater good. Here come the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Geneva Conventions, the Warsaw Pact, and so on, and so on, and so on.

The changes secularism brought about were gradual at first. Bible reading disappeared from the classroom. Then prayers. Birth control as a woman’s choice, then abortion as a hidden Constitutional right. Laws against what had long been held as moral perversions were declared unconstitutional infringements on individual liberty. Finally, the bedrock institution of society, marriage, was radically changed. In the quest for individual freedom, gender, the most important identifier of our humanity after being human itself, is seen as a barrier to self-identity and is being “abolished” from public discourse.

And now the church finds itself floundering about looking for a foundation upon which to stand. That which was born countercultural has become culture driven. Having seen public support for its moral principles evaporate, it doesn’t know how to respond. It has absorbed so much of the world about it, it finds it difficult to impossible to resist it. It loves the world; how is it to say, don’t love the world? The modern church hasn’t taught its members to think and act biblically. Don’t blame the people in the pew. It’s not their fault their pastors are preaching on how to be financially successful, or how to make a success of that second marriage, or how important it is not to be critical of others life choices.

In more ways than one, this is the best of days for the church. This is even better than the times of the early church. We have, each and every one of us, access to the bible – our own bible – in more translations than we can ever read or study. We don’t have to rely on oral traditions passed from pastor to pastor; we’ve got the Word as close to the originals as we can get. We have access to commentaries, biblical scholarship, great preaching, bible study aids, all these things that, with the amplification of the Holy Spirit, are meant to make us strong Christians who can live the love of Christ in the world -any world.

So the church is no longer the alpha dog in the social pack. It no longer has the State to enforce its beliefs on the rest of society. It’s flabby, and it’s ill-informed. But it is not left an orphan. These are times in which the church can excell. It can excell because it has the Truth. And it can excell because its master is God Incarnate, the maker and ruler of heaven and earth.

Motherhood can be easily divided into three phases.

The first phase is the easiest: conception, gestation, and birth. All it requires is a fertile woman and a willing sperm donor.

The second phase is the most difficult: the socialization, education, and spiritual formation of her children. This phase is often farmed out to other care providers: daycare, nannies, schools, youth pastors, gurus, Sunday Schools, etc. Mothers who place their children in other hands for this phase miss the joy and satisfaction of being the primary educator and character developer of their children.

The third phase is the most enduring: the mentoring of her adult children. If a mother has established a close teaching relationship with her children during their childhood and adolescence, her role as counselor/encourager and wise friend will last until death separates her from them.

Motherhood is awesome!