Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenti Beria remain notorious. Yezhov was a crazed, alcoholic, bisexual dwarf who enthusiastically oversaw Stalin’s Great Terror. Beria, his successor, was a sadistic killer and rapist. Neither, particularly Beria, was averse to getting blood on his shirt.

Preceding these depraved Stalinist hangmen was the lesser-known Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. Menzhinsky was an intellectual of sorts. Like Himmler, he let his thugs do their thing in the cellars and kept his own collar clean. Menzhinsky would recline upon a divan, legs wrapped in a blanket, and interrogate his victims in a kindly fashion. And yet, the historian Donald Rayfield noted that the “excruciatingly polite” and efficient Menzhinsky was responsible for more murders than Yezhov and Beria.

That’s an imperfect segue to this: the ongoing focus on partial birth abortions has always seemed to me a case of playing at the edges, a case of accusing Beria and excusing Menzhinsky. First, there are thousands of late-term partial birth abortions, hundreds of thousands of first-trimester abortions. Second, for the doctor who “performs” the dirty deed, maybe the other types of abortion seem more clinical and less bloodthirsty than partial birth abortion. If we focus on results, though, how are these other forms less brutal for the child? To put it another way, if an executioner gave me a choice between (a) a partial birth abortion where he’d jam scissors into the back of my neck and suck my brains out, (b) a saline abortion where he’d scald me to death, or (c) his most common method, where he’d use a suction tube with a sharp cutting edge to dismember me… Well, I think I’d ask if an option (d) was available.

Beyond people playing Frankenstein and murdering the innocent and helpless, isn’t it the case that all of these methods are barbaric and vicious? No one should get kudos because they oppose one limited and little-used variety.

Tim Bayly’s latest writeup on Barack Obama’s appeal to “moderate” evangelicals reminded me of a few choice Sobran quotes from 1996:

Liberalism wants us to “set aside our differences,” as if our differences don’t really matter as much as the things on which we can all agree with liberalism itself. You can almost define a liberal as one who demands that others reach his conclusions from their premises. -1/4/96 column

[O]n issues as contentious as abortion, there is no “middle.” When you try to find one there, you only make both sides distrust you, because both sides agree on one thing: that there are principles at stake. Faced with clashing principles, [Bob] Dole chooses neither. …When Mr. Dole compromises, he gains nothing for his side, if he can be said to have a side. He merely gets the Democrats to settle for three-quarters of a loaf, in exchange for giving him part of the credit. -7/23/96 column

I don’t know if Obama’s schtick is cynical demagoguery (see Clinton, Bill) or simple inanity. “Common ground,” in his parlance, is just another word for pro-life surrender. Oh, you’re free to carp on the sidelines, but don’t even think about running out on the field with your helmet on. The game’s over. The Supreme Court told us that years ago when they ushered us out of the Dark Ages.

The life issue is pretty much binary: dead baby or live baby. How are you going to find common ground or compromise on abortion? Saw kids in half, maybe? That’s no worse than what’s being done now. Or maybe allow half of those intended for the slaughter to live and half to die? As morally odious as that sounds — it’s like an old Star Trek morality play! — it would represent the kind of “three-quarters of a loaf” success the pro-life movement hasn’t achieved in my lifetime. I’m not pushing it as feasible or moral, but just noting that even such a repugnant idea as this would actually represent an improvement on the current situation.

It’s not the type of compromise the Left would ever entertain anyway. No, the machinery of death will continue to run. On that there will be no compromise. Amid the soaring rhetoric about healing, the abortion mills will faithfully grind, day after day. NARAL and Planned Parenthood will continue to cut their checks to politicians like Obama to keep their blood money safe. Parents will continue to murder their offspring with the indispensable help of this support infrastructure.

Good-faith compromisers on the pro-life side will just have to settle for getting the credit for seeking “common ground.”

One rarely hears the word “harlot” today. We still hear the word “whore,” but mostly in a non-Biblical sense (”attention whore”). The implications of fornication and adultery are mostly gone. The decline from “sodomite” (Biblical term implying judgment) to “homosexual” (clinical term) to “gay” (phony euphemism) is now mirrored by the decline from whore/harlot (judgment) to today’s “prostitute” (clinical cf. the TNIV) to tomorrow’s euphemistic heir apparent: sex worker.

Sex worker. What a term! Norm MacDonald, whose vulgarity clouded clever satire, nailed the new morality back in 1997 (and yes, all but the punch line really happened):

In San Francisco last week, a birthday party for one of the area’s leading political figures, attended by the city’s Mayor, Sheriff, and members of the board of supervisors, culminated with a performance in which a dominatrix used a razor blade to carve a satanic star into the back of her male partner, then urinated on him, before finally sodomizing the man with a liquor bottle. After learning of the incident from press reports, San Franciscans expressed shock and outrage that the liquor bottle was not recycled.

Environmentalism is one thing, but the precincts of liberalism that glory in their irreverence and acceptance of degradation are way too precious to deal with anything implying condemnation. This gets the Tolerant crowd downright offended, angry, even violent. That’s not what they mean by free speech, pal. It turns out that the world has its own Puritan (impuritan?) streak.

“Sex worker” seems so bland, so inoffensive, so legal. And of course, the whole point is to muddy the waters and soften the blow. Consider:

How the faithful city has become a whore sex worker. -Isa. 1:21

“You have played the harlot sex worker with many lovers; and would you return to me?,” declares the Lord. -Jer 3:1

Not quite the same, eh?

Even we Christians cringe when hearing “harlot” and “whore” used in their Biblical sense. They aren’t meant for polite company any longer. But isn’t that another mark of our worldliness?

Stories like this continue to surface stating that young evangelicals are peeling away from conservatism. It’s hard to tell how big of a movement this will be until the election (our liberal media has long indulged in wishful thinking in such matters), but it bears watching.

The reason given by these young evangelicals is that they aren’t “single issue” voters. They’re pro-life, but they also believe in “social justice.” What is social justice? Well, it’s pop-culture speak for the use of taxpayer money to “fight” poverty and AIDS, to “protect” the environment, etc. In other words, it’s the same old, tired liberalism. (To digress, I’m convinced that popular culture inculcates this propaganda more effectively than the usual suspects in the mainstream news media. It’s the subtle, liberal premise on MTV, VH-1, afternoon talk shows, movies, and Comedy Central that, with endless repetition over a period of years, work its magic on minds already untethered by discernment. This, along with churches no longer preaching the whole counsel of God and discipling the sheep, is what has led to the rapid acceptance of sodomy over the last 20 years. The shift in even the last 10 years has been incredible. What a damning lack of love we show by acting as if this is cultural advancement.)

I’m not a single-issue voter, either. I won’t vote for someone who is pro-abortion, but the role of government and the rule of law is also critically important. There’s a reason why a government that historically saw its main goal as providing for the common defense now regulates (via the EPA) the gallons-per-flush for your toilet. That particular power wasn’t enumerated in the constitution, but it didn’t come from nowhere either. It was an accretion on prior interventions in the market. Similarly, government funding of Planned Parenthood didn’t come out of the blue either. It was another layer of plaque buildup on top of prior unconstitutional prerogatives assumed by our government. If we get to the point in this country reached by a few European countries where it’s a “hate crime” to speak the whole counsel of God in matters of sexuality, you can be sure that that won’t come from nowhere either. It will follow other “plausible” and “sensible” government meddling in related matters.

Henry Hazlitt, whose Economics in One Lesson should be read by all, noted:

This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

That about says it all for liberalism. My late father defined a liberal as “someone who likes to spend someone else’s money.” Well, another definition might be: “Someone who always — always — overlooks secondary consequences.” (In Ohio now, we have a group pushing a ballot issue to force businesses with more than 25 employees to provide seven mandatory sick days. Now isn’t that a fine prescription for making Ohio, already one of the worst business climates in the country, more competitive, especially in this era of expanding inflation and high gas prices? Pity our small business owners.)

Here’s what I say to young, wavering evangelicals:

• Barack Obama is another in a long line of empty-suit, vote-buying demagogues peddling phony hope for power. (McCain is a vote-buying demagogue too, but that’s a matter for another time.)
• If you think abortion a negotiable issue — should a mother be allowed to kill her offspring? — then examine your heart. You’re out of line with what the church has always believed.
• Liberal social justice is a violation of the eighth commandment. Sure, you spend a few trillion and you’re going to manage to help someone. But who’s really benefiting from it? Politicians, lawyers, and special interests, that’s who. And who’s paying the price? Taxpayers, the poor people who live around bums, drunks, and crackheads, and the bums, drunks, and crackheads themselves. African missionaries like David Wegener and my pastor can tell you the effects of foreign aid in Africa. A better answer is the exact opposite of what the social justice movement offers, namely property rights, the replacement of public “safety nets” that enable bad behavior with private charity, the return of vagrancy laws, discouragement of sodomy instead of handing out rubbers (Planned-Parenthood style), and, most of all, the gospel of Christ. The abortion movement is flat-out evil; liberal social justice is flat-out stupid and counterproductive (and that’s a charitable take).
• Liberal social justice (and that includes the environmental movement) is an enemy of freedom. Value your freedom to live and worship. The government already takes half of our income on average, and there is some truth in the idea that every dollar spent by government is a dollar of our freedom. That’s one reason why, for example, many families don’t feel they can afford to have mom at home, because politicians in Washington — especially the ones who prattle on about “working families” — think they know how to spend our money better than we can. This arrogant attitude is well demonstrated by a U.S. senator in favor of a 1990s tax hike who said something to the effect of “well, if we don’t do it, people will just go out and buy more VCRs and TVs.”
• The Christianized version of liberal social justice offered by the Rick Warrens isn’t a new reformation of Christianity; it’s the same candy-coated spirituality offered by the social gospel movements of the 19th and 20th centuries that decimated the mainline churches.

I’ve never thought much of Habitat for Humanity. It always had that vague taint of the (now-trendy!) social gospel and political leftism espoused by regressives like Tony Campolo. Now Habitat is revealing itself by logrolling with Planned Parenthood.

Someone at National Review (back when it was much better) once posited a rule that any organization that is not explicitly conservative will drift leftward over time. I don’t know if Habitat really had to drift too far. I do know this: Not one dollar of our money will be sent to organizations like Habitat or Susan G. Komen.

McCoy: We were speculating. Is God really out there?
Kirk: Maybe he’s not out there, Bones. Maybe he’s right here. [points to his heart]
-from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Every few years, a book comes out that captures the world’s attention using the same basic New Age stew (and a big marketing budget). The latest deceiver is Eckhart Tolle. He’s being touted by Oprah Winfrey, who herself has a long track record of pushing falsehood. The book names may change, the endorsers may change as the decades go by (John Denver, Shirley MacLaine, Marianne Williamson), but the beliefs are pretty much the same vapid samplings of pantheism, paganism, gnosticism, and self-help.

Paul and John in particular warn against those pushing false knowledge of hidden things (e.g. the book of Colossians). The early church father Irenaeus meticulously chronicled the “absurd ideas” of gnostics like Valentinus. Compared to the complexities of the old heretics, the pop-culture smorgasbord tends to serve heretical appetizers (a little bit o’ this and a little bit o’ that) and junk food.

Given that, why would anyone waste time reading Oprah Winfrey’s latest guru instead of mining the Scripture? Well, for one, these false teachers tell itching ears (2 Tim 4:3) what they want to hear. They impart supposedly “secret” knowledge that turns out to be the same old lies: You are a good person with great potential, so look within and become a god (compare with Jeremiah 17:9…”The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked”). And of course, they tell us not to worry about King Jesus. Jesus, to these false teachers, is a “demigod” or “spirit guide,” but not the only begotten Son of God who rules the nations (Psalm 2). He’s tame.

Also, these books prey on the ignorance of our Christian neighbors. This is the kind of stuff — along with all the other self-help, quasi-religious therapy of television talk shows — that forms people’s spiritual beliefs. Peter Brown, in his biography of Augustine, noted the time Augustine spent correcting and guarding his flock in letters marked by “an inspired fussiness, and by a heroic lack of measure when it came to the care of endangered souls… [They] catch the barely suppressed sigh of a tired old age, characterized by constant quiet acts of self-sacrifice as Augustine lent his pen, again and again, to the defence of his Church, at the expense of intellectual projects that engaged him more deeply.” (pgs 466 and 492, 2000 edition)

Well, I saw Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I hardly agree with its premise that academic freedom is the solution to persecution of those who believe in Intelligent Design. A better solution would be to tear down the evolutionist’s fort by abolishing state-funded education. Public schools — particularly universities — are largely sheltered from market forces and allow for the creation of intellectual fiefdoms. In other words, we’re free to disagree with Darwinists as long as we keep funding them. How about making these people get real jobs that aren’t based on government coercion? As a Christian, I would add that academic freedom means only so much if our wills are in bondage to sin.

Those caveats aside, one only need look at the absurdly negative reviews of Expelled to see that it’s touched a nerve (cf. universally positive reviews of this documentary). It’s the same nerve jangled when sodomy and abortion are discussed, a nerve inflamed by hatred for God and his church (aka. those inferior ‘religious nuts’).

It is well-made. It makes good points. You’ll have to see Expelled to hear some utterly absurd Darwinist theories about how life began. Also, David Berlinski– the guy had me laughing.

More signs of the drift in evangelical youth. Where did people get the idea that there is virtue in living sinfully — indeed, flaunting it like Anna Karenina — as long as you’re honest about it? Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. Authenticity must be the tribute that vice pays to vice.

In his review of Ben Stein’s new movie Expelled, Time magazine critic Jeffrey Kluger tells us:

The man made famous by Ferris Bueller, however, quickly wades into waters far too deep for him. He makes all the usual mistakes nonscientists make whenever they try to take down evolution, asking, for example, how something as complex as a living cell could have possibly arisen whole from the earth’s primordial soup. The answer is it couldn’t–and it didn’t. Organic chemicals needed eons of stirring and slow cooking before they could produce compounds that could begin to lead to a living thing.

I am having a flashback to Columbo.

Murderer: “Well, apparently the killer did a, b, and c.”
Columbo: “Oh… well that explains it.”
Columbo walks toward door, pauses, and turns: “Oh, just one more thing, sir.”

OK, so the soup was stirred for a million years… What difference does that make?

By the way, the authoritative Mr. Kluger is a journalist and attorney who’s authored some stuff on science topics. I guess that gives him standing over and above the rest of us “nonscientists.” You know, it’s the old “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV.”

Greetings evangelicals. I hope today finds you getting geared up for Earth Day. Only one week away! The excitement is palpable in the Pipe household.

The Pope is baptizing Muslims. Evangelicals are preparing speeches on The Gospel and Global Warming. Saving souls, one recycling bin at a time.

To paraphrase Tim Bayly, have we all gone mad? What’s up with this whole green movement? Mercy.

“Eco-friendly” is the latest triviality engaging the world. A Google news search on “environment” yields 182,000 hits. “Green” yields over 200,000 (granted, a few of these aren’t about the environment, but most are). By comparison, “Jesus” yields 29,000 hits.

Yes, there’s always More We Can Do to save the planet. Another light bulb to buy, another letter-writing campaign, another statement to sign, another politician to elect (after all, the green tree has red roots).

I’m all for stewardship, but enough with the idiot hopes and idiot despair. It makes me want to go out and buy some styrofoam.

And they will say to you, Look, there! or Look, here! Do not go out or follow them. -Luke 17:23

You know, occasionally a blog comes along bringing satire that is almost inspiring. A friend sent this along. Don’t miss the conversion stories to the right.

Because of Barack Obama’s pastor, we’ve been hearing a lot about liberation theology. What is it? Sam Storms explains.

I haven’t heard the term much since the mid-1980s, when it was associated with Catholic nuns who aided Marxist insurgencies in Central America. It’s yet another variant of the phony social and political gospel. You might expect that given that the United Church of Christ boasts that they were the “first [denomination] to ordain openly gay lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons (1972).” No wonder the denomination also tell us: “When we baptize you into our community, we promise that we will never take it back – no matter what you discover about yourself or what others discover about you along life’s journey.” (We can assume that this unconditional promise excludes discovering orthodox Christianity and the ensuing need for church discipline.)

In the recent newsletter of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio, a reader chastises the Rev. William Gartig for approving of sodomy and denying the “clear teaching of the church for thousands of years.” Gartig responds:

If you start from texts (whether biblical texts or later Christian writings), you can never get to an accepting attitude to homosexuality. … In my opinion, the homosexuality issue is one therefore that comes down to a sharp choice between starting from texts or starting from somewhere else. It involves some people consciously disagreeing with the biblical text and others being unwilling to disagree with the text. As I wrote in an earlier column (September 2005), the difference between theological conservatives and liberals can be boiled down to what is your ultimate authority.

Bingo. An honest appraisal. And that authority ultimately is either (A) God speaking through Scripture or (B) me. Gartig chooses B. Reverend Gartig then revealingly connects the issue to its Siamese twin:

I wish we Christians could disagree in good faith about this issue as we do about other issues and treat the issue of homosexuality like we treat women’s ordination.

In denominations not focused mostly on experience, sodomy is simply the next exit down the highway from egalitarianism. Both deny Scriptural authority, one is just more “progressive” (a term now generally synonymous with “abominable”). It just takes another generation of seminary rot and seared consciences.

A recent Sobran column reminds me of how my Darwinist faith finally died in a college anthropology class. The teacher would tell us that a certain skull was thought to be the missing link, then a few years later it turned out to be human. Then another skull was thought to be a missing link and it turned out to just be an ape. After watching this pattern repeat itself over and over again, I wondered: If the history is one of being wrong, why are we taking tests on this stuff as if our current understanding is right? It was a joke. It sure wasn’t anything to believe in.

The fact that no missing link has ever been found, and the sheer distance between any animals and humans, makes evolution one of the silliest of all belief systems. If millions or billions of years ago the earth was a bowl of soup, what would logic tell you it’d be a million years hence? A bowl of rotten soup? A dried out, rotted bowl? I know one thing: it wouldn’t be anything resembling the complexity of our current ecosystem. The idea that eyeballs and brains and other such wonders would evolve themselves is really the height of absurdity.

It’s a symptom of the blindness of men that they believe such nonsense. Lewis said that the Life-Force God is the world’s great achievment of wishful thinking, and he’s right. But second place belongs to evolution. If you believe in such hocus pocus, who are you to insult a witch doctor?

Baylyblog is stirring the waters again with Carolyn Custis “two last names” James. Pastor Gleason has followed suit.

Why all this whining about pastorettes and deaconesses? Moody would’ve asked us to focus on winning souls. Today’s leaders might ask us to meet people where they are (or worse, to help defeat global warming). In any event, this whole “women thing,” we’re told, is something on which all Christians of good will can disagree. It’s adiaphora, a matter of indifference.

Really? Perhaps we can take the temperature of those fine denominations with ordained women. That great pragmatist, V.I. Lenin, said that peace treaties were scraps of paper. So are the confessions of faith of these churches. They have sodomy lobbies gathering steam, if not already in control. They have pastors who deny that anyone really needs the righteousness of Christ; why, any spiritual belief will do. The moderates who do so much damage in aiding this transition (”thus far, but no farther!”) find themselves, like the original Russian Marxists who welcomed revolution, cast into a whirlwind that carries them far from their intended destination. When you deny the obvious, when you deny what Scripture says directly and you deny its entire context (no female apostles, no female priests, etc.), then you’ve denied its authority. When doctrine divides and confessions and confessionalism just don’t matter, then church discipline doesn’t matter. Eventually the Gospel doesn’t matter. Eventually Jesus isn’t the heavenly high prophet, priest, and king, but just a fine man.

Fr. Bill Mouser has a post in the aforementioned Baylyblog post that is well worth reading. An excerpt:

Evangelical Protestantism in the second half of the 20th century fell [I'd say, more accurately, is falling] in exactly the same way that Protestantism fell in the second half of the 19th Century: its heart was captured by world dominating ideas that are fundamentally anti-Biblical and hostile to the gospel. In the 19th Century it was Darwinism and the zenith of post-Renaissance rationalistic hubris. In the second half of the 20th Century it was sexual egalitarianism and the zenith of modernist individualism. The beachhead in both defeats is found in the seminaries. Soon after these were well-infected, the contagion spread to the publishing houses and denominational and mission agencies. That is why Grudem’s recent book catalogs so completely the capitulation of American evangelicalism’s institutions to the egalitarian cause. That is why modern evangelicals virtually identify evangelism with modern marketing techniques aimed at consumers of religious products and services.

The interesting thing about the 19th century northern Presbyterian church is how quickly it fell. Towns across America are still filled with liberal mainline churches in beautiful old buildings. Many of the people in those churches are finally bleeding into megachurches with faulty underpinnings– vague theology, non-confessional, fad-driven. Would anyone be surprised to see Unitarians wandering the halls of Saddleback in a generation?

Meanwhile, the orthodox in the PCA have fight, but cleaning up the mess that has gotten to this point could be something like what the Baptists experienced some years ago. And the cries for “peace, peace” will be at every turn.

One dumb thing we occasionally hear is that we can be “so heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good.” It figures that this quip, which belongs in the same closet with falsehoods like “God helps those who help themselves,” was attributed to the atheist Oliver Wendell Holmes.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither. -C.S. Lewis from Mere Christianity, Hope

The Apostle Paul says:

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. 3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. -Colossians 3:1-4

And because of your heavenly-mindedness, Paul goes on to say, put to death your sins. Heavenly-mindedness should lead to earthly good.

As Chrsitians, we believe that God has revealed Himself in His word. The Bible is a revelation of what we need to know. It doesn’t tell us everything about everything, but it tells us, in the words of the Westminster Confession, “the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life.” God created and God expects us to do what the Holy Spirit has revealed to us in the Bible (for example: repent and believe in the Gospel).

Therefore, picking and choosing what you want to believe from Scripture is obviously absurd. Why not just choose nothing and be done with it? It makes a mockery of revelation. It makes a mockery of the Holy Spirit speaking to us through the Scripture. Similarly, we should reject Hippie Jesus, Feminist Jesus, Global Warming Jesus, and the like. These are the fraudulent concoctions of false teachers. That the Scripture is silent about such nonsense is shown in that no one in the history of the church believed this stuff until the last century. If we believe that the Gates of Hell will not prevail against the church (Matthew 16:18), then we believe that it has not prevailed against it either. If politics and social matters were really the content of what mattered to God, you’d think that the Holy Spirit would have revealed this to our forefathers.

So, no to tired political journeys, no to Christianity and water, including the kind offered by the church growth movement, and no to mysticism (aka. direct, and usually contra-Biblical, revelation). Take the Bible for what it is. Take our Lord for who He is as revealed in His word. It’s the only serious thing to do.

Did you see Joel Osteen’s interview on 60 minutes this past Sunday? It wasn’t that useful. News shows work in soundbites that lack content. Also, Mr. Osteen has never seemed to understand (or doesn’t want to understand) the problem with his message well enough to engage it, nor do TV interviewers. Osteen’s moneymaking prowess indicates that few are offended by moralism.

Pastor Riddlebarger sums it up succinctly: Osteen is an evangelist without an evangel.

‘Course I’m respectable. I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.

So says the evil Noah Cross in Chinatown. I think of that classic comment when I come across Hugh Hefner on TV. Once distastefully considered a libertine and pornographer, “Hef” is now just a campy, grandfatherly icon. Little shows the blatant depravity of men than a desire to be like him. How many see his idolatrous life as the American dream, a blessing among blessings? The truth is that such folly (Prov. 6:32-33, Rom. 1:28) proves one far more likely to be under God’s curse:

Prov 22:14 The mouth of forbidden women is a deep pit; he with whom the Lord is angry will fall into it.

He with whom the Lord is angry… How’s that for plain talk? Matthew Henry comments:

Those who abandon themselves to that sin give proof that they are abandoned of God: it is a deep pit, which those fall into that are abhorred of the Lord, who leaves them to themselves to enter into that temptation, and takes off the bridle of his restraining grace, to punish them for other sins. Value not thyself upon thy being in favour with such women, when it proclaims thee under the wrath of God. It is seldom that they recover themselves, for it is a deep pit; it will be hard getting out of it, it so besots the mind and debauches the conscience, by pleasing the flesh.

When heresy rises in an evangelical body, it is never frank and open. It always begins by skulking, and assuming a disguise. Its advocates, when together, boast of great improvements, and congratulate one another on having gone greatly beyond the “old dead orthodoxy,” and on having left behind many of its antiquated errors: but when taxed with deviations from the received faith, they complain of the unreasonableness of their accusers, as they “differ from it only in words.” This has been the standing course of errorists ever since the apostolic age. They are almost never honest and candid as a party, until they gain strength enough to be sure of some degree of popularity. Thus it was with Arius in the fourth century, with Pelagius in the fifth, with Arminius and his companions in the seventeenth, with Amyraut and his associates in France soon afterwards, and with the Unitarians in Massachusetts, toward the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. They denied their real tenets, evaded examination or inquiry, declaimed against their accusers as merciless bigots and heresy-hunters, and strove as long as they could to appear to agree with the most orthodox of their neighbours; until the time came when, partly from inability any longer to cover up their sentiments, and partly because they felt strong enough to come out, they at length avowed their real opinions. -Samuel Miller from introduction to The Articles of the Synod of Dordt

The US’s largest Lutheran denomination, the ELCA, continues down the path trod by the Episcopal Church USA and the United Church of Christ. It’s hard to tell who is ahead in the race to join these hapless forerunners at the bottom: the PCUSA, the UMC, the ELCA. All continue their long slide into oblivion. Their race for relevance (i.e. worldliness) has rendered them irrelevant. All of these churches long ago capitulated on feminism, and after you deny Scriptural truth so blatantly, why not ordain homosexuals? The “Lutheran” homosexual quoted in the article has it right on one count: the failure to discipline is “huge.” No sanctions means, in time, no church.

These mainline churches regularly lament their declining numbers. Of course, the problem is what the Catholic columnist, Bob Novak, noted of his time as a Unitarian: after attending church for a few years, he and his wife decided they might as well just stay home in bed. I mean really, why bother? You can do what’s right in your own eyes without messing with a church.

I have often recommended the Reformation Study Bible. Its notes are very helpful, but occasionally there is an oddity. Nahum predicts the downfall of Assyria, and verse 3:12 uses this allusion to the disintegration of its armies:

Behold, your troops are women in your midst.

Now, without further comment, let’s compare the RSB to Matthew Henry in discussing this verse:

In the face of the approaching army all the Assyrian troops are like women (i.e. not trained for warfare). -RSB

[T]hey have no wisdom, no courage; they shall be fickle, feeble, and fainthearted, as women commonly are in such times of danger and distress; they shall be at their wits’ end, adding to their griefs and fears by the power of their own imagination, and utterly unable to do anything for themselves; the valiant men shall become cowards. -Matthew Henry

This is Funny stuff. It reminded me of what we learned about Hillary Clinton in a breathless and unintentionally hilarious old Washingon Post profile (”Hillary Clinton’s Inner Politics,” May 6, 1993). The first line of the article is one of the great howlers of modern journalism:

It just happened, slipped out- from deep inside of her-in a quiet but stunning way.

I could lovingly quote the article’s comedy further, but to get to the point, Mrs. Clinton is eventually quoted thusly:

My politics are a real mixture… An amalgam. And I get so amused when these people try to characterize me: She is this, therefore she believes the following 25 things. … Nobody’s ever stopped to ask me or try to figure out the new sense of politics that Bill and a lot of us are trying to create. The labels are irrelevant. And yet, the political system and the reporting of it keep trying to force us back into the boxes because the boxes are so much easier to talk about. You don’t have to think. You can just fall back on the old, discredited Republican versus Democrat, liberal versus conservative mindsets.

By now I know what you’re thinking: “Put the pipe down, Hillary.” But seriously, the point is this: it pays to regard those who will not let themselves be defined concretely with much caution. It’s been my experience that those who claim to have moved beyond labels are up to no good.

Those who take issue with the Emergent Church Movement, which is mostly repackaged liberalism, are told that they just don’t get it. All attempts to clearly define terms are rebuffed (just like Arius).

I get the same “you don’t get it” vibe from the far more erudite Federal Vision folks. Every time someone tries to take them to the woodshed, they seem to get buried under an avalanche of theological gobbledegook (at least to my limited ears). It turns out that our best theologians in the OPC and the PCA don’t “get” it either. If they can’t get it, how is a ninny like me going to get it?

Uncle. A man must understand his limitations. I’ve yet to meet an actual proponent anyway.

Bill Mouser with a fine post on religious madhouses. He explains:

Now, what’s wonderful about religious madhouses is this: they usually appear utterly normal. All the psychic (or, theological) horrors are well hidden behind the visible veneer of civility, piety, and bible-babble. Stained glass, well-polished and padded pews, tasteful colors and the soft rustle of choir robes or clerical vestments render it all so … well, staid.

Yes, the gentle slopes, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings. It’s all quite familiar to those of us who’ve spent many Sundays in mainline church pews.