Josh Bishop Reads

When Saint Paul said that he must be all things to all men, he did not mean that he would be stupid for the stupid.

We understand the temptation to talk about the Bible mostly in terms of ‘what it means to me’ and its ‘practical application to daily life.’ But when this hermeneutic dominates—as it does today—Christianity becomes little more than self-help therapy. And it leaves people ignorant of Scripture’s deeper meaning, and therefore unable to spot false teaching.

Many teenagers today have seen a greater number and variety of sex acts than the most debauched Mughal emperor managed in a lifetime.

The sexual revolution rests on two mutually exclusive propositions: sex has no meaning and that meaning must be expressed. On the one hand, we are told that there is no ‘essence’ to sexuality, nothing inherent in sexual activity that gives it a natural shape or meaning. And yet, we are told that the worst thing we can do to anyone is repress their sexual expression. So sex is nothing and everything at the same time. Sex is essential to our identity, but the essence of sex is arbitrary.

Not long ago, I asked the head of a prestigious prep school how her institution teaches its students about character. She answered by telling me how many hours of community service the students do. That is to say, when I asked her about something internal, she answered by talking about something external. Her assumption seemed to be that if you go off and tutor poor children, that makes you a good person yourself. ¶ And so it goes. Many people today have deep moral and altruistic yearnings, but, lacking a moral vocabulary, they tend to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions. How can I serve the greatest number? How can I have impact? Or, worst of all: How can I use my beautiful self to help out those less fortunate than I?

If the ‘I am a Christian' strategy is to carry any force at all, churches need to start taking marriage seriously. They need to start taking pastoral and, if necessary, disciplinary action against adulterers, against spousal abusers, against trivial divorces. Only then will the statement ‘I am a member of a church so have a high view of marriage’ start to appear plausible to the outside world.

The church did not lose the wider cultural argument on sexual identity. No argument against traditional marriage was ever really made. I have noted before that the culture shifted because soap operas and sitcoms seized the political initiative and made the case for change via emotive narratives and shameless pulling at heartstrings. Thus, there is little point in arguing the case for traditional marriage in the public sphere. If there is hope for traditionalists, it can only come by demonstrating good marriages and families in action.

The flesh of black Americans is still for sale in these United States. They are doing it right now in FedEx boxes.

Here lies the boundary of a Christian church that knows itself to be bound by the authority of Scripture. Those who urge the church to change the norm of its teaching on this matter [homosexuality] must know that they are promoting schism. If a church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognized homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage, such a church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the unequivocal witness of Scripture. A church that took this step would cease to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

Editor’s note: This blog post refers to individuals who menstruate as women because the author wanted to highlight gender inequality in health care. We acknowledge that not all individuals who menstruate identify as women and that not all individuals who identify as women menstruate, but feel this generalization is appropriate considering the gendered nature of most health care policies.

Too many of them [post-1960s Americans] think that same-sex marriage is merely a question of sexual ethics. They fail to see that gay marriage, and the concomitant collapse of marriage among poor and working-class heterosexuals, makes perfect sense given the autonomous individualism sacralized by modernity and embraced by contemporary culture—indeed, by many who call themselves Christians. They don’t grasp that Christianity, properly understood, is not a moralistic therapeutic adjunct to bourgeois individualism—a common response among American Christians, one denounced by Rieff in 2005 as ‘simply pathetic’—but is radically opposed to the cultural order (or disorder) that reigns today. ¶ They are fighting the culture war moralistically, not cosmologically. They have not only lost the culture, but unless they understand the nature of the fight and change their strategy to fight cosmologically, within a few generations they may also lose their religion.

I also was struck by the spectacle of an enormous outcry against the Confederate flag happening just a few days before the Obergefell decision, a decision that marked the most egregious assault on state sovereignty in a half century — and mind you, that’s saying something. If I were editing a movie script that had this particular juxtaposition in it, I would red pen it, and send it back to the boys in the basement with comments like “Heavy-handed. Too obvious. Lighten up, boys.” But then the celestial movie producer would overrule everybody with His divine stet.

The crying need of the hour is for us to put our own house in order, to strengthen and steel ourselves with soft hearts and hard heads, repenting of our own sexual foolishness and complicity in the cultural upheaval we find ourselves in, then seeking to be shaped and formed by the Word of God, training our own minds and the imaginations of our children to run in biblical ruts so that we stop acting as the incubator for generational unfaithfulness in the church.

Kennedy is so terribly bad at his chosen profession of judge that he has now unmasked himself, and his four silent colleagues who joined his opinion for the Court, as imperial rulers with no regard for the Constitution, for the forms of reasoning that give the law its real vitality, or for the rightful authority of the people to govern themselves within the bounds of a Constitution they understand and respect.

Biblical Christianity teaches that the self is not self-defining. We are all created in the image of God, whether or not we want to be. We all stand in judgment before a holy God, whether or not we want to. We have all been given certain natural abilities, opportunities, frustrations, and liabilities by a sovereign God. We do not, as many would have us believe, "create our own reality." There is one reality, ordered by the one God. We are answerable to Him for our conduct within that reality. Our cultural life should encourage us to acknowledge that reality is centered in Jesus Christ, not in our self. At root, popular culture's dynamics tend to encourage a self-centeredness that Christians ought to avoid.

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.