Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For October 21, 2020

 Oct 17

Tor R. Scott Clark and his blogpost that criticizes what he calls the 3 Sexual Revolutions that have occurred in this nation. This appeared in Heidelblog.

Though we must oppose the legalization of elective abortions, is opposition to the legalization of birth control and same-sex marriage something we should embrace?

Behind the opposition to those two practices is the association of the Gospel with oppression. That is because the Gospel was seen as supporting oppressive status quo conditions. When Clark talks about the 3 sexual revolutions, he neglects to mention those oppressive conditions.  For woman's suffrage, which was an important issue during the much of the time of what Clark calls the 1st sexual revolution, women's equality, which was the key issue during the 2nd sexual revolution, and  full equality for the LGBT community, which is the key issue in the current sexual revolution were seen as responses to oppressive conditions. And there might be a reason for why Clark fails to mention these issues. That is because of the attitudes of fellow reformed Christians at those times seemed to support the status quo.

We should note that the J. Gresham Machen mildly wrote against woman's suffrage (see  https://www.covenanter.org/reformed/2020/9/16/letter-to-a-congressman-on-womens-suffrage  ). For though he did not adamantly oppose suffrage, he questioned its wisdom and whether it was just. In addition, he thought that it should be determined by the states. And though his view seemed to be one that relied on democracy, he was basically saying that women needed the permission by the men of each state in order to be recognized as having the right to vote.

We should also note that the Roman Church opposed woman's suffrage as did one of its more popular members G. K. Chesterton. He also opposed women working outside the home.

We don't see much from the Reformed Presbyterian Churches on the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. We do occasionally see some disparaging reformed Presbyterian remarks against egalitarianism though (see Machen for example as well as pg 278 of the Minutes for the 68th General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church--  https://opcgaminutes.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2001-GA-68-red.pdf   ). Here we should note that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was just a part of the Women's Liberation Movement of that time.  What Clark does not mention is that women were made very dependent on men by the practices of the financial institutions of the time. So the quest for equality was a larger issue than sexual mores though the latter was tied in with the former.

When we get to the 3rd sexual revolution, we start to see an end to society's marginalization of the LGBT community. And on the issue of same-sex marriage, we see an opposition by the 2KT community and the Transformationalists against allowing same-sex marriage in society. We should note that the the quest for same-sex marriage in society by the LGBT community is just a part of a bigger quest for equality in society. We should note that the LGBT community has been sorely pressed in America for hundreds of years. And even for part of my lifetime, homosexual relations was counted as criminal acts.

Yes, there has been and still is harm brought about by the "3 sexual revolutions" mentioned by Clark. But what he doesn't include is the harm caused by the status quo conditions of those times. And perhaps if the Church had spoken out against that harm, it could have partially mitigated the effects of the 3 sexual revolutions. That is because revolutions often contain overreactions to the current forms of oppression that were in place during their time.

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Oct 19

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost commenting on the relationship between and interaction of the Church and the state and society. One comparison made in the article is a comparison between Transformationalists and 2Kers. This appeared in Heidelblog.

I take the same approach to the differences between 2Kers and Transformationalists as Martin Luther King Jr. took toward the choice between Communism and Capitalism. King noted that Communism forgets that life is individual and Capitalism forgets that life is social. So too  Transformationalists forget that the state and society is free from Church rule because the state and society consist of believers and unbelievers while 2Kers forget that the Church, as an institution, must speak prophetically to the state and society and not just to people as individuals. We should note here that both Transformationalists and 2Kers both try to rule over the state and society to varying degrees when it comes to applying natural law.

In forgetting that the state and society are free from Church rule, Transformationalists forget the divide that the New Testament puts between the Church and society in the New Testament. Consider the passages that deal with Church discipline (see Matthew 18:15-19 and I Corinthians 5:12-13). In addition, Transformationalists forget Jesus's warnings against 'lording it over others' and HIs instructions to His disciples to let it go and move on when a village does not accept their preaching.

In forgetting that the Church, as an institution, must speak prophetically to the state and  society, 2Kers forget the concept of corporate sin that is so often employed in the Old Testament. That the state and society, though consisting of unbelievers and believers, must treat its people with justice, especially the vulnerable. Unfortunately, the only prophetic demands that many 2Kers believe the Church should make as an institution on the state and society is to promote laws that govern sexual behaviors--a position that is not taken by Paul in I Corinthians 5:12-13. The conservative Christian objection to elective abortion is appropriate.

In secular terms, while Transformationalists tend to push for a Christian ethnocracy, 2Kers tend to inadvertently repeat an unfortunate Church tradition of siding with wealth and power by way of its silent complicity in not speaking prophetically to the state and society regarding its treatment or neglect of the vulnerable as well as other corporate sins.

We should not that 2Kers use Natural Law to assume the right to promote laws that put sanctions on homosexuality. Regarding that, we should note that natural law could be confusing here since we see homosexuality occurring in roughly 1,500 species of animals where there is a positive effect for some of the species. Thus, whose natural law is it becomes the issue when it is appealed to when promoting such laws.