Hearts of Darkness

One of the reasons I started this blog was because I often see parallels in seemingly divergent events and/or ideas of the day and this seemed as good a place as any to unload them.

Sure, an opinion piece in the ultraliberal New York Times by a progressive family researcher who once said "Jesus was very anti-family" and an article by Reformed firebrand Douglas Wilson might seem odd companions ... but what can I say? I just work here.

First up, our friend the progressive. Her name is Stephanie Coontz and she wrote a op-ed piece in the Times called The Heterosexual Revolution. A sampling ...

Traditional marriage, with its 5,000-year history, has already been upended. Gays and lesbians, however, didn't spearhead that revolution: heterosexuals did. Heterosexuals were the upstarts who turned marriage into a voluntary love relationship rather than a mandatory economic and political institution. Heterosexuals were the ones who made procreation voluntary, so that some couples could choose childlessness, and who adopted assisted reproduction so that even couples who could not conceive could become parents. And heterosexuals subverted the long-standing rule that every marriage had to have a husband who played one role in the family and a wife who played a completely different one. Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.

Challenging? Sure. True? You bet.

When I pulled this article I wrote the following: When we are confronted with sin in a society, the first place we, as the church, should look is in the mirror. After all, is the "salt and light" to blame a dark world for its heart of darkness? Leave it to Wilson to say it a thousand times better. He did so in his piece Owning the Curse. This piece hits like a ton of bricks. Quote!

"Something seems fundamentally awry in the way the Christian Church interacts with the homosexual movement around the nation. Christians so easily fall into default assumptions, usually of a secular, conservative brand. Our most immediate response is almost always in terms of "Here is evil; let us condemn it," without a thought to, "Here is evil; let us confess it." We tend to view the struggle in a morally mechanistic manner rather than in covenantal terms."

... more ... Quote!

"Homosexuality is not a typical sin that cultures face like theft, lying, or murder, but it is apparently a very symbolic sin through which God reveals His anger. The Apostle Paul described homosexuality as what happens when God gives up on a nation's normal idolatries: "For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful" (Rom. 1:26,27). Widespread homosexuality is a sign that the society in question is not living under normal chastisements; it is the sign of God's abandonment of us—Ichabod."

... and ... Quote!

"Our nation's chastisement is the Church's responsibility; we Christians are the cause, not the secularists. And as our problem, we must seek to remove the curse by ecclesiastical means, namely, confession and right worship. Our focus in this situation is not preaching the law to secularists. It should be searching out the cause of the curse in our own hearts, and in our own tradition."