Standing firm against "historical inevitability"

Now let us be quite clear. We have not chosen this fight. The new religion has come to us, and it demands total submission. It demands that we cease to worship God, and that we cease to tell the truth. We have come to the cleft in the road, what Lewis called the great divorce. God will, if we allow him, heal our evil ways; Jesus came to call sinners. But God can no more accept evil in his household than he can cease to be God. He is holy. He will wash our grubby robes white in his blood, but Truth cannot lie. He cannot declare the unclean to be clean. He can only make it clean by his grace.

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10 Jesus called the crowd together and said, “Pay attention and try to understand what I mean. 11 The food that you put into your mouth doesn’t make you unclean and unfit to worship God. The bad words that come out of your mouth are what make you unclean.”

12 Then his disciples came over to him and asked, “Do you know that you insulted the Pharisees by what you said?”

13 Jesus answered, “Every plant that my Father in heaven did not plant will be pulled up by the roots. 14 Stay away from those Pharisees! They are like blind people leading other blind people, and all of them will fall into a ditch.”

15 Peter replied, “What did you mean when you talked about the things that make people unclean?”

16 Jesus then said:

Don’t any of you know what I am talking about by now? 17 Don’t you know that the food you put into your mouth goes into your stomach and then out of your body? 18 But the words that come out of your mouth come from your heart. And they are what make you unfit to worship God. 19 Out of your heart come evil thoughts, murder, unfaithfulness in marriage, vulgar deeds, stealing, telling lies, and insulting others. 20 These are what make you unclean. Eating without washing your hands will not make you unfit to worship God.

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In our day, the issue is not Christology. We're not so sophisticated in our heresies. The issue is sex. We're encouraged to pretend that the child-making act is not essentially ordered to child-making. We must pretend that it's only the friction of erogenous flesh. We must pretend that a man can be made into a woman by a saw and a trowel, and a woman into a man by pinning the tail on the donkey, or by just thinking it is so

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nota bene said:

A friend sent me this editorial from Touchstone magazine, and I hope some will appreciate the comments on “historical inevitability” and how, like Athanasias, Christians are called to station themselves on the “wrong” side of “history.”

Author Anthony Esolen argues that “If we believe that 'God is love,' not that God happens to favor us, but that in his inner life God is himself love, we owe that belief to the inflexible fidelity of Athanasius” and that “The Lord does not require that we win. He requires that we be steadfast. The battle is not ours but his.” Touchstone Archives: Stand Firm

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