Biblical Theology - God’s Good Creation

May 5, 2022June 11, 2022

Creation’s Trinitarian Dance

There exists an elegant creational dance witnessed daily. The sun rises and sunsets. And underneath the surface of things, below the dance floor, the part we don’t see, green pigment chlorophyll gathers energy from the sun to empower the greening of the planet. All around us we see a living, breathing, beautiful embrace, and the fruitful coming together of difference, a union seen and unseen, dancing above ground and beneath. We witness daily the mystery of life. In God’s more complex life forms, we observe the give and take between male and female. At the pinnacle of creational complexity, we humans dance to melodies and harmonies which produce ever deepening companionship, complementarity and, of course, children.

Where would we be without that dance?

I believe God created both Heaven and Earth, Spirit and Matter, Soul and Body, invisible and visible things. I believe God designed us humans for body-soul integration. If you are a person who values God’s good creation and also believes God intends the bi-natured world to exist in loving harmony, as a integrated creation, with an overlapping and interlocking existence, mirroring the life of our Triune God, then you may be assigned the label “bigot” in this fluid world full of endless imaginings.

Why? Because you don’t believe that inner desire trumps biology. Or that the mind can be fruitfully separated from the body. Rather you believe in an inherent creational structure ordained and blessed by God. At the human level, you believe God created us male and female. And those are the only options. You also believe it is illicit to do irreparable harm to the body in service to one’s gender identity.

(It must be admitted that some Christians have reimagined the Faith and have expanded this project into reimagining our anthropology as well.)

We each, male or female, possess half of a reproductive system. So the long term purpose and intention, if humans want to remain a “going concern,” is the uniting of two into one flesh so that they might become three. This Trinitarian pattern of two becoming one that then becomes three, father, mother, child, echoes the existence of Classic Christianity’s Triune God.¹ Of course I won’t deny the mystery of the Trinity transcends this basic pattern of earthly existence, but I believe this particular “trace of the Trinity” in our created order speaks wisely & soberly to us.

At least it should.

To frame today’s most important debate as purely a question about loving people is insufficient. It is necessary but not sufficient if your main desire is to lead broken humans to wholeness. Jesus, as John tells us, was full of Grace & Truth².

You are not loving a person if you affirm their delusions. No matter how sincerely held those delusions might be.

“Love” separated from Truth is infertile, it cannot create life. It can’t make us whole. And that is what God desires for us. Fruitful, flourishing, wholesome life.

From the beginning.

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As a Classic Christian I encourage everyone to “Embrace, Don’t Affirm.”

Individuals with a Gender Identity Disorder (Gender-Dysphoria) need Truth-filled Love. Please read this post for more details.

For anyone interested in an extended review of the Gender-Critical Pro-Creation argument presented on this blog, but without having to scroll through every post, please visit the Menu at the top of each page and click on the Top Posts link.

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I’m a Classic Christian and think Gender Ideology is anti-creational to the core. This blog is about “God’s Good Creation.” That’s why I’m writing about Gender Ideology. And “speaking up” as I’m confident Jesus would.

"Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female.'" [Matt 19:4]

If you would like more detail on how my Christian worldview informs my understanding of Sex and today’s Gender Ideology please read the following posts.

**The Natchez** by Delacroix – 1835
Oil on Canvas
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Love refuses to affirm confusion.

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April 22, 2022April 23, 2022

The New Homophobia, LGBTQ Activism & Queer Theory

Ben Appel is gay. He’s also fearful of what he calls:

a frightening new version of homophobia pervading the U.S., disguised as, of all things, “LGBTQ” activism.

He just wrote an important opinion piece in Newsweek.

Appel enrolled in Columbia University and started an internship with two advocacy campaigns in Maryland promoting marriage equality & transgender rights legislation. He aspired to become a social justice writer and activist. But this didn’t quite work out:

My excitement about the internship quickly gave way to a nauseating mixture of fear and shame. I was, I quickly learned, not the right kind of "queer." I was just another "cis" (short for "cisgender," a word I had never even heard until it was assigned to me, typically as a slur) gay male—in other words, a privileged and unevolved relic of the past. After all, I had my rights—the right to marry, the right to serve openly in the military, the right to assimilate into this oppressive, "cisheteronormative," patriarchal society. It was time to make way for a new generation of "queer," one that had very little to do with sex-based rights and more to do with abolishing the concepts of sex and sexuality altogether.

Continuing his studies at Columbia he was introduced to Queer Theory.

... I learned about queer theory, an obscure academic discipline based largely on the writing of the late French intellectual Michel Foucault, who believed that society categorizes people—male or female, heterosexual or homosexual—in order to oppress them. The solution is to intentionally blur—or "queer"—the boundaries of these categories. Soon this "queering" became the predominant method of discussing and analyzing gender and sexuality in universities.

Queer theorists insist that subverting the categorizations which have been imposed upon young people—for example, the sex they were "assigned" at birth—is the ultimate expression of autonomy, and further, the key to liberating society from a system devised largely, so they claim, by cisgender white men. (Never mind the scientific and cultural achievements of women and racial minorities.)

Are you seeing any connection to the things I’ve been writing on this blog? I hope so. I’m occasionally asked, why are you so concerned about this issue? Because there are deep cultural currents at work here, about which most are completely unaware. Anti-creational currents. (Writing as a Christian, of course.)

Here’s the article in Newsweek. [Standard link disclaimer¹].

It’s worth your time.

We need to be willing to recalibrate our approach to today’s “world changing” moment. A world where some find it difficult to define the word “woman.”

Mr. Appel has recalibrated.

It is not enough to want to help “marginalized” folk. As he did. We must also tell them the truth. And point out radical untruths. As he did.

From a Christian worldview, the radical autonomy promoted by Gender Ideologues and Queer Theorists is, to use a very old word, idolatry, pure and simple.

It is the worship of the Autonomous Self.

But the Truth is we had nothing to do with being created male or female. A loving community brought us into being. And it cannot be undone.

We must help confused people accept who they were created to be. And tell them a great story about who they could become.

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April 13, 2022April 11, 2023

Christocentric Understanding of Creation

This is Holy Week for Christians. The most important week in the Christian calendar, the climax of the Christian year, when we celebrate the central historical events of our faith, the bodily death and bodily resurrection of our Lord & Reconciler, Jesus of Nazareth.

Diptych with Scenes of the Annunciation, Nativity, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, Silver gilt with translucent and opaque enamels, German — Bodily Death & Resurrection
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Resurrection, Claude Mellan (French, Abbeville 1598–1688 Paris), Engraving — The Resurrection – by Claude Mellan
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Second Person of the Trinity did not become flesh and dwell among us, and die for us, and rise bodily from the grave so that we could escape our bodies. The body-hatred promoted by today’s Gender Ideologues is an example of how not to honor our deepest Christian Truths. Those Truths are the Doctrines of Creation, Incarnation, Jesus’s Bodily Death, Bodily Resurrection, Bodily Ascension, Bodily Return and then culminating with the Bodily Resurrection of Believers. All of which actualizes the remarriage of Heaven and Earth.

The New Testament scriptures refer to this “remarriage” as New Creation. For the Creator’s design now is to bring about the reconciliation of the invisible with the visible. Cosmically and Personally. First and foremost reconciliation between God and God’s creation, and then between the bi-natured creation itself, heaven & earth, soul & body.

In other words, we are destined by God’s design for Creational Wholeness. A fully Integrated, unbroken creational communion. A communion that does not obliterate the differences of God’s creation, but unites the two in Holy Matrimony. As it was in the Beginning.

And at the center of that marriage will be the dwelling place of our Creator God. In scriptural language this is known as the Temple. The human signpost of this communal intent is Husband & Wife. And the life they create together.

The individual signpost is a fruitful mind & body integration.

Second Century Church Father, Bishop Irenaeus, (AD 130 – 198) is the outspoken champion of the ‘realism’ of Christian Theology. Much of his life’s work was to combat the empty spiritualism of the first great Christian heresy called Gnosticism. At root Gnosticism’s core principle was the devaluation of the material world.

In contrast to the Gnostics’ empty spiritualism and proud contempt for the body, Irenaeus stubbornly refused to let man cut himself off from the life of this world and escape into a pseudo heavenly half-existence.

If there is to be real redemption, this earth and no other, this body and no other, must have the capacity to take God’s grace into itself. And thereby become the Temple of God.

This is what Classic Christians like myself believe and confess every week when we recite our Creeds, carefully read our Scriptures, and celebrate the Eucharist.

So let us not be World-less Christians Celebrating Holy Week. Let us embrace our God given materiality and by extension, embrace the beauty of the earth around us. I’ve said a few times on this blog and several times to my brothers and sisters at church, God gave us bodies because we were meant to have them. Humans are not angel apprentices awaiting some future “exaltation” to the invisible realm. Angels are God’s created heavenly family, humans are God’s created earthly family. Embodied existence is our human destiny. After bodily death an interim existence within the loving embrace of God awaits us. Call it a heavenly existence if you like. But then there will be life after life after death. Classic Christians believe in a two-stage afterlife process, the interim loving embrace at death, and then the reconciliation of the invisible soul with the visible when our bodies will be restored incorruptible at the return of Christ and the consummation of all things.

The Resurrection – Bolswert, 16th Century
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

Let us not exclude the reality of God from the world God created, either the visible or invisible world. Let us not deny salvation to God’s handiwork.

God’s blessings to you this Holy Week. And the weeks to come….

Resurrection of the Dead – German 15th Century
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

Sun Rising – Zion National Park – March 22, 2022
blueridgemountain_man

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