Leading figures, like Prim Minister Tony Blair have long shown open favour to the gay community. McElvoy states, "his barrister wife Cherie represents a lesbian who is taking South West Trains to the European Court for sexual discrimination because it refused to grant her live-in lover the free travel it allows to heterosexual spouses". McElvoy even shows that some local councils even favoured homosexuals in their housing policies. Now, there are a number of myths, misunderstandings and misdemeanours that have grown up around this whole issue of Gay Rights:
The myth of equality. Equality and fair treatment of people of all races, cultural backgrounds, etc. is a completely different matter to equal treatment for every perversion of God's order that becomes acceptable. The politically correct babble of our politicians, social activists and academicians ignores the blatantly perverse character of the homosexual culture.
By treating homosexuality in terms of rights immediately levels all relationships. If homosexual relationships achieve in law the same legal status as marriage, then this immediately lowers marriage to just another option on the acceptable spectrum of relational options! The same, of course, applies to co-habitation. As soon as co-habitation and marriage receive the same legal status, then marriage is just another form of co-habitation, or, co-habitation is a version of marriage. Either way, the prime place of monogamous, heterosexual marriage has been removed. The gay social activists, know this, it's a pity the Church doesn't understand.
The homosexual culture is however, a dead-end culture. Without the family and therefore children and therefore a future the homosexual culture is doomed to be a short- lived affair! Romans 1 declares the truncated nature of their worldview. Jeffrey Satinover has shown that the whole biological argument for homosexuality, and the whole "gay gene" controversy, has been poor science at best, and misinformation at worse. Besides Satinover points out that if homosexuality is genetically determined, then as homosexuals do not reproduce, homosexuality is a genetic dead-end as well!
The gospel offers grace and salvation to repentant homosexuals, as it does to all sinners who freely repent of their sins and trust Christ alone as their saviour. This the Church's distinctive message to homosexuals: there is hope for homosexuals, because there is hope for all sinners. However, our society is not offering such a message, and nor is the Church, as it embraces homosexual clergy, gay vicars in it's "non-judgmental" love, and it's embracing (often literally) of all men. Our society is into acceptance , not in Christ, but in the old Adam, with his unchanged fallen, perverse nature and faithlessness. This is why our culture is dying.
The root problem is not that there are homosexuals about, there always have been and always will, but the real tragedy is that homosexuality has attained general acceptance, when God's law declares it sinful, criminal and therefore illegal. The problem is not the odd gay here and there, but the open cultural embrace of homosexuality as an equally valid life-option along with the rest. It is this kind of open acceptance and legitimisation that merits us the judgement of the LORD.
The best Biblical- theological critique :
Dr. Greg L Bahnsen: Homosexuality: A Biblical View. Baker.
The best cultural critique:
Grant/Horne: Legislating Immorality. Moody.
The best social critique:
Stephen Green: The Sexual Dead-End.
The best medical critique:
Jeffrey Satinover: Homosexuality And The Politics of Truth. Baker.
Jacqueline Kasun has written a brilliant book rebuffing and exposing this whole assumption. The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of Population Control (St Ignatius Press 1988) is a devastating critique of the assumptions, ideology and prejudices that have spawned the idea that over population is fact beyond dispute, and that international bodies and governments need to act to control population growth world-wide. She challenges the assumption that there are too many people and not enough resources to support them. She blasts the myth that world population expansion is spiralling out of control and intervention is required urgently. However, Kasun presents piles of evidence to the contrary; she question and demolishes false assumption after false assumption. She notes that the world's food shortages are not merely due to scarcity - in fact they are not due to scarcity at all. There are other factors. She cites Dr. David Hopper,
The world's food problem does not arise from any physical limitation on potential output or any danger of unduly stressing the environment. The limitations on abundance are to be found in the social and political structures of the nations and in the economic relations among them. The unexploited global food resource is there, between cancer and Capricorn. The successful husbandry of that resource depends upon the will and actions of men. (p. 36)
In fact, the world is possibly under populated! Did you know that less than 3 percent of land in the USA is urbanised? Moreover "only three tenths of 1 percent of the land surface of the earth of used for "human settlements"(p.37). The whole world's population could be comfortably located in the state of Texas "With a population density less than that of existing cities, and leaving the rest of the world empty"(p.37). This would give each family 1,500 sq. feet of space! Put another way, there is standing room for the whole world's population to fill one quater of Jacksonville, Florida, USA.
The purpose of the myth of over population has been renewed energies to somehow act to control world population growth. Here Kasun exposes the interventionism of the USA in various parts of the world. Through advocating sex education, to incentivised contraception and even sterilisation, the USA has been active in implementing a world-wide population control policy(pp.79-94). Behind this is bad economics. Kasun reminds us that larger families, mean more producers in the long run and care for the elderly is shared by the larger family. Readers will be surprised to see that Kasun quotes statistics to show that world population is growing steadily, but very slowly. In fact, population stagnation is a problem in some areas.
Nearer to home, the ethos behind the sex education curriculum in the state school system has been to re-educate a new generation in a new set of values ("values clarification"); these are values that are designed to reduce family size, stimulate sexual awareness in children, apart from the framework of family and marriage, and to promote sexual activity and licence.
Kasun's book is essential reading for every thinking Christian who wants to be able to counter intelligently the canons of modern humanism. It is time for us to challenge the assumptions and wrong-thinking that are rife today. We need to pluck our children from the hands of those who are expounding this new ideology through the education system, in the name of "neutral" and "factual" teaching.
Stephen J Hayhow
Moreover, the basic tenets of our Faith demand specifically Christian education:
if God created all reality, the whole creation (Gen. 1:1ff) then all of creation finds its purpose and meaning and interpretation only in terms of Him;
if God governs and controls all things (Eph 1:11), then He governs all the details of this world, from the hairs on our heads to the rise and fall of men and nations (History);
if sin has affected the whole person (Eph 2:1f) and the whole of life, then we must surely be careful as redeemed men, to view all reality in terms of this fact. For us "nature" is fallen;
if Christ came to redeem this world, and if the extent of His redemptive work extends to all things (Eph 1:7ff), then all redeemed reality must be studied in terms of that great redemptive act;
if Christ is to be Lord over all things in history (I Cor 15:25f), then should not all things be investigated in terms of His rule and reign;
if Christ is to return to bring about the final redemption of this fallen world (Rev 21-22) in its totality, then are we not to pursue our studies in the light of that fact.
The task of Christian education is to take all of the above and formulate a Christian approach to education. We cannot study "nature" without recognising that nature is fallen. We cannot study history without being conscious of the constant reality that history is His-story, God's plan and purpose manifested in time.
Christian education should also be classical. When we set out on the great task of understanding and teaching our children all things in terms of Christ and His Word, we are not the first to have attempted this "impossible" task! Too often we want to start from "zero". But there are those who have gone before us who have already encountered the many difficulties and conundrums that we run up against. The classical approach to education, the use of the Trivium, and mastering of grammar, logic and rhetoric as the basic tools of learning is an important re-discovery we need to make. Western (Christian) Civilisation was built upon a basically Christian theory and practice, in spite of its inconsistencies. We don't need to "re-invent the wheel", but take the classical, Christian model, and reform and re- shape it to suit our Biblical purpose. Dorothy L. Sayers, earlier this century, called for the recovery of The Lost Tools of Learning. The Trivium provides us with a tested and tried model of instruction that takes into account the child's natural development.
The Trivium begins with the mastery of language (grammar), phonetics, reading and basic comprehension. Once these basic skills are grounded, the ability to think properly (logic) is added. Lastly, the element of rhetoric is added in that now that when the child can use language, formulate arguments, he is to be trained in communicating those arguments effectively and well.
The classical approach also attempts to be faithful to history, it requires the mastery of the Christian and ancient classics. It requires a knowledge of Calvin, Augustine and Athanasius, together with Aristotle and Rousseau as enemies of the Faith. It frees us from an addiction to modernity. It cuts us loose from slavery to the latest educational fad and fancy. Today we badly need an education for ourselves and our children that is both Christian and then classical.
Rev. Stephen J. Hayhow
Europe might be sundered politically, and sometimes torn by bitter strife; but Europe remained one. This truth dominates the whole international scene at the period under review. In spite of intermittent antagonisms, that unity was manifest in many ways; for three hundred years Europe sailed the sees of mutual understanding, a thing which she had never done since the end of the Pax Romana, and which she would never do again. The brutal game of politics had not yet blinded Europeans to their being members of a family, to their representing a unique standard of culture. Of that they were keenly, though subconsciously aware, and without recourse to such terms as "United States of Europe" or "the European Community". (Cathedral and Crusade: Studies in the Medieval Church 1050-1350., p.26. J M Dent & Sons Ltd. 1957.)
Daniel-Rops observed that the bond that bound Europe together for centuries was Christendom, the Christian faith worked out in all of life and culture. As a result men travelled (more than we realise), conducted commerce, with little concern for race, nationalism or international constraints. It was the Christian faith that bound Europe together, this was the common ground between diverse peoples, and contrasting cultures. Therefore scholars travelled and taught and studied, merchants travelled and traded from country to country; they had a common language, Latin, and a common faith; Christianity. They managed all of that without a centralised bureaucracy!
Federal Europe is a manufactured unity, one that has been devised on purely political lines and is centred on the power of a new centralised bureaucracy. It has a political orientation that is entirely foreign to the bonds that bound the peoples of the Middles Ages and Reformation eras. Federal Europe can only result in big government and the further secularisation of our system of law. That means oppression and tyranny because Federal Europe will seek to thrust more and more power away from the local and the national into a centralised and increasingly secularised central state. The Bible makes it clear that fallen man has a sinful drive towards tyranny and centralised government: witness the tower of Babel (Gen 11:1- 9)and the Roman Empire (Rev 13). The Scriptures also make it plain that all power and authority resides finally with God (Roms. 13), and that the authority of rulers and states is not limitless, but limited under God who alone is Sovereign.
Moreover, when we consider the godless condition of Great Britain, we only have to consider the comparatively worse condition of other European nations. While the spiritual darkness of Britain is desperate and the Church effeminate and powerless, the spiritual climate in France, Germany, Spain and others is, if imaginable, worse still. At the same time the godlessness of the Scandinavian countries is notorious. This means that the law of "the lowest common denominator" will prevail in the new Europe. Europe will not be guided, as it once was, by the high ethical ideals of the Faith, but by the low, easily attained permissiveness of Holland and Sweden.
While the medieval attempt at Christianisation was flawed, it was a sincere attempt at working the claims of Christ the King into all spheres of human endeavour. The old world of medieval-Reformation Europe, even recognising its eccentricities, faults and weaknesses, was, nonetheless, a valiant attempt at a Christian civilisation. As we move further and further from the panoramic vision of Christendom secularisation must ultimately encroach more and more upon the Church. While we reflect on the Christian civilisation that is declining before and around us, we must not romantically look back, but gird ourselves for the conflict that awaits now. The rise of the New Europe is merely an aspect of that larger conflict. Freedom, liberty and justice for all are bound up with the faith, there is no freedom in any realm apart from Christ and His kingdom. This is the lesson we must learn and re-learn.
