The church service is not simply a convenient place to intimidate pro-life campaigners. To attack a worship service is not simply to annoy the participants. It is to profane the sacred. It is to enact that which abortion itself represents.
In the face of the trans moment, Williams seems to have abandoned serious thought for sentiment. Learned he may be, but the letter to Boris Johnson reads as little more than the death notice of a once great mind.
We have no shared moral vision and hence we default to the experts — the biologists and the medical professionals — abdicating our responsibility to their technical expertise. Yet this approach does not give us an adequate view of reality.
Like the idea that pornography liberates women, transgender theory is arguably one of the most effective male confidence tricks in recent history: Nothing that women can lay claim to as women is now off-limits for men.
In short, there is a clear push to grant LGBTQ+ ideology a favored legal and cultural status that enforces it without compromise. It also labels any and all dissent as morally evil. You don’t have to be an Old Testament prophet to see where this is all heading, or at least where those in power hope it is heading.
A sense of shame is nothing of which to be ashamed. Shame and modesty are not in principle oppressive. On the contrary, they are the means by which children learn to grow up, and to handle their emergence as sexual beings with responsibility.
The fate of Hefner’s reputation, like the success of his career, speaks eloquently about the state of America and perhaps the West as a whole. Self-indulgent to a tee, the only morality it knows is that which chimes with whatever the tastes of the moment happen to be, whatever works, whatever makes money.
Preaching lays claim to that power of language but does so with the authority of God behind it. It is thus an assertion of reality, a reminder of God’s sovereignty and our dependence upon Him, a demonstration that He is great and we are but dust in the wind.
Years ago, when teaching at seminary, I used to tell the students that moral relevance in the modern world was a cruel and fickle mistress. However much Christians accommodated themselves to her demands, sooner or later she would want more. Christian morality and the morality of the world simply could not be reconciled in the long term.
Once upon a time it was assumed that words reflected reality. At least, it was assumed that some words did, such as “man” and “woman.” That assumption in turn rested upon the notion that the world had a particular structure and shape. In our present age, both of these ideas are proving unpopular.
