NOTHING TRIVIAL ABOUT REVISIONIST COMPROMISE

In an otherwise excellent post about the continuing persecution of Christians in Iraq, blogging genius Archbishop Cranmer dismisses the current preoccupations of English Roman Catholics and Anglicans as ‘trivia’.

Whilst Iraqi Christians suffer for their faith with the bombing of their churches and homes,

one church here croaks of acquiring five converting bishops, and rubs its hands with glee at the prospect of winning ‘a wave’ of entire parishes; and another obsesses over issues of gender and sexuality,

he declares.

Clearly 'croaking' and 'obsessing' are not to be commended in the visible Church of Christ. But if orthodox Anglicans contending for biblical truth against liberal revisionists are included in this charge of 'obsessing', then regrettably cc must take issue with C.

The New Testament drives no such wedge between the Christian calling to bear up under persecution and the need to resist worldly compromise.

The letters to the seven churches in Revelation make that dual Christian responsibility crystal clear.

Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested, and for ten days you will have tribulation. Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life,

the living Christ says to the church at Smyrna (Revelation 2v10 – RSV).

The church at Thyatira is rebuked for cultural compromise, particularly in the area of sexual morality:

But I have this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice immorality and eat food sacrificed to idols (Revelation 2v20).

No hermeneutical contortions or theological polysyllables should be allowed to muddy the clear message of this to the Church of Jesus Christ in any and every cultural context until He returns. The number seven in Revelation represents completeness, so these seven letters within the book of Revelation represent a complete picture of what the reigning Christ approves of in His Church and what He disapproves of.

Patient endurance in the teeth of persecution is something Christ commends completely to His Church in every culture and generation; sexual immorality is something He completely deplores.

Where the hermeneutical wrangling kicks in within the modern Church is over the definition of sexual immorality. Liberal revisionists insist that faithful same-sex relationships are acceptable, even commendable in the sight of God.

But that view, contrary to a biblical theology of God the Holy Trinity, the human person and the institution of heterosexual marriage and held almost exclusively in liberal Protestant denominations of the decadent, post-1960s West, is manifestly the poisonous fruit of the cultural compromise the Lord Jesus so emphatically deplores.