No, the title of this article was not ripped from the virtual pages of the satirical website Babylon Bee.

A Time Magazine article on InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s (IV) 20-page internal policy position paper on human sexuality is generating a huge brouhaha.

IV, an evangelical parachurch organization that includes 667 college chapters as well as InterVarsity Press which publishes books by D.A. Carson, William Lane Craig, Os Guinness, J.I. Packer, R.C. Sproul, and John Stott, distributed this position paper, which addresses sexual abuse, divorce, premarital sex/cohabitation, adultery, pornography, and same-sex “marriage,” to employees in March 2015. Beginning in November 2016, employees will be required to affirm these historical and biblically consonant positions.

It will come as no surprise that the IV position that is causing all the vexation,  huffing, and puffing is its position on marriage—a position that “progressive” disciples of diversity believe no individual and no organization should be permitted to affirm. And I guess that goes for Jesus who created marriage:

“He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

As theologian Denny Burk tweeted, “We live in a day when this is news: Intervarsity stands with scripture and the consensus of the entire 2,000-year history of the Christian church.”

Leftists are fake-enraged over this non-news, and others are wondering why the theologically orthodox IV is making clear its theologically orthodox views on marriage now.

There are two good reasons for IV to make clear its views on marriage now, neither of which should need to be identified but for the cave-dwellers among us, here they are:

1.)  If churches and parachurch organizations are not crystal clear in articulating their positions on matters related to sexuality and if they do not require affirmation of and behavioral adherence to these theological positions, the litigious Left will come after them.

2.) The anti-cultural mess we’re mired in has resulted in either the church’s cowardly silence on essential matters pertaining to homosexuality or its embrace of heretical views on these matters. Between the corrosive ideas on sexuality in general and marriage in particular that pervade American public life, Christians and especially young Christians are being deceived. Christians need clarity, correction, and unequivocal, unambiguous teaching.

A young IV worker cited in the Time Magazine  article provides troubling evidence of the heretical views being adopted by Christian youth:

Bianca Louie, 26, led the InterVarsity campus fellowship at Mills College, a women’s liberal-arts school in Oakland and her alma mater….Louie and about 10 other InterVarsity staff formed an anonymous queer collective earlier this year to organize on behalf of staff, students and alumni who felt unsafe under the new policy. They compiled dozens of stories of individuals in InterVarsity programs and presented them to national leadership. “I think one of the hardest parts has been feeling really dismissed by InterVarsity….The queer collective went through a very biblical, very spiritual process, with the Holy Spirit, to get to where we are. I think a lot of people think those who are affirming [same-sex marriage] reject the Bible, but we have landed where we have because of Scripture, which is what InterVarsity taught us to do.

I’m pretty sure it was neither Scripture nor the Holy Spirit that led the queer collective to affirm same-sex “marriage.”

Theologically orthodox pastor and well-known speaker Skye Jethani has written a very good blog post articulating the reasons IV’s policy directive is both a “big deal” and a good and even necessary document. That said, Jethani concludes his post with this head-scratching comment:

However, I do grieve that rather than allowing Christians, and particularly younger Christians, grow in their understanding of these matters in an environment of grace and inclusivity, wonderful ministries like InterVarsity are being forced to take premature and artificially divisive stands.

Would Jethani grieve if IV were to take an unequivocal and explicit position on consensual adult incest, bestiality, polyamory, or slavery? Would he grieve if IV required employees to affirm biblical positions on these issues rather than allowing them to “grow in their understanding of these matters in an environment of grace and inclusivity?” How is requiring employees to hold fast to biblical truth lacking in grace?

And although Christianity (like “progressivism”) is exclusive in that it holds some beliefs to be false, it is inclusive in that anyone who repents and follows Christ is included. In order to repent and receive God’s grace and mercy, people need to know what constitutes sin. And surely those, like IV employees, who already claim to be Christ-followers, should know and affirm truth.

Moreover, IV’s position is neither premature nor artificially divisive. If IV has employees who reject biblical truth on marriage, heresy has created the division—not IV. And if IV has employees that embrace heresy, IV is late to the party decorated with rainbow-appropriated streamers.

Marriage is a picture of Christ and his bride, the church. The belief that marriage can be the union of two men or two women necessarily entails the belief that there is no difference in role, function, or nature between Christ the bridegroom and his bride, the church. Further, affirming the false belief that marriage can be a same-sex union undermines respect for the authority of Scripture and not just on marriage.

Every church and parachurch organization and every Christian should explicitly affirm the biblical view of marriage as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship has done.

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~Correction/Update: Although Neuqua Valley High School still lists Hemant Mehta on its Math Department faculty webpage, he no longer works there. Linked screenshot below* was taken today, Dec. 19, 2014.~

A new Chicago-area billboard campaign from the aggressively offensive Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) exposes again this organization’s hostility to and childish misunderstanding of Christian faith.

The FFRF has announced that eleven billboards are going up with these special holiday messages:

• “Kindness comes from altruism, not from seeking divine reward.”
• “We are here to challenge you to think for yourself.”
• “I believe in reason and logic!”
• “Equality for all shouldn’t be constrained by any religion.”
• “Free of faith, fear and superstition”
• “I put my faith in science.”
• And this featuring Neuqua Valley High School math teacher* Hemant Mehta (aka the “Friendly Atheist”): “I’d rather put my faith in me.” (It’s curious that the billboard doesn’t identify Mehta as a public high school teacher. To learn more about Mehta, click here, here, and here.)

A few brief responses to the FFRF’s shallow slogans:

1. Kind acts are “friendly, generous, warmhearted, charitable, generous, humane, and/or considerate acts.” Altruism is unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Kind acts may be motivated by ignoble, selfish sentiments—perhaps even a wrong theological belief that one earns salvation through one’s actions. But kind acts can also be motivated by altruism that derives from faith in Christ.

Kindness can be the result of the regeneration that God performs in the hearts of believers, which deracinates selfishness and naturally results in desires more in line with God’s nature. Kindness can result from an overflowing of thankfulness for God’s great gift of salvation, which makes followers of Christ love and give more unselfishly, often even sacrificially.  They act kindly and altruistically not to gain reward but to thank God and to express his love to others.

2. Finding the Old and New Testament writers to be persuasive no more constitutes a failure to “think for yourself” than does finding the ideas of Bertrand Russell, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, or Richard Dawkins persuasive. And believing that reality is not exclusively material does not constitute a failure to think logically.

Are the members of the FFRF actually arguing that Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, G.K. Chesterton, Karl Barth,C.S. Lewis, G.E.M. Anscombe, Pope Benedict XVI, John Finnis, Hadley Arkes, Alvin Plantinga, D.A. Carson, Eleonore Stump, N.T. Wright, William Lane Craig, Francesca Aran Murphy, Doug Wilson, Robert George, Francis Beckwith, David Bentley Hart, and Alex Pruss did or do not think for themselves and/or that they reject reason and logic?

3. Equality—properly understood—is advanced by Christian faith. Equality demands treating like things alike, and increasingly both those who embrace an atheistic scientific materialism and people who embrace heterodoxy are incapable of recognizing fundamental truths—including even facts—about human nature. Therefore, they are incapable of identifying which phenomena are in reality alike.

4. First, one can make an argument that those who most fear, for example, death are those who have an unproven faith in the non-existence of an afterlife.  Second, a superstition is “a belief held in spite of evidence to the contrary.” As such, the Christian faith does not constitute a superstition, because there is ample evidence for the existence of God and his human incarnation, Jesus Christ. Atheists reject the evidence based on their a priori assumptions about what constitutes evidence.

5. Christians too put their faith in science. Christians, including Christian scientists, trust and have confidence that science proves what it can prove. Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of an immaterial reality. And science cannot prove whether altruistic acts are objectively morally good acts or merely acts that humans have evolved to believe are objectively good because such a belief serves to enhance survival.

6. Faith in self alone reflects the kind of hubris that leads more often to intellectual and moral error than it does to altruism.

“The Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity—hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory—because at the Father’s will Jesus Christ became poor, and was born in a stable so that thirty years later He might hang on a cross.” ~J.I.Packer

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