23AR28-01

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AR 28:1 - Marriage and the Boundaries of Christian Orthodoxy

In this issue:

GENDER - Queer Theory versus marriage

+ how even the most left-of-center can be labeled "reactionary bigot"

MARXISM - when leftist academics dominate (and decimate) the workforce

Apologia Report 28:1 (1,598)
January 4, 2023

GENDER

It is a truth once universally acknowledged that marriage is a sacred institution for both church and society. Matthew M. Kennedy calls us to appreciate it for the balance it brings to our disintegrating culture with "Marriage Is about the Gospel: Clarifying the Boundaries of Christian Orthodoxy" (Christian Research Journal, 45:2/3 - 20022, pp16-23) -- "Christian orthodoxy means submitting heart and mind not just to the creedal formulas but to the fullness of biblical revelation, moral proscriptions included."

After discussing the preliminary context, Kennedy writes: "According to New Testament scholar Robert Gagnon <www.bit.ly/3Wsa1ai> the language Jesus uses in [Matthew 19:3-6] indicates that God made them male and female for the very purpose of joining them together as one flesh. God made them male and female *so that* He might join them as one flesh. Jesus considers that first union a marriage and (since He applies the model to marriages in His own day) constitutive of all marriages. The reason a man cannot 'Divorce [his] wife for any cause' is that God joins every husband and wife together just as He joined Adam and Eve. ...

"The mystery [Ephesians 5:31-32] is marriage, God joining a man and a woman together in a one-flesh union. Marriage, Paul says, is not simply analogous to the relationship between Christ and His church. Marriage *refers* to it. That is, the purpose for which God made them male and female and joined them together is so that their one-flesh union (and every subsequent one-flesh union) might refer to, bear witness to, and make visible in the flesh the union between Jesus and His church. ...

Commenting on Romans 1:26-27, Gagnon notes that "the idolatrous turn from Creator to creature is mirrored by the narcissistic turn in homosexual relationships: 'what bothers Paul about female-female or male-male intercourse is the absence of a gender complement and the narcissistic and/or delusional attempt at merging with a sexual same.' ...

"These explanations are readily dismissed, depending as they do on extra-biblical categories of sexual identity and orientation introduced by Queer Theory, assumptions about historical context that either cannot be demonstrated or that have been shown to be false, and on challenges to classical interpretations driven not by solid exegesis by the contemporary agenda to justify homosexual relationships. In this way, pro-LGBTQ interpretations should be categorized alongside the Arian misuses of Scripture rather than within the pale of orthodox disagreement.

"Worse, these arguments ignore the wider context of biblical sexual prohibitions. Scripture's sexual prohibitions are never in service to arbitrary, culturally conditioned norms but rather to the overarching narrative of redemption that is grounded in the incarnation of the Son of God, His death, resurrection, and ascension, for the sake of His body and bride. Any theological framework that does violence to the institution of marriage between one man and one woman, therefore, also does violence to the gospel. Such disagreements, by definition, cannot be received as orthodox but must always be identified as false - and those pastors, leaders, and theologians who promote them must be considered anathema and exhorted to repent and believe the gospel." <www.bit.ly/3Z3cxWi> (Kudos to CRI for recently relaxing their paywall restrictions.)

"Say Trans - or Else! A Norwegian lesbian risks jail for denying that a man can be a lesbian" by Bruce Bawer <www.bit.ly/3G2bw8a> (American Greatness, Dec '17 '22) -- "Even by Scandinavian standards, Tonje Gjevjon, a 55-year-old Norwegian performance artist and activist who is one of the founders of the Lesbisk Forbund (Lesbian Association), qualifies as left-of-center. The three largest national newspapers are all solidly left-wing, and she writes regularly for Dagbladet, the one that's most left-wing. But like many progressive women these days, Gjevjon has found herself labeled a reactionary bigot because she refuses to accept that a man can be a woman. ...

"In a 2017 op-ed, Gjevjon challenged Norway's recently enacted law stating that whether an individual was legally considered male or female would no longer be based on chromosomes but on a person's 'experience' of gender identity. Why, Gjevjon asked, hadn't this rather important issue been put before the public and openly debated before parliament chose to pass the law? ...

"In a subsequent op-ed, Gjevjon pointed out the explosion in trans identification among young people and expressed doubt about the wisdom of allowing biological men to use women's space and letting 6-year-olds change their legal sex. She announced that she was part of a new initiative aimed at encouraging kids to be happy in their own bodies. This time around, it was Gjevjon's fellow Dagbladet columnist Martine Aurdal who responded, calling her a transphobe and a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) and telling her to leave trans kids to the 'experts.'"

Gjevjon "singled out for criticism Christine Jentoft, born Christer Jentoft, a biological man who sleeps with women but who's employed by a lesbian organization....

"On November 17, Gjevjon received a letter from the police department in Follo, a suburb of Oslo, summoning her to an interrogation because the National Competence Center for Hate Crimes had reported her Facebook post for violating paragraph 185 of the Criminal Code, which forbids hateful statements about vulnerable identity groups. ...

Turns out the Norwegian police "acted against Gjevjon entirely on their own" without civil complaint.

If convicted, Gjevjon could face three years in prison - "in a country where a convicted rapist can get as little as a year. As Gjevjon puts it, let them try." <www.bit.ly/3jBwrrd>

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MARXISM

In his latest book, Israeli philosopher/theologian Yoram Hazony <yoramhazony.org> writes that by the summer of 2020 America's leading institutions had "adopted a policy of accommodating their Marxist employees by giving in to their demands.... [W]hat initially looked like a temporary policy of appeasement has since become a rout."

Control of the most important media, schools, corporations, government bureaucracy, military, and some churches had "passed into the hands of Marxist activists. We know that most of these institutions will never return to what they were [because] liberalism has lost its ability to command."

"Anti-Marxist liberals find themselves in much the same situation.... [A] few brave liberals are now waging war on the very institutions they so recently controlled, trying to build ... in the shadows of the prestigious, wealthy, powerful institutions they have lost.

"Meanwhile, others continue to work ... learning to keep their liberalism to themselves and to let their colleagues believe that they too are Marxists - just as many conservatives learned long ago how to keep their conservatism to themselves and let their colleagues believe they are liberals.

"This is the new reality that has emerged in the United States, Britain, Canada, and some European countries. Now it is being replicated throughout the democratic world." See his Conservativism: A Rediscovery, by Yoram Hazony, 2022, p311. <www.bit.ly/3VP5UUu> Before taking the plunge by reading the book, consider this helpful EpochTV interview with the author: <www.bit.ly/3i29Fbm> (registration required) Also see "Liberalism and Its Discontinuities" by N.S. Lyons <www.bit.ly/3GaVHvI>

The above comes from one perspective, the following provides another. "UCLA Professor Admits Conservatives' Fears Were Justified about Leftist Academics in the Workforce" by Christina Buttons (DailyWire, Dec 26 '22) -- "Russell Jacoby, author and professor emeritus of history at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), wrote a book in 1987 dismissing conservatives' fears that students of postmodernism and critical pedagogy would wreak havoc on American culture. ...

"Jacoby said he wrote the book in response to a number of bestselling books in the eighties that speculated that various offshoots of Marxist-derived Critical Theories taught in universities would produce leftist activists that would bring chaos to Western civilization. ...

"There were only a small number of public leftists teaching in American universities in the 1950s. ... The jobs they would have assumed as university faculty were no longer available in many fields. 'In my own department in 10 years we went from accepting over a hundred students for graduate study to under 20 for a simple reason,' said Jacoby. 'We could not place our students.' ... 'The hordes who took courses in critical pedagogy, insurgent sociology, gender studies, radical anthropology, Marxist cinema theory, and postmodernism could no longer hope for university careers,' he added. As a result, the leftists who would have become university professors had to join the workforce, bringing with them the 'sensibilities and jargon they learned on campus.' ... 'The leftists who would have vanished as assistant professors in conferences on narratology and gender fluidity or disappeared as law professors with unreadable essays on misogynist hegemony and intersectionality have been pushed out into the larger culture.' ...

"'When employees protest that they feel unsafe because their company is publishing an offensive article or book, we know what university courses they have taken,' said Jacoby. ...

"'The self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous students who filter into the public square,' Jacoby said." (Reminds us of our deep look into Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind.) <www.bit.ly/3WXr4Rn>

"Jerry Coyne, a prolific evolutionary biologist and author <www.bit.ly/3i5lVYF> of the bestselling book, 'Why Evolution Is True,' hosts a website by the same name where he wrote about Jacoby's article. 'There's no solution offered by Jacoby, just a big kvetch about how things are,' said Coyne. 'And, indeed, given that the 'studies mills' are still grinding out students who can't get academic jobs and will thus infest university administrations and the media for years to come, I'll have been long underground when and if this movement dies out.' The world-famous biologist Richard Dawkins shared Coyne's review, 'Progressive professors: the root of all evil,' to his Twitter followers on Friday. Elon Musk even chimed in on Dawkins' post and said, 'True, 'progressive' professors are the root of this evil.'"

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