The Sinner

The Sinner

Oct 13, 2022 | Culture

Despite what you think, this post isn’t about me, although the title might imply that. It’s about a Netflix series called The Sinner which my wife and I have recently been watching. We just finished season 3, and I learned season 4 is coming to Netflix this week. The show stars Bull Pullman as Detective Harry Ambrose, an emotionally scarred detective, thus the title, and he has the perfect vibe for the character. He does what typical detectives do, but his emotional baggage allows him to connect in a unique way with the also emotionally scarred people he’s investigating. He kind of reminds me of another detective those of my generation would be familiar with, Columbo, but with a lot of problems. His issues, coming from his dysfunctional upbringing, help him to relate in some way to those he’s investigating, which in turn helps him deal with his own demons.

Dealing with terribly broken people, the show has themes of redemption and forgiveness, and the ongoing effects of sin. It reminds me of what Moses wrote in Numbers 14:18:

‘The LORD is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation.’

At first reading we might consider this is unfair. Why should children suffer for their parents’ sins? When we think about it for a minute, though, how could it be any other way. He isn’t saying the Lord visits punishment arbitrarily down through the generations, but that the sins of parents have implications in the lives of their children, and their children’s children and so on. It’s an obvious fact of life, and one portrayed skillfully in The Sinner. Sin always has consequences, even generational consequences.

What is not in the show, however, is God, not even a hint, except in the third season which is an interesting exploration into the nihilistic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. So God, in effect, becomes a character by his absence. I couldn’t help thinking of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and his character Raskolnikov who took his God-less view of the universe to what he thought was its logical conclusion. I appreciate that a TV series in 2022 would tackle something like that. You wonder if Bill Pullman’s character in response might see God as an answer to his emotional pain and confusion, but he doesn’t, or at least he hasn’t so far.

While the title implies something religious, The Sinner is a typical secular modern drama, a broken and messed up man trying to figure things out as he interacts with other broken and messed up people. God obviously isn’t relevant to that process. That’s how secularism on a cultural level perpetuates itself. God isn’t denounced a la the angry atheist, he’s just irrelevant. That is powerful cultural messaging, even though the writers don’t intend it to be. They’re just secular people writing secular drama for other secular people who would never think to ask, a la Where’s Waldo, where’s God? As Christians, we think leaving out God is as dumb as making a Where’s Waldo picture with no Waldo! He’s gotta be in there somewhere, right? Nope.

The writers and directors of secular entertainment don’t intend to program secularism into those who watch, but it happens at a subconscious level, nonetheless. As I’ve written here before, that’s how plausibility structures are built in the modern human mind. Unless someone gets a consistent dose of counter programming, secularism is what seems real to them. Watching The Sinner, they would never think to ask, why isn’t God part of this drama. Like most people outside the church in the Western world, they are seeped in the secular stew all their lives, so God is an afterthought at best.

Almost everyone in the West “believes in God” because they know intuitively that atheistic materialism (matter is all there is) is absurd. They can’t believe everything came from nothing, but whoever or whatever God is, he’s just not relevant to their lives. This is inconceivable to we Christians because life without the constant presence of God in our thinking isn’t life. But as Christians, we need to be aware of the secular programming of the culture because it affects us, and we too are immersed in that stew; there’s no escaping it.

A rich vein of examples of such programing could be mined in our lives, but The Sinner offers one up with no digging required. The message we would take from the show is that the problems in our lives are not inside of us, not in our sinful human inclinations and rebellion against our Creator God but are outside of us, and primarily caused by others. If not by others, then by circumstances beyond our control. We are, to put it another way, victims. Thus, Detective Ambrose is consistently looking back at his upbringing, his psychologically disturbed mother and absent father, and the memories haunt him. But there being no Jesus, no mercy, no grace, no unconditional love of God in Christ, no divine rationale for forgiveness, he grapples as best he can. Season 3 ends with him weeping uncontrollably over the death of a nihilistic murderer, and we’re left to wonder why exactly he would do that.

As Christians we realize the answer Detective Ambrose is looking for is the gospel, which is the good news that can give him the only answer to all the emotional pain life has dealt him.

Last Sunday our pastor in the sermon said something that gets to the heart of that answer. He said, our problem isn’t others sinning against us, or us sinning against others, but our sinning against a holy God. Once we are reconciled to our Creator God in Christ, we’ll be able to see that it is not the effects of sin that is our problem, or the people or circumstances that cause those problems, but that we’re the problem. King David after he had committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband killed to try to cover it up penned Psalm 51. In it he wrote these amazing words that indicate he understood the essence of our sin, that it is primarily an offense against God:

4 Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight;
so you are right in your verdict
and justified when you judge.

When we too understand this, no secular programing of an irrelevant God will tempt us to see ourselves as victims. That is good news indeed!

CRU Goes Full-On Woke

CRU Goes Full-On Woke

Jul 21, 2022 | Culture, Uncategorized

I Knew when Campus Crusade for Christ changed their name to CRU in 2011 it wasn’t a good sign. I can understand that the word crusade had some negative connotations in the Middle East, but only because Muslims and too many Christians accepted a faulty interpretation of The Crusades as Christian oppression of Muslims. The story is much more complicated and fails to consider that Islam is a religion of military conquest. Be that as it may, Campus Crusade had done just fine with that name for the previous 60 years, and it didn’t seem to hamper its mission. What this name change reflected is a bowing down to cultural shibboleths in the name of Christian sensitivity and compassion. They are not the only Christian organization or church to destroy their real counter-cultural witness in the name of good intentions, not by far.

Fast forward to 2019 and CRU’s annual conference. The reason I choose 2019 is because 2020 and ‘21 probably didn’t happen, and I just happen to come across the following video learning about CRU going full-on woke (thank you, Maya!). When you watch, you’ll see a compilation of videos that a young man, Jon Harris, put together, and you simply have to see/hear it to believe it. When you do, you’ll understand why I put the adjectival phrase full-on before woke.

Jon does some commentary after the video, and one thing he says is that there is no gospel in any of this. This is a tragedy, considering what the actual mission of Campus Crusade was for sixty years prior to 2011. I have no idea how quickly wokeness took over the leadership of the organization, but clearly, they’ve fully bought into wokeness. The reason there can be no gospel is because the entire woke ideology is born of Marxism, specifically the bastardized version now known as cultural Marxism. At the heart of Marxism is two things. One is perpetual grievance against societal and cultural “power structures,” whatever they or that might be, so the people will have what follows from that, revolutionary consciousness 24/7. There can be no forgiveness, mercy, or grace because that mitigates against the fundamental goal of Marxism, which is peretual revolution. I’m not saying any of this is well thought out, especially by well-meaning, sincere Christians, but this drives them whether they know it or not.

I recently read a book called, Awake, Not Woke by Noelle Mering. In it she calls wokeness “an ideology of rupture,” which is spot on. From her introduction, she continues, “The term woke refers to the state of being alert and attuned to the layers of pervasive oppression in society . . . . Specific acts of injustice are used to serve the larger goal of furthering the ideology that sees all of human interaction as a power contest . . . . [It] is an ideology with fundamentalist and even cult-like characteristics that is on a collusion course with Christianity.” CRU might want to consider if such a contention is true or not. Mering says the ultimate target of the woke revolt is God himself in Christ. Ouch! If it’s true. CRU staff and leadership who buy wokeness, would likely deny all or most of this, or that they are even “woke,” but you watch/listen to the video, and you come to your own conclusion.

Libertarians are Not Conservatives: Dave Ruben and Same-Sex Surrogacy

Libertarians are Not Conservatives: Dave Ruben and Same-Sex Surrogacy

Jul 10, 2022 | Culture

We live in very strange times. For all recorded history the peoples of the world, no matter what their view of the universe and religious outlook, from the most rank deranged heathens to the most pristine moralistic religious people, believed in the fundamental duality of biology. In other words, there is man and there is woman, nothing in between, two sexes. I used to wonder why certain conservative intellectuals warned us against using the term gender. I didn’t understand what they meant until the transgender insanity broke out of Western academia into wider Western culture. Since gender is a sociological construct and not tied to biological reality, it is ultimately malleable. The concept would have mystified anyone who lived before the current post-modern generation, as would a related concept unknown in all of human history until now, same-sex “marriage.” The two ideas are connected by the same moral framework, which does not, cannot, include our Creator God.

The inspiration for this post is a piece in Life Site News about popular conservative political and cultural commentator Dave Ruben, and the decision he made with his “husband” to have a baby. Thus, same-sex surrogacy, meaning a woman has agreed to have “their” baby. The title of the piece was click bait for me: Why is the Daily Wire promoting same-sex surrogacy? That is a very good question! The subtitle of the piece reflects my opinion as well: “Same-sex surrogacy is a grave distortion of the family, and intrinsically evil.” Surrogacy is morally problematic in general, but to put a child into a “marriage” without a mother and father is morally reprehensible. And in case you don’t know, The Daily Wire is a conservative website founded by Ben Shapiro and film director Jeremy Boreing, and I wanted to know why they were promoting something that is clearly not conservative. I was surprised to find out this promoting came during an interview with none other than Jordan Peterson, who I gather is a new contributor to The Daily Wire. Before I address the moral framework, I stumbled upon this short video of Doug Wilson basically eviscerating the arguments of both Ruben and Peterson:

I’ve known since I first realized I was a conservative when Reagan was elected (just between you and me, I voted for Carter, but not a word to anyone) I was not a libertarian, but I’ve struggled ever since to explain exactly why. The debate between conservativism and libertarianism has existed since the dawn of the modern conservative movement with the founding of National Review by Bill Buckley (RIP to both). Out of that came something called fusionism whcih held traditionalist conservatism and libertarianism together for decades. It’s been a marriage of convenience, but something fundamental separates the two so the marriage could never be consummated. The author of the Life Site piece in critiquing the argument Ruben and Peterson make explains why fusionism ultimately doesn’t work. The justification they are making for same-sex surrogacy comes “from the faulty libertarian emphasis on choice over morality.”

The reason libertarians believe choice is more important than morality is because, they argue, without the choice to be moral or immoral, one’s action can’t have any moral meaning. This is of course true. If someone points a gun at my head and threatens to kill me if I don’t walk the little old lady across the street, my doing so has no moral value; I was coerced. We are, however, rarely confronted with any kind of coercion to be moral or immoral, but constantly confronted with choices whether to be moral or not, do right or wrong, be good or bad, tell the truth or lie. Putting my self-interests and self-fulfillment over the interests of children is deeply immoral, and that is exactly what Ruben and his “husband” are doing. Wilson’s assessment of their arguments demonstrates their weakness, and futility, but also why there is nothing conservative about them. As the author of the Life Site piece points out, “there is no conservatism when you eschew moral tradition and natural law,” and both come primarily from one source, The Bible. Without God there is nothing to conserve. Libertarianism, to the contrary, can do just fine without God because the liberty to choose is in effect their God, their highest good.

The founders of America were most definitely not libertarians. They fought a revolution, gave their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the cause of liberty, but it had nothing to do with libertarianism. They knew without “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” there could be no liberty, and they held “these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Every person who read these words at the time had no doubt Jefferson, maybe the most Deist among the founders, meant the Creator God of the Bible. He knew without the moral compass of Christianity there could be no “nation conceived in liberty,” in the words of Lincoln. The supreme law of the land depended on Christianity as it’s moral North Star. As John Adams, the second President of the United States declared, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He too meant the religious people of the Old and New Testaments.

I’m grateful for the many liberals, like Ruben and Peterson, who have moved to the political and cultural right over the last five or ten years, and who believe in truth over “The Narrative.” I’m happy to be co-belligerents with them against the Marxist woke left and the globalist elites who despise our liberty, and hate America as founded. That, however, doesn’t mean we call evil good, and good evil, even if it comes from those who claim the mantel of “conservative.” The homosexual and transgender agenda come from the same evil source, the same (im)moral framework, and you can’t accept one and reject the other; they are a package deal. Conservatism without the package is not conservative.

Tim Keller’s Unfortunate Moral Equivalence Between Left and Right

Tim Keller’s Unfortunate Moral Equivalence Between Left and Right

Jan 26, 2022 | Culture, Truth

I love and respect Tim Keller, immensely. Not only was he our pre-marital counselor when my wife and I were in seminary back in 1987, but his teaching has been a significant blessing to me both theologically and apologetically. I also pray for him daily as he deals with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. However, when he wades into discussions of politics he often loses me. Over the years I’ve always questioned the way he focuses on “social justice.” The phrase is loaded with political and ideological baggage, specifically Marxist baggage, and I do not believe Christians should use it. All justice is by definition social, so there is no need to use the phrase, and when they do Christians play into the hands of the leftist mob that dominates so much of political and cultural discourse. But here I want to address the issue of Keller’s moral equivalence between left and right.  (more…)

Jordan Peterson’s Daughter Converts to Christianity

Jordan Peterson’s Daughter Converts to Christianity

Jan 18, 2022 | Culture, Plausibility

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when I learned Jordan Peterson’s daughter, Mikhaila, had recently become a Christian. If you’re not familiar with Peterson, five or six years ago he became a cultural phenomenon by speaking what to most people is common sense, but not in the Canadian university setting in which he worked. One piece on him put it well, “Mr. Peterson is the canary in the toxic coal mine of political correctness and petty thought police.” He became a Youtube sensation back in 2015 when he started to challenge leftist Canadian groupthink. He then published a best seller called 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which launched him into a popularity he seemed to endure far more than he enjoyed. A good introduction is a documentary you can see on Amazon Prime called The Rise of Jordan Peterson. (more…)

Netflix’s Midnight Mass a Secular Hit Job on Christianity

Netflix’s Midnight Mass a Secular Hit Job on Christianity

Oct 11, 2021 | Culture

And it started out with some promise, which is why we ended up watching all seven episodes, but it went downhill from there. We (the wife and I) wanted to see where the writers and director took it, and we did. It was easily predictable, but I was hoping against hope that people who obviously have no clue about Christianity might get Christianity, but alas they didn’t. If you’re not familiar with it, Midnight Mass is a new Netflix series about a very strange little island with only one lone old Catholic church that eventually dominants everything on the Island, and in very unexpected ways. If you want to watch it and be surprised, I’d suggest you come back to this later because I can’t talk about it without revealing spoilers, including the next sentence. (more…)