A superb critique of Saint Athanasius’ apologetic on a topic quite appropriate for the season of Advent with its emphasis on Christ’s two comings. I especially appreciate his emphasis that Athanasius was concerned for the reclamation of creation from the ravages of human sin and the myriad Evil it unleashed. This is what real Christian theology looks like. Ignore it at your own peril. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
The fourth-century African theologian Athanasius is known for standing contra mundum, against the world. When much of the church had turned toward Arianism, he stood firm on the truth that Jesus is, and always has been, fully God. For this, Athanasius endured opposition and exile. Yet he never wavered.
Contra mundum, however, doesn’t capture the fullness of Athanasius’s approach to the world. He was against the world for the sake of the world. He opposed the idolatry, heresy, and injustice of the world because he was for the redemptive flourishing of the world.
In a culture shaped by compromise and confusion, Athanasius shows us what it looks like to hold fast to Christ with courage and love.
Hostile Environment
To understand Athanasius’s apologetic, we must begin with his context. He wasn’t writing from history’s sidelines but from the heart of one of the world’s most influential cities.
Alexandria was the cultural capital of the Roman Empire, a bustling crossroads of trade and ideas. Home to the greatest library in the ancient world and filled with representatives from every major school of philosophy, Alexandria was a melting pot of cultures, religions, and competing worldviews. To be a bishop there was to be at the center of global conversations about truth, meaning, and power.
As bishop, Athanasius faced constant attack. His opponents launched theological challenges, political schemes, and personal accusations. These battles often forced him into exile, five times in all, equating to nearly 20 years away from his church. Yet those exiles shaped him as a theologian. In the deserts of Egypt and in the cities of the empire, Athanasius found both refuge and perspective. Cut off from his familiar responsibilities, he wrote many of his most enduring works, sharpening his vision of Christ and clarifying his defense of the gospel.
Athanasius’s apologetic wasn’t abstract. It was forged in the crucible of cultural diversity, political pressure, and personal suffering. His life in Alexandria taught him to engage competing ideas with clarity. His years in exile gave him space to reflect and to write for the good of the wider church. Out of this unique context came an apologetic that was both deeply theological and profoundly pastoral.
Vision of the World Re-Created
If Athanasius stood against the world, it was only because he believed so deeply in God’s good purposes for the world. Unlike theologians shaped by Gnostic instincts that see salvation as merely spiritual, Athanasius began with the goodness of creation itself, affirming that the world was made through the Word and intended for life with God.
He was equally clear-eyed about sin’s ravaging effects. For Athanasius, sin is not only disobedience but de-creation. It unravels God’s design, corrupts human dignity, and sets the world on a path toward death and nothingness. Salvation, therefore, can never be reduced to forgiveness alone or escape from the material world.
In Christ, God entered creation to re-create it. The incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus weren’t a detour from creation but the renewal of creation. As Athanasius put it, “The renewal of creation has been wrought by the self-same Word who made it in the beginning.” Redemption is nothing less than the re-creation of God’s good but fallen world.
This vision fueled Athanasius’s apologetic. He was against the world’s distortions precisely because he was for the world’s flourishing in Christ.
A good article, appropriate for the season of Advent, worth your time and reflection. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
The fact that death is coming for all of us, raises the inevitable question of how we should view it. Is it something we should be afraid of, or not?
In the Anglican Christian tradition to which I belong, a classic answer to this question is provided by the homily, or sermon, ‘Against the fear of death’ which was authorised for use in parish churches by the Church of England in the sixteenth century.
This homily explains why there are three reasons why ‘worldly’ (i.e. ungodly) people commonly fear death:
‘…. one, because they shall lose thereby, their worldly honours, riches, possessions, and all their heart’s desires; another, because of the painful diseases, and bitter pangs, which commonly men suffer, either before or at the time of death; but the chief cause, above all other, is the dread, of the miserable state of eternal damnation, both of body and soul, which they fear shall follow after their departing, after the worldly pleasure of this present life. ‘
However, none of these causes should make a Christian afraid of death. This is because:
Sermon originally preached on Christ the King Sunday B, November 21, 2021.
Lectionary texts: Daniel 7.9-10, 13-14; Psalm 93; Revelation 1.4b-8; St. John 18.33-37.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today we celebrate Christ the King Sunday, a feast relatively new to the Church’s calendar. Pope Pius XI instituted this feast in 1925 as a way to resist the rise of totalitarianism and secularism of his day. How appropriate for our day as well, even if it is misplaced on our calendar. It marks the last Sunday of the Church’s calendar year and as its name implies, today is a day when we culminate the season of Kingdomtide where we proclaim Christ as King, Messiah, and Lord of all God’s creation. I’m going to cut right to the chase. Do you believe any of this? If not, here’s why you can.
We start by acknowledging that God’s world is occupied by an alien, malevolent power—Satan and his minions, both human and spiritual. Why God has allowed this, no one can say nor should we spend much time on the question because the answer is not ours to know, at least in this mortal life. What is important for our discussion is that the ubiquitous presence of Evil in this world has caused many, Christians included, to not believe Christ is really king. What kind of king allows Evil to be so awfully present? And frankly, that is just what the dark powers want us to believe! When we see evil run apparently unchecked (the key word being apparently) and have doubts about Christ’s ability to rule over his creation, despite the NT declarations that he does reign as king (e.g., Col 1.15-19, Christ’s ascension or any of his exorcisms), the dark powers celebrate because doubt seeds despair and unbelief and can lead to the abandonment of the faith once delivered to the saints, to you and me, made saints by virtue of the blood of the Lamb shed for us.
However, the mere existence of Evil cannot fully explain why many of us fail to believe Christ is really king. Part of it involves human pride. We think we know better than God. We forget that we are finite, fragile, and mortal, prone to erroneous thinking and sinful behavior. We forget that God is omnipotent, eternal, and omniscient, that God’s ways are not our ways and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. To one extent or another we are all products of “enlightened thinking,” an oxymoron if there ever was one, where we limit reality to what our senses can perceive and what we can measure. This creates in us a skepticism about some of the things we read in the Bible, like today’s OT passage, e.g., or Christ’s healings and exorcisms. The Enlightenment, for all the good it has produced, has also produced the Holocaust, Communism, two disastrous world wars, and the woke lunacy that is attempting to impose itself on us today to name just a few. The Enlightenment reveals human pride at work, determined to use one of God’s gifts, reason, to replace superstition and religion, the two sources most enlightened thinkers believed (and still believe) were/are the cause of all the evils of the world. Of course this is utter nonsense and we can see the results of thinking that excludes God from the equation all around us. Contrary to popular belief, when humans actually take God seriously and act according to God’s holy ways and laws, the results are always positive.
Whatever the reason for our doubts and fears about God’s sovereignty—and let’s be clear, Kingdomtide season is all about God’s sovereignty—as all our lessons this morning testify, lessons that represent the whole of Scripture, Christ really is king and we can live confidently in that knowledge and reality. We must therefore learn what to look for concerning the signs of God’s rule in his world. In our OT lesson, Daniel shares the vision given to to him in response to the previous visions he received. In it we see the Ancient of Days, the Ancient One, God himself, preparing to judge the evil in his world as well as the powers behind it, both human and spiritual. The vivid imagery suggests purity and power, with God’s fiery judgment on all evil and those who perpetrate it. We humans need to be exposed to scenes like this, hidden from our senses, because they remind us God is in control of things, chaotic as our times and lives may be, mysterious as it all is to us.
And then we see the Son of Man, who interpreted through the lens of the NT is Christ himself, coming on the clouds—biblical language attributing God’s presence and power to him—ready to be God’s agent of justice and judgment. This scene should make sense to us because until the time evil and evildoers are judged, there can be no real peace, no perfect world. Like the blood of Abel, the blood of the martyrs and those murdered and killed unjustly will continue to cry out to God until God finally acts decisively to give them full justice. As Christians, we believe that day will come when Christ returns to finish his saving work and raise his saints to everlasting life. We may not like the fact that we have to wait for this day. Being children of instant gratification we may grow impatient and angry over Christ’s promised delayed gratification, but the fact remains that this promise and hope—the sure and certain expectation of things to come—are necessary if we are to thrive in this mortal life where we live in the already of God’s victory over Sin, Death, and Evil and the not yet of its consummation. As St. John the Elder reminds us in our epistle lesson, the blood of the Lamb has conquered Evil in a surprising and totally unexpected way. God’s victory is accomplished by the power of God himself, the only power strong enough to defeat Evil and Sin and Death.
In our gospel lesson, St. John the Evangelist also proclaims that Christ is God become human, that by going to the cross he will fulfill the prophecy and promise of Daniel that God will bring about God’s perfect justice to rid the world of all evil and evildoers. St. John proclaims this in part by telling us the story of Christ’s confrontation with Pilate, i.e., in telling us the story of God’s kingdom and justice confronting worldly power and justice. In this confrontation, St. John in effect proclaims that here is the Son of Man, coming on the clouds, i.e., coming in God’s power, to confront and deal with the evil and corruption of the world’s systems and beliefs. In this deeply ironic story, we see Pilate, who represents corrupt human notions of power and justice, mistakenly thinking that he is in charge and judging Christ as a political enemy when in fact it is Christ who is judging him—by going to the cross. For St. John, the cross is where Christ is crowned King and his kingdom’s rule begins. Again, in a deeply ironic moment, Christ’s crown consists not of gold but of thorns and most who are confronted by the story fail to understand this reality.
Notice carefully that Christ does not tell Pilate his kingdom is not of this world, but rather not from it, meaning the source of his power and authority emanate from God’s power and not human’s. Our Savior’s prayer that appeals for God’s kingdom to come on earth as in heaven makes little sense if Christ’s kingdom is some kind of spiritual kingdom rather than God’s power finally reasserting itself to heal a broken and corrupt world and its people. Pilate, ever caustic and cynical doesn’t get this. Neither do many of us in our cynicism. But our Lord tells him (and us) that he had come to testify to the truth, the truth being that God will not allow alien and hostile forces represented by Satan and his minions, Pilate among them, to go on causing havoc and pain and destruction and injustice and death forever. God in his loving goodness can never ultimately allow Evil to win the day as our OT lesson testifies. Pilate, of course, has no conception of truth because he retorted with the famous question, “What is truth?” Here we see St John testifying that truth is not of our making. Pilate in his cynicism, a cynicism that is increasingly popular today, cannot fathom this. Truth in his economy is something each of us holds. It is ours for the making so to speak. Not so, says Christ. Only God is the owner of truth and that truth never changes or varies. We can’t bend it or invent it according to our needs and whims. But only by Christ dying for us would the world have the chance to learn this truth and start to live by it. This in part is what it means to submit to Christ’s rule. Because we do not like the truth does not give us the license to change it. We are to obey God’s truth in how we live our lives and that means we are to pattern our lives after Christ. What is truth? God’s great love for sinners like you and me, a love so great that God was willing to become human and shed his blood to rescue us from our slavery to Sin and to conquer Evil by the self-giving power of love. And in so conquering Sin, Death, and Evil, God has pronounced judgment on it all and those who commit and perpetrate it. Evildoers may seem to win the day, but their victory is pyrrhic and short-lived. Their day of destruction and judgment is coming and what a terrible day that will be. That is the truth. If you believe it, you will treat it like the eternal treasure it is and live accordingly.
So what does that look like? What does that mean for you and me? First, when we realize that Christ is our crucified king who has defeated and judged Evil by taking it on himself, we have reason to believe the NT’s promise that on the day of his return, his cruciform victory will be consummated and we will finally be freed from all that has the power to harm and destroy us, including and especially the power of Death. And when we learn to recognize what Christ’s reign looks like, we learn to have confidence in its truth and reality. That means we have real hope for the present and future. No matter how bad things get for us, we persevere in the power of the Spirit as we await the final redemption of our body and soul. Hope is a great blessing, my beloved. Don’t ever abandon it, especially when its source is God himself.
Second, our lessons invite us to learn and live by the truth, not the fiction of our own making, but God’s truth. As we have seen, despite appearances to the contrary, the truth is that God calls us to live according to his laws and created order and when we refuse to do so, we can expect God’s judgment. I will have much more to say about this topic in two weeks, but for right now I would simply point out that God’s judgment always leads to God’s justice and is motivated by God’s love for us. God created us in his image to represent his presence in the world. When we do that, things go swimmingly well for us and we find wholeness and contentment, despite the corrupting influence of living in an evil-infested world. As followers of Christ this means that we choose not to be partakers in evil and to confront evil with love and good after the manner of our Lord Jesus, even when it appears that our efforts are defeated or go for nothing. Let me give you a quick example of what this looks like in real life. Recently the Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore J. Cordileone, confronted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over her support for abortion. Unlike the powers of the world who use vitriol and anger and all the rest, the Archbishop instead called for prayer and fasting on behalf of Speaker Pelosi, asking God to convert her “maternal heart” away from supporting abortion. ++Cordileone also asked Catholic Christians to sign up for a “Rose and Rosary for Nancy,” where a rose would be sent to the Speaker for every Christian who signed up. As of Nov 15, 15,728 roses had been purchased, one of which were mine, and 1000 have been delivered, God be praised! This is how Christ the King’s reign works. In marked contrast to the nasty political business and name-calling (business as usual), we see God’s people praying for the repentance of one who denies the truth and supports murder. There was no name calling, just prayer and fasting and roses. Whether the Speaker repents is not the issue here. Rather, it is God’s people in Christ, working in loving obedience to him and appealing to his power to change hearts, minds, and lives. It is born out of a deep faith in the reality and efficacy of that power to conquer Sin and Evil and it confronts an unholy reality in a way that the person might actually be able to hear it without condemning her because we know that judgment is ultimately left to God and God alone. The world does not expect this and cannot recognize God’s power at work (one critic called the Archbishop “nutty,” for example). Therefore the world has misplaced or no hope, a terrible judgment in its own right. Not so with us. We have seen our crucified and risen Lord and we know his healing love and presence. On his behalf we dare to love each other enough despite our differences to support each other in our trials, tribulations, and suffering because we know that our trials are only temporary and the hope of glory, the new heavens and earth where we live in God’s direct presence forever, await us. And in doing so, we make known his love and presence among us. There is nothing better in all creation. This is why we can believe in Christ the King and his reign despite all the ambiguities, unanswered questions, and chaos that swirl around us. My beloved, I appeal to you to give (or continue to give) your lives and ultimate allegiance to Christ the King because in him, and only in him, will you find the strength and power for the living of your days and the blessed hope of eternal life awaiting you after you have finished running your race. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.
In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
For those of you who have read and are fans of the Revelation to Saint John (all 5 of you out there) like I am, one of the clearest interpretations of Revelation 20.5-6, a notoriously difficult passage, I have read. You would be wise to heed and follow the good’s Saint’s teaching. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
He Who Overcomes Shall not be Harmed by the Second Death
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye as the final trumpet sounds, for the trumpet shall indeed sound, the dead shall rise incorruptible and we shall be changed. In saying “we,” Paul is indicating that the gift of that future change will also be given to those who during their time on earth are united to him and his companions by upright lives within the communion of the Church. He hints at the nature of the change when he says: This corruptible body must put on incorruptibility, this mortal body immortality. In order, then, that men may obtain the transformation which is the reward of the just, they must first undergo here on earth a change which is God’s free gift. Those who in this life have been changed from evil to good are promised that future change as a reward.
Through justification and the spiritual resurrection, grace now effects in them an initial change that is God’s gift. Later on, through the bodily resurrection, the transformation of the just will be brought to completion, and they will experience a perfect, abiding, unchangeable glorification. The purpose of this change wrought in them by the gifts of both justification and glorification is that they may abide in an eternal, changeless state of joy.
Here on earth they are changed by the first resurrection, in which they are enlightened and converted, thus passing from death to life, sinfulness to holiness, unbelief to faith, and evil actions to holy life. For this reason the second death has no power over them. It is of such men that the Book of Revelation says: Happy the man who shares in the first resurrection; over such as he the second death has no power. Elsewhere the same book says: He who overcomes shall not be harmed by the second death. As the first resurrection consists of the conversion of the heart, the second death consists of unending torment.
Let everyone, therefore, who does not wish to be condemned to the endless punishment of the second death now hasten to share in the first resurrection. For if any during this life are changed out of fear of God and pass from an evil life to a good one, they pass from death to life and later they shall be transformed from a shameful state to a glorious one.
—From A Treatise on Forgiveness by Saint Fulgentius of Ruspe
This is an excellent piece. I commend the author for recognizing true love being expressed when he sees it. No shrill voice here. Neither liberal idolatry or shortsightedness. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
At a recent Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi, JD Vance remarked that he hoped his wife, Usha, would convert to Catholicism. The backlash was swift and savage. People criticized the vice president for being a bad husband and not respecting his wife’s choices and Hindu faith. Most of it was just noise. The backlash does, however, express an unfortunate reality. It is the terminus of American small-l liberalism: The ultimate truth is individual autonomy, and by publicly expressing a desire for his wife to convert, the vice president committed the cardinal sin in the religion of liberalism.
The vice president’s marital situation is common. According to the latest data from Pew Research Center, just over 25 percent of marriages in America consist of spouses with different religions. And for a few years, I too was counted among them.
My wife and I were both raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, served as missionaries for the church, were married in the Los Angeles temple, come from devout LDS families, and were ourselves devout. We had been married about ten years with four children when I left the LDS religion and converted to Catholicism. My wife had no interest in leaving her faith at that time. But eventually, she too became Catholic. Not everyone’s experience is the same: Since writing about our conversions in various publications, I have received a number of emails over the years saying: “I converted to Catholicism, my spouse did not. What do I do?” There are, to my mind, two related answers.
First, a simple directive: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it” (Eph. 5:25). Given that to love is to will the good of the other, that God is the greatest good, and that religion is an aspect of the virtue of justice whereby we render unto God what is owed him, it follows that husbands are to will that their wives believe and practice the true religion. JD Vance ought to will that his wife convert. To do otherwise would be unloving.
I told my wife on more than one occasion that I hoped she would convert, and I even expressed that desire publicly. Willing the good of the other is a concept mostly lost on liberalized Americans. “You do you” is the motto of our day. But it is an uncharitable motto.
Second, once we desire the conversion of our spouse, we need to know how to prudently direct our will to that end. I am grateful to the pastor I had during the time in which my wife and I were of different faiths, because he counseled me against both indifference and coercion. He advised prudence. As Aquinas writes, “it belongs to the ruling of prudence to decide in what manner and by what means man shall obtain [virtue].” Each marriage is different; each will need a different approach. When is the time to have that “hard conversation”? When is the time to just let something go? No one knew my wife and our relationship and our family better than I did. Prudence helps us to do the right thing, for the right reason, in the right time, and the right place.
Ultimately, it is God’s grace that first moves our wills toward him. We are merely instruments. And we never know when the right moment to say this or that thing, make this or that invitation, will be. My pastor wisely told me to faithfully live the sacramental life and use prudent judgment. And that is ultimately all I can tell anyone who finds themselves in that situation. Trust God. Never doom. And remember, prudently and publicly expressing the heartfelt hope that one’s spouse convert may just be the means by which God gives that ever important “twitch upon the thread.” JD Vance should be commended, not condemned.
A good and balanced piece on immigration. Would that the Church’s leaders pay attention. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
Catholic discussions of immigration frequently omit salient facts, most prominently the legal status of the “migrant.” I criticized this curious neglect in Pope Leo XIV’s apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te. In that document, the discussion of “migrants” ignores the question of their legal status. Since then, Pope Leo has acknowledged state sovereignty while saying it must be “balanced” with the duty to provide “refuge”—telling us neither how such balance is achieved nor assuring that the Church won’t always fault nations for addressing a migration crisis. Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich’s latest video insisting the “Church stands with migrants” likewise evades the question of legality.
An honest discussion would not circumvent the issue of legal status, which is why growing numbers of people are beginning to ask whether the Church is a good-faith interlocutor on questions of mass migration. Glossing over the distinction between legal and illegal residency cannot be ecclesial oversight; too many critics have pointed out that the Church regularly sidesteps this issue. Church leaders at times formally acknowledge state sovereignty over immigration, but in practice the rhetoric (“undocumented”) suggests otherwise. Which makes one think the Church is dodging the question of illegal status, a posture more befitting a lobbyist pushing an agenda than an honest broker addressing a question that affects the common good.
The Church seeks to frame the discussion of illegal immigration through the lens of “human dignity.” This is a fitting concept with which to begin. But the Church’s selective use of this framing neglects to address the way in which illegal immigration offends human dignity.
Free will is an essential aspect of human dignity. Man is alteri incommunicabilis:Nobody can will for me. Nobody can ultimately makeme want something. I can be influenced, pressured, and even physically forced, but I cannot be made to will something. Even God does not interfere with free will; in the end, he respects what we have chosen, even if we damn ourselves in the process.
Willing is not limited to individuals. Political sovereignty is also an act of will. It is a decision of a community, exercised by its designated leaders. In Catholic thought, sovereign decisions are accorded deference, because the one charged with attending to the common good is supposed to employ an objective overview of the common good—which individual parties with individual interests might not see—when making a decision. It’s why distributive justice belongs to the one responsible for the community and not its individual members.
In modern political structures, the sovereign will is expressed by the democratic choice of a majority, adopted through processes established by rule of law. In our constitutional order, this is done through passing legislation in accord with proper procedures. These laws are entitled to the presumption that they serve the common good, which means that they are not subject to veto by parties outside of the legislative process. There is a profound moral reason for the presumptive respect for validly enacted laws: They express the rightly adopted will—an essential aspect of human dignity—of the organized political community on a question. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 fits that requirement.
Thus, if we recognize human dignity to be expressed through free choices, individual as well as collective, and that the latter deserve our deference as decisions made for the common good by those responsible for that common good, then validly enacted laws also deserve recognition as expressions of human dignity. A political community’s free choice of a morally legitimate option (no one has claimed immigration restrictions are intrinsically evil) by a collective decision in the name of the common good cannot be dismissed on the ground that it affects the human dignity of an individual, as if the individual is the only party that has a dignity claim.
The Church’s unartful dodges on the migrant question have especially disturbing consequences. It practically canonizes the isolated individual’s decision to judge laws, find them wanting, and justify disobeying them. This undermines the coherence of Catholic teaching. It makes an unjustified exception to a Catholic’s responsibility to obey legitimate laws, suggesting an anthropology that asserts that the only dignity at stake is the individual’s. This marks a departure from Catholic tradition, which accords dignity to the valid expression of a collective community will embodied in duly adopted laws.
When churchmen speak about the human dignity of migrants, they are drawing attention to an important principle, one that rightly governs law enforcement’s treatment of any person who is suspected of breaking the law. But it is baffling to think that the mere assertion of the human dignity of an individual can serve as justification in practice for ignoring immigration law. Does “dignity” immunize somebody against enforcement of a valid law? Does “dignity” nullify a state’s right to enforce a valid law against a violator?
An excellent piece from Father Roseberry with which I totally agree. What is happening in the Church of England is what has happened in the Episcopal Church and other mainline Protestant Churches in the West. It is both maddening and heartbreaking to watch. Lord, have mercy on your Church. Spare her from unbelief and false teachers. May none who legitimately bear your name ever be ashamed of the gospel (Romans 1.16). Raise up for us faithful leaders, especially bishops, who are bold in the Faith and able to teach it to those whom you call.
For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
It’s been a rough week for the Church of England.
First came the announcement of a new Archbishop of Canterbury—a decision that breaks with two thousand years of Christian tradition. Then came the photos from Canterbury Cathedral itself: graffiti splashed across the pillars and walls of that great and ancient cathedral.
Note: Canterbury isn’t just another cathedral. It’s where the story began. It is the cradle of English Christianity. The seat of the Gospel on British soil since 597, when Augustine came from Rome to preach Christ to the Anglo-Saxons. 1From that moment on, Canterbury became the spiritual heart of a nation. Kings were crowned there. Martyrs bled there. Pilgrims walked for days to pray there.
Every Anglican church in the world can trace its roots back to that mission. That’s what makes this so serious. When Canterbury loses her sense of the sacred, something profound—and ancient—is being lost with her.
Put these headlines together, and you see an embarrassing and tragic problem. The Church isn’t being murdered by outsiders. She’s doing herself in. This is not vandalism or persecution. It’s suicide.
Every time we trade holiness for popularity, or beauty for relevance, a little more of the Church’s purpose falls from view. The Church will never die, but a congregation can. A denomination will. And the Church of England had better wake up and realize that antics such as these are not just silly—they are harmful to its mission.
The Church is harming itself—self-vandalizing. That’s the real murder in the cathedral.
The Cathedral as Billboard
The Dean calls it art—an installation called Hear Us. Vinyl graffiti stickers, plastered on medieval stone, meant to look like spray paint from a subway tunnel. Supposedly, it’s meant to make people “think.”
I’ve seen the photos. Some graffiti artists are true to their art form—bold, illegal, shocking by what it says and where it says it. But the shock value here is only in where it’s plastered.
And when was the last time you saw graffiti that had been carefully sourced? Typed in a font made to look like graffiti—the “real thing”—then scanned at the nearest FastSigns in Canterbury and neatly applied on the pillars and staircases. Stick and peel.
One observer put it plainly:
“You don’t take a sacred site like Canterbury Cathedral—one of the oldest and most culturally significant buildings in England—and turn it into a billboard for a temporary art project. This isn’t engaging with the community. It’s a blatant disregard for the sanctity of a space that should be treated with the utmost reverence.”
And that’s exactly the point. We’ve stopped believing that the sacred is sacred. We’ve convinced ourselves that to reach the world, we must become like the world—even in our sanctuaries.
Another voice on X said it perfectly:
“Every line of this ‘installation’—‘Are you there?’ ‘Do you regret your creation?’—reveals the modern clergy’s nervous breakdown. The faith that once proclaimed truth now questions itself in neon letters. The cathedral hasn’t been vandalized by outsiders; it’s vandalized itself from within, trading reverence for relevance and beauty for gimmickry.”
Even our own Vice-President, J. D. Vance, weighed in:
“It is weird to me that these people don’t see the irony of honoring ‘marginalized communities’ by making a beautiful historical building really ugly.”
Chasing Relevance
There’s a mini-revival of spiritual things happening in England. The culture is asking the kind of questions the Church has the answers to.
But the Church of England is pretending it doesn’t know. It’s feigning dumb. Acting mute. Trying not to sound self-assured, as if questions are always better than answers.
This impulse—to make faith “relatable”—has infected churches for decades. It sounds noble: We want to reach people where they are. But in practice, it becomes a slow death.
I learned this early in ministry. In seminary, the question was always, How can I make the Gospel relevant to modern life? It sounds harmless enough. But once you make relevance your goal, you’ll bend anything to achieve it.
You’ll dress up the message, sand off the edges, trade truth for tone. And little by little, you start to lose the very thing you meant to share.
It’s not murder with a knife. It’s murder by compromise—a slow, smiling suffocation of the sacred.
The Gospel Doesn’t Need Makeup
But the Gospel doesn’t need to be dressed up. The Holy Spirit is already at work in the world. He stirs hearts, awakens hunger, and draws people to Christ. Our job is not to sell Jesus, but to show him.
Not to lure, but to present Him to the world.
“Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” That’s enough. That sentence could fill a cathedral all by itself. The Gospel is inherently beautiful, inherently magnetic.
Hanson offers a spot on analysis of what is happening in Portland, OR. Yet the problem runs much deeper than even his excellent analysis posits; it is not just a “Democrat or Left problem,” perverse and bizarre as the party has become; rather, it is a problem of the human condition that we all share. At it’s core, it is the spirit of lawlessness and chaos unleashed that have gripped this country and that stem from rebellious and sinful hearts that we inherited in and through the Fall (Genesis 1-3), and barring God’s merciful and gracious intervention on our behalf, our country his headed for (self-) destruction. This is one of the ways God’s terrible judgment plays out on nations that forsake his laws (see, e.g., Romans 1.18-32; 2 Thessalonians 2.9-12) and it is a fearsome and terrible thing to behold, especially for those involved. Pray to Christ that this does not ultimately happen to us to destroy the high ideals that made this nation great in the first place. Secularism isn’t the answer. Neither is rejection of our Judeo-Christian heritage—these two factors helped get us where we are! No, only repentance and spiritual renewal after the manner of Christ can save us, and then only through the sheer mercy and grace of God the Father. Other nations have been down this path before and it rarely if ever is pretty. Let all who love this country humble themselves and commit to regular prayer and fasting, that the Lord might be merciful to us and spare us. Lord have mercy on us. Christ have mercy on us. Lord have mercy on us. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
In blue cities across America — Portland, Oregon, especially — often violent protesters now seek to surround ICE facilities to stop federal officers from fulfilling their assigned and legal duties of arresting illegal aliens.
Some 10 million or more illegal aliens were allowed to enter the U.S. during the Joe Biden years — illegally and thus without criminal or health checks.
Neither Antifa nor liberal urban America objected to such a flagrant disregard for the law. But both are now as intent on obstructing the legal enforcement of the law as they were earlier in favor of its illegal non-enforcement.
Much less did they care about the consequences of sending millions of foreign nationals into cities and counties where they swamped social services, spiked crime, and flooded emergency rooms and schools.
ICE has repeatedly presented data that show in its first rounds of deportations, it is concentrating on removing either criminal illegal aliens or those who have already been processed with deportation orders, somewhere between 70 and 90% of all current apprehensions.
No matter.
Left-wing protesters are swarming ICE headquarters in Portland to violently oppose all deportations, even those of known criminals and those who have already exhausted efforts to remain here illegally.
…The reigning moralistic assumption is that ceding territory to terrorists, not enforcing local and state laws, and nullifying federal statutes are all small prices to pay for the larger projection of chaos and violence that can be blamed on Trump.
Such thinking entails utter indifference to any Portlanders who live near the siege and are nightly subjected to constant disruptions, harassment, and occasional violence. Do these law-abiding residents have fewer civil rights than the lawbreaking armies of the night?
In contrast, the use of federal troops to stop the siege of ICE facilities will remind the violent protesters of the left that their neo-Confederate tactics will not work, but instead subject them to arrest and federal indictments.
Bringing in federal forces to uphold the law will also protect the rights of ICE personnel and neighborhood residents to live in peace and security and have their constitutional protections secured. Not all American citizens are Portlanders, but all Portland citizens are Americans.
In other words, both Antifa and the appeasing Oregon officials are our new neo-Confederate secessionists. They feel that their states are now autonomous entities that are still entitled to federal money but not obligated to follow federal laws.
A compelling and thought-provoking article with which I wholeheartedly agree. Our lives and our bodies are not ours to do with as we please, contrary to popular belief. Our lives and bodies are God’s because he has purchased them with the Blood of his dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ to save us from the power and inevitable results of our sin—our eternal destruction. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
I first heard Robert Munsch in second grade. Our teacher read his 1986 classic Love You Forever to our class, and like almost everyone who heard the story as a child and read it to his or her own children years later, the cadences of the mother’s beautiful lullaby stayed with me: “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, as long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.”
I had to grow up to grasp the beauty of the book’s ending. The boy, now a man and a father, cradles his frail, ailing mother, and sings the lullaby back to her as her own voice breaks and fades, changing the last line by two words: “As long as you’re living, my mommy you’ll be.” When he was a baby, a boy, and a teen, his mother covered his vulnerabilities with unconditional love. Now, as she’s dying, it’s his turn to gather her into his arms.
That last phrase—“as long as you’re living”—took on a heartbreaking significance with the news that Munsch, who lives in Canada, has been approved for euthanasia (referred to by the Orwellian euphemism “medical aid in dying,” or MAID). According to his daughter Julie, Munsch first mentioned that he was planning to die by euthanasia in a 2021 interview with the CBC after being diagnosed with dementia, but the decision made headlines when Munsch discussed his choice in an interview with the New York Times published on September 14.
The eighty-year-old author told the Times that his memory and creative processes are declining. “I can feel it going further and further away,” he said. This, as well as witnessing his brother’s death from Lou Gehrig’s disease, prompted him to apply for euthanasia. “Hello, Doc—come kill me!” he joked. “How much time do I have? Fifteen seconds!” Munsch added that his death has not yet been scheduled, but that by law he must be able to consent just prior to the lethal injection that will kill him.
“I have to pick the moment when I can still ask for it,” he told the Times. The news coverage of the interview prompted his daughter to post a clarifying statement online: “My father IS NOT DYING!!!” she wrote. “Thanks to everyone and their well wishes, however, my father’s choice to use MAID was in fact made 5 years ago. . . . My dad is doing well but of course with a degenerative disease it can begin to progress quickly at any point.”
The public interest in Munsch’s decision to opt for euthanasia, of course, is because he is one of the most famous children’s authors in the world. Munsch, an American by birth who moved to Canada in 1975, has sold more than 30 million copies of his over seventy books. For countless children, Munsch was—and is—a fixture; he is the most stolen author at the Toronto Public Library. Now, if he decides to go through with his decision, the name “Robert Munsch” will forever be tied to Canada’s euthanasia regime, and he will join the more than 60,000 Canadians who have already been legally killed.
For advocates of euthanasia and assisted suicide, Munsch’s choice is a triumph for autonomy. But it is much more than that. Munsch is making a very public value judgment. A life with dementia, he believes, is a life not worth living. Indeed, he said that he is worried about waiting too long to take the plunge into eternity because, as he told his wife Ann, if he can no longer legally consent, “you’re stuck with me being a lump.”
The description made me almost physically recoil. I love someone who suffers from dementia and treasure every moment I have with her. People suffering from dementia are not “lumps,” as Munsch says—and I hope his loved ones have made that very clear to him. Perhaps they have. But Munsch does not need their permission to die—he only needs permission from the state. In Canada, the government decides who is eligible for a state-funded and facilitated lethal injection, and who is not.
Because euthanasia is not, in fact, a “free choice.” It is a choice granted only to some. By passing legislation determining who qualifies, the government has pre-selected those they believe have lives so valuable they are legally barred from suicide, and those with lives so worthless they can be assisted in their demise. In fact, a “provider” can come to your home and dispatch you in the comfort of familiar surroundings. Many like Robert Munsch, fearful after a devastating diagnosis of what the future might hold, become suicidal. The government does not affirm their worth but affirms their suicidal ideation.
An excellent piece, as usual, from Dr Trueman. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
Recent events indicate that the struggle against the dehumanization represented by trans ideology is far from over. True, the U.K. has closed down the Tavistock child gender identity clinic, the U.S. is moving against allowing men to compete in women’s sports, and scientists are starting to free their research in this area from the grip of ideologues and activists. More celebrities are voicing their concerns: Malcolm Gladwell has expressed regret over his silence on a 2022 panel about the issue, claiming this was more the result of cowardice than conviction. No surprise there. How many celebrity advocates for trans rights have read any of the relevant philosophical or medical literature?
Despite the turning of the tide on the scientific (and to some extent the political) front, the situation with transgenderism is still ambiguous and remains a danger both to its victims—preventing them from obtaining proper care, rather than “affirmation,” for their condition—and to basic freedoms such as that of speech, something that once distinguished Western democracies from regimes such as the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. The evidence is all around us.
There was the widespread and pitiful use of “preferred pronouns” for the Annunciation Catholic School shooter in Minneapolis (one must respect a man’s identity politics even after he has slaughtered children at worship), the intimidation of a Canadian gender researcher (follow the science, but only to the extent it follows the pronoun preferences of the moment), and last week’s arrest of comedian and writer Graham Linehan as he disembarked in London from a transatlantic flight; Linehan was accused of “inciting violence” after posting anti-trans tweets on X. And yesterday, there was the tragic slaying of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley State University, reportedly while speaking about trans mass killers, though details on the killer and his motivation have yet to emerge. In any event, Kirk faced threats and vitriol from trans activists throughout his career, and gave a number of de-transitioners a platform to speak. Now, his voice has been silenced.
All these indicate that trans misogyny, attacks on women’s safety, and opposition to freedom of speech continue, with the stakes becoming higher all the time. The trans issue is not simply about protecting children from hormonal and genital mutilation. We make a fatal error if we stop once that is achieved. The trans question is about the nature of public life and humanity as a whole. It is no surprise that it has gained traction in Western society at the moment when the very question of what it means to be human is now a source of social confusion rather than cohesion. And it is clear that this dehumanization will be pressed forward by all means necessary, including the use of violence.
The capitulation of the American cultural commentariat on the pronoun issue (helpfully summarized by Lionel Shriver in The Spectator) is no surprise, with the New York Times as always leading the way. And the real chaos that underlies the ostentatious moralism of these opinion writers and pundits has been exposed. When a member of a class that regards itself as innocent victims proves to be a malevolent victimizer, they have no coherent moral calculus by which to frame their response, revealing the amorality of their creed. But while elite pandering to pronoun preferences, even of murderers of children, is sadly no surprise, the response to Kirk’s murder defied belief. Before the barrel of the gun was cold, media pundits were fretting that it might be used by the administration to its own political advantage, and even that to think and speak certain thoughts—presumably including those that do not conform to the progressive denial of reality—will inevitably lead to violence. Blaming the victims is apparently justified in certain circumstances, not to mention making shameful public comments that Kirk’s widow and children might well see. Such people lack any semblance of decency. They have no sense of a shared humanity.
Back in the U.K., the arrest of Linehan for his tweets was another shocking escalation of the culture war. To those unfamiliar with his work, he was the writer of Father Ted, a cleverly absurd Irish comedy that brought the tradition of dark Gaelic humor, exemplified in works such as Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, to the small screen. He then went on to write The IT Crowd, another hit series. But in recent years, he has become notorious for doing what satirists always used to do: critiquing the smug pieties of the ruling class, in his case the sacred cow of that most absurd rebellion against reality, transgenderism. In this he has stood nearly alone, with so many of his earlier friends and collaborators now exposed not so much as anti-establishment as anti-that-old-establishment-to-which-they-did-not-belong.
Linehan was arrested by five armed police officers at Heathrow. While U.K. police do not typically carry firearms, they do so at airports. But why five of them, and why in a very public space where they would be armed? Linehan was not on the run or in hiding or brandishing a weapon. Perhaps they feared that Linehan would tell a joke and innocent bystanders would die laughing? More likely they were indulging in the level of theatrical drama they deemed necessary to send a signal to anyone else tempted to behave likewise. The chief of the Metropolitan police might whine about lack of clarity in the law, but the response of his officers was unambiguous: Tweets we don’t like, even from months ago, will be met with overwhelming armed force.
But there are two sins, not of individual deed, but of spiritual condition, which cannot be forgiven; that is, as it seems to me, which cannot be excused, passed by, made little of by the tenderness even of God, inasmuch as they will allow no forgiveness to come into the soul, they will permit no good influence to go on working alongside of them; they shut God out altogether. Therefore the man guilty of these can never receive into himself the holy renewing saving influences of God’s forgiveness. God is outside of him in every sense, save that which springs from his creating relation to him, by which, thanks be to God, he yet keeps a hold of him, although against the will of the man who will not be forgiven. The one of these sins is against man; the other against God.
The former is unforgiveness to our neighbor; the shutting of him out from our mercies, from our love—so from the universe, as far as we are a portion of it—the murdering therefore of our neighbor. It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that kills the image, the idea of the hated.
—From Creation in Christ by George MacDonald
Many who call themselves “Christian” have forgotten this (or willfully ignore it). May you not be one of them. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
There are various kinds and degrees of wrong-doing, which need varying kinds and degrees of forgiveness. An outburst of anger in a child, for instance, scarcely wants forgiveness. The wrong in it may be so small, that the parent has only to influence the child for self-restraint, and the rousing of the will against the wrong. The father will not feel that such a fault has built up any wall between him and his child.
But suppose that he discovered in him a habit of sly cruelty towards his younger brothers, or the animals of the house, how differently would he feel! Could his forgiveness be the same as in the former case? Would not the different evil require a different form of forgiveness? | mean, would not the forgiveness have to take the form of that kind of punishment fittest for restraining, in the hope of finally rooting out, the wickedness? Could there be true love in any other kind of forgiveness than this? A passing-by of the offense might spring from a [frail] human kindness, but never from divine love. It would not be remission. Forgiveness can never be indifference. Forgiveness is love towards the unlovely.
—From Creation in Christ by George MacDonald
For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.
