Five lies of the world, what is beauty, and recognizing their tactics
Notes from Day 1 of the ACCS meeting
Hi all. I am typing this from Pittsburgh where (for most attendees) we just had our first day of meetings at the conference of the Association of Classical Christian Schools.
For the interested, what follows are brief notes on three of the talks I attended. I think some may find them helpful, but they look like quickly written notes because they were quickly written notes.
Rosaria Butterfield: Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age
Rosaria Butterfield gave quite a feisty talk (which two months from now will also be a book), in part about the harm done by Christian leaders who want to be a “soft voice in Sodom” and cede all moral language to the forces of evil. (I say “harm”, we could also say that people who are trapped in sin, who need help from the Church, are not getting that help from us.) I did not write in my notes every time she used a word such as “traitor” or “coward”, but she did employ such language quite a bit.
(And at the end of her talk, may I just say… The Gospel Coalition is now pointed to as the archetypal example of how rapidly a previously good Christian institution can go bad.)
Before her “five lies”, she had three reasons - why is the Church so divided today on issue of sex and identity?
Reason one: We have failed to see that the seeds of the gospel are in the garden.
God’s plan for men and women is found in Genesis 1, and it is central, not peripheral.
Reason two: We have failed to read the times in which we live.
Courts have introduced the idea of “dignitary harm”, such that refusing to use someone’s “preferred pronouns” can be legally treated as violence and oppression.
Churches that make winsomeness their goal, instead of a means, affirm the idea of “LGBTQ persons” (with the implication this is an unchangeable identity attribute) and cede all moral language to the Left.
Ironically, we have made it unsafe to repent of these sins in many of our own churches.
Reason three: We have failed to love our enemies, and have instead pretended that our enemies are our friends.
When she was a lesbian, she thought Christians were her enemies. (They were.)
Central to her own conversion was Christian neighbors who regularly invited her to dine at their table. One day, at that dining room table, they had her read and sing Psalm 24.
“Have you ever read a book, and realized you were reading it from the wrong perspective the whole time?”
She realized - I was God’s enemy, I was my Christian neighbors’ enemy, but they loved me enough to have me sit at their table.
Now much later, the Church eventually received me as a repentent sinner, now sister in the Lord.
And then, her five lies of the world:
Lie one: Homosexual orientation is normal, fixed, and immutable.
This locates original sin as part of our image-bearing.
This imposes an attribute of God onto man. This is only plausible in a world that has traded worship of the Creator for worship of creation.
Lie two: Being a spiritual person is kinder than being a Biblical Christian.
Man is inherently good, Adam’s sin had little effect.
Lie three: Feminism is good for the Church and the world.
Feminism has had four waves, and the most recent is so tied to LGBTQ+ that we cannot even define what a woman is anymore.
Old-school feminism is now so passé it’s only really alive in the Church.
Verses that call a woman to obey are contextualized and dismissed.
Well, she is unashamed to say that she supports Biblical patriarchy.
The question is not whether you want men in charge, but which ones
Lie four: Transgenderism is normal, at least for some people.
(But it wasn’t until castrating children became a revenue source for hospitals, she notes.)
You can walk out with sterilizing hormones now in 45 minutes after a visit to Planned Parenthood.
Yes, a very few people do have intersex conditions or serious gender dysphoria. We are all born with sin, this does not redefine the creation ordinance.
A man or woman who mutilates their own body, but then converts and becomes a Christian, will receive in the New Jerusalem a glorified body with no traces of what they had done.
Too many Christian leaders want to be a “soft presence here in Sodom”, they are largely silent, they have no interest in offering Christian language as a response.
Lie five: Modesty is an outdated virtue and it contributes to the victimization of women.
The idea is that calling women to a different standard is oppressive.
At heart, the objection is that it just isn’t fair that woman are different than men.
Modesty has now been almost completely replaced by exhibitionism.
You cannot be a soft presence without carrying water for the other team.
Cole Jeffrey: The Idolatrous Eye: How to Recognize and Respond Rightly to Beauty in a Fallen World
This talk was largely about, “what is beauty?” and “how do we teach students to recognize and appreciate it?”.
Many teachers think and/or act like students are blank slates, and passive learners, and we can make them better just by exposing them to good things. Doesn’t really work like that. “Judas heard all of Christ’s sermons.”
Aquinas distinguished between “looking” at an object (the sensory experience), and “seeing” it (a rational evaluation).
When we see an object, we contemplate the object’s qualities, and its right relationship to other objects / observers.
Aquinas said that beautiful objects had three properties.
Claritas: light, radiance. Your eye is drawn to the object.
Integritas: perfection, wholeness.
Consonantia: harmony, proportion.
Everything is rightly related to each other.
No beautiful object exists in isolation, it must be connected to something bigger.
We are made better when we “see” objects in the way Aquinas intended.
Don’t let your students be too easily pleased. Many have experienced a life of shallow pleasures now, and it makes it harder for them to respond to things that are good, true, and beautiful.
Douglas Wilson: Tombs of the Prophets
I’m just going to share a couple of scattered notes here, so I won’t summarize the talk!
We like to name things after people. A good check - could the person your school is named after get a job at your school? Could John Calvin get a job at Calvin University today? No, he could not.
We live in a media age, our generation naturally looks to the reaction. We want to train students to look at the hubbub on that news clip and instead think, “but is what the original speaker said true?”.
We are attacked with our sins, but not for them. They don’t really care that you did X, they don’t care at all. One of their guys does X and you start criticizing him, they’ll come up with some reason your criticism is inappropriate.
You are not going to get people to stop criticizing your institution, because God has established the antithesis. Not unless and until they are converted.
I loved Butterfield’s book on her conversion and I’m practically cheering at the points you’ve recorded her making, as a former pro-LGBT atheist/agnostic with a progressive feminist upbringing. I believe sometimes it takes those who have lived outside of comfortable Christian culture entering into the faith with a foundation in historical, orthodox Christianity to expose this -- it grows more clear to me over the years that the state of our society can in many ways be attributed to Christians complying with the modern lie that faith in the God of the Bible is a personal matter that has no business influencing the public realm. Postmodernism has undoubtedly filled this vacuum left by the receding influence of the Church.