It wasn’t many years ago that such a thing – the Senate confirmation of a transgendered person for high government office – would have been impossible. But in 2021 America, Levine’s confirmation was inevitable.
A month earlier, the conservative website Revolver ran an article correctly predicting Levine’s confirmation. The piece stated that, “Rachel Levine’s imminent confirmation proves Transgenderism is America’s new state religion. The article went on to note,
Fifty years ago, the cult of transgenderism didn’t even exist. Merely ten years ago, it was still so obscure most Americans knew nothing about it. But over the past decade, transgenderism has been accepted en masse by the centers of power in America, which are now imposing them on the whole country. The core parts of its doctrine are easy to list:
Physical sex and “gender identity” are completely unrelated to one another.
Being “cisgender” and “transgender” are equally ordinary.
Gender is “fluid” and there are far more genders than merely “male” and “female.” In fact, there may be infinite genders.
Gender roles are socially constructed, and there is no biological basis for behavioral differences between males and females.
Despite the above, a person can also innately know that they were assigned the “wrong” gender, even if this is based on their failure to conform to gender norms that are, supposedly, only social constructs.
A person can know he is transgender at any age. It is completely normal for teenagers, preteens, and even toddlers to become “transgender,” with potentially invasive treatments like puberty-blocking pills and even surgery.
A person has the right to choose their own pronouns, to demand that others “state their pronouns,” and to demand punishment when their pronouns are not respected.
Not only may a person change his name at any time, but it is “deadnaming” to use or even mention a prior name.
By this time, you may be wondering why, in a post about the Biblical account of the creation of man, I’m writing about transgenderism. My reason for doing so stems from the stated purpose of this series. As I wrote in Part 1, “It is my intention in this series to apply the revealed history found in Genesis to the current moral, political, scientific, and economic problems of our day, refuting the contemporary confusion and setting forth the mind of God on these issues.”
Nowhere is the confusion of our age more evident than in the matter of transgenderism, and nowhere is the mind of God in more desperate need of application.
Detail from The Tower of Babel by Peter Brugel, 1563.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
“The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.” Thus reads Chapter 1, Section 4 of The Westminster Confession of Faith.
Last week it was mentioned that it would be both foolish and impious of me to attempt to prove that the 66 books of the Bible are the infallible and inerrant Word of God. The foolishness of this project, as you may recall, was found in the axiomatic position the Bible plays in the Christian system of thought.
An axiom is a first principle, an unproven and unprovable first principle. The reason an axiom is unproven and unprovable lies in the very definition of the term “axiom” itself. If one were to prove a first principle, then it would no longer be a first principle. Whatever argument used to prove the axiom would take the original axiom’s place as the new first principle.
Some Christians may be concerned by the assertion that we do not prove the axiom of Christianity – The Bible Alone is the Word of God – supposing that somehow this puts Christianity on a shaky footing. But this concern can be assuaged by remembering that all systems of thought – and this includes all secular systems of thought of the sort the world delights to throw at Christians – have their axioms. In this case, the Christian with his axiom is no worse off than the secular scientist or philosopher with his axioms. The Christian begins his thinking in one place, the 66 books of the Bible. On the other hand, the scientist begins his thinking in another place, perhaps on the axiom of the general reliability of the senses.
In addition to it being foolish to attempt to prove that the Bible is the infallible and inerrant Word of God, it was also mentioned that it would be impious to do so. “Impious” is not a term we use often, so perhaps a definition is in order. Merriam Webster defies it as irreverent or profane. The notion that the fallible words of sinful man are better testimony of the truth than God’s Word itself is the very definition of impiety.
The Westminster Confession citation above refers to several passages from Scripture to supports its claims.
1 Peter 1:19, 21 And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts; for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.
2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.
1 John 5:9 If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater.
It was Augustine who famously wrote, “For understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe that you may understand” (Tractate 29 on John 7:14-18). In this statement, Augustine shows himself a Scripturalist. He attempts not to prove the Bible is the Word of God, but accepts it as true – that is, he accepts the Bible as his axiom – and his understanding of God and his works follows from this.
With all this said, let us turn to the subject at hand, which is Genesis as history.
Detail from The Tower of Babel by Peter Brugel, 1563.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
“The work of creation is, God’s making all things of nothing, by the word of his power, in the space of six days, and all very good.” That’s the answer the Westminster Shorter Catechism gives to the question, “What is the work of creation?’
It’s one of my favorite question and answer sets from the Shorter Catechism, for the same reason as the passage in Genesis on which it is based is one of my favorite passages of Scripture: it captures elegantly, and in a few words, the astonishing work of the creation of all things.
In the introduction to his commentary on Genesis, John Gill wrote, “In the Syriac and Arabic versions, the title of this book is “The Book of the Creation”, because it begins with an account of the creation of all things; and is such an account, and so good an one, as is not to be met with anywhere else.”
Genesis is, as Gill implies in the quote above, not the only account of creation from the ancient world. The Greeks had a creation mythology, as did the Babylonians and numerous other cultures.
But creation mythology is not limited to the ancient world. In modern times, we have our own mythological creation account known as the Big Bang. This account, just like the ones from the ancient world, is a garbled version of the true account of the creation of the heavens, the earth, and all that is in them as set forth in Genesis chapter 1.
At this point, some may ask how it is I can prove that the Biblical account of creation is true and that the others are mythological and false. The short answer to this question is that the creation account given in Genesis is part of the inerrant, infallible, 66 books that comprise the revealed Word of God.
If you ask me to prove that the 66 books of the Bible are the revealed Word of God, my answer is that not only can I not prove to you that the 66 books of the Bible are the inerrant and revealed Word of God, but also that it would be impious for me to even attempt to do so.
Now before you think I’ve thrown in the intellectual towel and am simply trying to dodge a serious question about why I believe what I believe, let me explain this a bit further.
The reason that I cannot and will not attempt to prove that “the Bible alone is the Word of God” is that this is the axiom of Christianity. It would be both foolish and impious of me to attempt to prove the axiom of Christianity.
Why would this be foolish?
Because trying to prove an axiom is absurd. The reason it’s absurd lies in the definition of the term “axiom.”
Detail from The Tower of Babel by Peter Brugel, 1563.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
“Republicans and Evangelicals are stupid.” So proclaimed a work colleague of mine one day, seemingly out of the blue.
Since I fell into both groups and was a bit curious as to what prompted his outburst, I asked him, “Why do you say that?”
My colleague pointed me to an article he was reading in a newspaper he had brought with him – yes this was way back in 2007 before everyone had smartphones and still read physical newspapers. The article was about the opening of the Creation Museum here in the Cincinnati area.
Having lived in Cincinnati, I was well aware of the Creation Museum project. Several years in the making, the museum had garnered extensive press coverage both locally and nationally. Most of it was negative. Denunciations galore poured forth from various mainstream news organizations about the mass enstupification of the of the American public that was nigh upon our doorstep because of museum’s opening.
One example of that hostility is a Los Angeles Times editorial from May 24, 2007 title “Yabba-dabba science,” which, as you may gather from the title, makes great fun of the Creation Museum, likening it to an episode of “The Flintstones.”
Apparently, my work colleague bought the propaganda.
Science, we are told by the L.A. Times and other voices of “reason,” is all about hard facts and logic. All which, we are confidently told, militate against any possibility that the earth is a mere 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs and men walked the terra firma at the same time.
But is science so-called really the arbiter of truth? Think about just the past year and all the contradictory science we’ve heard. Some of the most blatantly contradictory statements have come from the same supposed scientific experts. For example, in a March 2020 interview with 60 Minutes, Dr. Anthony Fauci said,
Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks….there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is, and often there are unintended consequences – people keep fiddling with the masks and they’re touching their face.
Now, this same Dr. Fauci is out there saying that we may have to wear masks until 2022. And not only that, he’s stated on the record that double-masking makes “common sense”! And all this despite a great deal of scientific evidence that mask mandates do nothing to slow the spread of Covid.
Clearly, Dr. Fauci has contradicted himself. In fact, his statements often seem to be driven by some hidden political agenda rather than the scientific facts at hand. Yet we are told that he is a coolly rational scientific mind and that anyone who doubts him is, in the words of Joe Biden, a Neanderthal.
Or take the matter of the uber trendy cause of Transgenderism. Facebook offers members a palette of 58 gender options. Fifty-eight! Supporters of transgenderism are often the same people who loudly announce their love of science and are quick to denigrate those who disagree with them as “science deniers.” Yet it is the progressives themselves who are the science deniers.
If we consider the most up-to-date scientific opinion, the most reasonable conclusion is that there are only two sexes, and that the notion that there can be 58 genders is an absurdity. Yet, the transgender folks will argue that one’s gender identity is not tied to one’s biological sex, and that a biological man really can reasonably identify as a woman and a biological woman really can identify as a man. And yet, even if a man successfully “transitions” to a woman, every cell in his body is still genetically coded as male, with a both an X and a Y chromosome. This seems like a hard case of science denialism on the part of transgender activists, but it’s rare for anyone to point this out.
As Christians, we don’t rest our argument that there are only two sexes, male and female, on the findings of geneticists. We believe this, because it’s revealed in the Word of God. But it is interesting that today’s ideologically confused progressives will, on the one hand, lecture Christians about their supposed “science denialism,” while on the other hand, denying the science they claim to love so they can indulge their transgender fantasies.
Destruction from The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole, 1836.
Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful….
Hebrews 12:11
Another week in the collapse of America is in the books.
On the political front, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed that there is no crisis on the southern border, even as the daily number of migrants who were apprehended illegally entering the US through the southern border is 3,000…daily. This is apart from the approx. 300 unaccompanied minors apprehended daily. To put that in some perspective, Jeh Johnson, DHS Secretary under Barak Obama was quoted in 2019 saying, “if it was under 1,000 apprehensions [of illegal border crossers] the day before, that was a relatively good number, and if it was above 1,000, it was a relatively bad number, and I was gonna be in a bad mood the whole day.” So a number three times what Jeh Johnson thought was “a relatively bad day” is pouring across our southern border, but Biden DHS Secretary Mayorkas is fine with this.
Concerning our ever more aggressive cultural commissars, Dr. Suess got cancelled this week. Well, not completely, at least not yet. So did the Muppets. Yes, the Muppets. Disney, which recently released five seasons of the show on it streaming service, has slapped a content warning disclaimer on the show, warning how very bad the show is for its stereotyping and “mistreatment of people or cultures.”
Now consider for a moment the contrast between the way Dr. Seuss and the Muppets are treated compared to the vulgar, immoral filth that characterized American pop culture in 2021. I was thinking about this contrast the other day when sitting at a red light next to a car blasting rap out of the open windows. Now perhaps not all rap music is as vile as the stuff I was subjected to, but much of it is. Yet no one seems concerned about slapping a content warning on it. In 2021 America, the vilest lyrics imaginable are perfectly acceptable, but Americans must be warned about the crimethink inherent in the Muppets and Dr. Seuss.
Oh, and then there’s the whole Mr. Potato Head thing. I lack the words, so I’ll spare you a long diatribe. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, click here. Let’s just say, I thought it was fake news when I first read about it. It wasn’t.
Concerning our nation’s economy, Yahoo reports that “Another 745,000 American filed new unemployment claims” during the last week in February. Now let’s put this number in some perspective. Simply quoting a number such as initial jobless claims doesn’t have much meaning unless it’s seen in context. Here’s a good way to understand just how bad things are in the economy. At the height of the 2008 financial crisis, the highest initial jobless claims number printed was 665,000 in March 2009, and the all-time record was 695,000 in October 1982. Due to the government’s unchristian, unconstitutional and unscientific overreaction to Covid, the US weekly initial jobless claims numbers have never fallen below the old record – either from 2008 or the all time high from 1982 – since 3/21/2020. That’s nearly a year of disastrous employments numbers with no end in sight. The economy and the financial system of the United States is a disaster area waiting for a major implosion. The only solution our politicians can come up with is to do more of what has helped lead to this mess, namely, print more money to stimulate the economy. This unbridled money printing will lead to the collapse of the US dollar and its removal as the world’s reserve currency. Americans will experience a dollar collapse as rapidly rising prices and a rapidly declining standard of living. This is going to happen. It’s just a matter of when.
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her!
Matthew 23:37
“White House working with social media giants to silence anti-vaxxers,” ran a recent headline in the New York Post. According to the article, the Biden regime, “is asking social media companies to clamp down on chatter that deviates from officially distributed COVID-19 information as part of President Biden’s “wartime effort” to vanquish the coronavirus.”
Another headline, this one in Big League Politics, read, “House Democrats Browbeat Cable Providers in Hopes of Deplatforming Fox News, OANN.” The story reports that California Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, “addressed a series of letters to companies such as AT&T, Amazon, Charter, and Comcast, aggressively questioning if they planned to continue offering cable packages that include OANN, Fox and Newsmax in the future, citing censorious claims of ‘misinformation.’”
Eshoo and McNerney, it seems, did not like the aforementioned networks’ editorial stance on either the 2020 election or the so-called Covid pandemic. According to the esteemed members of Congress, these networks were guilty of spreading “misinformation” on these subjects. Which is simply another way of saying, they didn’t agree with the networks’ questioning of the 2020 election results or the Covid lockdowns.
For it was so, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned his heart after other gods; and his heart was not loyal to the LORD his God, as was the heart of his father David.
1 Kings 11:4
Just yesterday, I watched a video – confession, I binge watched several videos – about the sinking of the Titanic. It’s remarkable after well over a century – this April will mark the 109th anniversary of the sinking of the great ocean liner – the fame of the ship and of its disastrous end show no sign of abating. Doubtless, it’s the most famous maritime disaster ever.
Some years ago, I listened to a classroom lecture by Gordon Clark, dating, if I recall correctly, from sometime in the 1950’s. Clark, remarking on the youth of his students, commented that they hadn’t even been born at the time the Titanic sank. Clark himself was a few months shy of his 10th birthday when Titanic went down in the icy waters of the north Atlantic on that fateful morning of April 15, 1912.
Shipwrecks have always had a certain fascination for me. Were you to press me for why that is, I suppose I would have to answer that it’s not so much the shipwreck itself that I find fascinating, but the reaction of the people involved in it. Life and death situations have a way of revealing the true character of those on board. And shipwrecks, because they tend to play out over longer periods of time than some other types of disasters, give greater opportunity for the faith, bravery, good judgment, foolishness, and cowardice of people to show themselves.
One of the Titanic videos I watched was titled “Titanic History/What caused the Titanic to Break Up?” Years ago, when I first heard about the Titanic, no one talked about the ship splitting in two. Maybe this was something known to those who studied the disaster closely, I don’t know. But for decades, it was not generally known to the public that, before sinking, the ship split in two. .
One of the points that the presenter made in the video was that, although the breakup came suddenly and visibly, there was a lot happening to the structure of the ship on the inside as it went down. It was these unseen stresses on the ship’s structure ultimately resulted in the breakup, even if the forces at work were not obvious to onlookers before it happened.
In reflecting on this idea – the notion that powerful, unseen forces can be at work for some time before producing very visible results – it’s easy to see how it can have a wider application. In this case, I’m thinking how unseen, yet powerful forces can put stresses on the structure of a nation for years, decades, maybe even longer, prior to their resulting in a major and visible catastrophe of some sort.
Take the nation of Israel, for example. The kingdom hit its peak under the Solomon. But even while Israel was at the height of its wealth and power, forces were at work which would split the nation shortly after Solomon’s death.
Solomon’s policy of forced labor and heavy taxation to pay for his public works projects was very much resented by the people. He also split the nation into administrative districts that paid little heed to traditional tribal boundaries. There was the longstanding north-south rivalry that, while remaining subdued during the reigns of David and Solomon, nevertheless was present and which would reassert itself under Solomon’s successor Rehoboam.
There was a fourth, and most important, factor in the breakup of Israel after the reign of Solomon: idolatry. In 1 Kings 11 we read,
But King Solomon loved many foreign women, as well as the daughter of Pharaoh: women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites – from the nations of whom the LORD had said to the children of Israel, “You shall not intermarry with them, nor they with you. Surely they will turn away your hearts after their gods.” Solomon clung to these in love. And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines; and his wives turned away his heart. For it was so, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned his heart after other gods; and his heart was not loyal to the LORD his God, as was the heart of his father David.
As a result of Solomon’s sin, his lack of faith in the Lord and his turning to idols, God told him that he would tear the kingdom from him.
Scripture doesn’t record for us what the Israelite public thought of Solomon’s idolatry. If I were forced to conjecture what the public’s attitude was toward Solomon as his idolatry become more and more obvious, it seems to me that most people probably paid it little heed. There was no public outcry against it that I am aware of noted in Scripture. This is not surprising. After all, Israel’s prospects had never looked brighter in the 500 or so years since Joshua had led them into the promised land. The nation was numerous, economically prosperous, and militarily powerful. It must has looked to most Israelites as if the future was even brighter. And if there was a little idolatry going on in high places, well, no one is perfect.
Let’s fast forward to our own time. Do any of the lessons from Titanic or Israel – hidden forces at work for a period of time which result in big, visible breakups – apply to America? The answer, I think, is yes.
Our nation traces its roots to Puritan settlers from England in the 17th century. Although at the time of the American Revolution, the colonists were remarkably homogenous – 98% of the population was Protestant – there were still significant divisions present. The most obvious of these was – in an interesting recapitulation of the fault lines found in ancient Israel – the north/south split over slavery.
In the 19th century, the homogeneity of the nation began to change as waves of Roman Catholic, Eastern European and Jewish immigrants brought large numbers of people to America that did not share the history, religion or political and economic beliefs with the old-stock American’s descended from the nation’s founders. The 20th and 21st century have seen the growth in the Muslim population in America. As was the case with the Catholic and Jewish immigration in the 19th century, Muslim immigrants brought with them a religion with a philosophy of politics and economics that was at odds with a free constitutional republic. It’s not that Roman Catholics, Jews Muslims – and, to be fair, one must add Orthodoxists – are inferior people, but their ideas are inferior and incompatible with republican government.
In today’s world where diversity is become the pearl of great price and more to be prized that all other virtues, any suggestion that diversity may not automatically be a strength, but can, in fact, prove to be a weakness, is dismissed as unacceptable. But look at Solomon’s wives. They were a diverse lot, but they were not a source of strength, but rather one of weakness. His Moabite, Hittite, Edomite and Egyptian wives “turned his heart after other gods,” the major factor in the breakup of the United Kingdom.
At the same time waves of non-Protestant immigration was taking place, American Protestantism itself was succumbing to the forces of irrationalism, liberalism and feminism. Had American Protestants remained true to the faith of their forefathers, perhaps they could have served as counterbalance to the increasing religious and ethnic diversity in American and kept the nation on an even keel.
But just as Solomon’s unfaithfulness allowed once hidden divisions within Israel to rise to the surface after his death, so too has the faithlessness of American Protestants led the collapse of any basis for national unity in the United States. We’re no longer so much a nation with a shared history and set of beliefs as we are a warring mob of people that happen to live in the same geographical vicinity to one another. In the Year of Our Lord 2021, it appears to this observer that the rule of law in America is, if not fully dead, very nearly so and that there is nothing to stop its ultimate demise. If and when that day comes, can America be long for this world? Jesus said that a kingdom divided against itself will not stand. If true, and it is, how can America survive?
Earlier I mentioned that what I find most compelling about shipwrecks is that they provide opportunity for people to reveal their true character. On Titanic there were heroes and cowards. Not often mentioned were the brave stokers and engineers who stayed at their posts in the bowels of the ship long after it was obvious that Titanic was going down. Their actions helped keep the ship’s power on and wireless going to the very end. There were cowards, too. One man dressed as a woman to secure a place on lifeboat he otherwise would not have been able to board.
The metaphor “ship of state” dates all the way back to Plato’s Republic, and is certainly an apt turn of phrase for this post. Just as ships are large and powerful objects that require a steady hand to steer them, so to do states. After a large disaster in either case, there can be a lot of second guessing of the people in charge. You can play the “what if” game with Titanic just as you can with America.
What if Titanic’s designers had extended the watertight compartments a deck or two higher?, what if the ship wasn’t traveling at top speed?, what if the lookouts had spotted the iceberg 30 seconds sooner?, what if the iceberg hadn’t just nicked the six and final compartment?
What if slavery had never been established in the colonies?, what if American Protestants had not abandoned the Calvinism of their colonial forefathers?, what if America had a wiser immigration policy in the 19th and 20th centuries?
We can play “what if” all we want, but obviously none of that is going to change either the fate of the Titanic or the present reality of our nation.
As did Titanic, America is taking on water, and fast. As Christians, how do we respond? Do we ignore what’s going on around us and seek to rearrange the deck chairs? Do we panic? Do we play the coward hoping to survive through dishonest means? No to all that. What we do is what we’re called to do, to walk in our present circumstances in a manner worthy of the Lord. And what does that look like? Read what the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.”
That’s our job. Yours and mine.
One-Time
Monthly
Yearly
Make a non-tax deductible donation to support the work of Lux Lucet.
Lux Lucet 