On Pentecostals and Paint: Destiny Church and Rainbow Crossings

The Cross, Conversion Therapy, and the Countries Down Under

March 19, 2024 Ming

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“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked…”
Ephesians 2:1-2A

Introduction

Recently, Australian news sources have been abuzz with plans for a bill outlawing conversion therapy to be passed in New South Wales. Though I do not think that we have any direct access to what the Australian bill contains, looking at our (New Zealand’s) conversion therapy act passed in 2022 will surely do some good.¹ I will briefly provide an overview of the bill in this section, list two objections against our bill in the second section, and then address a deeper issue, namely the fundamental conflict of the Christian Gospel and conversion therapy bills.²

The explicit aim of the New Zealand conversion therapy bill is twofold: to “recognise and prevent harm caused by conversion practices” and to “promote respectful and open discussions regarding sexuality and gender.” A conversion practice is defined as a “practice, sustained effort, or treatment” that “is directed towards an individual because of the individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression” and which is performed “with the intention of changing or suppressing the individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.”

Abortion and Peter Singer: Singing out of Tune

2 Comments February 20, 2024 Ming

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“For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.”
Psalm 139:13

It is not a controversial fact that life begins at fertilization.¹For instance, a Princeton University webpage lists fifteen academic sources that support this point. One of the quoted sources clearly states that “fertilization is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed”.² An article from PubMed states that “Biologists from 1,058 academic institutions… assessed survey items on when a human’s life begins and, overall, 96% (5337 out of 5577) affirmed the fertilization view [human life begins at fertilization]”.³ I could go on.

So, the abortion debate is now centred on philosophical considerations. One case study will do. Peter Singer, Emeritus Professor of Bioethics at Princeton, answers whether he would save a mouse or human being from a fire: in “almost all cases [he] would save the human being”. Interestingly, the reason for this saving is “not because the human being is human” but because “it matters whether a being is the kind of being who can see that he or she actually has a life — that is, can see that he or she is the same being who exists now, who existed in the past, and who will exist in the future”. Singer’s criteria for something that is worth saving involves some kind of temporal awareness. To explicitly connect this answer to abortion, “no newborn baby is a person” because newborn babies do not have “a sense of the future”.⁴

Of Toolsheds, Marsh-Wiggles, Atheism, and the New Year

January 7, 2024 Ming

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“…in your light do we see light.”
-Psalm 36:9

Of Toolsheds and Marsh-Wiggles

A few minutes before the dawn of the New Year, I found myself on a steep and crowded street that overlooked most of the Auckland skyline. Most people (I included) aimed phones at the skyline in anticipation. A vague countdown began, and then the vast horizon blossomed with fireworks. I was struck by the sheer number of people fixated on recording, swaying their phones to and fro like wands by which memory and atmosphere could be captured.

The aim of this article is an indictment of modernity. As Michael Ward states: “The incessant spiritual orchestration that accompanies [the universe], that actually constitutes it, and that is normally inaudible, is now also considered incredible. The cosmos therefore comes to be regarded as nothing more than a very elaborate machine when in reality it is tingling with life…'”¹ Ward claims that the medieval conception of the universe as a “festival not a machine” is now beyond belief.² Our world has become disenchanted. In the words of Saturn by Sleeping at Last, we have lost the reality of, “How rare and beautiful it is to even exist”.

Fragments from Narnia – Part Ten: Truth and Spite

November 22, 2023 Ming

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“For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”
2 Peter 1:16

“For the next few days [Lucy] was very miserable. She could have made it up with the others quite easily at any moment if she could have brought herself to say that the whole thing was only a story made up for fun. But Lucy was a very truthful girl and she knew that she was really in the right; and she could not bring herself to say this. The others who thought she was telling a lie, and a silly lie too, made her very unhappy. The two elder ones did this without meaning to do it, but Edmund could be spiteful, and on this occasion he was spiteful. He sneered and jeered at Lucy and kept on asking her if she’d found any other new countries in other cupboards all over the house.”
C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

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Truth and Spite

There are two lessons I want to draw from Lewis’ brief description here. The first lesson is that an uncompromising devotion to truth, and indeed the Truth (Jn. 14:6), must characterise Christians. The second lesson concerns rotten fruit and a “pour lemon juice” mentality exemplified by Edmund. I will focus primarily on the first point, particularly relating it to apologetics and cultural interaction. Let me preface this article by reiterating what I have stated in previous articles. Lewis, through simple stories, communicates practical truths. Stories incarnate virtue. This incarnation is not only important for children to understand but for adults too. Even if what I discuss here is simple, and it is, that does not mean it is simplistic.

Firstly, Lewis describes Lucy as a “very truthful girl”. Already, we see something that our culture frowns upon. Our culture does not appreciate describing people in objective categories. A Stuff article from 2009 describes a then 54-year-old man, an “overweight bloke, with a moustache, who drove a 4WD and was into heavy drinking”, who decided that he was a “woman trapped in a man’s body”. He then changed his identity to Rebeka and began to wear female clothes.¹ Notice the separation of psychology and biology. One can fit into the category of “man” biologically, but this category is not so objective that it extends also to psychology. The category is flexible and subjective, subordinated to your feelings or thoughts. Another example of the cultural frowning upon objective categories is a lecturer in forensic psychology who I remember declaring that we should not call people “pedophiles” but instead say they have a “pedophilic disorder”. To categorise them as “pedophiles” would be stigmatising. We would not want to hurt their feelings, of course. But the Biblical view is that people are objectively and categorically one way or the other. You are either truthful or a liar. You are either a man or a woman. You are either dead in sin (Eph. 2:1) or alive in Christ (Eph. 2:4). You are either unrighteous or justified (1 Cor. 6:9-11). We would do well to talk in objective categories.

Fragments from Narnia – Part Eight: The War Against Children

November 8, 2023 Ming

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“Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, ‘When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live.'”
Exodus 1:15-16

“You are the child,” said Mr. Tumnus. “I had orders from the White Witch that if ever I saw a Son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve in the wood, I was to catch them and hand them over to her. And you are the first I ever met. And I’ve pretended to be your friend and asked you to tea, and all the time I’ve been meaning to wait till you were asleep and then go and tell her.”
C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

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The War Against Children

I do not believe Lewis’ mention of the White Witch’s command against any “Son of Adam” or “Daughter of Eve” was arbitrarily chosen. Namely, when the White Witch commanded Tumnus to catch any child of Adam or Eve and give them to her, it was not merely because of her general malice. She, like her real-world analogue Satan, has a specific agenda against children. In addressing this agenda, this article will be split into two parts. The first part addresses why this agenda is the case. The second part discusses specific cultural manifestations of this agenda. However, before all this, a few preliminary comments on supernaturalism must be made.

Supernaturalism simply refers to belief in the supernatural. The supernatural is stuff outside the natural, things that cannot be accounted for through empirical evidence or scientific experiments. The supernatural includes God, demons, Satan, angels, and so on. Though these supernatural entities exert influence on the natural world, they themselves are not part of it. God is spirit (Jn. 4:24), angels are called “ministering spirits” (Heb. 1:14), and demons and Satan, on account of being fallen angels (Rev. 12:7-8), are spirits too.

Fragments from Narnia – Part Seven: After Darkness, Light

October 31, 2023 Ming

Hubble snap a beautiful supernova explosion some 160,000 light-years from Earth by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
Ephesians 2:8-9

“The White Witch? Who is she?”
“Why, it is she that has got all Narnia under her thumb. It’s she that makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!”
C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

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After Darkness, Light

I must immediately confess that I have gone back to a previous passage. I originally intended to proceed through the text without skipping to and fro. I must also confess that the topic discussed in this article has very little to do with the Narnia quote. In other words, because it is Reformation Day, I have essentially highjacked this Narnia series to discuss Reformation doctrine, which hopefully will not cause too much distress. The only semblance I can draw between the Reformation and the quote above is that just as Christmas followed winter in Narnia, light followed darkness in the Reformation. Post tenebras lux is the Latin phrase for this; after darkness came light. The obvious dissimilarity is that Lewis intended for Christmas in Narnia to symbolise the consequences of Christ’s earthly ministry. So, the connection of this article to the Narnia quote may be extremely tenuous, but as the New Zealand saying goes, “she’ll be right”.¹ My goal in this article is twofold: to briefly discuss Reformation doctrine and secondly, what the Reformation can teach about our times.

Justification by faith alone (sola fide) is called the material cause of the Reformation. This language, which borrows Aristotelian categories, refers to how sola fide was the stuff at the heart of the Reformation. Just as marble is the material cause of a Renaissance statue because it is the stuff out of which that statue is made, sola fide was the stuff that constituted the Reformation. Without it, you had no Reformation. Martin Luther called sola fide the “chief article”.³ John Calvin declared that it was the “principal ground on which religion must be supported”.⁴ Moving to contemporary times, R. C. Sproul proclaimed that “[w]ithout the doctrine of justification by faith alone, the gospel is not merely compromised, it is lost altogether”.⁵ J. I. Packer wonderfully articulates that “to declare and defend God’s justification publicly as the only way of life for any man was at once an act of confessing their [the Reformers’] faith, of glorifying their God by proclaiming his wonderful work, and of urging others to approach him in penitent and hopeful trust just as they did themselves”.⁶ Scripture alone (sola scriptura) was the formal principle of the Reformation, giving shape and form to the Reformers’ arguments.

Fragments from Narnia – Part Four: Service under the White Witch

October 14, 2023 Ming

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“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”
Ephesians 2:1-3

“Like what I’ve done,” said the Faun. “Taken service under the White Witch. That’s what I am. I’m in the pay of the White Witch.”
C. S. Lewis, The Lion, THe Witch, and the Wardrobe

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Service under the White Witch

In our current cultural climate, freedom is valued as a kind of highest good. This valuing can be found in the feminist or LGBTQ cry for “reproductive freedoms” or “sexual liberation”, which includes abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, abhorrence of traditional Christian views on gender and marriage, and so on. Another example is the Marxist cry for the proletariat to throw off their chains inflicted by capitalism and the unjust bourgeoise. Eastern religions teach freedom from the flow of life and ceaseless suffering as we are subsumed into Hinduism’s Brahma or Buddhism’s Nirvana. Secularists call for freedom from the restrictive bonds of religion and its allegedly toxic impact on families and society. Humans desire freedom. Contrarily, the Christian view is considered harsh, restrictive, Victorian, Puritanical, and a list of other pejoratives. Our culture claims that being a Christian is a stultifying, soul-crushing affair.

But the question, Biblically speaking, should not be whether we are enslaved to anyone or anything, but who or what we are enslaved to. The Apostle Paul presents only two alternatives: we are slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness (Rom. 6:15-23).¹Logically, this dichotomy means that there is no middle ground. There is no neutral space of agnosticism when approaching God. To be a slave to God means that we give our all to Him and that we pray “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10) not with an empty formality but with a deep desire to align our will more with His, and from then on to do His will. This notion of slavery is one that seems deeply repulsive, but really it is not one in which the slave’s identity is crushed under the domineering spirit of the master. Biblically, submission, servitude, or slavery to God is the opposite: it is one wherein our identity is found in Him and our service for Him. More on this later.

Fragments from Narnia – Part Two: Daughter of Eve

September 25, 2023 Ming

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“[T]hen the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
Genesis 2:7

“Good evening, good evening,” said the Faun. “Excuse me—I don’t want to be inquisitive—but should I be right in thinking that you are a Daughter of Eve?”
“My name’s Lucy,’ said she, not quite understanding him.”
C. S. LEWIS, the lion, the wtich, and the wardrobe

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Daughter of Eve

Now would be a good time to reiterate that my reflections on Narnia will not be strictly exegetical. I will not be noticing everything Lewis may have wanted me to notice, and I may be commenting on things that Lewis did not intend to imply. As long as this is done responsibly and in moderation, I think this is quite fine. I mention all of this because I want to provide a few thoughts on the passage above, which occurs at the start of the second chapter of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. It is an incidental comment: Lucy did not understand what Mr. Tumnus meant by “Daughter of Eve”. I do not know if what I will say here is what Lewis intended.¹ Nevertheless, I chose to highlight this because in modern times, due to belief in Darwinian evolution, society no longer considers humanity as sons and daughters of Adam and Eve; rather, we are the mere product of naturalistic mechanisms. I will argue here that this is not without consequence.

To launch instantly into a drastic example, take the comments of Peter Singer, a moral philosopher at Princeton. In a section on his website about commonly asked questions, he responds to a question asking whether he would rather save a mouse or a human being from a fire. He says: “Yes, in almost all cases I would save the human being. But not because the human being is human, that is, a member of the species Homo sapiens. Species membership alone isn’t morally significant, but equal consideration for similar interests allows different consideration for different interests.” This comment is already significant enough: he does not say “in all cases” but “in almost all cases”. I am not sure whether Singer means that there would be one case where he rescues the mouse over the human, but that is not my primary focus here. Note what Singer says next; the reason that he would save the human is “not because the human being is human” because just being part of a species “isn’t morally significant”.

Christian Reflections on the Barbie Movie – Part Two

September 4, 2023 Ming

“In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”
John 1:4

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Christian Reflections on the Barbie Movie – Part One

Christian Reflections on the Barbie Movie – Part Two

Feminism

In this section, I aim at a twofold goal: to provide commentary on the opening scene of the Barbie Movie, thereby leading to a discussion of demeaning children and abortion, and to present a Biblical case for the role of men and women.

The trailer or first scene of the movie begins with a landscape shot, shifting to depicting little girls playing with dolls and prams. The girls sit on a barren, rocky landscape. “Since the beginning of time, since the first little girl ever existed, there have been dolls.” says the narrator dramatically. Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra, a symphonic poem named after Nietzsche’s nihilistic philosophical work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, begins to play and continues in the background. The narrator continues: “But the dolls were always and forever baby dolls until…”. The music crescendos. A giant Barbie dressed in a black-and-white swimsuit appears. She lowers her sunglasses, smiles at the girls, and winks. The next shot immediately depicts a girl shattering a doll with a different doll. Another doll is thrown into the air.¹

Culture

Introduction

Of Toolsheds and Marsh-Wiggles

Articles in this Series

Truth and Spite

Articles in this Series

The War Against Children

Articles in this Series

After Darkness, Light

Articles in this Series

Service under the White Witch

Articles in this Series

Daughter of Eve

Articles in this Series

Feminism