God made us; we don’t have to define ourselves, he has already done that. By turning away from him, we have spoilt everything. We can’t sort it out ourselves, because we are part of the problem. But God has sent the rescuer we so desperately need.
God’s Son being born on earth is a wonderful affirmation of our created bodies. He identified with our sinful nature, without himself being a sinner. He died the death that we deserved. …
Genesis 3 records the scene in which the first humans, given great freedom to enjoy God’s good creation, defied his clear command. But their bid for freedom, far from making them ‘like God’, dragged them down into a state of brokenness, of fallenness.
We are created, but fallen – and every aspect of our humanity is affected by this: we are all prone not only to bodily sickness and decline but also to disorders of our intellects, emotions and wills.…
According to Genesis 1:27 (quoted by Jesus in Matthew 19:4), ‘God created mankind in his own image…male and female he created them.’
We are creatures, and therefore our identity is found, not by asserting our independence, but by embracing what our Creator has made us to be.
We are not machines; we are ‘flawed masterpieces’. If you set out to restore an Old Master, you don’t think: “This would look better with a car, rather than a hay cart”: you must be true to the work of the original artist.…
One result of the Enlightenment was that reliance on revelation was replaced with reason as the authoritative source of knowledge. But our society has now largely lost its confidence in reason, and therefore has abandoned the concept of objective truth as applied to the ‘big questions’ of meaning and morality.
We live, accordingly, in an age of subjectivism, of individualism, of personal freedom. I am free: free to think and live as I want. Free to be me. …
Here’s the first instalment of my summary of Vaughan Robert’s short book on this subject:-
Transgender is today’s big social, ethical and cultural issue. Stories of transitioning, debates about which public bathrooms to use, documentaries on transgender children, are impacting us on almost a daily basis.
How are Christians to respond:- not only to the issues, but also to the people involved, as we come into contact with them?
‘Transgender’ covers a range of experiences in which an individual’s sense of gender does not match their biological sex. …
It is sometimes thought that in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 we have two entirely separate and self-contained creation accounts, so different as to be incompatible.
But they are neither contradictory accounts, nor carbon copies of one another.
Claire Smith discusses the similarities and differences most helpfully:
When we look at these two accounts we see there is sameness and difference. They are not conflicting accounts, but they are not carbon copies either. Each makes its own distinctive contribution.…
Sometimes, we need to move from the general to the particular, from statistics to personal experience, to really feel the impact of the ‘sexual revolution’.
Denny Burk quotes the heartbreaking words of a mother whose daughter has ‘transitioned’:
Like any parent, I felt betrayed when I found out a pediatric endocrinologist, someone who knows how powerful our bodies’ natural hormones are, would teach my 16-year old daughter to inject herself with testosterone, a primarily male hormone known and documented to have many horrible side effects on young girls including male pattern baldness, vaginal atrophy, infertility, and an increased risk of heart disease and cancer.…
Clearly, God is not ‘male’. So should we not stop referring to God exclusively (or predominantly) as ‘he’?
The argument is that to refer to God with masculine language is to demean the dignity of women, to imply that they are less ‘godlike’ than men, and to perpetuate their subservient positions.
The solutions would be either to refer to God in both masculine and feminine language (in roughly equal proportions), or to use gender-neutral language when referring to the deity. …
Who am I? People today are obsessed with the question of self-identity.
But a coherent sense of identity is under threat:-
In the past people settled into relatively stable patterns quite early on in their life cycle – a long-term job, getting married, bearing children. Now the transition from adolescence to adulthood stretches into the early thirties, with an ever-widening range of possibilities offering vastly increased options for how to be ‘me’ today.
The problem is magnified by the rise of hyper-connectivity, with the proliferation of social networks and streams of information. …
This recent post by Ian Paul has prompted me to return to the subject of statistics on sexual identity.
According to the Office for National Statistics:-
…
- In 2016, just over 1 million (2.0%) of the UK population aged 16 and over identified themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB).
- The population aged 16 to 24 were the age group most likely to identify as LGB in 2016 (4.1%).
- More males (2.3%) than females (1.6%) identified themselves as LGB in 2016.
