"I'm Not a Social Reformer, I'm Here to Preach the Gospel"

Dear Friends:

Suppose you are a member of the Mission Committee of your church, and there are a number of missionaries that you support around the world. There is a missionary who you specifically are very fond of, a bright, committed and active guy in the jungles of the Amazon, working among the indigenous tribes there. He sends back amazing reports about scores of natives converted to Christianity, evangelistic outreach, churches planted and so on. The Mission Committee is happy to support him, and your church is proud to display him as one of the most successful missionaries you’ve ever supported.

One day the Mission Committee authorizes you to make a mission trip to the Amazon and visit the missionary and see his work first hand. You pack up your video camera, your toothbrush, and clothes for a couple of days, and one Saturday afternoon, after a short and uneventful flight, followed by a long a very eventful ride in an old Landrover through a rainforest where the ground has never seen the sunlight break through the canopies of the trees, you are safely accommodated at the comfortable though far from luxurious home of the missionary. He is excited. He has talked to you the whole way from the airport, and now he has retired to prepare his sermon for the next day, giving you the opportunity to relax and even get some sleep.

The church service the next day is amazing. The building is full, scores of people, some from other villages, singing hymns, taking communion, and some of them even reading from the Bible. The tribal chiefs are there too, singing and worshiping with the rest. The mission is an obvious success, and you don’t miss to record it on video.

Then comes Monday morning. The missionary has told you that he needed to travel to the nearest mechanic shop to fix his car, so you are left in the village, and you have the opportunity to sleep late and then spend some time with the local people. You are awakened early in the morning by monotonous singing of several male voices. You look through the window and you see not far away a dozen of men on their knees before something that looks like a Tapir hide on a pole. They sing a few words, then lay prostrate before the pole, then back to their knees and sing a few more words. When you look at the faces of the men, you can recognize some of them from the church service the previous day, and in fact, you can also recognize the village chief who read from the Bible the day before!

You frantically dress up and go to find your translator to ask him about what you just saw. His answer is that the chief and the men are going hunting and they are praying to the spirits to give them good luck – in the form of a nice fat Tapir, of course. Before you can recover from your astonishment, the men end their prayer, get on their feet and go to their huts to get their weapons. One of the men, before he leaves his hut, grabs his wife by her long hair and starts punching her mercilessly in the face, yelling at her in their language. Then he pushes her aside and follows the chief and the other men as they disappear in the jungle. You ask the translator why the man beat his wife. The translator says that she was not supposed to feed her mother anymore because she has reached the “separation” age. “What is a separation age?” you ask, only to get the horrible response that this is the age at which old people are left in the jungle to die or be eaten by predators to save expenses for the family.

This is now too much for you. While meditating on the events of the morning, you hear terrible squeals. You run there to see what’s happening and you see a group of boys and a small pig. When you get closer, you see they are some of the boys on the church choir of the day before. But then you see the reason for the squeals: The boys are torturing the poor animal! They are using their knives to flay it alive, and you can see it still kicking and screaming in their strong hands. But the picture is not complete until a group of girls joins in and laughs merrily at the desperate squeals of the pig.

You run back to the house, disgusted and shaken, and you are trying to gather your thoughts. The translator, alarmed by the distressed look in your face, has come back with you and he is now trying to understand what the reason for it is. “Didn’t you see what all these people are doing?” you ask. “The prayer to the spirits, the man beating his wife, the old woman about to be sent to die, the cruelty of those young kids?”

The man is confused. “Yes, sir, I see them. But … what’s the problem with those things, sir?”

“What’s the problem!? Are you serious? These people were in the church yesterday, and today they act as if they have never heard the Gospel!”

The man is still confused. “But our missionary never told us anything against those practices.”

Now you know whom to talk to.

A couple of hours later the missionary is back, and you meet him, determined to corner him and get the truth out of him. The guy is in a cheerful mood; obviously he had success with repairing his car, so now he sits and listens to you with a content smile on his face. You tell him about what you saw a couple of hours earlier. He doesn’t seem moved.

“Well, Mr. Missionary,” you ask sternly, “what do you have to say about it? I saw a few practices this morning, clearly idolatrous and barbarian, and the translator tells me you never really told these people how abominable these practices were! Now, tell me the truth. What exactly are you doing here as a missionary?”

The missionary doesn’t seem to be concerned at all. In fact, he seems to have expected your questions.

“The truth, Mr. Sponsor, is this: I am a Christian missionary, not a social reformer. I am here to preach the Gospel, to save souls, and to plant churches. When I came to your church and asked for support, I didn’t say I was going to do anything else but those three things. I did not say I was going to try to change their society, their customs, and their political structure. I am not trying to tell them how to build their economic system. I am not here to interfere with their education or welfare programs.

“The things you saw are exactly this. You saw the chief and his men going to work. This is part of their economic system. Praying to the spirit of the Tapir is their way of preparation for work. It gives them the psychological and emotional preparedness for the economic task ahead. I know, it seems weird and backwards, but who am I to try to impose my American way of business and economics on them?

“The man beating his wife was only following an ancient custom. The family is a sociological unit, and there are specific rules in the family that are part of the overall social environment. I personally don’t like it, but again, I am not a social reformer, I am a missionary. And yes, it is important that her mother is left to die, because otherwise she would be an economic burden on the family. This is the way their welfare system works: Someone has to sacrifice or be sacrificed so that the rest have enough to eat. Can I interfere there? Based on what authority? I am here to preach Jesus to them and give them the opportunity to save their souls; I am not here to give them solutions to social problems.

“In this society it is not considered cruelty for children to torture animals; on the contrary, it is part of the educational system. All of the productive time of the men is spent providing food by hunting. The children need to learn from an early age to kill an animal, skin it, and cut it into pieces. They need to learn to reject their natural impulse to not inflict pain. It is important economic education, as well as political, because the same skill is necessary when the tribe defends its villages against other tribes. There is no mercy in the political world of the jungle, and I cannot allow my American prejudice to dictate that they should change their political and social rules.

“In short, Mr. Sponsor, my work is with the sacred, not with the secular. I am not a liberal reformer, and I am not preaching a social gospel. I am preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the salvation of men, not their institutions or their societies. That’s why I don’t believe I have the authority to tell the Christians in this village to change their social and political practices. The Gospel is about salvation of souls, not about changing cultures, and that’s what I am doing here.”

Respectfully,
Mark

Thanksgiving: A Religious Holiday All the Way

Dear Friends:

On Thursday, September 24, 1789, the First House of Representatives voted to recommend – in its exact wording – the First Amendment of the newly drafted Constitution to the states for ratification. The next day, Congressman Elias Boudinot from New Jersey proposed that the House and Senate jointly request of President Washington to proclaim a day of thanksgiving for “the many signal favors of Almighty God.” Boudinot said that he “could not think of letting the session pass over without offering an opportunity to all the citizens of the United States of joining, with one voice, in returning to Almighty God their sincere thanks for the many blessings he had poured down upon them.”1

Roger Sherman spoke in favor of the proposal by reminding his colleagues that the practice of thanksgiving is “warranted by a number of precedents in holy writ: for instance, the solemn thanksgivings and rejoicings which took place in the time of Solomon, after the building of the temple…. This example, he thought, worthy of Christian imitation on the present occasion.”2

There are numerous claims to the first official Thanksgiving celebrated in the New World. One of the earliest recorded festivals occurred a half century before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. “A small colony of French Huguenots established a settlement near present-day Jacksonville, Florida. On June 30, 1564, their leader, René de LaudonniPre, recorded that ‘We sang a psalm of Thanksgiving unto God, beseeching Him that it would please Him to continue His accustomed goodness towards us.’”3

In 1610, after a hard winter called “the starving time,” the colonists at Jamestown called for a time of thanksgiving. This was after the original company of 409 colonists had been reduced to 60 survivors. Extreme hardship did not deter the survivors from turning to God in thanksgiving. The colonists prayed for help that finally arrived by a ship filled with food and supplies from England. They held a prayer service to give thanks.

This thanksgiving celebration was not commemorated formally on a yearly basis. An annual commemoration of thanksgiving came nine years later in another part of Virginia. “On December 4, 1619, 38 colonists landed at a place they called Berkeley Hundred [in Virginia]. ‘We ordain,’ read an instruction in their charter, ‘that the day of our ship’s arrival … in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.’”4

Records show that the first official Thanksgiving Day was celebrated on June 29, 1676, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from Boston. Gov. Jonathan Belcher had issued similar proclamations in Massachusetts in 1730 and in New Jersey in 1749. George Washington proclaimed a day of thanksgiving on October 23, 1789, to be celebrated on Thursday, November 27.

While none of these Thanksgiving celebrations was an official national pronouncement (no nation existed at the time), they do support the claim that the celebrations were religious and specifically Christian in their origin and purpose. “Thanksgiving began as a holy day, created by a community of God-fearing Puritans sincere in their desire to set aside one day each year especially to thank the Lord for His many blessings. The day they chose, coming after the harvest at a time of year when farm work was light, fit the natural rhythm of rural life.”5

On October 3, 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared that the last Thursday of November 1863 would be set aside as a nationwide celebration of thanksgiving:

• We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown.
  
  But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most high God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy…. I do, therefore, invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday in November next as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent father who dwelleth in heaven.

Beginning with Lincoln, Presidents proclaimed that the last Thursday in November would be set aside for a national day of Thanksgiving. Franklin D. Roosevelt changed the celebration to the third Thursday in November “to give more shopping time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”6

This pragmatic and commercial approach to Thanksgiving has been adopted by our secular culture. Are we surprised that government schools want God out? If they keep Him in, they would be obligated.

SOURCES:

1 The Annals of the Congress, The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, Compiled From Authentic Materials by Joseph Gales, Senior (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 1:949-50.

2 Annals of the Congress, 950.

3 Diana Karter Appelbaum, Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, An American History (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1984), 14-15.

4 Jim Dwyer, ed., Strange Stories, Amazing Facts of America’s Past (Pleasantville, NY: The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., 1989), 198.

5 Appelbaum, Thanksgiving, 186.

6 Edmund H. Harvey, Jr., ed., Readers Digest Book of Facts (Pleasantville, NY: The Reader’s Digest Association, [1985] 1987), 125.


Respectfully,

Mark

Never Give Up. Never Surrender.

Dear Friends:

Alexis de Tocqueville was a keen observer of American society. Writing from the perspective of the 1830s, the French author concluded that the exceptional virtue, moral fiber, and self-restraint shown by Americans were due to the extraordinary influence of the Christian faith in this land. “It was religion that gave birth to the English colonies in America,” Tocqueville wrote.1

The religion that Tocqueville wrote about was Christianity. “While the United States embraced ‘an infinite variety’ of religious sects, Christianity stood in this new land as an ‘established and irresistible fact which no one seeks to attack or defend.’”2 Tocqueville considered America’s religious climate superior to that of Europe.

• All foreign visitors to America, Tocqueville noted, agreed that sexual morality was “infinitely stricter” in the new United States than anywhere else in the world. In America, he reported, all books, even novels, supposed women to be chaste, and no one boasted of amorous adventures. He was astonished to discover that in cases of sexual immorality, both the seduced and the seducer were scorned; he was equally surprised to learn that rape was punishable by death, while in France it was difficult to get any jury to convict rapists, even given much lighter sentences.3

The Puritan ethic was solidly entrenched in America prior to Tocqueville’s visit. His observations were later incorporated in his celebrated Democracy in America. But by 1830, European Enlightenment philosophy had gained a foothold in America and was making a significant impact.

Because of the strong influence of Christianity, Enlightenment philosophies were diluted enough so their impact was minimal. Even so, the incremental strides the movement had made were real. Add to this Darwinian evolution (1859), combined with Higher Criticism as propounded by Graf and Wellhausen (1869-1878), and a volatile mix had been concocted to destroy biblical ethics.

• Having turned away from the knowledge given by God, the Christian influence on the whole of culture has been lost. In Europe, including England, it took many years in the United States only a few decades. In the United States, in the short span from the twenties to the sixties, we have seen a complete shift. Ours is a post-Christian world in which Christianity, not only in the number of Christians but in cultural emphasis and cultural result, is no longer the consensus or ethos of our society.4

In all of this, man became the interpreter of reality. The Bible was just another book about religion. What Tocqueville saw as differences between European and American worldviews have now become nearly indistinguishable, especially at the academic and political levels. The rallying cry of the nineteenth century was “freedom” without restraint. “To be free was to be modern; to be modern was to take chances. The American century was to be the century of unleashing, of breaking away, at first from the 19th century (as Freud, Proust, Einstein and others had done), and eventually from any constraints at all.”5

What we are seeing today is the fruit of a nation’s steady but determined rejection of the Bible. “Everywhere this thinking, rooted in godlessness, bears fruit today. We can see that the fruit is bitter. In all areas of life man is trying to take control of his own ship. Meanwhile the ship is out of control, and many live in a state of helpless perplexity.”6

The libertines began to turn the ship slowly. They knew it would take time. In terms of television, there is a starting date: November 1, 1972, with the airing of That Certain Summer. This ABC TV-movie featured Hal Holbrook as Doug Salter, a divorced father whose son comes to stay with him for the summer. The boy is shocked to learn that his father has chosen homosexuality and to live with his “lover” (played by Martin Sheen).

The taboo had been broken, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put the taboo back together again. That Certain Summer was the vehicle the homosexual community needed to make their lifestyle seem normative. They were not after drama, “they wanted propaganda.”7 Even though homosexuals are a minority, they persisted in normalizing their worldview. They never give up; they never surrender. We’ve won a few small battles recently. The Maine anti-homosexual marriage reversal was big. Do you think this 31st setback is going to stop the homosexuals? Don’t count on it. The New York legislature is about to vote on homosexual marriage. It will probably pass. Then it will be up to the voters … again!

SOURCES:

1 Quoted in Allan C. Carlson, “Our National Self-Confidence: Understanding its Decline and Supporting its Revival” (Rockford, IL: The Rockford Institute, 1984), 6.

2 Carlson, “Our National Self-Confidence,” 6.

3 Carlson, “Our National Self-Confidence,” 7.

4 Francis A. Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1984), 28-29.

5 Roger Rosenblatt, “What Really Mattered?,” Time (October 1983), 25. Emphasis added.

6 Eta Linnemann, Historical Criticism of the Bible: Methodology or Ideology?, trans. Robert W. Yarbrough (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1990), 34.

7 Richard Levinson and William Link, Stay Tuned: An Inside Look at the Making of Prime-Time Television (New York, St. Martin’s, 1981), 133. Quoted in Montgomery, Target: Prime Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 77.


Respectfully,

Mark

4 Sheets of Parchment v. 2,032 Pages of Government Control

Dear Friends:

The Constitution of the United States was written on four sheets of parchment. If you count the Preamble and all 27 Amendments (remember there were originally only ten), it comes out to 20 typed pages. If you don’t count the signatures and amendments, you’ll have a document of 11 typed pages. No single Amendment is a full page. Many are only a single sentence in length. The First Amendment covers a multitude of freedoms: religion, press, assembly, speech, and the right to petition the government. It does it with only 45 words. Those original four sheets, about 4,500 words, were good enough to serve as a document to govern a nation.

Can you imagine a 2,032-page healthcare care bill with similar interpretive powers for Congress, the courts, and an always-in-power bureaucracy? Consider how much damage the two governmental branches have been able to do with just four sheets of parchment. What will they be capable of doing with 2,032 pages of a healthcare bill that will enable them to govern every facet of our lives?

Do you remember how the Supreme Court came to legalize abortion in 1973? Seven of the nine justices agreed that they had found in the “penumbra” – the “shadows” of the Constitution – the right to abortion. Here’s how Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion, argued for the shadowy “right” to kill preborn babies:

• The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however … the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. In varying contexts, the Court or individual Justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment … in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments … in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights … in the Ninth Amendment … or in the concept of liberty guaranteed by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment ….These decisions make it clear that only personal rights that can be deemed “fundamental” or “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” … are included in this guarantee of personal privacy. They also make it clear that the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage … procreation … contraception … family relationships … and child rearing and education ….

Notice that first line: “The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy.” But it doesn’t matter. One can be found in its shadows, and like shadows, they can be interpreted in almost any way, like the game parents play with their children asking what they see in cloud formations. “I see a bear… I see a dog… I see healthcare rationing… I see the right to abortion because the Supreme Court says it’s a right.”

But didn’t some Congressmen vote for the healthcare bill because abortion was stripped out? A lone Republican fell for this nonsense. Once government is in control of something, it gets to define it. Bureaucrats, judges, special interest groups, and all around guilt-manipulators will shine their lights on the dark places of this bill and create the shadows they need to force their long-term agenda on all of us. This healthcare bill is not about health; it’s about control.

It’s a shame that many in the pro-life community don’t see this. They believe they won one for the unborn. They haven’t. They only made it easier for so-called moderates to vote for a bill that one day will support abortion on demand and many new government mandated provisions that will affect us in ways that we cannot now imagine.

UPDATE:

• Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the Democrats’ chief deputy whip in the House, said that she and other pro-choice lawmakers would work to strip the amendment included in the House health bill that bars federal funding from going to subsidize abortions.
  
  “I am confident that when it comes back from the conference committee that that language won’t be there,” Wasserman Schultz said during an appearance on MSNBC. “And I think we’re all going to be working very hard, particularly the pro-choice members, to make sure that’s the case.”

While abortion is a violation of the sixth commandment, this healthcare bill additionally violates the second (sets up the State as an idol), fifth (makes the State our parent), eighth (supports legislative theft), and tenth (makes covetousness a national pastime) commandments. No one has described what we are in for better than Herb Schlossberg did in his book Idols for Destruction:

• “Rulers have ever been tempted to play the role of father to their people…. The state that acts like a wise parent instead of a vindictive judge has been an attractive image to many people. They include ecclesiastical authorities who have completely missed the point of the gospel warning to ‘call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven’ (Matt. 23:9). The father is the symbol not only of authority but also of provision. ‘Our Father who art in heaven…. Give us this day our daily bread’ (Matt. 6:9, 11). Looking to the state for sustenance is a cultic act [an act of worship]; we rightly learn to expect food from parents, and when we regard the state as the source of physical provision we render to it the obeisance of idolatry. The crowds who had fed on the multiplied loaves and fishes were ready to receive Christ as their ruler, not because of who he was but because of the provision. John Howard Yoder has rightly interpreted that scene: ‘The distribution of bread moved the crowd to acclaim Jesus as the new Moses, the provider, the Welfare King whom they had been waiting for.’
  
  “The paternal state not only feeds its children, but nurtures, educates, comforts, and disciplines them, providing all they need for their security. This appears to be a mildly insulting way to treat adults, but it is really a great crime because it transforms the state from being a gift of God, given to protect us against violence, into an idol. It supplies us with all blessings, and we look to it for all our needs. Once we sink to that level, as [C.S.] Lewis says, there is no point in telling state officials to mind their own business. ‘Our whole lives are their business’ [God in the Dock, p. 134]. The paternalism of the state is that of the bad parent who wants his children dependent on him forever. That is an evil impulse. The good parent prepares his children for independence, trains them to make responsible decisions, knows that he harms them by not helping them to break loose. The paternal state thrives on dependency. When the dependents free themselves, it loses power. It is, therefore, parasitic on the very persons whom it turns into parasites. Thus, the state and its dependents march symbiotically to destruction.
  
  “When the provision of paternal security replaces the provision of justice as the function of the state, the state stops providing justice. The ersatz [artificial and inferior substitute] parent ceases executing judgment against those who violate the law, and the nation begins losing benefits of justice. Those who are concerned about the chaos into which the criminal justice system has fallen should consider what the state’s function has become. Because the state can only be a bad imitation of a father, as a dancing bear act is of a ballerina, the protection of this Leviathan of a father turns out to be a bear hug.1

If this bill passes the Senate, abortion will be the least of our problems because the government will have a new definition of welfare to work with. Healthcare can and will be interpreted to mean what the judges say it means. We are under a Constitution, but as history has shown the Constitution is what the judges say it is.

SOURCE:

1 Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and its Confrontation with American Society (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1983), 183–84.


Respectfully,

Mark