By Scott Tibbs, February 20, 2015
In a sermon a few weeks ago, Doug Wilson made the following point:
| Many defenders of traditional values refuse to honor God as God and refuse to give Him thanks by name. No wonder we lose. We cannot defend generic morality. The reason we cannot defend generic morality successfully is there is no such thing as generic morality. |
I thought this was an especially poignant point. After all, why do we believe in the "traditional values" we talk about? It is because we are Christians. The reason we argue that the institution of marriage should be one man and one woman is because that is the way it is defined in Scripture, especially in the New Testament. The reason we oppose abortion is because the unborn baby is a person made in the image of God.
There are two big reasons this is important. First, because we lose credibility when we pretend we are making secular arguments when everyone knows we are acting under the conviction of our faith. Even those who disagree with us can respect that we are being honest about why we are advocating for the positions we hold, but when we dishonestly wrap our position in a secular argument and pretend there is no faith-based reason for that argument we cannot command respect - but we do deserve scorn.
The second (and much more important reason) is that we are acknowledging that we are under the authority of the King of Kings and that we are speaking out on these issues because of our commitment to Him. We are showing we are ashamed of our faith and our belief that we have to rely on our own strength, knowledge and wisdom to win the argument. When we do this, we are every bit as much in rebellion against the universal authority of Jesus Christ as the unbelievers who openly oppose him, whether our policy position is in line with Biblical morality or not.
I used to be of the opinion that we cannot use explicitly Christian arguments or use Scripture to make our case but I have since realized the arrogance and folly of that position. Why would we not want to acknowledge that the Creator is on our side and that we are acting out of obedience to Him? Are we really this arrogant and self-important? Are we really ashamed of our faith and our Savior?
This is not to say that we should not use secular arguments to make our case. There are plenty of secular arguments for the protection of the unborn, for example. God is the Author of all logic, and He gave us our intellect for a reason. Logic is not opposed to Christianity. Instead, logic flows from Christianity. But we should always put that under the authority of our Savior, instead of simply being just another political interest group. We need to kill the "traditional values" movement and replace it with Christian values.
