By Rick Palsterer, Juicy Ecumenism blog
The rapid advance of social liberalism, both in its social acceptability and the legal requirement of conformity to it, has left Christians disoriented and reacting, and for not a few, seriously considering alternatives which are clearly outside of what Scripture and Christian tradition allows. Since it is through Scripture that we hear the voice of Christ that we are to obey, we need to again orient and anchor ourselves in its unchanging truth in order to be obedient to Christ. In particular, we need to remember that the truth we believe in objectively corresponds to reality; it is not a human construction that we find we are comfortable with.
The first move of the Christian is to respond in obedience to the voice of God. This continues throughout life and into eternity. There should never be deviation from it, whatever the reason. The Bible particularly emphasizes this is to be faithfully followed regardless of the pain that such obedience may cause. We have the examples of Abraham, willing to sacrifice his favored son (Gen 22), Daniel’s three friends risking horrific death as the price of obedience (Dan. 3), and the call to turn away from the world and toward Christ at the beginning of the Gospels (Matt. 4:17). This immediately sets us at odds with the contemporary West, which insists on quality of life as a final criterion of morality.
Faithful Christians must therefore have a clear confession of faith in a world which has become much more hostile than we have known it in the West for generations. The Christian orthodoxy that this entails is not difficult to identify or support from Scripture – it consists of faith in a supreme personal being, identical with the God of Israel, incarnate in Jesus Christ, who died a bloody death for sin, and rose giving us eternal life.