Christian education will outshine the fires of neo-pagan revolution.
This forms the crux of Dr. Stephen Chavura’s 30-minute morale-boosting, broadside delivered at Emmanuel College in Sydney over the weekend.
Campion College’s senior history lecturer is adamant that “Bible-affirming educationalists” have been given a kairos moment.
The emerging neo-pagan dark age – aka the ‘great awokening’ – is a time of “great opportunity,” not surrender, he argued.
We should be advancing! Not hiding light under a bushel.
We should be light. Not huddled together in cloistered communities, out of disinterest, or fear.
Nor should we be trumpeting retreat to the sound of: “We need to lose the culture wars cheerfully.”
A genuine Ecclesia should “shine brighter, as the world gets darker,” he exclaimed!
The qualifier for this is, of course, consistency, and conviction.
This light only shines with a high calibre burn for “as long as we understand scripture, and live according to its teachings.”
As long as, he continued, “We understand that our Logos is Jesus.”
Some will be stung by this “brightness, and declare it harmful, and pernicious.”
To many, though, “that brightness will be The Light that declares, with power, there is life beyond sin and guilt,” Dr. Chavura added.
This is because people know deep down something is wrong.
They’re turning for “meaning and direction to various sources, which include pale imitations of Christianity.”
Examples Chavura uses are Jordan Peterson’s painfully cautious crawl towards finding meaning and purpose in the Bible.
Parallel to this is the cultic seduction of Marx’s “hideously contorted Christianity,“ demonstrated by “Cultural Marxism, Wokeness, and identity politics.”
This is all subjective moralism.
Hence, he warns: “Acting on empathy easily slides into acting on feelings,” he explained, citing esteemed church historian and theologian Carl Trueman.
“This can be like performing surgery or administering medicine, without any understanding of human anatomy.”
Empathy has value, the problem is sin.
“Like reason, empathy is affected by sin, and liable to be destructive.”
Another example he uses to illustrate his point is how oppression is being “conflated with people merely not getting what they want.”
The word “oppressed” has come to mean “someone who is not allowed to act upon their desires,” such as pederasty.
“Personal desire satisfaction is opposed to living according to our ends as God’s image bearers.”
Hence, God’s objective morality, and therefore Christian theological education, still speaks to its rightful place in the world.
Even in a neo-paganised society.
Christians like William Wilberforce, and those involved in the anti-slavery movement are not irrelevant, nor anachronistic.
Neither is their Biblical view of humanity: that of being made in God’s image.
Look at the world, Chavura declared, this morality is far from outdated.
This great opportunity to speak into the great awakening is forged by those who came before us.
To lose the culture war battles cheerfully means loving ourselves rather than loving our neighbours.
If you are “losing the culture wars cheerfully, and understand the implications of loss for your neighbours, then you’re unloving.”
To “lose the culture wars cheerfully is unchristian.”
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