All the statistics point to an increase in acts of aggression and violent crime in our society. But why is this happening? Secular thinkers used to opine that religion exacerbated violence; the theory being that commitment to absolute truth would cause people to insist that their viewpoint must be adhered to and that violence would be the tool most readily used by close-minded bigots to force others to change. But the twentieth-century gave the lie to this notion - instead of the religious zealots being the violent ones, it turns out that the atheists and pagans (from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to Pol Pot to Mao) have been most guilty of acts of violence and that frequently against people of religion.

In other words, secularism seems to be less of a bulwark against violence than it is a foundation for it. But why would this be? Chuck and Aaron discuss how belief in absolute truth creates the possibility of rational discourse as a tool to persuade others, but a lack of belief in God lends itself to an abandonment of the hope of using logic as a means of personal contact. This makes education hopeless, and the only tool left for personal persuasion is power. The end result, unfortunately, has all too frequently been violence.

For Christians, the hope of peace can only be found in the God who personally took on the violence of this world but didn’t respond in kind, who absorbed the physical terrorism of the Roman Empire, absorbed it, and loved in return. If Christians can model for our culture what it means to live in the God who eschewed violence for self-sacrificial love, and if Christians can recommit to the truth which comes from the God who is the Truth Incarnate and persuades others with relational love instead of force, then the Christian church can become a paradigm for how the world can run on peace and not violence.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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For Christians, any discussion about any topic must begin and end with the Bible, because if God is God we cannot afford to deny him the final word. When it comes to topics upon which the prevailing culture diverges from what God says in the Bible, the temptation for Christians is to accommodate its teaching to meet the current mood of the cultural moment, but this is at its heart an attempt to be God instead of him, believing in him when he agrees with us but dismissing him when he doesn’t.

The Bible’s teaching on sexuality is clear - God has designed humans for one of two actions: either a lifelong, covenant-committed relationship between one man and one woman, or faithful celibacy. God calls us, when we commit any sexual desires or behaviors that do not fit into this pattern, to repentance, forgiveness, and the promise of being fulfilled in Jesus’ love for us.

Because all humans are sinful all humans struggle against this command, but whether the sinfulness we struggle against is opposite-attracted desires and actions or same-sex desires and actions, the promise of the Gospel that there is no sin the blood of Jesus cannot cover holds true!

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

Subscribe to the show at https://cacg.saintjamesglencarbon.org.

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What does it mean when someone wears a cross? What if that person is a Christian, or a non-Christian? Is it ever wrong to wear a cross? There are roughly two answers to this question.

First, since the cross serves as a symbolic reminder for Christians that the creator God is not a distant divinity, but a flesh-and-blood human who died to rescue his creation, the cross should be worn with faith in Jesus and reverence for the great lengths he went to in his mission to save us.

But second, there still remains a value to the symbol of the cross, even when worn in unbelief. The very fact of its existence as jewelry stands as a witness to the unbelievable subversion of worldly political powers by the self-sacrificial power of God. In the Roman Empire, the cross was a tool of subjugation, of the public humiliation of those who dared oppose the power and claims of Caesar. The whole point of the cross was propaganda - if you dare oppose the Emperor you will be stripped naked, hung up in the middle of your town for all to see, and slowly killed by a symphony of pains and deprivations; in other words, it was designed to be deeply shameful. That Christians took this symbol of the death of a slave and co-opted it as the symbol of their God who became a suffering slave to defeat the evil powers that be and rescue his people from sin is historically astounding. And if the one who wears the cross necklace does not believe in this message (while incredibly important for the eternal destiny of that particular person), the power of the symbol itself can still not be undermined.

In this sense, the wearing of the cross as decoration or jewelry serves as a constant reminder to a culture which would like to forget it, that Jesus is Lord and no amount of effort to stamp him or his kingdom out will ever be successful - truly, the gates of hell cannot prevail against it.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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To comment on this episode, visit https://saintjamesglencarbon.org/cacg-ep110.