My comment wasn’t to argue, “we should be held to the same standard as Satanists.” As you note, I was asking from the perspective of the civil magistrate. I understand God will deal with his people in his providence as he sees fit for our good, and that includes being subjected to injustices. Amen and amen.
My concern/critique is for those here who seem to want to defend or applaud that somehow the civil authorities are getting it right on this tylenol and tums thing. They aren’t. They’re simply showing more of their double standard against Christians. Let’s not pretend that what they’re doing is righteous.
If they are going to give a pass to Satanists in their overtly insincere beliefs in the name of religious freedom, while taking extreme care and scruple, and assigning their own standards against Christians in their sincerely held beliefs, that isn’t called good governance. That’s called wickedness.
How is it any more of a double standard for one group than the other? A quick search came up with a 2018 study on Tylenol. From the Ethics Statement we learn that
Human fetal testes were obtained after elective termination of pregnancy, according to the Declaration of Helsinki–Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects.
This is a new abortion and human baby parts we’re talking about. If you make the case for religious exemption from vaccines, how could the same religious objection not apply to Tylenol and Ibuprofen?
Do you have any evidence that suggests Matt Troup, president and CEO of Conway Regional Health System, has an animus against Christians?
That very well may be. I have no issue calling out that wickedness. But using abortion as a human shield behind which we hide political ideology (whether or not that ideology is correct) is also wicked. I’m not responsible for the civil magistrate in the same way I am for those in my congregation and others who bear Christ’s name. You may not be doing this, but others certainly are. We must understand what precisely a conscientious objection actually is, and where it’s just a cloak for rebellion. And saying, ‘my conscience disapproves’ simply doesn’t cut it. Regardless of what the civil magistrate makes of us, Jesus Christ will judge us for how we invoke his name.
Is that what you see here? Masochistic Christianity? Or is it maybe something a little deeper than that? Is it maybe that we understand it’s no sin to be defrauded and it is most certainly sin to defraud others (and manufacturing a conscientious objection that no one held a year ago is defrauding others). You call it ‘the Christian’s moral obligation to lose.’ I say that it’s better to lose a fight we fought righteously than to win a fight in which we dishonoured our Saviour’s name. Was Paul losing when he suffered beatings even though they were unjust? Was Jeremiah losing when he was rejected again and again despite still following the people with God’s word?
You’re right: we lose too much. But why is that? What’s wrong with us that we lose so much? If our cause is so morally just why is God against us? This fight isn’t political; it’s theological. What’s wrong with our theology and application that despite our rhetoric and guns and bravado we can’t accomplish a thing?
Complaining that ‘Christians love being abused’ is exactly the same moral compromise every other generation has made to attempt to keep power. If we wanted to win we’d preach repentance, but that just costs too much. So we deflect and make it about our tactics…
There isn’t a Tylenol mandate. Also Tylenol is a brand name.
Furthermore, people are not required to be comprehensively consistent in everything they abstain from. For example, I make an intentional point to go through significant effort to avoid Amazon because they are a profoundly evil company. I would oppose any mandate that required me to purchase from Amazon. Nevertheless, I will still occasionally choose to buy from Amazon because of the options available to me. We are not morally required to boycott everything evil, but we are required to hate it. So I do things like pray for the destruction or conquest of Amazon, encourage people to not buy from them, try to redirect my money to not support them, but occasionally I will use them just because it is the best fit for what I need.
If your goal is to be perfectly consistent in your plans for consumption, there really is no way to do that. But it is also weak/pathetic to make no effort to avoid paying money to the people who hate you, hate Christ, and want to destroy your culture. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
No, he simply hates your freedom to choose and thinks he is better than you and is tyrannically flexing his authority. This is like the “what about shellfish” argument from Fedora Atheists.
It’s not a human shield. We are not required to be 100% internally consistent to render moral principle. Anything that uses abortion is a blank check for rejection on moral grounds.
Rebellion is when a tyrant usurps the liberty that God gave the people. Not when a Christian uses the tyrant’s own law against him.
No it’s not. We deal with contentious questions when they become aware to us. Basically no one knows about the use of abortion in all of the pharma world. You can object on the basis of conscience for any reason provided it is a righteous cause. This is like when the Kentucky official who refused to sign Sodomite Wedding licenses was raked over the coals for being divorced multiple times. The fact that she was divorced and likely sinned in previous cases has no bearing on whether she morally objects for a righteous cause later. If I have committed adultery 10 times and then later decide I don’t want to an 11th time, that’s not hypocrisy or lying. I have the right to make a righteous decision at a later date.
Because we don’t even try, and we let snakes into our midst like Russell Moore and Tim Keller whose job it is to convince us to lose every fight for the sake of our witness or the gospel or something.
I don’t ever see Christians seriously trying to take power. To our shame the last generation that seriously made a go of it was Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell etc. It should be a judgment on us that those men had the courage to make that fight but not the reformed world.
This is preached all the time. It’s trying to win that is objectionable.
As I’ve written elsewhere, there’s a difference between a drug’s development being predicated upon aborted fetal tissue, versus a drug being incidentally tested in an unethical way at some point in time.
I am sure many unethical things have been done with Tylenol since it went to market, but it wasn’t invented in 2018.
Then it’s clear your objection is to mandates. Since you also don’t believe consistency is required, then you are free to pick and chose what commands apply to you.
@ben, what exactly were you hoping to get from this forum? Seems to me you’re just telling those who are interacting with you they’re wrong and you’re right. If we are the problem, what makes you think you can fix us? We’ve obviously got loads of issues!
Most of us here are used to pushback. But that involves interacting, back and forth, argumentation. Not just switching the subject or throwing every comment back at the commenter.
First, I note that you have refused to answer my question about whether you are an officer in Christ’s church.
On Sanityville, we make a point of identifying ourselves and our positions so that people can speak appropriately given their station and the station of those they are interacting with. It happens to have a lot to do with honoring authority, something you have demonstrated precious little ability to do.
Given your attacks on pastors, you will be required to stop commenting or identify yourself more fully publicly.
Exactly. Which is to say, our consciences are bound by God to submit to the authorities He has placed over us. Thus, when you deny the ability of the civil magistrate to forbid you from shooting up heroine mixed with Fentanyl for the fun of it, because they cannot tell you what God has forbidden you to taste and touch, you’ve completely misunderstood Scripture and you are misapplying it. The point of that passage is that church leaders may not say “God forbids meat.” Trying to make it apply to the civil magistrate because God has said we must obey the civil magistrate is tying Scripture in knots. You should read more and talk less.
I do the same!
But notice what you didn’t say: My conscience is bound by God’s law, therefore I may not buy from Amazon.
You’ve chosen a perfect example of precisely what these other men have been trying to point out to you: the difference between a principle and a religious conscience conviction. If you meant to say that sometimes you slip up and sin by buying from Amazon, you should acknowledge buying from Amazon to be sin, and you should stop buying from them, because your conscience requires it.
The same is true of many drugs. If it is a sin to get a vaccine because it was tested with fetal tissue after it was developed, then it is a sin to do the same with other drugs. Some are willing to acknowledge this. You are not. Therefore, you are simply picking and choosing when you feel like something is a sin. It is nothing more than saying that every man should do that which is right in his own eyes.
I agree with you in principle that we may fail to obey in some instances and that doesn’t make our obedience wrong in other instances. The problem is when you are unwilling to acknowledge the other instances as sins.
I’m all for not binding mens consciences to perfect consistency on things like boycotts or other principled stands. But when you try to bind mens consciences and say that Christians must stand up and “win” whatever that means, I’m just left shaking my head.
And now, having caught up on reading to the end, I’ll add that what Pastor Aaron just said to you is a good rebuke, and you should take it to heart.
Interesting, because I think that you are telling me that I am wrong and you are right. I’ve got a lot of friends in the churches associated with Warhorn and I was honestly shocked that these are the perspectives that are being held. Warhorn associated churches have a reputation for being those who actually fight the culture wars, and the failure to see clearly on these issues is deeply troubling to me. Frankly, this question is basically easy mode.
I’ve done my best, virtually alone, to respond as much as possible to the substance of issues raised.
Frankly, I’ve been involved in debates and rhetoric long enough to know not to answer “innocent asides” for someone trying to flex on you. I’m not an officer. At the end of the day, you may be pastors but you are not my pastors. Joel Osteen is also a pastor. I don’t submit to you as pastors any more than I submit to other people’s dads as someone’s child. I have no problem with submitting to righteous authority. I am highly skeptical of people trying to flex their authority outside of their bounds. I know that I have submitted to authority many times including when it has been costly to me, and I also know that dragging out my personal history during debates is simply bad practice.
This is why I don’t play these games. I don’t enter into If-this-then-that rationalization to justify absurdity.
God did not establish rulers on earth so that they could force us to inject spike proteins and mRNA into our bloodstreams that were formulated with murdered babies as a condition for being allowed to work for a living. The fact that I am being asked to provide some principled rationale for this is simply embarrassing at this point.
This isn’t complicated. There are legitimate religious reasons to avoid taking the vaccines that the state has no natural or biblical right to force on you in the first place. If you think that your people who want religious exemptions don’t have clear thinking on the religious rationale, then help them clear up the rationale but still help them get the exemption.
The Bible is full of examples of people making tactical decisions. Here is a perfectly legitimate tactical decision:
I have half a dozen real reasons I oppose the vaccine
One of these reasons is well tested in court
I will use the well-tested reason, even if my real reasoning is more complicated.
Just like when Daniel is dealing with Nebuchadnezzer in Dan 2:12-16. He knows the king’s decree is unrighteous, but rather than rebuke him to his face, he deflects to a safer rhetorical position, asking instead, “Why is the king’s matter so urgent?” That’s being tactical, and lives were saved because Daniel was tactical and didn’t just say, “This is the truth whatever happens happens.”
It is unrighteous to be morally neutral about the outcomes of matter of righteousness. Every action we take must have a sincere tactical desire to succeed or we are just playing games.
There are many difficult questions involved in the topic of our relationship to civil government, and much of the dialogue here on Sanityville over the last year has been men trying to think through them together. A new point here; a new avenue of thought here. Had we ever thought of this or that thing this way? What are the implications of this view, etc.
We can (and should) discuss all these things with vigor, for they are important. But let it always be with a view to sharpen, and to be sharpened, and to love our brothers for whom Christ died. The church will endure long after COVID is gone, and our testimony of love for one another must not be marred through this present, fleeting trial (John 13:35).
This view of authority is very sad, brother. Growing up, did you show no respect to your friend’s fathers, though they were not your father?
God’s word commands honor to be extended beyond relationships of formal authority. There are those whom we are to show proper honor to as fathers, even though they aren’t our fathers. Even the relationship between a young pastor and an older congregant demands a level of respect (1 Timothy 5:1).
Yeah, the fact that you deny that any child needs to listen to any adult other than his own father is pitch-perfect for you. It’s also a denial of the Westminster Standards and biblical doctrine.
You’re welcome to keep reading, but you won’t be commenting any further.
Call that “flexing” all you want, but here I’m the authority, and we have certain expectations for the conversation, which you have been told about and exhorted on both publicly and privately by moderators and others.
I read the comment you linked, and I’m still confused by this argument. Maybe you can help me out.
Vaccines were around long before fetal cell line testing was commonplace also. Even in terms of the modern vaccine industry, Sanofi Pasteur released an an alternative to the main polio vaccines in 2020, leveraging monkey cell lines instead of human - proving that vaccine development as a whole is not predicated on the continued harvesting and purchasing of murdered children, even today.
My understanding is that, in many cases, fetal cell lines are leveraged to enable realistic prototyping and testing but are not necessary to form the actual vaccine (the medicine) itself. This would obviously exclude vaccines like MMR that have cell line derivatives as ingredients, but I fail to see how a vaccine that was merely tested using fetal cell lines is irredeemable in a way Tylenol is not.
This section of the recently published statement about the vaccine mandates is germane to the discussion in this thread and other related threads about conscientious objections:
"Some indeed may decline COVID vaccines because their conscience requires it. Yet note: this is a high bar. To be bound by conscience to disregard a mandate is not the same as disagreeing with or objecting to the magistrate’s right to institute it; nor is it the same as fearing its long-term political trajectory or health risks. Rather, it is to be convinced that it is a sin to comply with it. It must also be said that the conscience is neither pristine, nor innocent, but fallen and fallible (Jer. 17:9). Making wise decisions requires the conscience to be educated in truth and knowledge.
Christians who therefore refuse vaccine mandates on the principle of following conscience and protecting sphere authority must do so recognizing there is no Biblical requirement always to refuse compliance to a command from an authority who oversteps his bounds. Indeed, Christ Himself alternatingly complied or refused to comply with an overstepping authority, depending on the circumstances (John 10:39; 18:7–11). Thus, contrary to the understanding of many today, resisting tyranny is not always obedience to God. In all but the most severe cases, obedience and disobedience are matters of wisdom".
The culture we live in is postmodern, so while common grace does exist, I am uncomfortable relying on the total benefit of the doubt of civil authorities given the postmodernism rampant in our world. I do believe our disposition towards authority should be towards obedience, yet I think it is important to be aware of the fact that if we rely on postmodernists to test the legitimacy of our conscientious objections we might end up in a lot of trouble.
For example, it is often pointed us that we aren’t pro life if … followed by democrat party platform points (like being pro welfare state). I could see a scenario in which we do have to object to something on the basis of it being truly pro-abortion and then having their standard of pro-life applied towards us as a test. Or If gender pronouns were mandated and we objected they try and make us follow OT ceremonial laws.
That’s really not a question of common grace. It’s a question of what to do in the face of wicked judges.
Common grace couldn’t exist if wicked men didn’t exist. That common grace includes their ability to reason and tell right from wrong, but of course, many have their foolish hearts darkened.
To answer the actual question, though, we must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Often those who are intent on “winning” lose precisely because they don’t think carefully about their rashly reasoned principles.