Category: Culture

The Church and the Natural Family

~ Alastair Roberts ~ 2 Comments

In the past two episodes of “Mere Fidelity” there was an underlying issue which was touched on, but not fully discussed. That is the relationship between the biological family and the New Family of which Christ is the firstborn. Examples I am thinking of: 1.) Does the Great Commission now call us to emphasize “being fruitful and multiplying” for this New Family through making disciples, over and against being fruitful in biological families? 2.) For those who cannot have biological families, how much should the church be relied upon to be family? 3.) The New Testament certainly seems to de-emphasize biological family to some degree, what do we make of this?

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Singles Adopting

~ Alastair Roberts ~ 3 Comments

I am curious about your thoughts regarding the growing trend of singles in the church adopting children. More specifically- is the Biblical prohibition of sexual immorality simply a nominal command to keep sex within marriage for its own sake because God commanded? Or is it also a safeguard that ensures children, the natural consequence of sexual intercourse, are birthed into a covenanted relationship? If the answer is the latter, should it also inform our view of singles adopting? Or does it matter since the family structure is already fractured and the single person is trying to repair the breach? Does single adoption betray any aspect of God’s designs? Or should an unmarried believer consider other factors?

There was recently a single adoption at my church, and largely the women gushed with how brave this woman was to take this child on alone, how this is caring for widows and orphan like James commands, etc. The men I spoke with were much more skeptical and reserved in their praise. But they couldn’t put their finger on why they were flummoxed.

Wondering if you could give some wisdom….

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Gender Segregation?

~ Alastair Roberts ~ 4 Comments

In relation to your “Paul Maxwell on Masculinity” video, I definitely have observed the beneficial impact that working together seems to have on men. However, you suggest that keeping men and women working separately as much as possible is the best way to allow men to have good sense of their own masculinity. What exactly would that look like in a modern context, and are there areas where you think that separation would become problematic? Prudence Allen’s work on philosophical concepts of women indicates that the treatment of universities as male-only spaces did have some very negative results, and she argues for a complementarity view of the sexes that emphasizes the way positive interaction between the sexes can create more fruitful results, intellectual and otherwise, than if the sexes are kept separate. Are there spaces where you think gender exclusion should not take place?

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Appeals to Natural Law and Scripture and the Effectiveness of Jordan Peterson

~ Alastair Roberts ~ 2 Comments

I guess I’m intrigued about a couple of things.

First, do you really think it’s the case that there is actually any kind of moral consensus in principle among people? The kind of thing that lets pro-Natural Law folk say, “Everyone knows that murder is wrong” when, actually, a glance at our history raises at least some questions about this.

I guess this is prompted in part by the fact that what passes for sexual ethics in the public square is now moving so fast that even I feel old-fashioned, and (more to the point) I can remember a day not so long ago when “Everyone would have thought” that things now accepted as normal would have been described as abhorrent and unnatural.

Doesn’t this ethical slide raise at least some questions about the stability of any kind of NL ethic?

And second, a question from the other side of the coin. Shouldn’t Jordan Peterson’s remarkable success in making arguments in the public square in part on the basis of an unashamed appeal to the Christian Scriptures give us rather greater optimism that some seem to have about the credibility of making such an appeal to people who aren’t themselves Bible-believing Christians?

Might it not be possible to make a kind of (presuppositionally?) self-validating appeal to an unacknowledged source of religious authority like the Bible, in a way that doesn’t rely on a prior commitment to its authority, but rather generates precisely that commitment by the cogency of the appeal and the argument as a whole?”

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