Well, it certainly goes without saying how delighted I am to be with you all. I'm amazed that anybody came out tonight. First of all, because of the inclement weather you've been having. And then, why would you come and want to hear me? So I'm amazed in a few ways and thought that this is the worst time to actually come and give a lecture in Columbia. But it turns out you folks are faithful and you are here. I do indeed lead a ministry called Truth Exchange, which this very church supports, so thank you for your support. We continue to feel like what we do is significant, and I have here a beautiful piece of artwork, which is only a preliminary piece, and it's announcing or will announce a conference we are doing a year from today in Escondido entitled The Two Loves, A Biblical Response to Gay Christianity. I feel this is the next apostasy coming down the road to the church. And few people are dealing with it, so I'm going to ask you to pray about this. that the Lord will bless it and give us great wisdom as we seek to deal with it. And for those of you who would love to come and be part of it, you are very welcome. The two loves, a biblical response to gay Christianity. The final thing I'm going to do, for those of you who don't get my monthly comment on the culture, and would like to, I'm going to pass this clipboard around while I'm speaking. It won't bother me. Some of you already get it, so don't do it twice. But some of you don't. Please feel free to sign up on the sheet, and you'll get my comment on the culture. So if you'd start that off, and surreptitiously, we'll pass it around. One more thing. I have a few copies of our recent prayer letter There's only about 10 of them here, so first come, first served. Two things happened yesterday. The democratic debate took place. Did anyone watch that? A few of you. I watched the whole thing. I'm a news junkie, though. The same day, I think it was the same day, it was announced that Playboy would no longer do a centerfold. And a brilliant article by Al Mola came across my computer today. It was entitled, Playboy Opened the Floodgates and the New Culture is Drowning. I knew you'd enjoy that reference to floods, What he's actually saying is that in the 60s, that floodgate began to be opened. But today, Playboy is far too tame. They cannot pay their bills. Because everyone now has access to pornography by the touch of a button. And it's become so extremist that Playboy couldn't touch it. And here's the conclusion of Al Mola. that the change of Playboy represents the fall of an entire civilization and a moral consensus that made that civilization possible. The fall of a civilization. You know what I noticed in that debate last night? Not once was personal morality ever raised. Personal sexual morality is off the table. We may not talk about it. But it's the one thing that is radically undermining this culture. With all these wonderful visions and programs, civilization is dying under our noses. Well, I want to talk about this. It's a really exciting theme. I'm sure you'll enjoy it. But I want to do it in a way to not discourage you, but to arm you for the future. If our present Western civilization is on the point of collapse, we are not, the church is not, and it will have to learn to exist within that collapsing situation. And what word do we have to say? Is there anything of a constructive nature that we can bring to an imploding culture? And I want to talk now not about the heterosexual implosion which Playboy represents, but the challenge of homosexuality. But I want to put it in a particular context that will make, perhaps, hopefully, more sense. I want to talk about sexuality in the context of a pagan cosmology. Cosmology means a word about the cosmos, that is to say a worldview. So don't get uptight about the word cosmology. It's very simple. It's a worldview. Of course, when you raise this question of homosexuality, you must exercise great care, I believe. The pitfalls in landmines are enormous. and our homosexual friends often suffer from deep hurt, severe psychological injury in childhood, and sometimes are not guilty of the state in which they find themselves because they've been the result of abuse. And so we must be very careful how we approach our fellow citizens that claim to be of this disposition. Now, especially we as Christians, reformed evangelicals, we must avoid what I like to call moralism. You know, the kind of approach that said, God hates you, God hates fags, and look how good we are by implication. Have we not learned from scripture that we are all broken and that we can never be moralistic? And so we must be careful because it will immediately close all doors if we come over that way. And we must remember, of course, that the gospel is not moralism but grace. So great care in approaching this subject. I think, too, though, that we must avoid sentimentalism. And that's where I see the weakness of the evangelical church. On the edges now, but I feel like it's sort of seeping in. Because we want to be known as those people that love those who are rejected. And so much progress is made because of sentimentalism. There is a so-called evangelical ethicist, David Gushie, who has become absolutely committed to gay Christianity, said this, my heart got broken so I began to be able to see the scripture through the tears of our most oppressed group. I think it's dangerous to do exegesis through sentiment. Because that's, in the end, not what people need. They need to hear truth. They can hear it with sentiment, with passion, but it must be truth. So here is what we must avoid. Not moralism, not sentimentalism, not traditionalism. We've always done it this way. And indeed, this is a new one, not just citing Bible verses that are against homosexuality. I think the opposition enjoys us doing that because it can put us in that category of, you know, the folks that are killjoys. There are a number of texts, of course, that are very clear about the relationship of scripture to homosexuality, and there is a place for that. But we are dealing with a subject that is extremely emotional, and it is very easy for us when someone says, are you against love? Are you against these two people that are having such a wonderful relationship? And to be put down as moralists and as killjoys. And so we lose that argument every time. Are you against love? So, I would argue that as we begin to think about this subject, and I think we will all have to think about it deeply and seriously in the days to come, not just for us, but for our children as well, who are out there now in the places of education where this acceptance of homosexuality has become really quite orthodox. And if you don't do this in college, then you really are rejected. So our children need to be taught this before they go off and hopefully we can catch some of them who've already left. But it is in terms of trying to figure out what is behind this movement. Is it a movement just for free expression, for civil rights, or is something else going on of a much more important nature? When you hear the argument of Justice Kennedy in rendering homosexual marriage according to the Constitution, he actually says this, some rights are too important to leave up to the democratic process. So he doesn't want you voting on this. He doesn't want states' rights. Where does he get his information to make this decision if he doesn't get it through the political process? He says it's too important. Well, obviously, he thinks that he's getting it from a much higher source than mere voting booths. So what is the higher source? It comes very clear when you realize that some rabbinic text 2,000 years ago commenting on Leviticus 18, which denies homosexuality, said, You shall not walk in the Egyptian and Canaanite statutes and what they do. A man married a man and a woman married a woman. In other words, these rabbis 2,000 years ago understood that this kind of sexuality was an expression of the pagan nations. And I believe with this step that the Supreme Court made, we have made a major step into the production of a pagan civilization. Few people see it that way, of course. This is for love and fair play and against discrimination and all those things. But I want to show you that this is indeed the case. I mentioned what happened yesterday with Playboy. Derek and I were around, I was a little older, I know, in the 60s revolution when things flipped, when things changed radically. Our present generations don't understand this. So when we talk about values, they think we're trying to restore the 50s, which I'm not interested in doing. But what is important to note is that something radical happened in the 60s. Melanie Phillips, a Jewish commentator in Great Britain, speaks of this moment as an attack on Western civilization. So I want to look at what's happening sexually through this larger perspective. But I want to get your attention by referring to some things that are happening just apparently, incidentally. You will figure out why I'm interested in this kind of terminology a little later. But what I've been seeing for the last few years is a program in the culture called the denial of the binary. How many of you have heard of the binary and the rejection of the binary? I guess one guy. You're probably from the north. Well, you will never forget it from now on. You will definitely notice it if you read certain journals and watch certain programs. The denial of the binary. What does binary mean? Binary means two-ness. Things that are separate. And it's become a technical term for the progressive movement. They want to get rid of the binary. I wonder why. Is this the essence of civil rights or of normal living? What's wrong with the binary? Here's an example. A few days after the Supreme Court made its decision about homosexual marriage, an article appeared in the Huffington Post written by a teacher of four-year-olds And this is what she said, I work to create a classroom environment where differing points of view, men marrying men, women marrying women, can be addressed. And through conversation, we can model non-judgmental behavior and challenge binary thinking. See, that's what she means by binary. Binary thinking is right and wrong. Something's right, acceptable. Something's wrong, unacceptable. She wants to transform the classroom for four-year-olds by eliminating that kind of thinking. Now, she wants a non-judgmental approach, but of course she's being judgmental about binary thinking, so you can't avoid that problem. Two lesbian academics recently published an article entitled, Can We Put an End to the Gender Binary? Ah, you've seen this happening, right? The gender binary must go. There's no such thing actually as gender anymore. So why bother trying to separate out the genders? Dartmouth College seeks to provide a living environment welcoming to all gender identities, one not limited by the traditional gender binary. Again, that phrase. Oberlin College says the same thing, defining a space that defies the binary in our society. I think with this terminology, we are coming face to face, though we don't really realize it, with a massive conflict of worldview. between those who want to get rid of binary distinctions and those who embrace them. And it is a worldview because it is affecting us at this very seemingly simple level. And I believe, as I've thought about this for some years, that this conflict of worldviews actually also is involved in the binary. in this sense, that I believe that there are only two worldviews. Should I say that again? There are only two worldviews. That comes as a rather nice discovery for some of you who thought that there are 365 different ways to God and it's all so very complicated. But when you get to the basics, when you get to the beginning of things, there are only two possible explanations. Only two possible ways of explaining our origins. A British scholar by the name of Colin Gunton, who recently died, made this statement. There are probably, ultimately, only two possible answers to the question of origins. Only two. What are they? Either that the universe is the result of creation by a free personal agency, God, or it creates itself. They're the only two. If you can come up with another one, let me know at the end of the session and I'll add it. There are only two ways of accounting for origins. We either create ourselves or a God beyond us has created us. And here, in a sense, we reach rock bottom. Alexis de Tocqueville, whom you know as Tocqueville, actually had the same comment. He talked about the primary division of things, which human beings are constantly trying to eliminate. by including God and the universe in one great whole. Instead of keeping God separate from the universe, God is being included as one great whole. Tocqueville said that in the 19th century. It's of course what the Apostle Paul said, and I love to base what I'm doing on scripture, but some of you Well I spoke in a class on Romans. I must have mentioned Romans 125 in that class a few months ago here in Mark Barrow's class. But in Romans 125 you remember Paul says there are only two ways of being a human being. I was shocked when I realized that that was what Paul was saying. When he says you either worship creation or you worship the creator. Again, the only two possibilities. Now, I call those two possibilities one-ism or two-ism. See how I make theology so easy? If you can count from one to two, you can be a theologian. One-ism is that everything is self-creating, and naturally, if it's capable of creating itself, it's worthy of worship. As Paul says, you worship creation. Of course, if you're part of creation, then you have to worship yourself. But that's one view, and it's gaining in power. It's always been around. Obviously, it was around when Paul was writing. So that's one view, and then I call that one-ism because all elements within this one circle of everything are all finally the same. I also like to call it a homo-cosmology, a cosmology of sameness. And sameness, of course, wants to eliminate the binary, right? Because the binary is distinctions. I'm losing some of you. I'm sorry. We'll get back. The other option, worshipping the creator, I call twoism. Because if there is a creator that is uncreated, and everything else is created, As we learned from the first statement of the Bible, right? In the beginning, God, He was in the beginning, and then He created everything else. So, there are two kinds of reality in existence. The creator and creation. That means, twoism is the right way of thinking about things. Twoism is essential to the way we think as Christians. As soon as we start trying to make God and find Him inside us, we have lost the Christian faith. And so we keep God separate, not that He's impersonal and away from us, but He's other than us. That's the essence of Christianity. And I call that two-ism. But you can see from that very starting point that we have a fundamental binary that determines how we think. In that sense, binary is the most beautiful, positive thing we could ever imagine. I like to say that twoism is the key to the cosmos. Without that, you can't make any sense about anything. So we have this conflict. And it's been going on above the surface of our western once quite Christian culture since the 60s. And here's a classic recent example of the kind of conflict that we now face. Not everyone is talking this way, but here is one statement that makes your hair stand on end if you had any. I wasn't meaning you, Terry. Jeremy Rifkin, an advisor to the European Union since 2002, makes a programmatic statement of this progressive non-binary thinking. Listen. We no longer feel ourselves to be guests in someone else's home, and therefore obliged to make our behavior conform with a set of pre-existing cosmic rules. There are no cosmic rules anymore. It is our creation now. We make the rules. We create the world, and because we do, we no longer feel beholden to outside forces. We no longer have to justify our behavior, for we are now the architects of the universe. We are responsible for nothing outside of ourselves, for we are the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Is that a oneist or twoist statement? It's oneist, right? We make ourselves. We create our boundaries. We create our existence. And so the question is, how much is this worldview conflict going on around us? I've tried to show you and totally failed by the simple reference to the binary since no one has seen it. But I hope from now on you will see that phrase, but at least you've seen the reality of it as we try to eliminate distinctions and especially distinctions in gender. But it's going on now as a conflict of world views. And I'd like to just point out a few areas where it's going on. It's going on in theology. Out west, we have this celebration called the Burning Man, which you find 70,000 people from the intellectual centers on the West Coast coming together, in fact they come from everywhere now, to celebrate paganism. And the founder of it was asked the other day if he was an atheist. And he said, I do not believe in a supreme being, but I believe that being is supreme. He could have written Romans 1.25, that guy. Worship and service of the creation rather than the creator who is blessed forever. And so what we're seeing in theology, something of a worship of creation, even a spiritual form of this now. You know, the atheists of the past were considered materialists. They rejected spirituality. I've been reading recently that we are living, hi people over there, I just want to tell you that I know you're there and I'm trying to talk to you as well, especially you young guys. I've been reading that we are now living in a post- what? Post-Christian? Post-Secular? Here it is. The word is post-secular. Think about what that means. A post-secular world is a world where secular humanism no longer dominates. And those who were secular humanists have now discovered spirituality. This is the world that is now developing around us. There are many examples of that. And so in theology, we're discovering more and more how to worship nature and rejecting God, the creator. One writer who is influential in what's called the emergent movement, sort of a radical evangelical movement, says we need a God defined less in binary terms. Praying to God is our mother, the nourishing spirit of Mother Earth. This stuff is read by certain evangelicals, you see. not perhaps seeing the worldview conflict that's going on here just below the surface of these seemingly nice ideas. In spirituality, we are seeing the rise of the non-binary. In meditation, for instance, How many people are involved in meditation? I read this afternoon that 30 million Americans are now doing yoga. I'm not saying that everybody in yoga is doing meditation, but that's part of the goal of yoga. It's part of the goal to bring the West to the East, to get Americans raised on twoism to be much more at home with oneism. I discovered this to my great surprise when I was reading a book analyzing the American culture entitled American Veda by Philip Goldberg, American Veda, V-E-D-A. And he attempts to show that Hinduism, which is the Indian religion, has now invaded America, and we're all involved in becoming Hindus. Now that's obviously an exaggeration, but at the same time, it's happening all over the place in spirituality. It's the reduction of a twoist worldview into a oneist way of thinking, and the proof is, and this is why I liked finding it, he says we're now We must learn the truth of the Hindu term Advaita. A-D-V-A-I-T-A. Advaita. You didn't know you were going to get Sanskrit tonight for no extra charge. Advaita, guess what it means? Not to. You get that? Not to. Destruction of the binary. All over the place. Relation to God, in relation now to spirituality, all is not two. I was shook by that since I'd been trying to make the point that the only two options are either twoism or oneism. And here is the example that we are being brainwashed with in our time. So I want you to keep your ears and eyes open as you watch this process going on. It is, I admit, very subtle. But here are some of the phrases where you will see it occurring. I've mentioned busting the binaries. Another is discovering non-dual reality. Non-dual is non-binary. Same thing. You follow that? Dual-to-ness? Another one is destroying the dichotomies. We want to get rid of opposites. The delusion of duality. The joining of the opposites. That's a classic phrase out of ancient paganism, by the way. The conjunctio oppositorum is the goal of ancient paganism, to join the opposites. I was thinking about that and thinking to myself, I wonder if that ancient world where this joining of the opposites was so important, whether intuitively they were trying to get rid of the idea of God who is separate from the earth and creation and bringing things together as we're doing now. Bringing together that which is distinct and opposite. And of course, we find it in Al Gore's classic phrase, all is one. Does anyone remember Al Gore? I think I shouldn't ever say that again. Though he's now head of a $10 billion company. I learned that yesterday. So he's doing quite well. Both he and Bill Clinton sit on billions. Isn't that interesting? A number of years ago, they were president and vice president candidates, and now they're billionaires. I should take up politics. So I'm suggesting to you, and I should also suggest to myself what time it is. I'm doing fine. You don't know how fine I'm doing. No, relative to what I have to say. Well, I said that we should look at it in terms of theology, how God is being eliminated. In spirituality, how we are eliminating the distinctions between us and God and elevating creation as the source of worship. And then, of course, sexuality. Sexuality is the leading edge of this sword in bringing about this Hindu onest worldview, which is simply a classic form of paganism, the worship of nature. So how do we look at homosexuality in this light? I'm only talking about this as a warning. I don't mean to make any individual homosexual feel guilty, but I do think it is necessary that all of us need to be warned as to where this kind of thinking will take us and our families. Robert Reilly, a recent brilliant writer on the subject of homosexuality in his book, Gay is Okay, describes present homosexuality as a new form of ancient Gnosticism. And Gnosticism, you remember, is the rejection of the body, the physical, and the promotion of the spirit. And in this case, applying this Gnostic thinking to homosexuality, it's clearly suggesting that people no longer allow the biological to determine who they are, but they go inside to discover who they want to be, who they think they are. And indeed, when I myself studied Gnosticism, both at Harvard and at Princeton, I read all kinds of weird texts. And the ancient Gnostics rejected the flesh. They presented themselves as these wonderful spiritual people, but the flesh, the physicality of things, was evil. Now, you know what that means. That means, and it's true, that the Gnostics refused to read the Old Testament. They mocked the Old Testament. And then, of course, once you do that, you also reject the God of the Old Testament. They said that the true God was the spirit behind everything, and that the Creator was an evil God that had to be rejected. Here's the way they rejected the physical. Phrases like, flee maternity and destroy the works of femaleness, which meant don't get married and have children. They held androgyny to be the ideal. What is androgyny? It's a joining of male and female into one person. Do you see the destruction of the binary there? You join male and female together in one person. These are old notions that we're seeing today. And it's interesting to me to note that the Gnostics of the ancient times, buying into this kind of thinking, one day, will cast Yahweh into hell. The Gnostics breathed fire upon Yahweh's face and threw him down into hell. I think we must be aware of this happening in our day and age as we stomp all over the notion of God the creator. as we redefine marriage according to some ethereal notions we have, and not any kind of understanding of the way the human body is put together, that we are going towards this kind of rejection of God the Creator. Well, Gnosticism is a variant of ancient paganism, and I did a study on ancient paganism throughout time and space with regard to sexuality. And I wrote an article that some of you might like to read. It's on my website, truthexchange.com. It's entitled, Androgyny, the Pagan Sexual Ideal. Androgyny, the Pagan Sexual Ideal. And in it, I tried to look at the history of homosexuality throughout time and space, I was helped by using the work of the man considered to be the greatest expert in world religions, a Romanian by the name of Mircea Eliade, who speaks in his book, A History of Paganism, of ritualized androgyny as a classic form of pagan worship. Ritualized androgyny. That is to say, a spiritualized notion of homosexuality which is essential to religious worship. And it's true, when you look 2,000 years before Christ, at the worship of Ishtar, the Sumerian goddess, she is surrounded by homosexual priests. and you can follow that through at the time of the New Testament the goddess Artemis had homosexual priests and Augustine in the 5th century writes about these homosexual priests and their parades down the streets and finding that distasteful since they were wearing makeup and all this kind of things that's in the 5th century in the worship of the goddess Artemis When our forefather, I guess we should say this for Columbus Day, our forefathers, I'm an Englishman, I don't have any forefathers going here. When the conquistadores came to America, they discovered homosexuality all over the place. amongst the Aztecs and the Mayans. The high priest was a homosexual, sometimes a lesbian. And so you can actually show that throughout time and space, and when I say time, I mean from the second millennium BC to now, And space, I mean throughout all the places of the earth, the jungles of Africa and Borneo and so on, you find the same phenomenon. Which means that this kind of spiritualization was not created by people saying, ah, you do that, we should do it, because you can show no contact. Which means that it must arise from the essence of the religions being practiced. and pagan religions are onest. And I'm suggesting to you that homosexuality in its essence is an onest embodiment of this kind of religion. Now, Christian homosexuals don't realize this. Many gay people have no awareness of it, but it is a fact that this kind of sexuality has been the carrier of a pagan religion from as far back as we can go. And I believe that will carry us into a new day of pagan celebration in once Christian America. Once this becomes normalized, once it's taught in our schools, once our own children are at ease with it, we will discover ourselves becoming worshipers of nature, one way or another. Now, if this were just my idea, you could shut off what I'm saying as some rabid fundamentalist, which I'm not, I hope. But actually this is said by leading homosexual thinkers in our time. That homosexuality is actually the carrier of a particular kind of religion. Pagan religion. I found this especially in a book by June Singer written in 1977 at the cusp of the sexual revolution. where she writes a book, Androgyny Towards a New Theory of Sexuality. Androgyny, as I said, is male and female together. But homosexuals, as a couple, have to play the role of both male and female. And so, in a certain sense, they have become androgynous. But she states that the type of androgyny, or the archetype of androgyny, appears in us as an innate sense of and witness to the primordial cosmic unity. That's heavy stuff, but what she's saying is, it's one-ism. It's a witness to one-ism. And here's the final proof in what she says. That is, it is a sacrament of monism or one-ism, functioning to erase distinction that was nearly totally expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition and the patriarchal God image. And so she says, the androgyne, the human being, aware of being both male and female, participates consciously in the evolutionary process, redesigning the individual society and the planet. She is talking in this book, and of course it was 77, she was talking about a new cosmology that we will work on to produce a new world. And this is what it is, she says, it is redesigning the individual society and the planet based on this notion of primordial cosmic unity. Now it's easy to go over that and think, well, oh, we'll all be together. You know, we are the world, Coca-Cola and all that kind of stuff. What she means by cosmic unity is the rejection of God the creator and the worship of creation as the ultimate. That's said by a modern scholar. It's also said by a much later modern scholar, Toby Johnson, a gay theorist who says that gay consciousness represents a new religious paradigm. which fits perfectly with interfaith religion since all religions are one. The role of gay identity today is to call all people to get over dualistic, polarized thinking so that we can all live in peace. So there is the evidence from modern thinkers that that historical background is working in the present. An Old Testament scholar by the name of John N. Oswald, The Bible Among Myths, has a section of his book, I don't know him, maybe Max you would know him, John Oswald, I think he's an evangelical, but I'm not sure. In a section entitled, Denial of Boundaries. The same thing, by the way. Denial of boundaries, denial of binaries. And he says, ancient libertine sexual practice is not an unfortunate aberration or primitive morality. They are theological statements, necessary expressions of the world view of which they are part. necessary attempts to join the opposites. Well, you know, I rejoice to see this being said simply because, what time should I end? You have ten minutes, sir. Ten minutes. Simply because I think that's what the Apostle Paul is saying. He gets so much flack now from these gay Christians who consider what he says to be quite insignificant. As he develops his argumentation in Romans chapter 1, he talks about worship of God as the judge and creator, you remember, and that we see God's works in nature. So God as the creator is absolutely essential to his gospel. And then he talks about how people reject that, suppress the truth, and they engage in the worship of idols, animals and human beings. They're worshiping nature. And of course, that's what he says in verse 25, they worship and serve creation rather than the creator. But he's going through these categories, you see, of theology and then spirituality, And he ends up with sexuality. So that you cannot dismiss what he says as what the so-called gay Christian exegetes call clobber texts. You can't say this is a clobber text because it's so profoundly related to all the theology going before it when he reaches the question of sexuality. And here's the proof. Verse 26 of Romans chapter one, which as you brilliant people know, immediately follows verse 25. You've never heard a more profound statement from this lectern than that one. Verse 25 says, they worship and serve the creature rather than the creator. Verse 26 says, for this reason. In other words, Paul is giving a theological interpretation to what he goes on to describe as homosexuality and lesbianism. Because he saw it at work in the world where he was. I have to wonder. if our present evangelical brothers and sisters who are seeking to now normalize homosexuality have any notion of where the world is being taken. As they try to justify and to bring in even some of our own Presbyterians, the fellow Fred Harrell in San Francisco, who was a PCA church planter. I actually brought him down from San Francisco and had him preach in our chapel at Westminster Seminary 20 years ago. And just this year he has accepted gay marriage and he is now receiving gay and lesbian, homosexual and lesbian church members and they can apply for leadership. This is an ex-PCA man. So we're seeing this. But I think that this is, as I said to you at the beginning and showed you that image of the conference we're doing, that this is a sign of the future. And I want all of you to know why you won't follow that trend. And I know you won't. But I want to give you a real deep reason for why that should not be the case. Here's an example of someone who was raised in evangelicalism, who has just been swept along by this stuff. Some of you may know the name of Rachel Held Evans, who became a, was raised in an evangelical home, became a feminist, and she writes an article in November 2014, the false gospel of, oh, I did it, the false gospel of gender binaries. And she castigates the church for attempting to fit intersex, transgender, gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons into a rigid gender binary system. She argues that gender, sex, and sexuality ought to be understood as a continuum rather than polarities. See how that starts to, and then, you know, do you do this in theology as well? A little bit of Isis, Jupiter, Yahweh, Christ. It's a continuum, right? And that's unfortunately where so many of these people end up, in interfaith pluralism and finally paganism. Well, that was the introduction to my lecture. But I will take five minutes to give the second part of my lecture, if that's okay. And I'll do it without notes, so it'll be much more interesting. That's what people tell me, anyway. How do we develop this biblical worldview, which I call twoism? Well, I do think that we have a fundamental biblical reason for doing it. And I think we have to bring to our imploding society awfully good news and also the truth about who we are. Even when we are attacked, let's never hesitate to speak truth. That's the one thing that people finally need to hear. And it's probably the only thing we have to give. apart from living it out ourselves and in our families and so on. But there is a biblical concept that makes so much sense to what I'm saying, and it is the notion of holiness. Holiness. I know when I say that, some of you shrink because you probably had a grandmother like I had. that was a member of a holiness movement, she's laughing, with her hair in a bun and skirts to her ankles and just looked awful, and that was holiness. But I've since moved on, and I realize that holiness really is the Bible's worldview. God creates a holy world. But what does holy mean? I think we get slightly mixed up by thinking that it has to do with moral purity. Obviously that's related, but actually, how are the utensils on the altar in the temple morally pure? Since they're impersonal, they don't do anything, and yet they're called holy. So, what does holy then mean? Well, it means set apart for particular places and particular functions, the binary. Binaries mean that, right? That we have specific things that are not confused with other things that have their special places. And when God creates the world, He does it in a binary sense because he is distinct from the world that he creates. And that's how Jesus tells us how to pray. Our father who is in heaven, holy is your name. He's holy because he's distinct from us and we address our prayers to someone who is distinct from us. That's what it means for God to be holy and to worship him in the beauty of holiness. So the very act of God creating is an act that preserves the notion of holiness as distinction between God and us. But then God writes those distinctions into the creation he makes. And so Genesis 1 is full of statements about separating the day and the night and light and dark and everything else. You know, as God is creating this mass of matter, he's putting it into specific ways of being. In a certain sense, he's sanctifying it. He's making it holy. And at the very end of chapter one, we get the statement that God created man and woman in his image. and it was very good. Can we lose that message in our day that male and female are very good? Certainly we can't because male and female is in God's image. And that means that male and female, as distinct as a human binary, reflect something of God in his Trinitarian being. Because in the Trinity, there is the binary distinction of the three persons. I know I'm getting confused with two and three. Hang in there. The Trinity is a binary structure in the sense that there is distinction and unity. And that the distinctions, in order to get unity, don't lose themselves but maintain themselves, which is true about marriage as well. And so we are called, you see, to reflect God because we're given his image. And, you know, as Paul says in Romans 1, people see God in the things he's made. Now we always think that as the, you know, the Great Canyon. What's it called now? In Arizona. The Grand Canyon. That's God, you know. And of course, the wonderful thing, you know what? God is seen in the male and female distinction as well. If the male and female is made in God's image, then people need to see God in that as well. And so we must uphold it. Holiness then is a challenge in today's world. Not moralistically, but cosmologically. How did God make the world? And who is God anyway? And it seems to me that if we can take that approach, we can perhaps escape as much as we can possibly escape the challenge of hate speech. Because now we're thinking in terms of fundamental notions, of which there are only two, and you either choose one or the other. And I think that's part of our presentation of the gospel today. You can't appeal anymore to the Bible says, because nobody believes the Bible anyway. So you have to ask people, how do you put your world together? And you can tell them they either have a oneist or twoist worldview, and that that has implications for everything, including sexuality. Well, I probably oversimplified a very difficult subject, but I wanted to give you at least some ways of maintaining your faith in God's word, by understanding what God is saying to us in what he teaches about sexuality, something of the essence of the creation he made, and the health that such a life brings as we obey his understanding of what it means to be holy. Thank you very much. Test, test. Yeah, that's better. We have some time for questions. I ask those of you who can to send your questions forward. But I realize that there are some who cannot necessarily write a question down. I want to give equal opportunity to them. And so while you're passing your questions forward, I will ask for a first question. Is there a question? And I'll work nearest from the chair. How's that? Questions? Yeah. think we need to be involved in as far as possibly going to some of these places and sharing the gospel, or do we just stay away and let people do that? I think you may not have heard the question, do we get involved in these celebration events like Wild Goose and Burning Man? Or we stay away from them? I would say we get involved. I know there are Christians who go to Burning Man. I've actually seen videos of them trying to share the gospel. And I do think that many of our young people today have not got much notion of worldview. And I think we can bring a great deal of wisdom to our rising generation. I lecture to bright students through the Alliance Defending Freedom group, which is, some of you have heard of it. It's a legal ministry, but they bring together sharp students from some of the big universities and have them for a week and I get to teach. And I teach them this kind of material and they just love it. I mean, they say, you put my world together. I want to go and speak So I would not discourage anybody from not being involved from an evangelistic desire to be in those places. Dr. Jones, a question has come forward. Does the binary system lead to oppression and violence? If so, how do we combat that while preserving our faith? That's a good question. There are always a downside of good things. You know, does marriage lead to wife battery? Yes, sometimes. But there's a good marriage and then there's a bad marriage. And so there's good binary and bad binary. So if you are simply dismissing people, then in the name of the binary, I think that would be bad. But the very notion that there is distinction and that is good should motivate the way we think. I'm trying to think of bad expressions of binary. I don't come up with many. Maybe some of you see that. Yes? One is us versus them, which is, you know, indicative to all governments, societies, and religions. Right, right. Yeah, well, that's a false binary, I suppose. Obviously, it would be a false binary. Us and them is not true, because we're all us, and we're all them. So... Even in Christianity, there would be believers and non-believers. Well, that's not a false binary. That's a real binary. Oh no, oh no. Dr. Jones, we have a question. What was the purpose or intent of the old pagan religions in teaching one ism? I just mentioned that. I had said, if you remember, that these ancient religions must have sensed if Paul is right and you see in nature the evidence of the creator God, then pagan religion has to wipe that out. And it wipes it out, it seems to me, by successfully joining the gods and the humans as the Greek religions did. The Greek gods were simply extensions of the humans. But really, in no religion is there a true transcendent divine being the way there is in Christianity. And so, in order to eliminate that notion of true radical transcendence, I think pagan religions sought to eliminate the very clear evidences of that within nature by joining the opposites of all kinds. And we have another question. Actually, it's a two-part. Is homosexual, quote, marriage, unquote, sinful at its core because it embraces one-ism, that is, homo or same worship of self, whereas heterosexual marriage forces us to sacrifice self for someone different from ourselves. That's just a wonderful comment. That's not a question. I agree entirely with it. And you, the person who wrote that was clearly following well what I had to say. Yeah, that's the problem with homosexual marriage as such. is that instead of being confronted with the other, you're confronted with the same. And the whole notion of the relationships of marriage is God gave to Adam a fifth helper, but it's not the same as him. but somebody perfectly adapted to his needs, in particular his need, by the way, to fulfill the creational mandate to fill the earth and replenish it. And he looked around at all the animals and it didn't work. And then God gave him Eve and we get the formula egg plus sperm equals civilization. I just made that up. Are there other questions from the floor? I don't know that I can get to you from there or you can be heard from there. Let me see what I can do. If you'll meet me halfway, I think we might get there. You think that the march of one-ism that you've described carries with it a rejection of authority in general, or do you think it's simply a transfer of authority to different sources? Good question. I think what it actually does is reject all notions of distinction, including authority. But what it does do is create the possibility of power. that the only way then of organizing human beings is through power. See, I do think the classic American system was a twoist system, and that's why so many progressives hate the Constitution. Because what it is saying is that, yeah, there is the human realm, and then there is the divine. And so we have the rights from the creator and so on. And that always gives a space between humanity and authority. You always can appeal outside of the human realm to the divine, but once you get rid of the divine, then some people seize power and there's no place to appeal because they're all one. And I think we have to argue well for a twoist political system. And in all phases of life, twoism makes sense in the moral system. One of the great Achilles heels of a oneist system is If everything is one, then evil is part of the system. And you cannot eliminate it. That's why you have the notion of the joining of the opposites, by the way. You think you have eliminated evil by joining good and evil together, but you've simply done it as an arrangement for your own self and your own power. But you don't get rid of evil. But the proof is, somebody leading this group actually said that Hitler went to heaven His deeds were not evil, they were mistakes. See, you cannot agree to evil. And do you notice how difficult it is for our leaders today to use the term evil? They'll go all around the bush describing things, but you cannot say evil because it's an embarrassment to a one in system. I believe we have time for one more question. Here earlier you mentioned the idea of only two possibilities for creation. Speak loud, I think. A God who is a personal creator and self-creation. Would you elaborate a little bit on the matter of the absurdity or irrationality of self-creation? Yes. I've often been thinking about the irrationality of trying to explain complexity by lack of complexity. In other words, how do you ever arrive at where we are today if you don't have an adequate explanation for it? And it seems to me, how can you argue for personhood out of impersonal matter? You always have to have a valid cause to give a valid explanation of the results. And it seems to me that we can make a case Because everybody wants to be recognized as a person, right? Human rights are made in God's image. That's where we get human rights. And so we can make a case for a transcendent personal God as the source of everything.