Jesus is the Son of God

In a previous post I remarked that in the 14 year tenure of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury, I could not recall seeing a single report of any of his speeches in which he asserted several essential key points of Christian belief. It was all politics and do-gooding. The lordship of Christ over the UK today? His death on the cross? Our need to repent of where we'd stopped following the Bible? Nope. Even allowing for the newspapers' general tendency to report things from their own perspective instead of objectively, that was a spectacular failure.

As such, it would be churlish for me not to appreciate seeing something different in here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9946252/Justin-Welby-enthroned-as-105th-Archbishop-of-Canterbury.html

"For more than 1,000 years this country has to one degree or another sought to recognise that Jesus is the Son of God; by the ordering of its society, by its laws, by its sense of community."

That's the nail on the head. Britain and the West did not rise through modern-day secular humanism. It rose through the faithful sufferings of God's people as they sought for a settlement in which the truths of the Bible, and the supremacy of the resurrected Son of God, were duly recognised. Modern secular humanism is parasitical, leeching off the past benefits whilst lyingly pretending that things have always been this way. Meanwhile, the foundations subside and the capital of the past is about to run out.

The above quote recognises that the lordship of Jesus is a public fact, and not only that, but public fact number one. It is not, according to the gospel (which declares that Jesus rose in this world, in this present age) a private religious belief, only relevant for people who happen to like it, and then only in their private lives.

Not so encouraging was a report from a relative who heard some more of Justin Welby's inauguration on the radio, and reports that he said both (something like) that Christianity did not hold that a man could have sexual relationships with a man; but also on the other hand he had been challenged in his thinking by meeting nice couples as personal friends.

Which is it? And which note will win out when the pressure of the world is placed upon him? Anyone who's risen in the church of England in modern times is used to a massive degree of compromise over Biblical essentials. Yet we can pray with integrity that the sound which wins out in Mr. Welby's proclamation is not (paraphrasing) "I have nice friends and the feelings that that brings make me wonder whether Jesus was really right after all", but "Jesus is the Son of God, and creation is his. There is an order of creation, which is not up for grabs, no matter how many warm and fuzzies come our way". (As an aside on that point, over here and here Steve Hays makes the point that there is nothing nice and fuzzy about sodomy, despite the best PR of the homosexual lobby. A man penetrating a man is intrinsically revolting; an act of the utmost depravity).