Counter Culture by David Platt

Author:David Platt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Life / General
ISBN: 9781496400000
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2015-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

Definitions of terms are extremely important.

I was preaching in Germany one day, and a group of new friends asked me, “Do you want to play football with us this afternoon?”

I enjoy football—both watching it and playing it. In high school and college my friends and I used to spend our weekends throwing the ball outside and playing pickup games. “Count me in!” I told them excitedly.

To my surprise, when I got down to the field, I didn’t find tall goalposts and a brown ball with pointy ends. Instead, I saw two goals with nets on them and a round, black-and-white ball. That’s when I remembered: football in Europe (and most of the rest of the world) is a lot different from my American understanding of football. I call their kind of football soccer.

Football. Same term, different definitions. And definitions of terms affect the decisions we make. Football is a simple, relatively inconsequential, example of this (though had I known I’d agreed to play soccer with a group of European friends who are experts in the sport, I may have come to the field with a little less enthusiasm!). But there are other more significant, extremely consequential examples of this as well. As we considered in chapter 3, one’s definition of a human has huge ramifications for one’s view of abortion. How terms like this are defined by a culture determines much about how people not only make decisions but also lead their lives in that culture.

So how does one define marriage?

This question lies at the heart of a moral revolution in our time and culture. For millennia, civilizations have defined marriage as an exclusive, permanent union of a man and a woman. Two decades ago politicians in our country voted across party lines to defend this definition of marriage in what was called the Defense of Marriage Act. Yet in June 2013 the Supreme Court of the United States struck down key provisions of that Act, paving the way for the complete redefinition of marriage across our culture. In the days that followed, states began officially defining marriage according to different terms, now notably allowing same-sex relationships to be classified as so-called marriages.

As if this Supreme Court ruling were not enough of a paradigm shift, the majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy asserted that the men and women who voted for the Defense of Marriage Act were acting with the intent to harm. In their minority opinions, Justices John Roberts and Antonin Scalia both acknowledged how the majority court was painting supporters of marriage as it has been defined for millennia as “bigots” who sought to “demean,” “disparage,” “humiliate,” and “injure” same-sex couples. In a sweeping decision, the Supreme Court of our country thus redefined “an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence—indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history” while simultaneously defining proponents of traditional marriage as “enemies of the human race.”[57]

The court’s decision

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