March 01, 1989 by Ralph D. Winter

The crucial difference!

 The esteemed Protestant reformer, John Calvin, assented to the execution of Servitus on the grounds that his description of the doctrine of the Trinity was defective. Servitus certainly intended no parody or ridicule of the Christian faith. Now we have a Salman Rushdie who goes “all out” to elicit the horror and to dare the wrath of millions of Muslims who hold certain things sacred. And we are surprised that his death is called for by a mob of 50,000 in Bangladesh, etc. Where have we been?Americans are very strange. We are content to allow lawsuits running into the millions of dollars against people who would dare to say nasty things about anyone who is not a public figure. Yet we seem surprised that anyone would get upset about blatant, intentional malignment of highly respected religious leaders (like Muhammed).

Are we prepared for the fact that Salman Rushdie’s wife has apparently, and simultaneously, been operating on the same theory (that maligning the sacred will sell books) and has just now come out with a book that does for Christianity what her husband has done for Islam? Good old Harper & Row is publishing this one. Sure, it will sell.

But there is something far worse in all this. Ordinary Christian believers in the Western nations have now for many decades been subjected to a crude sophistication which allows printed and other media gradually to escalate into an insidious, ever-heightening attack against God Himself. We have allowed our American concept of “freedom of speech” to splatter the whole earth with printed and VCR perversity ranging from pornography to obscenity.

Way back in my college days I can recall books I read in English Literature and American Literature classes that often seemed to a great extent simply to be the attempt to demonstrate that righteousness, kindness, honesty, etc. do not work, and that in the real world you really must give up your convictions, morality, etc.

But now we have people attempting to sell their books and their souls with the ultimate in blasphemy.

Meanwhile, the Prison Fellowship newsletter reports the case of the imprisonment of a woman medical doctor whose daughter has been consistently abused sexually by her estranged husbands on periodic visits. Why is she imprisoned? Contempt of Court. A judge ordered the visits to continue and the mother sent the little girl into the underground…only 11 of 13 doctors examining the child felt sure she was being abused.

Can you imagine anyone these days in America being put in prison for Contempt of God? If you can’t, then you haven’t travelled very much. In other parts of the world there are lots of people who take divine things very seriously.