Review of Peter Jones, One or Two: Seeing a World of Difference, Escondido: Main Entry Editions, 2010.
Peter Jones, the director of truthXchange, has written a most incisive treatment and application of Romans 1. He considers, with good reason, that the two hottest issues today are Christian uniqueness and homosexuality. When we reject the revelation that God has given to all mankind, our theology is distorted (Rom.1:18-21), then our spirituality or worship (Rom.1:22-23), and finally our behaviour, especially our sexuality (Rom.1:24, 26-32). This does not make for pleasant reading, but it no time for Christians to make-believe that all is well. At the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the USA, Bishop Gene Robinson prayed to the ‘God of our many understandings’.
Harvey Milk has now become a hero, and lunatics and misfits like Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Jung are treated as founts of all wisdom. Our leaders usually contribute to the problem, not the solution. Prince Charles is one who detracts from the wisdom of the world every time he opens his mouth. It is small wonder. The Church itself is in ruins in so many places. Mark Hanson, a bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, has declared that ‘Human sexuality should not be the occasion to divide the church.’
We have returned to the culture condemned in Romans 1, the time when Nero married two homosexual lovers – Pythagoras and Sporus. Sporus was actually made empress. Today he might have become a bishop. Yet not all is doom and degradation. Reality has a way of teaching us, and just before he turned 81 the long-time philosophical atheist, Anthony Flew, announced that he had become a theist. Hopefully, he embraced Christ before his death. Peter Jones finishes with the testimony of a fortune-teller who went to hear Martyn Lloyd-Jones preach, and said that she experienced ‘clean power’ for the first time. If the darkness is dark, we can be assured that the light is still clean and powerful.
– Peter Barnes