Jen Hatmaker and a Most Courageous Status

I like to think I’m on the cutting edge of these cultural times, but really, the only reason I know about anything anywhere is because of my friends very kindly linking everything on Facebook. Facebook is the town crier of our times. It’s the place where you find out news, where you discover the new celebrity, and where you can virtue signal your up to date theology and social concern.

So a few months ago I did hear about the existence of Jen Hatmaker, whom, I was informed, is akin to some kind of Christian celebrity. Someone sent me a picture of her mocking of her child in a Facebook status, and I thought to myself, “ugh”. I clicked around her award winning website and tried to read some stuff. She has a book out. And goes about speaking. And just wants to be email buddies.

And now she has the usual modicum of heresy to propel her to the next level.

Fortunately, having not heard of her so much as to have been hanging on her every word, I am not now I’m the position of rethinking everything she has ever said, because I don’t know what any of that is. I have a growing stack of books I mean to read so as to discover the specious and illogical thinking of so much of American Christianity, but I’m a slow reader, and I keep getting distracted by real books, like Pilgrims Inn, and No Fond Return of Love.

I would just like to say, having sort of gotten through her Facebook post, the obvious. Coming out in support of LGBTQ Transgender Virtue Signaling Social Justice Warrioring is neither “prophetic”, nor “courageous”. Getting on board with the most socially acceptable meme of the day isn’t the least bit brave.

Also, it’s not loving. I know, I know. This keeps being said and nobody cares any more. But, here I go again. The cultural definition of love is not to be conflated with the biblical one. In the culture, love is a fulfillment of self expression grounded in your gender and sexual identity. Love is what you feel and who you are. Love, cough, is apparently all you need. Love love love. But in the bible (and don’t miss the sarcasm dripping from my fingers here, and the noted condescension) God gets to give the definition of love. And according to God, in the bible, love is an act of self sacrifice for the good of another grounded in the truth of the gospel. It’s not your feelings, it’s not what you wish were so, it’s not your felt needs, it’s not the filling of the God shaped void in your heart. No, in Christianity, the ground of love is the death of Jesus on the cross for sinners who didn’t deserve for him to do that and don’t deserve to be gathered into him, because they were his enemy.

No one, not a single one, is a persecuted victim. God, in Jesus, is the innocent victim who died in our place because we were bound for hell. No one gets a pass on this. I don’t care how cutting edge your gender identity or sexual preferences are. Everyone has sinned. Everyone hates God. Everyone needs to be redeemed by the perfect blood of Christ.

And that being so, it is manifestly unloving to preen your feathers on facebook about how much you love the LGBT Transgender community when you are, in fact, not willing to tell the truth about the status of the individual before God. That’s not loving. That’s actual a very hateful thing to do.

And so, when professing Christians deny the foundation of that Gospel, it is surely appropriate to quote, however sarcastically, Ms. Hatmaker herself, “Nope. No. No ma’am. Not on my watch. No more. This is so far outside the gospel of Jesus that I don’t even recognize its reflection. I can’t. I won’t. I refuse.”