Inter-Church Festival
It is reported in the Press that more than 5000 people from all over Scotland are expected to attend a huge inter-church festival in Edinburgh next year. The programme will include music, drama, clown, puppets and dance. The theme of the Festival will be ‘Faith in the Future’. Rev. Maxwell Craig, General Secretary of ACTS (Action of Churches Together in Scotland) said: “We see it partly as the beginning of a countdown to the year 2000, looking at the way the church will be and how it will reach people in the next few decades.”
It is indescribably sad to think what Churches will resort to in order to attract people. How blind the religious leaders in Scotland are to the fact that it is abandonment of the Gospel by the Churches which has emptied these Churches. It is a waste of time for them to propose carnal amusements in order to attract people to the Churches of the land. Let the Churches of the land return to the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in all its fulness. This alone will bring the people of Scotland back again to the Churches.
The House of Lords and Sabbath Gambling
The House of Lords followed the House of Commons in sanctioning off-course betting on horse and greyhound racing on Sabbath. This applies to England and Wales. The Peers also backed a Government amendment making clear that the Sabbath Observance Act of 1780 no longer would apply to “any sporting activity.” While the House of Lords, along with the House of Commons, have now legalised Sabbath Gambling, the law of God remains unalterable and by that law shall Parliamentarians and others be judged at the last day. That will be a more solemn tribunal than the meetings of Parliament which authorised desecration of the Lord’s Day. It will be a tribunal which will have respect for the honour and glory of God.
Joint Parentage for Lesbian Couple
Evidence of how low the nation has fallen through the sins of Sodom is seen in the granting of a court order to a lesbian couple, making them joint legal parents of a child, whose birth to one of them they organised with a surrogate father. Their lawyer stated that they now had the same legal status as parents. What a solemn awakening sinners will have one day who go on in the most vile sins, and what solemn retribution must fall on a nation which legislates to accommodate the vilest transgressions of the moral law.
Head of the European Commission
Britain’s veto of the proposal to appoint Jean-Luc Dehaene as the next head of the European Commission has had wide ramifications in the European and domestic political scenes. Of more interest to us, however, is an article which appeared in The Daily Telegraph on 30th June, 1994 by Noel Malcolm. He sees prime minister John Major’s veto as one of “the first decisive steps to detach (the British Conservative Party) from the Christian Democrats in Europe.” He points out that during the recent European elections, Mr Douglas Hurd felt obliged to declare publicly that Tory Euro-candidates had nothing to do with the manifesto issued by the “European People’s Party”, the Christian Democrat grouping in Strasbourg. However, he thinks that Mr Major’s veto at Corfu went further than this.
It is heartening if this is indeed the case. There is some concern that the prime minister is too much under Romanist influence. Readers may remember that John Major’s friend, Chris Patten, who was central to the last general election victory, is a Roman Catholic. When Patten was first appointed to the Cabinet, the chief political correspondent of The Times gave him a glowing write-up, and although he was merely appearing for the first time he wrote that he had the potential to be a future prime minister. It was Chris Patten who supplied Major with the “subsidiarity” word at an earlier stage in the European debate. Subsidiarity is the principle of devolving decision-making down to the appropriate level of government. This was said to derive from Roman Catholic principles (although it is just as true of Presbyterianism). Even when Patten went out to Hong Kong, it was reported that John Major kept in close contact with him.
Noel Malcolm’s article reminds readers that the Social Chapter is not derived from Karl Marx but from Roman Catholic social doctrines, and that this is the reason for its support by the Christian Democrats in Europe. It points out that social “justice”, “solidarity”, “partnership”, “co-operation” are the buzz-phrases of modern Roman Catholic social theory. Malcolm claims that “a new alignment is in the making”. If this is indeed so, and that there is a developing rift between the Government and the Christian Democrats, this is to be welcomed.
Malcolm also states that Tony Blair is a devout Anglican with Anglo-Catholic leanings, whose wife is a Roman Catholic. Mr Blair frequently attends his wife’s church, and Blair apparently wrote not long ago that the inner meaning of Holy Communion was that it was a symbol of social interaction.
D.M.B.
Scotch Whisky Distillers and the Free Church of Scotland
A strange alliance between Scotch Whisky and the Free Church of Scotland was pictured in the northern press recently. United Distillers has donated a mini-bus to the Rosskeen congregation of the Free Church of Scotland near Alness. The Teaninich Distillery, Alness, has donated this towards the congregation’s community work. The company’s Scotch whisky production director was photographed handing over the keys to the Rev. Kenny MacDonald.
D.M.B.