Letter sent to the Belfast Newsletter, 5.35 pm, Saturday 23rd October 2021, by Rev Ivan Foster.
Sir,
In a letter to your newspaper, dated Thursday 21st October, Mr Gregory Campbell penned these words:
“Again there are those who want to abandon those values while there are others who demand that previous ways of upholding those values are the only way to proceed. The former is wrong and the latter is unsustainable.”
The ‘values’ he is referring to he identifies a few lines earlier in his letter as “a moral value system that is being attacked on a regular basis. It needs defending within the changing times we all live in.”
I assume that he is referring to the morals proclaimed by the gospel since Mr Campbell is a professing evangelical Christian.
Where I take issue with Mr Campbell is in just what he means by the words: “There are others who demand that previous ways of upholding those values are the only way to proceed. . . . the latter is unsustainable.”
There is only one way of upholding God’s standards and teaching and that is GOD’S WAY!
Now Mr Campbell may or may not have been referring to the criticism which has been directed at the DUP of late for its embracing of a pro-active agenda regarding the LGBT lobby and sodomy generally.
Like all politicians it appears he has lost the talent of calling a spade a spade! Such a tactic of course provides a back door through which to escape if any unwelcome criticism is aroused by his statement.
He can always use that old well known ‘escape hatch’ — ‘Oh, I didn’t mean that!’
If Mr Campbell did in fact claim that the desire to adhere to previous ways of upholding gospel values is ‘unsustainable’ then he is not merely wrong but unbiblical in his assertion.
Jeremiah 6:16 sets forth most succinctly just what I mean.
“Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where [is] the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk [therein],” Jeremiah 6:16.
In this instance, the ’they’ in the verse seems, sadly, to include Mr Campbell.
Rev Ivan Foster (Rtd)
Kilskeery.
21st October, 2021.