It's Monday, April 4, 2022. I'm Albert Moeller and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

We've been tracking the intersection of modernity

and so many of the big moral transformations of our age.

We're also looking at what can only be described as an inevitable collision

between the numerality of this modern age and historic biblical Christianity.

The fronts on this battle are many and yet one of the most important of them right now has been taking place in the nation of Finland.

Finland is not so often in the active imagination of Americans as a precedent-making nation when you're thinking about many of these

cultural issues but right now Finland is ground zero and in order to understand

what's going on there we need to see that there are two people who have recently been acquitted by a court there,

perhaps only for a brief amount of time, basically for holding to biblical Christianity.

One of them, very importantly, is a Lutheran Bishop, a Bishop of a smaller Lutheran church there within the nation of Finland,

and the other is a legislator, a member of Parliament, who is also a medical doctor who had previously served as the

Interior Minister for the Finnish government. Both of them found themselves facing

criminal charges there in Finland for on the one hand the parliamentarian having written a

document that was entitled male and female he created them upholding a biblical

understanding of gender and sexual relations and then the Bishop of a church for a biblical

understanding of gender and sexual relations, and then the bishop of a church

for having held to the same convictions,

having supported the member of parliament,

you can pretty much see the picture.

Now the good news is that last week a federal court there in Finland acquitted the two of the charges.

The bad news is state prosecutors have indicated they're going to try to appeal the acquittal of these two defendants.

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