(London) The word “fail” should be banned from use in British classrooms and replaced with the phrase “deferred success” to avoid demoralizing pupils, a group of teachers has proposed.

Members of the Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) argue that telling pupils they have failed can put them off learning for life.

Get ready to e-mail this one to your friends…
July 20, 2005. Reuters – Oddly Enough

Comment: Could this be the same reasoning behind Antinomians saying, "Christians no longer need to have the law preached at them. It destroys the self-esteem that God has created in them."?

Just because the law is indeed not established for a righteous person, is a righteous man therefore lawless? Certainly not. But since the righteous person has received beforehand through Christ the status of one who has fulfilled those things which are required by the law, the law is not against this righteous person who has done the law. Rather the law is established against those who fail to obey, judging them to be transgressors.

Epiphanius of Salamis (365-403). Catalog of the Dogmas of the Manichaeans, p 334
cited by: König, George, Centuria Vinidiciarum Sacrarum – Locus III: I Tim. 1:9
cited in: Dogmatics, Exegesis, and Pastoral Theology. p. 209
Summer 2004. WLQ, Vol. 101, No. 3

[If you preach a gospel of tolerance] you change God’s clear message and allow human behavior to go on unchecked and unchanged. God’s forgiveness changes people; tolerance leaves things as they are and hides human faults under layers of rationalizations. A gospel of tolerance that ignores God’s law does not prepare anyone for eternity. It only avoids the concept of sin and dodges conflict. It is no gospel at all.

…Those changed by his forgiveness abandon what is contrary to the will of God. They seek God’s will not their own. Zacchaeus didn’t hear a gospel of tolerance; neither did the thief on the cross. Instead they turned away from what was contrary to the will of God…

The point is difficult to make in a world of political correctness where everyone is equally right and where every challenge to sinful human behavior is considered to be arrogant, ignorant, judgmental, and without love.

But God did not treat sin with blind indulgence or uncritical tolerance. The bloody and bruised face of Jesus reveals the seriousness of sin and the lengths God went to remove it. He did not simply forget it and allow humanity to meander though history without a real remedy.

Braun, John. Forgiveness transforms us, p 34
July 2006. Forward in Christ – Editorial, Vol. 93, No. 7

In Los Angeles, there’s a hotline for people in denial. So far no-one has called.

Carlin, George

Comment: "Antinomianism" - when Christians are in denial of their need of God's Law. Can you hang up the phone on the Ten Commandments?

Whereas the sixteenth century Reformation returned our focus to sacred Scriptures as the only infallible rule for faith and practice, the new reformation will return our focus to the sacred right of every person to self-esteem! (p 38) Sin is “any human condition or act that robs God of glory by stripping one of this [sic.] children of their divine right to dignity” (p 14). The most serious sin is the one that causes me to say “I am unworthy. I may have no claim to divine sonship if you examine me at my worst” (p 98).

Schuller, Robert. Self-Esteem: the New Reformation
cited by: Brug, John F. Scylla And Charybdis, p 5
Winter 2006. Wisconsin Lutheran Quarterly - Foreword to Volume, No. 1

Comment: I don't post these statements because I agree with them, nor does the author of "Scylla and Charybdis." They represent a misguided concept about sin that focuses on an individual's rights and self-esteem. These quotes are presented as 'antinomian' concepts, that is: Christians don't need the law, because they are now driven by a consciousness of self-worth. They should read Romans 7 again to find a sinful Paul, dealing with more than just poor self-esteem; Real sin rages within each of us. Only in Christ do we find hope and the greatest self-worth -- that he loved us so much to make us his own.