This Mexican American explains why Donald Trump is getting his
vote. He is deeply rooted within the Mexican culture, and says that when he
said he would vote for Trump, he got ostracized and told he wasn’t really
Latino. Not all people think the same, he says.
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Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Monday, May 30, 2016
Mailvox: how to eject the Cult of Nice - Vox Day
JB
asks how to go about restoring the worship of Jesus Christ to the nominally
Christian church where the Cult of Nice has taken root:
My
own church is not infested by SJWs, but it is solidly in the Church of Nice
camp. There have never been any horror story sermons such as those
described by Dalrock on his blog, but the big ministry push is to send as many
people to Mexico on "mission trips" as possible... and sometimes they
bring natives back with them. Also, the pastor expressly avoids
"politics" in his teachings but routinely uses examples such as
Jackie Robinson and Holocaustianity in his sermons. I've never heard
anything outrageous from the pulpit, but neither have I heard anything truly
inspiring. The best word I can think to describe my church and its
leadership is "lukewarm."
I used to think my congregation was fully Churchian, but in a weekly class on Christian Ethics I decided to stop being "Nice" myself. We talked about standard political issues like economics, abortion, environmentalism, etc. The leader was a well-meaning man but in his research prior to our discussion on immigration he apparently could find little Biblical support for immigration restrictionism. At the beginning of the immigration class, he explained to everyone that he was originally anti-immigration but his research forced him to conclude that the Bible mandated open borders. Fortunately, I reread Cuckservative the night before and (thanks in large part to you and John Red Eagle) systematically demolished his argument and built a Christian case in favor of immigration restrictionism. My case was not "Nice" by any stretch.
However, rather than being excommunicated from the class because I dared say that Christians can morally support borders (a heresy in the Churchian mindset), I was invited to explain my position in more depth the next class and many people congratulated me and wished to learn more after the class was over. Even the class leader seemed relieved to hear that a Christian case for immigration restrictionism was possible. If there had been an SJW in the class, I would have been ejected. Instead, I became a thought leader for the rest of the course and the class as a whole became less "Nice" and more "Christian" in the true sense.
This event led me to conclude that my congregation wants to be Christian but is Churchian out of ignorance and timidity. This ignorance is shared at the top of our leadership. No one appears to be fully SJW, but many do seem to believe that Churchianity is Christianity whether they like its repercussions or not.
I've been asked to help teach a discussion course next semester on why children raised in the church tend to leave it as they get older. Of course, I believe the "Christian alt-right" explanation that modern Churchianity is poison and that a true Christian church would draw everyone back into the pews. But I'm not sure using pure red meat such as Cuckservative immediately as a main text is as solid a strategy as using some softer stuff to build the students' tolerance for alt-right theology.
How would you bring an ignorant, but apparently receptive, congregation back into the Christian fold from a surface-level Churchianity?
I used to think my congregation was fully Churchian, but in a weekly class on Christian Ethics I decided to stop being "Nice" myself. We talked about standard political issues like economics, abortion, environmentalism, etc. The leader was a well-meaning man but in his research prior to our discussion on immigration he apparently could find little Biblical support for immigration restrictionism. At the beginning of the immigration class, he explained to everyone that he was originally anti-immigration but his research forced him to conclude that the Bible mandated open borders. Fortunately, I reread Cuckservative the night before and (thanks in large part to you and John Red Eagle) systematically demolished his argument and built a Christian case in favor of immigration restrictionism. My case was not "Nice" by any stretch.
However, rather than being excommunicated from the class because I dared say that Christians can morally support borders (a heresy in the Churchian mindset), I was invited to explain my position in more depth the next class and many people congratulated me and wished to learn more after the class was over. Even the class leader seemed relieved to hear that a Christian case for immigration restrictionism was possible. If there had been an SJW in the class, I would have been ejected. Instead, I became a thought leader for the rest of the course and the class as a whole became less "Nice" and more "Christian" in the true sense.
This event led me to conclude that my congregation wants to be Christian but is Churchian out of ignorance and timidity. This ignorance is shared at the top of our leadership. No one appears to be fully SJW, but many do seem to believe that Churchianity is Christianity whether they like its repercussions or not.
I've been asked to help teach a discussion course next semester on why children raised in the church tend to leave it as they get older. Of course, I believe the "Christian alt-right" explanation that modern Churchianity is poison and that a true Christian church would draw everyone back into the pews. But I'm not sure using pure red meat such as Cuckservative immediately as a main text is as solid a strategy as using some softer stuff to build the students' tolerance for alt-right theology.
How would you bring an ignorant, but apparently receptive, congregation back into the Christian fold from a surface-level Churchianity?
Alt-right
theology, now there is a simply terrifying term! Anyhow, I
would start with a private meeting with the pastor first, and if he is
supportive, with the elders next. It's important to determine if you have an
amenable authority or a hostile one before taking action, as that will
significantly effect the way in which your campaign proceeds.
The next step would be to develop a program called "Back to the Biblical Basics" which the pastor could draw upon for his sermons and the Sunday School teachers and Bible Study leaders could utilize for their weekly activities. These subjects should be selected for undermining the various Churchian and Cult of Nice concepts that have gradually crept in over the years. Each topic should be based around a single Bible verse that contradicts or otherwise destroys the Churchian narrative, such as the way Matthew 15:25-28 destroys both the equalitarian and the immigrationist aspects of that narrative.
The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
But Jesus replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
“Yes, Lord,” she said, “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
“O woman,” Jesus answered, “your faith is great! Let it be done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.
I would welcome similar suggestions in the comments; I expect 10-12 would be the minimum to provide a foundation for the "Back to the Biblical Basics" program.
And JB's instincts are correct. Christians steeped in the Cult of Nice should not be encouraged to readSJWAL or Cuckservative, much less the relevant Alt-Right sites. They are not ready for it. Instead, they should be asked, relentlessly, if the narrative position they are upholding is one of which the world approves or not, and if worldly approval of its positions is the primary objective of a Christian Church. For every argument they make, from "we must be welcoming" to "everyone is equal", have a verse to hand that demonstrates it to be the extra-Biblical, non-Christian nonsense that it is.
The third step is to embrace the consequences. Some church members will acknowledge Scriptural authority. Help them grow in understanding, conviction, and courage. Other members will reject Scriptural authority, cling to the Cult of Nice, and will probably threaten to leave the church. Don't try to talk them out of it, but rather, help them go, as per the example of Gideon. If church members are more of the world than of the Church, then they belong in the former, and not the latter. The Church has no need of numbers; just 12 Apostles were all that was required to shake the world.
The next step would be to develop a program called "Back to the Biblical Basics" which the pastor could draw upon for his sermons and the Sunday School teachers and Bible Study leaders could utilize for their weekly activities. These subjects should be selected for undermining the various Churchian and Cult of Nice concepts that have gradually crept in over the years. Each topic should be based around a single Bible verse that contradicts or otherwise destroys the Churchian narrative, such as the way Matthew 15:25-28 destroys both the equalitarian and the immigrationist aspects of that narrative.
The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
But Jesus replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
“Yes, Lord,” she said, “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
“O woman,” Jesus answered, “your faith is great! Let it be done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.
I would welcome similar suggestions in the comments; I expect 10-12 would be the minimum to provide a foundation for the "Back to the Biblical Basics" program.
And JB's instincts are correct. Christians steeped in the Cult of Nice should not be encouraged to readSJWAL or Cuckservative, much less the relevant Alt-Right sites. They are not ready for it. Instead, they should be asked, relentlessly, if the narrative position they are upholding is one of which the world approves or not, and if worldly approval of its positions is the primary objective of a Christian Church. For every argument they make, from "we must be welcoming" to "everyone is equal", have a verse to hand that demonstrates it to be the extra-Biblical, non-Christian nonsense that it is.
The third step is to embrace the consequences. Some church members will acknowledge Scriptural authority. Help them grow in understanding, conviction, and courage. Other members will reject Scriptural authority, cling to the Cult of Nice, and will probably threaten to leave the church. Don't try to talk them out of it, but rather, help them go, as per the example of Gideon. If church members are more of the world than of the Church, then they belong in the former, and not the latter. The Church has no need of numbers; just 12 Apostles were all that was required to shake the world.
Sunday, May 29, 2016
CAP – Study 9 – Institutions – Family – Children
CAP –
Study 9 – Institutions – Family – Children
This study addresses the parents’
responsibility for their children, especially their education. The Bible is not
vague on this subject. It is very clear and specific.
It is my personal belief that this issue
is the primary reason why the church is ineffective in America, the country is
in deep trouble and the Kingdom of God is not being advanced as we would expect.
Sadly, our public education system is making disciples for the religion of
humanism with the tax money extracted from Christians – apparently with their
full approval.
The items covered are:
·
Children are a blessing of God.
·
The family is a training ground for
leadership in the church.
·
Education is the MORAL responsibility of
parents.
·
The modern State has arrogated to itself
the education of all children.
·
Most Christians have approved ‘tithing
their children to the State’.
The following narrative is from Gary
North’s “Unconditional Surrender”.
Children
Children are a blessing of God.
"Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is
his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the
youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be
ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate" (Psalm
127:3-5). The
enemies in the gate are opponents who have come before the judges of the city,
who in Old Testament times sat at the gate, to bring a charge against a man.
Men with large families have confidence in themselves, and so are not afraid of
such enemies. This appears to indicate that the self-discipline involved in being the head of a large family
carries over into other human relationships. Large families
produce heads of households who are better fit to lead in the community.
One of
the requirements for holding the offices of elder or deacon in the church is
for a man to be married (I
Timothy 3:2,12). He is to rule over his household effectively (I Timothy 3:4-5, 12). The family is a training ground for leadership in the
church. One of the obvious failures of almost all denominations
and local churches-a failure which goes back to the early church- is the
unwillingness of church authorities to write into their denominational
handbooks guide lines defining successful rule over a family. The modern
churches place great emphasis on where a man went to college or seminary, on
whether he can raise money, or on whether he can deliver a red-hot sermon. The
Bible puts little or no emphasis on any of these factors. It puts emphasis
on the leader's abilities as the head of his household.
Children are a tool of dominion. They are to be sacrificed for in
their youth. They are to be instructed carefully and continually in the law of
God. "And these words,
which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart; and thou shalt teach
them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in
thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and
when thou risest up* (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). The time spent in training children
in God's law is time well spent, for it is a capital investment. It does
produce the next generation of godly, dominion-minded families. The Bible says,
"Train up a child in the
way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it" (Proverbs
22:6).
This
leads us to an extremely significant conclusion: education is
the moral responsibility of parents. They
are the ones who must determine whether or not their children are being taught
the truth. They are responsible before God for the rearing of their children.
They are held responsible even for the content of their children's education.
This is why it is a great responsibility to bring children into the world.
The modern State has asserted its
responsibility to educate children. This is the means by which the modern State
has arrogated to itself the position of the established god on earth. The
government schools have become the established religion of every nation on
earth. Humanism, which is the worship of man and his works, rests on this
crucial institutional foundation: the tax-supported, State-regulated,
hypothetically neutral, deeply religious humanist school system. There can be
no neutrality, yet the government schools have almost completely stamped out
Christianity and the law of God by means of the neutrality myth. The State
forces Christians to finance schools that teach a rival religion, the religion
of humanism. The State has also attempted to regulate Christian and
independently financed schools. At every point, the State has substituted
tenured bureaucrats who are virtually impossible for parents to remove from
authority, while it has removed parents from the seats of power in setting
curricula or any other standards. The
modern State-which is a messianic, supposedly man-saving institution-has used
the tax-supported, compulsory schools as the primary means of stealing children
from God, by removing them from parental control.
Christians complain about
taxation, but they have tithed their children to the State. They have abdicated their financial responsibilities
"Let the State finance my children's educations" and in our day, they
have abandoned almost all other aspects of their instructional
responsibilities. They have turned the production of citizens over to tax-financed,
state directed schools. The priests of the religion of humanism have been able
to enlist the support of many generations of Christian parents, who have
decided that it is easier to transfer the responsibility for educating their
children to bureaucrats hired by the State.
Naturally,
parents have to delegate responsibility to someone. Few parents have the time
or skills to educate their children at home. But the fundamental principle of
education is the tutor or the apprentice director. Parents hire
specialists to teach their children along lines established by parents. The
private school is simply an extension of this principle, with several parents
hiring a tutor, thereby sharing the costs. But the parents, not the tutors, are
institutionally sovereign. Since sovereignty must bear the
costs, education should be parent-financed. Anything else is a
transfer of authority over education to an imitation family.
Children
are to honor their parents (Exodus
20:12). It is the first promise which is attached to a commandment: "... that thy days may be long
upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee" (Exodus 20:12b). So
the parents owe their children educations, food, shelter, and care, but the
children owe their parents honor. This means financial support. There are mutual
obligations based on personal bonds. No
one in the transaction is to become an endless giver, and no one is to
become a perpetual recipient.
The modern messianic State has intervened
here, too. The State promises to uphold men from womb to tomb. The State
promises to become the new father. The impersonal, bureaucratic State has
substituted its rule for the father's rule, and its children-perpetual
children-are to remain obedient to it all the days of their lives.
The
Bible tells us that children grow up and begin new families. "Therefore shall a man leave
his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one
flesh" (Genesis 1:24). There should be no
perpetual one-way obligations. Parents are to train their children to be
obedient, but also independent. They are to foster maturity in their children.
The State wants perpetual children, complete obedience. The State is a sad
imitation of a family. It is a pseudo-family which threatens human
freedom.
Why Morality is the Only Thing We Should Legislate - By Selwyn Duke
“You
can’t legislate morality!” is a common battle cry today. It’s thought to be a
quintessentially American idea, even though the Founding Fathers never
expressed such a sentiment. Nor did the early Americans who would unabashedly
enforce a biblically based code of morality in their localities, both via
social pressure and governmental laws, with transgressors sometimes spending
time in stocks — or worse. No, our common battle cry is a modern idea, and one
of modernism. It also betrays a fundamental, and dangerous, misunderstanding of
law’s nature.
In
reality, the only thing we should legislate is morality. The only
other option is legislating whims or immorality.
One
problem with addressing this issue, which I have done several times, is that
many readers have a reason-clouding emotional reaction induced by the
assumption that I’m advocating big government. So I’ll preface what follows by
saying that even if we enact just one law — let’s say, prohibiting murder — we
have legislated morality. The only people who could credibly say they wouldn’t
legislate morality are those who wouldn’t legislate at all: anarchists.
I’ll
start by putting this simply. Could you imagine a legislator saying, “This law
doesn’t prevent something that’s wrong, but I’m going to impose it
on you anyway”? What if he said, “This other law doesn’t mandate anything that
is a good, but I’ll compel you to adhere to it simply because I
feel like it”? Would you suppose his legislation had a sound basis? Or would
you think that, unlike a prohibition against murder or theft, the imposition of
something lacking a moral foundation (“rightness” or “wrongness”) was the very
definition of tyranny?
Generally
speaking, a law is by definition the imposition of a value (which can be
positive, negative or neutral), and a just law is the imposition of a moral
principle (good by definition). This is because a law — with the exception of
laws for naming post offices and such (which don’t constrain us and which won’t
be included henceforth when I speak of “laws”) — states that there is something
you must or must not do, ostensibly because the action is a moral imperative,
is morally wrong, or is a corollary thereof. If this is not the case, again,
with what credibility do you legislate in the given area? There is no point
imposing something that doesn’t prevent a wrong or mandate some good. This is
why there will never be a powerful movement lobbying to criminalize strawberry
ice cream or kumquats.
As
an example, what is the possible justification for speed laws? Well, there is
the idea that it’s wrong to endanger others or yourself, and, in the latter
case, it could be based on the idea that it's wrong to engage in reckless
actions that could cause you to become a burden on society. Of course, some or
all of these arguments may be valid or not, but the point is this: if a law is
not underpinned by a valid moral principle, it is not a just law.
Without morality, laws can be based on nothing but air.
One
cause of the strong negative reaction (generally among libertarian-leaners) to
the above is the word “morality” itself; as with “capitalism” in liberal
circles, the term has taken on a negative connotation. Yet this is partially
due to a narrow and incorrect view of what morality is. Use the word, and many
imagine the Church Lady or a preacher breathing fire and brimstone; moreover,
reflecting our libertine age’s spirit, people’s minds often automatically go to
sex. “Stay out of the bedroom!” we hear, even though the only side legislating
bedroom-related matters today is the Left (e.g., contraception mandate, forcing
businesses to cater faux weddings). It’s almost as if, dare I say, some people
are worried that others may ruin their fun.
Morality
encompasses far more than sexual matters, however. Yet it is narrow in one way:
it includes only correct principles of rightness. And, again,
when these are not the stuff of laws, elements of wrongness will be.
Speaking
of which, everyone advocating legislation seeks to impose a conception of
morality or, as modernists are wont to put it, a “values” set. For example, the
only justification for forcing bakers to service faux weddings is the
(incorrect) notion that it’s “wrong” to deny such service. ObamaCare could only
be justified based on the idea that providing medical care for those who can’t
afford it is a moral imperative. And “transgender” bathroom laws
would have to be based on the fancy that it’s wrong to
disallow someone from using facilities associated with his “gender identity.”
A
common argument I’ve heard in response to the above is “No, I don’t legislate
morality; something should only be illegal if it harms another.” Other
arguments are that we should merely prohibit “force” or protect “property
rights.” Leaving alone the deep matter of what constitutes “harm,” these
assertions are, with all due respect, dodges. Is it “wrong” to harm another,
use unjust force against him or violate property rights? If not, why trouble
over it?
People
making the harm, force or property-rights argument are almost universally
sincere, except with themselves, as it’s self-deception. It’s a way of
preserving a mistaken ideological principle (“Don’t legislate morality”) by
obscuring what it is you’re actually doing when making law. It’s also dangerous
because it keeps things on a more superficial level. It’s a way relativistic
moderns can avoid dealing with something they consider inconvenient, messy and
divisive: determining “What is good?” But when you don’t work hard to settle
what is good, you end up with what is bad.
Another
reason many people are oblivious to the morality underpinning their conception
of law is that many moral principles are now woven so seamlessly into our
civilization’s fabric that we don’t recognize them as “morality.”
Yet a moral
does not cease to be a moral because it becomes a meme. Consider that while we
take for granted that theft, murder and slavery should be governmentally
prohibited, most pre-Christian pagans would have found such an idea foreign.
Pillaging for a living, Viking-style, was common and accepted; might made
right. And while you might not murder or enslave your fellow group members (one
problem Athenians had with Spartans was that the latter enslaved other Greeks:
the Helots), outsiders were fair game. In fact, if there had been such a thing
as a libertarian Roman, he just might have said to Christians endeavoring to
outlaw the brutality of the arena, “You can’t legislate morality!”
There
can be no such thing as a separation of morality and state. That is, unless we
want to regress to man’s default, the immoral state.
Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on
to SelwynDuke.com
Russia, Solzhenitsyn, and the Reset Button - By Fay Voshell (A truly profound article)
In
2009, Hillary Clinton, then U.S. Secretary of State, presented her Russian
counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, with a “reset” button she
thought symbolized a new era for Russian and American diplomacy.
Lavrov
pointed out the word the Americans had chosen, “peregruzka,” meant
“overcharged,” not “reset.” Though the two leaders laughed off the mistake, the
mistranslated button was a symbol of persistent misunderstanding between the
two nations.
Russia
has long been characterized by many in the West as enigmatic; indeed, almost
beyond understanding. It was Winston Churchill who in October of 1939, mere
weeks after the invasion of Poland by Nazi armed forces, speculated on the role
of Russia in the war, famously depicting
Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
He
added: “…but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. It
cannot be in accordance with the interest of the safety of Russia that Germany
should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun
the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of south eastern Europe.
That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia.”
In
other words, Churchill could not envision the dismemberment of the Soviet Union
by the German war machine without Russia fighting for her “life interests.”
History proved him right. Russia survived, though gravely wounded.
The
claims of Russia to her unique, historic life interests again came to the
forefront when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s and Russia the nation
and empire appeared on the verge of total disintegration. Russia found itself
in desperate need of a Weltanschauung that would replace the
communist ideology that had held the nation in its grip for seventy years. If
she did not, she might even face the prospect of radical shrinkage back to the
proportions of Kievan Rus, her empire absorbed into Eastern Europe and the Far
East. For some, if not most, of Russia’s political and intellectual leaders,
the prospect of seeing the Russian empire virtually disappear was unthinkable.
Discerning
that a U.S. Marshall Plan was not in order for Russia, several main figures
came forward with ideas for a Russian reset button, one which they saw as
including the “historic life interests” of Russia in the post-communist era.
One, of course, is Vladimir Putin, whose embrace of Russian Orthodoxy has been
a reason for the elevation of Christianity to a place of influence it occupied
for over a millennium.
One of the spiritual and philosophical
influences behind Putin has been Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Partly due to Putin’s
influence, Solzhenitsyn’s master work The Gulag Archipelago is
now required reading in Russian schools.
Solzhenitsyn
openly rejected the secularist and leftist liberal political philosophy
dominating the cultures of Europe and America. Russia, he said, had her own
unique spiritual and historic heritage, a heritage that clashed with the
dominant ideology of the West. Though he admired the spirituality of the
American heartland, he saw the West in general as drowning in a vortex created
by moral degradation, anti-religious sentiment, and extreme individualism.
Perhaps
the most succinct and prescient analyses of the errors of the liberal
democratic West and the failure of the West to understand Russia and Russian
spirituality is found in his speech at Harvard University, given in 1978 some
eleven years before the collapse of East Germany and the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn
reminded the Harvard graduates that the West was not the one and only advanced
culture. Russia also deserved high regard as an ancient and autonomous
entity:
“Any ancient and deeply rooted, autonomous culture… constitutes
an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking… For one
thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking
systematically committed the mistake of denying its autonomous character and therefore
never understood it…”
In other words, if Russia was an enigma, it
was due to Western blindness, a blindness that was largely due to spiritual
cataracts. If Russia seemed inscrutable, it was because American and the
rest of the West failed to understand the Russian soul and the Russian nation.
No reset was possible unless the West returned to its own Christian spiritual
roots. Until spiritual eyeglasses provided vision, the materialistic but
powerful West would remain blinded by its sense of total superiority.
The
West, he went on to say, thought of itself as possessing the most attractive
system, and regarded other nations as culturally inferior entities that needed
to come up to speed, rejecting their “wicked governments” and “their own
barbarity” in order to take “the way of western pluralistic democracy and
adopting the Western way of life.
Countries are judged on the merit of their
progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which develops out of
Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of
measuring them all with a Western yardstick.”
Russia
had its own ancient and autonomous character and was in some ways more advanced
than the secularist West, which he saw as declining in courage, and as inclined
toward overemphasis on individual rights seldom ameliorated by a corresponding
emphasis on individual obligations. Such was the emphasis on individual rights
that “destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space.”
The result was that evil had boundless freedom to expand in every part of
society, expressing itself as individual “rights,” be those rights exhibiting
themselves in pornography, violence, and even anarchy. A firm belief in the
basic goodness of human nature coupled with an almost complete misapprehension
of the evil inherent in human nature had led the West to embracing what
amounted to spiritual and moral anarchy.
The
spiritual condition of the West meant its system was not the ideal model for
Russia, which Solzhenitsyn characterized as possessing spiritual strength the
West had once possessed, but which it had rejected. The West was spiritually
exhausted due to the repudiation of the Christian principles on which it was
based. As Russia was, even in the midst of the communist regime, gaining her
spiritual strength, a vitiated West had virtually nothing to say to her beyond
advocacy of runaway materialism and out-of-control individualism.
Solzhenitsyn
went on to point out the basic error that led to the decadence of the West; namely,
the assumption of the Enlightenment that mankind has no higher force above him,
but is autonomous -- mankind as the center of everything that exists. In
effect, the West, including America, which at its inception believed quite
differently, rejected the idea that all “individual human rights were granted
because man is God’s creature.” Freedom, he said, is conditional in that it has
grave religious responsibilities, an idea that had roots thousands of years
old.
He
concluded any commonality between Russia and the West had to be spiritual:
“[If] the world has not come to its end, it has approached a
major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to
the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge: We shall have to rise
to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature
will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our
spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era. This ascension
will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth
has any other way left but -- upward.”
For
Solzhenitsyn, Christianity, specifically the Russian Orthodox Church, had
informed the Russian soul and Russia since the end of the first millennium,
with roots going back to the Eastern Roman Empire. The path leading to
restoration of true greatness lay in a return to God and a repudiation of the
dark inheritance of a so-called Enlightenment that fostered atheism and sought
to tear down Christianity.
Having
experienced firsthand the brutality of a regime motivated by atheism,
Solzhenitsyn saw a similar deleterious influence at the core of the crisis of
the West. Once again, runaway atheism was revealing its inherently destructive
nature. In his Templeton Prize Lecture of May 1983, “Godlessness: The First
Step to the Gulag,” he said:
“And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal
trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find
anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten
God. The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension,
have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.
“…the world had never before known a godlessness as organized,
militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within
the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their
psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than
all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely
incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the
central pivot.
[In the West] …the concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed
for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by
political or class considerations of short lived value. It has become
embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart
before it enters a political system.”
The
West, including America, was sliding toward an abyss of its own making. The
young were deliberately being taught godlessness and hatred of their own
society. The subsequent corrosion of the human heart and hatred was fast
becoming the signature of the contemporary free world, which appeared anxious
to export to the rest of the world its own philosophy of godlessness and
immorality.
The
solution, he concluded, was repentance and return to God:
“…[W]e can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of
God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can
our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our
bands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in
the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment
amounts to nothing… If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours
alone.”
Solzhenitsyn’s
powerful insights hold much truth. If there is to be a reset between the West
and Russia, it must be based on the mutual and ancient Christian roots of both
entities. Here in the United States, there is a Christian commonality that
still exists, but it desperately requires fostering and revival.
In
the meantime, Christianity in the West and in Russia remains a key to the
relationship between the two.
Therein
lies a way to rapprochement.
Therein
lies a possibility of a “reset button.”
The
way will not be easy, as the present leaders of the West have largely bowed to
the forces of a spiritually arid and atheistic secularism.
But
there is hope that some will seek to hear and to heed the voice that says,
“This is the way. Walk in it.”
Fay
Voshell is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She holds a M.Div. from
Princeton Theological Seminary, where she received the seminary’s prize for
excellence in systematic theology. Her thoughts have appeared in many online
magazines, including Russia Insider, National
Review, CNS, RealClearReligion and Fox News. She has also presented her
views on radio and television. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Productivity gains don't explain the demise of US manufacturing jobs - By Sierra Rayne
At
the Financial Times, Martin Wolf purports
to provide a prescription for "How to defeat rightwing
populism." Beyond the all too typically mindless bashing of Donald
Trump (see, e.g., "This is why Mr Trump is so danger
us: he has no notion
of the foundations of US success" and other quotes therein), Wolf provides
the following insight:
If rightwing populism is to be defeated, one must offer
alternatives. In a forthcoming article Dartmouth College's Douglas Irwin notes
that protectionism is quack medicine. Productivity growth accounted for more
than 85 per cent of the job losses in manufacturing between 2000 and 2010.
This
is very wrong.
The
Federal Reserve has kept records of real output per hour of all persons in
manufacturing since 1987:
If productivity growth between 2000 and
2010 accounted for 85% of all job losses in U.S. manufacturing, then we would
expect to have seen some type of break (aka a tipping point) in the historical
trend of productivity growth in 2000, signifying a transition to a much faster
rate of productivity growth that then links to a historical relationship
between employment losses and increased productivity.
Instead, we see nothing of the kind.
From 1990 to 2000, the index of real
output per hour increased by 25 units, and manufacturing sector
employment was relatively constant (technically declining by only
3.9%, but there was effectively no substantive change in the number of
manufacturing employees from the mid-1980s to 2000).
And then, from 2000 to 2007, the index
of real output per hour increased by another 25 units. What happened to
manufacturing employment over this time? It declined by a massive 20%.
If we
take the entire period from 2000 to 2010, the index of real output per hour
increased 36 units, and manufacturing employment dropped more than 33% – trends
entirely out of step with the productivity-employment relationship during the
1990s.
We
see the same trends, even more clearly, for real output per
person in manufacturing.
The
fatal flaw in the productivity argument comes from looking at just two years:
2000 and 2001. From 2000 to 2001, real output per hour was unchanged, and
real output per person actually declined slightly. And yet, the U.S. lost
824,000 manufacturing jobs (or nearly 5% of total sector employment) between
2000 and 2001.
What
happened between 2000 and 2001 – and subsequent years – that is a more likely
cause of most of these job losses? China's accession to the WTO.
Looking
back at the historical data for American manufacturing just doesn't support the
notion that modest gains in productivity will lead to the type of large-scale
sectoral layoffs seen since 2000. Certainly some small numbers of job
losses are due to increasing productivity, but not 85% of them.
The
United States was founded on manufacturing protectionism and became wealthy off
it, owing much to Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures.
Many of the most prosperous periods of American history are labeled protectionist
periods, including the 1980s economic boom under Ronald Reagan.
Theodore
Roosevelt was clearly not a fan of free trade:
Thank God I am not a free-trader. In this country pernicious
indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty
degeneration of the moral fiber.
Neither
was Ulysses S. Grant, who made a prescient prediction:
For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to
extremes and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that
it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries,
England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that
protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, Gentlemen, my
knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within 200 years, when
America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt
free trade.
Nor
was William McKinley:
Under free trade the trader is the master and the producer the
slave. Protection is but the law of nature, the law of self-preservation, of
self-development, of securing the highest and best destiny of the race of man.
Efforts to rewrite history will inevitably
fail. The only question is how much damage the free traders will be
allowed to do in the meantime. If protectionism is quack medicine, then
all of well established U.S. economic and political history is quackery.
Losing Ground In Flyover America - By David Stockman
The cowardly dithering in the Eccles Building is
sucking Wall Street punters into a vortex. And it promises to
be the mother of all bubble implosions.
There is no other possible outcome
for a stock market that is trading at 24X reported earnings in the teeth of an
enormous headwinds ever accumulated.
The intensifying global deflation/recession lapping upon
these shores gets more ominous by the day. Yet that’s only the half
of it.
When you take an unvarnished look at the domestic
economy, the real recessionary skunk in the woodpile becomes
apparent. Yet the casino is falsely capitalizing earnings
as if recessions have been outlawed and the nirvana of Keynesian full-employment
has become a permanent condition, world without end.
Today’s bubble vision meme that all is well because the Fed
judges the economy to be strong enough to absorb 1% money market rates sometime
next year is just a manifestation of that permanent full employment
delusion. After all, earnings always collapse during a recession—–so implicitly
there is not one in sight as far as the eye can see.
Then again, why would anyone credit the Fed’s insight into the
future or even its grasp of the present? In its April minutes, for example, it
noted that the world financial dangers that caused it to pause in March have
now eased.
No, they haven’t. As detailed below, the only thing that changed is
that China went through another flash bubble in the commodity space that is
already done and gone.
In fact, the Fed has never, ever anticipated a
recession——even when we were in month 118 of the 1990s technology and dot-com
bubble.
Likewise, it had no clue that the housing collapse was coming
and was shocked by the September 2008 Wall Street meltdown. And
now it has had to revise sharply lower every single GDP forecast it has
made in the years since the crisis........
Book review: - The Essential Malady reviews Cuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed America - Comments by Vox Day
One
of the most ferociously written (and critical) broadsides hits what Day often
calls “Churchianity”. It is well known by those who care to find out that
church groups have a huge hand in assisting mass immigration – often absurdly
of non-Christians that have no intention of converting. This is facilitated by
the state and as I understand it, quite lucrative for all involved except the
native population. This chapter deals more with the perversion of Christianity
towards earthly ends than with this fraud though and the generally touchy,
feely and ultimately suicidal niceness of committed Christians especially of
the Evangelical persuasion. This has hopefully reached peak insanity with this couple but I’m not so sure. Christ wants us to bring other
nations to him not other nations to us.
On a personal level, I can relate to the term and I would say that for a long time I was myself a “cuckservative”. I knew deep down in my gut that what I wanted to preserve as a conservative was white Christian society but knew that openly stating such would get me called a racist and worse. Part of the reason for this is I was cultured to think so and the only mainstream voices available tripped over themselves often embarrassingly to avoid being called racist. Yet, if they’re honest with themselves, that’s where the conservative instinct should lead.
On a personal level, I can relate to the term and I would say that for a long time I was myself a “cuckservative”. I knew deep down in my gut that what I wanted to preserve as a conservative was white Christian society but knew that openly stating such would get me called a racist and worse. Part of the reason for this is I was cultured to think so and the only mainstream voices available tripped over themselves often embarrassingly to avoid being called racist. Yet, if they’re honest with themselves, that’s where the conservative instinct should lead.
The racial equalitarians, particularly in the
Christian churches, need to be called out and held accountable for their
treason. If you're going to claim "there is neither Greek nor Jew, neither
American nor Chinese, in Jesus Christ" means that no one has any more
right to live in the magic dirt of the United States than anyone else, that's
fine from a free speech perspective, but you should probably also be considered
an open and avowed enemy of America and of the Christian church.
You're also a liar. The Churchians who sell that line are perfectly happy to welcome the immigration of animists, Muslims, demon worshippers, Hindus, and every other form of religion under the guise of Christian equality. Like all deceivers, they rely on bait-and-switches, they hide behind rhetorical fogs, and they deny the obvious consequences of their actions.
If you are an elder in a Christian church, you must expel the churchians and cuckservatives from your midst whenever they reveal themselves. They are deceivers and destroyers, and they do not serve that which they claim to serve.
You're also a liar. The Churchians who sell that line are perfectly happy to welcome the immigration of animists, Muslims, demon worshippers, Hindus, and every other form of religion under the guise of Christian equality. Like all deceivers, they rely on bait-and-switches, they hide behind rhetorical fogs, and they deny the obvious consequences of their actions.
If you are an elder in a Christian church, you must expel the churchians and cuckservatives from your midst whenever they reveal themselves. They are deceivers and destroyers, and they do not serve that which they claim to serve.
Ron Paul's Online Summer School
Subject: Ron Paul's Online Summer School
GARY NORTH'S TIP OF THE WEEK
Summer is a good time for high school students to study
for CLEP exams and also enroll in Ron Paul's summer school program.
After an academic year of political correctness, your
teenager deserves a break. Here is the break:
My recommendation: take my business course. But I'm
biased.
Note: if you enroll your child in my business course, you
get to take it, too.
For free.
This includes your invisible child, Harvey.
Gary "Grindstone" North
==================================
Friday, May 27, 2016
Progressives Just Made the Best Argument Possible for Voting Trump - By Tim Dunkin
Progressives and others
on the radical Left are not very intelligent people. This is something we
should be very thankful for, because were they actually competent, they would
have completely overwhelmed the spineless, feckless Republican Party and
established total control decades ago. As it stands,
because progressives in the United States have so little foresight and
self-control, they end up damaging their own cause through their own foolish
behavior and inability to moderate themselves for the sake of more broadly
appealing to the masses.
This was shown most recently in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where a
crowd of left-wing hooligans—including a large contingent of Mexican
flag-waving illegal immigrants—attempted to
shut down a Trump rally in the city. They failed, of
course, as people on the Left nearly always do, but not before they
demonstrated to the rest of the country why we desperately need President Trump
to clamp down on people like them. In the course of the riot (not
“protest”), they burned American flags, fired pellet guns at people, threw
rocks and bottles, attacked a man in a wheelchair, destroyed police vehicles,
and even critically injured a police horse. To date, the Left has not
condemned, or even apologized for, the violence committed by these
thugs. By all appearances, the Left seems to approve of the attempt to
use violence to stifle free political expression and to coerce its opponents
into silence……
(Full text at link below)
……………..The choice is clear
Trump, now having secured enough delegates for a first ballot
win, and has ever-increasing momentum in his up-and-coming contest with Hillary
Clinton, specifically because he is the one candidate out of all of them who
actually takes seriously the average American citizen’s concerns about illegal
immigration. It’s sad that out of 17 starting Republican contenders, only
Trump came out strongly against the globalism and open borderism that a
majority of Americans have now come to reject. His victory is a testimony
to the impression that issue has made on the average American’s psyche.
This, in turn, is because people, even if subconsciously, recognize what I said
above—illegal immigration as we are seeing it today is an invasion, not just an
economic phenomenon. It has grave social, cultural, and demographic
ramifications that the majority of Americans don’t want to see applied to this
nation. Events like we just saw in Albuquerque hammer these facts
home. If the sort of thing we saw is what will happen if America becomes
Mexicanized, then we don’t want America to become Mexicanized. If we
wanted to live in Mexico, we’d move there and deal with all of the (much more)
onerous laws they have which apply to foreigners living in their country.
The choice is clear—allow the radical Left to continue to have
access to millions of anti-American street thugs who can be used for Nazi-like
street violence and campaigns of coercion with the design of overthrowing our
consensual, orderly political system, or bite the bullet and do the things
necessary to send those people home and keep them out. What’s it going to
be, America?
Gospel, Sanctification, and Theonomy - by Dr. Joel McDurmon
A thoughtful reader emailed a question regarding Theonomy
and “law and Gospel.” Specifically, in light of Theonomy, the call for
Christians to acknowledge the law of God as the pattern of our sanctification,
both personal and social, and the call to obedience to that law, “What place does the gospel
have in the believer’s life moment-by-moment?”
This is an excellent question for more than one reason. One
reason is that those who are new and first developing a foundational
understanding of such theological issues often come from a background of
general evangelical theology. This theology generally neglects the role
of God’s law almost entirely, except as a tool to drive us to Christ and the
Gospel. The law is rarely spoken of in its role of providing a guide to godly
behavior for Christian good works (Eph. 2:10).
Even though the Reformed Confessions acknowledge this role of the law, and even
though many Reformed and Evangelical theologians mention this role, it
is rarely developed even for personal life, and even more rarely developed for
social life and institutions.
The reader who sent this question understands Theonomy well
enough to know that it is “not just about reconstructing a society where the
glory of the Lord is displayed in toto, but at heart it is the flip side
of justification, i.e., sanctification,” and “that through sanctification we
are being conformed to the image of Christ.” Great! But there is a lingering
issue regarding what role the Gospel plays “moment-by-moment” in conjunction
with this “in toto” sanctification.
The first thing we need to acknowledge is that this is
hardly an issue pertaining to Theonomy or Reconstruction alone. It is an issue
that needs to be developed and emphasized by all Reformed theology
(indeed, all theology, period). Readers should acknowledge that even if
Theonomy were incorrect, this question would still persist for all general
Reformed theology, for all general Reformed theology asserts both the
constant need for the Gospel and the abiding progress of
sanctification—even if that sanctification pertained only to personal
piety.
I addressed these issues in reference to Theonomy somewhat
elsewhere in a
certain polemical discussion. The relevant meat of that discussion is how
the relationship between “being saved” and ongoing sanctification is nothing
more than basic Confessional Reformed theology. I’ll repeat the points
in more general (non-polemic) form in what follows.
The Confessional view of santification
Rushdoony once made the comment: “The purpose of Christ’s
atoning work was to restore man to a position of covenant-keeping instead of
covenant-breaking, to enable man to keep the law by freeing man ‘from the
law of sin and death’ (Rom. 8:2), ‘that the righteousness of the law might be
fulfilled in us’ (Rom. 8:4).” The thing to note here is a necessary connection
between the believer’s personal relationship with Christ and his or her ongoing
sanctification. This is a Gospel-filled, Spirit-filled life which, because
of these things, goes on also to be an obedient life filled with good
works.
Is this a novel teaching? Hardly. The London Baptist
Confession (LBC) teaches exactly the same thing. LBC Chapter 13 on
“Sanctification” makes clear that as the saints grow in grace, they also grow
“in evangelical obedience to all the commands which Christ as Head and King, in
His Word hath prescribed them.” Obedience? Obedience to commands?
What could this mean? Let a more traditional Reformed Baptist commentator, Sam
Waldron, answer this for us: “In general good works are those which
conform to the law of God as revealed in the Scriptures (see chapter
19).”1
See Chapter 19 indeed. Consider sections 5, 6, and 7 of
Chapter 19:
The moral law doth for ever bind all, as well
justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof, and that not only in
regard of the matter contained in it, but also in respect of the authority of
God the Creator, who gave it; neither doth Christ in the gospel any way
dissolve, but much strengthen this obligation.
Contrary to zealous critics who presents this view of the
law’s binding obligation for the life of the believer after the Gospel as being
“under the law,” the LBC teaches the exact opposite:
Although true believers be not under the law as a covenant
of works, to be thereby justified or condemned, yet it is of great use to them
as well as to others, in that as a rule of life, informing them of
the will of God and their duty, it directs and binds them to
walk accordingly; . . . [M]an’s doing good and refraining from evil,
because the law encourageth to the one and deterreth from the other, is
no evidence of his being under the law and not under grace.2
Section 7 goes on to speak in the exact same terms as
Rushdoony:
Neither are the aforementioned uses of the law contrary to
the grace of the gospel, but do sweetly comply with it, the Spirit of
Christ subduing and enabling the will of man to do that freely
and cheerfully which the will of God, revealed in the law,
requireth to be done.3
Remember what Rushdoony said? “The purpose of Christ’s
atoning work was to restore man to a position of covenant-keeping instead of
covenant-breaking, to enable man to keep the law by freeing man ‘from
the law of sin and death’ (Rom. 8:2), ‘that the righteousness of the law might be
fulfilled in us’ (Rom. 8:4).” It is without any surprise, then, that we
find among the LBC’s scripture proofs for this section none other than . . . Romans 8:4.
Here again, Sam Waldron’s comments, coming from a more
mainstream Reformed view, are helpful. He concludes this section with a
statement almost identical to what Rushdoony said above: “The very
purpose of the gospel is to deliver men from lawlessness and
cause them to obey the law of God (Jer. 31:33;
Ezek. 36:27;
Rom. 8:4; Titus 2:14).”4
Note also not only the same exact sentiment and language, but the same
reference to Romans
8:4.
I have found Waldron’s extended comments on this section
very helpful, particularly in providing a more traditional Reformed alternative
to the idea that it is “insidious and dangerous” to suggest that believers are
somehow bound to the law after having received the Gospel. For example, Waldron
comments:
Some apparently were saying that while we ought to do what
the law says as to its content or matter, we should not do it because the law
says it, but simply because of gratitude to Christ. Several serious problems
may be pointed out in such a sentiment. It is unscriptural (James
2:10-11; Matt. 5:17-19; Rom. 3:31; 1 Cor. 9:21). This
is a subtler form of the error that justified persons are not bound to obey the
law, since ultimately it is not the authority of the law they regard, but
only their gratitude to Christ. Its practical effect is to convey to the
popular mind a lessened sense of the majesty of the law of God and of the
seriousness and absolute necessity of law-keeping. It makes faithful
exhortation to duty difficult, because those who hold this teaching always
object that you are bringing them back into slavery. If anyone speaks to such
people of duty and obligation, their response is that such exhortations are
legalistic. Christ strengthens the original authority of the law. He
does not put the content or the matter of the law on a new foundation. He does
not eliminate the obligation to obey our Creator, but adds the obligation of
gratefully obeying our Redeemer.
Waldron’s point is that a diminished view of law-keeping for
the believer leads not only to complacency, but to the type of complaints
against Theonomy we have heard from critics for some time: it is legalism,
slavery, “under the law,” etc.5
What this “under the law” error does is illustrate the
dangers of overreacting to the claims of Theonomy. In something that is
actually quite common, people overreact to “the law” so much they end up
arguing like liberals, or even antinomians. When one carries their
anti-theonomic critiques—especially in straw man form—to their logical
extremes, they actually start speaking against the basic Reformed theology of
sanctification, and thus, become like antinomians.
Or, looked at from the positive side of the argument, there
is as direct and organic a relationship between salvation in Christ sola
fide and Theonomy as there is between salvation in Christ sola fide
and general, personal sanctification according to the Confession. Answer the
more fundamental question, and you’ll answer the question in regard to Theonomy
as well.
The “moment-by-moment” role of the Gospel
So how does the Gospel of God’s saving grace in Christ Jesus
relate to all of this? I think answer lies right there in the Reformed
Confessions (particularly, the Westminster Confession and the LBC). Chapter 13
of the LBC (to which the WCF is substantially the same), addresses the nature
of our Sanctification:
They who are united to Christ, effectually
called, and regenerated, having a new heart and a new spirit created
in them through the virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection, are
also farther sanctified, really and personally, through the same
virtue, by His Word and Spirit dwelling in them. . . .
Section three concludes that “although the remaining
corruption for a time may much prevail, yet through the continual supply of
strength from the sanctifying Spirit of Christ, the regenerate part doth
overcome; and so the saints grow in grace, perfecting holiness in the fear of
God, pressing after an heavenly life, in evangelical obedience to all the
commands which Christ as Head and King, in His Word hath prescribed them.”
For our purposes here, we need to make three observations.
First, the means by which we are sanctified is the exact same means by which
we are saved in general. The confession is at pains to note that our
sanctification is “through the same virtue” as our union with Christ, effectual
calling, regeneration, and renewal. This virtue includes Christ’s “death and
resurrection,” as well as “His Word and Spirit dwelling in them.” It is by His
finished work and by His Word and Spirit dwelling in us that we are brought to
believe the Gospel, and it is by these same means that we are brought to
believe, love, and seek to obey the Law.
Whatever differences theologians have posited rightly
between “law and Gospel” for all of history, the role of Christ, Word, and
Spirit in animating and empowering the believer in both cannot be one of
them. By the same token, then, we must acknowledge that Reformed theology affirms
obedience to the Law as a Gospel-driven, Spirit-filled reality.
Second, we deduce, therefore, that the very reason for which
we need the Gospel “moment-by-moment” is also the very reason we strive to grow
more faithful in obedience “moment-by-moment” (and perhaps the same could be
said, vice versa). There is no separating the faith by which we
apprehend forgiveness for our sins through Christ’s atoning work and that by
which we mortify the flesh and conform our lives to his standards of
living—even though we distinguish between them for several reasons.
Again, the reason for confusion on this issue is most likely
because of a failure to teach on the sanctification and obedience side of the
equation. Indeed, it is very likely that all the recoil against
application of God’s law has left a vacuum in Christian teaching that begged to
be filled with something theological, or theological-sounding. Some
quarters have returned to various liturgical niceties to fill this void. Some
have created a type of neo-hyper-confessionalism. Some have turned to church
growth tactics of all sorts. Others—probably most of conservative Reformed
circles—have been left to do nothing more than continually emphasize
only justification by faith and our need for the Gospel every moment of our
lives.
I believe this latter emphasis, which I hear from many
non-Theonomic and anti-Theonomic Reformed Christians, is what has created the
difficulty for people like the reader who asked this question. The continual
drumming of our continual need for the Gospel combined with the continual neglect
of applying God’s law (i.e., sanctification), has created a dissonance in the
minds of people who begin to contemplate what sanctification is and how it
works. The moment they begin to ask the sanctification question, and thus the
Theonomy question, they begin to fear they may be departing from that which
they have been taught (rightly) is the all-crucial doctrine: our continual need
for the Gospel. The obvious answer does not appear readily as it should: both
Gospel and law are processed in us by the same power, virtue, agency, and
means, and that is Christ, His Word and His Spirit dwelling in us.
Third, our obedience (sanctification) must be to “all the
commandments” Christ has given us, and this means sanctification has a much
larger scope than just our personal devotions and prayer closet. This is where
Theonomy begins to get real, because this is where sanctification begins to get
real. What happens when we contemplate radical obedience in the areas of
education or business? Debt?
This is not even to ask about the so-called “civil” use of
the law which applies to society and non-believers also. That is also a major
Theonomic topic. But here we consider only “all areas of life” concerned with
the personal and social aspects of believers. This is a huge category, but it
is no less confessional than any other, and we must embrace it just as much as
we embrace salvation by grace alone through faith alone, as well as the basic
understanding of sanctification through those same means and power as described
above.
Conclusion
So, for
a Theonomist, “What place does the gospel have in the believer’s life
moment-by-moment?” The answer to that is simple. It has the same place,
moment-by-moment, as it does for any general Reformed theologian, and as it
should for any Christian. It has a central, crucial, and absolutely necessary
place in our life of saving faith in Christ. But
our sanctification unto obedience has exactly the same requirement. We need
affirmation of the forgiveness of sins and full, free, gracious acceptance by
the Father because of Christ’s finished work every moment of our lives.
We also need the outlook, direction, and corrective influence of God’s law every
moment of our lives. And we require Christ’s Word and His Spirit every
moment of our lives for either to have even one moment’s effect in
us.
Notes:
- Waldron, Samuel E
(2013-03-27). A Modern Exposition 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith (Kindle
Locations 3526-3527). Evangelical Press. Kindle Edition.
- Waldron, Samuel E
(2013-03-27). A Modern Exposition 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith (Kindle
Locations 3958-3975). Evangelical Press. Kindle Edition.
- Waldron, Samuel E
(2013-03-27). A Modern Exposition 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith (Kindle
Locations 3981-3983). Evangelical Press. Kindle Edition.
- Waldron, Samuel E
(2013-03-27). A Modern Exposition 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith (Kindle
Locations 4127-4128). Evangelical Press. Kindle Edition.
- See Waldron’s further
comments at Waldron, Samuel E (2013-03-27). A Modern Exposition 1689
Baptist Confession of Faith (Kindle Locations 4088-4128). Evangelical
Press. Kindle Edition.
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