Iron Ink

“The triumph of Bolshevism was not a triumph of the popular will over Tsarist tyranny, or of revolutionary enthusiasm over conservative order. It was the victory of authority and discipline over democratic idealism and individualism. As we see clearly in the first volume of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, it was the victory of a few men who knew what they wanted and allowed nothing to stand in their way over a vast majority that was driven to and fro by the uncertainty of the politicians and passions of the mob. It was, above all, the victory of one man – Lenin – the most remarkable personality that the age produced.”

Christopher Dawson
Enquiries into Religion and Culture – pg. 19

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw

“History has never been dominated by majorities, but only by dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally on their faith.”

R.J. Rushdoony

The most effective thing that Christians can do is to know what they believe and why they believe it and what they don’t believe and why they don’t believe it. From that faith we can resist and overcome all comers regardless of their numbers. Indeed, we might go so far as to say as when minority faith systems like Bolshevism and men like Lenin win the day it is only because Christianity and Christians have lost the edge of their faith.

These quotes also give those of us in the minority hope that regardless how bleak things may be a bright future is obtainable to those who will be carried in their faith. Lenin, for example, as recently as the April before the 1917 Bolshevik Lenin was living in Switzerland in comparative obscurity. He was allowed to traverse Germany from Switzerland by the Germans, in a diplomatically sealed train car, in hope that Lenin would be the instrument that would create enough unrest in Russia so as to relieve Germany of the second front of WWI. If we are to believe Dawson, the faith of one man against insurmountable odds recreated Russia and the world. Imagine how much more one man, believing in the God of the Bible, – securing in his belonging to Christ – and knowing what he believes and why he believes it and what he doesn’t believe and why he doesn’t believe it could do to overturn a world that still belongs to Lenin’s faith.

Our current cultural night is dark but we have been called to be lights to the world. If one pagan like Lenin could overcome the world why not one Christian?

Hat Tip to Rachel Bacon for finding the Rushdoony Quote for me.

“There is not a single instance in history, in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire. If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage.”

John Witherspoon
Presbyterian Minister / Educator / American Founding Father

I lifted this quote from a piece

http://www.americanvision.org/article/i-refuse-to-be-comforted/

written by Bojidar Marinov. It is a piece I wish I would have written and really should be read by all Christians but especially those who use the doctrine of God’s sovereignty to cancel out the doctrine of our responsibility to the commands that issue forth from our High King Jesus Christ. As Bojidar notes, there should be no comfort found by or for a people who try to use God’s sovereignty as blanket to cover the ongoing sin of their refusal to contend for the crown rights of King Jesus.

However as good as that article is – and it is great – I want to take this quote in a slightly different direction. I have, for what seems like an eternity, said that there are two ways for Christian culture to die. These two ways are never mutually exclusive. Christian culture can die both from the inside out or it can die from the outside in. Just as a tree can die both because it has become rotten at its core – only to find that rot move outward – or because the tree has become rotten in its extremities – only to find that rot move inward, so Christian culture can rot from the inside out or from the outside in. This unwavering conviction is one reason why I have struggled so mightily against the dualism of R2Kt for I see it as a rot virus that will kill what remains of our Christian culture (and very little remains) from the outside in.

Christian Cultures that rot from the inside out are cultures where the Theology, from which they draw their life, is untended and neglected. The the character of sin, the absolute necessity of redemption, the doctrines of grace, the Sovereignty, Transcendence, and Immanence of God, the Lordship of Christ, The work of the Spirit in sanctification are ignored and so one form or another of the rot that is Humanistic idolatry where man is large and God is small begins to infect the Church and as the Church is the fountain from which a Christian culture drinks its theology the whole culture begins to share in the rot. God sends a leanness into its soul.

However, Christian cultures can also rot from the outside in. Now keep in mind that I’ve noted that these two are never mutually exclusive. Christian culture that rot from the outside in are those cultures where the the life of the culture (its theology) for some reason isn’t moving out to the extremities in order to nourish them and give them life. On one level the Church is fine because it continues to affirm and care for its theology. However Christian theology at the same time becomes abstracted from everyday life to the point that people in the Church eventually can’t see the application or connection between things like a conscience not in bondage and temporal property, or the connection between religious liberty and civil liberty, or, to give a more fundamental example, the connection between the Lordship of the King Christ and the necessity for limited and decentralized governments. When it is no longer possible for the core of the culture to send its nourishment out to the extremities of the culture because of the inability to make proper application, the extremities begin to whither and that withering eventually begins to move to the core and the whole culture begins to rot. As I have said repeatedly this is the danger of all Christian theologies that want to posit culture and faith as independent and unrelated phenomena. There are Christian theologies that encourage that Christian theology should not bear on the public square. Such theologies ensure rot from the outside in because if the public square (the tree’s extremities) can not be informed by Christian theology it will be informed by some other pagan theology and as that pagan theology gains in strength in the extremities of culture it will eventually work inward to infect the institution that produces the theology that informs the culture so that core of the culture and the extremities of the culture theologically correspond so that both are thoroughly rotted.

This is the kind of rot that Witherspoon is warning against. We cannot find sanctuary in our Churches and leave the cultural extremities to their rot and not expect that eventually the rot will work its way into our sanctuaries. Christian people live and swim in the culture and if that culture in which they are swimming is not spring fed by a Christian theology then what will happen is that Christian people, will, with exceptions, begin to reinterpret the Christian faith in light of the theology that they are constantly drenched in during the week.

Christians must mind their theology. Both in its theory that bolsters the concrete and in its application praxis where the dots are connected between the orthodoxy and the orthopraxy. Currently we are not doing so well either in theory or in praxis and so we are in danger of rotting from both the inside out and the outside in.

“The liberal thinkers and statesmen who were the makers of the nineteenth century civilization regarded religion and culture as entirely independent phenomena. Religion was entirely a matter for the individual conscience and it had nothing to do with social and economic life. But the resultant secularization of culture which took place throughout Western Europe in the nineteenth century brought its own nemesis. It led to the discredit of a religion that had no power over social life and of a culture that had no spiritual sanctions. It found at once its logical conclusion and its refutation in the yet more radical secularization of life characterized by the Marxian philosophy. While Liberalism had pushed religion on one side, Communism eliminated it altogether and thus prepared the way for the complete re-absorption of the individual in the social organism, while at the same time it transformed the social organism into an economic mechanism.

Christopher Dawson
Enquiries Into Religion & Culture – pg. xviii

1.) It is a myth to think that one can separate religion and culture. However, what the nineteenth century did was to insist that Christianity (this is the religion that Dawson is referring to) could be confined to the individual while culture could get along quite well uninformed by the Christian faith. What actually was happening, was not the secularization of culture, but rather what was happening was the incremental and subtle moving of culture to a different religious foundation besides Christianity. The liberal statesmen and thinkers of whom Dawson mentions – most of whom doubtless were not epistemologically self-conscious about what they were doing – could not have succeeded with their task of positing Western culture on a different faith/religious foundation if they had been explicit about their intentions. Consequently, the justification for the cordoning of Christianity off to a private individual realm that was compartmentalized from culture was advanced in the name of constructing a more equitable public square through the pursuit of secularizing it (i.e. – moving it off its Christian foundation) so that conflicts of faith would be kept out of the public square.

2.) Such an endeavor is ultimately futile. Just as Christian ethics can not be retained over the long haul when the attempt is made to peel those ethics away from the Christian Theology that supports and informs those ethics, so a Christian culture can not be retained over the long haul when the attempt is made to peel a culture away from the religion/theology that informs it. The attempt to both move culture off of its Christian base in the pursuit of “secularization” and to expect the retention of the stability that was characteristic of that culture when it was firmly pinioned on the Christian religion is akin to the attempt to move a water fountain off of a well that gives potable water in the pursuit of a alien polluted well while retaining the expectation that the polluted well will be fine since the water fountain has always previously issued potable water.

3.) When Dawson mentions a degraded culture that has “no spiritual sanctions” it reminds me that cultures are always covenantal. One of the characteristics of covenant is that there are always sanctions for violating the covenant. The culture that resulted from the shift to “secularization” is a culture where the spiritual sanctions have not so much that the spiritual sanctions no longer exist but rather the spiritual sanctions have changed so that the new covenant resulting from the putative secularization are sanctions that just the opposite of what they had previously been. Now, since the sanctions have drastically changed it may look like that the culture no longer has “spiritual sanctions” when looked at with the expectation of the sanctions of the previous culture but one can be sure that some sanctions still exist. As one obvious example of what I am getting at, two generations ago homosexuality in the culture of the West received the spiritual sanction of being ostracized. Two generations later if one expects those same spiritual covenantal sanctions to exist one might say that the culture no longer has spiritual sanctions. However, as I said, the spiritual sanctions haven’t gone away but rather now the spiritual sanctions fall on those who expect spiritual sanctions to fall on homosexuality. Culture is inevitably covenantal. It has spiritual sanctions. When you move the culture from one religion to another religion the covenant changes with that movement and the spiritual sanctions do likewise.

3.) Note that the point that Dawson is making is that nineteenth century liberal thinkers and statesmen were embraced a dualism that divorced religion from culture. It is interesting that the R2Kt proponents w/ their Escondido Hermeneutic contend for the very same dualism as the nineteenth century liberal thinkers and statesmen that Dawson refers to. Likewise both the Escondido Hermeneutic and the doctrine of the nineteenth century liberal thinkers and statesmen insist and insisted on a religion that is and was restricted to the individual conscience that has nothing to do with social and economic life.

4.) Don’t miss the powerful point that Dawson makes when he tells us that the result of creating a dualistic culture where Christianity is grossly privatized what arises is a new theology (Marxism) that will overcome the previous dualism in favor of a religion (some variant of socialism) that will provide a unify integration point that will provide cohesion for all of society and its culture. The danger here of course is that Marxism is a corporate humanism that provides not a unifying but rather a Humanistic Unitarian integration point that allows for no diversity as the Christian faith does. What this means is a savage Borg-like ugly sameness that is impressed upon all individuals in the societal hive. This is the guaranteed eventual result of the dualism that is offered by the Escondido Hermeneutic. If Christianity will not inform all of life then some other pagan belief system will provide the integration point that will inform the totality of a society and culture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHr5qdIwb7U

This is only introductory. There is much more that might be said but it is a good start for those who are uninitiated to the difference between classical historical conservatism and the leftist Trostky “conservatism” that comprises the neo-conservatism that is typical of much of what one finds in the Republican party.

Rick,

I fear your arrangement finds God reacting to man. The Gospel is not man’s response to the Gospel but the declaration of God’s saving action that objectively has occurred before man even responds. Indeed, man’s affirmative response to the Gospel wouldn’t be possible if justification had not been both a eternal reality and objectively accomplished.

Look, Brother, in the ordo-salutis if you make regeneration prior to justification and you have immediately at that point turned faith into a work that you trade up for justification. Justification is not subsequent to regeneration because such an arrangement would make the what happens in me to be prior to what happens outside of me. This is the kind of thing that Osainder taught and that Calvin rejected. It is putting works in your justification. It is making what is imputed dependent upon what is imparted. To put regeneration logically prior to Justification is to make sanctification prior to justification as regeneration is an aspect of sanctification. We all agree that would be unfortunate.

However, should you make the totality of justification prior to regeneration then what you have done is left a dead person with the capacity to have faith since faith can only come by regeneration.

The solution to this is by realizing that regeneration is part of our subjective union w/ Christ but subsequent to our objective justification accomplished by Christ on the Cross where all the blessings of God’s people were secured – including the blessing of the Holy Spirit who would give regeneration and faith. In Christ we were objectively justified long before we ever existentially embraced Christ. Christ died for us, was buried for us, and was raised for us before we responded to that message. Our response to all this by believing all of this is not what makes these matters so. It is because these matters are so that we believe. It is because Christ accomplished our objective justification that we are subjectively justified.

Now, should we continue to trace this back and ask why did Christ die for His people the answer that Scripture offers is this idea of eternal objective union. We were in solidarity w/ Christ from eternity. Christ came to die for His people. All eternal justification does is close the circle and insist that those who were in solidarity w/ Christ from eternity being those who God set apart for whom Christ would die and justify and the Spirit would apply the benefits of that death to were people who in God’s mind were justified … and that from eternity. The lamb of God is slain from the foundation of the World. God has eternally decreed it and the unfolding of that decretal work is merely the instantiation of what is already true in God’s mind – to wit the justification of His people.

When I was regenerated by the Spirit and had justification applied by the Spirit it was merely the case that I walked into what had been true of me in God’s mind from eternity. It was all God’s doing from the decree to justify to the realization of the decree accomplished in Christ’s objective work on the Cross to the application of that accomplished work by the Holy Spirit who was sent to finish the work and apply the benefits that resulted from Christ’s death. The Blessed Father eternally decreed my justification in covenant w/ the Son and The Spirit, the Blessed Son accomplished that decretal reality w/ the approval of the Father and the Spirit and the Blessed Spirit was sent by the Father and the Son to apply what the Triune God had decretally planned and objectively accomplished in space and time history in the birth, baptism, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the Son – my Great and Honorable High Captain Jesus.

All of this explains why the Apostle could break out in great paeans of praise

For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be the glory forever! Amen.

My salvation is not dependent in the least upon human activity though human activity is always the consequence that one, having been saved, is being saved. We have, after all, been saved to walk in good works.

The problem w/ some arrangements is that justification is either made dependent upon our response (instead of seeing that our response is dependent upon objective justification) or that faith becomes something other than that which rests in Christ for all.

Finally, when it pertains to salvation, we must insist that while justification is completely God’s work sanctification is a concursive work where we work out our salvation w/ fear and trembling knowing that even then God works in us both to will and to do. However, what we see in both justification and sanctification is that God is always prior. God initiates and we respond. It is never a case where we initiate and God responds to us. Even when God blesses us for obedience it is the case that in our obedience God gave what He required.

It is grace all the way down. Many people believe that but many people have systems of thought that contradict what they say they believe. One such system is to make the human response to the Gospel to be the Gospel itself.