Sovereign Predestination & The Beehive/Anthill Social Order

Because fallen man does not believe in a sovereign predestinating God, he therefore must find some other mechanism to provide order, and control in the social order. Most commonly he turns to the State to replace God to do the work of sovereign predestination.

The state, being comprised of fallen men, then provides a sovereign predestination that allows for no individuality. The State, as the sovereign predestinating agent commands and requires absolute conformity by all the individuals in the social order. A fallen social order that locks out the God of the Bible as the sovereign predestinating agent, will always create a beehive/anthill social order. In the beehive/anthill social order all Christian conceptions of “ordered liberty” are eclipsed in favor of “Statist order.” Freedom that isn’t licentiousness completely disappears.

This beehive/anthill social order is reinforced by the reality of the demand for a fallen unity in the social order godhead. The idea here is that wherever the god of the social order is located (usually the state) there one will find a uniformitarian impulse since the social order along with the State is acting as god and all gods are one. That oneness will be expressed via the uniformitarian nature of the social order.

This, provides explanatory power as to why social revolutionary behavior will almost always have the impulse towards social conformity. Here we are mindful of the French Revolution with its “citizen” and with its Phrygian cap. Here we are mindful of the Russian revolution with its “comrade.” Here we are mindful of the Chinese Revolution with its ubiquitous “Mao suit.” In all cases this uniformitarianism in the culture is communicating the oneness of the State/social order god.

One sees, thus, that any social order that locks out the God of the Bible will become a beehive/anthill social order. That is increasingly what is happening in the West as we are constantly degraded in our speech, dress, intelligence, habits and ethnicity to a lowest common denominator vulgarity.

Depart from the God of the Bible and the result is social order ugliness led by a immanent State-god forcing all to conform so as to create a beehive/anthill culture.

Calvin’s Ecclesiology

“The conception of the church as the restoration of order in the world, means that the church cannot be thought of apart from the world, or as a secure corner of redemption in it. That is so because the order which is being restored in the church is nothing else than the restoration of the image of God in man and the three spheres of order are interrelated. The restoration of man will thus entail the restoration of order in the world. Calvin’s political activism then, may be traced directly to his conception of the church, as that movement which stands at the frontier of history, beckoning the world towards its appointed destiny.”

Benjamin Charles Milner Jr
Calvin’s Doctrine of the Church

Calvin did not restrict the righteousness that God demands to the abstracted atomized individual nor to the church realm. Calvin saw that the church as organism was to be God’s means by which order in the world would be restored. This understanding flies in the face of the Church’s century long hibernation in pietism and in the face of the militant amillennialism we call R2K. For both pietism, and R2K, the church is a monastic retreat center that does not engage with the world so as to re-order it in Christ honoring direction.

This quote also touches on why the modern Reformed world so thoroughly hates theonomy in any expression. Theonomists, agreeing with Calvin (see his series of sermons on Deuteronomy titled “The Covenant Enforced”), understand that the church, as God’s mouthpiece, works to restore the world by proclaiming what God’s righteousness concretely looks like as revealed in God’s moral law and the general equity of His civil law.

There is definitely a flavor of postmillennialism in the quote above. There is the expectation that the realm of “the world” will shrink as it is re-ordered consistent with God’s revelation.

Considering Christopher Dawson

“Christopher Dawson insisted that the function of any educational system was to created a common world of moral and intellectual values, a common memory which helped a given culture to maintain itself. To say that such a common educational tradition has now largely disappeared is to say that our culture is under thread of dissolution. What is today called ‘multiculturalism,’ that is, the idea that a society can be built around a plurality of cultures, with no single one of them dominating, presumably for Dawson would be a prescription for culture disintegration, and one question is whether in any respect he would be wrong.”

Christopher Dawson
The Crisis of Western Educations
Glen W. Olsen – Introduction

This is why I expect a civil war to break out in the West an America in the next 10 years. If it doesn’t it will be due to the fact that the single culture of multiculturalism will have put down all contenders to the throne. Multiculturalism could prevail as the single culture as it did in antiquity with the State being the agent that all cultures must bend the knee. In this scenario the State keeps the peace among all the various gods/cultures and in essence becomes god walking on the earth. As in ancient Rome all gods/cultures are allowed as long as they all pinch incense to Caesar. It looks to me that is where we are arcing and only if one of the religions/cultures really take their religion/culture seriously could there be a possible altering of our current historical arc.

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“Christopher Dawson thought it impossible for a minority to maintain to retain rigorous religious practice in a secular culture. Within the religious minority there would be constant ‘leakage’ with only a minority actually living and understanding their religion. Therefore it was not possible for Catholics to long live in a ghetto. They constantly had to address the enveloping culture, and their constant effort should be to encourage growth in the secular culture around them of those things which make the Catholic life viable, especially the teaching of an objective form of the history of Christian culture in the public schools.”

Christopher Dawson
The Crisis of Western Education
Glen W. Olsen – Introduction

1.) I wonder if Dawson would have labeled any culture as secular given his insistence that all culture is the enfleshment of some religion?

2.) The reason for the constant leakage is found in the fact that the culture shapes the people and as, per Dawson, culture is religion enfleshed, the reason that the leakage occurs is because the Christians as living in an alien religious culture are constantly being catechized by that culture into a religion that is not Christianity.

3.) When Dawson talks about the need for Christians to “encourage growth in the secular culture around them of those things which make the Catholic (Christian) life viable,” what he is saying is that Christians must not be conformed to the world but transformed by the renewing of their minds.

4.) Of course Dawson was in error about the need for all this to happen within the public schools. Even in Dawson’s lifetime the schools were hopelessly determined to snuff out a Christianity (Catholic or Protestant) that could challenge Dawson’s “secular culture.”

Christopher Dawson & McAtee; The Relationship Between Religion & Culture

“The idea that culture is embodied religion runs through Dawson’s writings. According to this view, every culture in its origins has religion at its center, and we may speak of culture as a kind of enfleshment of religion over time. Culture is the sum of ways in which some religion becomes embodied in material forms and patterns of life.”

Christopher Dawson
The Crisis of Western Education
Introduction – Glen W. Olsen

1.) Those who desire to champion two Kingdom thinking can never understand this truth because for them religion/theology belongs in a very circumscribed realm. For two Kingdom chaps religion/theology is one thing while politics, education, arts, family life, philosophy, etc. are all quite different things. Indeed, the two kingdom chaps insist that religion/theology must stay out of these other areas that are the very marrow of culture. Dawson (and Henry Van Til, and all worldview thinkers protested vehemently.

2.) For those with eyes to see all of life, not least of which includes culture, is a window into the soul of those moving through life. From the way a man dresses to the way that they speak to the way that they drive to the foods that they eat are all contributory expressions of the religion/theology they embrace and so animates them. Habits, as well as culture, are the movie screen on which the theology of people(s) is cast.

3.) Because this is true understanding culture grants one the prophetic/predictive ability of what people will do next. This is because people act consistent with their culture/habits. Because that is true one can build on the ability of understanding people by understanding their culture (religion).

4.) This also explains why parents must be careful about the education of their children. The role of the educator is to catechize the student into the religion/theology that is the driving of the curriculum being used. There is no curriculum, nor study, nor textbook that isn’t at the same time inculcating some religion/theology. We would also add that this explains why parents should be careful with the friends they allow their children to make. All potential friends are theology containers. Are those potential friends of your children carriers of the theology/religion that you, as a parent, desire your children to be influenced by?

5.) I note all this fully understanding that Dawson himself believed that Christian culture had a kind of dualism at heart. At this point I believe Dawson was inconsistent with his own project. All of culture is religiously/theologically integrated so as to from one expression of the same religion/theology.

Doug Wilson & His Advocacy for Open Borders

“Of course a healthy society has nothing to fear from immigrants. A free society is therefore one with open borders.”

Doug Wilson
The Camp of the Saints – 2015 Article

People are suggesting that only within the last few years has Doug Wilson shifted from a trustworthy brand to a malignant brand. I would say that this quote above demonstrates that Doug has had the devil in him for over a decade now.

1.) This quote demonstrates that before Wilson is Libertarian before he is theonomic.

2.) This kind of statement requires the person making the statement to affirm his prior belief in propositional nationhood. With this statement Wilson reveals his belief that a nation is NOT comprised by a people of a core ethnicity. No wonder Wilson hated Kinism from the very beginning.

3.) If a nation does not have borders it is not a nation. Borders are what designate what people the respective Government of said society is required to prioritize in protection and the distributing of justice and what people it does not have those immediate obligations.

4.) Families can be healthy societies also. Is it also the case that families, as healthy societies, should also likewise have open borders when it comes to who does and who does not belong to their family?

5.) Did Laken Riley, Molly Tibbetts, Rachel Morin, and Kate Steinle have nothing to fear from the immigrants who murdered them Doug?

6.) When Doug writes about “free society” here he is using “free” in the sense of malignantly free, or recklessly free or libertine free. He is not using free in the sense of “ordered liberty.”

Doug has been very bad in his reasoning for a very long time. That is what Libertarianism will do to people.