Category: Ethnic considerations

Is God Still the God of Nations?

In the Patriarchal narratives, God’s focus narrows. Taking on the role of a tribal deity, He concerns Himself with a singular family, by providing security, opening barren wombs, playing matchmaker, and dealing with other familial matters. However, in the book of Exodus, God’s role changes significantly. Coincident with the revelation of the meaning and significance of His personal name as I AM, God takes on the status of a national deity with roles of deliverer, guide, provider, protector, and warrior.

Bruce Waltke 
An OT Theology — pg. 393

1.) We shouldn’t miss the simple fact that Scripture transitions from God being a tribal deity in Genesis to being a national deity in Exodus for the simple fact that the tribe that God is the God of has become a nation by Exodus thanks to God’s grace in providing security, opening barren wombs, playing matchmaker and dealing with familial matters.

2.) God never ceases being a God who is a God of nations. The arrival of Christ did not end God’s status of a national deity. However, in the New Testament God is no longer uniquely the God of the Hebrew Nation. In the New Testament God is seen as the God of many nations as nations. This was foretold in the Old Testament prophecy,

Isaiah 2:2 Now it will come about that In the last days The mountain of the house of the LORD Will be established as the chief of the mountains, And will be raised above the hills; And all the nations will stream to it.

Micah 4:1 And it will come about in the last days That the mountain of the house of the LORD Will be established as the chief of the mountains. It will be raised above the hills, And the peoples will stream to it. 2Many nations will come and say, “Come and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD And to the house of the God of Jacob, That He may teach us about His ways And that we may walk in His paths.” For from Zion will go forth the law, Even the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.…

Isaiah 19:21 And the Lord shall be known to Egypt, and the Egyptians shall know the Lord in that day and shall do sacrifice and oblation; yea, they shall vow a vow unto the Lord, and perform it. 22 And the Lord shall smite Egypt: he shall smite and heal it: and they shall return even to the Lord, and he shall be intreated of them, and shall heal them. 23 In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians. 24 In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land: 25 Whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance.

The import of this is that any attempt to suggest that God was a God of a nation in the Old Testament (Israel) but with the coming of Jesus God no longer deals with people in their nations but instead God deals with people just as individuals is not a Biblical reading of Scripture. God is still a God of nations. God still enters into covenant with nations to be their God. Yes, God builds the Church out of people from every tribe, tongue, and nation, but it is a Church that is gathered as tribes, tongues, and nations.

This also ruins any idea that Christianity foresees a time where God rules over a United Nations Babel-like Christian Church. God is decidedly not a one worlder. Dr. Geerhardus Vos teaches this when he wrote on Romans 11:17, 19,

(The) “branches broken off” metaphor has frequently been viewed as proof of the relativity and changeability of election, and it is pointed out that at the end of vs. 23, the Gentile Christians are threatened with being cut off in case they do not continue in the kindness of God. But wrongly. Already this image of engrafting should have restrained such an explanation. This image is nowhere and never used of the implanting of an individual Christian, into the mystical body of Christ by regeneration. Rather, it signifies the reception of a racial line or national line into the dispensation of the covenant or their exclusion from it. This reception, of course, occurs by faith in the preached word, and to that extent, with this engrafting of a race or a nation, there is also connected the implanting of individuals into the body of Christ. The cutting off, of course, occurs by unbelief; not, however, by the unbelief of person who first believed, but solely by the remaining in unbelief of those who, by virtue of their belonging to the racial line, should have believed and were reckoned as believers. So, a rejection ( = multiple rejections) of an elect race is possible, without it being connected to a reprobation of elect believers. Certainly, however, the rejection of a race or nation involves at the same time the personal reprobation of a sequence of people. Nearly all the Israelites who are born and die between the rejection of Israel as a nation and the reception of Israel at the end times appear to belong to those reprobated. And the thread of Romans 9:22 (of being broken off) is not directed to the Gentile Christians as individual believers but to them considered racially.”

Geerhardus Vos
Dogmatic Theology Vol. 1 — 118

God still deals with people as being members of nations, peoples, and races. This is a very unsavory truth for the modern Evangelical with their love affair for the erasure of all the creation distinctions God created us with. God has not given up on Nations which is why when the Lord Christ was entrusted with all authority in heaven and earth by the Father the commission He gave His people was to go and teach the nations to observe all things he has commanded. Because of God’s purposes to still deal with nations as nations, the Church can be spoken of as a confederated nation of nations.

God did not inspire John Lenon to write and sing “imagine their’s no nations.”

 

 

Christianity vs. Multiculturalism on Nation, and Culture

According to Dr. Bruce Waltke, in his “An Old Testament Theology,” a Nation, according to Scripture, is defined as:

1.) A common people (Genesis)
2.) Sharing a common history (Exodus) 
3.) Having a common law (Deuteronomy)
4.) With a common land (Joshua)
5.) And a Kin King (David’s Kingship)

Our present-day Multicultural empire presents an agenda that is a far cry from a biblical definition of nationhood. Indeed multiculturalism is an attack on the Scripture’s definition of nation in favor of a Babel-like New World Order where we imagine there are no nations and above us only sky.

We agree with the late Sam Francis who defined multiculturalism as “a deliberate device by which the power-hungry can subvert a culture, whose moral codes deny them power, and build an alternative culture, whose different moral codes yield power for themselves.” What Sam failed to mention here is that the alternative culture that the multiculturalists desire is one that is reverse of what Biblical Christianity offers in terms of culture. In point of fact, the culture produced by multiculturalism is anti-culture culture.

However, multiculturalism not only produces an anti-culture culture but in keeping with that it produces an anti-nation nation. Consider that whereas in Classical Liberalism, a key foundational (though untrue) tenet is the separation of Church and state. Multiculturalism extends this by insisting upon the separation of nation and state. For multiculturalists, the state is not identified with a definable nation, nor is the state responsible for any people group that composes the nation. The nation and the state are thus separated.

However, oddly enough the way this works itself out is that the nation and state are not separated because the state ends up being identified with all peoples who will identify with the State’s multiculturalist agenda. All peoples who, regardless of their ethnic origin, will align with a Statist identity are the people who compose the nation whom the State represents.

The multiculturalist separation of nation and state is just a reflection of an alienist agenda. In this arrangement, it is those who refuse to identify ethnically and only will identify ideologically with the State who comprise the nation whom the state represents. Separation of nation and state is a doctrine that kills the nation in favor of the anti-nation nation.

In the end, multiculturalism provides both a culture and a nation but it does so as an anti-nation nation and as an anti-culture culture.  Bono and U2 w0uld be pleased,

I believe when the Kingdom comes
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
But yes I’m still running.

So, we live in a time when all the pieces are moving towards a Babelistic New World Order. The vision of the enemy is a uni-culture and a uni- nation. We will have a common people, a common land, a common history, and a common law but it will be the commonality of the contents found in a blender. Resistance is futile. We will all be assimilated.

The media moguls with their Hollywood films, books, radio, and magazines are cramming down our throats the messages of a Globalism that offers an amalgamated, unisex world union as a promised utopia. Likewise, Corporations and Governments are pushing us incessantly towards this nightmare dystopian New World Order vision. Even the modern contemporary Church in the West, both ‘conservative’ and liberal, having reinterpreted Christianity through a Cultural Marxist grid, is pushing this globalist agenda.

To the contrary, we stand with the Dutch theologian Geerhardus Vos, who could write in his Biblical theology,  “Now it is through maintaining the national diversities, as these express themselves in the difference of language, and are in turn upheld by this difference, that God prevents realization of the attempted (Babel) scheme… [In this] was a positive intent that concerned the natural life of humanity. Under the providence of God, each race or nation has a positive purpose to serve, fulfillment of which depends on relative seclusion from others.”

 

Wright on Ethnic Realities

“When the white population falls below the 50% mark, the days of whites running interference for blacks will be over. And so will those special laws biased towards safeguarding perquisites for the ‘Disadvantaged,’ which can be mighty expensive to enforce.

Again, what are the odds that those 18th-century injunctions devised by those funny little men in britches and waistcoats will prevail, once the polyglot new Americans from Asia and Central and South America begin to flex their political muscle?

So many blacks and their white liberal gurus failed to appreciate those Anglo-originated laws based on ‘self-evident truths’ and the consent of the governed, which were flexible enough to take under their protection the nation’s former slaves. Who will there be to ensure that jobs and scholarships and government contracts, and the surfeit of other entitlements, will be available for a people who have grown used to looking to others for slices from the economic pie, instead of baking their own share of it?

Once what’s left of constitutional law is gone, partly out of neglect, because the story of the Constitution and its creators will no longer be taught in the various Chinese-Indian-Latino-Arab colored school systems, a new corner will be turned. If blacks think they’ve been mistreated at the hands of whites, just wait until the affirmative action, set aside party is over–when there is no one to insist that they get undeserved perks, or have a ‘right’ to intrude themselves into places where they are not wanted.

The new dominant ethnics come to this land with their own sob stories of oppression. Unlike whites, they are hardly likely to fall over one another to apologize for past wrongs. Nor are they likely to spend their time in Congress concocting new laws designed to discriminate against their own sons and daughters in favor of blacks.

‘Reparations,’ did you say? Just wait until the first move is made to un-name and re-name some of those Martin Luther King, Jr. boulevards.”

Elizabeth Wright
Black essayist and social critic

 

The Politically Correct Narrative Challenged

One of the many guilt trips that are foisted upon Christianity is the terrible treatment of the American Indian. The modern narrative finds the White Christian coming upon the noble savage American Indian who was one with a pristine nature.

Now doubtless the treatment of the American Indian by those calling themselves Christian was not always consistent with Christianity.  However, to embrace a narrative that is absent of the whole truth is to embrace a lie.

Below is an excerpt from some of my reading from a couple of years ago. It helps give a larger context in order to understand.

“Given that human sacrificing and scalping were part of American Indian culture, but not mentioned in Government school textbooks, it is not surprising that the cannibalism that was also present in many tribes likewise is not mentioned. A little-known fact is that the Mohawk tribe derived its name from its habit of eating human flesh. Alpheus Hyatt Verill writes: ‘ The Mohawks were notorious eaters of human flesh, and were called Mohowauock or man-eaters by the Narragansets. William Warren, a native of the Chippewas, noted in his History of the Ojibways (1852) that his people occasionally ate human flesh. In 1853 John Palliser wrote that the Sioux and Minitares had their women cut pieces of human flesh from slain enemy warriors. These pieces were then broiled and eaten. Eskimos, especially during times of stress, also consumed human flesh. The Pawnees would roast their prisoners for food. The French explorer, La Sale, reported that the encountered an instance in which the slaves of Indians were forced to eat their own.

In the 1670’s Father Chrestien Le Clercq described some Iroquois cruelties that often including forcing prisoners to eat their own flesh. The Roman Emperors, Diocletian and Nero, the two savage persecutors of the early Christians, ‘would hold in horror the vengeance, the tortures, and the cruelty of the Indians of New France [Quebec], and above all the Iroquois, towards their prisoners. Le Clercq noted that the Iroquois cut off the prisoners’ fingers, burned them with firebrands, tore away their nails, and made ‘them eat their own flesh.’

The Menace of Multiculturalism
Alvin J. Schmidt — pg. 48

Next time someone wants to tell you about the evil culture of the white man you might want to recite the above. Apparently our forebears had a good reason for calling many of the Natives they happened upon, “savages.”

Dr. Rev. Joe Morecraft’s Curious Argumentation

Peter was a racist because he was a coward….

So and so what do you think finally and ultimately defines a man; his race or his religion? 

He said, “I really don’t know,” and I said, “then you really don’t know the Gospel of Jesus Christ, for what finally defines a man is not the color of his skin, nor his social level, nor his educational level, nor his financial level. What finally defines a man is his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ….
 
“But racism has crept in (to the Church) in other ways. There is a new movement called “Kinism,” and it is basically a new word for racism that says the races should be kept separate, There is a superior quality to the white race. The color of your skin does make a difference. If a white man and a black woman should marry the black woman is guilty of adultery. In the Reformed world, there is a lot of Kinists. They’re smart. They know how to use the internet. They can out argue you. They know how to twist scripture.
 
Rev. Dr. Joe Morecraft
Excerpt from Sermon — 30 July 2017

The Battle for the Gospel

Just today someone pointed me to this excerpt from Dr. Morecraft’s most recent Sunday morning sermon. I am going to interact with it a bit below but first some prologue,

1.) I think that Dr. Morecraft has done some fine work over the years. Overall, he has been on the side of the angels. I’ve listened to much of his work and have read some of his material. The Reformed Church is all the richer for Dr. Morecraft’s work over the years.

2.) I am not a Kinist and the reason I disavow Kinism is sermons like this. If this is what Dr. Morecraft honestly thinks that all Kinists believe there is no use trying to rescue the word or identify with the label. This is why I have chosen my own word. I am a “familialist.” By choosing my own word I get to define it and I don’t have to keep correcting over and over again the relentless and constant freaking out over the word “kinist.”

Now on to the matter at hand.

1.) In this sermon on Galatians 2 Dr. Morecraft calls Peter a “racist.” This charge is pretty standard fare in the pc post-modern Reformed Church today and Galatians 2 is often brought forward as an example of racism.

However, I am convinced that Dr. Morecraft is not exegeting the passage properly. Peter’s sin in Galatians is not that he was a racist. Peter’s sin in Galatians is that he was an Alienist. This is seen in the fact that he gave into the Judaizing demand that the Gentile Christians Peter had been having table fellowship with had to become culturally Jewish before they could be considered Christian. The Gentiles had to eat like Jews, and be circumcised like Jews in order to be considered Christian. The desires of the Judaizers in Galatians 2 was that all would be put into the Judaizer blender to become culturally one. Peter’s sin was Alienism… not racism. If the Gentiles had agreed to all the Jewish stipulations to lose their Gentile culture and identity than the Judaizers would have had no problem with Peter having table fellowship with those Gentiles. It wasn’t the fact that Peter was having table fellowship with Gentiles that bothered the Judaizers. (If that had been the problem then perhaps the accusations against Peter that Peter was a racist might be sustained.) No, the problem with Peter was that the Gentiles were not culturally Jews. It wasn’t their ethnicity of the Gentiles that bothered the Judaizers. It was their culture. Peter fell into their trap and was guilty of Alienism … of refusing to insist that the Gentiles had to be just like the Jews culturally before they could be considered Christian.

Dr. Morecraft is in error in this passage on this point.


2.)Dr. Morecraft asked his friend,

“For what finally and ultimately defines a man; His race or his religion?”

To be honest this is a bit reductionistic. Dr. Morecraft knows that man is a being that is composed of body and soul. A man is not ultimately defined by either his soul (religion) or his body (race). A man is finally and ultimately defined by both. Would Dr. Morecraft seriously ask, “what ultimately and finally defines an airplane, the wings or the engine?” He wouldn’t ask this because of how obvious such absurd reductionism is in error. 

Dr. Morecraft knows we can’t divide a man in two and say only one part ultimately defines him any more than we could do the same type of thing in regards to the person of Christ without falling into major heresy. The similar error here would be asking, “What finally defines the person of Christ, his God nature or his man nature?”

Obviously to answer that question is to fall into heresy. In the same way, it is to fall into heresy which ever way Dr. Morecraft’s question is answered. To answer Dr. Morecraft’s question by saying, “his race” would have the respondent fall into the heresy of materialism. To answer Dr. Morecraft’s question by giving the answer “his religion” would find the respondent falling into the heresy of Gnosticism.

Dr. Morecraft hasn’t thought this through as well as he usually thinks matters through.

But if we were forced to answer this question there are several alternatives we might offer up,

a.) “The answer is obviously religion Dr. Morecraft, but if you’re going to suggest now that such an answer means that the way God created men… the way God enfleshed men isn’t worthy of paying attention to or honoring, why then Dr. Morecraft, I can’t help but wonder how you escape the Gnostic briar patch.

b.) “Well, Dr. Morecraft, for the black man what finally and ultimately defines him is his religion and for the White man what finally and ultimately defines him is his religion. Every man regardless of what people group that man belongs to is finally and ultimately defined by his religion. You ask about a man in the abstract but man doesn’t come in the abstract. A man comes in the concrete and it is the concrete man that we must deal with.”

Now let me ask you a question, Dr. Morecraft,

Isn’t it Gnostic of you to suggest that the way our Creator God created a man is unimportant and that all created differences can be whisked away by appealing to the “spiritual?”

c.) “Dr. Morecraft, I’ll answer that question if you will answer this question; What finally and ultimately defines a person? Their gender or their religion?”

“Now, be careful Dr. Morecraft, because if you answer religion I am going to take that as meaning that you’re contending that just as race doesn’t make any difference between people neither does gender make any difference between people. After all if skin color doesn’t make any difference why should plumbing?

d.) Dr. Morecraft, God created man with both a spiritual and physical nature and while we are spiritually united with all the Elect in Christ, we retain our unique, diverse identities in our physical attributes: gender, ethnicity, disposition, etc so that both man’s race and his religion finally and ultimately define man.

Obviously, the import in all this is that Dr. Morecraft is practicing a danger anthropological reductionism here that isn’t consistent with our Christian theology.

Dr. Morecraft ties his answer of “religion” to knowing the Gospel of Jesus Christ but I can’t help but wonder how his answer doesn’t tie him to some kind of creeping Gnosticism; that first great heresy that the Church had to contend with. Man remains a modified unichotomy (the integrative reality of body and soul) and to suggest that his soul is finally and ultimately more important than his creaturely fixity is a curious position for such an esteemed Pastor as Dr. Morecraft.

Now to end just an observation. Much of what Dr. Morecraft says about Kinism just isn’t universally true. As one example, most kinists I know insist that all the diverse races have both superiorities about them and inferiorities about them. Kinists are not White Supremacist. This is just one example of why I no longer claim the kinist label. When esteemed men like Dr. Morecraft spread this kind of libel and slander it is just not possible to rescue the term.

Another observation to end that is only related to Dr. Morecraft’s comments in a tertiary fashion. Those One Worlders out there are the hardest on those who still insist that ethnicity and race matters. Yet at the end of the day, One Worldism is its own kind of KINISM. Their allegiance is to their tribe of an ethnically coffee cream colored people who have the racial distinction of not being racially distinct. This One Worlder Kinism will support a universal non-descript dishwater nondistinct culture which will find it’s distinction in its being universal. Likewise, the One Worlders have the religion of no religion which is unique to their tribe. One Worlders are, without a doubt KINIST, in every way. So the One Worlders attack a form of Kinism they don’t like while at the same time advancing a form of Kinism they do like.

Kinism or something akin to it thus is an inescapable category.

I’m not advocating for it. Remember … I’ve disavowed the label. I’m merely saying that something like it is impossible to escape.