Symbol Change

Judges 6:5 That night the Lord said to him, “Take your father’s bull, and the second bull seven years old, and pull down the altar of Baal that your father has, and cut down the Asherah that is beside it 26 and build an altar to the Lord your God on the top of the stronghold here, with stones laid in due order.

Studying the book of Judges right now and in Judges we see how unfaithful Israel had built altars to Baal as opposed to previous generations who had erected altars to “I AM” thus communicating who the people and the land were being given over to. I was struck with the importance of those altars as symbols and declarations of ownership.

When we tear down old symbols and replace them with new symbols we are, like the Israelites of old, giving ourselves, our children and our land over to different gods. The tearing down of a flag or a monument and the raising of a new flag or new monument is a significant happening. What you are witnessing is the gods being changed out.

In the last 100 years, we have seen quite a bit of this. When you do any reading on the fall of Czarist Russia and the rise of Communism you note that the Communist went whole hog on this very point. They not only tore down Churches. The Communists changed those Churches usage from houses of worship to places where pigs were housed. The Communists changed the Churches from places where the soul could find relief to latrines where a different kind of relief was found. The Communists after the revolution went on a rampage tearing down old symbols and erecting new ones. Out with the old God. In with the new gods.

When the Soviet Union fell the process was reversed. I clearly remember many scenes of statues of Stalin and Lenin being pulled down by cranes. When “Desert Storm” was finished one of the clearest images of victory was the pulling down of a statue of Saddam Hussein.  Out with the old god. In with the new gods.

Now in our country, we have been experiencing the very same thing. First, it was the Confederate flag desecrated and hidden away. Recently, I read a longish piece on how it is the Gadsen flag that has been determined as “racist” and no longer can be tolerated in the public square. Statuary of our ancestors is being removed in favor of the ancestors of an alien and strange people. Out with Christianity. In with the new gods.

Whenever you find this happening you are witnessing a religious attack on the people. Where this religious attack is successful you are witnessing a people being conquered. In the book of Judges, the people had been conquered by Baal as witnessed by all those new altars built to Baal. In Czarist Russia the Christian Russians had been conquered by the Jewish Bolsheviks as witnessed by removal of their Christian Churches. Today White Western Christians are being conquered by the enemies of Christ and the evidence of that is the removal of our symbols in favor of the symbols of our enemies.

The old West — The West of Christendom — is under siege and most Christians aren’t even aware that they and their undoubted catholic Christian faith is under attack.

The Work of Social Atomization

The common error was to believe that if the individual were liberated from the smaller organic groups he would be set free. But in actual fact, he was exposed to the influence of mass currents, to the influence of the stage, and direct integration into mass society. Finally, uprooted, the individual became much less stable.
 
Jacque Ellul
Propaganda; The Formation of Men’s Attitude
 
 
1.) Most men are chameleons. They will blend into their socio-cultural background. Strip man of the Institutional covenantal backgrounds of a decidedly Christian family, community, and church, and man will not cease to be a chameleon. Instead, man will begin to blend into the larger pagan background of the pagan state, the pagan media-cultural complex, and the pagan legal framework.
 
Paradoxically enough, the Atomization of man that Ellul chronicles here does the yeoman work of creating mass man.
 
2.) On the issue of the uprooted individual becoming much less stable, I would contend that this is creating a kind of social insanity. Social sanity requires the kind of stability of which Ellul laments the loss. This kind of stability requires long established community and familial infrastructure, customs and routines that are inter-generational, and a sense of place. All those have been largely lost.
 
The uprootedness (the social insanity) that we often see in our social order can be directly traced back to the loss of our organic groups.
 
3.) However, this uprootedness serves the interest of the heathen state
 
An unstable and uprooted people are not likely to have the foundation or moral capital upon which to rebuke and resist the tyrannical state. It is a net positive for the usurpatious state to uproot and destabilize its citizenry because in doing so there is job security for the bureaucratic class.

Examining Rev. Dr. Jim Cassidy’s “Racial Supremacy and The Gospel” Sermon (III)

“The Javanese are a different race than us; they live in a different region; they stand on a wholly different level of development; they are created differently in their inner life; they have a wholly different past behind them; and they have grown up in wholly different ideas. To expect of them that they should find the fitting expression of their faith in our Confession and in our Catechism is therefore absurd.

“Now this is not something special for the Javanese , but stems from a general rule . The men are not all alike among whom the Church occurs. They differ according to origin, race, country, region, history, construction, mood and soul, and they do not always remain the same , but undergo various stages of development. Now the Gospel will not objectively remain outside their reach, but subjectively be appropriated by them, and the fruit thereof will come to confession and expression, the result may not be the same for all nations and times. The objective truth remains the same, but the matter in appropriation, application and confession must be different , as the color of the light varies according to the glass in which it is collected. He who has traveled and came into contact with Christians in different parts of the world of distinct races , countries and traditions can not be blind for the sober fact of this reality. It is evident to him. He observes it everywhere.”

Abraham Kuyper
‘Common Grace’ III  XXXII

RDC sermonized,

“The good that is given to each culture comes by the undeserved blessing of God. The bad, of course, comes only from sin and to the curse.

Now, it is true that we can say that some Nationalities have produced some aspects of culture that are superior to others. There are (not that the race is superior, not that a particular ethnicity is superior) we can say, we have to rightly acknowledge that there are some aspects of culture that some Nationalities have excelled at advancing.

For example, think of the Germans. The Germans are known to have made a better car than the Irish. But the Irish are known for making better whiskey than the Germans. Fair enough. But see we also have to keep in mind on the negative side that the Irish drink way too much of their whiskey and the Germans drive their cars way too fast. Alright? So you’ve got good and you’ve got bad. But be that as it may, before the eyes of God — and this is the point — all Nationalities, all races stand condemned and each and every one of these races are totally depraved. You see sin becomes the great leveler of humanity. It’s not like we can find a race in the world that is morally superior to another, that is perhaps only 90% depraved, or that we can find a race of Ethnicity in the world that is only 70% depraved. No, all the people of all the nations are 100% depraved. That is what our doctrine of total depravity teaches us.”

Bret responds,

I am confident that RDC is mishandling total depravity. 

When Calvinists speak of humans as “totally depraved,” they are making an extensive, rather than an intensive statement. The effect of the fall upon man is that sin has extended to every part of his personality — his thinking, his emotions, and his will. Not necessarily that he is intensely sinful, but that sin has extended to his entire being. So, total depravity is extensive, not intensive. Not all total depravity looks the same. People and / or Nations can remain totally depraved and still be morally superior to other people and / or Nations who are also totally depraved. Total depravity does not mean that everyone is equally depraved, in the sense that everyone is as equally wicked as they could possibly be. Total depravity most certainly is not the moral leveler that RDC contends. People and / or Nations who are totally depraved can be morally superior though that moral superiority lends no salvific aid.

Dr. Loraine Boettner put it this way,

This doctrine of Total Inability, which declares that men are dead in sin, does not mean that all men are equally bad, nor that any man is as bad as he could be, nor that any one is entirely destitute of virtue … What it does mean is that since the fall man rests under the curse of sin, that he is actuated by wrong principles, and that he is wholly unable to love God or to do anything meriting salvation. His corruption is extensive but not necessarily intensive.

Further, God’s common grace can be more abundant to one people group than another people group so that the former group is indeed morally superior than the latter group. That common grace, in the end, makes the former group more ripe for judgment but total depravity does not make all men, cultures, or races, functionally or morally equal. Who would ever contend that the cannibal Korowai tribe from Indonesian New Guinea is on the same moral level as Victorian England? Yet, outside of Christ Victorian England perishes in its sins as much as the Korowai tribe does.

Now certainly when it comes to salvation sin levels us all in the sense that it makes all, outside of Christ, fit only for hell. However, total depravity does not mean that all people, nations, and cultures are equally functionally wicked.

RDC wrote,

“Now that doesn’t mean that any given people or any given nation is as depraved as it can be by God’s restraining grace. We know that sin is held in check but sin nevertheless does reign in each of us extensively. So where then could be our boasting? Sin becomes the great leveler of humanity.”

Bret responds,

I quite agree that any boasting of any superiority, as if that superiority is not all of grace, is an indictment writ against the one doing the boasting.

RDC writes,

“Sin is the great equalizer. We are all 100% depraved. What kind of deep-seated arrogance then, what kind of deep seated pride does it take to think that we, or our particular ethnicity, or our particular culture, or our particular language (whatever it is) is superior to another? You see sin, being the great leveler, renders all men under sin…. We are all equally depraved.”

Bret responds

The fact that all unregenerate peoples are depraved and so equally, spiritually shut out from God does not translate into all Nations are functionally equal. Japanese culture, as one example, is certainly superior to the Bush Men culture of Irian Jaya. Now, as outside of Christ, they are equal in being without God and without hope but that is not the same thing as saying that because of sin they are leveled in terms of ethnicity, race, or culture so that one is not superior to another.

RDC’s reasoning seems to make total depravity the handmaiden of cultural relativism. Total depravity, per RDC, is the great leveler of race, nations, and culture, therefore, no culture is superior or inferior to any other culture. The Reformed doctrine of total depravity does not teach functional egalitarianism.

There seems also to be a kind of double speak here again. On the one hand, sin is the great leveler, but on the other hand, earlier RDC admits that the Irish can be superior in making whiskey. The confusion here may be found in the fact that RDC keeps jumping the shark on categories. It is true that spiritually speaking all unregenerate people stand condemned before God but then there are times RDC wants to apply that category broadly so as to say, “therefore there is no functional superiority in terms of race, ethnicity, nations, cultures or languages.”

RDC sermonizes,

“The Gospel is also a great equalizer…. The Gospel teaches us that Christians especially must never regard themselves as …. superior over others. That is because the Gospel teaches us that was rent asunder at Babel has now been brought together and healed. What is more, since the Gospel means that God is the one who saved us, then we Christians stand on the same footing with one another before God, for we stand on Jesus Christ and in this sense there is equality…..”

Bret Responds,

Yes, we are equally saved by grace alone in Christ but that does not mean that are races or ethnicities are functionally equal. This would be to teach cultural or racial relativism. Cassidy has confused categories here. He wants to make a Redemptive equality of outcome in terms of any people and / or person looking to Christ to translate into a Creation equality of outcome in terms of culture and / or race. This is a category confusion. Many are the people that have come in from comparatively backward cultures and who will be in the New Jerusalem but that doesn’t mean their comparatively backward cultures, in the present, are equal to other clearly superior cultures.

RDC is correct when he says, in that last sentence above, “in this sense there is equality.” If he had stuck to the idea that Paul presents in Galatians 3:28f that temporal position or status doesn’t advantage or disadvantage one in terms of Redemption he would have been fine but RDC constantly wanders from that wonderful truth and seeks to apply it into functional realities.

Because RDC has muddied the waters earlier it makes his statement about “the Gospel being the great equalizer,”  suspicious, if only because historically it has been the Anabaptists who were known as thoroughgoing socio-cultural “levelers” and “equalizers.” Historically the Anabaptists have believed that Jesus Christ is our great High Priest and Chief Leveler. Historically, the Reformed have always spoken out against Anabaptist socio-cultural levelers and equalizers.

And RDC is wrong about Christians never thinking themselves superior. Clearly St. Paul is making the case of his superiority of the more inferior false Apostles in II Corinthians 11. Now, Paul thinks it is folly that he is forced to do so, but there is no doubt that he is making a necessary case for his superiority in that passage.

The fact that Babel has not been brought together and healed the way the RDC thinks has been dealt with earlier, but I will note again here that all those nations walking around in the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21-22) testify that the Church is a nation of nations and not Babel restored.

RDC wrote,

 

“God forbids that we would segregate in the Church. Peter tried that and Paul was very upset about it. We do not separate the people of God based on race or nationality. Ethnic churches while in one sense understandable are far from ideal. What is glorious however is when we see the people of God gather for worship and we see among the people of God many nations represented in her midst. That is Pentecost.”

Bret,

1.) In Galatians., Paul was the one in favor of segregating in the Church. The Judaizers and Peter were arguing that in order to be justified one had to become a soci0-cultural Jew and keep the same laws. Paul, on the other hand, was reasoning that one could remain an ethnocultural Gentile and still be Christian. The Judaizers and Peter were the ones trying to force an integrated uniformitarian Church and Paul resisted them to their face and insisted that one could have a Gentile diet and be justified … Gentiles could be segregated and have their own Church. (see also Acts 15)

2.) Quotes that contradict RDC’s claim that “we do not separate the people of God based on race or nationality;

a.) (See opening quote by Abraham Kuyper)

b.) “Scripture, as I read it, does not require societies, or even churches, to be integrated racially. Jews and Gentiles were brought together by God’s grace into one body. They were expected to love one another and to accept one another as brothers in the faith. But the Jewish Christians continued to maintain a distinct culture, and house churches were not required to include members of both groups.”

John Frame,
“Racism, Sexism, Marxism”

c.) “As a matter of fact, the early church was segregated. First of all, in New Testament times it was segregated between the Jewish believers and the Gentile believers. And there was… a good reason for that. The Jewish believers were so far superior that to integrate the two would have meant more often confusion. And when you realize that in, say the Corinthian church, they didn’t even know that fornication or adultery was a sin because in the Greek world there was nothing wrong with that. After all the chambers of commerce in Greece and Corinth and elsewhere… in Corinth, the chambers of commerce maintained regularly around two thousand prostitutes for all visiting businessmen. It was a manufacturing town and so on… and no one thought there was anything immoral about that. Or about men having relations with prostitutes. This was all taken for granted. So in the Gentile churches, the moral standard was pretty low. It was a lot of hard work for a couple of generations and more to bring them up to any kind of standard. Well, the Jewish congregations represented a far higher moral standard and Paul saw nothing wrong with that, nor did any other apostle. So the principle of segregation was present there from the beginning.”

R. J. Rushdoony
Audio – On Segregation

God does not forbid segregating in the Church.

 

 

Hillary’s Social Engineering Commitment — Election 2016

“Look, I don’t believe you change hearts, I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. You’re not going to change every heart. You’re not.”

Hillary Rodham-Clinton

1.) This is as clear of a confessional statement in regards to social engineering as you will ever find. Hillary is admitting here that change does not come via persuasion but rather by brute Governmental force. The Government is the Potter and the citizenry is the clay and those who handle the pulleys and levers of the Government change people by changing their environment via legislative, executive and judicial diktat. People then change not because they are persuaded but because they are forced by governmental tyranny.

2.) This heavy emphasis has a theological origin. The theology that is driving this anthropology, is one where people are seen, not as free moral agents but rather as those who are behaviorally conditioned and who are responding to a top down stimuli. In this worldview, Hillary and the Government are the mad scientists and the citizenry is the Pavlovian dog made to salivate upon being conditioned by Governmental decree.

3.) This attitude also conveys the attitude of legal positivism. The law is not discovered. The law does not belong to some objective transcendent order that exists to be discovered and bowed to. Law, instead, is created by humans as a tool to shape other humans. The law is subjective to the ever-shifting need of the zeitgeist as determined by the State as God walking upon the earth.

4.) This is the mindset of most of our politicians and it is the mindset of tyranny. Seize the reins of power. Rule in a top-down fashion. View the citizenry as clay to be molded at the magistrate’s command. Change the way systems operate so that rank and file in those systems are forced to comply. Resistance is futile. The citizenry will be assimilated.

Examining Rev. Dr. Jim Cassidy’s “Racial Supremacy and The Gospel” Sermon (II)

“It may be agreed right off that for those that can see only this world, whether claiming to be Christian or not, the passion for unity in and of the world must become a veritable obsession. It may be admitted that an overriding unity of creation is as necessary to human existence as food and air. As long as that final unity is consciously or subconsciously seen in the One who made all that is, then the separations, diversities, distinctions and differences which abound in creation become not an unendurable frustration, but a boundless vista of goodness and peace. But if all talk of God is only a facade of pietism, and if the only thing that matters really is this world, and the Christian hope of the world to come is better described in the famous Marxist sneer as ‘pie in the sky;’ if all the direction and purpose of life is found in this world, and if all that matters is improvement and ultimately even perfection of this world, then unity, too, must be achieved in terms of this world. Hence, integration—a plan for another step in the unifying process of the diverse parts of society. Integration is not an end in itself, but a supposed step toward the end of achieving heaven on earth. Integrationists, therefore, like all Utopians everywhere in all times are wildly determined to remove from their path all who would obstruct their progress toward ultimate unity and heaven on earth.”

T. Robert Ingram
Episcopalian Rector 

RDC sermonized,

“In this new Nation (the Church) there is neither Jew nor Gentile, Barbarian or Scythian (Colossians 3:11).”

Bret responds,

The point here in Colossians is much the same as Paul’s point in Galatians 3:28. The point is that in terms of being in Christ (the “New Man” in Colossians 3.) there are no racial nor national restrictions that stand in the way. God calls all types of men to Himself and no man, from any tribe, tongue or nation, is turned away from Christ because of his race or ethnicity.  That Paul understood that Nationalities exist after conversion is seen from the His special affection for His own people (Romans 9).

“I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”

That the early Church understood Nationalities exist and must be dealt with as nationalities is seen by its appointing 7 Greek named deacons to deal with the Greek widows complaining against unjust treatment vis-a-vis Hebrew Widows in Acts 6.

Colossians 3:11 (or Galatians 3:28) does not teach that race and ethnicity go away or maleness or femaleness, or ethnic differences are undesirable, or that the Church ignores these realities, or insists they must go away.

The Church is indeed a new nation but it is a nation of nations. People from every tribe, tongue, and nation in their tribes, tongues, and nations comprise the one diverse but unified body of Christ. The one body of Christ is not all an eye or an ear. There is a maintained diversity within this one body of Christ. There is one wild olive tree but many branches. The Church is thus not all trunk or all branches. Unity in diversity. 

Dr. Geerhardus Vos understood all this when he wrote on Romans 11:1-2,

This (branches) 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 11:22 (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

RDC sermonized,

“Ethnic differences are undesirable. Ethnic differences — Ethnic divisions among the Nations is a product of the divine curse…. A curse that is gloriously overcome by the Gospel.”

Bret responds,

If ethnic differences are undesirable what other godly course exists except to try and eliminate ethnic differences? They used to call that ethnocide.

With this statement, it is hard not to hear music in the background,

Imagine there’s no countries,
It isn’t hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the people
living life in peace…

Certainly, the Gospel gloriously overcomes racial hatred and animosity but to suggest that it overcomes the reality of ethnic differences is to advocate for a kind of Marxist Gospel. A Marxist Gospel taught and embraced by another leader from a different kind of pulpit, once upon a time,

“Marxism cannot be reconciled with Nationalism, be it even of the ‘most just,’ ‘purest,’ most refined and civilized brand. In place of all forms of nationalism, Marxism advances internationalism, the amalgamation of all nations into a higher unity, a unity that is growing before our eyes…

The proletariat … welcomes every kind of assimilation of nations, except that which is founded on force or privilege.

The proletariat cannot support any consecration of nationalism: on the contrary, it supports everything that helps to obliterate national distinctions and remove national barriers; it supports everything that makes the ties between nationalities closer and closer or tends to merge nations.”

Vladimir Lenin
Critical Remarks on the National Question

Can’t well-intentioned ministers see that when they say things like, “Ethnic differences are undesirable,” that they are reading off a sheet of music that is the very antithesis of Biblical Christianity? Are we to believe that God and Lenin agree? Are we to believe that this is one place Communism got it right? God wants us to imagine no more countries?

Another thing we must keep in mind is that ethnicity is merely an extension of the family. Ethnicity is the next concentric circle outside of family and clan. If Ethnicity is gloriously overcome by the Gospel what else are we to conclude but that the family is gloriously overcome by the Gospel? 

Finally, on this point, we would note that ethnic differences can’t really go away. Large-scale ethnic intermarriage does not reduce ethnic differences, but rather, by their million permutations, increases them. This is what happened in Brazil as this documentary captures,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g29P3-xj7GQ&feature=youtu.be

RDC sermonized,

 

“That means that the differences that separate us as human beings are, in one sense, lamentable. We have to understand that in a certain respect the differences that make us different from one another, that separate us as different ethnicities, with different races, with different colors of skin, different cultures, different languages that put us apart from one another is, in fact, a lamentable thing that should be and is overcome by the Gospel. Now, we have to say just as a sideline here, in another sense many of the differences that separate us as cultures is quite understandable. They’re not sinful. There are certain differences that separate us as cultures. Things that make each of our cultures distinct. And those cultures have good things and bad things that characterize their cultures that make them distinct from other cultures.”

(Gives Illustrations about Irish)

Bret responds,

First, this is difficult to respond to because of what sounds like double speak. On one hand, our differences like ethnicity, race, the color of skin, culture, languages, are lamentable. On the other hand differences, that separate our culture are quite understandable. I submit that if one subtracts ethnicity, race, the color of skin, culture, and language there is nothing left of a culture that can make its difference understandable.

What all this sounds like is the idea that grace destroys nature, or, to say it a different way, this sounds like Redemption negates creation. The effect of salvation is that we lose the identity God created us with. The Reformed, have always said instead, that Grace restores nature. Redemption does not make our creaturely identity markers go away. After conversion, I still retain race, ethnicity, and gender. Upon Redemption, I do not quit being a Father, a Son, a Daughter, a Wife. Rather upon Redemption, I am a new man in regards to those unerasable creaturely realities. When regenerated, I lean into my creatureliness as one translated into the Kingdom of God’s dear Son.

The Gospel does not overcome man’s God assigned creatureliness and it is errant to say that it does. The Gospel overcomes the twistedness in which I handle my God assigned creatureliness.