War of Northern Aggression / War Against the Constitution — Reading List

This class will be geared towards telling the untold story of the War Against the Constitution. The class will elide past the motif of war that the victors get to write the history. One can find that “history” everywhere. The goal in this class is oriented to give you the whole story of the War of Northern Aggression. I am providing a long list of books. We will not be able to get to all of these but now you will have this list in case you ever want to go diving for yourself. We will be using the books that have an asterisk next to them. This does not necessarily mean they are the best books, though they sometimes will be. It means they are the books that will fit into our time frame most easily. Shelby Foote’s III volume series, for example, is elegantly written and is a living book but, alas, we can not fit Foote’s III volume into this course. Still, I would encourage all to turn the TV off and read Shelby Foote.

There are countless books on this huge subject. These are some of the ones I have read. My hope is this will wet the appetite of both children and parents to desire to continue on in their learning regardless of their age.
I would say that he who gets the history of the War Against the Constitution wrong will get very little else right about US History. It is an important subject.

Keep in mind that the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877) could be a whole separate semester class with a reading list every bit as long and controversial as this one. You really can not tell the story of the War Against the Constitution without telling the story of Yankee Reconstruction.

Keep in mind that learning never ends.

(1.) Shelby Foote — The Civil War: A Narrative (III Volume set)
(2.) * R. G. B. Horton — A Youth’s History of the Great Civil War in the United States From 1861-1865
(3) Alexander Stephens — A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (II Volumes)
(4) Edgar Lee Masters — Lincoln the Man (Free Audio on Amazon)
(5) * Webb Garrison: Lincoln’s Little War; How His Carefully Laid Plan Went Astray
(6) * Thomas J. DiLorenzo — The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War
(7) * Thomas J. DiLorenzo — Lincoln Unmasked
(😎 * Walter D. Kennedy — Myths of American Slavery
(9) * Understanding the War Between the States; A Supplemental book by 16 writers that Enable A More Complete and Truthful Study of American History (Middle School, High School, College, and Beyond)

(10) *Ludwell H. Johnson — North Against South; The American Iliad 1848-1877
(11) * John S. Tilley — Facts The Historians Leave Out: A Confederate Primer
(12) Otto Scott — The Secret Six
(13) *Mildred Lewis Rutherford — Truths of History
(14)* Walter Brian Cisco — War Crimes Against Southern Civilians
(15) James Ronald Kennedy & Walter Donald Kennedy; “The South Was Right”
(16) Al Benson — Lincoln’s Marxists
(17) Jeffrey Manber & Neil Dahlstrom — Lincoln’s Wrath: Fierce Mobs, Brilliant Scoundrels and a President’s Mission to Destroy the Press
(18) Avery Craven — The Coming of the Civil War
(19) Thomas & Debra Goodrich — The Day Dixie Died
(20) Howell Cobb — A Scriptural Examination of the Institution of Slavery in the United States
(21) Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, Jennifer Frank — Complicity; How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
(22) Jennifer L. Weber — Copperheads; The Rise & Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North
(23) C. C. Goen — Broken Churches, Broken Nation
(24) Lyon Gardiner Tyler — John Tyler & Abraham Lincoln; Who was the Dwarf?
(25) Jefferson Davis — The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (II Volumes)

Excising R2K — The Stakes

See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.  — Colossians 2:8

I have labored in this volume to demonstrate by teasing out a host of reasons that Radical Two Kingdom theology is a false gospel and so a false Christianity. Should one wholly embrace R2K the consequence is a un-biblical epistemology (chapter 1) which in turns yields the dualism of a “hyphenated-life” (chapter 2). Should one have a presuppositional epistemology for the R2K grace realm and a Natural Law epistemology for the R2K common realm the consequence will be a raging Platonic dualism. Every single time. The owning of R2K also yields a warped soteriology, (chapter 3) where Jesus Christ’s office of King and Liege Lord is reduced to a Gnostic reality. R2K fanboys end up turning into a militant Amillennialist (chapter 6). The only place R2K will fight for the Kingdom is when it is fighting those who hold to a optimistic eschatology. Together we have considered the covenantal malfeasance of R2K (chapter 4) and we remind ourselves again that per Reformed giant Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield federal (covenant) theology is the, “architectonic principle” of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647).Chapter 4 is important because if you get your covenant theology wrong (which R2K does) then the rest of your theology is going to be seriously skewed. In chapter 5 we noted the failures of R2K to understand that religion – even in their “common realm” is an inescapable category as it pertains to both magistrates and states. R2K, in good Jeffersonian fashion seeks to erect a wall of separation between Christianity and State quite without realizing that all laws invoke a moral order and all moral orders in turn rely upon religious tenets. Sans R2K it is not possible to have a religiously naked or neutral public square. Cult and culture deriving from the same root word as they do reminds us that what a culture forbids or sanctions reveals the religious orientation of the culture. Religion is an inescapable category for both Magistrates and States and since it is the religion of the realm and of Magistrates needs be Christian and not neutral or naked as R2K advocates. Together in chapter 7 we listened to the R2K gurus in their own words and discovered the reason for the “R” in the R2K. Radical is a understatement. As chapter 8 unfolded we learned that R2K does not believe it is possible that families should be, or even can be “Christian.” In chapter 9 we explored the theocratic fears of R2K. We demonstrated that R2K needs to get over its fears since all social orders are organized, either explicitly or implicitly as theocracies. In chapter 10 we exposed some of the spoof texting of R2K. It really is not possible to expose all their spoof texting since R2K runs all of scripture through their R2K grinder with the consequence that R2K reads all of scripture as proving R2K. The best approach to defeating the spoof-texting of R2K is to go after it from a systematic theology approach. As we worked together through chapter 11 we examined the fears of R2K when it comes to the idea that Christianity is to be a transformational faith. R2K, locking Christianity away into the Church realm, becomes nervous when Christians begin to speak of Christianity leavening all areas of life and being salt to all callings. As we traveled through chapter 12 we noted that R2K has some strange ideological soulmates in places as diverse as Marxism, Anabaptist theology, classical liberalism, and other strange bedfellows. Chapter 12 reveals how R2K has been taken captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition. In chapter 13 we provided a better way to handle the issues that seem to bother Radical Two Kingdom theologians.

The matters that we have mapped out in our time together are matters that others have seen and are seeing. In July of 2022 Dr. Rev. Sacha Walicord raised a warning similar to what can be found in this volume. Walicord offered in his sermon, “Two Covenants, One Law;”

“Christ is the mediator of this covenant of grace and here is something we need to hear — especially have to hear in the United Reformed Churches, as increasingly our people are being confused with a false understanding of exactly this topic. You have to understand that the Law and the Gospel are not opposites. They are in full harmony as Paul in vs. 21 reiterates … He asks exactly the question that has been plaguing the United Reformed Churches and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church for a along time; ‘Is the law then contrary to the promises of God? Certainly not’ he says. How much clearer do we want it? How crafty does it get with our enmity against the law of God? How deception can preachers become in luring our people away from the truth – away from a wonderful benefit of the covenant of grace, (of God’s dictated order of life) and changing the Gospel into something else?

And Paul continues, ‘If a law had been given that could give life then righteousness would indeed be by the law.’ Now this describes exactly the trap in which many of the contemporary Reformed have fallen. They do rightly understand that we have been saved through faith in Jesus Christ but they go ahead and say, “Since it is the promise and not the law that saves we have to abandon the law’ and they become anti-nomians. They become enemies of the law – discarding the law altogether. They portray the Law and the Gospel as contrarians – as competitors and they pit the two, as it were, against each other, just like the Marcions of old did with their heresy. That’s in its core the fasle understanding and the false doctrine — the so-called Radical Two Kingdom doctrine, which is being heavily promoted by a seminary on the west coast and by many of its graduates almost cult like — even in our Federation and we have to begin of calling this out this as what it is. It is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But it is another Gospel.

There I said it with all the possible repercussions and consequences. It (R2K) is another Gospel.

Because that is clearly not what the Bible teaches and that is not Gospel that Paul preaches who driven by the Holy Spirit says just the opposite.

Dr. Rev. Sacha Walicord
https://www.sermonaudio.com/solo/walkerurc/sermons/8722150511983/
Begin at 19:00 Mark

Dr. Walicord has lifted a battle cry that needs to echo from Reformed Churches across the West. If we, the Church, do not excise Radical Two Kingdom theology from the Reformed Church the consequence will be that the Reformed Church will become the enemy of Jesus Christ. The task before us upon defeating R2K is to follow the words of Reformed Theologian Dr James Orr and to realize that;

“The Church has another and yet more difficult task before it if it is to retain its ascendancy over the minds of men. That task is to bring Christianity to bear as an applied power on the life and conditions of society; to set itself as it has never yet done to master the meaning of “the mind of Christ,” and to achieve the translation of that mind into the whole practical life of the age — into laws, institutions, commerce, literature, art; into domestic, civic, social, and political relations; into national and international doings — in this sense to bring in the Kingdom of God among men.”

James Orr
The Progress of Dogma — pp 353-354 (1897)

Consistent with Orr, a generation later, J. Gresham Machen could write in his essay Christianity & Culture;

 

“We may preach with all the fervour of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root. Many would have the seminaries combat error by attacking it as it is taught by its popular exponents. Instead of that they confuse their students with a lot of German names unknown outside the walls of the universities…. What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires. In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combatted; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate. So as Christians we should try to mould the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity….

The real difficulty amounts to this—that the thought of the day, as it makes itself most strongly felt in the universities, but from them spreads inevitably to the masses of the people, is profoundly opposed to Christianity, or at least—what is nearly as bad—it is out of all connection with Christianity. The Church is unable either to combat it or to assimilate it, because the Church simply does not understand it. Under such circumstances, what more pressing duty than for those who have received the mighty experience of regeneration, who, therefore, do not, like the world, neglect that the whole series of vitally relevant facts which is embraced in Christian experience—what more pressing duty than for these men to make themselves masters of the thought of the world in order to make it an instrument of truth instead of error? The Church has no right to be so absorbed in helping the individual that she forgets the world.”

J. Gresham Machen

 

R2K, in ignoring men like Dr. James Orr and J. Gresham Machen would turn Christianity into a faith that will, in this life and world always be a minority voice laboring away in the catacombs of irrelevancy. R2K, with its avowed convictions creates conditions where the faith once and forever delivered unto the saints will always be a marginalized voice begging just be allowed to exist so it can demonstrate to all with eyes to see how fabulous it is for its great ascended and triumphant Liege-Lord to always be in subjection to pagan Kings and Magistrates. R2K with its theology guarantees that Christianity will always be a private religion not allowed to walk in the public square and taken up only by old women, fools, and people who have a masochistic tendency. R2K sells itself as that elixir that promises to keep the Christian faith irrelevant, defeated, and supine. R2K promises your soul to God while giving your body to the State.

The stakes are high in this debate. Should the Reformed Churches not rid themselves of Radical Two Kingdom theology the consequence is going to be that a theological/ideological vacuum is going to come to the fore in the Reformed Churches and that vacuum is going to be filled by cultural Marxism – the predominant worldview du-jour today. The inevitability of this is guaranteed due to the fact of the R2K soy boy pulpiteers refusal to give a “thus saith the Lord” on moral issues facing Christians in the R2K common realm. If there is no voice from the pulpit about what pleases God on issues ranging from abortion to economics (Heidelberg Catechism Q. 110) to trannie-ism to the idolatry of putting children in Government schools, to God’s mind on the New World Order, etc. then the voice that God’s people in the pews are going to be hearing is going to be the voice of the Cultural Marxists. If the R2K Church will not give a “thus saith the Lord,” then the consequence is the laymen is going to absorb the worldview zeitgeist on these issues. R2K guarantees that the Church will eventually tack to the hard left.

One wonders if that is in part what all this R2K emesis really is about. Has R2K been just a clever way to emasculate the Church in the face of the belching of Hell? Anecdotally speaking, it seems that so many of the R2K fanboys tilt to the left in their thinking and speaking (see chapter 7). Is R2K just providing cover for the Cultural Marxists? Silent the pulpits and the slime of Cultural Marxism can more easily ooze into the Church?

This has never been the way that the Reformed Churches, when healthy, have functioned in the past. When healthy the Reformed Churches were always at the front of cultural battles. When healthy the Reformed Churches have warned Kings, refused to bow to threats of Magistrates, and insisted on the law of God as the norm that norms all norms for all men in all settings.

We end with a statement that brings together the best of historic Reformed Christianity in its missionary impulse. The best of historic Reformed Christianity has always been evangelistic to the individual while holding out God’s standard to nations, social orders, and cultures. R2K tries to half that equation and by doing so ends up losing the best of the historic Reformed faith.

“In giving the Church a mission to the nations, Jesus does not diminish the importance of the individual. The offer of the Gospel must be sincerely extended to individual persons in all times and places. After all, at stake is the salvation of human beings, called to repent and believe. But also at stake is the salvation, well-being, and peace of the nations, that is, societies as God would have them. The Son of God must ‘rule all nations’ (Rev. 12:5). The nations must bow down before the Lord and come to walk in His light (Rev. 15:4; 21:24). These nations, with their cultures, traditions, and religions turned away from the God of Holy Scripture, are called to be converted to a sure salvation. This conversion of a nation does not happen apart from the individual lives of faithful Christians, but precisely through the influence of such lives. Moreover, each nation’s conversion is to reflect the uniqueness of that nation.”

Pierre Courthial
A New Day of Small Beginnings — pg. 112

Let God be true and every R2K theologian a liar.

Reno & McAtee on the PoMo Project

“Like Weber, Derrida recognized that his therapies of disenchantment can bring sadness. There is a ‘Rousseaustic side’ of our era that longs for a return to unity based upon sacred authorities. Faced with ‘decentering,’ ‘the absent origin,’ and the ‘disruption of presence,’ we can feel ‘saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty,’ as if we are losing noble truths and betraying higher duties. Derrida recommends what he takes to be a better way. We need a society that is open all the way down. That can be found when we view disenchantment as opening the way for the ‘Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.’ These words of consolation amount to a sophisticated, now politically confident restatement of Popper’s urgent, almost panicked assertion some two decades earlier: ‘Although history has no meaning, we can give it meaning.’

R. R. Reno
Return of the Strong Gods; Nationalism, Populism & The Return Of The West — p. 66-67

1.) The idea that we can have a society that is open all the way down is just another way of saying, “Hath God really said?”

2.) ‘A world of signs’ where active interpretation can take place is oxymoronic, if only because a “sign” is something that stands in the place of a higher reality and yet we are being told that there is no higher reality. As such Derrida following Nietzsche is talking about actively interpreting a world of signs where the sign has no real reality behind it. As such it, by definition, cannot be a sign because it points to nothing and by definition there can be no interpretation since interpretation presupposes that something exists that can be interpreted. However, disenchantment denies all off this. This ends up being one huge mass of contradiction.

3.) One wonders who is the “we” who are going to give history meaning? There are 7 billion people on the planet. Are each and all going to impart their own personal meaning? Anarchy anyone? Or, is it the case that underlying this statement is the assumption that some elite can arise to assign meaning to meaningless history? An assigned meaning the rest of us plebes will be required to adopt?

Look What “The Brotherhood of All Men” Has Done

Further, the consequence of such thinking that we do not have a greater responsibility to love those closer relationally to us than those far away relationally from us  makes it impossible for Biblical Christians to resist further movements to normalize what heretofore Biblical Christians would have found abhorrent. It is a short trip from the flattening of natural hierarchies and distinctions to the embrace of a egalitarian universal monistic social order.

Of course, all of this is born of some version of the old Unitarian idea of the Brotherhood of all men and the Fatherhood of God over all men. If all men are indeed Brothers than it is hard to argue that I am more obliged to my Brother than I am to a stranger in Timbuktu. A Christian version of the Brotherhood of all men states I have more in common and so more obligation to the Christian in Iran then I have to my own unbelieving conservative Father.

We would also note that Christianity assumes these “natural” hierarchies because they are in reality biblically sanctioned hierarchies. It is the fact that these hierarchies are Biblical that makes them “natural.” It is the Scripture that teaches the necessity and importance of concentric circles of familial and community relations.

The devil has always been about abstractions in opposition to the concrete. The first temptation required Eve to think abstractly in dismissal of God’s concrete commandment to not eat. The first temptation required Eve to think abstractly in order to envision the egalitarian order promised wherein she would be as God determining good and evil.

The modern Christian movement (TGC, T4G, PCA, OPC, CREC, CRC, URC, RCA, RPCNA, etc. etc. etc.) cannot withstand the impulse of the times because they have embraced the core premise of the times that men are are interchangeable cogs that can be changed out for Mother and Father, Brother and Sister, Wife and child. We have arrived at this moment because of a misguided notion of universal love that trumps particular love. Loving the Nigerian Anglican Woman has the same claim on us as loving our Dispensational Arminian Mother.

Of Dysmorphic Delusions, Transgenderism, and Madness

The dysmorphic delusions that sufferers of diseases like bulimia and anorexia find a connection with those men and/or women who insist they are not men or women. In both cases (anorexia/bulimia and transgenderism) the sufferers feelings about themselves exist only in their minds and existing in the mind no one can tell them that objectively the case is not as their delusions are telling them. The difference however between something like bulimia or anorexia is that society is still willing to tell the afflicted that they are not right in the head whereas with the transgenders society has now decided to join them in their delusion. With transgenders like the seismic anomaly  (Richard Levine) serving as a four-star admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps it is now those who won’t play along with their make believe distorted vision of reality who now are deemed “not right in the head.”

As such the radical subjectivism at the heart of intersectionality, WOKE ideology, and gender theory now unchallenged and affirmed as a real state of affairs has abolished the possibility of disinterested debate by its ability to recast any disagreement by appealing to sanity. If the deluded register a claim to suffering if their delusion is not affirmed as being insensitive to their lived experience then all must bow before their claim of suffering. As such we are now in a position of either joining the delusion of the mentally ill or being accused of being trannie-phobes, haters, and downright mean.