Are Our Meaning Problems Derivative of Darwin … or Derivative of Franz Boas? Wilson’s Errant Analysis

In a recent clip Doug Wilson effectively demolishes Russell Moore’s belly aching about Wilson. There is plenty to belly ache about Wilson but all of what Moore was belly-aching about is exactly the opposite of what the problems with Wilson are. Moore was critiquing Wilson from the Cultural Marxist non-Christian Left. My problems with Wilson are from the Dissident Christian right. Still, how can I not rejoice whenever the right side of the left (Doug Wilson) demolishes the left side of the left (Russell Moore)?

So, a tip of the cap and three “Huzzahs” for Doug here!

(10:23-10:43)

There was a major insight though from Wilson as he aptly and ablely picked apart Moore. Wilson said, in the course of his righteous screed against Russell Moore, that where we, as a culture, are at is “All downstream of Darwin.”

Now, that is a major analysis error on Wilson’s part. It demonstrates that he doesn’t really know the times. Indeed, because of this analysis we can begin to locate why Wilson is so often wrong the way he is. It is absolutely false that where we are at as a culture is all downstream of Darwin. In point of fact, the person we are all downstream of held the exact opposite views of Darwin. I would insist that where we’re now is “all downstream of Franz Boas.”

Franz Boas was the anti-Darwinists of his age and perhaps is one of the least known persons today whose thinking has had monumental impact    on our current zeitgeist. Boas abominated Darwin and it is Boas’ worldview that has gained the ascendency. Boas was a cultural anthropologist who argued against Darwin’s “biological determinism,” opting instead for a cultural relativism that allowed for an egalitarian view of all cultures. Further, Boas argued against Darwin’s “scientific racism” by emphasizing nurture over Darwin’s nature argument.

This inability of Wilson’s to see that the battle we are now fighting in the West is not against Darwinism so much as it is against Boasianism explains a good deal about some of the things that Wilson says about race and culture.

The significance of this error on Wilson’s part is monumental.

Now, certainly there remains a good deal of Darwinism extant. It’s not as if Darwinism has gone away. However, the real fight in the trenches is not with Darwinism but is with the exact opposite mirror error of Boasianism. The lost of meaning that we are suffering from as a culture has more to do with the success of (((Franz Boas))) worldview winning out than it has to do with Darwin’s worldview winning out.

Sure & Certain Victory

“What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.”

Karl Marx

“You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.”

Ho Chi Minh

In reading Carroll’s “The Rise and Fall of the Communist Revolution,” one constant theme across the Communist Revolution where-ever it was found was the certainty of coming victory despite the odds or despite any recent defeats. The Communist elites knew that victory was inevitable. Whether you are talking about Lenin in Russia, Mao in China, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Guevara and Castro in Cuba, Sukarno in Indonesia or Caballero in Spain they all were absolutely optimistic about the coming victory that they would eventually win. These Demon animated men were optimistic in their eschatology. They were not always right but they were right many times more than they were wrong.

What of Christians? What of they who have the truth? What of they who champion the cause of King of Kings and the greatest anti Marxist Revolutionary who has ever lived?

The great majority of Christians admit and boast that they are going to lose. John MacArthur even once went of a jag in the pulpit saying;

“We lose down here. Get used to it.”

And the Amen chorus coming from the R2K “Amen corner” was deafening.

This Christian pessimistic eschatology,which has been the majority report in the Reformed Church at least since the end of WW I, of both the premil and amil variants ends up being a self-fulfilled prophecy. If one really believes that they are going to “lose down here,” then they will live their lives planning for defeat and expecting disappointment.

It seems that where we Christians need to be more like the Marxists in anticipating victory we are at that point most unlike them and where we Christians need to be least like the Marxists in being egalitarian we are at that point most like them.

Yet, despite being saddled with the dead weight of a Church, who in the majority, are pessimistic in their eschatology I still know that small as our numbers might be right now we will, in the end, win out. We are going to win. It is evident. We have the God’s own testimony in Scripture. It is as sure as the sunrise coming the following morning. Tears may last for the night but joy cometh in the morning. The enemy can not defeat us or our cause — no, not even the enemy in our midst.

The Current Common Ground Between Marxism & Christianity

It is well known that the Marxism/Communism of the 20th century was a religion that required of men everything. It required their dissolution of their human-ness in order to be re-designed into the “New Soviet Man.” The New Soviet Man was a man with no allegiances, no identity, no distinctiveness, except as set against the all Sovereign Party/State. The Marxists/Communists so believed this that man became an interchangeable cog in the machinery of the state/party. Practically, what this meant was the destruction of the family for the reason that the family gave one an identity other than the Party. This meant the destruction of maleness and femaleness as sexuality & gender was irrelevant for the New Soviet Man.  This destruction of maleness and femaleness was demonstrated in the Soviet effort during WW II where 5% of the Soviet troops (appx. 800K) were comprised of women who fought as snipers, pilots, and as medical personnel. Per Communist doctrine man qua man was a distinction-less, identity-less, being that was to find his whole identity only in terms of the State/Party.

Of course the same principle applied to man in terms of his racial-ethnic identity. Man’s creaturely distinctive of race, ethnicity, family were irrelevant categories for the New Soviet man. The State/Party was to serve as the the New Soviet Man’s race. One way this was pursued in the USSR, by Stalin was by means of mass deportations of different people groups from one area of the USSR to another. The goal was to so dilute ethnic identity with their distinctive cultural lifestyles by thrusting them amidst new locales and different peoples.

Stalin, and his henchman, Lavrentiy Beria (Head of Soviet NKVD), pursued these mass deportations as a way to suppress any coordinated uprisings by particular concentrated people groups protesting Stalin’s totalitarianism. Such deportations also served the purpose of creating a visibly observable internationalism that bespoke a uniform identity of all Soviet peoples. Between the 1930s-1950s in the Soviet Union approximately 3.5 million from 40 different ethnic groups were relocated (deported) from their previous homeland in order to discover and enjoy become part of the New International man.

All of this is consistent with the explicit statements by the Marxists/Communists on their intent of eliminating all national distinctions so that a new man could be created — a new man whose only identity was the Communist Party/State apparatus. Here are but a few of their own words;

”What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities?

The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and hereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property.”

~ Frederick Engels in “The Principles of Communism”, 1847

Or we might consult one Nikita Khrushchev;

“Full-scale Communist construction constitutes a new stage in the development of national relations in the U.S.S.R., in which the nations will draw still closer together until complete unity is achieved…. However, the obliteration of national distinctions and especially of language distinctions is a considerably longer process than the obliteration of class distinctions.”

Nikita Khrushchev

And Marx himself,

“Even the natural differences within species, like racial
differences…, can and must be done away with historically.”
 
K. Marx’s Collected Works V:103,
 
As cited in S.F. Bloom’s The World of Nations: A

Study of the National Implications in the Work of Karl Marx, Columbia University Press, New York, 1941, pp. 11 & 15-19:

What we have seen here thus is that Communist/Marxist Godlessness has always sought to destroy the distinctive creaturely stamp that God has placed upon men at their birth. Gone are gender/sexual distinctives in the Soviet state. Gone are racial/ethnic distinctions in the Soviet State. Gone are family distinctions in the Soviet State.

Mussolini’s words here describe perfectly this totalitarian arrangement;

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’

Now, I have a larger purpose in pointing all this out, as interesting as it might be by itself. My larger purpose here is to suggest that modern Christianity and the modern Church has become an ape to this kind of Soviet understanding of man with its repeated denunciations of the reality of races, ethnicities, and clans. Indeed, so much like the Soviets of yesteryear have become that churches now are routinely defrocking, disbarring, and disciplining ministers who give even the slightest inclination of believing that the Christian’s Union with Christ does not take away their human distinctives of sexuality, family, race or ethnic belongingness.

The cases of Michel Hunter, Michael Spangler, and my own are somewhat known now. However, other men such as Rev. Zach Garris and Rev. James Baird have likewise been given a good amount of official grief for their views. Then there are cases like Tim Harris, and Ryan Louis Underwood that have not received the publicity that they should have received. Then going way back, there is the case of Neil Payne and Todd Mahaffy where the SPLC was brought in, in order to substantiate the charges “racism” brought by an Alienist PCA minister. Fast forward to this past spring and the RPCNA, ARP, and PCA all adopted Soviet like language in order to condemn that which the Soviet Politburo would have heartily agreed. The Reformed churches keep trying to put a lid on all this but the lid keeps popping off.  Now combine all this with the inability of the PCA to bring discipline against the self-confessed celibate but still sodomite Rev. Greg Johnson and we begin to see that the contemporary Reformed Denominations, in principle, look an awful lot like they are in league with the now defunct Soviet Union in creating the “New Soviet Man.”

The Modern Reformed Church and Reformed clergy, at least in the matter of trying to erase God ordained creaturely distinctives because “since we’re united with Christ we are all one” is singing out of the same hymnbook as Robespierre, Lenin, Marx, Stalin, and Mao. The Modern Reformed Church in its shared embrace with the Marxism/Communism doctrine of egalitarianism is testifying against itself by insisting that “grace destroys nature.” It would have been better if the Soviets had succeeded in this egalitarian attempt rather than our being in the position where the Reformed Churches of Jesus Christ may well be successful in this same effort where the Marxists thus far have not been successful.

Having said all this, I am glad to admit that it is possible to make an idol out of one’s family or ethnicity or race, but having admitted that this is possible is it really the case that the modern West is in danger of sliding into that abyss? I mean, how much ancestor worship do you come across daily in the non third world immigrant parts of the West? It has gotten so bad that there are those who now insist that they have more in common with a Nigerian Grandmother who is Christian than they have with their own unbelieving Mother. Honor thy Father and Mother much?

The modern Reformed church needs to return to the principle that grace restores nature. It needs to admit that churches that practice the homogenous principle are not in some kind of grave sin. I mean, the modern Reformed church if just find and dany with the homogenous principle as applied to Korean or Hmong Churches or even Black church but suddenly it begins to blanch when white Westerners pursue the same thing. The modern Reformed church needs to embrace men like Dabney and Thornwell, Palmer and Girardeau, Morton Smith and John Edwards Richards, Michael Spangler and Michael Hunter, Zach Garris and James Baird. The modern Reformed church needs to quit with its racial and Marxist witch hunts that are determined to eliminate every bit of legitimate racial realism that exists within their confines.

Kinism has always been part and parcel of the definition of Christianity through the ages. The two long anthologies “Who Is My Neighbor,” and “A Survey of Racialism in Christian Sacred Tradition” has made it indisputable that those Christians who understand that Kinism is just Christianity 101 are standing in the tradition of believing what all Christian at all times and in all places have believed.

If the Modern Reformed Church does not change its course on this matter historians of the future are going to look back on this time and describe it as “The Marxist Captivity of the Church.”

 

 

 

Machen’s Christianity & Liberalism & The Contemporary Church

“A terrible crisis unquestionably has arisen in the Church. In the ministry of evangelical churches are to be found hosts of those who reject the gospel of Christ. By the equivocal use of traditional phrases, by the representation of differences of opinion as though they were only differences about the interpretation of the Bible, entrance into the Church was secured for those who are hostile to the very foundations of the faith.”
 
 J. Gresham Machen
Christianity & Liberalism

One point covered yesterday in Sunday School as we continue to work through Machen’s “Christianity & Liberalism” is that Liberals are forever accusing Biblical Christians of having a “mean” God and a “mean” faith. Their reasons for their existence, in part, is to give us a kinder and gentler Christianity. However, the ironic part here is that the Christianity of the liberal is an example of “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.” Liberal Christianity, that seeks to get rid of all the “cringe factor” in Biblical Christianity is, in point of fact, the cruelest and meanest “Christianity” going. It yields a God who cannot save, a Christ that is not God, a salvation that is only experiential and emotional, and a anthropology that tells man he is basically good and just needs a few tweeks. It is the meanest of all faiths because it leaves men damned.

Machen was dealing with men who had emptied Christianity of its historical and doctrinal meaning and were refilling it with a content that was not Christian in the least. We fight the same battle today in our Churches with that problem. “Christianities” like R2K, Federal Vision, Dispensationalism, New Perspective on Paul, Roman Catholicism, Arminianism, Pentecostalism, all empty Christianity of its original historical and doctrinal content in favor of a redefined Christianity that is no Christianity.

Machen wrote “Christianity and Liberalism,” but today we could write books titled “Christianity and R2K,” “Christianity and Federal Vision,” “Christianity and Arminianism,” etc. because it is all bogus Christianity and it is all mean and cruel to those who embrace it.

Revolutionary Marxism & Biblical Christianity

“Mao barely knew the German philosopher Hegel, and had only a limited understanding of the concept of the dialectic which Marx had derived from Hegel. But his mind ran in the same channels as Hegel’s and Marx’s and Lenin’s, for all the vast difference in his cultural background. Like them, he saw a universe in which conflict was not temporary disharmony, but the esse — the supreme fact and law of existence. Mao said: ‘Balance, qualitative change and unity are absolute and permanent.’ ‘If there were not contradiction and no struggle, there would be no world, no progress, no life, there would be nothing at all.”

What did this mean for communism, his dream and his goal?

‘The universe, too, undergoes transformation, it is not eternal. Capitalism leads to socialism leads to communism, and communist society must still be transformed, it will also have a beginning and end…. Monkeys turned into men, mankind arose; in the end the whole human race will disappear, it may turn into something else, at that time the earth itself will also cease to exist. The earth must certainly be extinguished, the sun too will grow cold.’ – Mao

So, even a communist society must have its revolutions; and he, Mao Tse-Tung, the supreme revolution maker, would keep on making them.”

Warren H. Carroll
The Rise and Fall of the Communist Revolution – p. 462

A few observations

1.) Note that a major foundation for Marxist thought is the idea of conflict of interests. This is what is taught with the Hegelian dialectic. Communist Revolution is never final. It always progresses to the next thing. This explains in the West the movement of accepting adultery, to accepting sodomy, to accepting Trannie-ism. It is how the progressive nature of Revolution works. Revolution is always restless and never complete. The result of one Revolution is the necessity of the next Revolution.

2.) This in turn underscore the Marxist core theme of always returning to chaos. Because the Marxist Revolutionary believes in the necessity of the conflict of interest there is a constant pursuit away from whatever order might initially be established and towards absolute chaos because it is the Marxist Revolutionary faith that out of chaos order comes. As such whenever any order is established in any society given to Marxist emphasis there will always be a vanguard who is pushing for chaos. This explains the constant rioting that we found in the “Black Lives Matter” movement and the whole George Floyd affair in Minneapolis. In a social order where there is an overwhelming presence of just a significant minority of Revolutionary Marxists there will always be a drive to chaos. The pursuit of chaos is in keeping with their religion.

3.) Notice how the biological presuppositions of Darwinism twined their way into social theory. This explains why Marx and Engels rejoiced to see Darwin’s book. They knew that once Darwinism was accepted in biology that Marxism would be accepted in social theory. Sociologist Herbert Spencer was the great mind that took biological Darwinism and translated it into a full world and life view through his writing.

4.) Only Christianity can put an end to Revolution making and the Marxist thought that drives it because, unlike Marxism, Christianity presupposes not a conflict of interest but a harmony of interest. Also, Christianity, unlike Revolutionary Marxist thought does not believe that man is just matter in motion. For the Marxist, because man is merely matter in motion, man has no significance and having no real significance man is something that can be slaughtered in order to make the better if indeed not perfect social order. After all, in the words of Stalin, “If you want to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs.” For the Marxist Revolutionary the individual man is of no consequence. Christianity challenges this and opposes Marxism because Christianity teaches that man is made as an image bearer of God.

5.) For Revolutionary Marxism the State / Party is God. “All within the state and nothing outside the state” is its Maxim. The State/Party thus becomes God walking on the earth. The Revolutionary Marxist understood that Christianity was his enemy because he was self aware enough to know that Christianity has always opposed, throughout its existence, any institutional structure that takes itself as the ultimate meaning maker. In order for Marxist Revolutionary thinking to gain traction real and serious Christianity and Christians must be wiped out.