My Night On The Town … Celebrating Jane’s Birthday

I took the wife out today for her birthday. Now, I don’t go out in public that much. I see the folks in the Church I serve. I see my children and grandchildren. I talk on the phone with people who share a like faith/worldview but I don’t rub shoulders with the hoi poloi very often.

After tonight I know why I don’t go out very often. Tonight, while shopping at a small knick-knack establishment the wife wanted to stop at, I saw a clerk who was tatted all up. Now, I know this is pretty common, but it was not the fact of the tatts that had me gawking in amazement. No, rather it was the type of tatts. If you remember the kind of macabre stuff that Film Director Tim Burton used to deliver up (see his film “Night After Christmas”) this woman was tatted all over with Tim Burton kind of cartoon characters. As I watched her move from task to task it was akin to watching a live version of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” only with Tim Burton type characters.

Then there was another tatted white woman who was decidedly blond but who had a Rastafarian style hairdo wherein the Rasta locks looked like they were each a different color randomly drawn from a Crayola crayon mega box. Her blond locks bounced around with her Crayola Crayon Rasta locks and it reminded me of those old multi-flavored life-saver candy wrappers. Now, what really made it surreal is that she was holding the hand of a 3 or 4 year old and was speaking to the child in a nurturing and loving tone, like any mother might. I thought, “This must be what it is like to be the child of a mother who is a cross between Medusa and Willy Wonka.”

At another store I couldn’t help but hear the conversation of two rather tall chaps who looked all the world to be from the Dinka tribe and likely playing Basketball for Michigan State. We were in Lansing after all. Their conversation was loud and almost undecipherable. Yet, every so often I’d hear, “Gonna get me a flannel shirt. Never had a flannel shirt.” Only it came out more as monosyllabic grunts that I’m sure in the Dinka language was really quite flowery and expressive. As to the second tall Dinka, well the only thing I could make out from his language was “LEVIS.” It became apparent that he had never owned a pair of Levis before and he was delighted with finding a pair that might fit his extraordinary inseam. They made me nervous because wherever I went in the small store, the Dinka Brothers seemed to be following me with their strange and barely decipherable yet energetic linguistic outbursts. I guess all those cases of Iryna Zarutska and Austin Metcalf are starting to give me the jitters.

Then we dropped into a bookstore. You’d think one would find maybe a Christmas display or something down that line but the first thing I bump into upon entering the store is a display in praise of Hannukah heaping praise on sundry Jewish authors during this Hannukah season. The good news though is that I did not see any Kwanza displays. They were probably in another part of the bookstore.

As we walked the Mall I couldn’t help but notice how many of the “street vendors” in the Mall had a great deal in common with Vivek Ramaswamy, Usha Bala Chilukuri Vance, Piyush “Bobby” Jindal and Nimarata Nikki Randhawa Haley. I guess those people are just really good entrepreneurs, thus explaining why they would be so well represented in those little side shops.

I was also in a Macy’s store where I saw a very well dressed male clerk going about his business stocking shelves. He was wearing a tie and a suit. I thought … “Now this chap sticks out more than anybody I’ve seen so far because he is so 1960s with his well-trimmed mustache, his nattily pressed suit, and his conscientious arranging of the stock for which he was responsible.” Yep… he was the weirdest sight of them all. The guy who was the most “normal” existing and going about his business in the midst of a circus show specializing in the “odd and never seen before,” was the circuses biggest attraction.

We decided to eat at a Chinese Restaurant where, I am confident in saying, that all the help spoke perfect Chinese. I don’t know if they could speak English since I didn’t hear any until it came time to pay my bill. Only then did I discover that some “Engrish” was in their grasp.

Now, Lansing, Michigan is a university city (Home of Michigan State) and so I shouldn’t be surprised with the multicultural feel. However, as I reflected that night on previous celebrations of my wife’s Birthday over the decades, I couldn’t help but hear the echoes of Dorothy ringing in my ears … “Toto, darling, we are not in Kansas anymore.”

J. C. Ryle Was A Kinist …. Just Like Every Church Father Before 1960

“The dwelling-places of the earth’s inhabitants are curiously divided. The world is not made up of one people or one colour. God by His providential ordering has separated the earth’s inhabitants into distinct nations, languages, and races, each with its own peculiar characteristics. These distinctions have existed for centuries, and have been preserved in a most remarkable manner. No climate, no teaching, no misfortune has ever succeeded in obliterating them. The negro is still black, the Red Indian is still red, and the Chinaman is still yellow. Nothing seems to account for these things but a miraculous interposition of God.
…
Let us beware of giving way to the modern notion that there is no such thing as God’s providential arrangement of the nations, and that the present attempt to amalgamate all nationalities and races, and to denationalise and unchurch people, is wise and politic. God has divided the world into separate nationalities, climates, languages, and churches, and it is the height of mischief to try and break down the divisions.”

~J.C. Ryle
Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, Matthew 24

Historic Usage Of Doctrine Of “Spirituality of the Church” In USA

 I am currently reading Daniel G. Hummel’s, “The Rise And Fall Of Dispensationalism; How The Evangelical Battle Over The End Times Shaped A Nation.”

I’m learning that the “Spirituality of the Church” (a doctrine repeatedly appealed to by R2K) was pursued by men like Rev. James H. Brooks, Rev. J. H. Thornwell and others as a means to avoid having to answer the political question of slavery that was dividing the nation. Thornwell, originally did not want to secede, and as such, he appealed to the “Spirituality of the Church” doctrine in order to teach that the Church did not have to take a position on the matter. Brooks did much the same. Thornwell, eventually, made known his opposition to freeing slaves, after secession became a fait accompli designating slavery as key to maintaining social order. (See his, “To All The Churches Of Christ.”) However, before secession actually occurred Thornwell tried to evade the secession he opposed by saying that the Church did not need to speak on it given the doctrine of the Spirituality of the Church.

Brooks, though privately opposed to slavery, carried out his allegiance to the “Spirituality of the Church,” by refusing to pray for the success of the Union Armies while in the pulpit serving his St. Louis Presbyterian church. For this omission Brookes was eventually tossed from his pulpit though a split occurred that resulted in Brooks taking the new congregation who was good with his doctrine of the “Spirituality of the Church” and his refusal to pray for the success of the Union Armies.

The thing to note here is that this “Spirituality of the Church” doctrine while insisting that it wants to avoid politics, embraces politics firmly. Not taking a position on a moral issue that the Scripture speaks to is taking a position against the Scripture.

The putative doctrine of the “Spirituality of the Church” was and is not so much a doctrine as it is a tactic in order to evade controversy where controversy is inescapable. If God’s word speaks to all of life then the church is not an institution that can evade the pressing issues of the time like slavery (which Scripture clearly regulates and so allows), political plans that promote socialism as seen in confiscatory taxation (which per the 8th commandment is theft), legislation that works to the end of weakening the family, etc.

In the end the appeal to the doctrine of the “Spirituality of the Church” as defined so to rule out the Church speaking from the pulpit where God has clearly spoken is a doctrine for cowards who do not want to deny themselves and take up the Cross. I have heard of accounts in NAPARC Presbyteries of a refusal to condemn an prospective ordinates’ clearly articulated socialism because “God’s word doesn’t speak to socialism.” This is all about the “Spirituality of the Church.”

McAtee Contra Jared Lovell … The Latest Natural Law Fanboy

“Typical theonomist category confusion. Nature is the medium of the law, not the source. Law is mediated through nature and Scripture. Both agree. We learn things from Scripture that we cannot know from nature. We learn things from Nature that are not revealed in Scripture.”

Jared Lovell
Memoria Academy 
History Teacher

Bret responds,

It is irrelevant whether nature is medium or source of the law because;

1.) Nature, like man, is fallen.

2.) Even if nature wasn’t fallen and was the perfect medium the problem wouldn’t be with nature. The problem is that man himself is fallen. Being fallen man no longer has the epistemological ability (or even desire) to read a putatively unfallen natural law. The problem isn’t in the sender. The problem is in the receiver. Fallen man, having denied God all the while claiming that God is not necessary to interpreting, has denied, in principle, the essence of everything that man interprets in nature including his own being.

That fallen man can and does get things right only means that fallen man can’t be perfectly consistent in his God denying interpretations and remain alive. As such, fallen man will get various things right but those things he gets right he can’t account, given his beginning presupposition, why or how he gets them right. As Bahnsen used to say … “Man can count but he can’t account for his ability to count.”

Jared Lovell writes errantly AGAIN,

Classic Motte and Bailey. If theonomists mean only what I am saying here, they are not saying anything new at all. They want to take down the entire edifice of natural law underlying western civilization and then when pressed, back track to say nothing new and distinct. Would you affirm that there is content revealed in natural law that cannot be known from Scripture? Or do I have to know Scripture to anything in nature?

Bret responds,

Natural law has been an abysmal failure. The reason we are now at the point we are at in the West is because Natural Law was floated by well meaning but not yet thoroughly Reformed men. Natural law has given us the Marquis De Sade arguing that Sadism is consistent with Natural Law … has given us Darwin arguing that evolution is consistent w/ Natural Law … has given us the gender blenders saying Trannie-ism is consistent with Natural Law…. has given us David Van Drunen arguing that Clergy are to be silent on public square sin. Natural Law is a wax nose that is made to proclaim whatever the reader of Natural Law desires it to say.

God and His Word is the precondition of all intelligibility. If one does not presuppose God and His Word then he is presupposing his fallen self and his fallen word. So yes, in order to knowingly know one must presuppose the Triune God in whom is hidden all the treasures of Wisdom and Knowledge.

The Natural Law position cannot be embraced by those who are consistently Reformed because to be consistently Reformed one MUST begin with Total Depravity and the “Reformed” Natural Law fanboys, have given up being Reformed when they argue that man is not so fallen that his epistemological apparatus (or sometimes his will) is still viable.

Look, I try to be nice. Really I do. But these Natural Law fanboys don’t get the Reformed faith.

Reading CVT on Barth

“God’s revelation does indeed take place not behind but in the words of Scripture. But the identification of revelation w/ Scripture is never direct. It is always indirect. No document of history can offer anything more than a witness to primal history.

The ‘witnesses to the resurrection’ still deal with the promise only. As far as ordinary history is concerned, the facts of the gospel story from the virgin birth to the ascension are enshrouded in such mystery as to admit of various interpretations. A true faith will not build its house upon the quick sands of ordinary history.

In all this opposition to the idea of revelation as directly identical with history, Barth is doing, in effect, what Kierkegaard did when he argued that truth is in the Subject.

Barth tells us that a true approach to theology must be existential. But a true existential approach is not possible on the basis of the idea of direct revelation. On the basis of objective or direct revelation, man is not really involved in the question of his relation to God. ‘Where the question is really that pertaining to man, there the subjective is objective.’

Man must meet God, then, not through direct revelation in history but man must meet God by becoming cotemporaneous with God in Urgeschichte.

CVT
Christianity & Barthianism – p. 309

1.) Scripture is not God’s revelation but has the potential of becoming God’s revelation in encounter.

2.) Scripture is a witness to history without being true history (this is Barth’s “Historie.”)

3.) True faith should not and cannot be anchored in the recorded history as penned by the authors of Scripture. The thought here is that if true faith is not anchored in Scripture then when Scripture is proved historically false then faith cannot be affected.

4.) In order for faith to be true faith and to be a genuine faith it must come from within the subject but not as based on an objective outside Historie word.

5.) Man meets God when man projects himself into his own god concept.

___

“When Kierkegaard said that truth is subjective he did not intend this in the individualist and solipsist sense of the word. On the contrary, he intended to overcome subjectivism in the bad sense by speaking of God as the true and ultimate subject. Even so, this God as absolute Subject was only the projection of man as the autonomous subject.”

CVT
Christianity & Barthianism – p. 308

And because that last sentence above is true, even though existential “theology” seeks a God that is only the projection of man as the autonomous subject the end result is individualist and solipsist.
If God can’t be known then the “I-Thou” relationship is reduced to “I-I said Loudly” relationship.

____

CVT critiquing Kant again. Remember, modern scholars are trying to tell us that CVT was Kantian. Does a Kantian critique Kant like this?

“The critical philosophies of Kant and of recent dialecticism are indeed open for the idea of the religious. They make room for God. But always they make room for the kind of God who opens up the future for man as a realm of pure possibility. And always the end result is a monism in which man is absorbed into the God which man himself has projected as his ideal. Thus modern man is still going round in circles of his own consciousness writ large. The God of this religious consciousness, as qualitatively different from man, remains man’s hypostatized and personalized ideal. Like a rocket that needs first to be thrown up into the sky in order then to come with light from above, this God of recent dialecticism is an eject of man’s own consciousness.”

CVT
Christianity & Barthianism – p. 306

___

The idea of Transcendence in Barth’s early theology was that of pure negation.”

CVT
Christianity & Barthianism

Barth’s “God” was so transcendent he couldn’t be reached. Being that transcendent (unreachable) the effect was to make Barth’s God to be totally immanent as man now was in control of how God would be described since the transcendence of God made God unable to describe Himself.
The Liberalism that Barth had been fighting had reduced God to man. Barth’s answer to Liberalism was to absorb man into God.

The end result was not much different except for style points.