Year: 2010

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends IV

Carmon Friedrich, next to my own wife, is the wisest woman I know. This is a piece that absolutely nails the ugly contradiction of very public women leading the charge in the conservative family values campaign. Would to God that more women thought like Carmon.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

The nomad and the anarchist accuse the domestic ideal of being merely timid and prim. But this is not because they themselves are bolder or more vigorous, but simply because they do not know it well enough to know how bold and vigorous it is. – G.K. Chesterton

Have you ever sat too long in the doctor’s waiting room and resorted to browsing through a children’s magazine, desperate for something to read? (For the sake of my example, we’ll assume you never even considered cracking the cover of the ubiquitous People magazine beckoning on the table.) Remember those mind-bending — to a five-year-old — puzzles which show two similar pictures, but in the second picture there are some differences which you are supposed to spot? What’s wrong with this picture? is the name of the game, and some of the changes can be quite subtle, making a mature woman spend way too much time poring over those junior periodicals and missing the nurse’s call when the examination room is finally free.

Ahem.

Life mirrors art, and I’ve been thinking of how we can get the wrong impression if we don’t carefully examine the picture we are presented by those who paint a scenario they want us to believe in.

Last January I happened to be in Washington, D.C. with my daughter and a family friend during the annual March for Life. As ardent pro-life supporters, we knew we needed to join with the thousands of others on the Capitol Mall and by our presence, at least, show that we were on the side of life and unborn babies. It was encouraging to be among so many people who oppose abortion and want to see it stopped. But as I listened to the speeches from the podium, I grew restless and frustrated. I had heard the same speeches before, many times, over the past couple of decades. “If we only elect so-and-so” or “If we only get rid of so-and-so” were the most common refrains. That seductive stick with the juicy carrot of judicial appointments which could overturn Roe v. Wade was waved about several times. Most of the speakers were women.

I turned to the girls with me and looked them in the eye, and quietly gave them my take on the things I was hearing. Abortion in all 50 states throughout all nine months of pregnancy was declared “legal” by the Supreme Court in 1973, 27 years ago. Some in the pro-life movement claim minor victories as some abortion mills close down or statistics show slight decreases at times in the number of abortions, or Congress passes a law banning partial birth abortion. But reality is that we still have the blood of over one-and-one-quarter million babies each year crying out from the ground (Gen. 4:10). I told the girls that legal action to stop those deaths would be a wonderful blessing, but I don’t believe anything will change until the hearts of women who want those abortions are changed. They don’t want their babies. Why?

I notice that more and more of the leaders of pro-life and pro-family organizations are women. They are articulate and gifted women, skilled at public speaking and good at rallying the troops, like Joan of Arc or Deborah. It doesn’t take being a Sherlock Holmes to make a reasonable deduction that in order for these women to hold those leadership positions, they have to devote a lot of time and energy to their careers. That doesn’t leave much time for home and family. I will get in trouble for saying it, but I can’t help noticing that the empress is wearing a business suit and not an apron. And these are the women who are supposed to encourage women inclined to end an inconvenient pregnancy to instead sacrifice their time and energy in order to have a baby. Titus 2 for the twenty-first century.

That is one way the picture has some subtle changes from what we ought to see: many of the spokeswomen for the blessing of babies are living a lifestyle which portrays the feminist dream of power, prestige, and leadership in the public realm, a lifestyle which is not conducive to family life, let alone so-called “traditional family values.”

This brings me to a related issue which skews the picture our conservative friends are crafting: the whole-hearted endorsement of so many women for political office in the recent elections.

The frequent mention of the anomaly of Deborah during a time when every man was doing “what was right in his own eyes” has become a din almost as annoying as those vuvuzelas at the World Cup. She was one woman called out by God when there were no men with the gumption to take the lead and fight the scary Canaanites. Today, we have numerous women stepping into positions of leadership in every realm, but the real phenomenon is the strong support of so many conservative Christians for female political leaders, to carry the banner for those “traditional family values.”

“I do not think it means what you think it means.” –Inigo Montoya

The most prominent Deborah, of course, is Sarah Palin, who is angling for the highest office in the land. She recently proudly proclaimed herself a feminist. As she travels around the country giving high-paid speeches to tea party activists anxious for political hope and change, she speaks of “empowering women” and a “a new revival of that original feminism of Susan B. Anthony.” Unfortunately, that feminism laid the ground-work for the feminism of NOW, Hillary Clinton, and Gloria “A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle” Steinem.

And I know I will get in trouble (again) for saying it, but what about Baby Trig, single mommy Bristol, and husband Todd? What are they doing while Sarah is taking on the liberal establishment and reclaiming feminism? Who is holding down the home fort?

We hear a lot about Deborah today, but not so much about Jael. Some friends just had their fifth baby the other day, and her middle name is Jael. That same day, I was in a store and the young woman who was the clerk had a name tag that said, “Jael.” I commented on it and told her about my friends’ baby. The clerk, who sported several tattoos, was touched and told me her parents named her for the woman in the Bible, and she said she needed to go back and read the story again. I encouraged her to do so.

Do you know the story? After Deborah rallied the troops and encouraged General Barak to stop hiding behind her skirts to go after the Canaanites (she did NOT go into battle herself), the Israelites kicked their numerous behinds (i.e., “routed their troops”), and the enemy General Sisera ran for his life. Tired and scared, Sisera was given refuge by a woman named Jael, who lured him into her tent with assurances of safety. She kindly offered him a glass of warm milk, which every woman knows has soporific effects, and this time was no different. Soon he was sawing the logs, and Jael put an end to him with a tent peg to the temple. It’s not a story often told in Sunday schools, which may be why Deborah is more well-known than Jael.

This tale set in the context of a time of great turmoil and apostasy in Israel begins and ends with a woman. Deborah herself pointed out the irony of victory coming at the hand of a woman. Not exactly an imprimatur for future generations of women leaders. And the second woman stayed home and finished the job, using her domestic skills to foil the enemy. Imagine that.

What is it we are wanting to accomplish? Do we want to address symptoms or causes in our quest to set things straight? First we need to agree on which picture is true and which is distorted. We need to portray a lovely picture of the blessings of being a woman at home, having babies, being content as the helpmeet rather than taking the lead. We need to understand the great power in that privileged position and see God’s great providence at work as He brings opportunity knocking at our door, without the need to gallivant about looking for greener pastures or quixotic quests. Faithful service over a couple generations will generate greater hope and change than dozens of political campaigns filled with the same old platitudes, wrapped in a different package for a new crop of gullible voters.

We need more Jaels, not Deborahs.

Self-loathing & Self-Hatred Wrapped in Christianity & The Death of the West

There is, in the Church in America today, a profession of a love for Jesus that is in reality a masquerade for a self-loathing and self-hatred that stems from the conviction that White, Western, Male and traditionally Christian is the fountain head of all that is evil in the world. This pseudo-love for Jesus expresses itself as a love for others who are non-White, non-Western, feminist female, and marxist-Christian but in reality this faux love that seeks the advantage of the non-White, non-Westerner, feminist female, and marxist Christian is in reality an attempt, based on a overwhelming sense of unrelieved guilt, to provide a self-atonement by means of ethno-cide.

This kind of behavior is expressed in the countless ways that different expressions of the Church are advocating wealth redistribution away from the West to the non-West, and from a people still limned as Christian to a people who are certainly not historically Reformed, nor possibly even Christian. Whether it is the pursuit to continue to combine illegal immigration with a unfettered entitlement culture or the pursuit of junk science claims of anthropogenic global warming that end up de-funding the West in favor of the non-West or whether it is pursuit of gender neutral language that seek to emasculate the traditional male in favor of the Feminist female. It doesn’t matter that such attempts have never worked to enrich those who have funds redistributed in their direction, or that attempts to empower women have consistently, in the long run, ended with women being hurt and embittered and men becoming effeminate and without courage. All that matters is that the ongoing attempt to provide self-atonement for the perceived and conjured sins of some imaginary wicked past that is being carried as a great burden, and which serve as the foundation of the self-loathing.

What makes this self-loathing and self-hatred — this attempt at self-atonement — so insidious and reviling is that it is wrapped in Jesus talk. This self-loathing and self-hatred is made to appear that it is the very love of Jesus that has Western “Christians” immolating themselves in favor of non-Western non-Christians. What makes this self-loathing and self-hatred so sad is that it cannot help either non-Westerners who need the Gospel nor Westerners who are re-defining the Gospel to mean self-destruction. The result of this re-defining of Christianity will be death both for those it is intended to help as well as death for those who are doing the “helping.”

With this self-loathing, wrapped in happy Jesus talk, comes the death of the West by means of the pursued self-atonement that demands the West’s death in favor of the non-West in order to find some elusive forgiveness for past evils. The person who questions this self-loathing “Christianity” is the selfish, racist, bigot, sexist, hater of Jesus who is only trying to keep everything for himself. Even when that accusation is met with the reasoned reply that if our house is burned down we can not help those who are homeless, it is insisted with some kind of reply that amounts to “equity demands that true love for others means we burn down our own homes.”

This is not to say that the West has not had its share of sins. Nor is it even to say that the West has not often played the role of the oppressor. It is to say that for all its crimes and sins, the West, because of the past influence of Biblical Christianity, has exceeded every other culture that can be named in providing a context where people can live with the dignity that being made in the image of God demands.

However, though I believe that with God all things are possible, I also believe a fair reading of the times indicates that the self-loathers are going to succeed in tearing down the West. Then it will be seen to be true what Winston Churchill once said of Socialism,

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

Of Antinomians and Legalists

Antinomians are almost always legalistic. Where ever you find an antinomian you will find vacuous rules like don’t smoke, don’t drink, always be nice, being sentimental is necessary, etc. Whenever God’s law is abandoned some other law inevitably becomes the standard by which antinomians will measure themselves as “good little Christians.”

In the same way all Legalists will always be antinomian since to be a legalist is by definition to be against the law. The legalists aren’t legalist according to God’s law because God’s law teaches “don’t be a legalist.” As such their legalism is antinomian every time.

Ron Paul & Abortion

“To those who argue that we cannot allow the states to make decisions on abortion since some will make the wrong ones, I reply that that is an excellent argument for world government — for how can we allow individual countries to decide on abortion or other moral issues, if some may make the wrong decisions? Yet the dangers of world government speak for themselves.”

Congressman Dr. Ron Paul
The Revolution — pg. 61

This is my problem with Libertarianism. When it is given its head it turns into license for criminal behavior.

Paul, argues here for states rights on the issue of abortion but if he were to be consistent why wouldn’t we argue for states rights on the issue of first degree murder? Why wouldn’t we argue for the rights of individual states to sanction rape? Why wouldn’t we argue for states rights to turn their state into a Muslim Caliphate ruled by Sharia law? Why wouldn’t we argue for states rights to require burning widows upon the death pyre of their dead husbands?

I’m all for allowing maximum liberty but there is a point where liberty becomes criminal license. Allowing states to sanction first degree murder, in terms of abortion, when the Constitution guarantees due process for all citizens, as well as a speedy trial (where is the trial for the unborn child?), is simply not something that falls under states rights. States do not have the right to sanction first degree murder.

On the whole nonsense that Paul raises suggesting that insisting on a uniform policy outlawing abortion will lead to a world government forcing other countries not to preform abortions is simply answered by the word “jurisdiction.” These united States have no jurisdiction on abortion in other sovereign nations.

Congressman Paul is completely wrong on abortion and his stance suggests that he doesn’t really believe that abortion is murder.

In Memoriam … Dr. Glenn Martin — In Defiance … Dr. Ken Schenck

The greatest man in my life was Dr. Glenn Martin. Dr. Martin was chair of the Political Science Department at the college I attended and the college Dr. Ken Schenck now teaches at. Dr. Martin set me on the path of Presuppositionalism and Worldview thinking and introduced me to presuppositionalist authors such as Dr. C. Gregg Singer and Dr. Francis Schaeffer. Two of my majors at Marion (Political Science and History) found me sitting under almost every class that Martin offered.

Even before Cultural Marxism, Political Correctness and multiculturalism descended upon the West in full force, Dr. Martin was warning about these coming realities. Dr. Martin was pro-South, taught Austrian Economics, taught that the mainstream Media was captured by the Socialist left, exposed the leftist history of the Union movement in America, taught about the communist influence in the US Government and told the real story about Alger Hiss and Whitaker Chambers. Dr. Martin exposed the wickedness of Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Dr. Martin introduced me to Alexander Solzhenitsyn where I read Solzhenitsyn’s — to date unheeded warning to the West — in his Harvard address. From there I absorbed on my own Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” and “A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich,” as well as other writings by Russia’s Prophetic voice to the West. Dr. Martin introduced me to Dr. Fred Schwarz’s “You Can Trust The Communists To Be Communists.” This was a book written in 1960 that should be required reading even yet today for in that book one can learn a great deal about our current domestic enemies. From Martin I likewise learned Muggeridge, Kuhn, McLuhan, Efron, and a host of other authors.

At 18-22 I hardly understood these authors and their greatness as well as I one day would when I would circle back and re-read them as I aged. Likewise, at 18-22 I never appreciated Dr. Martin as much as I do now. I now realize I missed the bullet that most university students, who receive majors in the fields I received them in, take right between the eyes as their education is conditioned w/ Marxist poison of different varieties. Dr. Martin’s teaching was so exhaustive and so demanding that he always insisted that if you could earn an “A” in his class you could earn an “A” in any university in the country. The difference in those “A’s” though, was that most Universities in America were teaching history, political science, government, media, philosophy, from a pagan worldview while Martin was the Wesleyan version of R. J. Rushdoony.

Dr. Martin taught us the distinctions between different kinds of socialism (Fabianism, German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, etc.) and how it was, in most varieties, a political precursor to the same Utopian state that Communism was pursuing. Dr. Martin hated collectivistic and tyrannical government with every inch of his being. He hated them so much he loved telling a story about how he would speak in Churches and little old ladies would come up to him following his lecture and say, “What we need is a Christian dictator.” Dr. Martin would tell us in class that the very last thing we needed was a Christian dictator if only because such a thing is not possible. Dr. Martin believed in and taught Biblical government. Everything that Gary DeMar teaches in his “God and Government” book, Dr. Glenn Martin was teaching me in his 101 courses in 1977 at Marion College.

Further, as with all good presuppositionalists he taught the intellectual history of the philosophy of the West that was driving much of the cultural bankruptcy of the West. This included his course titled. “Western Intellectual and Social History.” In this course Dr. Martin traced the degradation of the Philosophy of the West starting w/ the attempt to synthesize Augustinianism w/ rationalism through Aquinas and the Scholastics. Martin’s premise was as long as the West kept trying to mix Biblical Christianity w/ pagan philosophy it would never have the strength to resist defeat. Martin spent a good deal of time covering existentialism covering Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others. This training put me in good stead to understand postmodernism for what it was when it showed up on the scene.

As I grew older, I discovered other presuppositionalists (Bahnsen, Rushdoony, Clark, Os Guiness, Van Til, etc.) and by learning them I learned at the same time that Dr. Martin would have been well served if had been a little more conversant in Reformed Theology. Dr. Martin tried to avoid the Reformed vs. Arminian conflict his whole teaching career. I think his teaching would have been even more powerful if he had had some background in Reformed systematic and historical theology. As it was, since he taught at a Arminian college, he was forever trying to avoid the Arminian vs. Reformed debate, choosing to always only refer to himself as a “Biblical Christian.” As I became more conversant in Reformed Theology and later re-read his works I noticed some glaring inconsistencies in some of his lectures. I think though I can say that Dr. Glenn Martin, though he may have never intended to, planted some Reformed seeds in me that years later came to maturation. (I was still quite the rabid Arminian when I graduated Marion College.)

When I began college I was a personal mess. To this day I can’t believe I made it through my first year. (I even actually “quit” for a week, but went back because I had nowhere else to go.) I was failing exams and courses left and right. I finally made my failures a matter of prayer and told the Lord Christ that, “if in the exam I was taking on the morrow, in Dr. Martin’s class, I failed that really would be the end.” I took the exam and the next week received the exam back. I think I had scored something like a “45%.” I thought to myself … “Well, Lord I guess that does it — I’m finished.” However, I thought I would check on Dr. Martin’s door to correlate the score to the grade and found out, that because Martin graded on a curve, and because the rest of the Freshman class was as stupid as I was that a “45%” was a “C.” I stuck with it and the rest is, as they say, History.

Dr. Martin was also my adviser through college and we became as much friends as a bumpkin and a genius can become. I’ll never forget that he went out of his way to attend the first sermon I ever preached. (Which must have been quite painful for him to sit through.) I also remember him attending a meal in my honor at my graduation w/ my family and friends. I also was privileged to be invited to his home to watch the Republicans in 1980 nominate Ronald Reagan for President. Reagan was a man for which Dr. Martin had great hopes.

Dr. Martin was always viewed with suspicion at his place of employment. In reflection I would say that that was one part envy and one part ideological conflict. The suspicion became so deep while I was there that one professor each from the Sociology and the Psychology departments actually enrolled to take classes from Dr. Martin because they just couldn’t believe what Martin students were bringing to and saying in the classes in sociology and psychology they were teaching. It was clear that Worldview conflict between departments at Marion College was intense. Dr. Martin seemed not to be phased by this as he understood and taught the whole Reformed idea of the antithesis, though he never called it “Reformed.”

Dr. Martin’s influence was so great at Marion College while I was there that when an attempt was made to start a “Young Democrats Club” nobody showed up to become a member. Largely because of Dr. Martin Marion College was a conservative (I would even say paleo-conservative) campus.

I left in 1982 and occasionally I would hear through the grapevine that Indiana Wesleyan University (the new name of my Marion College) was going liberal. When I attended Marion College there was always a professor here or there who was loopy that way, but on the whole the religion and theology department (one of my degrees was from this department as well) was as solid as Arminians can be in that regard. I mean, in hindsight their theology sucked, but they weren’t teaching the historical-critical method of hermeneutics or singing the praises of Bultmann or Tillich, or Barth. They were basically “come to Jesus” (revivalist) people in their theology and while the damage in such theology is bad enough it was nowhere near the muck and mire that is being taught at Indiana Wesleyan University now.

And this brings us back to Dr. Schenck. Somehow (and I honestly quite forget how) I learned that Schenck and the Religion department was running down Dr. Martin. Then as I interacted w/ Dr. Ken Schenck I leanred for myself the incredible public disrespect Schenck exhibited for Dr. Martin.

Now, I have many faults. Legion is their name. However, one of them isn’t a lack of loyalty. I owe a debt that I will never be able to repay to Dr. Glen Martin and I didn’t and don’t take to kindly to these fool Ph.D’s in the religion department at IWU running down the greatest teacher that University will probably ever know. Further then that this becomes a, “Who is on the King’s side,” kind of tale because in the attacks the religion department made on Martin while he was alive and now makes on him now that he is dead they are attacking, as far as I am concerned, King Jesus. Not because Dr. Martin = Jesus but because many of the positions that Martin took were just your basic Christianity 101.

The theology of these people isn’t merely your garden variety Arminianism (which would be bad enough) but rather IWU has gone over the edge w/ a Barthian-post-modernist strain in their thinking. Schenck himself has told me that there is no way that one can ever find an objective. For Schenck all there is, is particulars. There are no Universals. This descends into pure subjectivism in theology and in matters of truth. Schenck insists that he prefers to play “small ball” when it comes to these issues but if there are no Universals then how can he know what small ball is?

I will always … always have a soft spot in my heart for the Wesleyans. When I was a child and a young adult they were the love of Christ to me when I was living in a pretty messed up family life. It may seem a severe mercy with the slapping around of Dr. Ken Schenck that I am returning to them for all their past kindnesses but if I could write anything to shake these people up and get them to return to John Wesley Arminiansim as opposed to Ken Schenck post-modern Arminianism I would be ecstatic.

And besides, I’m not a guy with a lot of heroes in my life and the handful I have I am going to defend against the attacks of little men like Dr. Ken Schenck who look big in our even smaller culture and church.