Dear Pastor,
I’ve had some people writing me, knowing that I know you, asking if you are a White Supremacist. They seem to think the article below somehow proves that. I told them I would go directly to you as opposed to spreading vicious and unsubstantiated rumors.
In Defense Of Nationalism … In Defense of Basic Christianity
Thank you for your ministry to me and my family,
Chole
Dear Chloe,
Thank you for writing to ask.
I honestly am left completely befuddled that anybody could read that piece and come up with white supremacy. The word “white” does not show up in the piece and I even went out of my way to quote the white Marxists as opposed to Marxists of other nationalities and races in order to demonstrate that, in many cases, it is white people who are at the vanguard of cultural Marxism. (And of course, the article was about Cultural Marxism and its pushing of globalism before it was about anything else.)
I am tempted to conclude that those who could get white supremacism from the article linked are folks who are part of the cultural Marxist problem that we currently have in the Church but since I don’t know the people who are contacting you, I’ll take their query as being sincere and not as part of a larger agenda.
So, to be clear Chloe, I am not a white supremacist, although that won’t keep people who are cultural Marxists, or who have been influenced by cultural Marxism or who are just, in the words of Vladimir Lenin, “useful idiots,” for the Cultural Marxist agenda from making that accusation.
I believe in biblical nationalism for all peoples, tongues, and nations. Just as I believe that people from every tribe, tongue, and nation, will be part of the one Redeemed Church of Jesus Christ. However, that doesn’t keep me from noting Scripture, with all its talk of “nations” in the New Jerusalem (see original article),
Isaiah 2:2 And it shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the Lord’S house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall flow unto it.3 And many people shall go and say, “Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 4 And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.
We see this promise coming to fulfillment in Revelation Chloe, where we see recorded,
25 Its gates will never be shut at the end of the day because there will be no night there. 26And into the city will be brought the glory and honor of the nations.
The Dutch scholar Doctor Schilder comments on this
“And they shall bring the glory of the nations into it, into the new Jerusalem.” Revelations 21:26
“The universality of this covenant requires that not one race or people be left out. Yet during the old Testament times, there was one nation singled out of the many as the chosen people, such separation was but an ad-interim. We may look upon the covenant as then a march toward fulfillment, towards times when all nationS from the uttermost parts of the earth would belong to the covenant.
Klaas Schilder
Calvin Seminary Professor Dr. Martin Wyngaarden, who was one of the men I learned this from Chloe, was getting at much the same thing when he wrote in his book,
“Now the predicates of the covenant are applied in Isa. 19 to the Gentiles of the future, — “Egypt my people, and Assyria, the work of my hands, and Israel, mine inheritance,” Egypt, the people of “Jehovah of hosts,” (Isa. 19:25) is therefore also expected to live up to the covenant obligations, implied for Jehovah’s people. And Assyria comes under similar obligations and privileges. These nations are representative of the great Gentile world, to which the covenant privileges will, therefore, be extended.”
Martin J. Wyngaarden, The Future of the Kingdom in Prophecy and Fulfillment: A Study of the Scope of “Spiritualization” in Scripture (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2011), p. 94.
And again,
“More than a dozen excellent commentaries could be mentioned that all interpret Israel as thus inclusive of Jew and Gentile, in this verse, — the Gentile adherents thus being merged with the covenant people of Israel, though each nationality remains distinct.”
“For, though Israel is frequently called Jehovah’s People, the work of his hands, his inheritance, yet these three epithets severally are applied not only to Israel, but also to Assyria and to Egypt: “Blessed be Egypt, my people, and Assyria, the work of my hands, and Israel, mine inheritance.” 19:25.
Thus the highest description of Jehovah’s covenant people is applied to Egypt, — “my people,” — showing that the Gentiles will share the covenant blessings, not less than Israel. Yet the several nationalities are here kept distinct, even when Gentiles share, in the covenant blessing, on a level of equality with Israel. Egypt, Assyria, and Israel are not nationally merged. And the same principles, that nationalities are not obliterated, by membership in the covenant, applies, of course, also in the New Testament dispensation.”
Martin Wyngaarden
The Future of the Kingdom in Prophecy and Fulfillment: A Study of the Scope of “Spiritualization” in Scripture — pp. 101-102.
And, not to put to fine of a point on it Chloe, the great Dutch theologian Dr. Geerhardus Vos also spoke about the importance of a Biblical Nationalism when he wrote in his Systematic Theology,
Romans 11:17, 19, with its “branches broken off” metaphor has frequently been viewed as proof of the relativity and changeability of election, and it is pointed out that at the end of vs. 23, the Gentile Christians are threatened with being cut off in case they do not continue in the kindness of God. But wrongly. Already this image of engrafting should have restrained such an explanation. This 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
So, Chloe, unless your un-named friends also desire to put Wyngaarden, Schilder, and Vos in the “White Supremacism” pokey, I’m not saying anything that they didn’t say first.
Further, Chloe, I believe, that in the varied Christian cultures that have existed, do exist, and might yet exist, in varying nations, that each will show its own particular stripe of strengths and weaknesses. In other words, different Christian nations will have different supremacies. One body… many parts. (A tried and trusted Biblical precept.) Given all the Scripture I cited in the original article in question, I should think that it was clear that the Scripture clearly teaches that Biblical nationalism is simply defined as a “proper love of our people and a proper love of our place.”
The Christian poet, Sir Walter Scott, was getting at this sentiment when he wrote,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.
And far as love of one’s own people one only needs to consider the great Apostle Paul when he wrote,
3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh,
Obviously, Paul could have a unique love for his un-regenerated Kin and still retain a love for the Gentiles to whom he was an Apostle, as one born out of time. St. Paul had the kind of love for His own people, that is communicated by Thomas Babington Macauley in his “Horatius at the Bridge,
And the temples of his gods
Of course, our vision is of the nations being converted to Christ so that they are defending the Church of Jesus Christ.
I shouldn’t have to say it again Chloe but in case your friend missed it, I’m not defending garden-variety Nationalism. The Nationalism I’m defending and am insisting as always been the norm in the Church is Biblical Nationalism. A nationalism whereby the authorities in the differing jurisdictional realms which comprise the nation all pledge fealty to Jesus Christ.
The great Dutchman Abraham Kuyper provides another example for us Chloe,
“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 cannot be blind for the sober fact of this reality. It is evident to him. He observes it everywhere.”……
Abraham Kuyper:
Common Grace (1902–1905)
Now, allow me a few lines to reverse this Chloe. The refusal of Christ-centered Nationalism leaves us either in an ugly man-centered nationalism (which in the previous article I distinctly abjured) or it leads to a man-centered internationalism. In our epoch that man-centered Internationalism is having its water carried by Cultural Marxism and is the danger that is most pressing in upon the 21st-century church in the West in terms of Worldview competition. Cultural Marxism by definition seeks to eliminate all distinctions that are ordained by God. The noble Dutchman Van Prinesterer, using incredible foresight, warned about this,
“Just as all truth rests upon the truth that is from God, so the common foundation of all rights and duties lies in the sovereignty of God. When that sovereignty is denied or (what amounts to the same thing) banished to heaven because His kingdom is not of this world, what becomes then of the fountain of authority, of law, of every sacred and dutiful relation in state, society and family? What sanction remains for the distinctions of rank and station in life? What reason can there be that I obey another’s commands, that the one is needy, the other rich? All this is custom, routine, abuse, injustice, oppression. Eliminate God, and it can no longer be denied that all men are, in the revolutionary sense of the words, free and equal. State and society disintegrate, for there is a principle of dissolution at work that does not cease to operate until all further division is frustrated by that indivisible unit, that isolated human being, the individual—a term of the Revolution – naively expressive of its all-destructive character.”
– Guillaume Groen Van Prinsterer
Mentor of Abraham Kuyper
But let me guess Chloe… Van Prinsterer was teaching white supremacy …. just like that nasty white supremacist McAtee.
A century after Van Prinsterer, another Christian, this time an Anglican Priest, wrote a very similar concern echoing Van Prinsterer.
“The movement toward integration is a denial of Christ. It is part of an effort to create one society in which there are no distinctions or differences. . . . For it is not the races only that must disappear and be brought into conformity with the requirements of a world-state: so with the sexes, so with parents and children, so with nations, states, tribes, and empires. All must go and be swallowed up in the maw of the great monad, theologically familiar to students of oriental mysticism as religion, and to traditional Christianity as Satan.”
T. Robert Ingram
Anglican Priest
Again… Ingram must have been a White Supremacist.
Chloe, this is the burning issue of the modern Church in the West. Will we follow the Reformation where God ordained distinctions were honored as coming from God or will we swallow the Anabaptist inspired swill of Cultural Marxism? The white supremacist John Calvin knew where the danger was,
“Regarding our eternal salvation, it is true that one must not distinguish between man and woman, or between king and a shepherd, or between a German and a Frenchman. Regarding policy, however, we have what St. Paul declares here; for our, Lord Jesus Christ did not come to mix up nature, or to abolish what belongs to the preservation of decency and peace among us….Regarding the kingdom of God (which is spiritual) there is no distinction or difference between man and woman, servant and master, poor and rich, great and small. Nevertheless, there does have to be some order among us, and Jesus Christ did not mean to eliminate it, as some flighty and scatterbrained dreamers [believe].”
Calvin Sermon on 1 Corinthians 11:2-3
Chloe, if I’m teaching white supremacism, then the Church from the 2nd century forward has been teaching white supremacism. It is only via the re-defining of words, as done by cultural Marxist Social Justice Warriors, pointing and sputtering, that it can be said that their accusations have any anchor in truthfulness.
Thank you for writing me.
Thank you for this article and the excellent references within it. I am a descendant of those men who fought in the War of Independence to form a nation of likeminded people, mostly Calvinists, who escaped persecution and risked their lives to come to a new land. I am distressed by the relentless push to erase our past, import people who are hostile to us, give away a nation that we founded, and disdain the gift with which God blessed us. I have hoped in vain for the church to recognize and stand up against the anti-Christ forces trying to change a Christian nation into a non-Christian multicultural Tower of Babel.