“Led by Chancellor and CEO J. Ligon Duncan, Reformed Theological Seminary is now on the Social Justice bandwagon. A 2009 document produced by the Seminary extols a program referred to as SWC — Seeking the Welfare of the city. Among its recommendations, the report … yammers about white privilege, internalized racism…”
Brannon Howse
Marxianity – p. 100
I’m finishing up Howse’s “Marxianity” Howse gets an “A” on his research. He footnotes every point he makes and every quote he provides so that the shocked reader can look up the sources to make sure that those he quotes really said something that stupid. Howse also gets an “A” for finding where all the bodies are buried. Every TGC writer has his Marxist friendly quotes chronicled. It’s all there. The chaps he says are guilty, are guilty. Like getting caught on prom night in the back seat with Peggy Sue, “The Gospel Coalition” chaps are caught by Howse fornicating with Karl Marx. The case has been made (exhaustively) that we are being shagged by the clergy leadership that the Reformed Church in the West currently has.
Howse is also excellent tracing the connections between the Marxianity clergy and the organizations that they are fronting. He traces out the connections between these different Marxist organizations. Of course no organization sells itself by saying, “We are Marxist,” but Howse solves the deception by giving us the names of members of these organizations and the Marx-y things they have written in other places through the years.
However, Howse gets an “F” for locating the fault in the inroads of Marxianity in the eschatology of the Reformed world. Howse is a true believer in premillennialism and he never misses a chance to beat the Reformed guys over the head for actually believing that God’s Kingdom would successfully go from the mustard seed to the vast tree on planet earth. Because of Howse’s eschatology he finds the problem of Marxianity in the expectation that the Gospel will flourish so that social order Institutions will one day rightly be considered part of God’s flourishing Kingdom. For Howse the Kingdom only arrives with the in breaking 2nd coming of Jesus Christ. Until then it is suffering, defeat, and misery for the Kingdom and per Howse it is sin to seek to be part of the always present and ever expanding Kingdom of God. Howse’s view is that Christianity is only about getting individual’s saved with no expectation that the consequence of Redeemed individuals is eventually Redeemed families, education, law, politics, the arts, etc. as well as the social order Institutions that are the receptacles and carriers for these realities — all to the end of a Cosmos that is in ever expanding service to the Lord Christ.
Howse is also weakened by his embrace of the modern concept of “racism.” Howse has embraced the postmodern concept that race is merely a social construct, misinterpreting Acts 17:26 in support of his view.
Howse’s mistake is that he cannot distinguish between the optimistic eschatology of TGC and T4G types with the fact that those types misinterpret the Kingdom of God and what it looks like. Howse rightly complains about their Marxism but wrongly complains about their desire to see the Kingdom go forward. The clergy Marxists (Dever, McDurmon, DeYoung, Keller, Sean Michael Lucas, Mohler, etc) are right in their optimism but are wrong in their vision of God’s Kingdom. This results in them thinking that they are building up the Kingdom of God when in fact they are agents of Mephistopheles building up Satan’s Kingdom with their Marxism. Their problem is not eschatology. Their problem is their anthropology, hamartiology, Christology (they are Gnostic), and even their soteriology. Those who Howse properly puts in the dock are guilty of the same thing Walter Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden, Richard T. Ely, Josiah Strong and others were guilty of over 100 years ago. They are guilty of a socialist social Gospel. They have retained a positive eschatology while marrying it to humanism (Marxism) and calling it “Christianity.” This new Marxianity retains the power of the postmill impulse and outlook while working to crush the very thing it claims it desires to advance.
This Marxianity that Howse rightly locates is dangerous because those who are pushing it really believe they are doing it for Jesus. The purveyors of this Marxianity are the very types that C. S. Lewis warned about,
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
If there is one thing that is communicated by the TGC types it is their smug sense of superior self-righteous morality. These TGC types will hound Biblical Christians out of the Church and that with the approval of their own conscience. Clergy (speaking from experience) always have a problem with thinking themselves morally superior in their self-righteousness but the TGC types with their Marxianity have it in spades. If anyone dare disagree with them they are immediately “racist,” “misogynist,” and “xenophobe,” and so not fit to be members in Christ’s Church.
Keep in mind that this is not an issue where we can dismiss the Marxist virus our clergy are carrying. It is not as if we can say, “Well, they may be wrong with their social Gospel but they are so good on other areas.” No, they are not! This is a case where a little leaven leavens the whole loaf. If you dip into these guys teaching at any point you are going to be eventually infected with their Marxianity. Marixsm and Christianity are two mutually exclusive totalistic worldviews. You can not serve both God and Marx. These men must be cut down root, branch, and twig.
Howse is correct that our current Marxist celebrity clergy are leading us (The Institutional Church) down the highway to hell just as Howse’s premill Dispensationalism has led the Church to the same destination by a different route.
Read the book and profit it from it but make sure and spit out Howse’s lunatic pre-mill Dispensationalism.
