Where Oh Where Has Our Reformed Christianity Gone? Oh Where Oh Where Can It Be?

“Modern, wimpy, soft-spoken Reformed pastors will keep talking about ‘loving your neighbor’ and pretending that the government isn’t already commanding us to sin.

They don’t care about the old people dying of isolation, the mental anguish families are going through being separated from their loved ones, or little babies like this one who now is without a mother if it survives at all. They don’t care about people who have lost their family businesses — forever. They have NEVER cared to talk about the debt-based economy that’s precipitously close to collapsing on many millions of Christian families. They’re not talking about government indoctrination centers turning our kids into communists who are burning our cities every night.

No. They’ll preach five more sermons on Grace, wear their pleated khakis, grow a beard and pretend to deserve the respect that Reformed Pastors of old could command.

The modern church is anathema. Ichabod.“

Mrs. Emily Forte

I think it is well past time that we admit that the “Conservative” Reformed Church in America is a bust. We needs admit that the Reformed Clergy in America bears as much relation to John Calvin, John Knox, and Huldrych Zwingli as our modern soy boy males bear relation to Charles Martel, John Sobieski, or Godfrey of Bouillon.

Part of where that lack shows itself is in the pulpit. As Emily rightly points out the prototypical contemporary conservative Reformed clergy sermons have become reductionistic and irrelevant. We have reduced Jesus to the chorus of a Beatles song. We talk about a Jesus disconnected to the living of the people God has given us to serve and then we justify that disconnection by reciting the bald and explicit teaching by our wise-men in our Seminaries that God doesn’t speak an inscripturated Revelational Word about the public lives of God’s people. Our Clergy are insensate and can provide no direction to God’s people on the issues of our times — such as the ongoing attempted genocide of the White Christian people — because the modern conservative Clergy have been taught to believe that our physical corporeal lives don’t really matter because the realities those lives occupy are realities that won’t cross over to the New Jerusalem anyway. Christian families don’t exist now and won’t exist in the new Jerusalem we are told by Reformed Ph.d.’s. Christian civilization doesn’t exist now, can’t exist, never has existed, and won’t exist in the New Jerusalem we are told by the chaps with terminal degrees teaching your next Pastor right now. The same goes for any idea of Christian culture. You’re next Pastor is being trained right now that the idea of Christian culture is a myth… and that in “Conservative Seminaries” across the nation. Is it any wonder then that your minister knows nothing about how debt based economies are a violation of the 8th commandment? Is it any wonder that your Pastor Lovejoy thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to put his own children (as well as yours) in Government indoctrination centers to be catechized into a false faith? Our clergy are stupid and they have been trained to think that God loves stupid.

And all this above… and all that Emily rightly noted is dismissed by our enemy Seminary wisemen by saying, “Well, your people can get instruction on those issues outside the Church by competing worldview Christian sources and organizations. We (the Church) have to spend our time with more important things like the Gospel.” In this one clever move the Gospel has been divorced from Christianity. The Clergy want to be Gospel oriented, and Gospel Intentional (all the rage buzz-phrases today) but they want that as it is divorced from Christianity as the total Weltanschauung. Now these types will immediately protest that they don’t believe in Weltanschauung (World and life view) but all that tells me is that their Weltanschauung doesn’t allow them to believe in muscular and totalistic Christianity. They want the Pietistic Christianity where one gets saved, becomes an ever increasingly nicer person who fits into the expectations of their cultural surroundings with a pinch of abstract Jesus perfuming all they do.

These types have won the day in the modern “conservative” “Reformed” “Church.” They have done so because there is just a smattering of truth to what they say. That truth is found in the reality that too often it really is the case that the Reformed Church has indeed concentrated on a kind of therapeutic deistic morality disconnected from the living and resurrected Jesus Christ. We have not connected our morality enough to the office of Jesus Christ as our “eternal King who governs us by His Word and Spirit.” When we speak of properly disobeying Tyrants we should connect it with Christ’s office of our great High King. When we speak of not sending God’s covenant seed to be Humanist and Statist schools we should connect that statement that Christ, as our Great High Priest, was put to death for such sins and that as God’s Holy and Elect we should not want to sin by putting the children of God in the schools of Canaan. We need to do a better job in connecting the totality of Christianity with the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Prophet, Priest, and King. By doing so we reveal that it is the Reductionistic Gospelers who have perverted the Gospel of Jesus Christ and not those of us who want all of Christianity and not this Gnostic dualistic Christianity that is now offered up so routinely in our Reformed R2K Churches.

Those who desire a “Gospel-centered” Church to the neglect of a Christian Church are those who desire the seed of Christianity but insist they have no interest in bark, flower, leaf, fruit or branch, twig, stem, and shoot of Christianity. They desire a message that,

1.) God is big and Holy
2.) Man is small and sinful
3.) Christ provides a way for sinful man to come to a Holy God

And that is where they want to stop. Oh, they may include some instruction on how to be a “nice” person but they refuse to describe what the Christian life looks like in the public square. They refuse to talk about Christian culture or civilization. (Remember, those things are not possible). Where they are consistent they would refuse to bring to heel any civil Magistrate for any action except possibly the forbidding of worship. For these types Christianity is all purr and no bite.

Our enemy “Gospel-Centered” Christianity responds by insisting that “we can’t allow Biblical Christianity into the pulpit. After all, no minister can be so trained as to be an expert in all these varying fields. Pastors need to become experts in the Gospel and leave the other issues to the experts in their respective fields. We don’t want Lawyers or Teachers or Anthropologists trying to be experts in the Gospel and so we shouldn’t try to be experts in those fields.” Never mind that this attitude belies the reality that all truth is organic and inter-related so that a firm understanding on Biblical Christianity does indeed give one the ability to speak to the theology driving all these different fields. As a minister, I don’t need a degree in Cultural Anthropology to identify the evolutionary presuppositions that are driving Cultural Anthropology. As a minister, I don’t need a degree in Sociology to know that Emile Durkheim was selling a Sociology that allowed for sociological and cultural relativism. As a minister I don’t need a degree in Keynesian Economics to know that debt based economies violate the Eight commandment. I don’t need a degree in history (though I have one) to be able to warn God’s people against post-modern historians who insist that objective truth doesn’t exist. I don’t need a degree in Philosophy (though I have one) to identify that the Cartesian “cogito” foundationalism is an anti-Christ epistemology. I don’t need a degree in Political Science (though I have one) to tell God’s people not to vote for politicians who embrace a political theory that presupposes that God does not exist (Marxism). The excuse that ministers can’t be expert enough to speak to different fields God’s “Thus sayeth the Lord” is errant and filthy thinking. It can be done.

So, we have to admit that this “Reformed Christianity” is a different Reformed Christianity than that which Emily is expecting. This “Gospel Centered Christianity” is not the Christianity of our Reformed forefathers who put the fear of God in Kings and Queens who ruled in defiance of the God of the Bible. This “Gospel-Oriented” Christianity is not the Christianity of Jenny Geddes though I’d love to join Jenny in throwing a few stools at its representatives on a Sunday Morning. This Klinean Calvinism is for eunuchs, cowards, and the milquetoast. If this was the type of Calvinism that had been born at Geneva the whole world would have either been conquered by Servetus or been reconquered by the counter-Reformation of the Roman Catholics.