I’ve been away for awhile with various matters drawing me away from Iron Ink. However, Rev. Rich Lusk has a way of bringing me back to my love of writing. This is not the first time I’ve had a go at something Lusk has written on Kinism. Last year on the same subject we find
Lusk and I also in years past have tangled on his support of the heresy of Federal Vision across different sites on the web. I’m not a big fan of Rich and I suppose he is not president of my fan club — such as it is.
Before I engage Rev. Lusk’s offering let me say that my Spidey senses are tingling on the matter of the CREC (Doug Wilson’s own personal paedo-creedo denomination) and Kinism. That is to say that there is some circumstantial evidence that begins to suggest that there is unrest in what is thought to be the last Elven home (Rivendell) of “conservative” Reformed denominationalism. Members of the CREC keep turning to the issue of Kinism in denunciation which makes one think there must be some kind of threat of Kinism prospering in the denomination. I mean, why else do CREC types online keeps returning to the subject?
Rev. Lusk (Hereafter RL) writes,
Love of people and place is virtuous. It is good to love one’s family, and love of one’s family easily extends to a love of nation, which is largely an extension of the family. One way to honor my mother and father (and grandmother and grandfather, etc.) is to honor the land in which I was born. Cultivating love of people and place is an application of the fifth commandment, among other things.
BLM responds,
This paragraph is pure on Kinism. I’m glad to see Lusk confessing what the Scripture routinely teaches.
RL writes,
(1) But kinists take the love of people and place to an unwarranted, unbiblical, even idolatrous extreme. (2) For the kinist, “my people” comes to mean primarily people of a certain skin color. (3) Skin color becomes more essential to identity than faith. (4) Skin color becomes synonymous with culture, so that defending one is the same as defending the other. (5) Kinists want to build a racially homogenous civilization because they believe racial unity is the key to social harmony. (6) But this is a misplacement of the antithesis, which divides people not according to skin color but according to their spiritual state. (7) Biblically, it is faith rather than skin color that is determinative. (8) To put it in concrete terms: I would much rather build a culture with Clarence Thomas and Voddie Baucham (who share my faith but not my skin color) than Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi (who share my skin color but not my faith). (9) Culture is not tied to skin to skin color in the way kinists seem to think. (10)Insofar as culture is the product of religious conviction (which it always is), white people do not share a common culture because not all white people share a common faith. (11) And many people with other skin colors might be much closer to some white people in culture because they do share the same faith. (12) God’s Word requires us to make careful distinctions. (13) Further, the Great Commission requires the Christian faith to permeate every nation — indeed, every culture and subculture — with the gospel. (14) If kinists claim that cultures should remain homogenous and closed off to all outside influence, they make the mission of the church impossible. (15) The Great Commission requires a certain level of cross-cultural intermixing and influence. (16) That is not the same thing as the borderless, multi-cultural “new world order” the globalists dream of, but neither is it identical to the racially segregated world he kinists want.
BLM responds,
(1.) I always get a jolt by reading what Alienists say kinists believe. It is akin to reading Arminians describe what Calvinists believe or listening to Baptists tell me what covenant means.
But, I must admit that just this morning I demonstrated my idolatrous extreme by entering my kinist shrine which I have in my house (all kinists have shrines to their ancestors in their homes). Once in my shrine I went through the steps of my idolatrous extreme by lighting candles and reciting chants to my ancestors. This was only after I forced my children to recite their ancestors names back to me going back 15th generations.
(2a.) Lusk writes in his first paragraph about how it is proper to love one’s own nation and yet he seems to forget that etymologically to love one’s own nation means to love those who are descended from a common ancestor. Webster’s 1828 dictionary notes,
“nation as its etymology imports, originally denoted a family or race of men descended from a common progenitor, like tribe…”
Now obviously, it is very unusual any more to be able to limit “nation” to this definition what with immigration, and conquest or forced intermixture, it still remains the case that nation by etymological definition means what we find italicized in the definition above.
If all men in a nation are descended from a common ancestor then obviously skin color is going to part of that dynamic. Therefore, Lusk has a serious contradiction between his first paragraph and the first sentence of his second paragraph.
(2b.) Next on this score Lusk goes all reductionistic on us by suggesting that people groups can be reduced to being just a matter of skin color (melanin level). This is the constant nonsense that emanates from the communication hole of Alienists. Kinists reject the suggestion that a people group is primarily only about skin color. Certainly skin color may be one particular aspect about a people group but to suggest that is all that Kinists care about is just stupidity parading as profundity.
(2c.) Is Lusk going to fault the Apostle Paul when he speaks of the special love for people of his own race in Romans 9:3? Has the Holy Spirit in that passage suddenly found himself involved in an unwarranted, unbiblical, and even idolatrous extreme?
For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race — Romans 9:3
(3.) This is utter bull feces. The Kinist raises Christ above all other considerations. They can sing with Luther, “Let goods and kindred go,” unlike the Alienist who having no love for kindred think it no big deal to “let kindred go.” However, all because Christ must have the preeminence that does not mean that therefore there shouldn’t be a proper natural affection for one’s own people just as we find in St. Paul.
There is an implied false dichotomy in what Lusk writes. His false dichotomy is that a person can only love Christ or he can only love his God ordained extended family as if those two loves are necessarily exclusive and contradictory.
It is interesting that Lusk would never warn that maleness or femaleness not become more essential to identity than Christ. All Christians immediately understand that their maleness or femaleness is part of their identity that they have as in Christ. However, Lusk seemingly thinks that somehow we should automatically separate our belongingness to our people as not being part of our identity in Christ as if grace doesn’t automatically restore nature. Lusk is positing a false dichotomy here between grace and nature and thus demonstrates what he has been accused of before in the Federal Vision debate that he is a latent Gnostic.
(4a.) Once again Lusk continues with his reductionistic nonsense by constantly referring to races and peoples are merely a matter of “skin color.”
(4b.) While one’s ethnicity and/or race certainly is not exactly synonymous with culture it is also the case that the two can not be disentangled from one another. To think that culture has nothing to do with race as Lusk is proposing once again finds the door opened to bringing forth the charge of Gnosticism against Lusk. To suggest that culture and race have nothing to do with each other defies the definition that culture is the outward manifestation of a people’s inward beliefs. Culture is comprised of two realities; i.) a people groups genetic disposition — who God has created a people to be and ii.) what it is that people group believes regarding ultimate reality. To suggest that culture is only about what goes on between the ears of assorted and random individuals is just nothing but Gnosticism. It is a dishonoring of the corporeal side of who we are as humans as God as God has created us.
(5.) Kinists do not believe that racial unity is the only key to social harmony. However, they do believe it is one key to social harmony. Certainly, racial unity absent worldview/faith unity is not going to yield social harmony. However, we see in Acts 6 that neither does faith unity as existing among different people groups necessarily yield social harmony. So, we see that Kinists believe that social harmony is best achieved by the presence of both racial unity as combined with worldview/faith unity. Therefore, here we have established that Lusk is just in error with his assertion.
(6.) The antithesis is drawn so as to distinguish who is in Christ and who is not in Christ. The Reformed antithesis is not about what makes for the best social order circumstances. As John Frame has noted with regard to both Society and Church (which is a much smaller subset than a nation)
“Scripture, as I read it, does not require societies, or even churches, to be integrated racially. Jews and Gentiles were brought together by God’s grace into one body. They were expected to love one another and to accept one another as brothers in the faith. But the Jewish Christians continued to maintain a distinct culture, and house churches were not required to include members of both groups.”
John Frame,
“Racism, Sexism, Marxism”
(7.) Biblically it is faith and not skin color that is determinative of who is in Christ. All agree with Lusk there but that has nothing to do with what makes for the greatest harmony among a nation and its social order.
(8.) Who can disagree with what Lusk says in #8 above? However, that does nothing to disprove the issue at hand. It may be true that I would rather build a culture with biblical Christians of other ethnicities/races than I would to try to build a culture with pagans who belong to my own ethnicity/race but it is even more true that people from different races/ethnicity would prefer to build a culture with Christians from their own race and ethnicity than with Christians from a WASP race/ethnicity. And there is not the slightest thing wrong with that or un-Christian about that. Being in Christ doesn’t mean that grace destroys nature so that being in Christ means that all nature differences and distinctions no longer exist. It is perfectly acceptable, for example, for Koreans to want to worship with other Koreans vis-a-vis worshiping with WASPs. It is perfectly acceptable, for example, for the historic American Black Churches to desire to remain an entity that remains Black. All of this is about natural affections that God made.
(9.) Another Gnostic statement from Lusk. Culture and ethnicity/race while distinct are not divorced and are intimately tied together.
(10.) See #4b above.
(11.) And many ethnicities/races might be even closer still to their own Christian peoples/races than they are to WASPs because those people of other ethnicities/races shared the same faith with their people.
Note again here though the Gnostic Lusk reducing ethnicity/race to “skin color.” This is like reducing the meaning of Christianity to people agreeing only on the statement “I love Jesus.”
(12.) And here I continue to wait for Lusk to make the careful distinctions necessary instead of the hatchet job he is making of all this.
(13.) Elsewhere we learn that water is wet.
(14.) No Kinist is so stupid as to believe that social-orders can be hermetically sealed off so that heterogenous influences don’t weigh on particular social orders. Only Alienists could be stupid enough to think this way.
(15.) Lusk needs to read Roland Allen’s “St. Paul’s Missionary Methods and Ours.” In that book Lusk would learn that St. Paul would stay something like 6 months in different lands before he would push on to the next land. In that time St. Paul would entrust the nascent church to indigenous leadership so that the Church planted there would be kinist. There would thus be comparatively little intermixing and influence.
(16.) What the Kinist pray for is for all the nations — all the distinct ethnic/racial peoples that God has ordained to exist to find themselves all swearing allegiance to Jesus Christ as in their nations.
