The West has for a couple centuries has ever increasingly gone from egalitarian excess to egalitarian excess. What started in the French Revolution as an elimination of all class distinctions in the name of equality has burgeoned fatter and fatter with each subsequent incarnation of logical consistency. From the Sans-culottes work of pulling down the French Aristocrats in the name of equality, to the elimination of slavery by violence in America in the name of equality, to the elimination of titles as replace by “comrade” in the Bolshevik Revolution in the name of equality, to the muscular Feminism embodied by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Alexandra Kollontai, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and countless others to the accepting of sodomy, trannie-ism, and now in the chute, pedophilia, equality has been the cancer that ate the West.
The Christian church has not been inure from the infection that is egalitarianism. For example where Churches have not embraced women officers by way of official policy and pastors they have embraced women officers and Pastors for all practical purposes. Yes, exceptions exist. Now, egalitarianism is pushing for accepting sexual pervert members and officers. Eventually, the sexual perverts will win out because egalitarianism is a conclusion that will only continue until its fullest implications are embraced by all.
But this is not the way the Christian church has always thought. There was a time that the church spoke loudly and clearly that being a Christian did not mean God created distinctions (inequalities) ceased to exist.
Consider, for example this treatment of Titus 2:9 by Puritan, Dr. Thomas Taylor,
“Exhort bondservants (slaves) to be obedient to their own masters, to be well pleasing in all things, not answering back, 10 not [a]pilfering, but showing all good [b]fidelity, that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in all things.”
“Hence we note that religion and the doctrine of gospel frees no man from any duty, but rather fastens it upon him. In Christ, all are indeed one, but in regard to (1) the spiritual and inward man, and (2) The means of leading men to happiness. But in respect to the outward man, they abide master and servant, prince and people, bond and free.”
Dr. Thomas Taylor
Puritan Preacher/Theologian
Gary Lee Roper
Antebellum Slavery; An Orthodox Christian View — p. 253
Taylor here, was only agreeing with John Calvin who had preceded him in the previous century.
“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
These men understood that regeneration/conversion does not relieve slaves from being slaves, nor does it relieve men from submitting to their employers, nor does it release wives from submitting to their husbands. They understood that grace restores nature. It does not destroy nature.
Much of the modern church now longer embraces this principle. For much of the modern church being born again means you lose your race/ethnicity, or like Doug Wilson, “race doesn’t really exist,” or like Voddie Baucham, “race is only about melanin levels.”
Elsewhere more and more the modern church agrees that a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man. All of this clown world stuff emanates from the fact that the egalitarianism which begin to wax with the French Revolution continues to wax and wax and wax.
The historic Reformed position, as seen by the quotes above, has never given in to the absolutely insane idea that race is a social construct — a theory that is the laxative that gives way to the diarrhea that insists that gender and sexuality is a social construct.
Because of egalitarianism the world has gone stark raving bonkers. The Reformed knew where this egalitarianism would end up.
Author: jetbrane
I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling.
I am postmillennial in my eschatology.
Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity
Reformed in my Soteriology
Presuppositional in my apologetics
Familialist in my family theology
Agrarian in my regional community social order belief
Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief
Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic
Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern
Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview
One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics
Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place
Some of my favorite authors,
Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc.
My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture.
Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him.
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“All of this clown world stuff emanates from the fact that the egalitarianism which begin to wax with the French Revolution continues to wax and wax and wax.”
Marquis de Condorcet, the leading intellectual of the most radical wing of the French Revolution, consciously threw down this challenge to those more moderate kind of revolutionists who had reservations about female equality – he outright told them they could not jump off this slippery slope without renouncing the whole egalitarian “human rights” ideology itself:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas-de-Caritat-marquis-de-Condorcet#ref272130
“Condorcet, wholly a man of the Enlightenment, sought to extend the empire of reason to social affairs. He advocated economic freedom, religious toleration, legal and educational reform, the abolition of slavery, and—unusually for his time—equal rights for women, including woman suffrage.
…
In his essay Sur l’admission des femmes au droits de la cité (1790; On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship), Condorcet argued that the widely shared assumption that the natural rights of men are based on their capacities for reason and moral action logically implies that women possess the very same rights:
“The rights of men stem exclusively from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning upon them. Since women have the same qualities, they necessarily also have the same rights. Either no member of the human race has any true rights, or else they all have the same ones; and anyone who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, colour or sex, automatically forfeits his own.””