RS writes,
I have been receiving emails from Iron Ink for about 2 yrs and I always enjoy reading them. I am trying to learn more about kinism. At this point it is a highly contentious term and I would like to know more about it. I believe that my husband and myself are of this persuasion but whenever race is brought up in conversation at our church, the claim being made is that it is sinful.
BLMc responds,
Rachelle, it seems at time that the only thing that the modern church can get outraged by any more is a truth that is clearly taught in Scripture;
And has been so been universally held throughout Church history that it can be said that it is a doctrine that has been believed in all times and in all places where God has been pleased to grant the Church orthodoxy. The evidence is magnificently overwhelming that the Church has always been kinist.
Even into the mid 20th century the Church was Kinist or, if one prefers proto-kinist. Indeed, up until the last 30 years or so we didn’t even need a term such as “Kinism” because what is taught by Kinism was once just assumed to be part and parcel of the idea of Christianity. So, while we will talk about Kinism here, let it be said that I’d prefer to just talk about standard Christianity because that is all Kinism is.
So, it is simply the case that those at your church who are saying that “Kinism is sinful,” are themselves in sin since they are calling evil something that God calls good.
Kinist is indeed a “contentious term,” but then so was “Christian” once upon a time.
Rachelle writes,
I don’t believe it is a sin. I’m not able to effectively defend the arguments being made against kinism because I am learning myself. Our eyes have recently been opened to so many things we thought we knew, from the War between the States, or what we thought we knew about the “Civil war” to what we thought we knew about Hitler and the Jews. All lies, especially the one about not seeing color and only whites are racist. I don’t know why my husband and I are being made aware of so many issues that the church seems to be completely in the dark about, nothing special about us, they just seem to be very real threats and you are the only one we have found to write about it plainly in your articles.
Bret responds,
It is not a sin. Indeed kinism is righteousness. Opposition to Kinism is wicked.
Don’t be too discouraged that you are not able to make counter arguments against those who berate you. We have all so grown up in this anti-Christ egalitarian mindset that it is only with difficulty that we beign to see through the shell game the opposition is playing on us.
There are others out there writing on this subject. Here are a couple good links;
https://tribaltheocrat.com/2013/08/what-is-kinism/
https://faithandheritage.com/blog/
Now, in providing these links I do not affirm that I agree everything that you will find in them. I would agree with much of it. However, all I’m trying to do here is to show that writing on this subject is not somehow unique to me.
Rachelle writes,
I recently got into a conversation at church about kinism, it got a bit heated. I was attempting to make a case that it is not sinful to be a kinist.
Bret responds,
Yes, conversations surrounding can get a bit heated. I have been involved in them for a very long time now. I am sorry that you are drawing fire for a doctrine that is essential to the Christian faith. I genuinely wish I could there be with you to defend you from the slings and arrows. I’ve been wounded myself repeatedly in these kinds of conversations. I have been consigned to the deepest hell by those considered pillars in the Church. All that for merely defending the faith once and forever delivered unto the saints.
RS writes,
I sent my Pastor your blog and asked for him to look at it and give me his thoughts. This is what he shared with me:
Bret responds,
Rachelle, I am going to tell you before I wade into this that your Pastor’s response is an absolute embarrassment to the historical Reformed faith. It is an embarrassment to him as it testifies he has little ability to rightly divide the Scripture. It is an embarrassment because it demonstrates an ill educated man. Geoff may be a nice guy. He may make great conversations and he may be able to run a great church service, but this reasoning below is beyond horrid as well will soon see.
Pastor Geoff writes
“I finally got around to reading through this article. My initial response is that there is nothing objectionable to noting differences between cultures or races on a very broad level. A couple of things that do create a fairly serious problem:
The derogatory tone toward his opponents (ie. “per this idiot podcast”) is not in line with 2 Tim 2:24-26. That same attitude comes out in his other posts and some of the comments that he makes on his blog. Most people that adopt this posture are struggling with pride, though I admit I do not know this man at all;
Pastor Bret responds,
First, as to the appeal to being nice (for lack of a better word) as found in II Timothy. I certainly agree. How could I not? But let us not forget that II Timothy must be read in conjunction with the not nice engagements we find in Scripture. Would Pastor Geoff say that St. Paul was violating II Timothy when he told the Galatians that he wished that they would go all the way and emasculate themselves. How about when St. Paul said of his opponents, “Let them be anathema (eternally cursed)?”
Then, of course there is the example of our Lord-Jesus who did not mince words with his opponents. “Whited sepulchers, filled with dead men’s bones.” Then there is this passage;
44Woe to you! For you are like unmarked graves, which men walk over without even noticing.” 45 One of the experts in the law told Him, “Teacher, when You say these things, You insult us as well.” 46“Woe to you as well, experts in the law!” He replied. “You weigh men down with heavy burdens, but you yourselves will not lift a finger to lighten their load.
Jesus is told basically, “You’re not being nice,” and He responds with another verbal left hook to the jaw.
John Calvin gives solid counsel on this matter;
“The pastor ought to have two voices: one, for gathering the sheep; and another, for warding off and driving away wolves and thieves. The Scripture supplies him with the means of doing both.”
So, Rachelle, I have two voices and I deal with packs of wolves on a continuous basis and when I deal with wolves I offer no apology for using direct and stern language.
This was the pattern of the Reformers. Luther and Calvin especially could be both salty and earthy when necessary.
Look, this is not some small subject. If we lose here Rachelle so that egalitarian Christianity covers the globe we will further descend into a new Babylonian captivity of the Church. The effort to avoid that is worthy of some directness and perhaps even invective.
Of course I struggle with pride. What son of Adam doesn’t? But to suggest that I struggle with pride because I’m defending Biblical Christianity must give way to a counter idea that I am full of zeal for God’s honor on this matter. At least I an not crafting whips in order to whip the backs of my enemies who are dishonoring God. And that is what opposition to Kinism is… it is dishonoring God. Opposition to Kinism is a means of destroying Christianity by the work of humanism that would erase all the distinctions that God ordained.
I mean, can’t people see where we are and how we got here? I can draw a straight line connecting the dots that began with the pragmatic denial of racial distinctions beginning with Virginia vs. Loving, to the unmaking of womanhood by the attack on the distinction of femininity engaged in via the Griswold vs. Connecticut and Roe vs. Wade decisions, to the attack on the distinctions required for sexual relations in Lawrence vs. Texas, and for marriage in Obergefell vs. Hodges to the current attack on distinctions between what even constitutes male vs. female. Kinism stands against this destruction of the distinctions that God ordains and the root of all these distinction denials began with Virginia vs. Loving. Historically, behind all our history stands the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolution which each and all warred against God ordained distinctions and all ended in rivers of blood and mountains of skulls.
The goal in all this? To destroy the distinction between God and man. In such a way man can finally ascend to the most high and proclaim his divinity. We will never roll back this warfare against God ordained distinctions until we roll back the first one. Pull the root and the plant will die.
So, this is not an intramural battle. This is not an unimportant issue. If we lose here Christians return to the catacombs. We can not ignore any aspect of this battle hoping to avoid the fight without being called “unfaithful.”
Rachelle, I sense you are groping towards this realization. I urge you to continue to pursue truth. I’m glad to answer any questions you might have.
Pastor Geoff writes,
It is unclear to me what the significance of this observation is simply stated on its own.
Bret responds,
Well, I think above I gave the significance of my observation.
Pastor Geoff writes,
What is he arguing to be the impact or importance of these broad “superiorities”?
Bret responds,
Let’s be clear here. It’s always been my position that superiorities and inferiorities run through all races. If one looks at the NBA or NFL one might rightly conclude that Blacks have a superiority in athletics. That is just one example of the importance of these broad superiorities. If one looks at the civilizations built by the Christian white man one might say there is a broad superiority that has some impact when compared to the civilizations built by the pagan Aztecs or by Genghis Khan or Pol Pot or Mao or some other Asian dictator, or even when compared to Christian Auca Indians, or the Christian Sawi of Papua, New Guinea.
The impact or importance of that? Well, I should think that is now fairly obvious.
Pastor Geoff writes,
Is he just saying Italians are good at pasta and Indians at curry?
Bret responds,
“No.”
“If we lose here Rachelle so that egalitarian Christianity covers the globe we will further descend into a new Babylonian captivity of the Church.”
And the connection to Babylon is not entirely spiritual-symbolic either. For if we search the roots of Enlightenment egalitarianism, it turns out that the philosophical school of Stoicism played a big part in transmitting it from pagan antiquity into the Early Modern Era of Western civilization.
Stoicism was one of the most notable intellectual products of the new cosmopolitan Hellenistic culture created by the conquests of Alexander the Great (who died in Babylon). It self-consciously abandoned the narrow old tribalism, or polis-culture, of classical Greeks and sought to build up a new, universalistic ethic for the use of whole world.
And one of the most important teachers of the Stoic school was this one fellow, “Diogenes of Babylon”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Babylon
Diogenes of Babylon was part of the Greek embassy that first introduced Stoicism into Rome (where it would have such a huge career) in 155 BC – the Babylon-Rome connection that the Book of Revelation drew attention to:
https://academic.oup.com/book/8658/chapter-abstract/154659597?redirectedFrom=fulltext
And what was the connection between Stoicism and modern egalitarianism? Well, simply put, the famous slogan of MLK Jr., that people should be evaluated “by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin” matches the Stoic ideal almost perfectly. For according to the Stoics, virtue, understood in an abstract, philosophical sense, was the ONLY thing that mattered. EVERYTHING ELSE was, or should have been, mere “adiaphora,” or matter of indifference to wise and virtuous men. The race for example would be mere “adiaphora,” and even the sex could be so (the Stoics did not have problems with sodomy).
This was the PAGAN idea of “adiaphora,” which differs greatly from the Christian idea of “adiaphora,” even though they share the same name. For Christians, “adiaphora” could mean that we are allowed to recognize race, since “racism” is not explicitly condemned in the Scriptures, and we do right as long as we just refrain from excessive race-idolatry. But to pagan Stoic adiaphorists, it is wicked and immoral to make note of race, as if it would mean more than virtue, or “content of character”!
Thus, “I do not see color” is not so much a Christian than a Stoic concept. It is more philosophical than theological ideal that concentrates on purely abstract “virtue,” while ignoring the flesh-and-blood realities of created human beings. The Stoics were famous for scorning human beings as they actually existed, venerating their theoretical ideal of “wise man” instead of man as he actually existed.
Gary North was quite aware of the role Stoicism played in the development of secular universalistic ideology – the pagan roots of the Enlightenment were twofold: firstly Epicureanism (of course), with its base materialistic, atheistic utilitarian hedonism, but secondly, Stoicism with its idealistic-pantheistic, cosmopolitan ideal, which appealed to more “virtuous” kind of pagans who were motivated more by self-righteousness (prideful belief in their own intellectual powers and ethical purity) than by mere banal pleasure:
https://www.garynorth.com/freebooks/docs/html/gnbd/appendix_e.htm
“The foundation of Stoic philosophy was a denial of the Creator-creature distinction. Its outlook was summed up by Epictetus: “When a man has learnt to understand the government of the universe and has realized that there is nothing so great or sovereign or all-inclusive as this frame of things wherein man and God are united . . . why should he not call himself a citizen of the universe and a son of God?”(58)
…
Wolin cites the Stoic emperor (and persecutor of the church),(60) Marcus Aurelius, who defended the existence of common reason, common law, and common citizenship. This rational ideal became the foundation for empire, a one-world State and one-State world: “For of what other common political community will any one say that the whole human race are members?”(61)
…
Under the influence of Greek philosophy, especially Stoicism, and Roman law, a new guild of Western legal theorists appeared in the twelfth century. They moved from the acceptance of customary tribal laws (civil) and penitential law (ecclesiastical) to the ideal of universal natural law in the guise of a revival of Roman imperial law.(68)”
The reason why I have studied these issues so much is that I have felt keenly the need to supplement those works of men like Alexander Storen, who have dug up all these historical Christian sources to prove that traditional Christianity has never promoted the kind of egalitarianism that modern world praises.
For I believe that after having proved that, the next logical question must be answered: “Well, if egalitarianism did not come from the Bible, then where DID it come from?” The short answer would be “the Enlightenment,” but then you have to explain where the Enlightenment itself came from. And that means digging deep into the ancient pagan doctrines like Epicureanism and Stoicism (and Pyrrhonian scepticism, and many other sources).
I have dug up myself a huge amount of material in this question that I intend to make available on the Internet Archive in the near future.
A cynically frank modern Liberal writer confesses here that the modern godless doctrine of Equality came from Epicureanism via godless men like Thomas Hobbes who denied that there was any divine order or hierarchy in the world and believed, centuries before Cultural Marxists, that patriarchal system was just a “social construct”:
https://archive.org/details/naturesgodhereti0000stew_o9j9/page/324/mode/2up?view=theater
“Its core meaning is just that the inequalities observable among individuals in any actual society are not attributable to the nature of people or things. That is, there is no natural order of subordination among human beings. Lucretius made the point first when he observed that “slavery and freedom, poverty and wealth, war and peace” are not properties of the atoms themselves, but only of human arrangements.18 “Our actual inequality,” Hobbes emphatically concludes, “has been introduced by civil law.”19 An indication of just how seriously Hobbes takes this claim concerning natural equality is his stance on paternal authority, which he maintains is also a product of civil and social arrangements – quite a radical position in the unthinkingly patriarchal world of the time.”
This booklet, written by a conservative English churchman in the early years of the 18th century, shows how Hobbesian-Spinozistic ideas began right away to corrode the respect that children were supposed to feel for their parents (and ancestors, and other authority figures):
https://books.google.nl/books?id=X_1MAQAAMAAJ&hl=nl&pg=PP58#v=onepage&q&f=false
“It is long of them, and their Commentaries upon one of Moses’s Commandments, that we cannot make Men believe † that as soon as they come to Reason, they are free from the Yoke of Paternal Power, that they have no Obligations to their Fathers, who begot them for their Pleasure, nor to their Mothers, who bore them for their Ease; that Priests without Distinction, Priests of all Ages, Patriarchal, Jewish, and Christian, as well as Pagan Priests, are and always have been Cheats, and Impostours alike, and that Kings are the Servants of the People.
† These impious Sayings are commonly in the mouthes of Atheistical men, and Deists: And they are contrary to the Doctrine which the Light of Nature, and all undepraved Mankind, particularly of the Pythagoreans, who founded the Duty of Children to their Parents primarily, as to the of Principles of their Being; and secondarily as to their Benefactors.”
These ideas then bore full rotten fruit in the French Revolution, “and the rest is history.”
Sounds like something that Murray Rothbard could write.
For these early generations of infidels, it was a considerable problem that even though they themselves learned to scoff at traditional authorities, in their own mutual company, they often did not want to preach up such stuff to their own families. For they wanted to keep their OWN patriarchal privileges while denying the Father in Heaven! (Sort of like Voltaire wanted his own servants to keep believing in God so that they would not steal his silverware.)
Another conservative Englishman, Richard Blackmore, drew attention to this inconsistency (in the 1710s):
https://archive.org/details/creationaphilos02blacgoog/page/n50/mode/2up?view=theater
“But further; since these gentlemen show so much industry in propagating their opinions, and are so fond of making proselytes to atheism; since they affect a zeal in countenancing, applauding, and preserving, those whom they have delivered from religious prejudices, and reformed and refined with their free, large, and generous principles: how comes it to pass, that they neglect to inform and improve their nearest relations? Are they careful to instruct their wives and daughters, that they need not revere the imaginary phantom of a God; that religion is the creature of a timorous and superstitious mind, or of crafty priests, and cunning politicians; that, therefore, they are free from all restraints of virtue and conscience, and may prostitute their persons in the most licentious manner, without any remorse, or uneasy reflection; that it is idle to fear any divine punishment hereafter; and as to the shame and dishonour that may attend the liberties they take, in case they become public, that scandal proceeds from the gross mistakes of people perverted with religion, and misguided by a belief of a divine being, and of rewards and punishments in an imaginary life after this.
Do they take pains to inform their eldest sons, that they owe them no gratitude or obedience; that they may use an uncontrolled freedom in indulging all their appetites, passions, and inclinations; that, if they are willing to possess their father’s honour and estate, they may by poison or the poignard, take away his life; and, if they are careful to avoid the punishment of the magistrate, by their secret conduct, they may be fully satisfied of the innocence of the action; and as they have done themselves much good, so they have done their father no injury, and therefore may enjoy in perfect tranquillity the fruits of their parricide? Whatever they may affirm among their loose friends, I cannot conceive they can be guilty of so much folly, as to propagate these opinions in their own families, and instruct their wives and children in the boundless liberties, which, by the principles of atheism, are their undoubted right; for in all actions, where religion does not interpose and restrain us, we are perfectly, as has been said, free to act as we think best for our profit and pleasure.”