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.
View all posts by jetbrane
If we consider Liberalism to be a sort of parasitical, cancerous outgrowth of Christendom, that steals some ideas from the Gospel (like the ideal of altruistic charity) and mixes it with its own crap, then Islam was like the great predecessor of Liberalism, for it also stole something from Christianity (the basic monotheistic ideological frame), and then mixed it with its own crap.
Not even mentioning the Unitarian connection between Muhammad and the founders of Western liberal tradition – the latter could, already early on, play the role of fifth-columnist traitors of their civilization when they blithely asserted that Islam was theologically superior to Trinitarian Christianity. (In their dishonest polemics, the Unitarian-Socinian writers could also try to shame conservative Christians by touting the largely imaginary Muslim religious toleration.)
https://trisagionseraph.tripod.com/servetus.html
“Furthermore, and worse than all this, how much this tradition of the Trinity has, alas! been a laughing-stock to the Mohammedans, only God knows. . .Hear also what Mohammed says; for more reliance is to be given to one truth which an enemy confesses than to a hundred lies on our side. For he says in his Alcoran that Christ was the greatest of the prophets, the spirit of God, the power of God, the breath of God, the very soul of God, the Word born of a perpetual virgin by God’s breathing upon her; and that it is because of the wickedness of the Jews toward him that they are in their present wretchedness and misfortune. He says, moreover, that the Apostles and Evangelists and the first Christians were the best of men, and wrote what is true, and did not hold the Trinity, or three Persons in the Divine Being, but men in later times added this.”
(Michael Servetus, On the Errors of the Trinity, Book I, pp. 66-67, The Two Treatises of Servetus on the Trinity, translated by Earl Morse Wilbur).
In the late 1790s, this conservative English writer, in his letter to Paul I, the Tsar of Russia, directly compared Islam with Jacobinism, which at that time was seemingly rampaging through Europe with no one to stop it:
https://archive.org/details/asurveyturkishe00etongoog/page/458/mode/2up?view=theater
“None [of the European countries] will escape but the elder brethren of Jacobinism, the Turks, whose equally monstrous, though less dangerous tyranny, has for so many centuries insulted mankind, trodden underfoot the laws of nations, and blasphemed Christianity; who, unprovoked, attacked, conquered and slaughtered nations without number, murdered their sovereigns and spilt every drop of royal blood, massacred their priests at the altar, extirpated nobility, plundered the opulent, and bound the wretched remains of the people in fetters of perpetual and hereditary slavery. They alone, till the reign of Jacobinism had made property a crime, the violation of property a legal resource of government, and the lives and possessions of men the right of tyranny; they alone had hitherto confounded the hereditary ranks among mankind; had depressed genius, learning, and the Christian religion, and governed their barbarous empire by slaves and assassins. Like the Jacobins, they taught Christian children to fight against their fathers and their father’s God;* they too hold it lawful to murder prisoners in cold blood, they too possess a claim to every country in the universe, and a sacred right to subject all people to their law; they too hold all other sovereigns as usurpers, and dethroning them as the highest merit. But still the Turks have a religion, and though it permits them numberless enormities to their own sect, and all enormities to others, they acknowledge a God, and many moral duties. Not the contagion of their doctrine was to be feared, but their cruel sword, which once threatened the conquest of the universe, and the extinction of all virtue, dignity, and science in the world; yet was not this first monster so tremendous, in the insolence of his power, as an enemy, as is this second monster, in the insolence of his successes, as a brother.”
And even though Islam, as primitive and barbarous Unitarianism, naturally differed in many respects from the Unitarianism of civilized Christian West, the “Unitarian” logic of egalitarian levelling was still present in it as well. Especially the notion of “equality in servitude” – being all slaves together (slaves of Allah, and slaves of earthly rulers like sultans), and thus more or less equal.
Pierre Belon, a learned Frenchman who was Jean Calvin’s contemporary, was an ambitious person of lower-class origin, and thus admired this kind of “meritocratic” system when he visited the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power around 1550:
https://books.google.fi/books?id=HXy0DQAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&hl=fi&pg=PA17#v=onepage&q&f=false
““In this country,” explains Belon, “there is no point in claiming to be noble,” il ne sert de rien en ce pays là de s’avouer estre Gentilhomme.” This is because there is nothing like a hereditary nobility in Turkish society, he discovers.55 In a sense, all Turks are social equals since all of them are equally the Sultan’s slaves.
…
These façons de faire clearly meet with Belon’s approval, in part because of his philosophical convictions and, perhaps, in part also because of his own modest origins. The customs of the Turks appear to him as far more rational than those of his own countrymen. He goes out to make the Turks seem like noble savages whose natural simplicity has only recently given way to more civilized behavior through their contact with educated Jews of western origin.58”
And H.N. Brailsford, a British traveller who visited the decaying Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, could also witness how Islam promoted a “colorblind” vision of race, even though the clannish Albanian highlanders were resisting its influence:
https://archive.org/details/macedoniaitsrace00braiuoft/page/234/mode/2up?view=theater
“For the Albanian is essentially a European—a European of the Middle Ages. Alone of all races in Turkey, he has an hereditary aristocracy and a feudal system. Islam, among Eastern peoples, is everywhere a leveller. It obliterates birth and race. A labourer may rise to be a Pasha, and it is no rare sight to see a negro in officer’s uniform commanding white troops. But the Albanians have kept their pride of birth.
…
The marriage customs of the Turks make no account of social distinctions. A Turk will marry some Georgian or Circassian slave. The Albanians who became Moslems have remained strict monogamists.1 They never marry outside their own race and their own rank. A marriage with a wealthy Greek woman or an Albanian girl of new family is held to be a mésalliance. The mixing of blood which has resulted in the virtual extinction of the old Turkish stock in Stamboul is utterly unknown in Albania, and the primitive structure of society has remained un-modified by the conquest.”