“Now of course, belonging to a people (nation) is always more than being descended from a common ancestor but it is never less than that. The chief addition to belonging to a nation is embracing a shared faith/religion. This explains why many people have a short definition of nation that reads; “A nation is particular ethnos who share a common religion which together creates a common culture (law, customs, language), as normatively sharing a common geographic setting.” Clearly, like Israel of old, the foreigner may dwell among a particular people but the foreigner will always be understood by himself and the people as a foreigner – even as treated with dignity.”
Reed M. Walters
To dismiss as important the issue that race is real simply because it is not directly related to the gospel is foolish and it is foolish because the issue of race is directly related to the Gospel. To deny race is part of the egalitarian push to deny distinctions. The ultimate distinction that the consistent egalitarian who denies race wants to deny is the distinction between God and man. It ought to be obvious now that this is where all this distinction denying is leading. First we started with the denial of the distinction between races and now we are denying the distinction between male and female. How can people not see that it won’t be long till the egalitarians overtly stating what they are secretly presupposing and that is that there is no distinction between God and man?
If there is no distinction between God and man then there can be no Gospel. So, dismissing the issue of race because it is not directly related to the gospel is a non-sequitur that can only be championed by people who have no ability to do consequential thinking.
Now, can people be saved by the Gospel who remain practitioners and champions of egalitarianism? Only God knows but I would think that it depends on far they take their egalitarianism. You see, egalitarianism is another religion, with another definition of sin, another definition of Jesus, another definition of salvation, and another definition of sanctification. How wrong must one be before they are so wrong that they can’t be Christian?
Only God knows. But why try to press the boundaries to find out?
“The ultimate distinction that the consistent egalitarian who denies race wants to deny is the distinction between God and man.”
That might have been actually that standpoint that the Progressives STARTED from. For the Radical Enlightenment subversive movement got really rolling with Spinoza’s consistently anti-transcendental worldview of materialistic monism:
https://archive.org/details/worshippingstate0000wike/page/144/mode/2up?view=theater
“In direct contrast to Christianity, an immaterial God never became flesh. For Spinoza, all flesh (that is, all matter) always was and is God.
The implications of Spinoza’s pantheism are far-reaching. First of all, Spinoza collapsed creator and creature, destroying the essential distinction introduced at the very beginning of the Bible. Pantheism makes a god of this world and thus completely undermines the entire Judeo-Christian understanding of reality that flows from the creator-creature distinction in Genesis. Removing that creator-creature distinction allows for a reintroduction of pagan animism and idolatry, the worship of the divine in creatures. Spinoza’s “monism” was a radical rejection of the First Commandment.
…
The pantheistic state that had its seed in Spinoza would come to full flower in the ruminations of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), who declared that the Prussian state was the fullest manifestation of the immanentized “spirit” of God.
…
Spinoza, like Hobbes, denied the reality of objective good and evil. But Spinoza based his argument against moral absolutes upon the notion that God is everything – and therefore everything and everyone is God. Since God has “the highest right to everything,” and everyone is a manifestation of God, then “each individual has the highest right to everything it can do.””
Hegel indeed built (partly) upon Spinoza, seeing his dialectical scheme as the perfect “synthesis” between Spinozist monism and Kantian dualism. And he indeed forms the strongest connection between Spinoza and Marx, the two greatest Jewish subversives in history (after the Enlightenment Spinozists had managed to subvert God in the minds of European intelligentsia, it was so much easier for the Marxists to subvert earthly society).
This is how conservative Christians like the Scottish barrister Thomas Carlyle (the cousin of more famous Thomas Carlyle) saw it in the 1840s, when the radical “Young Hegelian” philosophical scene in Germany was bubbling over, and soon about to give birth to Marxism:
https://books.google.fi/books?id=9PViAAAAcAAJ&hl=fi&pg=PA68#v=onepage&q&f=false
“Kant is wholly out of date: Hegel, the perfecter of Spinoza, is in the ascendent. His doctrine is a mighty stride of devilry in advance. It is the first German system that promises to work; for it is a philosophy which tallies with principles in the breasts of all classes. But its work will be one of ruin; for the principles which it evokes are those of Antichrist. Its advocates are of various shades—half, whole, and ultra; and there are many who, in spite of its infection, preserve or have recovered a measure of faith and truth, although a far smaller one than they imagine. But in itself, it is unmixed Anthropotheism, not the exaltation of a creature to the place of God, but the assertion that a creature is the sole and essential God. It is the nearest approach yet made to the preparation of Christendom for receiving the Man of Sin.”
The Christian poet Sir Richard Blackmore satirized Spinozism (that was quickly spreading amongst the growing English freethinking demi-monde) in this manner in the early 18th century:
https://archive.org/details/poeticalworkscon00blacuoft/page/96/mode/2up?view=theater
“Sages, no longer Egypt’s sons despise,
For their cheap God, and savoury deities!
No more their coarse divinities revile!
To leeks, to onions, to the crocodile,
You might your humble adorations pay,
Were you not Gods yourselves, as well as they.”
That’s excellent Viisaus!
Jonathan Israel, the Jewish academic and historian of the Enlightenment, and a great admirer of Spinoza, describes the revolutionary implications of his philosophy thus – these were the intellectual birthpangs of the Radical Enlightenment movement (which Israel strongly differentiates from the “Moderate Enlightenment,” which sought some kind of friendly compromise with religion and other traditional customs):
https://www.google.fi/books/edition/Spinoza_Life_and_Legacy/4snKEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA441&printsec=frontcover
“Since “freedom” in Spinoza’s Ethics signifies not lack of constraint, but possessing “power,” God is also the only omnipotent being. It is from God’s infinite power and nature alone that things flow which means that nothing can exist outside God, signifying that there is no Devil, no demons, no magic, no heaven or hell, no afterlife and no divine authority interpreted by men separate from nature, only the unchanging, unalterable laws of nature, that is God’s omnipotence which “has been actual from eternity and will remain the same actuality to eternity,”7 beyond which nothing exists and nothing is exempt. Only those who do grasp that “God’s intellect, will and power are one and the same,” are in position to understand “true religion” which is essentially pursuit of the moral and social good of men, some fragments of which, fortunately, are patchily present in (albeit much of the time are also damagingly absent from) every earthly church and religious stream, whether Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or another, equally and without distinction. A further consequence of Spinoza’s proof of God’s existence is that nothing exists that is more sacred than other things and no one exists who is closer to God than anyone else, rendering all religious ceremonies and sacraments without exception total human fictions, sometimes useful in a limited way, but frequently not. One readily sees how and why Spinoza’s position looked “atheistic” and “blasphemous” according to the notions of early modern times (and the nineteenth century), but was not at all “atheistic” according to Spinoza himself and his followers.”
Israel lets us know how the 18th century Spinozist philosophy led almost “naturally,” or automatically, into nihilistically “egalitarian,” or levelling, state of mind, where every thing is equally meaningful, or meaningless:
https://books.google.fi/books?id=Mau9wgEACAAJ&lpg=PP1&hl=fi&pg=PA231#v=onepage&q&f=false
“One tract stressing the huge impact of “philosophy” on Denmark, En Grønlaenders Beskrivelse over Kiøbenhavn [1771] [A Greenlander’s Description of Copenhagen], is strikingly mild in condemning the unbelievers in Copenhagen who had “torn themselves from and denied all religion,” convinced the world has existed as it is since all eternity. These, explains this anonymous text, adopt as their hero a certain Dutch Jew called Spinoza who, in a thick, tedious book of metaphysical Latin, attempts to “prove all of nature is only one substance and that all Nature’s parts are only just so many modifications of it, so that all that one sees in the whole of nature, is equally as divine, as royal, as grand, so that the writer and his pen are equally important, both just modifications of nature’s whole.”83”