A Response to “As the Fighting Moderates Mount the Lone Bulwark,”

In his article; “As the Fighting Moderates Mount the Lone Bulwark,” Doug Wilson has a gif of the character played by Christopher Plummer in the “Sound of Music” where Plummer’s character rips in half a Nazi flag.

Score one for Captain Von Trapp.

However, the usage of this gif by Doug to adorn his article indicates that Doug really does think that he is standing on his lone bulwark fighting Nazis. In brief, everybody who doesn’t agree with Doug’s views of natural affections, Kin, race, or tribe is a Naziwhowantstokill6millionJews.

But it’s just not so and no matter how hard Doug tries to paint the Samuel Francis and Joseph Sobran battalions in his movement as Nazis it is clear by now that it is not going to work.

Doug’s history is as bad, in places, as his sociology. For example here;

“When Hitler double-crossed the Soviets, invading Russia,”

Historical context requires us to realize that it was a race between the Communists and the Nazis as to who was first going to double cross whom. Recent evidence has been put forth in books like “Icebreaker” that Hitler double-crossed the Communists before the Communists double-crossed him. It was a race to see who would double cross whom first. Read, in that light it hardly seems like double crossing.

Next, in the category of terrible history, Doug offers;

So while Churchill was certainly a great man, we still have to say that, great man or not, history still has a way of unfolding and/or unraveling on you.”
Doug Wilson
As the Fighting Moderates Mount the Lone Bulwark

Blog Mablog

Anybody who suggests that Winston Church was a great man is clueless about WW II history. Was Churchill a great man as a result of his Gallipoli campaign? Was he a great man in conjunction with his work to make sure passenger liners carrying war ordinance were torpedoed by German U-Boats? Was he a great man because of the copious amounts of alcohol he consumed during critical times of decision during war? Was he a great man because of his acquiescence at Teheran and Yalta to the Soviets taking over Eastern Europe? Was he a great man because of the Quebec conference? Was he a great man because he was all in on the Morgenthau plan to murder countless German civilians after the war? Was he a great man because of his demand for the firebombing in German cities or even just the routine bombing of civilian centers? (Churchill was doing this to Germany long before Germany responded in kind against England.) Was Churchill great when he stood on the roof defying the German bombers to bomb him knowing all the time because of intelligence reports that the German Bombers were not going to come near his location? Was Churchill a great man for how he starved out India? Was he a great man for conspiring with FDR to get us into a war we had no business being involved? Was Winston Churchill great because his leadership in both World Wars resulted in the end of the British Empire and the Communist take over of half of Europe?

You see… Doug Wilson is not a wise man. He calls one of the greatest villains of the 20th century a great man. Someone should tell Doug that it is possible to think Hitler a villain while at the same time thinking that Churchill was a villain as well.

So, we see that not only is Doug’s sociology dreadful but his 20th century history is dreadful as well. As a result, he puts the wrong chaps in the dock.

Now, we should say here that Doug’s concern that there may be people who are crypto-Nazis among white Christians in America is understandable but having been around and knowing a good number of Kinists it is not the Kinists who want to “Heil” them some “Hitler.” How does Doug figure that the Filipino Kinists I know, or the Hispanic Kinists I know, or the Black Kinists I know, or the sub-continent Indian Kinists I know are going to look going around going all “sieg-heil all the time?” As I have said countless times it is just ridiculous to suggest that Kinism = Nazism. But that is what Doug does and what Doug continues to do in this most recent piece.

Doug seems to take some exception to Dr. Stephen Wolfe’s recent tweet stating;

“White evangelicals are the lone bulwark standing between us and the disaster of moral insanity.”

He admits that it is a true statement but that whiteness has nothing to do with the observation. He notes that it is equally true that;

“Zionist dispensationalists are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America.” If we were to offer this up as a demographic observation, it makes the same kind of sense as does the white evangelical version because, in North America, white evangelicals really are overwhelmingly Zionist dispensationalists.

Perhaps, but it is also true that Zionist dispensationalists are overwhelming white people and so Stephen Wolfe’s statement remains true. As a whole we could say that “White evangelicals, many, but not all of whom are Zionist Dispies, are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America.” However, the one constant between these two groups (White Evangelicals in America and Zionist Dispensationalists in America) is that they tend to be overwhelmingly white.  All Doug has proven here is that some of those white people who are part of the Bulwark against moral insanity in America are eschatologically insane when it comes to thinking that modern Khazars in the Middle East have anything to do with the return of Jesus. However, that point does not negate Stephen Wolfe’s point that white Evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America.

Now, we would reassure Doug here that we are convinced that the reason that White Evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America is primarily because White Evangelicals are Christian. However, those White Christians remain White, as much as that seems to bug Doug.

Now, the question arises; “If White Evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America, where do we find the corps of moral insanity arising in the West against which White Evangelicals have to serve as the lone bulwark?”

However, in answering this question Doug would vigorously protest because a certain bone would get stuck sideways in his throat could he be dispassionate about the answer.

Doug next manages to call many of those who oppose his Churchillian vision of reality of being mangy dogs. In this context the Pope of Moscow writes,

“Now I have been maintaining for a long time that any conservative Christian minister who is not routinely accused of racism and misogyny is a minister who is not doing his job. I have also maintained that if the charges are in any way true, as determined by the scales of the Temple, he is also not doing his job. Got that? Faithful Christians are slandered as racists and misogynists, and secondly, the slander is in fact a slander.”

1.) Yes, but should faithful conservative Christiana (be they ministers or otherwise) be slandered by Doug as being dogs (mangy or otherwise) or as being “racists” or as being “Kinists” with the innuendo being that Kinism = racism? Et Tu Doug?

2.) I’m all for going by the scales of the Temple as long as Doug Wilson isn’t the one operating the scales while the weighing is going on. Got to watch that thumb on the scales routine.

3.) I know many Kinists and I have to tell you I am dancing with rage over the constant hinting by Doug that this group of men I know are racists, Anti-Semites, or misogynists. Now, I suppose there may be Kinist men I don’t know who are secretly racist (whatever that might mean), Anti-Semites, and/or misogynist but if those men exist they are buried pretty deep. I mean, after all, I have been called “The King of the Kinists.” You would think I would know my subjects. (I say, I say, I say, that’s a joke Son.)

To put a fine point on this matter. I don’t know all the men out in Pella, Iowa but I know some of them and I am hear to tell you those men are racists the way that Aunt Jemima syrup is a brand of Kaopectate. It is just ridiculous the way that Pella CREC church — modeling so well as it does the idea of a Christ centered community of faith — should have to put up with the slings, arrows, and denunciations coming from Moscow and the CREC Pope.

In this context Doug writes,

I want to fight for the truth in such a way as to make people accuse me of being a bigot. I also want to fight in such a way as to make it manifestly clear to all the sensible observers that I am not a bigot.

And here we find irony because I would 100% agree with that sentiment and yet Doug tries to cleanse himself of the bigot accusation by pointing his gnarly finger at ethno-nationalists/Kinists and in good Commie fashion denounces them as … “Bigots,” “Racists,” and “Anti-Semites.” I know… I have come under Doug’s examination myself in the past. So, to be clear here, I am accusing Doug of cleansing himself of the accusation of bigot by putting other men in the dock and falsely charging them with being a bigot. In such a way Doug can say to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal neo-con crowd, “See, I’m not a bigot like these filthy bigots.” That kind of behavior can tend to make people resent you.

Doug includes in his irrational diatribe,

“that doesn’t keep the situation in Pella from being a real pastoral mess.”

I know some of the men in that Pella Church. I know them as good men. I also know what it means to be a Pastor and I can guarantee you that when the Pope of the denomination one is attached to says things like the sentence above it makes your job as Pastor a giant 5 alarm migraine headache. I don’t know Rev. Michael Shover of Pella CREC. I have never talked to him. But, I can still sympathize with the headache that Doug has created for him in Doug’s authorial petulance.

Doug then talks about the stupid proposed Memorials that the CREC is fixing to adopt. Personally, I applaud those Memorials because they are going to serve to make the CREC irrelevant in the fight that is ahead for the survival of Christendom in America. Really, what Doug is trying to build now is a soft-multicultural ecclesiastical reality. The CREC, when it comes to multiculturalism, metaphorically speaking, objects to the rock group “Black Sabbath,” but they are perfectly fine with Ozzy Osbourne.

Doug finishes his article with this rhetorical flourish;

The edgy brethren, let us call them, think that they are the real threat to the regime. They believe that they are the lone bulwark. They have seen through all of the lies. They took one of the red pills, and then six of them, and then they emptied the bottle. They believe that years ago the Moscow gang started down the right road with our little putt-putt reformation, but they have come into the brutal truth. They, and they alone, have faced up to the stark realities.

Moscow, with its worship services, and psalms, and feasts, and wedding ceremonies, and conferences, and publishing, and Canon plussing, and small business start-ups, and education work, and so on and furthermore, is simply LARPing. They, by way of contrast, know the truth about the Jews and the start of the Second World War.

1.) Clearly, they have seen through the WW II lies that Doug has embraced. They are more likely to read David Irving or Patrick J. Buchanan while Doug is reading the court historians on the subject.

2.) Praise God there are people left who are emptying the red-pill bottle while swallowing rapidly. It is simply the case that seeing through all the lies and smog of this culture requires a hefty consumption of red-pills. Would that Doug tried swallowing a few more.

3.) Count me as one of those who believes that Moscow started something good but then got sidelined by bad theology (Federal Vision), bad history, bad sociology, and bad ecclesiology (Ecclesiocentrism). I am glad that a corrective to their corrective arrived on the scene. Doug is not the final word on Ecclesia semper reformanda est. Doug refuses himself to face historical stark realities. Shrug … God will raise up someone else who isn’t fearful of these stark realities.

4.) Doug finishes with what, in my opinion, looks to be insecurity. He cites the great might of his Empire and implies… “how dare you suggest that I could possibly be wrong?”

We tip the cap to all that Doug has accomplished and praise God for that work. However, Doug is not the end of the road. There is more road ahead and if Doug does not want to travel it, some of the men of Pella and others like them will travel further down the road.

 

 

McAtee Analyzes Stephen Wolfe Using Theological Categories

Col. 1:16 For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:

17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

Romans 11:36 For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things…

“We think that all faithful thinking has to be theological. But most things, to truly understand them, require non-theological analysis. That’s not to say that they are outside God but that the topics of the theological discipline cannot adequately explain/analyze them.”

Dr. Stephen Wolfe

“An Orthodox Jewish friend of mine spotted it immediately in a comment he made to me soon after seeing the movie (Gibson’s ‘The Passion of Christ’) himself and dismissing the charges of antisemitism as preposterous. ‘It’s all a put on, isn’t it?’ he remarked. ‘None of the guys claiming it’s antisemitic really believes that. It’s really just a question of power. That’s all.’

It is indeed a question of power because entirely apart from the theological, historical, and aesthetic merits of the Gibson film is the question of controlling the public culture, the way of life that defines American society and establishes public standards by which behavior, discussion, and thought are regulated. You probably do not have to accept Christopher Dawson’s view that ‘a living religion always aspires to be the center round which the whole culture revolves’ to grasp that religion is invariably a powerful force in defining a culture and that it is no coincidence that the words cult and culture both derive from the Latin cultus. The religion a society accepts—publicly, regardless of what its members privately believe—is what defines its morals and its patterns of what is and is not legitimate.

The angry controversy about (the movie) ‘The Passion’ is about which cultus will define American culture, and the conflict over the movie is a struggle for cultural power, for what Antonio Gramsci called  ‘cultural hegemony.’ Rabbi Jacob Neusner has remarked that Auschwitz has replaced Sinai in the religious sensibilities of many modern secularized Jews, and the bitter and hysterical war against Mel Gibson represents a further attempted displacement—that Auschwitz replace Calvary, that Christianity itself as Americans understand and accept it be defined and regulated by contemporary Jewish standards and those cultural hegemons who enforce them.”

Samuel T. Francis

I run these these three quotes, from Scripture, Wolfe, and Francis, together in order to demonstrate how mind bogglingly jejune Wolfe is to insist. “that to understand most things requires non-theological analysis”, by providing a Samuel Francis quote regarding a film. Francis’ quote, using theological analysis gets to the center of the meaning of Mel Gibson’s film as well as why it was so vehemently resisted.

Secondly, contra Wolfe and R2K, with their agreement on the Natural Law model of the world, there is no understanding of any reality apart from the usage of theological analysis and categories. I promise you any analysis that Wolfe does on anything is riven with theological assumptions and a-prioris. The theological assumption that is incipient in Wolfe’s quote above is that God is not needed in order to understand many aspects of reality. Wolfe is presuming that man can understand many aspects of reality in the context of completely discountenancing the God of the Bible. Autonomous man, can, starting only from his own reality, and as the measure of whatever he is analyzing, come to the truth of whatever he is analyzing.  You cannot understand the depth of the depravity of Wolfe’s quote without using theological categories to analyze his and its depravity.

Thirdly, what is odd about Wolfe’s quote when compared with the Francis quote is that Francis, who was not a Christian at the time he wrote this piece from which the quote comes, was not a Christian while Wolfe professes Christ. Here we have a case where the children of darkness are wiser than the children of the light.

I do accept Dawson’s view on religion and it is only Wolfe’s religion that could force him to not accept Dawson’s view on religion that religion/theology is the center around which all culture orbits. If we don’t do analysis on anything via theological categories then all that is left is doing analysis via humanistic categories, which, ironically enough, ends up being its own theological analysis.

Wolfe went on to describe anybody who disagrees with his quote above as doing the worst of worldview thinking. Keep in mind that Natural Law theory is inimically hostile to worldview thinking. It is only “natural” that a Natural law aficionado like Wolfe would say such a thing.

Dawson is correct. Religion/theology is the center around which all revolves and since that is the center than all is an expression of the religion/theology around which it revolves.

All the denials and vituperations of the Stephen Wolfes and the R. Scott Clarks of the world, who do not agree that everything must be analyzed using theological categories, no matter what else they might disagree on, will not change that.

Van Til & McAtee on Linguistic Deception

“Modernists will usually betray pretty clearly that they use Christian terminology before a pagan background . . . Modernism is the use of Christian terms for the purpose of conveying pagan thought . . . All the words that we daily use and give a Christian meaning must now receive a pagan meaning

Cornelius Van Til
“What Do You Mean?” The Banner, Vol. 67

This is called linguistic deception and we are seeing it all the time now. Linguistic deception treats words like eggs which can be cracked open and emptied of their content and then filled with new content. What these people do is they empty words used by Christians that have traditional meanings and then fill them with other meaning.

We see this w/ R2K for example. All R2K fanboys will affirm that Jesus is Lord, but eventually one learns that the word “Lord” for R2K fanboys means “Lord,” except for where Jesus is only “kind of Lord in a spiritual sense.”

We see this w/ Federal Vision types. They assert “Justification by faith alone,” and then they teach that there are two justifications, initial and final, and not all who are initially justified are finally justified. What’s the difference between the those who are initially justified and also finally justified and those who are who initially justified but not also finally justified? Well, what else can the difference be but the contributory dynamic of our works to that final justification?

We see this in Gary DeMar’s full Preterism. They recite the Apostles Creed but when they get to the part about Jesus returning again for the quick and the dead, suddenly that is reinterpreted to mean “returning for the persons of the quick and the dead but not their corporeal and now glorified bodies.”

Machen complained about this linguistic deception in his “Christianity and Liberalism,” continuously. He complained that Modernists (Liberals) where cracking open the words, emptying out the meaning, and then filling the words with new meaning, while still insisting that they were “Christian,” when in point of fact they were liars, just as the R2K chaps, the FV chaps and the Full Preterist chaps are liars when they do the very same thing.

OK… let me soften that a wee bit. At least some of them are epistemologically self conscious about their lying while the rest who are doing the same may not be epistemologically self conscious about what they are doing but instead are merely useful idiots.

Sundry Observations on the French Revolution

I.)”By the time I got through with my research and I was ready to write this book I felt anyone who understands the French Revolution will understand all left-wing revolutions. And anyone who doesn’t understand the French Revolution will… is going to be doomed to be victimized by a left-wing revolution.”

 

Otto Scott

Lecture — French Revolution and Its Influences

Pocket College

This quote teaches us that Clergy who are unfamiliar with the French Revolution should get out of the pulpit until they familiarize themselves with the French Revolution because what is happening in the West is that Christianity is being reinterpreted through the grid of the French Revolution and the ignorant Clergy is complicit because they don’t know better, and in not knowing better they don’t understand the urgency of the times to bring God’s Word to bear. God’s Word teaches that revolution begins in the desire to revolt against God’s authority. Because of this Scripture is anti-Revolutionary.

II.) Robespierre was the head of the “Committee of Public Safety.” This is a perfect example of Statist euphemisms. “The Committee of Public Safety?”

LOL — This Committee of Public safety was that Statist agency that was responsible for the flow of public blood in the streets compliments of Madame La Guillotine.

This is the way humanist Government always works. Whatever title they put on something you can be damn sure that something will be doing just the exact opposite of whatever title they stick on it.

Obama Healthcare anyone?

III.) “What Marx was to the Russian Revolution of 1917, Rousseau was to the French Revolution of the 1790’s. Like Marx, he was a parasite who never worked an honest day in his life. He was an expert at leeching off his aristocratic buddies, and wrote a series of treatises which blamed the evils of property and civilisation for the corruption of man. He wrote these while living in the lap of luxury with the aristocratic women he seduced.”

Moses Apostaticus

 

IV.) The cry of the French Revolution was Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

It was all a lie.

As long as Equality is pursued neither Liberty nor Fraternity is possible. Equality negates Liberty because Liberty creates unequal stations, accentuates different abilities, and creates classes as some men use Liberty to excel while other men use Liberty to stagnate. Equality negates Fraternity because Equality breeds envy against those who have used Liberty to excel and envy always destroys Fraternity.

You can have Equality or you can have Liberty and Fraternity but you can not have all three together and the choosing of equality is the choosing of a mechanism, usually the state, as the means my which equality will be monitored and forced.

The Miserable State of the Clergy Seen in the Words of Tim Keller

“I’d rather be in a democracy than a state in which the government is officially Christian. Instead of trying to take power, I think what Christians ought to be doing is trying to renew their churches.”

-Tim Keller, Wall Street Journal
02 September 2022

Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?
 Henry II of England 
 Referring to Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170 

1.) Understand what Keller has said here. He has said that he would rather be under a government that is non Christian than under a government that is officially Christian. Tim would rather have his magistrates be Christ haters than have magistrates who are in submission to Christ.

2.) Tim talks about how Christians shouldn’t “try to take power.” The question is “take power from whom?” Presumably, in Tim’s world Christians shouldn’t try to take power from non Christians and should be happy to be ruled by Christ-haters.  Has Rev. Keller ever considered that all power is derived from God, hence, godly men must pursue power  in order to honor God using power for righteous and godly ends — something that the Christ-hater can not do if he is consistent with his Christ hating worldview?

3.) You know Tim, it is possible to both try and renew our Churches and in godly ways seek to take power. The right honorable Dr. Rev. Tim Keller posits a false dichotomy when he suggest that Christians have a binary choice wherein they can either take power or they can renew their churches but they can’t do both. Has Tim ever considered that one piece of evidence that Churches are being renewed is that they seek to exercise godly dominion over the state apparatus?