Machen, The Postmillennialist — Part II

“But this is not the first period of decadence through which the world has passed, as it is not the first period of desperate conflict in the Church. God still rules, and in the midst of darkness there will come in His good time the shining of a clearer light. There will come a great revival of the Christian religion; and with it will come, we believe a revival of true learning: The new Reformation for which we long for and pray may well be accompanied by a new Renaissance.”

J. Gresham Machen
The Modern Use of the Bible
Princeton Theological Review, 23 (1925), p. 81

Machen would have never countenanced the current militant amillennialism as found in R2K. Any representation of Machen that he was no culture warrior — that he was a man uninterested in the Transformation of age — is just idiocy on stilts.

Tertullian & Race

Interestingly, Clemens of Alexandia identified three religious groups within man, Jews, Greeks and Christians, from where Christians became known in some pagan circles as the “third race” (tertium genus). Tertullian writes something fascinating in this regard:

“We are indeed said to be the “third race” of men. What, a dog-faced race? Or broadly shadow-footed? Or some subterranean Antipodes? If you attach any meaning to these names, pray tell us what are the first and the second race, that so we may know something of this “third.” … Granted, then, that the Phrygians were the earliest race, it does not follow that the Christians are the third. For how many other nations come regularly after the Phrygians? Take care, however, lest those whom you call the third race should obtain the first rank, since there is no nation indeed which is not Christian. Whatever nation, therefore, was the first, is nevertheless Christian now. It is ridiculous folly which makes you say we are the latest race, and then specifically call us the third. But it is in respect of our religion, not of our nation, that we are supposed to be the third; the series being the Romans, the Jews, and the Christians after them. Where, then, are the Greeks? or if they are reckoned amongst the Romans in regard to their superstition (since it was from Greece that Rome borrowed even her gods), where at least are the Egyptians, since these have, so far as I know, a mysterious religion peculiar to themselves?” (Ad Nationes 1.1.8 )

It is clear that Tertullian regards race as something distinct from religion, yet other and narrower than humanity. This is contra the idea that we find so prevalent in our Cultural Marxist age and Church that race is a “social construct” or that there is only “one race — The human race”. Also Tertullian sees race and nationhood as something physical rather than spiritual, thus he mentions the corporeal appellations like “dog-faced,” and “shadow-footed” to describe different races. Tertullian also clearly connects the concepts of race and nationhood contra the alienist idea of propositional nationhood.

Implicit in Tertullian’s words is the idea that all nations of men can be Christian but the fact that all nations can be Christian (and are Christian according to Tertullian) does not disprove that the nations cease being nations or that they are now all the same nation. To insist that the Christian is a race, Tertullian seems to be telling us is to slip into Gnostic categories. Christians are not a race but a religion and when races convert to Christianity, as they all will someday do, this will not negate the races or nations they already belong to. It will simply cause those races and nations to glorify God as one body with many parts glorifies God.

Hat Tip Hubert Languet for the quote.

Why We Have The Ministers We Have

“If you tell young men that entry into the ministry is based on passing written exams in institutions of higher education, they will spend most of their time and effort mastering the techniques necessary for passing the exams. The churches must select candidates from a limited supply of survivors. Problem: there is no evidence showing that passing written exams prepares men to pastor churches. There is considerable evidence based on actual Church growth rates that these skills are inversely related: the greater the skill in passing formal exams, the less the skill in pastoring. Additionally, there is a positive correlation between the ability to pass written exams and political liberalism. As Ladd and Ferree concluded in 1982, based on a detailed survey of the opinions of 1,112 members of American seminary faculties, “Those who teach in schools of religion and theology resemble fairly closely a larger community of academic humanists of which they are a part.” Of those responding, 50 percent or more described themselves as politically liberal. The Episcopalians were the highest: 78 percent. Then came Methodists (69 percent) and Presbyterians (63 percent). The only faculties below 50 percent were Southern Baptists (32 percent), other Baptists (17 percent), and Pentecostals (7 percent). Those students who seek access to a seminary education must first prove themselves skilled at passing collegiate exams designed and imposed by politically correct liberals, atheists, feminists, and New Age mystics on the college campus…. The Church’s preliminary screening process is placed in the hands of the Church’s mortal enemies. This has been going on for eight centuries. You get what you pay for, and hierarchical churches pay ministerial candidates for passing academic exams. The operational rule is: “Those who baptize infants have been academically certified by liberals.” … The weak point in churches that baptize infants is their intellectual pride.”

Gary North
Crossed Fingers — pp. 766-767

A few more observations,

1.) Besides the observations offered by Dr. North above we have to contend that Educational programming is liberal by its very dynamic. What higher education is really a model of is bureaucracy and bureaucracy is inherently liberal since it is committed to top town authority and working within the system. When that system is functioning as Humanist then the bureaucracy’s job is in support of the beast. In bureaucratic systems students learn never to challenge the system, never to question authority, and never to work outside the bureaucratically assigned boundaries. That which educational bureaucracies overwhelmingly produce is men and women who look like the liberal bureaucracy where they attended. Bureaucracy always reproduces itself.

2.) Even thinking about the whole “college experience” we conclude that it is Liberal. We take children out of the context of that which is familiar (Family life) and place them in the context of that which is strange and unnatural away from family. Why do we do that? Is it because we want to get the children away from non liberal influences so that they can be properly propagandized with the Liberal Humanist agenda? Further, in the big University settings we pack and stack them in co-ed Bacchanalian centers called dormitories so that those young adults who are coming from more conservative homes can be compromised with is licentiate humanist ethic and morality.

3.) Of course the implication of all this is that at a very fundamental level the guy you’re listening to on Sunday Morning is likely Liberal. Oh, naturally, most ministers are not going to lead with their chin on the matter, and it may only come up in putatively conservative churches in very subtle ways. But if Dr. North is correct in the above quote then your minister is likely Humanist and the reason you don’t see that is because you are also.

This also applies to the Seminary teacher as well. The reason our ministers are humanist / liberal, whether of the R2K type, the FV type or the Cultural Marxist, or the Statist type is because they learned it from their Seminary professors.

Naturally, like all things, exceptions exist. But they are far more rare then most people believe. A few students happen upon a College or Master’s program where some key Professor managed to slip through the Humanist net himself and so is able to mentor and teach a young student in a Biblical direction. Alternately, God still awakens men and women to see through the parlor game that Humanist Higher Education is.

The Christian Church member needs to realize that higher education is not their friend and that because ministers are produced by the humanist educational system that most Churches are not their friends either.

Could this be one reason why we were told to “not conform to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind?”

Machen, the Postmillennialist

“At present we are inarticulate; we know the riches of the gospel; we wonder at those who have it already at hand and yet are content instead with the weak and beggarly elements. When will God raise us the man of His choice to give His message powerfully to the world? We cannot say. But the truth is not dead, and God has not deserted His Church. Behind all the darkness and perplexity of the present time we can discern, on the basis of the promises of God, the dawn of a better day. There may come a time, sooner than we can tell, when again we cry in the Church, as every redeemed soul cries even now: ‘The old things are passed away; behold they are become new.”

J. Gresham Machen
God Transcendent, pg. 51

It is funny how R2K claims Machen for its own and yet Machen’s postmillennialism would have found him aghast at the R2K fighting as hard for their pessimism as he was fighting for the PCUSA. It was Machen’s postmillennial optimism that kept him in the fight when all was dark about him. It seems, at times, the only optimism and hope that the R2K advocates have is the optimism and hope that they will defeat the optimism and hope of the postmillennialists and the optimistic amillennialists.