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.

The FEDS Pursuit of Divinity

Proof that the FEDS desire to be as God

1.) Passed the FISA act thus reaching for omnipresence.

2.) Womb to the tomb care thus reaching for total providence.

3.) Knows all your correspondence & purchases thus reaching for omniscience.

4.) Bureaucracy that can’t be fired thus reaching for immutability.

5.) Desire to control movement of citizens and present denial of freedom of association thus reaching for omnipotence.

6.) Embrace of anarcho-tyranny thus reaching to own the wrath of God.

7.) Embrace of all different peoples (illegal immigration) as under their umbrella thus reaching for the Unity of the Godhead since the FEDS are the expression of all peoples.

From the Mailbag; Rachel Challenges Pastor Bret On His Hot Take On Carlson Interviewing Wilson

Rachel J. Hill writes,

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/tucker-talks-to-doug-wilson

If the link above works, it will take you to a direct link to the full interview on Spotify. I understand you were reacting to the short trailer video but I would be curious to know if any of your critiques change after hearing the entire thing.

I personally completely agree with you on the ethnic nationalism issue. But it’s a moot point because of the way America is already compromised of so many different kinds of ethnic groups. Short of kicking people out, there’s no way you’re going to narrow the gene pool. Not only that, but the very idea of narrowing the gene pool as a proposition to achieve national unity is absurd because sinful nature still exists in every ethnicity. That’s why I am not opposed to the nationalism Wilson defined, when contrasted with the parallel options of tribalism or globalism.

I understand that there are people who only follow Wilson because of his snark and sarcastic language. He’s an “edgy” Christian who draws people who are tired of the weak ecclesiastical response to sensitive cultural issues. But as of yet, I have not found any of his videos on his blog to be contrary to the Gospel. Rather, they’re some of the most intentionally laid out guides to application for Christian living that come across.

Bret Responds,

Hello Rachel

You’ll not be surprised to find me disagreeing with you once again. I’ll respond to you point by point.

1.) I’ll try to view the whole interview you have linked.

2.) Not a moot point. Look up Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback.”

3.) Narrowing the gene pool is no more absurd than expanding the gene pool. Have you ever heard of Rudyard Kipling? Kipling makes my point for me on the advantages of a narrower gene pool. Sinful nature indeed exist in every ethnicity but that sinful nature in the way it expresses itself is going to be unique and distinct in every ethnicity. This is why Kipling could write;

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk–
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wanted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control–
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father’s belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf–
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children’s teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

4.) Wilson’s propositional nationalism is NOT nationalism. Wilson is NOT a Nationalist. He is for Empire. Now it may be a domestic Empire but it is still Empire. If you read the book “Bowling Alone,” you might understand the problem better.

5.) I don’t find Wilson edgy anymore. There was a time I used to but now the man is just off the Christian Nationalist reservation with his propositional nationhood, love for lab grown meat. dalliance with Federal Vision, and warfare against those who are for ethno-nationalism. (OH, and lets not forget his advocacy for a paedo to marry a virtuous young woman as if marriage could fix sexual perversity.) Wilson is merely trying to revive the classical liberal world and life view but he will fair here. That world and life view is never coming back. Too many different moving pieces in religion and ethnicity for that to ever work again.

6.) In terms of Christian living… I will concede that Doug has been helpful with some of those issues, but I prefer sticking with the original (i.e. –Rushdoony) as opposed to going for someone who has said he was trying to be “Rushdoony 0.5.” I’m not a big pale ale fan.

Thanks for the conversation Rachel. Tell Doug I said “Hey.”

Pointing Out The Errors of Leithart On Nationalism

“Conservatives often present the nation as a throwback to pre-modern forms of political order, a restoration of natural, organic bonds in place of anemic cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism or the purely functional relations of the market. Nationalism promotes Gemeinschaft against the prevailing Gesellschaft. While nations existed in the pre-modern world, national-ism is arguably a product of post-Enlightenment political thought.”

Peter Leithart
On The “Nation” of Christian Nationalism
First Things
President of the Heretical “Theopolis Institute”Don’t miss the word “arguably” in the quote above. It is our clue that Leithart knows that this point is traversing thin ice. The whole point is arguable because long before “post-enlightenment” one finds OT Israel practicing a unmistakable Nationalism. Strangers couldn’t join the worship cult in Israel for three, or 10 generations, while some strangers never were to be welcomed in. Boundaries for each tribe belonging to the nation were strictly set. The genealogies of the OT demonstrate that Israel was very specific about marrying within the lineage lines of the nation. This all sounds like Nationalism to me. To suggest that Israel in the OT didn’t practice nationalism is just insane, and thus so is Leithart’s “arguable” statement.Dan Brannan offers that Leithart’s error is magnificent;

“The idea that nations never had a concept of sustaining themselves prior to the Enlightenment isn’t just wrong, but precisely the opposite of the case. It was the Enlightenment which proposed the abnegation of both local provinces and nations as a great good. Leithart is a buffoon.”

Despite these observations some will still argue, that “of course, Leithart does have a point. The modern nation state is a post French Revolution phenomenon. Lincoln ushered it in here, unfortunately.”

In response to that line of reasoning we note;

1.) This is a severe misreading of history as one could just as easily argue that the modern nation state arose with the Reformation but that was 275 years prior to the French Revolution and of course was being driven by a completely different set of ideas then those ideas which drove the French Revolution.

2.) Lincoln ushered in a Consolidated Nation State here but that doesn’t mean that Americans before Lincoln didn’t have a sense of unity in their diversity, thus having a kind of Nationalism.

We see Nationalism prior to the Enlightenment in the works of Wm. Shakespeare (1564-1616) who was often referred to as “England’s national poet.” Sounds like English nationalism to me in Richard II;

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

And again later we hear Christian nationalism with a whiff of antisemitism from the Bard;

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,

Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,

Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,

As Darrell Dow notes;

“Peter Leithart looks to his right and sees a political movement and proceeds to pick it apart –to deconstruct. The goal is to suppress action. As such he is a Regime Theologian.”

This is not the first time that Leithart has inveighed against Nationalism. He seems to have no problem with Christianity being the faith of the land but the notion of Nationalism leaves him with a case of the hives. This is true of many in the CREC as well. These folks salute the flag of “propositional nationalism,” believing that as long as people from all over the globe, who are migrating here, regardless of their third world status, are “Christian” then everyone is going to get along just fine. This theory though, is just a Christian version of NWO Globalism. It is our current Evangelical/Reformed leadership’s impersonation of Saruman to the Sauron played by the globalists like Schwaab, Gates, and the World Economic forum types. In order for a nation to be cohesive it must have not only a common faith, but it also must have a common genetic heritage. Heterogeneity in either faith or genetic heritage is sure to find people living in the same geographic area at one another’s throats.

Christian Nationalism is the only way forward because the only option in lieu of that is Pagan Nationalism or Pagan Internationalism. There will be no such thing as Christian Internationalism until Christ returns in order to rule over the confederated Christian Nations that are each pledging fidelity to Him in their own nations.

Doug Wilson Interviewed by Tucker Carlson…. McAtee on Carlson’s Interview of Wilson

“Rutherford was a practical and pastoral theologian who could soar to great heights of glorious consolation. . . But Rutherford was also a bare-knuckle brawler who was clearly able to hold his own in the theological bar fight that was the seventeenth century. You are now holding in your hands the evidence of that.”

Introduction to Canon Press’ Lex Rex
Douglas Wilson

Start @ the 5:13 point;

Doug Wilson — “Our current rulers are very ambitious and they want to aspire to that height (to be God). We don’t want to resist them in the name of Christ because we don’t want to launch another series of interminable religious wars.”

Tucker Carlson — Right

Bret responds;

1.) Will someone please send Pope Doug a copy of Wm. Cavanaugh’s “The Myth of Religious violence?”

2.) We don’t want to resist them in the name of Christ because we don’t want to launch another series of interminable religious wars? So, Doug prefers the current interminable religious war where the God state is attacking us? Honestly, what does it matter if we are fighting an interminable religious war against Jews and Muslims as opposed to fighting an interminable religious war against the humanist cultural Marxist?

I hope I am misunderstanding this because this sounds like Doug is not a Christian Nationalist but rather is a squishy Theistic nationalist where the God of the people can be the god of the Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

DW continues — “OK, because we don’t want the Muslims fighting w/ the Jews fighting w/ the Christians fighting w/, you know, all of that. OK that’s the most reasonable question.

When they say, ‘which God?’ – And here is the answer to your question of ‘What is Christian Nationalism,’ the Christian Nationalist is the one who is willing to answer that question and speaking into the microphone, ‘The true God. The living God. The one who exists. Not the God on our money…'”

Bret responds,

1.) Notice how Doug here avoids answering the question of what is Christian Nationalism. The answer to “what is Christian nationalism” is NOT what Doug says because what Doug says could be embraced by Jews, Mormons, Muslims, and Christians alike. They all believe they are serving the “true God, the living God, the God who exists.” No, the answer to the question “What is Christian Nationalism” is, “The Christian Nationalist is one who insists that Jesus Christ alone is the King of all the nations and those who conspire against His Lordship, whether they be the cultural Marxist State, or the Mormon, or the Jew, or the Muslim must all bow to Jesus Christ in this nation lest the Son become angry and they perish in the way.”

Now, I’m willing to admit that I may be misunderstanding the Protestant Pope but if I am somebody is going to have to show me how I am.

In the last minute of the clip Doug gets it partially right erring when he notes that the Preachers we need aren’t going to change this nation by preaching law. This only half right and so totally wrong.

It is half right because it is true that grace must be preached but grace never makes any sense without the prior preaching of God’s law. So, by all means Christian preachers must preach grace, but only after law has done its proper work of conviction. As preaching to those who hate Christ the first use of the law is thundered so that grace may be seen to be as gracious as it is. The preaching of the law is the hot needle that pulls through the scarlet thread of grace. If law is not preached there will be no desire for grace.

Secondly Wilson is half right on this score when he suggests that the nation can only be changed from the bottom up and that a top down concurrence isn’t part of the equation here. This idea that Reformation only comes from the bottom up is a Baptist idea that suggest renewal is purely individual and voluntaristic. Certainly, a bottom up approach is needed as Wilson suggests when he talks about preachers preaching a hot gospel, however, pursuing a Christian nation is both bottom up and top down at the same time. This has been seen throughout history. Whether it is Alfred the Great pressing on his people the book of doom or whether it was Luther’s Elector Fredrick making way for the Reformation in the area he ruled or whether it was Lord Protector Cromwell pressing on the English a particular expression of Christianity. It was seen in the Missionary efforts where early Missionaries would commonly go to the Chieftain or the Medicine man to convert him knowing if he were converted the whole nation would be forced to convert as well. When Wilson suggests that renewal is purely individual and voluntaristic his original Baptist impulses show themselves. Those who are not Baptist will not be impressed.

Finally, Wilson is not a Christian Nationalist because he clearly holds to the view of propositional nationhood. One cannot be a Christian Nationalist in the classical sense unless one understands that a nation is comprised both of a shared belief system along with a overwhelmingly shared genetic inheritance. Certainly, a nation does not have to aim at perfect genetic homogeneity but a overwhelming majority if required if homogeneity and true nationhood is to be achieved. You know, like what we had here in the States until 1980 or so.

Would that Wilson was more like Samuel Rutherford than like Doug Wilson.

 

Joel Beeke On The Weakness Of The Puritans

Dr. Beeke loves the Puritans so much he named the Seminary he founded “Puritan Reformed Seminary.” He clearly is a man who believes he is a champion of all things Puritan. Yet, in this question and answer below we see how far Beeke is away from the core of the Puritan ethos and mindset. Beeke like so much of our “Conservative” churchmen today is infected with the modernist, “Enlightenment” post WW II Liberal consensus. This infection then shapes everything that a man believes even if all else he believes is perfectly orthodox. It is like running perfectly good sausage through a filter made of Carolina reaper peppers. No matter how good the sausage is, in and of itself, that Carolina reaper pepper is going to make the meat inedible.

“Q: Where do the Puritans speak least helpfully to the contemporary church?

A: Political Liberty and Equality. (1) The concepts of liberty and equality now dear to us in the Western world hadn’t yet matured during the Puritan era. (2) Civil powers had established the church for more than a thousand years. (3) Full liberty of conscience was untested, and the disestablishment of religion seemed foolhardy in the context of multiplying heresies and sects. (4) Sensitivity to racism and sexism simply didn’t exist in any developed form in the British and European mindset as it does today. (5) We’d argue, however, that the seeds of truth that would blossom and bear fruit in contemporary freedoms are found in Puritan theology.(6)

We need to read the Puritans realizing that, while the Reformation had transformed much of their thinking by the Scriptures, in some ways they were more like medieval Christians in their cultural viewpoint than modern Christians. (7) Yet even here they are helpful, since they enable us to step outside our modern cultural box.” (8)

(1a) Keep in mind that “Liberty and Equality” were two of the watchwords of the anti-Christ French Revolution. There may have been a reason why the Puritans were not interested in “Liberty and Equality” the way those have come to us in from the hand of modernism.

(1b) Political Liberty and Equality can never work in a multicultural reality. The only reason Political Liberty and Equality worked where it worked in the West is because where it worked you found people sharing a Christian world and life view. Where a Christian world and life view does not obtain Political Liberty and Equality only yields chaos as seen in the French Revolution where Political Liberty and Equality sought to guillotine all the Christians (Royalists) who did not believe in Liberty and Equality.

(2a) Political Liberty and Equality are dear to us in the Western World because we have reinterpreted our Christianity though the lens of the Liberal Enlightenment project. There is more of Robespierre than there is of Jesus Christ in Dr. Beeke’s post. All men are not created ontologically equal. Political Liberty for the Christ hater who works diligently to overthrow Christian expression in the public square is a violation of the 1st commandment.

(2b) A nation is destroyed when Political Equality is given to a third world illegal immigrant who knows nothing of culture, history, and religion of the Christian West. The pursuit of political equality has been the destruction of this once Christian nation as seen in giving the vote to women. Political Equality has made slaves of us all to the Federal Government.

(2c) Political Liberty has given the voice of the Muslim and other assorted Christ haters the same volume as the Christian who owns Christ as King over the nation. Thank God the Puritans avoided this claptrap.

(3) Civil Powers continue to establish the Church here in the US. The only difference is that the church the civil powers are establishing is the church of Humanism found in both public schools and all Churches who join Beeke praising Political Equality and Liberty. Political Equality and Liberty mean that King Jesus is not free to be the alone King.

(4a) Note here that Beeke praises the disestablishment of the Christian religion. The reason that this is noteworthy is that as it is impossible for a Government not to be beholden to some form of an established religion, what Beeke is telling us is that it was good when Christianity was disestablished in favor of some other non-Christian religion. Would Beeke really surrender the Established religion of Christianity during the Puritan era for the disestablishment of religion that is now characteristic of the West where Christianity is being overthrown root, twig, and branch?

(4b) So, we finally disestablish Christianity and what has eventually followed? What has eventually followed is multiplying heresies, sects and competing religion. Does Beeke really think that His avowed King Jesus is pleased with his support of that which undermines the authority of Christ?

(5a) Here Beeke, by appealing to the faults of the Puritans for not being sensitive to “racism” and “sexism,” is demonstrating that he is not a Puritan man but is a true blue modernist. “Racism” is a category popularized by the communist Trotsky in order to overthrow Christian culture that was resistant to Communist inroads. Sexism is a category that was inflated by the likes of Alexandra Kollontai, Margaret Sanger, Betty Friedan, and other Feminists of their ilk. It is hard not to see Beeke preening for the despisers of Christianity, seeking to demonstrate how Modernist the nouveau riche Puritans like Beeke can be.

(6) No Puritan, should he be able to come back from the dead, would not absolutely excoriate Beeke’s “Christian” support for Political Liberty and Equality. The Puritans are absolutely opposed to Beeke’s position and so Beeke claims that “the seeds of Political Liberty and Equality” are in the Puritans. That is utter fantasy talk.

(7) Praise God the Puritans were more like medieval Christendom than they were like Christ hating Enlightenment modernist post-War consensus. At least by reading the medieval Puritans I can escape the current insanity in which I am now living both in the broader culture and the broader “conservative” “Evangelical” “Church.”

(8) This last sentence if hilarious. There is Beeke living fondly in our “superior” modernist Enlightenment culture and yet he says we can get outside our cultural box by reading the Puritans but obviously only so as to critique the Puritans for not embracing the Political Liberty and Equality doctrines that have destroyed Christendom.