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.

Christianity As An Adjective

Dr. Thomas Shirrmacher, in the April, 1992 Chalcedon Report, called attention to the fact that the word religion came into use with the Renaissance, and that previously, the word used for differing faiths was law; the Christian Law, the Islamic Law, the Buddhist Law, and so on. A faith was either polytheistic or catholic; that is either limited in scope or universal. The term catholic properly belongs to the faith and only to a church if it insists that God’s Law—not the church—is universal in its jurisdiction. But since the Enlightenment, or about 1660, Christian catholicity has waned, especially since the French Revolution. Christianity has been replaced, or Christendom has been replaced by the concept of the West, that is Humanistic Statism.

R. J. Rushdoony
Lecture — Religious Earthquake I

All religions are law systems and all law systems are the servants of some religion. This explains why theocracy is an inescapable concept. All governments must enact laws and when they do enact laws they do so on the basis of religion since law is a statement of morality and morality a reflection of religion. This, obviously, means that all governments are the reflection of some religion. No form of government is religion free. All forms of government are as equally intensely religious. This is true when the government says it eschews all religion, or, to the contrary when it insists, that it accepts all religion. When any government says that it is religious free it only means that it is basing all its legislative and governmental work on its own authority, which tells us that it is based on the religion of humanism where man dictates the morality upon which all legislation is based.  Religion has not gone away. When any government insists that it accepts all religion, once again we have a testimony of humanism since in the accepting of all religion it is the government which will determine which religion will be the religion that dictates the morality upon which legislation will be based.

The above is true for any institution in any jurisdiction wherein laws are made for the institution. Because, families, for example, have laws that govern the family, families are downstream of some religion, since the laws for the family are based on a morality and the morality in turn is based on some religion and God concept. Because this is so families will be “Christian families,” or “Humanist families” or “Jewish families,” or “Muslim families,” etc. However no family will ever be a non-religiously defined family. The same is true for law courts, for educational institutions, for workplaces, for political parties, etc. Religion is an inescapable concept and never goes away, though often it is insisted that this or that is “irreligious.”

All this explains, in part, why R2K is so disastrous. R2K insists that these different realms (family, arts, juridical, education, politics, government etc.) all should be, by definition, areligious. R2K, bone-headedly, insists that the adjective “Christian” should never define these different realms. Indeed, R2K goes so far as to say that it is sinful before God to insist that the adjective “Christian” should be supplied as a descriptor for any of these areas. In doing so, R2K turns over all these areas to non-Christian religions. This is so because once R2K has successfully convinced Christians that they should not pursue “Christian Education,” “Christian Politics,” “Christian Jurisprudence,” “Christian Art,” then all that is left as an adjective to define these jurisdictional disciplines is some non-Christian religion. This explains, in part, why R2K is idolatry and an abandoning of the Christian faith.

Doug Wilson On R. L. Dabney … No Disclaimers Allowed

Doug Wilson is one of those guys who will say anything that comes into his mind that sounds good at the moment. Here is a recent example. Now, I want to say at the outset that I don’t disagree with Dabney here – especially given the condition of the Black race in the South at the time – but I’m pretty sure that Doug would be insisting upon all kinds of disclaimers her regarding Dabney. The issuing of those disclaimers would prove that Doug often says things that are convenient for the moment.

“I think R. L. Dabney was a godly Christian man — a little irascible at places but nothing I think I need to put a disclaimer on.”

Doug Wilson

“[W]as it nothing, that this (Black) race, morally inferior, should be brought into close relations to a nobler race (White), so that the propensity to imitation should be stimulated by constant and intimate observation, by domestic affection, by the powerful sentiment of allegiance and dependence?”

R. L. Dabney
In A Defence of Virginia & The South – p. 282

LOL… I’m pretty sure Doug would be ruined if he didn’t put a disclaimer on that. Let the disclaimers be forthcoming.

Kingship of Jesus Christ

33 Pilate therefore entered again into the [q]Praetorium, and called Jesus, and said unto him, Art thou the King of the Jews? 34 Jesus answered, Sayest thou this of thyself, or did others tell it thee concerning me? 35 Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests delivered thee unto me: what hast thou done? 36 Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my [r]servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence. 37 Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, [s]Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. 38 Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?

And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find no crime in him. 39 But ye have a custom, that I should release unto you one at the passover: will ye therefore that I release unto you the King of the Jews? 40 They cried out therefore again, saying, Not this man, but Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber.

 __________

On the Church Calendar, this Sunday is designated as “Christ the King” Sunday.  The recognition of this day has an eschatological dimension and so points to the end of time when the kingdom of Jesus will be established in all its fullness to the ends of the earth.  As such “Christ the King” Sunday naturally leads into the Advent season, when the Church commemorates the first Advent of Christ.

As the modern Church only gives lip service to Christ’s office as King I find it incumbent to speak on this subject with every chance available. It is a place where the contemporary Church is falling down. It is a subject upon which it is good for all of us to be reminded.

In this passage in John Christ asserts His Kingship. This morning we want to examine how it is that Christ comes to this Kingship and what some of the implications are for Christ being King.

Here Jesus Christ confesses to Pilate that He is a King,

37 Pilate, therefore, said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, [s]Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into the world,

I.) Christ is the King by Divine Right

Since the Father is Sovereign… the Son is Sovereign

The idea that Jehovah is King is everywhere posited in the Old Testament.

Here are just a few examples,


Psalm 29:10
The LORD sat as King at the flood; Yes, the LORD sits as King forever.
 
Psalm 47:6-7
 
Sing praises to God, sing praises; Sing praises to our King, sing praises. For God is the King of all the earth; Sing praises with a skillful psalm.
Psalm 47:2
For the LORD Most High is to be feared, A great King over all the earth.
 
Psalm 95:3
For the LORD is a great God And a great King above all gods,
 
Isaiah 6:5
 
Then I said, “Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.”
When we turn to the New Testament we find the Testimony that the Son is the Sovereign King as well,Colossians 1:16 For in Him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through Him and for Him. 17He is before all things, and in Him, all things hold together.

Hebrews 1:8

 But of the Son He says, “YOUR THRONE, O GOD, IS FOREVER AND EVER, AND THE RIGHTEOUS SCEPTER IS THE SCEPTER OF HIS KINGDOM.

Revelation 17:14
“These will wage war against the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, because He is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those who are with Him are the called and chosen and faithful.”
 
Revelation 19:16

And on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written, “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.

So based on this unity of the Trinitarian Divine being,  as God is sovereign every member of the Trinity shares in that sovereignty.

According to one of the Important ECF, Cyril of Alexandria,

“Christ, has dominion over all creatures, a dominion not seized by violence nor usurped, but his by essence and by nature.”

As Jesus Christ is very God of very God, He shares in Sovereignty with the Father and the Spirit.  As such Christ, by way of His divinity, is King over all creation. As we have seen this is what Scripture teaches. Christ is King over all men and over all Creation.

II.) Christ is the King by Acquired Right

I Cor. 6:20 you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body

1 Peter 1:18 

For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life you inherited from your forefathers,

I. Cor. 7:23You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of men.

‘ We are no longer our own property, for Christ has purchased us as Peter teaches, “with a great price” and so our very bodies are the “members of Christ.”

The heart of our Catechism presupposes Christ’s Kingship,

That I am not my own, 1
but belong body and soul,
in life and in death, 2
to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ. 3
He has fully paid for all my sins
with his precious blood, 4
and has set me free
from all the power of the devil. 5


Here the emphasis is that Christ has paid the Ransom-price which grants Him the Divine Right of Kingship.

III.) Christ is the King by Divine Inheritance

A third ground of sovereignty is that God bestowed upon Christ the nations of the world as His special possession and dominion.

In the Great Commission Christ, Himself testifies to this,

“All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” (Matthew 28:18)

John 3:34For the One whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without limit. 35TheFather loves the Son and has placed all things in His hands.

John 5:22 Furthermore, the Father judges no one, but has assigned all judgment to the Son, 23so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him.…

So what are the Implications of Christ being the King of Kings and Lord of Lords? Thus far, I think one could get most of the Church on board with what has been said. But it is the implications of the Kingship of Christ which begins to stir the proverbial pot and so it is on the tangible impact of the Kingship of Christ wherein Christians begin to fall out with one another.

Implication #1 — Caesar must bow to Christ’s Kingship

If Christ is King over all then all must bow to the authority of Christ.

According to McGoldrick, in his book on Reformed giant Abraham Kuyper,

Kuyper believed that, “Christians must served God within the world, and not flee into seclusion as Monks and some Anabaptists have done. When Christians obtain positions of civil authority, they must operate in obedience to God, since the Lord has ordained their authority (Rom. 13:1-7). This, Kuyper argued, means that the civil government must “restrain blasphemy, where it directly assumes the character of an affront to the Divine Majesty.” The constitution of the state should acknowledge God as supreme ruler, and governments should set aside its regular activities on a Sunday and protect it as a day of worship. Magistrates… should regard themselves as responsible to God in the discharge of their duties. They should punish public attacks upon God as crime against civil law, which acknowledges God as the source of the state’s authority.”

Contrast, this Christian conviction with something just written recently by Baptist Minister John Piper,

 

So how do we express a passion for God”s supremacy in a pluralistic world where most people do not recognize God as an important part of their lives, let alone an important part of government or education or business or industry or art or recreation or entertainment?

Answer: We express a passion for the supremacy of God… 

5) by making clear that God himself is the foundation for our commitment to a pluralistic democratic order-not because pluralism is his ultimate ideal, but because in a fallen world, legal coercion will not produce the kingdom of God. Christians agree to make room for non-Christian faiths (including naturalistic, materialistic faiths), not because commitment to God”s supremacy is unimportant, but because it must be voluntary, or it is worthless. We have a God-centered ground for making room for atheism. “If my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight” (John 18:36). The fact that God establishes his kingdom through the supernatural miracle of faith, not firearms, means that Christians in this age will not endorse coercive governments-Christian or secular.

So, we are considering the implications of the Kingship of Jesus Christ and already we have come to a huge fork in the road between those claiming Christ. One expression holds that the implication of Christ’s Kingship is the Christians should rule as Christians. The other holds that the implication of Christ’s Kingship is that Christians should rule in such a way to make room for Atheism. Both would affirm the Kingship of Jesus Christ. Each is defining Kingship very differently.

The upshot of this is that while Christians each may affirm statements that are linguistically the same, they may very well being affirming very different things.

Implication #2 — Our Law Order must reflect the Law Order of the King

Christians and non-Christians alike fail to understand how much of the fabric of the Law Order that created Western Civilization was Christian in its beginnings.

Harold J. Berman’s Massive two  Volume Set “Law and Revolution,” notes this repeatedly.

“The Church … would work for… the reformation of the world through law, in the direction of justice and peace…. Law came to be seen as the very essence of faith. ‘God is himself law, and therefore law is dear to him, ‘ wrote the author of Sachsenspiegel,  the first German law book, about 1220…. Law was seen as a way of fulfilling the mission of Western Christendom to begin to achieve the Kingdom of God on earth.”

Elsewhere Berman notes,

“The Law of King Alfred, for example, start with the ten Commandments and a restatement of the Law of Moses, a summary of the Acts of the Apostles and references to the monastic penitentials…. Christianity broke the fiction of the immutability of folk law.”

And again in Vol. II Berman notes,

“The English Puritans… shared the belief that human history is wholly within the providence of God, that it is primarily a spiritual story of the unfolding of God’s own purposes…. They believed, further, that God willed and commanded what they called the ‘reformation of the world,’ and they emphasized the role of law as a means of such Reformation.”

Time does not permit to mine all the rich quotes from Berman’s two volumes that demonstrate that our Father’s understood that one of the implications of the Kingship of Jesus Christ was that social orders were to be governed by His Law Order. In the words of G. K. Chesterton, we are discovering anew that if ‘man will not be ruled by the Ten Commandments he will be ruled by ten thousand commandments.”

This denial of this implication of the Kingship of Jesus Christ is all very recent comparatively speaking. We have grown up in this rebellion so we tend to see the rebellion as the norm but up until about 100 years ago men understood the connection between God’s law and the law that guided the civil order in the West.

Harold O. J. Brown notes,

If there are no laws made in heaven, by what standards should human society organize itself? We do need laws by which to organize and structure our lives, but if God has not given them, where shall they come from? There is only one answer: We must make them ourselves. Of course, if we make our own laws they will have no more authority or force than what we ourselves possess and can assert by means of the power at our disposal. In other words, law comes to represent not the will of the Creator but the will of the strongest creatures. This became the widespread view, sometimes unexpressed but frequently explicit, of most Western societies in the first part of the twentieth century. America’s great legal statesman, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., thought no differently in this respect from the great dictator, Adolf Hitler. Both of them believed that laws simply represent the will of the dominant majority. Holmes was a courteous, urbane, sophisticated gentleman, but his idea of law would have offered no opposition to the enactments of Hitler, who for a time reflected the will of Germany’s dominant majority.

Harold O. J. Brown, The Sensate Culture: Western Civilization Between Chaos and Transformation (Dallas, TX: Word, 1996), 88.

Implication #3 — We will be considered intolerant because we are intolerant

Illustration — To make this concrete let’s consider that the same can be said of the relationship in physical organisms. Your body can’t develop a tolerance to a deadly parasite in your body. That parasite is trying to take over your whole body and kill you, while your body’s autoimmune system are doing their flat level best to kill the parasite. The two are at war. To tolerate an alien law system into your social order is to court death.

We are the King’s men. As the King’s men we cannot abide the King’s law and character being set aside and so we will oppose all that which opposes the King. Concretely, this means, as we have taken Christ as King, we live in a time as the loyal opposition. In this epoch, so set against Christ the King as it is, we must practice the virtue of intolerance. We must practice a confrontational disposition out of love for Christ the King and for other people.

There can be no tolerance in a law-system for another religion. Toleration is a device used to introduce a new law system as a prelude to a new intolerance… Every law-system must maintain its existence by hostility to every other law system and to alien religious foundations or else it commits suicide.

R.J. Rushdoony

 

 

Doug Wilson Camping On The Holocaust

“Do you believe the Holocaust happened? Are you a Holocaust denier? This is right where this stuff [the woke right stuff] leads.”

Doug Wilson

 
Does Doug believe that the Bagels had and have a vested interest in exaggerating what’s called the holocaust? Does he believe that the Holocaust conveniently serves the global purposes of those who style themselves to be Bagels? Doesn’t the once recorded and accepted but now dismissed idea of lampshades made of Jewish skin and soap made of Jewish fat indicate that there is reason to continue to ask questions surrounding “the holocaust?” If Lampshades make out of Bagel skin and soap made out of Bagel fat is now seen as ridiculous isn’t it at least possible that the numbers surround the holocaust are also ridiculously inflated?

One wonders if, for Doug, one can question the six million number and not be a holocaust denier?  How low of a number of total Jewish deaths can one affirm and still be called a “holocaust denier?” If one affirms, let’s say, three million Jewish deaths is one a holocaust denier at that point? two million? One million?

And one might wonder why Doug focuses in on this holocaust? Why doesn’t the man ever talk about the holodomor where Ukrainian Christians were the target of genocide by the Jewish Bolsheviks, or the Armenian genocide by those claiming to be Turks or the German holocaust recorded in the book by James Bacque titled “Other Losses?”

On top of this we might ask if the Bagels have a history of lying. Did they lie about the USS Liberty? Did they lie in their early claim that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” A few decades later did the Bagels lie about their oversight and involvement with the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees? Did the Bagels lie about the the 1994 blood-shedding of Palestinian worshippers in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque. According to Doug Wilson should we take any stock that the motto of Israel’s Mossad is “by  way of deception.”  If the Bagels lied about all this why is it not at least possible that they have lied about the 6 million number? Does it matter to Doug Wilson that the Bagels repeatedly prior to WW II insisted repeatedly that six million Bagels were being harrassed, persecuted, and in danger in publication after publication in different circumstances and instances across the world? How much of a pattern does one have to see repeated before it is rational to say … “I wonder if a particular well reported incident is also part of this ‘by way of deception’ pattern?”

Why is it that questioning the facts around death totals during WW II becomes the sine qua non of Wilsonian and neo-con (leftist) orthodoxy?

Further, does Doug think R. J. Rushdoony is “Woke Right” because he questioned the holocaust? Does Doug think David Irving is “Woke Right” because he questioned the holocaust? Does Doug think Michael Hoffman or E. Michael Jones are “Woke Right” just because the ADL says they are?

What does Doug do with Fred Leuchter’s testimony in the Ernst Zundel trial?

Doug Wilson has become a leftist normie.

From The Mailbag; What Is The End & Purpose of Kinism?

I had a good conversation with my wife yesterday about race, culture, and resisting the loss of distinctions. One of the things that came to my mind afterward is the “to what end?” question. In the USA we obviously have an historic culture that has been watered down over time, and now is under direct attack. What are the immediate and long-term aims/expectations of having the Church in the USA return to her historic positions on race, marriage, and national law?

Dr. Justin Baker
Head – Political Science Department
Androsloccin University

Dear Dr. Baker

Thank you for your correspondence.

Well, speaking only for myself, I would say that a return to her “historic positions on race, marriage, and national law” is only the penultimate concern. The ultimate concern is returning to her historic position on our undoubted catholic Christian faith. If that is what happens then the US historic position on race, marriage, and law take care of themselves. In other words our primary problems as a country is not our aberrant views on race, marriage, and national law but rather our primary problem is that we have rebelled against the God of the Bible and His Christ. It is because of that, that our social order is so twisted. The long term effect thus would be a social order harmony of interests.
 
My expectation would then be a return to a time where the US is predominantly a White Christian nation (88% of the nation was white when I was a boy). I would be good if we had those numbers again as combined with a return to the protestant non neo-Orthodox Christian faith. This would be glorifying to God.
 
As to the effect of that, well it would be a return to a stable social order so that white Christians are no longer headed towards a Rhodesia / South Africa existence. If we do not get off the arc we are currently on then we will see the truthfulness of the white replacement theory come to pass.