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.

Reporting From Charlotte, Michigan’s “Oddball Festival”

Did some street preaching @ Charlotte, Michigan’s “Oddball Festival” today. Had lots of people pouring out their hate on me. I thought one of the vendors was going to punch me given how angry he was and how he was getting in my face. Another vendor tore a street sign out of my hand and ripped it up. The sign talked about how Jesus condemned sex with children. Had a conversation w/ a chap named “Luke” who insisted that while he had no problem with Christians this protesting wickedness was counter productive. I tried to explain to Luke that Christians are instructed to “hate that which is evil,” and that this festival was pure on evil.

About half a dozen 20 something year old females were so angry that they made their own little signs saying… “All Hail Satan.” I went over to them with my sign and started singing at the top of my voice,

“All hail the power of Jesus name
Let Angels prostrate fall
Hail Him who saves you by His grace
And Crown Him, Lord God of All.”

I witnessed a couple Lesbians making out at the festival. They were show boating and trying to be offensive but it was still gross.

I thought it interesting that the Congregational Church had a booth in the festival pushing their anti-Christ literature. Indeed the Congregational church property was used for several booths pushing this dark arts stuff. This Congregational church in Charlotte is infamous for adorning its building with a LGBTQ flag. It has a church sign saying, “Where hate is loud, love is even louder.” The Congregationalists in Charlotte hate what God loves and loves what God hates.

I had one vendor call a cop on me. As I walked by the female vendor was earnestly talking to the cop while repeatedly pointing and gesticulating at me as I walked back and forth in front of her venue.

I witnessed one guy with tats all over his face. I witnessed a multitude of women tatted from top to bottom. I witnessed women barely dressed, or if dressed, dressed more tightly than if they had been dressed with cellophane wrap. I witnessed a couple yucky trannies (men dressed as women). I had a Roman Catholic vendor insist that she was a Catholic and so a Christian. When I told her that Roman Catholics were not Christians because they prayed to Mary and trusted in their performance I thought she was going to pop a vein.

More than a few people flipped me the double bird. One female vendor screamed at me, “You’re here to shame us.” I responded, “That is absolutely correct. I am here to shame you. I also was hoping that you would find yourself feeling some guilt as well as shame. The Bible says you must know how great your sin and misery are in order to be delivered from that sin and misery.” She responded hurling a few choice expletives at me. Another female vendor kept shrieking at me, “you’re a hypocrite, you’re a hypocrite.” I told her “that is true but how could you possibly know since you have never met me before.” (I believe all ministers are hypocrites since they are called to preach a message that has a standard that they will themselves never live up to.)

I did tell other street preachers to quit telling the crowd that “God Loves them.” I said …. “But scripture teaches that “God hates workers of iniquity.”

Like Americans in general, this was a very low IQ crowd. I saw people who looked like they had a received a day’s pass out of hell. I saw a venue doing something like palm readings or tarot card readings. I saw a venue where you could purchase different fake parts of a human baby. I saw t-shirt shops selling the most profane sayings you can imagine. Then of course there were the venues selling the usual Satanic nick-knacks and mementos.

The rational of the city fathers for allowing this bacchanalia is the tourist and profit it brings into the city. That is perhaps the most Satanic aspect to the whole thing. American’s city fathers (who see themselves a respectable businessmen) would sell their souls if they thought it would turn a profit.

They call this annual thing, “The Oddball Festival.” I’m not sure why, because the only oddballs there were the twenty or so Christians who showed up to resist that which is evil by clinging to what is good. All else I was seeing there is now the norm. There is nothing “oddball” about the “Oddball Festival,” inasmuch as the people you see there you can see at your local Walmart or Meijer super Mart on a daily basis. Failing that just be at your local high school when school lets out and see how normal the oddballs currently are. These people at the Oddball Festival think they are being odd but they are as normal as inflation.

Another thing that troubles me deeply about these festivals is those who do not turn out to represent Christ. Charlotte has over 20 churches and yet only myself and one other Pastor from the city showed up to “resist that which is evil.” I was told another might be there later in the day. Why won’t the Pastors stand against this commercial abomination? One would think that the clergy, of all people, would want to see Christ honored in Satan’s zip code.

Pray for these people. Pray for the American people who now indeed are Oddballs to God and His Christ. Pray that the Lord Christ might yet grant us Reformation at this late hour. Pray that people might have mercy on their own souls.

Theonomy/Reconstructionism Creates the Abstracted & Universal Man?

There are those who continue to insist that Theonomists don’t allow for particularity of cultures blaming RJR for demanding a universalist (globalist) social order. These chaps proclaim that Rushdoony insisted that the law could only be applied in only one way in every culture thus resulting in a “Christian” new world order where all particularity is lost.

This is utter nonsense on their part and I was pleased to see the Natural Law aficionado, Stephen Wolfe say in a recent speech, that only some theonomists were guilty of abstracting man so that he loses all his particularity and becomes “universal man”, though Wolfe rightly did put Jonathan Leeman and David Van Drunen and his R2K fanboys in the dock on this score.

Now, that some theonomists like Andrew Sandlin, Doug Wilson, and Gary North (before he recently died) have been guilty of this universalizing and abstracting tendency. This has been due to their Libertarianism and not due to theonomy. The Libertarian, by insisting on the non-aggression principle, reduces all culture to a least common denominator universal sameness. The theonomists who have allowed their Libertarianism to overshadow their theonomy are indeed guilty of abstracting man so that he loses his particularity when belonging to different people groups and different races.

Of course, the Father of Reconstructionism, R. J. Rushdoony, could never be rationally accused of abstracting man from his particularizing contexts. If one reads, for example, Rush’s “The One and the Many,” one sees explained there unity (universal) and diversity (particulars) in both the Godhead and then as among various peoples. Rushdoony, never demanded that all cultures be universal. Rushdoony taught that the ten words are in fact applied identically in all cultures. Murder is murder. Lust is just. Idolatry is idolatry, coveting is coveting and so forth. Those don’t change. However, Rush understood that all of the casuistic laws may vary from culture to culture.

If one desires to find a philosohy/theology that univesalizes and abstracts man one need only look to the Aristotelian paradigm. In that paradigm the state is viewed as an ethical institution aimed at cultivating virtue by applying natural law that tends towards a universalism regulating all aspects of social life.

Theonomy/Reconstructionism to the contrary has a negative concept of law where the state has a strictly juridical function and where that which is not forbidden by biblical law is allowed, leaving much more freedom for different socio-cultural paradigms to develop organically.

Indeed, so varied in Christian cultural outcomes as theonomy / reconstructionism is some students of Rushdoony have termed his position “Perspectivalism” or “Multiperspectivalism.” It is the idea that Christianity (and God’s law) will necessarily be expressed differently through different ethnicities. This view is also evident in Kuyper, et. al.

The people who are accusing Theonomists of an homogenizing globalism are confusing Theonomy with Libertarianism. Which is easy to do if you only know Theonomy through the lens of its platformed claimants today such as Jeff Durbin, Joel Boot, Andrew Sandlin, and Doug Wilson. The problem is that those 2nd generation “Reconstructionists” are represent Theonomy as redacted by and seen through the prism of Cultural Marxism.

Can Christians Breed Christians? or, Does God Have Grandchildren?

“God has no grandchildren.”

Billy Graham

A Baptist friend of mine recently said that “Christians can’t breed Christians.” Baptists say this because they insist people must have a born again experience before they are baptized and called Christian. Now, of course, all Christians recognize that our faith cannot be in our parents faith, nor can be faith be anchored merely in the water of Baptist considered apart from Christ, but having admitted that it is passing strange for Christians to say that two Christians don’t have Christian children. A Hindu, or Muslim, or Jewish Daddy and Mommy would never look at their child and say… “Little Aarav, or Little Muhammed, or Little Mordecai is not Hindu, Muslim or Jewish.”

If two Christian people who have bred children can not call their children “Christian” this, by necessity, means that they are to think of their children and call their children “Satan Spawn.” If two Christians can’t breed Christians and if there is no such thing as neutrality then two Christians who breed children breed Satan Spawn.

And yet the Scripture states that the promise of the covenant is for you and for your children. The Scripture has all those household baptisms and in household baptisms if there were children in the household they would have been baptized.

Now, what of the problem that some of these Christian children will forsake the covenant promises? Well, for them we would say that they were “Christian” in name only. Still, as Hebrews teaches they had a relation to the covenant and so were God’s people inasmuch as they stood in the outward administration of the covenant. Just as not all of Israel was of Israel, so not all called Christian were of Christ. They may not have had the essence of the covenant (Christ) but they were in the outward administration of the covenant and so were thought of and properly called “Christian.”

Two Christian people can only breed Christians.

Baptists hate this because they insist that we should not think that God unilaterally saves babies. Baptists think that Babies should not be raised being told that they are “Christians,” because they were Baptized according to God’s promise and command. Instead Baptists tell their children that they one day can be Christian if they just make a decision for Christ, completely disregarding that Christ has already made a decision for the Babies who were bred by Christian parents as seen by placing those Christian babies in a Christian home with Christian parents. All of this bespeaks of the atomistic individuality and lack of covenantal awareness that plagues Baptists.

On this subject, John Calvin observed,

“Baptism, viewed in regard to us, is a passive work: we bring nothing to it but faith; and all that belongs to it is laid up in Christ.” But, our Baptist friends might ask, “how can a child bring faith to baptism? Calvin answer, “Those who were baptized when mere infants, God regenerates in childhood or adolescence, occasionally even in old age,” as the seed of faith is planted in the heart of the covenant child. “Infants are renewed by the Spirit of God according to the capacity of their age, till that power which was concealed within them grows by degrees, and becomes fully manifest at the proper time,” Calvin wrote. None of the reformers believed that this was an optional sacrament any more than was circumcision in the Old Testament. Calvin stated, “Whoever, having neglected baptism, feigns himself to be contented with the bare promise, tramples as much as in him lies, upon the blood of Christ, or at least does not suffer it to flow for the washing of his own children. Therefore just punishment follows the contempt of the sign, in the privation of grace because the covenant of God is violated” (Institutes, Book 4, chapters 15 & 16).

Must our babies be born again?

Certainly… but why should we think that being born again isn’t routinely ratified in the waters of Holy Baptism? Why shouldn’t we give our babies the judgment of charity and call them “Christian,” as opposed to the Baptist insistence that the judgment should be that the children of two Christians are “Satan spawn,” until they can be convinced to “ask Jesus into their hearts?”

The inherent problem here is that Baptists look at Baptism as their work, their commitment, their promise and in order for Baptism to have efficacy or meaning their children must choose Baptism for themselves. However, in the Biblical view Baptism is not primarily about our commitment, our promises, or our decision. Baptism is God’s work. He is the one who is active in Baptism. He is doing all the doing. Sure, parents make promises when they bring their children to be baptized but those promises are only in light of God’s greater promises to be our God and take us as His people. Because Christians believe that God is faithful to a thousand generations we do believe that God has grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren, etc.. We do believe that a Christian Daddy and Mommy can breed Christians. We believe to believe otherwise is to call God’s covenant faithfulness into question.

Yes, Christian parents of Christian babies are to teach the children they have a sin nature. We are to teach them that in Adam’s fall we fell all. We teach them that the only cure for our sin nature is Christ. We teach them that they must grow up putting to death the old man. However, unlike Baptists, we teach them that in Word and Sacrament they are reminded and assured that Christ’s death and all His gifts are for them. We and our children, have an assurance that is objective to us in Word and Sacrament. We are not finding our assurance in our own remembered faith commitment. We are finding our assurance in our God and the God of our parents in Word and Sacrament.

So, for young parents, you can breed Christians and you can believe the promise is to you and to your children. You can believe God is so faithful to your generations that He is indeed a grandfather many times over. You can believe this because throughout both Old and New Testaments, God delights in calling himself the father of future generations (see Ex 20:6, 31:13; Dt 7:9; Ps 22:30, 31:11, 45:17, 89:1, 90:1, 100:5, 105:8, 119:90, 145:13; Is 51:8; Lk 1:48; Phil 3:5, 21; Col 1:26). Clearly, God has Christians breeding Christians and is comfortable in being a Grandfather.

The Curse of Religious Tolerance

“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.”

Dr. RJ Rushdoony
“The Institutes of Biblical Law,” 1973

“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

Muslim and Hindus as well as Jews and Atheists will support religious liberty not because they believe it in principle but because the concept of religious liberty both serves the interest of their minority group and because it affords the minority groups the space and time to become the majority wherein they can and will deny religious tolerance to Christians.

Because of “religious toleration,” formerly Christian America allowed adherents of other religions to attach themselves like so many parasites on once healthy body. Allowing for Hindus, Muslims, Jews, etc. into a country that developed in the context of Christendom is like allowing protozoa, helminths (worms), and ectoparasites to affix to your body. One just cannot develop a healthy tolerance to a parasite in your system because the parasite is trying to take over your whole body and kill it, while your body’s defenses spring to kill the parasite. The two are at war. Yet, by embracing the creed of religious tolerance the West has invited parasites on its body politique.

The demand of religious tolerance upon the Christian majority is always embraced by non Christian minorities, because in such a way there is discovered by the minority religious tolerance advocates a way to eventually subjugate completely the Christian God to the pagan gods.

Religious tolerance is just a convenient colloquial for polytheism.

Our Current Existentialism Tilt

“Existence precedes essence.”

Jean Paul-Sartre
Existentialism Is a Humanism – 1946

“The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,”

SCOTUS Justice Anthony Kennedy
Writing for the Court
Obergefell vs. Hodges – 2015

“So I define modern liberalism as the belief that civil society is a space for the abstract human. The human abstracted from any cultural particularity and robust moral vision. And the end of modern liberalism or the purpose of it is to politically secure each individual’s opportunity to define for himself the meaning of his own existence.”

Dr. Stephen Wolfe
Comments @ the “Just Say It” Conference

Ideas have consequences. The consequences of the ideas of existentialism wherein existence precedes essence has now become the cornerstone of not only Judicial pronouncements but also of our current civilizational parameters.

It is existentialism as a philosophy, incarnated into our culture, that allows Wolfe to correctly observe that “modern liberalism is the belief that civil society is a space for the abstract human.” Liberalism, whatever it once was, has been morphed into being a Worldview that has been co-opted by existentialism.

When Sartre claimed that existence precedes essence he was saying that humans are not born with any hardwiring, or in philosophical terms, humans have no nature out of which their actions proceed. Prior to the existentialists the philosophers would ask, “what does it mean to be human.” Sartre’s point was it doesn’t mean anything be human. Man does not come as designed or from the hand of a divine artisan who had a fixed purpose for man. Man is his own divine artisan and as having a preceding existence he defines for himself as he desires his own essence.

Of course the effect of this move was to cut the final string to the thought that any objective reality existed outside of man. Man is thrown into the world unbidden and man must create himself once in this world. His existence is the only given. His essence is something he makes up as he goes. The implication of this is that the only reality man has is a subjective reality.

Of course, Kennedy, in the above quote, is whistling past the graveyard when he tries to allow for a “lawful realm.” Obviously, the idea of a “lawful realm,” is just as subjective as the idea that what was previously understood as “lawful marriage” can be redefined so as to include what has for millennium been considered “unlawful marriage.” When “existence precedes essence” is given its head, the whole notion of any objective “lawful realm” is as relevant as teats on a boar.

We would also note that the word “liberty” that Justice Kennedy uses in the quote above is a gross misnomer. It is not “liberty” that Kennedy was talking about but rather license. In order for true liberty to have any meaning it must exist within an ordered reality. Kennedy, however, along with the concurring Justices, has given up on an objective ordered reality with the result that what we have is ever increasing licentiousness which stands in opposition to liberty.

Wolfe’s quote captures the implications of Sartre’s quip and Justice Kennedy’s ruling. Man is now a cipher. He is independent of and prior to any received meaning that he may have been born into or been assigned to by a Deity. Not only is his cultural and familial setting irrelevant to his or her identity, not even his or her genetics or gender can impinge upon who he or she decides themselves to be. This is the premise of the sovereign individual tetched with madness.

Now, combine this subjectivity of modern liberalism with the fact that since existence precedes essence there is no stopping point for the whirligig of options one can choose throughout life. Theoretically, one can, in one lifetime be as many different personas as one desires to be. In this world there is no stable personality or character. All is flux.

Of course, modern philosophy since Descartes has been inherently subjective but with the rise of first existentialism and then postmodernism with its variants of Critical Theory and Deconstructionism, man has reached the apogee of subjective existence. It has never been more true than what was observed in the poem, “Invictus,”

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

Because this is so, anyone who arises who would put constraints on this rampant subjectivity of human existence is now considered the madman. On the island of the insane only the sane are considered insane.

Of course, all of this accounts for the breakdown of Western civilization. No civilization can function in this kind of flux. It has almost impossible to see how any of this arrests itself short of some kind of Christian Reformation. It is only Christianity that has been able to bring objective meaning to a people without also bringing in tyranny. Christianity, being the faith it is, allows for both “liberty,” (particularity) and the “order” (universals) by which that liberty can exist. Other religions (Islam, for example) may be able to restore order but Islam can only do so by eliminating particularity. With Islam we would go from the anarchistic universal man that we now have to the tyrannized universal man. Islam, whose byword is “subjection” does not know the concept of ordered liberty.

So, we are in a conundrum. We cannot continue to swirl in the direction that we are swirling. This kind of subjectivity promises only chaos. Similarly, since modern man will not bow the knee to the only true God who alone can provide an objectivity that allows for particularity all that can be done is the continuation of our downward spiral.

Any Reformation that might deliver modern man must be a Reformation where this institutional malaise is addressed or else it is just one more “jump a pew,” pietistic or Charismatic “revival.” Like the so called revival that happened in Asbury, Kentucky a few years ago it will just be so much sound and fury meaning nothing. We must have Reformation that reverses existentialism, postmodernism, and modern liberalism.