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.

Rev. McAtee Answers Questions in Preparation for a Radio Interview

Years ago, I participated in a interview on a media format. Below are questions that they sent me to prepare for the interview and the answers that follow were limned out before the program in order to prepare for the questions.

“What is your hopefulness for a return to a Christianity that is once again characterized by covenantal kinism.”

Well, our hope ultimately can be based on nothing but God’s Word and God’s Word teaches that the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. As it is the case that covenantal kinism is nothing but Biblical Christianity I can be certain that where Biblical Christianity comes to the fore so will covenantal kinism. Covenantal kinsim will be part and parcel of the postmillennialist tide. Scripture teaches in Daniel about the Great rock cut out of the mountain which destroys the idolatrous nations and eventually fills all the earth. Scripture teaches that Christ must reign till he puts all things under His feet. Scripture teaches that the little Mustard seed becomes a tree that is home to the nations. Scripture teaches that all the nations will come to Christ to be taught the Scripture (Micah 4, Isaiah 2). Scripture teaches that Christ being victorious will go from victory unto victory and so our hope for a renewal of Christianity rests in God’s promises from Scripture. Now this does not mean there will not be times of the waning of Biblical Christianity and we are living through one of those epochs now but as Scripture teaches … tears may last through the night but joy cometh in the morning. I may not live to see Global Reformation in my lifetime but I know because of the promises of Scripture that Christ’s Word will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. That is the ultimate ground of my hopefulness. The penultimate ground of my hopefulness is knowing some of the saints that God has raised up for just such a time as this. If the Kinist movement was a Baseball team they’d exceed the 1927 Yankees in sheer quality. Our wives, and daughters and mothers in normal times would be considered Queens and the mothers of Kings. People like my wife and daughters, like the wife of John MacGregor in Atlanta, and Miss Emily Henry in the deep South, and like Miss Raudi there in Carolina. These are quality women who love Christ and demonstrate that in their homes and to their husbands. We are surrounded by quality men who know what they believe and why they believe it and what they don’t believe and why they don’t believe it. Read the writings of Davis Carlton, Luke Malsbury, Ehud Would, Darrell Dow and the Henry Brothers, Mickey and Robert. These are intelligent and humble people. Many or most of them should be in pulpits but they often can’t even find churches to attend. Tonight you’re reading a poem by Mark Chambers which would make Rudyard Kipling weep. Spend some time getting to know Dr. Shivers, Joshua Parries, John Macgregor. Arnold Jagt has given us a great gift in organizing and releasing www.Pocketcollege.com. If Arnold never did another thing besides giving us pocket college and marketing Robinson curriculum he would have a great legacy indeed. The Elders, Mike and Dave, at the Church I serve are wonderfully solid men. My son Anthony is wise beyond his years and will be around another 60 years or so to be God’s witness. My sons-in-laws Ben and Joshua are good men. There are so many names. The problem is that we are so spread out. And lets not forget the handful of ministers out there. If all Lutherans could be Lutherans like Ross Mahan is Lutheran concourse with the Lutherans would be far easier. If all Baptists could be Baptists like John Weaver and Peter Hammond talking with the Baptist would be an easier time. These are great men… all the men I’ve mentioned are great men and so hope is to be had. So you ask me what my hope is for covenantal kinism, my answer is two fold. Ultimately my hope lies in God’s Word and His postmillennial promises. Penultimately my hope rests in the people God has raised up for just such a time as this. The godly Christians who God has opened the eyes to the wonders of His truth regarding peoples and nations are marvelous people and their greatness and excellence reveals what a Great God we serve. That God could take such a motley crew as ourselves and turn us into Kings and Captains, as well as Queens and Mother’s of a god-fearing people bespeaks God’s amazing Grace.

“What do you think is the leading challenge to overcome in the Church in the West today as it pertains to race realism?”

Cultural Marxism is, without doubt, our greatest worldview challenge because it is in Cultural Marxism that we find the heart and pulse of Alienism… the desire so Atomize men that they no longer have identity except as that identity is understood against the background of the pagan tyrant State.

Cultural Marxism is the belief that all our cultural productions such as the arts, our varying Institutions, our whole understanding of reality and ideas are emanations of underlying power structures. Reality thus is a social construct comprising of how power impresses itself on man collectively and individually. This means we must scrutinize and judge all culture and ideas based on their relation to power.

Following from this premise, Cultural Marxist advocates for the “persecuted” and “oppressed” must attack forms of culture that enforce the values of the ruling class and disseminate culture and ideas that support “oppressed” groups and “progressive” causes. Since White people have held all the power therefore White people must be seen as an evil to be wiped out.

From this definition we see that for the Cultural Marxist objective Transcendent truth does not exist. Rather truth is whatever the power brokers can impress upon the times. If there is no objective truth then the whole notion of “power” is completely arbitrary, and so power becomes defined as whatever the Cultural Marxist as God does not like.

Another great challenge is Gnosticism, putatively the polar opposite of the Materialism of Cultural Marxism and yet it’s constant bed partner.

Gnosticism is playing its dangerous game by insisting that only spiritual realities matter and therefore those creational material categories we received at birth are merely social constructs that can be changed around at will. The Gnosticism shows itself when people suggest that ethnicity doesn’t really matter for Christians.

What is it that has led to this vitriol against Nationalism?

Well, I’m not sure it is vitriol against all Nationalisms or rather just vitriol against white Christian nationalisms. If you view films like the Black Panther it is clear that Black Nationalism is a positive good. The theology of James Cone will quickly inform you that Black Nationalism is a positive good. Listen to Louis Farrakhan and it becomes clear that Black nationalism is a positive good. The vitriol is for Christian white nationalism and that is because it has been Christian at its foundation.

What did some of the Church Fathers think about ethno-nationalism?

See the entry on Iron Ink titles; “So say we all.”

Why is it that White people are so hated?

White people by God’s grace alone and in the context of His providence have been the carriers of Christianity. They are perfumed with Christ. They have built the great civilizations. They are envied by those who have not. Envy finds delight in the pulling down of the superior even if it doesn’t mean the rising up of the inferior. And Christian white civilization purely out of God’s grace has been superior to all other civilizations. This a fact that requires humility and repentance because of whom much is given much is to be required. Christian white people are going to be beaten with many stripes because they have turned their backs on God… in the words of Solzhenitsyn, they have forgotten God and so are fast becoming the tail and not the head.

On What is Necessary for Well Functional Social Orders & What Serves as Sand in the Gears

“I believe the Church is like the world, and consists of many forms, many races. I say to every race, maintain the integrity of your race; and to every nation, maintain the integrity of your nation, that it be not antagonized by other nations. This is the duty which God has historically devolved upon us.”

A. A. Hodge

Evangelical Theology — p. 183

Philia. — Aristotelian concept signifying ‘friendship’ — ethno-cultural consensus between members of the same City.

Aristotle believed that democracy was only possible only within homogeneous ethnic groups. This belief is contrasted with the work of despots who realized that their despotism could only work when the social-order was highly fragmented. This is the conclusion that Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” also came to writing thousands of years after Aristotle.

We learn from Aristotle and Putnam that a multi-ethnic society therefore necessarily begets a top down despotic governmental type approach in order to bring order out of the ethnic/cultural chaos. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that a multi-ethnic society cannot be anything but anti-democratic and chaotic, for it lacks Aristotle’s “philia,” — the profound, flesh-and-blood fraternity of citizens.

Tyrants and despots divide and rule, they want the City divided by ethnic rivalries. Ethnic rivalries within one and the same social-order means that there must be a central power by which the rivalries can be tamed. For those with Despotic type ambitions the pursuit of racial/ethnic and cultural plurality is a must. for in such a social order one finds the indispensable condition for breaking up the a people’s natural sovereignty as found in its racial/ethnic and cultural unity. Ethnic/racial chaos prevents all philia from developing for the obvious reasons that there is very little common ground between people of vastly different racial/ethnic compositions. Even the common ground found among Christians of different ethnic/racial compositions may not be enough for a well oiled social order as we witness in the book of Acts where the Greek and Hebrew widows were at odds with one another in the Church over food distribution.

A national citizenry is formed on the basis of proximity — both in blood and faith — or it is not formed at all. The abstract, integrationist doctrines of the French Revolution envisage man as simply man as an abstract quite without a prior belongingness to a people. For the French Revolutionist types man is an interchangeable cog, a resident, or a consumer. His racial/ethnic makeup is irrelevant. To the contrary the Biblical Christian insists that those things which bind a people together begins with a common lineal heritage and a shared religion/faith. Those elements that are necessary to make a people a people like civic spirit, safe neighborhoods, social harmony of interests, and solidarity, are based not on education, or persuasion alone, or a shared national creedal allegiance abstracted from a shared homogenous reality but instead are based on a cultural unanimity that is found in common values, lifestyles, and innate behaviors largely accounted for by both a shared genetic gene pool and a shared common religion/faith. Societies need something to glue them together; it turns out that having the same basic hardware, and thus the same basic inclinations and abilities, is a necessary but not sufficient condition. This means that without it, you have no glue, but you need other stuff as well to make a society work, chiefly of which is a shared common religion/faith but also including a shared language and history.

If we flip that around, it means that without ethnic nationalism, no society will survive. Mixed-race societies substitute ideology (propositional nationhood) or dogma (Political Correctness) for those innate bonds, but these are not as strong, which is why such societies tend to militarize and become totalitarian in order to preserve some unity.

This social order dysfunction has been pursued in these united States ever since the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, advocated by Ted Kennedy, Phil Hart, Emanuel Celler and most of the Republican party at the time. It was Southern Democrats like Sam Ervin and Strom Thurmond (who had only recently become Republican) who opposed LBJ’s destruction of America. This was signed into law by LBJ, and it ended the immigration quota system that had been in effect since 1924 and which had been railed against by those who were only marginally American for decades. The proponents of the Hart – Celler act promised up and down that it would not change the demographics and so ethnic composition of the nation;

“First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same … Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset … Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia … In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think’.

US Sen. Edward Kennedy
Democrat — Massachusetts

Senate. Senator Hiram Fong, the first Asian-American Senator and the son of Cantonese immigrants, stated to the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization that,

“Asians represent six-tenths of 1 percent of the population of the United States … with respect to Japan, we estimate that there will be a total for the first 5 years of some 5,391 … the people from that part of the world will never reach 1 percent of the population …Our cultural pattern will never be changed as far as America is concerned”.

Attorney General at the time Nicholas Katzenbach testified that,

“This bill is not designed to increase or accelerate the numbers of newcomers permitted to come to America. Indeed, this measure provides for an increase of only a small fraction in permissible immigration.”

Robert Kennedy stated that if the bill was passed;

“I would say for the Asia-Pacific Triangle [immigration] would be approximately 5,000, Mr. Chairman, after which immigration from that source would virtually disappear; 5,000 immigrants would come the first year, but we do not expect that there would be any great influx after that.”

Despite these assurance by 1980, *most* immigrants were coming from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and at least 7 million entered the US legally during that decade. There has perhaps never been in all of US history such a deficit between political predictions about the impact of a piece of legislation and the reality that followed. When this Bill was passed 88.6% of the total US population in 1960 was white. In 2020 the percentage of the total population of Non-Hispanic white people is around 58% of America’s population. This is a decrease from the 2010 census when non-Hispanic whites made up 63.7% of the population.

All of this was accelerated and made worse by President Ronald Regan when he declared amnesty for illegal immigrants in 1986 which did nothing but provide an incentive for even more illegals to come and enter America illegally. Reagan perhaps did as much as LBJ to insure the browning of America. At least Reagan had the good sense to regret his signing of the 1986 immigration act. According to Ronald Reagan himself, as told to his trusted long-time friend and U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, the biggest mistake of his presidency was signing the 1986 amnesty for what turned out to be more than half the five million illegal immigrants in the country.

Clearly, we are now suffering the repercussions of the 1965 Hart-Celler immigration act and the 1986 Reagan Amnesty. This is clear to anybody who doesn’t deny reality — which would include people like America’s clergy class. Men like Rich Lusk, Doug Wilson, Michael Foster, Darrel Doane, James White, Voddie Baucham, J. Ligon Duncan, Russell Moore, John Piper, Al Mohler, Tim Keller, Sean Michael Lucas continue to insist things like “there is no such thing as race,” or “race is a social construct” or “race is only about the amount of melanin once does or does not have,” or “while ethnicity might exist race certainly doesn’t exist.” Try selling that bilge to the patient waiting to get a bone marrow transplant.

The clergy in the formerly White Hat denominations are the villains now in the work of preventing a solution to our immigration / social-order problems. All we get from the clergy crowd is Gnostic pollyanna-isms like, “But the gospel has the power to destroy nature so that all that has been true throughout history no longer need be true when it comes to building social orders that have a harmony of interests.” However, with these kind of statements or statements similar to this we find the clergy corps going all French Revolutionaries on us by insisting just as Danton and Robespierre did in the day that man is just an abstraction that has no belongingness that he is born with that has to be taken into consideration.

In the end the modern clergy corps is contributing to the genocide of the White man in the West and that all in the name of “the love of Jesus.” Yes, that is right… GENOCIDE

Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) as,

“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part ; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The White man in the West is now being deliberately inflicted upon him via immigration patterns and legislation conditions of life calculated to bring about the White man’s physical destruction in whole or in part.

How is this Christianity to embrace this suicidal altruism which is being foisted upon us by the clergy corps in America?

Wherein Natural Law Approves Sodomy

Start the video at the 2minute mark and learn from this intellect the value of Natural Law.

Also, as pertaining to the value of Natural Law a Senior Bishop in the Church of England tells us that it is no longer ‘self-evident,’ that Natural law teaches how it is we can know what a woman is.

“A senior bishop of the Church of England said this week the Church has no ‘official definition’ of a woman amidst an evolving understanding of gender in the contemporary world.

Adam Kendry, a lay member of the General Synod, the Anglican Church’s legislative body, posed a written question: “What is the Church of England’s definition of a woman?” during the July 8-12 meeting of the synod.

In his response, Dr. Robert Innes, the Church’s Bishop in Europe and chairman of the Faith and Order Commission, declared there is currently “no official definition” of a woman.

“There is no official definition, which reflects the fact that until fairly recently definitions of this kind were thought to be self-evident, as reflected in the marriage liturgy,” Bishop Innes stated.

____

When the quote above notes, “were thought to be self evident,” this is another way of saying that Natural Law does not teach us what a woman is since the idea of “self-evident” is a natural law category.

Natural law sucks. It is only as good as the presuppositions one brings to whatever they are observing.

The problem with Natural Law is not that God’s world doesn’t declare His handiwork. The problem with Natural Law is that man is in epistemological rebellion against God and as such refuses to own as true what they can’t escape ontologically knowing as image bearers of God. So, appealing to Natural Law as a means by which social orders can be governed as existing among fallen men is just the kind of logic one would expect from those getting a degree from Wesmin-Cal (Escondido) having sat under the tutelage of that faculty which gives one the likes of David Ven Drunnen Q. Scott Clark, and Hike Morton.

You’d think smart guys like Stephen Wolfe would recognize this.

Rethinking Cultural Products of the Past in Light of the New Standards

In light of the demand for a more sensitive reference to “Mothers,” and even more broadly women that requires phrases like “Birthing Person,” or “Menstruating Person,” I offer up some alterations to previous insensitive cultural products.

1.) Birthing Person I’m Coming Home — Ozzy Osburne

2.) Menstruating Person Mia — ABBA

3.) Menstruating People Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up To Be Cow-Persons — Willie Nelson

4.) Throw Birth Person From the Train — Film

5.) Birthing Person’s Little Helper — Rolling Stones

6.) Your Menstruating Person Don’t Dance — Loggins & Messina

7.) Menstruating-Birthing Person and Child Reunion — Paul Simon

8.) It’s Alright Menstruating Person (I’m Only Bleeding)- Bob Dylan

9.) Menstruating Person’s Birthing Person – Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show

10.) Menstruating Person Told Me Not To Come — 3 Dog Night

11.) Don’t Tell the Menstruating Person that the Babysitter’s (Another Menstruating Person) is Dead

Christina Applegate, Joanna Cassidy, John Getz

12.) Mr. Menstruating Person — Terri Garr / Ann Jillian / Michael Keaton

You get the idea.
13.) Only Menstruating People Bleed — Alice Cooper

Loving Your Enemy While Hating God’s Enemies

As we come to the Matthew text we need to begin by clarifying who Jesus is dealing with when He says,

“”Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy” (v. 43).”

44 But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may prove yourselves to be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Even the tax collectors, do they not do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Even the Gentiles, do they not do the same? 48 Therefore you shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

The question needs be asked here is where has Jesus’ audience heard what is recorded as having been said? Where would they have heard that they were to love their neighbor but hate their enemy?

Is that somewhere in the Old Testament? Does the Law and the Prophets teach that principle?

You can scour the OT and you will not find any command to hate thy enemy. Jesus here, when He says, “You have heard it said,” is not quoting from the Law & the Prophets. He is quoting from the talmud like expostulations that were being said by the teachers of the law that Jesus was dealing with during his incarnation.

And that such was the attitude of Jews during that time is seen readily from chaps like the historian Tacitus who could write of the Jews during this time frame;

“They readily show compassion to their own countrymen, but they bear to all others the hatred of an enemy”

St. Paul describes these same Jews being those who “contrary to all men, forbidding us to speak unto the Gentiles that they might be saved” (1 Thess. 2:15, 16).

Such was he disposition of the Jew. They loved their own which would not be a problem except that they insisted that to love their own they must also hate the Goyim.

A. W. Pink says on this score;

“The Jews have ever been a people marked by strong passions—loving their friends fervently and hating their enemies intensely; and from the Pharisees’ corrupting of the law of God so as to make it square with the prejudices of their disciples, the most evil consequences followed.”

This Jewish mindset wherein all those outside the Jewish circle are hated is what Jesus is speaking against here.

The Pentateuch will be searched in vain for any precept which required the Hebrews to entertain any malignity against their foes: thou shalt “hate thine enemy” was a rabbinical invention pure and simple.

Instead the Old Covenant taught;

Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am the Lord” (Lev. 19:18)

So, the principle here is to determine ahead of time that cunning and wickedness against those outside your clan, people or tribe is perfectly acceptable is contrary to Jesus own words.

Now here the alert person will raise a point of objection and we may say rightly so. The alert person will point to texts like

“Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee? And am not I grieved with those that rise up against Thee? I hate them with a perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies” (Ps. 139:21, 22).

2 Chronicles 19:2
Jehu son of Hanani the seer went out to confront him and said to King Jehoshaphat, “Should you help the wicked and love those who hate the LORD? Because of this, the wrath of the LORD is upon you.

Psalm 26:5
I hate the mob of evildoers, and refuse to sit with the wicked.

Psalm 31:6
I hate those who cling to worthless idols, but in the LORD I trust.

Psalm 119:158
I look on the faithless with loathing because they do not keep Your word.

Psalm 139:22
I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them as my enemies.

Proverbs 29:27
An unjust man is detestable to the righteous, and one whose way is upright is detestable to the wicked.

And pointing to these texts they will ask how can we at one and the same time love our enemies and hate the wicked.

The answer that resonates from Church history and frankly though not completely satisfying still is the best answer going is that the loving our enemies and hating the wicked must be understood as not being in the same manner or the same sense.

We must make distinctions here between private personal enemies and public enemies of God and His Kingdom.

A private personal enemy may well still be a Christian. They have done you a severe wrong. They have maligned your name or cheated you personally in some manner. Here we are to be like our Father in Heaven who sends His rain on the just and unjust. We must not take vengeance into our own hands. We must live with the promise that God will repay. We’ve all had people like this in our lives at one time or another. You can hardly be in a Church very long and be injured by these people. They are broken people who are babes in sanctification. They spew a cutting word or by some misunderstanding of the meaning of Scripture they are driven to denounce you.

Very well then … we must entrust the matter to our heavenly Father. We must not repay evil for evil. We surely can defend ourselves but the Scripture teaches here that we should return good for evil thus pouring burning coals on their head – thus communicating the idea of bringing burning shame and remorse upon those whose hostility is repaid with kindness. We bring them a meal when they are ill. We visit them in the hospital.

We see Jesus Himself living out this truth in His life.

We read in the Mt. 8 right after finishing the Sermon on the Mt. of the account where Jesus heals the Centurion’s slave. How much more of an enemy can one find than a Gentile Centurion who is part of the hated occupying force of the Nation?

So, in a living illustration of what Jesus himself has called for, Jesus goes to heal the Centurion’s slave. We see the same when Jesus heals the child of the Canaanite woman. These were non-Jews and yet Jesus shows the love to them that He is requiring of those who would be His disciples.

Very well that is how we deal with our personal enemies. But how are we to deal with God’s enemies?

How are we to deal with those who are open and inveterate in their revolt against God, those who are a menace to His cause and His people? The answer from the texts above is we righteously hate them, their cause and their sin. We pray imprecatory prayers that God would arise and cast them off. We plan to put snares before their feet. We do all that we can do to crush the public enemies of God. As the Holy Spirit says in Romans, “We hate that which is evil and we cling to that which is good.” (Romans 12:9)

Now having said this we realize that it is not always easy to distinguish between a personal enemy and a public enemy of God. Sometimes those two can easily and so often do overlap. As such there is a need for discernment here and this is one place where prayer has to come in.

“O Father, you know I am a wicked man and desire nothing more than to call every slight against me a matter of someone being your public enemy. Help me to distinguish properly Father between your public enemies and my personal enemies. Help me to be generous with people and try and think the best of them. Help me also though not to allow my cowardice of public confrontation not make me stand up and denounce the wicked who are your public enemies. Grant me wisdom in these matters please.”

I hope I have cleared that up as much as possible.

We obviously have to try and make these kinds of distinctions between personal enemies and God’s public enemies. To just say that we must love everyone unconditionally is to turn Christianity into a suicide pact. Are we to love unconditionally the men and women of the New World Order who would sink the globe into the social order of Hell? Are we to love unconditionally the unrepentant pedophile and rapist? Are we to love unconditionally the minister sending people to hell by preaching Cultural Marxism from the pulpit thus representing Christianity to be something that it is not? Surely, to ask the questions is to answer the question. The Christian life does not require one to be a pacifist in order to serve in the Kingdom of God.

“Unconditional love is a more revolutionary concept than any other doctrine of revolution. Unconditional love means the end of discrimination between good and evil, right and wrong, better and worse, friend and enemy, and all things else. Whenever anyone asks you to love unconditionally, they are asking you to surrender unconditionally to the enemy.”~~RJR

So the Scripture does not teach unconditional love is the sense we lose the ability to hate they who are evil.

Now we need to continue to consider this requirement of our Lord Christ to love our enemy – our personal enemy. We must ask what to love our enemy concretely means.

And here we run into how the word “love” has been redefined thus leading us astray in these matters. As all of you know love has become a word that really means nothing precisely because it means everything. Our English word love has come to mean something that is entirely emotional. We measure the definition of love as only against our un-sanctified emotions.

However, that is the not the Biblical use of the word “love.” In the Scripture love is not emotive before it is juridical. That is to say that love is defined as dealing with one’s neighbor justly according to God’s standard. If you love someone you treat them lawfully according to God’s law.

So, to love our enemy means to keep the law in relationship to them. Thou shalt not kill, commit adultery, bear false witness, steal, or covet or defraud your enemy. You will treat him as you would be yourself treated. You do not reason that since one is my enemy I no longer have to deal justly according to God’s law with them.

We must understand that love is defined as the fulfillment of God’s law towards one another. So, the command to love our enemies is the command to treat them consistent with God’s law. One doesn’t even have to have warm emotive fuzzies while doing so.

Secondly on the meaning of loving our enemy and so treating them consistent with God’s law, this means that there will be times when we are loving our enemy and our enemy is going to be screaming at us that we are not being very loving.

For example, when a minister preaches God’s law and by doing so exposes the wickedness of the wicked the wicked are typically going to screaming “you’re not being very loving.” Every time we lift us God’s standard for right and wrong someone is going to hurl at us the charge that we are not being loving to our enemy and to God’s enemies.

But as you know, speaking in such a way is the very essence of loving our enemy and showing God’s love to our enemy. It is not love to not warn someone standing on a railroad track that a train is bearing down on them and that they need to get their blankety blank tush off the tracks. Similarly it is not love to not warn the wicked that God is a just God who will by no means clear the wicked for their wickedness… to not warn them that they are sinners in the hands of an angry God…. to not warn them that God hates workers of iniquity. To not warn the wicked – family members, friends, and acquaintances – to not warn them and so speak frankly is not love but the very essence of hate and so we are compelled to speak in a way that the wicked will insist is not being loving.

Yet in speaking this way we are of all people loving our enemies.

All this came to the fore some years ago when a Pastor wrote me about the very matter we are examining this morning. Allow me to share that letter with you;

Dear Pastor,

Sodomites, then, are your enemy, and the enemy of your family, no? In such a situation, what does Christ command? “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” He presses his case even further: “…love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.” Then he points out that such behavior will bring us great reward from the “…Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

I don’t see much wiggle room there, or any exegetical tricks that allows for Orwellian twists of phrase like, “…my hating is an expression of my love for the Lord.”

I would be willing to wager that, if you pray with just a bit of persistence and ask God to grant you the ability to love sodomites, that he will grant you that ability, because he is a God of mercy who keeps his promises, and surely if he has commanded you to love your enemies, he will grant you the ability to do that. Not that it won’t be difficult: with God all things may be possible, but that doesn’t mean they are easy. No, usually the process is so difficult that it feels like your heart will break and you will likely just die before it’s over.

Best Regards,

Brad

Bret responds,

Dear Brad,

Your problem is that you are defining love differently than how God and I define love. We define love as acting towards others consistent with what God’s law teaches. God’s law teaches that sodomy requires the death penalty. You are defining love consistent with some kind of sentimental warm fuzzy. We are in different worlds and will not agree. You don’t think I’m being loving. I think my disposition towards the Christ hating sodomite to be the marrow of love. I also think your love is really hatred. I think it is hatred because you are not considering your hatred towards all those children who will be entrapped into the same lifestyle because sodomy was not criminalized. Your “love” for the sodomite, is hatred for the judicially innocent.

Of course you have completely ignored the command of Scripture to “hate that which is evil and to cling to that which is good.”

You also have to deal with the Psalmist who said…”21 Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?

22 I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.”

Now keep in mind that if this is a Messianic Psalm then this is Christ saying this.

You accuse me of exegetical tricks and Orwellian twists. Allow me to return service and accuse you of reading the Scripture through your postmodern emotions.

Throughout the Scripture we find love being expressed by hatred. we see it in Jesus attacking His enemies. You remember those times … “White washed sepulchers full of dead men’s bones,” and “You are of your Father the devil,” and “brood of vipers.” Are you really going to tell me that Jesus was not being loving here?

And what of St. Paul who told his enemies to go castrate themselves?

Yours is an effeminate Christianity. I want nothing to do with it.

I would be willing to wager that, if you pray to the God who is and not the god of your imagination and ask the God who is to open your eyes and give you wisdom and the ability to have a love that hates that which is opposed to your love, the God of the Bible who is angular and will never be made smooth, will grant you the ability to understand how a biblical hate serves biblical love.

Praying that the Spirit of Christ will grant you repentance Brad.

Respectfully yours,

Pastor Bret

And so we agree with RJR on this matter when he wrote,

Unconditional love is contrary to the Bible. The charge of the young prophet Jehu, the son of Hanani, to King Jehoshaphat was blunt: “Shouldest thou help the ungodly, and love them that hate the Lord? therefore is wrath upon thee from before the Lord” (II Chronicles 19:2). The commandment is “Ye that love the Lord, hate evil” (Psalm 97:10), and the prophet Amos repeated it: “Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate” (Amos 5:15)….

The enemy of God’s justice and God’s law, of fundamental law and order, must not be loved. To love them is to condone their evil. The accusation of the psalmist is to the point: “18 When thou sawest a thief, thou consentedst with him, And hast been partaker with adulterers” (Psalm 50:18). What we condone morally, we also approve of or delight in. Those who preach unconditional love are simply trying to disarm godly people in order that that evil may triumph.

RJR

ROOTS — pg. 626

So what succinct principles can we take from this survey of loving our enemies?

1. We are to love *our* enemies, not God’s enemies. To love God’s enemies is to seek the destruction of Christianity. We certainly may and must hate God’s enemies with a holy hatred. A man *cannot* love good if he does not hate evil.

2.) Love is not unconditional in the sense that one is required to open themselves to harm in the name of Love.

(Not even God’s love is unconditional. Remember, Jesus Christ met the conditions of God’s Holiness in order that we might have peace with God.)

3.) Love for Christians in their relation to others is defined as operating in terms of God’s law towards others — neighbors or enemies.

4.) Loving one’s people (neighbor) does not require hating those who are not one’s people or neighbor. This was the Jews mistake as Jesus handles the problem in the Sermon on the Mount.

An implication of #1 above when we think about hating God’s enemies we have to be done with the “Hate the sin love the sinner” mentality. While it might work as an abstraction in can never work in the concrete because one cannot artificially divorce actor and action. God does not throw sins into Hell, He throws sinners into Hell. There is no murder without a murderer or theft without a thief. Nowhere does the Bible teach “hate the sin, not the sinner” because, indeed, such is impossible. This is just a liberal bromide that’s been used, quite effectively, to undermine Christianity.