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.

Van Til Concisely States Presuppositionalism … McAtee Attacks Natural Law

“By his hatred of God the natural man is bound to repress the truth of revelation given him. He does not want to be confronted with the demands of the God against whom, ever since the day of Adam at the beginning of history, he is in rebellion. Even in the field of philosophy this opposition to God appears. Everywhere, in man’s own constitution as well as in his environment, God speaks to man. But everywhere too man  the sinner, seeks to suppress the truth about himself and his relation to God his creator. Even when God in his grace speaks redemptively to man through Christ, and then Christ speaks redemptively to man through the Scriptures, the natural man again seeks to repress this revelation. He uses his scientific and philosophic as well as his theological systems in order to keep under the challenge of the revelation of God to him. Everywhere God meets man and everywhere asks man to answer. Man is inherently a covenantal being. He is one who cannot help but answer to God. He can give the right answer to God only through Christ’s atoning blood and through the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit. Once Christ has become a curse for him on the cross, and once Christ has risen from the dead for his righteousness and he has by the Spirit’s power accepted this salvation wrought for him in history, then he seeks at every point to be a covenant-keeper. He then seeks to be a covenant-keeper in the field of science and philosophy no less than in the field of theology. The great presupposition of all his efforts at interpreting himself and the world about him is the fact that he and the world are first interpreted by God in Christ as revealed in Scripture.

On this basis human self-awareness is awareness of self in relation to what God has revealed himself as being for man through Christ. On this basis God speaks to man from above and man answers to God as a scientist, as a philosopher and as a theologian. All his predication constitutes one great answer of covenant gratitude to his redeemer through whom he has been brought back to God the father.”

Cornelius Van Til
Christianity & Barthianism – p. 432

This provides a succinct explanation by CVT on presuppositionalism. In the explanation of it we see why Thomistic Natural Law theories are not and can not be true. Man as fallen, is out of covenant with God and as out of covenant with God fallen man seeks to interpret all reality in relation to himself as the prime epistemological authority. Man, as it were, takes himself as God and seeks to interpret all reality is light of his own legislative word. As such, fallen man, necessarily interprets the totality of reality amis.

That fallen man, necessarily interprets the totality of reality amis does not mean that fallen man does not manage to get some micro matters of reality aright but when he does get some micro matters of reality aright it is always in service of his worldview that is determined that “we shall not have this God rule over us.” At those points when fallen man gets micro matters aright in service of his rebellion against God and His reality fallen man can never account for how it is he was able to get micro matters aright. As Dr. Greg Bahnsen was fond of saying; “Fallen men can count but they cannot account for how it is they can count.”  It should be noted though that over the course of time as the anti-thesis works itself out in history fallen man get fewer and fewer matters touching reality right. For example, fallen man in the West pretty much once understood that boys were boys and girls were girls but as time has passed and as the anti-thesis has developed now there is uncertainty about the answer to the question; “What is a woman.”

Fallen man, then, will use stolen capital from God’s reality to get his denial of God’s reality off the ground and flying.  This is necessary to fallen man because there is no way to have a perfectly God hating worldview and still remain alive, for a perfectly God hating worldview is the worldview of a graveyard. It is at the point of stolen capital that the apologist must challenge fallen man. For example, natural law has stolen capital from God’s worldview by saying that man is a knower. Fallen man is indeed a knower however what Natural Law does not take into consideration is that fallen man as a knower is committed, a-priori, to not knowing the one reality that would make fallen man a knowing knower. Natural law admits that all ground is common ground but it refuses to acknowledge that no ground is neutral ground and it refuses to admit that fallen man is not neutral to the matter of knowing. Knowing man may be a sharp blade but he is a sharp blade that cuts at the wrong angle every time.

Of Rulers & Religion

“Rulers infallibly decide the religion of the people. The true religion is always the religion of the prince; the true God is the God, whom the prince desires his people to adore; the will of the priests, who govern the prince, always becomes the will of God. A wit justly observed, that “the true religion is always that, on whose side are the prince and the hangman.” Emperors and hangmen long supported the gods of Rome against the God of Christians; the latter, having gained to his interest the emperors, their soldiers, and their hangmen, succeeded in destroying the worship of the Roman gods. The God of Mahomet has dispossessed the God of Christians of a great part of the dominions, which he formerly occupied.”

Baron d’Holbach
Enlightenment Philosophe/Encyclopedist & Writer

I have repeatedly said that the State and the Church always walk together — the Sceptre and the Mitre are one. When this isn’t the case the result is rebellion and revolution as a culture ruled by a divided Sceptre and Mitre will always be in turmoil.

Because the above is true the whole idea of “freedom of religion” as commonly understood is just ridiculous. What freedom is found in a “freedom of religion” society for those who don’t believe in “freedom of religion?” If one were to believe that no society  should have “any other gods before them,” is that person free in the embrace of their religion?

Understanding the quote above is key to understanding where we are at during this current moment. For decades the “Christian” church in the West has supported the State with its Enlightenment classical liberal religion. This is so true that Christianity has been reinterpreted through that Enlightenment classical liberal grid. This is so true that even some theonomists today will insist that they are “Libertarian Theonomists,” or “Theonomic Libertarians.” Whichever way they flip it, the fact remains that their Christianity is being interpreted through their Libertarianism. This is true, for example, of Doug Wilson, Andrew Sandlin, James White, and others who think that they have a Christian Worldview.

We see this also with the prevailing theology in the Reformed Church today. R2K is nothing but a readjustment of Christianity so as to conforms to the Worldview/religion that is the foundation of the State. R2K will never challenge the State because R2K is the State’s theology.

The quote above explains why Greg Bahnsen and R. J. Rushdoony were so hated by the institutional church. The institutional Church hated these men so viscerally because Bahnsen and Rushdoony’s theology was a challenge to the post-war consensus and so to Enlightenment liberal culture. The quote above explains the travails of John Weaver, Sam Ketcham, Michael Spangler, Ryan Louis Underwood, Myself, and others. Given our return to an older understanding of Christianity we are a threat to the current putative conservative Reformed Church’s alignment with the prevailing zeitgeist. We are a threat to both Sceptre and Mitre.

However, I believe we may be in a transitional stage. More young men are stepping up and saying that they are done with the Post-Enlightenment/Post-War consensus. We live in a time where those gods must be dispossessed and the God of the Bible embraced as Lord over all.

This means we live in a time of opposition. Opposition to the demon inspired State and opposition to the sulfur smelling institutional Church. The Post-Enlightenment/Post-War consensus has to go with its solas of “Holocaust Alone,” “Civil Rights Alone,” “MLK Alone,” “Judeo-Christianity Alone,” and “Netanyahu Alone.”

A Conversation On The Nature & Usage Of State Power

Seth has become a bit of a friend. I say “bit” because I have not yet had the opportunity to meet him. Like many of the chaps I meet my son’s age, Seth, like my Son, is a man who is well grounded and quite sharp. Here I take exception to an idea that I find being expressed by more than a few of these young chaps who are quite sharp.

Seth writes;

“Man is fallen, therefore the state must be weak” is a category error.

Fallenness negates sentimental trust, not the legitimacy of authority.

Depravity is not an argument against power, but against naïveté.

Power is dangerous– but most dangerous in the vacuum of its absence, surrendering order to unaccountable forces. In this sense, imperialism is not tyrannical aggression but nationalism bearing the burdens of sovereignty.

Order must be preserved at scale, which means authority must extend to meet necessity. For the United States, by geography and circumstance, defense is necessarily hemispheric.

Politics is governed by necessity, not sentiment. This active character in governance is the precondition for liberty.

“But tyrannical statism!”

The failure isn’t authority, one ditch abandons rule given by God, the other replaces judgment with administration and becomes as a god.

Order is preserved only where authority is exercised with judgment and at the scale necessity demands.

Liberty does not endure by abdicating power, it survives only where power is wielded rightly.

Bret responds,

Since power is inescapable, power never goes away, even when it is distributed properly. There is NEVER an absence of power. The idea of vertical and horizontal checks and balances was a good way to distribute power that can never be flushed away. The vertical balances in our current Government were destroyed and the result is that the FEDS took power so that we live in an era where “in the state we live and move and have our being.” That is because power was concentrated in the Federal Government.

The argument that “man is fallen, therefore the state must be weak” is an argument based on the fact that an unrestricted powerful state will gobble up other delegated power centers such as family, and church. Without the state being assigned a checked and balanced power base, eventually the state will become synonymous with society as the motto arises “everything inside the state, nothing outside the state.” We have seen this happen as the power of the state, since the rise of Lincoln, but especially with the Woodrow Wilson and FDR administrations, has expanded the control of the state. Without proper checks and balances on the power of the state the state gobbles up everything as we have seen and have lived through.

When it is said that “politics is governed by necessity” whose standard of necessity are we talking about here? If one leaves that standard for “necessity” to be determined by the state that will mean the state will  discover all kinds of actions are considered “necessity.”

Seth wrote,

“The active character of Government is the precondition for liberty.”

Tell that to those who lived under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot.

We are currently living under tyrannical statism and you want to suggest that the threat of tyrannical statism is overblown?

Man is fallen. The state is comprised of fallen men. Therefore there is a necessity to properly distribute power because it remains true, despite some denials of this I’ve seen lately, that;

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

I agree that it is sin to abandon authority given by God. Tons of marriages display this truth, (And tons of marriage display the truth that women need to submit) but power not used, when properly assigned, isn’t our problem right now. Our problem now is power improperly used by the FEDS. It is why Jefferson once wrote of “tying them down with the chains of the constitution.”

You wrote;

Order is preserved only where authority is exercised with judgment and at the scale necessity demands.

Bret responds,

Yes … but by what standard, necessity?

I don’t trust the FEDS (including the Trump administration) to determine what does and does not constitution “necessity.”

Seth finished by writing,

Liberty does not endure by abdicating power, it survives only where power is wielded rightly.

Bret finishes

I agree 100% with that final sentiment, especially on the word “rightly.”

Look, I’m all for power being properly used. However, in my lifetime I’ve seldom seen the FEDS use power properly.

“Banner Of Truth” Not Being Truthful … Or “Orwell Saw It All Coming”

In December I posted the following quote from J. C. Ryle.

“The dwelling-places of the earth’s inhabitants are curiously divided. The world is not made up of one people or one colour. God by His providential ordering has separated the earth’s inhabitants into distinct nations, languages, and races, each with its own peculiar characteristics. These distinctions have existed for centuries, and have been preserved in a most remarkable manner. No climate, no teaching, no misfortune has ever succeeded in obliterating them. The negro is still black, the Red Indian is still red, and the Chinaman is still yellow. Nothing seems to account for these things but a miraculous interposition of God.

…

Let us beware of giving way to the modern notion that there is no such thing as God’s providential arrangement of the nations, and that the present attempt to amalgamate all nationalities and races, and to denationalise and unchurch people, is wise and politic. God has divided the world into separate nationalities, climates, languages, and churches, and it is the height of mischief to try and break down the divisions.”

~J.C. Ryle
Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, Matthew 24

Today, a friend of mine showed up in the comments saying that he owned a hard copy of Ryle’s Expository Thoughts on the Gospels and that the quote I have above was not in his volume and asking me if I were confused.

That set me on the task of tracking down the quote. I traced the quote back to where I picked it up. I picked it up from my good friend and famous artist, Dan Brannan. I wrote Dan and asked him where he got the quote and together Dan and I went on a search and destroy mission to figure out where the problem was.

I soon learned that this book was published by “Banner of Truth Trust.” I immediately recalled that Banner of Truth had a past reputation of dropping material down the memory whole. That is Banner of Truth had been caught years ago editing out material from the work of A. W. Pink’s “The Sovereignty of God.” I immediately wondered if they had done the same to Ryle’s quote since it has the flavor of controversy about it.

In the meanwhile Dan was digging around in PDF’s online and discovering that despite Artificial Intelligence (GROK) giving him the quote above and the page number it was on in the Ryle volume he could not find the Ryle quote in available PDFs online.

Dan went back to GROK and asked … “Hey GROK, what gives? Why are you telling me that this quote exists — even giving me the page numbers — and yet when I go to the PDFs you have linked to me, the quotes are not there?

GROK wrote back;

” The specific passage on racial/national separation in the commentary on Matthew 24:1-7 appears to have been omitted or edited out in some later reprints and digital versions for sensitivity reasons in the 20th/21st centuries.

The full, unedited passage (including references to distinct races like ‘the negro,’ ‘Red Indian,’ and ‘Chinaman,’ and the warning against ‘amalgamating’ races/nationalities) is present in certain historical editions, particularly those published before widespread modern editing. However, it is not in most common public domain PDFs circulating online today.”

Webbon Interviews Fuentes I

I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of either the Joel Webbon nor the Nick Fuentes fan club. That doesn’t mean I hate them. I don’t. It merely means that I see them as just two more voices existing in a cacophony of voices that comprise the modern world.

I know (from experience) that this will make me persona non grata with many of the  male Gen-Z types. Any criticism of Fuentes meets the response that Uzzah met when touching the Ark of the Covenant. Many of them are rightly angry about the world they have inherited and to their credit they are not swallowing much of the bilge handed down to them from the dumb Boomers who continue to blindly plod on in their acceptance and support of what is now called; “The Post-War consensus.” I hope Gen-Z continues in that course of refusing “The Post-War consensus.”

I tend to view Fuentes as a modern version of Father Coughlin. A man barely anybody remembers now but who in his time was as popular, if not more popular, than Fuentes is now. In Father Coughlin’s day, before the TV, in the 1930s Coughlin reached an estimated 30 million listeners via radio. An astounding number given the US population at the time. Such a listenership made Coughlin, as Fuentes is today, one of the most prominent media figures in these united State. Today very few remember Father Coughlin or that for which he stood.

So … Nick is hot today but the media world is “easy come, easy go” and not many are able to remain on the top of the pile for very long. Yet, that truth does not dissuade Webbon from his youthful hyperbole as Webbon insisted that Nick would one day be President, or failing that would, at the very least, become a Kingmaker without whose support no one could become President.

Now if Fuentes was Protestant I might manage to find just a wee bit more excitement but given his fairly staunch Roman Catholicism even when Nick is slicing and dicing chaps like Piers Morgan or Ben Shapiro I can only get my excitement meter ramped up so much.

Long ago, I realized that talking heads, like politicians, are to be used like a valued tool. As long as the tool is doing the work that one’s need to have done it is just fine and dandy, but once the tool is no longer being effective for my purposes I have no loyalty whatsoever to that tool and will easily cast it aside. I think this way about Fuentes. I think this way about Webbon. I think this way about Doug Wilson. I think this way about Donald Trump. My years of hero worship are behind me.

Still, as I said I can salute all these chaps when they are serving my purposes and cast them aside when they are not.

As it pertains to the first installment of the Webbon interview with Fuentes one thing that become quickly clear is that Webbon and Fuentes are engaged in a project to orchestrate a religious fusion between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism that will serve political ends. The interview is an attempt to expand the Christian Nationalism movement so as to include, in co-belligerence, “Conservative” Protestantism and “Conservative” Roman Catholicism.

Now, I have often said I have no problem with co-belligerents from other faith expressions being part of a Christian Nationalism movement with the condition that it is thoughtful Protestants who are driving the bus. Everyone else is welcome to come along for the ride as long as they can live with Protestants driving the bus.

My reluctance to get on a Christian Nationalist bus driven by Nick Fuentes was seen in the interview. Near the beginning of the interview Fuentes makes it clear that he is against the death penalty except for murder of the most extreme type. Many Protestants believe the same. Even Webbon, who fancies himself some kind of theonomist, said he was willing for the death penalty to be used as only a maximum penalty for crimes that God’s Word says requires the death penalty. In other words, Webbon, like Fuentes, is weak on following on what God’s Word requires. Webbon would, like Fuentes, trim God’s requirement to meet his humanist parameters. At this point it was one humanist (Protestant) interviewing another humanist (Roman Catholic) on what their humanist standards would require for penalties associated with capital crimes. Fuentes said in essence, “no capital punishment except for really bad murderers as well as one other class of criminals,” and Webbon offered in essence, “Capital punishment for those who commit capital crimes except for those times when we decide that capital punishment shouldn’t be employed.” Webbon provided no textual argument where Scripture teaches that the death penalty can sometimes be optional. We were to take it on his say so.

Now, here is where an interesting turn entered. Not five minutes after Nick said “no capital punishment except for really bad murderers” he said that those who desecrate the Roman Catholic Host used in their blasphemous Masses, should  receive the death penalty. Now, he was quick to use Satanists as whom he was referring to as an example of those whom he would give the death penalty. Apparently, Nick knows of cases where Satanists are stealing the Hosts used for the Mass and are using that Host for Black Masses.

Don’t miss the significance of this addendum offered by Nick. Presumably, it would not need to be Satanists alone who were guilty of desecrating the Host who should receive the death penalty in Nick’s Roman Catholic world. Presumably, all non Satanists would also receive the death penalty if they were to desecrate the Roman Catholic Host. Now as a Protestant I think it is a sacred act to desecrate the Roman Catholic Host, and that because the Roman Catholic Mass is a desecration of the Eucharist. Indeed, my confession requires me to confess that “The Roman Catholic Mass is nothing but abominable Idolatry.” I view desecrating a Roman Catholic Host the same way I feel about burning a Koran or  using the Talmud as toilet paper.

Don’t get me wrong … I have no problem meting out some kind of justice to Satanists for worshiping like Satanists. However, making desecration of the Roman Catholic Host a capital crime commits us to being a Roman Catholic nation. To have prohibitions against desecrating the Roman Catholic Host would be to affirm that the Roman Catholic Host is what Roman Catholics say it is, and to affirm that the Roman Catholic Host is what Roman Catholics say it is, is, in turn, to affirm that Roman Catholicism is true. Honestly, from where I sit as a Protestant (Reformed) I see the Roman Catholic Host itself as a desecration of the sacrifice of Christ.

Now, at this point Webbon admits he has disagreements with Fuentes on the subject of the sacraments but immediately pivots to observe what a wonderful thing it was for Fuentes to see the necessity for capital punishment for a crime that would be violation of the first table of the ten commandments. At this point Webbon is desperately seeking to find common ground with Fuentes. A common ground that Protestants and Roman Catholics could agree on in this attempt by Webbon to create this Christian Nationalism fusion movement.

Now, I quite agree that the violations of the first table that require capital punishment should be punished by a Christian magistrate with capital punishment. I have no problem, for example, with Geneva’s Little Council doing what it did to Servetus. I have no problem with a Christian Magistrate visiting the punishment upon a false witness that was going to be visited up the one they were falsely witnessing concerning if they had been convicted. The problem I have is making that which is a desecration of Christ (the Roman Catholic Host) to be something that is not to be desecrated by pain of any penalty, let alone the death penalty.

I don’t know if Webbon and Fuentes will be successful in their attempt at a fusionism that finds Fuente fanboys and Webbon fanboys united in their political Christian Nationalism. I do know that I will be, once again, sitting on the sidelines looking in because I want nothing to do with a movement that has this feel of Roman Catholicism about it, as coming right out of the gate. As Joe Sobran said long ago; “I don’t have a dog in this fight. My dog died a long time ago.”

For those who are Biblical Christians I would advise that you sup with both Fuentes and Webbon with a very long spoon. There are things that these chaps will say and advocate that we will rightly cheer. However, there are also matters they will advocate that are going to poison the stew as a whole. We must continue to fervently pray that we might be like the Sons of Issachar, “who knew the times and what must be done.”