Blessed Magnificent Dread God, we are not deserving of your favor and your judgments against us are altogether true, but out of thy great love and mercy for your Son and His brethren would you not raise up another generation of Lees and Jacksons, Dabneys and Palmers, Stephensons and Breckinridges, for thy cause and thy people? Would you not fill us again with the desperate desire for liberty? Would you not cause us to once again connect the dots between being owned by no man save you and being free men. Benevolent Father, we pine for leadership. Send forth thy Spirit to renew us and raise up again, we beg of thee, a faithful band of men and women who, confident of your faithfulness to them for the sake of Christ alone, fear nothing.
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.
In Favor Of Pointed Disapproval Against Wickedness
Government schools have decided to go on a anti-bullying campaign to protect GLBT types. Why stop there? I think they should have some anti-bullying signs also to protect people who like to cozy up to farm animals. The persecution people can get from doing that is just terrible. Also, anti-bullying signs that protect people who like to cozy up to dead bodies is probably needed as well. I know I hate it when people are judgmental against people who like to cozy up to dead bodies.
Faulting those who communicate strong disapproval of homosexuals is a classic example of how people measure love in a quite shallow fashion. We are told it is mean and not nice to be strongly disappoving towards the wicked and so we get the state going on what they call “anti-bullying” campaigns.
But is it really true that societal disapproval is unloving?
Is it loving to show acceptance and tolerance for the wicked? To show this kind of tolerance towards the reprobate, I would contend, is an example of the Proverbs where it says that, “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.”
Is it really loving to the perverts in question to allow them to go on in their sin unchallenged? Would it not be mercy to them if they realized that their perversion couldn’t be practiced and flaunted unrestricted in open due to the social ostracization that they would experience? To deride their perversion, would make the practice of their perversion that much more difficult.
But let’s extend this and ask about the issue of love as it pertains to other people who are part of the societal equation besides the perverts.
Is it loving towards third party observers who might be swept up into the perverts lifestyle if the lifestyle of perverts is not disapproved of in the strongest terms? Are we being loving to those, who might otherwise not have themselves become perverts, if the perverts had met strong disapproval thus being forced back into the closet? I would contend that it is hateful towards those who might otherwise be tempted towards perversion to allow perversion to NOT be rebuked in strong terms.
What about society as a whole. If we do not speak adamantly against the behavior of the wicked we are creating a climate of acceptability of perversion in society. Societal Taboos are normally upheld by members of society, who by their disapproval are not tolerating violation of the accepted tabbos. Societal disapproval of perverse behavior is a healthy functioning of societies auto-immune system as it seeks to suppress societal infection.
Finally, is a lack of pointed disapproval loving towards God? Scripture tells us to “Hate that which is evil.” Is not disapproval, sometimes to the point of derision, a “hating that which is evil?” Did we not see Elijah on Mt. Carmel deride mock the servants of Baal to the glory of God? Was Elijah wrong for his derision? Was Elijah being being and unkind?
The pursuit of forcing mouths to be shut in the current Statist anti-bullying program that would otherwise express revulsion at perversion is merely the ongoing attempt by the Pagan state to seek to normalize perversion and to force the citizenry to accept perverse behavior.
Norseman & Cherokees
Maedoc ap Opwain Gwynedd was a Norseman who settled in Wales and then made his way across the North Atlantic and was lost at sea. His story is woven into Welsh and Icelandic chronicles, often told as tragic tale of lost potential. But there’s an alternate ending as well. When European Settlers in North America in the 16th century first began to ask the Cherokee people about their history, one story was of a white skinned people who preceded them. They were large, fierce men with golden grain instead of hair. They called them the Welsh tribe of the Vi-Kings. The Cherokee claimed descent from white forebears who crossed the great water. A legend like this among the Cherokee would likely have gone unnoticed, except that in Wales there are tales of this same Viking prince named Madeoc ap Owain Gwynedd who sailed west and discovered land sometime after the year 1100.
There’s sufficient evidence for some to conclude that Maedoc’s company landed in Mobil Bay and made their way to Tennessee, thus meeting the Cherokee and thus accounting for several mysterious stone Forts in Chattanooga and Manchester. The reconstructed account theorizes that the band continued through the Ohio Valley to Louisville where they intermarried with the Mandan-Sioux and moved up the Missouri River to the Dakotas.
If the Cherokee legends and Welsh and Viking tales were the only support for this fantastic story, and even if we had a few stone forts that we couldn’t explain, the story probably wouldn’t have had enough strength to survive the centuries. However, in his Principle Navigations of 1589, Richard Hakluyt offered the story of Maedoc in support of English territorial claims to the New World….
Additional support for the legend is found in the writings of American artist George Caitlin. While drawing pictures of the Mandan Sioux in N. Missouri in the 19th century, Caitlin discovered Indians w/ uncommonly pale complexions and blue eyes. He believed that they may indeed be the descendants of the legendary Viking / Welsh colony of Maedoc and argued for the case in his famous book North American Indians written in 1841.
Dr. George Grant
Notes From His Lectures on Christendom
Lecture 19
Why Christian Culture Is Necessary
“It is our duty, as far as lies in our power, immediately to organize human society and all its institutions and organs upon a distinctively Christian basis. Indifference or impartiality here between the law of the kingdom and the law of the world, or of its prince, the devil, is utter treason to the King of Righteousness. The Bible, the great statute-book of the Kingdom, explicitly lays down principles which, when candidly applied, will regulate the action of every human being in all relations. There can be no compromise. The King said, with regard to all descriptions of moral agents in all spheres of activity, “He that is not with me is against me.” If the national life in general is organized upon non-Christian principles, the churches which are embraced within the universal assimilating power of that nation will not long be able to preserve their integrity.
~ A. A. Hodge,
Evangelical Theology, 283-84.
If R2K “theology” is successful one result will be a sense of relief among those who advocate missionary Humanism. The advocates of hegemonic Liberalism are content with a religion that is privatized to the Church realm. Missionary Humanism does not care if the American Church elects itself to privatize the Church’s Christian voice to a realm of Redemption. Shoot, Missionary Humanism is content even if American law does not directly outlaw all private religious speech and exercise for the same reason. In both cases Missionary Humanism understands that the exclusion of Christian theological reference in the broader culture, whether brought about by the self-censorship of the Church or brought about by Legislation forbidding the Christian faith from probing into the public square, works to insulate the public square and civic discourse from a Christian theological frame of reference that, if free to walk in the public square and affect civic discourse, would train the broader community to forswear agnostic mental habits.
Conversely, when the Church self censors itself so that it does not allow itself to speak to the public square, or if the Church would be legislated out of the public square the effect would be to safely train the wider community into a pagan worldview. A second effect of sealing off the voice of the Christian Church from the public square is to create a de-Christianized social eco-system which would lead to the Christian faithful themselves to gradually doubt the objective truth or public relevance of their marginalized Christian beliefs — due to the persistent, subliminal effect of the given a-priori’s of the social eco-system in which they are embedded. If the dominant, persistent social practice of the wider community is anti-Christian the impact inevitably will be to peel away confidence in the Christian faith in private and redemptive realms.
Such a tamed religious community is no longer a threat to the liberal secular order or to the plans of hegemony of Missionary Humanism.
St. Davids
I have a 16 year old American cousin who lives in England I visited with today who is attending one of those English Prep schools that are all the rage among the arts and “ugly culture” crowd. These schools charge exorbitant fees to parents for tuition on the basis of what famous alumni attended in misty days past. As I recall, St. David’s is famous for the fact that former PM Gordon Brown was expelled from St. David’s when he was a tender lad.
As I was conversing with Paul (my cousin), Paul revealed that they did not teach History at St. David ’s choosing instead to go with a more integrative approach where one gets their history in their literature classes as they study certain period pieces of literature. Paul tells me that this method is now all the rage in English Prep schools as history is swallowed by what is being styled as the humanities.
When Paul mentioned the emphasis on literature this caused me to inquire whether or not they were teaching “literary theory,” in these literature classes. He affirmed that they indeed were. Figuring that liberal English prep schools were likely deconstructionist in their literary theory I asked Paul if he had come across names like Ricoeur, Rorty, de Man or Derrida in his class. He did not recognize those names. As such I asked him if he had come across the label of postmodernism for his literary theory. Again that drew a blank from Paul.
So, I tried and third route and just asked him to explain what they were being taught in literary theory. Paul responded by saying that they were being taught that while there may be meaning in the text there is no way that the reader could get back to the meaning of the text. Therefore, the student is taught to discover meaning in the text for themselves. Paul told me stories about how he and some of his peers would mock other students as they went “symbol hunting” in a text in order to come up with the most outlandish possible interpretations of texts.
Currently Paul’s class reading Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” and he noted that it was incredible all the different meanings that “Frankenstein” had as students went on their “symbol hunt.” Because Paul had seen this abuse of the text he had concluded that “Frankenstein” was just a good story. Though Paul conceded that doubtless there were some worldview truths that Shelley was trying to get at in the novel (depravity of man, danger of technology, danger of unbounded knowledge, etc.) he was insistent that it was just a good story.
What Paul was saying is that “Frankenstein” had no deeper meaning then the story itself. My son, who was also there, blurted out, “then you have concluded that the deeper meaning of “Frankenstein” is that it has no deeper meaning. “ Paul, reluctantly conceded that point.
What I found most interesting in the conversation is that when teachers communicate that a text only has the meaning in it that the autonomous reader can find by going on un–anchored symbol hunts the consequence is both that some students conclude that it really can have any meaning while the smart students (like my cousin) realize that if a text can have any meaning then it has no meaning. Perhaps we should call this the Seinfeldian educational method. After all the “Seinfeld Show” sold itself as being a “show about nothing.”
However the Biblical Christian realizes that even if one concludes that a text has no meaning that itself is the meaning that is being attributed to the text. The meaning of a meaningless text is that there is no meaning.
Sadly, Paul had not been trained to think as a Biblical Christian and His older cousin is seen as some kind of extremist Christian quack.
I weep for my cousin as his thinking is being ruined by the spirit of the age. He is effectively being educated into anti-Christ thinking. My tears are kept hot at my rage against those who are chaining a generation in the nether realms of utterly depraved thinking.