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.

Detroit News Takes Out After Homeschooling

Michigan home-schoolers were reminded recently how vigilant they must remain in order to defend their God given charge to educate their children. In a series of blistering articles attacking homeschooling by means of misdirection and innuendo Detroit News writer Ron French launched salvo after salvo at the homeschooling movement.

These articles can be accessed at,

http://www.detnews.com/article/20091217/METRO/912170337

http://www.detnews.com/article/20091217/METRO/912170390

http://www.detnews.com/article/20091217/METRO/912170386

The techniques that French used in order to besmirch Michigan Homeschoolers were as follows,

1.) Guilt by association — In his article French cited the Holland & Springer cases in Michigan. These were two cases where neglect and abuse in families eventuated in the wrongful deaths of two children. What French tries to imply is that there might be many other Holland and Springer cases in Michigan that the authorities don’t know about precisely because the State isn’t closely monitoring home schooling parents. In French’s article he connects the tragic deaths of Holland and Springer with homeschooling when in point of fact there is no connection with home-schooling in the slightest. The deaths of Holland and Springer have more of a connection with an inadequate Child Protective Services agency and no connection with home schooling laws that are sane. To enlist the deaths of Calista Springs and Ricky Holland into the attempt to ratchet up public outrage against homeschooling in order to once again place shackles upon Michigan citizens in their parental duty to educate their children is muck raking journalism that would make Wm. Randolph Hearst proud.

2.) Assuming what has not been proven — French, throughout his articles assumes that the State is responsible for Michigan’s children. This is an assumption on his part that is not granted. The people who are responsible for Michigan’s children are Michigan’s parents and it is not the job of the State to play the parent to the parents. It is obviously true that some parents are inferior parents when compared to other parents but do we really think a State that is so inadequate itself in the area of education is superior even to inferior parents. Certainly in some homeschooling homes there is less than a stellar job going on in educating students but does French really want to compare test scores of Michigan homeschoolers to children “educated” in government schools?

Secondly, on this score, what makes Mr. French think that children are safer in Michigan schools than they are in their homes? The list of links below reveal that Michigan schools are themselves places of abuse where female “cougar” teachers are out on the prowl for sexual minor school children partners.

http://www.candgnews.com/Homepage-Articles/2007/11-7-07/EE-BATKINS.asp

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,140486,00.html (Witchcraft)

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090326/NEWS02/903260332/-1/NEWS02

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50447

Why should Michigan homeschoolers put their children in places where such abuse is so prone to happen? We might ask Mr. French, who desires the state to monitor home schooling children more closely, if he has some answers as to who is going to monitor the monitors?

We could go on here citing other Michigan sex cases involving teachers like Melissa Lavendar and Laura Lynn Findlay but clearly with the links above Michigan’s children are hardly safe from abuse even when they are at school. Now, should we desire to use Mr. French’s reasoning we would say that these cases suggest that Michigan Legislators have a problem with government schools that must be attended to immediately, and we might observe that it hardly seems wise to suggest the State can efficiently monitor homeschoolers when they can’t even monitor their own teachers successfully.

In summary on this point we would say it is not the State’s role to usurp the parents responsibility to monitor the education of their children and even if it was (and it isn’t) we could hardly be confident concerning any legislation that Michigan might pass to increase oversight on homeschoolers given Michigan’s track record of not being able to monitor their own teachers. Indeed, one might almost observe that if you want to keep your children safe you better make sure you don’t entrust them to Michigan schools.

Obviously Mr. French is seeking to stir up trouble for the Michigan homeschooling community. One would hope that he would take his poison pen and practice his yellow journalism on another topic.

The Old Casting Light On The New … The New Casting Light On the Old

We have been taking a look at this genealogy in Matthew and we have been trying to probe why it is that Matthew begins His Gospel with this genealogy.

Some of the answers we’ve given thus far are that,

1.) Matthew wants us to know that while Jesus is the climax of the story Matthew is now continuing to tell at the same time there is a good deal of context that must be understood in order for the climax to make sense. The genealogy is a shorthand way of establishing the context.

2.) In giving the genealogy Matthew at the same time reminds us of the unitary nature of the Scriptures. The New Testament cannot be understood apart from the Old Testament and the Old Testament can not be understood apart from the New Testament.

3.) In giving the genealogy Matthews has, in an abbreviated form, laid out the problem to which Jesus is the answer. Those that knew their Old Testament history would remember, through the citing of this genealogy, that God had not yet fulfilled His promise to send a deliverer to rescue not only Israel but also the world. Jesus is that deliverer.

4.) In giving the genealogy Matthew thwarts any attempt to wrest Jesus by those who want their own “personal Jesus,” or their own “Jesus for a cause.” Matthew’s genealogy forces us to deal with a very particular Jesus that can’t be understood apart from his lineage.

The telling of God’s story that has Jesus as the culminating and completing point of this genealogy is the story from which Jesus acquires His identity and mission and it is the story to which He gives significance and authority. Without this Jesus this genealogy is just one more list. Without this genealogy Jesus is just one more baby with an interesting birth narrative.

Metaphors

If the genealogy is the setting of a royal table with all of its finery and precision then Jesus is the meal for which the royal table has been prepared.

If the genealogy is all the music that leads to grand finale then Jesus is the grand finale.

If the genealogy is all the planning, preparations and decoration that goes into a wedding then Jesus is the wedding ceremony itself.

As we continue to consider the relationship of the prologue to God’s story (the promises of the Old Testament) with the climax of God’s Story (the fulfillment that is the New Testament) we must be careful that we don’t de-contextualize or deflate God’s story into a bunch of abstractions (Here is the promise [OT] — there is the fulfillment [NT]). We must take the story in its concrete reality reminding ourselves that in this story we have real history with real people with a real God who is unfolding salvation history.

When we read Scripture as one whole then … when we read the genealogy in the light of Christ several benefits in our understanding of Scripture are realized,

1.) Whatever significance a particular event had, in terms of Israel’s own experience of God is affirmed and validated. Those historical events aren’t spiritualized away. When we understand and affirm the import of the redemptive event for God’s old covenant people it will give us a more profound understanding of the import of the Cross for us. The Old will shed light on the new.

2.) Now that we have the end of the story in Christ shining back on the earlier part of the story we are able to find even more significance in the earlier story. The new will shed light on the old.

The new is in the old concealed and the old is in the new revealed.

Example — The Exodus

New shedding light on the old — The Exodus teaches us what God calls deliverance. In the Exodus we see that God is characterized by care for His people who are oppressed and is motivated to action for justice on their behalf. This character of God and His redemption are so central in the Exodus story that they become definitive of the character of God and all that redemption and deliverance comes to mean.

Now w/ the coming of Christ what we learn of God and how He redeems and delivers His people does not go away. In deliverance and redemption God remains concerned for His people who are oppressed and God still desires justice. With the coming of Christ the redemption we expect in Christ must not be totally divorced from the kind of redemption that was defined in the Old Testament.

However when we read the Exodus event with the light of the fullness of the redemptive work of Christ shining upon it we see that the Exodus deliverance is not about political, social, or economic freedom before it is about the lifting of Spiritual oppression. Israel was in bondage in Exodus not primarily because they were suffering from economic disparity, or social inequity, or political tyranny. Israel’s bondage and oppression were what they were because they were in subjection to Egypt’s gods. The economic disparity, social inequity and political tyranny were the fruit of spiritual bondage. The Redemption that God conferred them rescued them economically, socially, and politically precisely because it delivered them from their spiritual chains.

Evidence God’s telling of Pharaoh “Let my people go THAT THEY MAY WORSHIP ME.” The explicit purpose of Israel’s Redemption and deliverance was that they would know YAHWEH in the grace of redemption and covenant relationship.

So, the Exodus, for all the comprehensiveness of what it achieved for Israel in terms of economic liberty, political freedom, and social release, points beyond those realities to a greater need for deliverance from spiritual bondage to covenant accord with God. Such a deliverance was accomplished by Jesus Christ (prefigured in the Passover Lamb) and can only be known by looking to Christ. This is so true that we can say apart from trusting in Christ of the Bible the pursuit of other freedoms amount to just so much windmill tilting.

Yet if at the same time we allow the old to shed light on the new we must insist that though redemption is first personal and individual it is not only personal and individual. God’s mighty act of the exodus was more than just a parable to illustrate personal and individual salvation. It is true that the redemption of the Cross breaks the bondage of my personal sin and releases me from the effects of sin but it is also true that Redemption, when it is widely unleashed, delivers God’s people from the cruelty, and oppression brought upon God’s people by those who are of the seed of the serpent and are alien to the covenant. Spiritual freedom when widely disbursed never fails to bring social, economic, and political freedom because spiritual freedom is the well out of which the water of social, economic, and political freedom flows. Forgiveness of sin delivers us from the Kingdom of darkness both in its spiritual dimension and in how that spiritual dimension manifests itself concretely in space and time.

The point here is that atonement and forgiveness of one’s individual sin is not the only word on what the Exodus redemption was about. It was also a deliverance from an external evil and the suffering and injustice it caused, by means of a shattering defeat of the evil power of the seed of the serpent that was holding Israel in bondage.

And here is the kicker …

If, then, God’s climatic work of redemption through the cross transcends, but also embodies and includes, the scope of all His redemptive activity as previously displayed in the Old testament our Gospel must anticipate the Exodus model of liberation once a tipping point of Spiritually delivered people trusting Christ is reached.

The light of the Old Testament upon the New teaches us the inadequacies of relegating the redemption God brings to some spiritual individual realm. The light of the Old Testament upon the New teaches us that the redemption God offers in Christ is a redemption that though it begins in individuals moves out from there to touch every area of life so that redeemed individuals being set free in themselves, by the power of the Holy Spirit, visit that freedom that Christ visited upon them to every area of life in which God has called them.

So then we can see that when we take OT history seriously in relation to its completion in Jesus Christ, a two-way process is at work, yielding a double benefit in our understanding of the whole Bible. On the one hand, we are able to see the full significance of the OT story in the light of where it leads — the climatic achievement of Christ; and on the other hand, we are able to appreciate the full dimensions of what God did through Christ in the light of His historical declarations and demonstrations of intent in the OT.

In the Exodus we have used just one example but the examples could be multiplied many times over.

Is Affirmative Action Affirmative?

“One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are to weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are to strong.”

Christopher Caldwell
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe — Immigration, Islam, and the West – p.326

Affirmative action was a foolish policy from the very beginning because,

1.) As Caldwell’s quote above implies, once affirmative action as a policy is pursued, it is nearly impossible to discontinue since special interest groups form around such a policy in order to protect it and to defend it. Such affirmative action special interests groups become roadblocks to ending affirmative action. Such an example of this is seen in the state of California which still has affirmative action programs designed to foster the hiring of non-whites even though non-whites now form a demographic majority in California.

2.) Affirmative action is a subsidy program. Whenever the government subsidizes something they get more of what they are subsidizing. In this case what they are subsidizing are people who are less qualified filling positions that would have otherwise been filled by more qualified people. A continued pursuit of such a policy leads inevitably to a culture that is less competitive with the world than it might otherwise be.

3.) Affirmative action creates and makes race pimping a profitable enterprise. Since affirmative action assumes the inequity of those receiving affirmative action a class of people arise who have it in their interest to professionally lobby in such a way that the putative inferior status of those receiving affirmative action can never be erased. Affirmative action policy creates men like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who exist in order to ensure that the perception is that the recipients of affirmative action never cease in being victims that need affirmative action.

4.) Affirmative action communicates to the recipients of affirmative action that they can not compete without the scales being weighted and rigged in their direction. Affirmative action then creates a psychology in the recipient class that perpetuates the very inequity that it was created in order to remove.

5.) Affirmative action communicates to the majority population that those who receive affirmative action are indeed inferior. What else are they to believe given that the premise behind affirmative action is that the recipients of it advance not on the merits of their ability but rather because their inability doesn’t allow them to compete on a level playing field. In this case affirmative action perpetuates the perception of the inequity that it is seeking to address to the point where even if affirmative action was answering the problem of inequity nobody in the non victim class would believe it since the ongoing necessity of affirmative action continues to testify to the inferiority of those who it is extended to.

Diversity & Self Loathing

“Diversity meant rooting out traditions that excluded people and trammeled the liberties of (immigrant) newcomers. All cultures have many such traditions. But while Europeans could easily dismantle their own prejudices, the prejudices of other ethnic groups were, quite naturally invisible to them….

Europeans who considered churches houses of stupidity, sexism, and superstition didn’t know enough about mosques or ashrams to form a judgment, and left them unmolested. They abolished the old and much mocked nationalistic school lessons about the virtues of nos ancetres les gaulois, but absorbed the new lessons about the virtues of other cultures, and the justice and nobility of exotic political causes, with a childish credulity. Immigrants could indulge certain comforting prejudices, myths, and traditions that natives would be disciplined, chastised, and ostracized, or jailed for indulging. Effectively, diversity meant taking old hierarchies and inverting them.

The European obsession w/ Third World ’causes’ was a function of Europe’s new guilt based moral order. Immigrants and their children were at liberty to express politically their wishes as a people, in a way that Europeans were not….The only nationalist claims that could be made w/o provoking accusations of nationalism, racism or xenophobia were those of foreigners….

Where it interacted w/ immigration, there was an illogic at the heart of diversity. If diversity ‘enriched’ and ‘strengthened’ nations as much as everyone claimed, why would any nation ever want its immigrants to integrate into broader society? That would be drawing down the nation’s valuable fund of diversity…. European leaders defended large-scale immigration in one breath by saying it would make their countries different (through diversity), and in the next by saying it would leave them the same (through integration).”

Christopher Caldwell
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

America is trodding many of the same paths that Europe has worn down before us.

1.) We have and continue to dismantle our cultural traditions in the rush to be “fair.” However in doing so we have not realized that it is impossible to be w/o cultural traditions. So, in the rush to be culturally neutral (whatever that means) we dismantled our own traditions (marriage is for two people each coming from the opposite sex, Ten commandments posted in the public square, Creches on government lawns, etc.) we have at the same time erected traditions that are familiar to those who we were trying to be neutral towards.

2.) Like Europe we have heaped pejoratives upon the idea of Christian Church, our heroes from our history and being a Christian people. And while doing so we have, though it is hard to believe, quite w/o knowing it, embraced the ideas of being a pagan people, with anti-hero heroes who despise the Christian church. We, (and especially our “leadership”) like Europe, have had a credulity that can only be labeled as childish.

3.) Like Europe, our whole politically correct atmosphere, is one that has given to us a guilt based social order where weakness is a tool by which those who are correct are defeated through manipulation only because they also happen to be in the majority.

The West is failing because it has lost confidence in who it is and the beliefs that made it. For 30 years it has embraced self loathing as a virtue and has prized the hostile stranger and alien over the cherished family member.

The Dangers Of Mixing Vast Immigration & Welfare

“That welfare states tend to arise only in conditions of ethnic homogeneity is a new version of a very old problem. ‘A State cannot be constituted from any chance body of persons, or in any chance period of time,’ wrote Aristotle. ‘Most of the states which have admitted persons of another stock, either at the time of their foundation or later, have been troubled by sedition.’ What Aristotle calls sedition we, in a more relativistic age, would call dissent. Immigrants don’t have the same prejudices as natives. They have what we would call ‘fresh ways of doing things.’ That can make them valuable in a competitive society. But welfare is supposed to be a refuge from competitive modern society. It is a realm of society in which dissent, eccentricity, and doing one’s own thing are not prized — as any American who remembers the uproar in the 1980’s over ‘welfare queens’ buying vodka with their food stamps will grant…. If welfare recipients do not share the broader society’s values, then the broader society will turn against welfare.”

Christopher Caldwell
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe — pg. 58-59

The remarkable thing about combining welfare with vast legal and illegal immigration is that the consequence is that the indigenous peoples end up subsidizing their own destruction. The pursuit of such policy is in reality just a version of ethnocide and culturalcide as the massive redistribution of wealth which welfare insures enriches the newcomers at the expense of the established citizenry.

Caldwell writes that “if welfare recipients do not share the broader society’s values, the the broader society will turn against welfare, but this is only true if the leadership of the broader society is willing to govern consistent with majority opinion. As it stands now what is happening is an attempt, through the current health care proposal, at the welfarification of the entire society. If that happens then society will never turn against welfare.