“The great impact (of the theater)is neither the persuasion of the intellect not a beguiling of the senses…. It is the enveloping movement of the whole drama on the soul of man. We surrender and are changed. Or at least we are when the magic works. Yet the ‘magic’ in the case of effectual calling is always the result of the wisdom of the playwright (Father), the content of the drama itself (Son), and — something that cannot be duplicated by any theater company of creatures — the charisma of the casting director (Spirit), who makes sure that the Word never returns empty, without having accomplished everything for which it was sent.”
Dr. Michael S. Horton
Covenant and Salvation — pg. 225In the italicized portion Horton is quoting Clifford Geertz’s,
“Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, — pg. 27-28
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.
Braveheart and 2042
“The trouble with Scotland is that it’s full of Scots….If we can’t get them out, we’ll breed them out.”
English King Edward I (Longshanks)
Dialog From The Film Braveheart
Part of the theme of Braveheart was the will of the Scottish people to retain their own unique ethnic identity over against the attempt by the English to destroy Scottish culture and ethnicity. This is a theme that is likewise picked up in the film “Rob Roy.” I’ll venture to guess that when most people viewed these films they were outraged by the attempt of the English to squash Scottish identity, ethnicity and culture as it was depicted in the film.
The attempted destruction of a set people and culture may raise the ire of movie goers but it seemingly barely raises the blood pressure of Americans as life imitates art in America. This week Americans were given a view of our end as a unique culture and people. News outlets reported that,
White people will no longer make up a majority of Americans by 2042, according to new government projections. That’s eight years sooner than previous estimates, made in 2004.
By 2050, whites will make up 46 percent of the population and blacks will make up 15 percent, a relatively small increase from today. Hispanics, who make up about 15 percent of the population today, will account for 30 percent in 2050, according to the new projections.
Asians, which make up about 5 percent of the population, are projected to increase to 9 percent by 2050.
People need to realize that this diminution of white people in the West is not some kind of freak accident. Indeed, it is not not anymore accidental then the plan of Longshanks in Braveheart to destroy the Scots. Ever since the Teddy Kennedy inspired immigration bill in the 1960’s there has been a concerted effort to destroy white ethnicity in America and the culture that is attendant with it.
This attempted destruction has not only been pursued through immigration policies but also it has been pursued through the government schools which have inculcated a mindset, through its educational and curriculum dominance, that embraces both cultural-cide and ethnocide. This idea has now likewise been picked up in Churches which have embraced the multi-cultural assumptions that are driving the elimination of the ethnic makeup that has made and makes the West, the West. The Church has taken it all one step further by wrapping the multi-cultural agenda in Christian jargon.
This drive towards the death of the West that we are heading for serves the agenda of globalist who are intent of building a uni-culture that reduces and flattens out all cultural, ethnic, religious and racial distinctiveness. What is coming in the West with the reduction of its historic majority population will either be a new mongrel ethnicity that results from the combination of intermarriage, or more likely what will occur is a balkanization where different people groups will cordon themselves into regional and demographic pockets with the peace being kept between disparate people groups by a strong centralized government.
It’s an odd thing that many Christians can watch Braveheart and cheer like wild when the Scots defeat the English attempt to crush their ethnicity and culture, and yet they get all contemptuous when some Americans desire to keep their ethnic and cultural identity accusing them of silly things like racism. Similarly, people would have understood that any ending of Braveheart where the Scots lose their ethnic, cultural and national identity would have been unsatisfactory but yet they have no problem with the prospect of America losing its ethnic, cultural and national identity.
The trouble with America is that it is full of Americans. If we can’t get them out we’ll breed them out.
Meandedring Thougts On Regeneration
When the US military took action in Iraq there were different ways of reporting it depending on where you were sitting. If you supported the US action you saw the Iraqi people in bondage to Saddam Hussein and so spoke about the action of the US military as one of liberating Iraq. No doubt there were others who spoke about that same action of the US military as one invading Iraq. The way the nomenclature is crafted reveals ones position on the action.
Something similar happens in discussions on regeneration. The Reformed will look at what God does in regeneration and they see a will in bondage and the action of God as liberating the will. Others see the Reformed doctrine of the Father speaking the Son as an illocutionary act with the Spirit accomplishing perlocutionary comprehension in the listener as an invasion.
How one sees regeneration, whether as invasion where God violently coerces the person or whether as liberation where God releases the person from brutally coercive and oppressive forces will depend on their worldview. Those who see regeneration as God’s violent act are those who see God’s regenerating work just as Muslims sympathetic to Saddam Hussein saw US military operations in Iraq. Those who see regeneration as God’s liberating work are those who see God’s work just as Frenchman saw the Allies arrival in 1944 in Paris.
Now we drop into the equation that those whose wills are in bondage and so are being brutally coerced are people who love their bondage, and insist that bondage is freedom. The effectiveness of their enslaved wills is seen in how they love their chains. Arminians then insist that these people who love their bondage and call slavery freedom should renounce, quite apart from God’s regenerative illocutionary Word and perlocutionary act, their spiritual captivity, and further Arminians agrees with those in captivity that God’s locutionary liberating speech act is an invasion. So on one hand Arminians agree that people in bondage need to be liberated but on the other hand they squeal when Reformed people insist that the Spirit of Christ is the sui generis liberator.
Next the question arises as to how it is that people in bondage are held responsible for the slavery that they can’t help but want. The answer to this question is that they are held responsible because they freely will out of their bonded will to call their bondage freedom all the while retaining the natural faculties to choose to the contrary even if they don’t retain the moral faculties to choose to the contrary. The fall and their shared identity in Adam hasn’t delimited any of their natural capacity or physical ability to choose God. This is why they are held culpable for their God hating leanings. We must understand that because the natural power remains intact in those who bear the image of God that they are rightly held responsible for using that natural power in defiance against their better knowledge.
However natural ability still has to reckon with moral inability. Though the natural and physical functions remain whole they are only as good as the moral dispositions that govern them. Those moral dispositions are given over to an agenda that seeks to dethrone God in favor of the self, all the while insisting that God has done them wrong by denying them full throated autonomy. In this state and condition man will use his natural faculties to attack God’s Godness at every turn and hence he is responsible. He can only recognize this bondage and be rescued from it by being liberated. Indeed, the first glimmerings of being liberated is recognizing the bondage for what it is. Before God can be seen to be anything but a repulsive and cruel enemy the human will must be set free, the heart of stone must be vivified to flesh, and the person must be brought out of their wastrel wanderings to the safety of covenant and the peace of home.
Francis Turretin — Does the care and recognition of religion belong in any way to the Christian Magistrate?
Thirty-Fourth Question: The Political Government of the Church
“What is the right of the Christian magistrate about sacred things, and does the care and recognition of religion belong in any way to him? We affirm
I. After having treated of the ecclesiastical government of the church, we must add something about the political. Concerning this, a grave question is moved in the examination and decision of which it is sinned in different ways, in excess as well as defect.
II. They sin in excess who claim all ecclesiastical power for the magistrate; who oppressed by the liberty of the ministry, deliver the thurible into the hand of Uzziah and think that no power belongs to pastors except what is derived from the magistrate.
They sin in defect who remove him from all care of ecclesiastical things so that he does not care what each one worships and allows free power to anyone of doing and saying whatever he wishes in the cause of religion Or who, although they ascribe to him the care of nourishing and defending the church, so that he may kindly cherish and powerfully defend it, still leave nothing of recognition and nothing of judgment concerning religion save the execution alone to him. They rest upon this foundation – that this knowledge and judgment about matters of faith is proper to the ecclesiastical order, whose decrees the magistrate is bound to respect and perform. This is the opinion of the Romanists, which Bellarmine sets forth.
III. The orthodox (holding the mean between these two extremes) maintain that the pious and believing magistrate cannot and ought not to be excluded from all care of religion and sacred things, which has been enjoined upon him by God. Rather this right should be circumscribed within certain limits that the duties of the ecclesiastical and political order be not confounded, but the due parts be left to each. this we embrace in two propositions.
IV. First proposition. “A multiple right concerning sacred things belongs to the magistrate.” It is proved (1) from the divine command. To him was committed the custody of the divine law; on this account he ought to care for the piety and worship of God, which is commanded by the first, no less than for justice and love, which is commanded by the second table: “And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites: And it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes” (Dt. 17:18,19)”
Francis Turretin – (1623-1687)
Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Vol.III, pgs. 316-317
Here Turretin gives a balanced two Kingdom approach. He recognizes extremes in Two Kingdom Theology and navigates between them. The R2Kt virus would have been, according to Turretin “a sin in defect.”
Notice also that Turretin doesn’t eliminate scriptural teaching all because it is somehow connected to Israel’s Theocratic embodiment. Turretin does not practice a intrusion ethic.
I have to quit blogging…. I’ve just received a sign from heaven
I am sorry to have to announce I have to quit blogging. The Lord severely chastised me when in looking at my hits for the day I saw that I had 666 hits for the day.
I reckoned it as a sign of the anti-christ giving objective proof of my evil, and so I am repenting in dust and ashes by giving up blogging.
The end is near. The end is near.