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.

More On Palin

Doug Wilson over at Mablog continues to fudge on the issue of how it would be un-biblical to vote for Sarah Palin as a female civil magistrate. Most recently Doug has tried to enlist John Knox on his side. According to Wilson, Knox wrote “The First Blast Of The Trumpet Against The Monstrous Regiment Of Women” aiming at Bloody Mary. According to Wilson, Knox while aiming at Blood Mary hit Queen Elizabeth square between the eyes as Mary died and Elizabeth ascended to the throne just when Knox’s work was being published. Wilson goes on to record that Knox “because of Elizabeth’s attitude toward the Reformation, Knox was more than willing to accept Elizabeth as a godly Deborah, and wrote to Elizabeth, telling her so. Wilson goes on to try and conclude that Knox, therefore, can’t be claimed as somebody who is against women in office unreservedly.

The problem with Wilson’s reasoning is that all that his post proves is that Knox wasn’t against women as Magistrates once they were in the position of Magistrate. If Sarah Palin finally does become Vice President or later President, all Christians would be obliged to work with her and support her, as she rules consistent with Scripture, as Knox supported and worked with Elizabeth as she ruled consistent with Scripture. However, the fact that Knox was willing to accept Elizabeth as a Godly Deborah doesn’t mean that Knox would contend today that Christians should vote for female magistrates to rule over them. Wilson seeks to prove to much by his post in order to serve his movement to supporting McCain.

There is another thing that must be said about this Palin nomination. While Christians must continue to insist that it is against Scripture to vote for a female magistrate as a political covenant head, we must at the same time insist that Palin is right about many of the issues which she has taken stands. There is so much right with Palin’s political positions that we must stand with her in as much as we are speaking narrowly about the issues. We agree with her on 2nd amendment. We agree with her on pro-life. We agree with her on her advocacy that creationism should be taught alongside evolution. (Well, actually we would advocate that evolution shouldn’t be taught at all but being confident that in a battle of ideas creationism would win out we would be satisfied with evolution being taught until it became such a laughingstock that nobody would teach it.) We agree with Palin on teaching abstinence in government schools (Well, actually we advocate shutting down government schools but if they must be tolerated then we are all for teaching abstinence as Governor Palin has supported.) We agree with Governor Palin on the value of life. We agree with Governor Palin in opposition to the coupling of perverts. We agree with Governor Palin in fiscal responsibility. We agree with Governor Palin in the necessity of reforming the political system. Since we agree with Sarah Palin in all these issues we will support her as she speaks to these issues while still insisting that it is against Scripture to vote for a woman to be a female magistrate.

This takes us to another issue and that is the necessity to defend Palin against all those who would destroy her. We must keep in mind that those who seek to destroy Palin are not trying to destroy her because she is Sarah Palin, but rather because she has the Christian convictions that she has. I believe the pregnancy of Palin’s daughter confirms that Governor Palin and her husband might have been better served paying less attention to their respective career and job and more attention to their family. However, having said that I will not stand by and let people rake Governor Palin across the coals for this when it is the case that if they had been in the same position they would have solved it by taking their daughter to the local abortion butcher to have the child in the womb tortured and killed.

On the campaign trail in March B. Hussein Obama called the prospect of one of his daughters having to have a baby because she got pregnant out of wedlock as a “punishment” to be avoided. A person who believes that a baby is a punishment, nor any of his acolytes, has any place to be criticizing Governor Palin because her 17 year old daughter is pregnant out of wedlock.

My opposition to Palin as Vice President is not going to find me in bed with others who oppose Palin for all the wrong reasons. I oppose Palin for honorable reasons and will defend her against those who will attack her because they want to destroy her for the convictions that she holds.

Memo

Note to self…

It is illegal to stab people for being stupid.

—————————————————————-

Given some comments I’ve been receiving I guess I better explain why I find this button so funny.

I can assure that the humor I see in it is not born of arrogance. I, more than anybody, am more than aware of my intellectual limitations.

The reason I find it so apt and funny is merely because I see the 100 year project of dumbing down the population via the Government schools to have been eminently successful. I have had school teachers, with a straight face, tell me that “I don’t teach morality in public schools because I can’t force my morality on somebody else,” completely oblivious to the fact that by teaching teen age sex education classes they are at that point forcing somebody else’s morality on those children. I’ve had professional business personal unable to follow the simplest of syllogism crafted to instruct them how to increase productivity. I’ve spoken to Congressman about the pro-life issues hearing them insist that they who reside in the place where life is incubated is “not life.” I’ve read statistics regarding how few people actually finish a book during their lifetime. Then, there is the reality of how we’ve adjusted the standardized tests downward in order that people can score higher though, in fact, being more stupid. If a person of such completely average intelligence as myself can see all this stupidity then we have become a stupid people.

I wish it weren’t true. I wish it didn’t need to be said. But it is what it is. We are (and I include myself) a stupid people — and like any other addiction, I suppose the first step to curing the addiction is to admit the problem.

The Family Values Candidate Just Sprung A Leak

And now we learn the 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant. She and the father of the child plan to marry. This may be a hard one for the Republican conservative family-values crowd to swallow. Of course, this can happen in any family. But it must certainly raise the question among the evangelical base about whether Sarah Palin has been enough of a hands-on mother.

Washington Post Article
Sall Quinn

It is now reported that Governor Sarah Palin’s 17 year old unwed daughter is 5 months pregnant. Now, there is and can be no proof that if Governor Palin had been more attentive to her family and less attentive to her career this would have been less likely to occur, but one has to wonder. It is possible if the Governor had not had her daughter in Government schools that this pregnancy would have been less likely to happen.

Clearly, 17 year olds today get pregnant out of wedlock quite frequently. As such I doubt that this will have a great deal of impact on the campaign, though I can’t help but wonder if only thirty years ago if a vice presidential nominee’s 17 year old unwed daughter being pregnant would have been a deal breaker to the American people.

The McCain campaign says that they knew of the 17 year old daughter’s pregnancy before Palin was tapped as VP. I seriously have my doubts about that.

The left will have a field day with this accusing Palin of hypocrisy I’m sure.

Remember, in an earlier article I said that the left would try to destroy Palin because of her pro-life, pro-gun, pro-Jesus, pro-drilling, anti-global warming, anti-buggery stances. Consider this only the first step.

Don’t be surprised if another shoe drops yet on this story.

Quixote & The Gospel

“Apart from the power and promise of God, the preaching of such a religion as Christianity, to such a population as that of paganism, is the sheerest Quixotism. It crosses all the inclinations, and condemns all the pleasures of guilty man. The preaching of the Gospel finds its justification, its wisdom, and its triumph, only in the attitude and relation, which the infinite and almighty God sustains to it. It is His religion, and therefore it must ultimately become a universal religion.”

W.G.T. Shedd
19th Century Reformed Theologian
Sermons to the Spiritual Man, page 421

Large and influential segments of the Church no longer believe that Christianity is God’s religion. This can be seen in the reality that the much of the Church has abandoned the notion that the success of the Gospel is dependent upon the power and promise of God of which Shedd speaks. Instead what we find is that the success of the Gospel is dependent upon etymological legerdemain. What we are doing, with increasing rapidity, is maintaining the accidentals of the Christian language and faith while filling them with new meaning. It is as if we have emptied a bottle of wine and refilled it with vinegar all the while insisting that it is still a bottle of wine.

This can be most clearly seen recently in the Emergent Church movement, but before the Emergent Church the same thing was done with the whole Seeker Sensitive movement. This phenomenon is not unique to our times though. If one goes back to the rise of Unitarianism or Transcendentalism in this country one can find large sections of the Church retaining Christianity only by this etymological legerdemain. Similarly if one reads the Sermons or hymns of the Social Gospelers early in the 20th century or examines the same work of the Existentialists later in the same century one can find that while the language of the Gospel has been retained the meaning of the Gospel has been changed. It matters little whether we are talking about the Christianity of the Unitarian Chauncy or the Transcendentalist Parker or the Social Gospeler Gladden, or the Existentialist Niebuhr, or the Seeker Sensitive Hybels or the Emergent Rob Bell. The one thing they all have in common is this refusal to practice what Shedd calls Quixotism. All of them redefined the Gospel so as to mirror the zeitgeist in which they lived.

In considering history one finds only periodic conviction that the Gospel is supposed to be an adventure in Quixotism. Occasionally one will stumble across the Quixote’s. Occasionally one will find a Boniface with an axe in his hand or a Latimer with burning green wood at his feet or a Solzhenitsyn in a Gulag or a Machen on trial or a Lull preaching to hostile Muslims, but more often it seems what we get is ministers redefining the faith according to the prevailing zeitgeist.

Ministers today are more like Derrida then they are Cervantes. We ministers today have little intent to tilt at windmills by preaching a Gospel that “crosses all the inclinations and condemns all the pleasures of guilty man.” Instead we aim to deconstruct (my etymological legerdemain) the message so our listeners can go with the flow of the prevailing culture. After all we have market share to worry about, not to mention our 401k.

With the Church’s constant adaptation to the times it is easy to begin to wonder if there is any there, ‘there’ to the Christian faith. Does the Christian faith have a essence that is supposed to be handed down from generation to generation or are we to understand that it is just so much ideological morphism, dependent on whatever wind happens to be blowing in any given generation? May our Lord Jesus Christ raise again a generation of Quixote’s who rely on the power and promise of God.

Shoot, I’d be pleased with a few Sancho Panzas.

Ask The Pastor — Is it wasting your vote, by voting third party?

First, your vote is not your vote. Your vote belongs to Jesus Christ. You are merely exercising it in His stead. As such, as a Christian you can not vote for either of the major parties because they are the embodiment of evil. Voting for Democrats gives us international socialism. Voting for Republicans gives us National Socialism. Both positions are anti-Christ.

Thus Christians are in the position of voting for third parties such as the Constitution party. Now, it may be the case that such a candidate doesn’t win but when one votes third party they are hoping to have real influence in the major parties in an indirect fashion. Recall that Eugene Debs ran third party candidacies on the Socialist ticket several times in the early part of the 20th century. We all know he didn’t win. What we don’t remember is that the Democratic party eventually adopted large sections of the Socialist party platform that Eugene Debs ran on. The Democratic party moved towards the Socialist party, partly because of the influence of Eugene Debs and the votes he received.

The same could have been true of the Democratic party in 1972 and 1976 when George Wallace was shot. Wallace had run as an independent in 68 and brought those votes into the Democratic primary in 72 and 76. Wallace very likely would have won the nomination in 72 if he had not been shot and he would have likely won in 76 except because of a flare up in the assassination injury he received in 1972 he had to be carried into Florida on a stretcher. Florida went to Carter that year because people would not vote for a man for President who had to be carried about on a stretcher. The point here is that the Democratic party would have been changed by Wallace’s third party candidacy in 1968. Other examples could be elucidated. The point is that your vote for a third party is not a wasted vote because often the major parties move towards the third parties in order to capture their voter base in subsequent elections.