Other Opposing Worldview

Bret Chit Chats With David The Roman Catholic

David, the Roman Catholic Dude writes me;

Jesus became human did he not?

To the extent that I depend on human works for my salvation, I do so because they are the works of Jesus Christ himself.

Bret Responds,

That’s a nice sentiment David but let’s examine it a bit before we swallow it shall we. Now, remember, this is your response to my insistence that justification is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. You objected to that by mocking the Protestants who believe in faith alone. When I noted that Scripture clearly disallows our works as contributory to our justification you responded with the above.

So, I take this as an affirmation of yours that human works are necessary for salvation. Indeed, you say you are even “depending on them,” but that’s OK because “they are the works of Jesus Christ Himself.”

Now, while it is true that God’s people are, as Titus 2:14 teaches, always zealous for good works, and while we affirm Ephesians 2:10

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

We also affirm that our right standing and acceptability with God is solely on the basis of the finished work of Jesus Christ reckoned to me and received by faith alone that is characterized as completely resting in Christ and His righteousness.

But, now you want to insert our works claiming that our works are the works of Jesus. This is large scale typical hubris on the part of Roman Catholics. David, do you really think any of your works (even if you think that they are the works of Jesus through you) can meet the standard for what God finds acceptable as a work? Are your good works absolutely Holy? Are your good works without any blemish or fault? This is what is required in order for your works righteousness to be accepted by God. We Protestants understand that by that standard all of our righteousness is like filthy rags. Yet, here we find a Roman Catholic, proudly declaring that to whatever extent he is depending on his works it is ok because his works are so exalted that his works are as acceptable as our saviors works.

Allow me to suggest David, that given this view of yours, you have not yet seen either God’s holiness or your sinfulness and as a result you do not understand your need for Christ’s death. I trust that in time the Holy Spirit will open your eyes to the foolishness of thinking that your works are acceptable before a thrice Holy God because, after all, your works have all the sanctity and acceptability of the works of the savior Jesus Christ.

Roman Catholic David writes,

To a Protestant Jesus is just an idea. Yes, you have faith. But even the demons believe God and tremble.

Bret responds,

Just an idea?

Nobody puts up with the persecution that the Roman Catholics visited upon the Protestants for “just an idea,” David. Nobody is martyred for an idea David. This statement is just Roman Catholic bloviating.

And while I don’t doubt that many Protestants have demon faith, I am more sure that even more Roman Catholics have demon faith. Indeed, there is not one Roman Catholic who is epistemologically self-conscious about what they believe who aren’t involved in demon faith. Your embrace of Trent, by itself, means that you are involved in demon faith.

David the Roman Catholic writes,

You never actually unite with him. That’s the real reason you reject his body and blood, and have no life within you.

Bret responds,

And yet David, the Scripture testifies that the Holy Spirit unites believers to Christ. The Holy Spirit, by whom Christ offered Himself without spot to God (Hebrews 9:14), regenerates the elect when He unites them to Christ. By this vital spiritual union, God brings the elect from spiritual death to spiritual life (Romans 5:6).

Protestants don’t reject the body and blood of Christ. We merely reject the demonic Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. We are done with Priestcraft and the attempt of the Babylon Church to have complete sovereign control over who is and isn’t saved, which the evil doctrine of transubstantiation teaches.

Will you not repent David and cease with your reliance on the apostate magisterial Church for salvation and instead trust in Christ for your salvation with the Church as His faithful minister?

David the Roman Catholic writes,

It is the legacy of Luther’s poor self worth, sadly. He never really believed in sanctification. A Christian to him was nothing better than a ball of dung covered in a little bit of snow.

Bret responds,

David, the most sanctified Christian believes of himself that he is a “unprofitable servant who has only done what he ought.”

So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’” (Luke 17:10)

The Protestant understands, David, that all our righteousness is in Christ alone and so we don’t spend much time thinking about ourselves. If we did spend much time thinking about ourselves we would understand that there is very little snow covering us as dung.

We do believe in sanctification David. We just understand that our only hope is not based on our own very real ongoing personal renewal but our only hope is found in Jesus Christ and His righteousness.

Won’t you join us and find your only hope in Jesus Christ and His righteousness?

David the Roman Catholic writes,

Jesus really does want to save you through and through. He made provision for a whole lifetime of grace. It’s not just some one-saved prayer that you prayed once when you were seven.

Bret responds,

Yes, I quite agree, that Jesus does save His people through and through. We are indeed saved to the uttermost and never fail of the salvation that is given in Christ. We know that because our Lord Christ said, “All that come to me I will in no wise cast out.”

We likewise believe that the triune God has made a provision for a whole lifetime of grace. Indeed, we even believe that Word and Sacrament are the means of grace — the way in which God conveys His grace to His “at the same time sinner, the same time saint” people.

We historic Protestants are not apologetic about our belief that the prayer of repentance is normatively consistent with the context of salvation, and that regardless the age of the one praying. However, we don’t believe that the prayer is magic or that the prayer makes the reality. We understand that a seven year old praying that prayer is the result of that seven year old being regenerated by the power of the Holy Spirit in the context of the Word preached.

And we will teach that protestant child who prayed that prayer that throughout their life they have need to attend Word and Sacrament in order to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. We will also teach them that the sacraments of the Roman Catholic church are blasphemies that empty the Cross of its power since it denies the “once forever” work of Jesus Christ on the cross and replaces that finished work with a insistence that Jesus has to be continually and perpetually sacrificed in the Mass so that salvation can be obtained.

David the Roman Catholic writes,

Jesus’ provision is the Eucharist, the true bread from heaven that give flesh for the life of the world. You can lie to yourself, but John 6 does not lie.

Bret responds,

I am not lying to myself David. Like all Protestants I believe that Word and Sacrament are means of Grace. I simply don’t believe, because of the teaching of Scripture, that Christ’s one sacrifice on the cross was insufficient for all time. As we read in Hebrews 10;

¹¹Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. ¹²But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, ¹³and since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool. ¹⁴For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.

A Response to Dimitry Wilsoneyev On Pulling Down Criminal Statues

“In such a moment, our task should be two-fold. First, don’t help them tear down anything else. I don’t care if it is a statue of Cecil Rhodes, or Winston Churchill, or Nathan Bedford Forrest—nothing else comes down.”

Doug Wilson

Imagine you’re living in 1990 Communist Russia. Finally, there is a crack in Communism and you and the boys decide you’re going to pull down a few statues of Commie heroes — Oh, let’s say a Trotsky statue or an Iron Felix statue or even a lowly Brezhnev statue. Change is in the air and you are determined that you’re going to cast off the “heroes” of the past.

But then comes Dimitry Wilsoneyev who warns you about all the social instability you’re going to create if you tear down statues — even if the statues you’re going to tear down are statues of mass murderers and criminal villains.

Of course your immediate response is…. “What the hell have we been living under for the last 80 years if not ever incrementally increasing social instability as created by those raised up for posterity in statue form?”

But Dimitry Wilsoneyev, good Christian that he is, reminds you that by pulling down these statues that you may well be letting loose anarchy upon the land.

Again, you stare unblinkingly at this Boomer. You’re bumfuzzled and are thinking, “You prefer this four score tyranny instead? You want to say to Dimitry, ” Even if you’re right about social instability and anarchy being set loose by tearing down statues of criminals and delinquents is that worse than what we lived under during the reign of these madmen? A reign that will continue and even increase if we don’t change the equation. Keep in mind Dimitry, that those supporting the maintenance of these statues we want to pull down are intent on continuing this criminally aberrant social order. Further, Dimitry, you’re counsel to go slow is serving to the end of supporting those that would turn the whole world into one vast gulag.”

“Think about it Dimitry …. if Cromwell had listened to your kind of counsel England would have never been set free from the villain Charles I. If the Colonials had listened to you we would still be quartering Red Coat soldiers in our homes. And if Europe had listened to your kind of counsel in 1989 the Berlin Wall would still be standing.”

“The problem honorable Dimitry Wilsoneyev is not that the idols erected to Churchill, Lincoln, or FDR are being torn down. The problem is that they were ever raised up to begin with.” Also, dear Dimitry, we need to ask, “what are we to do while living in already socially unstable times that find us having to barricade our homes against those who are ginning up the teeming crowds of refuse and delinquency to the end that someday statues of their vomitous likeness will be erected?

Sorry, Dimitry, but we are well past the exit that said “waiting will fix things.” Any counsel to people that in effect says… “it’s ok, go back to sleep,” is not going to cut it for people who love God, their family, and their people. Some statues / idols have to go, Dimitry and there is no time like the present.

Winston Churchill is one of them.

Won’t you help us tear down the old idols and statues of the post-war liberal consensus — even in the context when the enemy is out there pulling down the statues of genuine heroes?

Finally, Dimitry Wilsoneyev, social change is seldom without convulsions. Read an old book on Oliver Cromwell and learn that again.

Kinism & Its Fight Against the Gnostic Empire That Is The Reformed Church; McAtee Contra Leon

As most readers of Iron Ink know I have had a long running contest with most (not all) of the clergy in the Reformed world on the issue of their incipient Gnosticism. Usually, this contesting comes in the context of Kinism which is merely just historic traditional Christianity. However, because the Reformed Church has become so ridden with the Gnostic impulse in this country we have to give an aspect of basic Christianity a defining word of its own. That word is Kinism.

I must say, probably to my shame, that I have become very impatient with the attacks on Kinism from the Reformed clergy, if only because after 20 years of me dealing with this subject it seems these people are impervious to not only learning but even to hearing what I, and others, have been saying. I mean this material is so simple that even a toddler can understand and yet we find men trained in seminary — their numbers being legion — continuing to say the stupidest of things such as we find most recently from Rev. Aldo Leon.

The good Rev. wrote, amidst other banalities that fell from his fingertips on the subject;

“What do R2K and Kinists have in common?

And then answered his own question;

A.) They both are resistant to Christians being the societal X factor and in different ways defer to some primacy of nature.”

Rev. Aldo “Gnostic” Leon

First one asks,

What does societal X factor even mean?

I can only guess it means something like … “That factor in Christians which is supposed to make them different from everyone else.”

If that is accurate then what Rev. Leon is arguing is that because Kinists do not believe that grace destroys nature that therefore they fail the necessary X factor.

The whole quote belies the fact that Rev. Leon has been bitten by the Gnostic bug that has bitten so many Reformed clergy today who ignorantly rail against Kinism.

The first and most resilient heresy the Church faced and continues to face is Gnosticism, which in part, is the insistence that the corporeal is evil. The fight against Gnosticism is found in the New Testament (Colossians, I John) and was an opponent of some of the Early Church Fathers. One well known
was a chap named Cerinthus. One day the Apostle John was bathing in a community wash center and while there St. John discovered that the Gnostic Cerinthus had entered into the public washing centered. Irenaeus records for us St. John’s reaction to the presence of this Gnostic,” John, the disciple of the Lord, going to bathe at Ephesus, and perceiving Cerinthus within, rushed out of the bath-house without bathing, exclaiming, ‘Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within.'”

Gnosticism was a problem in the early Church and it has been a ongoing plague to the Church ever since.

Because the Gnostics considered the corporeal/material to be evil one of two responses were seen in the Church when it was infected with Gnosticism. The first was the response of denying to the body any and all pleasure often inflicting the body with pain because it was evil. The second response was that since the body was evil and since it couldn’t be escaped then it didn’t matter what someone did with the body. This led to all kinds of drunkenness, sexual deviance, and riotous living.

Today the Church continues to deal with the Gnostic impulse as is seen in the vituperation of the doctrine of Kinism. Kinism acknowledges the reality of the corporeal realm and insists that God delights in the differing races/ethnicities that He created. However the Gnostic Church with its Gnostic clergy come along and insist that the corporeal/material reality created and controlled by God as found in our human genetic constitution is a reality that can be undone when someone asks Jesus into their heart. Upon conversion we find our modernistic Reformed clergy effectively asserting that the material/corporeal reality vanishes. All the evil material genetic coding that is ours by way of creation is destroyed by Grace and we now are merely spiritual beings who need not be concerned with racial/ethnic realities. Before Christ we are racial/ethnic beings but upon conversion the Holy Spirit takes away our DNA and gives us a spiritual being-ness that transcends race/ethnicity.

This is nothing but the Gnostic Empire striking back at the Christian assertion that creation is a positive good that ought to be embraced.

Anybody who anathematizes Kinism is a Gnostic.

Continuing with this commentary on Rev. Leon’s jejune assertions we note;

1.) Contrary to Leon, merely recognizing nature is not to defer to “some primacy of nature” as if God as creator is not over nature or does not continue to deign, as creator to name all the corporeal realm He created as “very good” — including the genetic reality of race/ethnicity.

2.) We ask Rev. Leon, if someone has parents who have red hair and they themselves as the child of those parents likewise has red hair is that deferring to some primacy of nature? Does Jesus take away someone’s red hair if and when they ask Jesus into their hearts? If not, why would we think that race/ethnicity goes away or becomes completely irrelevant upon conversion?

Really, we say again, anybody who anathematizes Kinism is a Gnostic.

Remember folks what the Reformed cognoscenti like Rev. Leon has forgotten… “Grace does not destroy nature. Grace restores nature.” Because that is true, when man is visited by God’s grace that grace does not destroy the reality or significance of race/ethnicity but rather restores it to be what it was always intended to be by God’s creative act.

My frustration find me grasping for words to communicate how dumb this kind of Gnosticism is and that especially when found those who are supposed to be the ones who are holding forth the light of truth for God’s assembly. That’s my analysis. I end this piece by quoting a couple of my Christian friends as they commented on this piece of torpidity as coming from Rev. Leon’s fingertips.

“Nature and grace. God is the source and author of both. This nit wit is asserting that nature has some existence independent of its creator or at least in his rejection of Kinism suggests that grace obliterates God created racial distinctions rather than enabling unity between those distinctions.

He’s (Rev. Leon) stupid. ”

Mark Chambers

“It never ceases to amaze me all the convoluted gibberish these guys get up to in aims of denying the obvious. Nature is a means of God. In fact, ‘nature’ encompasses all means in general. And the Reformed have always held that God works through means because He is their author who declared them good from the beginning, and worketh all things according to His will and to the good of those who love Him. Nature therefore cannot be anathematized without inditing God Himself.

But the Gnostics of our day see themselves as something wholly apart from nature and God’s means. They seem to adopt a vague theory of theosis in which they transcend matter and means into identity with God Himself. Which really makes it another permutation of the devil’s primordial offer for man to be as God.”

Dan Brannan

In the end the humor in all this is that Rev. Leon, who apparently is writing a book against R2K “theology” is the one who shares common ground with the very thing he is writing against. By railing against Kinism the good Reverend is covered with the same dank smell of Gnosticism that so completely perfumes R2K theology.

What can I say?

It is a mad mad mad mad world.

A Response to “As the Fighting Moderates Mount the Lone Bulwark,”

In his article; “As the Fighting Moderates Mount the Lone Bulwark,” Doug Wilson has a gif of the character played by Christopher Plummer in the “Sound of Music” where Plummer’s character rips in half a Nazi flag.

Score one for Captain Von Trapp.

However, the usage of this gif by Doug to adorn his article indicates that Doug really does think that he is standing on his lone bulwark fighting Nazis. In brief, everybody who doesn’t agree with Doug’s views of natural affections, Kin, race, or tribe is a Naziwhowantstokill6millionJews.

But it’s just not so and no matter how hard Doug tries to paint the Samuel Francis and Joseph Sobran battalions in his movement as Nazis it is clear by now that it is not going to work.

Doug’s history is as bad, in places, as his sociology. For example here;

“When Hitler double-crossed the Soviets, invading Russia,”

Historical context requires us to realize that it was a race between the Communists and the Nazis as to who was first going to double cross whom. Recent evidence has been put forth in books like “Icebreaker” that Hitler double-crossed the Communists before the Communists double-crossed him. It was a race to see who would double cross whom first. Read, in that light it hardly seems like double crossing.

Next, in the category of terrible history, Doug offers;

So while Churchill was certainly a great man, we still have to say that, great man or not, history still has a way of unfolding and/or unraveling on you.”

Doug Wilson

As the Fighting Moderates Mount the Lone Bulwark

Blog Mablog

Anybody who suggests that Winston Church was a great man is clueless about WW II history. Was Churchill a great man as a result of his Gallipoli campaign? Was he a great man in conjunction with his work to make sure passenger liners carrying war ordinance were torpedoed by German U-Boats? Was he a great man because of the copious amounts of alcohol he consumed during critical times of decision during war? Was he a great man because of his acquiescence at Teheran and Yalta to the Soviets taking over Eastern Europe? Was he a great man because of the Quebec conference? Was he a great man because he was all in on the Morgenthau plan to murder countless German civilians after the war? Was he a great man because of his demand for the firebombing in German cities or even just the routine bombing of civilian centers? (Churchill was doing this to Germany long before Germany responded in kind against England.) Was Churchill great when he stood on the roof defying the German bombers to bomb him knowing all the time because of intelligence reports that the German Bombers were not going to come near his location? Was Churchill a great man for how he starved out India? Was he a great man for conspiring with FDR to get us into a war we had no business being involved? Was Winston Churchill great because his leadership in both World Wars resulted in the end of the British Empire and the Communist take over of half of Europe?

You see… Doug Wilson is not a wise man. He calls one of the greatest villains of the 20th century a great man. Someone should tell Doug that it is possible to think Hitler a villain while at the same time thinking that Churchill was a villain as well.

So, we see that not only is Doug’s sociology dreadful but his 20th century history is dreadful as well. As a result, he puts the wrong chaps in the dock.

Now, we should say here that Doug’s concern that there may be people who are crypto-Nazis among white Christians in America is understandable but having been around and knowing a good number of Kinists it is not the Kinists who want to “Heil” them some “Hitler.” How does Doug figure that the Filipino Kinists I know, or the Hispanic Kinists I know, or the Black Kinists I know, or the sub-continent Indian Kinists I know are going to look going around going all “sieg-heil all the time?” As I have said countless times it is just ridiculous to suggest that Kinism = Nazism. But that is what Doug does and what Doug continues to do in this most recent piece.

Doug seems to take some exception to Dr. Stephen Wolfe’s recent tweet stating;

“White evangelicals are the lone bulwark standing between us and the disaster of moral insanity.”

He admits that it is a true statement but that whiteness has nothing to do with the observation. He notes that it is equally true that;

“Zionist dispensationalists are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America.” If we were to offer this up as a demographic observation, it makes the same kind of sense as does the white evangelical version because, in North America, white evangelicals really are overwhelmingly Zionist dispensationalists.

Perhaps, but it is also true that Zionist dispensationalists are overwhelming white people and so Stephen Wolfe’s statement remains true. As a whole we could say that “White evangelicals, many, but not all of whom are Zionist Dispies, are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America.” However, the one constant between these two groups (White Evangelicals in America and Zionist Dispensationalists in America) is that they tend to be overwhelmingly white. All Doug has proven here is that some of those white people who are part of the Bulwark against moral insanity in America are eschatologically insane when it comes to thinking that modern Khazars in the Middle East have anything to do with the return of Jesus. However, that point does not negate Stephen Wolfe’s point that white Evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America.

Now, we would reassure Doug here that we are convinced that the reason that White Evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America is primarily because White Evangelicals are Christian. However, those White Christians remain White, as much as that seems to bug Doug.

Now, the question arises; “If White Evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America, where do we find the corps of moral insanity arising in the West against which White Evangelicals have to serve as the lone bulwark?”

However, in answering this question Doug would vigorously protest because a certain bone would get stuck sideways in his throat could he be dispassionate about the answer.

Doug next manages to call many of those who oppose his Churchillian vision of reality of being mangy dogs. In this context the Pope of Moscow writes,

“Now I have been maintaining for a long time that any conservative Christian minister who is not routinely accused of racism and misogyny is a minister who is not doing his job. I have also maintained that if the charges are in any way true, as determined by the scales of the Temple, he is also not doing his job. Got that? Faithful Christians are slandered as racists and misogynists, and secondly, the slander is in fact a slander.”

1.) Yes, but should faithful conservative Christiana (be they ministers or otherwise) be slandered by Doug as being dogs (mangy or otherwise) or as being “racists” or as being “Kinists” with the innuendo being that Kinism = racism? Et Tu Doug?

2.) I’m all for going by the scales of the Temple as long as Doug Wilson isn’t the one operating the scales while the weighing is going on. Got to watch that thumb on the scales routine.

3.) I know many Kinists and I have to tell you I am dancing with rage over the constant hinting by Doug that this group of men I know are racists, Anti-Semites, or misogynists. Now, I suppose there may be Kinist men I don’t know who are secretly racist (whatever that might mean), Anti-Semites, and/or misogynist but if those men exist they are buried pretty deep. I mean, after all, I have been called “The King of the Kinists.” You would think I would know my subjects. (I say, I say, I say, that’s a joke Son.)

To put a fine point on this matter. I don’t know all the men out in Pella, Iowa but I know some of them and I am hear to tell you those men are racists the way that Aunt Jemima syrup is a brand of Kaopectate. It is just ridiculous the way that Pella CREC church — modeling so well as it does the idea of a Christ centered community of faith — should have to put up with the slings, arrows, and denunciations coming from Moscow and the CREC Pope.

In this context Doug writes,

I want to fight for the truth in such a way as to make people accuse me of being a bigot. I also want to fight in such a way as to make it manifestly clear to all the sensible observers that I am not a bigot.

And here we find irony because I would 100% agree with that sentiment and yet Doug tries to cleanse himself of the bigot accusation by pointing his gnarly finger at ethno-nationalists/Kinists and in good Commie fashion denounces them as … “Bigots,” “Racists,” and “Anti-Semites.” I know… I have come under Doug’s examination myself in the past. So, to be clear here, I am accusing Doug of cleansing himself of the accusation of bigot by putting other men in the dock and falsely charging them with being a bigot. In such a way Doug can say to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal neo-con crowd, “See, I’m not a bigot like these filthy bigots.” That kind of behavior can tend to make people resent you.

Doug includes in his irrational diatribe,

“that doesn’t keep the situation in Pella from being a real pastoral mess.”

I know some of the men in that Pella Church. I know them as good men. I also know what it means to be a Pastor and I can guarantee you that when the Pope of the denomination one is attached to says things like the sentence above it makes your job as Pastor a giant 5 alarm migraine headache. I don’t know Rev. Michael Shover of Pella CREC. I have never talked to him. But, I can still sympathize with the headache that Doug has created for him in Doug’s authorial petulance.

Doug then talks about the stupid proposed Memorials that the CREC is fixing to adopt. Personally, I applaud those Memorials because they are going to serve to make the CREC irrelevant in the fight that is ahead for the survival of Christendom in America. Really, what Doug is trying to build now is a soft-multicultural ecclesiastical reality. The CREC, when it comes to multiculturalism, metaphorically speaking, objects to the rock group “Black Sabbath,” but they are perfectly fine with Ozzy Osbourne.

Doug finishes his article with this rhetorical flourish;

The edgy brethren, let us call them, think that they are the real threat to the regime. They believe that they are the lone bulwark. They have seen through all of the lies. They took one of the red pills, and then six of them, and then they emptied the bottle. They believe that years ago the Moscow gang started down the right road with our little putt-putt reformation, but they have come into the brutal truth. They, and they alone, have faced up to the stark realities.

Moscow, with its worship services, and psalms, and feasts, and wedding ceremonies, and conferences, and publishing, and Canon plussing, and small business start-ups, and education work, and so on and furthermore, is simply LARPing. They, by way of contrast, know the truth about the Jews and the start of the Second World War.

1.) Clearly, they have seen through the WW II lies that Doug has embraced. They are more likely to read David Irving or Patrick J. Buchanan while Doug is reading the court historians on the subject.

2.) Praise God there are people left who are emptying the red-pill bottle while swallowing rapidly. It is simply the case that seeing through all the lies and smog of this culture requires a hefty consumption of red-pills. Would that Doug tried swallowing a few more.

3.) Count me as one of those who believes that Moscow started something good but then got sidelined by bad theology (Federal Vision), bad history, bad sociology, and bad ecclesiology (Ecclesiocentrism). I am glad that a corrective to their corrective arrived on the scene. Doug is not the final word on Ecclesia semper reformanda est. Doug refuses himself to face historical stark realities. Shrug … God will raise up someone else who isn’t fearful of these stark realities.

4.) Doug finishes with what, in my opinion, looks to be insecurity. He cites the great might of his Empire and implies… “how dare you suggest that I could possibly be wrong?”

We tip the cap to all that Doug has accomplished and praise God for that work. However, Doug is not the end of the road. There is more road ahead and if Doug does not want to travel it, some of the men of Pella and others like them will travel further down the road.

McAtee Analyzes Stephen Wolfe Using Theological Categories

^{Col. 1:16}For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:

¹⁷And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

Romans 11:36 For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things…

“We think that all faithful thinking has to be theological. But most things, to truly understand them, require non-theological analysis. That’s not to say that they are outside God but that the topics of the theological discipline cannot adequately explain/analyze them.”

Dr. Stephen Wolfe

“An Orthodox Jewish friend of mine spotted it immediately in a comment he made to me soon after seeing the movie (Gibson’s ‘The Passion of Christ’) himself and dismissing the charges of antisemitism as preposterous. ‘It’s all a put on, isn’t it?’ he remarked. ‘None of the guys claiming it’s antisemitic really believes that. It’s really just a question of power. That’s all.’

It is indeed a question of power because entirely apart from the theological, historical, and aesthetic merits of the Gibson film is the question of controlling the public culture, the way of life that defines American society and establishes public standards by which behavior, discussion, and thought are regulated. You probably do not have to accept Christopher Dawson’s view that ‘a living religion always aspires to be the center round which the whole culture revolves’ to grasp that religion is invariably a powerful force in defining a culture and that it is no coincidence that the words cult and culture both derive from the Latin cultus. The religion a society accepts—publicly, regardless of what its members privately believe—is what defines its morals and its patterns of what is and is not legitimate.

The angry controversy about (the movie) ‘The Passion’ is about which cultus will define American culture, and the conflict over the movie is a struggle for cultural power, for what Antonio Gramsci called ‘cultural hegemony.’ Rabbi Jacob Neusner has remarked that Auschwitz has replaced Sinai in the religious sensibilities of many modern secularized Jews, and the bitter and hysterical war against Mel Gibson represents a further attempted displacement—that Auschwitz replace Calvary, that Christianity itself as Americans understand and accept it be defined and regulated by contemporary Jewish standards and those cultural hegemons who enforce them.”

Samuel T. Francis

I run these these three quotes, from Scripture, Wolfe, and Francis, together in order to demonstrate how mind bogglingly jejune Wolfe is to insist. “that to understand most things requires non-theological analysis”, by providing a Samuel Francis quote regarding a film. Francis’ quote, using theological analysis gets to the center of the meaning of Mel Gibson’s film as well as why it was so vehemently resisted.

Secondly, contra Wolfe and R2K, with their agreement on the Natural Law model of the world, there is no understanding of any reality apart from the usage of theological analysis and categories. I promise you any analysis that Wolfe does on anything is riven with theological assumptions and a-prioris. The theological assumption that is incipient in Wolfe’s quote above is that God is not needed in order to understand many aspects of reality. Wolfe is presuming that man can understand many aspects of reality in the context of completely discountenancing the God of the Bible. Autonomous man, can, starting only from his own reality, and as the measure of whatever he is analyzing, come to the truth of whatever he is analyzing. You cannot understand the depth of the depravity of Wolfe’s quote without using theological categories to analyze his and its depravity.

Thirdly, what is odd about Wolfe’s quote when compared with the Francis quote is that Francis, who was not a Christian at the time he wrote this piece from which the quote comes, was not a Christian while Wolfe professes Christ. Here we have a case where the children of darkness are wiser than the children of the light.

I do accept Dawson’s view on religion and it is only Wolfe’s religion that could force him to not accept Dawson’s view on religion that religion/theology is the center around which all culture orbits. If we don’t do analysis on anything via theological categories then all that is left is doing analysis via humanistic categories, which, ironically enough, ends up being its own theological analysis.

Wolfe went on to describe anybody who disagrees with his quote above as doing the worst of worldview thinking. Keep in mind that Natural Law theory is inimically hostile to worldview thinking. It is only “natural” that a Natural law aficionado like Wolfe would say such a thing.

Dawson is correct. Religion/theology is the center around which all revolves and since that is the center than all is an expression of the religion/theology around which it revolves.

All the denials and vituperations of the Stephen Wolfes and the R. Scott Clarks of the world, who do not agree that everything must be analyzed using theological categories, no matter what else they might disagree on, will not change that.