The Return Of The Jedhi — Antinomianism Attacked

“Tullian Tchividjian commits the same errors as many seventeenth-century antinomians. He holds that “sanctification is the daily hard work of going back to the reality of our justification.” This way of theologizing impacts his exegesis of Philippians 2:12–13. According to Tchividjian, “We’ve got work to do—but what exactly is it? Get better? Try harder? Pray more? Get more involved in church? Read the Bible longer? What precisely is Paul exhorting us to do?”

Tchividjian’s answer: “God works his work in you, which is the work already accomplished by Christ. Our hard work, therefore, means coming to a greater understanding of his work.” How does this fit with Paul’s exhortation to work out our salvation with fear and trembling? Paul surely did not reduce Christian living to contemplating Christ—after all, in 1 Thessalonians 5, toward the end of the chapter, Paul lists over fifteen imperatives. But Tchividjian’s type of antinomian-sounding exegesis impacts churches all over North America. Of course, he also uses antinomian-sounding rhetoric himself. In his view, “a lot of preaching these days has been unwittingly, unconsciously seduced by moralism.” He adds, “So many contemporary sermons strengthen this slavery to self. ‘Do more, try harder’ is the constant refrain.” In fact, “Many sermons today provide nothing more than a ‘to do’ list…. It’s all law and no gospel (what Jesus has done).”

This may well be true, though I suspect that the last part is overstated. But Tchividjian’s theology is not the solution to the problem of moralism. Swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction has never effectively combated error. True, for a time, people may feel refreshed, but eventually the initial boost of the “Pepsi” begins to cause damage if that is the sum total of the preaching diet they are under! Sanctification is not “simply” the art of getting used to our justification, however appealing that dictum may sound.”

“In addressing the issue of rewards, Owen responds to the criticism that “to yield holy obedience unto God with respect unto rewards and punishments is servile, and becomes not the free spirit of the children of God.” Owen could perhaps have listed several prominent antinomian theologians who never tired of making this point. John Eaton, for example, castigates legal preachers for extorting good works out of saints by “hope of rewards.” This objection has again surfaced in our day, with even Michael Horton claiming that fear of punishment and hope of rewards, as “a sound motivation for Christian holiness” , is a “disastrous pattern of thinking.” If fear of punishment and hope of reward provide the only motivation for holy living, then Horton certainly makes a valid point. However, this is yet another area where the Christian life is both-and, not either-or, on the matter of motivation. The fact is, one will have a difficult time finding many classically Reformed theologians denying that Christians should hope for rewards as a motivation for holiness.”

–From Mark Jones’ “Antinomianism”

For years now I’ve been screaming about what I have called “public square antinomianism,” a component aspect of R2K. Now a book has come out that has substantiated my “Canary in the Coalmine” routine. Dr. Mark Jones takes on the antinomianism that is oozing out of the putatively Reformed Church. This quote above is dealing the New-Calvinism sported by types like Tullian Tchividjian but the book exposes the antinomianism we find rampant in many quarters today. The spirit of John Saltmarsh and Tobias Crisp lives on in much of the Reformed Church today.

Jones is so serious about this endeavor that recently he put out a video savagely and righteously mocking the White Horse Inn crew for their latent antinomianism. Since then that video has been pulled. You can get in a great deal of trouble for tweaking the nose of the Reformed Establishment. In the video Jones was wearing skinny tight pink jeans while sporting a bottle of Whiskey. He even “accidentally” said “White Horse Inn” in his commentary covering it up with a “er uh, I mean … ” He was mocking the libertinism of the antinomian crew.

Dr. Mark Jones gets it and understands the stakes of this new public square antinomianism. Still, with all the evidence there is Jones has to pull his punches because of the influence of the antinomian establishment. He says of Tchividjian “he uses antinomian sounding rhetoric himself” and references Tchividjian antinomian sounding exegesis. That is extraordinarily diplomatic and is a tip of the cap towards the powerful influence of the antinomian establishment.

Here’s hoping his book will help many other people get it.

And in the context of this post, this should be kept in mind.

http://patrickspensees.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/the-divisiveness-of-antinomianism/

Colorado Obama-care Advertisements — Wickedness on Parade

A new add that the Obama administration is running in order to encourage young adults to sign up for Obama-care.

http://www.denverpost.com/portlet/article/html/imageDisplay.jsp?contentItemRelationshipId=5538569

A few points of analysis,

1.)A tyrannical government is always interested in involving the citizenry in true moral guilt for a citizenry that is burdened by its own true moral guilt will never be free to enter into righteous protest and if necessary rebellion against Governmental anti-Christ rebellion and against the Tyrant State for its own guilty actions against God and against the citizenry. People who have their own true moral guilt are helpless to hold accountable a State with a long record of its own true moral guilt. That is one reason why this poster makes sense. An immoral people will never overturn an immoral Government. As such it is in the interest of immoral governments to involve the citizenry in immorality.

2.) Notice that the female in the Obama poster is the aggressor and the pursuer. It is wicked enough to live in a culture where men do not honor women enough to not practice their natural male aggression to sexually triumph over women but it is doubly wicked when the State is contributing to the turning of the unwed female into the aggressor in pursuit of giving up her virtue with every “Nate hot to trot” they meet. Clearly Obama desires to turn our daughters into whores.

3.) It is not unimportant that the couple in the poster are white. In order for a Cultural Marxist social order to finally exercise total cultural hegemony more white people have to be compromised into that mindset. White people still are the majority representation in this country (for now) and everything possible must be done in order to strip them away from their Biblical Christian heritage. As such, the poster is pointed to young white people in order to turn them into Cultural Marxist voters thus assuring the death of Christianity in this country.

4.) Note the connection between enrolling in Obama-care and getting to have sex without consequences. The young lady has Obama care and so can get free birth control pills so she can go on the hunt for unsuspecting male prey. This is the continued work of separating sex from both marriage and children. Of course that in turn continues the divorce culture as the ability for young people who have slept find it difficult to create a marital bond that can last. Having been sexually bonded and unbonded so many times with so many different mates when marriage is finally entered into it can easily be dissolved since sexual coupling and decoupling has been repeatedly practiced prior to entering into marriage.

5.) Note the fine print at the bottom. The add insists that condoms protect from STD’s but that is a well documented lie. The microbes that carry STD’s are not always stopped by condoms. A person using condoms can still contract STD’s. Using condoms to stop STD is like playing Russian Roulette. Every once in a while your going to pull the trigger with a bullet in the chamber. The small print is a HUGE lie.

Clearly the Obama administration is at war with traditional Christian America. As such all Biblical Christians should be at war with the Obama administration lest they be found negligent in championing the cause of their great High King.

Egalitarianism & The Atonement

Evangelicals, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics alike all hold to a universal atonement wherein God does not discriminate in His intent concerning the Atonement. The thinking of such denominations is that the death of Christ is the same, potentially, for everybody. We might call this doctrine soteriological egalitarianism.

Of course, in our own culture egalitarianism is the idea both that there should be equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. As such, our cultural egalitarianism is really not about equality but about sameness. In the end everyone must be the same. Discrimination is seen as inherently evil and everybody must be treated the same.

In Evangelical, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic doctrines of hypothetical universalism we find a similar type of egalitarianism. We are told by these folks that Christ died for everybody and therefore everybody has the same equality of opportunity. For these folks it is sin to say that God discriminates in terms of opportunity though it is perfectly acceptable to say that it is man who discriminates in terms of God’s offer. Some men discriminate to accept the equal opportunity and some men don’t. Man can discriminate against God but God is not allowed to discriminate in terms of man. God must provide an atonement that is egalitarian in opportunity or He is not fair.

One wonders if the egalitarianism we see in our culture didn’t first begin with this kind of nonsensical egalitarianism in the Church as the Church turned away from the doctrine of Limited Damnation. If Theology remains the queen of the Sciences one must wonder if soteriological egalitarianism became the gateway through which egalitarianism in economics, politics, gender relations, and sociology came to the fore.

Obviously, in the Atonement God does discriminate. For reasons, known only to Him, God discriminated between the elect and the reprobate. Jacob God loved, but Esau God hated. God did not and does not treat all people the same.

And neither should we. Not all people are equally qualified for different tasks and there is nothing evil in discriminating against people who do not have giftedness or talents in certain areas.

There is nothing unbiblical in insisting that egalitarianism is wrong while discrimination for biblical reasons is right. God discriminated in the intent of the atonement and that discrimination was righteous. When we discriminate based on righteous reasons we are being God like in our actions.

So, insisting that Christ’s death applies equally to everyone may very well be the root of all other egalitarianisms that we are now plagued with. The atonement of Christ is not egalitarian. Everyone is not equal in Christ death. God discriminated for reasons known only to Himself, to have Christ die only for the Elect.

Can it be that Hypothetical Universalism is the mother load from where all other egalitarianism stems? Can it be that it is not a form of theological Marxism to make everyone equal and the same in the intent of the Atonement?

Ideas have consequences and I’m wondering if the teaching of evangelicals in terms of their soteriological egalitarianism wherein God is not allowed to discriminate is the mother spring from which our current egalitarianism water flows. Theology gets into everything. If we are going to be egalitarian in our doctrine of the atonement you can look for that egalitarianism to show in our social order.

Ideas have consequences.

Rich Man … Poor Man … GOD

“The Churches too have adopted this doctrine of humanistic debt to the people. The Bible tells us that we are totally in debt to the Lord God, that we owe Him as our Lord the tithe as the minimum, and our lives as living sacrifice. The new humanistic doctrine of debt turns the moral universe upside down and the poor replace God as the focus of moral concern.”

R. J. Rushdoony
Roots of Reconstruction — pg. 320

The thought categories of Biblical Christianity have too often been refilled with Marxist content so that man is the center of our Christianity and not the Lord Christ. This is seen most clearly in the doctrine of social justice which is so bandied about today inside and outside the Church.

Clearly we should be concerned with the righteous poor in our communities but the Church shows this Marxist switch when it draws the antithesis between rich and poor instead of between the righteous and the unrighteous. Marxism is the only thing that can explain how much of the Church knee jerks about social justice for the poor, forgetting that God loves the Rich righteous and blessed many throughout Scripture to be rich (Job, Abraham, David, etc.). God has no more love for the wicked reprobate poor just because they are poor anymore than he has love for the wicked reprobate rich.

Our social justice, if we must use that term, should be for those in Christ first. However Marxism has allowed us to feel good about ourselves if we damn all rich and act as if the poor are automatically righteous just because they are poor.

“Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me…”

Proverbs 30:8

One Characteristic Of Babel Humanistic Statism

Ironically, at the same time that humanistic statism de-personalizes life and man, it speaks often about ‘the Brotherhood of man’ a term from family life. This doctrine of brotherhood, however, is an intellectual concept and an abstraction. It has nothing to do with family life, even though the term ‘family of man’ is often used. This idea of the brotherhood refers to the statist integration of races, nationalities, and cultures to form a homogeneous blend in which all the distinctives of each are lost. The God given personal identities and ways of white, black Oriental, and other peoples are all offensive to these statists. They seek to create a humanity which has no personal identities but acts, responds, and functions in terms of social evolutionary plans. Theirs is a plan for death and they call it life.”

R. J. Rushdoony
The Roots of Reconstruction — pg. 323

What RJR is noting we might call “universal racism.” Universal racism would be that racism that treats people in an unloving way who do not agree that “integration of races, nationalities, and cultures to form a homogeneous blend in which all the distinctives of each are lost” is a good thing. Actually, the problem of Universal Racism is far more prevalent today then any other kind of racism