Category: Apologetics

To The Tune Of, “I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day.”

I heard the calls each passing day
For a heterodox thing called R2K
So rare a treat to embrace defeat
For peace for the Church and good will to gays

They thought now as a new era had come
“Thank God we’re done with Christendom”
Now raised their voice, and did rejoice
For peace for the Church, and good will to gays

Still niggling, wiggling in my mind
Dualism’s hold now on mankind
A care, a pause, for God’s cause
For truth in the Church, and good will to gays

And with resolve, I raised my head
“There will be no peace for the Church,” I said
“This 2K is weak, and mocks those who seek
Peace for the Church, good will to gays.”

Then shouted louder the Escondido peeps
“We are not dead, nor do we sleep;
We’ll weep and wail, we will not fail
In our Peace for the Church, good will to gays.”

And so now the Church has a choice
Will the Church yet now raise her voice
Or will she sleep, no regard for sheep
For false Peace for the Church, good will for gays

The humanist / Cultural Marxist want Christians to stay out of politics as Christians. R2K agrees going so far as to insist that the Church as the Church has no word for public square politics. The humanists / Cultural Marxists deny that there is a valid Biblical word that applies to this public square. R2K agrees opting instead to appeal to a neutral common realm that is ruled by a wax nose Natural law. The humanists / Cultural Marxists argue that Old Testament laws, if applied today, would produce tyranny. R2K seemingly agrees and so in order to avoid the dastardly taint of “tyranny,” so called, can find it theoretically acceptable for Christians to support legislation creating space for civil unions. The humanists / Cultural Marxists say that the civil government should be run in terms of putatively religiously neutral laws. R2K agrees. The humanists / Cultural Marxists deny that the God of the Bible brings predictable sanctions in history against societies that do not obey His law. R2K agrees insisting that evil will never triumph over good apart from a cataclysmic in-breaking. The humanists / Cultural Marxists deny that the preaching of the gospel will ever fundamentally change the way the world operates. R2K agrees arguing, in a Manichean fashion, that good and evil will always grow together. The humanists / Cultural Marxists say that Christians should sit in the back of the cultural bus. R2K agrees just so long as they can be irrelevant on Sundays during worship time.

This is why both of these positions hate the message of Christian Reconstruction and both of these positions will make common cause to insure that biblical Christianity will never come to the fore.

Both Cultural Marxism and R2K will lose as Christ will conquer both.

‎”… it’s a good thing that we no longer live in an era where Christianity is a culture.”

~Michael Horton, R2k architect

The reasons why Horton’s statement is absurd.

1.) According to Horton and the R2K lads it is IMPOSSIBLE for Christianity to be a culture. If it is impossible for Christianity to be a culture then no one at no time as ever have lived in an era where Christianity was a culture, and this even if they were so deluded as to believe that they were living in a Christian culture. To admit that there was a time when Christianity was a culture completely eviscerates the whole theorem of R2K.

2.) This reveals that the R2K theological neophytes don’t see an intimate relationship between cult and culture. Culture is merely the living out of the belief system inculcated by the cult as embraced by the adherents of the cult. R2K gives us a Christianity that is all personal conversion with no impact by those persons converted upon the culture they live in unto a social order that could rightly be designated as “Christian.”

3.) If #2 is true (and it is) Horton is confessing that it is good thing that we no longer live in an era where Christianity is the predominant belief system. He is saying it is a good thing that other belief systems are the belief systems that have won the day and so are producing non Christian culture. Horton is saying that it is good that the God of the Bible is no longer taken as God by the West. This is treason by Dr. Michael Horton.

4.) The West was what it was, and yet remains what it is because of the (now waning) influence of Biblical Christianity on people, peoples, and then how those people and peoples incarnated the High Priesthood and Lordship of Jesus Christ into their everyday living. As the West throws off Christianity as both cult and culture, due to teachings by both R2K advocates and the cultural Marxists. (Politics does indeed make strange bed-mates. Who would have ever thought that putatively Confessional Christianity would have served the agenda of cultural Marxism?) The R2K project is guaranteed to finish off what is left of both the West and Western Christianity. R2K, in pulling down the West with this God awful theology, will pull down its own house and be as relevant to what they create as the Russian Orthodox Church was relevant in Communist Russia.

5,) Since R2k is amillennialism run amok this agenda of R2k to divorce Christian theology from culture is a self fulfilling prophecy. R2k believes and teaches a suffering Church where Christian are pilgrims in this world. This so called theological pursuit of R2K thus absolutely guarantees what their theology insists upon. They believe that Christianity is only a suffering religion and so they have created a theology that will guarantee that suffering will come to pass.

“Calvin opposed the Roman concept of “perfectio” as well as that of the Anabaptists. He contended for an ethos that bound both the Christian and the world by the same set of requirements, so that the way of the Reformation did not result in a church segregated from the world. Although Calvin also recognized a two-kingdom doctrine, his exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount revealed that he did not let this antithesis lead him to a basic dualism.”

Calvin & The Anabaptist Radicals
Willem Balke

Unlike Calvin, R2K contends for a different ethos for the Christian and the world. The Christian is to be ruled by the ethos of Scripture in the Church realm and Natural law in the common realm, while the ethos for the world in the common realm is Natural law. Unlike Calvin the R2K “Divines” give a different ethos to the world and to the Christian. Now, there might be overlap between those two different ethoi but they are different ethoi. It is also true the R2K segregates the Church from the world though it does not segregate the Christian from the world like the Anabaptists did and do. R2K, like the Anabaptists of old do not allow the Church as the Church to be concerned with what happens in the non Church realm. (For R2K that realm is called “common,” while for the Anabaptists that realm was evil. Still, regardless of what each call that realm, the Church as the Church is segregated from it considering it “the world.”)

R2K “theology” is a tweaking of a historic theology but it is a tweaking of Anabaptist theology and not a tweaking of Historic Calvinist theology. R2K’s tweaking, as that tweaking is happening in the Reformed community, is a tweaking that pulls contemporary Calvinism more towards Anabaptist categories. Consider the R2K tweak of Anabaptist theology in its nomenclature. Historically Anabaptist theology called the non-Church realm evil. R2K doesn’t do that. Instead, R2K tweaks Anabaptist nomenclature and calls the evil realm “common,” but all the while insists that it is impossible for the R2K “common” realm to be Christian, insisting on calling it “common.” Now, one might observe that if it is impossible for the “common” realm to be “Christian” (per R2k) then all that is left is for the common realm to be not Christian. If the common realm is not Christian then how is it also (using Anabaptist nomenclature) not a evil realm? The R2K acolytes reply that the common realm is neither Christian nor evil but in doing so they have given up their Reformed credentials by creating a realm where the antithesis does not apply and they have completely given up on Van Til’s denial of neutrality. The R2K lads can say till they’re blue in the face that common does not equal neutral but saying that it is not so, does not make it not so.