Apologetics – Page 13

DVD & “The Strange but Basically Harmless Habit of Bedding Animals”

“Since, the Mosaic covenant, as noted, was designed in part to highlight the ultimate penalty that every sin deserves, under the protological law of the covenant of Creation (and will be administered at the final judgment). God willed that some sins be met with punishment that can not be accounted for in terms of intra-human relations. These sins are abhorrent to God even if they may strike people today as insignificant (such as gathering sticks on the Sabbath) or as strange but basically harmless (such as sex with animals). In contrast to the Mosaic covenant, the Nohaic covenant explicitly ordains civil penalties only in terms of intra-human relations, and points to the Lex Talionis as the standard for human retributive justice. Thus the fact that contemporary civil law should rest on the Noahic Natural Law again has significant ramifications for thinking through the contemporary relevance of particular civil penalties under the Mosaic law.”

David Van Drunen (DVD)
Divine Covenants & Moral Order – p. 511

1.) Note the hermeneutic of a hard discontinuity between the Nohaic and Mosaic covenant. Hermeneutics of discontinuity are a hallmark of Baptist theologies.

2.) The idea of turning the Noahic covenant into a “common grace/Natural Law” covenant is completely innovative to Reformed theology as pursued first by Meredith Kline and later by David Van Drunen and the R2K fanboys. Nobody of any consequence, prior to DVD sought to bleed off the redemptive continuity found in the Noahic covenant vis-a-vis the other epochs of the one unfolding covenant of grace.

3.) By introducing a fracture here in the one unfolding covenant of grace, Kline and later DVD introduces a dualism into their theology whereby the Abrahamic covenant is seen as gracious, the Noahic is seen as common, and the Mosaic is seen as a return to the covenant of works, except when it is not. (R2K fanboys are forever dividing the Mosaic covenant into one of grace for the nation while at the same time being one of works for the individual.) This is a kind of subservient covenant but it is a complete innovation of subservient covenant theology prior to Kline.

4.) For DVD (the disciple of Kline) and for all R2K fanboys, the Mosaic covenant is like a scaffolding that falls away from the building once the New and Better covenant arrives. The Ten Words, particularly as applied to the public square, are eclipsed in a return to the Noahic common grace/Natural law covenant. The dualism remains as the Church is ruled by God’s special revelation while the public square is cordoned off from the Church and its representatives, and is ruled by Noahic Natural Law. These two realms (church and common) are sealed off from one another and the Church has no business speaking to the common realm and the magistrates in the common realm are to be hands off regarding the regulation of the Church within the Church.

5.) Notice, in the quote above, the playing off of the Mosaic covenant with the Noahic covenant. The Mosaic covenant, both in its Moral law and in the application of the Moral law is completely bypassed as a standard for the public realm in favor of Noahic Natural Law.

6.) Notice the Marcion move in the above quote. God wanted His people ruled one way in the old and worse covenant but now in the new and better covenant God has lifted those previous standards and now what was penalized in the old and worse covenant are now bypassed in the new and better covenant. God’s standard has changed and so we are dealing with a different God in the new and better covenant.

7.) DVD does look bad in this quote because God’s abhorrence for gathering sticks on the Sabbath and for bedding farm animals only applies as under the Mosaic covenant. We are now ruled by Noahic covenant & these sins are no longer so abhorrent to God so as to require the death penalty in the non-sacred realm. DVD, is saying here, that since the Mosaic covenant is no longer applicable and since we live under the Natural Law Noahic covenant when active in the public square therefore the civil realm is not required to make laws forbidding bestiality since such action is not a intra-human relationship.

8.) The whole appeal here is to Natural law, in the common square, as established, per DVD, by the Noahic covenant. Noahic Natural law does not necessarily require any kind of civil penalty for bedding farm animals, though if people bed farm animals and don’t repent God will visit their alone and intimate time with farm animals with judgment. God can and will exact penalty. The civil Magistrate shouldn’t exact penalty.

9.) One wonders if DVD himself finds bedding farm animals to be “strange but basically harmless.” It is a curious way to put the matter.

Tikkun Olam; The Cultural Marxist Left Worldview

Any engagement with someone on the Cultural Marxist Left (hereafter CML) becomes a revelation of why worldviews matter. Further, any engagement with the CML becomes testimony that arguments and reason are not received in good faith by the CML.

The CML own a worldview that has as it main presupposition that reality is fundamentally made up of a oppressor vs. oppressed dynamic. That is their imagined starting point. Having that as their fantasy starting point they further imagine their Utopian world where oppression (as they define it) no longer exists. They own this vision of an Utopian egalitarian world and then in all their “reasoning” they war against anyone who doesn’t share this primary presupposition and the subsequent implication that the world must be repaired (Tikkun olam) by putting down the oppressors and lifting up the oppressed.

Never mind that the oppressed might be oppressed because they need to be oppressed. If any oppression anywhere exists as experienced by anybody (sodomites, trannies, furries, feminists, Satanists, etc.) that oppression needs to be lifted and it is their mission in life to see that happen.

The CML reasoning matrix looks something like this;

1.) Imagine a egalitarian/Utopian world
2.) Create and name gaps between said Imagined world and the real world
3.) Insist that said gaps are examples of oppression that need to cease
4.) Tikkun Olam

So, when one encounters the CML one is encountering someone who has an alternate view of reality. They used to call that being insane. There is no common ground between someone whose main presupposition is anchored in the oppressed vs. oppressor egalitarian Utopian fantasy world and someone who believes that hierarchy is good, that some people need to be oppressed because they are wicked, that Christianity is superior to all other false religions, and that the CML smells of sulfur.

Let’s us speak here a moment about the vision of the CML. How exactly does the CML want to repair the world. Well, in the CML world the Trustee family (and even the nuclear family) must be destroyed. For CML the family introduces hierarchy into the world. Hierarchy is evil because hierarchy automatically means somebody is being oppressed. As such, the family has to be reimagined and redefined. This usually means the pursuit of tearing down patriarchy since family in the West, created and shaped by Christianity, was patriarchal. Patriarchy, like hierarchy, is oppressive and must be ended. This is turn means rabid support for Feminism since the way to tear down Patriarchy is by having Matriarchy.

Secondly on this score, education becomes a primary tool of the CML to repair the world. Schools have become and must continue to be centers of radicalization. Education as the responsibility of brainwashing children into seeing the wicked oppressive nature of their own culture. White children must be taught that they come from a inherently oppressive and wicked stock. Perversion must be taught as being praiseworthy because by perversion the oppression of the straight white males can be brought to a halt. Schools must teach and inculcate the oppressor vs. oppressed reality and enlist the kiddie to be part of the cadres who are resolved to repair the world by being part of the long march through the institutions. Schools must become transmission belts that pass on the oppressed vs. oppressor world as well as hatred of Biblical Christianity.

Thirdly, Western culture being a primary carrier of oppression must be socially re-engineered. Culture is a means by which consent is arrived at and so culture must be commandeered by the CML to manufacture a oppressor vs. oppressed worldview. Culture is socially engineered by the media world producing film and television that mocks the “oppressors” and honors the oppressed. Culture is socially engineered by the State as it passes laws that countenance and approve of things like sodomy, abortion, and transexualism. Culture is socially engineered by the “Church” when it retreats in the face of the work of the CML to “repair the world,” and by becoming silent. Cultural is socially engineered by parents who refuse to say “no” to their children who have are and becoming socially engineered because the parents are too afraid of losing Johnny or Susie.

Fourthly, even something as benign as language must be weaponized to advance the cause of the CML. Language is thought to have encoded power dynamics and so it must be altered to serve the CML ends. Pronouns become person variable. Certain words are not allowed to be uttered. Orwellian doublethink must be learned and employed.

Consider also that the CML worldview is not falsifiable. This means that the oppressor vs. oppressed dynamic can never reach a point of resolution because there will always be a new oppressor and oppressed class. The CML requires oppression. It is the fuel by which it is propelled. This means that for every putative oppression that is ended in the pursuit to repair the world, there will be three more putative oppressions that will arise that need to warred against. The CML demands a lowest common denominator world as it always pursues ever more disintegration into the void of egalitarian Utopianism. There is always someone who is not equal and we all must be brought down to that lowest level. If you disagree at any point along the disintegration into the CML void you will be cast aside as a “bigot,” or as someone who wants to protect their privilege or as someone that is inflicting harm.

The CML is living in a different reality and their goal is reshape the world (Tikkun Olam) to fit their alternate delusional reality. Reasoning with these people is a waste of time. They are examples of those Jesus the Christ spoke of when he advised the necessity of shaking the dust off your feet. To reason with these people is to cast pearls before swine. Our prayers for them must be that the Holy Spirit would open their eyes to see the miserable end that their thinking will bring them that they might repent and trust Christ alone.

Worldview Thinking … Social Order …. Principalities & Powers

“The idea of unity so possesses itself of man, and is sought for by him so universally, that if he thinks he has found it, he readily yields himself up to repose in that belief. Nor does he content himself with the discovery that nothing is in the world but a creation and a Creator; still embarrassed by this primary division of things, he seeks to expand and to simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

“Democracy in America”

Fallen man is hopelessly Unitarian in his theology. He is forever looking for the unity of the godhead and having taken man as god, all individual men must submit to this denial of the Creator-creature distinction. All of this explains how it is that the State almost uniquely ends up being god walking on the earth. Fallen man, having denied the Creator-creation distinction looks to the state to provide the Unitarian God it requires and having found that God in the state all must be compelled to serve the state in order for the humanist godhead to have the requisite unity that divinity always requires. Thus slogans are born such as “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” When the Creator – creature distinction is denied the State, more often than not, is assigned the status of the imminent God (true transcendence having been lost) and having the status of the imminent God all the subjects (formerly citizens) must be as one with the Unitarian godhead of the State in order for the state to achieve apotheosis.

All of this follows like water running downhill. If a people eliminates the God of the Bible from their reckoning the inevitable eventual conclusion will be what is described above. However, all of this is not absent a spiritual reality. We are not talking about merely ideas here though obviously ideas enter into all this. We are also talking about principalities and powers. When the social order has evacuated the God of the Bible, embracing instead itself as its own unitarian God spiritual realities begin to exercise their muscle. Having locked God out of His rule — having made the heavens bronze and the earth iron — the power from below begins to reveal itself. Man’s evil thinking becomes consistent with the reasoning and work of the power from below. The social order is inverted and good becomes evil and evil becomes good. This was seen to have happened in the Weimar Republic. It was seen to have happened during the French Revolution as a brief familiarity with the Marquis de Sade’s work testifies. It is happening now in our social order. We have denied the Creator – creature distinction, we have joined the unitarian God-state in a creaturely oneness and the effect is now that we have let loose the demon horde upon ourselves as witnessed by our seeking to remake ourselves in the image of our creaturely demon god. Children are being sexually maimed via surgical techniques. Sodomy and Lesbianism is now mainstreamed and rampant (paging Rick Grenell) children are routinely sexually trafficked, the elite (as the Epstein files reveal) are Lizard people with no souls.

There is a danger of reading the times in a fashion that only traces out the ideas without realizing that behind the implications of bad ideas is a spiritual reality — principalities and powers — that rabidly hate those creatures who still retain the image of God that those spiritual powers likewise intensely hate. Hating God, they hate all creatures and so strive to pull down any social order that isn’t a reflection of the hell that they themselves occupy. Yes, ideas have consequences but both ideas and consequences are not spiritually neutered. There is a spiritual component to Worldview thinking that must be taken into account. It is not the case that we are only seeking to snuff out bad thinking. We have to realize behind that bad thinking is a Screwtape and a Uncle Wormwood that has an interest in breathing out bad thinking.

Yes, the denial of the Creator-creature distinction has great ramifications for a social order but those ramifications are being pursued by a malevolent consciousness to the end of destroying as many image bearers as possible.

A Few Words On Dispensationalism & A Book List

“[i]f Higher Criticism is the error of the Bible-disbeliever, “Dispensationalism “, as it is called, is the error of many a Bible-believer.”

O. T. Allis
Professor Princeton/Westminster
Semitic Philology

The stew that was Dispensationalism not only arose from the odd teachings of Edward Irving and John Nelson Darby as systematized by Scofield, Chafer, Ryrie, Pentecost, and others, it also folded into itself revivalism, common sense realism, Keswick and Holiness teaching, Pentecostalism, with additional contributions from prominent Lutherans (Seiss), Reformed (Chafer, D. G. Barnhouse), many Baptists (Vance Havner, John MacArthur, Jerry Falwell, W. A. Criswell, etc.), and of course the Brethren movement from which it arose. These various strains often jostled with one another for supremacy but in the end they all adopted one variant strain or another of Dispensationalism. Indeed, more than a few have argued that R2K is merely another variant of Dispensationalism and has been skewered by being called “Reformed Dispensationalism.” R2K certainly bears the mark of retreatism that was characteristic of Dispensationalism. R2K, also, like Dispensationalism divided the world into “worldly” (R2K’s common) and Spiritual arenas. Finally, R2K, like all Dispensational models emphasized covenantal discontinuity as opposed to covenantal continuity.

What few people know is that D. L. Moody used Dispensationalism as a tool to reunite a fractured nation after the War of Northern Aggression. Moody, who was hardly one to be overly concerned with theological systematization, used Dispensationalism as a tool for sectional reconciliation arguing that as Jesus was coming back at any moment previous disagreements between warring Christians should be put aside and the business of saving souls should unite us all. In such a way sectional recriminations were set aside for the greater work of soul saving.

In many respects then Dispensationalism has been the religious glue that kept America together since Reconstruction ended. It also served as the means by which we have been enslaved by Israel. Dispensationalism so emphasized the ongoing integrity and necessity of Israel that all of World History was changed because of Dispensationalism’s errant premise that Israel remained God’s earthly chosen people and that all Christians were duty bound to bless Israel upon pain of divine retribution.

A Few books that will forever cure you of Dispensationalism;

John Gerstner – Wrongly Dividing the Truth

O. T. Allis – OT Prophecy & The Church
Gentry/Bahnsen – House Divided: The break up of Dispensational Theology

Hummel – The Rise & Fall of Dispensationalism

Steven Sizer – Zion’s Christian Soldiers: The Bible, Israel and the Church

Steven Sizer – Christian Zionism

O. Palmer Robertson’s – “The Israel of God”

Allison Weir — Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel
Giles Corey – The Sword of Christ____

Charles Ryrie in his 1965 book seeking to bring Dispensationalism up to date wrote that the main distinctives of Dispensationalism were

1.) The distinction between Israel and the Church

2.) Literal and plain hermeneutic

3.) Overall point of history was to glorify God

Ryrie’s first essential fails to take into account that OT Israel was the Church in its cocoon stage. Ryrie failed to understand that God is eschatologically done with Israel as a nation-State. Modern Israel is irrelevant to God’s ongoing macro plan of redemption or eschatology.

Ryries second point requires asking the question, “By what standard.” All Protestants who believe in the inerrant and inspired and infallible word of God believe that Scripture should be read via a literal and plain hermeneutic. However, reading the Scripture via a literal and plain hermeneutic looks very different when somebody sane does it as compared when a Dispensational comic book theologian does it.

Everyone agrees w/ #3… we just don’t agree with how the Dispie thinks history is going to glorify God.

___

It’s startling how big a part eschatology and teleology plays into one’s theology. Indeed, I don’t think it would be too much to say that one’s eschatology is the engine that drives all other sub areas of systematic theology. Tell me a man’s eschatology and I’ll tell you his soteriology, ecclesiology, anthropology, etc.

I’m reading Hummel’s “The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism” now and Hummel makes the point that the reason that what he calls “new premillennialism” was able to take hold in the states is because people’s attitudes about the future were altered by the War of Northern Aggression and the desire for reconciling white people North and South. The new eschatology allowed the previous postmills to create a dualism that allowed them to be optimistic about the church while being agnostic about the world. If agnostic about the world there would be no reason to not embrace Yankee versions of reconstruction. The price that had to be paid for this “reconciling theology” though was the surrendering of the postmil eschatology that had previously been held widely in the Reformed Church in America. If Jesus was coming back at any minute then there was no need to see all of life needing to conform to God’s revealed law Word. The job at hand was to get souls saved. The job at hand was not to shine the brass on a sinking ship (the world).

Also, what is interesting here is that Plymouth Brethren theology (Darby) became owned by Baptists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians alike as filtered through their particular flavor. So the Plymouth Brethren eschatology owned the day without the Plymouth Brethren denomination reaching any kind of ascendency. Still, the AnaBaptist flavor of the Darby Plymouth Brethren doctrine leavened the whole denominational landscape in America resulting in Prophecy conferences, Bible Colleges peppering the landscape, and the rise of the Missions Movement.

I keep thinking as I read this … “Ideas have consequences.”

Also, I am beginning to understand some of the leavening effect that remains inasmuch as there is a good amount of Plymouth Brethren hermeneutic that remains in R2K

What A Nation Is … What It Means To Lose A Nation

A nation as a nation cannot exist as nothing more than a marketplace bizarre of workplaces and stores in which tokens earned at the former are then spent at the latter. Mistaking the economic machinery for a nation is the fallacy of assuming that man is nothing more than the sum of his economic spending habits. This is what we might call “the Libertarian fallacy.” A nation is more than the sum of economic individual choices as existing in that nation. A nation is a nation where there is a shared genetic stock who have a shared religion/faith who together built a shared culture with a shared language, a shared history, and a shared sense of purpose all yielding shared memories.

What happens to a society whose people have no reason to go on beyond their set routines interspersed with bouts of hedonism? What happens to a nation that loses its soul? We are living the answers to those questions. Because Christendom has reduced itself to an economic zone no longer asking or answering the larger questions of life we have lost the ability of self-understanding …. of understanding who we are together as a unique people. Having jettisoned our Christianity in exchange for bouts of libertarian hedonism we have lost the ability to think corporately. We have lost the ability to think of ourselves in terms of community being connected not only to the living who share our familial lines but we have even lost the ability to see ourselves connected to both our Fathers and our descendants. Because we have abandoned the God of our Fathers all other roots have been lost to us as well.

And so we have no auto-immune ability to resist the alien and stranger in our midst. No auto-immune ability to identify the rancid theology that is coming to us from our pulpits that reinforce our alienation, even teaching that the alienation is a positive good that should be gleefully embraced.

The first thing to go then was our undoubted catholic Christian faith. With the dissipation of that Christian faith came the dissipation of corporate self-identity. There can be no sense of belonging to a particular nation apart from a shared faith that serves as the coagulating agent that clots a particular people together.

T. S. Eliot long ago warned us that what we are now experiencing would come to pass;

‎”If Christianity goes the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great grandchildren; and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.”

T. S. Elliot
Christianity and Culture; The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Toward the Definition of Culture — pg. 200

So, because our Christian faith declined the result of that was redefining and reducing a nation to be an economic zone where tokens earned at the workplace are exchanged for goods in the marketplace. What was lost was the ancient Christian teaching that a nation is composed of a particular people, descended from the same ancestors, as located in a particular place. Several generations later we stand on the ledge of a nation that no longer can be a nation because it is now filled with peoples who own contesting religions that work to alienate even people who share the same common Fathers from one another. Now add to this the stranger and alien who serve strange gods from foreign lands and the consequence is “things fall apart. The center cannot hold.”

As far as solutions go, the only one I have is a return to the faith of our Fathers but it strikes me that God may indeed be purging us for our rebellion against His kindness towards us. If you’re a parent with young children the best you can do right now is to pass on to them a Christian faith that is so totatlistic that it explains every aspect of their being and thinking. This must be done because the enemy will search high and low to continue to snuff out all competition to their retooling of the now declining Christendom, so as to refashion it into a haven of demons.