Apologetics – Page 15

Dr. Strange and the Multicult of Madness — Part V

“Inside our personal information bubbles, our assumptions, our blind spots, our prejudices aren’t challenged, they are reinforced and naturally, we’re more likely to react negatively to those consuming different facts and opinions – all of which deepens existing racial and religious and cultural divides.”

Barack Obama

Here we return to the final installment critiquing Dr. Alan’s Strange’s excoriating of Christian Nationalism (CN).

I open with the quote above because Strange at the 12:17 mark of his third installment on the subject says much the same thing. I can’t help but find it interesting that a putative conservative Reformed theologian agrees with a Marxist like Obama on critiquing the reading habits of Americans.

1.) It seems that Strange is trying to pry Christian people away from having convictions that he personally doesn’t like and so he says, “read from sources that don’t agree with you.” Now, I don’t have a problem with reading broadly. Indeed, I often read my enemies because in such a way I can more easily disembowel their arguments. However, this isn’t why Strange (or Obama) want you to read outside those who agree with you. Strange wants Christians to read outside of those who agree with them because only in such a way will people be pried away from positions that Strange doesn’t like.

I would encourage people to read broadly but only after they have anchored themselves in a Christian World and life view.

2.) Strange insists that “we have to put politics in its place,” but he does so via his own political jeremiad that insists that everyone salute his politics. Strange’s politics insist that Christians should not prioritize politics. The problem here is that the enemies of Christ has politicized everything. It is the enemies of Christ who have politicized life, sex, and death. As Christians are we not to respond to this pagan politicization by entering into the political sphere by pushing back? The enemies of Christ have taking politics as their theology and by the means of politics they seek to cover the globe with their anti-Christ theology. For Christians, at this time, to put politics in its place the way Strang envisions is to surrender the whole ball of wax. The consequence of Strange’s version of “putting politics in its place” is to be forced back into the catacombs. The consequence of Strange’s version of “putting politics in its place” is the final hegemony of polluted pietism in the place of a muscular Christianity that walks uprightly in the public square. The consequence of Strange’s version of “putting politics in its place” means that Jesus Christ takes a back seat to whatever god or gods is/are running the public square. I submit to you that Strange, however well intended the man may be, is issuing a call to treason against Jesus Christ.

3.) Strange pulls, the now tired claim, that CN is just WOKEism on the right as if ideas of CN or race didn’t long predate the rise of WOKEism. This claim, now made by many, is just idiotic.

4.) Strange makes a typical R2K move by insisting that Christians must return to the “spirituality of the Church,” where spirituality means “surrendering to the anti-Christ forces” in the culture wars. Strange, it seems to me, will only be happy when Christianity is not a force at all in the public square, when Christianity will be restricted to what happens during Worship on Sundays, when Christianity is publicly irrelevant. The man is petrified by the notion that Christianity may become once again militant.

Look, at the end of the day, the Christianity that Dr. Alan Strange is hawking is a different Christianity from the likes of John Knox or Puritan Pulpiteers in colonial American history. It’s not a Christianity in which I am interested. I find it to be cowardly and dishonoring to the Lordship claims of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Strange and the Multicult of Madness — Part IV

Here we continue our series on Dr. Alan Strange’s podcasts concerning the depredations on the idea of Christian Nationalism (CN). I anticipate one more entry in order to finish this series.

Some have complained to me that I labeled Dr. Strange as a man of the left. I can come to no other conclusion about any man, despite their orthodoxy on any number of other subjects, that he is a man of the left when eschewing the idea of the explicit Lordship of Jesus Christ over a nation. Consider, as there is no such thing as neutrality, when one declaims against Christian nationalism the only options that remain is support for a nationalism that is driven by some anti-Christian religion or a internationalism that is driven by anti-Christ religion. (It is not possible for internationalism to be Christian.) Dr. Strange, and the other numberless hordes (Owen Strachan, R. Scott Clark, David Van Drunen, etc.) who are classical liberals are being driven by their Enlightenment faith and so can be considered nothing but “men of the left.” There is more of Robespierre, Danton, and Marat about these “Christian” men then there is Jesus Christ when it comes to their political theory. Hence, this is why I insist that Dr. Alan Strange is a man of the left.

Now to interact with Dr. Strange’s final podcast denigrating of Christian Nationalism;

1.) Strange, first lists his concern about the issue of how Christian Nationalism would imply coercion. This is true. Christian Nationalism would require coercion. Just as we Christians today, in the classical liberal model, are being coerced on any number of fronts to support our current state religion. Christians are being coerced to pay taxes to support the murder of the unborn, the murder of countless peoples in other lands because of our NWO guided military, the continued existence of our anti-Christ government schools and countless other projects. All governments are driven and inspired by a faith/religion vision and all governments in turn coerce people to salute that faith/religion vision. Christian Nationalism would be no different. We would coerce people — not to be Christian (only the Holy Spirit can do that) — but to operate within the confines of a Biblical Worldview and social order.

So, Strange, laments the possibility of coercion in the context of Christian Nationalism yet apparently he is willing not to lift his voice and do something about Christians being coerced to serve the agenda of our current state religion as it serves the gods of humanism. In the final analysis, when it comes to Governments, it is either coerce or be coerced. As Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, I have no problem saying, “Yes, Christian Nationalism would mean coercion.”

2.) Strange next insists that CN wrongly uses Scripture. This is basically a “anti-theonomy” argument. Now I agree with Strange that the Bible does not give us an exhaustive blue print for how social-orders are to be governed today. I do not believe that we should seek to repristinate OT Israel’s social order. However, I strongly disagree with Strange that the Scripture doesn’t speak to issues like proper tax rates (Strange mentions this). So, I agree with Strange that every political/social order issue can not be resolved with a “thus saith the Lord.” However, I disagree with Strange that many many political/social order issues couldn’t be resolved with a “thus saith the Lord.” For example, I do believe we should take the Scripture seriously that talks about taxation, that insists that a man should not dress like a woman, nor a woman like a man, that Magistrates should not have the capability to wage offensive wars, that Magistrates should be required to write out God’s law, etc. etc. etc. Strange’s strongly anti-theonomic position inevitably leads to “each man doing what is right in his own eyes.” It is a recipe for humanism.

3.) Strange, using an illustration for his position, next argues that the Scripture has nothing to say on whether or not the State should provide health care. This is a classic example of Strange being on the left. Scripture clearly denounces theft and the State cannot be involved in providing health care without stealing from the citizenry. State funded health care is anti-Christ and Christians should look with suspicion upon “Christians” who think like Strange. I don’t want to get too deeply in the weeds here but it is the jurisdiction of the family, and not the state to provide health care. Secondly, the prices of health care skyrocket when the state becomes the benefactor for health care. State funded health-care is not Christian.

4.) Strange next compares CN with Socialism and Communism by saying that his CN friends say “well, CN has never worked because it has never been tried by the right people.” Strange notes that is the same kind of logic that the Christian Utopians, Socialists and Communists use. I agree that is terrible logic. CN is never going to bring in Nirvana and that shouldn’t be our expectation. However, contrary to Strange the question isn’t “will CN bring in Shangri-La,” the question is will CN be closer to a God honoring social-order than other political/social-order arrangements that are decidedly anti-Christ? (Understanding that all other political/social-order arrangements that are not CN will be anti-Christ — no neutrality.) The answer there is clearly and unequivocally “yes.” I would rather live with the follies of a Cromwell or Charlemagne or Alfred the Great than the follies of a Stalin, Mao, or Obama.

5.) Strange then agrees with another chap (John Ehrett) who insists that Dr. Stephen Wolfe’s CN sounds more like Nietzsche than it does Christ. I have dissected that critique here;

McAtee Defends Stephen Wolfe Against Ehrett

More Growling & Snarling From Van Drunen’s “Pit Yorkie”

“The TheoRecons are theologians of glory, selling conquest and dominion in this life, before Christ returns. But they cannot square that vision with the eschatology and ethos of the New Testament, and it is to the New Testament, not their vision of glory, that Christians are bound.”

Dr. R. Scott Clark
Van Drunen’s Pit Yorkie

1.) All people everywhere at all times are reconstructionists. One is either reconstructing all of life as informed by the Scripture or one is reconstructing all of life as informed by the authority of some other God.

2.)This means that we could call R2K, “The TheoRecons of a false god.”

3.) R2K as Theorecons of a false god are theologians of glory for their god — the God who defeats and crushes the one true God of the theonomists/reconstructionists.

4.) Note therefore the contest between R2K and the theonomists/reconstructionists is a contest between the pagan God of R2K and the one True God of the Bible. The Christianity of R2K is a different religion than the Christianity of the theonomists/postmillennialists and the god and God of those two different religions are at war with one another all across the Reformed landscape. The result of that war will define what it means to be Reformed for generations to come. Choose ye this day whom you shall follow; the god of Escondido or the God of the Bible.

5.) The New Testament, as well as the whole Bible, is a postmillennial document. Again because Scott has a different God than the theonomists he reads the Scripture through the lens of that different false god. Keep in mind that is called IDOLATRY.

6.) It has been said before but I will offer it up again here. R2K is Roman Catholic inasmuch as in their thinking Jesus Christ is always on the Cross. If they were to carry around croziers it would be with Jesus on the Cross. For them, Christ is only victorious in a spiritual manner and so they have him upon the cross still. This is why they complain about postmillennialism being a “theology of glory.” Don’t you care ever suggest that Jesus is not still on the cross and instead is reigning at the right hand of the Father. They can not have an ascended Jesus who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords except in a “spiritual” (read GNOSTIC) sense.

Biblical Nationalism and the Sixteenth Century States

An honest and straightforward reading of the bible makes one a nationalist–indeed an “ethno-nationalist.” Here we see that there would have been no Reformation as we understand it today if ethno-Nationalism had not been in the mix. Do not believe the lies of the modern Reformed clergy today (like Dr. Alan Strange) who want to suggest that there is something inherently evil and/or dangerous about Christian Nationalism. At least this is the conclusion of Dianne Applebaum’s “Biblical Nationalism and the Sixteenth Century States.”

“The emergence of Protestant nations in sixteenth-century Europe was driven by the sudden rediscovery of biblical nationalism, a political model that did not separate the religious from the political. Biblical nationalism was new because pre-Reformation Europeans encountered the Hebrew Bible through paraphrases and abridgments. Full-text Bibles revealed a programmatic nationalism backed by unmatched authority as the word of God to readers primed by Reformation theology to seek models in the Bible for the reform of their own societies. Sixteenth-century biblical nationalism was the unintended side effect of a Reformation intended to save souls.”

“Christians inspired by the Reformation to read or hear the Bible found a ‘developed model’ (Hastings, 1997, p. 18) of nationhood, beginning with an expansive description of a world arranged into ‘kindreds, tongues, lands, and nations’ [Tyndale [1530] Genesis 10:20 (Daniell, 1992)]. This association of nations with kin, language, and territory is part of a biblical discourse that reflects many of the desiderata identified by later scholars as characteristic of nations. The biblical world is imagined as composed of rightfully sovereign and equal nations. God Put the borders of the nations (Tyndale, Deuteronomy 32:8), and generally played an active role in human history, allotting territories to specific peoples.”

“But [John] Foxe would have had in mind the establishment of Protestant states in the Swiss cantons and Germanies, Sweden (1531), Denmark (1536), and Scotland (1560). Protestantism in each of these states was driven by specific factors along a unique path. What they shared was a new conviction that the model of the Godly life, for whole societies as for individuals, must be sought and would be found in the unmediated text of the Bible. Some lands experienced the Reformation primarily as a top-down royal programme, some as popular revolutions, others as a reform movement harnessed by magnates. What the several sixteenth-century ‘New Israels’ had in common was the power of the biblical narrative of nationhood to generate mass political participation because the Bible not only provided both a lexicon and a discourse of nationhood, it provided those ideas with unmatched authority as the word of God.”

Diana Muir Applebaum
“Biblical Nationalism and the Sixteenth Century States”

Andy Sandlin’s Cryptic WOKEism

“The great divisions among humanity are never racial (Asian, Black, Hispanic, White), sexual (man, woman), economic (rich, poor) geographic (urban, rural), intellectual (educated, uneducated), or national (West, East), but ethical (covenant-keeper, covenant-breaker).

The great strategy of rebellious man is to posit the division anywhere but the ethical.”

P. Andrew Sandlin
Legend in his own mind

The fact that the great division, religiously speaking, is between covenant breakers and covenant keepers in no way diminishes other distinctions as Andy’s post implies. The fact that these very really distinctions are turned into divisions is indeed the consequence of sin as sin introduces a conflict of interest motif vis-a-vis a harmony of interest motif that one finds in the Christian faith. However, this does not mean that the distinctions turn into irrelevant realities upon conversion. Upon conversion men remain men and women remain women. Upon conversion the different races remain the different races and the different socio-economic classes remain the different socio-economic classes. One doesn’t get extra IQ points simply because one converts and so distinctions remain between the education and uneducated.

Because this is all true we would have to say that the great strategy of the stupid and rebellious man is to try and make these distinctions go away by blaming those who take these realities seriously as being rebellious. Most Kinists believe that one day the whole world, or at least much of the world will be converted. However, even in that happy day men and women will be distinct, the races will be distinct, geographic origins will still matter, IQ differences won’t disappear and national differences will remain. And all that is true when the ethical anti-thesis goes into abeyance because all men gladly bow to Christ as Lord of Lords.

Kinists understand these distinctions exist. Kinists understand that religiously speaking the great division is ethical. However, Kinists do not go all Gnostic by suggesting that grace destroys nature.

In the end what Sandlin is ultimately denying is the theological meaning intrinsic to Creation, not to mention missing that Scripture regularly sets forth principles and laws as predicated upon Creational realities. This is something these never to be wise men do with alarming frequency. They can’t understand the distinction between creation and redemption.