Apologetics – Page 9

Joel Beeke On The Weakness Of The Puritans

Dr. Beeke loves the Puritans so much he named the Seminary he founded “Puritan Reformed Seminary.” He clearly is a man who believes he is a champion of all things Puritan. Yet, in this question and answer below we see how far Beeke is away from the core of the Puritan ethos and mindset. Beeke like so much of our “Conservative” churchmen today is infected with the modernist, “Enlightenment” post WW II Liberal consensus. This infection then shapes everything that a man believes even if all else he believes is perfectly orthodox. It is like running perfectly good sausage through a filter made of Carolina reaper peppers. No matter how good the sausage is, in and of itself, that Carolina reaper pepper is going to make the meat inedible.

“Q: Where do the Puritans speak least helpfully to the contemporary church?

A: Political Liberty and Equality. (1) The concepts of liberty and equality now dear to us in the Western world hadn’t yet matured during the Puritan era. (2) Civil powers had established the church for more than a thousand years. (3) Full liberty of conscience was untested, and the disestablishment of religion seemed foolhardy in the context of multiplying heresies and sects. (4) Sensitivity to racism and sexism simply didn’t exist in any developed form in the British and European mindset as it does today. (5) We’d argue, however, that the seeds of truth that would blossom and bear fruit in contemporary freedoms are found in Puritan theology.(6)

We need to read the Puritans realizing that, while the Reformation had transformed much of their thinking by the Scriptures, in some ways they were more like medieval Christians in their cultural viewpoint than modern Christians. (7) Yet even here they are helpful, since they enable us to step outside our modern cultural box.” (8)

(1a) Keep in mind that “Liberty and Equality” were two of the watchwords of the anti-Christ French Revolution. There may have been a reason why the Puritans were not interested in “Liberty and Equality” the way those have come to us in from the hand of modernism.

(1b) Political Liberty and Equality can never work in a multicultural reality. The only reason Political Liberty and Equality worked where it worked in the West is because where it worked you found people sharing a Christian world and life view. Where a Christian world and life view does not obtain Political Liberty and Equality only yields chaos as seen in the French Revolution where Political Liberty and Equality sought to guillotine all the Christians (Royalists) who did not believe in Liberty and Equality.

(2a) Political Liberty and Equality are dear to us in the Western World because we have reinterpreted our Christianity though the lens of the Liberal Enlightenment project. There is more of Robespierre than there is of Jesus Christ in Dr. Beeke’s post. All men are not created ontologically equal. Political Liberty for the Christ hater who works diligently to overthrow Christian expression in the public square is a violation of the 1st commandment.

(2b) A nation is destroyed when Political Equality is given to a third world illegal immigrant who knows nothing of culture, history, and religion of the Christian West. The pursuit of political equality has been the destruction of this once Christian nation as seen in giving the vote to women. Political Equality has made slaves of us all to the Federal Government.

(2c) Political Liberty has given the voice of the Muslim and other assorted Christ haters the same volume as the Christian who owns Christ as King over the nation. Thank God the Puritans avoided this claptrap.

(3) Civil Powers continue to establish the Church here in the US. The only difference is that the church the civil powers are establishing is the church of Humanism found in both public schools and all Churches who join Beeke praising Political Equality and Liberty. Political Equality and Liberty mean that King Jesus is not free to be the alone King.

(4a) Note here that Beeke praises the disestablishment of the Christian religion. The reason that this is noteworthy is that as it is impossible for a Government not to be beholden to some form of an established religion, what Beeke is telling us is that it was good when Christianity was disestablished in favor of some other non-Christian religion. Would Beeke really surrender the Established religion of Christianity during the Puritan era for the disestablishment of religion that is now characteristic of the West where Christianity is being overthrown root, twig, and branch?

(4b) So, we finally disestablish Christianity and what has eventually followed? What has eventually followed is multiplying heresies, sects and competing religion. Does Beeke really think that His avowed King Jesus is pleased with his support of that which undermines the authority of Christ?

(5a) Here Beeke, by appealing to the faults of the Puritans for not being sensitive to “racism” and “sexism,” is demonstrating that he is not a Puritan man but is a true blue modernist. “Racism” is a category popularized by the communist Trotsky in order to overthrow Christian culture that was resistant to Communist inroads. Sexism is a category that was inflated by the likes of Alexandra Kollontai, Margaret Sanger, Betty Friedan, and other Feminists of their ilk. It is hard not to see Beeke preening for the despisers of Christianity, seeking to demonstrate how Modernist the nouveau riche Puritans like Beeke can be.

(6) No Puritan, should he be able to come back from the dead, would not absolutely excoriate Beeke’s “Christian” support for Political Liberty and Equality. The Puritans are absolutely opposed to Beeke’s position and so Beeke claims that “the seeds of Political Liberty and Equality” are in the Puritans. That is utter fantasy talk.

(7) Praise God the Puritans were more like medieval Christendom than they were like Christ hating Enlightenment modernist post-War consensus. At least by reading the medieval Puritans I can escape the current insanity in which I am now living both in the broader culture and the broader “conservative” “Evangelical” “Church.”

(8) This last sentence if hilarious. There is Beeke living fondly in our “superior” modernist Enlightenment culture and yet he says we can get outside our cultural box by reading the Puritans but obviously only so as to critique the Puritans for not embracing the Political Liberty and Equality doctrines that have destroyed Christendom.

The Nature Of Law-Order

“All law order is warfare against criminals and against enemies of the social order.”

Rousa J. Rushdoony
Law: Partial and Impartial
Pocket College

When you see the law being used to criminalize those who will not bake cakes for sodomites or who will not provide flowers for a sodomite wedding there you find that the official statist law order is supporting a religion that is counter to Christianity and that this new law order is intent on making you as a Christian, a criminal. When you see the law being used to normalize deviant and abominable perverted behavior so that any normative behavior that opposes said perverted behavior is criminalize there you find lawfare against Christianity. Where you find any legal movement that criminalizes a Christian championing of Christian law there you find warfare against Christianity. Where ever you find the law allowing breasts to be cut off of girls and hormone blockers being given to boys there you find a law order system that is seeking to bury Christianity. Where ever you find a law order supporting Transgender day of visibility on the highest Holy Day of the Christian calendar there you know that Christianity is under attack.

The law can be neither tolerant nor neutral. It is always intolerant of whatever it casts as deviancy, and it, not being neutral, hunts for the those who fall outside its constraints.

The fact that law orders, which organize all social orders, always are working to normalize and criminalize one behavior or another demonstrates that all governments are inescapably religious since the law demonstrates a standard by which right and wrong are being measured. That standard, whatever it is, is the religion or God of the state. This in turn demonstrates that R2K is idiotic when it champions a a-religious state, or a non-theocratic state. Such a beast has ever existed nor can it ever exist.

Atheist James Lindsey on “Christ is King”… McAtee on James Lindsey

“‘Christ is King’ is, in addition to its malicious uses, a Christian virtue signal. Christians say it’s true. Nobody else does. Repeating it shows you’re on the team. Refusing to brings suspicions. That’s why it works. Bad actors can abuse it and lots will go along and defend it.”

James Lindsey

Atheist

Platformed by “Christian” Michael O’Fallon

1.) What possible malicious uses can a true statement possibly be leveraged?

2.) Of course it is, at the very least, a virtue signal. Just as someone saying “There is only one God; Allah, and Muhammed is his prophet” is a virtue signal among some types.

3.) Of course only people who believe it is true say it is true. This statement by Lindsey is like warning people that water is wet. NSS.

4.) Of course saying it proves one is on the team. And your point is?

5.) If I were an employer, for example, I would be so suspicious of someone not confessing “Christ is King,” I would not hire them. Yet another Captain Obvious statement by Lindsey.

6.) The primary reason why saying “Christ is King” works is because Christ is King.

7.) The idea that there is, out there, this galaxy of bad actors who will say “Christ is King” in order to abuse it is the kind of reasoning that the denizens of Hell come up with in order to make sure nobody ever says “Christ is King.”

8.) Of course “lots will go along and defend people saying “Christ is King.” That is primarily due to the fact that lots of people believe that “Christ is King.”

Michael O’Fallon, if he is a Christian, will have a good deal to answer for by platforming James Lindsey, the Christ hater.

Poking Holes In Andrew Klavan’s “Argument”

“The Holocaust was the crucifixion compulsively reenacted on a grand scale: an attempt to kill God’s people in order to extinguish the Light of the World that shows us where we are(1). Sigmund Freud called this the ‘return of the repressed,’ a concept he discusses, not so oddly enough, in his essay, ‘The Uncanny(2).’ According to this idea, we bury the trauma and guilt of our past — in this case the murder of God — and then we keep reenacting that trauma helplessly, in this case through the murder of God’s people (3). The things we face come back and back to us, shaping our actions, getting bigger and bigger, until finally we either face the cause of them or they destroy us.(4)”

Andrew Klavan
In leaked book extracts arguing that the Holocaust was a reenactment of the Crucifixion and that it justifies Talmudist claims to be a chosen race.

Errant categories

(1.) We, as Christians, have exactly zero reasons to believe that Talmudists are the light of the world. Indeed, Christians are required to believe that is not the case. Scripture clearly has Jesus Christ saying “I am the light of the world.”

(3.) Who is Klavan’s “we” who are burying the guilt of our past? St. Peter, in Scripture says that the “we” that Klavan references are the one’s “who by the hands of wicked men put Him (Jesus) to death by nailing Him to the cross..” So, in order for Klavan to be accurate in his “we” above in sentence 3, he would have to think that it is the Talmudists who killed themselves in the Holocaust in order to bury their guilt for killing their Messiah. That is the only way the sentence could make sense. Of course Klavan doesn’t mean that but instead by using the “we” in the way he does he obfuscates historical reality.

(3.) We must ask Mr. Klavan, who was it, per scripture, that “murdered God.” I’ll give some hints… 1 Thessalonians 2:15, Acts 2:23, Acts 7:52.We should note here that God being God He can not be murdered. Teasing that out would take us far afield from critiquing this statement by Klavan.

(3.) The Talmudists are not God’s people any more or any less than Inuits, Peruvians, Japanese, or Mongolians are God’s people. The only people that God has had since Pentecost is the Church as it exists in nation by nation. The idea that Talmudists remain God’s people even though they “crucified the Lord of glory,” is a Dispensational idea birthed at the end of the 19th century and then popularized in the 20th century by C. I. Scofield’s bible notes. It is not a position that was ever advanced in Church history until that time. Of course Talmudists may become God’s people if they repent and trust Jesus Christ alone as their Messiah, and so cease being Talmudists.

(3.) If we want to see the murder of God’s people in History we’d have to look at the Holodomor by the Jewish Bolsheviks against the Christian Ukrainians, or the slaughter of the Christian Armenians by the Turks at the beginning of the 20th century or perhaps even the slaughter of the Christians at Vendee during the French Revolution or the slaughter of the Huguenots in the 16th century. Here we see genuine examples of the attempt to murder God’s people, and that because they belong to God’s Church.

The Problems Of R2K — Part I

Premise of Radical Two Kingdom “theology.”

1.) The idea of God’s Kingdom is exactly synonymous with the Church so that when once says “Kingdom” one must hear “church” and when one hears “Church” one must hear “Kingdom.”

What then of the rest of the creational reality? Well, all that is not Kingdom/Church is a separate and distinct non-redemptive common Kingdom that is isolated from the the redemptive realm where the Kingdom/Church is located and where one finds the happenings of redemption.

From this premise a dualism follows in the Christian’s approach to reality. R2K advocate D. G. Hart has labeled this “the Hyphenated life,” which is a gussied up version of “a life lived as dualism.” Our epistemological foundation in the redemptive realm is scripture while our epistemological foundation along with all other men, regardless of their claiming or not claiming Christ, in the common realm is Natural law. The two Kingdoms have two different laws and never the twain shall meet. Those in the hyphenated (Dualistic) life are split personalities being governed differently in each distinct realm.

R2K seeks to argue for R2K by harmonizing the the pre-fall cultural mandate given by God to Adam to govern creation and subdue it with a innovative read of the post-fall Noahic covenant where the assertion is maintained that after the flood the same cultural mandate was given again to Noah as a representative of the whole human race. Post-fall Noah, unlike pre-fall Adam is a covenant head of the whole fallen human race who together work to operate jointly in this common grace Noahic covenant that is absent of any redemptive particulars. Those redemptive particulars are to be found only in the Abrahamic covenant which is markedly and dualistically distinct from the Noahic covenant.

The covenant of grace, distinct as it is from the common grace Noahic covenant, is the Kingdom/Church redemptive covenant and finds its ultimate fulfillment (unlike the Noahic covenant) in Jesus Christ. Note here that we have two covenants (common and particular) that are operating on parallel and never intersecting tracks with one another. This accounts for the dualism that is characteristic of R2K.

Whereas all mankind (including believers) belong to the Noahic covenant, only Christians belong to the redemptive covenant that is characterized by R2K as “Church/Kingdom.” There in the redemptive covenant God’s plans are worked out for His new creation. In the R2K common realm God’s has no plans except for destruction at the end of the age.

So, in the R2K paradigm Christ is both the mediator of the new covenant (redemptive realm) and He is the Mediator of the creational realm (common realm). However, these two realms never touch in the Christian’s life. When the Christian operates in the redemptive realm then he must operate as a Christian. When the Christians operates in the common realm he must operate on the same eschatological and teleological basis as all other men regardless of their religion. This explains why in the R2K world there can be no such thing as Christian culture, Christian education, Christian Law, Christian families, or Christian Nations. For R2K all of these realities (culture, education, law, family, nations, etc.) belong to the common Kingdom and by definition therefore can not be Christian since that realm is not religiously conditioned but is conditioned by the common realm natural law accessible to the conscience of all men.

R2K is so consistent on this matter that they note that the common realm Kingdom will completely be consumed by fire (II Pt. 3:1-13). This means that, contrary to what we read in Revelation 21

²⁴And the nations of those who are saved shall walk in its light, and the kings of the earth bring their glory and honor into it.

that per R2K it is only individuals who are redeemed and nothing of what they cultural built to the glory of God.

So, what we see here, and what I am at pains to point out, is the Radical Two Kingdom’s radical dualism, or what D. G. Hart likes to style as “the hyphenated life.” With this radical dualism we are back to the Platonic upper realm and lower realm. For R2K the Upper realm is grace and the lower realm is nature, and never the two shall meet. All men alike, believer and unbeliever, together function in the common realm, ruled as they all are in that realm by Thomistic Natural law theory. All of this realm is going to burn and so as Christians while we are to be nice Christians we realize that nothing that we do in building up this common realm for Christ’s glory will last because it can only always be common.

Because the common realm is common special revelation found in Scripture need not apply in this realm. One implication of this is that God’s Law-Word is not to be applied in the common realm. R2K advocates have even gone on record as saying that Magistrates have no responsibility to enforce the first table of God’s law. More and more the second table seems negotiable for the R2K advocates. The appeal magistrates are to make in the common realm is to Natural law and not to special revelation. In the R2K paradigm Christ only rules through His word and spirit in the redemptive realm. Of course, all this dualism can not help but create a schizophrenic Christian that is only resolved on the last day when our existence in the common realm is deleted because the common realm has been torched.

Dr. Robert Letham has been helpful here;

“The two-kingdoms idea has the merit of pointing to two radically different eternal destinies. It also highlights the reality that, until Christ returns, the church and its members are pilgrims and strangers in a world that has been deeply affected by sin and rebellion against God. However, it is in contrast to Herman Bavinck, who held that Christians of all people are, in another sense, at home in the world, since it was created and is directed by the triune God, with Christ its Mediator. Moreover, as Beach remarks, the two-kingdoms view splits the Christian believer into a dualism: under Christ’s authority in the kingdom of God but neutral in the common kingdom. It appears to undermine the Bible as the supreme authority in all matters of faith and practice.”

The unbiblical and non-Christian dualism that R2K posits is inconsistent with God’s record. God’s Word teaches us that Christ is Head over all things for the Church (Eph. 1:20-23). R2K mutes the explicit mediatorial kingship of Jesus Christ over all creation and in its place places an explicit mediatorial kingship of a natural law that is only as good as the beginning presuppositional lenses through which that natural law is read as by fallen men. What is surrendered in order to embrace R2K is the cosmic kingship of Jesus Christ over all Kings (Psalm 2, 110) and all authorities, reducing the offices of Jesus Christ to His Great High Priestly office and our great Prophet. R2K strips the totalistic Kingship of Jesus Christ preferring a Gnostic King Jesus. R2K takes from our theology munus triplex and gives us munus duplex instead.

So, we see that R2K has a anthropological problem inasmuch as it ascribes to fallen man, who suffers from original sin and total depravity, the ability apart from the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, to read aright general revelation via the usage of Natural law. This is a denial that the carnal mind is at enmity with God (Romans 8:7) and a denial of basic Reformed anthropology. However, R2K also has a Christological problem as we have seen. Christ has effectively been stripped of His Kingly office except as existing in a very Gnostic fashion. This is not all though. The Christology of R2K is also defective in as much as Christ is divided. We could and should salute the idea that Christ is the one King, ruling by one law, over distinguished jurisdictions (family, church, civil-social, etc.) but we can never salute the idea that R2K gives us offering a Christ as the one King ruling over dualistic and divorced jurisdictions that have no relation to one another. Dualism is not Biblical and has long been the bugbear of the non-orthodox. Let the reader consider that Scripture teaches a continually expanding subjugation of Christ’s enemies (Mt. 13:31-38) so that the very last enemy that is abolished is abolished at His coming (I Cor. 15:20-26).

Next, we have to face the fact that R2K breaks down on its claims that the common realm is common. Do the Mullah’s of Iran agree that the R2K common realm is common? Does the Talmudist read natural law the same way as J. V. Fesko, or T. David Gordon and other R2K-philes. Do the trannies of Drag Queen story hour read natural law in the common realm the way that R. Scott Clark insists that it has to be read? In brief are the shock-troops of Lucifer in agreement that the common realm is common? This doctrine of a common realm seems to give up the idea that the church is to be about the business of destroying arguments, leading to every thought being taken captive to Christ (II Cor. 10:106). For R2K the church should be about the business of finding common ground in the common realm with those who share the common ground of hating Christ and His legislative word. Where is the “all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth,” in all this? Where is “the gates of hell shall not prevail” in R2K theology? Why this theology of dualism as opposed to a theology of the one and the many where Christ is the one ruler over many distinct realms?