Category: Apologetics

Ask the Pastor…. “But Christians Aren’t Under the Law?”

 

Dear Pastor,

Scripture says that we (Christians) are no longer under law. Can you explain to me why you teach that Christians are obliged to walk by God’s Law-Word?

Patrick
Colon, Michigan

Dear Patrick,

Let’s look at the passage that you reference

Romans 6:12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, 13 and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. 14 For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.

Paul is using the word “law” here to designate that which must be fulfilled as a required precursor to acceptance with God. The Christian has been delivered from being under law as a means of find peace with God. As such, when St. Paul says here that we are not “under law” he is not suggesting that God’s law is no longer relevant to the Christian. Paul is saying that the Christian is not under law as a systematic program to escape condemnation.

If Christians did yet remain under the law as a totalistic program for righteousness then sin would continue to have dominion over the Christian since the law, as a program for righteousness, cannot deliver but can only accuse. Because the Christian is under the reign of grace as God’s means of righteousness the Christian can refuse to let sin reign in their mortal bodies. “Under the reign of Grace” provides a power source for dealing with sin that “Under the reign of Law” could never provide, dead as we were in Adam.

Note also, though that at the Apostle repeatedly talks about “sin.” This implies a necessity for the concept of law because there is no way to even know what sin is apart from a standard (God’s Law) by which sin can be defined and identified. If we were to be done with the law, as many Christians advocate, then we would also be done with any concept of sin. It does me no good to encourage me to say no to sin or to lust if at the same time there is no law that standardizes what sin is.  How could we possibly know what behavior, thinking, attitudes please our great Liege-Lord apart from His Law-Word?

Christ did not redeem us so that we might walk contrary to His Law-Word. The Law’s intent is not so that by the keeping of it we can be saved. We can’t keep it as it is needed to be kept. That is why Christ came as our covenant head. Our Lord Christ fulfilled the law in our stead and because of the righteousness accounted to us we are counted Law keepers. Similarly, our covenant head, the Lord Christ, bore our penalty in our place on the Cross that our indebtedness to the Law is fulfilled as we are united to Christ.

BUT now that the law has been fulfilled for us in Christ’s law keeping and penalty bearing we now walk in terms of God’s law. We delight in God’s law now, not as means of gaining something we do not have. We delight in God’s law now, as a consequence of being given something, via imputation of Christ’s righteousness, that we could not earn or merit.

As WCF IX:18 notes, “Law and grace do doth sweetly comply (agree).” We can not posit Grace against law for the Christian. God’s law for the Christian is gracious and God’s grace unto the Christian was due to its honoring all that the law required.

So, now we study God’s law in order to more fully delight in God’s grace.

Some will contend that we have been delivered from the law and so interpret that to mean that we have nothing to do with the law. This is an unfortunate error in interpreting and thinking. The aspect of the law that we have been delivered from is the condemning aspect of the law. Because we are in Christ we are delivered from the law’s condemnation. There is, after all, therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. However, deliverance from the law’s condemnation is not equal to the idea of no longer having anything to do with the law. This is why the inspired Apostle can say that; “The law is Holy, Righteous, and Good.”

Praise God for His kindness to usward as expressed by giving us His Law-Word. Praise God that the Lord Christ was and remains the embodiment and incarnation of God’s Law. To properly love God’s law is to love Christ. Correspondingly a lack of love for God’s Law-Word is a lack of love for Christ.

Theology & The University

“War is the continuation of politics by other means.”

General Carl Von Clausewitz
German war theoretician 

As RJR notes in the quote below the same is true of Theology and all other disciplines. Every other discipline that can be named among the Humanities is just the continuation of theology by other means. This is why Theology was once understood to be the Queen of the Sciences. Our forbears understood that conclusions arrived at in the other humanities were only as good as the theology from which they were drawing.

Indeed, this understanding of Theology as the “Queen of the Sciences” is where we get our whole idea of “University.” The word “University” etymologically derives from the idea of “the whole,” or “the aggregate.” The idea was, in the midst of the various multifaceted disciplines offered and studied at a University there was a “Uni” that bound all the disciplines together. That “Uni” in “University” is Theology. Without theology as “Queen of the Sciences,” one no longer has a “University” but only a “Multiversity.”

The fact that we have given up Christian theology as “The Queen of the Sciences” goes a long way towards explaining the irrational age which we inhabit. Since we have no unifying glue to hold us together all that is left is the bizarre and the irrational.

Consider also, how modern Western man’s habit of compartmentalized thinking also is derivative of the refusal to have Christian theology be the “Queen of the Sciences.” Modern man is schizophrenic. He is a centripetal being. There is nothing that keeps him from the most strange and queer contradictions in his life. For example, modern man will, at one and the same time, espouse evolution and then turn around and attend church on Sunday. Modern man will complain about the Government and then keep on voting as if his vote will change what it has not changed for over a century. Modern man will see the modern woman for the feminist being she currently is and yet will still propose marriage. Modern man is a contradictory mess and that is largely accounted for, by the fact that he refuses to take Christian theology as the “Queen of the Sciences.”

What is interesting, though despite all the above being true, is that theology is an inescapable category, which means, that when man flushes Christian theology as the “Uni” in his “University” he doesn’t by doing so get rid of theology. Instead, he embraces something else has his theology. Marxists embrace Economics as their theology. Many moderns embrace “Science” as their theology, not realizing that that Science is only as good as the theology it is pinned upon. Cultural Marxists have, perhaps more insightfully than the rest, chosen culture as their theology. (More insightfully, I offer, because of the tight nexus that exists between culture and theology.) The point is that one never completely evacuates some kind of theology as the adhesive that is the sticking agency for something that passes as a pastiche of coherence for all the particulars.

As an aside all of this underscores again why R2K is such a stupid incoherent theology, arguing as it does, that there is no such thing as Christian law, or Christian Education, or Christian culture, etc. R2K strips Christianity of its fixative social order functioning and replaces it with the irrationality of a social order based on a “natural theology” that has only successfully existed when Christianity has dominated the culture.

Sociology, Literature, Psychology, Anthropology, Economics, Law, … all of it is just so much the continuation of theology by other means. If and when people ever come to grips with that truth, it will make conversation a good deal easier.

We end with the great Rushdoony making the same point.

“An abstract theology is only formally or technically systematic. Systematic theology must of necessity deny because God is sovereign, that there are any neutral facts or any areas of neutrality. All factuality is God-created and God-governed and interpreted. All facts are therefore theological facts, and every area of life, thought, study, and action is a theological concern.

Education, politics, science, the arts, the vocations, the family, and all things else, are theological concerns. A theology which does not involve itself in every area in terms of the sovereign God and His infallible law-word cannot be systematic: it is only abstract.”

 

When the Alt. Right Becomes the Alt. Left

1.) I’m starting to believe in reincarnation. I think Spencer was Ernst Rohm in a previous life.

2.) Hail Trump… Hail our People … Hail Victory

Sounds a great deal like,

Heil Hitler … Heil the Aryan race … Heil the Deutschland.

Hail Hydra anyone?

3.) When Spencer glorifies whites, he is doing so in the context of a Christless presupposition. Glorifying White people apart from Christ is “raceolatry,” and is to be repudiated at every turn.  I heard Spencer speak once and was able to query him afterward. When asking about Christ and nationalism he explicitly said he was not interested in embracing a distinct religion for his nationalism. He wanted a “big tent.” At that point I knew what he was promoting would be an utter failure. Spencer and the alt. Left is Anti-Christ. The attempt to rebuild Western Civilization and Christendom apart from the Kingship of Christ is like attempting to make Beef briscut without the Beef.

4.) Spencer mentions to his audience, “we are children of the sun.” A branch of the Hitler Youth was the Deutsche Arbeiter Jugend – HJ (German Worker Youth – HY). This organization  the Hitler Youth was a training ground for future labor leaders and technicians. Its symbol was a rising sun with a swastika.

5.) The Internationalist Leftist Press (Communist) have created the Nationalist Leftist movement (Alt. Left – Socialist). Spencer’s complaint about the “Lugenpress” is the “Lugenpress’s” own fault. As far back as the 1971 publication of Edith Efron’s “The News Twisters,” the Lugenpress has been deceiving, practicing disingenuousness, providing propaganda, and have been bald face lying with ink bought by the barrel.

6.) Having said all that about our “Lugenpress” Spencer seeks to turn these propagandists and liars into sub-humanoids with his comment,

“Indeed one wonders if they are people at all, or instead soulless golems animated by some dark power…”

Spencer here, as the enemy of all Christian men, is practicing the heart of objectifying the enemy and the results of such craft is always to the end of being able to hate without pangs of conscience those who have been turned into evil incarnate. This is routinely done throughout history. Americans did it to the Japanese in WW II by referring to them as “Japs” and by referring to Germans as “Huns.” The enemy can be defeated without turning them into non-humans. The Ukranian Christian Kulaks were turned into non-humans. The Bourgeoise were turned into non-humans. They Gypsies were turned into non-humans. The unborn child as been turned into non-human. Recently, there has been the attempt to turn WASP’s into non-humans. Spencer is following in that ideological train and it is a train that no Christian should desire to be on.

7.) I’ve been saying for quite some time now that the snap back that would attend the internationalist left’s program over the last century was going to be ugly. That snap back has created the pagan Nationalist left. Biblical Christians better realize, and that right quick, that Christianity cannot be reinterpreted through either the grid of Internationalist Cultural Marxism nor the grid of pagan Nationalist Marxism. We need to busy ourselves pointing out the common ground of each of these putative extremes as well as how each of the two is in rebellion to King Christ and His Law-Word.

8.) Having said all that, we must realize that the Mainstream Media’s (MM) head popping over this video is hypocritical to the extreme. Where was the MM head popping over the same radical extremism of “Black Lives Matter,” or “The New Black Panthers?” Where has been the MM head popping over La Raza or over the Southern Poverty Law Center, or the pronouncements of the Council of American – Islamic Relations? True, Spencer is ugly over the top but we’ve been living with “ugly over the top” for quite some time now and nobody in the MM has had a cow over that.

9.) So, after years of the pagan Black Lives Matter and of the pagan La Raza and of the pagan CAIR, and of the pagan ADL, a pagan White organization (Alt. Left) arises and people are surprised? None of these people or organizations are the Biblical Christian’s friends. Their respective news agencies are all propaganda tools. Their crummy salutes — whether the raised black clenched fist or the white, palm opened outward, salute — have anything to do with the sign of the Cross.

10.) Just as the Apostle Paul in Romans 9:3f I love Christ and so I love my family, and so I love my people and so I love the stranger and the alien. Each of these outward concentric loves all in their proper place. Those loves compel me to warn against any “love” that lifts race — whether the preferred blender race of the Internationalist Cultural Marxist leftist, or the preferred Christless Aryan Race of the National Socialist leftist — above Christ. One cannot love their people apart from loving them as Christ as King.

We live in strange times. We should be aware of all the various ways we can fall into error.

A Brief Primer On Cultural Marxist’s Usage Of “Racist”

Concerning the pejorative “racist,” or “racism.”

All can concede that if racism was hating someone based upon the color of their skin that would be hatred and sin.

However, in the current cultural milieu where the words “racism” and “racist” have gained so much traction, we do not find that simple of a definition. Instead what we get in terms of definition of racism is “prejudice plus power.” This is why many people insist that it is not possible for minorities to be “racists” or to practice “racism” because, so the argument goes, minorities, while perhaps having “prejudice” certainly do not have “power.” Hence it is impossible, so the argument goes, for minorities to be “racist” or to practice “racism.”

The irony of a definition of “racist” or “racism” that has as its substance, “prejudice plus power,” is inherently ironic because in such a definition the only people who can be guilty of practicing “racism” or of being “racist” are white people since, as the argument goes, only white people have prejudice as combined with power. So, we see, the cultural Marxist definition of racism is racist. Not only is the charge “racism” or “racist” racist it is a tautology.

Just as “bald people have no hair” is a redundancy so “White people are racist” is a redundancy. In Cultural Marxist speak it goes something like this,

Q.) Who are the racists?

A.) White people.

Q.)Who are white people?

A.) They are the racists.

Hard baked into the word “racist” or “racism,” as used by the modern cultural Marxist and churchmen (is there any difference?) is the presuppositional reality that the accuser himself, is the racist. He has a prejudice against white people and the use of the word itself is a power play. Prejudice plus power. The usage of that word against somebody else involves the one using the word in a contradiction of the most startling sort.

But hey … who cares about being in contradiction anymore? After all, rationality is so over-rated.

Symbol Change

Judges 6:5 That night the Lord said to him, “Take your father’s bull, and the second bull seven years old, and pull down the altar of Baal that your father has, and cut down the Asherah that is beside it 26 and build an altar to the Lord your God on the top of the stronghold here, with stones laid in due order.

Studying the book of Judges right now and in Judges we see how unfaithful Israel had built altars to Baal as opposed to previous generations who had erected altars to “I AM” thus communicating who the people and the land were being given over to. I was struck with the importance of those altars as symbols and declarations of ownership.

When we tear down old symbols and replace them with new symbols we are, like the Israelites of old, giving ourselves, our children and our land over to different gods. The tearing down of a flag or a monument and the raising of a new flag or new monument is a significant happening. What you are witnessing is the gods being changed out.

In the last 100 years, we have seen quite a bit of this. When you do any reading on the fall of Czarist Russia and the rise of Communism you note that the Communist went whole hog on this very point. They not only tore down Churches. The Communists changed those Churches usage from houses of worship to places where pigs were housed. The Communists changed the Churches from places where the soul could find relief to latrines where a different kind of relief was found. The Communists after the revolution went on a rampage tearing down old symbols and erecting new ones. Out with the old God. In with the new gods.

When the Soviet Union fell the process was reversed. I clearly remember many scenes of statues of Stalin and Lenin being pulled down by cranes. When “Desert Storm” was finished one of the clearest images of victory was the pulling down of a statue of Saddam Hussein.  Out with the old god. In with the new gods.

Now in our country, we have been experiencing the very same thing. First, it was the Confederate flag desecrated and hidden away. Recently, I read a longish piece on how it is the Gadsen flag that has been determined as “racist” and no longer can be tolerated in the public square. Statuary of our ancestors is being removed in favor of the ancestors of an alien and strange people. Out with Christianity. In with the new gods.

Whenever you find this happening you are witnessing a religious attack on the people. Where this religious attack is successful you are witnessing a people being conquered. In the book of Judges, the people had been conquered by Baal as witnessed by all those new altars built to Baal. In Czarist Russia the Christian Russians had been conquered by the Jewish Bolsheviks as witnessed by removal of their Christian Churches. Today White Western Christians are being conquered by the enemies of Christ and the evidence of that is the removal of our symbols in favor of the symbols of our enemies.

The old West — The West of Christendom — is under siege and most Christians aren’t even aware that they and their undoubted catholic Christian faith is under attack.