Category: Culture

Yeah, I’ve Got a Beef with Doug Wilson & So Should You

“Doug Wilson doesn’t want to fight. What he wants to do is be known as a fighter among the members of the Judeo-Christian Ladies Luncheon Society. So he blames gay marriage on Christian fathers, making himself out to be the only real man in the room. He also loves to bloviate about how everything in America is the Church’s fault, and issue vague calls for “repentance” of nothing in particular, and then condemn to Hell any Christian who points to the people who actually are causing so many of our problems as “anti-semites” and “racists.” It’s hilarious that he can write this article without a glimmer of awareness that he’s describing himself.”

F. H. Glastonbury 
Pseudonym

When Doug Wilson and Doug Jones first showed up on the Reformed scene I lapped up their Credena Agenda with my PCA minister friend up the road. We howled together as Wilson and Jones lampooned every sacred cow on the planet. All that to say that there was a time when Wilson ranked very high in my pantheon of good guys.

Those days are long gone.

Now I think that Doug Wilson is an impediment to the Reformed cause if only because the fact that he still often gets a great deal right it makes it easier for people to accept the great deal he gets wrong. In that way Wilson is even more dangerous than a Tim Keller or a Russell Moore. With Keller and Moore and J. Ligon Duncan, and Sean Michael Lucas, and Al Mohler, and Matt Hall, and David Platt, and J. D. Greear, and Mike Horton, and R. Scott Clark, and Joke Harder, and ad-infinitum for much of the rest of the Reformed of “conservative” world people can just say to themselves when one of these guys pops up; “Yep, just one more dumbass statement coming from the piehole of the Evangelical – Reformed Clergy.”

But with Wilson it is different. People actually listen to this guy and they (unfortunately) take the chap seriously. It is precisely that which makes Doug such a danger to the handful of the genuinely Reformed people left out there. I know, for example, that many young Reformed ministers see Doug as a kind of “last guy standing.” Sorry … I’m not buying it.

This article elucidates a few reasons why. Keep in mind this is only intended to be a kind of “Whitman’s Sampler,” or if you prefer, “Doug’s Greatest Hits.”

1.) Of course we all know about Doug’s time on the “Pale Ale” Federal Vision bar stool. This was error that was (and is)so serious that if we lived in sane times Doug would have been defrocked.  Doug escaped that because the people who were criticizing him the most (the R2K boys) were even more heterodox than he was. Since then Doug has said that it was all a big mistake and he’s sorry.  You can find at least a couple of articles here on Iron Ink of me taking Doug to task during his halcyon Pale Ale Federal Vision days.

2.) Of course Doug Wilson butted his nose into the R. C. Sproul 2.0 case giving Sproul a pass after another Reformed denomination didn’t give Sproul a pass. The lack of wisdom on that move came out sometime later with the news of Sproul’s subsequent oopsie daisies.

3.) Can you say … “Steven Sitler?”

4.) Can you say “plagiarism?”

5.) Then there was Doug Wilson’s 2015 article on appropriate government actions concerning vaccines and forced quarantines;

“If a person has decided personal convictions about the contagious disease he is carrying, the society in which he lives has an equal right to have decided and contrary convictions about that same contagious disease he has. And if there is an outbreak of such a disease, and the government quarantines everyone who is not vaccinated, requiring them to stay at home, the name for this is prudence, not tyranny.”

Doug Wilson
2015 … Pre-Deep State Virus

Even in 2015, given the nature of our Federal Government Doug should have given some kind of clever codicil about being suspicious about pronouncements of the Federal Government. Instead what we got was the kind of pronouncement one might have expected from a minister who was certified by Reichsminister for Church affairs.

6.) Then there was this gem from Doug;

“In the brewing culture wars, we ought not to stand with those seeking to ban same-sex marriage (or with those seeking to impose it).” “So we openly accept homosexual marriage in the civil realm as God’s means of undermining that civil realm, and we accept that He has done this in judgment for wicked fathering within the Church.”

Doug Wilson

Here the culture was on the brink of a full-on Luciferian assault against God, country, and family and Doug steps up to the mic and before God in heaven and man on earth instructs God’s people to openly accept homosexual marriage in the civil realm because like the prophets of old Doug has a pipeline to God and so knows that to resist same-sex marriage would be a mistake because Doug knows that God has visited us with the scourge of sodomite marriage because of wicked fathering within the Church.

Now, every minister can say that whatever comes into the lives of a people is providentially from the hand of God but no minister should suggest that he knows why God is providentially doing X, Y, or Z because of reasons A, B, C. No minister can crawl into God’s filing cabinet to get a definitive “this is that” reason. I don’t disagree that there is wicked fathering in the Church. I protest that Doug can make macro pronouncements about the mind of God concerning God’s providence — I protest Doug’s assumption to be a kind of Christian version of the Oracle of Delphi. Maybe God, in His providence, visited us with the scourge of sodomite marriage in order to punish us for hammerhead ministers making wild arse guesses about why God does this or that.

And to say that “we openly accept sodomite marriage?” What was the man smoking that day? Maybe God intended, contra Saint Doug, for Christians to rise up and resist magistrates who want to foist upon us the acceptance of sodomite marriage instead of just accepting it?

And now Trannyism is upon us. I can just hear the Oracle of Moscow now;

“In the brewing culture wars, we ought not to stand with those seeking to ban  men in our women-folk bathrooms (or with those seeking to impose it).” “So we openly accept Trannys in the civil realm as God’s means of undermining that civil realm, and we accept that He has done this in judgment for not enough Christians agreeing with me about not resisting sodomite marriage.”

I can’t wait for Doug’s next “from on high” pronouncement on the coming pedophilia outbreak, not to mention, what God tells Doug about how Christians should not resist the routine bedding of farm animals in the civil realm.

Note here that this positioning of Doug on these issues puts him functionally in the same exact camp as the R2K lads. The R2K lads would absolutely salute Dougie’s reasoning here.

7.) Here is Doug’s pearl of wisdom on voting;

“So you should vote in a way that you can in good conscience ask God to bless … But I’m planning on writing in Ben Sasse because that is a vote I could in good conscience ask God to bless. I don’t expect anyone to count it, but I do want to ask God to bless it.”

Doug Wilson

Now this one was a weird confluence of the stars. I say this because Ben Sasse was the idee fixe of the R2K fanboys — who routinely hate Doug Wilson with the might of a thousand exploding yellow stars. Yet, here was Doug getting in bed with an R2K acolyte (Ben Sasse). That one left a permanent crick in my neck as my head whiplashed so badly upon reading Doug’s endorsement.

However, Doug’s support of a Ben Sasse is perfectly consistent if you read #6 again because that is the same exact policy that a Ben Sasse would follow.

On these scores, both Sasse and Wilson are following a uber-Libertarian kind of political reasoning.  Uber-Libertarianism is not particularly Christian.

8.) “Christians must learn to distinguish sins from crimes. If God reveals His will on a matter, disobedience is sin. If God reveals the civil penalty which must be applied, then it is also a crime. But without wisdom from Him on the civil penalty to be applied, the civil order must leave enforcement of God’s law to the church, family, or the providence of God….when pornography is made and distributed, it should simply be used as evidence — of the adultery or of the sodomy, etc.”

Doug Wilson

The Short version here is that Doug would have agreed with the landmark 1973 SCOTUS Miller vs. California case which loosened up the ability to traffic in pornography.  Again … all of this is to boggle the mind and is the essence of Libertarianism.

The rumor is that when Doug made this pronouncement from on high that Larry Flynt wined and dined Doug at a 5-star restaurant. (That’s a joke Son.)

For centuries the West criminalized the production of porn but here Doug steps up to the mic and announces all of that was; “Our bad. Sorry.” Can anybody imagine the Westminster Divines saying; “Yeah, porn is a sin but we are powerless to recommend any civil penalty for porn producers. (?)”

9.) Then there was Doug’s media tour with Christopher Hitchens hawking Hitchens’s new atheist diatribe. Doug got face time on all kinds of media as he served as a kind of human punching bag for Hitchens to assail the God of the Bible on National Television.

10.) Most recently Doug writes articles about the dangers of antisemitism in the Reformed Christian community that he never defines or gives examples of. I note this because it has been a long-used tool by the enemies of Christians to scream Anti-Semitism every time someone commits the sin of noticing and points out an inconvenient truth about the strangely disproportionately high percentage of Jewish people in this or that desultory industry, revolution, or culture influence position.

11.) Then there is Doug’s continued insistence that race is a social construct. Who could have guessed that Franz Boas’ influence would live through Doug?

Now, I understand Doug buys his cyber-ink by the barrel and that he is voluminous in his writing. I further understand that Doug has done some fine work for he which he should be saluted.

However, the kind of stuff above at least should make us realize that Doug can’t be accepted without being interrogated on all he says.

I hope people see here that I am not punching right. I am punching left on a guy who scads of people think belongs to the conservative element of the Reformed world. If Doug really was on the right I wouldn’t be punching.

In the end, Doug Wilson is to the Reformed movement what Wm. Buckley was for Conservatism for a generation, and that is Doug with the Reformed world like Buckley with the conservative world makes sure that Reformed Christianity doesn’t get outside the banks of a nice predictable river.

 

 

 

 

Sports Illustrated & Its Pervert Tranny Swimsuit Issue

Imagine longing for the good old days with SI gave us heterosexual soft porn with Christie Brinkley as opposed to trans-sexual soft porn with an Equatorial male tranny on the cover.

The homosexual agenda used to reveal itself by making the mark of beauty in women to be revealed in glamorizing androgynous women with breasts. Androgynous women with breasts were the closest the homosexual agenda could get to straight-up offering men as sex objects. Now, with the tranny beauty queen winning the Miss Nevada contest and with the tranny named “Bloom,” being featured on the cover of SI the sodomite agenda has expanded its reach so that they no longer have to feature androgynous type women with breasts they can just give us straight-up men.

The interesting thing is that inside the swimsuit edition the sodomite agenda is attacking female beauty as well by giving us “Plus” sized women in blankets cut to look like bikinis. (A normal size man could probably survive a hard frost using those bikinis as blankets.)

Now the next interesting thing about the SI swimsuit issue is that all the “beauties” (cough cough) on the cover (they sell 3 different cover issues with 3 different women on each cover) are minorities. The plus-size (gargantuan?) woman very proudly proclaims how her Asian-American life has been made so difficult by people being prejudiced against plus-sized Asian women.

So… what the elite are doing in terms of changing the standards for what constitutes beauty is that they are telling us that;

1.) Tranny men should be the object of male desire
2.) Minority tranny men should be the object of white male desire

3.) Minority women should be the object of white male desire

In this fashion, SI is pushing both sodomy and miscegenation. If successful in either predictive programming the result is the incremental continuation of genociding white people.

Keep in mind that the demographic target of Sports illustrated is men between the ages of 18-34 who are upper-middle class. Clearly, that is, in the majority, going to be a white demographic target. Keep in mind also that SI could not exist on the money they might make appealing to a tranny audience of men wanting men who look like women. As such, the motive for this kind of gender malfeasance bespeaks an agenda that is other than just profit. SI is pushing this in order to push the social order increasingly in an anti-Christ direction.

Life Experience Explains Why I Hate Sodomy

Some might wonder why I am all in on the whole same-sex attraction buzz working itself out in the PCA and the larger Reformed world. The answer is multifaceted. Let me limn that out somewhat before reviewing another interview I listened to by Dr. Greg Johnson today.

First, I’ve seen the sodomite world somewhat closely. Not as close as some but close enough. A couple of my better friends in (Christian) college were sodomite and ended up as part of my wedding party though I did not know they were sodomite until after the wedding when right after having a photo taken of each of them simultaneously giving me a kiss on the left and right cheek they informed me they were “gay.” One of those chaps I even lived with for a summer in between my sophomore and junior years. Only afterward after becoming a little more worldly-wise do I look back and realize that he may well have been hitting on me that summer of 1980. I was 20 and still quite naive about all things sexual.

As time went by it was clear what the sodomite lifestyle had done to them. The gross immorality accompanied by the revolving door “relationships” led to broken spirits, broken health, and personalities that are no longer integrated. There is nothing glamorous about the sodomite lifestyle. The bacchanalian hedonism was over the top and the “gay bar” scene had to be seen to be believed. (On a dare I went to one with my friends one night even then not realizing that they were daring me for a reason.) In the words of Three Dog Night,

“I seen so many things I ain’t never seen before
Don’t know what it is – I don’t wanna see no more”

Second, I was associated once with an ecclesiastical movement that was populated by sodomites. Debates raged more than once about this issue in the context of those meetings and it was clear that while they claimed Christ theirs was a different faith than mine. To this day I am convinced that I had fallen into an ecclesiastical sodomite nest. I don’t mind admitting that the mannerisms and the “logic” used by those people gave me the creeps.

Third, as a Pastor, I have seen what the sodomite lifestyle has done to people and families.  These people don’t live well and they don’t live long. My observation is that they are perpetually miserable and find very little meaning in life. As a Pastor one sees a great deal of brokenness in people’s lives and it breaks one’s heart in two. Little brokenness is more broken than what I’ve seen among the sodomite and lesbians’ lives.

All of this means that I am saddened for them and the trap they have created for themselves. The most loving thing I can do for them is to resist the same-sex attracted movement as Johnson wants to move into the Church while at the same time trying to remain sympathetic to those like Johnson who are confused on issues at hand.

All that tees up the brief review that follows on another interview I listend to today done by Dr. Greg Johnson. It is clear that Johnson sees himself as a kind of visionary seeking to pull the Church into a reality that he believes it is denying. This interview was 45 minutes long and centered on how John Stott (especially) as well as C. S. Lewis, Billy Graham, and Francis Schaeffer were early proponents of what Johnson is now championing.

Now, we should note out of the gate that Lewis though at times intriguing and so sometimes quite helpful was hardly orthodox. The same is true of Billy Graham who was straight-up Arminian. John Stott had a huge streak of early on SJW’ism in his theology and had low thoughts on the seriousness of sin as seen in his doctrine of soul sleep. That leaves us with Francis Schaeffer who also had streaks of SJW’ism in him. So, this foursome is an interesting quartet for Johnson to be appealing to in his new book.

Johnson likes the story about an encounter between Francis Schaeffer and Jerry Falwell wherein Falwell and Schaeffer are reputed to have had a conversation about sodomites. Falwell asked Schaeffer what he thought of sodomites and Schaeffer gave a nuanced answer whereupon Falwell responded; “If my dog did to other dogs what those men do to each other I would put him down.” Per Johnson, Schaeffer reputedly told his son about their departure from that conversation; “That man (Falwell) is disgusting.” Now the reason I found this now twice accounted conversation (in two different interviews) interesting is that putting down men who engage in this kind of behavior is exactly what God required in His law upon the testimony of two or three witnesses.

“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.” Leviticus 20:13

This made me realize that Johnson has low views of God’s law. Johnson sees God — if we are to learn from how enamored Johnson is with this Schaeffer and Falwell conversation — as being disgusting. God, like Falwell, told His people to put such people down.

Another thing that comes out from this interview is that Johnson is on a crusade against reparative counseling, or the “Ex-Gay movement.” Johnson is absolutely convinced that same-sex attraction does not go away. This seems to suggest that Johnson believes that people are born sodomite or lesbian. I don’t believe this. If people were born sodomite the way they are born left-handed there could be no sin in sams sex desire and the Scripture would not label it “contrary to nature,” as it does in Romans 1.

Also, Johnson’s view of the 1st use of the law I think is under question. For Biblical Christians, the belief is that the work of the law is to convict of sin before the Gospel can provide for relief for that conviction. There is in Evangelism then the reality that those apart from Christ have some hard things to hear that will quite unsettle them before a solution comes to relieve them of that fear and righteous condemnation. It seems to me that Greg wants to step over that portion of Evangelism where the law must do its work. Greg seems to opt instead for a kind of friendship evangelism model where if people see their sin they see it not in terms of God’s righteous wrath against sin but rather in terms of a kind of psychological model where people discover what they are pursuing is not good for their human flourishing. The former finds people repenting because they realize that God is opposed to them and they understand that they can only find relief under the wings of the Son of God who paid their penalty. The latter finds people repenting because they realize that their behavior is getting in the way of their best life now. It doesn’t take much to understand that there is a world of difference between these two types of repenting.
Greg says in this interview that same-sex attraction when it flares up in him must be mortified as sin. So, in Greg’s mind, there seems to be a distinction between the active temptation of same-sex attraction which must be resisted and mortified, and the ongoing reality that one will never be other sex attracted (heterosexual). This distinction allows him to talk about being a “same-sex attracted” Christian. The problem I see here is that there seems to be just a matter of factness about all of this reality in Greg’s mind, instead of a crying out to God to be delivered from this same-sex attracted reality which is contrary to nature. In brief, Greg is too comfortable with being “gay.” None of us as sinners should be comfortable with who we once were in Adam.

The Effects Of Two World War Victories in 2021 In Three Stanzas

They delivered all mankind from the evil foreign Hun
Now Stockholm burns, London bleeds, and Paris is undone
Global Democracy, then defended, by bayonet in Battles like Verdun
Safe havens now for Mosques, and Minarets to reside in the West
And safe for Bankster tribal interests to swallow up the rest

Safe for the elimination of borders in favor of a New World State
Safe for the rise of the nowhere men the Money power will create
To serve as slaves on the grounds of the New World Order estate
So salute the Dough-boys, and G.I. Joes, who kept the world Free
So that their lands could be invaded by third-world refugees

Raise a cheer, and throw ticker-tape on this grand Memorial Day
The Boys of Normandy swarmed the beaches, so their grandsons could be Gay
They fought the Bulge, and Coral Ridge and the West turned Christ away
In favor of a melange hybrid faith suitable for the living damned
Fit for turning all the West into one Global urban London-istan

Not Getting R. Scott Clark’s Inability to Get The Obvious

“Practically, what does it mean to speak of transforming softball or orchestral music or any other cultural endeavor? Why cannot softball simply be what it is, recreation? What is distinctively Christian about “Christian art” or “Christian history” or Christian math”? I understand that the rhetoric is sacrosanct (a shibboleth, as it were) but what does it signify? What are the particulars? I understand that when we get to ultimate matters, e.g., theology, there is a distinctively Christian view of things and there is certainly a Christian interpretation of the significance of things. That is a Christian worldview properly understood but what does it mean to speak of transforming penultimate things? Is the neo-Kuyperian view related to the Anabaptist vision of nature and grace and if not, how are they essentially different? What if Leonard Verduin intuited something?”

Dr. R. Scott Clark 
Heidleblog

Recently, someone left the link to a brief Clark essay wherein this quote was found in the comments section on Iron Ink. The commenter thought this essay proved that Clark was making progress. I disagree.

Clark objects to the idea of grace transforming nature (and so culture) preferring instead to say that grace renews nature in salvation. Clark desires to keep the renewing power of grace constrained to humans as it pertains to their salvation. However, this seems to be a constrained view of reality. After all, it is grace renewed and saved people who are the ones who create culture (an embodiment of nature). If grace renews nature in salvation then grace is going to renew everything that those salvifically renewed people are going to create in culture. One simply can’t have grace renewing nature in salvation without that renewal getting into everything the renewed and salvation visited person touches.  The products of culture, after all, don’t come into being apart from the renewed or unrenewed people who create them. I honestly don’t understand why this is so difficult for R2K Clark and his R2K buds.

Then Clark lists several, what I take are supposed to be real stumpers. as to how grace renews nature (grace transforms culture). Let’s take these one by one.

1.) Softball

I am going to use baseball as an example but it would apply to softball as well. Baseball just gives me more at-hand examples.

In 2017 the Houston Astros (Baseball) won the World Series. Sometime afterward it was revealed that the Astros won the World Series by the art of cheating as they were stealing signs. Several key team leaders lost their jobs and the team itself was fined $5 million for this cheating scandal. Allow me to propose to Dr. Clark that Christian baseball vis-a-vis non-Christian baseball would be less inclined to have this problem.

If Dr. Clark doesn’t like this example we could note that non-Christian baseball has seen performing-enhancing drugs be a huge issue in the recent past providing a barrier to Barry Bonds, Rafael Palmerio, and Roger Clemens gaining entry to the Baseball Hall of Fame. They are each in essence guilty of playing non-Christian baseball.

We could go on to give examples of Ty Cobb sharpening his spikes so that when he slid into 2nd base he would cut up the Shortstop covering the bag. We could write about Pete Rose paying the penalty for playing non-Christian baseball by violating the rules against gambling while a player.

Let’s pretend that genuine Reformation visited Major League Baseball. Does Dr. Clark actually believe that grace would not renew nature so that grace transformed baseball culture?

2.) Orchestral Music

Francis Schaeffer in this work  “The God Who is There,” spends some time looking at the Orchestral music of composer John Cage and demonstrates how Cage’s orchestral music was a declaration that the cosmos was the product of time plus chance. Cage’s music communicated that there was no meaning. This would be non-Christian Orchestral music and it is again difficult to understand how Clark can find this concept difficult. Is what Cage did in music akin to what Bach did in music?

3.) Art

Clark wants to know what makes Christian art, Christian. First, let us note there that the artist as God’s image-bearer cannot avoid getting their worldview into their art. Every piece of art means something and the meaning of that Art is going to determine whether the art in question is Christian or non-Christian or a mixture of both.

Second, art typically aims at beauty. Beauty is an objective category as existing in different genres. Art exists along an objective scale in those different genres of ugly to beautiful. The more beautiful a piece of art is the more Christian that art is and vice-versus.

It would seem that when we compare the modern art of a woman pushing paintballs out of her vagina onto a canvas (yes… that is a thing) and compare that to Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” or Monet’s “Water Lilies,” we would have to say that inasmuch as Rembrandt and Monet were going after beauty their work more closely approached Christian than pushing paintballs out of a human orifice on to a canvas.

4.) History

This one is a little breathtaking as history is really nothing but theology told in another venue. Does Clark not realize that a period of history as handled by the Marxist Historians Charles and Mary Beard is going to look and read very differently than that same period of history as covered by the Christian Historian C. Gregg Singer?

History is Christian or not Christian depending on the presuppositions that the historian has who is approaching the time period they are writing upon. I expect Nesta Webster or Edmund Burke as Christians to tell me a different story about the French Revolution than I expect to be told by Simon Schama or Albert Sobul. When I read the accounts of the American era of Reconstruction I expect a different report from the Dunning School than I expect to read from the Marxist “historian” Eric Foner.

5.) Math

Clark in all likelihood believes that Math is impervious to Christian or non-Christian categories. However perhaps Clark hasn’t heard of one Kareem Carr?

Harvard PhD student Kareem Carr’s recently had a dialogue about the abstract nature of mathematics and it was profiled by Popular Mechanics in an article entitled “Why Some People Think 2+2=5…and why they’re right.”

Carr’s “hope is that you understand the flexible relationship between our mathematical systems, our perceptions of the world, and the symbolic manipulations we use to reason about reality.

Note what is being said here is that mathematics is a social construct. There is nothing in objective in mathematics.  Any such reasoning gives us non-Christian mathematics.

So, pace Dr. Clark we do see that these matters can be handled either in a Christian manner or a non-Christian manner. Frankly, it is bewildering to me at least how any educated man could not readily see this. It’s like not readily noticing the oddity of tits on a boar.

However, the oddity does not end here for Dr. Clark. He goes on to say above that;

“I understand that when we get to ultimate matters, e.g., theology, there is a distinctively Christian view of things and there is certainly a Christian interpretation of the significance of things.”

What else is baseball, orchestral music, art, history, and math but “things?” And if they are “things” then why should there not be a Christian view of these things? Another theologian who shared the same last name as our erstwhile Escondido novice wrote a book a generation ago titled “A Christian View of Men and Things.” Gordon Clark realized that all things were at their heart theological. This is something that seems to escape Dr. R. Scott Clark. Maybe Scott should pick up Gordon’s book and give it a read. Maybe then he would understand?