Category: Culture

10.) When you finish praying the imprecatory Psalms you finish with “In Jesus Christ’s name we pray, Amen.”

9.) On memorial day you wonder why folks honor the veterans who beat back totalitarian bad guys in WW II while the same folks currently embrace the same type of totalitarians as good guys.

8.) You see Obama at Notre Dame and you say to yourself … “I thought Notre Dame was Roman Catholic.”

7.) You believe Charles Murray’s Bell curve findings that race and ethnicity are an indicator for intelligence.

6.) You find it curious that people take seriously the call for a reasonable discourse on the issue of abortion from someone whose hands are dripping with the blood from infanticide and expanded abortion “rights.”

5.) You know the founders meant what they said when they wrote the 10th amendment.

4.) You can’t look at Hillary Clinton, Janet Napolitano, and Kathleen Sebelius at an Obama cabinet meeting and not wonder if they are involved in a menage a trois.

3.) You use a picture of Rahm Emmanuel for your dartboard.

2.) You’d love to see a Texas chain link fence wrestling match between Obama, Kim Jong Il, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Nuclear Weapons must be checked at the ring.

1.) You believe the present and coming Kingdom of Christ will crush the current pretense Kingdoms that are strutting on the stage now. You pray daily that you may live to see it.

The New World Order Reformed Church is hosting its inaugural gala in Grand Rapids Michigan. Reformed denominations from around the world were slated to send representatives to appear at the formal dinner hosted in the DeVos Performance Hall on 22 June 2010. The booked Keynote speaker was Koshi Sanchez Washington a renown Reformed Conference speaker from Japan whose Father was the President of the Brazilian Reformed association of itinerant Pentecostal ministers and whose Mother was an activist among Black Reformed Churches in America and whose Brother was the founder of Conservative Homosexuals For Jesus. The New World Order Reformed Church conference was to be the first time Koshi had addressed an American audience and she was looking forward to the opportunity to press on the new organization on the necessity to embrace the Belhar confession.

Already tongues were wagging about the planned spectacular fete but almost as much buzz was created by the conclave that would be held on the day before at Ah-Nab-Awen Park in downtown Grand Rapids. At the Ah-Nab-Awen Park on 21 June, The New World Order Reformed Church planned to host a spiritual extravaganza where people could sample different ethnic Spiritualities that would be folded into and be a part of the new association of Reformed Churches. The planners had set aside space in the vast park so that visitors could mingle while at the same time participating in a potpourri of interactive spiritual traditions.

The plan was to have one venue were people could participate in the spirituality of an American Indian sacred Ghost dance. At another venue a mock Shinto shrine would be set up where the spirituality of lighting incense in honor of the ancestors could be experienced. Down the river trail there was an interactive hut where those struggling with pedestrian aches and pains could enter and consult either a Shaman or his new age healer wife. The highlight of the festival was a Seance where people could come and go, participating as they please. The selling point of each of these Reformed Spiritualities is the assurance offered by Christian sages that each of them had been sanitized of their former pagan associations and were now explicitly Christian and Reformed.

http://www.crcna.org/news.cfm?newsid=1329

“The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.”

Plato
Republic — Book IV

I wonder what this means for the Church. I wonder if we imperil the Church when we introduce the strangest of melodies. Sure, there can be little doubt that introducing cutting edge music will grow the church but is the numerical growth of the church achieved at the price of the malformed Christians?

Parents, pay attention to what music your children listen to. Music is not neutral and as such the music they listen to will shape them in the direction of the musicians tastes and thinking. I suspect that in our current climate this will be in a direction not desired by the parents.

“‘Man is a political animal,’ says Aristotle. He thrives in a community of families and clans who govern themselves freely and well, providing for more than basic subsistence. What they mainly provide is freedom: free time, leisure for conversation, an arena for debate, for struggles that have consequences, for reading and arguing, for sport, for contemplation, for honing all practical and intellectual virtues. True civility has more to do with a well-ordered fight than with the bonds of niceness.”

Anthony Esolen
Politically Incorrect Guide To Western Civilization — pg. 36

This gives us instruction about the kind of Government men should build in order to pursue the end of true civility. If Government is centralized it is to intrusive for the end of true civility. If Government is anarchistic lawlessness gets in the way of true civility. In our time we have allowed the government to create a soft tyranny that squeezes out civility. The Government has done this by its reduction of the citizenry through its “educational” arm, to a point where the citizenry is incapable of the intellectual virtues required to engage in a well ordered fight — the key sign that true civility exists.

“Every society reproduces its culture — its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience — in the individual, in the form of personality. As Durkheim said, personality is the individual socialized. The process of socialization, carried out by the family and secondarily by the school and other agencies of character formation, modifies human nature to conform to the prevailing social norms.”

Christopher Lasch
The Culture Of Narcissism

Please understand the import of this quote from Lasch. Lasch is insisting that culture is the mold that an individual is poured into that produces personality. All of this works to bend human nature in the direction of societal norms. Now, certainly, we would add that this process works in reverse at the same time. A handful of individuals always escape and rise out of the societal mold in order to make major contributions to the shape which the societal mold will take.

All of this is why it is so important for the Church as well as individual Christians to speak to cultural issues. If the Church surrenders her input then the norms, underlying assumptions, and the culture’s mode of organizing experience will belong to the religion and theology that doesn’t surrender on this score.

Further, Lasch’s point is that people are individual manifestations of the culture that has been impressed upon them. Pagans understand this in a way Christians do not. This is why pagans want the children for their schools. This is why the pagans want to use legislation for social engineering. This is why the pagans want to control the media levers. The pagan understands that when a culture and its institutions are pagan then the individuals will be pagan as well. Now, the fact that this isn’t universally true is the providence of God calling His people out from the cultural mold, but how faithful to their rescue and their rescuer are those who have been rescued from that pagan mold who insist that it is wicked and wrong of the Church to be culturally engaged?

If personality is the individual socialized then the Church should move heaven and hell to speak into that socializing process.