Magic In The Modern Church

In Seminary, while pursuing my degree in cross cultural dynamics I did a course work and a good deal of reading on the idea of magic. At that time I thought we were headed for the mission field and being familiar with how culture worked was a natural fit. Most of the reading and study I did on magic was as sat in the context of third world pre-modern cultures. We looked at the idea of totems, charms, spirit-animals, grimoire, shamans, and everything in between. As it turned out Jane and I didn’t end up on the mission field (not for lack of trying) but oddly enough all that work studying magic and cross-culture contexts ended up being instrumental for understanding culture in modern and post-modern contexts right here in the USA.

When one strips all the mysticism and spooky context from the idea of the magical one is left with the reality that Magic, by definition, is the attempt to manipulate one’s surrounding by means of gaining control of the cultural context. In a pre-modern context magic is about manipulating the false gods (the supernatural) so as to put them in the magicians service. Magic thus is a way of gaining power over every circumstance that one encounters. Magic works to put the gods in the service of the one who knows the keys to manipulating the supernatural forces that guide the universe. In magic the practitioner is the one who is controlling the controllers (supernatural).

Now in a third world pre-modern context that means gaining control by means of manipulating the gods. However in a modern context magic still gains traction even though the concept of supernatural is diminished and/or dismissed. Because the gods don’t go away, even if they no longer exist in a pre-modern animistic setting, magic still is a thing. However, the adjustment one needs to make in applying the idea of the use of magic manipulating the gods in a third world setting is to understand that while magic might look different in a modern/post-modern world magic is still practiced in leverage against the gods. The secret was translating the gods of animism to the gods of in the post-modern world. Now, unlike a animistic setting where the supernatural is everywhere and the gods are thick as flies the modern/post-modern world, having denied god, has merely rearranged the deck chairs of divinity so as to find the supernatural as being controlled by the new God in town — sovereign Man. Once one understands that one begins to see that magic, as a means of establishing total control over the world, other men, and the “supernatural” via manipulation of reality in one’s favor is still a thing with the difference that the shaman, witch-doctor, and sorcerer translated into modern/post-modern culture is now called the sociologist, the marketer, the psychologist, and the propagandist. If you pause to consider it, it is easy to see that these categories of people are to us today in the modern world what the magician was to the animistic world.

Secondly, wherein “primitive” cultures it is the gods who are manipulated in modern/post-modern culture it is man as god that is controlled and manipulated by our new forms of magic. And sociology, psychology, propaganda, and marketing are the means by which man the controller magician has established manipulative control over man as god. Modern man as magician uses these forms of magic to control man as god just as the Shaman in animistic cultures used magic to control men.

You see the difference is that in the world of animism the magician worked on the supernatural to control it to his ends, whereas today in the Western world the magician works on the natural that has taken the place of what the gods were to the animistic world. In the third-world the Magician resorts to reading entrails, casting bones, chanting spells, and making potions. In today’s modern/postmodern world the Magician is more likely to read statistics, cast marketing reports, chant psychological gibberish, and map simple ways, via propaganda to get people to act the way you want them to act. However, in the end it is all about controlling people via controlling the gods. It’s all magic.

Scientism is a sub-category of modern magic as well. Scientism is used as a magic to control and manipulate modern man. This was most recently clearly seen in the whole Covid fiasco – disaster. Scientism, aided by propaganda, sociology, and psychology worked the work of magic by the magicians to control mass man. There was no reality there. It was all “magic.” It was all manipulation and control of god — of modern man. Looking back, who could ever doubt the control of the magicians? It was breathtaking to see how they used their magic spells to control the world’s population. The greatest sorcerers  of all time (Merlin? Allanon? Bremen?) would be envious of the magic cast by the Covid magicians of the 21st century.

A troubling thing happened at the tail end of the 20th century and that the kind of magic spoken of above came into the Christian Church via Fuller Seminary’s “Church Growth Movement.” Lead by the likes of Donald McGavern, C. Peter Wagner, Allen Tippet and then taken up by the likes of Rick Warren,  Lyle Schaller, and Bill Hybels magic was brought into the Christian Church and has not waned since its introduction. The Church growth movement was all about sociology, psychology, propaganda, and marketing. It was the magic movement coming into the last place magic should have been seen. People were “converted” by means of this magic but like all magic the spell wore off for a considerable portion of these people. Hybels went down in a sex scandal. Warren became connected to the CFR. Wagner went off the Pentecostal edge with the Vineyard movement.  However it ended each of these people and many others introduced magic into the Church.

In Seminary we had to study how marketing plans could build the church. We had to take humanist psychology dressed up as Christian, we had to take a whole semester class in Church Growth techniques. (Somewhere around here I still have my Donald McGavern and C. Peter Wagner books.) We had to understand how sociology could direct people’s affections. They were all magic courses.

And now one can barely function as a church apart from the operation of magic over the congregation. Indeed, Pastors have become known more for their marketing skills or psychology counseling skills than for their understanding of reality because of familiarity with God’s Word. It is not too much to say that magic has turned the Pastorate into a Shaman or Witch Doctor. Pastors are expected, as one Pastor told me years ago, “to put the meat in the seat.” That is to be accomplished via the control that comes from rightly handling the magic. Because this is so our churches are burgeoning with people who are not converted but instead have had a successful magical spell cast upon them. Some form of modern magic (sociology, psychology, marketing, scientism, propaganda) has gripped them and holds them in congregations. Much like a voodoo doll in ancient magic would find it controlling the person who it represents so much of the modern church controls its members via magic and sociological manipulation.

Understand that the sociology, marketing, propaganda, and psychology used by the modern church is manipulation by means of modernist notions of magic. Modern magic manipulates reality by convincing people of realities that are not real. Just as the magic of Covid created a reality that dictated that poisonous vaccines were a cure, that masks stopped disease, that social distancing made one whit of difference so the modern magic of the Church creates a reality where the awe of God is lost in worship, where the law is no longer proclaimed, where egalitarianism is a spell that is cast over the congregants, where the Pastor is Shaman.

It’s all magic folks, and you need to wake up from the spell that has been cast.

Zuidema & McAtee On The Ecclesiasticizing of Christianity

“The ecclesiasticizing of religion necessarily calls into being the profaning of the non-ecclesiastical area …. the ecclesiasticized church calls into being a secularized world… The more church becomes ecclesiasticized, the more it will profane life outside the church and abandon it to profanation… The more the Church profanes life, the less it becomes the humble servant of Christ and his spiritual world dominion… people lament, certainly not without justification, about the ongoing secularization of life in the lands populated and governed by Western peoples. Concurrent with this secularization comes the distressing problem…and oppressive reality of human emancipation as the self-liberation out of the bonds to God and his Word… This is a problem which, unless it leads man to retrace his steps in this emancipation, will irretrievably abandon us to nihilism and the destruction of every last human worth, human honor, human value, and human responsibility…”

S. U. Zuidema

Communication and Confrontation

1.) Ecclesiasticizing of religion = Christianity existing only for the sake of the church. This is the goal and object of Radical Two Kingdom “theology.”

2.) This is merely the admission that if Christianity is to retreat from the public square the consequence will be a vacuum that is filled by some other prevailing religion that shapes and informs the public square. The public square can never be “neutral.” The public square is always the incarnation and thus expression of some religion. The public square only exists as being animated by religion.

3.) It is true that the public square because of secularization becomes increasingly profane. However, the profanation of the secular realm for the Christian is the divinizing or sacralizing of the public square as consistent with the tenets of the false religion that is shaping and informing the public square. In other words the profanation of the public square according to the standards of the Christian religion becomes the sacralizing of the public square according to the standards of whatever religion replaces Christianity. It’s not that the public square is no longer set apart as belonging to the God of Christianity. It is that the public square is set apart as belonging to the god of some other faith system (religion).

4.) Radical Two Kingdom Theology (R2Kt) is doing the devil’s work and as such ministers who imbibe R2K theology are of their Father the devil, intentionally or unintentionally. They are doing the work of the devil because in their work to ecclesiasticize the Christian faith they are de-Christianizing the public square in favor of some other religion which will fill the vacuum that their de-sacralizing the public square has done.

5.) When the Christian religion is ecclesiasticized the consequence is that men are released from the guiding ethos of the Christian faith. Being thus “liberated,” from Christianity in their everyday living because of the clergy’s work to ecclesiasticize the Christian faith men instantly experience bondage to some other false demon god. If men will not have the freedom that comes from living in the constraints of God’s Word then they will live in bondage to false demon gods who promise absolute libertinism. How free is a goldfish who has been set free from their fish bowl? How free is a train that is free from it’s tracks? The R2K false religion, because it ecclesiasticizes the Christian religion is guaranteed to be the greatest engine of bondage ever invented by Satan’s engineers.

6.) Unless the Lord Christ grants Reformation and renewal and delivers us from this sulfur laden doctrine of R2K that ecclesiasticizes the Christian faith mankind will continue to de-man themselves in pursuit of ever greater expressions of “freedom.” This in turn will lead to the nihilism that Zuidema speaks of, as well “as the destruction of every last human worth, human honor, human value, and human responsibility…” If the public square will not be ruled by the standards of a vibrant Christianity that informs and applies to the public square then the consequence will be the loss of true meaning and then the loss of the manishness of man. Finally, the coup de grâce will be the loss of Christianity in the ecclesial (the Church). If all that surrounds the Church is a public square that is being governed by the impulse of a false religion then the inevitable consequence is that the Church itself will fall to the public square god that was given hegemony by a Christian Church that had ecclesiasticized the Christian faith.

7.) This is not some kind of children’s game. If we cannot arrest this demonic work of ecclesiasticizing the Christian religion we will have reached a pivot in the history of mankind wherein we will find a great descent of darkness falling upon mankind.

More Reinforcement On The Current NAPARC Scene

Last night I heard from an old friend I had not spoken with in quite some time. He was on speaking terms with a Pastor in a NAPARC church in a region of the country far away from where I live. He knows of how I have mocked the NAPARC denominations citing their abandonment of the historic Reformed faith as seen in the persecutions of Rev. Michael Spangler, Rev. Michael Hunter, and Rev. Zach Garris.

He contacted me to blow off some steam. He himself does not attend a NAPARC Church but in the past has met a Pastor of a local NAPARC church through mutual friends. This NAPARC Pastor learned of my friends Kinist like beliefs and found himself compelled to grill my friend about his Kinist like beliefs in order to “set him straight.” It seems that this same Pastor, who thought that my friend (let’s call him “Derek”) was so potentially dangerous to the Christian faith because of his views on Kinism, was himself spending a good deal of time staring at the interesting things on the internet that one can stare at while on the internet. It seems this staring has gone on for a good amount of time and yet nothing of any consequence was done to this Pastor by NAPARC church leadership in light of this pastoral staring until only recently when a very slight slap on the hand was given for this improper pastoral ogling, gawking, and leering at internet images.

So, here we are in 2025 and owning views on race that have been owned by centuries in the Reformed Church and by the Fathers of the Reformed faith can get one tossed by clerical cultural Marxists in NAPARC churches but a preoccupation with improper internet staring is treated as if someone improperly belched while giving a sermon.

This reminds of another case I was aware of and involved with a few years ago. I knew a chap from Michigan who was Pastoring a flagship NAPARC church in a region of the country far away from where I live and this Pastor chap had the chops to criticize me online for my very traditionalist revisionist views on the War of Northern Aggression. It seems he thought that because we were both from Michigan and both Pastors that gave him some duty to lecture me. His views were politically correct and along the way I was privy to his incessant online charges of “racism.” His time in the ministry ended so badly that out of respect for what remains of his non-Pastoral life and out of respect for his family I will not go into any detail of how all this ended except to say it was the height of hypocrisy for him to be going all spastic against my pro-Southern views on the war of Northern Aggression while he was involved in the unseemly matters he was involved with and which eventually (sadly enough for he and his family) caught up with him.

All this to say that modern Reformed clergy, no doubt with notable exceptions, are a joke. Likewise modern Reformed NAPARC churches, exceptions notwithstanding, are merely pale (and sometimes not so pale) reflections of the broader WOKE culture. I would rather take Christian counsel and spiritual advice from my auto mechanic then listen to modern conservative Reformed NAPARC clergy. When the NAPARC clergy move their lips I hear the voices of Antonio Gramsci, Al Sharpton, and Ron Burns (aka –Thabiti Anybwile).  These are men who are condemning the theology of Calvin, Rutherford, Althusius, Augustine, Dabney, Thornwell, Palmer, and Girardeau all the while involved themselves in the grossest of inconsistencies. When I’m around these people (as long as my stomach can hold out) it is as if I am surrounded by grifters, snake oil salesmen, and intellectual dullards. I am thankful that there are exceptions but those exceptions are just that — exceptions.

Clearly, the Seminary system has failed and this is likely due to the fact that the Seminary Professors are cut from the same cloth as those who are graduating from these “conservative” cemeteries.

Yes, I realize this is a screed … a rant if you please. However, we are talking about the Church of Jesus Christ here and it strikes me that an occasional rant / screed is appropriate when living under our current Reformed Babylonian captivity.

Free Spangler, Hunter, and Garris.

NAPARC, Shadow Confessions, And The Ecclesiastical Lynching Of Godly Men

What Geerhardus Vos combatted as liberal scholarship, the Church today faces under the banner of evangelicalism only in reference to Cultural Marxism. Evangelical scholarship now stunningly embraces many of the assumptions and methods of Cultural Marxism. In Vos’ words Evangelicals seem

“……resolute in showing kindness for what once was called liberalism. To put it frankly, there is an unnerving sympathy within evangelical scholarship for seeking light in darkness, for synthesizing antithesis, and even for wedding belief and unbelief. It has become all too acceptable to appropriate the methods of unbelieving scholarship, to assert common ground with its unbelieving assumptions, and to give such syncretism some credible-sounding, winsome label like ‘believing criticism.’”

Geerhardus Vos

 

The Institutional Reformed Church keeps doing the orthodox folks among the Reformed rank and file the favor of showing us who they really are. Earlier this year the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) tossed one Rev. Michael Spangler from their midst using some of the most unique and contrived methodologies possibly imagined. Most recently the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) via a majority report in the Rio Grande Presbytery brought charges against Rev. Zach Garris for noting that inasmuch as the Scriptures regulate slavery therefore the Scriptures do not forbid all types of slavery. Over in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARP) they are cooking up much the same kind of feminine outrage and hissy fit over some of the vanilla type things that Rev. Michael Hunter has said or written on the subject of race.

Keep in mind that anything and everything these chaps are writing and speaking about race have been said repeatedly by Reformed divines throughout Reformed church history. It is not as if these three chaps are acting like the Confederate soldiers at Ft. Pillow. What Spangler, Hunter, and Garris have said and written is moderate and supported with varied and sundry quotes from Southern Presbyterians.

Yet, despite the moderation coming from the pens of these good men, the institutional structures of these NAPARC churches are hell bent on treating them as if they are King Kleagles of the Klan.

Matters have gotten so bad in today’s Reformed and Presbyterian Church Aimee Byrd, Duke Kwon, Lamont English, Greg Johnson, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and Ron Burns have eclipsed R. L. Dabney, J. Gresham Machen, Morton Smith, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, James Henley Thornwell and John Girardeau as the heroes of the faith.

This isn’t your Father’s Presbyterian Church.

What we have here is a clear demonstration that the Reformed denominations in America have gone WOKE. The Confessions that they say they subscribe to have been displaced by what might well be referred to as “shadow confessions.” Shadow Confessions are Confessions that operatively are controlling men and so the church but exist as not explicitly stated. What has happened in the previously “Conservative” “Reformed” denominations is what happened in the US as explained by Christopher Caldwell in his book; “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.” In that book Caldwell argues that with the passage and embrace of Civil Rights Legislation in the 1960s the US, in a defacto sense, took on a new Constitution that replaced the previous Constitution. Caldwell argues that ever since that time the original Constitution has existed in name only.

The same type of thing has happened in Reformed denominations. The Westminster Confession and the Three Forms of Unity are still present but they really are not the confessional standard by which the Churches are ruled. Instead, a shadow confession has been owned and that is the real standard that these non-Christian clergy in the denominations are operating in terms of their allegiance.

That shadow confession amounts to an embrace of Cultural Marxism categories. There is a good deal of information on Iron Ink on the subject of Cultural Marxism and I urge you to probe Iron Ink for more information on what Cultural Marxism is but as a shorthand explanation Cultural Marxism embraces the “Oppressor vs. the Oppressed” narrative and applies it in the Church to how the white man, playing the Oppressor, has allegedly  mistreated the 0ppressed minority, oppressed females, and oppressed perverts. Now that we are aware of this long injustice we live in a time when the oppressed is to be given “justice” so that the oppressor is finally brought low. Part of this whole Cultural Marxist narrative that is operating as the shadow confession in the Reformed Church is the whole Critical Race Theory paradigm.

As a result of this shadow confession of Cultural Marxism / Critical Race Theory in the Church both the Scriptures and the Confessions are read through that prism and reinterpreted in light of these new reigning shadow confessions. The truth of this was underscored for me when I heard of a  ordination controversy that happened recently in one of the NAPARC denominations somewhere in the Southeast. It seems that the candidate up for ordination had admitted he was a socialist or had socialist leanings. There was some heated exchange on the floor until someone stood up and insisted that since the Westminster Confession didn’t speak explicitly to the issue of Socialism therefore there could be no barring of the candidate from being ordained. The problem with that reasoning is that it just isn’t so. Consider the Westminster Larger Catechism when explaining the sins that are condemned by the Eighth commandment;

 all other unjust or sinful ways of taking or withholding from our neighbour what belongs to him, or of enriching ourselves;

The above could stand as a definition of Socialism as socialism withholds from our neighbor what belongs to him so that we can enrich ourselves and worse yet it uses the State to accomplish this larceny.

The candidate was ordained and became another WOKE clergy in the bulging ranks of our WOKE Reformed clergy.

It is these types that are going after Spangler, Hunter, and Garris and they are going after them with such success that one can only conclude that the modern NAPARC churches are, generally speaking, anti-Christ churches. The fact that they are wickedly pursuing god fearing men like Spangler, Hunter, and Garris are proof of that. The fact that they brought down men like Ryan Louis Underwood in the United Episcopal Church of North America a few years ago testifies to how ubiquitous this anti-Christ malady exists as among the “Reformed” “clergy,” and denominations.

I am being told that the cancer is especially bad in the PCA as among their Mission to the World organization. In that organization there is a black chap named Lamont English who has a title who seems to be best exemplifying this Cultural Marxist mindset. It is English (irony abounds) who pressed the case against Rev. Zach Garris. MTW has been a problem in the PCA for at least a couple decades as clear back in the late 1990s they were largely controlled by a pagan Psychology mindset. (First hand experience here.)

Of course most of the rank and file in these denomination are clueless about this controversy. Unfortunately, the rank and file tend to trust their Pastors which right now is like the goat herd trusting the Judas Goat to lead them.

I’m pretty sure that this is not going to change. The Cultural Marxists/CRT crowd are controlling these NAPARC denominations. It strikes me that we are at a time where Biblical Christians need to flee these anti-Christ denominations and start new ones.

Keep in your prayers Rev. Hunter, Rev. Spangler, and Rev. Garris. Pray that God would vindicate them upon their and His enemies.

Rev. Bret McAtee, Maurice Pinay, and Winston Churchill on the Jews

Rev. Michael Hunter was recently grilled (interrogated) by the ARP’s Grace Presbytery Minister and His Works Committee regarding his views on a number of subjects. One of the questions put to Rev. Hunter was as follows:

14) Bret McAtee of Pactum (Institute) has said, “Jews do in fact play a disproportionate role in the destruction of Western Civilization and the white race via the Great Replacement.” What is your view on this as well as modern Jews generally?

Rev. Hunter gave his answer to this question which was quite excellent but since my name was brought up it seems only appropriate that I answer this question also. Clearly, the ARP Presbytery in citing my name as well as Dr. Adi Schlebusch’s, and Rev. Michael Spangler’s in their loaded questions to Rev. Hunter was attempting the old “guilt by association” technique. The methodology was … “as Spangler, Schlebusch, and McAtee are clearly guilty as seen in the quotes we provided, therefore you, Rev. Hunter, must be guilty also of whatever it is we have determined they are guilty of.” 

Let me note that this observation about the contest between Jews and White Christians is hardly unique to me. Indeed, so obvious is the truth of this that it strikes me that the ARP MHW committee is implying that I am guilty of the sin of noticing and they’re guilty of not knowing their own Church history.

In terms of Church history my quote is confirmed by Maurice Pinay in his history book, “The Plot Against The Church.” In this book Pinay chronicles two millennium of Church history concerning the ongoing religious conflict between Jews and Christians. If the clergy knew their own Church history they wouldn’t even invoke my name or my observation in questioning Rev. Hunter.

Perhaps Pinay is not good enough for the MHW committee of the ARP? If not then perhaps Winston Churchill would suffice as a witness to the truthfulness of the quote they cited from me. Churchill wrote in a 1920 London Newspaper column:

In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.1

My quote that the ARP referenced in questioning Rev. Hunter is about as controversial in its truth as an assertion that “if one falls into water one is sure to get wet.”

1. Churchill, Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), February 8, 1920, p. 5.