Category: Ethnic considerations

Dr. Owen Strachan is the Provost & Research Professor of Theology at Grace Biblical Theological Seminary. Dr. Strachan also hosts the “Antithesis”  podcast and is author of the book, “Christianity & Wokeness.

Recently on Twitter Strachan lit out after Kinism tweeting;

“I see 2 forms of “Christian Nationalism” today: One that is problematically ethnocentric and traffics in sinful “kinism,” whatever other claims it may make: AVOID.

Bret responds,

One does wonder if Dr. Strychnine  is only upset with white Christian Nationalism or if Dr. Strychnine would fault a Christian Nationalism that was characterized by minority communities and churches. For example is Dr. Strychnine apoplectic over Kinist churches that are uniquely Korean, Hmong, or Black which are also, per Strychnine, problematically ethnocentric or is it only white Churches that are anti-gospel and dead wrong?

I suspect that Dr. Strychnine has only a problem with white Kinism and white Nationalism. I suspect that he would be perfectly fine with minority expressions of Kinism. I know I am. I am thankful for my friendships with minority member Christian Kinists.

However, Strychnine is correct in accusing Kinism as being unblushing. It is true that we are not ashamed of Biblical Christianity.

Dr. Strychnine goes on to say,

A second that is *not* sinfully ethnocentric and that’s focused on God’s law and public good: THINK THROUGH.

The first is associated with Stephen Wolfe’s “A Case for Christian Nationalism” and his broader program, which undoubtedly has “kinist” elements. The second is being pondered by many folks, alongside matters like theonomy, postmillennialism, and the role of the church and state.

Bret responds,

1.) If people become theonomists if they are consistent they will become Ethnocentric, Kinist and Christian Nationalist. Theonomy implies ethnocentrism, kinism and Christian Nationalism.

2.) I am pretty sure that Dr. Stephen Wolfe would be appalled at the notion  that he is associated with theonomy. I know that many theonomists are appalled at the notion that they would be identified with Wolfe’s Natural Law project.

3.) Dear reader you need to understand that kinism has become a acid test for Biblical Christianity. Those “Christians” who refuse kinism are to be suspect since somewhere in their DNA they have adopted Cultural Marxist (WOKE) categories. As Achord and Dow’s book “Who is My Neighbor” demonstrates what is called Kinism has been for a millennium Christianity 101. Get the anthology. Look at the quotes from Augustine, Aquinas, and the Reformers. Over and over again our Fathers were what Dr. Strychnine is warning against.

We end this entry by demonstrating Dr. Wolfe’s inconsistencies. Remember, it has been my point consistently that Wolfe’s problem is that he is all over the map on the issue of Christian Nationalism, particularly as it pertains to the ethnic component. We see that clearly in this quote and response;

Today R. Scott Clark, obviously having no sense of irony posted the following post on the Hiedleblog praising J. Gresham Machen, just a day after lambasting me for being allegedly guilty of the very same thing that he elsewhere exonerates Machen for being;

Machen Was Worth a Hundred of His Fellows

“We have lost a man whom our times can ill spare, a man who had convictions which were real to him and who fought for those convictions and held to them through every change in time and human thought. There was power in him which was positive in its very negations. He was worth a hundred of his fellows who, as princes of the church, occupy easy places and play their church politics and trim their sails to every wind, who in their smug observance of the convictions of life and religion offend all honest and searching spirits. No forthright mind can live among them, neither the honest skeptic nor the honest dogmatist. I wish Dr. Machen had lived to go on fighting them.’

Such was the tribute of novelist and former liberal missionary Pearl S. Buck who won both the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes. J. Gresham Machen was a critic of much of what she represented.”

BRAD ISBELL | “Some of Machen’s ‘enemies’ admired him” | March 21, 2023

Here is another quote from the Machen that Clark is affirming praise for;

“It is true some of them are ‘sticklers’ for the civil rights for negroes — it always makes me intensely angry to hear people talking glibly about equal civil rights for negroes when in many parts of the South those equal rights would mean that every legislator and every judge would be a savage of a type and white men would be more unsafe in parts of this country than in most parts of the world where at least protection of his home government is to some extent with him.”

J. Gresham Machen
Letter to his Mother

R. Scott Clark is a magnificent hypocrite because he has on his blog a whole entry defending the orthodoxy of J. Gresham Machen, despite what Clark considers to be a racist letter to his mother, while at the same time casting modern day Machen Kinists into hell by referring to them as heretics.

Machen’s Letter To His Mother Or What To Do With Dead Sinners?

Obviously, Clark would never step up to the microphone and declare that on the basis of Machen’s social order beliefs that Machen, who was a 20th century Kinist, was a “heretic.” And yet that is exactly what the arch-heretic R. Scott Clark has done with 21st century Kinists. So Clark condemns 21st century Kinists as heretics but begs for understanding for 20th century Kinists like Machen. Bottom line Scotty is that either Machen was a heretic for believing what he believed or I am and all modern Kinists are not heretics for believing the very same types of things that Machen believed. You can not have it both ways. Either we are all in hell (like Machen per Clarkian reasoning) or on the way to hell (like living Kinists) for being heretics.

After all Scott, no heretic ever made it into heaven. Now, lots of people who were in error on this or that issue are in heaven but no heretic is in heaven.

Hey Scott … does Machen’s letter above disqualify him from heaven?

R. Scott Clark (RSC) writes,

“The CRC Is Right”

Bret responds,

I’m sure that the Reformed Alliance, the OCRC, and the URC, who all left the CRC in the 90’s forward would find it interesting that Scott says “the CRC is Right.” I’m sure NAPARC who kicked the CRC out of their Reformed organization would find it interesting that Scott says “The CRC is Right.”

I admit that I find it fascinating that Clark hates orthodox believers, who (Kinists) are merely embracing what the Reformed Church has embraced for 500 years, so much that he would affirm the CRC and even get in bed with Doug Wilson, a man he has loathed for years. All of this just in order to smear the author of a book (me) who wrote a irrefutable take down of R2K. Clark holds hands with Wilson and the CRC in the attempt to deny my book or me credibility.

The logic goes… “McAtee is a Kinist heretic therefore it is obvious that his book exposing R2K can’t be accurate and should be shunned.”

RSC writes,

Over the 15 years that the HB has been published, I have had occasion to criticize the drift of the CRC toward broad evangelicalism. This, however, is an area where confessional Reformed Christians can learn from our brothers and sisters in the CRC.

Bret responds,

Broad Evangelicalism?

When I began to pastor a CRC Church in 1995 I was assigned a “pastoral mentor” who was through and through Neo-Orthodox (Barthian). When he came to the text he presupposed that the supernatural could not be true. The denomination knew what he was when they ordained him decades prior to that. His was a famous case involving his denial that snakes could talk. During my time associated but never ordained in the CRC I heard ordained men make appeals on the floor of Classis for Homosexuals to be members and officers in the CRC. On those occasions I was the only one who stood up to protest. The silence of the other delegates was deafening. During my time associated but never ordained in the CRC I heard on the floor of Classis theologians of the Anabaptist stripe (Yoder) quoted approvingly as support against US going to War in the Middle East. On those occasions I was the only one standing and asking why Reformed men were quoting Anabaptist theologians in order to protest against War. (And I was even against the war myself.) On those occasions I was the only one who stood up to protest. The silence of the other delegates was deafening. During my time associated but never ordained in the CRC I saw men ordained who denied infant baptism, who denied justification by faith alone, and who thought my asking them what the three imputations in Scripture were, “a trick question.” All of this is only the tip of the iceberg of what I saw during my time of being associated by never ordained in the CRC. Believe me when I tell you that if the CRC is merely tacking in a broadly Evangelical direction then Trannyism is merely a tacking towards a more inclusive gender mindset.

If Scott wants to call the CRC’s growing denial of the authority and divine inspiration of the scriptures as summarized in our confession (cf. Belgic Confession Articles 5 & 7), then by all means let him do so. To do so only demonstrates his own incipient liberalism. If Scott wants to say women in office is only a “broadly Evangelical problem” then let him say so. I think such a move tears at the fabric of patriarchy which in turn undoes all of Scripture and so instead is a “decidedly Liberal problem.” Then there is the issue of question 80 of the Heidelberg Catechism, which the CRC has voted to have no binding validity anymore (that question says that the Roman Catholic Mass is an idolatry). Per Scott this is only a “broadly Evangelical problem.”

Clearly, with the “thinking” that Clark demonstrates we can see where the URC will soon enough follow the CRC.

RSC writes,

As Reginald Smith notes, the Kinists,

look at Old Testament examples to demonstrate how God forbade interracial marriages between Israel and other nations, and they use this to justify the statement that God must also forbid interracial marriage today. Kinists use Genesis 1:25 and 11:7–9 to state that God mandated life based on kinship or relationships with people of “the same kind.”

Bret Responds,

Some hard kinists will teach that inter-racial marriages are sin and that therefore God forbids them. Other kinists will say instead that Scripture clearly demonstrates that inter-racial marriages are not normatively wise and so should not be entered into. It is possible that people do not like that but it is not possible to say that some form of those kind of views have been the norm in Church History. For example,

• “The vast majority of good thinking people prefer to associate with, and intermarry with, people of their respective race; this is part of the God-given inclination to honor and uphold the distinctiveness of separate races. But there are many false prophets of oneness, and many shallow stooges, who seek to force the amalgamation of the races.” ~

  Dr. John Edwards Richards
  The Racial Problem Facing America (1964)
  One of the Founders of the Presbyterian Church of America
  Professor of Reformed Theology — Reformed Theological Seminary

  “I don’t believe [racial integration] is what the Bible teaches. Even though we may have transgressed the boundaries of nationhood and of peoplehood, it seems to me that God did create man of one blood in order that he may dwell as different nations throughout the world. But after the fall, when sinful man cosmopolitanly – meaning by that, with a desire to obliterate separate nationhood, with a desire to build a sort of United Nations organization under the Tower of Babel…attempted to resist developing peoplehood…[God confused the tongues of men]…because men had said, ‘Let us build a city and a tower which will stretch up to heaven lest we be scattered’… Pentecost sanctified the legitimacy of separate nationality rather than saying this is something we should outgrow… In fact, even in the new earth to come, after the Second Coming of Christ, we are told that the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of the heavenly Jerusalem, and the kings of the earth shall bring the glory and the honor—the cultural treasures—of the nations into it… But nowhere in Scripture are any indications to be found that such peoples should ever be amalgamated into one huge nation.”

  Dr. Francis Nigel Lee (1934-2011)
  Reformed Theologian
  

  “Love imagines that it can overleap the barriers of race and blood and religion, and in the enthusiasm and ecstasy of choice these obstacles appear insignificant. But the facts of experience are against such an idea. Mixed marriages are rarely happy. Observation and experiences demonstrate that the marriage of a Gentile and Jew, a Protestant and a Catholic, an American and a Foreigner has less chance of a happy result than a marriage where the man and woman are of the same race and religion….”

  Dr. Clarence MacCartney
  Presbyterian Minister

  “Again, if diversity is God’s revealed way for mankind, one wonders about any program that advocates the intermarriage of the diverse races in a way which will eradicate the differences that God has established.”

  Morton Smith
  The Racial Problem Facing America

  “What do ye call natural affections?

  “Such as be among them of one blood and kindred, as between parents and children, husbands and wives, kindred, country, heathens, yea Christians also void of these.

  (How) does it differ from human and Christian affection?

  Human affection is that whereby we embrace all men as men; natural affection is that where by we embrace them which are nearer unto us by blood; Christian affection is that whereby we love good men because they belong to Christ.”

  Thomas Wilson
  Puritan
  A Commentary on the Most Divine Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans
  3rd ed. 1653, Chapter 1 — p. 54

  And of course these are just a few of the quotes that sustain that Kinims is merely vanilla Christianity 101 and that despite what either Reginald Williams or R. Scott Clark whines about.

  But there is a flip side of this that needs to be considered and that flip side is the position that both Clark and Reginald Williams are embracing. That position is called Alienism which is just the social order intent of Marxists.

  Reginald Williams, a black man married to a white woman (a point he has labored publicly to make known), and R. Scott Clark a white man who says Kinists are heretics because they don’t agree that normatively that inter-racial marriage is a good idea both agree as Alienists that Kinists should be run out of the Reformed Church. With that idea that “Kinism is evil” they are in agreement with the Marxists throughout history;

  1.) ”What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities?

  The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and hereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property.”

  ~ Frederick Engels in “The Principles of Communism”, 1847

  2.) “The equality of races and nations is one of the most important elements of the moral strength and might of the Soviet state. Soviet anthropology develops the one correct concept, that all the races of mankind are biologically equal. The genuinely materialist conception of the origin of man and of races serves the struggle against racism, against all idealist, mystic conceptions of man, his past, present and future.”

  —Mikhail Nesturkh, Soviet anthropologist, 1959
  “The Origin of Man” (Moscow)Mikhail Nesturkh, Soviet anthropologist, 1959:

  3.) “The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and end all national isolation; not only to bring the nations closer together but to merge them….”

  Vladimir Lenin
  The Rights of Nations to Self Determination — pg. 76

  4.) “… Just as mankind can achieve the abolition of classes only by passing through the dictatorship of the proletariat, so mankind can achieve the inevitable merging of nations only by passing through the transition period of complete liberation of all oppressed nations, i.e., their right to secede. “

  Vladimir Lenin 
  The Rights of Nations to Self Determination 

  5.) “Even the natural differences within species, like racial differences…, can and must be done away with historically.” 

  K. Marx’s Collected Works V:103,

  As cited in S.F. Bloom’s The World of Nations: A

  Study of the National Implications in the Work of Karl Marx, Columbia University Press, New York, 1941, pp. 11 & 15-19:
  
  

  6.) “Full-scale Communist construction constitutes a new stage in the development of national relations in the U.S.S.R., in which the nations will draw still closer together until complete unity is achieved…. However, the obliteration of national distinctions and especially of language distinctions is a considerably longer process than the obliteration of class distinctions.”

  Nikita Khrushchev
  
  And with this entry we see that it is the Alienists like Reginald Williams, the CRC,  R. Scott Clark, and Doug Wilson, and just about all the rest of the fallen Church in the West today who are the heretics. Call this my McAtee Contra Mundum moment. It is true that I and my handful of Kinist compatriots are standing against today’s world but we are the ones who are perfectly in alignment with the Church Historical. It is people who are harassing us (and keep in mind it was Clark who lobbed grenade at me) who are outside what the Church has confessed in all times and all places where God has been pleased to grant the Church orthodoxy.