R. J. Rushdoony’s & Otto Scott’s Proto Kinism

[Otto] I don’t really know what the church today sermonizes against. Once we… when we really come to it, all sins seem to have shriveled down to racism.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Beyond that there is no sin…

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is very good. That is about the only sin that is left. And that is an odd thing to choose as a sin, because one of the characteristics of people all over the world has been a preference for their own. People prefer their own families. They prefer their own nationality or their own race, which is entirely legitimate as long as they don’t abuse and mistreat others.

I believe that the world has seen more racism in this century than ever before precisely because we are trying to equalize everything and we are trying to obscure the differences and say they don’t exist. And when you do that, you are going to create a situation where there will be a bootlegged and resentful recognition of differences.

[Scott] Well, you drive underground what doesn’t belong underground. The business of justice, the business of treating people fairly, the business of equality before law and meritocracy, so to speak, of making opportunities open to all, the whole idea of a civilized society is based on the idea of mutual respect. But respect is one thing. A denial of reality is something else. If in order to get along or to placate we have to pretend that everyone has the same intellect and intelligence, the same ability then we have downgraded all intelligence and all ability.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is usually a question of let’s you and he be equal. Not you and I.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, by obscuring the fact of differences, what we have done is to create a climate in which any awareness of reality is gone.

[Scott] Well, it is dishonest.

[Rushdoony] Yes. You are not living in a real world if you don’t recognize differences and say he is better than I am. He is of another color. And he or she is not as good as I am in this particular field where I am good.

  http://www.pocketcollege.com/beta/index.php?title=Envy_-_RR161AY93

Note especially here that the objection of Otto and Rush is that the denial of racial reality contributes to the disintegration downward into the void. Their main protest is that when the egalitarian vision is pursued the consequence is not that all people are lifted up but rather that all people are leveled to the lowest common denominator. The egalitarian project is a project that attacks excellence, superior capabilities, and the reward of meritorious ability in favor of mediocrity, weakness, and dullness. It creates a Harrison Bergeron social order.

Bowsma on John Calvin’s Passion For Distinctions — Sermon Distinctions

Text — Genesis 1
Theme – Distinctions
Proposition — God creates and delights in distinctions
Purpose — Therefore having seen that God creates and delights in distinctions let us honor the distinctions that God has created.

___________

In the Genesis account we see God as the God of distinctions. As we enter into the Creation account all is equally the same. All the earth and every aspect of the earth together was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. In today’s parlance we would say that all was equal.

And then the distinction making God went to work and started making distinctions and with those distinctions order and structure was introduced.

Night is made distinct from day
Evening is made distinct from morning
The Waters of the Heavens are made distinct from the Waters of the Earth
The Land is made distinct from the Seas
The fruit and vegetation is made distinct according to its kinds
The Sun from the Moon and Stars is made distinct and given distinct spheres to rule over
Sea creatures, and Birds of the Air, and beasts of the field are created as distinct
Man is created distinct from God
Woman is created as distinct from Man.

All of Creation is one long episode in God creating and assigning distinctions.

Then we come to the fall and in the working of the Serpent in the context of the Fall, what the serpent is seeking to do is to eliminate the distinctions that God had established. In tempting Eve the Serpent successfully erased the distinction, not only between God and Eve but also between Adam and Eve. It is largely accepted that in the Fall, the attempt of the Serpent was to convince Eve to leave her distinction as mortal and to erase that distinction by becoming as God in determining good from evil, but I think we should also note that there was role reversal as well. The distinctions between male and female were negated inasmuch as Eve took the lead that should have been Adam’s and Adam submitted and followed His wife Eve.

Satan’s work in the Fall was to overturn the distinctions of God’s created order. Eve shall be Adam. Adam shall be Eve. Adam and Eve shall be God. It is interesting in the cursing of the fall distinctions are reintroduced. Eve has her own distinct curse. Adam his own distinct curse. And the Dragon his own distinct curse.

We could continue this theme throughout the Scriptures, seeing where God is a God of distinctions while the role of destroying distinctions belonged to Old Scratch.

This idea of set distinctions was at the core of Christendom. It is just the idea that not everything is the same and that the proper distinctions that are found are found because God established them. To deny this … to insist on a world where the God given distinctions are eliminated is to embrace a worldview that is in antithesis to a Biblical Worldview.

Of course we see this all around us today. Dr. Peter Jones has styled these two competing worldviews as “Oneism vs. Twoism.” He is trying to simplify heavy philosophical matters by doing so, but what Dr. Jones is after is the idea that when we presuppose the God of the Bible we get a culture where Biblical distinctions obtain and are settled while if we refuse to submit to the God of the Bible we get a culture distinctions are a thing of the past.

The idea here is that the God of the Bible provides a Transcendent point of definition wherein all things find their meaning and so their distinctions. On the other hand when God is scrubbed from reality then what you have is a world and reality where there is no “outsidedness” by which one can find meaning and so determine distinctions. The consequence then is a kind of Pantheistic worldview where all is one.

Hence Jones has taken to calling this Worldview “Oneism.” It is a worldview that denies that Creation was handed to us as already greatly pre-interpreted and opts instead on insisting that God is not and we instead can interpret our own reality.

Here is Jones on the matter,

“This Utopian vision (of a kind of egalitarian Pantheism) has a long spiritual history. The ideal of the alchemists of the Middle Ages involved ‘the uniting of the opposites …the fusion of male and female, good and evil, life and death — whose union, they believed, eventually created the perfected and completed, ideal personality called Self. The Utopian cosmology in question understands how deeply the Christian faith has molded Western culture and intends to destroy the ‘bourgeois’ Judaeo-Christian culture as the first step toward a better world. To accomplish this, its advocates must weaken the culture systematically in its economy, its military, its psychology, and its morals.They also know what it will take to establish a revived pagan cosmology and will not tolerate half measures. They want all or nothing. The goal is the complete remaking of human identity…

At this  point, such a powerful cosmology takes on an unmistakably religious character. One is reminded of the goal of the occult Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn…. “The Great Work, is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties, and his future; it is especially the prefect emancipation of his will….”

… the true power of the movement: its possession of a new liberating cosmology, includes not just politics and economics but sexuality and spirituality. The sociological analysis, joined to the ideology of revolutionary sexual and spiritual liberation, forms a powerfully influential movement, determined to reinvent the world. Indeed, as politics becomes more all-inclusive, it becomes more religious, claiming to answer all human aspirations, physical and spiritual, and to usher in a better world. ”

Dr. Peter Jones
The Other Worldview; Exposing Christianity’s Greatest Threat — pg. 98

And so we are in worldview warfare right now and the battle lines are drawn at the point of Oneism (all is One) vs. Twoism (The Creator Creature distinction that then translates into all other distinctions).

You’re living right now through an all out assault on what made Western Civilization. As the British Journalist Melanie Phillips offered,

“The attack on Western civilization, at its most profound level, is an attack on the creed that lies at the very foundation of that civilization.”

And of course that Creed is Biblical Christianity.

You see, we have now gone well beyond the attack of God has Redeemer to the point where we are now attacking God as Creator. We are now at the point of challenging God’s authorial rights to delegate distinctions.

Of course the intensity of this battle to eliminate distinctions has been going on for quite some time. It has always been the goal of those in set defiance against God,

“Princes and nations will disappear without violence from the earth, the human race will become one family and the world the abode of reasonable men.”

-Adam Weishaupt, quoted in Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (London: Orion Books Limited, 1993), p. 32.

Capitalism developed the ever more inhuman polarization of the sexes. The cult of making distinctions, which serves only for oppression, is now being swept away by awareness of resemblance and identity.

M. Walser
Uber die neusten Stimmungen im Westen
In: Kursbuch, Bd. 20, 1970, S. 19-41.

“… 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. “

V. Lenin
The Rights of Nations to Self Determination

These Communists of the past are joined today by those today, who like their Communist Fathers of the past are seeking to eliminate distinctions.

“Being queer is more than sleeping with a person of the same gender…. it means transforming the very fabric of our society’s view of family. The goal is radically reordering society’s view of family”

Paul Ettlebrick
Gay Activist

We as Christians then … as those who uphold the idea of God ordained distinctions are in the contest of our lives.

Jones gets at the stakes in this contest between Christians and those who would erase distinctions when he notes,

 

“The push for homosexual rights is not a concession we throw to a tiny percentage of our population in a compromise that will bring no real harm to society. Pushed with ethical fervor through appeals to anti-discrimination, equal right, equality legislation, and the checking of privilege, this social movement deconstructs from the foundational social concepts like family, gender, and social achievement.There is no ‘live and let live,’ when faced with advocates of this agenda.”

Dr.Peter Jones
The Other Worldview — pg.96

And so to return to our Christian convictions on this matter of the distinction making God we make just a few observations in closing,

“In the beginning God created the Heavens and the earth.”

1.) Note that at the beginning of God’s revealed word that God is presupposed. There are no elaborate arguments given for the existence of God. No ontological, cosmological, teleological, moral or Historical arguments for the existence of God. God cannot be proven unless He is first presupposed and when He is first presupposed then everything proves and demonstrates the reality of God. Indeed nothing can be proven unless God is presupposed. Genesis 1:1 reveals that the reality of God is a necessary precondition for intelligibility.

2.) God is a creator God. The fact that God has created the heavens and earth reveals that pantheism (Oneism) is false. Since God is a creator we know that He is distinct from His creation and any teaching that runs God and His creation together without recognizing the proper distinction between Creator and creation is heresy. Genesis 1:1 is thus the death knell for all forms of process Theology that hold that God along with His creation is becoming. Likewise all Hegelian notions of God being universal spirit are out of bounds because of how it tends to put God in constant process. Further the idea that God is a creator God distinct from His creation implies the creator creature distinction that is often forgotten by modern Christians. God is the thrice awesome Creator. Worship that contained a little awe and respect would be a welcome relief in most American worship services.

3.) Likewise Genesis 1:1 teaches that the creation is not totally separate from God. Creation is totally dependent upon the Creator. If God did not uphold His Creation it would cease to be. Therefore Genesis 1:1 reveals that all forms of Deism are heresy. God remains intimately involved with His creation. All that happens (all historical events, all natural happenings) remains personal because God remains not only the creator but also the sustainer and governor of His creation.

4.) Christian Theology must continue to take into account God’s work in creation as well as God’s work in redemption. In some sense Redemption serves the work of God’s creation by restoring creation to its original intent. God’s work of Redemption returns God’s work of Creation to the status of ‘very good.’ Creation provides the context where Redemption happens and Redemption in return brings Creation to all that it was intended to be and Creation groans for the fullness of Redemption that is yet to be. Creation and Redemption while distinct can never be divorced. They have an incipient relationship.

5.) On the question of origins we see the Christian Worldview demands a supernatural answer. The Cosmos was created by a personal Creator. This stands in sharp contrast to the Humanist Worldview where all happens by time + chance + circumstance and where all starts by impersonal materialistic process. According to the Christian the Heavens hold a listening and watching God and all life has meaning because this personal God has placed His fingerprint on it all. According to the Humanist the Heavens are brass and all of life is meaningless — a mere chasing of the wind. Which Universe would you prefer to inhabit?

6.) If God is the creator and man is the creature then man is responsible to God. Man is not an end in Himself. He is now accountable to the Creator God and will one day give an account for his actions to the creator God.

7.) Genesis 1:1 is the beginning of Revelation where God reaches down to make Himself known to fallen man. All other religions stand in contrast to Christianity on this point. All other religions are mythologies where man seeks to ascend to God. The god or gods of all other religions are ‘man’ said loudly. Only in the Christian religion does God descend to man in order to make Himself known. We come to know God because He has made Himself objectively known. Orthodox theology thus distances itself from all forms of existentialism where that which is subjective precedes and destroys all notions of that and He which is objective.

8.) Genesis 1:1 implies God’s aseity. The doctrine of divine aseity holds that God is not dependent on anything outside himself for his being and nature. The Creator is not dependent upon the creation for His existence but rather the creation is dependent upon the Creator. If a tree fell in the woods it would still make a sound even if nobody heard it (if only because God would hear it) and If there was no creation to hear God, God would still be God. God did not create because there was some kind of lack in God. God did not create because He was lonely for fellowship. God did not create because He had some kind of unfelt need going un-met that was met by us (lucky for God He made us — blech!). God has eternally been the eternally happy God. God’s creation was the spill over of His eternal satisfaction in His triune self.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Conclusion

We end with a quote from someone who analyzed the life of Calvin and who offers Calvin’s thoughts on the importance of distinction.

“But the notion that what ails the world [inseparably from sin] is confusion had much practical value for Calvin … Thus, when Calvin associated disorder with obscurity, he could conceive of correcting it by sharpening the contours of the various entities composing the world; once one thing has been clearly distinguished, physically or conceptually, from others, it can be assigned its proper place in the order of things … Thus he abominated ‘mixture,’ one of the most pejorative terms in his vocabulary; mixture in any area of experience suggested to him disorder and unintelligibility. He had absorbed deeply not only the traditional concern for cosmic purity of a culture that had restricted mixture to the sublunary realm but also various Old Testament prohibitions. Mixture, for Calvin, connoted ‘adulteration’ or ‘promiscuity,’ but it also set off in him deep emotional and metaphysical reverberations. He repeatedly warned against ‘mixing together things totally different.’ …

The positive corollary of Calvin’s loathing of mixture was his approval of boundaries, which separate one thing from another. He attributed boundaries to God Himself: God had established the boundaries between peoples, which should therefore remain within the space assigned to them … ‘Just as there are in a military camp separate lines for each platoon and section,’ Calvin observed, ‘men are placed on the earth so that each nation may be content with its own boundaries.’”

W.J. Bouwsma
John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait — p.34-35

 

 

Who Knows The Aims of Socialism Better … Vladimir Lenin or Bojidar Marinov?

[F]rom its very beginning, to this very day, mainstream Marxism has been kinist and racist to the core, looking at genetic makeup – together with many other material factors – as determining the cultural level of a group of people. From Marx’s complaints that “Jews undermine the European civilization by mixing European blood with Negro blood,” through Stalin’s purges of whole ethnic groups due to “genetic backwardness,” through the war in Yugoslavia (where the Marxist incentive was the superior genetic makeup of the Serbs), to our modern black racism (on Marxist grounds), Marxism has never been anything else except racist and kinist. There has never been any genetic integrationism in Marxism, but to the contrary, Marxism has always divided peoples by genetic composition, just like the kinists (d)o.

Bojidar Marinov

“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

Of course the words of Lenin directly contradicts the claims of Bojidar.  Who should we believe on this matter? Should we believe Bojidar or Lenin concerning the aim of socialism?

Now we admit that Lenin also advocated national revolution and even encouraged nationalism in the service of overthrowing what he characterized as “colonial” oppression. How can we reconcile that with Lenin’s desire to merge all nations?

Once again, Lenin himself gives the answer:


“… 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. “

National liberation then was a transitory factor. It was a prelude to a working class movement within the nation, and its ultimate aim was socialism and so the amalgamation of all nations into one. Communists would support such movements, but at the same time they would seek to obtain control over them and, where possible, turn them into workers’ and peasants’ revolutions.

When these elements controlled the state apparatus, then the possibility of unifying that nation with the rest of the socialist world could be realized.

So clearly Bojidar Marinov, once again, is demonstrated as not being, in the least, a trustworthy source on this issue. Communists, contrary Marinov, were Internationalists and desired the erasure of all distinct borders and peoples. Communists were never Kinists except as a dialectical tactic to arrive at the higher communist good of total amalgamation.

Don’t take my word … just read Vladimir Lenin. If you don’t like Lenin here consider Richard Wurmbrand’s analysis of the same issue. This analysis also overturns the errors of Mr. Marinov’s understanding,

Wurmbrand on the subject:

“Hess had taught Marx that socialism was inseparable from internationalism. Marx writes in his Communist Manifesto that the proletariat has no fatherland. In his Red Catechism, Hess mocks the fatherland notion of the Germans, and he would have done the same with the fatherland notion of any other European nation. Hess criticized the Erfurt program of the German Social-Democrat Party for its unconditional recognition of the national principle. But Hess is an internationalist with a difference: Jewish patriotism must remain. He writes, 

Whoever denies Jewish nationalism is not only an apostate, a renegade in the religious sense but a traitor to his people and to his family. Should it prove true that the emancipation of the Jews is incompatible with Jewish nationalism, then the Jew must sacrifice emancipation The Jew must be, above all, a Jewish patriot.’ 

I agree with Hess’ patriotic ideas to the extent that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I am for every kind of patriotism – that of the Jews, the Arabs, the Germans, the Russians, the Americans. Patriotism is a virtue if it means the endeavor to promote economically, politically, spiritually, and religiously the welfare of one’s own nation, provided that it is done in friendship and cooperation with other nations.”

~Richard Wurmbrand, Marx & Satan, pp.54-55

The point that Wurmbrand is making is that Marxism is Internationalist in its flavor. Its aim is for all colors, creeds, and nations to bleed into one, except for the Jew. This of course, is contrary to what Mr. Marinov claims.

As an aside, isn’t it interesting that much of the modern Church has much the same goal, and uses much the same language as Lenin? In much of the modern church in the West today you can hear some preacher somewhere on any given Sunday morning  say things like; ‘the aim of socialism Christianity 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 and only the Gospel of Jesus Christ can do that.’

If you hear that remind yourself that your hearing Lenin and not Christ.

 

Mrs. Marinov … Please Notify your Husband that there is Linkage between Genetics and Culture

 

In the graphic below our old friend, Bojidar Marinov, suggest that proof is found that genetics and culture have nothing to do with each other.  He offers this pearl of wisdom, in his trenchant commentary on the graphic,

<i>”The awkward moment when you think that genetics determines culture, and then geneticists tell you that Spain is more “Celtic” than Scotland, and Austria is about as “Germanic” as Ireland.”</i>

Now the point we will be making below the graphic is not that culture is a reflection of only genetics. That position would force one into the unbiblical position of materialism. No Christian can claim to be consistently Christian and believe that culture is alone dictated by genetics.

However, contrary to Mr. Marinov’s views, neither is it, in the least, consistently Christian to deny that genetics has anything to do with culture. Such a position gives us Gnosticism, the very opposite of materialism. Mr. Marinov’s views that whom God has created us to be in our humanity, has nothing to do with culture is the stuff of which Gnosticism is made.

The best approach to culture is that it is the outward manifestation of a people’s inward beliefs. Note that in this definition we have the inclusion of both what a people think and the fact that it is very real corporeal people, with all their DNA (genetics) who are thinking.

The point that we will be making below the graphic is that Mr. Marinov observation, given above, is just nonsense.

 

View post on imgur.com

1.) We might start by asking Mr. Marinov how it is exactly that Europeans, being closely related to other Europeans, is some kind of “awkward moment.” After all,  Europeans are closely related to each other. That’s not a revelation. And it seems to imply the exact opposite point as Mr. Marinov imagines — that there really is a European / White identity.

2.)  Secondly, we need to note that all because there are different ethnic markers in different places doesn’t mean that  English, Irish, Scots, etc are Swedes, Germans, Danes, etc. Also, we must take into consideration that the West is a lot more mobile now. International corporations have greatly contributed to that mobility (along with the ebb and flow of conquering armies). Corporations have undermined the state and regional loyalties here in the US. So it shouldn’t be surprising that there is a mixture of European ethnicities.

3.) Touching Mr. Marinov’s observations regarding Spain being more Celtic than Scotland. This really isn’t that difficult and if Mr. Marinov knew his history better he wouldn’t be getting out on this limb that is currently being sawed off from beneath him. You see, Galicia (a part of Spain) is borderline one of the Celtic nations. The Gaels who settled Ireland came from Galicia, then went to over to mess with the Picts in Scotland. Also, Celts covered the continent at one point until empires were established over them. Obviously, given this reality one would expect to find just what the graphic reveals. Mr. Marinov’s post demonstrates his ignorance of tribal migration. One hopes this isn’t intentional on Mr. Marinov’s part. Regardless, whether it is ignorance or subterfuge the truth of the matter is that Mr. Marinov is quite inaccurate on this point.

4.) The fact that Europe’s culture is being re-made by the arrival of  non-European people groups ought to be evidence enough that there is a relation between genetics and culture. If one ventures into different parts of “Londonistan” or “Parisistan” one finds a very different genetic pattern accompanied by a very different culture then one finds in French Paris or English London.

5.)  Mr. Marinov says that genetics has no impact on culture. Well, as genetics is determinative of gender (as well as ethnicity) does he really want to advance the idea that there are no genetic differences between male and female such that those differences impact cultures that men and women create?

Are the differences between men and women (not physiological but cultural) only to be accounted for by how men and women think? This is what Mr. Marinov would have us believe if “genetics have absolutely nothing to do with culture.”

Mr. Marinov should visit an all girls school and a all boys school and take tours to demonstrate that genetics effect culture.

More might be said but this is enough to, once again, dismiss the Gnostic impulse of Mr. Marinov.

This rebuttal was a corporate effort by the members of one America’s more illustrious Reformed Think Tanks of which I am a member.

Calvin College Professor; ” Both unity in Christ and differentiation in creation are very good”

As many have noted, the idea of separation and differentiation, of dividing and consigning, is a prominent theme throughout the first chapters of Genesis as the world is being described.” The concept of separation and division, the making of things that are different essentially, each having an identity and self-action, controls much of the further presentation of material in the book of Genesis. But in particular it is that which gives the cultural mandate to man to develop (differentiate) the whole earth its concrete content and meaning.

We learn then from Scripture that no choice has to be made between unity and sameness in Christ and having distinct earthly identities. In other words, no appeal to the dynamic directive of redemption to be one in Christ can be made to determine the structures of earthly, institutional life. Both unity in Christ and differentiation in creation are very good, the former representing God’s work in redemption, the latter, which data relevant theory investigates, God’s work in creation. Oneness in Christ is no alternative to natural separations and differences in the world and hence is no alternative to a social theory of separate cultural development.

Stated in general terms, God’s act of creation is an act of separation, definition, and law-giving. The unity of things is a moral and religious principle, not an alternative definition of what being should be like. In fact the unity of things is dependent, according to Christian faith, on their distinctiveness in being. If the central ecclesiastical argument against Apartheid is that its idea of separation contradicts the biblical idea of reconciliation in Christ, then the ecclesiastical critics are simply theologically wrong, cashing in on a biblical and religious idea to legitimate a taken-for-granted “natural theology” of integrationism for which they are dependent on the homogenizing philosophy of modern, British political liberalism. Though there is a moral and emotive point to the outcry that Apartheid is a heresy, in substance this charge is a simplicism that is unbecoming of the best of Reformed social thought and practice.

Dr. Henry Vander Goot
Former  Professor of Religion and Theology,
Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
“Orthodoxy and Orthopraxis in the Reformed Community Today” , pgs. 111-112