Category: Family life

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends … Mickey Henry; A Christian Apologetic For Open Carry During Church Worship Services

Mickey Henry is a non de plume of a personal friend of mine who was recently rebuffed by his Church “leadership” for daring to open carry in Church in a state where to do so is legal. This is a letter he wrote to his leadership after being told he may not open carry in his “conservative” Church. Try to keep in mind that there was a time in the history of our country when it was not uncommon for men to carry their weapons to Church. I think that Mickey’s letter is convincing.

——————

Dear Elder Donnie

Since concealed carry is encouraged, we share a lot of common ground concerning self-defense and the errors of pacifism. Suffice to say, armed defense of innocents is simply the application of the positive requirements of the Sixth Commandment. The crux of disagreement, then, is open vs. concealed. Here, in brief, are my arguments for open carry:

1. I am of the strong opinion that open carry acts as a deterrent to violence. Open carry is essentially a clear statement that acts of aggression will be met with strong resistance.

2. To Christ is given all authority; all earthly authority is thus derivative. Because we Christians confess Christ as Lord, submitting to His Law-Word, Christians have a unique responsibility to rule under Christ as His earthly vicegerents. We are, in fact, commanded to do so by the Dominion Mandate. Weapons and related imagery, such as swords, spears, maces, the fasces, halberds, etc., are the customary tokens by which power and authority are symbolized and commonly recognized (the instruments of the death penalty are identified with the authority to execute the death penalty). I open carry as a visible symbol of my submission to Christ’s Law-Word, and my willingness to use the authority He has given me to defend my family and other innocent life.

3. Just as the Gospel is made clear in the symbols and liturgy of the Church, there is a certain visible representation of the Law-Grace dynamic in the open carry of weapons by confessing Christians: grace and mercy to the innocent, justice for those who would transgress His Law.

4. The degenerate culture around us tolerates Christians only if we are weak and impotent. But we are to be standard bearers, a city on a hill, no matter the spirit of the age. I am glad that a number of the men at Redeemer do carry weapons, but open carry makes manifest that ours is a vital faith, and we will not cower or lower ourselves to the popular image of the ineffectual Christian man engendered by the enemies of God.

5. As to scaring away visitors, I humbly submit that this is an expression of the “attractive Gospel” theories of the Kellerite/New Calvinist movement, and is at odds with the historical understanding of Calvinism. A work of God’s grace on His elect is to overcome their sinful aversion to the practical outworking of His Law. Large families, homeschooling, modest dress, infant baptism, all male leadership, advocacy for traditional marriage – these things and others in open view at Redeemer are offensive to the broader culture and even to some of our brethren in other denominations, but we practice them as the people of our Lord and Savior, and depend on the sufficiency of His grace to reach those who visit us. Additionally, this being Texas, I have little doubt that at least some visitors would be attracted by a sign of such vitality.

Notre Dame Philosophy Professor Reflects the Zeitgeist

The love of a mother is no more or less important than the love of a father. We all know this. But then, in general, mothers should be under no greater burden than fathers to abandon their callings for the sake of their children. The asymmetry in our responses to working mothers and fathers, then, suggests that other factors are in play. In an evangelical protestant context, the context I have in view here, there is good reason to suspect that these other factors include a tendency to devalue the gifts and contributions of women particularly in positions of teaching and leadership

Michael Rea
Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame

The above is culled from here,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-rea/mothers-in-ministry_b_8760590.html

Why, instead of the conclusion that Dr. Rea draws in his last sentence above, don’t we conclude that the reason Evangelical Protestants don’t want women in social order leadership is,

1.) The Scriptures forbid it.

2.) We so value women and their role in hearth and home that we don’t want to treat them like roses used as kindling to start a fire by turning them into ecclesiastical versions of “Rosie the Riverter?”

It is a fallacy to think that all because women are not treated like men therefore women are devalued in their gifts and contributions.

3.) We understand and affirm that men and women were not created to be interchangeable cogs as if both sexes were created to do the same thing.

Overall I would say it is Dr. Rea, and people like him, who are devaluing the gifts and contributions of women. It is people like Dr. Rea who are taking from children their Mothers who are to be the leaders and teachers of the most impressionable in our social order.

As a young lady, stay at home Mom, friend of mind said, in discussion about this article,

“With ‘men’ like Dr. Rea, who needs women to run for church office? We already have them!”

(And believe me when I tell you that this young lady, I’m quoting above, could run circles around any three Woman Pastors combined, you might want to name, in terms of giftedness in leadership and teaching.)

Finally, note the methodological way that the Left works here. Suggesting that men and women are interchangeable is put into such noble and glowing words and sentiments, while at the same time, the idea that women are distinct from men is made to look cruel and mean. The appeal to emotion is made with the consequence that the rational is bypassed. This is a common methodological tool of the unholy Left.

Walsh on the Deconstruction of the Family

The attack on normative heterosexuality — led by male homosexuals and lesbians, and invariably disguised as a movement for ‘rights,’ piggybacking on the civil rights movement of the 1960’s — is fundamental to the success of Critical Theory, which went straight at the hardest target (and yet, in  many ways, the softest) first. The reason was simple: If a wedge could be a driven between men and women, if the nuclear family could be cracked, if women could be convinced to fear and hate men, to see them as unnecessary for their happiness or survival — if men could be made biologically redundant — then that political party that had adopted  Critical Theory could make single women one of their strongest voting blocs.

And so Eve was offered the apple: In exchange for rejecting a ‘traditional’ sex role of supposed subservience and dependency (slavery, really), she would become more like a man in her sexual appetites and practices (this was so called ‘freedom’), and she would be liberated from the burdens of motherhood via widespread contraception, abortion on demand, and the erasure of the ‘stigma’ of single motherhood (should it come to that) or spinsterhood. Backed by the force of government’s fist, she would compete with men for jobs, high salaries, and social status, all the while retaining all her rights of womanhood. the only thing she had to do was help destroy the social order.

The results has been entirely predictable: masculinized women, feminized men, falling rates of childbirth in the Western world, and the creation of a technocratic political class that can type but do little real work in the traditional sense. Co-educational college campuses have quickly mutated from sexually segregated living quarters to co-ed dorms to the ‘hook up culture’ depicted by novelist Tom Wolfe in I am Charlotte Simmons to a newly puritanical and explicitly anti-male ‘rape culture’ hysteria, in which sexual commissars promulgate step-by-step rules for sexual encounters and often dispense completely with due process when adjudicating complaints from female students.

Crucially, at every step of the way, ‘change,’ from the old norms was being offered as ‘improvement’ or ‘liberation’ — more fulfillment, more pleasure, more experience. And yet, with each step, things got worse — for women. Eve’s bite of the apple sent humanity forth from the Garden, sadder but wiser. Today’s transgressive Western woman is merely sadder and often ends her life completely alone, a truly satanic outcome. G. K. Chesterton’s parable of the fence comes to mind, in the ‘The Drift from Domesticity,’ in The Thing (1929):

In the manner of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which probably will be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law, let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this, let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer, “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

A splendid example of Chesterton’s Fence was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, championed by Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. “Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will non inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area,” said the Massachusetts Senator. “In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think … The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.” Half a century on, those predictions have proved dramatically wrong: the question is whether Kennedy and his fellow leftists knew quite well at the time that there forecasts were bogus — although (as someone or other famously said) what difference, at this point, does it make?

In the same way, much of contemporary, ‘reform’ is marked by impatience, ridicule, and haste, cloaked in ‘compassion,’ or bureaucratic ‘comprehensivity,’ disguised as ‘rights’ prised out of the Constitution with a crowbar and an ice pick, and delivered with a cocksure snort of derision against any who would demur.

Michael Walsh
The Devil’s Pleasure Palace; The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West — pg. 88 – 89

Examining Dr. McDurmon and American Vision on Immigration

There simply is no biblical reason to refuse legitimate refugees. The Bible is clear that national borders should be open to all peaceful and law abiding individuals. Further, when we properly understand the meaning of the Bible’s teachings on immigrants, we will understand that to loathe refugees is to loathe ourselves and our own nation.

Dr. Joel McDurmon
American Vision

1.) First we would note that Dr. McDurmon confuses the issue somewhat by conflating the categories of “refugee” and “immigrants.” A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her home country, while an immigrant is someone who chooses to resettle to another country. There is a third category of “asylee” that is part of the conversation. These distinctions are important in this kind of conversation for without them it makes it even more difficult to make progress in the conversation.

2.) Dr. McDurmon makes this assertion in the face of what many have styled as “civilizational Jihad.” The recent deceased  Muammar Gaddafi, noted,

“We have 50 million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe—without swords, without guns, without conquest—will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”

Consistent with Gaddafi’s observation, authors Sam Solomon and E. Al Maqdisi in their book, “Modern Day Trojan Horse; The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration,” call Muslim immigration to the West a “modern day Trojan Horse.” They go on to note that,“Mohammed himself proclaimed that migration is jihad,” and provides a flourish with. “from the Islamic jurisprudence view the immigration of the Muslims to the West is to be regarded as the most important step on the ladder for achieving the establishment of an Islamic state in the West. This is the primary objective of Islamic Mission in the West.”

Dutch political leader, Geert Wilders again echoes the above sentiments by noting that, “gradual and incremental transformation of our societies and legal systems, or what is termed ‘Isalmisation’ of our democratic societies by the vast growing numbers of Muslim immigrants who are importing Islam into our Western way of life.”

Ann Corcoran in her book, “Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America,” writes Hijara means migration and, according to Islam’s doctrine and its quietly acknowledged organizational strategies, the goal of migration, today is not peaceful assimilation to the political system and mores of the host country. Instead, the goal is jihad by non-violent means known as civilizational jihad or Islamization.

Would Dr. McDurmon have us believe that God would be pleased with embracing a immigration pattern, the soul intent of which is squashing what little remains of Biblical Christianity, by a Muslim immigration horde intended to be used as a hammer of submission to obliterate the Christian remnant in the West and all this to the end of the Humanist attempt to establish a New World Order?

3.) Next we would note that Dr. McDurmon is  just wrong in this assertion above, as OT Scholar Dr. James Hoffmeier points out ,

“The very positive statements about the treatment of strangers in the Bible, some of which were already quoted, show compassion for the alien in ancient Israel. The defenders of illegal aliens point to these passages as the rationale for rewriting current laws. The problem is that they make a simplistic correlation between the ancient Israelite social law and the modern situation as if the Bible was addressing the same problem. Three important questions must be raised before one attempts to apply Israelite law to the modern situation: 1) Was there such a thing as territorial sovereignty in the second millennium B.C. when these laws originated; 2) Within that socio-legal setting, what was a “stranger” or “sojourner;” and 3) How does one obtain this status?”

The fact of the matter is that McDurmon has likewise rushed passed these distinctions just as he rushed by the distinctions between “refugee” and “immigrant.” McDurmon completely disregards the distinction between the differing words in the OT translated as differing times as “stranger,” “foreigner,” “alien,” and “sojourner.” This is a significant error and reveals a certain sloppiness on Dr. McDurmon’s part.

In point of fact, as Ehud Would has written, putting the strongest contradiction possible to Dr. McDurmon’s opening quote,

“In biblical law foreign races were permitted to enter the border only under patronage and direct legal oversight of a native. Whether ambassadors, contracted laborers, or slaves, they were forbade from owning land, ascending to any positions of political power, forbidden to marry members of the nation, and weren’t allowed to lend to natives at interest (though natives could do so toward them). Nor could aliens conscript natives to perpetual slavery, but natives could buy chattel slaves so long as they were of other peoples. And any of foreign breed who would not consent to these terms for entry of Israel’s border was regarded a hostile invader and subject to forcible expulsion as in the cases of the mass deportations under Ezra and Nehemiah.”

Dr. James Hoffmeier, unlike Dr. McDurmon in the opening quote, pays close attention to the different OT Hebrew words that are so significant in this discussion, and confirms much of Ehud Would’s observation immediately above,

“The delineation between the “alien” or “stranger” (ger) and the foreigner (nekhar or zar) in biblical law is stark indeed. The ger in Israelite society, for instance, could receive social benefits such as the right to glean in the fields (Leviticus 19:9-10; Deuteronomy 24:19-22) and they could receive resources from the tithes (Deuteronomy 26:12-13). In legal matters, “there shall be one statute for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you, a statute forever throughout your generations. You and the sojourner shall be alike before the LORD. One law and one rule shall be for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you” (Numbers 15:15-16). In the area of employment, the ger and citizen were to be paid alike (Deuteronomy 24:14-15). In all these cases, no such provision is extended to the nekhar or zar. In a sense, the gerwere not just aliens to whom social and legal protections were offered, but were also considered converts, and thus could participate in the religious life of the community, e.g. celebrate Passover (Exodus 12:13) and observe Yom Kippur, the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:29-30). They were, moreover, expected to keep dietary and holiness laws (Leviticus 17:8-9 & 10-12). It is well known that within Israelite society, money was not to be lent with interest, but one could loan at interest to a foreigner (nekhar). These passages from the Law make plain that aliens or strangers received all the benefits and protection of a citizen, whereas the foreigner (nekhar) did not. It is wrong, therefore, to confuse these two categories of foreigners and then to use passages regarding the ger as if they were relevant to illegal immigrants of today.”

4,) Another problem with Dr. McDurmon’s quote above is that Dr. McDurmon is calling for the State to have charity but as Dr. R. J. Rushdoony notes, “the state has no part in charity; the scripture never says that the state is to administer it. ” Rushdoony, in the same lecture,  “Justice and World Law,” offers about this issue of immigration,  “first of all they [illegal immigrants] have broken the law. And justice to everyone requires that the law be upheld. So if they are illegal aliens they should be deported. Now that’s justice because it’s comparable to breaking and entering into a man’s house.” From this quote we see that Dr. Rushdoony also disagrees with Dr. McDurmon’s opening quote.

In conclusion it is interesting that seemingly all of Institutional Christendom is insisting that civilizational Jihad must be embraced, and that the West must embrace its death by commandment of God. Whether it is the long acknowledged Left like the “Sojourners” organization or whether it is the Cultural Marxist Churches, or whether it is organizations like Lutheran World Relief or Catholic Relief Services or any number of other Denominational organizations what Christian laity are almost universally being told is that that if they don’t support the dissolution of themselves in their undoubted catholic Christian faith and as a people and  they don’t love Jesus and are guilty of Racism. This call to accept civilizational jihad now even comes from those organizations that heretofore were considered “conservative” such as American Vision.

Christians need to be assured that they can oppose immigration and still be considered Christ honoring. Opposition to the kind of immigration that is being foisted upon the West today can happen in the context of obeying the 1st commandment, the 5th commandment, and the 8th commandment. Opposition to the kind of immigration that is being foisted upon us today can be embraced on the basis of the admonition of the necessity to provide for one’s own household.  Opposition to the kind of immigration that is being foisted upon us today can be embraced on the basis of the same kind of love for our people that we find St. Paul expressing in Romans 9:3. In point of fact, I would insist that opposing the kind of immigration that is being foisted on the West today is the duty of every Christ loving Christian.

“

In Defense of the Family

Recently someone pointed me to this article from 2010 from an OPC Minister. I think it particularly bad and will spend some time pointing out its problems and hopefully correcting them.

http://opc.org/os.html?article_id=226

OPC Minister (Hereinafter OPC)

Families Are of this World, but the Church Is of the Next

We begin by observing that marriage is a temporary, for-this-life-only institution. Although marriage is given us by God for several reasons, its main purpose is to symbolize the relationship between Christ and his church, as the Apostle Paul teaches in Ephesians 5:25-32. This primary and exemplary purpose is more central to the institution of marriage than childbearing, which is the means by which a marriage becomes a family.

Bret

We would note in our hymnody we sing of families being reunited in the next life,

Thus to the parents and their seed
shall thy salvation come
and numerous households will meet at last
in one eternal home

But beyond hymnody the speaks of the coming day when the circle of family will be unbroken Scripture gives us reason to think that families exist beyond this life. In the book of Revelation there is the repeated mention of Nations present in the new Jerusalem. Now, as Nations are constituted in the Scriptures as a people with a shared lineage (Genesis),  a shared history (Exodus), having a common law (Deuteronomy) sharing a common land (Joshua) and having kin leadership (Judges) it seems obvious that when the book of Revelation speaks of Nations in the New Jerusalem that families, like the Church, are of the next world.

Revelation 22:1 Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, 2in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

Revelation 21:23And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it…. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.

Rev. Kingsbury seems to think that the new Heaven and Earth is an existence that is largely discontinuous with this life. It is better to think that what is to be expected of the new Heaven and Earth is a transfiguration of this life with all the expected continuities and discontinuities. The result of the consummation then is not abolition of this world but rather redemption of it including the redemption of a family structure that exists in the next world.

Second, on this point, though the Ephesians 5 passage does teach that Christian Marriage is analogous of Christ and the Church, Ephesians 5 nowhere explicitly teaches that this analogy is the main purpose of Marriage. Now certainly, the primary purpose of Marriage, like the primary purpose of all things that we as Christians do is to glorify God but to say that the main purpose of Marriage is to symbolize the relationship between Christ and his church goes beyond what Ephesians 5 teaches.

OPC

What do the Scriptures say?

Interestingly, no text in Scripture teaches that bearing children is a universal purpose of marriage, that is, something which should characterize every marriage. While Psalms 127 and 128, among other passages, say children are a blessing, they do not say every marriage ought to produce children.

Bret

So, what is being advanced here is that Scripture does teach that children are a blessing from God but that some marriages do not need or want to be blessed by God?

OPC

Genesis 1:28 records the “dominion mandate” given to the first married couple: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Some assume, therefore, that married couples ought be about the business of filling the earth with more people. However, God gave Adam and Eve this commandment not because they were a married couple, but because they were the married couple—that is, all mankind. Hence, the dominion mandate is given to all humanity and is to be carried out by humanity as a whole, but not necessarily by every human being. To put it another way, if Genesis 1:28 means every marriage ought to produce children, then every marriage ought also to be dedicated to agricultural productivity.

Bret

1.) Where in the text of Genesis does Rev. Kingsbury find that the reason for God’s command to be fruitful and multiply was “because they were the married couple—that is, all mankind”? Of course, that is eisegetical work on th part of Rev. Kingsbury.

2.) How is the dominion mandate given to all humanity, and to be carried out by all humanity as a whole without individual humans carrying out the dominion mandate?

3.) Genesis 1:28 does not say to Adam and Eve to be farmers, though Adam likely was a tiller of the ground. Genesis 1:28 teaches a cultural mandate that requires that all men, as God’s sub-regent, to have dominion over creation. That command to be God’s sub-regent unto godly dominion remains, just as the command remains that all men be fruitful and multiply.

OPC

Marriage’s symbolic function will be moot in glory when we have perfect union with Christ, and so it will pass away: “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage” (Matt. 22:30). If marriages pass away, then so do families. The family, in its nuclear form, grows out of and depends on a marriage for its existence; therefore, whatever is true of the greater (marriage) is true of the lesser (family).

Even in this life, families are temporary. They are regularly broken up and reorganized as children marry and form their own families. In fact, whenever children grow up and go out into the world, their parent’s authority ends. For practical purposes, this also effectively dissolves the family. Of course, I do not deny the enduring nature of kinship ties which persist as family members go their own ways, or even when a divorce occurs. When I speak of family dissolution here, I am using the word “family” in its most narrow, technical sense, i.e., the nuclear family.

Bret

1.) The fact that in the resurrection that “they neither marry, nor are given in marriage,” does not mean or prove that family disappears in the eschaton. If indeed future marriage passes away that does not mean that past family realities disappear. Given Kingsbury’s reasoning we might also say that since they neither marry nor are given in marriage therefore gender passes away in the eschaton. If marriage passes away, then so does gender. Gender is necessary for marriage and marriage depends on gender therefore since there will no marriage in the eschaton therefore there is to be no gender. Whatever is true of the greater (marriage) is true of the lesser (gender).

Rev. Kingsbury’s reasoning is curious.

2.) A family that extends into new family units does not mean the end of families, per Rev. Kingsbury, but rather their continuance. One problem is that Rev. Kingsbury thinks in terms of “nuclear family,” while the Scripture speaks of families in their Trustee capacity. Family is not defined, per Scripture, as the Nuclear unit, but rather more in terms of what we might refer to as clans. So, Christian families are not broken up with the advent of the marriage of children and the arrival of grandchildren but instead are strengthened and extended.

OPC

Families are like the rest of this world: impermanent and continually passing away. Therefore, families have a diminished importance within a Christian taxonomy of values, especially when compared to the church. While the church is eternal and will not find her perfect expression until glory, she has begun and lives out that life already, in the here and now. The church manifests the eternal and heavenly in the middle of a temporary and earthly world. Because she is eternal, the church is more important than the temporary family.

Bret

We established earlier that Christian families are not impermanent but pass into the eschaton therefore the fallacy of this argument is obvious.

The argument that the Church is more important than the family is like arguing that the left leg is more important than the right leg when it comes to walking. It is a non sequitur argument. The fact that the Church and the family are bound up together in importance is seen in the Baptismal font. God claims our familial generations as His own and in Baptism ratifies His claim upon His and our seed. Baptism speaks of God’s faithfulness to His promise to the generations.

To argue that the Church is more important than family is like arguing that pregnancy is more important than sex. Pregnancy may well be more important than sex but without sex no ones getting pregnant.

Secondly, while I understand that “Word and Sacrament” belong uniquely to the Church I’m not sure why the Church alone is able to manifest the eternal and heavenly in the middle of a temporary and earthly world. The permanence of matters eternal can incarnate themselves in family worship and in Christian families.

OPC Minister

Because the eternal church has precedence over the earthly and temporary family, Jesus demands loyalty to himself first and last. In a decision between Jesus and his church versus the family, Jesus wins. This is simple when parents are unbelievers and guilty of obvious sin, but less obvious when one has Christian parents who attempt to usurp the church’s authority.

Bret

Of course the Lord Christ is the priority above all priorities. Who could ever disagree with that? However, lest we fall into some kind of ecclesiocentrism I would be careful about perfectly equating the Lord Christ and the Church as if the voice of the Church is always the voice of the Lord Christ. While it is true “that in a decision between Jesus and his church versus the (errant) family, Jesus wins,” it is also true that in a decision between the Lord Christ and an errant Church demanding departure from a faithful family, the family standing with the Lord Christ wins.

Rev. Kingsbury misses the close interdependence of Church and Family. For examples Elders are not qualified to serve in the Church without managing his family well. This provides insight into the interdependence of Institutional Church and family.  Elders are to be husbands of one wife thus again drawing linkage between leadership in home and church.

In a time when the family is being viciously attacked from all sides it really does us little good for representatives of the Church to be “reasoning” like this. Now, certainly, it is possible to lift the family above the Church so that it is wrongly prioritized but the answer to that is not to tear down the family but to show that the Church has its proper place in God’s economy.