Category: Quotes & Commentary

Tim Keller’s Preference For Democracy

“I’d rather be in a democracy than a state in which the government is officially Christian. Instead of trying to take power, I think what Christians ought to be doing is trying to renew their churches.”

-Tim Keller, Wall Street Journal
02 September 2022

1.) Understand what Keller has said here. He has said he’d rather be under a government that is non Christian than under a government that is officially Christian. Tim would rather have his magistrates be Christ-haters than have magistrates who are in submission to Christ.

2.) Tim talked about how Christians shouldn’t “try to take power.” The question is “take power from whom?” Presumably, in Tim’s world Christians shouldn’t try to take power from non Christians and should be happy to be ruled by Christ hating pagans.

3.) You know Tim, it is possible to both try and renew our Churches and in godly ways seek to take power.

4.) Tim’s statement above implies that there is something automatically wicked about Christian’s wielding power. Yet, here is Tim seeking to wield his power as a highly platformed Evangelical voice in service of keeping Christians from pursuing power.

Quotes From Maurice Pinay’s “The Plot Against The Church”

At this time of the year back in 2022 I was reading Maurice Pinay’s “The Plot Against The Church.” The author used a pseudonym in this volume which is committed to chronicling the history of the Christian Church and its interactions with the Jews. It was written in the context of the second vatican council by officials in the Roman Catholic church who were violently opposed to what the 2nd vatican was doing. Because it tells the truth of Jewish and Christian relations through the centuries it is considered anti-Semitic, much as E. Michael Jones’ works chronicling different historical interludes of that interaction are considered “anti-Semitic.” Below are just three quotes.

“Of all revolutionary systems, which throughout human

history have been devised for the destruction of our civilised
values, Communism is, without doubt, the most perfected, most
efficient and most merciless. In fact, it represents the most
advanced epoch of the world revolution, in whose postulates it
therefore not only acts to destroy a definite political, social,
economic or moral institution, but also simultaneously to
declare null and void the Holy Catholic Church as well as all
cultural and Christian manifestations which represent our

civilisation.

All revolutionary currents of Jewish origin have attacked
Christianity in its different aspects with particular
one-mindedness. Communism spawned from this same
revolutionary stream of thought seeks to banish Christianity
for the purpose of causing it to vanish from the face of the

earth, without even the slightest trace remaining.”

Maurice Pinay
The Plot Against the Church — pg. 35

“Before the final establishing of Bolshevism in Russia the directors and organizers of all Communist movement in their entirety were almost solely Jews, just as the great majority of the true organizers of the revolutions were to which they gave their impetus. But in Russia, as the first land where Bolshevism finally triumphed, and where it was and still is the fulcrum of driving force for the Communizing of the world the Jewish paternity of the system of organization and of Soviet praxis also allows no doubt or error. According to the irrefutable data, which has been fully and completely proved and recognized by all impartial writers who have dealt with the theme, the Communist work of the Jews in the land of the Czars is so powerful that it would be useless to deny this disastrous as their monopoly.

This is demonstrated by statistics published in Paris by the counter-revolutionary newspaper ‘Le Russe Nationaliste’ coming after the victory of the Jewish Communists in Russia. Keep in mind when considering these stats that Jews comprised at most 5% of the Russian population. These statistics reveal that of the 554 Communist leaders in Russia at the Revolution who were of the first rank were as follows;

Jews– 417
Lithuanians — 43
Russians — 30
Armenians — 13
Germans — 12
Finns — 3
Poles — 2
Georgians — 2
Czechs — 1

Hungarians — 1″

Maurice Pinay

The Plot Against the Church — pg. 49, 51

During the bloody dictatorship of Lenin, the Committee of
Investigation under Rohrberg (Rohrberg, C.), which after the
capture of Kiev entered this city with the White volunteers in

August 1919, reported the following:

“The entire concrete floor of the large garage (this was the
place where the provincial Cheka of Kiev had carried out
executions) was swimming in blood, which did not flow but
formed a layer of several inches; it was a grisly mixture of
blood with brain and skull fragments, as well as strands of hair
and other human remains. The entire walls, holed by
thousands of bullets, were spattered with blood, and fragments
of brain as well as head skin adhered to them.

“A drain ditch of 25 cm width and 25 cm deep and about 10

m long ran from the middle of the garage to a nearby room,
where there was a subterranean outlet pipe. This drain ditch

was filled to the top with blood.

“Usually, immediately after the massacre, the corpses were
removed in lorries or horse-drawn wagons from the city and
buried in a mass grave. In the corner of a garden we came upon
an older mass grave, which contained about 80 corpses, in
which we discovered signs of the most varied and
unimaginable cruelties and mutilation. There were corpses
from which the entrails had been removed; others had
different limbs amputated and others again were cut into
pieces. Some had had the eyes poked out, while the head, the
face, the neck and the torso were covered with deep wounds.
Further on we found a corpse with an axe in the breast, while
others had no tongues. In a corner of the mass grave we

discovered many legs and arms severed from the trunk.”4

Maurice Pinay
The Plot Against the Church — pg. 37
Footnote — S. P. Nekgunov, “La terreur rouge en Russie: de 1918

One Theory Of Why Failed Natural Law Theory Came To The Fore During Reformation Era

“Calvin had inspired in his disciples that energy of piety which abhors all halfway measures, which boldly endeavors to make all the affairs of life subject to Christ, the Head and Lord. . . . But what was needed, viz., firm principles about the relation of the Reformation to the forces of modern emerging culture—to the state, science, and art—this was lacking, and how could it be attained all at once in the midst of all the unrest of the time? Regarded in this way, we believe the appearance of natural law doctrine becomes comprehensible. A doctrine of the state constructed on evangelical principles was not in existence. But such a doctrine was imperatively needed and demanded by the need of the time. Men needed to have clearness about the relation of the ruler to the subjects, about the problem of Church and State, about the relation between different churches in the same country. No wonder that in the lack of a conception of the state revised in the light of fundamental evangelical ideas, men had recourse to the political theory taught in the traditional jurisprudence, without heeding the fact that that theory had an origin foreign to the Reformation, and involved tendencies and consequences which would lead away from the Reformation. These tendencies, of course, became apparent later in slowly developing after-effects, and then, especially after the spiritual enervation sustained in the protracted religious wars, they could not fail gradually to dissipate and destroy the Reformation’s basis of faith. . . .”

EL Hebden Taylor, The Christian Philosophy Of Law, Politics And The State, p.3
(quoting August Lang in the Princeton Theological Review entitled “The Reformation and Natural Law”)

The Reality And Prevalence Of Linguistic Deception

“Modernists will usually betray pretty clearly that they use Christian terminology before a pagan background . . . Modernism is the use of Christian terms for the purpose of conveying pagan thought . . . All the words that we daily use and give a Christian meaning must now receive a pagan meaning.

Cornelius Van Til

“What Do You Mean?” The Banner, Vol. 67

This is called linguistic deception and we are seeing it ALL THE TIME now. Linguistic deception treats words like eggs which can be cracked open and emptied of their content and then filled with new content. What these people do is they empty words used by Christians that have traditional meanings and then fill them with other meaning.

This is what J. Gresham Machen was fighting in his classic “Christianity and Liberalism.” The premise in that book was that the Liberals were using the same language as the Christians in the Church but they were filling it with such utterly different meaning that the words used were no longer the same words that the Christians had used for centuries. Van Til himself wrote a book titled “Christianity and Barthianism” which teased out the same theme only as applied to Neo-Orthodoxy. Machen complained about this linguistic deception in his “Christianity and Liberalism,” continuously. He complained that Modernists (Liberals) where cracking open the words, emptying out the meaning, and then filling the words with new meaning, while still insisting that they were “Christian,” when in point of fact they were liars, just as the R2K chaps, the FV chaps and the Full Preterist chaps are liars when they do the very same thing.

We see this w/ R2K for example. All R2K fanboys will affirm that Jesus is Lord, but eventually one learns that the word “Lord” for R2K fanboys means “Lord,” except for where Jesus is only “kind of Lord in a spiritual sense.” When the R2K fanboys likewise talk about “covenant” they have so redefined the word “covenant” that it no longer bears any resemblance to previous Reformed definitions of “covenant.” When the R2K “geniuses” talk about God’s law it is a law so redefined that the Westminster divines would never recognize God’s Law vis-a-vis how they dealt with God’s Law.

We see this w/ Federal Vision types. They assert “Justification by faith alone,” and then they teach that there are two justifications and not all who are initially justified are finally justified. What’s the difference between the those who are initially justified and also finally justified and those who are who initially justified but not also finally justified? Well, what else can the difference be but the contributory dynamic of our works to that final justification?

We see this technique in those “Christians” denouncing “Christian Nationalism” insisting that a truly Christian nation has tolerance in the public square for all the gods and that the God of the Bible should not be given preeminence. By tacking in such a way they have along the way redefined idolatry as well.

We see this in Gary DeMar’s full Preterism. They recite the Apostles Creed but when they get to the part about Jesus returning again for the quick and the dead, suddenly that is reinterpreted to mean “returning for the persons of the quick and the dead but not their corporeal and now glorified bodies.

Perhaps it is the case that some of the examples above are not epistemologically self conscious about their lying and so are merely guilty of being useful idiots. However, there are always some who know what they are doing. They know they are playing fast and loose with the language. They know they are being deceptive. They know that they are offering up a stew that would have never passed in centuries past for Christianity and yet they just keep serving it up.

I don’t envy these types on that final day.

Synchronicity …. Wherein Martin Luther & The Outlaw Josey Wales Agree

“You can expect from me everything save fear or recantation. I shall not flee, much less recant. I shall go to Worms if there were as many devils there as there are tiles on the roofs of the houses.”

Martin Luther

“Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. ‘Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.”

Josey Wales