Quotes & Commentary – Page 22

Calvin On The Necessity For Struggle

We should be very grieved that the Church is torn by internal divisions as evidenced by thousands upon thousands of denominations in Protestantism, but it is better that some shall separate themselves from the ungodly and be united to Christ their Head, than that all should agree in despising God.

If we have to fight against godless teachings, then, even if it is necessary to move heaven and earth, we must persevere, nevertheless in the struggle. We must certainly make it our primary concern to see that the truth of God is maintained w/o any controversy; but if unbelievers resist, we must struggle against them, and we must not be afraid that we will be blamed for the disturbances.

For the peace, of which rebellion against God is the token, is an accursed thing; whereas the struggles, which are necessary for the defence of the Kingdom of Christ, are blessed.

Paraphrase from Calvin
Commentary on Jn. 10:19 / I Cor. 14:33

Solzhenitsyn on the Brandon Raub Illegal & Unconstitutional Detention

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/21/brandon-j-raub-marine-detained_n_1817484.html

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Dabney & Bastard Democratic Protestantism

“A hundred years ago French atheism gave the world the Jacobin theory of political rights. The Bible had been teaching mankind for three thousand years the great doctrine of men’s moral equality before the universal Father, the great basis of all free, just, and truly republican forms of civil society. Atheism now travestied this true doctrine by her mortal heresy of the absolute equality of men, asserting that every human being is naturally and inalienably entitled to every right, power, and prerogative in civil society which is allowed to any man or any class. The Bible taught a liberty which consists in each man’s unhindered privilege of having and doing just those things, and no others, to which he is rationally and morally entitled. Jacobinism taught the liberty of license—every man’s natural right to indulge his own absolute will; and it set up this fiendish caricature as the object of sacred worship for mankind. Now, democratic Protestantism in these United States has become so ignorant, so superficial and willful, that it confounds the true republicanism with this deadly heresy of Jacobinism. It has ceased to know a difference. Hence, when the atheistic doctrine begins to bear its natural fruits of license, insubordination, communism, and anarchy, this bastard democratic Protestantism does not know how to rebuke them. It has recognized the parents; how can it consistently condemn the children?”

R. L. Dabney
Attractions of Popery
http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/dabney/popery.htm

Socialism & The War Against Distinctions … Sundry Quotes

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.

”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

“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:

This from Igor Shafareivich’s “Socialist Phenomenon”

“But with almost perverse consistency, most of the projections of Marxism have been proven incorrect. A better percentage of correct predictions could probably have by making random guesses…. we limit ourselves to three (examples) in order to underscore the typical and in most cases fundamental nature of the errors: the truth proved to be not merely different but in fact the opposite to that which had been predicted.

a.) The national question: ‘National differences and antagonistic interests among various peoples are already vanishing more and more and more thanks to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the corresponding conditions of life. The supremacy of the proletariat will accelerate the disappearances of differences.’

(BLMc commentary on Shafarevich quote) — So, we see the Marxists have always believed that due to their scientific Marxism Nationalities would be eclipsed. Marxist theory anticipates the end of ethnic and racial distinctions. As the worker (proletariat) comes to the fore National differences disappear. It is difficult to comprehend that in the Marxist believing of this, they would not have done all they could to bring this consequence about.

A Older Calvinism

‎”When Kings or rulers become blasphemers of God, oppressors and murderers of their subjects, they ought no more to be accounted Kings or lawful magistrates, but as private men to be examined, accused, condemned, and punished by the law of God…. When magistrates cease to do their duty, the people are as it were, without magistrates … If Princes do right and keep promise with you, then do you owe all humble obedience. If not ye are discharged from and your study ought to be in this case how ye may depose and punish according to law such rebels against God and oppressors of their country.”

Christopher Goodman
Puritan / Co-pastor with John Knox in Geneva

How Superior Powers ought to be obeyed of their subjects; and wherein they may lawfully by God’s word be disobeyed and resisted.

“The fanatic for Calvinism was a fanatic for liberty; and, in the moral warfare for freedom, his creed was his most faithful counselor and his never failing support. The Puritans … planted … the undying principles of democratic liberty.”

George Bancroft — Historian
History of the United States of America — Vol. 1 — pg. 464

“Obedience to God’s Laws by disobeying man’s wicked laws is commendable, but to disobey God for any duty to man is all together damnable.”

John Knox

“On the eve of the Revolution, John Adams asserted that the pulpits of heavily Presbyterian Philadelphia thundered and lightninged every Sunday against the foreign tyranny, which Jefferson described a Virginia in which ‘pulpit oratory ran like a shock of electricity through the whole colony.”

James H. Huston
Religion and the Founding of the American Republic — p. 42