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Exodus 20:¹² “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.

In the early to mid 80’s I often attended 1st Presbyterian Church in Columbia South Carolina. I was in Seminary at the time and the Church would often hold meetings, conferences, and get togethers for the Seminary students. I also worshiped at 1st Presbyterian from time to time during this same time frame. At the time Dr. Glenn Knecht served the saints at First Presbyterian in Columbia.

Fast forward now 35 years and First Presbyterian has decided to bow to, and so join the Cultural Marxist band wagon. First Pres. announced today on John Calvin’s Birthday that

“The Community Relations Committee ( 1st Presbyterian, Columbia, SC) also addressed the issue of the use of the names of James Henley Thornwell and Benjamin Morgan Palmer, and the Session unanimously agreed the following calling for the “immediate removal of the Thornwell and Palmer names on church buildings, the summer lecture series, and church publications.”

The reason that First Pres. had to be so explicit here is due to the fact that J. H. Thornwell served as a Pastor for First Pres. once upon a time. Also recently, National Public Radio did a hit piece on First Pres. and their association with Thornwell in the last week. Obviously the NPR hit piece scared the Session and so it decided to join the Cultural Marxist virtue signaling throngs.

Per the session of First Presbyterian,

“Thornwell held that slavery was Biblically justified. Tragically, this view was not his alone, but widely embraced and influential. First Presbyterian Church regards his positions on race and slavery as directly contrary to Biblical teaching. “

This is, of course, a blanket statement that includes all of Thornwell’s writings on race and slavery. As such I wonder if First Pres. thinks the below quote from Thornwell is directly contrary to Biblical teaching?

” It is a public testimony to our faith that the Negro is of one blood with ourselves that he has sinned as we have and that he has an equal interest with us in the great redemption. Science falsely so called may attempt to exclude him from the brotherhood of humanity. Men may be seeking eminence and distinction by arguments which link him with the brute but the instinctive impulses of our nature combined with the plainest declarations of the Word of God lead us to recognize in his form and lineaments in his moral religious and intellectual nature the same humanity in which we glory as the image of God. We are not ashamed to call him our brother.”

J. H. Thornwell
Southern Theologian
Sermon — The Christian Doctrine of Slavery

First, clearly, nobody on the Session is familiar with the writings of Thornwell. If they had been they would have been more careful about their wording in dismissing Thornwell. As such we find them condemning Thornwell’s positions on race and slavery but without even being familiar with Thornwell’s particular positions of race and slavery. Such a repudiation is moronic and is but one more example of the success of cancel culture.

Second, I’d like to see the session of First Pres. prove for me, from the Scripture, that slavery is not biblically justified. Now, they may want to try and say that unbiblical slavery is not justified (though even St. Paul’s words to slaves in what was Roman unbiblical slavery makes that difficult) but there is no way in Hades they can prove from Scripture that biblical slavery is not biblically justified. What do these ecclesiastical clowns do with the book of Philemon, never mind the injunctions in Colossians and Ephesians for slaves to obey their Masters?

In the end we find 1st Pres. violating the fifth commandment by libeling and slandering one of their former Pastors and all to appease the Cultural Marxist vultures who will never be satisfied no matter how many sacrifices are offered up to it.

The hypocrisy here is breathtaking. Southern Churches find themselves thinking it is necessary to flog themselves over slavery and race while it is the case that Northern Churches can glory in their support of the rape, murder, theft, and mayhem visited upon their Christian brothers in the South. Where is the apologies from Northern denominations and congregations for the sin of abolitionism, the sin of Jacobinism, the sin of egalitarianism? No, apologies necessary for these sins but any Church in the South that wants to function has to repudiate its own past in order to make sure the jackals don’t descend upon it to rip it apart.

This violation of the fifth commandment on the part of First Presbyterian is a serious matter. There are plenty of their own sins that need to be confessed without confessing the sins of their own Fathers. All this confession and repudiation are is virtue signalling.

The First Presbyterian Session stood by itself and prayed, ‘God, I thank You that we are not like the other churches — racially insensitive, anti- egalitarian, not willing to denounce their fathers, or even like J. H. Thornwell and Benjamin Morgan Palmer. We renounce fake sins and libel our Fathers.

Scripture does not speak well of this kind of cowardice on display by First Presbyterian in Columbia, SC.

⁸ “But the cowardly …. they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”

There is no such thing as a “traditional American” who is not a Calvinist. All other “Americanism” is an Americanism that is artificial and non indigenous to the American soil. The Pilgrims who settled here were Calvinists. The founders of Plymouth Rock were Calvinists, the first two Governors of Massachusetts Bay Colony were Calvinists, the founder of Connecticut and New Haven colony were Calvinists. Even Wm. Penn, though no Calvinist was still discipled by the Calvinist Huguenots. America’s founding was Calvinist.

The original Ivy League Universities were started by Calvinists for Calvinists. The Calvinists understood there was no education that was not a Calvinist education. America’s University system was Calvinist.

The population was Calvinist. At the time of the American War for Independence Calvinists were thick as flies on honey. The colonies recorded a population of 3 million. Of that 3 million an easy 2/3 were assorted ill tempered fighting Calvinists. Among this number were 900K stubborn Scots / Ulster-Scots, 600K punctilious English Puritans, 400K exacting German or Dutch Reformed, as well as a significant smattering of Huguenots, as well as Episcopalians who understood their 39 Articles were Calvinistic. The British parliament knocked over a Calvinistic hornets nest and the English would be stung without mercy.

All this is to say that Americans who are not anchored in Calvinism are all Cowboy and no hat.

Doubt me?

When Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown he surrendered in the teeth of a Continental Army which every single Colonel save one was a Presbyterian Elder. Further, over 50% of the whole Colonial Army at the time of Cornwallis’ surrender — officer and men — were Presbyterians.

And this Calvinism was not the sterilized R2K modern effeminate Calvinism. It was a fighting Calvinism. It was a Calvinism that scratched, clawed, and swung from the hip relentlessly. It was the same Calvinism that was defeated four score and seven years later by the same enemy it defeated in 1781. The Calvinism of America’s founding would not have recognized the Calvinism in America today. If those Calvinists were alive today they would pity the Calvinist clergy we have today. The Calvinism of our founding was characterized by “election Sermons,” the “Black-robed regiment,” and firearms everywhere in the Sanctuary. Our current Calvinism is characterized by “Clergy” in skinny jeans, the forbidding of preaching on God’s Law, and absolute terror at the sight of a weapon in the sanctuary. We have fallen.

Even the Brits understood that 100% proof Americans were Calvinist. English Prime Minister Horace Walpole standing in Parliament said, “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian Parson.” An American Tory wrote home saying, “I fix all the blame for these extraordinary proceedings upon the Presbyterians. They have been the chief and principal instruments in all these flaming measures. They always do and ever will act against government from that restless and turbulent anti-monarchical spirit which has always distinguished them everywhere.”

Our own American Historian, George Bancroft could write, “The Revolution of 1776, so far as it was affected by religion, was a Presbyterian measure. It was the natural outgrowth of the principles which the Presbyterianism of the Old World planted in her sons, the English Puritans, the Scotch Covenanters, the French Huguenots, the Dutch Calvinists, and the Presbyterians of Ulster.”

The home grown American, in its original meaning, was a Calvinist and any hope that America has going forward to find her footing once again will be anchored in American returning to her Calvinistic roots.

Don’t tell me you are American Patriot unless you’re next sentence is “I am also a Calvinist.”

Men are animated to action by one of two great motivators. The first is sentiment which is the compulsion of feeling. Men’s wills are often quickened to action by their feelings being plucked. The second great motivator of the will of men being catapulted into action is firm conviction as arrived at by ideological persuasion. As either of these control a man or woman, over the course of time their moral character will be shaped.

When we consider the man who is animated by sentiment and feeling we can know that we are dealing with a person who is unstable in all his ways. He is blown about by whoever or whatever can stir the shallows waters of emotion. A song on the radio. A wistful look from a maiden fair. A poetic turn of a phrase. An image brought before his eyes. In all these things the man of feeling is animated.

To the contrary the man who is animated by thought and conviction is the man who tends towards stability in all he does. He does not enter into flights of fancy merely by the tweaking of his emotions. Instead, he is the man who examines all that comes into his orbit of consideration. He can not be changed until his mind has changed and his mind, constantly turning matters over as it does, does not change easily or quickly.

As applied to the area of Christianity we have already, perhaps quite without realizing it, drawn a line distinguishing Calvinism from Arminianism. These two longstanding expressions of the Protestant faith have ever stood contrary to one another in their systematic approaches to the Scripture. However, we see here that there is more than just systematic theologies that separated these expressions of the faith. What also separates them is that central pivot upon which the respective men of these competing Protestant expressions are animated by unto action.

Consider, that the appeal of Arminianism has always chiefly been to the sentiments of their adherents. It is the emotive part of man that the Arminian evangelists is typically going after. This explains the revivalism of Arminianism. It explains the early anxious seat. It explains the long drawn out hymns during the altar call. It explains the dimming of the lights. The whole environment is organized so as to play to man’s emotions. This was evident first with the early Methodists who were known as “Holy Rollers.” It was then ratcheted up by the Pentecostals (who are likewise Arminian when they are anything) who discovered that more emotion led to greater attendance.

All of this is keeping with the appeal of the Arminian system with its doctrine of libertarian free will. In the Arminian doctrine man has complete free moral control of himself. He is the Captain of his own fate as he responds or doesn’t respond to prevenient grace. In the Arminian system man is in free moral control of himself, and is able to, at any moment, determine his own eternal state. As this is true it only stands to reason given this anthropological conviction of Libertarian free-will in the Arminian system that what needs done in appealing to fallen Arminian man is to arouse, stimulate, and manipulate man’s emotions. If winning a lost soul for the Kingdom of God can be accomplished by the simple arousing of the emotions then why take the long laborious route of feeding a man’s mind with the truth? Whatever can lawfully awaken the feelings is considered expedient for the purpose of winning souls. As such Arminian evangelism, theology, and continued sanctification works on men’s senses. The typical Arminian then (and remember we are talking about the lion’s share of the Protestant world) is religiously speaking, a man of feeling, emotion and sentiment and consequently is, by way of disposition, given to that which catches the eye and tickles the ear. Further, we expect to find in Arminians (Methodists, Pentecostals, Wesleyans, Nazarenes, Free-Methodist, Church of God, Many varieties of Baptists, etc.) a tendency to sporadic fluctuations in action depending at any given moment on the wave of sensation that is currently breaking upon their emotions.

Before, turning to the opposite side of this sentiment / conviction coin, we should offer that it really is the case that most Americans, regardless of their official denominational or theological affiliations are, personality wise, functional Arminians. In its macro-culture Americans have, from birth, been animated by sentiment and feeling. The advertising industry, the film industry, and the K-12 education industry combined with the sensuous nature of our culture overall has propelled modern Western man for decades towards being animated by sentiment and emotion. The latest Wuhan scare as proven that in spades. Using the emotion of fear, modern Western man has been stampeded into action. Very few were those who approached the plannedemic from a position of thinking the matter through. Instead, feelings were manipulated and to this day a large segment of our population is living according to the emotion of fear.

The contrary to being animated by sentiment, feeling and emotion is being animated by idea, thought, and conviction. The older Calvinists called it “conscience.” In this older Calvinistic conception God has marked out the way in which man is to walk. Sentiment or emotions have very little to do with how the Calvinist is animated. It is a matter of thought out duty. This is not to say that there will not be emotions present – there may or may not be – but the engine of action is the conscience informing the sense of duty. For the Calvinist, man walks in this assigned path by God with as much or as little sentiment as man pleases. As such the Calvinist is not, religiously speaking, a man whose character is defined by emotional demonstrations, but rather typically is a man of ideas. This disposition towards thoughtfulness and rationality has the consequence of building a character that is associated with stability and strength which can sometimes bleed over into stubbornness and a certain jaggedness.

The Calvinist’s theology teaches him to view all things as operating under the great and prefect system of God’s laws – both decretal and by way of precept. These laws operate in defiance of man’s emotions or sentiments and must be obeyed lest corrective punishment be visited upon the disobedient. The Calvinist’s theology, unlike the Arminians, instructs him that the sinner is dead in his trespasses and sins and so is unable, even by the most heated emotion, to find faith leading to salvation. His Calvinist theology teaches him that feelings cannot adjudicate truth. That theology instructs the Calvinist evangelist to turn away from techniques and human efforts for “soul-winning” to the God who holds all men’s hearts in His hands. Calvin considered it almost criminal to appeal to men’s feelings simply in order to have them act. Calvin desired rather to bring the thought life, as based on Scripture, into the practical life and so make the voice of God as speaking in Scripture and mediated by the Spirit that standard by which the life of the mind would measure all conduct.

This is all consistent with the great idea of the Calvinist; The contemplation of the universe made by God for His glory and revealed in Christ. This great idea is not one of sentiment but one of thought that can and will go on for eternity. To be sure that great idea will affect the sentiment but it is in that order… thought unto affections.

The life of the mind; this is the Calvinist byword. It is the life of the mind, as dwelling on Scripture, and illumined by the Holy Spirit that animated the Calvinist and that still animates that odd Calvinist you can find laying around. This life of the mind then gave way to a sense of duty in the moral life of the Calvinist. Duty, not in the sense of bothersome drudgery, but duty in the sense of the great privilege in serving the King. Emotion need not apply.

“He (the Calvinist) is troubled,” offered the French Historian Hippolyte Taine, “not only about what he must believe, but about what he ought to do; he craves an answer to his doubts, but especially a rule for his conduct ; he is tormented by the notion of his ignorance, but also by the horror of his vices ; he seeks God, but duty also. In his eyes the two are but one.” “We have” Taine continues, “considered these Puritans as gloomy madmen, shallow brains and full of scruples. Let us quit our French and modern ideas, and enter into these souls : we shall find there something else than hypochondria—namely, a grand sentiment – Am I a just man ? And if God, who is perfect justice, were to judge me at this moment, what sentence would he pass upon me?’ Such is the original idea of the Puritans. . . . The feeling of the difference there is between good and evil had filled for them all time and space, and had become incarnate. . . . They were struck by the idea of duty. They examined themselves by this light, without pity or shrinking; they conceived the sublime model of infallible and complete virtue; they were imbued therewith; they drowned in this absorbing thought that lit all worldly prejudices and all inclinations of the senses. . . . They entered into life with a fixed resolve to suffer and to do all, rather than deviate one step.”

And while Taine, doubtless is in error regarding the Puritan’s self understanding regarding the basis of God’s judgment of said Puritan, Taine has captured the mindset of the Calvinist. Historically, at least he has not been a man that was guided, manipulated, or animated by emotion. He is the man of thought and so stability in an otherwise unstable church and world.

And in our 21^st century context, the Calvinist (should you ever come across one) is a strange breed.

God give us more Calvinists.

A recent sin invented is the sin of “White privilege.” White privilege in terms of social relations is defined as

 1. a. A right, advantage, or immunity granted to or enjoyed by white persons beyond the common advantage of all others; an exemption in many particular cases from certain burdens or liabilities.

 b. A special advantage or benefit of white persons; with reference to divine dispensations, natural advantages, gifts of fortune, genetic endowments, social relations, etc.

White privilege then is the advantage that one might find in the households of particular families. When I go to visit the Smith’s home (for example) I fully expect that in the Smith’s home one will discover Smith privilege. It is their home and it is only natural.

Privilege is the way matters typically run when dealing with families or extended family. If I attend the Jacobs’ family reunion where extended family is present, I expect that the Jacobs family — Carl and Laura’s descendants — are going to know Jacobs’ privilege as opposed to Baker’s, McNulty’s and Serio’s who might show up at the reunion for one reason or another.

Japan is one nation where this can be most clearly seen. Clearly if one is visiting Japan one would be foolish not to expect to find Japanese privilege.

Historically speaking, at least, White privilege, should be expected to occur in these united States. Consider our own Constitution,

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Both in the Constitutional convention and in the States’ ratification assemblies those writing and signing the Constitution as well as those ratifying the US Constitution in the States were European White Christians. As such they had in mind for the new Confederated nation their future and the future of their European White Christian posterity. They created a Confederated nation with the explicit intent of white privilege.

This was underscored three short years later when in the first Naturalization Law of 1790 the freshly minted White privilege US Congress set the first standard rules for the granting of US citizenship by means of naturalization. That law law limited naturalization to “free white person[s] … of good character”, thus excluding Indians, indentured servants (regardless of color), slaves, free black and later Asians. White privilege was the national policy.

In today’s climate these are “hate facts.” Yet, facts they remain and they demonstrate that there is nothing anymore inherently immoral about White privilege then there is about Japanese privilege when visiting Japan.

But of course, all that history is past now and so we are to believe that White privilege is a problem and indeed it might be if any could be found but clearly we are living in a social order where White privilege has long been extinguished in favor of minority privilege. Take for example, the anti-discrimination laws which favor the minority and disadvantage the White man when it comes to hiring practices. No longer is it the case that man with the best skills is hired for government contracts but rather the privilege belongs to filling the quotas for minority that the law requires. Another example is how minorities are privileged over superior White people due to the points that are added to their SAT scores. This privileges non-white people over white people regarding getting into prestigious Universities. Clearly, the white man has no privilege here. The recent outrage against the Police has demonstrated that minorities are privileged over whites in terms of how police interact with minorities vis-a-vis whites.

So, while White privilege may have existed properly once upon a time, clearly white privilege is now a thing of the past and what we are really living through is minority privilege. However, it is to the advantage for minorities to complain about White privilege because in doing so minorities are more readily able to seize for themselves a victim status which grants to them even more minority privilege.

Where White privilege does exist then white people ought to salute the advantage that privilege gives, just as minorities salute the quota laws and “set-asides” which give to them minority privilege. This is the inevitable outcome when a country decides to pursue the balkanization of its population by means of its immigration policy and sauce for the goose by all expectations should be sauce for the gander.

Finally, those of us who are White Christians should always keep in mind our Christian fathers who sacrificed so much so we could have White privilege. Our fathers bequeathed to us what White privilege we have by sacrificing themselves and by going without. They built this “once upon a time” nation by an ethic that included leaving a better world to their children than they had themselves. Indeed, their passing on of White privilege was so great that when the White privilege tide was in, all people groups were advantaged in this country. In point of fact it is only the reality of a benevolent White privilege that allowed minorities to complain of white privilege. Our White privilege was so noble that it was willing to surrender its privilege so that the minority could more easily make his way in a country that was originally set aside for Whites.

White privilege and racism and systematic racism are no more sins than Lollipopism, familialism, or Christianism. As Stuart Dinneno has written elsewhere,

“The so-called churches have foolishly swallowed hook, line, and sinker the false notion devised by anti-Christs that there is a sin called “racism,” even to the point of elevating it as if it were more grave than actual sins and treating it almost as if it is unforgivable. But we Christians must look to God’s Law, not the God-hating modern culture, when defining what is, or is not, sin. And if we do so, then we find that the things being condemned under the label of “racism,” are not sins at all.

Noticing racial differences violates none of God’s commandments. Preferential love for your own kind violates none of God’s commandments. Demanding privileges for you and your own people in the land of your ancestors, and in the nation they founded, violates none of God’s commandments. Dealing with strangers on the basis of stereotypes — which is merely recognizing patterns of behavior — violates none of God commandments. Refusal to share your wealth, your cultural inheritance, and your land with those of a foreign race violates none of God’s commandments. And maintaining a separation between those of your own nation (ethnos in biblical Greek) and those of other nations because you want to preserve your people, violates none of God’s commandments.

All such acts are routinely condemned as “racism” by the modern American church, in accord with the dictates of godless egalitarian modernists, but none of them are actual sins. On the contrary, the concept of “racism” is part of an anti-Christian and Marxist moral code that was specifically designed to break down unity in white Christian nations by demonizing natural racial and ethnic affinities and loyalties among whites, in order to divide and conquer them. Therefore, the evil is not in the so-called racists who do the things mentioned in the previous paragraph; the evil is in those Christians who condemn them for “racism.” The churches, in promoting this innovative concept of sin and condemning Christians according to it, have actually become part of the Marxist revolution that is attempting to destroy Christianity. Such are what the Communists of the past called “useful idiots” — those who unwittingly aided the revolutionaries in their plot, not knowing that it would eventually lead to their own destruction.”

Titus 1:⁶ if anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination.

I Timothy 3:⁴ He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, ⁵ for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church? 

Dear Pastor,

“In general, what conduct of one’s children disqualifies one from Church office?”

Joshua in Florida

First, note here the covenantal assumptions. It is not merely the man who is occupying the office but the man as he is connected to his family. Elders, are not to be placed abstracted from their family lives since their family lives reflect who they are.

Second, note that the Timothy passage finds the emphasis being placed upon the Elder as father and his authority to keep order in his household while in the Titus passage the emphasis is placed on the children as submissive to discipline and order.

Third, both passages are not only looking for the children to be of the faith but also examples of the faith. The Titus passage especially focuses on behavior. Elders are to have children who not only are orthodox but also who are practitioners of orthopraxy. The word debauchery can also be translated “riotous.” The emphasis seems to be that self-control is a hallmark of the children of Elders in the Church of the Lord Christ.

Fourth, the prohibition of debauchery (riotous) recalls visions of the prodigal son. Remember in the 1st century world with its pagan Temples and low moral ethic, debauchery would have been a state easily to fall into.

Fifth, this kind of language seems to imply that St. Paul expected those placed as Elders to be men who had grown children. Toddlers don’t typically engage in riotous behavior. It seems we are looking at men who were in their late 30’s onward whom St. Paul envisioned being Elders.

Sixth, the Timothy passage uses the word “dignity,” which can also be translated “gravity.” What is being communicated in the Greek is that the Father in his managing of his household is doing so as one who understands his position before God. He acts with propriety of demeanor in his head of the household responsibilities and that especially in relations with his children.

Putting this all together it seems clear that conduct in older children in the home that would disqualify a man from being Elder would be things like high handed disobedience to the Father as well as a dissolute and rebellious lifestyle. I think we would have to include a obvious lack of self-control that would edge into serious irresponsibility on the part of the child. Children of Elders must not only believe, but they must not be involved in conduct, as a lifestyle, that wars against a confession of faith.

Now obviously, children are going to be children, and so doubtless children will do what we all do and that is sin. As such I think that for a child’s conduct to void a man being an Elder must be a conduct that is routine and unremitting. We are not talking about a one off behavior that is inconsistent with a general pattern of obedience.

Hope that helps Joshua.