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A few days ago (08 May) the West marked a significant milestone. On that date, in 1945, it was officially declared by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) that the Axis powers and particularly what was left of the Nazi Government had inked an unconditional surrender, thus ending World War II as a hot war.

This was reported on recently by Dr. Albert Mohler (DAM) of the Southern Baptists in one of his daily briefings. While DAM got a good deal right in his report he also left out or errantly altered a few impactful details that changes the coloration of the story of the Germany’s surrender. This post is intended to provide correction to DAM.

DAM mentions that Germany was surrounded by Allied forces on 7^th May, 1945 with the Communist Bolsheviks (DAM’s – “Russians) on the East and the other Allied forces on Germany’s West. This is true. What DAM doesn’t tell his listeners is that the reason that Germany was surrounded by the Soviet Bolsheviks in the East is because the SHAEF had slowed down their military descent on Germany so as to allow the Soviet Bolsheviks to catch up from the East. Now, this may seem a small detail until one realizes the rape, murder, and general war crimes that the Soviet Bolsheviks were involved in as the barely Russian but fully Soviet hordes descended upon Germany. The Bolsheviks had explicit orders from their high command to rape, torture, murder, and pillage as they went. Leaflets were dropped among Soviet troops at the order of the Bolshevik high command encouraging and requiring such behavior of the rank and file troops. German women from those who were prepubescent to old Grannies were violently raped and that repeatedly by the Eastern Asiatic hordes that served as shock troops for the Soviet Communist Bolsheviks. The accounts are horrific to read and the Western Allies knew it was happening and still drew back so that the animal Bolsheviki could descend on Germany from the East.

There should be no illusion either on the nature of Allied behavior upon German women and citizens as descending from the West. However, what the Allied troops did in Aces, the Bolsheviki did in Spades.

This is the context of Germany’s being surrounded on May 07^th 1945 by the Allies. A context which DAM either doesn’t know or isn’t telling. Another DAM doesn’t tell is that the cost of allowing the Communist Bolsheviki to descend from the East was the complete loss of all of Eastern and much of Central Europe to the Marxists. In brief, the Western Allies allowed Eastern and Central Europe to be occupied and brutalized by the Communists for almost 50 years by their policy of waiting for the Bolsheviks to catch up with them so as to surround Berlin. This major policy error was assured by the decision to invade Europe via France (D-Day) instead of the Allies attacking as from through the Balkans. This option was strenuously argued for by Britain’s Prime Minister Churchill (no hero himself) and others in the Allied high command (Mark Clark for one). The policy decision was made, many scholars have opined since, so that the Soviets would be rewarded with the plunder and spoil of occupying and brutalizing Eastern and Central Europe after the War.

So, yes DAM, the Allies had Germany surrounded from East and West on 07 May, 1945 but it is hardly the case that the way in which the Western Allies pursued that end was not and is not 75 years later any reason to rejoice. Tens of millions of people suffered for a whole generation because of the Western Allied policy in how Germany should be defeated.

Dr. Albert Mohler (DAM) then spoke about the unconditional surrender aspect of the war’s end and again managed to get this terribly wrong. DAM tells us that President Roosevelt (FDR) insisted upon unconditional surrender and that the allies agreed. This is not quite accurate. There was precious little conversation by FDR with the other Western Allies about the issue of unconditional surrender. In point of fact when FDR blurted that tidbit out in a press conference at the Casablanca meet up with the Western Allied leadership, Churchill was stunned because he had not agreed to unconditional surrender. So, DAM is wrong when he reported that Allied leaders had agreed to unconditional surrender in Casablanca. They only agreed to it once FDR unilaterally decided on that policy in order to please Uncle Joe Stalin, who even then was concocting post-war dreams of European hegemony.

Make no mistake, FDR had been advised by his counselors that unconditional surrender was a mistake because it would extend the duration of the War, which in turn would cost many more American lives. These advisors understood that if unconditional surrender was announced the way it was in Casablanca such a position would galvanize the German people’s support around Hitler because the German people would understand that a war ended without negotiation — as most European wars were ended — meant the total destruction of Germany. This is indeed what happened as FDR’s counselor’s warned. Germany fought down to the point of boys who had seen to few winters and old men who had seen to many winters bearing arms against the enemy. With his policy of unconditional surrender that DAM praises so highly FDR extended the war, cost the lives of more American boys than would have otherwise been necessary, and gifted East Berlin to the vile Bolsheviks.

Continuing to critique DAM, we note his praise in this piece for General U. S. Grant. This is the same U.S. Grant that Northern Newspaper’s, during the War Regarding the Constitution (1861-1865) called “Grant the Butcher” for the way he cavalierly used his Troops as canon fodder. DAM clearly needs to read some non-Court Historians about any number of subjects.

DAM gets his history wrong again when he says, “the Nazi regime represented the absolute political incarnation of evil to an extent unimaginable before its emergence,” and so deserved the pursuit of unconditional surrender. If this statement was not so horrific it would laughable. No one doubts that the Nazis, being National Socialists (Marxists) were a terror but let us keep in mind that the chief external threat of the Nazi’s were Stalin’s Communists…. Stalin’s communists who made the Nazi political incarnation of evil look like the equivalent of a schoolboy pulling the pig-tails of his little girl schoolmate in comparison. DAM is just embarrassing when he suggests Nazi Germany as being the greatest political evil ever. It is the statement either of a man who is either historically ignorant or has an agenda. If Al hasn’t read Solzhenitsyn, or “The Black Book of Communism,” or any number of other books detailing the brutality, and evil Character of Leninist and Stalinist Russia he needs to just shut up when he talks about a “political incarnation of evil to an extent unimaginable before its emergence.” The State mass murder by Lenin, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Radek, Litvinov, Kamenev, Bukharin, Beria, Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, Molotov, and Stalin make Hitler’s revolting and despicable work pale in comparison.

DAM says that “Roosevelt was absolutely right. The surrender must be unconditional.” That statement is unmitigated bull fecal matter. If anybody should have surrendered unconditionally it was the Soviets but FDR was too worried about kissing Uncle Joe’s bottom that he never put any conditions on the man.

At the end of his piece DAM says “Thank God the right side won.” I go to bed every night not confident that there was a right side that could have won WW II.

Dr. Albert Mohler, like so many members of the Clergy, needs to spend about 20 years in a library before he opines on such weighty matters that he obviously knows so little about.

“And He will judge between many peoples
And render decisions for mighty, distant nations.
And each of them will sit under his
Vine and under his Fig Tree
With no one to make them afraid.”
Micah 4:3-4

Micah, sees in the Latter days that nations (extended families) will exist and each have their own property uniquely theirs. We will have more to say about property in the future but we want to stay concentrated today on the importance of family.

Everything in our culture is designed to destroy the stable family. First, we have the whole New World Order agenda devoted to taking us out of our families and giving us in exchange the universal “family of man.” We have the demasculinizing of man; and the rise of Feminism, which is nothing but the de-feminization of women; we see, the attempt to create revolution among children demanding their rights (UN Children’s rights). We have The multi-tens of billions of dollars pornography industry and the reality of how it is ripping families apart. We have the FEDS inheritance laws that have been written so as to weaken the family and instead strengthen the government as the FEDS become in essence the first born son who receives the double inheritance. We have social legislation that subsidizes behavior that is destructive to strong family life. We have the purposeful creation of a culture that has stripped the family of its role as an economic unit. We now have the redefinition of marriage and with the redefinition of marriage, the redefinition of family comes in its wake. Our Churches too often reinforce this attack on the family by how they age segregate members of the family once you walk in the door.

“On no single institution has the modern political state rested with more destructive weight than on the family.”

Robert Nisbet
Twilight of Authority — pg. 238

And of course, the reason for this attack is that the family unit — in both its nuclear and extended expression — is the foundational social order unit in a Christian civilization. Naturally, then God’s enemy as our enemy desires to destroy the family. It is the family that God primarily deals with. When God calls Abraham one of the promises is that “in you, all the families (nations) of the earth will be blessed.” It is promised that the forerunner of the Messiah will, in anticipation of the Messianic age, “turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers;” Even in the new Jerusalem in the book of Revelation we see the presence, not of a conglomeration of people, nor of just mass atomized people, but the new Jerusalem is occupied by the families of men (nations).

All this is underscored in the NT. The NT is family-centric and rife with instructions for family including instructions for husbands in providing for their family and kin, instructions on how families are to take care of widows, instructions for raising children, instructions to children on honoring parents, instructions on how husbands are to treat wives and how wives are to treat husbands.

This morning, on this Mother’s Day I want to open by just allowing the weight of Scripture press down upon us as it speaks to the glorious calling and nature of women.

I Peter 3:7 Husbands, likewise, dwell with them (your wives) with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered.

I Timothy 2:12 And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. 15 Nevertheless she will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control.

I Timothy 5:14 Therefore I desire that the younger widows marry, bear children, manage the house, give no opportunity to the adversary to speak reproachfully.

Proverbs 31:27 She watches over the ways of her household,
And does not eat the bread of idleness.

Titus 2:3 the older women likewise … that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, 5 to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.

I Corinthians 11:7 For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. 8 For man is not from woman, but woman from man. 9 Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man.

I Corinthians 14:35 And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church.

Ephesians 5:22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.

Psalm 68:12 “Kings of armies flee, they flee,
And she who remains at home divides the [a]spoil / plunder.

Isaiah 3:12 As for My people, children are their oppressors,
And women rule over them.
O My people! Those who lead you [a]cause you to err,
And destroy the way of your paths.”


What we see from this compendium of Scripture is that the prima facie evidence from Scripture is that women are different from men and as being different have a different role and calling then men.

We also would say that from this reading that when a social order is operating in a way that reflects Biblical priorities women have a unique relationship to the maintaining of the household to the glory of God. Scripture teaches, that God made women to be man’s Prime Minister in the Home. The Man is the King but the role of Prime Minister in domestic affairs is a position of honor and esteem.

Now, we immediately offer the caveat that when social orders are not operating in a fashion that reflects Biblical priorities it is often the case that women are pressed into responsibilities that should have been filled by men. Deborah is the prime example. Huldah, if your remember your Bible is another. Huldah was a prophetess but in an age of severe decline in Israel. She becomes key when she steps on the scene but one wonders if Israel had not been in decline if Huldah would have even been in that position.

So, what we are looking at this morning is the normative, all the while conceding we hardly live in a biblical normative social order and as such we might find all kinds of irregularities that we might support now that we otherwise wouldn’t support. For example, given the irregularity of our social order we might well prefer that a Biblical Christian women be elected for a particular political position vis-a-vis her opponent, a sodomite being elected. If things were normal, women would not be forced into positions where Scripture says they don’t belong, just as Deborah didn’t belong in charge of an Army.

When we press women into roles that men are by nature called to fill it is as if we have decided that the purpose for Roses is to serve as Kindling for fires or that our best bone China is to be used as a dog dish. When women serve in roles that is contrary to their God ordained nature and calling we are at that point abusing women and that is criminal.

The Scripture speaks with a uniform voice, as we heard, that a woman’s high responsibility and privilege is to fill the honorable role of wife and mother – supporter of the work of Her husband.

Gen. 2:18 Now the Lord God said, “It is not good (beneficial) for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper [one who balances him—a counterpart who is] suitable and complementary for him.”

Now invariably when we talk about the nature and role of women as help-meet and complimentary to her husbad, there will be some men who hear strange things.

They will hear things like “Me Tarzan. You Jane,” or they start humming the Stones, “Under my Thumb.” They become one part Ghengis Khan and one part my former Brother-in-law. However those types need to hear Rushdoony at this point,

“The Bible declares Sarah to be the model wife in her obedience and subjection (I Peter 3:1-7). We cannot understand the meaning of that without recognizing the fact that, on occasion, Sarah, confident in the godliness of her position, gave Abraham an ultimatum (Gen. 16:5; 21:9-13), and God declared, “in all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice” (Gen. 9:12), a sentence men rarely if ever use as a sermon text! “

So, the fact that women have a particular nature and role as wives and mothers as help-meets to men and as complimentary to men does not mean that she is inferior to men. It merely means that God has equipped her to excel in one way and domain while God has equipped men to excel in a different way and domain.

We see that we have a Charybdis and Scylla here. On one side is the danger of overbearing men treating their wives altogether as lesser beings. If you’ve ever seen this danger you pray God you can get away from it as fast as you can. It is an embarrassment to see and a tragedy to have to live with. On the other side is the danger of a women who are Shrews and who run their men. They may even become Governors in Mitten shaped states. If you’ve ever seen this foul state you begin to pray, “And deliver us from the Evil One.”

The Scripture forbids both the Charybdis and the Scylla providing us a patriarchal paradigm that honors men as men and women as women resulting in a harmony of interests in the home that is promissory of God being honored, adults being happy, and children growing up well adjusted.

The Scriptures teach that the biblical call for Patriarchy can’t exist without faithful women who are delighted with their callings as Prime Ministers in the home. But of course we have long lived in a Church wherein women have revolted from this place of honor and wherein men have encouraged them to cast aside their God honoring privileges.

Let’s take a few examples,

Aimee Byrd is a member of a Reformed Church and has been pushing to overthrow Biblical Patriarchy for years now.

The easiest way to prove her feminism is simply to read her blog.  She complains that women don’t write more theology and aren’t encouraged in higher theological learning, and wonders why “all the women publishing good academic works are egalitarian.”  She promotes the writings of egalitarians. She criticizes the Nashville Statement on human sexuality for being to conservative when in point of fact the Statement is too progressive. She warns of the perils that attend teaching abstinence from premarital sex. She praises an author for denying that Scripture is “a hopelessly patriarchal construction” and for explaining the “gynocentric interruption of the dominant androcentricity of Scripture.”

Another “Reformed” woman is who is seeking to tear down Biblical Patriarchy is Rachel Miller. She has a book out that says it all, “Beyond Authority and Submission.”

The third woman is Valerie Hobbs. She was previously a fellow at the Greystone Theological Institute, working alongside noted Reformed ministers and professors. A senior lecturer in applied linguistics, one of her pet projects has been researching the treatment of women in conservative Reformed churches as seen in her numerous journal articles The articles reveal her animus against the teaching of Reformed churches about women. Her popular level articles reflect the same animus.

There are countless men as well. Ministers Todd Bordow, Carl Truman, Todd Pruitt likewise push the egalitarian feminist agenda. However for our purpose this morning let’s consider,

Michael Rea is Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, renown Roman Catholic Institution could write several years ago,

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.”

Why, instead of the conclusion that 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 as we saw at the outset. Scripture clearly envisions the women as the Prime Minister of the Home advancing her Husband King’s dominion.

2.) We so value women and their role in hearth and home that we don’t want to treat them like fine family silver used to dig for worms by exiling women from hearth and home in order to embrace the curse of men to till the ground by the sweat of their brow.

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 Rea who are taking from children their Mothers and Mothers from their children. It is men like Dr. Rea who are suggesting that somehow women are missing out by being the leaders and teachers of the most impressionable in our social order.

The hidden goal of feminism, as a created tool of the NWO, since feminism’s rise at the turn of the 20th century and its acceleration in the 60’s and 70’s was to destroy the family. By engendering discontent in women with the home and so getting women out of the home and into the workforce (i.e. — Rosie the Riveter) via the NWO’s instigation of WW I and especially WW II multiple ends were served, one of which was getting women out from under their husband’s authority and another was separating Mothers from their children — their instinctual impulse.

In such a way two things happened. First, children would more naturally become defacto wards of the state (from daycare to Government schools) as two income families increasingly predominated across the landscape of America. Second, women would become less dependent upon their husbands and so have the resources to leave at the smallest provocation. In all this the family would become more destabilized and the State would expand in power where the family decreased in power. Feminism serves the end of the rapacious state. Indeed, it might be well said that state legislation that supports feminism is a case where the State is raping women. For those women who support feminist legislation one might rightfully say that, metaphorically speaking, “those women enjoy rape.”

So, it is in the interest of the tyrant State to breathe life into feminism because by doing so the tyrant State breaks down a potential adversary insuring that the family, as a potential alternate power center does not arise to challenge the tyrant State. This explains why the we have gone from the Trustee family model in the West to the Trustee family model and now ever increasingly to the Atomistic family style. The elimination of the family is life for the tyrant state.

The tyrant state does not want a Christian home where wives and mothers as homemakers are paid and amply taken care of and provided for by a loving Christian husband. Unless there were extenuating circumstances, why should a Christian wife and mother want to work for a different covenant head in the workforce when she can take care of her covenant head and family at home?

I have no doubt that situations will arise where women have to work outside of the home in addition to their work as caring and nurturing wives and mothers in the home.

I have no doubt that situations will arise where women have to work outside of the home in addition to their work as caring and nurturing wives and mothers in the home. Further, I am convinced where women can do the same work as men they should be paid commensurate with their work.

Having said that, and having worked for the Airlines industry for 15 years I know for a fact that in many career occupations that require strength, women, on the whole, (again exceptions probably exist) can not do the work that a man can do and so shouldn’t be paid what a man is paid.

Men are not women and women are not men and to say that they automatically should be paid equally reinforces the egalitarian agenda.

Now, there are industries where women should might well be paid more than men. Nursing, for example, were predominated by women early on and this because women were seen as natural nurturers and caretakers.

Having conceded that, the best and safest place for a woman is in the home. Women being forced outside the home are being cheated.

There was a time when this kind of thinking was not controversial in the least and was embraced, above all, by women.

“No system of philosophy has ever yet worked out in behalf of woman the practical results for good which Christianity has conferred on her. Christianity has raised woman from slavery and made her the thoughtful companion of man; finds her the mere toy, or the victim of his passions, and it places her by his side, his truest friend, his most faithful counselor, his helpmeet in every worthy and honorable task. It protects her far more effectually than any other system. It cultivates, strengthens, elevates, purifies all her highest endowments, and holds out to her aspirations the most sublime for that future state of existence, where precious rewards are promised to every faithful discharge of duty, even the most humble. But, while conferring on her these priceless blessings, it also enjoins the submission of the wife to the husband, and allots a subordinate position to the whole sex while here on earth. No woman calling herself a Christian, acknowledging her duties as such, can, therefore, consistently deny the obligation of a limited subordination laid upon her by her Lord and His Church.”

Susan Fenimore Cooper

Conclusion

Unless God is pleased to give us Reformation, and that right quickly, future sane generations will look back at our current dementia and with the benefit of sanctified hindsight will see our time as the apex of lunacy wherein warfare against God’s design of human nature was waged with full fury and intent.

They will trace how the lunacy began stirring in the Anabaptist Radical Reformation and in the murkier depths of the Renaissance. From there with Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelly as accompanied by the likes of the Marquis de Sade and Charles Fourier they will trace how the Enlightenment vomited up Feminism as a continuing theme… a theme then taken up by the French and Russian Revolutions which heaved up the likes of the Marquis de Condorcet and Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai… they will trace a theme which finally triumphed here with the aid of WW I and WW II.

A future sanctified generation will look back at our times and identify what the modern Conservative Church cannot see today and that is late stage Cancer feminism and egalitarianism finally expressed itself just before the death of the blood and family patient with the tumors of same-sex marriage and gender confusion. If God is pleased later generations will draw a line connecting the Cancer’s earlier manifestations of legalizing birth control, easy divorce, women in the work-force and deadbeat Fathers.

And perhaps a future sanctified generation will promise by God’s grace alone,

“NEVER AGAIN.”

Before getting into this next installment wherein we disembowel R2K and Dr. David Van Drunen we want to make sure that the readers have the link so that they can listen for themselves the kind of ideas that are being advocated under the banner of Christ and His Kingdom.

https://www.wscal.edu/resource-center/politics-after-christendom

“The only thing I can do is to say to the people read my Biblical-Theological argument and if you have criticisms of that then make them on Biblical-Theological grounds. I mean I recognize we are all affected by our cultural context. We are all affected by certain biases we have and so yeah, there is always a danger that each one of us have to look out for that we try to make arguments that support positions that we want to hold. for other reasons. I have tried my best to make a kind of new Biblical-theological argument for why there needs to be a generous measure of tolerance and religious liberty and I am happy to hear back from other people who want to engage that argument seriously. So, that is what I would like to hear from others. It seems to me that to simply say, ‘Well you’re capitulating to modernity,’ — Well, prove it by showing flaws in my argument. You know, I’m not trying to be cocky when I say that, I’m just saying that I’ve tried to make a rigorous argument and so I hope people will deal with it on its own terms.

I would say, and this is the way my book presents things; God established in the covenant with Noah this idea that political communities are to be common communities in which believers and unbelievers live together in some measure of peace and order and when God entered into covenant with Israel at Sinai and brought them into the promised land that was … a kind of parenthesis. This was an unusual situation Now we recognize that a big chunk of the Bible is talking about life in this situation and so I think that might distort the way we think about things a little bit but I think there are all sorts of evidence in Scripture that the way things operated in the promised land under the law of Moses for the old covenant Israel was very specific for old covenant Israel. As we were talking earlier, I Peter comes along and says your ‘exiles’ and ‘sojourners’ it is actually point us to ways of living that are different in important respects from way Israel in the Promised Land experienced. So, the way I would see it is that for us under the new covenant in a number of important respects our lives are are more like the sojourning Abraham, more like Israel under exile than Israel in the promised land in which, granted there was not anything like religious liberty in the way we know in which there was a God ordained politically confessionally unified society.

Dr. David Van Drunnen (DVD)
Politics after Christendom
Interview w/ Dr. R. Scott Clark
Office Hours program

1.) In these responses, DVD, we have looked at your Biblical-Theological grounds. Mene mene tekel upharsin. We have shown the flaws. We have overturned the idea that there is anything rigorous about what you have done.

2.) DVD says something quite profound here as it pertains to biases. We have to keep in mind that the eschatology of DVD is a rabid Amillennialism. R2K is what it is because of its strenuous Amillennial character. What DVD has done with R2K is he has taken his negative expectations of future Kingdom development and progress and he has reasoned backwards from those negative expectations so as to develop a system (R2K) that insures the negative outcome that the man is theologically wedded. Being rabidly Amillennial DVD has contrived a reversed engineered system that guarantees that the pessimistic anticipations that Amillennialism teaches comes to pass.

3.) Notice the bold print. This is another key admission. Forever, R2K has flip-flopped on the issue of whether their version of “Christianity” is the faith once and forever delivered unto the saints or something completely innovative that no Christian has ever seen before. Here, in the bold print, we have admission from one of the key architects of R2K that what he has done is completely innovative. No Christian who has ever lived as ever seen what DVD has done with R2K. I find this beyond significant.

4.) In previous entries we have demonstrated that tolerance and religious pluralism is a myth. In any political community there is always a reigning religion. That is an inescapable reality.

5.) The whole notion of a Mosaic parenthesis is troubling because it yields a Marcionite theology where God changes. God deals with man one way in the Old Testament but in the New Testament He has different expectations. In the Old Testament God required His people to cast out the leaven in their political communities but in the New Testament God requires His people to allow the leaven to continue to spread in their political communities. What DVD gives us here is that Jesus died on the cross, in part ,so that men would become religiously tolerant in their political communities and so that men no longer had to walk in terms of God’s revelational law in the common realm.

6.) Note the appeal to dispensationalize large chunks of the Old Testament.

For DVD’s appeal again to “living as exiles and sojourners, per I Peter, see previous installments of this response.


“For one thing, I think it is important for us to remember as Christians that supporting some generous measure of religious toleration and liberty is good for us as Christians as we seek to evangelize the world. We don’t really have a vested interest in having political communities that are religiously intolerant because we are a missionary religion calling for people to leave their old faiths and to come and to join us in the Church of Jesus Christ. So, I do think there is something pretty powerful to be said that the more we appreciate the missionary character of of the Christian religion the more friendly we should be to a kind of religious tolerance in our broader societies. So, I think, on the one hand we as Christians — we as Churches — want to be zealous evangelistically. So that is part of our perspective. At the same time it seems to me as we think about our political responsibilities I think we need to make a distinction between those responsibilities and our call to evangelize. There are times we have to talk to our unbelieving neighbors about practical problems — challenges that we share in common — and how is that we can have conversations with them? How can we try to work through a property dispute? How can we work through a two lane or a four lane road? As well as more weighty questions of law and politics. How can we do that even as we recognize that we disagree about some fundamentally important questions about God, the world and human beings?

The last chapter I reflect on the liberal and conservative traditions. I think it is really important to remember that people use the terms “liberal” and “conservative” sometimes in very different ways and I discuss this in this (final) chapter (in my book). I try to offer what I mean by liberal and conservative. By the ‘Liberal’ tradition, I’m essentially getting at this idea that all political communities are made up of people with different worldviews or theologies or whatever term you want to use. and that we are called in some way to live together. To find ways to have a political polity without forcing our neighbors to convert to think like us about these most important things. By the ‘conservative’ tradition I am getting at the idea that we ought to have a kind of respect for our traditions. We have learned things over time and we have gained a certain knowledge of the importance of certain institutions like family for example. What I suggest is that we can become kind of comfortable with a conservative liberalism. A liberalism not in the sense of left wing progressive politics. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about a liberalism that is content to live in communities in which we try to live in peace with all sorts of different people. It is a conservative liberalism in the sense that it respects traditional institutions. It respects the wisdom of the ages. I hope that gives just a little bit of enticement by saying that conservatism and liberalism both have some aspect of of the truth. I hope that can bring some type of perspective on these things that readers haven’t thought about.”

Dr. David Van Drunnen (DVD)
Politics after Christendom
Interview w/ Dr. R. Scott Clark
Office Hours program

1.) I have no idea why religious tolerance helps in our missionary efforts. I would think that a Christian political community would be the very essence of positive missionary efforts for newcomers to that political community.

Secondly, I think all the evidence is in that we need that our religious tolerance has most certainly not helped our missionary efforts. In point of fact just the opposite has occurred. It is the Christian community, because of Religious tolerance whom has become the target for missionary success. All the statistics are saying that we are becoming, with each half-generation, an increasingly pagan people. This, no doubt, is in large part due to our religious tolerance. The pagans have successfully evangelized Christians to their faith(s) because they were given the room to do so via religious tolerance. On the other hand think how successful the Christian missionary Boniface was with religious intolerance, in the 8^th century, as he wielded the mighty ax which hewed down the sacred oak and who then used the oak to build a Christian chapel dedicated to St. Peter. Fortunately, for the Germanic pagans, St. Boniface had never heard of R2K or religious tolerance.

Note also that DVD is demanding his own version of intolerance. DVD is intolerant of Christians who won’t refuse to embrace his teaching of tolerance. You know that if DVD could, he would make it so every Christian who is intolerant of his call for tolerance would be removed from our political community so that the work of evangelizing all those pagans via a mighty tolerance could be achieved. DVD is all about tolerance until he is faced with people who will not tolerate his views. Maybe if DVD just prays harder all of us non-tolerant non R2K people will convert to R2K.

2.) Honestly, DVD’s bringing up property disputes and four or two lane highways is a red herring. Nobody thinks that one has to have confessional unity in a political community in order to deal with those issues. However, whether or not to build Minarets so that the Muezzin’s can issue the Islamic call to prayer or whether to require special Muslim chapels in airports, or whether Sharia in Dearborn Michigan can supersede all other law, now these are issues that begin to get us closer to the damage that a R2K belief system will do if given its head. (And it has already been given its head.) The fact is that no political community can survive the balkanization that comes with have a pluralism of gods in the public square and if Christians thing that tolerance is the answer to the problem of the plurality of Gods then Christians and Christianity will be the faith that is snuffed out.

4.) All I see in DVD’s blather about Conservative vs. Liberal is the Marxist Hegelian dialectic. Thesis (Conservatism), Anti-thesis (Liberalism), Synthesis (DVD’s Utopia).

5.) The idea that one can define liberal as those” content to live in communities in which we try to live in peace with all sorts of different people,” is a howler if there ever was one. Did DVD never read any 20^th century history while he was getting his Jesuit endorsed Ph.D? The very definition of Liberal is someone who is not content to live in peace with all sorts of people. Ask the Kulaks in the Ukraine how well the Bolsheviks lived in peace with all sorts of different people. Ask the Chinese how well Mao’s Communist hordes lived in peace with all sorts of different people. Ask the French Catholic Church how well Robespierre, Marat, and Danton lived in peace with all sorts of different people. Ask the Spanish Nationalist during the Spanish Civil war how well the Rojos lived in peace with the Nationalists.

Honestly, this is really what turns my temperature up when it comes to R2K. It’s as if these people know nothing about history and how their proposed theories are going to get Christians and others killed. It is a shorter distance between the kind of political and religious tolerance these people advocate and Madame Guillotine then these people realize. Tolerance is merely the stage for Christ haters between seeking to gain the ascendancy in a political community and actually achieving that ascendancy in the political community. One can be sure that once the Christ haters reach that ascendancy they will be pulling up the ladder of tolerance so no one can replace them.

6.) Liberalism has zero aspects of truth.

With that I am finished. I can only pray (and I do pray) that Christians will see in R2K the certain apostasy that is contained therein. I do not doubt that many of these people have fine intentions but as the maxim goes, “good intentions pave the road to hell.” These people, intentionally or unintentionally, are a blight on the Church and are the guarantors that Biblical Christianity will go into abeyance if they are ever to gain the ascendancy.

I am convinced that in the Reformed world they are close to gaining the ascendancy.

____

“One of the things that was important to me in developing some of the arguments in my book was in I Peter 2 when he calls us, as Christians, ‘sojourners and exiles,’ and I think that is really fascinating because when you hear those terms you’re supposed to think back to the Old Testament. Sojourners; you think about Abraham and his family — they were sojourners in the world. Abraham was not living in a confessionally Christians — or whatever you would call it at that time –sort of society. And then ‘Exiles;’ that makes us think of the Babylonian exile in which the Israelites were taken out of their land and living in a land controlled by pagans and So, in both instances Abraham and later the Israelite exiles had to live in common with their unbelieving neighbors and try to find their way and live godly lives in that context. So very fascinating that Peter would say to us as New Testament Christians, ‘this is actually what you are like — this is what your experience is like in this world and I think that is a very different way of thinking about things than saying ‘you are called to be creating a kind of Christendom in which actually you are not so much a sojourner or you’re not really an exile, you’re in charge this is your society. That’s not what we are called to do it seems….’

Most Reformed Christians today, in one way or another, reject certain aspects of the way the early Reformed thinkers thought about society. You know what we would think of and what we would actually value as say the 1st amendment paradigm in the united States is something that our Reformed forefathers would not have accepted. They would not have believed in the ‘freedom of religion’ in the way we would think of it. They would envision civil government that would affirm the one true faith as they understood it and believed that government officials had responsibilities to be suppressing heresies and blasphemies and non-Christian religions and so I’m thankful that, say your church, the United Reformed Churches and my church the Orthodox Presbyterian Churches I mean we’ve actually revised our confessional documents to reflect these things. We haven’t done that with the vast majority of our confessional statements. We affirmed the basic theology still today but this is something we have re-thought and I think it has been helpful for us to re-think these things. We always have said as Reformed Christians that the Scriptures are inspired, inerrant, and infallible but our own theology is not and that just as in the 16th century we had to reform the theology of the Medieval Church we may not have gotten a 100% of things right at that time and I think this is just an area where we just have to be honest and say that ‘we made mistakes here,’ and I think it is proper for us in all humility to recognize that we are Christians on the way and we sometimes don’t get things right. and I think it is better for us just to acknowledge if we in the Reformed tradition didn’t get something exactly right and if we need to repent and to do better, so be it. But I would say the idea the idea that the civil magistrate has to in some way enforce and support the true Church, it’s not a fundamental doctrine that changes the way we think of the atonement or the way we think of the sacraments or the way we think of our ordo salutis. We can think ‘Church-State’ relations without touching all those other important areas of Reformed theology.


Dr. David Van Drunnen (DVD)
Politics after Christendom
Interview w/ Dr. R. Scott Clark
Office Hours program

A brief preface to this entry. Some may wonder why I spend all this effort in disemboweling DVD and R2K. The answer is that this is personal to me. I have a child who is in a R2K church and this child will periodically report to me what she is hearing from the pulpit. Now, my child is not going to be fooled by all this skubala but my heart breaks for how this doctrine of demons is affecting the congregation in which my child sits. Because of my love for Christ and His doctrine I continue to play Don Quixote tilting at R2K windmills for His glory and for love of His people across the West.

1.) DVD attempts to take two metaphors that Peter uses in addressing 1^st century Christians and absolutize those metaphors as the only metaphors that Christians should own for their relation to the times in which they are living. Of course the Scripture uses other metaphors for our lives. Scriptures tells us that we are “more than conquerors.” Scripture tells us that Christians are Christ’s body over which he is the head. Scripture tells us that Christians are seated with Christ (a picture of ruling) in the heavenly places. Scripture tells us that Christians are confessors. The Heidelberg catechism, following the Scripture speaks of Christians as being prophets, priests, and kings. As one can see from this list of metaphors we should be careful not to absolutize any one or two metaphors so that they eliminate the impact of the other metaphors.

2.) God gave Israel revelation through the prophets to settle in Babylon as exiles. God has not given us revelation that we are to settle in our various communities as exiles. God has not given us revelation that we are to be always ruled by anti-Christ magistrates and that we should be good with that. Indeed when we look at Acts 19 and Paul’s effect on the community in Ephesus we see a political community troubled by the Christians who are not leaving the pagans alone. The economic structure of the Ephesus community is threatened by the Christians. The theological structures of the Ephesus community is threatened by the Christians. Indeed the whole law and order structure of the Ephesus political community is threatened there in Acts 19 and the pagans didn’t like it. When one reads Acts 19 it doesn’t look like the Christians in Ephesus are being strangers and exiles the way DVD is “teaching.”

3.) DVD says explicitly that Christians are not to be in charge and implies that Christians are not to have their own society. Now when this man says these kinds of things all that is left is to conclude that he is “teaching” that those Christians who do believe in Christendom and who do desire to exercise godly rule as magistrates under Christ’s authority are in sin. If Scripture teaches we are to be exiles and sojourners as DVD “teaches” then what else can it be but sin to say the contrary? We need to be very clear about this. Those of us who disagree with DVD do believe he is in sin for teaching these things and we should understand that he and those of his stripe do believe that those of us who disagree with him are likewise in sin and so displeasing God. There can be no tertium quid here between R2K and Biblical Christianity. Either R2K is pleasing to God or Biblical Christianity is pleasing to God. Either we are to be exiles and sojourners or we are to be ruling or seeking to rule as under Christ’s authority.

4.) DVD tells us that our Reformed forefathers would not have accepted the Liberal worldview where putatively pluralism reigns. Someone who would have accepted this though is the Anabaptist Roger Williams. It really is the case that DVD is pushing the Reformed Church to take Roger Williams and his Rhode Island project as a Reformed saint. Who could have ever guessed that the Reformed world would canonize Roger Williams? The Puritans are spinning in their graves. Indeed, with the idea that Reformed theology should provide the underpinning of the Liberal Worldview we find the Anabaptistification of the Reformed faith.

5.) I wonder if DVD realizes that the 1^st amendment as originally constructed protected the States in their decisions to be Erastian as it pertained to their colonies? The 1^st amendment was never intended as originally crafted to turn the whole political community into Rhode Island. The 1^st amendment meant as originally crafted meant that the FEDS could not dictate to the States what would be each State’s denominational expression of Christianity. Still, having said that I am convinced that the 1788 American Revision of the WCF was a significant error.

6.) Let us be clear that to accept what is now understood as the 1^st amendment paradigm of freedom of religion is a myth. As I have already argued in this response to DVD, the idea of freedom of religion is a myth that supports the myth of pluralism. The idea of freedom of religion and pluralism is that we invite all the gods into the public square and in that way all the adherents of the different religions can be assuaged. The problem with this reading is that there has to be some mechanism whereby the competing gods can find their limits when they conflict in the political community. In pluralism that mechanism is the State and as such the State becomes the God over the competing gods and is in fact the ruling God over all the gods and the State is thus seen as the one true God in the putatively pluralistic political community. So, we see freedom of religion is a myth and of course the implication of this is that multiculturalism is a myth. The Anabaptist and Liberal Worldview has failed and all the R2K Humpty Dumpties won’t be able to put it back together.

7.) This leads us to say that we still live in a social order where the civil government affirms the one true faith as they understand it. (Just not the Christian faith.) We still live in a time where government officials have the responsibility to be suppressing heresies and blasphemies that are contrary to pluralism and multiculturalism – so called. And what are those heresies and blasphemies? Why, most routinely the heretics are Christians who say that “pluralism is a myth” or that “Christianity should legally be in ascendancy over all other religions.”

8.) The changing of the confessions (1788 WCF and then in the 20^th century the BCF) did indeed alter the Reformed faith to be something that wasn’t Reformed. What these alterations did was to reduce the Christian faith to be a personal and individual faith. These alterations took the corporate and social-covenantal stuffing out of the Christian faith. These alterations allowed the social order backdrop scenery of our Christian political communities to be changed out so that new social order backdrop scenery could be erected and that had the effect of re-orienting the personal-individual to create a Christianity that was consistent with the new corporate and social-covenantal and alien religion backdrop scenery. Like the chameleon who fades into whatever background that he is pressed up against, the changing of the social-order covenantal backdrop led incrementally to changes in the Christianity of the individual. DVD, and R. Scott Clark (the host and interviewer of “the Office Hours) are just flat out in error when they say that changing the confessions here didn’t effect the Reformed faith. Indeed, this change eventually destroyed the Reformed faith. We should have listened to the Father’s here.

9.) Now it may be the case that short term changing the Confessions in the area of Church and State didn’t immediately effect our understanding of the Atonement, or the sacraments or the ordo-salutis the change did over time dilute our understandings of those doctrines if only because with the new social-covenantal backdrop very few people cared. Secondly, as all political communities will have a doctrine of the Atonement a political community that does not have a Christian doctrine of the atonement (answering the question of how to get rid of sin and guilt) will adopt non Christian doctrines of the atonement. So, for example, in our social order we seek to get rid of our sin and guilt by placing all our sin and guilt on the rich, or the poor, or the minority, or oppressive Whitey. All of these are attempts of our social order to provide atonements since we no longer accept, as a social order, the atonement as found in Jesus Christ.

Clark and DVD (and W.Cal) are not thinking through the implications of having changed out our historic Reformed doctrine of Church and State and the consequence is our current pandemic in the modern Church