When Stalin put on his show trials, confession was the only reasonable response coming from men innocent of the charges brought against them. (Which is different from being innocent of any crime. Those convicted in the show trials many times over deserved death.) If one believes the Party is God — and all good communists do — if the Party says you sinned then all that is left for you to confess. One just does not protest one’s own innocence when God says you’re guilty.
In the same way many Christians, particularly those who have grown up in conservative Reformed Churches, view the Church. If the Church says you’re guilty of sins – sins that it just so happens that the Cultural Marxists say you’re guilty of — then you’re guilty. You don’t fight back. You take your stinging rebuke and say, “Thank you Sir, may I have another.” At least that is the fashion in which some operate.
But what if the Church, like the old Soviet State – Party, is just compromised and so wrong? Is it right and proper to apologize for acting and speaking the same as the Prophets and Apostles spoke? Is it right and proper to accept the discipline of an Institution itself that Jesus Himself is embarrassed by? Why should Christians accept the judgment of Sessions and Consistories who are themselves saturated with the Zeitgeist?
I have seen, in the past few years, sundry attempts, both successful and unsuccessful, of Reformed Churches going after laymen for holding positions on race, nationality, and patriarchy that only two generations ago would have been seen as Biblical and normative.
Further I’ve noticed a pattern. First, someone gets wind of something someone said, usually in some kind of social media context and not infrequently as occurring in some kind of setting that was supposed to be private. Second, said person either snitches on a conversation that was supposed to be private or passes it on too someone who does the same. Third, the private correspondence becomes very publicly known. Fourth, the context of the text is completely stripped away so that stripped away from the context (which might have included humor, or sarcasm, or tongue in cheek communication) the text is seen as outrageously scandalous. Fifth, the person who is bringing attention to the matter goes all “point and splutter” combined with hyperventilating and all the while breathlessly repeating “can you believe this,” and “how dare you.” This has the intention of starting a “point and splutter” avalanche so that myriad others join the original “pointer and splutterer” all pointing and spluttering about that which nobody can give a substantive Biblical reason for their pointing and spluttering. Imaging a roomful of Junior High girls hearing a rumor that a mouse is loose in their locker-room and the attendant shrieking and gasping which would follow. And here’s the kicker, later it is found out that it really wasn’t a mouse but a large dust ball.
The subsequent step then is for the authorities to step in. These are authorities who have been all conditioned by the pointing and spluttering and who themselves have zero ability to think critically. The only real difference between themselves and the original accusers is that they have adopted a more refined and erudite cultural Marxist Christianity that instead of pointing and spluttering prefers to clear their throats with dignity all the while using the word “Jesus” a lot in explaining the sin of the poor fly who is now stuck in the spider web.
And now the show trial begins. Our brier patch occupant enters into the star chamber. “CONFESS CONFESS CONFESS” cry out the modern Torquemadas. The Stalin show trials are under way. Acquittal is not possible since the jury has already been told by the Cultural Marxist clergy how the trial must end. Besides, as mentioned above the jury itself has been indoctrinated from the culturally brainwashed pulpit not to mention that the jury pool has been poisoned by the already released putative damning correspondence that has been stripped of its context. The verdict is inevitable only to be possibly avoided by a larger desire on the part of the Institution staging the performance show trial to avoid the publicity and possible embarrassment of a drawn out trial if the accused dare to mount a defense that included file cabinets full of quotes from the Church Fathers supporting the position of the accused.
If the accused doesn’t mount a defense he must grovel and apologize for his “sins,” against God and mankind. Now, the kicker here is that the apology often really amounts to lamenting your thought crime for all the world to see and the purpose of it isn’t so much to satisfy somebody who was genuinely wounded as it is to make an example of those who would dare walk contrary to the sanctioned narrative of our PC overseers – PC police who are now Elders in our churches.
The accusation without context might be, “Your guilty of demeaning a people group with your language,” never mind that St. Paul called all Cretans liars and Jesus referred to a gentile woman and her kind as “dogs.” Only a context can guide us in adjudicating if a people group was demeaned without cause. The accusation without context might be “your guilty of being sexist,” never mind that Western civilization for millennium, following Scripture, insisted that women should operate under male covenant headship. Only a context can guide us in adjudicating if sexist things were really said. The accusation without context might be, “He said that, ‘God does not embrace all peoples as equal,” never mind that depending on the the context it is true in the proper context that God does not embrace all peoples as equal. (And for the record, the idea that any Calvinist would choke on the idea that doesn’t love all peoples equally need to return the reality that God hated Edom but loved Israel.)
These types of charges are not so much accusations interested in a dispassionate pursuit of justice as they are attempts to assassinate the character of the one being charged. They are ecclesiastical versions of Christine Blasey Ford vs. Brett Kavanaugh or Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas. There purpose isn’t to arrive at justice. There purpose is to rend reputations and defile character, while protecting the narrative that historic Christianity and the carriers of it were and are nekulturny, bigoted, and destructive. All of this “evidence” as set before the oi polloi Elder rubes who couldn’t begin to tell the difference between evidence and circuses.
Personally, I’m tired of it. I’m tired of the attempt, sometime successful and sometimes not to destroy otherwise good men. I’m tired of the visible Church playing the role of Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky in a Stalin show trial. I’m tired of this ridiculous narrative that is only not Three Stooges comical because it is taken so serious by the brain dead brainwashed. I’m tired of scads of people ignoring scads of evidence from scads of witnesses, now long dead, that this Cultural Marxist narrative is completely innovative and a stranger to Church History only arriving on the scene sometime around 1950. I’m tired of the assertion that there is something criminal in loving your kin more than loving the alien and stranger, that there is something troglodyte in believing that there are distinct male and female roles which should be honored, and that there is something inherently sinful about Western Christian civilization.
God grant us Reformation.