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The War Heats Up — McAtee Corrects R. Scott Clark #1

Well here I find myself reminding myself of the maxim that “there is no such thing as bad publicity,” which is a good thing because bad publicity seems to be the majority report when it comes to reporting on me or matters concerning me.

Most recently, Dr. R. Scott Clark (RSC) wrote part I of what one can only presume is at least a two part (and maybe more) blog posts series on Kinism. In this post by RSC I am referenced more than once, though RSC demonstrates the ability to do so without actually mentioning my name. I have reached, it seems, the status wit Scott of “he whom shall not be named.”

I provide the link hesitantly because I hate to think of providing RSC any traffic, but because my quoting of him will seem so fantastic as to not possibly be true, I want to give those following along the ability to read for themselves what I am citing RSC as writing.

The CRC Is Right About Kinism (Part One)

Now, we should note at the outset that this post by RSC is a backhanded attempt to smear me so as to discredit my recently published book that demolishes Scott’s cherished Radical Two Kingdom “Theology.” IMO, Scott goes this route because he cannot deal with or overturn the actual arguments found in my “Saved to be Warriors; Exposing the Errors of Radical Two-Kingdom Theology.”

As anybody who has a pulse now knows, R2K is bleeding out fast. The substance of it is being slammed in so many quarters that it is taking more hits then the World Wide Wrestling Entertainment Federation’s “The Big Red Machine Kane,” who has lost more wrestling matches than anybody in WWEF history.

Most recently RSC tried to sell the idea that an overture sent to the PCA asking the Denomination to petition the FEDS and State governments;

“to renounce the sin of all medical and surgical sex change procedures in minors by the American healthcare system because they result in irreversible harm.”

Was out of order and not proper per RSC’s unique reading of the Westminster Confession of Faith. However, Scott seemingly thinking nobody was watching, got a smackdown of epic proportions. I don’t care for Scott and even I hurt for him watching this smackdown;

In reading through the above it becomes apparent, once again, that Scott plays fast and loose with any text he reads if he thinks he can manipulate the text to his ends. It is very postmodern of him to handle texts the way he does. That inability becomes a theme also in his latest diatribe against myself and Kinism which we turn to next.

Well, enough by way of introduction let us get to the meat of RSC’s libel against myself and Kinism.

First, Scott provides us with some definitions:

  1. Theonomy holds that the civil magistrate should enforce the Mosaic judicial laws, that they did not expire with the Israelite state.
  2. Christian Reconstructionism expects a coming collapse of civilization and a new, Christian civilization to be reconstructed along theonomic lines.
  3. Postmillennialism looks forward to the conversion of all the nations and an earthly glory age of considerable length (one writer suggested 40,000 years) before the return of Christ.

    #1 Above is not accurate because Theonomy holds that the civil magistrate should enforce the Mosaic judicial laws, in their general equity. Please note dear reader that if this is not true in some manner then we have no solid basis for criminalizing bestiality. And indeed it has been, in the past, the very view of some who share RSC’s R2K convicition;

    “Not being a theonomist or theocrat, I do not believe it is the state’s role to enforce religion or Christian morality. So allowing something legally is not the same as endorsing it morally. I don’t want the state punishing people for practicing homosexuality. Other Christians disagree. Fine. That’s allowed. That is the distinction. Another example – beastiality (sic) is a grotesque sin and obviously if a professing member engages in it he is subject to church discipline. But as one who leans libertarian in my politics, I would see problems with the state trying to enforce it; not wanting the state involved at all in such personal practices; I’m content to let the Lord judge it when he returns. A fellow church member might advocate for beastiality (sic) laws. Neither would be in sin whatever the side of the debate. Now if the lines are blurry in these disctinctions,(sic) that is always true in pastoral ministry dealing with real people in real cases in this fallen world.”

    Rev. Todd Bordow
    R2K Pastor

    In short, the final word on Scott’s #1 above was written in 1996 by Martin Foulner and is titled “Theonomy and the Westminster Confession.” Foulner shows clearly in that book that many of the Westminster Divines if they were not Theonomists they were clearly something very close to what we call today Theonomy.  To my knowledge 27 years later no one has answered Foulner’s book.

    On RSC’s #2 above, RSC makes it sound horrid that a social order would be governed by God’s law. What is wrong with a social order governed by God’s law? If not God’s law Scott then who’s law? Now as it regards the Scott’s complaint about the Reconstructionist idea of a coming collapse of civilization one can only wonder if RSC reads the newspaper.

    Finally, in regards to RSC’s #3 we can take the time to list just a few of the Reformed luminaries throughout history who have owned the dreaded eschatology called “Postmillennialism.”

    The greatest theologian in the first 1500 years of the Church (Augustine) was postmillennial;

    In his book Prophecy and the Church Dr O.T. Allis gives this accurate outline of Augustine’s eschatology. “Augustine taught that the millennium is to be interpreted spiritually as ful­filled in the Christian church. He held that the binding of Satan took place during the earthly ministry of our Lord (Luke 10:18); that the first resurrection is the new birth of the believer (John 5:25); and that the mil­lennium must correspond there­fore to the interadventual period or Church Age” (pp. 3-4).

    Augustine, taking Rev. 20:1-6  as a recapitulation of what preceded in the book of Revelation and living, as he did, in the first half of the first millennium, understandably enough, took the 1000 years of Rev. 20 literally and anticipated the Second Advent of Christ  to take place at the end of that time-frame. He did not believe that Revelation 20:1-6 described a new age following sequentially from the events set forth in Revelation 19. Augustine believed this interadventual period might end about 650 A.D. with a great outburst of evil, the revolt of Gog, which would be fol­lowed by the coming of Christ in judgement.

    In short, Augustine regarded the millennium as a present spiritual reign by Christ in the earth and that the Second Advent of Christ would be at the end of this period, that it would be Postmillennial. So, Augustine believed he was living in the postmillennial age.

    Besides Augustine we can count the following as just a Whitman’s sampler of those who have been postmillennial of one stripe or another throughout history;

    Thomas Goodwin
    Richard Sibbes
    John Howe
    Samuel Rutherford
    George Gillespie
    David Dick­son
    Robert Leighton
    John Browm of Wamphray
    Jonathan Edwards
    Thomas Chalmers
    Three Hodges: Charles., A. A., and C. W
    W. G. T. Shedd
    R. L. Dabney
    B. B. Warfield

    In summary then, RSC’s complaint against Postmillennialism is just him carping about his own Church history.

    Hey, I thought that RSC made his stripes by being a Church Historian. Why am I having to tell him all this about Church history?

     

     

Continuing to Critique Wolfe on Nationalism

“Here we come to Wolfe’s concept of the “nation,” which is left surprisingly ambiguous. We learn from Wolfe that the “nation” is not to be identified with the post-Westphalian nation-state,23 or with racial groups in the modern sense,24 but rather with “one’s own people-group” and “sharing . . . particularity with others.”25 Exactly what, though, demarcates one nation from another? The argument in this section unfolds at a dizzyingly high level of abstraction, with specific comparative examples in short supply. Wolfe acknowledges, to be sure, that “[t]he idea of nation is notoriously difficult to define”26—but more is required than the book provides. Surely, for instance, my college is not a “nation,” no matter how many of the phenomenological conditions for nationhood (similar customs, similar backgrounds of residents, common sense of place) it possesses.”

John Ehrett
Was Nietzsche Right?
American Reformer

1.) I have been saying this ever since I read Wolfe’s book and listened to his interviews so naturally I like it when people agree with me. Let’s be honest here, this is the only criticism of Wolfe’s book that is needed to demonstrate that it is not a serious work on Christian Nationalism. If you can’t or won’t define what a nation is then any musings on Nationalism of any stripe is just so much hooey. This is the first indicator that Wolfe’s book isn’t really a serious work on Nationalism.

2.) A second indicator that Wolfe himself isn’t really a serious Nationalism scholar is seen in a Tweet is pushed out some time ago.

“Isn’t it interesting that neo-Calvinists emphasized improving what is earthly but never mentioned the improvement of the body.”

Now, keep in mind that Wolfe takes pains in his book to promote his Natural Law Bona Fides at the expense of neo-Calvinism. Wolfe desires to ground his vision (such as it is) in Natural law theory and so neo-Calvinism has to go.

This is all well and good and understandable given Wolfe’s persuasion. However, the Tweet above is just not true and a scholar would not have shoved that Tweet out since a scholar would have known that one of the leading neo-Calvinists (Bavinck) of the 20th century wrote a long section in his “Reformed Ethics” on the necessity to improve the body.

Part B. Our Duties toward Ourselves

18. General Bodily Duties to Self
&36 General Duties (Self-Preservation)
&37 Duties toward Bodily LIfe
19. Basic Necessities of Bodily Life
&38 Food and Nourishment
&39 Clothing
20. Bodily Duties to Our Souls
&40 Our Duty to Life Itself
&41 Attending to Bodily Life in the Seventh through Ninth Commandments
&42 Duties toward the Soul

3.) Wolfe’s book on Christian Nationalism is more Rorschach test than it is a scholarly work on Christian Nationalism. I have said that repeatedly since I read the book and it is with pleasure that I notice a recent reviewer of Wolfe’s book has said the same thing.

“As a result, I anticipate that Wolfe’s book will prove to be a Rorschach test.”

John Ehrett
Article Critiquing Wolfe

I understand that there are those who desperately desire a path so as to return to a healthy Christian Nationalism. Dr. Stephen Wolfe’s book, with its Thomistic nature vs. grace Natural Law paradigm does not provide that path. What Wolfe has done for us in this publication is to make it clear that Thomistic thinking remains a non-starter when it comes to philosophy of any kind. It has also made it clear that presuppositionalists who are chomping at the bit for Christian Nationalism are, at best, only going to dine with the Thomistic Natural Law guys, with their version of Christian Nationalism with a very very long spoon.

Hoedemaker and McAtee on the Relation of Reason to Revelation

“What is this (human) reason, to the guidance of which, in the opinion of the majority of our voters, we cannot surrender ourselves (to) in the area of statecraft?

The understanding is the ability to form correct ideas, to distinguish them, to compare them, and to join them together in new judgments, whether in the form of conclusions or of compound and generic concepts. Reason is sometimes regarded, in distinction from understanding, as the ability of man to come in contact with the transcendental world, to form and apply ideas. However, if, as happened in the debate of the Lower House, reason is set against revelation, then this distinction is lost, and besides that, everything that does not stem from revelation is attributed to reason, giving rise to confusion of concepts which with an eye to all kinds of Romanist errors, has it dubious aspects.

Here reason is 1) a capacity for knowledge: the eye of the spirit with which man perceives, and the hand with which he processes what he perceives; 2) an area of knowledge under which to allocate everything that a natural man, a heathen, an unbeliever, in a word, someone who does not allow himself to be illuminated by the light of revelation, becomes acquainted with.

Let us not for the moment forget that because one can also speak of general revelation, the word ‘revelation’ is equivocal and restrict the use of the word either to the speech of God, by which He makes Himself known, His plan and will, or to Holy Scripture, in which that knowledge is contained, for this word is used in all three meanings. It is purely Romish to make it (revelation) so independent of reason as the organ of all human knowledge that it falls outside the forms of thought of our understanding, is independent of the laws to which our thinking is subject, and that, with respect to investigation of Holy Scripture, reason has no function to fulfill.

Now then, if were to set everything that man comes to know apart from Scripture against the knowledge which is the fruit of special revelation, and thus obtain, as it were, two areas indicated by the contrast ‘reason or revelation,’ ‘nature or grace,’ then we would already be on our way to Rome. It is in this connection that the proposition ‘revelation corrects reason’ becomes very questionable: one forgets that it is not reason but the misuse of reason, not the natural knowledge of God but the mutilation of that knowledge, of which this can be said. Revelation supplements reason.

We confess, it is true, that the understanding has been darkened by sin, but add in distinction to the Roman Church and to Luther: just as much in the area of natural as of the spiritual life! Our fathers used to say that, with man as with a fish, the corruption caused by sin manifests itself first in the head. Consider the Dreyfus affair and the English with regard to South Africa.

How, then, does reason stand in relation to revelation? Article 1 of our [Belgic] confession of faith gives us the answer. According to our confession, there is a natural knowledge of God which nevertheless needs to be supplemented. ‘But God makes Himself known even more clearly in His Divine Word.’ Natural and supernatural revelation are not mutually exclusive. **Armed with the latter, man sees not differently, but only better and further.

With this view, now, both nature and Scripture come into their own.

It goes without saying that in our investigation into the realm of minerals and plants, it is not Scripture to which we primarily turn, although we do not neglect the data that Scripture offers us. We operate this way in the sphere of state life as well. There have been excellent regents, well-appointed states in ancient times, the former walking by the light of nature, that latter established according to the data that all men possess.

Now, then, what place does the Bible occupy in the entirety of this human knowledge? God reveals Himself, and the way of redemption. He acts in Israel as King, Lawgiver, Judge. This revelation spreads its light on man’s origin and destination, and on the various relations in which he acts. It teaches us to see that the state and life in the state are not supreme; that Christ founded His church, why He did so, etc.

All this compels us, then, not to give up nature, experience, or history to unbelief, not to have any part of a division between nature and grace, reason and revelation: and with regard to reason, only contest the sovereignty which leaves the most important part of our knowledge out of consideration. Like Groen (van Prinsterer), we do not fight against reason on the behalf of revelation, but against the philosophical systems that seek to fashion constitutional law after they have first mutilated and falsified the concept of God.

I conclude this part of our investigation with a quotation from Groen’s Verspreide Geschriften (Scattered Writings), where he says ‘Revelation opposes the supremacy of the understanding (Reason) which does not recognize a higher principle outside itself, and itself must oppose everyone who believes in Revelation…. The main question is: does one have to submit to a higher Being who desires respect for His own laws, or is one bound to nothing and no one but oneself, which must end in arbitrariness.’ 

We therefore run no danger of looking in the Bible for a handbook of constitutional law or of giving up the independence of science to which it is dedicated. What the Bible means for that constitutional law, we will discuss in the next chapter.”

P. J. Hoedemaker
The Politics of Antithesis; The Antirevolutionary Government of Abraham Kuyper 1901-1905 — p. 53-55

1.) Reason cannot operate apart from revelation of some God or god concept. Even if reason is said to be operating independently of some revelation at that point the revelation that reason is operating in submission to is the revelation of man as autonomously considered. At that point, man, serving as his own god, melds both his revelation that he provides for himself with the reason he uses to engage that self-revelation. Revelation thus, like reason, is seen as an inescapable category. It is never a matter of whether or not revelation is being appealed to. It is, instead, always a matter of which revelation is being appealed to. That revelation can be explicitly appealed to or it can be implicitly present. The Biblical Christian is more likely to explicitly appeal to Scripture as the basis of his revelation while the humanist will typically try to hide the fact that he has a revelation that his reason is pinioned upon. The humanist will typically say something like; “this is just the way things are.”

2.) Reason is thus only as good as the Revelation that it is based upon. Where “reason” gets matters right when based on a Revelation that is in hostility to the God of the Bible and His Word, that reason is only getting it right by way of coincidence. After all, very few people have been able to be 100% in error, 100% of the time. Also, we should say that sometimes pagan reason can get matters right because it is using borrowed capital from the Christian revelation it denounces generally speaking and it generally uses this borrowed capital without even realizing that it is doing so. One glaring example of this is when the haters of Christian revelation dare to talk about the categories of “right,” and “wrong.” Those who are haters of Christian revelation, were they consistent, would never use those categories.

3.) Hoedemaker points out the difference between Rome and Protestantism on this matter. Rome sees that “reason” and “revelation” are two paths to truth. “Reason” is used in non-spiritual areas whereas “revelation” is appealed to for truth in the realm of grace. This is where Natural law finds its logical appeal, though there have been many Protestants who have embraced this bifurcation of reason and revelation.

4.) The only place I take exception to Hoedemaker above is indicated by the **, where he offers, “Armed with the latter (supernatural revelation), man sees not differently, but only better and further.” I would contend that when fallen man is viewing natural revelation through the prism of a false “supernatural” revelation man does see differently. Conversely, the Christian does see not only better and further vis-a-vis those who despise God’s special revelation, but he does see differently.

5.) The Groen van Prinsterer quote gets at everything. We do not fight against  reason as it exists within a Christian construct. We only fight against “reason” so called as it exists in a God’s revelation hating construct. One can not genuinely call “reason,” reason if that pseudo reason is arising out of a philosophical system context wherein the concept of God has first mutilated and falsified. Any putative reason arising in that context is referred to as reason only out of politeness. Such a reason poisons everything that it engages.

6.) Of course this quote, especially the last Groen van Prinsterer quote completely demolishes R2K.

McAtee on Rev. Dewey Roberts’ Complaint About An Aspect of Federal Vision

On the whole I have been quite pleased with Rev. Dewey Roberts’ book “Historic Christianity and the Federal Vision.” I am glad he wrote it. I would recommend that people read it. I am glad I have read it. I do complain vigorously against his chapter wherein he seeks to tie Theonomy and Dr. Bahnsen to Federal Vision. That chapter alone threatens to make people question his integrity on everything else he has written in the book because people are apt to think… “If he got it so wrong on theonomy how can I trust his analysis in the rest of the book?”  I was able to get past that because I know the Institutional Reformed world has been wetting their beds for 40 years now over the issue of theonomy and I can’t expect someone who belongs to that Institutional tribe to not also be a bed wetter on the subject of theonomy. As such, I can denounce that particular chapter while still supporting people reading this volume.

One other problem I have with Rev. Dewey Roberts’ book critiquing Federal Vision is that he is repeatedly complaining about how FV talks about “Covenant Faithfulness being the way to salvation,” as if there is something wrong with the idea of being covenantally faithful as the way to salvation, or that such a notion is a wrong headed idea. Now certainly if one talks about the necessity of covenantal faithfulnes being the way to salvation apart from forensic Justification then there is a parting of the ways with Reformed orthodoxy since to talk like that puts us back in Pelagian-ville. However, once united to Christ it is the case that covenantal faithfulness is the way to salvation.

Rev. Roberts’ complains against FV;

“The doctrine of final Justification is based on the view that the members of the covenant must live in obedience to God’s laws in order to be finally vindicated. Covenant faithfulness is taught as the way to salvation.”

Rev. Dewey Roberts
Historic Christianity & The Federal Vision — pg. 347

Now, Roberts has expressed his concerns that such an arrangement could well make for self-righteousness as people who believe this would be prone to pride because they become convinced that they can fully meet all the law’s stringent requirements. And there is reason, given the old man in all Christians to want to be careful about communicating that error I am sure. However, the opposite problem that Roberts doesn’t speak much to is the antinomian implication found in Roberts seeming advocacy that covenant faithfulness should not be taught as the way to salvation. Do we really want to teach God’s people that covenant faithfulness is not the way to salvation for the forensically justified?

To solve this perhaps we should resurrect the way the Puritans used to speak on obedience. They would make a distinction between “evangelical obedience” which is required of all saints with the result that covenant faithfulness was indeed the way of salvation for those in Christ, and “legal obedience” which was an obedience that was not resting on Christ’s obedience for us and in our stead. That kind of obedience can never be characterized as covenantal obedience and it cannot be required as the way of salvation because it bespeaks reprobation with its implicit belief that one’s obedience is making God a debtor who will owe the obedient one salvation.

Now, it could be the case that Rev. Dewey Roberts would agree wholeheartedly with all this but it seems to me as I read this book the way he complains about FV expecting that covenantal faithfulness as the way to salvation is seen as not wholesome to Rev. Dewey. However, to complain like Rev. Dewey has to my mind suggests that covenantal unfaithfulness is perfectly acceptable as the way to salvation. Now, again, it must be said that covenantal faithfulness as the way to salvation is never going to meet the standard of faithfulness that is required to be characterized as absolutely and fully faithful but at the same time the covenanted who are moving ever upward in terms of faithfulness on their way to salvation by God’s grace alone understand always, in the context of their obedience, that their only hope is nothing less than Jesus and His righteousness. Indeed, it is because they understand that truth that they so earnestly desire to be found to be covenantally faithful on their way to salvation.

I mean we really don’t want to teach, do we, that for the Saints the way to salvation is covenantal unfaithfulness?

Extremist Hate Group, SPLC, Has Employee Arrested For Domestic Terrorism

Southern Poverty Law Center attorney among 23 arrested for domestic terrorism

“An attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center was arrested for domestic terrorism in a group of 23 who allegedly violently attacked the future site of an Atlanta police training facility.

Thomas Webb Jurgens, 28, was rounded up with the other violent protesters for throwing Molotov cocktails, fireworks, rocks, and bricks at the facility.

Liberals and others have expressed outrage over plans to build a $90 million police training facility over 85 acres just outside the city.”

The reason I post this is due to the fact that this extremist hate group (the SPLC) had the chutzpah to list Charlotte Christ the King Reformed Church as a extremist hate group back in 2020.

Our crime according to the SPLC? Our crime is that we are “White Nationalist.” Actually, if they had said, “White Christian Nationalist” they would have been more precise.

Our Church Fathers believed that races were distinct and should organize themselves into nations that would likewise be distinct and we merely concur with those who have gone before, contra the Marxist bubbleheads in the Church today;

” [The] differences between the Caucasian, Mongolian, and Negro races, which is known to have been as distinctly marked two or three thousand years before Christ as it is now. . . . [T]hese varieties of race are not the effect of the blind operation of physical causes, but by those cause as intelligently guided by God for the accomplishment of some wise purpose. . . . God fashions the different races of men in their peculiarities to suit them to the regions which they inhabit.”

Charles Hodge (1797-1878)
Systematic Theology, Volume 2, Chapter 1, Section 3 (1872–73)

“You can’t change my mind about God having made us the way we are. The yellow man and the white man and the black man. God made our races. I know the Marxists and the bubbleheads say: “Oh, that’s old-fashioned baloney! Everybody should get together and intermarry and pretty soon there won’t be races, and where there are no races there won’t be any hate, and if there’s no hate, there won’t be any war.” Oh, for cotton batting to stuff in the mouths of people who don’t know better than that!

A.W. Tozer

“I don’t believe [racial integration] is what the Bible teaches. Even though we may have transgressed the boundaries of nationhood and of peoplehood, it seems to me that God did create man of one blood in order that he may dwell as different nations throughout the world. But after the fall, when sinful man cosmopolitanly – meaning by that, with a desire to obliterate separate nationhood, with a desire to build a sort of United Nations organization under the Tower of Babel…attempted to resist developing peoplehood…[God confused the tongues of men]…because men had said, ‘Let us build a city and a tower which will stretch up to heaven lest we be scattered’… Pentecost sanctified the legitimacy of separate nationality rather than saying this is something we should outgrow… In fact, even in the new earth to come, after the Second Coming of Christ, we are told that the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of the heavenly Jerusalem, and the kings of the earth shall bring the glory and the honor—the cultural treasures—of the nations into it… But nowhere in Scripture are any indications to be found that such peoples should ever be amalgamated into one huge nation.

“In another fourteen years, the future looks bleak for White Christians everywhere. In 1900, Europe possessed two-thirds of the world’s Christians. By 2025, that number will fall below 20% — with most Christians living in the Third World of Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Then, nearly 75% of the world’s Catholics will be Non-Western Mestizos or Black Africans. Right now, Nigeria has the world’s largest Catholic Theological School. India has more Christians than most Western nations. And Jesus is more and more being portrayed with a dark skin. By 2050, more than 80% of Catholics in the U.S. will be of Non-Western origins. Only a fraction of Anglicans will be English. Lutherans, Presbyterians and other mainstream denominations will find their chief centres of growth in Africa, Asia and Latin America — often syncretistically absorbing large quantities of Pre-Christian Paganism as revived Voo-dooism and increasing ancestor-worship. This “Christianity” rapidly degenerates into an immigrationistic, prolific and socialistic jungle-religion.”

Dr. F.N. Lee circa 2011
Christian-Afrikaners pg. 87

These kind of quotes can be repeated countless times over. The fact that the SPLC, a Christ hating organization if there ever was one, put me on their extremist hate list, only says to me that I must be doing something right.

However, the point of this post is to point out that it is the SPLC who are the haters and their slush fund of circa 500million dollars, can’t obviate who the haters really are.

Keep in mind that the extremist hate group known as the SPLC works hand in glove with the FBI and other FED agencies in order to “help” the FEDS keep an eye on extremist hate groups. Don’t miss the irony of the largest extremist hate group in America (the SPLC) being the organization that the FEDS go to in order to identify “extremist hate groups.”

Clearly, this is the case here of the FOX guarding the Henhouse. Clearly, the only ones who land on these extremist hate lists are those who hate what the extremist hate group, (the SPLC), love.

Neither I, nor anybody in the Church I serve has been arrested for rioting and domestic terrorism like this SPLC lawyer employee listed above.