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Indiana Wesleyan University & The Wesleyan Church — Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

“The Christian college and university as an industry — as an organization — is compromised. There are very few Christian schools that I would recommend people consider attending these days because a wolf in sheep’s clothing is dangerous but a wolf in shepherd’s clothing is deadly. In many ways today I’d rather send my kids to a state university where at least you know that wolves are wolves and prepare the kid accordingly than send them off to a ‘Christian’ institution that is nothing but a wolf in shepherd’s clothing.”

Dr. Everett Piper
Former 17 year President of Oklahoma Wesleyan University

I began as a Wesleyan. It was in the Wesleyan Church I was baptized. It was in the Wesleyan Church I first learned that God was big and man was small. In the Wesleyan Church, I had my first friends. In the Wesleyan Church every summer I attended one week of youth camp revival where we all got religion all over again every year. After high school, which was finished while living with a generous family who was members with me of the Wesleyan Church, I attended a Wesleyan college where I earned my undergraduate degree.

Because of the above, I will always have a sense of gratitude for the Wesleyan church even if now I look back and see that in many respects, doctrinally speaking, Wesleyan-Arminian theology was a very weak and immature expression of Christianity. I will always thank God that the Wesleyan church was a stable place for a very unstable kid like me to find safety. Indeed, it is not too much to say that I am who I am, in part because of how God used the Wesleyan church in the early years.

It is the fact that I am so grateful that will make the rest of this post more difficult.

When I was connected to the Wesleyan church it was thought of as a conservative institution. It remembered its old paths and sought to find a connection between where they were in the present to their storied past. They were thick with a conservative pietism that embraced strict sabbath observance, a forbidding of playing cards, dancing with girls, and drinking alcohol.

All that now is in the rearview mirror and if it had been replaced by a genuine biblical and conservative piety you wouldn’t find me complaining. However, the piety that is driving the Wesleyan car these days is anchored in WOKENESS, with its political correctness, critical race theory, intersectionality and cultural Marxism in general.

This breaks my heart.

My first hint of this came several years ago when I engaged Professor Ken Schenck here on Iron Ink in a series of discussions that revealed that Dr. Schenck had been drinking from a fountain with some relation to neo-orthodoxy. I found Dr. Schenck to be a delightful sparring partner as he was just as flippant, condescending, and arrogant as myself. Be that as it may, he clearly was not orthodox in any sense as related to historic Christianity. There was more Barth, Brunner, Schleimarcher, and Kierkegaard about Schenck than there was Wesley, Asbury, Coke, or Cartwright.

However, I let that go until years later it came to my attention via a couple of recent Indiana Wesleyan graduates whom I had made an acquaintance with that the progressive leftism at Indiana Wesleyan had gone from a mere skin rash to a case of cultural Marxism boils covering the whole Institutional body. It is not just Ken Schenck now, but the Cultural Marxist push comes also from full-on WOKE gate-keepers like Dr. Rusty Hawkins (Professor of History/Humanities at Indiana Wesleyan), Wayne Schmidt and JoAnn Lyon (each formerly holding the title of General Secretary of the Wesleyan Church) and Dr. Katie Karnehm-Esh (Professor of Creative Writing at Indiana Wesleyan).

Dr. Rusty Hawkins has co-edited a book WOKE book on “Racism” and has another book in the chute taking up the Cultural Marxist cudgel of “White Privilege.” Schmidt and Lyon have both pressed for ever-expanding numbers of immigrants and refugees in their positions at the Wesleyan Church. Dr. Karnehm-Esh prides herself in her status as social justice warrior.

Hawkins is especially ironic given that just a little over a decade ago Dr. Glenn E. Martin was the head of the History Department at Indiana Wesleyan University. Martin was as opposite of Hawkins as one can imagine, being a Biblical Christian who was sympathetic to the South in his teaching. This is the very opposite of Hawkins whose new book is titled; “The Bible Told Them So: Southern White Christians’ Fight against Racial Equality,“ which argues that white Christians’ theology informed and shaped their resistance to the civil rights movement in the South. (As an aside, I quite agree with Hawkins that white Christians’ theology informed and shaped their resistance to the civil rights movement in the South. I would only disagree with Hawkins that fighting the Communism that was the foundation of the Civil Rights movement was a bad thing.)

The WOKENESS of Hawkins was again on display when he said;

“Racism, my friends, is our country’s original sin. And with the exception of a few rare instances, the white church in the United States has been complicit in supporting this sin. When you take into consideration the racial history of the United States, it should come as no surprise whatsoever that the American church is deeply divided along racial lines. It’s difficult to build bridges between the races inside the church when, for so long, the white church helped to support the structures that kept the races apart.”

Further evidence of WOKENESS has popped up from time to time in recent years. In 2014 one of the Indiana Wesleyan Professors confessed that he was both pro-choice and pro-life. In 2017 political correctness, as pursued by the John Wesley Honors program faculty and administrators, showed its ugly claws by bouncing a student (Micah Sample) because he refused to wear a politically correct Halloween costume and further had the temerity to say such a policy was stupid.

However, the word is beginning to spread about Indiana Wesleyan University and the Wesleyan Church at large. This is in part due to a new documentary film released titled, “Enemies Within The Church.” This new documentary considers the failures of the Wesleyan Church, as well as other Evangelical Institutions, and warns parents that they are doing their children a disservice to Christ by sending their children to “Christian” Institutions like Indiana Wesleyan Church. Indeed, the danger is so great that Sample, as interviewed in the documentary suggests that ministerial graduates of Indiana Wesleyan University will be spreading the Gospel of Cultural Marxism in the Churches they will be charged to lead and not the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Having written the above it should be clear that this malaise in the Institutional Church is not limited to the Wesleyan Church. It is an infection that is pandemic among the Institutional churches in the West. In the Presbyterian Church of America for every Rusty Hawkins, there is a Sean Michael Lucas. For every Wayne Schmidt, there is a J. Ligon Duncan. In the Orthodox Presbyterian Church for every Wesleyan Katie Karnehm-Esh there is an Amy Byrd.

Simply put the institutional visible church in the West is sick beyond repair and those who are serious about their undoubted Catholic Christian faith have to think creatively to avoid the infection that the visible Church in the West is spreading.

Racism as an Inescapable Category?

“Antiracism” permits many people to practice racism vicariously by adopting the cause of every race but their own.

Wilmot Robertson

The Dispossessed Majority

In this quote, Robertson seems to be defining racism as a “preference for one’s own ethnic people group.” I presume that because Robertson talks about racism as “adopting the cause.” I only note this because so often in conversations about racism the word is left undefined. Robertson has defined it for us here and in doing so has also informed us that “racism” is an inescapable category. Per Robertson, if you are not adopting the cause of your own people you are, by default, adopting the cause of those who were formerly not your people but who are now your people because you have adopted their cause.

Think of those people who are advocating for more immigration or for amnesty or open borders. Think of those voluntary agencies that help relocate putative refugees and are so often tied to Church organizations. In that advocacy, those people have not avoided being champions for a particular race and they have not avoided being racist as against a particular people. They have not shed themselves of “racism.” Instead, they have taken up the cause for the stranger and the alien as against their own people. They have determined to render an inheritance to the stranger as opposed to their own children. What they have not done is eliminated their own ethnic bias. They simply now are biased against their people and are biased for those who are displacing their extended family. They have gone from an ethnic bias for their people to an ethnic bias for the stranger and the alien.

Of Family & Adoption … A Concise Rebuttal

Beau M. Vonira has been advancing the thesis the family is not organized around blood relations, insisting instead that lineage and inheritance in the Bible is “always ethical/judicial, that is, by adoption.”

His position that wants to pretend that adoptions, being exceptions to the blood basis of families, prove that blood is meaningless to define families is beyond comprehensible. If not for blood bonds, there would be no families and thus there could be no adoption into families. Families have to exist by blood before adoption, as a gracious exception, can even be considered, just as the Israelites had to descend from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by blood before the Gentiles could be adopted.

Mr. Vonira’s continues to pursue the “exception as the rule” fallacy. For example, having your prophet marry a whore is an exception. Having your prophet strip and run around naked is an exception. Surely everyone can see that exceptions are not the basis upon which we can overthrow the rule.

We gladly concede that exceptions exist. Sons can be disinherited. Adoption does occur. But to suggest that such exceptions overthrow the rule so that lineage and inheritance are normatively not by ties of blood and kin is to agree, in principle, with those today who are insisting that a Franken-family is just as much a family as a blood family.

Blackstone & McAtee On Marriage & Voting

“The husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.”

Judge William Blackstone

This provided one argument against women’s suffrage. The woman didn’t need the vote because she voted in the Husband. When the husband voted as covenant head the wife voted by her covenant head proxy. Did women ever lack the vote then? No, not in Christian history. She always voted in her husband. As it stands now the wife “votes” in a way that technically separates her from her husband. So what else was women’s suffrage but an incremental declaration of universal divorce? The institution of marriage was weakened in all existing and future marriages as women were encouraged to act apart from their husbands.

When the woman is allowed to vote it potentially strips the husband of the leadership in the home as a wife can potentially negate her husband’s vote. Further, when women vote, statistics demonstrate that the weight of their vote is for paternalistic statist policies supported by politicians. Women are created to desire protection and security and because of that, the weight of their vote will be (and historically have been) for candidates who promise protection and security, even at the cost of liberty. Ironically, when women vote, they tend to vote for candidates who promise from the state what their husbands ought to be but often are not providing.

So, we see, that women having the vote aids and abets in the destruction of the Biblical family unit as women in voting have an independence from their husbands that was never present before women were given the vote. Women voting also has the unhappy consequence of hardening women as they are forced to enter the coarsening world of politics. Biblically, we see the woman’s role as creating hearth and home as well as nurturing children. It is not without reason that women were once referred to as the “fairer” and even the “gentler” sex. As we have pressed women into both the voting booth and workplace the effect has been a coarsening of the “fairer sex,” so that she is just as bawdy and just as full of rough and tumble as the guys. We lose some of the feminines in our women when they become masters of the political realm.

We no longer think that women not voting is”fair.” There is a reason why we no longer think that fair and that reason is that we hate biblical covenantalism, we hate God’s law, and we hate God’s law order. Further, the reason we think this is not fair is that we have so reinterpreted “equality” that we think that if members of both sexes can’t do the same exact thing that they, therefore, are not “equal.” However, because a woman might not be allowed by law to vote, does not mean that therefore said woman is not equal to her husband. It merely means that she is different than her husband. As a man, I am not able to give birth to children. That does not lead me to conclude I am not equal to women.

Of course, this is a much older way of thinking as the Blackstone quote demonstrates and so I do not expect it to be very popular or to be cheered in the streets.

One more practical note we need to add here. If Biblical Christians kept their wives from voting given the current arrangement then obviously the statists would even have a higher proportion of the vote. Because of this, my recommendation is for husbands and wives to sit down and converse before going to vote in order to make sure that both will be voting for the same slate of candidates. This is what my wife and I have done for decades now. To my knowledge, my wife has never canceled my vote with her vote.

Structure & Direction — And Why R2K Sucks as Theology

As Christians, we must keep in mind the distinction between what has been called ‘structure,’ and ‘direction.’ When we think about who Christ really is he is the ‘Son of God. This is where the Apostle John begins in his Gospel; “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.” St. John introduces us, as he continues, to the fact that the person of Christ is both divine and human. So, from John, as inspired by the Holy Spirit, we learn that the Word (Christ) is the creator (cmp. Colossians 1:16-17) as well as the Redeemer. Now we tend to think in terms of cross-centered Christianity as Christians, and we know what the heart behind that is (that we believe that Jesus died for our sins) but we don’t see that the resurrection, the ascension, and the session of Jesus Christ in the seat of authority is as important for our salvation as His death on the cross because Christ is the Creator as well as the Redeemer and those two realities while distinguishable can never be separated and divorced from one from another. This is important because His redemptive work is about restoring the creation that was alienated from Him. You see, it wasn’t just we as a people who were alienated from God by our sin. In our sins we now seek now to alienate God’s creation from Him. Because of this the structures and norms that God has established for creation — everything from what we call laws like ‘law of gravity,’ or the ‘law of 2nd thermodynamic,’ through to matters such as the norms for marriage and family,– to cite just a few concrete examples that God has established — these are the structures that God has established at creation.

Now, these norms, in our sin and rebellion fallen men, seeking to be consistent with his hatred of God and God’s order are seeking to obliterate. (Though increasingly fallen man is trying to play with the more impermeable category of the fixed laws of creation) We see this today of course in the attempt to completely redefine marriage so that people of the same sex can marry and we see this in the Tranny movement as men and women seek to rip off their gender identity appointed by God, we see this in our putting women in front line military and first responders positions, we see this by the Church putting women in the pulpit. In all this, you have a war on God and His law-word for man’s personal and social order. All of this overturning of God’s order is an attempt by fallen man in his alienation from God to work to the end of alienating God’s own creation from God Himself. It is just a visible expression of fallen man’s resolve that “we will not have God rule over us.” We see therefore we have these parallel tracks in creation. First we have these creational laws and norms and those laws and norms are inescapable and so impinge on everybody’s lives every day.

We are all creatures of God as God’s image-bearers and as living in God’s creation. Mankind lives Coram Deo – before the face of God – and living before the face of God he can not – try as he might – escape God’s realities of social order laws and norms. Everything about us is oriented towards our creator and sin can be defined as that attempt of fallen man to reorient himself away from God as creator. Because of all this God’s creational structures and norms despite our sin do not go away. We see this in marriage as just one example. People can redefine marriage all they ruddy well like but Jesus spoke of God’s creational norm for marriage when He cited God’s work in the garden and man’s re- definitions cannot undo that norm. These are all God’s structures and those structures and norms as they fell from God’s hands are very good.

The problem comes then not from the structures and the laws and norms that go with God’s creational structures. The problem enters in, in what we are calling direction. Here you have these God-ordained and given creational structures, laws, and norms but fallen man seeks to pervert these structures by the God dismissing way he desires to direct them. So, for example, God made sex as one of the structures of man, and sex as a structure is good but man wanting to de-god God and en-god himself as god moves that structure in a sinful direction via porn, the LGBTQ movement, adultery, pedophilia, etc. that sullies the whole structure.

However, the structure qua structure remains very good. The problem is not the structure but the direction that fallen man has taken the God-given creational structure. In all this malfeasance with God’s structures, man is serving himself as the creation having given up God as the Creator (Romans 1). So, we see that when man refuses to worship God the Creator he worships himself as the creator, and in doing so he absolutely poisons all the creational structures, norms, and laws as they fell from God’s hands. Still, those creational structures, norms, and laws, qua creational structures, norms, and law, remain in themselves “very good” because they were given and established by God.

Now, we connect all this with Christ as Creator and Redeemer. When Christ comes His purpose as Redeemer is to restore all that He established as Creator. It is not that Christ only restores fallen man (which He certainly does) but in restoring fallen men He restores the direction fallen man pursues in these creational categories of structure, norms, and laws as they originally fell from His hand. Because of this man, as redeemed, is now Christ’s agent in restoring all these structures, norms, and laws back to their original intent as redeemed man handles these structures, norms, and laws, in submission to His Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The shorthand language for this is that redeemed men seek to walk in terms of God’s Kingdom. Because of this family life is renewed once again under Christ’s authority for structures, norms, and laws, civil life is renewed once again under Christ’s authority for structures, norms, and laws., education is renewed once again under Christ’s authority for structures, norms, and laws, the law is renewed once again under Christ’s authority for structures, norms, and laws, and as this happens across the board all of culture as a whole is renewed once again under Christ’s authority for structures, norms and laws as converted men are set on a redeemed and reconciled direction. We cease then to be a people who are seeking to alienate God from His creation and instead become a people who are no longer alienated from God and His creational structures.

Now, please notice the difference between this understanding of Christianity vis-a-vis the understanding of Radical Two Kingdom theology (R2K) that is predominantly taught in our Seminaries today. R2K explicitly says that the structures are common and in being common there is no such thing as a particularly Christian direction as compared with a pagan direction. R2K, contrary to the vision briefly outlined above insists that it is not possible to have Christian culture, Christian art, Christian nations, or Christian anything as that anything lies in the common realm.

If culture is defined as the public expression of a people’s worship so that one can identify the God that the public is worshiping by looking at its culture then the effect of the spread of Christianity will be a change of direction in terms of the culture and with that change of direction, there will be a change of culture.

Jesus Christ does not reconcile and redeem fallen men without that reconciliation and redemption altering the trajectory of culture so that the creational structures, laws, and norms as they fell from the hand of God are once again pursued in Christ-honoring direction.