The CREC & It’s Ecclesio-olatry

The CREC crowd is out there insisting that when one is converted they are not only converted from death unto life but they are also converted from their old family to a new family discovered as and in the Church. Allow me to contend this is yet another example of grace destroying nature that is so ubiquitous in the CREC ecclesiolatry model that is owned by the CREC.

Below we find a Whitman’s sampler of quotes sustaining the claim above;

“I believe that familism is a pervasive error in American Christianity….In heaven, however, the family is not the nuclear, biological family. Jesus said that the natural family, not the state, would be the greatest enemy of His kingdom. The new family is the church. The parents are not the biological parents, but the elders of the church, who act for Christ. The natural, biological family is dead in Adam, and its children are born dead.”

James B. Jordan
(Biblical Horizons » No. 21: A Letter on Paedocommunion)

“Christian universalism takes concrete political form in a global communion of saints. It’s an ecclesial universalism. The bonds that connect Christians across national boundaries are deeper and stronger than bonds of blood or culture.”

– Peter Leithart
First Things — August 2022
Against National Conservatism

“Men and women are called upon to be separated from their natural identities as members of race and class and be given a new Spiritual identity by being added to the body of Christ in baptism.”

Mark Horne

“The Church is God’s greatest masterpiece. It is not a man-made institution; it is the creation of God the Father, Son and Spirit….The Church is made new by the Pentecostal fire of Acts 2. She is the undoing of Babel. Whereas in Babel God separated the families of the earth, in the Church Christ brings the nations of the earth together to form one holy and undivided family.”

The Church-Friendly Family
Randy Booth and Rich Lusk XVI
(This is from Uri Brito’s intro)

“We must affirm the supremacy of the Church among all the spheres and institutions of human life by placing ourselves within the life and mission of the Church.”

The Church-Friendly Family
Randy Booth and Rich Lusk XVII
(This is from Uri Brito’s intro)

“He even initially separates us from our family so that new families can emerge…The Church is an outpost of the kingdom of God. From there we are sent back to our families to establish outposts of the Church.”

Randy Booth and Rich Lusk
The Church-Friendly Family — p. 2

“We must come to see the Church as the primary family and our individual families as outposts of the Church…The Church, then, is the primary institution of society.”

Randy Booth and Rich Lusk
–The Church-Friendly Family — p. 20

“The Church is not an institution ordained to assist the family so that it can be a blessing to the world rather than a curse. The same is true for the State. The Church holds the place of primacy–always. If it is the Body of Christ, then there’s no other place for it.”

Randy Booth and Rich Lusk
The Church-Friendly Family — p. 21

First, we want to note that all of the above has a very Roman Catholic feel about it. Remember, Rome always insisted that were any Institution to have legitimacy it had to, in some fashion, come into the Church and so be under its umbrella of legitimacy. This kind of hegemony won its spurs when Henry IV went to Canossa to submit to Pope Gregory VII. There the Church had gained its primacy over the state and by extension over all things. The CREC looks to be demanding that the modern family go to Canossa to gain legitimacy.

Second, the admonition that we find in I Timothy 5:4f cuts against this ecclesiolatry model that is being pushed by acolytes in the CREC;

4 … But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God.

Note the centrality of the family in its proper role. The inspired Apostle is telling Timothy and the Church that it is the family’s natural role to be the first to provide for their own elderly over and above the Church.

Then there is the account in Acts 6 which demonstrates, just as I Timothy 5 demonstrates how much natural relations, not only character qualities, impacts the life of the Church and not the reverse of that which is being pushed by the ecclesiolaters in the CREC. Notice in Acts 6 that in the midst of conflict between ethnic lines (The matter of provision for Hebrews Jewish widows vs. the provision of Grecian Jewish widows in the Church) the Church chooses Hellenistic Deacons to address the needs of their Grecian widowed women-folk who were being overlooked (Acts 6:1, 5). This is communicating that family realities are not necessarily superseded once one is converted and comes into the Church.

Further the fact that the realities of nature ordained by God continue to have reality and impact in the Church is seen by the fact that women are not allowed to hold office in the Church (cf. 1 Cor. 14:34–35; 1 Tim. 2:12). and that quite without any denial that women have all the spiritual benefits of being united to Christ.

Indeed the centrality of the family as in its own nature sphere is not even eclipsed in the New Jerusalem where in the book of Revelation we see that the New Jerusalem is populated by the nations in their nations (Rev. 20-21). Even the resurrected and now glorified saints will not lose their familial or community identities that were characteristic of them in the fallen world (cf. Rev. 7:9). The nations as nations come walk in the new Jerusalem by the glory of God’s presence and light.

So, we see the error that the ecclesiolaters in the CREC are making in their hyper-prioritizing of the church. One is tempted to say that they are trying to immanentize the eschaton by pulling heaven down to earth but that is not even accurate as we see above since even in the eschaton the both family and church have an existence.

I am not familial-centric though that is what I’ll be accused of, but neither am I ecclesiocentric or an ecclesiolater. I believe that the Church and the Family are both ordained of God to work in a harmony of interest to extend the crown rights of Jesus Christ into every area of life. I believe the church and the family are the left leg and the right leg of walking the Christian life. Both are necessary and we are left crippled without both legs being the same length.

 

The Point of Linkage Between the R2K Dispute & The Kinism Dispute

“The R2K crowd is willing to cede the point that Christ’s spiritual kingdom or mediatorial kingdom is synonymous with the church. This is the classic non roman position. But they are unwilling to admit that Christ’s kingdom of power exists at all. The Kuyperians are unwilling to admit that there is a distinction between the kingdom of grace and the kingdom of power at all. Thus they are unable to draw a distinction between grace and the natural order. Or if they do nature is bad and so must be eliminated. Grace eats up nature and your church membership becomes more fundamental to your being than your father’s blood.

Both are errors. Neither comport with magisterial Protestantism or confessional Christianity.”

Robert Hoyle

Over the years here at Iron Ink two of my main foils (though not my only adversaries) have been R2K and “Christian” Alienism. What Robert offers above shows the reason for that. There is linkage between these two errors. Now, Robert and I do not agree on Natural Law scholastic theology but all theologians talk about the relationship between nature and grace. It has been a Reformed motif over the centuries that “grace restores/renews nature.” 

The CREC wants grace at the expense of nature. This is seen in Doug Wilson’s silly diatribes against biblical Kinism…. well, except when it is his Kin who are at stake. When it is his kin at stake then suddenly we begin to smell ethnic puffery. Take for example these two paragraphs from Pope Douglas read back to back;

I.) Doug “I hate white Kinism” Wilson

“We of course reject all such ethnic pufferies, and we do so with just the right amount of loathing…By making absolutely everything about superficial ethnicity indicators, it turns out that some have learned this lesson in reactionary ways, and have embraced their superficial ethnicity indicators. Instead of being ASHAMED of this made-up reality, they became PROUD of this made-up reality. And that’s how we got a collection of Proud Boys going down to heckle folks at an Antifa rally, with the Boys in question made up of Scots, Norwegians, Germans, and a Ukrainian, arms locked, singing a Celtic war song. This is nothing more than playing tribal dress-ups, or ethnic cosplay, and all of it based on nothing more than a shared susceptibility to sunburn. ” –Doug Wilson

II.) Doug “I love me some Jewish Kinism” Wilson

“My affection for Israel is personal, in addition to being theological and political. My wife’s great-great-grandfather was Rabbi Cohn, one of my co-grandfathers is a Christian Jew, my kids and grandkids have cousins who are Israeli, and according to AncestryDNA, I myself am 2% European Jewish. Nancy is 11% European Jew, her mother 26%. What all this amounts to is that our family would be much more involved on an active personal level if terrorists overran Israel than we would be if terrorists overran Vermont.” — Douglas Wilson

At least in the first paragraph nature is just so much “ethnic puffery” that is to be met with just the right loathing of all those ethnic pufferers who share the common trait of susceptibility to sunburn. However, in the second paragraph its all bagels and matzo ball soup serious.

The CREC would replace the ethnic puffery of the first paragraph with ecclesiocentrism and grace. White boy summer ethnic puffery is not important. What is important for the CREC (at least for white boy summer) is grace over nature unless, of course unless all your grandchildren are descendants of Rabbi Cohn. This may be accounted by the wide spread admission of ecclesiocentrism that is found in the CREC.  What is important per the Moscow boys is not the family (the ground zero for ethnic considerations). What is important is the Church. Apparently, for the CREC types it is in the Church we live and move and have our being.

However, not to be outdone, R2K comes along with their famous condescending “tut, tut, tutting,” to remind us that the CREC is wrong. It is not grace eclipsing nature. Rather, it is grace and nature set in dualistic compartmentalization from one another. This explains why the grand Pu-bah of R2K can say things like;

“God is not redeeming the cultural activities and institutions of this world”…“Those who hold a traditional Protestant view of justification consistently should not find a redemptive transformationist perspective attractive.”

David Van Drunen — Westminster Seminary California Professor
“Living in God’s Two Kingdoms”, pp. 13–21.

One readily sees here that grace and nature have been compartmentalized from one another. Grace is an upper story reality and nature is a lower story reality and never the twain shall meet institutionally speaking.

So to reduce to a Venn diagram

CREC = Grace Supplants Nature (No unapproved of ethnic puffery allowed)
Materialism = Nature is all there is (The Cosmos is all there is)
R2K = Grace and Nature exist in a dualistic ying & yang (Secularism forever)
Rome = Nature must come under Grace for Nature to count
(This explains why for Rome everything had to come into the Church to be Holy.)
Animism = Spiritual is all there is

To the contrary, for right-minded people it is the case that the Church is a central expression of the Kingdom but it is not the only expression of the Kingdom. The Kingdom of God, being among us, or in our midst (Luke 17:21) is a Kingdom that is not only redemptive as it works in the Church with its means of Grace in the Word and Sacrament unto the end of opening and closing the Kingdom, but the Kingdom is also authoritarian as it works as under Christ’s Kingship through redeemed Kingdom men, who, by the means of taking every thought captive to Christ and doing all things to the glory of God unto, labor unto the end of the ongoing expansion of the already present Kingdom of God so that one day the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.
The model is found in the Incarnation. Taking seriously the Council of Chalcedon’s definition of the incarnation is how one avoids going off the road into either the R2k ditch or the CREC ditch which in the end both lead to Gnosticism by either over materialization or over spiritualization.

R2K R. Scott Clark Attacks Oklahoma Gov. Stitt For Claiming Oklahoma For Christ

“Gov. Stitt of Oklahoma had no business as governor claiming Oklahoma for Christ. As much as it is his vocation as a Christian and as a private person to advance the Kingdom of God in Oklahoma, through the due use of the means of grace, by prayer, witness, etc., that is not his vocation before the Lord as governor. His vocation as governor is to secure justice for all the citizens of the state and to fulfill his natural, secular responsibilities.”

Dr. R. Scott Clark
Westminster-Cal R2K Professor
Heretic

1.) Note that Oklahoma, per R2K, is NOT to be claimed for Christ. This is classic R2K doctrine. Christ does not rule Oklahoma explicitly but only by means of Natural law. R2K calls this “Christ ruling by He left hand.” Now, keep in mind that all the other gods out there are just delirious with delight over this R2K doctrine because as Oklahoma is not to be claimed for Christ that means the door is open for the adherents of the competing gods of the false religions to claim Oklahoma for their gods. I promise you that the other gods are not shy whatsoever in the drive for hegemony.

And indeed, truth be told, Scott’s god is Enlightenment pluralism and Scott is doing his damnedest to make sure his god reigns. Of course this clearly communicates that Scott’s Christ and my Christ are different Christs.

2.) No Christian who is a public person, per Clark’s R2K, is to be a public Christian. When Gov. Sitt of Oklahoma becomes Governor he is, per Escondido’s R2K, supposed to sit aside his private convictions in order to rule as a public person.

3.) Notice that Scott is defining justice in a non-biblical direction. Justice can only be had by presupposing the rule of King Christ. It is Christ and His Law-Word which defines “justice.” If Christ is not King of Oklahoma it is not possible for Oklahoma to have justice. No King Christ … no law of Christ. No law of Christ … no justice. Justice in Scott’s worldview is a complete abstraction w/ no concrete roots in Biblical Christianity.

4.) Note how Scott and his R2K divides the world into a secular realm and an non-secular realm. Gov. Sitt of Oklahoma has secular responsibilities that should not find his Christian faith impinging upon. Politically speaking this is pure Libertarianism.

5.) How in the world does Scott square all this with the Belgic Confession of Faith which teaches;

“Their (Magistrate) office is not only to have regard unto and watch for the welfare of the civil state, but also to protect the sacred ministry, that the kingdom of Christ may thus be promoted. They must therefore countenance the preaching of the Word of the gospel everywhere, that God may be honored and worshipped by every one, as He commands in His Word.”

Love of Faith … Love of Place … Love of Fathers

“Our country is ourselves. It is our villages, our altars, our graves, all that our fathers loved before us. Our country is our land, our faith, our King… But their country (Those of the French Revolution) — what is it? Do you understand? Do you? … they have it in their brains; we have it under our feet… Theirs is as old as the Devil, this world that they call new and that they wish to found in the absence of God…. They say we are slaves of the ancient superstitions; it makes us laugh! But in the face of these demons who rise up again century after century, we are youth, gentlemen. We are the youth of God, the youth of fidelity! And this youth will preserve, for its own and its children, true humanity and liberty of soul.”

Francois-Athanase Charette
Royalist during French Revolution

Leader of the Peasants of the French district of Machecoul
Charette would later forfeit his own life opposing the Revolution.

Notice here that what Charette is giving us is the difference between those who hate Nationalism, opting instead for some kind of vision of a “propositional nation” — a nation as Charette puts it; “that is only in their brains.” This is how Charette analyzed the French Revolution. It was a matter of those who hated God and who embraced the idea of France as an idea vis-a-vis those who loved their faith, their home, their fathers, and their land.

Charette understood that his enemy wanted to re-make the world, and further that they wanted to remake it absent any notion of God and absent any respect for past Christian traditions, past bonds of faith and family, and any past sense of belonging to a place.

Charette said this enemy rises century after century and so they do. Charette faced them in Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Fouquier-Tinville and Desmoulins. After the French Revolution they arose again in the European Revolutions of 1848, in the US Yankee Armies of 1861-1877, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918, the Communist Revolution in China in 1949, and elsewhere since 1789. We face them today in the NWO/Great Reset/Deep State. We face them in Michigan in Whitmer, Benson, and Nessel. We face them in the Washington in just about every elected and appointed office.

We can never defeat this enemy of Christ and His people if we do not understand where the lines are drawn. We have to understand that those who would embrace propositional nationhood are doing the devil’s work even if they shout constantly; “Lord, Lord, have we not done great things in your name?”

The hour is late. We need to understand the foundational issues. The haters of Christ go after Christ via the backdoor of attacking place, home, faith, and the honored Christian traditions of the storied past.

Charette was right. The CREC’s war on Kinism with its allegiance to place, home, faith and the honored Christian traditions of the storied past is wrong.

Heidelberg Catechism — Q. 25

Several years ago I began a project of providing a simple commentary of sorts on the Heidelberg catechism. I got up to question 24 before I tailed off. Recently, I have had one of the Father’s in the Church suggest that I should take this back up again. So, I have decided to do so for the benefit of the whole Church. I will try to do a question and answer daily. There may be days I do more. I figure if I can accomplish 5 questions a week I can finish this is less than 4 months (since I already have 24 questions finished.) Those previous entries on the Heidelberg catechism are listed under “Caleb’s Baptism” on Iron Ink for those who desire to peruse those.

I hope this can be of benefit to folks. Allow me to say that there are works out there on the Heidelberg Catechism. Herman Hokesema’s “Triple Knowledge” is excellent but in three volumes it will probably task most families. G. I. Williamson’s commentary is also solid. Current readers will want to keep before them that in the work that is being attempted here I have family devotions in mind. As such I am not going to be all Herman Hoeksema writing three volumes. (Though I highly recommend Hoeksema’s work for mature believers.)

With that let us turn to question 25 today;

Question 25: Since there is but one only divine essence,4 why speakest thou of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?

Answer: Because God hath so revealed Himself in His Word,5 that these three distinct persons are the one only true and eternal God.

We know that God in one divine essence from the Scripture’s themselves. In Deuteronomy 6:4, as one example, we have the famous Hebrew Shema. The Hebrew word “Shema” means “Hear” and it opens the passage cited;

4Deut. 6:4, Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD.

Every Hebrew child would have been taught this from the crib. The reason it was pounded into their head, besides being true, was because the Hebrews lived in and among polytheistic and henotheistic cultures. These cultures owned pantheons of gods and so it was easy for Israel to take up this pagan polytheism. In order to ward such destructive influence off the Hebrew people repeatedly recited the Shema.

In question #8 however, the query is to the Trinitarian character of God. We are taught here that the One God of Heaven and Earth is spoken of as “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” thus introducing plurality into the One God who is and who reigns forevermore. The question asks why we speak this way.

And the simple answer provided is that this is the way that God Himself speaks of Himself in Scripture. Here, Zacharius Ursinus, with assistance from Caspar Olevianus (Authors of the Heidelberg Catechism) teach us that we are to be dependent upon the Scripture for our understanding of God.

They appeal to Scripture as follows for finding plurality in the Godhead. As you read the Scripture here keep in mind that if we had only one verse in Scripture to this end the doctrine might be more difficult to grasp. However, with the cumulative impact of the varied Scriptures we see a constant theme develop in the unfolding of Redemption that there is plurality in the One only God.

5 Gen. 1:26, And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Note the plural pronoun “us” and “our” above. God is singular but the pronouns are plural. Now there are those who will try to diminish the importance of these plural pronouns or who will try to explain them away but doing that becomes more and more difficult as the Scriptures begin to pile up in a Trinitarian direction.

They next cite

Isa. 61:1, The spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; He hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.

Here the plurality is found in the combination of the utterance of the ideal Servant of Jehovah (“upon me” … “anointed me”) speaking. That this ideal Servant of Jehovah is God is seen when this very passage is taken up by Jesus who is the Messiah in Luke 4 at the beginning of His ministry and who is later anointed by God with the Holy Spirit in His Baptism to the end of accomplishing His Messianic assignment.

Here we find a harmony of interests among the members of the One God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, work without contradiction in achieving the same task. The Father anoints. The Spirit of the Lord is the anointing. The Son is the anointed one.

John 14:16–17, And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him: but ye know Him; for He dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.

Here again we see plurality in the one only God. The Son, who Scripture teaches is very God of very God, prays the Father to the end of being provided another Comforter (a Comforter like Himself) to be with the Church forever. The Holy Spirit who is sent by the Father and and the Son dwells in the body of Christ to the end of glorifying the Son that the Father might be known. Once again we see the divine harmony of interest.

1 John 5:7, For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.

Here we have a clear claim of unity in diversity. The Word was one of John’s ways of referring to God the Son. Here God’s plurality, as supported by the other passages, is undeniable.

John 14:26 But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you.

Again, note the plurality. Jesus the God-Man is speaking instructs His disciples that God the Spirit will come as sent by the Father in the name of the Son. Again, note the harmony of interests among the members of the Trinity. This is important to keep in mind because other lesser forms of Christianity will often times try to create a conflict of interest among the members of the Trinity.

Matt. 28:19, Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Here again is plurality. Jesus the God-Man Messiah is speaking. Jesus uses the Greek singular for the word “name” and yet the singular name that is cited is plural –“Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

2 Cor. 13:14, The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.

We will end here. There are many more passages from Scripture we could easily cite that declares the trinitarian nature of the one only God. Here the plurality of God is explicit.

The doctrine can be a confusing doctrine resulting in significant, even if unintended, errors. For children the best way to teach is by trying to be as simple but comprehensive as possible. As such we would do well to teach our children the summary of the great American Presbyterian Dr. B. B. Warfield:

(1) “there is but one God,”

(2) “the Father and the Son and the Spirit is each God,” and

(3) “the Father and the Son and the Spirit is each a distinct person.”

“When we have said these three things, we have enunciated the doctrine of the Trinity in its completeness.”

Naturally, as the children grow there will be a need to explore this doctrine even more. We will want them to understand something of the personal properties of each member of the Trinity which distinguishes each member of the trinity from the other. We know from Scripture, for example, that the Father eternal begetting of the Son, the Son’s eternal generation from the Father, and the Spirit’s eternal procession from the Father and the Son. (Known as “paternity,” “filiation,” and “spiration.” We will want them to know about the fellowship they can have with each person of the Trinity (See John Owen’s work).

The doctrine of God as One and Many is a doctrine that one could spend a life in discovering and probing. There is no end to the depths that are found in this doctrine and frankly no exhausting of the errors that can arise from improper understandings.

In conclusion the doctrine of the plurality in the One only God is embraced because it is taught in God’s revelation of Himself in the redemption record of Scripture. In the plurality of the One only God we find God as both transcendent and God as immanent. We find God both High and lifted up and God who shared in our flesh and blood. We find a fuller understanding of the Cross and a deeper appreciation for our ongoing sanctification.

Indeed, without Plurality in the One only God, we would have a religion that is not Christianity and would therefore be some form of paganism.

“We thank thee magnificent God that thou hast revealed thyself as One and Many. We thank thee that a proper Trinitarian understanding colors and forms all of our thinking about all of reality. We beg of thee that you would enlighten those pagan religions which deny your Trinitarian reality. As such we pray for Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons who each deny your Trinitarian character. We thank you that because of your Trinitarian character you are a personal God who has not and never will forsake His people. We bless you One only God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

In Christ’s name we pray,

AMEN