With Apologies to Manly Hall

The world is charged with the grandeur of God
It shines out, like innocence from a child
It’s magnificence like bruised love reconciled
Why do fools then announce Him a fraud
Being blind to that which leaves lesser men awed?
Such fools build as rebels, energetic in their toil
Resolved to construct a tower of straw and wet soil
Only to come to the end to feel the wrath of His rod

And during all this, man knows all along
The suppression never quite reaches the source of the true
Never quite quenches the glorious song
So he works to drown out what face to face he once knew
Finding some solace in seeing that he’s joined by that throng
Which has jointly resolved to succeed in Adam’s failed coup

Cultural Marxism, Broken Families, and The Prophet’s Task

In terms of world and life views it is clear that the leading Weltanschauung voice in the West today is some form of Cultural Marxism. By way of definition Cultural Marxism is that belief system that sees all Truth as being “truth” and arrived at by the success of one identity group over another identity group in a power struggle wherein each group was involved. Cultural Marxism seeks to right all those previous wrongs by taking the victims (losers) of the previous power struggles and giving them their just due by taking the fruits of victory away from those who were the victimizers in those previous struggles.

Cultural Marxism, replaces the proletariat (worker class) of classical Marxism and replaces them with victim class. This victim class is comprised of the previous losers and victims in Western culture. As such where as classical Marxism called for “workers of the world to unite,” Cultural Marxism calls for the perverts and Christ haters of the world to unite to throw off the chain of Biblical Christianity. It is this new proletariat in Cultural Marxism which will accomplish the long march through the Institutions of the West.

So, Cultural Marxism in action is constantly on the search for perceived power imbalances (men vs. women, whites vs. minorities, sodomite vs. heterosexual, etc.) with the purpose of injecting agitprop in order to advance their agenda of a kind of equity that brings down the gifted and talented to the same level as those perceived to be victims.

Every elite institution in the country that has dominance over knowledge transmission, dominance over religious formation, dominance over culture production, and dominance over, even, in many cases, material production, has converged on a ideology upon which they all agree. That ideology is called, “Cultural Marxism.”

Of course that includes the Christian Church and that in turn includes the supposedly “Conservative” “Reformed” “Churches” in America. The Clergy is not inoculated against the zeitgeist simply because they are clergy. This accounts for how the current Reformed church in the West has been almost completely compromised by Cultural Marxism. Reformed Ministers spend at least seven years after High School in “Higher Education” and given the character and nature of that “Higher Education” it is almost impossible for them to not be oriented in Cultural Marxist thinking.

If your Minister can’t simply and succinctly tell you what Cultural Marxism is then it is very likely he is preaching it from the pulpit.

Now, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that this dominance of the Worldview of Cultural Marxism is just a passing fad. There have been more than a few people (public intellectuals) who have argued that it won’t be long until we are out of this Cultural Marxist phase.

I am not one one of those who agree with that analysis. It is my conviction that short of some kind of significant impacting disaster or a remarkable providence that brings unexpected Reformation that this worldview of Cultural Marxism is here to stay for the foreseeable future. I base that  conviction upon the inherent instability that is present and growing in this country. In the thirteen years between 2009-2021 40.36% of the children born in this country were born to unmarried mothers. If we keep this trend up for just a few more years that will mean that we will have a generation, a large percentage of which, will have been raised without a stable family life. Instability in family life translates into instability in every area including the thought life of a people.

Cultural Marxism feeds on convincing people they are victims and people without stable family lives is a ready made audience for the Cultural Marxist message. Now combine the fact that Cultural Marxism goes forward by normalizing the abnormal with the fact that the abnormal becomes the normal for those from unstable family life and the facts are suggestive that Cultural Marxism or some variant of it is not going away any time soon.

Now, it is a given that Biblical Christians must do all they can to fight against this trend but at the same time Biblical Christians should be realists and realism demands the recognition that it would take a remarkable providence of the scale of the parting of the Red Sea to turn this degradation around. Biblical Christian should fight against this trend by having large healthy families that drop out of the trappings of the Culture all the while realizing that the broader culture is sailing on the good ship Titanic. Countries don’t come back from a long sustained 40% illegitimacy birth rate.

I don’t mean to sprinkle too much reality over one’s cornflakes but the above statistics are not alone in their foreboding. Because of those illegitimacy rates as combined with divorce we are now looking at somewhere in the vicinity of 70% of US children growing up without fathers. Now, to this number add the numbers who are born into a family with Dad and Mom together and whose fathers are not estranged but who spend their whole lives in Government schools and now the numbers are
probably 95%+ of the populace has been religiously, morally, mentally, and psychologically crippled.

It’s a fully marginalized society.

Now, to be sure God has, in times past, brought peoples back from the edge of destruction. It is often said that the Reformation led by George Whitfield in England as assisted by the Wesley Brothers in the 18th century brought England back from the French Revolution abyss but for every England that can be mentioned a hundred non-recoveries can be cited.

Some form of Cultural Marxism is the perfect ideology for a country so broken in their family structures. Cultural Marxism specializes in blaming someone else for the victim’s woes. There will be plenty of woe looking for someone to blame and plenty of aberrant behavior that Cultural Marxism will justify as being perfectly normal.

This is what the Prophets have faced over and over again. Jeremiah faced it. Amos faced it. This is the kind of thing Isaiah faced when God told him
8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”

And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

9 He said, “Go and tell this people:

“‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding;
    be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’
10 Make the heart of this people calloused;
    make their ears dull
    and close their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
    hear with their ears,
    understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed.”

Trying To Be As Pithy As Possible On The Contradictions Of The Credo-Baptists

It suddenly occurs to me that in the Baptist conception is inherently contradictory. For the Baptist, baptism is basically “deponent” ( that is to say that it is “passive in form, but active in meaning”). For the Baptist the person “is baptized” (passive). It is something that is done to them. However in nearly every other Baptist explanation of Baptism it has to do with how this Baptism is the declaration by the person of his or her decision to follow Jesus thus contradicting the whole passive idea with a definition that bespeaks activity. This is a contradiction and is in contrast to the Biblical meaning of baptism as a sign of Christ’s claim on the believer from the foundation of the world, a decision in which the believer is a totally passive recipient.

And it is the refusal of the Baptist to bring their children to the Baptismal font that unwinds the contradiction so as to reveal what the Baptist really believes. The Baptist might say that the recipient in Baptism is passive but inasmuch as they refuse to bring their children to be baptized they are screaming that the recipient of Baptism must be the active party. Baptism, thus for Baptists is not about God’s claim upon the believer but rather it is about the believers claim upon God.

This is actually put on display visibly as in Baptist Baptism the person being Baptized is not passive in the least but is clinging to the person who is baptizing them giving aid to both the person dunking them and their arising out of the water.

Baptist thinking, however well intended it might be, is thus a anthropocentric leaning into Christianity and thus can never be genuinely Reformed. It is the mix of synergism with the claim of monergism.

Hat Tip — Jonathan Lovelace

The Reformed Faith & The Enchantment of the World

I have always had a difficult time understanding why anybody would want to stay in Rome or Constantinople. However, this week while listening to a long interview by a couple of EO types on the subject of Feminism and the Occult they got on a side bar that helped me to understand the attraction of Rome and Constantinople.

(57) The Occult Origins of Feminism with Rachel Wilson – YouTube

 
It seems that Rome and EO are convinced that the rationality of Geneva (Protestantism) had the eventual effect of disenchanting the world. The accusation was that the rational approach of Protestants to the Christian faith emptied the world of its enchantment and mystery. By their lights the Reformation had led to the disenchantment of the world and by their lights Rome and EO provides the faith wherein the world can once again find re-enchantment. Actually, this makes a certain amount of sense given that the world in which Rome and EO came into was a world where the seen and unseen world did not lie as far apart as the modern world. The ancient world was one of superstition, animism, and the mysterious. Rome and EO conquered that world because they preached a doctrine of Christus Victor wherein the unseen world, while remaining real, became tamed and defanged by the victory of Christ over all comers. Early Christianity retained the enchantment of the world while at the same time announcing that Jesus Christ had conquered the enemy that lay in that enchanted world.

The mystery and enchantment was retained in the Eucharist. There in the table the mystery and enchantment of the world was proclaimed and the supplicant at the table was brought near to the very real unseen world. In the sacrament (mystery) the world remained enchanted and man was delivered from the dry rationalism that we currently find in modernity.

However, though their explanation made sense and resonated with me, I found myself thinking that Rome and Constantinople retained the enchantment of the world at the cost of embracing the irrational and the contradictory. Theirs was and remains an escape from reason.  I do not believe that we have to embrace the irrational in order to own a world that is enchanted and full of mystery. I need not swim the Tiber or the Bosporus in order to have enchantment.

If the Sacrament is where man finds the Mysterium tremendum or where the believer can enter into that “Great Cloud of Unknowing,” there is plenty of that to be found in the classical explanations (Lutheran or Reformed) of the Eucharist. Calvin’s explanation of Receptionism where the supplicant, by the work of the Holy Spirit, is lifted into the Heavenlies where he dines on the real (spiritual) presence of Christ has plenty of the mystery in it and one can certainly walk away with his world still full of the enchanted. Then there is the reality of a stout Reformed prayer life that can also minister mystery. No Protestant who has known and experienced the closeness of the Holy Spirit in prayer needs to worry about a disenchanted world.

It strikes me that the Protestant world is indeed aching for the world to be re-enchanted. I think this ache explains for the rise of the Pentecostal church as the 800 pound gorilla in the Protestant world. What else is the attraction of Pentecostalism except for its promise that it can connect the worshiper with the unseen realm? Pentecostalism is Roman Catholicism on cheap without the formality of smells and bells. Pentecostalism gives a vulgar re-enchantment of the world. I have to admit that forced to pursue enchantment as between Pentecostalism and Constantinople I would begin working on my Iconography.

We should insert here that it seems to me that part of the explanation of the ancient Cathedrals with their sense of beauty and architectural transcendence is the fact that by that beauty and architectural transcendence enchantment was communicated and delivered. Those Cathedrals incarnated the magnificent mystery of biblical Christianity. We should keep in mind man’s need for the mystery in his life before we build our pole barn sanctuaries.

Having said all this though I have to admit that too many expressions of Protestantism once were guilty of disenchanting the world. Many of the works of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers and the Inklings  I think were trying to provide a basis for the continuing enchanting of the world for Christians. Maybe this explains the love of many Protestants for these works?

In the end it is only in the Reformed faith where the enchantment of the world can remain consistent with a rational faith that hasn’t fallen either into a dry and arid rationalism or a irrational fanciful faith where one is kissing Icons and being swept away by smells and bells. One has only to consider the writings of a John Milton or John Buchan to find the enchanted world in the Reformed faith. The Reformed faith both delivers from the hopelessly contradictory but enchanted world of Rome and EO while at the same time able to provide both a world that remains enchanted while at the same time rational.

Doug Wilson on Christians and Anti-Semitism … McAtee on Doug Wilson

This is my 2nd post rebutting Wilson in three days. In my defense I don’t go looking for his material. I have friends that shoot me emails with links saying breathlessly… “You’ve got to listen to this. You won’t believe what he has said this time.” Sometimes those friends ask me to respond. Sometimes they know that the Wilsonian “wisdom” will be so over the top that they know me well enough to know that I can’t help but to respond.

If it was anybody else but Wilson I probably wouldn’t respond but when Wilson goes off the reservation (as he does with alarming regularity) he is taking much of the putatively conservative team with him. You see nobody with a conservative impulse really believes someone like Kevin DeYoung or Joe Carter or Al Mohler or T. Ligon Duncan are conservative. However, Wilson has positioned himself nicely as the lone conservative voice howling into the wilderness and as such Wilson needs to be taken more seriously then most of the other Evangelical Yahoos precisely because Wilson is seen as the “true blue conservative.” “Why…. he’s one of us. He’s a guy wearing a white hat.” And sometimes that is so.

And many other times it is not so.

This is another one of those times. In a recent plodcast the Pope of Moscow offered;

“I want to talk about anti-Semitism. This go round I want to begin with my basic argument against the anti-Semitic impulse…. So when I see people talking about the Jews in a snarky and critical way it is impossible for me, as a pastor, to not hear the crackle of envy in this. Now in order to believe that the Jews are, you know, the International conspirators, who are wrecking everything and destroying civilization and bringing us all down — doing awful things.

Basically it is one thing to say I have identified these people as my enemy and I love my enemy but I am going to oppose them as opposed to the kind of envious crackle I see — and it is not a matter of detecting minor traces of it (giggle) it is just all over. And I think this is about the most anti-Gospel frame of mind possible for this reason.”

 

Doug Wilson
Plodcast

This is wrong on so many levels it is hard to know where to start.

First, there is the issue of whether the modern “Jew” has any genetic relation to the Judeans of Jesus day. People like Arthur Koestler in his book, “The 13th Tribe” has brought up the very real possibility that those Wilson refers to as “Jews” are indeed Khazars from the Black Sea area of the world. Others believe that they are genetically related to the Edomites. If Wilson’s Jews don’t bear any relation to the Jews of the NT era then Wilson’s invoking of Romans 11 he does later in this plodcast doesn’t make much sense.

Second, it is obviously true that I can’t know the kind of blatantly envious anti-Semitism that Doug is running into. He’s in Idaho and I’m in Michigan. Might as well be two different planets. However, I have conversations with folks as Doug does and I have to say that the last thing I see in these conversations is envy. Remember, envy is more than just jealousy. Envy is wanting what the other person has and not being happy with what the other person has unless the other person is utterly destroyed at the same time. I meet any number of people who are as aware of the Jew as our Christian Fathers were and I seldom find myself looking at envy. What I find myself looking at are people who understand the natures of mega- Banks, mega-Corporations, Hollywood, Lugenpresse, Corporate-Medicine, Government etc. One who doesn’t like rattle snakes because they and their kin have been repeatedly bit is not one who should be characterized as envious — and that no matter how many possessions the rattle snake has squirreled away in his nest.

Third, one wonders if Doug is familiar with any of the recent works on this subject? Has he read E. Michael Jones material? Has he read Michael Hoffman’s “Judaism’s Strange Gods?” Does Doug know the history of Christian and Jewish interaction? Has he read Maurice Pinay? Has Doug read Luther? Calvin? Chrysostom? Is he familiar with the 4th Church Council of Toledo? If Doug has read these works does Doug think all these chaps are or were also envious? After reading some of this well documented material it becomes pretty evident it is at least possible that the folks that Doug hears are hardly envious.

Fourth, we are glad to concede that there are Semites who have contributed to the formation of civilization. We are also glad to concede that the vision of the Jews for civilization is a very different vision than the vision of the Biblical Christian. I can make these generalizations because I know what the voting patterns are of Jews in America vis-a-vis the voting patterns of Biblical Christians. Another reason I can make these generalizations is because I know the history of Hollywood and the conflict that once existed there between Jews and the Church (Hays code anyone?). Obviously, different visions exist. Are we to think, following Wilson logic, that Republicans whom Biblical Christians (unfortunately) generally vote for  oppose Democrats whom Jews generally vote for because Republicans are envious of Democrats?

Fifth, there is the simple reality of history. Were the Jews cast out of so many countries so many times over the millennium because the Christian peoples and monarchs were so envious of them every single time?

Sixthly, there is the Talmud. Does Doug know what counsel the Talmud gives to the Jews in relation to their understanding of the goyim? Here, Doug would profit by reading Michael Hoffman. Is Doug aware, for example, of how the Talmud deals with the rodef (pursuer) and how the in-utero baby can be justly tortured and murdered (aborted) because Jewish Talmudic law teaches the baby is a rodef?

One frustrating thing about the Wilson piece is that he has framed it in such a way that any disagreement with him from the right automatically means that one is an anti-Semite. Well, as long as we understand that an anti-Semite is defined as someone who doesn’t love the Jews no matter what they do or say then color me Anti-Semitic.

I hope I have examined this Wilson quote without any “cackle” in my voice. I am one of those who pray along with Doug that all peoples including those we call the Jews would repent and bow the knee to Christ and so cease with the ways that they have become rightly infamous for as those who pursue  Biblical Christians. However, until that postmillennial day arrives I will continue to believe my Christian Fathers about the envy of the Jews.