Economics Is A Tricky Business

True story;

It’s the 18th century in British ruled India. In Delhi, the Brits have a problem. It seems that there are far too many Cobras in the streets of Delhi and these Cobras are presenting a health crisis.

So, the Brits, always so wise in their administration of their colonies, arrive at an idea. They decide to offer a bounty for every dead Cobra that is turned into their designated Cobra centers.

This works great … for awhile. Dead Cobras are being turned in. People are making some money from the exchange. Delhi is becoming comparatively pestilent free of Cobras. However, during the period in which there was a bounty on cobras, the number of rats in Delhi increased and with it an outbreak in the bubonic plague. When the bounty ended, the number of rats significantly decreased.

Also, someone gets the idea of breeding Cobras as a lucrative option. The reasoning went like this …. “We will breed Cobras which have monetary value, and then once they reach a certain maturity we will kill the Cobras and turn them in for the English bounty.” The English bounty was working as a subsidy on Cobras and whatever a government subsidizes it gets more of.

Suddenly the English offices were flooded with dead Cobras and the British realized that it was necessary to end the “dead Cobras for money” program.
The problem was though that the Cobra breeding farms had mushroomed throughout Delhi. Now, these farms had a product (live Cobras) which had no monetary value. Who wants to keep all kinds of live Cobras around? So, the Cobra breeding farms just released their formerly lucrative product, with the end result that Delhi’s Cobra problem was greater after the English “Cobras for Cash” program than it was before the program.

The moral of the story …. Beware the law of unintended consequences.

One Theory Of Why Failed Natural Law Theory Came To The Fore During Reformation Era

“Calvin had inspired in his disciples that energy of piety which abhors all halfway measures, which boldly endeavors to make all the affairs of life subject to Christ, the Head and Lord. . . . But what was needed, viz., firm principles about the relation of the Reformation to the forces of modern emerging culture—to the state, science, and art—this was lacking, and how could it be attained all at once in the midst of all the unrest of the time? Regarded in this way, we believe the appearance of natural law doctrine becomes comprehensible. A doctrine of the state constructed on evangelical principles was not in existence. But such a doctrine was imperatively needed and demanded by the need of the time. Men needed to have clearness about the relation of the ruler to the subjects, about the problem of Church and State, about the relation between different churches in the same country. No wonder that in the lack of a conception of the state revised in the light of fundamental evangelical ideas, men had recourse to the political theory taught in the traditional jurisprudence, without heeding the fact that that theory had an origin foreign to the Reformation, and involved tendencies and consequences which would lead away from the Reformation. These tendencies, of course, became apparent later in slowly developing after-effects, and then, especially after the spiritual enervation sustained in the protracted religious wars, they could not fail gradually to dissipate and destroy the Reformation’s basis of faith. . . .”

EL Hebden Taylor, The Christian Philosophy Of Law, Politics And The State, p.3
(quoting August Lang in the Princeton Theological Review entitled “The Reformation and Natural Law”)

The Reality And Prevalence Of Linguistic Deception

“Modernists will usually betray pretty clearly that they use Christian terminology before a pagan background . . . Modernism is the use of Christian terms for the purpose of conveying pagan thought . . . All the words that we daily use and give a Christian meaning must now receive a pagan meaning.

Cornelius Van Til

“What Do You Mean?” The Banner, Vol. 67

This is called linguistic deception and we are seeing it ALL THE TIME now. Linguistic deception treats words like eggs which can be cracked open and emptied of their content and then filled with new content. What these people do is they empty words used by Christians that have traditional meanings and then fill them with other meaning.

This is what J. Gresham Machen was fighting in his classic “Christianity and Liberalism.” The premise in that book was that the Liberals were using the same language as the Christians in the Church but they were filling it with such utterly different meaning that the words used were no longer the same words that the Christians had used for centuries. Van Til himself wrote a book titled “Christianity and Barthianism” which teased out the same theme only as applied to Neo-Orthodoxy. Machen complained about this linguistic deception in his “Christianity and Liberalism,” continuously. He complained that Modernists (Liberals) where cracking open the words, emptying out the meaning, and then filling the words with new meaning, while still insisting that they were “Christian,” when in point of fact they were liars, just as the R2K chaps, the FV chaps and the Full Preterist chaps are liars when they do the very same thing.

We see this w/ R2K for example. All R2K fanboys will affirm that Jesus is Lord, but eventually one learns that the word “Lord” for R2K fanboys means “Lord,” except for where Jesus is only “kind of Lord in a spiritual sense.” When the R2K fanboys likewise talk about “covenant” they have so redefined the word “covenant” that it no longer bears any resemblance to previous Reformed definitions of “covenant.” When the R2K “geniuses” talk about God’s law it is a law so redefined that the Westminster divines would never recognize God’s Law vis-a-vis how they dealt with God’s Law.

We see this w/ Federal Vision types. They assert “Justification by faith alone,” and then they teach that there are two justifications and not all who are initially justified are finally justified. What’s the difference between the those who are initially justified and also finally justified and those who are who initially justified but not also finally justified? Well, what else can the difference be but the contributory dynamic of our works to that final justification?

We see this technique in those “Christians” denouncing “Christian Nationalism” insisting that a truly Christian nation has tolerance in the public square for all the gods and that the God of the Bible should not be given preeminence. By tacking in such a way they have along the way redefined idolatry as well.

We see this in Gary DeMar’s full Preterism. They recite the Apostles Creed but when they get to the part about Jesus returning again for the quick and the dead, suddenly that is reinterpreted to mean “returning for the persons of the quick and the dead but not their corporeal and now glorified bodies.

Perhaps it is the case that some of the examples above are not epistemologically self conscious about their lying and so are merely guilty of being useful idiots. However, there are always some who know what they are doing. They know they are playing fast and loose with the language. They know they are being deceptive. They know that they are offering up a stew that would have never passed in centuries past for Christianity and yet they just keep serving it up.

I don’t envy these types on that final day.

Christians & The US Military — A Post From 15 Years Ago

In one of his recent notes R. C. Sproul Jr. asked the question, How would you counsel a Christian young man who wants to serve in our armed forces? His answer when reduced amounted to, Well yes our Government is corrupt to the core but that doesn’t mean that a Christian young person can’t serve in the US military as long as they are given a good stern warning about the dangers of the US government as they are inducted.

This is my response to Jr.

It’s good to know that you would have been perfectly fine with “Christians” joining up w/ Lincoln’s, Sheridan’s, Sherman’s and Grant’s Yankees in order to kill, rape and savage the South.

The US gov’t today is no less evil than it was in the time of Lincoln and those who fight today support an evil cause now just as “Christians” fighting in Mr. Lincoln’s war in 1861 were supporting evil.

Or if we don’t like that example would you have wanted to find yourself telling WW II era  Russian “Christians” that it was perfectly acceptable to join the Bolshevik  military in order to aid and assist the expansion of the Stalinists?

Here is a enlightening comment from Dr. H. Henry Meeter and his book “The Basic Ideas of Calvinism,”

“Among the Christians of the early centuries of Christianity there were many who opposed war, not as a matter of principle, but because it required their entering into the service of a Government which persecuted Christians and demanded worship of idols by the militia. When the Roman Eagle was exchanged for the Cross and the Empire turned Christian, the attitude toward war among Christians underwent a corresponding change.”

So, as the former friend in the previous discussion you allude to I am just returning to the position of the early Church. In principle I don’t have a problem with Military service or fighting in wars. I do however have a problem doing so when the agenda being pursued by the State is to crush all religions before it (including and especially Christianity) for the purpose of establishing a religious pagan global order. This is what is happening today and any person serving in the US military is a instrument serving to the accomplishing of that pagan agenda end.

As far as Lk. 3:14 is concerned I don’t think you are handling that text properly as it is a open question as to what military the soldiers in question were serving. Were they serving in Rome’s military or in Herod’s. Secondly, even if they were serving in Rome’s these are questions coming from people already in the military and not from people seeking to determine whether they should join the military. Thirdly, if Christian soldier did what John the Baptist said it wouldn’t be long until they would be court martialed.

The Bible does not universally forbid serving in the military. Such a interpretation would be Anabaptist. What the Bible does teach is that we are hate that which is evil and cling to that which is good. If the government service puts one in league with evil then joining it to do its bidding is hardly a sign that one is “hating that which is evil.”

Now, I’m not a purist. I quite understand that there are times when the good guy’s white hats are soiled. I understand that one might fight for a government that is soiled. But in this country our government has long moved past soiled. We are Babylon the Whore and we are the ones who are seeking to set up a religious pagan globalistic order.

How any young Christian person can sign up to aid and assist the US Military and its design is quite beyond me. I counsel against it as a undershepherd of Christ.

Of Proxy Wars And Dog Whistles

“Attacks on the West, America, traditional values, the patriarchy, hetero-normativity, and so on are all proxy wars aimed at Christ. And Christians are largely clueless.”

Doug Wilson
Last Letters of the Year
2022

Doug is speaking in the abstract here but when we start looking at the concrete Doug is tweeting a pretty large dog whistle. Concretely speaking, one has to ask who built ‘the West,” and then America? Who are the people that established traditional values, patriarchy, and hetero-normativity?
The answer is that it is the Christian white man who built the West and then America. The answer is that it is the Christian white man who established traditional values, patriarchy, and hetero-normativity.

And the upshot of all this is that the ultimate proxy war aimed at Christ that Doug speaks of can not be successful unless that proxy war successfully destroys the Christian white man.

And what that means, in turn, is that Doug should be defending not only the West, America, traditional values, patriarchy, and hetero-normativity in the abstract but Doug should also stop with his “race isn’t real” bilge and start defending the Christian white man whom God, out of His pure grace, called to build a civilization where patriarchy, traditional values, and hetero-normativity became the norm.

And maybe Doug could also admit that the attack against these things has, historically speaking, come from one particular and concentrated direction.