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.

By Today’s Standards Jesus Was A Racist

And He answered and said, “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”   Matthew 15:26

Dogs (κυναρίοις). A contemptuous diminutive, rendered by Wickliffe, “whelpies,” or, as we might say, “curs.” This was the term applied by the Jews to the Gentiles, even as Turks nowadays talk of “dogs of Christians,” and as in later times, by a curious inversion, the Jews themselves were generally saluted with the opprobrious name of”dogs.” Some have seen a term of endearment in the diminutive “little dogs,” as though Christ desired to soften the harshness of the expression by referring, not to the prowling, unowned animals that act as scavengers in Oriental towns, but to the petted inmates of the master’s house. But Scripture gives no warrant for thinking that the Hebrews ever kept dogs as friends and companions, in our modern fashion; and our Lord adopts the language of his countrymen, to put the woman in her right position, as one with whom Jews could have no fellowship. To take the blessings from the Church of Israel in order to give them to aliens was to throw them away on unworthy recipients.

Pulpit Commentary

Nine Paragraphs On The Failure Of Natural Law

Fallen man remains God’s man and as Gods man fallen man remains the fingerprint of God. However, fallen man hates God and by extension hates himself as the fingerprint of God. Therefore fallen man both knows God and doesn’t know God. Ontologically fallen man cannot get away from the realities of who he is. However, fallen man uses his epistemological apparatus to deny what he can’t escape ontologically. In Romans this is called “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.” This epistemological suppressing the truth in unrighteousness is applied to all of creation and nature since all creation and nature likewise are fingerprinted with the finger of their creator and as such the real meaning and truth of them must be suppressed and denied. The further fallen man becomes consistent with his suppression the more God’s creative reality must be assaulted and denied. This explains the current perplexity where a sitting Supreme Court justice and countless others like her no longer can answer the question; “What is a woman.” Fallen man cannot answer this question because even though fallen man cannot escape ontological reality, he will, by the usage of his epistemological apparatus suppress and deny what he can’t escape from knowing.

When a whole culture is given over to this consistent denial and suppressing of Natural Law givens the result eventually will be death, because all those who hate God love death.

However, cultures strewn with the unregenerate can be stabilized by the presence of believers who are not suppressing reality and who read Natural Law aright because they are reading it through the lens of Special Revelation. In such cultures and in such cases what happens is that fallen man, being inconsistent with his self avowed God denying principles, sneaks into his Christ hating worldview capital from the Christian world and life view. This stolen capital keeps the unbeliever afloat so that, as one example, in a culture leavened with Christ (a Christian culture) they can make marriages that last and are comparatively stable.

In such a culture stabilized by a Christian ethos you would then expect there to arise a philosophy that embraced Natural Law because then the stability of the culture can be ascribed to man who reads NL aright instead of being ascribed to the Biblical beliefs of the Christians in the social order. However, all along, the epoxy of the social order is special revelation.

In such a culture, Christian thinkers themselves may well begin to talk about Natural Law as being the epoxy that allows Christians and fallen man to together create a stable social order. However, if those same Christian thinkers could live long enough lives to see the deterioration of their once stable cultures because the Christ hater began to be more and more consistent with their suppressing the truth in unrighteousness they would then realize that it was not Natural Law that was the epoxy that held the culture together but rather it was the explicit special revelation that was embraced by them and their kind that created a sturdy headwind that allowed the unregenerate to sneak that earlier spoken of stolen capital into their worldviews in order to keep stability in the culture leavened with Christ.

If the above isn’t helpful try to reverse engineer all of this. Imagine growing up in a Cannibalistic adulterous ridden culture where treachery and treason were exalted as genius and so was untouched by Biblical Christianity. Could anyone imagine that such fallen people would ever come up with a Natural law that taught the precepts found in the 10 commandments?

Of course the problem here is never with God’s natural revelation of which Natural Law is a subset. The heavens do indeed declare the handiwork of God. All of creation screams the truth of God. However, fallen man is like the chap who is constantly pushing the buttons in order to find a radio station that doesn’t play “the truth of God’s revelation.” Fallen man, becoming increasingly consistent with his enmity against God (Romans 8:7) would go as far as to rip his own eyeballs out in order to not see the truth contained in Natural Law.

Because of this Natural Law is a weak reed in order to lean on to make law for a particular social order populated by a large majority of people who are being ever more increasingly consistent with their hatred of Christ. We are seeing this daily in the West.

For Christians in the West then, the appeal is not to Natural Law. The appeal is to the politicus usus of God’s perspicuous Law in order to order social order aright. This, in combination of heralding the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only way to pull back anti-Christ social orders from the edge of the abyss. Appeals to Natural Law will only hasten our nearing, ever nearing, to the final fall.

Is The Moscow vs. Ogden Kerfuffle Really Less Theological Than Political?

https://www.thedailygenevan.com/blog/2025/1/3/paleoconservatism-and-christian-nationalism?fbclid=IwY2xjawHmrLRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHb3EWNdEhbATkejp-zW4VBqNS3fqTkiy4qJ_h24vBS-EbQUk4W_vggniWA_aem_zJNuGIgKhILwy73x6IQDRQ

I strongly recommend the above link by my friend Darrell Dow. It is an excellent and succinct explanation of why Ogden is Battling Moscow. A Battle where the Moscow position is way more liberal than we would like while the Ogden position is not nearly as conservative as we would like.

For those of us who are not completely satisfied with either Ogden or Moscow we have to take what we can and try to support Ogden as much as we can without compromising our core principles. We do this realizing, as Joe Sobran once said, “I don’t have a dog in this fight. My dog died a long time ago.” There really is very little to support in the Moscow position.

Now at points I strongly disagree with some positions of those whom Dow is providing summary. On the other hand I agree with nearly everything that Dow says in his own analysis in this piece except for one important observation;

“With exceptions, the vituperativeness and anger directed at Wolfe and adjacent allies is less theological than political, less about principle than power. The attacks aren’t primarily about doctrinal distinctives (or memes) but a result of men protecting their brands and roles as self-appointed gatekeepers. In other words, it’s all very Buckleyesque. “

I am convinced that the rhubarb in this kerfuffle is indeed not less theological than political and oddly enough, Dow even later agrees with me as he explains the reasons for the break which at their core are all theological.

When you read the article you find Darrell laying out the differences between Ogden and Moscow, (Ogden and Moscow are shorthand … I realize there are more parties involved) and those differences when traced back to their beginning point are straight on theological. Because there are these theological differences there are in turn differences in the politics of each camp.

Darrell spends time noting the differences between Ogden and Moscow by telling us that Ogden in more inclined to hold on to the particulars while Moscow desires to hold on to the Universals. Another way of saying this is that Ogden (rightly I think) is responding with an offered correction to decades and decades (maybe even centuries … stemming back to the Enlightenment) of emphasizing the cosmopolitan and the unity of mankind, which Moscow is championing. This stems from the classically liberal worldview wherein the brotherhood of all men and the fatherhood of God over all men is emphasized. Now, Moscow, is not completely in the tank for that idea but what Moscow is doing is offering up a sanctified version of that world and life view and the chaps at Ogden are protesting in favor of particularity of peoples and nations. This difference can be captured by comparing the lyrics of a couple different songs,

“I believe in the Kingdom Come
Then all the colors will bleed into one
Bleed into one
But yes, I’m still running” U2

This represents the kind of Universalism that the Ogden chaps are opposing. They would prefer to sing along with “Show of Hands;”

“And we learn to be ashamed before we walk
Of the way we look, and the way we talk
Without our stories or our songs

How will we know where we come from?
I’ve lost St. George in the Union Jack
It’s my flag too and I want it back

Seed, bark, flower, fruit
Never gonna grow without their roots
Branch, stem, shoot
We need roots”

Again Moscow is not as WOKE as John Lennon singing “Imagine” but as I said they are trying to bequeath a Christianity that is mixed with this kind of Universalism. Likewise, Ogden is not based enough on this subject but it seems they are moving in a wholesome direction.

Now, back to the theological issue that is driving all this. The theological issue that is driving all this is the Christian doctrine of the One and the Many. Because there is a one and a many in the Creator there is a one and the many in creation. The accusation against Moscow (which I believe is true) is that they are emphasizing God’s oneness over His manyness to such an unhealthy extreme that we are losing particularity in creation, as seen in Doug Wilson’s constant sniping at “racism.” When God is seen as One to the neglect of Many the result is a creeping monism in creation where the particularity that is rightly found in “the Many” is lost.

Now, speaking only for myself, I see the Ogden chaps trying to understand the beauty of this Creator One and the Many as it incarnates itself into the created one and the many. I still think they are holding on too much to the One but it is a breath of fresh air to read some of the things they are saying.

So, we see the differences between Ogden and Moscow are theological before they are political and it is only because the differences are theological that the political division subsequently arises. Because there are differences in theological principles you have this contest over political power. The difference, contra Dow, are doctrinal before they are political. There will be no solving of the political fracture apart from a conversation of the theological issue of “The One and The Many.”

In the West we have lived a very long time neglecting the import of the One and the Many. The result has been egalitarianism, WOKEism, and Cultural Marxism. The Ogden boys are trying to speak to that.

Read the whole Dow piece and bring yourself up to speed on what is disturbing the “conservative” Church in America. Darrell does a bang up job in his article. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Addendum

Elsewhere I have reduced all of this to this one paragraph;

“If Oswald Spengler was correct (and he is not) that ‘Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism’ then the contest going on right now between the Ogden / Wolfe chaps and Doug Wilson / James White is a contest between an older Christianity vs. a Spenglerian Christianity. Wilson/White/Boot/Sandlin and company, intentionally or not, desire a Christianity that is rootless, and cosmopolitan in its social order theory while being Capitalistic in its worse sense economically. They are practitioners of Enlightenment “Christianity” and they are doing their utmost to halt the return of a pre-Enlightenment Christianity where rootedness, family, and belonging are the signposts pointed at by the few who retain ecclesial sanity.”