Quote From RJR’s “The One & The Many,” & Commentary

“Wherever a society has a naturalistic religion, grounded on the concept of continuity, man faces the total power of the state. This is clearly true today, as it was in antiquity. The Scythians “worshipped the elements” and practiced veneration of ancestors, and the royal Scyths “ruled as despots.” The Parthians practiced a religion affirming continuity, and their monarchs had “nearly despotic” power and claimed the title of “Kings of Kings.” The list can be extended at length. Where there is no transcendental law and power in a separate and omnipotent being, then power has a wholly immanent and immediate source in a state, group, or person, and it is beyond appeal. The state becomes the saving power and the source of law; it becomes the priestly agency of its own total power and the manifest power of its divinity. Such a state becomes god walking on the earth, and its every tyranny is identified as liberty, because being and meaning are both identifiable in terms of the state. Since it is held that there is no law beyond the state, meaning is what the state defines, and liberty is what the state provides. In this faith, for man to be free means to be in the state. More than that, for man to be, he must be a member of the state, for being is one and continuous, and salvation is a metaphysical unification of all being.”

The One and the Many
R. J. Rushdoony

1.) It is more accurate to say that where the God of the Bible is not owned and worshipped in a social order the consequence is that the State will absolutized and so worshiped, whether in a de facto or de jure sense. The citizens will become subjects and all will believe that “in the state we live and move and have our being.”

2.) All social orders must have transcendence in order to operate. They can choose either from a transcendent, transcendent (the God of the Bible) or they can create an immanent transcendent. Of course, an immanent transcendent is a contradiction but when a transcendent, transcendent is rejected then something must serve in its place. What happens with an immanent transcendent is that something subjective (usually the State as seen in history) is inflated with a pseudo objective transcendence so as to become that reality against which all other realities find their point of reference in order to find definition.  When this happens the social order, as a whole is in transgression against the first commandment.

3.) Perhaps one of the most glaring examples of this in history occurred during the Soviet Show Trials of the 1930s. In that setting Stalin put on trial Communists who had been with Lenin during the success of revolutionary Marxism. They were the old lions of the revolution; Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and  Radek. These men went into the kangaroo court show trial where their guilt was predetermined. Though innocent, they pled guilty to the charges of treason brought against them. Now, many have offered that the false admission of guilt was due to threats against family members of the accused by Stalin. However, the accused knew that Stalin was no man to keep his word. No, their admission of guilt was because they believed the State was God (the transcendent, transcendent). They had based their whole lives as revolutionaries upon the premise that the State was God. Now, the State (their God) was insisting they were guilty and being true believers they confessed to the guilt that their God said was theirs. If your God says your guilty, you are guilty whether you think you are or not.

4.) In this phrase “because being and meaning are both identifiable in terms of the state,” means that if and when the state becomes a social order’s transcendent, transcendent then the state becomes the arbiter of being and meaning. If you are a chameleon, then whatever color you are placed in as a background becomes the standard by which you know what color to turn to. In the same way when men make the state the transcendent, transcendent they play the chameleon to the state. All being and meaning are determined for the individual in the social order by the state in its metaphorical coloring.

5.) All of this is why Socrates chose to drink the hemlock as opposed to be banished by the state. Death was a better choice then to lose one’s being by being banished from one’s meaning maker.

6.) When this kind of situation obtains then reality becomes increasingly inverted. As Rush notes above, Liberty becomes tyranny and tyranny becomes liberty. We are seeing this in our culture. Reality is being set on its head. Men are women, and women are men. Marriage has no stable meaning and can include all kinds of permutations. Theft by taxation is called “paying your fair share.”

7.) Touching this statement by RJR; “it (the state) becomes the priestly agency of its own total power,” communicates that the tyrannical state playing the transcendent, transcendent not only will claim the authority of “King,” but also will exercise the power of “Priest.” This means that the state will mediate its own “salvation” to those living in the social order. Now, because everything is upside down in tyrannical orders as described this means that what is called “salvation,” will indeed be “destruction.” For example, playing the role of Priest, mediating salvation, the current tyrannical state in the West as said; “in order to be saved we need to import millions of third world people into our lands. This will give us more cheap labor.” However, in the mediation of this salvation, the West is being destroyed. Bureaucrats who work for the state often play this role of priest for the state.

8.) All this proves that a God or god concept is inescapable. All this proves that Atheism is a myth. All men take either the God of the Bible as God or they embrace a false god. There is no such thing as someone or some culture who.which has no god.

9.) When RJR uses this phrase; “salvation is a metaphysical unification of all being,”  Rush is talking about humanist salvations. Humanist salvations require uniformity of all. This is due to the fact that all godheads must have unity. If the state is the god in the social order then all in the social order must be one with the god of the social order. Unification of all being is necessary. This truth explains why Rome persecuted the Christians who would not pinch incense to Caesar. In their refusal to pinch incense to Caesar they were committing treason inasmuch as that refusal was a denial of the metaphysical unification of all being.

Random Observations On Dispensationalism & A Reading List For Dispies

All of this in the context of reading Daniel G. Hummel’s “The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism; How The Evangelical Battle Over The End Times Shaped A Nation.”

In 1957 A. W. Tozer warned that;

“A widespread revival of the kind of Christianity we know today in America might prove to be a moral tragedy from which we would not recover in one hundred years.”

He was referring to Dispensationalism.

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In 1967 there was an updated version of the C. I. Scofield Dispie Bible released. One of its most significant updates was a note on Genesis 12:1-4 where the Holocaust (TM) was introduced into the notes. The new note clarified that God’s promise to Abraham- “I will curse those who curse you” — was;

“A warning literally fulfilled in the history of Israel’s persecutions. It has invariably literally fulfilled in the history of Israel’s persecutions. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Bagel – well with those who have protected him. For a people who commit the sin of antisemitism brings inevitable judgment.”

Now, the kicker here, that is not in the notes, is that the Bagels and Christian Zionists were the ones who got to define what antisemitism meant.

Look, when I see this stuff, it only convinces me that as a Christian I am playing on team stupid.

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Charles Ryrie in his 1965 book he authored sought to bring Dispensationalism up to date. Ryrie wrote that the main distinctives of Dispensationalism were;

1.) The distinction between Israel and the Church

2.) Literal and plain hermeneutic
3.) Overall point of history was to glorify God

Ryrie’s first essential fails to take into account that OT Israel was the Church in its cocoon stage. The distinction between Israel and the Church was always the distinction between caterpillars and butterflies. Ryrie’s Dispensationalism always insisted (and still insists) that God, after the death, resurrection, ascension, and session of the Lord Christ, still has a plan for Israel that is tied to God’s eschatological and redemptive clock.

Ryrie failed to understand that God is eschatologically and redemptively done with Israel as a nation-State. Modern Israel is irrelevant to God’s ongoing macro plan of redemption or eschatology. And “No,” Romans 11 does not prove me wrong.

Ryries second point requires asking the question, “By what standard.” All Protestants who believe in the inerrant, inspired and infallible word of God believe that Scripture should be read via a literal and plain hermeneutic. However, reading the Scripture via a literal and plain hermeneutic looks very different when somebody sane does it as compared when a Dispensational comic book theologian does it. For example, when there is Sensus Plenior in the text to read the text that way is to read it according to its literal and plain hermeneutic. For example, when the text requires a archetype and type reading to read it in just such a way is to read the text according to a plain and literal hermeneutic. For example, to make a proper distinction between allegory and parable and then to read those aright means a plain and literal hermeneutic is being used. The point is, is that Dispensationalism doesn’t get to claim that it alone is reading the Scripture according to its original intent while everyone else is limping along trying to keep up with the Comic Book interpreters. When Dispies slice and dice the Scriptures into seven compartmentalized epochs, when Baptists refuse to see the continuity of Scripture so as to not bring covenant children to the Baptismal font, when Pentecostals insist that speaking in tongues is required for believers, they are all not reading the Scripture according to its plain and literal meaning. However, Dispensationalists exceed all in this category.

Everyone agrees with Ryrie’s #3… we just don’t agree with how the Dispie thinks history is going to glorify God. For example, the Dispie thinks that history will glorify God with doom and despair being the necessary keynotes before Christ return, whereas Biblical eschatology theology understands that the King is going to return to a world where the Great Commission has been fulfilled.

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A reading list to cure what ails the Dispensationalist;

1.) John Gerstner – Wrongly Dividing the Truth
2.) O. T. Allis – OT Prophecy & The Church
3.) Gentry/Bahnsen – House Divided: The break up of Dispensational Theology
4.) Daniel G. Hummel – The Rise & Fall of Dispensationalism
5.) Steven Sizer – Zion’s Christian Soldiers: The Bible, Israel and the Church
6.) Steven Sizer – Christian Zionism
7.) O. Palmer Robertson’s “The Israel of God”
8.) Allison Weir — Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel

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“The dispensationalist believes that throughout the ages God is pursuing two distinct purposes: one related to the earth with earthly people and earthly objectives involved, while the other is to heaven with heavenly people and heavenly objectives involved.”

Lewis Sperry Chafer
Systematic Theology – p. 448

Dispensationalism is NOT Christianity. This sets the Abrahamic covenant on its head and works to the end of keeping the Bagels as God’s chosen (earthly) people. That is total trash thinking and largely explains where we are today with our problems with the Bagels.

But how different is this from Doug Wilson’s advocacy of “The Covenant With Hagar” crapola?

And Now A Word From My Oldest Daughter

As Christians we cannot cherry pick the Bible. Somehow praying for our enemy has to work with David’s sentiments to destroy the wicked from the land and to hate those who hate God with a holy hatred. After all, other than when David was called out for his sin with Bathsheba, God depicts him as a man after God’s own heart.

Then there is also Samson who got really cozy with the enemies of God’s people, to His own hurt. At the end of his life Samson prayed for a return of his strength so that he could deal a crushing blow to God’s enemies and God gave it to him.

Judges 16:30 Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines!” Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Thus he killed many more when he died than while he lived.

The call to love our neighbor and pray for those who persecute us I think might best be depicted in the story of Jonah with the Ninevites. If God chooses to use our witness to cause people to repent then we should not have a stinking attitude about it. However, Jonah didn’t go there and tell them; “God is love and has a wonderful plan for your life.” He told them;

4  … “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”

Jonah’s message was clear; “God is opposed to you”

Jonah’s words caused them to repent in sackcloth and ashes.

Loving our neighbor means to faithfully extend God’s law while praying for their repentance and it doesn’t mean acting has if foreign invaders who hate God are equivalent to neighbors just because they are here now. However, that does not mean we withhold justice from either the invaders or our people. We do not try to make the nations into our neighbors while selling out our children’s future and inheritance. We must realize that our children are our primary neighbor. That’s the whole idea of the Ordo Amoris.

God’s people is his Church. Therefore we must be faithful to protect those who are Christians and stop being ok with passive types of invasion. We must cease insisting that since foreigners got proximally close to us we have to love them as we understand familial love.

Yes we have to love them as we are to love all mankind by holding them to the law and yes we should pray for their repentance but unless and until they repent they are to be opposed and hated as David hates those who hate God as Samson destroys those who are opposed to God’s people.

Does that mean randomly shooting individuals? No, clearly not, as we do not have that authority but where our authority lies we should apply and uphold God’s law because He is King and He is King of even the foreigners who are giving God the middle finger. It should be noted for those with the correct authority that this may end up meaning shooting people if they attempt to harm others.

The Continuing Problem Of American Clergy, or Rev. Dorris Needs To Read The Novel; “The Camp Of The Saints.”

I don’t know Rev. Jerry Dorris from Adam. Never met him. Never talked to him. Never corresponded with him on social media. All I know is that he is a Reformed Baptist clergy in Kentucky.

I suspect that it is possible that Jer and I might agree on a number of things. However, on the issue considered in this fisk, Jer and I are on different planets.

Below is a post by the good Rev. Dorris, and my reply. I didn’t reply to him online because I know it wouldn’t do any good having been in more than a few of these kind of conversations.

Pray for the clergy in America. We have fallen so far from our Father’s standards.

Rev. Jerry Dorris writes,

I can recognize that through the state’s failed immigration policies we have allowed dangerous patterns of immigration that have altered neighborhoods and reshaped the nation. As a Christian, I can say plainly that this was wrong. It should stop, and it should be reversed decisively. That conviction does not compromise my duty to communicate the gospel.

Bret replies,

So far, so good.

Rev. Jerry Dorris continues (RJD)

God has allowed our nation to fail in this area (of failed immigration policy), and that failure demands correction. Yet through it, He has brought the nations to our doorstep. What was politically reckless has become, by His providence, a gospel opportunity.

Bret responds,

It is true that the Gospel should be heralded to men from every tribe, tongue, and nation. Even those tribes, tongues, and nations, who have broke US Law in order to be here. In point of fact we, as Christians, should advocate that once these illegals are put into prison camps, built by FEMA, in order to accommodate them until they can be shipped back to their country of origin, they should have the Gospel preached to them by itinerant ministers coming into the camps to preach for just such a reason. In just such a manner we can pray that God might send many of them back to their homelands as converts to their own people.

In just such a way I can both love my neighbor and work in the context of God’s providence that brought them, by way of law-breaking, to this country.

Keep in mind here before we push on from this point that when we speak of “love of neighbor,” we must consider not only the alien and stranger who has been brought here in order to replace White Anglo Saxon Christian America, but we must also consider, as neighbor, our White Anglo Saxon Christian neighbor who the elite NWO bastards in this country intend to replace.

RJD wrote,

I can hold those truths together. I can oppose the policy while loving the neighbor God has placed in front of me. The state’s failure does not excuse hatred. That is the danger for Christians. Political frustration begins to govern moral posture. Anger aimed upward (State) turns sideways (neighbor). The neighbor becomes a symbol rather than a soul.

Bret responds,

Understand here that RJD does not seem to understand that the alien and stranger that is now potentially the neighbor of various and sundry Christians, has been placed here with the intent of rolling Christ off His throne. The illegals that have been brought here by the NWO elites have been brought here to destroy the White Christian population. The NWO elites intend to pull Christ down from His throne and by the elimination of White people the NWO elites are accomplishing their agenda to cast down Jesus the Messiah by diminishing the presences of the one people group who throughout history has built Christendom wherever their feet have trod.

If I am to love the stranger and alien, I must first start by loving them enough to seek to remove them from my community. I can, at one and the same time, bring them a meal, or help babysit their children, while doing all I can to have them put into FEMA camps for extradition. There is nothing inconsistent in the least with doing both of those things at the same time.

Indeed, if I don’t seek their removal, I am not loving my White Anglo Saxon neighbor by allowing their presence and influence be diminished in the Nation built for the White Anglo Saxon Christian.

Rev. Dorris’ danger as a Christian clergy is by allowing his political acquiescence to govern his moral disposition. Rev. Dorris has completely forgotten his duty to love God and his neighbor. Rev. Dorris has forgotten his love for God by failing the first commandment. Dorris seems not to understand that by swamping us with practitioners of other religions from third world countries that the gods they bring with them are being prioritized over the God of the Bible as their gods will now receive equal consideration by the same NWO elites who brought them here.

Dorris has allowed the alien and strange to become a symbol of evangelistic possibility at the cost of the souls of his White Anglo Saxon Christian brothers.

But … by all means, I do pray that while we are trying to save our nation that we should speak Christ to those strangers and aliens who hate Christ and hate His church. Preferably, when they are in the kind of camps the Japs were during WW II. (Which by the way would be high living for them considering where the living conditions of where they came from.)

Well, at least, when they aren’t trying to stuff, pin, and sink our 4 y/o grandchildren into a horse trough full of snow with a mop handle.

RJD writes,

You are not permitted to hate the neighbor because the state failed. You can seek national correction without abandoning personal faithfulness. When politics reshapes your posture toward the lost, it has exceeded its authority and must be resisted.

Bret responds,

1.) It is the very gnard of love to advocate for legislation to round up illegals to ship them back to their country of origin while giving them extra hand me downs I find in the attic so their children won’t play in the street naked.

2.) Scripture calls for us to “hate that which is evil.” If strangers, aliens, and foreigners are evil is it ok to hate them then?

3.) I wonder if RJD would have faulted Cortes for all the hatred he showed to the Aztecs?

4.) Try a thought experiment here. Pretend, if you can, that it is the 12th century. For whatever reasons the European elite has decided to import Mooselimb hordes into European homelands. You know with each boatload of Mooselimbs that settle in your once Christian land that your Christian faith is going to be, soon enough, jettisoned because these Christ haters get to vote.

Would Jerry say it is “hate” to want to keep the Mooselimbs at arm’s length?

Van Til Concisely States Presuppositionalism … McAtee Attacks Natural Law

“By his hatred of God the natural man is bound to repress the truth of revelation given him. He does not want to be confronted with the demands of the God against whom, ever since the day of Adam at the beginning of history, he is in rebellion. Even in the field of philosophy this opposition to God appears. Everywhere, in man’s own constitution as well as in his environment, God speaks to man. But everywhere too man  the sinner, seeks to suppress the truth about himself and his relation to God his creator. Even when God in his grace speaks redemptively to man through Christ, and then Christ speaks redemptively to man through the Scriptures, the natural man again seeks to repress this revelation. He uses his scientific and philosophic as well as his theological systems in order to keep under the challenge of the revelation of God to him. Everywhere God meets man and everywhere asks man to answer. Man is inherently a covenantal being. He is one who cannot help but answer to God. He can give the right answer to God only through Christ’s atoning blood and through the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit. Once Christ has become a curse for him on the cross, and once Christ has risen from the dead for his righteousness and he has by the Spirit’s power accepted this salvation wrought for him in history, then he seeks at every point to be a covenant-keeper. He then seeks to be a covenant-keeper in the field of science and philosophy no less than in the field of theology. The great presupposition of all his efforts at interpreting himself and the world about him is the fact that he and the world are first interpreted by God in Christ as revealed in Scripture.

On this basis human self-awareness is awareness of self in relation to what God has revealed himself as being for man through Christ. On this basis God speaks to man from above and man answers to God as a scientist, as a philosopher and as a theologian. All his predication constitutes one great answer of covenant gratitude to his redeemer through whom he has been brought back to God the father.”

Cornelius Van Til
Christianity & Barthianism – p. 432

This provides a succinct explanation by CVT on presuppositionalism. In the explanation of it we see why Thomistic Natural Law theories are not and can not be true. Man as fallen, is out of covenant with God and as out of covenant with God fallen man seeks to interpret all reality in relation to himself as the prime epistemological authority. Man, as it were, takes himself as God and seeks to interpret all reality is light of his own legislative word. As such, fallen man, necessarily interprets the totality of reality amis.

That fallen man, necessarily interprets the totality of reality amis does not mean that fallen man does not manage to get some micro matters of reality aright but when he does get some micro matters of reality aright it is always in service of his worldview that is determined that “we shall not have this God rule over us.” At those points when fallen man gets micro matters aright in service of his rebellion against God and His reality fallen man can never account for how it is he was able to get micro matters aright. As Dr. Greg Bahnsen was fond of saying; “Fallen men can count but they cannot account for how it is they can count.”  It should be noted though that over the course of time as the anti-thesis works itself out in history fallen man get fewer and fewer matters touching reality right. For example, fallen man in the West pretty much once understood that boys were boys and girls were girls but as time has passed and as the anti-thesis has developed now there is uncertainty about the answer to the question; “What is a woman.”

Fallen man, then, will use stolen capital from God’s reality to get his denial of God’s reality off the ground and flying.  This is necessary to fallen man because there is no way to have a perfectly God hating worldview and still remain alive, for a perfectly God hating worldview is the worldview of a graveyard. It is at the point of stolen capital that the apologist must challenge fallen man. For example, natural law has stolen capital from God’s worldview by saying that man is a knower. Fallen man is indeed a knower however what Natural Law does not take into consideration is that fallen man as a knower is committed, a-priori, to not knowing the one reality that would make fallen man a knowing knower. Natural law admits that all ground is common ground but it refuses to acknowledge that no ground is neutral ground and it refuses to admit that fallen man is not neutral to the matter of knowing. Knowing man may be a sharp blade but he is a sharp blade that cuts at the wrong angle every time.