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.

Of Rulers & Religion

“Rulers infallibly decide the religion of the people. The true religion is always the religion of the prince; the true God is the God, whom the prince desires his people to adore; the will of the priests, who govern the prince, always becomes the will of God. A wit justly observed, that “the true religion is always that, on whose side are the prince and the hangman.” Emperors and hangmen long supported the gods of Rome against the God of Christians; the latter, having gained to his interest the emperors, their soldiers, and their hangmen, succeeded in destroying the worship of the Roman gods. The God of Mahomet has dispossessed the God of Christians of a great part of the dominions, which he formerly occupied.”

Baron d’Holbach
Enlightenment Philosophe/Encyclopedist & Writer

I have repeatedly said that the State and the Church always walk together — the Sceptre and the Mitre are one. When this isn’t the case the result is rebellion and revolution as a culture ruled by a divided Sceptre and Mitre will always be in turmoil.

Because the above is true the whole idea of “freedom of religion” as commonly understood is just ridiculous. What freedom is found in a “freedom of religion” society for those who don’t believe in “freedom of religion?” If one were to believe that no society  should have “any other gods before them,” is that person free in the embrace of their religion?

Understanding the quote above is key to understanding where we are at during this current moment. For decades the “Christian” church in the West has supported the State with its Enlightenment classical liberal religion. This is so true that Christianity has been reinterpreted through that Enlightenment classical liberal grid. This is so true that even some theonomists today will insist that they are “Libertarian Theonomists,” or “Theonomic Libertarians.” Whichever way they flip it, the fact remains that their Christianity is being interpreted through their Libertarianism. This is true, for example, of Doug Wilson, Andrew Sandlin, James White, and others who think that they have a Christian Worldview.

We see this also with the prevailing theology in the Reformed Church today. R2K is nothing but a readjustment of Christianity so as to conforms to the Worldview/religion that is the foundation of the State. R2K will never challenge the State because R2K is the State’s theology.

The quote above explains why Greg Bahnsen and R. J. Rushdoony were so hated by the institutional church. The institutional Church hated these men so viscerally because Bahnsen and Rushdoony’s theology was a challenge to the post-war consensus and so to Enlightenment liberal culture. The quote above explains the travails of John Weaver, Sam Ketcham, Michael Spangler, Ryan Louis Underwood, Myself, and others. Given our return to an older understanding of Christianity we are a threat to the current putative conservative Reformed Church’s alignment with the prevailing zeitgeist. We are a threat to both Sceptre and Mitre.

However, I believe we may be in a transitional stage. More young men are stepping up and saying that they are done with the Post-Enlightenment/Post-War consensus. We live in a time where those gods must be dispossessed and the God of the Bible embraced as Lord over all.

This means we live in a time of opposition. Opposition to the demon inspired State and opposition to the sulfur smelling institutional Church. The Post-Enlightenment/Post-War consensus has to go with its solas of “Holocaust Alone,” “Civil Rights Alone,” “MLK Alone,” “Judeo-Christianity Alone,” and “Netanyahu Alone.”

A Conversation On The Nature & Usage Of State Power

Seth has become a bit of a friend. I say “bit” because I have not yet had the opportunity to meet him. Like many of the chaps I meet my son’s age, Seth, like my Son, is a man who is well grounded and quite sharp. Here I take exception to an idea that I find being expressed by more than a few of these young chaps who are quite sharp.

Seth writes;

“Man is fallen, therefore the state must be weak” is a category error.

Fallenness negates sentimental trust, not the legitimacy of authority.

Depravity is not an argument against power, but against naïveté.

Power is dangerous– but most dangerous in the vacuum of its absence, surrendering order to unaccountable forces. In this sense, imperialism is not tyrannical aggression but nationalism bearing the burdens of sovereignty.

Order must be preserved at scale, which means authority must extend to meet necessity. For the United States, by geography and circumstance, defense is necessarily hemispheric.

Politics is governed by necessity, not sentiment. This active character in governance is the precondition for liberty.

“But tyrannical statism!”

The failure isn’t authority, one ditch abandons rule given by God, the other replaces judgment with administration and becomes as a god.

Order is preserved only where authority is exercised with judgment and at the scale necessity demands.

Liberty does not endure by abdicating power, it survives only where power is wielded rightly.

Bret responds,

Since power is inescapable, power never goes away, even when it is distributed properly. There is NEVER an absence of power. The idea of vertical and horizontal checks and balances was a good way to distribute power that can never be flushed away. The vertical balances in our current Government were destroyed and the result is that the FEDS took power so that we live in an era where “in the state we live and move and have our being.” That is because power was concentrated in the Federal Government.

The argument that “man is fallen, therefore the state must be weak” is an argument based on the fact that an unrestricted powerful state will gobble up other delegated power centers such as family, and church. Without the state being assigned a checked and balanced power base, eventually the state will become synonymous with society as the motto arises “everything inside the state, nothing outside the state.” We have seen this happen as the power of the state, since the rise of Lincoln, but especially with the Woodrow Wilson and FDR administrations, has expanded the control of the state. Without proper checks and balances on the power of the state the state gobbles up everything as we have seen and have lived through.

When it is said that “politics is governed by necessity” whose standard of necessity are we talking about here? If one leaves that standard for “necessity” to be determined by the state that will mean the state will  discover all kinds of actions are considered “necessity.”

Seth wrote,

“The active character of Government is the precondition for liberty.”

Tell that to those who lived under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot.

We are currently living under tyrannical statism and you want to suggest that the threat of tyrannical statism is overblown?

Man is fallen. The state is comprised of fallen men. Therefore there is a necessity to properly distribute power because it remains true, despite some denials of this I’ve seen lately, that;

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

I agree that it is sin to abandon authority given by God. Tons of marriages display this truth, (And tons of marriage display the truth that women need to submit) but power not used, when properly assigned, isn’t our problem right now. Our problem now is power improperly used by the FEDS. It is why Jefferson once wrote of “tying them down with the chains of the constitution.”

You wrote;

Order is preserved only where authority is exercised with judgment and at the scale necessity demands.

Bret responds,

Yes … but by what standard, necessity?

I don’t trust the FEDS (including the Trump administration) to determine what does and does not constitution “necessity.”

Seth finished by writing,

Liberty does not endure by abdicating power, it survives only where power is wielded rightly.

Bret finishes

I agree 100% with that final sentiment, especially on the word “rightly.”

Look, I’m all for power being properly used. However, in my lifetime I’ve seldom seen the FEDS use power properly.

“Banner Of Truth” Not Being Truthful … Or “Orwell Saw It All Coming”

In December I posted the following quote from J. C. Ryle.

“The dwelling-places of the earth’s inhabitants are curiously divided. The world is not made up of one people or one colour. God by His providential ordering has separated the earth’s inhabitants into distinct nations, languages, and races, each with its own peculiar characteristics. These distinctions have existed for centuries, and have been preserved in a most remarkable manner. No climate, no teaching, no misfortune has ever succeeded in obliterating them. The negro is still black, the Red Indian is still red, and the Chinaman is still yellow. Nothing seems to account for these things but a miraculous interposition of God.

…

Let us beware of giving way to the modern notion that there is no such thing as God’s providential arrangement of the nations, and that the present attempt to amalgamate all nationalities and races, and to denationalise and unchurch people, is wise and politic. God has divided the world into separate nationalities, climates, languages, and churches, and it is the height of mischief to try and break down the divisions.”

~J.C. Ryle
Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, Matthew 24

Today, a friend of mine showed up in the comments saying that he owned a hard copy of Ryle’s Expository Thoughts on the Gospels and that the quote I have above was not in his volume and asking me if I were confused.

That set me on the task of tracking down the quote. I traced the quote back to where I picked it up. I picked it up from my good friend and famous artist, Dan Brannan. I wrote Dan and asked him where he got the quote and together Dan and I went on a search and destroy mission to figure out where the problem was.

I soon learned that this book was published by “Banner of Truth Trust.” I immediately recalled that Banner of Truth had a past reputation of dropping material down the memory whole. That is Banner of Truth had been caught years ago editing out material from the work of A. W. Pink’s “The Sovereignty of God.” I immediately wondered if they had done the same to Ryle’s quote since it has the flavor of controversy about it.

In the meanwhile Dan was digging around in PDF’s online and discovering that despite Artificial Intelligence (GROK) giving him the quote above and the page number it was on in the Ryle volume he could not find the Ryle quote in available PDFs online.

Dan went back to GROK and asked … “Hey GROK, what gives? Why are you telling me that this quote exists — even giving me the page numbers — and yet when I go to the PDFs you have linked to me, the quotes are not there?

GROK wrote back;

” The specific passage on racial/national separation in the commentary on Matthew 24:1-7 appears to have been omitted or edited out in some later reprints and digital versions for sensitivity reasons in the 20th/21st centuries.

The full, unedited passage (including references to distinct races like ‘the negro,’ ‘Red Indian,’ and ‘Chinaman,’ and the warning against ‘amalgamating’ races/nationalities) is present in certain historical editions, particularly those published before widespread modern editing. However, it is not in most common public domain PDFs circulating online today.”