Exposing the Stupid Blathering of Liberal Greg Johnson Aimed at Fundamentalists

“Fundamentalism is too simple and too easy to be true. Its cavalier spirit with God’s glory is the first indicator of its falsity. When all answers are simple, all of the rules clear and easily kept, when doubt and fear and bewilderment and mystery are disavowed and disallowed where certainty about all things is the only permissible path, and leaders exist not to point beyond themselves but to enforce unchallengeable conformity to themselves, there you have fundamentalism in all of its ferocious, shaming, soul-shriveling horror. It is exactly there where you may find many forms of religion, but also exactly there where you won’t find the authentic Christian Faith confessed, explored, & lived. It is one reason why contemporary Evangelicalism is in such disarray & those with questions flee its quarters. A recovery of the Evangelical spirit marked by a humble, thoughtful, & deep reception of Scripture combined with a respectful, humble deep reception of people – the single-hearted double listening that arises from the twin loves of the Great Commandments – must become a priority.”
 
 
David Cassidy
Co-Signed Greg Johnson
 
Fundamentalism is typically the first stick that a liberal fundamentalist like Greg Johnson (he of sodomite but celibate PCA Minister fame) will reach for when he’s been turned to jelly in an argument by an orthodox Christian. I have found that Liberals are consistently the most Fundamentalist people I know. In what follows below I hope to expose Liberal fundamentalism by making them eat their own words.
 
1.) How much more simple and easy can Liberalism be if all it has to do to stake its superiority is to claim that its opposition is “too simple and easy to be true?” I mean … such a claim is hardly the stuff out of which profundity is made.
 
2,) Cassidy and Johnson assert but do not demonstrate that Fundamentalism has a cavalier spirit as it concerns God’s glory. I can make the same assertion. “Liberal fundamentalism has a cavalier spirit as it concerns God’s glory.” See, that was easy, and like Cassidy and Johnson, I’m dead serious about that.
 
3.) In Liberal fundamentalism all answers are simple. How do I know that? Because the answer is always characterized by the lack of certainty that says, “I’m not sure,” as if doubt is somehow an automatically superior position to take. Never mind that the Liberal Fundamentalist is absolutely certain about their uncertainty and if you challenge their certainty in uncertainty then you’re a fundamentalist prig who is always committing the sin of certainty.
 
4.) Look, you can’t get much more simple than someone telling you, “All the rules are unclear and so can’t be kept.” You can’t get much more simple than telling people, “It’s all bewilderment and mystery so do what thou wilt.” You can’t get much more simple when uncertainty about all things is the only permissible path. You can’t get much more simple than having leaders who point beyond themselves to a great realm of mystery, uncertainty, and bewilderment. In all this one finds Liberal fundamentalism with its demanded conformity to the leader’s insistence that nothing is knowable with certainty, and that doubt is good, fear is understandable, and uncertainty is to be treasured above all prizes.
 
5.) Liberal Fundamentalism is exactly where you find all forms of mystery religions but also exactly where you won’t find authentic Biblical Christianity confessed, explored, & lived.
 
All of this is one reason why Liberal Fundamentalism can never provide a satisfying resolution for those seeking answers by which to live. Liberal fundamentalism is in disarray and thinking people are forever fleeing its quarters. We must have a recovery of the Evangelical faith marked by a humble, thoughtful, and deep reception of the certainty that comes from being confident that the Scripture gives us a sure and certain “thus saith the Lord,” to which we can find a sure foundation and not the slippery forever changing base that Liberal fundamentalism offers.
 
Only with a sure and certain Word can we fulfill the twin commandment requirement to love God and our neighbor.
 
There is no hope in the dead and uncertain faith of Liberal fundamentalism which Cassidy and Greg Johnson champion.

Ignore their bloviating. It means nothing. Besides, they can’t be certain that they are right because that would be committing the sin of certainty.

Yeah, I’ve Got a Beef with Doug Wilson & So Should You

“Doug Wilson doesn’t want to fight. What he wants to do is be known as a fighter among the members of the Judeo-Christian Ladies Luncheon Society. So he blames gay marriage on Christian fathers, making himself out to be the only real man in the room. He also loves to bloviate about how everything in America is the Church’s fault, and issue vague calls for “repentance” of nothing in particular, and then condemn to Hell any Christian who points to the people who actually are causing so many of our problems as “anti-semites” and “racists.” It’s hilarious that he can write this article without a glimmer of awareness that he’s describing himself.”

F. H. Glastonbury 
Pseudonym

When Doug Wilson and Doug Jones first showed up on the Reformed scene I lapped up their Credena Agenda with my PCA minister friend up the road. We howled together as Wilson and Jones lampooned every sacred cow on the planet. All that to say that there was a time when Wilson ranked very high in my pantheon of good guys.

Those days are long gone.

Now I think that Doug Wilson is an impediment to the Reformed cause if only because the fact that he still often gets a great deal right it makes it easier for people to accept the great deal he gets wrong. In that way Wilson is even more dangerous than a Tim Keller or a Russell Moore. With Keller and Moore and J. Ligon Duncan, and Sean Michael Lucas, and Al Mohler, and Matt Hall, and David Platt, and J. D. Greear, and Mike Horton, and R. Scott Clark, and Joke Harder, and ad-infinitum for much of the rest of the Reformed of “conservative” world people can just say to themselves when one of these guys pops up; “Yep, just one more dumbass statement coming from the piehole of the Evangelical – Reformed Clergy.”

But with Wilson it is different. People actually listen to this guy and they (unfortunately) take the chap seriously. It is precisely that which makes Doug such a danger to the handful of the genuinely Reformed people left out there. I know, for example, that many young Reformed ministers see Doug as a kind of “last guy standing.” Sorry … I’m not buying it.

This article elucidates a few reasons why. Keep in mind this is only intended to be a kind of “Whitman’s Sampler,” or if you prefer, “Doug’s Greatest Hits.”

1.) Of course we all know about Doug’s time on the “Pale Ale” Federal Vision bar stool. This was error that was (and is)so serious that if we lived in sane times Doug would have been defrocked.  Doug escaped that because the people who were criticizing him the most (the R2K boys) were even more heterodox than he was. Since then Doug has said that it was all a big mistake and he’s sorry.  You can find at least a couple of articles here on Iron Ink of me taking Doug to task during his halcyon Pale Ale Federal Vision days.

2.) Of course Doug Wilson butted his nose into the R. C. Sproul 2.0 case giving Sproul a pass after another Reformed denomination didn’t give Sproul a pass. The lack of wisdom on that move came out sometime later with the news of Sproul’s subsequent oopsie daisies.

3.) Can you say … “Steven Sitler?”

4.) Can you say “plagiarism?”

5.) Then there was Doug Wilson’s 2015 article on appropriate government actions concerning vaccines and forced quarantines;

“If a person has decided personal convictions about the contagious disease he is carrying, the society in which he lives has an equal right to have decided and contrary convictions about that same contagious disease he has. And if there is an outbreak of such a disease, and the government quarantines everyone who is not vaccinated, requiring them to stay at home, the name for this is prudence, not tyranny.”

Doug Wilson
2015 … Pre-Deep State Virus

Even in 2015, given the nature of our Federal Government Doug should have given some kind of clever codicil about being suspicious about pronouncements of the Federal Government. Instead what we got was the kind of pronouncement one might have expected from a minister who was certified by Reichsminister for Church affairs.

6.) Then there was this gem from Doug;

“In the brewing culture wars, we ought not to stand with those seeking to ban same-sex marriage (or with those seeking to impose it).” “So we openly accept homosexual marriage in the civil realm as God’s means of undermining that civil realm, and we accept that He has done this in judgment for wicked fathering within the Church.”

Doug Wilson

Here the culture was on the brink of a full-on Luciferian assault against God, country, and family and Doug steps up to the mic and before God in heaven and man on earth instructs God’s people to openly accept homosexual marriage in the civil realm because like the prophets of old Doug has a pipeline to God and so knows that to resist same-sex marriage would be a mistake because Doug knows that God has visited us with the scourge of sodomite marriage because of wicked fathering within the Church.

Now, every minister can say that whatever comes into the lives of a people is providentially from the hand of God but no minister should suggest that he knows why God is providentially doing X, Y, or Z because of reasons A, B, C. No minister can crawl into God’s filing cabinet to get a definitive “this is that” reason. I don’t disagree that there is wicked fathering in the Church. I protest that Doug can make macro pronouncements about the mind of God concerning God’s providence — I protest Doug’s assumption to be a kind of Christian version of the Oracle of Delphi. Maybe God, in His providence, visited us with the scourge of sodomite marriage in order to punish us for hammerhead ministers making wild arse guesses about why God does this or that.

And to say that “we openly accept sodomite marriage?” What was the man smoking that day? Maybe God intended, contra Saint Doug, for Christians to rise up and resist magistrates who want to foist upon us the acceptance of sodomite marriage instead of just accepting it?

And now Trannyism is upon us. I can just hear the Oracle of Moscow now;

“In the brewing culture wars, we ought not to stand with those seeking to ban  men in our women-folk bathrooms (or with those seeking to impose it).” “So we openly accept Trannys in the civil realm as God’s means of undermining that civil realm, and we accept that He has done this in judgment for not enough Christians agreeing with me about not resisting sodomite marriage.”

I can’t wait for Doug’s next “from on high” pronouncement on the coming pedophilia outbreak, not to mention, what God tells Doug about how Christians should not resist the routine bedding of farm animals in the civil realm.

Note here that this positioning of Doug on these issues puts him functionally in the same exact camp as the R2K lads. The R2K lads would absolutely salute Dougie’s reasoning here.

7.) Here is Doug’s pearl of wisdom on voting;

“So you should vote in a way that you can in good conscience ask God to bless … But I’m planning on writing in Ben Sasse because that is a vote I could in good conscience ask God to bless. I don’t expect anyone to count it, but I do want to ask God to bless it.”

Doug Wilson

Now this one was a weird confluence of the stars. I say this because Ben Sasse was the idee fixe of the R2K fanboys — who routinely hate Doug Wilson with the might of a thousand exploding yellow stars. Yet, here was Doug getting in bed with an R2K acolyte (Ben Sasse). That one left a permanent crick in my neck as my head whiplashed so badly upon reading Doug’s endorsement.

However, Doug’s support of a Ben Sasse is perfectly consistent if you read #6 again because that is the same exact policy that a Ben Sasse would follow.

On these scores, both Sasse and Wilson are following a uber-Libertarian kind of political reasoning.  Uber-Libertarianism is not particularly Christian.

8.) “Christians must learn to distinguish sins from crimes. If God reveals His will on a matter, disobedience is sin. If God reveals the civil penalty which must be applied, then it is also a crime. But without wisdom from Him on the civil penalty to be applied, the civil order must leave enforcement of God’s law to the church, family, or the providence of God….when pornography is made and distributed, it should simply be used as evidence — of the adultery or of the sodomy, etc.”

Doug Wilson

The Short version here is that Doug would have agreed with the landmark 1973 SCOTUS Miller vs. California case which loosened up the ability to traffic in pornography.  Again … all of this is to boggle the mind and is the essence of Libertarianism.

The rumor is that when Doug made this pronouncement from on high that Larry Flynt wined and dined Doug at a 5-star restaurant. (That’s a joke Son.)

For centuries the West criminalized the production of porn but here Doug steps up to the mic and announces all of that was; “Our bad. Sorry.” Can anybody imagine the Westminster Divines saying; “Yeah, porn is a sin but we are powerless to recommend any civil penalty for porn producers. (?)”

9.) Then there was Doug’s media tour with Christopher Hitchens hawking Hitchens’s new atheist diatribe. Doug got face time on all kinds of media as he served as a kind of human punching bag for Hitchens to assail the God of the Bible on National Television.

10.) Most recently Doug writes articles about the dangers of antisemitism in the Reformed Christian community that he never defines or gives examples of. I note this because it has been a long-used tool by the enemies of Christians to scream Anti-Semitism every time someone commits the sin of noticing and points out an inconvenient truth about the strangely disproportionately high percentage of Jewish people in this or that desultory industry, revolution, or culture influence position.

11.) Then there is Doug’s continued insistence that race is a social construct. Who could have guessed that Franz Boas’ influence would live through Doug?

Now, I understand Doug buys his cyber-ink by the barrel and that he is voluminous in his writing. I further understand that Doug has done some fine work for he which he should be saluted.

However, the kind of stuff above at least should make us realize that Doug can’t be accepted without being interrogated on all he says.

I hope people see here that I am not punching right. I am punching left on a guy who scads of people think belongs to the conservative element of the Reformed world. If Doug really was on the right I wouldn’t be punching.

In the end, Doug Wilson is to the Reformed movement what Wm. Buckley was for Conservatism for a generation, and that is Doug with the Reformed world like Buckley with the conservative world makes sure that Reformed Christianity doesn’t get outside the banks of a nice predictable river.

 

 

 

 

The Nations and Their Gods

Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD; and the people whom he has chosen for his own inheritance. Ps. 33:12

 

Has it ever changed that any nation or people are not a nation and people of some god? I see no evidence of that idea anywhere in the Scriptures. Nations and peoples remain as organized by and identified with their god or gods. This is an inescapable category. And if this is true we are forced to ask, which god is the god of our country and people?

Consider that as every civil government is a law structure, and all laws are simply enacted morality, and all morality has a theological foundation, and to have a theological foundation is to have a god that is driving the morality which is driving the laws. So whatever law structure a nation has is inescapably theological. Thus, the state is an establishment of religion as that religion is a reflection of some god. Thus all nations and people, as seen by their law system, still belong to some god or gods.

Which brings us back to the text and causes us to ask, “Can we be characterized as a people belonging to the Lord?” Of course, we belong to the Lord as belonging to the Church … and as belonging to Him familially and individually. But as we belong to a people, we need to ask do we as a nation … as a people belong to God? The Saudis belong to Allah. Japan belonged to the Emperor-god at one time. I think as I look around I would have to say the Americans belong to some Sodomite god. We hate children as seen by our abortion stats. We have legalized sodomite coupling. We have laws forcing Christians to do business with the perverted. Or maybe our god should just be called Demos and it is the case that the voice of a perverted people is the voice of our perverted god?

But be sure of this much… it is still the case that all nations (all peoples) belong to some god or gods. A nation (people) belonging to God or some god is an inescapable concept and this explains why we as Christians should be in friction with our larger culture because our God and the pretender god of this “nation” who we have empowered in this country are in conflict.

Doug Wilson … Manning the Extreme Right Side of the Left for Decades

Doug Wilson’s latest entry … “Beware of Peru Rising,” makes the case that while Joe Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov were evil men, men like Alger Hiss and Lauchlin Currie were just well-intentioned goofs who wanted to believe the best about people. Hiss and Currie then like Keller, Mohler, Russel Moore, and others now are really affable good-hearted men who while mistaken remain our friends — even if misguided. One wonders how many times one has to be knifed in the back by these amiable dunces that Wilson lists before one concludes that…“Jeepers, this might be more than just a case of well-intentioned goofiness gone astray.”

Doug also raises the horrific specter that as opposed to real Reformation what might happen is that America gets red-pilled. Doug doesn’t pause to consider that Reformation might come in the context of being Red-pilled. However, Doug has never met a false dichotomy he didn’t want to bed.

The fact that Doug can see men like Keller, Mohler, David French, and Matthew Hall as amiable dunces and not as enemies who know they’re enemies is proof positive that Wilson is an amiable dunce who desperately needs both Red Pilled and Reformation. Y’all can trust him to man the walls and ring out the warning if you like but I’m keeping my own eyes peeled for what is coming next.

People who listen to Wilson too often think they are getting the 100 proof rotgut whiskey when in point of fact they are sloshing down hand over fists the very finest Shirley Temples.

Oh… and if you want to be served up the rotgut Whiskey you know where to find me.

Addendum

A word of warning to the Kellers, Halls, Mohlers, and Moores that Wilson mentions. You people better find a way to move towards Wilson because if you don’t there is a whole wave of warriors coming over the horizon who are just going to bury you with your bastardized Calvinism.

In the state, we live and move and have our being

Originally written in 2009  — Before Obergefell vs. Hodges

Melinda woke up at 6:00 am realizing that her water had broke. Quickly she woke up her partner Gladys who was sleeping next to her in order to drive her to the hospital. Melinda and Gladys had recently been married after the state had passed the gay marriage law. Melinda and Gladys had decided to get pregnant in celebration of their marriage. Glady’s gay Brother had been kind enough to contribute some of his semen in order that Melinda could be artificially inseminated once the state fertility center had given Glady’s brother’s semen its government certification stamp. Fortunately, the provision in their state-run health care insurance paid for the fertilization procedure as well as for the costs of having baby Hillary.

Gladys had just dozed off after getting home from working the late shift as a data organizer for ACORN. Melinda was thankful that the timing of her water breaking was such that she could drop off her 4-year-old Eddie at his school for the early school program. Melinda briefly wondered if she would have time to fix Eddie’s breakfast until she remembered that Eddie could get the state-provided breakfast and lunch at the government school.

So, within 15 minutes of her water breaking Gladys, Melinda, and Eddie were out of the door of their house – a house recently purchased with the help of both the Government-owned Freddie Mac and one of the area’s Government banks. Melinda slid into the passenger side of their sleek new government motors hybrid “Medusa.” The state-run hospital was five miles away, with the state-run school being a mere two blocks away from the state-run hospital. So, the three of them went from their state-owned house mortgaged by state-run financial institutions, to the state manufactured car, to the state-run school, to the state-run hospital all in a matter of 20 minutes.

Once in the doors of the hospital, the state employee hospitals informed Melinda that there was at least a 95-minute wait for the labor room and that instead, they were going to have one of the state internee doctors deliver the baby in the emergency room – which they hoped would be available sometime soon. While Melinda was being informed of this Gladys was being reminded that according to the state hospital records that Eddie had not been brought in for the state-required vaccinations. Gladys was told that if she didn’t see to it that Eddie came in soon there would be both a fine and a government medical worker coming to the home to visit.

Finally, all the red tape was finished and Melinda was wheeled into the emergency room while Gladys took a detour in order to purchase one of the state-run media newspapers.

45 minutes later Melinda gave birth to a baby girl. Upon birth, the baby girl (Hillary)  was put through government-mandated measurements and assessments. After baby Cher was determined to be worthy of life by the state, the state hospital assigned a government care worker to Melinda and Gladys in order to make periodic checkups and provide “counsel” as to how to raise baby Cher. This “benefit” of a government care worker coming into the homes of parents with newborns was part of Gladys and Melinda’s health care insurance.