Diary on Summer Vacation Reading from 2012

Productive 3 days at the lake

Finished …. Igor Shafarevich’s, “Socialist Phenomenon”
Finished …. Anthony Sutton’s, “Skull and Bones”
Almost finished … R. J. Rushdoony’s, “Chariots of Prophetic Fire”
Made good progress in David Hall’s “The Genevan Reformation & the American Founding.”

RJR’s book is great as a kind of devotional for the lives of Elijah and Elisha.

RJR gives insights consistent with what you find elsewhere in RJR — to wit — the warnings against Statist control, the development of the antithesis in the life of Israel, Observations about the dangers of syncretism, and what it means to be a “Throne man.” Very good

Shafarevich’s book is a must-read if you want to understand what we are living through. Shafarevich connects the dots between atheism as a belief system and socialism as the incarnation of atheism into a social order. Shafarevich lays bare the irrationality of socialism and in a treatise that is worth the price of the book. He spends time exposing how socialism is popular among those who think only as animals (intuitively) as opposed to those who think like humans (using reason). A fantastic book and if one were to combine this read with Dr. Fred Schwarz’s “You Can Trust the Communists to be Communists,” and Toledano’s “Cry Havoc,” and Von Mises “Socialism,” and Hayek’s “On the Road to Serfdom,” one would have a pretty good working foundation on the worldview that is our greatest enemy in our time.

Anthony Sutton’s book made me realize again how deep the wormhole goes. Much of what we get from the thin crust media is 100% spin. The next level isn’t much better with what we get from the court historian publishing houses. Sutton documents the role of the Skull and Bones order in the US and World History. Sutton re-emphasizes that most of the conflict that we see in our times is purposely created as part of the dialectic between a manufactured left vs. right that has as its goal the result of a New World Order. Read in conjunction with other Sutton books, Carol Quigley’s “Tragedy and Hope,” and books like “None Dare Call It Conspiracy,” “The Zionist Factor,” “Behind Communism,” and “Secret Societies and Subversive Movements,” one begins to realize that the need for heaven-sent Reformation is far greater than any of us could possibly be aware of. Good book.

Hall’s book is the antidote for the disease that Sutton names. Hall describes for us how Liberty-minded Calvinism is and he traces the impact of Calvin’s thinking on the creation of the West and especially the founding of America. Quoting numerous sources Hall probes how and why genuine Calvinism has always revolted against those who revolt against the Lord Christ as King. This book should be read in combination with Witte’s “The Reformation of Rights.”

This book explodes the myth that R2K thinking is Calvinistic in the least.  Hall has done us a real service with this work.

Quotes & Commentary from E. Michael Jones’ “Monsters from the Id”

Once morals disappear from the human equation, all human interaction is a function of force, which means that women come out on the short end of the stick because, according to feminist theory and the thought of the Marquis de Sade, they are weaker than men.

E. Michael Jones
Monsters from the Id — pg. 314

With the impact that existentialism and then postmodernism has brought on morals, we see the truth of Jone’s statement. Because of a lack of morals, we can routinely torture and murder the unborn. Because of a lack of morals, we can open the Church doors to side-b sodomites who desire to be known for their besetting sins. Because of a lack of morals, we now have a manosphere because both men and women are locked into individual and personal sexual politics. Mao captured succinctly what Jones is saying above when he said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

“Modern critics can not understand the genre of Horror because they can’t understand the Enlightenment, and they can’t understand the Enlightenment because they are inside it so to speak, espousing its goals; the critics, virtually to a man, espouse its values so completely they can’t conceive of any alternative to it as the project which orders their lives.”

E. Michael Jones
Monsters from the Id — pg. 296
There is something in this quote that the modern Church needs to hear as a principle. The modern Church, like Jone’s critics, too often are of little use to Christians today because the modern Church has swallowed the Enlightenment core principle of Egalitarianism. The modern Church can not fight where the fight is of most import because the modern Church is inside the Enlightenment and holds as dear to God the Enlightenment’s most core principle. This does not mean that the modern Church can never give profitable counsel. It DOES mean that any counsel the modern Church gives pertaining to the most animating issue of our time (Egalitarianism) — an issue owned by the enemy — is counsel that smells of the sulfur that besots our enemy. In the words of Pogo, In the modern Church, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

In time the modern Church will overwhelmingly fall on the sodomite marriage issue, on the Confederate flag issue, and on the Transgender issue because the modern Church owns as a principle of Christianity the core principles that drive those issues. Borrowing from Jone’s, “Egalitarianism is the project that orders their lives.”

Rushdoony & Dabney Teach Us The Proper Attitude Towards The Honored Dead

“[A]nytime that we are ready to confess the sins of our forefathers, there is something wrong with us, because we have enough of our own sins to confess without confessing mama’s and papa’s and grandpa’s and great grandma’s sins. … That’s what our generation is busy doing: confessing the sins of our forebearers. Oh how terribly they treated the Indians, and how terribly they treated this or that person, or the blacks. … So don’t go confessing the sins of your ancestors or missionaries of the past. They were very often better people than we are. And we need to be up and doing so that we can accomplish as much as they did in their day. They were not perfect, none of us are this side of Heaven. But they did the Lord’s work as best they could, and we should thank God for them.”

~ R. J. Rushdoony

_____

We are a beaten, conquered people, gentlemen, and yet if we are true to ourselves, we have no cause for humiliation, however much for deep sorrow. It is only the atheist who adopts success as the criterion of right. It is not a new thing in the history of men that God appoints to the brave and true the stern task of contending and falling in a righteous quarrel. Would you find the grandest of all names upon the roll of time? You must seek them among this “noble army of martyrs,” whose faith in God and the right was stronger than death and defeat. Let the besotted fools say that our dead have fallen in a “lost cause.” Let abandoned defamers and pulpit buffoons say that theirs are “dishonored graves.” … We have no need, sirs, to be ashamed of our dead; let us see to it that they be not ashamed of us.

~ Robert Lewis Dabney

Trying to Help the Baptists Not be Baptists

An example of Baptist reasoning touching infant Baptism

A man who belongs to Christ

Marries

A woman who belongs to Christ
AND
Have a baby.
This baby though, belonging to the man and woman who belong to Christ, should not be thought of as one upon whom Christ as a claim of ownership and so should not be baptized.
UNTIL
The baby is old enough to claim that Christ is owned by him.

So … claims of belonging and ownership moves from the divine to the acquiescence of the human who is owned.
And yet, the parents do not wait before being responsible for the child until the child asks the parents into their lives.

Charles Church objects.

Parents or children don’t ask because the child is begotten of them. No one wonders about whether those born of God are proper candidates for baptism either.

Unless, then, you are prepared to confess baptismal regeneration…not even that really, since your point is about who are proper candidates for baptism, so if you are prepared to confess that children of believers are automatically regenerate, then your parallel can make sense. But not until then.

Bret responds,

  • The children of Reformed parents are Baptized with the presumption of charity as to their redemptive identity. This presumption of charity as to their redemptive identity is valid because God Himself has been pleased to open the womb of His redemptive people and provide a covenant seed for Himself. Thus children of Reformed parents are Baptized with the presumption of charity as to their redemptive identity. Reformed people Baptize their babies, not because they know that the babies are regenerate but rather on the basis of God’s command and promise. God’s promises are to us AND TO OUR CHILDREN, (Acts 2;39) and Christ commands for the Nations to be Baptized (Matthew 28) and as children are part of those Nations to be Baptized they are to be Baptized.

    There is a key difference seen here Charles. Baptists do not baptize their children because they are operating with the presumption that their children are damned until those children are old enough to;

    A.) Be old enough to not be presumed damned
    B.) By offering up their ability to agree to God’s claim upon them from conception in exchange for God’s mark of ownership seen in baptism.

    Third, unlike Baptists, Covenantal Reformed do NOT hold to the doctrine of every member of a visible Church is automatically regenerate simply because they are members of the Church. We concede that there are within the visible Church those who are only administratively attached to the visible Church while others have the essence of what is promised by being marked by baptism into Christ’s and His body. As such, there is no claim on our part (unlike Lutherans) that Baptism itself brings regeneration.

    Baptism is God’s claim of ownership wherein the expectation is found that said Baptized child will grow up yielding to love and commands of He who has claimed Him. However, just as all of Israel was not of Israel in the Old Covenant (Romans 9:6-7), so today not all of grown up Israel (the Church) is of grown-up Israel. Just as then some who would fail were rightly marked with the sign of the covenant so today some who will fail are rightly marked with the new covenant sign.

    Baptists presume that the babies born of Christians are born as belonging to Lucifer AND as God having to wait on their decision to claim Him before God can make a valid claim upon them without their consent.

    It really is a matter of priority. Baptists believe that the priority of claim of ownership moves from divine to human before the claim of Divine ownership upon man, as communicated in Baptism, can be allowed.

    Baptists are latent Arminians because they are requiring that their babies are able to bring something they can’t as babies bring (their verbal testimony of conversion) to Baptism in exchange for the sign of the covenant that age-accountable people can bring.

Archetype and Ectype Exodus

The end of the Spiritual captivity, with the death of the Lord Christ, like the Exodus from Egypt, came in the context of a Passover celebration. As Jesus celebrates the Passover with his followers, He gives them a new meal and a new cup, and in the cup is the blood of the new covenant (Matthew 26:26-28). This blood and this cup is new because it is the fulfillment of all the typological anticipation in the old covenant, which could only ever be promissory though proleptic.

As the new Exodus takes place, like the first exodus, the new one comes with a covenant. Again … it is the covenant of Grace but now as fulfilled in Christ. As the new Exodus takes place, like the first exodus, it comes through the slaughter of a lamb, whose blood covers the people. The blood on the lintel is typologically fulfilled in the blood of the Lord Christ, which is poured out for many for the remission of sins