MODERNITY AND THE CHURCH

Across the tattered landscape of “conservative” Christianity an interesting divide is taking shape.  The division mirrors a broader political and cultural schism.  The Nationalist-Populist/Globalist-Elitist dynamic has an often ignored religious dimension. The battle between the unwashed hoi polloi and their elitist masters—a division that increasingly defines modern politics- has come to church. 

Regrettably, the division between Evangelical elites and pew-sitting deplorables extends far and wide.  While secular institutions take up arms to “tear down the patriarchy” and root out “white privilege,” the same conflict rages within the most conservative precincts of the Christian church. 

The infection has seeped far beyond the bastions of mainline Protestantism and into denominations such as the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), America’s largest Protestant denomination, which has more than 47,000 congregations.

Post-modern assumptions have been smuggled into conservative churches, denominations and parachurch ministries via the Trojan Horse of “racial reconciliation,” “social justice,” and the #ChurchToo movement.  Teaching and doctrine borrowed from Black Liberation Theology, Critical Race Theory and Intersectional Feminism are being proclaimed from pulpits, conference lecterns and the Twitter feeds of Evangelical spokesmen and leaders. 

Back in 1995, Samuel Francis prophesied the growing liberalization of traditionally conservative churches and denominations.  In an infamous column written for the Washington Times, which led to the loss of his position as a staff columnist, Francis criticized the SBC for approving a resolution apologizing for slavery.  

Francis predicted that churches subordinating scripture to liberal morality would accept a “bastardized version of Christian ethics” permeated by the “pseudo-Christian poison of equality.”  “Now that they’ve decided to join the parade toward that destination,” wrote Francis, “We can expect them to adopt some even more modern resolutions that will pave the road for them.”

Ever the prophet, Francis’s prediction took roughly twenty years to come to fruition.  Aside from a ritual denunciation marking the 150th anniversary of Dred Scott, the SBC avoided racial issues until 2015 when it passed a resolution on “racial reconciliation,” urging affiliated churches and entities to increase representation of non-White leadership. 

The goalposts quickly shifted with talk of reconciliation cast aside in favor of more aggressive denunciations of “structural racism” and “White privilege” along with broader attacks on historical symbols and the Dissident Right. 

In 2016, the SBC repudiated the display of the Confederate Flag–a rejection of its own founding; in 2017 it denounced the “Alt Right” and “white supremacy,” neither of which were defined nor running rampant in SBC churches;  in 2018 SBC organizations held conferences lionizing Martin Luther King Jr.; and in 2019 the convention adopted a resolution endorsing the use of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality as an analytical tool.

Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, spent most of 2016 assailing Donald Trump and his voters.  Given that 81% of White Evangelicals voted for Trump, this represented an attack on the folks filling Southern Baptist pews and paying his salary through the SBC cooperative program, through which affiliated SBC churches support state convention and SBC missions and ministries.  

Moore, who once called Jesus an illegal immigrant, said that Trump was breathing life into the White Supremacist movement.  He compared Trump’s clerical supporters to Kool Aid drinking cultists.  Describing himself as a survivor of “Bible Belt America,” he called Trump a “Bronze Age warlord” and accused his Christian supporters of worshiping a golden calf.

As looters have burned and pillaged cities and mobs of iconoclasts set upon the cultural legacy of America, SBC leaders bent the knee before Black Lives Matter and poured gasoline on the proverbial fire.  

Southern Baptist Convention President J. D. Greear denounced phrases like “all lives matter” saying, “Southern Baptists, we need to say it clearly as a gospel issue: Black lives matter.”  

Greear also warned fellow Baptists to refrain from bringing facts to bear on any discussion of “systemic racism.”  “Let’s spare each other the quoting of stats right now,” Greear said.  Tossing around biblical tropes about “neighbor love” and “weeping with those who weep,” pastors have cancelled data-driven analysis and replaced it wholesale with an empathy cut off from all other virtues.  

In an attempt at triangulation and “gospel winsomeness,” Gospel Coalition editor and ERLC communications specialist Joe Carter called Confederate soldiers traitors.  He penned a rambling diatribe advocating the removal of Confederate monuments while meekly offering that “reasonable Christians may disagree” as to whether George Washington’s ownership of slaves means that images of the indispensable man should be purged from public life. 

Demanding a change to the state flag, the Mississippi Baptist Convention made the audacious claim that “the need to change the flag is a matter of discipleship for every follower of Jesus Christ.”

Increasingly, the clergy and those training the coming generation of pastors have embraced emancipatory politics and critical theory turning politics into a Manichean struggle between the “White Patriarchy” and “people of color” and “oppressed” women. 

But good men are beginning to rise, shining a light on the infiltration of seminaries and entire denominations by postmodernism and Critical Race Theory.  Others are finally beginning to teach their flocks about the poison of Cultural Marxism, identity politics, so-called “White Privilege,” and social justice.

Christians looking to slow the spread of social pathogens wreaking havoc in the body politic should stop tithing to institutions and churches that are taking a hammer to what remains of Western Civilization and the faith that sustains it.  Instead, they should give resources, financial and otherwise, to the relative handful of shepherds that have not bent the knee to Baal.  

-By Scot Olmstead

For many I know it would be hard to believe but I do have a influence upon some young Padwan Jedi Knight apprentices of mine. This is a letter from one of my padawans I received last night. It was so good I wanted to post it here for your encouragement. Some people are getting it.

Hello Pastor Bret

A new friend mentioned the Federal Vision to me in passing a couple days ago and tonight while perusing Sermon Audio for a nice sermon to fall asleep to, I came across Brian Schwertley’s critique of the Federal Vision among Christian Reconstructionists. Sounded interesting and I hoped it might explain some things. Then the guy proceeded to bash Kinism and argue against paedo-communion and alarm bells went off in my head. Is Schwertley a Presbyterian Baptist? Because it sounds like it! 

It hit me like a sledgehammer how terrible Baptist theology really is during his offhand comment about paedocommunion being wrong. In short, Baptist thinking denies THE ENTIRE REPRESENTATIVE AND COVENANTAL NATURE OF REALITY SET FORTH BY SCRIPTURE! How on earth did it ever become mainstream?!

Infant baptism and paedocommunion are inescapable if a representative covenant of redemption and obedience exists. Man centered humanism has infected modern Reformed salvation doctrine on a bone deep level. It assumes that salvation acts on a purely atomized and personal level and not on a representative-corporate paradigm. And yet the Bible, whenever it speaks of salvation, from Adam to Abraham to David to the Lord Jesus frames it as a representative-familial-national act between God and man!
When a man is saved, it is not in a vacuum but within the context of his God-given purpose as a husband and father. This reestablishes a covenant of grace and law THAT BY DEFINITION includes his family in the father’s representative dispensation of his covenantal duty. Having his children baptized and partaking of communion from their earliest days is nothing but a FAITHful acknowledgement that it is the sovereign grace of God alone that saves and NOTHING TO DO WITH THE CONSCIOUS MIND OF MAN!   (Heaven help us! Consistent Baptists must believe that the mentally retarded are beyond salvation!) Not only this, the act of infants taking part in the sacraments puts our necks under the very serious reality that while God generally promises generational salvation, it is up to His sovereign decree and Divine will as to HOW and the EXTENT of that promise. Because as we know, not all covenant children are elect but that in no way does away with the promises and reality of corporate salvation anymore than God’s promise of prosperity to those who keep His law is done away with by the suffering many suffering saints have endured. It’s like Baptists have never read their Bibles! How do they fail to recognize that infant circumcision as the mark of God’s NATIONAL, COVENANTAL salvific ownership AND expectation of righteousness from that covenant member is OBVIOUSLY carried over by infant baptism and communion. Ultimately, Baptists DENY Christ and the very nature of the salvation they are trying to safeguard. Man is made in the image of God and thereby models His nature on that which is communicable – in this case, representative covenants (Being a Baptist actually means you deny sin because if we have to be of conscious maturity to be recognized as believers, then we didn’t fall in Adam because we must be of conscious maturity to partake of Adam’s choice). Further, the Apostle Paul explicitly stated that men in marriage and therefore including their children are modeling the representative relationship between Christ and the Church. If this is the case, then just as the Church had no choice but to acquiesce to salvation and sanctification in their representative; neither do children before their fathers’ God-given faith in generational salvation and the expectancy that they keep His Law. Baptists deny this and in turn deny that it was Christ’s work that saves but our own mature minds acting to receive it. 

I apologize for this rant on a subject you know well. But I found I had to get my thoughts out and roar against what seems a terrifying heresy in our midst. If I am wrong on anything, I would welcome your correction. It just seems that Baptists and Brian Schwertley are condemning infants taking part in the sacraments as part of the Federal Vision and they’re wrong. Also, what the sherbert is Federal Vision – exactly? I have been looking it up and it is just endlessly confusing. I get a few things (like denying the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to man) but the precise nature eludes me.

Lastly, it appears to me that Baptists got lost on the way to the mall and drove over a cliff instead. And by the looks of it they are still falling. This is what happens when the familial, kin-based, corporate, flesh and blood nature of salvation gets lost on people and they replace it with an abstract construct divorced from the real life Christ of blood, hearth and family!

Love you Pastor! And if you have time, please let me know if I have got a hold of this properly….

God bless

Perry Salvius

____

Dear Padawan,

On the whole I think you have this right though I might state some of these matters with a wee bit more precision.

In terms of Schwertly’s criticisms against Kinism they have been thoroughly refuted in a two part response here,

http://faithandheritage.com/2014/12/kinist-orthodoxy-a-response-to-brian-schwertley-part-1/

In terms of your question on Federal Vision allow me to say briefly that while Federal Vision did a service for the Church in pointing again back to the implications of Covenant theology Federal Vision over-corrected and ended up in the opposite ditch of heresy as the ditch of heresy their arch-opponents (R2K) were laying. In all the cross fire of the R2K vs. FV battler R2K tried to besmirch Theonomy with the brush of FV.

Here are a few links that explain why Federal Vision is heretical.

https://ironink.org/?p=2665

https://ironink.org/?p=66&

https://ironink.org/?p=3700&

https://ironink.org/?p=672

I have waged an unrelenting war against Federal Vision as well as R2K since I started this blog. The two errors deserve each other. They are to our modern setting what Eutychianism, (also known as Real Monophysitism) and Nestorianism were to each other in that early Church battle royal. R2K and FV are mirror errors as I explain elsewhere on this blog.

However, I want to say again here, that one thing FV got right was taking us back to covenantal categories with teeth. Indeed, the kind of teeth that you note in this letter my Padawan.

Interestingly enough most of the Reformed world declaim against paedocommunion, while generally speaking FV gets that one right. Scripture and less importantly logic dictates if we are going to bring children to the baptismal font we should be bringing them to the table. First generation Reformed Theologian Wolfgang Musculus agrees,

(1) Those who possess the thing signified also have a right to the sign

(2) Children who can receive the grace of regeneration (as is evident from Baptism) can also be nurtured in their spiritual lives without their knowledge.

(3) Christ is the Savior of the whole church, including the children, and feeds and refreshes all of its members.

(4) The demand for self-examination (I Cor. 11:26-29) is not intended by the apostle as a universal requirement.

W. Musculus – Loci Communes
First Generation Reformer

Remember that it is often the case that two errors fighting each other can both be wrong and can both get some things right. Federal Vision and R2K are arch enemies. We desire to be in neither camp, choosing instead to watch and eat popcorn while their war rages. Of course the occasional Bronx cheer for both sides is always in order.

Keep up your training Padawan. You are coming along nicely.

The Jedi Knights will prevail against the dark forces on all sides.

Your Master Jedi,

Obi Wan McAtee

Modernity promised that Universal schooling would bring Shakespeare and Milton to every child so that no child would be left behind in English Literature. Instead, what it made accessible to the brightest was literature like the Twilight series, Harry Potter, and Lemony Snicket. Modernity has given us integration downward into the void.

Modernity promised single women that they would be emancipated from the “drudgery” of home, children, and husband. The reality is the career woman who is chained to her salaried job and daily hearing the “tick-tock” of her biological clock. Modernity has given us integration downward into the void.

Modernity promised married women that divorce would be a better life than working on a troubled marriage. The reality is three marriages later and now the most recent marriage is still troubled. Modernity has given us integration downward into the void.

Modernity promised that sex without marriage would be “win-win” for everybody. The reality is 50 million babies who didn’t win, single mothers who didn’t win and a generation of men who understandably refuse to marry. Why buy the cow when you get milk for free? Modernity has given us integration downward into the void.

Modernity said that Christianity was old fashion and “legalistic.” The reality is that lives without borders turns out to be “nasty, brutish, and short.” Modernity has given us integration downward into the void.

Modernity is a lying wench and it’s about time someone put her in her grave.

Completed Dr. Fred Schwarz’s “You Can Trust The Communists to be Communists.” You can tell I think this is an important book because I only occasionally re-read a book. This is the third time I’ve read Schwarz’s book. It’s chapter on the Materialistic dialectic probably should be read every year.

The book is dated having been written in 1958 but the material remains important in understanding the basics of Communism. Now, people will ask; “Why read a book like this when Communism fell in 1989?”

The answer to that is three fold,

1.) I’m not convinced that Communism really fell in 1989
2.) Even if the Easter Bloc did fall, China remains
3.) Communism thrives here in the West

As such there is a need to stay up with what Communism is, how it functions, how it moves forward, how it recruits, and what it’s purpose is.

Schwarz gives us all that and more.

This book is needed for Biblical Christians because it helps us to understand our own faith. I remain convinced (though legion are the people who disagree with me) that is not enough to know what we believe and why we believe it but that we must also know what we do not believe and why we do not believe it. Knowing the inner-working of other Christ denying faith systems makes us more able to instantly locate the fault in any system anywhere we encounter it.

Of course this means that Communism is a faith-system and so a religion. That it is a faith system and religion the Communists would never agree because a “faith-system” is not a corporeal or material something and so cannot be true. The Commies insist that their Communism is Scientific and so indisputable. However, that is just Marxist bovine scat. Communism is a full blown religion that requires of its adherents faith in the unseen.

Schwarz gives us a chapter on how Communists organize (we saw that come to the fore especially in Obama’s campaigns for President) with the creation of a multitude of false fronts that can easily dissipate with the wind only to be re-created somewhere else as needs be. Schwarz gives us a chapter on how Communists recruit, noting that intellectuals find Communism appealing because it provides a purpose in life and a reason for existence — something nothing else yields except a muscular Biblical Christianity. In the chapter on Communist organization Schwarz gives us the five circles of communist commitment and how they interlock.

Schwarz gives a chapter on the Communist necessity of violence and terrorism as their technique for seizing and maintaining power. We see this technique being used today in our streets and in the demand to mask and social distance. All of these are just contemporary versions of the Communist philosophy of violence as to the seizing and maintaining of power here in the States. A key thing to remember is that there cannot be Communism without constant terror and violence. Communism thrives on the conflict of interest and so can not allow harmony of interest.

Schwarz gives us insight in how the Communist model works in a top down fashion and so explains why Communist states so easily crush any opposition that arises (think Hong Kong). Communism thrives on the strong man model as the system requires everyone to reflect the decisions of the Strong man at the top.

There is a good deal more, but if you read this book and understand it you will have a better grip on knowing the times we are in right now and what should be done. We desperately need our clergy to be reading these kinds of books because these kinds of books inform us where the battle is raging hottest and what must be spoken to from the pulpit.The Communists offer their own version of salvation and if the clergy refuses to compare and contrast and crush false notions of salvation the danger is that salvation will be reinterpreted in a Communist direction. (And we are seeing that in spades with books from Tim Keller like, “Generous Justice,” and the spate of books and conferences that have been held such as MLK50, and all the Communist racial justice blather.) The modern church is awash in Communist assumptions.

In the end Communism can only be defeated by a Muscular Christianity. R2K and Federal Vision and Keller Christianity need not apply.

In the original Communist vision it was an article of faith that the proletariat class (workers) must eliminate (wipe out) the residue of the bourgeoisie (ownership class). This being accomplished the Communist Utopia would come to pass.

Now, with the Gramscian version of Marxism (Cultural Marxism) the new proletariat class (workers) has been changed out and now is comprised by the minority community, the pervert community, most of the Academician community and the feminists. The proletariat class remains but remains as occupied, no longer by the workers of the world, but as occupied by these new and improved champions of the Marxist vision. It is this new proletariat that have been and will continue to be the Marxist man as marching through the Institutions.

But not only do we have a new proletariat but we have a new bourgeoisie as well. In the old original Marxism the bourgeoisie was identified as those who were the owners of Capital and so the means of production. In the new and improved Gramscian Marxism the bourgeoisie is comprised by the Christian White man. The Christian white man (and more generally the non-pervert, non-Academician white man as a whole) constitutes the evil bourgeoisie and so in this new and improved Gramscian Marxism it is the White man who must be genocided in order for the New Proletariat man to be able to have his Utopian existence.

The non-pervert, non-Academician white man needs to realize that he is targeted for genocide. Everything screams this. From the attack on the Christian family (see David Brooks recent article in Atlantic Monthly) to the attack on conservative Christian faith (see the SBC recent embrace of critical race theory and intersectionality… see the PCA’s embrace of the celibate sodomite Revoice movement … see the OPC’s embrace of the feminism of Aimee Byrd, Rachel Green Miller, Valerie Hobbes and others) it is clear that the traditional conservative faith that animated Christian white men through the centuries and which made the West the West is under attack from Gramscian Cultural Marxism and their advocates.

Consider this action recently that underscores the reality of what is being driven at here,

The University of Georgia just cleared their employee Irami Osei-Frimpong, who is a teacher’s assistant and a Ph.D. candidate, of any “violence” or “wrongdoing” for writing on social media that “white people may have to die for black communities to be made whole.”

Here, it is explicitly said that white people (note the generic) may have to die. Can you imagine the outrage if a white teacher’s assistant at the University of Georgia had said, “black people may have to die for white communities to be made whole.”

The whole trajectory of where we are at in history is to kill the Christian White man and by doing so pull Christ down from his throne. The attack on the white man (as has been said here before) is only the penultimate attack. The ultimate target is our great Liege Lord Jesus Christ.

We are at the point though where while we can and should make distinctions between race and ideology we cannot divorce the two. The minority community, generally speaking, along with the pervert community, the Academcian community, and the Feminists desire the destruction of the non-pervert, non-Academician, non-feminist white man. Just as the Bolsheviks put a soft bullet into the brain pan of countless Bourgeoisie so the Cultural Marxist, if they are to stay true to their ideology, must put a soft bullet into the brain pan of the Christian White man.

It needs to be said just that baldly.