The Christian Faith and Marriage — A Brief Distillation

Human history begins with a wedding in the garden (Gen. 2:22-24). In the Fall, the first place where one finds Alienation, after alienation from God, is alienation between the husband and wife (Gen. 3:12). The re-creation, which restores man to God’s Kingdom garden, begins with Christ’s miracle at a Wedding in Cana of Galilee (John 2:1-11). The relation between between Christ and the Church is analogized as a marriage (Eph. 5:22-33).  Finally history is consummated with the Marriage feast of the lamb (Rev. 19:6-9). Scripture thus forms an inclusio around the theme of marriage broken, marriage restored and marriage consummated. Beyond this redemptive thrust we learn that God hates divorce ( Malachi 2:16), designates that marriage should be honored by all (Hebrews 13:4-7),  and teaches that marriage provides a covenantal set apart-ness (has a sanctifying effect) even for a unbelieving spouse (I Cor. 7:14f).

Covenant theology finds much of its substance in God’s faithfulness to the seed of the generations who are the fruit of godly Marriage (Malachi 2:15). Covenant theology, which bespeaks God’s covenant faithfulness to familial generations, could not exist if there were not covenant families as formed by covenant marriages. The whole covenantal structure of Scripture presupposes Marriage and family. The Church is even spoken of as  “the Household of God” ( (Ephesians 2:19).

When we, as a people, as a church, or as a culture get marriage and family wrong we twist the very foundations of our Christian theology and yet we would never get marriage and family wrong without first having twisted our Christian theology.

 

 

Mark 7 — The Traditions Of Men … Evil Proceeds from the Heart

3 For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders.

4 And when they come from the market, except they wash, they eat not. And many other things there be, which they have received to hold, as the washing of cups, and pots, brasen vessels, and of tables.

5 Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen hands?

6 He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

7 Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

8 For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do.

9 And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.

We must realize here that no Old Testament texts call for anyone to wash hands before eating (but see what priests do in Exodus 30:18-21; 40:31). This may be an example of what was called “building a fence around the law.” The idea was that laws would be given that would prevent people from getting near to breaking a law just as a fence insures that no one gets near trespassing on private property.

These “traditions of men” that our Lord Christ keeps referring to here has to do with Jewish source of authority — “the Oral Law” —  which would eventually become “The Talmud.” The Talmud is a collection of Rabbinic writings from the first few centuries after Christ, however those Oral Law writings are based upon the kind of Oral traditions mentioned here and reach back long before the time of Christ. In the time of Christ, the Pharisees had already developed a system of Biblical interpretation of the Old Testament that allowed them to violate the letter and spirit of Biblical commandments while fulfilling them in a barely superficial way.

 

Here Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for adhering to legalistic man-made tradition while neglecting the law of God.

If we examine the Talmud, it becomes obvious that the Jews ignored Christ’s rebuke and continued down the path of wickedness. The Jews have progressed so far down this path that they no longer worship God, but instead worship their own techniques of hairsplitting argumentation. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the following episode from the Talmud (Baba Mezi’a 59b). In this passage, the Rabbi Eliezer is debating with his fellow rabbis about the cleanness of an oven. The other rabbis refuse to accept Eliezer’s argument, even after God himself speaks from heaven on Eliezer’s behalf:

The conviction was that since the Oral Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai; they need pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because Thou hast long since written in the Torah at Mount Sinai.

After this debate Rabbi. Nathan met (OT Prophet) Elijah and asked him: What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do in that hour (when it was said “pay no attention to a Heavenly voice”)?

Elijah responded,  He (God)  laughed [with joy], he (God) replied, saying, ‘My sons have defeated Me, My sons have defeated Me.’

This mindset is codified in the Babylonian Talmud,

“Since God already gave the (Oral) Torah to the Jewish people on Mt. Sinai we no longer pay attention to heavenly voices. God must submit to the decisions of a majority vote of rabbis. —

BT Bava Metzia 59b

Rushdoony made it is life’s work to warn about this phenomena,

The self-righteous man makes his own will his law; he replaces the law of God with man-made traditions of his own devising.

~ R. J. Rushdoony

As it pertains to the value of the Oral Traditions, one OT Scholar could say,

The oral traditions of the ignorant rabbis …(give) not the sense of the Mosaic writings. Many of the laws of the Pentateuch would make a strange figure indeed, if we were to interpret them as the Pharisees did, whose exposition, according to Christ’s declaration, in many cases served to inculcate doctrines and precepts directly the reverse of what Moses had taught and commanded… even with regard to Jewish antiquities, prior to the Babylon captivity, the Talmud is … an impure source of information … a book … which appeals only to oral tradition can tell us nothing worthy of credit …”

Johann David Michaelis
Professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages
University of Gottingen
Commentaries on the Laws of Moses

*.) Talmudic Traditions of Men in our Current Laws

God’s law says, as quoted by Christ in Matthew’s Gospel,

Matthew 19:4And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE,5and said, ‘FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH ‘?

This is God’s law. It is the only law we know. It is the law that must be the soil out of which any other law must grow.

This is God’s law, but this is not man’s law. No, instead we are having talmudic type law foisted upon us. We are being forced to governed by the very traditions of men that the Lord Christ so severely denounces in this passage.

The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest. With that knowledge must come the recognition that laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter.

Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges

Now there exists a fundamental right to marry?

And by what standard are we defining “stigma and injury”? Where does our “basic charter” prohibit the stigma and injury that comes with violating God’s eternal law.

The right to marry is fundamental as a matter of history and tradition, but rights come not from ancient sources alone. They rise, too, from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era. Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here. But when that sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the State itself on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then denied. Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right.

Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges

1.) “Rights come not from ancient sources alone” — Clearly a swipe at the Christian Scriptures. So, rights do not come from God alone? Well, what other God is there to give rights if not man?

2.) “Better informed understanding” — those poor poor fools of the past who were not bright enough to have the better informed understanding of this brilliant current generation.

3.) We’re not disparaging you or your beliefs as wrong in the least. We are just saying that you did not have the “better informed understanding” that we have. No disparagement at all here.

4.) So, Christian beliefs as enacted law should not be but the religious beliefs of sodomites should be enacted law?

5.) Is it ever proper to stigmatize or disparage any sexual self identity Mad Anthony? Should we stigmatize Bestiality? Should we disparage Pedophilia? Should we consider Necrophilia taboo? Remember Justice Kennedy you have created a right of self identity in this decision.

And we must mention here the connection between Talmudic thinking and the Supreme Courts decision on Abortion (Roe vs. Wade).

Whereas God recognizes life even before it is in the womb,

Jeremiah 1:5 Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

Our law, based on Talmud takes a different direction.

According to Michael Hoffman in his “Judaism’s Strange Gods”

“Since the 1973 SCOTUS decision, Roe v. Wade, the standard American abortion procedure is considerably Talmudic in nature, since the Talmud specifically states that if the unborn baby is adduced to be ‘rodef’ (one who threatens), the rabbis authorize that it can be chopped up at any time: ‘They chop up the child in her womb.’ (Mishnah Ohalot 7:6)

Rabbi Meir Abulafia decreed, “So long as the fetus is inside the womb, it is not a nefesh, and the Torah has not pity on it.” Judaic legal scholar Rabbi Isaac Schorr stated, “The sense of the Talmud is that a fetus is not a person.” The Talmud contains the expression, “ubar yerech imo” — the fetus is as the thigh of its mother. (That is to say that the Fetus is deemed to be part of the pregnant woman’s body.)

* .) The “Christ Has Delivered Us From The Law Position” (We are ruled by Grace not law)

Old line Dispensationalism

“The law (which) grace writes in our hearts must answer to the law written in God’s Word.”

John Owen

*.) The “Christ Has Delivered From the General Equity Argument”

R2K

Mosaic Covenant as Covenantus Interruptus

Ruled by Nat’l Law.

Claim that at this point in time when Christ is speaking in defense of God’s law He was living between the ages of the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. The New Covenant had not been enforced yet by His death and so these kinds of Law remained in force. (Tithing of Mint, Dill, and Cummin for example)

However with the death of Christ, so this argument goes, we have a “new and better covenant,” that does not include the OT judicial case law, which was only for OT Israel.

*)  The Continued Non Judicial Attempt To Press Upon Us The Traditions of Men As Law

We live in a culture, that having denied God’s law, opt for the traditions of men. Today the “Traditions of Men” is typically rephrased as “Political Correctness.” We are given an implicit speech code and we implicitly told that if we violate this speech code law that we are guilty of sin by man’s standard.

And so we have a list of sins that are man created and which we are to be constrained by.

It is against the law of Political correctness to say “illegal alien,” or “anchor-baby,” or “sodomite.” It is against the law of Political correctness to be opposed to homosexuality or transgenderism. Political Correctness has made laws against matters they seldom define. For example there is the modern sin of “racism,” not mentioned in God’s Word and very seldom if ever defined. As such it is impossible to not be accused of breaking this law whenever an enemy of God finds it convenient to accuse someone of “racism.”

The traditions of men live on as law whenever one is accused of not sufficiently loving Jesus because one might be convinced that Scripture defends the idea of “nations,” and so would disallow universal open borders. The traditions of men live on as law whenever anyone condemns someone for saying that women are different then men and that God made them different.

It gets worse than that though. Today, given our Political Correctness and Cultural Marxism, if we insist upon the necessity of a known Lord Christ in order to be saved we are accused of breaking the Traditions of men that demand tolerance and acceptance. If one suggests that one simply cannot inherit the Kingdom of God while still pursuing the deliberate lifestyle of sin one is accused of being insensitive, being bigoted, being intolerant. Even more, given our current climate, if one makes a righteous judgment, consistent with God’s word, but that just judgment hurts someone’s feelings then that person who made the just judgment is uncaring, unloving, and unfeeling.

This is madness. Having traded in the law of God for the traditions of men we have at the same time traded in God’s legislative sovereign authority in exchange of man’s legislative sovereign authority. Having traded in the law of God for the politically correct traditions of men we have exchanged God’s definition of sin for man’s definitions of sin, we have tried to cast off our guilt as God designates guilt and have embraced a false guilt foisted upon us by charlatans, mountebanks, and perverts, and in doing so we are destroying ourselves as we seek to pull down God.

The Westminster confession defines sin as  any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God. This is reflective of God’s Word which teaches, “Sin is the transgression of the Law” (I Jn. 3:4).  Let the “Traditions of men,” as law therfore be damned. Let Political Correctness and Cultural Marxism as God’s law be cast into the deepest nether regions of hell. Let the false guilt of false sin stemming from a false law from false Messiahs go bugger itself. Christians are free men and Christ and must not be weighed down with the yoke of a law from hell.

____________

*.) The real problem

15 There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man. 20 And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man.21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, 22 Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: 23 All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.

What Jesus subjects to fiercest criticism in this passage is the human being. Joel Marcus notes the concentration of the word anthrōpos(“human being” or “person”) eleven times in the span of Mark 7:7–23 and says:

“The basic problem Christians should be concerned about, Mark seems to be saying through this striking pileup [of the word anthrōpos], is not how or what one should eat but the internal corruption of the anthrōpos. It is this malignancy that chokes the life out of tradition, turns it into an enemy of God, contorts it into a way of excusing injustice, and blinds those afflicted by it to their own culpability for the evils that trouble the world.”

The teaching here is the necessity to guard one’s heart.

Interesting here that this list of our Lord Christ of what Each of these particular vices is, in some way, a sin of lust. Adultery, theft, avarice, envy, pride — each of these springs from a desire to take, to grasp, to own, to devour.

The corruption of the human heart is rooted in desire to suck the life out of that which is not ours to have.  It turns out that our lusts do affect our hearts. If our desire for the satisfactions and the quenching of our lusts is not identified and repented of we become increasingly Demonic.
(Proof for doctrine of total depravity.)

Brief discussion of Heart — (not speaking of non rational self)

Warning against self righteousness.

Odd that in a passage that so clearly warns against hypocrisy finds us in danger of falling into hypocrisy and self righteousness. It is easy to envision ourselves of not being guilty of the Pharisee’s error. We can fall into think that we respect God’s law unlike everyone else. We can fall into thinking that “Ha … we get it right.”

But are we humble enough to search ourselves to see examine where we create our own traditions of men in our own lives. Do we hold people to God’s standard while allowing ourselves to be excused. Do we not see that we break the law every day in word, thought or deed? Can we come before this passage and not shiver and shake in fear that we are the one’s that our Lord Christ is speaking of?

*.) The Cross as only remedy for forgiveness for our creating “The Traditions of Men.”

 

 

Sexuality and Man & Woman as Image Bearers of God

In the embrace of homosexuality there is the attempt to strip off the imago dei by the Lesbian or sodomite in question. Sexuality is so closely tied up with the Image of God in men and women that when one defiles and reverses their sexuality they at the same time are seeking to rip the image of God out of themselves.

The reason this can be advanced is that male and female together comprise the image of God.

Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

When a man or a woman seek to strip themselves of their God ordained sexuality they are therefore seeking to undress themselves of the Image of God appointed to them in their composite role as image bearers.

There is also the reality that in man and woman together reflecting the character of God, in all their glorious God appointed sexuality, the fact that, together as image bearers, they reflect the one and the many found in the Unity and plurality of the Godhead. In seeking to strip off their God ordained masculine or feminine sexuality there is the attempt to turn God into a monad absent of His plurality.

The embrace then of Lesbianism and / or Sodomy then is, at its foundational level, an attack on God via the means of the attempt to erase God’s Image by erasing God’s ordained sexuality placed upon the man and the woman as God’s creaturely image bearers.

This explains why this particular sin is so dangerous and why St. Paul can write,

I Corinthians 6:17 — Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body.

The lesbian and / or the sodomite is sinning against their own body because by illicit coupling they seek to disembody themselves of the image of God contained in their physical bodies as given in their sexuality.

Sexual sin is particularly primal. It goes to the core of our identity as image bearers of God. While one can never successfully sanitize themselves of the fact that they are the Imago Dei, one can so twist their self understanding of the reality that they are image bearers that the twisting begins to approach a searing of the conscience so severe that few recover.

Alienism & Christianity

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

– Sir Walter Scott

Civility is a kind of relation that recognizes the moral priority of more intimate relations. We don’t owe fellow citizens the same sort of obligations we owe family, friends, and co-religionists. Civic relations respect this order of duties and affections, as when a wife is excused from testifying against her husband. (Nomocratic rule supports this moral priority). But in teleocratic regimes, everything may be collapsed into political membership, and children may be ordered to inform on their parents, or taken away from parents who subvert their loyalty to the state, as by teaching them religion…. 

What is plain, at any rate, is that Alienism is far from a marginal force. It offers malcontents of all sorts an ideology or gnosis that enables them to interpret normal life maliciously as a crude though somewhat disguised struggle between oppressors and victims. If the oppression isn’t obvious, that is because the oppressors are so cunning and their victims so totally subjugated that even their perceptual powers are in thrall. Acquiring the liberating gnosis is called “consciousness-raising.” The process enables the initiate to strip off the mask of oppressive structures and see capitalism as exploitation, freedom as “repressive tolerance,” and prosperity as “invisible poverty.”
 
Joe Sobran
Pensees
 

When Christianity embraces Alienism the result is that God favors eliminating the natural priority of family in favor of prioritizing the stranger and the alien so that the stranger and alien, in essence, are now the benefactors of the priority that was once bent towards family. Alienism, run amok, thus prefers the alien and the stranger above and over members of one’s own household. When Christianity embraces Alienism the result is that the proverb “Charity begins at home,” is seen as demonically sourced. When Christianity embraces Alienism the result is the owning of the sulfur doctrines of the “Fatherhood of God of all men,” and the “Brotherhood of men with all men,” with the consequence that the  Universal affection those doctrine require stamp out all the particular affections of family, people, and nation.  Christianity, does indeed teach the necessity of the Universal when it teaches to, “do good to all men,” but not without adding, “especially to those who are of the household of faith,” thus demonstrating that the Particular still remains. Christianity insists upon the Particular when it teaches, “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever,” and this without denying the noble character of the Good Samaritan.

Alienism is the faith of the Unitarian. It believes in and actively seeks to build a world where “all colors bleed into one,” so that mankind is as undifferentiated as the Unitarian God it serves. Alienism is the faith that hates all God ordained distinctions in favor of an equality of the garbage scow where distinctions likewise are non-existent. Alienism denies the God ordained distinctions of mankind just as Unitarianism denies the Trinitarian distinctions in the Godhead. As the Alienist worships a Unitarian God, mankind must be made in that god’s Unitarian image.  As such, distinctions melt away in the name of equality (sameness) as equality is pursued in the name of practical Unitarianism.  Women are men. Children are purple penguins. Marriage is distinction-less. Bathrooms are gender-less. Ethnicity is a social construct. Pronouns must become gender neutral. All roads lead to god. Why can’t you “Co-exist”?

Alienism, as it comes into the Christian faith, trades in the Revolutionary language of “Citizen,” or “Comrade,” — that language that flattens out all distinctions in favor of a grand oneness —  for the Anabaptist “Brother,” which does the same thing but with a Christian patina. Alienism, as it comes into the Christian faith, posits a eschatological vision of a Unitarian border-less world where, because Jesus has triumphed, therefore the particularity of Nations cease to exist. Where such a eschatological vision exists any pointing to passages in the Scriptures that speak about Nations remaining in the New Jerusalem is shouted down as “heresy,” and “hateful.”

Alienism will settle for nothing less than the complete inversion of orthodox Christianity.  According to Alienism it is a positive good when thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long; and there shall be no might in thine hand. According to Alienism it is a sure sign of Christian maturity when,  the stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low.  He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.  This is all acceptable to Christian Alienism just as long as we so reduce the meaning of Christianity so that everyone can be considered Christian. The definitional distinctions that a robust Christianity demands are as offensive as every other distinction to the Christian Alienist. In such a way the rank and file Christian can be brow beat about his insensitivity and lack of love for Jesus if he even begins to object to the Alienist vision and worldview.

Usually, Christian Alienism, is not quite as cutting edge as “secular” Alienism. For some reason Christians think that they honor Jesus if they stay 10-15 years off the cutting edge. Because this is so Christian Alienists will allow for Homosexual Christians as long as those Homosexual Christians are not practicing Homosexual Christians. “See,” thinks the Alienist Christian, “we are sensitive to the need to blur distinctions also.” Alienist Christians can be found who will even speak about their “Brother Muslims.” Alienist Christians prove their mettle most obviously when they insist that Jesus is especially pleased when the worship of the WASP  takes place in multicultural settings. This despite the fact that these same people take great pleasure in the existence of uniquely Korean congregations in their denominations.

In the end, Alienism as Christianity, is just another disguised version of the Marxist vision to eliminate all distinctions.
The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and end all national isolation; not only to bring the nations closer together, but to merge them….”

Vladimir Lenin
The Rights of Nations to Self Determination — pg. 76

“Princes and nations will disappear without violence from the earth, the human race will become one family and the world the abode of reasonable men.”

-Adam Weishaupt, quoted in Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (London: Orion Books Limited, 1993), p. 32.

Capitalism developed the ever more inhuman polarization of the sexes. The cult of making distinctions, which serves only for oppression, is now being swept away by awareness of resemblance and identity.

M. Walser
Uber die neusten Stimmungen im Westen
In: Kursbuch, Bd. 20, 1970, S. 19-41.

”What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities?

The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and hereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property.”

~ Frederick Engels in “The Principles of Communism”, 1847

“The equality of races and nations is one of the most important elements of the moral strength and might of the Soviet state. Soviet anthropology develops the one correct concept, that all the races of mankind are biologically equal. The genuinely materialist conception of the origin of man and of races serves the struggle against racism, against all idealist, mystic conceptions of man, his past, present and future.”

—Mikhail Nesturkh, Soviet anthropologist, 1959
“The Origin of Man” (Moscow)Mikhail Nesturkh, Soviet anthropologist, 1959

Alienism is very likely the greatest threat to orthodox Christianity today and so of course the Church has embraced it.

 

 

 

The Way Madmen Speak

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Barack Obama

Only a madman, one might think, would dare to speak of changing the entire milieu — “building a new society” — or even to speak as if such a thing were possible. And yet this is the current political idiom. It is seriously out of touch with a set of traditions whose good effects it takes too much for granted; it fails to appreciate them, as it fails to appreciate the human situation.

Joe Sobran
Pensees