Sundry Quotes and Thoughts From My Reading Surrounding Christ And His Work

“T. F. Torrance argued that, as the High Priest in the OT disappeared when he entered the Most Holy Place on the day of Atonement, so the atonement is a mystery. Limited atonement is seen as a rationalistic attempt to reduce a mystery to the bar of human logic, and so is imperssible.”

Robert Letham
Systematic Theology — pg. 573

I always love it theologians use logic to insist that we shouldn’t use logic.

If human logic is out of bounds as having explanatory power then we are all blind, deaf mutes when it comes to understanding anything.

Keep in mind Gordon H. Clark’s words here;

“in the beginning was the Logic and the Logic was with God and the Logic was God.”

——

John 10:11 “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”

The good shepherd laid down His life for the sheep but many of those sheep the good shepherd laid down His life for were not yet born and would not be for millennium. This fact drives us to conclude that countless number of the sheep that Christ laid down His life for were His sheep before they were His sheep. That is, His sheep were His sheep from eternity past so that there existed an objective Union between the Shepherd who would give His life and the countless number of sheep yet to be conceived who would be the future beneficiaries of the Shepherd’s cruciform work.

Before Christ won me, I belonged to Christ. Objective Union with Christ from eternity. Subjective Union w/ Christ when we are regenerated with a regeneration that is a gift flowing from the Cross wherein Christ justified the people who were objectively justified from eternity.

——-

All those who hold to the idea that Christ’s death is universal in scope (or hypothetically universal in scope) cannot have a penal substitution understanding of the atonement wherein Christ makes effective atonement for particular sinners. If Christ died for everybody in general and nobody in particular then Christ’s simply suffered various sufferings so that eventually in time sinners in general might do something to effectuate what up until the point of effectuating was inert and without power. The Cross is latent with salvation but it does not save without something from the human being mixed with it to make it effectual. That something is usually a inverted definition of faith, wherein faith actually becomes a work that activates the Cross’s power and obligates God to give salvation in response to the human response of faith.

Those who don’t hold to the penal-substitution theory, at best, have a Governmental view of the Atonement where the Father punishes the Son to uphold a generic justice in His universe and whereupon men, feeling pity for the suffering Christ, come to Christ out of a sense of compassion.

——

“Calvin’s dominant theme on the atonement is satisfaction of the justice of God. Christ has abolished sin, banished the resulting separation from God, and acquired righteousness for us ‘by the whole course of his obedience,’ although peculiarly and properly by His death. Even in death ‘his willing obedience is the important thing because a sacrifice not offered voluntarily would not have furthered righteousness.’ He offered Himself to the Father as an expiatory sacrifice. By His obedience He acquired and merited grace w/ His Father. The substitutionary nature of Christ’s death is clear as Calvin cites Mt. 20:28, John 1:29, Rmns. 4:25, and 5:19, and Gal.4:4-5. Christ’s offerings rends ‘ the Father favorable to us, this propitiatory sacrifice being a provision of God’s love. Calvin affirms, ‘Christ’s grace is too much weakened unless we grant to His sacrifice the power of expiating, appeasing, and making satisfaction.’ ‘The righteousness He acquired for us when He reconciled us to God is as if we had kept the law. The link to justification is clear.”

Robert Letham
Systematic Theology — p. 566-567
Citing Calvin’s Institutes

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“The merciful Father … said to [his Son]: ‘Be Peter the denier; Paul the persecutor, blasphemer, and assaulter; David the adulterer; the sinner who ate the apple in Paradise; the thief on the cross. In short, be the person of all men, the one who has committed the sins of all men. And see to it that you that you pay and make satisfaction for them.”

Martin Luther
Luther Works – Vol. 26 – p. 280

——-

If you have a doctrine of the atonement that emphasizes satisfaction to God’s honor then don’t be surprised if the culture around that doctrine ends up being a honor culture.

The fact that the concept of honor has been so diminished in our culture, I would suggest, is proof positive that we have abandoned the Satisfaction theory of the Atonement.

—————-

John 17: 9 I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours.

As our great High Priest Jesus prays for a very particular people. Part of the ministry of the Priest was not only to offer sacrifices for the sins of the people (which Jesus did by offering up Himself as our sacrifice) but the ministry of the Priest was to represent the people to God in prayer.

If that is true (and it is) then if Jesus as our Great High Priest only prays for those the Father has given Him then consistency demands that this same Great High Priest only renders up Himself as the sacrifice for those same particular and unique people He prays for.

Non particularistic doctrines of the Atonement are NOT Biblical and really should be read out of Christendom.

From the Mailbag; Pastor Can You Give Me A Reading List Dealing With The Post-War Consensus

A friend writes and asks;
Dear Pastor,

Do you have some recommended reading on the Post War Consensus debate? I’m trying to get some awareness into these recently contested matters.

Bret responds,

Hello Josh. I don’t know of anything that deals directly with the current angst but here are a list of books that if read will give you the context of why people are justly complaining about this “post-war consensus.” (That really is a bit of mislabeling since the post-war consensus is just the final flowering of all that was pursued in the post-enlightenment consensus.)

Return of the Strong Gods — R. R. Reno

The Age of Entitlement — Christopher Caldwell
The Unprotected Class — Jeremy Carl
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe — Christopher Caldwell
Out of Revolution — Rosenstock-Huessy
Law and Revolution — Harold J. Berman
Law and Revolution II — Harold J. Berman
The Bondage of the Free — Kent Steffegen
The Dispossessed Majority — Wilmot Robertson
The Tears of the White Man; Compassion as Contempt — Pascal Bruckner

Teasing Out Some Implications Of The Fifth Commandment

“Honor thy Father and Mother”  Exodus 20:12

It should be observed first that these few words destroy the idea of a egalitarian social order where all are functionally and economically equal. These words spell out hierarchy in social order relations. This is especially drawn out by the Westminster Larger Catechism where the meaning of the commandment is explained;

Q. 124. Who are meant by father and mother in the fifth commandment?

A. By father and mother, in the fifth commandment, are meant, not only natural parents,649 but all superiors in age650 and gifts;651 and especially such as, by God’s ordinance, are over us in place of authority, whether in family,652 church,653 or commonwealth.654

If ever there was a portion of Scripture that destroys egalitarianism it is the 5th Word of the decalogue.

Secondly, it does not stop with the support of hierarchy but in citing the core principle as starting with Father and Mother this commandment is a clear articulation of Kinism. True, the commandment ripples outward to proper respect for all superiors and inferiors but the center core is love for one’s own kith and kin. Indeed, egalitarianism with its elimination of proper social hierarchy is the inevitable consequence of a steady and resolved disobedience of the fifth commandment. Where there is no honoring of one’s parents there will be no proper honoring of even recognizing of people placed by God in the position of “superior.”

On this score, third, we would observe that it is not possible to honor one’s own immediate parents without honoring the parents that belong to the parents we are to honor. Of course this then is a reflexive glance to not only grandparents but also to all the Fathers and Mothers that belong to all our generations. This commandment thus attaches us generationally to all our parents that have gone before us and does so by requiring us to honor them all. This requirement to honor our Kin serves as adhesive binding all the succeeding generations to all the previous familial generations. Where the fifth commandment is esteemed there we find a Kinist social order.

Of course the great presupposition behind this commandment is that all of our Fathers were honoring the God of the Bible — hence the first commandment. Where our Fathers were a God honoring people, they honored their parents. As such, when we honor our Christian Fathers and Mothers we are at that point then honoring their and our God. The corollary of this is when our parents do not honor God then we are released from obligation to honor our parents where their dishonoring of God serves as a barrier to our honoring God. As converts then, we are to then take up honoring God first and foremost so that our children may rightfully honor God and us.

This brings us to a point that will be disputed given our alienist zeitgeist.
It is hard to imagine how we honor our Christian Fathers and Mothers by marrying into peoples that were aliens and strangers to our Fathers and Mothers. If our Fathers and Mothers saw fit to pass down to us not only a godly legacy but also the particular genetic inheritance of generations of a particular people it is difficult to see how it is the honoring of those generations to cast aside the genetic inheritance built up over generations and generations in order to do something (marry interracially) that in all times and places was considered verboten until about 1960 or so when the sexual revolution / civil rights revolution began to reinterpret Christianity through the lens of Cultural Marxism. Of course this principle is true for Christian peoples of all races. Interracial marriage, especially among Christians, is a dishonoring of generations and generations of one’s Christian people and past.

On this score alone we might wonder if the fact that the WASPs who once owned this country are no longer finding it to be the case that we are safe in the land that our Fathers and Mothers built? Is it not the case that because we no longer honor our Father and Mother as seen in the way that we have become comfortable with interracial marriage we no longer see the latter half of the verse being the case;

“that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”

That our days are no longer “long upon the land” is known to us as “replacement theory.” This theory holds that the white anglo saxon Protestant is being replaced by the stranger and the alien. All I am asking is, “is the reason that we are being replaced due to the fact that we have been, for generations, no longer honoring our Fathers and Mothers as seen especially in our marriage habits as a people.”

It is worthy at least to be considered.

Fisking Humanist Manifesto III; Antioch Declaration (Part VI)

We finish fisking the Humanist Manifesto III (Antioch Declaration)

We will start with a quote by highly regarded Reformed Theologian Gisbertus Voetius

“The frauds, the injustices, the greedy excesses, the rapacious plunders, the usuries, the calumnies, by which they incessantly attack Christians, are hidden from no man, except for him who never has seen Jews, or never heard anyone tell him what a Jew is.”

Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676)
Dutch Theologian

Humanist Manifesto III (Antioch Declaration — hereinafter referred to as AD)

Humanist Manifesto III (AD)

“We deny that the church of Jesus Christ in its particular locale has any compulsory quotas or assigned ratios for ethnic mix. The make-up of any local church community will be dependent on many socio-cultural, lingual and regional factors, and there is no requirement that any given congregation “look like the new Jerusalem.” But We FURTHER deny that a Christian congregation has the right to arbitrarily exclude any person based on prejudice, malice or bigotry toward their ethnic group.”

Paleocon,

The church is a place where all sinners, of whatever tribe, tongue, and nation, are welcome to hear the word of God.

However, having said that I do believe that Churches will operate better as practicing what is called “The Homogenous principle,” as articulated by Donald McGavran. Like the Greek Jewish widows in Acts 6, people will do better with leadership that comes from their own people groups. I agree with Reformed Theologian John Frame when he wrote;

“Scripture, as I read it, does not require societies, or even churches, to be integrated racially. Jews and Gentiles were brought together by God’s grace into one body. They were expected to love one another and to accept one another as brothers inthe faith. But the Jewish Christians continued to maintain a distinct culture, and house churches were not required to include members of both groups.”

John Frame,
“Racism, Sexism, Marxism”

Humanist Manifesto III (AD)

“We affirm that the ultimate bond or good for temporal human life is not grounded in absolute loyalty to blood and soil, family or nation, but in the totalizing bond of the Kingdom of God through the Covenant of Grace (Matt. 3:9; 6:10; 8:11;12:46-50; Lk.14:26; Eph. 2:11-21; Rev.7:9-10).”

Paleocon

Well the key above is that word “absolute” isn’t it?

If the above is saying we may not make a idol out of our family (familolatry) then who could disagree?

However, why must we make a dichotomy out of faith and family. Isn’t it possible that many in our family will own Christ and so we can have allegiance to both family and covenant at the same time.

Also, let us keep in mind Romans 9. Paul did not seem to make the kind of false dichotomy there that is made above. Listen to Reformed Theologian John Murray here;

“The use of the term ‘brethren’ bespeaks the bond of affection which united the apostle to his kinsmen. ‘According to the flesh’ is added to show that those for whom he had concern were not contemplated as brethren in the Lord…but it also expresses what is implicit in the term ‘kinsmen’ and supplies an additional index to the bond of love created by this natural, genetic relationship.”

John Murray
Commentary Romans 9:3

In the previous century Reformed Theologian Charles H. Hodge could also write;

“Brethren according to the Flesh.”

Romans 9:3

Paul had two classes of brethren; those who were with him the children of God in Christ; these he calls brethren in the Lord, Philip, i. 14, holy brethren, &c. The others were those who belonged to the family of Abraham. These he calls brethren after the flesh, that is, in virtue of natural descent from the same parent. Philemon he addresses as his brother, both in the flesh and in the Lord. The Bible recognizes the validity and rightness of all the constitutional principles and impulses of our nature. It therefore approves of parental and filial affection, and, as is plain from this and other passages, of peculiar love for the people of our own race and country.

Charles Hodge
Commentary Romans 9

The Boomer-Cons don’t sound like previous generations of Reformed theologians on this subject.

Humanist Manifesto III (AD)

“We affirm that in all things, including the treatment of our fellow human beings, the model man and example is not the life and teaching of Aristotle, nor any other merely historical personage, but the Lord Jesus Christ himself, Son of Man and eternal Son of God.”

Paleocon,

Correct. And that explains why I have written to unwind your nonsense Manifesto.

Fisking Humanist Manifesto III; Antioch Declaration (Part V)

Continuing the fisk the Humanist Manifesto III (Antioch Declaration). We start with a quote by John Calvin;

“I have had much conversation with many Jews—I have never seen either a drop of piety or a grain of truth or ingenuousness—nay, I have never found common sense in any Jew.”

 John Calvin (1509-1564)

Humanist Manifesto III (Antioch Declaration — hereinafter AD)

“We deny that scapegoating is a legitimate practice for Christians to participate in because God has already provided the final and perfect scapegoat in Christ Jesus who alone is the true sin-bearer.”

Paleocon

Agreed.

However, where is the proof that anybody is scapegoating… well, unless it is the scapegoating the Boomer-Cons are doing in making all these wild and veiled accusations.

Humanist Manifesto III (AD)

“We deny that our rejection of antisemitism requires us to ignore or minimize the destructive impact that various God-hating individual Jews have had in human history, just as our rejection of the hatred of Europeans and Anglo-Saxons does not require us to ignore the cultural devastation that many God-hating individual Gentiles have produced. Every ethnic people have members to be ashamed of, and every ethnic people have members to be grateful for.”

Paleocon

Y’all haven’t rejected antisemitism. You’ve redefined antisemitism to mean “somebody who commits the sin of noticing regarding the history of the Jews.” Also, what you have done is embraced philosemitism. Your refusal to talk in generalities proves that. If you can find one exception you suggest that proves folks who notice trends are anti semitic. For example if I say, “it is a problem that Jews, generally speaking, as a group, vote consistently for Democrats and that therefore means we have a problem,” you consider that observation anti semitic by trotting out the exceptions to that observation.

I will be glad to admit that the WASP is the one finally responsible for where we are. If we had not rebelled against Christ we would have never listened to the Bagels. So, the bad is on us before it is on the Bagels. But repentance means that we begin once again to be willing to commit the sin of noticing exactly what our Fathers noticed in all of Church history. This is something you are not willing to do and in not willing to do that you are pulling down the house of Christian civilization down around our ears.

Thanks ever so much.

Humanist Manifesto III (AD)

“We deny that Jews are in any way uniquely malevolent or sinful, that Judaism in its multifarious expressions is objectively more dangerous than other false religions, or that it represents an exceptional threat to Christianity and Christian peoples. By nature, the Jews are objects of wrath just like the rest of us, which is condemnation enough (Ps. 14:2-3), and are equally recipients of God’s grace (Rom.11:11-32).”

Paleocon

1.) Of course not everyone agrees with your interpretation of Romans 11. There is always the partial Preterist view of Romans 11.

2.)

“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not. Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me? He that is of God heareth God’s words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God. Then answered the Jews…”

— Jesus Christ

“…the Jews: who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost.”

— Paul the Apostle

“For they [the Jews] being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.”

— Paul the Apostle

“For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake.”

— Paul the Apostle

“Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son. Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.”

— John the Apostle

Finally you may not think the Bagels are any kind of extra existential threat to the Church or Christian civilization but please realize that is not the report of the Church throughout Church history.

Humanist Manifesto III (AD)

“We deny that world affairs are governed by conspiring Jews or that there is a global Jewish conspiracy to corrupt and destroy Western society.”

Palecon;

Have you ever considered the extraordinarily large percentage of Bagels who comprised the top echelons of the Soviet Union during the Bolshevik Revolution? This is especially interesting when we consider that Russia was 2-3% Bagel at the time. I suppose that was just a coincidence.

And what about this quote from Winston Churchill?

“This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.”

Clearly at the time of his writing in the London newspaper, Old Winnie did not agree with you. Neither did Nesta Webster. Neither did Chrysostom, Calvin, Luther, Ambrose and countless others. I’ll stick with these guys and go right on thinking y’all are mentally unstable on this subject.

Humanist Manifesto III (AD)

“We affirm that the Jews are as all other men—alienated from God and in need of the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ. As a people they have nevertheless remained an object of God’s providential care. With the Puritans of old, We affirm that in God’s good time, multitudes of Jews will come to faith in Christ and be added to the true commonwealth of Israel, inheriting the same blessings as Gentile believers. Hence, the cancerous and counterproductive sin of antisemitism has no place among God’s people.”

Paleocon

1.) Christ made it abundantly clear in the NT that he was done with the Bagels as a people.nation in connection to the matter of redemption. He cursed the fig tree, which was representative of Israel, and said, “May you never produce fruit again.” In the parable of the barren fig tree Jesus spoke of cutting down the tree if it refused to produce fruit. It didn’t produce fruit and it was cut down.

Now, it may be the case that in God’s economy in the future individual Jews may well own Christ but the idea of a great rush of Jews coming into the Church was bad exegesis from the beginning and remains so. In AD 70 God gave Israel its divorce papers. Individual Jews may come to Christ. We pray that many do. But as a people/nation God is done with them. The Puritans were just in error here.

Now, that doesn’t mean that therefore we should take up anti-semitism. It merely means that we quit with this preoccupation with Israel. It and they are irrelevant to eschatology that has yet to unfold.

Humanist Manifesto III (AD)

“We deny that there is more than one message or way of salvation. Salvation is through Christ alone, by faith alone, and by grace alone for both Jew and Gentile, out of whom God has made one new people, removing the dividing wall of hostility (Eph 2.11-21).”

Paleocon

The dividing wall is a reference to the Mosaic Law. Christ tears down the “dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances” (Eph 2:14b-15a). When Christ died, God no longer imposed on Jews the rules that once separated them from Gentiles. The purpose of those aspects of the law has now been fulfilled. The laws that specifically divided Jew and Gentile are now done away with. It is not just the ceremonial laws that are now gone, but the old covenant to which they were intricately attached has been replaced by the new covenant. Under the new covenant God no longer imposes these expectations on his children. This arrangement grants Gentiles wide open access to enter the kingdom of God.

Further, Paul is not talking about generic ethnic divides but specifically the aspects of the law-covenant that divided Jew from Gentiles. Therefore, someone cannot impose ethnic distinctions onto Paul’s words. The apostle has something uniquely covenantal in mind.

Second, the dividing wall was originally the will of God. To take the word “hostility” in and apply it to racism is dangerous. The dividing wall to which Paul is referring is the Mosaic Law, and the Mosaic Law was God’s idea. He made the wall; then he removed it in Christ. The division was God’s will, not the by-product of human sin. “Racism,” on the other hand, is the result of human sin and never is the result of what God commands. By applying Ephesians 2:14 to ethnic strife today you effectively turn God into a “racist.”

Third, did Christ remove by his death the various differences between cultures today? Not at all. Before Christ’s death, one culture may prefer beer. Another culture may prefer wine. After the death of Christ the first culture still likes beer and the second culture still likes wine. The death of Christ was not intended to move the needle on these types of cultural differences (except for the aspects of man’s culture that are sinful). Nor did it overturn other aspects of human relations grounded in creation and nature.

More fundamentally, the church and nation are two different entities governed by Christ in different ways–with different laws and rules of citizenship. Perhaps you should read Stephen Wolfe’s book and get these distinctions in your head rather than collapsing every institution into the church.

 

We affirm that God has ordained the existence of peoples and nations (Acts 17:26-28) and as such our cultural heritage is something to be grateful for so that, in view of God’s good gifts to our people, national pride, along with a healthy patriotism, are appropriate for Christians. At the same time, it is important to reject every form of identity politics, whether of the left or right—or whether the form it takes is malicious or vainglorious.