Charles Hodge on Hart, Horton, VanDrunen, Fesko, Berry, Gordon and R2K

The demands of those who require that religion, and especially Christianity should be ignored in our national, state, and municipal laws, are not only unreasonable, but they are in the highest degree unjust and tyrannical. It is a condition of service in connection with any railroad which is operated on Sundays, that he employee be not a Christian. If Christianity is not to control the action of municipal, state, and general governments, then if elections be ordered to be held on the Lord’s Day, Christians cannot vote. If all the business of the country is to go on, on that as on other days, no Christian can hold office. We should thus have not a religious, but an anti-religious test act. Such is the free thinker’s idea of liberty. (A free-thinker is a man whose understanding is emancipated from his conscience. It is therefore natural for him to wish to see civil government emancipated from religion.) But still further, if Christianity is not to control the laws of the country, then as monogamy is a purely Christian institution, we can have no laws against polygamy, arbitrary divorce, or “free love”. All will demand that we yield to the atheists, the oath and the decalogue; and all the rights of citizenship must be confined to blasphemers. Since the fall of Lucifer, no such tyrant has been made known to men as August Comte, the atheist. If, therefore, any man wishes to antedate perdition, he has nothing to do but to become a free-thinker and join in the shout, “Civil government has nothing to do with religion; and religion has nothing to do with civil government.”

Hodge,Charles.
Systematic Theology, Vol III (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Pub, 1982) Page 346.

CRC Listening Tour

Recently the CRC mandated committee to provide guidance on applying the denomination’s policy on homosexuality has been conducting a “listening tour,” and that “Listening Tour” touched town in the Classis of which I am a part. Never mind that it is not possible for someone to “listen” unless someone is speaking, the “Listening tour,” as it is officially sold, is intended to get people talking (and Listening) and to unofficially poll the denomination on its views on sodomy. In my estimation the purpose of this “Listening tour” is to get the denomination talking about sodomy so as to put a “human face” on it to the end of making sodomy more acceptable.

Alexander Pope wrote of this technique in the 18th century when he wrote,

“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”

Of course, as the Dutchman Abraham Kuyper hinted at, given his doctrine of the antithesis, that neutrality is impossible and so the facilitators of the listening tour were anything but neutral though I do believe that in their own minds they were seeking to be as neutral as possible. I also think though that their presuppositions were driving their own attempt at neutrality. At one point of the Listening Tour one of the Facilitators said that the discussions that were taking place in the break out groups was not to include our Reformed Theology. He was quickly called out on that statement by one of the participants and immediately attempted to walk his comment back. Another facilitator ended the meeting by telling a sentimental story that was intended to make the participants feel sorry for homosexuals, though the story was given the cover of being an example of how and why the CRC needs the committee to provide guidance on applying the denomination’s policy on homosexuality.

The story that was told and which officially ended the “Listening tour” went as follows.

“There was a Pastor who had an Elder who had a son who was ‘marrying’ another man. The Pastor had determined to go with his Elder since the Pastor had determined, ‘I wasn’t going to let my Elder go alone.'”

Immediately the natural response of the Modern to this story is to feel sorry for both the Pastor and the Elder in this situation and so the climate is created for a positive disposition towards what is being called “hommosexual marriage.”

Why couldn’t the Pastor, instead of giving a tacit endorsement of homosexuality and perverted marriage instead of told the Elder that both of them are commanded to, “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them, for it is shameful even to speak of those things which are done by them in secret”(?)

You see the facilitators are supposed to be facilitating and being neutral and yet we can see that, as much as they might try not to, they have an agenda. It is not possible that they wouldn’t.

The way the “Listening Tour” started is that we gathered at separate tables of 8. The funny story there, that I was later told by someone who had the inside skinny, is that the biggest supporter of homosexual “marriages,” a respected octogenarian, waited to choose his seat until he saw where I was going to sit. Upon my seating he then joined the table I was at. He did this because he apparently believed there needed to be a strong voice to counteract my own voice on the issue. He was successful at being irrational in his support for his perversion.

Some dialogue between us,

Don — “Here we have two people who desire to be married and what does the Church tell them? What does the Church say? The Church says ‘no.'”

Bret — “Homosexuals and Lesbians are allowed to marry anybody they want who fits the definition of marriage — Men go with Women. I’m not saying ‘no’ to them. I’m telling them to find the correct matched set. Homosexuals and Lesbians are allowed to marry anyone they like who allows their marriage to fit the definition of marriage.”

Don — “Can you believe that the Culture and Corporations are fully invested in giving homosexuals “marriage” rights and yet the Church is lagging so far behind.”

Bret — “Why not get ahead of the curve then Don and have the Church advocate Necrophilia Marriage or Bestiality Marriage? Now there’s a church of which one could be proud.”

Don — “Do you use that word ‘sodomy’ whenever you talk about this issue?”

Bret — “Yes, and I use the word “Necrophiliac” whenever I talk about living people who have a sexual fetish for dead people and I use the word “Incest” whenever I talk about two people in the same family having a sexual tryst and I use the word Bestiality whenever I talk about people who have sexual liaisons with animals. Yes, I always refer to sodomites as sodomites. Are you suggesting that there are people who don’t? And if they don’t why wouldn’t they?”

Don — “You are so unloving.”

Bret — “I’m trying to warn people of the consequence of their sin, both temporally and eternally, while you’re encouraging them to recreate God in their own image and I’m the one who is unloving? You’re trying to normalize what God calls vile behavior while I’m pleading with them to give it up and I’m the one who is unloving? I’m thinking about a social order where children grow up thinking sodomy is normal and consequently those children will potentially be more easily be drawn into that lifestyle and so out of love for children I warn against this and you accuse me of being unloving?”

As the conversation rolled on and as I was pressing for the necessity to agree with God’s word on the issue another Pastor at the table piped up and made the following statement which was intended to mute my observations regarding the necessity of obeying Scripture,

“I think one of our problems in the CRC is that many of our Pastors belong to the intellectual class and they have this overwhelming necessity to be right. They sense that being right is of ultimate importance. They are always studying, always reading and so being right is important to them. And I think we must agree that is poisonous to the Church.”

There was a brief awkward silence since this was obviously aimed at me. Finally I said,

“So, tell me Robert, are you insisting that you are right about that observation?”

And in true post-modernist fashion he said, “I don’t know.”

You see, the modern churchmen cannot even be certain regarding his observation upon the dangers of certainty. He must even be uncertain when decrying certainty.

Some might ask, what are your greatest concerns, if any, concerning same-sex marriage?

Here are my concerns.

1.) the sodomite agenda is about destroying heterosexual marriage.

see — http://salvomag.com/blog/2013/03/five-gay-marriage-myths/
see — http://www.peter-ould.net/2012/12/07/gay-marriage-and-the-effect-on-heterosexual-marriage/

2.) People will begin to believe sodomite marriage is possible. Sodomite marriage is no more possible then being an accomplished rider of a two wheeled unicycle can be accomplished. Sodomite marriage is no more possible then the drawing of a square circle. Sodomite marriage is not possible given the very definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. Are we forgetting the Scripture by even talking about the possibility that sane Christians can subscribe to “sodomite marriage?” Will we advocate next that Christians subscribe to the reality of Fairies and Goblins?

3.) I am greatly concerned that the Church is going to rebel against God on this matter by normalizing sodomy and sodomite marriage and so diminish His glory among men and incur His wrath.

4.) I am greatly concerned for the souls of sodomites, that are precious to God, will end up being confirmed in their sin and be told that God loves them “just the way they are.” I am concerned over how hateful and cruel any action that “normalizes sodomy or sodomite marriage would be to sodomites.

If I have any great hopes, concerning same-sex marriage it would be that it will be seen as an absurdity and will be recognized as always characteristic of a social order about to flame out.

Resources recommended for those who want to become informed,

Homosexuality; A Biblical View — Dr. Greg Bahnsen
Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation & Political Control — Dr. E. Michael Jones
Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior — Dr. E. Michael Jones
Redeeming the Rainbow — Scott Lively
The Born Gay Hoax — Ryan Sorba

On the “Listening Tour” we were asked to discuss these questions. I have put my responses beneath the question

1. What are the pastoral priorities should a same-sex couple begin attending your church?

It should be noted first that “same sex couple” is as an euphemistic term as ever existed and a phrase that supports the advocates of this program since is it not possible for two people of the same sex to be a “couple” the way the word “couple” has always been used. By using this phrase repeatedly and the phrase “same sex marriage” the facilitators are prejudicing the conversation from the outset in the direction of their agenda.

a.) We have to think of the children and do all we can to make sure that the children are not given the idea that what God calls “sin” is normative.

b.) We need to realize that the “same sex couple” have eternal souls and have a need to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Of course, as the Heidelberg Catechism teaches that Gospel begins with the law as the hot needle that pulls through the crimson thread of redemption. As such, out of love to them, we must at some point preach God’s law to them which informs us that such behavior is sinful and must be repented of. This is the same way we deal with anyone who shows up to Church and is outside of Christ.

c.) We should, as Van Til used to say, always be willing to buy them the next cup of coffee. That is to say, as long as they are willing to engage the conversation we should be willing to go the extra mile to engage them.

d.) So, if a “same sex couple” shows up at church we treat them the same way we would treat any other person who is outside of Christ. We call for them to repent and we offer the Gospel.

It was interesting that one breakout group seemed to suggest that “if a ‘same sex couple’ became members they would have to realize that they would not be able to work with the children and they would not be able to be leaders.” I found myself wondering, “If they are actively involved as a “same sex couple” why would a orthodox church ever bring such a “couple” into membership?”

2. What do you need most from the CRC to help you navigate questions that arise in response to same-sex marriage?

I merely need the CRC to stand by Scripture and to encourage other of their Churches to stand my Scripture.

3. The survey the committee sent out is revealing very diverse perspectives within the denomination. What would you see as implications arising from this reality.

Implications

a.) The church has not been teaching our undoubted catholic Christian Faith.

b.) The church has not been practicing discipleship and discipline.

c.) If there really are diverse perspectives on this issue then that would be promissory of an eventual split.

I must say that the asking of this questions bothers me. It is, as if, the committee is suggesting that we come to truth by counting noses. Further, one might also see in this question the desire to muffle all disagreement with the committee by suggesting that their eventual report was trying to be sympathetic to all sides, when in point of fact if the committee reports are favorable to “same sex marriage” (an eventuality that has to occur if the committee is committed to be sympathetic to all perspectives) it is obvious that those who are opposed to the Church condoning sodomy will not be pleased with the committee work.

R. L. Dabney Writes On Government Education circa 1873 … Is Proved Right in 2014

“Said Daniel Webster…‘In what age, by what sect, where, when, by whom, has religious truth been excluded from the education of youth? Nowhere never. Everywhere, and at all times, it has been and is regarded as essential. It is of the essence, the vitality of useful instruction’”

Robert L. Dabney (1820-1898)
“State Free Schools” and “Secularized Education” in Discussions Vol.4,
Ross House Books and Sprinkle Publications, 1979 [1897], pg. (219).

By now people well know my opposition to Government schools. Of course my opposition is only a reflection of my reading and observations. In what follows in this post I am combining my reading of Dabney with the observations of Bobbi Leigh Swagger, a person who is closely connected to Government schools and what goes on there. Knowing about Government schools is part of Bobbi Leigh’s vocation and career. Hopefully, the result of the combination of the abstract (my reading) with the concrete (real life accounts from Bobbi Leigh) will make a bigger impact on Christians to the end of getting their children out of Government schools if at all possible.

“We propose now…that tuition in Christianity is essential to all education which is worth the name…we mean in the fullest sense that Christianity must be a present element of all the training at all times, or else it is not true and valuable education…The human spirit is a monad, a single, unit, spiritual substance, having facilities and susceptibilities for different modifications, but no parts. Hence, when it is educated it is educated as a unit…it is impossible to separate the ethical and intellectual functions…knowledge is really valuable only as it is in order to right actions… The nature of responsibility is such that there can be no neutrality…‘He that is not with his God is against him.’ He who does not positively comply with the ever-present obligation does ipso facto violate it, and contract positive sinfulness. Hence as there cannot be in any soul a non-Christian state which is not anti-Christian, it follows that any training which attempts to be non-Christian is therefore anti-Christian. God is the rightful, supreme master and owner of all reasonable creatures, and their nearest and highest duties are to him. Hence to train a soul away from him is a robbery of God, which he cannot justify in any person or agency whatsoever” (220,221).

Robert L. Dabney (1820-1898)
“State Free Schools” and “Secularized Education” in Discussions Vol.4,
Ross House Books and Sprinkle Publications, 1979 [1897], pg. (220, 221).

“There can be, therefore, no true education without moral culture, and no true moral culture without Christianity” (222). R. L. Dabney

1. Just found out that a school in one of the former Cotton States just took down the walls of the bathroom stalls in the school because the kids were fornicating in the bathrooms. Oh, by the way this was a Middle School.

Bobbi Leigh Swagger

(I’m still working on understanding how it is that a child who would fornicate in a bathroom stall would suddenly find some scruples and modesty about fornicating without a stall.)

“Education is the nurture and development of the whole man for his proper end. The end must be conceived aright in order to understand the process” (230).

Is “a really secularized education either possible or admissible?…No people of any age, religion, or civilization, before ours, has ever thought so…Pagan, Papist, Mohammedan, Greek, Protestant, have all hitherto rejected any other education than one grounded in religion, as absurd and wicked” (230,231).

R. L. Dabney

“In one school district in which I operate they recently sent kids home with a test that said:

True or False: Christopher Columbus came to America and boiled the natives alive to make soap.”

Bobbi Leigh Swagger

“True education is, in a sense, a spiritual process, the nurture of a soul…Every line of true knowledge must find its completeness in its convergency to God, even as every beam of daylight leads the eye to the sun. If religion be excluded from our study, every process of thought will be arrested before it reaches its proper goal…[What if an unbeliever claims to be merely] teaching some purely secular course, without any such maiming of his subjects or prejudicing of Christianity? If his teaching is more than a temporary dealing with some corner of education, the fact will be found to be that it is tacitly anti-Christian; overt assaults are not made; but there is a studied avoidance which is in effect hostile. There can be no neutral position between two extremes, where there is no middle ground, but ‘a great gulf fixed’…The training which does not base duty on Christianity is, for us, practically immoral.”

R. L. Dabney (232-236)

In the Lone Star state I recently spoke with a parent who told me that her 9th grade daughter came home on Friday telling her mom that the teacher told them that Pocahontas married John Smith.

The child brought her own book about Pocahontas back to the school on Monday to show her that only in a Disney movie did Pocahontas fall in love with John Smith. The teacher said,

“I asked around, and none of the history teachers here agree with your version. They all think she married John Smith, so you must be wrong.”

Bobbi Leigh Swagger

The Christian creed of responsibility: “According to this, obligation to God covers all of every man’s being and actions. Even if the act be correct in outward form, which is done without any reference to his will, he will judge it a shortcoming. ‘The plowing of the wicked, is sin’ [Prov.21:4]…Our Savior has declared that there is no moral neutrality… The comparison of these truths will make it perfectly plain that a non-Christian training is literally an anti-Christian training” (238).

R. L. Dabney

In Connecticut I interviewed a Mother who told me her child was being summoned to the Dr. today for a psychological evaluation because her son had been cutting himself in 5th grade, stressed out over their new standardized tests.

Bobbi Leigh Swagger

(By the way folks … 5th grade means we are talking about a 9 or 10 year old.)

The “direction of the education of children…[is] properly a domestic and parental function…[God] looks to parents, in whom the family is founded, as the responsible agents of this result…He has also in the fifth Commandment connected the child proximately…with the parents, which, of course, confers on them the adequate and the prior authority…It thus appears that naturally the parent’s authority over their children could not have come by deputation from either State or visible Church…[But] the dispensation of Divine Providence in the course of nature shows where the power and duty of educating are deposited…No parent can fail to resent, with a righteous indignation, the intrusion of any authority between his conscience and convictions and the soul of his child. If the father conscientiously believes that his own creed is true and righteous and obligatory before God, then he must intuitively regard the intrusion of any other power between him and his minor child, to cause the rejection of that creed, as a usurpation…If this usurpation is made by the visible church, it is felt to be in the direction of popery, if by the magistrate, in the direction of despotism” (243,244).

R. L. Dabney

What “Protestant concedes therefrom that his religious rights were either conferred, or can be rightfully taken away, by civil authority?…The State or Church has no more right to invade the parental sphere than the parent to invade theirs…Did our republican fathers hold that any people have ever the right to subvert the moral order of society ordained by God?…So far is it from being true that the civil authority is entitled to shape a people to suit itself; the opposite is true, the people should shape the civil authority.” (245,246).

R. L. Dabney

In another case in the nutmeg state a Mom pulled child out after she showed up at the child’s school to get the child for a doctor’s appt…she had a doctor’s note/summons in her hand and they wouldn’t let her have her kid. Period.

Bobbie Leigh Swagger

Concluding with Dabney,

The State has no right to oppose the theological beliefs of Christians, but they do oppose these beliefs when they educate souls as they do, “because a non-Christian training is an anti-Christian training” (238).

“Since all truths converge towards God, he who is not to name God…can only construct a truncated figure…And no person nor organism has a right to seem to say to a responsible, immortal soul, ‘In this large and intelligent and even ethical segment of your doings you are entitled to be godless’” (239,240).

“In fact the Church does not and cannot repair the mischief which her more powerful, rich, and ubiquitous rival, the secularized State, is doing in thus giving, under the guise of a non-Christian, an anti-Christian training” (241).

Closing observations

1.) Keep in mind that R2K insists that there is no such thing as Christian Education.

2.) Obviously, not all Government schooled children will all have equally bad horror stories about their time in Government schools. Some accounts will be less bad than other accounts but all will be bad. Even in my own time we were taught the occult and given death studies. We also did the whole communist re-education thing in writing biographies.

3.) Even if Government schooled children have a comparative “good” schooling experience nothing can take away the fact that your children are being educated into a Worldview where God is hated and is seen as irrelevant.

The Communist Eschatological Vision

“The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country. National differences and antagonisms between people are daily more and more vanishing.”

(Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)).”

“Socialism … gives full play to the “sympathies” of the population, thereby promoting and greatly accelerating the drawing together and fusion of the nations.” (Vladimir Lenin ).”

The Communist vision has always been for a time when all colors bleed into one. The Communist eschatology has always thus been the “fusion of nations” that the Communist Manifesto sets forth.

Lately however, this vision has also become the vision of some “Christian” expressions. There seems to be a vision among even putative conservative Christians that the postmillennial success will be measured by the increasing fusion of the Nations as that there is a “Christian” new earth where all colors bleed into one.

This is a clear and unequivocal denial of the Christian one and the many, wherein what is taught that there is unity in diversity and not unit in uniformity.

What shall we be my friends? Shall we be Christians or shall we be Marxist who call ourselves Christians?

John Murray Contra R2K … Christian Education Is a Must

“Now if the biblical revelation is ultimate for thought, outlook, and practice, we must readily see the implications for education… In a word, education must be Christian… [This] means that the subject matter of the classroom must derive its interpreting principles from the Christian revelation” (368,369).

“How indispensable to education from the earliest years, even before the child arrives at school age, is the word of Gen.1:1…No question is more urgent than that of whence… Whence the universe in which we live? Correlative is the doctrine of God’s providence… [Thus] unless the school fosters the fear of the Lord as the beginning of knowledge and of wisdom, the influence of the home and of the church, even when it is to a high degree exemplary, tends to be negated, and it is common knowledge and experience that in many cases the school has undermined what home and church have sought to establish and develop” (369).

“Education, apart from any conception of man as to his distinguishing identity, purpose, and destiny, is inconceivable…If education is to be Christian, it must be based upon and conducted in terms of the Christian view of man. If not, it is not Christian, and if not Christian it is alien and opposed to Christian interests…If boys and girls…are in the image of God, if that is their identity, their chief end cannot be anything less than to glorify God and to enjoy him. And education that is destitute of this objective, or has allowed it to suffer eclipse has lost its direction” (370,371).

“Christianity gives us a world view; it enunciates principles which underlie all our thinking if we are Christian; it prescribes the governing conceptions in terms of which we are to interpret reality. Christianity is not something tacked on to our world view; it is itself a world view. And the central features of our Christian faith are conditioned by, and in turn condition, that world view” (372).

The sum is: “The whole range and content of education must be God-centered; that is, God must be the unifying principle and the interpreting principle of the whole curriculum” (374).

John Murray (1898-1975)
“Christian Education,” in Collected Writings of John Murray, Vol.1, Banner of Truth, 1976, pgs.367-374.