Tim Keller’s Preference For Democracy

“I’d rather be in a democracy than a state in which the government is officially Christian. Instead of trying to take power, I think what Christians ought to be doing is trying to renew their churches.”

-Tim Keller, Wall Street Journal
02 September 2022

1.) Understand what Keller has said here. He has said he’d rather be under a government that is non Christian than under a government that is officially Christian. Tim would rather have his magistrates be Christ-haters than have magistrates who are in submission to Christ.

2.) Tim talked about how Christians shouldn’t “try to take power.” The question is “take power from whom?” Presumably, in Tim’s world Christians shouldn’t try to take power from non Christians and should be happy to be ruled by Christ hating pagans.

3.) You know Tim, it is possible to both try and renew our Churches and in godly ways seek to take power.

4.) Tim’s statement above implies that there is something automatically wicked about Christian’s wielding power. Yet, here is Tim seeking to wield his power as a highly platformed Evangelical voice in service of keeping Christians from pursuing power.

What Matt Walsh And Stephen Wolfe Have In Common

Question from the audience for Matt Walsh;

Is it wrong to want to preserve our heritage? The country our ancestors founded — European?

Matt Walsh the cultural Marxist Answers;

“I don’t believe our unifying principle was ever race, skin color, ethnicity. Our unifying principle was essentially a doctrine. It was a doctrine of human rights… It (the questioner’s position) sounds like bigotry.”

John Jay (One of the founders) tells Matt Walsh he is a man whom wisdom have forever chased but never caught;

“With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people–a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.”

For Pete’s sake, is Walsh so stupid that he flies right past the language of the Constitution where they talk about “for us and OUR POSTERITY.” Just exactly whose posterity were they talking about?

Look, while no one can doubt that Walsh has done some fine work with this response it is clear that Walsh is the enemy. Walsh is a neo-con and the kind of propositional Nation that Walsh believes in is not the unifying principle of the nation as it was founded. Walsh is an idiot and as long as he holds this view he will never defeat who he thinks is his enemy since at the end of the day they share the same foundational worldview principles.

Some of you think that the “Daily Wire” is a conservative redoubt. I am here to tell you that the “Daily Wire” is just another Trotskyist neo-con webzine.

Matt Walsh is not our friend, or is at least only intermittently our friend.

All of this reminds me of some analysis that I read by Darrell Dow when wrote an article that in part was dedicated to explaining Stephen Wolfe’s view of Christian Nationalism. Dow’s analysis of Dr. Wolfe offered this;

“In two additional chapters, Wolfe discusses the Christian nation.  Rather than a historical analysis he offers a phenomenological approach to the nation, focusing on the lived experience of everyday life.  Ethnicity is therefore something primarily (but not exclusively) experienced subjectively through shared manners, stories, and rituals rather than defined by blood.  Common social norms and customs along with attachment to place are foundational, says Wolfe, to the highest aspirations of earthly life.  What “…is most meaningful to our lives and what is required to live well is particularity and sharing that particularity with others.”

Now, if Dow’s analysis is correct in the paragraph above, we see Wolfe making the same kind of mistake that Matt Walsh makes above. Walsh would have no problem saluting the idea that “ethnicity is therefore something primarily (but not exclusively) experienced subjectively through shared manners, stories, and rituals rather than defined by blood.” Indeed that is the very point that Walsh is making above. Walsh insists the shared point of unity is allegiance to common propositions, while Wolfe insists that the shared point of unity is shared manners, stories, and rituals. However both agree that the point of unity in a nation/ethnicity is not blood.

Now, we can agree that blood relations as being the foundational point of unity for a nation/ethnicity can indeed be and has been in history fetishicized and/or idolized. But it is no fetishicizing or idolizing to recognize that the primary point of unity that makes a people a people and a nation a nation is having a common blood inheritance in conjunction with a shared faith. To place blood relations in a secondary role as if it is an afterthought to other considerations like shared propositions or shared experiences is to give up the idea of ever living in a nation or sharing an ethnicity.

It really is no different than family. Nation/ethnicity is merely family said at a broader level. If someone were to ask what was the shared foundational point of what makes my family my family the answer is a shared blood inheritance in conjunction with a shared faith. Now, there might be exceptions to that idea but it serves as the general rule. My family finds unity not primarily in shared propositions nor in shared experiences (though those will likewise be present in a secondary manner). My family finds its primary unity in having a common ancestor.

Wolfe and Walsh are just in significant error.

Natural Law Conversation Continues

“For Christ did not come into the world to teach precepts about (civic) morals, which man already knew by reason, but to forgive sins, in order that he may give the Holy Spirit to those who believe in him.”

Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560)
Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics

“Reason cannot precede faith or consist of clearer knowledge, and as such, reason cannot be the foundation of faith.”

– Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676)

Voetius shows that reason comes after faith because reason makes inferences from one proposition to the next, and therefore reasoning cannot get started unless there is already a proposition to reason from. This includes any reasoning about any area of life since any reasoning about all areas of life is a reasoning that is faith conditioned. Once reasoning about Jurisprudence or Education or Art or Politics is a reasoning that comes after some faith commitment. So, this teaches us that Melancthon was just in error.

Now Francis Turretin, who would share Melanchthon’s Aristotelian  premises offers;

“If various wicked laws obtained among the heathen, repugnant to the natural law (such as those sanctioning idolatry, human sacrifices, permitting theft, rapine, homicide, incest), they do not prove that no light of reason was granted to men by nature… Rather they prove only that men with *leisure ill employed* have wickedly abused the conceded light and, by struggling against and striving with all their might to extinguish it, were given over to a reprobate mind.”

Turretin
IET 11.1.19

I don’t disagree that Natural Law was against the wicked laws among the heathen. Neither do I disagree that the heathen have wickedly abused the conceded light. What I do disagree with, as pushed by Natural Law afficiandandos, is that the heathen ever do not struggle against and strive with all their might to extinguish what Natural Law teaches. Now in different non-Christian social orders will fluctuate in their opposition to what Natural Law teaches due to the waxing and waning of the salt and light influence of Christianity. However, as the antithesis works itself out ever more consistently Natural Law is interpreted as as to teach the very opposite of what it does indeed teach when read through the lenses of special revelation.

The reality that Natural law is a myth, as an independent tool by which to organize social orders did not hit until the 20th century in the West because prior to that Christendom was largely presupposed. When Christendom is no longer presupposed Turretins can’t and won’t get traction no matter how much they bleat about “the light of reason.”

Wherein Joe Sobran and John Rocker Agree

“I think the target of all this (multiculturalism / political correctness) is not the white man as such. I think the target of all this is Christianity.”

Joseph Sobran

Lecture — The Bigotry of Tolerance (30:30)

I have been saying this for years now. Imagine my relief to know that a far greater mind than mine observed it 20 years ago.

Note also that there is no way that we can fight this without at the same time defending the White Christian and Western Christian civilization. We cannot defend Christ from this clever backdoor attack unless we are willing to shut the backdoor by insisting that White Christian civilization has been a singular blessing of God given in the fullness of grace.

The Baseball pitcher John Rocker was excoriated for noticing this way back in 1999. In an infamous interview with Sports Illustrated, Rocker made controversial comments about New York City. He directed abuse at the cultural and ethnic diversity that the city had and said that the presence of “foreigners” in the city was distressful:

“The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. I’m not a very big fan of foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?”

He would also add previously that he would rather retire than play for the city’s two most decorated teams.

“I would retire first. It’s the most hectic, nerve-racking city. Imagine having to take the [Number] 7 train to the ballpark, looking like you’re [riding through] Beirut next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing.

Quotes From Maurice Pinay’s “The Plot Against The Church”

At this time of the year back in 2022 I was reading Maurice Pinay’s “The Plot Against The Church.” The author used a pseudonym in this volume which is committed to chronicling the history of the Christian Church and its interactions with the Jews. It was written in the context of the second vatican council by officials in the Roman Catholic church who were violently opposed to what the 2nd vatican was doing. Because it tells the truth of Jewish and Christian relations through the centuries it is considered anti-Semitic, much as E. Michael Jones’ works chronicling different historical interludes of that interaction are considered “anti-Semitic.” Below are just three quotes.

“Of all revolutionary systems, which throughout human

history have been devised for the destruction of our civilised
values, Communism is, without doubt, the most perfected, most
efficient and most merciless. In fact, it represents the most
advanced epoch of the world revolution, in whose postulates it
therefore not only acts to destroy a definite political, social,
economic or moral institution, but also simultaneously to
declare null and void the Holy Catholic Church as well as all
cultural and Christian manifestations which represent our

civilisation.

All revolutionary currents of Jewish origin have attacked
Christianity in its different aspects with particular
one-mindedness. Communism spawned from this same
revolutionary stream of thought seeks to banish Christianity
for the purpose of causing it to vanish from the face of the

earth, without even the slightest trace remaining.”

Maurice Pinay
The Plot Against the Church — pg. 35

“Before the final establishing of Bolshevism in Russia the directors and organizers of all Communist movement in their entirety were almost solely Jews, just as the great majority of the true organizers of the revolutions were to which they gave their impetus. But in Russia, as the first land where Bolshevism finally triumphed, and where it was and still is the fulcrum of driving force for the Communizing of the world the Jewish paternity of the system of organization and of Soviet praxis also allows no doubt or error. According to the irrefutable data, which has been fully and completely proved and recognized by all impartial writers who have dealt with the theme, the Communist work of the Jews in the land of the Czars is so powerful that it would be useless to deny this disastrous as their monopoly.

This is demonstrated by statistics published in Paris by the counter-revolutionary newspaper ‘Le Russe Nationaliste’ coming after the victory of the Jewish Communists in Russia. Keep in mind when considering these stats that Jews comprised at most 5% of the Russian population. These statistics reveal that of the 554 Communist leaders in Russia at the Revolution who were of the first rank were as follows;

Jews– 417
Lithuanians — 43
Russians — 30
Armenians — 13
Germans — 12
Finns — 3
Poles — 2
Georgians — 2
Czechs — 1

Hungarians — 1″

Maurice Pinay

The Plot Against the Church — pg. 49, 51

During the bloody dictatorship of Lenin, the Committee of
Investigation under Rohrberg (Rohrberg, C.), which after the
capture of Kiev entered this city with the White volunteers in

August 1919, reported the following:

“The entire concrete floor of the large garage (this was the
place where the provincial Cheka of Kiev had carried out
executions) was swimming in blood, which did not flow but
formed a layer of several inches; it was a grisly mixture of
blood with brain and skull fragments, as well as strands of hair
and other human remains. The entire walls, holed by
thousands of bullets, were spattered with blood, and fragments
of brain as well as head skin adhered to them.

“A drain ditch of 25 cm width and 25 cm deep and about 10

m long ran from the middle of the garage to a nearby room,
where there was a subterranean outlet pipe. This drain ditch

was filled to the top with blood.

“Usually, immediately after the massacre, the corpses were
removed in lorries or horse-drawn wagons from the city and
buried in a mass grave. In the corner of a garden we came upon
an older mass grave, which contained about 80 corpses, in
which we discovered signs of the most varied and
unimaginable cruelties and mutilation. There were corpses
from which the entrails had been removed; others had
different limbs amputated and others again were cut into
pieces. Some had had the eyes poked out, while the head, the
face, the neck and the torso were covered with deep wounds.
Further on we found a corpse with an axe in the breast, while
others had no tongues. In a corner of the mass grave we

discovered many legs and arms severed from the trunk.”4

Maurice Pinay
The Plot Against the Church — pg. 37
Footnote — S. P. Nekgunov, “La terreur rouge en Russie: de 1918