The CRC, the Banner, Rev. Bob DeMoor and Homosexuality

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In the July issue of the Banner,

http://www.thebanner.org/departments/2015/06/don-t-walk-away

soon to be departing Rev. Bob DeMoor, makes a case for the CRC denomination not fracturing over the potential future doctrinal embrace of practicing homosexuality. DeMoor’s comment are, politically speaking, quite genius. DeMoor will be leaving the Banner soon and so there is little fallout he will have to face over his advocacy of the Denomination accepting practicing homosexuality via the local option. Once Rev. DeMoor is gone, other bureaucrats can respond to complaints by merely offering, “that’s Bob, and Bob’s gone now.” In the way this has been done the next policy step has been pointed to in a very clean and surgical manner.

Rev. DeMoor implores his readers and the denomination to allow each local congregation to choose for themselves whether or not their local congregation will acknowledge the teaching of Scripture that homosexual practice and lifestyle is sin. What Rev. DeMoor doesn’t tell the reader is that if such a decision was arrived at what that would mean is that those who work for the bureaucracy of the denomination (including the Seminary) would at least have to subscribe to the idea that Scripture both teaches and does not teach that homosexual practice and lifestyle is sin, or at the very least that Scripture is so ambiguous on the subject that it is a matter of adiaphora. As such, with such an embrace of the “local option” as policy the consequence would be a bureaucracy and Seminary that would, by its required muddledness on the subject, be pro-homosexual practice and lifestyle. How long could local churches hold out in upholding God’s clear word against sodomy when the whole Denominational institutional infrastructure is, at best, unable, due to denominational diktat, to be anti-homosexual lifestyle and practice?

Rev. DeMoor enjoins that the denomination should take upon itself the 1980 example of making remarriage after divorce a local option issue. Rev. DeMoor doesn’t mention that there was a long history, in the Reformed World in general, that allowed divorce after remarriage. For example, John Calvin allowed for remarriage in the context of adultery, believing that the penalty for such adultery should be death. Divorce under such circumstances gives the innocent party freedom to remarry, Calvin held, for Jesus’ condemnation of remarriage as adultery applied undoubtedly only to “unlawful and frivolous divorces.” Although Calvin was very conservative in his theological view of divorce, like Luther his practice was more liberal. His “Ecclesiastical Ordinances,” adopted by the Little and Large Councils of 1561, allowed three grounds for divorce and remarriage other than adultery: impotence, extreme religious incompatibility, and abandonment. Calvin also provided for annulment where a spouse could not, because of some physical infirmity, perform the conjugal act.

Similarly the  Westminster Confession of Faith Article 24 has taught since the 17th century,

“In the case of adultery after marriage, it is lawful for the innocent party to sue out a divorce: and, after the divorce, to marry another, as if the offending party were dead.”

We could just as easily appeal to Tyndale, Bucer, Knox and other Reformed luminaries for the acceptability of remarriage after divorce in some cases.

We conclude thus that the CRC 1980 decision had historical precedents to reverse previous Synods and to allow Churches to employ the local option on the matter of divorce and remarriage. Where are the centuries long historical precedents in the Reformed world for suggesting that homosexual practice and lifestyle is a valid option so that the determining of its acceptability can be decided on a church by church and case by case basis? Rev. DeMoor is comparing apples to bananas by suggesting a parallel can be drawn between the local option as exercised for the allowance of divorce and remarriage and the local option as exercised for the allowance of men sodomizing men and women doing whatever it is that women do to one another when sharing a “conjugal” bed.

Rev. DeMoor then asks the question if such an approach would erode our teaching to biblical commitment and then answers his own question by saying “no” and then citing Scripture that communicates, in Rev. DeMoor’s world, that unity trumps all matters. However, as has been communicated by many a Divine throughout history, Unity is always only a byproduct of shared truth. Where truth is not shared the closest to unity a organization can come to is the empty shell of administrative and bureaucratic unity. This is a unity only for the sake of unity. It is a unity that stands for nothing, that strives for nothing, and that achieves nothing. It is a mirage that progressives are forever seeing.

Rev. DeMoor would have us “have the humility, love, and grace to affirm that we may have to reexamine our own certainties in light of what we communally discover in God’s Word.” This sounds so high minded and pious but what if, after reexamining our own certainties in light of what we communally discover in God’s Word, we have to say, “Here I stand against the communal discoveries, I can do no other”? My Mother always had a word for communal discoveries after I would appeal to her on that basis. Mom would simply say, “If everyone decided to jump off a cliff would you jump off with them?” Mom was pretty wise that way.

Rev. DeMoor fears denominational hemorrhaging, and well he should. However, Rev. DeMoor and others should keep in mind that hemorrhaging only happens where a wound has been inflicted on the body. The sanction and embrace of homosexual practice and lifestyle by the denomination would be a case of a self inflicted wound that results in to be expected hemorrhaging.

One thing I do agree with Rev. DeMoor and that is his observation that, “We won’t agree on what’s pastoral until we agree on what’s sinful.” There is a good deal packed into that sentence. Different visions and understandings of sin, by necessity, imply different visions and understandings of the Character of God. Different visions and understandings of sin, by necessity, imply different understandings of just exactly why the Lord Christ was raised upon the Cross and so raised from the grave. Different visions and  understandings of sin give us different understandings of the person and work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration and sanctification. In point of fact different visions and understandings of sin give us different Gods, Atonements, and Spirit filled living. Those differences give us different Christianities.

May God be pleased to grant to the Christian Reformed Church the wisdom to embrace the Christianity displayed in Holy Writ.

 


 

 

 

 

Tim Keller Channels George Orwell

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, London, part 1, chapter 3, pp 32

“I think Genesis 1 has the earmarks of poetry and is therefore a “song” about the wonder and meaning of God’s creation. Genesis 2 is an account of how it happened… For the record I think God guided some kind of process of natural selection, and yet I reject the concept of evolution as All-encompassing Theory.”

Tim Keller
The Reason for God — pp 97-98

Keller refuses to accept either 6 day creationism, nor full blown evolution. Keller is also on record as saying, “You’ve got some problems with the theistic evolution….” As a result Keller goes for the “messy approach” that seeks to combine all of them and none of them. Of course the “messy approach” means that Keller has just embraced contradiction. In point of fact, Keller has exceeded Orwell’s “double-think,” moving on to the hallowed ground of “triple-think.”

Examining Keller’s quote above we easily detect Keller’s contradiction in terms of the most basic tenet of Reformed Christianity (Keller is a Presbyterian minister) and that is God’s exhaustive sovereignty. What Keller has posited here is that God and some other agency called “Natural selection,”  co-operated together unto the end of creation. Now, Keller does seem to give God the upper hand but notice that Keller’s God is merely guiding Natural selection. Where did this Natural selection that God is guiding come from?

Do keep in mind also that one of the core tenets of Natural selection is the arrival of species by a random process of time plus chance plus circumstance. The whole idea of Natural Selection is that it is not guided. Meanwhile the whole idea of a sovereign God is that He doesn’t cooperate in creation by guiding another independent agent called “Natural selection,” to a agreed upon end. When reduced to its essence, Keller has a Sovereign God guiding a process that is by definition a random process of chance. This is classic Orwellian double think taken up as Evangelical art form. In saying everything Keller has said nothing.

Keller does indeed reject Evolution as a all encompassing theory of origins but at the same time he has also rejected the Sovereign God of Reformed Christianity as a all encompassing theory of origins. The result is a mish mash of contradictions as combined with a miasma of pseudo-intellectualism.

Indeed so great is Keller’s faith in his “Natural selection guiding god” that Keller can testify with all the fervor of a true believer,

“How could there have been death before Adam and Eve fell? The answer is, I don’t know. But all I know is, didn’t animals eat bugs? Didn’t bugs eat plants? There must have been death. In other words, when you realize, ‘Oh wait, this is really complicated,’ then you realize, ‘I don’t have to figure this out before I figure out is Jesus Christ raised from the dead.’ ”

So, Keller can not have enough faith to believe the Scripture that death did not enter until after Adam’s fall but he does have enough faith in his “Natural selection guiding god” that (s)he could have it all figured out even if he can’t figure it all out. If one is going to have that kind of faith why not place it in the Biblical record?

Some, in speaking out Keller’s defense have noted that Keller often speaks differently in different contexts. I am not surprised by this in the least. In point of fact it is exactly what we would expect in someone practicing Orwellian double think. There is nothing intellectually sophisticated in any of this. It is all Orwellian double and triple think. In short we see Keller channeling Orwell,

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

The US Policy of White European Cultural Genocide

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Bertolt Brecht

Brecht’s poem has become quite useful as we are living through a time when the State is seeking to, as Obama promised to “fundamentally transform America.” It is past apparent now that part of what Obama meant in his promise to “fundamentally transform America” was to diminish and perhaps even dissolve America of its Historic White Anglo Saxon Christian heritage.

A key rule of thumb when it comes to politics is to never listen to what politicians say but to always watch what they do. If we follow that rule of thumb we find that our political class is intent, in Brecht’s words, in dissolving the people and electing another. Thomas Fleming put it well in a recent article when he wrote, “The secret is out.  The American ruling class in both political parties despise the people they rule.  They hate their religion, their traditions, their culture, and their history.”

The evidence of this is ubiquitous. From the illegal immigration policy that has been pursued by both Republican and Democratic administrations to the tune of the relocation of 25% of Mexico’s population to these united States to IRS pursuit and harassment of overwhelmingly White Tea Party Organizations to Democratic Presidential contender Martin O’Malley apologizing for saying that not only to black lives matter but so do white lives and all lives matter to Obama’s insistence that, “We are no longer a Christian Nation,” to the SCOTUS decision to legalize sodomite marriage,” to Obama’s dowsing the White House in Rainbow Sodomite lighting in celebration of the SCOTUS decision to the exact opposite response wherein Obama initially refuses to fly the US Flag at the White House at half mast in honor of five dead white soldiers murdered by the 1965 immigration act, to the Federal Government’s recent HUD decision to bribe communities into forcefully integrating to the distribution of the 2009 Missouri Information Analysis Center report warning Missouri police against Americans who know the Constitution as potential terrorists  what has been consistently pursued by the our political class is the dissolving of America of both its White European ethnic substratum as well as the Christian faith which made the White European people the people that they have historically been.

Now when you combine all this with the recent push by many Church denominations in insisting that somehow if a White Church is not integrated then Jesus is displeased as well as the constant media push that racially blended families are the ideal what one sees is a confluence of cultural gatekeepers working to fundamentally transform America from its White European Christian roots to an America that is minority white wherein the prominent religion is cultural Marxism often masquerading and mislabeled as “Christianity.” This is not accidental and all of this borders on fulfilling the United Nations definition of “genocide.” Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) as,

“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part1 ; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The underscoring of this is found in the recent assault of the symbols of Historic Christian America. In South Carolina, second generation Indian Nikki Haley, though Christian, testifies that she remains proud of growing up in the Sikh faith and would “never disown her roots” while finding herself more than willing to disown the roots of her White Christian constituents by taking down the St. Andrews Cross flag. In Memphis, Tennessee they’d like to disinter the remains of a White Southern Hero and his wife so as to scandalize and criminalize white Southern History. All of this is the attempt to steal the History and so the identity of a people so as to force upon them a new identity. Quoting Milan Kundera here, “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.” Without a past, we are not a people, we are just abstractions of the Cultural Marxist Utopian minds, to be eliminated whenever it becomes politically expedient to do so. And the expedient moment has come: The white man must be eliminated, to make way for a new people purged of the sins of the past and ready to live and strive in the new non-Christian, non-white utopia of the future.

If not ethnic genocide it is at the very least cultural genocide and always the policy of those who were intent on vanquishing and squashing conquered nations.

This policy of subjugation was captured in the film Braveheart where Uncle Argyle says to young Wallace, upon the death of their kin and as observing the midnight mourning of their clan around the grave, “They are saying goodbye in their own way. Playing outlawed tunes on outlawed pipes.” True, to paraphrase Lincoln, we can not absolutely know that all these moving parts are the result of a premeditated plan. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen — George W., Barack, Russell Moore, and Nikki Haley, for instance — and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few — not omitting even scaffolding — or, if a single piece be lacking, we can see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in — in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that George W., Barack, Russell Moore, and Nikki Haley, and their many co-laborers  all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.

It is simply the case, when one objectively examines the facts, that White Anglo Saxon Christian America is being subjugated by Rainbow Cultural Marxists. And though it is a sin to notice, you will forgive me if I notice when war is being waged against me and mine and if I object to my faith and my people being subjugated.

Please forgive me as I seek to wake up the remnant.

 

 

O’Malley’s Apologizes For Saying Some Lives Matter

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley apologized on Saturday for saying “All lives matter” while discussing police violence against African-Americans with liberal demonstrators.

Several dozen demonstrators interrupted the former Maryland governor while he was speaking here at the Netroots Nation conference, a gathering of liberal activists, demanding that he address criminal justice and police brutality. When they shouted, “Black lives matter!” a rallying cry of protests that broke out after several black Americans were killed at the hands of police in recent months, O’Malley responded: “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.”

 The demonstrators who were mostly black, responded by booing him and shouting him down.
_________1.) Can you imagine booing someone for saying that “all lives matter”?

2.) Can you imagine apologizing for saying “all lives matter”?

3.) If white people booed and shouted someone down a black candidate for saying that “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter can” you imagine the hue and cry?

4.) Clearly there is a double standard here and when one has to apologize for saying “white lives matter … all lives matter” how can it not be the case that what is being communicated is that white lives do not matter?

5.)Keep in mind that the high profile cases of late that has found the death of black people at the hands of police the only one where a white officer alone was involved was in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson Mo. In the Freddie Grey case in Baltimore there were Black cops involved. In the Eric Garner case in New York there were Black cops involved. In the Trayvon Martin case, Mr. Martin was shot by a non white person.

Now, even where there is white assault on black people we needs keep in mind that this is a problem, if it is a problem, that does not move just one direction. Just over a decade ago John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, two black men, went on a sniper rampage killing 10 white people. During the trial Malvo testified that his accomplice Muhammad, driven by hatred of America because of its “slavery, hypocrisy and foreign policy” and his belief that “the white man is the devil”, planned to kill six whites a day for 30 days. Malvo further testified that Muhammad wanted him to shoot pregnant white women.

Beyond Martin O’Malley being a sniveling and pandering coward, why should he be required to apologize for adding to the truth that “black lives matter,” the corresponding truths that “white lives matter, all lives matter?”

When we see Politicians of the highest profile apologizing for saying that “white lives matter,” and “all lives matter,” as well as saying the truth that “black lives matter,” then in my estimation what is being proclaimed that indeed many lives don’t matter. The corollary of that would be that if many lives don’t matter then its open season on those lives.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/07/20/martin_omalley_apologizes_for_saying_all_lives_matter.html

The Enlightenment Use of Passions as Vehicle for Control

Classical ethics proposes restraint as the means of freedom; Sade proposes vice as the way to freedom; indeed Sade’s political theory proposes freedom as a way of annihilating moral restraint, but ends by imposing another more severe restraint in its place, thus introducing the central paradox of the Enlightenment: freedom equals control. ‘As we gradually proceed to our enlightenment,’ Sade writes giving the standard physics of the enlightenment as his starting point.

‘we cam more and more to feel that, motion being inherent in matter, the prime mover existed only as an illusion, and that all that exists essentially having to be in motion, the motor was useless; we sensed that this chimerical divinity, prudently invented by the earlier legislators, was in their hand, simply one more means to enthrall us.’

In classical physics, all objects were at rest unless moved by some agent; in Newtonian physics, all objects were in motion unless halted by some greater opposing force. The same could be said of Sade’s politics, which he derived from Newton’s physics. In an inversion of both Plato and Aristotle, Sade saw ‘insurrection’ as the natural state of men, who are nothing more than machines made out of matter in which motion was inherent. Since the passions are the moral equivalent of gravity, the successful government is not on which stifles passion, but rather one that foster it, and then directs the subsequent motions to its own ends. The state, in other words, should foster vice as an instrument of control:

‘The Greek lawgivers,’ Sade writes,

‘perfectly appreciated the capital necessary of corrupting the member citizens in order that their moral dissolution coming into conflict with the establishment and its values, there would result the insurrection that is always indispensable to a political system of perfect happiness which, like republican government, must necessarily excite the hatred and envy of all its foreign neighbors. Insurrection, thought these sage legislators, is not at all a moral condition; however, it has got to be a republic’s permanent condition. Hence it would be no less absurd than dangerous to require that those who are to insure the perpetual immoral subversion of the established order be moral beings: for the state of a moral man is one of tranquility and peace, the state of an immoral man is one of perpetual unrest that pushes him to, and identifies him with the necessary insurrection in which the republican must always keep the government of which he is a member.’

Sade’s politics is the classical tradition turned upside down. The key insight of both the Marquis de Sade and the Christian West is that the moral man is in a state of peace; he is, in other words, not in motion and so therefore impossible to direct and control from the outside. The revolutionary’s very restlessness, his very rebellion against the moral order, which is the source of his restlessness, holds within it the seeds of control because once in motion the state need only manipulate the revolutionary’s desire by controlling his passions, and it succeeds in manipulating and thereby controlling him. Sade is not slow in drawing this very conclusion. ‘ Lycugus and Solon,’ Sade tells us,

‘fully convinced that immodesty’s results are to keep the citizen in the immoral state indispensable to the mechanics of republican government, obliged to exhibit themselves naked at the theater.”

Lust in other words, is the force which keeps the citizenry of the republic from succumbing to the inertia of tranquility which is the fruit of adherence to the moral order. At this point we enter into something like a circular argument. Lust is good because it fosters the restlessness of republicanism, but republicanism is also good because it fosters lust. Either way what we have here is the rationalization of desire as an instrument of simultaneous ‘liberation’ and control; what was hither to deemed pathological is not to be seen as social norm:

We are persuaded that lust, being a product of those penchants, is not to be stifled or legislated against, but that it is, rather, a matter of arranging for the means whereby passion may be satisfied in peace. We must hence undertake to introduce order into this sphere of affairs, and to establish all the security necessary so that, when need sends the citizen near the objects of lust, he can give himself over to doing with them all this his passions demand, without ever being hampered by anything, for there is no moment in the life of man when liberty in its whole amplitude is so important to him.”

Liberty, according to this line of thought is the ability not to act according to reason, but rather th ability to gratify illicit passion, which means that in the very act of attaining his ‘liberty’ man becomes the thrall of the passion he gratifies. Before long, it becomes clear that Sade’s politics is in many ways just the physics he says it is. Man at the beck of passion is in many ways like a particle with no will of its own, since reason, especially morals, is the soul source of man’s ability to govern himself. And once gratification of passion becomes the definition of ‘liberty,’ then ‘liberty’ becomes synonymous with control because he who controls the passion controls the man. Liberty, as defined by Sade, becomes a prelude to the most insidious form of totalitarian control known to man. This was the genius of Enlightenment politics, which is in reality nothing more than a physics of vice. Incite the passion; control the man; this is the esoteric doctrine of the Enlightenment, one that has been refined for over 200 years through a trajectory that involves everything from psychoanalysis to advertising to pornography and the role it plays in the Kulturkampf. Sade clearly understands that sexual liberation leads to social control and sees this liberation and subsequent control of passion as the basis of permanent revolution that life in France would become ‘If You Would Become Republicans.’

‘No passion has a greater need of the widest horizon of liberty than sexual license,’ he writes, 

‘here it is that man likes to command, to be obeyed, to surround himself with slaves to satisfy him; well, whenever you withhold from man the secret means whereby he exhales the dose of despotism Nature instilled in the depths of his heart, h will seek other outlets for it, it will be vented upon  nearby objects; it will trouble the government. If you would avid that danger, permit a free flight and rein to those tyrannical desires which, despite himself, torment man ceaselessly: content with having been able to exercise his small dominion in ht middle of the harem of sultanas and yours whose submission your good offices and his money procure for him, he will go away appeased and with nothing but fond feelings for a government which so obligingly affords him every means of satisfying his concupiscence.’

There are a number of ironies here, some obvious some not. One irony is obvious: Once man is freed from the moral order, he is immediately subjected to the despotism of those who know how to manipulate his desires. This is the essence of the enlightenment regime; not to prohibit, but to enable, to encourage motion or restlessness, and direct the flow of that activity by manipulating desire. This is the political genius behind a regime that is based on advertising and pornography and opinion polls and the other instruments which control liberated man.”

E. Michael Jones
Monsters From the Id — pg. 85 – 88