Reformed vs. Lutheran Preaching … A Brief Synopsis

 

Lutheran preaching uses the Law and Gospel hermeneutic. It will often begin with what God requires and man can not give (Law) and will finish with what God alone gives (Gospel). Like Lutheran theology, Lutheran preaching terminates on man.

Reformed preaching often likewise followed the Law and Gospel hermeneutic. Reformed preaching will also emphasize how the law leaves us guilty before God, with the same ringing announcement that God must do all.

The difference between Lutheran and Reformed preaching is that Lutherans saw Justification (the Gospel glad tidings in preaching) as being an end in itself. Once the announcement was made to man that God has done all that is the end. Not so the Reformed. The Reformed agreed with Lutherans on the wonder of Justification (the Gospel glad tidings in preaching) BUT the Reformed insisted that Justification was not an end but a means to a higher end — a higher end that could not be spoken of apart from the good news. The higher end of Justification was the answering of the question, “How shall we now live, as a Justified people, in order to glorify God.”

In brief the Reformed didn’t absolutize the antithesis between Law and Gospel. The Reformed in their preaching, following Scripture, saw the hermeneutical antithesis as between the seed of the Woman and the seed of the Serpent. The law does not function solely as negative in the lives of those who belong to Christ. The Reformed saw a harmony between the Gospel and the third use of the law with which Lutherans are not typically comfortable.

And so Reformed preaching goes on from Lutheran truncated Law Gospel to explain what it looks like now, in keeping with the third use of the law,  for a purified people who have been Redeemed by Christ from every lawless deed to now live as a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds (Titus 2:14)

Lutheran ears hear Reformed preaching and think that it fails their Law Gospel hermeneutic, and so is legalistic, but the point of the matter is, is that Lutherans have made the Gospel end upon man’s salvation (and so really is anthropocentric) while Reformed preaching understands that man’s salvation serves God’s glorification and so Reformed preaching, while announcing the same glad tidings as Lutheran preaching goes on to instruct God’s people that salvation means that we make it our goal to please Him and then spends time how it is that people who God is pleased with, for the sake of Christ’s atoning work, can live as children who please their Father in all their living. Thus Reformed preaching is Christocentric.

Subtle differences. Important differences.

Now, Reformed preaching can break down and where I have heard Reformed preaching break down is in the respect that it is often Law/Gospel/ and then the Law again as a means to earn God’s favor. It ends up sounding something like, “Yeah. Isn’t the good news good. OK. That’s enough of a break from the burden of the law. Now get back under there and start doing some “sanctified” law keeping.” To avoid falling back under the works of the law, we need to keep in mind the Heidelberg Catechism which teaches us that good works are,

Only those which are done
out of true faith,
in accordance with the law of God,
and to his glory,
and not those based
on our own opinion
or on precepts of men

We also need to keep in mind that we, as God’s Redeemed, never obey in order to attain an uncertain forgiveness, but we obey out of love and gratitude for a certain forgiveness granted. We do not obey to gain life.  We obey out of life already obtained. As such, our third use of the law, law respecting, is not a threat to justification by faith alone.

Next, we need to remember that the Holy Spirit has been given as a deposit guaranteeing that which is to come. Because we have been given the Holy Spirit we are a people thirsty to work out what God has worked within us. We are not a people who are obeying by lifting ourselves by our own bootstraps, seeking to curry an uncertain favor. Rather we are a people who are only living in ways that we are bent toward due to our possession of the Holy Spirit.

Finally, we need to keep before us that even when God is pleased to increase in His people sanctification that we still are only received by Him for the sake of the finished work of Jesus Christ. We remain unprofitable servants who have, even when we have done what we think is our “best,” only done what we ought (Luke 17:10). There is nothing in us or our performance that wins our salvation. Our salvation is anchored only in the performance of the Lord Christ on our behalf. This is a comfort to us when we begin to see that even our best of works are far from what they are called to be.

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends … Amiee Chauvin Dissects Piper

The following is a comment left by one of the young ladies who attends the same Church I do. If I could I would stand and applause this response by Aimee because it reminds me that a little leaven can leaven the whole loaf.

Throughout (Piper’s) whole piece, John Piper establishes a false dichotomy between defending yourself with a gun and trusting Jesus. It’s not either/or. Especially in his 9th point, Piper allows that God does expect us to fend for ourselves in a way, (“Even though the Lord ordains for us to use ordinary means of providing for life [work to earn; plant and harvest; take food, drink, sleep, and medicine; save for future needs; provide governments with police and military forces for society”]) and yet Piper drastically draws a line at self defense (“nevertheless, the unique calling of the church is to live in such reliance on heavenly protection and heavenly reward that the world will ask about our hope [1 Peter 3:15], not about the ingenuity of our armed defenses.”) without much of an explanation as why the line should be drawn there. Why is working to provide money for food, clothes, and housing not considered a contradiction to the call to live in “reliance on heavenly protection?” ~ I think it’s much more trusting to stop working and depend on God for my meal. That way people will have no doubt as to where my hope is.~ In the Lord’s prayer we are instructed to ask God for our daily bread, but most of the time God provides that bread through providing a job that will pay for the bread. The job is the means to God’s provision that God established. Likewise, carrying a gun is also a means of God’s provision for my protection.

I’m also reminded of the false dichotomy between corporeal and spiritual. The verse itself in every version I’ve seen does not use the words “physical” or “material.” Instead it uses “carnal,” or “of this world.” It makes sense that the not “of this world” would be similar to the way Jesus used it in His response to Pilate in John 18:36 in that it does not receive its power from this world. Our weapons are spiritual in that they are helping to establish a spiritual battle. Any object in a Christian’s hand can be a spiritual weapon. The laptops that were used to type out Biblical responses to Piper’s heretical views are spiritual laptops. A gun used to protect God’s people and the judicially innocent are spiritual weapons.

A Nation Legislated Out Of Existence

The fact that we are no longer a “nation” can be accounted by the invasion, since 1965, of alien peoples from alien cultures. What Americans and the West can’t seem to understand is that this non-European immigration invasion, assured by the 1965 Immigration Act with its opening of the borders to the non-European world, is a colonization and a conquering of this territory once called “these united States.” It is the replacement of the previous people and culture in favor of a differing people and culture. The passage of said legislation was a masterful piece of lying from beginning to end. Sen. Teddy Kennedy, one of the chief sponsors of the Bill promised,

“First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same…

Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset… Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia…

In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think… The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”

Sen. Teddy Kennedy was a lot of things but stupid was not one of them. Kennedy, along with Sen. Philip Hart, Sen. Jacob Javits, Emanuel Cellar and others could not be so blind as to not know that the Hart-Cellar act would fundamentally transform America from a WASP nation to a Propositional Universal nation.

In this 1965 Act America was certain to cease being a nation, if only because the heart and soul of a nation is its people. The 1965 Immigration Act guaranteed the replacement of the nation’s people and so in principle, killed the American Nation that existed in 1965 in favor of a Universal Propositional Nation that exists now. In the words of Bertolt Brecht, what the Government did in 1965 was to dissolve the people and elect another. 

That Universal Propositional Nation is a failure. The Liberal magic dirt theory that posited that non-Christian Europeans would instantly become Christian Americans simply by setting their foot on American soil has demonstrated instead that Somalian cliterectomies, and Arab “Allahu Akbahr barking,” and the third world sex trafficking doesn’t cease just because new arrivals from non Christian European countries have US soil under their feet.

 

Mr. Bojidar Marinov & His Insistence That Open Borders Is Not Marxist Policy

‘Anyone who claims that open borders is a Marxist and Communist policy is an idiot who understand neither Marxism nor history.’

Bojidar Marinov

My only grievance with the former Communist and now Libertarian Bojidar Marinov is that he is so often wrong and yet still taken so seriously by formerly Theonomic organizations like American Vision and Chalcedon. In this quote we find yet another example of how egregious Mr. Marinov’s error usually is.

First, we should note that Karl Marx promoted a stateless border-less world. The abolition of the state was the central point of Marxism. This fact is echoed by Marx’s co-laborer Engels. When asked, “What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities, Engels responded by saying,

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

Secondly, we need to remember that the Communists promoted immigration. It was emigration that the Communists so strigently controlled. Americans were free to leave America and move to the Soviet Union or East Germany back in the 1950’s. So, they championed porous borders to enter but closed borders to leave.  The Communists were vicious about closed borders but that was because they didn’t want anybody to get out of their Utopian paradise. The Marxist talk today about “open borders,” is the talk of “open borders” in a Communist New World Order where it would not be possible for anyone to escape. “You can go to any Communist Country you want to go to Comrade.”

Thirdly, Mr. Marinov’s call for “open borders” is misleading, and deliberately so. This nomenclature is intended to foster the illusion that one can be both open and closed. It is akin to advocating for pregnant virgins. Such language borders on lunacy. Retaining the word for “borders” in an “open borders” policy does not mean you have actually retained the borders. By opening them, you destroy them. If your policy is openness, openness is what you have. You are no longer closed off and so you no longer have borders. Pull the door off of your house and you soon cease to have a house. Why? Because one of the things making it a house was its door. The walls will soon follow as invaders tear them down using the hole that was formerly a door.

There is no way to have a national area that is both open and closed. It is difficult to imagine that Mr. Marinov does not understand this. You can have integrity in your borders, or you can have dissipation and lack of national definition. You cannot have both. What illness could possibly explain the fantasy of having both openness AND borders?

Thirdly, Mr. Marinov is just in error with his statement as this quote from Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky, demonstrates,

“Very differently from the apprentice or the merchant is the modern proletarian torn loose from the soil. He becomes a citizen of the world; the whole world is his home.

No doubt this world-citizenship is a great hardship for the workers in countries where the standard of living is high and the conditions of labor are comparatively good. In such countries, naturally, immigration will exceed emigration. As a result the laborers with the higher standard of living will be hindered in their class-struggle by the influx of those with a lower standard and less power of resistance.

Under certain circumstances this sort of competition, (that we Marxists are calling for) like that of the capitalists, may lead to a new emphasis on national lines, a new hatred of foreign workers on the part of the native born. But the conflict of nationalities, which is perpetual among the capitalists, can be only temporary among the proletarians. For sooner or later the workers will discover that the immigration of cheap labor-power from the more backward to the more advanced countries, is as inevitable a result of the capitalist system as the introduction of machinery or the forcing of women into industry.

In still another way does the labor movement of an advanced country suffer under the influence of the backward conditions of other lands. The high degree of exploitation endured by the proletariat of the economically undeveloped nations becomes an excuse for the capitalists of the more highly developed ones for opposing any movement in the direction of higher wages or better conditions.

In more than one way, then, it is borne in upon the workers of each nation that their success in the class-struggle is dependent on the progress of the working-class of other nations. For a time this may turn
them against foreign workers, but finally they come to see that there is only one effective means of removing the hindering influence of backward nations: to do away with the backwardness itself. German workers have every reason to co-operate with the Slavs and Italians in order that these may secure higher wages and a shorter working-day; the English workers have the same interest in relation to the Germans, and the Americans in relation to Europeans in general.

The dependence of the proletariat of one land on that of another leads inevitably to a joining of forces by the militant proletarians of various lands.

The survivals of national seclusion and national hatred which the proletariat took over from the bourgeoisie, disappear steadily. The working-class is freeing itself from national prejudices. Working-men learn more and more to see in the foreign laborer a fellow-fighter, a comrade.

The strongest bonds of international solidarity, naturally, are those which bind groups of proletarians, which, though of different nationalities, have the same purposes and use the same methods to
accomplish them.’

Here is an explicit statement by a known Marxist on the positive good that immigration and open borders are to Marxist.

Mr. Marinov, once again, despite his cocksure confidence, is in major error on this matter. Given all that has been adduced here we must ask Mr. Marinov, “Who is the idiot” and “Who is the one who does not understand either Marxism nor History.”

How many times does someone have to be wrong before American Vision and Chalcedon quit listening to him?

_______________
Assists for this post goes to Habakkuk Mucklewrath, Martin Svetislav, Colby Malsbury

“The Other Worldview; Exposing Christianity’s Greatest Threat” … A Book Review

Dr. Peter Jones has been a great benefactor to the Christian Church in the West with his work on Gnosticism, Egalitarian Pantheism, and Oneism. Via his various works his has been a prophetic voice warning the Church of a worldview switch that is already upon us. The greatest threat to the Church and the West is what he calls “Oneism,” but could just as easily be called “systematic Cultural Marxism.” He mentions Cultural Marxism but his focus is more on Karl Jung and Jung’s disciples. He locates animistic type religion in Jung’s psychoanalysis and insists that the goal of this religious Cultural Marxism is “thus all men Shamans.”

Dr. Peter Jones relates that the problem of the Jung(ians) is that they live in a Cosmos that is defined by Outsidelessness. This is another way of saying that there is no Transcendent Reference point by which meaning can be determined. Without a Transcendent outsidedness (that is also Trinitarian and so personal) what results is man sinking into himself to find meaning and to discover the divinity within.

This new Monistic Cultural Marxist religion is committed to the New Age goal of combining the opposites. This gives us a “beyond good and evil” morality where each man does what is right in his own eyes. Of course this is just another way of embracing the Hegelian dialectic of Marxism.

What has happened in our lifetimes is that we have moved from a Monistic Humanistic materialism where spiritual realities were folded into material reality to a Monistic Humanistic spiritualsim where material realities are now folded into spiritual reality. Both humanisms are Monistic with the only difference being that during the Enlightenment age that which was genuinely spiritual was reduced to the material whereas now that which is genuinely material is reduced to being categorized as spiritual. When one looks at the modern sciences of Quantum indeterminacy, quantum holism, and quantam non-locality (sub sets of Quantum physics) along with Quantum mechanics one begins to see a “science” that is more friendly to the New Ageist Spirituality of Eastern Mysticism and Western Romanticism.

In this new gnostic Monism the goal is the elimination of not only Modernity but also of Biblical Christianity. All of the distinctions that one finds in Biblical Christianity are eliminated in favor of the merging of the opposites. As a result we can speak of now of a Homocosmology, Homostoricism, Homorality, as well as Homosexuality. Indeed so great is the push for the elimination of distinctions that Jones’ opines that a day is coming when Biblical Christianity will be criminalized. The sodomites are NOT interested in equality folks. They are interested in turning normalcy into the aberrant.

Jones’ goes out of his way to agree with what I’ve been saying since I was 30 and that is psychiatry and psychology are the cutting edge expressions of this new religion that intends to crush Biblical Christianity. My angst at this confirmation is that much of the Church and Church Mission agencies have already redefined themselves in terms of the Monistic psychiatry and psychology that Jones’ warns against. It has been the case for years that in many denominations one cannot enter into the ministry or missionary field without first submitting to a battery of Monistic humanistic psychological exams, as well as- required time spent with the Denominational Shrink – Shaman. What has happened is that instead of these fields being reinterpreted through a biblical grid (if indeed that is even possible) the disciplines of humanistic shamanistic psychology have reinterpreted Christianity through their Monistic – gnostic grids. You can be sure that Christ’s Church has suffered as a result of this.

As a criticism of the book, I’m not convinced that Jones’ himself has extirpated all the Monism from himself that he so clearly sees elsewhere. In point of fact, given some of Jones’ complaint about “Institutional racism,” and “Institutional Sexism” one wonders if Jones’ despite his excellent work here hasn’t himself swallowed a poison pill of Monistic making.

I’ve read most of Jones’ published work now and viewed many many of his lectures. That should tell you that I value his work. In point of fact I think it is indispensable given our time and historical situation. When combined with more thorough works on Cultural Marxism and Postmodernism by other authors I think one has the opportunity to see Christianity’s greatest worldview opponent at this time.

In ending I think it should be said again that Radical Two Kingdom theology works perfectly in tandem with what Dr. Jones calls “Oneism.” R2K, in its most virulent and consistent forms, insists that the public square is, by definition, a-religious. As such Christians have no business in trying to appeal to Christianity in order to set aright the inroads of “Oneism.” R2K aids “Oneism” by not only not resisting to Oneism but by suggesting that it is sin to resist to “Oneism.”