I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends; Ethan Holden On Transparency

“I’ve always believed in a “Flags Out Front” approach to things.

Meaning:

1. Be upfront and honest with what you believe politically, theologically, philosophically, and morally.

2. Don’t be afraid to put your views out in the open, especially the ones that people will find most controversial.

3. Fight for those views without apology.

4. Eventually, you will have the “Adam Carolla” or “Howard Stern” affect. Have you ever noticed how those two men can say anything they want, and nobody calls for them to be cancelled anymore? They used to….but not anymore. Why? Because they know that both of those men are too far gone to be scolded and scorned into changing their opinions. The sons of earth are shrewd in that way, and we should be too.

5. Don’t lie or obfuscate your views unless you are dealing with your enemies. You do not owe them any information. But your family, friends, and church leadership are not the folks that you want to hide your beliefs from. To do so is to put them in the same camp as your enemies.

6. If your more controversial “flags out front” views are not shared by your Elders, do not undermine them by trying to convert the congregants to your point of view. Sure, use your public platform to discuss what you want to discuss. But do not be a subversive.

7. Lastly, enjoy yourself! Don’t be a shrill, get wrapped around the axels, and self righteous. State your business, and have a good time doing it!

Raise the flag.

They are going to find out anyway.”

On Mastering One’s Fears

“I have a friend in Hollywood. He is an actor. He is a well known actor. He has work. He strongly supports President Trump. He’s a real patriot. He just asked me to be sure that I don’t tell anybody (that he supports Trump) because of the system.”

Roger Stone
Interview with Robert Davi

I am running this quote not in connection with the political aspect but rather with the reality of the fear that people have in connection with their putative convictions. I say, “putative” because how much of a conviction can someone hold who is ashamed of that conviction, or fearful of what would happen to them should their conviction be known?

I have had, as a minister, on more than one occasion have had people speak to me the same kind of idea that Roger Stone had spoken to him by his Hollywood actor friend. More than once I’ve had people say something like, “I agree with you but I can’t be associated with you because it would put my career in danger”, or “I would lose my friends,” or “my family wouldn’t understand,” or “agreeing with you publicly would make it hard on my children.” Another version of this is, “I agree with you but you make the issue at hand far more important than it really is.” Usually, such statements circle around Theonomy, or Kinism, or my views on Government schooling.

I can be very bi-polar about my response to this. On one hand I understand the necessity sometimes to play one’s cards close to the breast. There are times when one keeps the false flag flying and doesn’t raise the Jolly Roger to let everyone know you’re a pirate. I, myself, have, in the past,  played the “clever to protect myself” game. I genuinely understand the more than a few ministers who correspond to me telling me that they agree with my Kinism but they dare not let Kinism come from the pulpit or in their online writings — and that even though they agree it is a Biblical doctrine. The price to be paid by especially clergy is a high price to be paid. It means very possibly the end of their career, the inability to provide for their family, and the hatred of countless numbers of dumb people (i.e. — the Normies).

So, I understand the sentiment captured in the opening quote. And I get people’s fears. I myself live with those fears daily.

But at some point it is my conviction that people have to rise above these natural fears because until people in the shadows come out and nail their flags to the mast, the depredations of our egalitarian culture, our lawlessness, and our thinking destroying habits is going to destroy us, first as a visible church, and then as a people.  If we will not stand up in favor of Kinism, in opposition to government schooling, and in opposition to the prevalent opposition to God’s law then we will disappear as a people and our children and grandchildren will be the victims of what too often is nothing but cowardice dressed up in the evening clothes of personal pragmatism and an egocentric self protection.

Jesus spoke about the necessity of taking up the cross, and denying one’s self. The writer to the Hebrews reminds his recipients not to give up on Christianity because of the difficulties they were facing by embracing Christianity, reminding them, “you have not yet resisted unto the point of blood.” Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progess” is all about the theme of the winning through the difficulties of following Christ. It was not about the theme of avoiding the difficulties of following Christ.

I can hear now the potential protests. “But those issues and those types of issues are not really hills to die on. They are not the issues upon which Christianity pivots.” It’s hard to believe that someone would argue this way given how government schools are brainwashing our children against Christianity, and given how our culture (and Church) is manifestly doing everything it can to evade championing God’s law, and given the egalitarianism that has now gone so far as to seek to normalize the most aberrant of behaviors. This egalitarianism did not start with the transgenderism that we are embracing as a culture now but started far further up on what turned out to be the slippery slope of all slippery slopes.

And yet people are frightened. So frightened that even some of them don’t want to it to be publicly known that they embrace what Trump symbolically stands for. (Admission … I like Trump as a symbol, but I do not think the man matches the symbol and so will not be voting for Trump.) However, fear, is no reason to not play the man and come forward consistent with one’s “secret convictions.”

Here I am in the middle. Being frightened myself I get that people are scared. However, the whole idea of courage is the ability to stand even in spite of legitimate fears.

I hope, that in the near future, Roger Stone’s Hollywood friend can have enough courage to come out of the closet and let it be known he is done being ashamed of his convictions, and that regardless of the cost.

A Response to Dimitry Wilsoneyev On Pulling Down Criminal Statues

“In such a moment, our task should be two-fold. First, don’t help them tear down anything else. I don’t care if it is a statue of Cecil Rhodes, or Winston Churchill, or Nathan Bedford Forrest—nothing else comes down.”

Doug Wilson

Imagine you’re living in 1990 Communist Russia. Finally, there is a crack in Communism and you and the boys decide you’re going to pull down a few statues of Commie heroes — Oh, let’s say a Trotsky statue or an Iron Felix statue or even a lowly Brezhnev statue. Change is in the air and you are determined that you’re going to cast off the “heroes” of the past.

But then comes Dimitry Wilsoneyev who warns you about all the social instability you’re going to create if you tear down statues — even if the statues you’re going to tear down are statues of mass murderers and criminal villains.

Of course your immediate response is…. “What the hell have we been living under for the last 80 years if not ever incrementally increasing social instability as created by those raised up for posterity in statue form?”

But Dimitry Wilsoneyev, good Christian that he is, reminds you that by pulling down these statues that you may well be letting loose anarchy upon the land.

Again, you stare unblinkingly at this Boomer. You’re bumfuzzled and are thinking, “You prefer this four score tyranny instead? You want to say to Dimitry, ” Even if you’re right about social instability and anarchy being set loose by tearing down statues of criminals and delinquents is that worse than what we lived under during the reign of these madmen? A reign that will continue and even increase if we don’t change the equation. Keep in mind Dimitry, that those supporting the maintenance of these statues we want to pull down are intent on continuing this criminally aberrant social order. Further, Dimitry, you’re counsel to go slow is serving to the end of supporting those that would turn the whole world into one vast gulag.”

“Think about it Dimitry …. if Cromwell had listened to your kind of counsel England would have never been set free from the villain Charles I. If the Colonials had listened to you we would still be quartering Red Coat soldiers in our homes. And if Europe had listened to your kind of counsel in 1989 the Berlin Wall would still be standing.”

“The problem honorable Dimitry Wilsoneyev is not that the idols erected to Churchill, Lincoln, or FDR are being torn down. The problem is that they were ever raised up to begin with.” Also, dear Dimitry, we need to ask, “what are we to do while living in already socially unstable times that find us having to barricade our homes against those who are ginning up the teeming crowds of refuse and delinquency to the end that someday statues of their vomitous likeness will be erected?

Sorry, Dimitry, but we are well past the exit that said “waiting will fix things.” Any counsel to people that in effect says… “it’s ok, go back to sleep,” is not going to cut it for people who love God, their family, and their people. Some statues / idols have to go, Dimitry and there is no time like the present.

Winston Churchill is one of them.

Won’t you help us tear down the old idols and statues of the post-war liberal consensus — even in the context when the enemy is out there pulling down the statues of genuine heroes?

Finally, Dimitry Wilsoneyev, social change is seldom without convulsions. Read an old book on Oliver Cromwell and learn that again.

Kinism & Its Fight Against the Gnostic Empire That Is The Reformed Church; McAtee Contra Leon

As most readers of Iron Ink know I have had a long running contest with most (not all) of the clergy in the Reformed world on the issue of their incipient Gnosticism. Usually, this contesting comes in the context of Kinism which is merely just historic traditional Christianity. However, because the Reformed Church has become so ridden with the Gnostic impulse in this country we have to give an aspect of basic Christianity a defining word of its own. That word is Kinism.

I must say, probably to my shame, that I have become very impatient with the attacks on Kinism from the Reformed clergy, if only because after 20 years of me dealing with this subject it seems these people are impervious to not only learning but even to hearing what I, and others, have been saying. I mean this material is so simple that even a toddler can understand and yet we find men trained in seminary — their numbers being legion — continuing to say the stupidest of things such as we find most recently from Rev. Aldo Leon.

The good Rev. wrote, amidst other banalities that fell from his fingertips on the subject;

“What do R2K and Kinists have in common?

And then answered his own question;

A.) They both are resistant to Christians being the societal X factor and in different ways defer to some primacy of nature.”

Rev. Aldo “Gnostic” Leon

 

First one asks,

What does societal X factor even mean?

I can only guess it means something like … “That factor in Christians which is supposed to make them different from everyone else.”

If that is accurate then what Rev. Leon is arguing is that because Kinists do not believe that grace destroys nature that therefore they fail the necessary X factor.

The whole quote belies the fact that Rev. Leon has been bitten by the Gnostic bug that has bitten so many Reformed clergy today who ignorantly rail against Kinism.

The first and most resilient heresy the Church faced and continues to face is Gnosticism, which in part, is the insistence that the corporeal is evil. The fight against Gnosticism is found in the New Testament (Colossians, I John) and was an opponent of some of the Early Church Fathers. One well known
was a chap named Cerinthus. One day the Apostle John was bathing in a community wash center and while there St. John discovered that the Gnostic Cerinthus had entered into the public washing centered. Irenaeus records for us St. John’s reaction to the presence of this Gnostic,” John, the disciple of the Lord, going to bathe at Ephesus, and perceiving Cerinthus within, rushed out of the bath-house without bathing, exclaiming, ‘Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within.'”

Gnosticism was a problem in the early Church and it has been a ongoing plague to the Church ever since.

Because the Gnostics considered the corporeal/material to be evil one of two responses were seen in the Church when it was infected with Gnosticism. The first was the response of denying to the body any and all pleasure often inflicting the body with pain because it was evil. The second response was that since the body was evil and since it couldn’t be escaped then it didn’t matter what someone did with the body. This led to all kinds of drunkenness, sexual deviance, and riotous living.

Today the Church continues to deal with the Gnostic impulse as is seen in the vituperation of the doctrine of Kinism. Kinism acknowledges the reality of the corporeal realm and insists that God delights in the differing races/ethnicities that He created. However the Gnostic Church with its Gnostic clergy come along and insist that the corporeal/material reality created and controlled by God as found in our human genetic constitution is a reality that can be undone when someone asks Jesus into their heart. Upon conversion we find our modernistic Reformed clergy effectively asserting that the material/corporeal reality vanishes. All the evil material genetic coding that is ours by way of creation is destroyed by Grace and we now are merely spiritual beings who need not be concerned with racial/ethnic realities. Before Christ we are racial/ethnic beings but upon conversion the Holy Spirit takes away our DNA and gives us a spiritual being-ness that transcends race/ethnicity.

This is nothing but the Gnostic Empire striking back at the Christian assertion that creation is a positive good that ought to be embraced.

Anybody who anathematizes Kinism is a Gnostic.

Continuing  with this commentary on Rev. Leon’s jejune assertions we note;

1.) Contrary to Leon, merely recognizing nature is not to defer to “some primacy of nature” as if God as creator is not over nature or does not continue to deign, as creator to name all the corporeal realm He created as “very good” — including the genetic reality of race/ethnicity.

2.) We ask Rev. Leon, if someone has parents who have red hair and they themselves as the child of those parents likewise has red hair is that deferring to some primacy of nature?   Does Jesus take away someone’s red hair if and when they ask Jesus into their hearts? If not, why would we think that race/ethnicity goes away or becomes completely irrelevant upon conversion?

Really, we say again, anybody who anathematizes Kinism is a Gnostic.

Remember folks what the Reformed cognoscenti like Rev. Leon has forgotten… “Grace does not destroy nature. Grace restores nature.” Because that is true, when man is visited by God’s grace that grace does not destroy the reality or significance of race/ethnicity but rather restores it to be what it was always intended to be by God’s creative act.

My frustration find me grasping for words to communicate how dumb this kind of Gnosticism is and that especially when found those who are supposed to be the ones who are holding forth the light of truth for God’s assembly. That’s my analysis. I end this piece by quoting a couple of my Christian friends as they commented on this piece of torpidity as coming from Rev. Leon’s fingertips.

“Nature and grace. God is the source and author of both. This nit wit is asserting that nature has some existence independent of its creator or at least in his rejection of Kinism suggests that grace obliterates God created racial distinctions rather than enabling unity between those distinctions.

He’s (Rev. Leon) stupid. ”

Mark Chambers 

“It never ceases to amaze me all the convoluted gibberish these guys get up to in aims of denying the obvious. Nature is a means of God. In fact, ‘nature’ encompasses all means in general. And the Reformed have always held that God works through means because He is their author who declared them good from the beginning, and worketh all things according to His will and to the good of those who love Him. Nature therefore cannot be anathematized without inditing God Himself.

But the Gnostics of our day see themselves as something wholly apart from nature and God’s means. They seem to adopt a vague theory of theosis in which they transcend matter and means into identity with God Himself. Which really makes it another permutation of the devil’s primordial offer for man to be as God.”

Dan Brannan

In the end the humor in all this is that Rev. Leon, who apparently is writing a book against R2K “theology” is the one who shares common ground with the very thing he is writing against. By railing against Kinism the good Reverend is covered with the same dank smell of Gnosticism that so completely perfumes R2K theology.

What can I say?

It is a mad mad mad mad world.