Are The Ogden Lads Really That Adamantly Opposed To The Post-War Consensus?

Additionally, you have recommended John Weaver on multiple occasions as a resource members of the church should look to. There are views which we will absolutely not tolerate within the church. One of those views includes the forbidding of so-called interracial marriages, or kinism, characterizing so-called interracial marriages as sinful, even adulterous. Due to this, we will not tolerate John Weaver to be recommended to anyone in the congregation and will, if necessary, publicly warn the church against his ministry and materials.

The Elders of Refuge Church
Ogden, Utah
Letter to Disaffected Member
Circa 2021

1.) I cite this letter because I get the sense that at times the Ogden chaps want to present themselves as somehow distinct from Doug Wilson on this issue “Kinism” and are providing an alternative. If they are distinct from Doug it would be a matter of merely degrees and not of substance.

Here we are left wondering if the Ogden chaps, like Doug, are practicing a type of conservatism that Dabney once wrote of;

“American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. . . . Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom.”

2.) Note the phraseology “so called interracial marriages.” This would seem to mean that the Ogden chaps don’t believe that interracial marriages are possible and it strikes me that could only be possible if there is a implicit denial of the reality of race here. Why are interracial marriages only “so-called?” Hey Ogden fellows; Are such marriages people of two different races genuinely interracial or are they not “interracial?” And if they are not interracial … then pray tell why not?

3.) In this quote above the Ogden boys commit the same tomfoolery as their arch-enemy Doug Wilson does inasmuch as they both are giving a very narrow definition of Kinism. There are many Kinists who don’t say all interracial marriages are sinful though they may well consider many of them as sinful and most of them as unwise. That such a Kinist view is seen as outrageous is testimony to how liberal the Ogden boys are on this subject, for such a view was, before 1950 or so, the position of nearly all of Christendom. See the two anthology books … “Who Is My Neighbor,” and “A Survey of Racialism in the Christian Tradition.”

The quotes in these books vary. Some are less racially charged, and others more. There are writings that are often about the unity of all races (in their calling to follow Christ) but yet distinguish by race. Some of these make very clear distinctions even between what we can now understand and define as ethnicity (a select stock of descent; Irish versus Breton), nation (a body of members derived from the same ethnicity), country (a collection of members either of closely related ethnicities or of one ethnicity), and race (a broad grouping categorized by a general descent, especially as defined by continental region). Saint Isidore of Seville goes so far as to include the prohibition of miscegenation under the natural rights of nations.

Before 1950 or so, no one would have labeled someone who said that miscegenation is sinful as being beyond the pale of the Christian faith. Yet here is the Ogden group … a group who style themselves as reaching back to champion an older Christianity staining someone as upright as John Weaver trying to make him persona non-grata. This highhandedness is neither Christian nor conservative. It makes one wonder if the Ogden chaps are, like so many other clergy, just playing the tune that they think will resonate with their audience.

4.) When Weaver, and Rushdoony before him, talked about interracial marriages being “adulterous” they were pointing to a legitimate meaning of the word “adultery.” The word “Adultery” also retained the meaning of “to water down.” When someone mixes whiskey with water they are adulterating the whiskey. When someone mixes blue paint and yellow paint they are adulterating both the blue paint and the yellow paint. And when a Japanese marries a Cherokee they are each adulterating their races. This is not a controversial statement. It is an objective fact. So, when Weaver, or Rushdoony makes the statement about interracial marriages being adulterous they are really merely proclaiming a tautology.

5.) I know John Weaver a wee bit. I have good friends who know John Weaver very well. For anybody to indict John Weaver like this is just unconscionable and I take more than a little umbrage at this.

6.) I must tell you also that I find this correspondence very Doug Wilson like in tone. I mean who are they to tell people who they can or cannot read? Now, as a Pastor, if I know someone is pushing views that I believe are contrary to Biblical Christianity I may write a blog post or preach a sermon exposing the problems as compared to Scripture but then I would tell them to go ahead and read so and so if they must and see whether or not my warnings are correct.

Think about this … these chaps at Ogden have been screaming ruddy murder about Wilson’s “gate-keeping,” and yet is not this “gate-keeping” at its best? So it seems gate-keeping is not proper for Doug but it is proper for them.

7.) In the end my problem here is that these chaps are going on and on suggesting that they are opposed to what is now called “the post-war consensus” but in this letter from 2021 they are gate-keeping for the post-war consensus that Weaver had been rightly attacking.

Now, it may be possible that the Ogden blokes have moved in their thinking on this matter since 2021 and as such would not write this letter again in 2025. If that is the case it would be good to know because if they still hold the above position then they are really still invested in maintaining one important aspect of the post-war consensus.

I say all this as someone who does not believe that all interracial marriage is always sinful, while still believing that interracial marriage is the chief tool being used to make the post-war consensus eternal.

Economics Is A Tricky Business

True story;

It’s the 18th century in British ruled India. In Delhi, the Brits have a problem. It seems that there are far too many Cobras in the streets of Delhi and these Cobras are presenting a health crisis.

So, the Brits, always so wise in their administration of their colonies, arrive at an idea. They decide to offer a bounty for every dead Cobra that is turned into their designated Cobra centers.

This works great … for awhile. Dead Cobras are being turned in. People are making some money from the exchange. Delhi is becoming comparatively pestilent free of Cobras. However, during the period in which there was a bounty on cobras, the number of rats in Delhi increased and with it an outbreak in the bubonic plague. When the bounty ended, the number of rats significantly decreased.

Also, someone gets the idea of breeding Cobras as a lucrative option. The reasoning went like this …. “We will breed Cobras which have monetary value, and then once they reach a certain maturity we will kill the Cobras and turn them in for the English bounty.” The English bounty was working as a subsidy on Cobras and whatever a government subsidizes it gets more of.

Suddenly the English offices were flooded with dead Cobras and the British realized that it was necessary to end the “dead Cobras for money” program.
The problem was though that the Cobra breeding farms had mushroomed throughout Delhi. Now, these farms had a product (live Cobras) which had no monetary value. Who wants to keep all kinds of live Cobras around? So, the Cobra breeding farms just released their formerly lucrative product, with the end result that Delhi’s Cobra problem was greater after the English “Cobras for Cash” program than it was before the program.

The moral of the story …. Beware the law of unintended consequences.

One Theory Of Why Failed Natural Law Theory Came To The Fore During Reformation Era

“Calvin had inspired in his disciples that energy of piety which abhors all halfway measures, which boldly endeavors to make all the affairs of life subject to Christ, the Head and Lord. . . . But what was needed, viz., firm principles about the relation of the Reformation to the forces of modern emerging culture—to the state, science, and art—this was lacking, and how could it be attained all at once in the midst of all the unrest of the time? Regarded in this way, we believe the appearance of natural law doctrine becomes comprehensible. A doctrine of the state constructed on evangelical principles was not in existence. But such a doctrine was imperatively needed and demanded by the need of the time. Men needed to have clearness about the relation of the ruler to the subjects, about the problem of Church and State, about the relation between different churches in the same country. No wonder that in the lack of a conception of the state revised in the light of fundamental evangelical ideas, men had recourse to the political theory taught in the traditional jurisprudence, without heeding the fact that that theory had an origin foreign to the Reformation, and involved tendencies and consequences which would lead away from the Reformation. These tendencies, of course, became apparent later in slowly developing after-effects, and then, especially after the spiritual enervation sustained in the protracted religious wars, they could not fail gradually to dissipate and destroy the Reformation’s basis of faith. . . .”

EL Hebden Taylor, The Christian Philosophy Of Law, Politics And The State, p.3
(quoting August Lang in the Princeton Theological Review entitled “The Reformation and Natural Law”)

The Reality And Prevalence Of Linguistic Deception

“Modernists will usually betray pretty clearly that they use Christian terminology before a pagan background . . . Modernism is the use of Christian terms for the purpose of conveying pagan thought . . . All the words that we daily use and give a Christian meaning must now receive a pagan meaning.

Cornelius Van Til

“What Do You Mean?” The Banner, Vol. 67

This is called linguistic deception and we are seeing it ALL THE TIME now. Linguistic deception treats words like eggs which can be cracked open and emptied of their content and then filled with new content. What these people do is they empty words used by Christians that have traditional meanings and then fill them with other meaning.

This is what J. Gresham Machen was fighting in his classic “Christianity and Liberalism.” The premise in that book was that the Liberals were using the same language as the Christians in the Church but they were filling it with such utterly different meaning that the words used were no longer the same words that the Christians had used for centuries. Van Til himself wrote a book titled “Christianity and Barthianism” which teased out the same theme only as applied to Neo-Orthodoxy. Machen complained about this linguistic deception in his “Christianity and Liberalism,” continuously. He complained that Modernists (Liberals) where cracking open the words, emptying out the meaning, and then filling the words with new meaning, while still insisting that they were “Christian,” when in point of fact they were liars, just as the R2K chaps, the FV chaps and the Full Preterist chaps are liars when they do the very same thing.

We see this w/ R2K for example. All R2K fanboys will affirm that Jesus is Lord, but eventually one learns that the word “Lord” for R2K fanboys means “Lord,” except for where Jesus is only “kind of Lord in a spiritual sense.” When the R2K fanboys likewise talk about “covenant” they have so redefined the word “covenant” that it no longer bears any resemblance to previous Reformed definitions of “covenant.” When the R2K “geniuses” talk about God’s law it is a law so redefined that the Westminster divines would never recognize God’s Law vis-a-vis how they dealt with God’s Law.

We see this w/ Federal Vision types. They assert “Justification by faith alone,” and then they teach that there are two justifications and not all who are initially justified are finally justified. What’s the difference between the those who are initially justified and also finally justified and those who are who initially justified but not also finally justified? Well, what else can the difference be but the contributory dynamic of our works to that final justification?

We see this technique in those “Christians” denouncing “Christian Nationalism” insisting that a truly Christian nation has tolerance in the public square for all the gods and that the God of the Bible should not be given preeminence. By tacking in such a way they have along the way redefined idolatry as well.

We see this in Gary DeMar’s full Preterism. They recite the Apostles Creed but when they get to the part about Jesus returning again for the quick and the dead, suddenly that is reinterpreted to mean “returning for the persons of the quick and the dead but not their corporeal and now glorified bodies.

Perhaps it is the case that some of the examples above are not epistemologically self conscious about their lying and so are merely guilty of being useful idiots. However, there are always some who know what they are doing. They know they are playing fast and loose with the language. They know they are being deceptive. They know that they are offering up a stew that would have never passed in centuries past for Christianity and yet they just keep serving it up.

I don’t envy these types on that final day.

Christians & The US Military — A Post From 15 Years Ago

In one of his recent notes R. C. Sproul Jr. asked the question, How would you counsel a Christian young man who wants to serve in our armed forces? His answer when reduced amounted to, Well yes our Government is corrupt to the core but that doesn’t mean that a Christian young person can’t serve in the US military as long as they are given a good stern warning about the dangers of the US government as they are inducted.

This is my response to Jr.

It’s good to know that you would have been perfectly fine with “Christians” joining up w/ Lincoln’s, Sheridan’s, Sherman’s and Grant’s Yankees in order to kill, rape and savage the South.

The US gov’t today is no less evil than it was in the time of Lincoln and those who fight today support an evil cause now just as “Christians” fighting in Mr. Lincoln’s war in 1861 were supporting evil.

Or if we don’t like that example would you have wanted to find yourself telling WW II era  Russian “Christians” that it was perfectly acceptable to join the Bolshevik  military in order to aid and assist the expansion of the Stalinists?

Here is a enlightening comment from Dr. H. Henry Meeter and his book “The Basic Ideas of Calvinism,”

“Among the Christians of the early centuries of Christianity there were many who opposed war, not as a matter of principle, but because it required their entering into the service of a Government which persecuted Christians and demanded worship of idols by the militia. When the Roman Eagle was exchanged for the Cross and the Empire turned Christian, the attitude toward war among Christians underwent a corresponding change.”

So, as the former friend in the previous discussion you allude to I am just returning to the position of the early Church. In principle I don’t have a problem with Military service or fighting in wars. I do however have a problem doing so when the agenda being pursued by the State is to crush all religions before it (including and especially Christianity) for the purpose of establishing a religious pagan global order. This is what is happening today and any person serving in the US military is a instrument serving to the accomplishing of that pagan agenda end.

As far as Lk. 3:14 is concerned I don’t think you are handling that text properly as it is a open question as to what military the soldiers in question were serving. Were they serving in Rome’s military or in Herod’s. Secondly, even if they were serving in Rome’s these are questions coming from people already in the military and not from people seeking to determine whether they should join the military. Thirdly, if Christian soldier did what John the Baptist said it wouldn’t be long until they would be court martialed.

The Bible does not universally forbid serving in the military. Such a interpretation would be Anabaptist. What the Bible does teach is that we are hate that which is evil and cling to that which is good. If the government service puts one in league with evil then joining it to do its bidding is hardly a sign that one is “hating that which is evil.”

Now, I’m not a purist. I quite understand that there are times when the good guy’s white hats are soiled. I understand that one might fight for a government that is soiled. But in this country our government has long moved past soiled. We are Babylon the Whore and we are the ones who are seeking to set up a religious pagan globalistic order.

How any young Christian person can sign up to aid and assist the US Military and its design is quite beyond me. I counsel against it as a undershepherd of Christ.