Knowing The Times … Knowing The Audience

“From the fact that to a generation which knew God only as a righteous Judge, and in an atmosphere surcharged with the sense of retribution, He (Jesus) made the sum and substance of His preaching the love of God, it does not follow that, if He were in person to preach to our present age so strangely oblivious of everything but love, His message would be entirely the same.”

Geehardaus Vos
Redemptive History & Biblical Interpretation
The Scriptural Doctrine Of The Love Of God

Different generations and different people need different aspects of the one Gospel emphasized at different times. This is why it is so important to know the times in which one lives, the culture one moves in, and the people with which one deals.

This reality perhaps explains, at least in part, why there are divisions within the body of Christ. By way of example, if one looks over the landscape and determines that disobedience on the part of God’s people is a major problem there are going to be systems of thought that develop that so emphasize obedience that some will accuse the practioners of those systems of eclipsing the truth of Grace. On the other hand, if in the same generation there arises a parallel group who determine that legalism on the part of God’s people is a major problem, there are going to be systems of thought that develop that so emphasize grace that some will accuse the practioners of those systems of eclipsing the truth of and necessity for holiness. In these kinds of situations disagreements that arise aren’t really so much over the nature or character of the Gospel as it is over the nature or character of the times in which we are located.

Following this theme for just a moment, I have always wondered if the Puritans could come back today if they would be puritanical in the same way that we know them. As we know them they were famous for their plain sermons, their plain buildings, and their plain worship. Much of this ‘plain-ness,’ was a reaction against the superstitions and magic like quality of religion and worship that bled the substance out of worship and religion and replaced it with smells and bells that left the people both credulous and stupid. I wonder though, if we could bring the Puritans back today and if they could observe the way that the sense of the supernatural and fear of God has been bled out of modern Worship if they would advocate bringing back some of those things that during their age they had been against. Would they advocate bringing back some high Church Architecture? Would they advocate bringing back the surplice? Would they mind to terribly much if we knelt to receive the Eucharist? In the face of a dead rationalism that removes all sense of the transcendence of God in worship is it more in keeping with the spirit of the Puritans to insist that something must be done that creates a complimentarity between the transcendent and holy God that is proclaimed and the worship environment in which we learn about this high and holy God?

Manufactured Culture

Most people, still today, think that all entertainment to do with movies and drama is there for nothing more than their entertainment. Such has never been the case. The greatest social messages are promoted through movies, high drama, and television, through the fixation of emotive sequences that drive emotional responses as opposed to logical or factual sequences which would drive rational response. Through the emotive sequences points are pushed across in an emotional way which registers and fixes in the mind. The emotional content provided by entertainment media is extraordinarily important. Rather than going through an actual discussion or argument using logic and facts, entertainment media that calls for a passive response is a downloading through fiction that bypasses the discursive parts of the mind. The parts of the mind that exercise critical thinking are in hibernation mode when we become sponge receptors of whatever message is being communicated via story time media. This is particularly true when a generation is trained from the youngest age to soak in front of the television. What the aggressive media does in its entertainment format is to encode messages that are downloaded into the passive recipient without having to engage in debate or even explanation.

With the advent of the National media, the tools of the media have been used for dominion via the exercise of social engineering as expressed by a message that comes in a host of different venues or story-lines but which all reinforce the same overarching narrative.

Now throw into this mix the tactic of diversion. Not only would there be a constant barrage of the same message delivered through an aggressive media to passive recipients but also there would be created diversions that would channel off potential resistance by channeling that aggressiveness into harmless allegiances. H. G. Wells before the advent of National Sports teams talked about “Arenas,” Wells offered, over a hundred years ago, that arenas could be set up all over the world for sports. Now at that time when Wells offered that idea, sports was something that children participated in while, exceptions notwithstanding, adults would go on to adult things. It was unimanigable during Wells time that there would be a need for adult sports on the scale we have it today. Wells idea at the time was to eventually create a “Sports culture” for the men, using a tribal system where men would form allegiances according to a tribal system where men in set geographic areas would exhaust their aggressiveness in a vicarious identification with “their team.” Because men would be more disengaged then ever before from their own destiny a “Sports culture” was developed for them in order to provide an outlet for aggression that might otherwise be channeled in things that really were matters of consequence for responsible male citizens of a commonwealth. Between the passivity created by the entertainment model as well as the messages downloaded for conformity by the elites, and the pseudo and abstract aggressiveness aligned with a tribal team men would be effectively neutered in leadership and castrated in resistance. This in turn would allow the cultural gatekeeper elites to have their way in terms of setting the agenda for the social order.

All of this was reinforced by the majority of the populace being linked to the same message entertainment conduits. People would judge their own sanity by bouncing “their” ideas — ideas learned from their entertainment downloads — off of their neighbors who themselves have been downloaded with the same messages with the result that a reciprocity of comfort would be afforded to neighbors by neighbors, quite without realizing that they all had received these same ideas from those responsible for creating and making and marketing culture. It is quite irrelevant if this programming is true or whether it corresponds to reality, or whether it coheres as long as everyone agrees among themselves what a great ideas they all share.

Once this regimen is successfully put into place a Matrix is created that is almost impossible to get out of since virtually everyone is sharing the same deception. Certainly, there will be some margin for disagreement and often that disagreement will be fanned to life by the Message Masters in order to advance some new Message but by and large the citizenry is all hooked to the same message life support system.

The Cultural gatekeepers have been practicing this game for decades now using men such as Edward Bernays to learn how to create and then control mass psychology. Propaganda has become a science and advertising a art as the culture creators pull the strings on the Marionettes of John Q. Public.

The only thing way that this can be challenged is if individuals and families once again take it upon themselves to enter into the great conversation that has been happening over centuries. People must once again read the great books and then they must converse among themselves as they get together to re-establish genuine community that is flavored with what Augustine said or what Chrysostom offered or what Dante offered etc. Until our conversations reach again beyond the American Idol contestants or the latest episode of “Good Christian Bitches,” we will continue to live in the Matrix and will turn whatever way our Masters pull our strings.

Around the Web

I.) Library

http://www.hornes.org/theologia/rich-lusk/what-is-biblical-theology

http://chalcedon.edu/research/articles/the-family-3/

http://www.trinityfoundation.org/journal.php?id=167

http://www.realnews247.com/who_rules_america_updated_2004.htm

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/021843.html

II.) Video

III.) Audio

Rail Against The Machine — Reflection On The Belhar;

The Belhar would find us confessing,

We believe

• that God has entrusted the church with the message of reconciliation in and through Jesus Christ; that the church is called to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, that the church is called blessed because it is a peacemaker, that the church is witness both by word and by deed to the new heaven and the new earth in which righteousness dwells

Now remember the problem that we have recognized with the Belhar is its ambiguity. The reason for that ambiguity is lodged in the reality that we do not know what meaning the drafters of the Belhar are filling their words with. We need to keep in mind in this discussion that while words have true meaning in themselves, one tactic that is used by a alien worldveiw to overthrow an existing worldview is to retain the form of the word while emptying it of its true meaning and then filling that word with a novel meaning unique to the worldview that the word is now dwelling. Purposeful ambiguity thus becomes a chief weapon for those seeking to introduce non-Biblical thinking. The Church has had to fight this tactic of subterfuge by purposeful ambiguity for millennium. If one reads carefully through books like Jude or I John one sees that a similar tactic was being used there as the Gnostics / Docetists were retaining the language and jargon of the Christian faith but were filling it with a meaning that was unique to their alien world and life view. In the 20th century, in the Modernist vs. Liberal controversy that roiled the Church the battle was fought over the tactic of the Liberals / neo-orthodox to empty Christian words and jargon of its orthodox meaning only to fill those words and that jargon with a meaning that was alien to Biblical Christianity. In all such contests the form of Christianity is maintained but the thing itself is mutated into something unrecognizable to those who previously identified with it.

This is the kind of ambiguity we find throughout the Belhar. Over and over again we find words, concepts, and jargon used that sounds familiar to the Christian ear but upon closer examination one is left wondering if the words used, left undefined as they are, really mean what they have historically meant or if those words are being used ambiguously in pursuit of subterfuge.

The emboldened words in the paragraph above is just such an example.

What few people in the American setting recognize is that the words “witness by word and by deed to the new heaven and the new earth in which righteousness dwells,” have a decidedly political meaning in the light of statements that have been made by liberation theologians. In other words what we have in the phrase “witness by word and by deed to the new heaven and the new earth in which righteousness dwells,” is a phrase that has been co-opted by some of the Liberation Theologians. Dr Allan Boesak, a key drafter of the Belhar and one influenced by Liberation theology and theologians, explained the above emboldened phrase like this:

“The New Jerusalem is no future world somewhere else. No, the new Jerusalem comes from Heaven into this reality… The New Jerusalem is no mirage from the beyond… It does not need to wait for eternity. This new Jerusalem will arise from the ashes of all that which today is called Pretoria. For the old things have passed away.”

Now, when you read the quote immediately above and then juxtapose it with this liberation theology inspired quote below from Dr. Boesak suddenly the implications of the Belhar take on foreboding meaning,

“[Black Power] is action to achieve justice and liberation for black people. It does not purport to be the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, or the true Christian church. Black Theology is how black theologians understand Jesus Christ, the Spirit, the church, etc., in relation to justice and liberation

Farewell To Innocence: A Socio Ethical Study On Black Theology And Black Power
Dr. Allen Boesak — pg. 71

Now, in light of these words one wonders if the New Jerusalem in which righteousness dwells is in fact a community ruled by Black Liberation Marxist theologians and inhabited by disciples of James Cone. At the very least we see that the phrase “the church is witness both by word and by deed to the new heaven and the new earth in which righteousness dwells,” is one that is filled with ambiguity. If the Belhar is adopted that phrase could be read in terms of its historic Christian meaning or it could easily be read in terms of Liberation theology. Do we want to affirm a Confession that we are not sure what it means?

The Weaknesses of New-Calvinism, Sonship Theology, New Covenant Theology

Any theology that teaches you that growth in sanctification is accomplished by meditation alone on Gospel realities such as one finds in “Sonship Theology,” New Covenant Theology, and in New-Calvinism circles is reductionist foolishness.

First, such a theology completely eliminates the historic Calvinist teaching regarding the third use of the law. The third use of the law teaches that God gives us His law as a guide to life to inform us how we might live in such a way that we might meet our aspiration of pleasing Him. The teaching of the third use of the law is not accomplished by telling people just to contemplate on the Gospel, but rather by teaching people what the path of godliness looks, though it is gladly admitted that gratitude for all Christ accomplished for us is the motivation for people to take seriously God’s law as it comes to us in its third use.

Second, such a theology eviscerates the idea that sanctification requires the work of putting to death the old man and bringing to life the new man. Putting off the sin that doth so easily beset us may be aided by contemplation but it still requires man’s concursive work of sanctification where man works out his salvation in fear and trembling.

Third, meditation or contemplation in New Calvinism becomes the new law that must be obeyed. All other Biblical law, the Neo-Calvinists tell us, is hypocritically embraced when it is pursued in obedience but the law of the New Calvinists of contemplation is a law that can be pursued in obedience that is not hypocritically embraced. How is it that if one believer pursues obedience to God’s revealed law that is hypocrisy according the Sonship theology but if another believer pursues the obedience of Gospel contemplation that is automatically noble?

Fourth, by the New Calvinists own standard, if contemplation is something that is pursued then it becomes a fruit that is stapled on instead of organically developed. This is true because it is still the subjective self who must do the contemplating and so their complaint about pursuing obedience not being valid because it is subjective boomerangs back on them since the subjective self is required to do the contemplating.

Fifth, as said earlier, certainly our pursuit of obedience to God’s concrete revealed law is animated by being filled with the Spirit of Christ, and by being mindful that Christ was put to death for our sins and raised to life because of our justification, but, as said earlier, it is reductionist to insist that sanctification is only a matter of Gospel contemplation.

Sixth, Gospel contemplation reminds us that we are forgiven for the sake of our beloved Christ when we see our failure of meeting God’s righteous requirements but that reminder is not the same as telling ourselves that we need not be concerned about the work required on our part to walk in newness of life. Contemporary expressions of Calvinism as found among some prominent Calvinists have seemingly brought us to the antinomian point where we need not preach on what righteousness looks like, thus answering the question, “How Shall We Then Live,” simply because we have been declared righteous. Such preaching completely forgets the Apostle Paul’s constant technique of telling people to “become what you have been freely declared to be.” Such preaching is long on “what you have been freely declared to be,” and is short on, “increasingly becoming what what has been freely declared to be.”

The Worldview embraced by New Calvinism, R2K, Sonship Theology, New Covenant Theology, is perfect theology for the triumph of Talmudism since such “Christian Theologies,” leaves a vacuum created by their implicit antinomianism that Talmudic law is more than happy to fill. The result is a Talmudic law defined social order that ends up defining Christianity.