2:00 Of Dr. Greg Bahnsen Exposing The Cowardice Of WS-Cal

“If you sincerely try to stand against the slide into the cesspool of wickedness in our state, and in our culture by looking for a consistent biblical position by which you can witness against the disgrace all around us, (as many of us have found), you’ll lose your job within the Seminary community. You’ll lose your standing in the Church establishment. You’ll virtually become unemployable — even if your orthodox. You’ll become ostracized. You’ll be called ‘dangerous.’

What’s wrong with us that theonomists are dangerous when we have to lock our windows at night? It’s crazy isn’t it?

How many times can a man turn his head and pretend he just doesn’t see?

Of all the wicked heresies and threatening movements facing the Church in our day, when Westminster Seminary finally organized their faculty to write something in unison they gave their determined political efforts not to fight Socialism, not to fight homosexuality, not abortion, not crime and mayhem in our society, not subjectivism in theology, not Dispensationalism, not cultural relativism, not licentiousness, not defection from the New Testament, not defection from the Westminster Confession of Faith, — all of which are out there and they could give their legitimate efforts to. Boy the thing they had to write about was ‘Theonomy.’

How many times can a man turn his head and pretend he doesn’t see?

We are living in the cesspool of relativism and the Church doesn’t have an answer. Well, I praise God … that the truth that the early Church knew and is found in the Bible and is available to us and there are people like he who were willing to pay the price and say, ‘it’s worth it.'”

Why stand against the slide into the cesspool of wickedness when you can write articles suggesting that perhaps Christian could reach an entente with homosexuals on homosexual marriage? Why stand against Dispensationalism when your own theology is but a variant of Dispensationalism? (Some have even taken to calling R2K “Reformed Dispensationalism.”) Why stand against Socialism when your agenda is defined by Enlightenment and Liberal categories? Why stand against cultural relativism when your theology insists that your theology has nothing to say to the public square culture?

Look, long ago J. I. Packer noted that “bad theology hurts people.” R2K, doubtless is a theology that makes for nice sentimental people who get all teary eyed when they sing, “Trust & Obey,” but it is a theology that hurts people because it is escapist and retreatist when it comes to the public square. As an escape religion R2K is the perfect oppositional religion to the Cultural Marxists who practice power religion. It is the perfect oppositional religion for the cultural Marxists because it offers no opposition. If the cultural Marxist want to build an Idol out of the God State R2K says … “we’ll help you with those nasty reconstructionists by pointing them out to you and by making sure they are unemployable. We will blacken their names. We will misrepresent their positions. We’ll do all we can to cast them out of the Church. We will spit on the memories of Rushdoony (Why, we’ll even call him ‘Rushlooney’ in our private get togethers), and Bahnsen (Psst … We will call him ‘Rabbi Greg’ — ha ha ha).”

The White Hat Reformed Church is now riven by those who have two completely different worldviews and all the wishing and hoping in the world is not going to reconcile these antithetical worldviews.

You Are What You Love

Psalm 115:8 They that make them (Idols) shall be like unto them; Yea, every one that trusteth in them.

“God has made humans to reflect Him, but if they do not commit themselves to Him, they will not reflect Him but something else in creation. At the core of our beings we are imaging creatures. It is not possible to be neutral on this issue: We either reflect the Creator or something in creation…. All humans have been created to be reflecting beings, and they will reflect whatever they are ultimately committed to, whether the true God or some other object in the created order…. We resemble what we revere, either for ruin or restoration.”

G. K. Beale

We are imaging / reflecting creatures. This is why I say humans are chameleons, for they will reflect whatever culture that they are set against. When living in a pagan culture this explains why it is so important to not be conformed to the pagan culture but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. The problem with the Church today is that it is reflecting and mirroring our pagan culture. This is why Churches that refuse to address the Public Square, because their theologies do not allow them to speak to the public square, will soon enough die out. Those churches will die out because their members will incrementally conform to the Spirit of the age since those Churches are ultimately committed to making sure that their members live in a zeitgeist that reflects one form of idolatry or another.

The Relationship Between Fearing God, Walking In God’s Commands And Meaning

The name of God occurs in Ecclesiastes no fewer than 37 times and that in such a way that the naming of Him is at the same time the confession of Him as the True God, the one who is Exalted above the world, the Governor and the Ruler over all. And so while the Teacher in Ecclesiastes draws out the vanity of searching for meaning apart from God, he constantly returns to the idea that “Fearing God” is the beginning place where meaninglessness (vanity) might become meaning.

Ecclesiastes places the command “Fear Thou God” (5:6-7, 12:13) in the foremost rank as a fundamental moral duty. Fearing God is central to happiness of men (8:12-13). Man’s final destiny is based upon the necessity of man to fear God (7:18, 11:9, 12:14). Ecclesiastes contemplates the world as one that was Created by God as very good (3:11, 7:29) and as arranged and directed that men might fear God (3:14).

And this fear of God that is put forth so clearly finds its concrete meaning at the end of the book.

“Fear God and Keep His commandments.”

There is thus struck a natural relationship between a life that is supercharged with meaning, fearing God, and walking in the ways of God’s commandments. Distinctions may be drawn between these three realities but they can never be divorced. No one can say that they fear God and not walk in the way of His commandments. Similarly, no can say they have found meaning in life without fearing God. Just so, fearing God, and having meaning exhibits itself by walking in God’s commands.

Ancient Egypt & Communist Russia — A Unifying Thread

Yesterday I was doing some reading on the religions and philosophies of the Ancient world. I came across an explanation of the Egyptian Ma’at religious / philosophical systems.

“The concept of the State was a necessary corollary in the total cosmic ideal of ancient Egyptian culture and religion. And central to the idea of the state was the divinity of the King. ‘The State was not a man made alternative to other forms of political organization. It was god-given …. it continued to form part of the universal order. In the person of the Pharaoh a super human being had taken charge of the affairs of men….’ In consequence the service of Pharaoh was a religious, not a purely secular function, and sense of duty was strengthened by faith. The ancient Egyptian’s culture was a slave culture, one of absolute servitude to the power and authority of the King…. The fiat word of Pharaoh could brook no opposition. The life of the Egyptian was in the hand of his king as in the hand of his god…. It is not strange, then, that his conception of Ma’at (right order) should be viewed more in terms of what it is not, than of what it is; that he should be more concerned with what threatened to destroy it than what justifies its nature and existence. Ma’at has been established. That is axiomatic. The wise man will live so as to not upset the rule of the right order. He will bow in submission to Ma’at. He will submit unreservedly to his god-king….

Simply put, Ma’at was an order that could not be violated with impunity.

Michael Kelly
The Burden of God — pg. 34-36

This social order philosophy was known as Ma’at. The Ma’at system, as the quote above indicates was a slave system. In the pecking order in Ancient Egypt all were the slaves of someone above them in the pecking order and Pharaoh was the Slave-master of all. (Though one might argue that Pharaoh himself was slave to a religious / philosophical social order he knew was not true.) The Pyramid thus becomes the perfect symbol of Ma’at because in the Pyramid you have the pinpoint apex of the triangle representing Pharaoh as at the top of the religious / philosophical social order and everything under the apex of the Pyramid triangle serves and supports the Pharaoh apex.

As I was reading the above quoted description suddenly my reading on the Communist show trials of the 1930’s came to mind. Here were many of the Old Bolshevists who created the Soviet Ma’at system revealing their loyalty to the religious / philosophical order confessing their guilt even though they were clearly innocent f the charges preferred against them. All they had was the Ma’at State. That was their reality. They could no more deny the Communist State then they could deny themselves. If the State said they were guilty then they must be guilty.

And though the Bolsheviks insisted they were Atheists it is clear that they viewed the State and the Party as god walking on the earth. As such, if their god, as apotheosized in Stalin, said they were to be shot for false crimes committed against the party then they would go to their execution singing songs of praises.

Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was one such example of this. Even though Bukharin wrote a series of very emotional letters to Stalin protesting his innocence and professing his love for Stalin, in his final plea the Old Bolshevik who worked with Lenin to establish the Soviet Ma’at State could explain,

“For three months I refused to say anything. Then I began to testify. Why? Because while in prison I made a revaluation of my entire past. For when you ask yourself: ”If you must die, what are you dying for?” – an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. There was nothing to die for, if one wanted to die un-repented. And, on the contrary, everything positive that glistens in the Soviet Union acquires new dimensions in a man’s mind. This in the end disarmed me completely and led me to bend my knees before the Party and the country.”

This is nothing but Ma’at speak. All in the Party / State. Nothing outside the Party / State.

Stalin had become the new Pharaoh (God-King) and all below him would serve him as slave, even if that meant bowing to the Pharaoh’s desire for Bukharin to lie in order to support the god-king’s false accusation.

But shed no tears for Bukharin. The man sowed the wind and he merely reaped the whirlwind.

For he wounds, but he binds up; he shatters, but his hands heal.

They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.

“In this world of sin no Christian individual and no Christian organization can be positive and constructive till after it has been negative and destructive. To deny and ignore this fact is to deny or to ignore the fact of sin.”

Cornelius Van Til
Essay On Christian Education, p. 187

When I was a lad I contracted a serious infection. This infection required the scrubbing of my wounds until they bled followed by the administration of the proper ointment on the bleeding wounds. To this day the memory of those scrubbing sessions jolts me upright. And yet, without the cleansing work of the scrubbing, the ointment could not have done its work. The medicine that was intended to heal could not work until I was first wounded.

In many quarters of the West today the Church is deeply wounded. There are no solutions that do not start with being scrubbed of her infected wounds. And because of the necessity for her wounds to be scrubbed (the negative and destructive work that Van Til speaks of) she will not submit and so will not be healed.

“Come, let us return to the LORD; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.” Hosea 6:2

Prayer

God of all sufficient grace, be so kind as to wound us that we might be healed. Cease not with thy severe mercies that lead us to rejoice in thy tender mercies. Deliver your church from being stiff necked and cause us to yield to your hammer blows of grace as you shape us on the anvil of thy rough kindness.

In Christ’s name,