Bret Lee on Brian Lee

“Focusing perhaps too much on the civil laws of the old covenant, as if they were still in effect in the new covenant era, the book (Tim Keller’s “Generous Justice”) gives too little attention in my view to Jesus’ explicit “new commandment” for his followers to “love one another as he has loved them” (John 15:12-17; 1 John 2:7-10; 3:11-24). Jesus even says that it is by this special love that his followers will be known in the world. How does this command relate to Israel’s calling to manifest God’s justice societally?”

Dr. Brian Lee
Minister — URC
Article From Modern Reformation Publication

http://www.modernreformation.org/default.php?page=articledisplay&var1=ArtRead&var2=1285&var3=main&var4=Hom

1.) I don’t agree with Tim Keller. I think Keller advocates a kind of soft Marxism as Christianity. Whatever will be written here is not in defense of Keller. Instead I am defending the idea that the Old Testament law is not obsolete per Lee’s reasoning.

2.) The Westminster Confession insists that the civil law remains in effect in terms of its general equity.

“To them also, as a body politic, He gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the State of that people; not obliging under any now, further than the general equity thereof may require…”

The fact that the last phrase is placed in the WCF 19:4 suggests that Lee is in error about the civil laws no longer being in effect today. The civil laws as they pertained to OT Israel, as the Old Testament saints existed in their National existence, have expired, however, the general equity of those civil laws abide on and remain in force. When we attempt to just throw out God’s civil law without paying attention to the general equity that remains we eviscerate the applicational use of the Moral law as the civil law was merely the moral law as interpreted into case law. When we whimsically toss out the general equity of the civil law we make the moral law toothless. It is true that we have to do interpretive work here to find the general equity of the civil law but upon doing the interpretive work the heart of the civil law continues to live.

3.) When Lee appeals to Jesus’ new commandment and plays that off as superseding God’s eternal law as codified in the OT how is Lee not making a Dispenstional move here? Is Lee here suggesting that the amorphous idea of “love” is supposed to be the ethic by which New Testament Christians are to live? How is Lee’s approach any different than Joseph Fletcher’s approach in his book, “Situation Ethics: The New Morality?” Fletcher posited an ethic of “Loving concern” as the beacon by which all decisions are made. Is this what Lee is suggesting as well?

4.) When Jesus commanded his people to love one another, He did so in the context of upholding the law of God at every turn. The point here is that love as an ethic, cannot be defined without a transcendent law structure to inform it. When Jesus said “love one another,” they could only know what love was and looked like by referencing and accessing God’s transcendent law. Jesus Himself loved His people by fulfilling God’s law in relation to them. If they were to love one another as He had loved them then in order to do so they would have to love one another by respect to and fulfillment of God’s law word just as Jesus had loved them in respect to and fulfillment of God’s law word.

5.) So, Keller makes the OT speak soft Marxism, while Lee makes it speak antinomian Dispensationalism. Neither approaches are particularly satisfying.

Postscript,

For a good article reviewing Keller’s “Generous Justice” as soft Marxism see,

http://freedomtorch.com/blogs/3/2762/tim-keller-and-social-justice

Review Of Rushdoony’s “The American Indian” — Medicine Men

“True medicine men, it was said, had given way to the white man’s doctor because he knew more than the Indian practitioner…. [The older Indian men] had no loyalty to the old ways per se. The white man’s gun was far superior to the bow and arrow. Why not his medicine also?”

R. J. Rushdoony
The American Indian

In this brief chapter RJR gives a few anecdotes about his experience with Indian Medicine men as well as what he learned from Indian elders.

“From their (older Indian men) perspective, there were no medicine men on the reservation — only fakers.”

However, according to Rush’s account there were Indians who were what we would call Natural-paths and homeopaths. Rush mentions one particular gentleman who could identify every plant in the area as well as the medicinal purposes that those plants might have had. This reminds us that allopathic medicine does not have all the answers that it pretends to have. Indeed, there are times I wonder if allopathic medicine shouldn’t be viewed as alternative medicine in favor of a more homeopathic path.

Still, despite this natural-pathic skill RJR reports that the Indian,

“liked modern conveniences and advances, including modern medicine.”

Rush reports this because the Federal Government, during the New Deal, sought to re-Indianize the Indians and as such encouraged the Indians to go back to their ancient ways. Rush writes,

“They [the Indian] had no loyalty to the old ways per se…. they did not identify their Indian-ness in terms of artifacts, and it annoyed them when others did…. They saw nothing exclusive about the benefits of the white man’s civilization …. In brief, these old men liked modern conveniences and advances, including modern medicine…. they recognized and appreciated the advantages of modern medical practice, of nurses and hospitals.”

Rush does not again the failure of the State in terms of medicine,

“They [the Indians] knew that the agency doctors were often inferior to the doctors outside of the reservation….”

The immediately above quote is important because it reminds us again that whenever the State involves itself so that people are required and forced to go to them for any service the consequence is a lowering standard of quality of whatever service the State has seized. The Indians that RJR came in contact with in his Reservation ministry were forced into a governmental health care system and as such the Doctors that they had to deal with were inferior to Doctors operating in the supply and demand market. This is an observation pregnant with meaning as the citizenry today in our country are inching towards the kind of Socialized medicine the Indians had forced upon them. Our quality of medical care will be inferior just as the Reservation’s medical care was of lower quality.

Rushdoony returns to the medicine man issue by noting that what passed as the medicine men, in his observation, were, for the most part, dabblers in peyote.

“What then of the so-called medicine men practicing at that time? Most were peyote leaders. Peyote was administered as a holy, healing medicine. It tended to paralyze the digestive tract, or at least deaden it to pain, I was told. The patient felts no pain and assumed that he was being healed.”

Rush notes that such patients of the peyote practitioners would often finally fail and at the last second would give up on the medicine man and go to the hospital, despite the warnings of the medicine man against the hospital. Often when such people finally went to the hospital they quickly died because of the previous neglect. Upon their death, the peyote medicine men would then claim that the death was the result of giving up on the medicine man and going to the hospital.

RJR ends this chapter by admitting that there were a few other types of medicine men who were not peyote playboys. Rushdoony suggests that these “healers” were in fact, demonically enabled.

“There was another kind of practitioner. How deep his roots were in Indian history, I do not know…. These medicine men, if they could be called such … I would call occultist. They had strange powers I cannot explain. One of them … could pick up a rattlesnake, chant to it, hang it around his neck and not be bitten…. [Medicine] men such as A.C. were Indian in a fanatical way: they sought to blot out the world of the white man.”

RJR notes that as Christianity waned after WWII occultism increased. He notes that only the Gospel of Jesus Christ can counter such occultist practices and muses that,

“When men turn their backs on Christian civilization, see only evil in it, and try to abstract Biblical faith and morals from themselves and the world, are they not courting the demonic.”

This is an important word for our church and culture today. In many many places in the Church today churchmen are turning their back on Christian civilization, and indeed see only evil in the idea of Christian civilization. Indeed we are everywhere seeing the attempt to abstract Biblical faith and moral from silly conceptual paradigms like Natural law. One can only wonder if such churchmen are courting the demonic by turning their backs on Christian civilization.

Review of Rushdoony’s “The American Indian” — Education

“One reason for the catastrophe which struck Indian tribes was that now, with the coming of the White man, there were alternative forms of education.”

R. J. Rushdoony
The American Indian — pg. 29

In the chapter on “Education” in RJR’s book we find Rush time and again writing about how damaging the White man’s arrival was to the American Indian and that culture.

“The White man’s arrival complicated education. It introduced an alternate lifestyle with many material advantages, including liquor…. One of the most devastating effects of the white man’s influence was that Indian children no longer grew into a set mold…. At an early age they (children) could work for the white men and be free of their people”

The constant returning to this theme by Rush reminds us that no civilization in history has been able to manage, for a sustained period of time, the presence of numerous different people groups, religions, and worldviews seeking to form one unified culture. A Diversity that has vast differentiation between people groups, religions, and worldvies is not a strength to social orders. Rushdoony reminds us repeatedly that the Indian was better served by remaining Indian. Of course Rushdoony insisted that the regenerated Indian builds a stronger social order and culture then the non-regenerated Indian but even then the Redeemed Indian culture will remain uniquely “Indian.”

As Rush continues to tell the story of the Indian and his Education, Rushdoony brings to the fore that the Indian idea of education was a education where the Grandparents instructed the children in the ways of the past.

“… that was education. It meant passing on the wisdom of the past and present to the future. These men saw the white man’s world as full of marvels. The radios were of interest to them and the white man’s guns and knives were wonderful. But for them the life link was gone. Their grandchildren were not linked to them but to the White man, and foolishly so.”

Clearly the American Indian, at least as represented by Rushdoony, had no interest in becoming white. Just as, doubtlessly, the white man had no interest in becoming American Indian. The Gospel of Jesus Christ can ameliorate the hostility that can arise from these people group distinctions as those distinctions are marked by the sinful dispositions of each. Further the Gospel will work so that differing Redeemed people groups work in harmony, but the Gospel can no more undo ethnicity any more than it can undo gender. Christ has come to save all the Nations and create a Spiritual Unity among them, but Christ did not come to erase the nations in favor of some New World Order amalgamation. Rushdoony’s book, by repeatedly noting and honoring these ethnic distinctions underscores this truth.

Rushdoony also criticized the American Indians for their faults. In this chapter he writes how the American Indian turned to his “whiskey religion.”

“The older men, who themselves often had problems with alcoholism, called drunkenness and alcoholism ‘the whiskey religion.’ I had never heard the term before. It was used by these older Indians very seriously, but some of the younger men used it as a joke. What the older men meant by it, they explained, was that what Christians looked for in Christ, Indians often found in a bottle. For them it was peace, and answer to problems, empowerment, escape, and more. There was another factor, too, as they saw it. Whiskey changed a man, like Jesus did, but in another direction. A bottle of whiskey was for them a religious solution.”

Further RJR notes the weakness of the American Indians in their refusal to frustrate their children through child rearing discipline.

“The saddest fact of my own experience with the Indians was the indifference of the children to the parents. The children were never chastised….frustrating the child seemed to them a white man’s cruelty…. Never to face frustration is no preparation for life. Not surprisingly, by the age of ten, alcoholism was common place; by thirteen or fourteen, fornication too. Self denial was an alien idea, and an inability to accept frustration was commonplace in recent years this had the highest suicide rate in the United States, a fact closely related to the nurture of children there.”

Rushdoony in this chapter is even handed in articulating the faults of both Whites and Indians as distinct people groups and in the doing so Rush demonstrates that while all men in all people groups are sinners not all people groups have the same predilections in terms of how that sinful peccadilloes manifest themselves. Different people groups have different besetting sins to which they are going to be more inclined. Similarly, upon Redemption, we can expect different people groups to have different strengths in terms of sanctification.

In the end though Rushdoony’s passion was for the American Indian to come to know Christ. In this Chapter he mentions pagan Anthropologists who came to study the Indian and whose only concern was to confirm a preconceived agenda.

“From my perspective, there was another problem with the anthropologists. Their framework of reference was evolution. They viewed Indian culture in terms of myth, not in terms of taking an interest in a people whom God created and who needed Jesus Christ to attain their true potential. The anthropologist’s impersonal approach bred an instinctive hostility. The Indian is a person, not a scientific specimen. The anthropologist’s laboratory approach irritated the Indians. As a result, even when they gave correct answers to the scientist’s questions, the meaning and flavor of their lives was missed. To the Indians those questions sounded artifact oriented, not concerned with people.”

Note here how Rushdoony sees the Indian as a distinct “people whom God created,” and who, as a distinct people, could only find their true potential by being attached to the Lord Jesus Christ. For Rush, all people groups, as people groups, became more genuine as to their ethnicity and culture only upon being united to Christ. Christ does not strip men of their ethnic identity upon Redemption. Christ, in Redemption, makes our ethnic identity more genuine even as only in Christ do humans find their genuine humanity, even as only in Christ both Men and Women find their genuine Femininity and Masculinity. Being united to Christ doesn’t erase our corporeal markers. Being united to Christ brings those God given corporeal markers into subjection to Christ that they may be increasingly what God intended them to be.

Katy Perry, Beyonce & Otto Scott On The Ascendancy of the Pornographic

In light of the recent Grammy Awards (which can be viewed easily enough on youtube) as well as the filth that comes out of Washington DC, I thought this quote from Otto Scott to be on target. An excellent book that teases this reality via a historical overview is Dr. E. Michael Jones

http://www.amazon.com/Libido-Dominandi-Liberation-Political-Control/dp/1587314657/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390930353&sr=8-1&keywords=libido+dominandi

“After their departures the pillars of the Age of Reason toppled sideways for lack of a sound foundation, lesser men came crawling out of the lower dark. Then the condition of France became different from the rest of Europe in a very real sense, and the enemies of the nation watched with some satisfaction. A great loosening began; the country slowly came apart.

For the first time since the decadent days of Rome, pornography emerged from its caves and circulated openly in a civilized nation. The Catholic Church in France was intellectually gutted; the priests lost their faith with their congregations. Strange cults appeared; sex rituals, black magic, Satanism. Perversion became not only acceptable but fashionable. Homosexuals held public balls to which heterosexuals were invited and the police guarded their carriages. Prostitutes were admired; swindles and sharp business practices increased.”

Otto Scott
Robespierre, The Fool as Revolutionary: Inside the French Revolution — pg. 8

Review Of Rushdoony’s “American Indian.” Introduction

“The American Indian is a standing indictment against the Christianity of this nation.”

R. J. Rushdoony
The American Indian — pg. 7

One of the books I’m currently reading is a short book by Rushdoony on the American Indian. I thought I would review it chapter by chapter in order to capture some of RJR’s thinking about ethnic and Statist type issues.

It is clear in RJR’s Introduction that Rush understood that different people groups existed. For example in one place he notes the attitude of American Indians in a quote from an Old Indian summarizing the Indian attitude towards the “White man,”

“The white man wanted what we had, our land, but he didn’t want us. We wanted what the white man had — his improvements, his guns, his modern conveniences — but we didn’t want him. And so we fought, each wanting what the other had but not wanting the other and trying to eliminate him; and we lost. That’s the story.”

A couple of paragraphs later Rush notes the differences between two non-white people groups as seen through the eyes of the American Indian,

“They could not subject him (the American Indian) to slavery…. it was impossible to enslave the North American Indian. He absolutely refused. If Indians were taken captive and enslaved, they either died or they fought and escaped To this very day, the Indians have a strong prejudice against Negroes. They say, ‘The Negro became a slave. You can’t say much for people who became slaves. You either die or fight for your freedom. We fought for freedom, and we were beaten, but we were never made slaves.’

Of course we would disagree here. The Indian was eventually made a slave to the State just as the White men are now largely becoming slaves to the State. The forms of slavery have changed but we remain enslaved all the same. However, having said that, it is clear that Rush was not one who believed that real ethnic differences did not exist and RJR did not believe that those differences should not be noted. Throughout the Introduction there is constant referral to distinct people groups as people groups.

In this Introduction RJR also tells the story of how the White pagan Federal Government destroyed the Indian. In doing so, Rushdoony teases out the dangers of cradle to womb care as provided by a centralized State,

“… the Government didn’t try to teach Indians anything. For many years, the system was simply this; put the Indians on a reservation; tell them that if they leave, the army will go after them; and while they are on the reservation, tell them to report to the government office every Saturday or every other Sunday for a ration of goods, clothing, and necessities of life. Of course that meant that the Indians didn’t have to work. He had his living handed to him. After a few years of government handouts, the Indian Character was completely destroyed.”

A few pages later Rushdoony quotes a conversation with an American Indian foretelling that much the same thing is happening to the White man,

“Look at those people of mine. They’re no good. They’re like me, just no account. All they’re fit for is a reservation where someone puts a fence around them and takes care of them. That’s it. They’re not fit for anything else. But,” he went on, “I’ve been across this country two or three times now in the last few years, and I’ve learned something: the white man isn’t much better. He has reservation fever now. He wants someone to put a fence around the whole North American continent and take care of him. He wants governments to give him a handout. and to look after him just like Uncle Sam looks after us. And he’s going to get it. If some outfit doesn’t come in and do it for him, some foreign country, and turn the whole of the United States into a reservation, he’ll do it to himself. You wait and see. ‘Cause he’s got reservation fever.”

In these last two quotes we see that sin returns all men, regardless of their heritage, to conditions of slavery. It makes no difference if men are Black, Red, or White, men outside of Christ will beg for their chains to be placed upon them and will call “slavery,” “freedom.” However, men will, according to their lineage and heritage express their slavery differently. Slavery is slavery but not all slavery is identical and different people groups will express their bondage differently. Rushdoony captures this idea when he writes,

“… the Indian problem is basically one of faith and character.”

With this every right-minded Christian would agree. The problems of any and all people groups, as those respective people groups stand sundered from Christ, are problems of faith (the dismal things they believe) and character (who they are as that dismal faith integrates with and animates their people group dispositions.

According to Rushdoony the reason that the White man can’t help the Indian is that the White man has been such a hypocrite. According to Rush the Indian see’s the White men’s Christianity as just another White man hand-me-down. Rushdoony, notes that the American Indian sees the inconsistency and contradiction of so many of the White Churches in terms of affirming certain truths but then denying the necessity to live those truths out. One such example that Rush gives is the inclination of quiet Presbyterian Churches to not reach out to the American Indian and welcome them when they come to visit their churches in the city.

“At almost any Church they (American Indian) go to, they will be outsiders. That’s just the plain fact. And they know it; they’ve tried it. They are strangers in any Church they go to. Even if they are met with a glad hand by a handful of people in the church it means nothing to them. The Indians know that they (themselves) are weak in certain character traits espoused in these churches, but they also expect to see some of the practical application of those traits that have, in fact, characterized Indian life.”

Clearly the lesson here is to be reminded that the Gospel is for people from every tribe, tongue and Nation. God has designed to call all the Nations and we should do nothing to put non-biblical obstacles up between men from different people groups coming to Worship Christ.

In the Introduction RJR introduces the old character of the American Indian as being a rugged individualist and how that character was destroyed by pagan American visions of Socialism. RJR tells about the “Ghost Dance” and how this mystical practice was supposed to be connected to the rejuvenation of the American Indians and the destruction of the White people who oppressed them. A mental note might be made here to the end that when people groups are being enslaved and destroyed and are in a position of no longer being able to fight back they will turn to religions of irrational mystical encounters in order to do for them what they can no longer do themselves. The religion of the irrational and the mystical can sometime be traced back to being the last ditch means of attempting freedom by the vanquished and enslaved. RJR notes that once the Ghost Dance failed in what it promised the American Indian turned to the escape of peyote. Irrational activism (Ghost Dance) gave way to irrational passivism (peyote).

Elsewhere in the Introduction RJR communicates the three stages of Government policy pursued in terms of the American Indian once they were defeated. The first attempt in 1887 to the New Deal was to Americanize the American Indian. The second attempt from the New Deal to Eisenhower was to Indianize the American Indian. Rushdoony notes that this was an attempt turn the American Indian into primitive communists. The third attempt beginning with Eisenhower was to rehabilitate the American Indian and to break up the Reservation system. RJR insists this failed because of Government involvement.

“Government cannot create character, although it had destroyed it. It can no more create character in the Indian by acts of administration than it can create character in the American people by acts of Congress.”

In RJR’s Introduction there comes singing through his long war against the pagan state. Likewise, in the Introduction it is clear that RJR sees that distinctions between people groups are real. Further, it should be noted that in the Introduction, RJR, like all Biblical Christians, sees that the Church has a responsibility to disciple the Nations. There is no place in Biblical Christianity for any people group to block the way to the Cross
of any other People group.

May the Lord Christ grant us grace not to so befoul the Christian faith that we make it anathema to the distinct Nations He has ordained. May the Lord Christ reveal to us our own inclination, as a People group, to become slaves to the Pagan State.