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.

America Is Dead … Long Live AmeriKa

“In fact official American belief regards the Declaration of Independence as the beginning of an endless process of active movement toward an ever more egalitarian and universalist society. This is because of the intervention between us and the Founding Fathers of that sea-change in the thinking of men that is summed up in the term ‘the French Revolution.”

Dr. Clyde N. Wilson
From Union To Empire

Wilson’s thesis is that American Nationalism has undergone a series of transmutations, the degree of which, has left the successive American Nationalism incomprehensible to the previous American Nationalism. Wilson suggests that the taking of the Declaration of Independence as a document that insures a endless process of active movement toward an ever more egalitarian and universalist society, is the consequence of the second American Nationalism, as crafted by the French Revolution and birthed in America through the war of Northern Aggression. Wilson seems to suggest that the American commitment to the idea that all men are created equal with certain inalienable rights was a far different stripe from the French Revolution egalitarianism that came to be eventually accepted in the American Nationalism that was successive to the form of Nationalism of the Founding Fathers. It would seem that the difference between these two competing notions of equality is the difference between the older belief that men are equal in respect to the application of law and the newer belief that men should be equal in opportunity and outcome.

Wilson goes on to note that there was another American Nationalism that was propelled during the Progressive era and consolidated during the after WW II.

“During and after WWII American society for the third time made a perilous leap into the cauldron of history, boiling down its existing consensus in the optimistic prospect of molding itself into a newer and more daring form. The Civil Rights revolution and a revolutionary alteration of the immigration laws were simultaneously undertaken in the 1960′s. It was as if the Melting pot, having proven itself able to boil down all of Europe, was now to test its capacity to do the same for the whole world.”

The question that Wilson raises is whether or not such a stripped down American Nationalism that is posited only upon unitarian notions of egalitarianism provides enough ingredients in order to make a cultural glue by which a culture may find cohesion.

In a culture where there exist no communitarian mystic chords of memory that includes either a shared ethnicity, a shared literature, a shared music, a shared religion, a shared history, or a shared language there exists nothing that can bind a people together except a shared prosperity. The question that begs being asked is whether or not a nation can stay together when national prosperity turns to national adversity except by brute force as used by the State.

One can easily conclude given Wilson’ taxonomy that America as America no longer exists. Following Wilson we might say America died a slow death in 1861-1865 with the War against the Constitution. In 1913 the American coffin was nailed shut with Banksters achievement of the Centralized Bank. Finally, America’s burial was in 1964 with the work of the minions of the Banksters passing the Javits inspired Immigration act. What we see happening in America now with the disharmony of interests is merely the legitimate children and the cultural Marxist bastards fighting over the estate.

Conservatives know this, but refuse to admit it; the Cultural Marxists know it, and every evening on the Cultural Marxist media outlets are proclaiming it loud and clear. Unfortunately, the name “America” will not go away, and neither will the Constitution, because liberals and Marxists will always appeal to these for legitimacy. They covet the prestige by association, but have not a particle of the pedigree. The Frankfurt School is the perfect example. Very good people labored to establish America’s most honorable institutions, traditions, and customs. They built the buildings, endowed the trusts, and nurtured the culture. Once that very hard work was done, the Marxist Frankfurt cowbirds flew in and laid their eggs, always claiming to be the faithful philosophical heirs of the founders and the progressive realization of their ideals. Now, to take up the mantle of a “Original American” and remind the Christ hating Cultural Marxists and everyone else that they are impostors, frauds, and hoaxers is to bring down upon oneself an onslaught of venom, vengeance, hatred – the very intolerance the imposters attribute to and vilify in anyone who dares tell the truth.

Just one more testimony proving that the last vestiges of Christian Western civilization–which has been dying for decade upon decade–are gone from America. The leaves have all fallen, autumn is over and winter is here. Not only have we left the house of the Christian God who alone is our source of strength and where alone we have protection, but we have forgotten the way home.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/02/state-supreme-court-says-roe-should-be-overruled/

http://dailyreformation.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/the-mediatorial-dominion-is-of-the-same-extent-with-the-absolute-dominion-that-belongs-to-god-as-creator-this-was-given-to-christ-as-his-mediatorial-dominion-without-reserve-or-limitation-in-virt/

http://date-dabitur.com/2005/05/primitive-money-theory/

Benjamin Morgan Palmer & Bret L. McAtee on “The Gospel”

“It [the gospel] is the only system which undertakes to provide a perfect pardon and to readjust man’s relations to the violated law. In every government, human or divine, the first thing to be considered is our relation to the law. Immediately upon transgression, the law seizes the offender’s person, brings him before the tribunal of justice, convicts him under the evidence, fixes upon him the sentence of condemnation, holds him in prison, awaiting the execution of the penalty. Of necessity, therefore, in seeking relief, his first concern will be to settle with the law and to cancel its indictment. It does not make a particle of difference, at the first, how the man feels as to his transgression; whether he glories in it, or is sorry for it; whether, if released from punishment, he will lead a life of obedience or repeat his trespass to the end. The first and absorbing question is how to escape the infliction of the penalty which he has incurred. How shall he come forth from the shadow of his prison and walk in the free air of heaven with an erect form, and look without a blush in the faces of other men. Now, this is just what the gospel undertakes to do for the sinner. It provides a perfect pardon, and secures it upon principles of strict justice and law. The imperfection of human government is in nothing more manifest than in the fact that it never can exercise mercy except at the expense of justice. The criminal can never escape the penalty without inflicting a certain amount of injury upon the country and the law. If he escape by any defect in the evidence he is turned loose again to prey upon society as before. If executive clemency sets aside the deliberate judgment of the court, a shock is given to the stability of government by the collision between its two departments, which ought to be mutually supporting. But in the gospel, the justice and integrity of God are as completely vindicated as in the punishment of the transgressor. Whilst the sinner escapes the penalty, the law of God is more firmly established than before. Such a pardon, in which every claim of law is satisfied, goes to the root of the sinner’s case, so far as his guilt is concerned, for the reason that it is a pardon which can be sealed upon the conscience and give it perfect peace.”

BY REV. B. M. PALMER, D. D., 1818 – 1902
Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, New Orleans, La.
Sermon — THE TRANSFORMING POWER OF THE GOSPEL

Note,

1.) Dr. Palmer’s burden is to communicate how the Gospel resolves the legal indictment of heaven against us as sinner. Palmer’s concern here is not experiential, or emotional, but rather forensic / judicial. God has a case against us. God, in Christ answers God’s case against His people. In our contemporary Gospel preaching the objective reality of judicial guilty is seldom touched upon and instead we go for felt needs as if what the sinner outside of Christ is emotionally feeling is the primary need to be addressed as opposed to God’s just wrath against sinners. If our Gospel begins with the felt needs our Gospel will forever be jerked about by the vagaries of “felt needs” that both redeemed and un-redeemed experience. Palmer’s Gospel is “from above” and so can reach below. Contemporary “Gospels” are from below and seldom, if ever, provide answer to God’s objective wrath.

2.) Dr. Palmer’s recognition that if mercy is exercised upon a criminal then a punishment is visited upon someone else. In the case of the Gospel we are extended mercy at the cost of punishment to the Son of God. This principle though needs to be understood by our social order structures today. If we turn a blind eye to justice to the guilty and extend “love” we are at the very moment turning a seeing eye of injustice upon someone else and are extending cruelty upon another. There was no cruelty visited upon the Lord Christ because he willingly laid down His life having entered into covenant w/ the Father from eternity but when our modern systems of “justice” ignore the law of God by extending “mercy” to the criminal, then at the same time cruelty is being extended at the same time somewhere else.

3.) Guilt is seen as objective and subjective in this quote. The criminal has objective guilt that must be dealt with and is dealt with in the cross of Christ. However, guilt is also subjective. The guilty must have his conscience quieted. The subjective feeling of guilt is only quieted in the sinner when the objective reality of guilty is answered. How Christian are men unless they know and answer that what they were saved from was a objective guilt that incurred God’s just wrath against them?

Rage Against The Machine — Reflections On The Belhar

In the Belhar we find,

Therefore, we reject any doctrine

• which absolutizes either natural diversity or the sinful separation of people in such a way that this absolutization hinders or breaks the visible and active unity of the church, or even leads to the establishment of a separate
church formation;

Again the Belhar document suffers from severe ambiguity on this point.

We already noted in the last post the problems that the phrase “natural diversity” suffers from, so we won’t go down that road again, although we most certainly could. Let us assume instead that this is a prohibition against congregations forming that are ethnically homogeneous. A natural reading of this rejection might be (and who can know for sure given the ambiguity in the statement) that it is verboten to have congregations or Classis’ that are Korean in their makeup since a Korean Classis would be an example of hindering or breaking the visible and active unity of the Church.

So, if the Christian Reformed Church makes the Belhar document a Confession will that mean that Pacific Hanni California Korean Churches will have to dissolve or reorganize since such a Classis breaks the visible and active unity of the Church?

Really, though, what is sinful about a set ethnic people being homogeneous in their formation and worship? It is perfectly understandable that people find it more comfortable to worship with people who have a shared culture, language, and history. In “The Bridges of God” Church growth guru, Donald McGavaran wrote: ‘People become Christian fastest when least change of race or clan is involved’. In Understanding Church Growth (1970, 3rd Ed. 1990), which McGavaran co-wrote with C. Peter Wagner, this observation has become the ‘Homogeneous Unit Principle’. Empirical evidence, they argue, ‘people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers’. As a result homogenous churches grow fastest. Homogeneous churches are those in which all the members are from a similar social, ethnic or cultural background. People prefer to associate with people like themselves – ‘I like people like me’. And so we should create homogenous churches to be effective in reaching people. Obviously the Korean Churches and Classis in the CRC are employing the homogeneous unit principle and yet should we make the Belhar a Confessional document it would seem Classis formed like this would have to go.

If we affirm the status of the Belhar as “Confession,” are we saying that the Koreans are racist? If we don’t pass the Belhar as “Confession,” are we saying that we affirm the Homogeneous unit principle for all peoples? And if we are affirming the homogeneous unit principle for all peoples then would we not be in error for pursing quotas in the denominations hiring practices since such hiring practices would be erecting more barriers to individuals of all people groups pertaining to salvation.

Ironically, the insistence that we must reject any doctrine which absolutizes “natural diversity,” could be argued as “racist,” since the insistence that Churches must be a homogenization of multiple people groupings is to give in to current and recent Western notions of the way culture should be formed. To insist on a multicultural approach to organizing Churches is to absolutize the fad of pop Western multiculturalism as the organizing motif by which all Churches must be formed.

So, it seems we are on the horns of a dilemma here. If we affirm the Belhar we are implying that the Korean Churches are racist. If we don’t affirm the Belhar we are denying the Homogeneous unit principle.

However, all of this is assuming that the statement on “natural diversity” is referring to ethnic groupings and not to something else. Given the ambiguity of the document, it is hard to know what is being said exactly.

The New Egalitarian World Order

One thing that must not be missed in the current “contraceptive wars,” is that these wars are as much about equality as they are about sex and collectivism in service of the State. It is true that these wars communicate almost the “divine right of untethered and indiscriminate promiscuous sex,” and it is also true that these contraceptive wars are centralizing power again into the hands of the god-state but it is also just as significant — and perhaps even more significant to the Egalitarian Fascists that the “contraceptive wars” have the end of serving the New World Egalitarian Order.

One must keep in mind that with the fact that women can get pregnant that a dreaded distinction is manifested between men and women. This distinction is a horror to those who are pursuing the Egalitarian social order of the ages. So, in order to mute this distinction into a hopeful oblivion contraception must be spread to the four corners of the earth. Only by doing so will women be able to be the same as men.

Now couple this push towards egalitarianism with the idea fairness it becomes self-evident to those of the Cultural Marxist mindset that contraceptives must be provided by the god-state in order that women may not be more at risk for the non-same condition of pregnancy then men are. You can bet the farm that if the Cultural Marxists could find a way by which men could get pregnant men would be forced to get pregnant and would not be given the choice of aborting since pregnant men would serve the end of the egalitarian order.

Another dynamic that should be noted that is being played out in our current “contraceptive wars,” is that in all of this we are seeing a mindset towards pregnancy (the woman’s privilege) that communicates that pregnancy is a disease to be both abhorred and avoided. Pregnancy is the disease and contraceptives are the aspirin for the womb and abortifacients are to the disease of pregnancy what Dr. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was to polio.

In this New World Egalitarian order women who refuse to take contraceptives or have abortions can be referred to as “breeders,” who are to be looked down upon as being second class entities and are to be pitied. So, from a generation of women who were the keepers of the home and who were clearly distinct and distinguishable from men we went to a generation of women who seized the right to vote claiming a social equality with men, and from the generation who seized the right to vote we went to a generation of women who discovered the pill finding a reproductive equality with men, and from the generation of women who discovered the pill we have gone to a generation of women who insist on being the same as men claiming that men and women are indistinguishable and indistinct from one another.

You’ve come a long way baby.

Now in addition to the contraceptive wars which are serving the end of the New Egalitarian Order we have the current push in the medical community, as influenced by this worldview mindset, to attempt to turn sundry confused little boys into girls and confused little girls into boys. A market is burgeoning that provides “answers,” by way of surgical mutilation and / or pharmaceutical chemical warfare for the problem of little boys and little girls unhappy with their sexuality. Mommy and Daddy, themselves perfect reflections of the insanity of New Egalitarian man, “serve” little Joanne’s confusion by having her breasts lopped off so that she can become little Johnny. Similarly, little William will be proscribed testosterone blocking medicine so that he might remain little Wilhelmina. In the story linked below two Butch Dykes, having adopted a little boy, are showing their hatred of men by parenting their 8 year old boy into a sex change.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2043345/The-California-boy-11-undergoing-hormone-blocking-treatment.html

And in this news story it is a little girl who is switching to a little boy,

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20120220/D9T13HO02.html

Of course all of this serves the Egalitarian order of the ages. If sexuality is not biologically determined then we are left with sexuality being nothing but a social construct and if social construct are only what people make of them then one social construct is as good as another and innate distinctions are all a matter of the troglodyte minds that have not yet caught up to the egalitarian times.

But as reality is what it is these attempts to reconstruct God’s construction are going to end badly.