Wesleyan Seminary Dean Insists That God Does Not Conform To Universe’s Rationality

“I allow for the things of God to be beyond rationality, to be suprarational. I believe this is a rational thing to do since, if God created the world out of nothing, He is outside this universe and not conformed to its rationality.”

Dr. Ken Schenk
Wesley Seminary Dean and Professor of New Testament and Christian Ministry

I am working on wondering what the point of interacting with you is any further Ken since you hold that God is beyond rationality. If God is beyond rationality and if the creator creature divide is so vast then all of this is speculative hookah smoking and there is no such thing as either one of us being ‘right’ and our systems are left to being promulgated and embraced not because they correspond to reality but because they find a way to get in the stream of popularity and as such I might be better served by learning more about marketing then I do about doctrine.

If God is trans-rational or supra-rational then all your ratiocination in the world is just so much making of mud pies. On one hand you insist that God doesn’t conform to our rationality while on the other hand you continue in a rationcination that presumably anticipates a correspondence to a God that by your own admission doesn’t conform to our rationality. You are lost in a sea of subjectivism Ken. You have a man of water climbing a ladder of water affixed to a sky of water speculating about a God who is beyond rationality.

How, pray tell, could we find out that God is irrational? If God doesn’t conform to our rationality then how could we ever label him either as supra-rational, trans-rational, rational or irrational? Your God is so transcendent – so other that he dwells in Kant’s noumenal realm making conversation about him meaninglessness (aka – Logical positivists), with faith defined as being a Kierkegaardian existential leap.

And why would you ever think that this universe has a rationality that is unique to it? Where is that idea taught in Scripture? If God is “outside this universe and not conformed to its rationality” then how could we believe that God’s Word conforms to our rationality? If God does not conform to our rationality then it could be that when the Scripture says that God is love what it really means (admitting that we can’t really know what it means since God doesn’t conform to the universe’s rationality) is that God is a Ice Cream Cone.

Like many denominations in the West the Wesleyans have a major problem in their Seminary faculty. Let us pray that God is pleased to raise up new Denominational training centers where men are ‘t taught to be irrational.

Bavinck On R2K

“Scripture is the Book of the Kingdom of God, not a book for this or that people, for the individual only, but for all nations, for all of humanity. It is not a book for one age, but for all times. It is a Kingdom book. Just as the Kingdom of God develops not alongside and above history, but in and through world history, so too Scripture must not be abstracted, nor viewed by itself, nor isolated from everything. Rather, Scripture must be brought into relationship with all our living, with the living of the entire human race. And Scripture must be employed to explain all of human
living.”

Herman Bavinck,
“The Kingdom of God, The Highest Good”

HT — Mark Van Der Molen

Queen Victoria On Feminism

“I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings, and would surely perish without male protection.”

— Queen Victoria, 1870

Quotes on Democracy

Recently I had a conversation with a young woman who just positively glowed about the benefits of Democracy. I seem to get in these kinds of conversations frequently. Of course people who say they love Democracy have no earthly idea what they are saying. I believe they think they are saying that they Love America. The Problem is, is that America was not formed as a Democracy.

So, in order to understand Democracy we must have an understanding of what it means. Democracy is merely mobocracy. It is the idea that a 50% plus 1 vote equals legal rule. As such, we could cite the whimsical, but true saw, that Democracy is 3 wolves and 2 Lambs voting on what is for dinner.

The fact that our founders hated the idea of Democracy is found in the words of James Madison (you know … he who is known as the Father of our non-democracy Constitution). Madison said

“[D]emocracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

Our Second President, John Adams said of Democracy,

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

What follows is a flurry of quotes on Democracy. Of course my young female friend had no idea of what Democracy really means or else she would have never been so vehement about supporting the silliness and danger that is Democracy.

“A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens…which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it…which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’ ‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.” ~

Robert A. Heinlein

“Democratism and its allied herd movements, while remaining loyal to the principle of equality and identity, will never hesitate to sacrifice liberty.” ~ Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

“Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.” ~ Hans-Herman Hoppe

“Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.” ~ Aristotle

“Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone’s slave.” ~ Karl Kraus

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” ~ H.L. Mencken

American was not founded as a Democracy. It was founded as a Constitutional Republic. Of course that has been largely lost via government education combined with brain dead politicians who are forever giving us claptrap about America as that “great shining Democracy that the whole world aspires to be.

In point of fact the degeneration of our nation can be largely traced to the tendency of our Nation to embrace more and more mechanisms that smack of Democracy. The elimination of the US Senators being voted upon by State Legislators in 1913. The tendency towards referendum ballot initiatives. (Initiatives that are consistently ignored if the population doesn’t vote the way the State desire the outcome to end.) The push in some quarters to get rid of the Electoral College. All of these movements towards Democracy chip away at the Liberty upon which this diverse nation was founded.

Democracy … the killer of nations and the midwife of tyranny.