Barbara Ann Moree, Ella Steinhauser & The Goodness of God

My mind keeps drawing me back to remember Barbara Ann Moree.

Barbara was a little girl who was on our prayer list weekly when I pastored the small country Church in Longtown, South Carolina. Barbara had been born with a severe disability (something like Cerebral Palsy) and had been institutionalized since she had been born. Over the years in Longtown I visited Barbara several times and prayed for her weekly in the long pastoral prayer during the Sunday Service.

As near as I could tell the only family that cared and looked after Barbara was her Grandmother Margaret who was a faithful member of the small flock I served in Longtown. Margaret was a gentle lady who cared deeply for this child and it was through Margaret that I came to know Barbara Ann.

I would go with Margaret occasionally to visit the child who would have been between 8 and 10 years old when I first met her as a newly minted minister. Barbara Ann couldn’t speak or walk and showed no outward signs of recognizing people being in her presence. She was thoroughly confined to a hospital bed.

Margaret had told me Barbara Ann’s story and it was a sad one. Despite that I rejoiced that Barbara Ann had her grandmother as an advocate and so was not totally bereft of family love.

Eventually, Margaret asked me if I would baptize Barbara Ann and remembering Jesus’ words to “forbid not the children to come unto me for such is the Kingdom of Heaven,” I did indeed Baptize Barbara Ann in that lonely and sterile hospital room with just Margaret in attendance. Margaret was so grateful that day that her little broken granddaughter had been given the sacrament of Baptism.

My mind keeps being drawn back to Barbara Ann because I now have a grand-daughter that is broken much the same as Barbara Ann was. And I am learning through my grand-daughter that it is possible that Barbara Ann may have understood much more of the world than I would have thought possible in 1995 when I knew Barbara Ann. Given Barbara Ann’s condition I assumed that there was nobody home. Now I realize that it is possible that Barbara Ann was very much present in a body that was completely broken.

My Grand-daughter is likewise, to all immediate appearances, a child who one could easily conclude is completely mentally inert. Like Barbara Ann, Ella cannot walk or speak. However, as of late, because of the advent of technology and the determination of Ella to let people know that she is present, Ella has, despite her broken body, begun to blossom. She is communicating now about any number of subjects — subjects that most 12 year old little girls wouldn’t ever think to take time to comment. Yesterday, for example, Ella listened to a sermon on the sin of Grumbling and the necessity to be thankful and she responded via her technology that “I would rather know Jesus than be able to walk.”

My emotions when this is reported are mixed. I rejoice that Ella is able to communicate, however at the same time I remain deeply saddened concerning her brokenness. However, I likewise am drawn back to Barbara Ann Moree with regret and shame that I just assumed that she was completely absent and inert. Maybe Barbara Ann wasn’t home … but Ella has taught me that maybe she was.  I also then find immediate gratitude and deeper appreciation for Barbara’s Grandmother Margaret who was so faithful in caring for that child.

I am also thankful again for God’s grace to Barbara Ann in the gift of Baptism. Even if I failed Barbara Ann in not being more solicitous I can thank God for His marking out this child as a member of the covenant. The one person who was more faithful to Barbara Ann than her grandmother was our and her loving heavenly father.

I don’t know why God decided to touch both Barbara Ann and Ella and countless others. These kind of disabilities can only be dealt with by trusting that God will have a final eschatological word to say about the problem of evil in general and the problem of evil as touching particular people. The revelation of the particulars of God’s goodness in these cases will only be known on the final day. Until then, we trust the testimony of Scripture that God is good to His people without fail — and we hold tenaciously to God’s goodness even though the world might scream at us the way Job’s wife did; “Curse God and die.”

I imagine 30 years later that Barbara Ann may likely have passed away given the severity of her condition. However, I look forward to meeting her again in the new heavens and the new earth.

In all this I am reminded again how important it is to be gentle with those who are physically and mentally broken. I am also reminded to thank God for those things that come into our lives that we don’t understand and am reminded to continue to trust Him despite the fact that our senses shout at us to not trust God.

Further, I thank the benevolent God for my grand-daughter Ella. She is only 12 but I already long for the ability to trust God the way she clearly does. I thank God that He has determined that Ella would be able to thank her parents for their care and I thank God that He has given her the ability, seemingly against all odds, to be able to draw and paint. If you ever met Ella you would never be able to guess that her drawings and paintings could come from her broken and crippled hand.

Finally there is a word here about the necessity to continue to be pro-life as Christians. It would be easy to conclude that lives such as Barbara Ann and Ella are not lives worth living. Yet, God is the creator of all life and who is man that he should arise to the place of Creator and sovereign to determine who should and should not be given life? For Christians especially we should be reminded of the need to esteem and minister “to the least of these.” In light of that I thank God for Margaret and for Ella’s parents and siblings (Edward, Gwen, Winry and Alphonse). It is hard work caring for a broken and disabled child and such families do not receive the recognition that they should receive for so faithfully fulfilling their calling, as assigned by God, to the least of these. So, for whatever it is worth I salute my son-in-law and daughter and their children. I salute the Aaron Belk family who I know only a wee little bit who likewise minister to a child touched by God in this way.

And I pray for a faith that can trust God in all the hardships in life that mystify us now and will continue to mystify us until all is made clear on that final day.

Trinitarianism and Kinism

“There is a most profuse diversity and yet, in that diversity, there is also a superlative kind of unity. The foundation for both unity and diversity is in God…. Here is a unity that does not destroy but rather maintains diversity, and a diversity that does not come at the expense of unity, but rather unfolds it in its riches. In virtue of this unity the world can, metaphorically, be called an organism, in which all parts are connected with each other and influence each other reciprocally.”

Herman Bavinck 
Reformed Dogmatics — Vol. II: p. 435

Kinists are Kinists because we believe that on a creational level the reality of unity in diversity found in the fact of multiple races in the one human race reflects the Creator who is Himself unity in diversity. Likewise then, Kinists believe that Alienists who deny Kinism are, whether self-conscious of it or not, denying the trinitarian character of God in favor of a Unitarian monad theology. In point of fact Kinists insist that the denial of Kinism for social order is the consequence of social order Unitarianism. When the Kinist defends Kinism behind and below that defense is his conviction that God is both One and Many as well as the conviction that to deny that unity in diversity is to deny our undoubted catholic Christian faith.

Critiquing Haines & Fulford on Natural Law

“By natural law, then, we mean that order or rule of human conduct which is

(1)based upon human nature as created by God

(2)knowable by all men, through human intuition and reasoning alone (beginning w/ his observations of creation, in general, and human nature, in particular), independent of any particular divine revelation provided through a divine spokesperson; and thus

(3) normative for all human beings.”

David Haines & Andrew A. Fulford
Natural Law; A Brief Introduction and Biblical Defense

#1 is not possible since human nature as created by God no longer is human nature, fallen as man is.

#2 fails to take into account that Scripture teaches that the carnal mind is enmity against God (Romans 8:7) and the Scripture that teaches of fallen man;

they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind.

Also #2 fails in what is implied in the phrase “reasoning alone.” There is no reasoning that man develops that is not beholden to some God or god concept. Even the very idea of reasoning has to presuppose some kind of God in order to mean anything. The problem here is the premise that “reasoning” is a neutral something that fallen man engages in quite apart from a-priori presuppositions about God and His reality.

#3 fails the is and ought test. All because Natural Law teaches what ought to be normative for what fallen man knows does, doesn’t mean that is what fallen man claims to know.

The problem with Natural law in a nutshell is that Natural Law theorists don’t take into account the relationship between the ontological realities of fallen man and the epistemological realities of fallen man.

Ontologically fallen man remains a creature of God. He can’t avoid intuiting the fact that he is to God what a fingerprint is to a finger. He knows it in all of his being. He can’t escape it. However, fallen man, being fallen, uses his fallen epistemological apparatus to deny what he can’t escape knowing to be true ontologically. As such he suppresses the truth, via his fallen epistemological apparatus, in order that God may not rule over him.
Natural law does not take this into account positing as it does that fallen man has the ability by use of fallen reason unguided by special revelation and a regenerate mind that fallen man is capable of a knowing that can align him with the creator’s world.

In and by this move Natural Law advocates deny the uniquely Reformed doctrine of total depravity. It is the fallenness of man that makes it true that what fallen man ought to know by way of natural law fallen man claims not to know as he suppresses what he ought to know in unrighteousness.

Natural Law thus introduces into Christianity huge amounts of contradiction. Only a presuppositional approach removes that contradiction. Only a presuppositional approach is consistent with Reformed Christianity.

Something R2K Will Never Be Accused Of

“and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.””
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Acts‬ ‭17‬:‭7‬ ‭ESV‬‬

Can you imagine any pagan crowd today complaining; “Those R2K Christians… I hate them because they are always saying there is another King, Jesus?”

This one passage by itself should eliminate R2K from serious consideration as a legitimate Christian theology.

Doug Wilson, Side-B Nazism, The Green Witch & Awaking From The Silver Chair

In his latest brain fart the legendary gatekeeper Rev. Doug Wilson accuses those of us who agree with Augustine, Chrysostom, Luther, and Calvin on the issue of the Bagels as being a new version of “Revoice.”

Only the most high Rev. Wilson observes; whereas “Revoice” was about side-b sodomy, those of us who agree with our Fathers on the issue of the Bagels are side-b Nazis. According to Pope Doug we who agree with our Fathers on the Bagel issue are trying to be “sin-adjacent.” True, per Pope Doug, we don’t want to be out right Nazis but we do want to be kind of like that. Why some of us even have the temerity to agree with Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, David Irving, and many others that the genocide numbers may well have been inflated. Indeed, per Doug it seems that it may well be a sin to not only inquire too closely about the actual number total of deaths but it is even the case that it is beyond the pale to even contemplate the possibility that International Jewry had an agenda that was decidedly against the German people. One wonders if Doug has ever read about the boycott against German goods called for by International Jewry in March of 1933?

So, in Doug’s brain any honest attempt at historical revision automatically falls under the category of a Nazi version of revoice where Christians see how close they can get to Nazism without actually becoming Nazis. Of course, by this standard, Augustine, Chrysostom, Luther and Calvin and many Church councils were the original version of Revoice that folks like Sam Alberry, Nate Collins and Misty Irons copied in 2018.

Of course, Doug, as he typically does, leaves himself an out by saying, after he rips people who question the WW II narrative, that he has been questioning the WW II narrative for decades. Yeah, it sure shows Doug.

Doug wants to accuse these young chaps of being a Nazi version of “Side-B Sodomy.” Very well then, I accuse Doug of being the embodiment of C. S. Lewis’ “Green Witch” in the Narnia book “The Silver Chair.” If you will remember in that novel, Prince Rilian, has been seduced and enchanted to serve the ends of the Green Witch. However, the spell is never complete and daily the Prince is required to sit in the Silver Chair in order to get his daily fix of enchantment that will keep him beholden to the Green Witch. One day, in the presence of Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum, Prince Rilian incrementally awakens from the spell and begins to rail and rage against The Green Witch and her spell upon him. At this point the Green Witch enters into the room they are all in and begins to sing again her spell of enchantment in order to put the Prince back to sleep and so under her spell.

Doug is playing the Green Witch. Young men are waking up to how much and how often they’ve been lied to by the Governmental-Corporate-Ecclesiastical-Media complex. In this awakening everything is being questioned from the post-Enlightenment/ WW II consensus forward. People are discovering that for centuries, if not millennium Jewish and Biblical Christian interests have been at severe cross purposes. Yet, in this awakening there we find guys like Doug Wilson seeking to reinvigorate the spell that has had us all sleeping for decades and has had us serving as lackeys for the purposes of an Institutional Green Witch that is contrary to our own Christian and National interests.

Now, to be sure, there are voices out there that are excessive on this subject. For example, some of the work, that the Lutherans, Mahler and Woe, are doing is positively unhinged. Keep in mind though that the swing back of this pendulum may be particularly vicious given the resentment and rage over being lied to for decades. If the snap back is extreme guys like Wilson (Andrew Sandlin, Karl Trueman to name a couple more) have to share the blame. Forcing the lid down on a boiling pot only guarantees that the whole pot is sure top explode.

Doug Wilson on this subject (and more than a few others) is the Green Witch seeking to put the young Princes of the realm back to sleep.

And myself?

I’m just trying to play the role of faithful Puddleglum by casting myself on the fire that is aiding in the Green Witch’s enchantment. I can only hope that burnt McAtee smells as head clearing as burnt Marshwiggle.

Addendum

I would strongly recommend that Doug read the following books. It is only a start.

E. Michael Jones — The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit
E. Michael Jones — The Holocaust Narrative
Maurice Pinay — The Plot Against The Church
Hillarie Belloc — The Jews
Martin Luther — The Jews and Their Lies
John Calvin — Response to Question and Objections of a Certain Jew
Against the Jews — Chrysostom