Ultimate Cause of the War Against the Constitution — Part II

In America the Calvinist impulse that was the animating religion that founded America was eventually replaced, at the end of the 18th century by the Enlightenment faith characterized philosophically by Deism and religious by Unitarianism. God was seen as the Watchmaker who wound up the universe and then tottered away so as to be uninvolved in a universe that was operating independently according to natural principals. This impulse was to be seen even in many of the American Founding Fathers. Indeed, many argue that the US Constitution was a compromise document that could either be read through the portal of Enlightenment presuppositions or through the portal of Christian presuppositions. By the end of the 18th century Unitarianism had taken over the many of the public Institutions (Especially the Universities) and Christianity was being reinterpreted through the prism of Enlightenment Deism. With Unitarianism the epistemological (how do we know what we know) authority that was Revelation found in Scripture that was the foundation of Colonial Christianity was replaced by right reason and natural law. Right reason and natural law now served as the norm that normed all norms.

Then with the rise of the Democratic Jacksonian man a new shift is on the scene in the States – particularly in the North is away from Enlightenment Deism as well as the continued movement against Biblical Christianity. That shift also came from Europe where it was called Romanticism. As Romanticism came across to America and mixed with the cultural fauna in America it became today what we call Transcendentalism. It was Romanticism/Transcendentalism that fired the imagination of the Northern abolitionists to the point of desiring to wage war on the Christian South.

Keep in mind as we consider this “History of Ideas” that the philosophies/worldview that we are looking at are both contributory towards while also a consequence of the reality that there is a shift in theology so that a new god is being worshiped other than the previous God. That shift demonstrates itself by a different ethos among the people as well as creating a different type of person — a person with a different disposition, a different lean into life, a different prioritization of the things that matter most. Peoples with two distinct Worldviews, and so two different gods will never be able to live as neighbors to one another. Unrest and war is the consequence of trying to have two different worldviews living cheek by jowl in the same culture.

In Transcendentalism, man becomes his own measure. Yet unlike Enlightenment Deism/Unitarianism the Romantic and Transcendental writers shifted their epistemology from right reason and natural law to imagination and intuition, thus abandoning all allegiance to objective reason. This is a shift from non-Biblical rationalism to non-biblical irrationalism in epistemology. Man knows that he knows just by knowing that he knows. There is no outside source of authority. This is played out in many of the debates on slavery leading up to the War Against the Constitution. Many of the debaters on the issue from the South are clergy and they are making their appeal to Revelation as found in Scripture. Whereas their opponents appeal to an intuitive sense that slavery must be wrong just because it must be wrong.

Do not miss here that the North and the South are separated now in their allegiance to different authority sources. The antebellum South is still pinioned on a Christianity that looks to Revelation as the Norm that norms all norms, while the North (especially the abolitionists, and Jacobins) is looking to intuition of the individual as the norm that norms all norms.

So, in this worldview divide that reflects the fact that each region is serving different gods, we have an epistemological divide. We also have a ontological/anthropological divide.

Now before we press on here keep in mind that I am speaking in generalities. The South wasn’t perfectly righteous and every person in the North was not perfectly evil. I am speaking in terms of generalities and not universals. The Southern minister was more consistently someone in line with a Dabney, Thornwell, Girardeau, and Palmer while the Northern minister was more consistently someone in line with Theodore Parker, Henry Ward Beecher, Emerson and Thoreau.

Now back to the issue of the differences – North and South – in terms of ontology and anthropology. We need to keep in mind that the very word Transcendentalism refers to a spirituality that transcends the realm of rationality and the material world. This tells us that we are moving in the direction of irrationalism and a kind of spiritualism contra the materialism of Deism. Transcendentalism holds that man is fundamentally good but corrupted by society and that man should therefore strive for independence and self-reliance. It is easy to believe this given that the Transcendentalists also believed that individual participates in godness. Emerson the Transcendentalists tells us this when he wrote;

“Standing on the bare ground,–my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,–all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays

 This quotation highly demonstrates Emerson’s transcendentalist thought. Emerson finds himself away from all the imperfections of society where he is ultimately finding himself one with nature and becoming this so called “transparent eyeball” he speaks about. This transparent eyeball he speaks about is escaping the corruptions of society and finding a divine soul with nature. Abandoning the materialism of society, Emerson becomes one with God directly through nature, which ultimately is the entire message of Nature. 

The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

So man partakes of God and man is basically good. If all men partake of God and if all men are basically good then it is easy to see why the Transcendentalist is all worked up over slavery. Here you have men who are basically good and who participate in God and you have these wretched Southerners holding them in slavery. Something must be done. And the something that must be done is clamor for slave revolts.

Note here that this Anthropology North vs. South is stark. The South believes that man is basically sinful. The South believes not in the primacy of the individual as the Abolitionist Transcendentalist does but rather the South believes that man is to be understood as belonging to the covenantal entities of family, Church, and community as those are hierarchically ordered by the revelation of Scripture.

Note here that this Ontology (the question of existence, becoming and reality) North and South are at odds. The South is still working in a Biblical framework that supports the hierarchy that slavery is a part of. Note also that the slave is typically part of that family hierarchy in the South. If you doubt that I challenge you to read the slave exit interviews done in the 1930s by the Federal Government and read some of the descriptions of former slaves of their time as slaves. You’ll be surprised.

Very well then, North and South are serving different Gods which give them different regional religions. The South is still largely animated by Biblical Christianity. The North is animated by Romanticism/Transcendentalism and because of those different gods and different religions North and South become estranged brothers trying to live in the same house.

So, I have tried to make the case that what is mistakenly called the Civil War had as its ultimate causation the fact that the regions were serving different Gods and so had different World and life views – Romanticsm-Transcendentalism vs. Biblical Christianity. I have tried to show you via their different epistemology, ontology, and anthropology how those differences worked themselves out and how these differences were bound to make for hostility between the two regions.

So, before we start talking about the causes of the war mentioning slavery, tariffs, agricultural vs. industrial, the lack of enforcement of the fugitive slave laws, etc. we should say that the ultimate cause of the War of Northern aggression was the different theologies owned North & South.

Ultimate Cause of War Against the Constitution — Part I

Pertaining to war one of the more famous quotes is from the Prussian Military genius Carl von Clausewitz who said;

“War is the continuation of politics by other means.”

What von Clausewitz didn’t say but should’ve said — something which is every bit as true — is that politics is the continuation of theology by other means.

We bring this up in order to argue that in order to understand the War Against the Constitution one has to begin with theology since theology is the foundational point as to why wars — any war — is made.

War is the continuation of politics by other means and politics is the continuation of theology by other means.

Men come into conflict for a host of reasons but always laying at the foundation of those reasons is that they have conflicting views about the nature and reality of God. Because this is so, the contesting participants are being animated by different world and life views which are themselves dependent ultimately upon each contesting participants view of God or the gods.

The ancients understood this better than we did. They understood that people’s warring with one another was just a reflection of the gods of those people going to war with one another.

This is perhaps most vividly expressed in the OT when Israel and Egypt are in conflict regarding Israel’s release. The Scripture clearly communicates in the plagues that God of the Hebrews is making war on the gods of the Egyptians. Since the God of the Bible wins out Israel wins out in their contest over Egypt.

So, what I am saying here is that the ultimate cause in the War of Northern Aggression is that North and South each had different World and life views which were themselves reflective of the fact that each were serving different God/gods.

I can sustain this observation with just a few quotes;

The first is from famous Southern Theologian James Henley Thornwell. Thornwell supports my contention that in the War for Secession that first and foremost cause was a difference in the Gods who were owned by North and South. Thornwell offers,

“The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders—they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground—Christianity and atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity at stake.”

Clearly, Thornwell sees the conflict first and foremost as between the Gods. The South is fighting for a God described as one who accounts for regulated freedom, while the North is fighting for their god who is but man said loudly.

 Benjamin Moran Palmer, another one of the South’s great Theologians concurred with Thornwell. This is from Palmer’s famous 1860 Thanksgiving day Sermon,

“In this great struggle, we defend the cause of God and religion. The abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic. The demon which erected its throne upon the guillotine in the days of Robespierre and Marat, which abolished the Sabbath and worshiped reason in the person of a harlot, yet survives to work other horrors, of which those of the French Revolution are but the type. Among a people so generally religious as the American, a disguise must be worn; but it is the same old threadbare disguise of the advocacy of human rights. From a thousand Jacobin clubs here, as in France, the decree has gone forth which strikes at God by striking at all subordination and law. Availing itself of the morbid and misdirected sympathies of men, it has entrapped weak consciences in the meshes of its treachery; and now, at last, has seated its high priest upon the throne, clad in the black garments of discord and schism, so symbolic of its ends. Under this suspicious cry of reform, it demands that every evil shall be corrected, or society become a wreck—the sun must be stricken from the heavens, if a spot is found upon his disk. The Most High, knowing his own power, which is infinite, and his own wisdom, which is unfathomable, can afford to be patient. But these self-constituted reformers must quicken the activity of Jehovah or compel his abdication….

This spirit of atheism, which knows no God who tolerates evil, no Bible which sanctions law, and no conscience that can be bound by oaths and covenants, has selected us for its victims, and slavery for its issue. Its banner-cry rings out already upon the air—”liberty, equality, fraternity,” which simply interpreted mean bondage, confiscation and massacre. With its tricolor waving in the breeze,—it waits to inaugurate its reign of terror. To the South the high position is assigned of defending, before all nations, the cause of all religion and of all truth.”
Benjamin Morgan Palmer
Sermon: The South, Her Peril and Her Duty, November 1860

That this mindset of the War Against the Constitution was a religious war … was a war that was first and foremost a war where the God’s were at war was an opinion also shared by the North. Thomas Fleming in his book, “A Disease in the Public Mind” brings this out. Quoting Fleming;

“The abolitionists convinced themselves, based on their evangelical experiences, that smearing the South’s reputation in every possible way would create the “anxiety” that would lead to a mass conversion of the North to their crusade. In an analogy that was tortured at best, and blasphemous at worst, the South was portrayed as a province ruled by Satan that would consume the North’s soul if her citizens did not vow to expunge the sin of slavery. It was the evangelical camp meeting on a National scale, accusing the South of four unforgivable sins: violence, drunkenness, laziness, and sexual depravity…. Abolitionist clergymen developed a jeremiad on the Slave power. They identified it as the Anti-Christ, come to terrifying life in America after their Protestant ancestors had defeated this evil being in a centuries-long struggle with the Catholic Church in Europe. The South was the ‘apocalyptic dragon’ of the book of Revelations, rising to strangle freedom in the North as it already extinguished it in the South…. Senator William Sumner of of Massachusetts summed up his rampaging hatred with three questions he roared at the rapt audience in Boston’s Faneuil Hall. “Are you for freedom? Or are you for slavery? Are you for God or the Devil?

Thomas Fleming
A Disease In The Public Mind — pg. 177-178

So before the cause of the War was about Tariffs, before the cause of the War was about what would be the nature of American labor, before the cause of the war was about slavery, before the cause of the war was about how the Constitution should be interpreted, the War of Northern Aggression should be first understood in terms of what caused the war, in terms of the conflict that existed as between the different God(s) that were worshipped, North and South.

I would contend that the South existed as one of the last if not the last vestiges of Christendom in the West.  The Southern Army was a Christian army as seen by its Christian leadership and its Christian piety. The Christianity of men like Lee, Jackson, Dabney, and Polk and many others is well known. The book “Christ in the Camp,” vividly demonstrates the centrality of Christianity in the life of the Southern army. The Confederate Battle Flag, which, as you know, is the St. Andrew’s Cross bear testimony that the Southern Army was a Christian Army.

In contrast the Northern Army demonstrated the God they served by not only their actions (Sherman’s Bummers / Burning down of Columbia) but also in their battle song. Time does not permit us to expose the god of the Battle Hymn of the Republic but I assure you that the God of the Battle Hymn of the Republic is not the God of the Bible.

So there you have it. The primary cause of the War Against the Constitution was the fact that each contestant — North vs. South, were defending their god and their gods. There would have been no war were it not the fact that the North were not serving and beholden to a false god.

Eugene Genovese supports my thesis when he wrote in his “Southern Front,”

“Shortly before his death Thornwell went further. Cautiously, in his ‘Sermon on National Sins,’ preached on the eve of the War, and boldly in a remarkable paper on ‘Relation to the State to Christ’ prepared for the Presbyterian church as a memorial to be sent to the Confederate Congress, he called upon the South to dedicate itself to Christ. He criticized the American Founding Fathers for having forgotten God and for having opened up the Republic to the will of the majority.

“A foundation was thus laid for the worst of all possible forms of government — a democratic absolutism.’

To the extent to which the state is a moral person, he insisted, ‘it must needs be under moral obligation and moral obligation without reference to a superior will is a flat contradiction in terms.’ Thornwell demanded that the new constitution be amended to declare the CSA in submission to Jesus for, ‘to Jesus Christ all power in heaven and earth is committed.’ Vague recognition of God would not do. The State must recognize the Triune God of the Bible — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Eugene Genovese
The Southern Front — p. 40

Now, as to how the service of these different gods expressed themselves we turn. In the North, the prevailing religion that serviced the god of the North was called “Romanticism/Transcendentalism.” This was the religion of the God of the North.

End Part I

 

What Does Tim Keller Have In Common With Talmudists?

“It is natural for the Talmudist to reject all Godly or Biblical aspects of government and to promote atheistic and humanistic forms of government such as democracy, socialism, or communist regime. These political concepts stem from Talmudic and Babylonian philosophies of government whose end is total control and dominion.”

Charles E. Weisman
Who Is Esau-Edom?

“I’d rather be in a democracy than a state in which the government is officially Christian. Instead of trying to take power, I think what Christians ought to be doing is trying to renew their churches.”

-Tim Keller, Wall Street Journal
02 September 2022

1.) Understand what Keller has said here. He has said I’d rather be under a government that is non Christian than under a government that is officially Christian. Tim would rather have his magistrates be Christ haters than have magistrates who are in submission to Christ.

2.) Tim talks about how Christians shouldn’t “try to take power.” The question is “take power from whom?” Presumably, in Tim’s world Christians shouldn’t try to take power from non Christians and should be happy to be ruled by pagans.

3.) You know Tim, it is possible to both try and renew our Churches and in godly ways seek to take power.

The Joint Work of Liberalism & Alienism

When living in a liberal social order moral principles are required to be considered nothing but individual subjective opinions which are all equally valuable and equally valueless. The chief public value of a liberal social order is that no public value is allowed to have public value in the public square above any other value. This means that Liberalism gives birth to Alienism inasmuch as Liberalism alienates the liberal from the idea that objective moral values exist. If there are no objective moral values that circumscribe all men then all that is left is an alienism from all else besides the sovereign autonomous self who does the value choosing/determining.

This in turn means that the Liberal is alienated from all other norm making mechanisms. The Liberal is alienated from his own civilization/culture, the Liberal is alienated from any idea of transcendent truth, the Liberal is alienated from any notion of an extra-mundane God and the Liberal is alienated from reality and all this because it is the Liberal’s creed that each of these and all of these are person variable. All that is left to the consistent Liberal is his own alienation born of the conviction of the sovereign autonomous self that there are no objective moral values that can circumscribe the sovereign autonomous self. There is nowhere else to go except to an alienism that supports the Liberal’s instinct that there is no objective moral order to call home. This explains why the Liberal tends to embrace those very realities that are in conflict with those realities that were once his own. Having been alienated from his own civilization/culture, transcendent truth, God, and reality the Liberal begins to own as His own that which is alien to what he is now alienated. Liberalism alienates and in alienating turns the alienated one to love the strange and the alien.

For the alienated “consistent” liberal the norms that once normed his world are now the enemy. For example belonging to kith and kin, love of God and country, and a sense of place instead of being sources of comfort for the Liberal are now to he who has become the Alienist, sources of all evils, oppressions, and injustice. However all this righteous self-indignation of the Liberal/Alienist is in fact driven by a inward disorder within themselves born of their insistence that no objective moral order exists. Their outrage against the norms that once normed their world is in point of fact their attempt to prove their foundational liberal conviction that they are masters of their self-created universe where no objective moral values exist. In order to sustain their Liberalism wherein they are the sovereign and autonomous creators of all private value they must embrace an alienism that denies any previous macro norms that normed all norms.

So, consistent Liberalism leads to Alienism and Alienism is the love of the other; of the stranger and the alien. This Alienism then leads to a need to attack and destroy all previous owned norms so as to demonstrate that there exist no objective moral public values that all must own. There can be no yardstick or canon to which the sovereign, autonomous Liberal/Alienist self must be measured.

Examples abound that demonstrate what I am getting at;

1.) The Liberal idea that the sovereign autonomous self cannot be challenged in determining moral values translates into the loss of a self-control that bespeaks conforming to a standard outside. This lack of self-control in turns eviscerates all other sense of traditional values as found in family or community. This evisceration creates Alienism in family structures and serves as a destroyer of familial stability and harmony. The family is irretrievably harmed and the irony enters in when the Liberal/Alienist blames the destruction of family values on the antiquarian Christian notions of family.

2.) The Liberal idea that the sovereign autonomous self cannot be challenged in determining moral values translates into the creation of a new morality that is at war with the previous norms that the Liberal/Alienist is now fighting against. Consequently, their arises the anti-morality morality of the sodomite, the tranny, and the Drag Queen child groomers. Once this new morality of the Liberal/Alienist begins to unravel as it must, the hue and cry goes up that the chao that results is the fault of repressive Christian values.

3.) The Liberal idea that the sovereign autonomous self cannot be challenged in determining moral values translates into the denial of patriarchy and the Christian idea of male and female roles as a pervious Christian norm. The Liberal/Alienist insists now that men and women are interchangeable cogs or are merely social constructs. When this creates the social disintegration that it must the Liberal/Alienist doesn’t own his mess but instead screeches that the problem is that too much patriarchy still exists and it is that patriarchy that accounts for the social disintegration.

4.) The Liberal idea that the sovereign autonomous self cannot be challenged in determining moral values translates into the destruction of home in the pursuit of expanding America so as to make it more inclusive and more diverse. The Liberal/Alienist insists now that the previous Christian norm that a nation was related to common descent is passe and so the Liberal/Alienist seeks to prove their Liberal/Alienist credentials by destroying home.  When that vision begins to demonstrate the creaking and cracking of racial/cultural tensions the Liberal insists that the reason for the lack of success is that there remain to many people who do not share the Liberal/Alienist vision.

That this Liberal vision would eventually lead to a normative destructing Alienism was always the vision of the far-sighted consistent Liberals as seen in a bevy of quotes from earlier Liberals;

“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is MENTALLY ILL because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you teachers to make all of these sick children well by creating the international children of the future.”

~Dr. Chester M. Pierce

“What the church has been for medieval man the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God will be replaced by the concept of the public good…The common schools…shall create a more far-seeing intelligence and a pure morality than has ever existed among communities of men.”

~Horace Mann

“The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new–the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism.”

~John Dunphy, The Humanist, January / February 1983

“Faith in the prayer-hearing God is an unproved and outmoded faith. There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, the immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes.”

~John Dewey “Soul searching” Teacher Magazine, September 1933

We see with this flurry of quotes another connection between Liberalism and Alienism and that is the conviction that man is naturally good. If Liberalism and Alienism (the love of the “other” over love of one’s own) stand together on the premise that atomistic man is sovereign and autonomous they are intertwined on the conviction that man in inherently good. This conviction must demolish every other competing anthropology that would deny this idea of man’s inherent goodness. This means that Liberalism and Alienism must be at war with any Civilizational or cultural order that embraces the Christian notion of man as fallen and by nature sinful. Liberalism/Alienism will not be satisfied until all other competitors to its civilizational hegemony are laid to waste and anyone who stands in the way of the Liberal/Alienist doyens do-gooders are not merely wrong but they are standing in the way of progress and so must be utterly destroyed.

This explains the conflict present in the conservative Reformed Churches that currently exists. There are a smattering handful of men and churches who get this contest against the Liberals/Alienist who are now providing the leadership in Reformed Churches today. These Liberals/Alienists are not epistemologically self-conscious that they are doing the devil’s work but in their defense of women pastors, their glorification of transracial adoptions and miscegenation, and their support for ever increasing immigration, they are striking at the vitals of Biblical Christianity. They are in league with Rosseau, Locke, and de Sade, against Christ and His idea of love patriarchy, one’s own people, and place.

Of course in the end Liberalism/Alienism is just another front in the long war against Christianity. In the end this triumph of the atomistic sovereign autonomous self that embraces the idea of the inherent goodness of man and which leads to bald Alienism is just another attempt to roll God off His throne. It is an attempt at Christo-cide.

In brief, the success of Liberalism with its presupposition of the sovereign autonomous self that brooks no outside objective set of moral values has brought in its wake an Alienism which in turn has wrecked havoc on all previous norms based on the fumes of Biblical Christianity. This Liberal birthed Alienism is where we have come. It explains the inversion of all previous norms that normed all norms. This explains why Liberal/Alienist is seeking to wipe out the white man as it is the white man considered in respect to his civilization who is most closely associated with the idea of eternal norms that are outside to us and which come to us by divine authority. The assault on the white man is a proxy war for an assault on the God of the Bible. It is not the white man ultimately that the Liberal/Alienist is after. It is the Triune God who rules over all.

The deepest cut in all this is that the Liberal/Alienist has won out. They are no longer the contender/outsider who is seeking to win his championship belt. The Liberal become Alienist is the insider, the one who controls the levers of culture, the one who is seeking to snuff out the last dying embers of biblical Christianity. It is Alienism that is cool. Yet, still, Liberalism become Alienism still tries to represent itself as standing alone on the ramparts fighting the legions of zombie Christians seeking to force their standard on the world, when in reality a handful of Christians remembering the old paths of Scripture and the words and examples of their Fathers are left fighting as saboteurs seeking only, at this point, to slow down the blob that is Alienism — a blob that has covered media, entertainment, politics, education, religion, sports, medical industry, and Government and corporate America.

We ask only for God’s strength and God’s wisdom for such a day as we find ourselves in.

 

McAtee Contra Doug Wilson on Sodomy

Below is a question to Doug Wilson along with his answer. I culled this question and answer from a very interesting video below that I highly recommend.

—-

Dear Pastor Wilson,

What are your beliefs on concupiscence, and specifically, as it pertains to homosexuality?

Noah

Doug Replies;

Noah,

I believe that the stirrings of such desire are temptation, to be resisted but not confessed, and that indulgence and expression of such desire is to be confessed to God as sin. Under no circumstances should it be made an aspect of your identity.

Doug

———-

A few observations on my part now follow;

First a definition of concupiscence, since it is not a word we use a great deal today.

Concupiscence

kŏn-kyoo͞′pĭ-səns
Noun

a.) A strong desire, especially sexual desire; lust.
b.) Improper or illicit desire; sensual appetite; especially, lustful desire or feeling; sensuality; lust.
c.) Strong desire in general; appetite.

As we examine Doug’s statement we note;

1.) There is a very thin line between temptation that is not yet sin and so to be resisted and temptation that already is itself sin and so needs to be both resisted and confessed. Indeed, we see that in the book of James;

But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.

James 1:14

Here we see temptation itself is driven by a desire that is not God glorifying. So, we quite agree that not all temptation is sin and we agree that temptation is immediately to be resisted and that temptation need not to be confessed as sin though humans, being inveterate deniers of sin, probably would not be hurt by confessing more of their temptations as sin since sinful desire is what drives temptation. In terms of concupiscence in relation to homosexuality we should note that in Romans 1:26 Paul says Sodomites are given up to “vile passions,” which is to say that the disposition preceding Sodomitic acts is itself vile, i.e. sinful. As such I would be inclined to say concupiscence in relation to homosexuality should both be resisted and confessed as sin. Because of this I have a qualified disagreement with Rev. Wilson on his answer to Noah.

2.) Elsewhere on this subject Wilson has said;

“I don’t think homosexual orientation is a sin.”

This is an odd thing to say and in my estimation reveals how much peace even the conservative church has made with sodomy. I say this because I am fairly certain that Doug would not also say;

A.) “I don’t think pedophilia orientation is a sin”
B.) “I don’t think necrophilia orientation is a sin”
C.) “I don’t think that bestiality orientation is a sin”

The only reason that the initial sentence sounds reasonable to people is because most people have made peace conceptually speaking with the sin of sodomy.

On this issue of orientation we must understand here that Wilson is using “Revoice logic,” and Revoice in turn follows Roman Catholic theology as it insists that one is only culpable for what they choose. The upshot of this in this theological matrix is that if one has allegedly unbidden homosexual desire/orientation one is not sinning in that desire since that desire was not volitional.

However, here we see the Pelagian (Non-Reformed) anthropology glimmering through. The sinfulness of sin is not found in our volition cooperating with the sin. The sinfulness of sin is found in the reality of sin — chosen or unchosen — present in our lives. It is Pelagian to say that it is our choice that makes sin to be sin.

Keep in mind that in the OT there were sacrifices for unintentional sins. The unintentionality behind the sin did not relieve the sinner from the guilt that came with having committed the unintentional sin.

Just so now. The fact that homosexual desire is allegedly not combined with volition does not mean therefore that the homosexual orientation that is a consequent of the homosexual desire is not sin. It is sin and we are not helping people who have, for whatever reason, a disposition towards this kind of desire/orientation when we seek to let them off the hook of responsibility. Those people are responsible for the sin of homosexual desire even if their volition to that end is absent if only because God says such desire/orientation is sin.

Scripture teaches Christians on this score …

22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

The choice for all sinners in all the permutations of their sinful desires/orientations is to put to death (starve to death) all corrupt desires/orientations whether those desires/orientations are volitional or not.

3.) Doug says that under no circumstances should it (homosexual orientation) made an aspect of your identity.

This is to be applauded. Now if only Doug himself would not under any circumstances make homosexual orientation a part of Christian’s identity. Doug has admitted his church has “Homosexual members.”

Go to 44:15 mark.

How is saying that not working to the end of making the orientation part of their identity?

Let’s be clear here. Doug is saying that same sex attraction (Homosexual orientation) is not sin. It is not sin because allegedly there is no volition in the orientation. Yet sin is sin not because human volition makes sin sin. Sin is sin because God says sin is sin. Keep in mind also that there is no way to prove the presence or absence of volition in any given person.

Now, a Pastor might say, “I have people in my congregation who struggle with the temptation of homosexual orientation but as they do not identify with their struggle except so as to admit and confess their sin, they never refer to themselves as ‘homosexual Christians.'”

As an aside let’s try to keep in mind that when we refer to the “Homosexual” community or just to “Homosexuals” by using that language we are giving ontological status to those who are what they are not because they are ontologically a particular way. Rather they are who they are because of their patterns of sinful desire. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that homosexuals don’t even exist — at least as in the sense that we use that word today.  It is the work of Magnus Hirschfield and later Alfred Kinsey that created a whole new category of “homosexual,” as someone having some kind of unique ontological status.

Finally, let us admit that we destroy our language when we talk about things like “Homosexual sex,” or “Gay Marriage,” or “Homosexual intimacy,” as if we should think it even possible that homosexuals could have sex whatever they are doing or that it is even possible for two women to get married, or that it is even possible for sexual intimacy to occur outside it occurring as between a man and a woman in marriage. When we make our language bend to the zeitgeist by slamming these kinds of phrases together we are destroying our language and destroying our platform to defend the reality behind our language.