Here re some posts on various topics from the first couple weeks of March….
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Postmillennialism is simply the view that Christ’s lordship will make a long march through the institutions. It has already begun, is continuing, and will result in a transformed, discipled world.
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I’m not sure where this came from but it’s true: “Before Christianity came to the shores of these islands, the British people were running round buck naked, painted blue and eating each other. Those are your “British values.” The rest is Christianity.”
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The world as a whole is objectively better, more leavened, than it was 1500 years ago, 1000 years ago, 500 years ago. God will show his faithfulness to 1000s of generations, as he said through Moses. Even if the leaven works slowly, and the kingdom has times of ebbing, in the long run God has promised “to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.”
“Strong and certain was the conviction of the Christians that the church would come forth triumphant out of its conflicts, as it was its destiny to be a world-transforming principle that would attain to dominion of the world.”
— J.A. Neander, History of the Christian Religion and Church (1851)
“Micah proclaims how all the world will be brought to God at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. This reunification has already begun, is taking place now, and will continue until the end of the world. … Jesus Christ has been designated the Lord, not simply of one corner of the world, but of all nations. … Since our Lord Jesus Christ’s kingdom has hardly begun, it is necessary for it to be implemented little by little, until it achieves its full perfection.”
— John Calvin, Sermons on the Book of Micah
“David was not a believer in the theory that the world will grow worse and worse, and that the dispensation will wind up with general darkness, and idolatry. Earth’s sun is to go down amid tenfold night if some of our prophetic brethren are to be believed. Not so do we expect, but we look for the day when the dwellers in all lands shall learn righteousness, shall trust in the Saviour, shall worship thee alone, O God, ‘and shall glorify thy name.’ The modern notion has greatly damped the zeal of the church for missions, and the sooner it is shown to be unscriptural the better for the cause fo God. It neither consorts with prophecy, honours God, nor inspires the church with ardour. Far hence be it driven.”
— C. H. Spurgeon
“There is a kind of veil now cast over the greater part of the world, which keeps them in darkness. But then this veil shall be destroyed, “And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread over all nations” (Isaiah 25:7). And then all countries and nations, even those that are now most ignorant, shall be full of light and knowledge. Great knowledge shall prevail everywhere. It may be hoped, that then many of the Negroes and Indians will be divines, and that excellent books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Tartary, and other now the most barbarous countries. And not only learned men, but others of more ordinary education, shall then be very knowing in religion, “The eyes of them that see, shall not be dim; and the ears of them that hear, shall hearken. The heart also of the rash shall understand knowledge” (Isaiah 32:3,4).”
— Jonathan Edwards
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One of the main things conservatives are supposed to conserve is the God-designed natural order of things in society. But many “conservatives” today cannot even explain what the natural order is. Thus, it’s not a surprise modern American conservatism has largely failed.
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A lot of what gets as diagnosed as mental illness in our day really stems from unresolved guilt and shame. Much of our culture’s mental illness crisis is really a spiritual crisis arising from a refusal to confess sin as sin and repent of it. For example, should it really surprise us that a nation that has shed the blood of 60 million unborn babies is wracked with depression, anxiety, and fear? When David committed sexual sin and then committed murder to cover it up, he finally came clean with the writing of Psalm 51. How many Psalm 51s do Americans need to write, sing, and pray before we can be healed? Not every case of mental illness arises from sin, of course. But many do. Pills and therapy are no substitute for repentance.
[Note my claims are soft rather than absolute, eg, “a lot” rather than “all.” The mental illness category has gotten stretched way too wide. Christians cannot settle for purely materialistic explanations and treatments; the spiritual dimension must also be considered. It is certainly possible to have a physical issue in the brain (or any other bodily organ) that is not due to sin in particular, but due to the general fallenness of the world. At the same time, many Christians blindly go along with the mental illness overdiagnosis craze and end up not addressing what are fundamentally moral issues. Therapeutic culture is an enemy of the gospel insofar as it replaces sin with other categories, eg, trauma. Also, Deuteronomy 28:28 has to be kept in mind when we are assessing why there has been an explosion in mental illness in our nation.]
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Many nations, from ancient Israel to modern America, are not strictly genetic (eg, there is no common ancestor from which all Americans descend, which is why we use the term “founding fathers” in a symbolic, metaphorical sense). National identities can be fluid, so that it’s possible to have a multiracial nation. Of course, in mega-nations (empires) this is even more true. That’s just an empirical fact about the world – just as empirical as the existence of biological groups we call “races.
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It’s hard to see how Noah’s sons constitute different races in a biological sense. This deserves a longer answer, but I’d say his sons founded nations which eventually, providentially, morphed into various races. Genesis 10 gives a table of 70 nations, not races.
I don’t have a problem with races as biological groups. But races are not covenantal entities the way nations are. Nations, like families, have heads so they have covenantal representation. That’s not true of races. Obviously there some nations in the world today that are monoracial. But there are no races that are mononational. In sum: Race is a biological category. Nation is a covenantal category.
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Adopting the framing of “anti-Semitism” is a mistake. It plays right into the hands of those Jews who want to subvert the Christian faith because it allows them to frame our opposition in racial rather than religious terms. We are not opposed to the descendants of Shem as such. We are opposed to Judaism, progressivism, atheism, Islam, and all other false religions and ideologies that set themselves up as rivals to Christ. Opposition to a religion of worldview is very different from prejudice against a racial group.
As a term, “Semite” does not describe a religion. It describes those who descend from Shem. Jesus is opposed to Judaism, just like he is opposed to all other false religions. But that’s not “anti-Semitism.” Not all Jews are Semites and not all Semites are Jewish. Besides, the same Jesus who attacked the Pharisees for their arrogant unbelief also wept over Jerusalem. Paul longed for his countrymen, his fellow Semites, to be saved, so much so he was willing to be cursed for their sake if possible.
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All leaders and institutions who are actually making a difference should expect sabotage attempts. The key is to be undeterred by them and press through them.
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For liturgical Protestants who follow the church calendar….
We have seasons of the church year focused on the promise of Christ, the birth of Christ, the mission of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, and so on. Why not also have a season of the church year focused on sufferings and warfare of Christ? Jesus is the reason for this season, just as he is the reason for every season of the church year.
For the record, I see little value in things like seasonal partial fasts. But I do see value in seasonal hymns and teaching that focuses on Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, Christ’s suffering on the cross, and Christ’s crushing the serpent’s head as he hung from the tree. For that matter, just as we have seasons that emphasize the Christian virtues of joy, generosity, gratitude, and so on, I think there can be value in having a season focused on the virtues of cross-bearing, self-denial, humble confession of sin, and fighting the good fight.
No church or Christian needs to keep Lent, so to speak. But (a) if you’re going to do it, do it right, and (b) that means doing it in a way that emphasizes biblical truths and virtues, not dehumanizing gnosticism or hypocritical religiosity.
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The empathy wars continue. For the uninitiated, I’d suggest reading the relevant sections of Friedman’s Failure of Nerve (or Rigney’s Christian reworking of Friedman) and compare that to Brene Brown’s therapeutic model.
The issue should be simple: Empathy is an emotion, a feeling, and like all emotions, it needs to be tested against the objective standard of Scripture before it can be validated. A person who is completely incapable of empathy is probably a sociopath; but a person who is given over to empathy with no objective moral framework is also a sociopath because they have lost all touch with reality.
Just like most every other emotion, there are good and bad forms of empathy. Good empathy aligns with God’s moral norms. Toxic, poisonous empathy is autonomous. The same could be said of love, hate, anger, etc. – all of these feelings exist in righteous and sinful forms.
Brown’s idea that empathy means we withhold all moral judgment is categorically disastrous. A child molester is sad because he just missed out on nabbing another victim….and now I’m supposed to withhold judgment and weep with him because he’s weeping? That view needs to go back to the pit of hell from which it came. Our feelings always have a moral component and therefore must always be judged, evaluated, and tested. Feelings are not morally neutral. Feelings do not get a free pass as though Christ’s lordship did not extend over them. You can never just say “Well, I feel what I feel and I can’t help what I feel.” You are responsible for your emotions. Your emotions are an overflow of who you are as a person. Your emotions, like everything else about you, must bow the knee to King Jesus. Your emotions and emotional responses reveal your character. If you are pursuing Christ-likeness, you will recognize that your emotions must be in sync with reality and with God’s Word, and when they are not, you need to repent.
Even “good” empathy is vastly inferior to sympathy and compassion in most instances. Most of the time, compassion is superior because compassion is not merely entering into another’s feelings, but taking action to rescue them from their misery. It’s standing on the bank and tossing them a rope so they won’t drown. The only instance I can think of where empathy would be on par is in the case of the death of a loved one. In the case of death, there is really no rope I can throw to the grieving person that will raise their dead loved one back to life. All I can do is get into the pit of grief with them and trust God will bound the grief with the comfort of his promises.
There is no question evil empathy is the root of our political and cultural decay. Toxic empathy is why parents don’t spank their children when they disobey, it’s why churches do not practice discipline, it’s a big reason why the murder of babies in the womb continues largely unabated in our nation, it’s why we cannot bring ourselves to dismantle the utterly destructive welfare state, it’s why we are so lacking in competent and decisive leadership, it’s why educational standards have fallen apart, it’s why we have let DEI replace skills in many workplaces, etc. Toxic empathy is the core of wokeness and progressivism. Irrational appeals to empathy have manipulated millions of voters to support wicked and foolish political candidates. And so on. To paraphrase Proverbs, the empathy of the wicked is cruel.
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I first read Friedman’s book Failure of Nerve about 15 years ago. I liked it, made some mental notes of some key points in the book, and sought to incorporate them into my life and teaching. But then I came back to the book around 2016, I re-read it, and I was astounded at how much more insightful I found him. Friedman really explains the world we live in today. There are problems with the book, e.g., he uses some evolutionary models we would reject, he takes a pretty androgynous approach to human relationships, etc. But he is still full of profound insights. His understanding of leadership is very helpful in any context — church, family, politics, business, etc. He sees that leadership is more about being confident and decisive than building a consensus. He sees how leaders face the threat of sabotage and must push through it. The chapter on empathy alone is worth the price of the book. The material on anxiety, self-differentiation, triangulation, safetyism vs adventure, the dangers of expertise/specialization and information overload, the true cause of burnout, etc., are also incredibly useful. Friedman (like Murray Bowen, perhaps a better known name) is a systems theorist. I find it relatively easy to connect a lot of his insights and principles to biblical teaching and examples.
A few quotes:
“A major criterion for judging the anxiety level of any society is the loss of its capacity to be playful.”
“I have found that the single most important factor distinguishing those families that became hopelessly stuck or that disintegrated into crisis from those that recovered was the presence of a well-defined leader. And again, by leader I do not mean someone who tells others what to do, but someone who can maintain the kind of non-anxious, well-principled presence I have been describing. What is always absent from chronically anxious, regressed families is a member who can get himself or herself outside of its reactive, herding, blaming, quick-fix processes sufficiently to take stands. It has to be someone who is not so much in need of approval that being called “cruel,” “cold,” “unfeeling,” “uncooperative,” “insensitive,” “selfish,” “strong-willed,” or “hard-headed” immediately subverts their individuality.””
“Mature leadership begins with the leader’s capacity to take responsibility for his or her own emotional being and destiny.”
“The twin problems confronting leadership in our society today, the failure of nerve and the desire for a quick fix, are not the result of overly strong self but of weak or no self.”
“If a society is to evolve, or if leaders are to arise, then safety can never be allowed to become more important than adventure.”
“Beware the insensitivities of the sensitive.”
If you haven’t read Failure of Nerve, tolle lege.
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Van Til’s Christian presuppositionalism is the opposite of fideism.
Fideism = we believe what we believe without having any reasons or evidences for it
Presuppositionalism = there is nothing but reason and evidence for what we believe
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A post from January:
If Christians are embarrassed by any part of God’s Word, progressives will continually weaponize that part of Scripture against us. They will use our embarrassment to discredit the faith as a whole.
We must be committed to living under the authority of the whole Bible, rightly interpreted. We must not apologize for anything Scripture teaches. We can explain the Word, but we must never explain it away. We must have the courage to embrace the politically incorrect and unpopular portions of Scripture and not shy away from them.
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