Union with Christ is the heart of the gospel
We are saved only as we are incorporated into the Savior by faith alone
“As the Savior, so the saved” is a wonderful slogan to sum up the gospel
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All that Christ has done is yours: His death to sin is your death to sin His resurrection to new life is your resurrection to new life His justification is your justification His righteousness is your righteousness His vindication is your vindication His victory is your victory His perseverance is your perseverance His riches and glory are your riches and glory His ascension is your ascension Even as Christ received the Spirit from the Father, so you have as well Even as Christ defeated the world, the flesh, and the devil, so you share in these triumphs
There are no benefits apart from union with the Benefactor – but because you are united to Benefactor, Christ, all he is and has is yours Everything Christ he did for you and he gives to you freely
The gospel is like a diamond with many facets – each facet is a different perspective on what our union with Christ means So long as you are united to Christ, you can no more lose your salvation than Christ can fall out of heaven Here I stand!
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This denial of agency is an entirely correct assessment of the problem – and it is largely due to the cowardice and effeminacy of so many men in the evangelical world (including pastors). There is a flight from responsibility. This a refusal of salt to be salty. Can anyone imagine John Calvin being this indifferent to the politics and culture of Geneva as Chandler is to the American political situation? Or Cotton Mather shrugging at widespread immorality in the Massachusetts Bay Colony?
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I know the Theo bros like to pick on Allie Beth (some of it deserved perhaps) but she’s definitely more gutsy than most evangelical pastors. Probably better informed and better read than a lot of those pastors too.
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Several things here worth noting for pastors and other church leaders who want to do political discipleship in their congregations (as they should).
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There is unlikely to be a “black robed regiment” leading the NCR anytime soon. And I fully understand a lot of the frustration with pastors, especially after 2020/Covid, when so many pastors had a failure of nerve. But who is exactly is leading (or will lead) the NCR? What individuals and institutions will most shape it? How sizeable is it? How much does it exist outside of social media? And what exactly is Christian about it? How is the NCR different from secular dissident right movements? There are nascent answers to some of these questions, but much is still up for grabs.
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From the beginning of the Bible to the end, liturgical leadership is masculine. Worship is led by men who represent the Son to the Bride. The songs of Miriam, Deborah, and Mary are not exceptions to this rule because these women did not lead the whole congregation (eg, in Exodus 15:20, we find Miriam only led other women in song, whereas Moses led all of Israel earlier in that chapter). There are no priestesses in Scripture. Women never teach men in a public assembly; indeed, they are expressly forbidden from doing so in 1 Cor. 14 and 1 Tim. 2. Women never read Scripture to the assembly and never preside at the communion table. There are prophetesses in Scripture but they do their prophesying outside of the gathered assembly. When the church gathers as the church, it does so under the oversight of male elders and is led by male pastors. Any deviation from this pattern is a violation of God’s Word and of God’s creational design.
If you go to a church that puts women forward as liturgical leaders, even if your church has all male officers, you should seek to reform your church or leave it for a more faithful church. The fall happened when the woman in the garden took on a position of liturgical leadership, giving the sacramental food to a man instead of receiving it from him. Sexual role reversal is at the heart of the fall. This is no small sin; it is disastrous. When the church gets this wrong, the whole culture falls into liturgical confusion (idolatry) and sexual confusion (homosexuality and other perversions). Sexual order is the key to all order.
1/3
But someone will insist that women can preach just as well as men.
Answer: It doesn’t matter. All female preachers and female pastors are Jezebels. Look at how Jezebel is described in Revelation 2: she made herself into a teacher/prophetess, leading (= seducing) people into sexual immorality. Most denominations that accept women preachers/pastors eventually accept sexual immorality (such as the LGBTQ agenda). This is because a church that allows women to become preachers has already substituted the authority of emotion and empathy for the authority of God’s Word. A church that puts a woman into office or into liturgical leadership might as well worship a goddess rather than the Triune God of Scripture. It is no longer the Christian faith; to change the symbolism is to change the religion. A god represented by a woman in public services is no longer biblical religion.
Further, Jezebels pervert the sacramental meal, just as happened in Genesis 3. Jezebels do not serve the Lord’s Supper; they serve an idolatrous meal and those who partake are communing with demons, not with Jesus.
Again, women in liturgical leadership and women in pastoral office is not a trifle. It is a huge and disastrous sin that gets compounded over time until you see just the kinds of sexual darkness that had infected our civilization today. This is why I’ve said LGBTQ is really FLGBTQ — feminism (the F) is the source of the sexual rot and rebellion all around us.
2/3
1 Corinthians 14 is a good case study in the necessity of men leading worship. (I preached a sermon on this chapter some years ago entitled “Worship That Is Masculine, Missional, and Militant” if you want to get more detail.) The entire letter of 1 Corinthians is addressed to the men of the church. Look at how many times he addressed them as “brothers….” in the letter. In 14:34f, he does not give instructions to the women directly. He says, “Let your women keep silent in the churches…for it is shameful for women to speak in church.” Note that: “Let your women….” Whose women are they? The women belong to the men – to their husbands and fathers, who are responsible for them. A command for women is actually given to men because they must lead and teach the women.
The men of the church,
particularly the male officers, are responsible for making sure all things are done decently and in order (14:40). “Decently” means with propriety, in a fitting way. It is fitting for the service to be led by men because God made men to lead, to initiate, to take corporate responsibility, to symbolize/represent the Fatherhood and Sonship of God within the Trinity to his people. “In order” means many things, but it certainly means doing things in accordance with God’s created order, which Paul unpacked earlier in the letter, especially in 11:1-15, when he argued the man is head of his wife just as God the Father is the head of Christ the Son. There is an order, a hierarchical pattern, built into the creation, rooted in the economic Trinity and reflected in liturgical and marital roles.
At issue in this is not the worth, giftedness, or ability of women. At issue is God’s command, God’s design, and the symbolism of the gospel which is at the heart of reality itself (including sexual reality).
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The CREC has accountability for local churches and pastors. We also have quite a few enemies who spend hours each day lying about us and slandering us. You’re free to look at our governing documents. This is my church’s constitution:
https://trinitypresbham.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/tpc-constitution-revised-2024-1.docx
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Very common for PCA pastors to spend more time explaining what baptism does not do than what it does. I know men who have gotten in trouble in ordination exams for quoting Knox or Calvin on baptism. I’ve seen men up for ordination get asked how the sacraments become effectual means of salvation (a WSC question) and deny that they are effectual means – but they still passed the exam.
Yes, I think the PCA has a baptism issue.
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Real pastors cannot have a failure of nerve when it comes to church discipline. If there is anything that has undermined paedobaptism, it is that failure of paedobaptist churches to carry out necessary church discipline, pruning off fruitless branches.
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Passive, abdicating fathers got us in this mess, so repentant fathers will be crucial to getting us out of it. Of course, pastors and mothers/older women (Titus 2) also have roles to play. Young Christian men need to stand their ground, pursue competency and virtue, develop godly masculinity, and many things will eventually realign. But it’s not going to be easy. Thankfully, we do have pockets of Christian culture that never departed from the old paths. But they are small right now.
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Granting Wolfe’s version of CN, what’s the plan for getting the Christian prince into power? Let’s make this practical. Pastors can’t be involved because we are not allowed to preach on politics according to Wolfe, so I don’t think there’s anything for me to do in my official capacity. But for everyone else: How does this prince get into his princely office?…
Pastors have to equip their people for political/social/economic action, which brings us back to the original question about the scope of the church’s preaching/teaching, and the place of pastors in Christian political movements.
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Insofar as race (and the related topic of ethnicity) is a biblical/theological issue and an ethical issue, pastors do need to say something about it. That doesn’t require pastors straying outside their supposed area of expertise into genetics and whatnot, but racial issues can certainly come up in a pastor’s regular expository/pulpit ministry. Here’s my stab at some of the issues:
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The church’s failure to do political discipleship is one of the reasons we are in the mess we are in
When pastors stopped preaching election day sermons, politics fell into the hands of secularists and progressives
Historically, the church discipled both civil magistrates and citizens in their political duties, according to the word of God
Many people want to keep the church out of politics, but to do so is to muzzle the pulpit
For pastors to go along with this is to refuse to preach the whole counsel of God
There is no way to restore America to political sanity without political preaching
Without such preaching from the “black robed regiment,” America would not even exist
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Men who lack purpose distract themselves with pleasure The nihilistic, black-pilled hedonism we see amongst young men today is the result of lacking a mission in life This is an indictment of the church, especially pastors – but today’s young men also represent a mission field, ripe unto harvesting
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It’s been almost 400 years since the Westminster Shorter Catechism was written
It’s been over 20 years since the start of the Federal Vision conversation
And still there are many Reformed people, including pastors, who are confused about the relationship of faith to the effectual means of salvation
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The evangelical and Reformed church in America is drowning in cheap grace
Pastors are definitely having a failure of nerve when it comes to speaking the way the Bible (not to mention the Reformed tradition) speaks of the necessity of obedience in order to be saved
People in the pews need to hear plain spoken, unvarnished truth about obedience, good works, and repentance – if most church members are made uncomfortable every now and then, that’s ok
One casualty of this downgrade is the loss of church discipline
If good works and a life of obedience are not explicitly required, how can church members be excommunicated for living in unrepentant sin?
Preaching and teaching that makes the necessity of obedience die the death of a thousand qualifications is unhelpful
We do not protect the doctrines of salvation by grace or justification by faith if we minimize grace’s power to transform or if we fail to make clear that the only kind of faith that justifies is a living, working, obedient faith
Far too many church-going American Christians do not even know the ABC’s of biblical teaching on this – they have no idea how to articulate the relationship of salvation, grace, and faith to repentance, obedience, and good works
Our preachers do not sound like the Bible – and that’s a problem
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What Trump is spouting about IVF is immoral and idiotic. But I wonder: how many American pastors have done anything to educate their congregations on the ethical problems with IVF? How many Reformed and evangelical churches have done adequate education and discipleship in this area? Does the average evangelical or Reformed Christian in America today have a solid grasp of any of these things? The story of America’s fall into apostasy and immorality cannot be told without excoriating a huge number of American pastors. “As the pastors, so the people.” When pastors fail at their jobs, there are huge social, cultural, and political consequences. The Old Testament shows this again and again – the nation of Israel fell into apostasy again and again because her priests were compromised and corrupted. The same dynamic has played out in America over the last 50+ years.
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No situation is so bad that it cannot be made worse
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“Circles are better than rows” is the perfect ministry slogan for a church accommodating itself to an egalitarian age, in which castrated pastors pander to an effeminate congregation. https://x.com/thisisfoster/s/thisisfoster/status/1838680810414838237
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Knox’s Appellation was addressed to Scotland’s nobility, the Westminster Standards were produced by Parliament wanted a new confession for the established church, etc.
The Protestant Reformation was not just ecclesiastical, it was political
The early Protestant pastors spoke to civil magistrates constantly
Etc.
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Tweets like this are exactly why people need pastors and elders so badly – because without them, you are likely to misread the Bible in a horrifically terrible way.
By the way, 1 Cor. 14:26 is a rebuke of the Corinthians disorderly worship, not a liturgical program for you to follow in your living room.
Go to church. A real church. Obey your elders, like the Bible says.
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We need less therapeutic preaching and more fire and brimstone.
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Young conservative and Christian men are being baited right now – this is especially true of white men, obviously Don’t take the bait! In other words, do not become what the left wants you to become Don’t become what they think you already are Don’t given them any ammo to use against you or against worthy causes It’s fine for the left to accuse you of all kinds of things – that can’t be controlled, and it’s inevitable since Satan’s people always make accusations against God’s people But live in such a way that the accusations are false…
Help me understand what you and others are getting at.
You want pastors to say to young men, “Now is the time for _.”
Fill in that blank for me.
If you don’t want pastors to play that role, then don’t complain when they don’t play it
If you do want them to play a role, then spell out what it is so we’ll know what you’re asking us to do
I do not think it would ever be the job of a pastor to command young men to form a militia – that’s the kind of thing a godly magistrate (especially an intermediate magistrate) could and should do
But pastors could be crucial in providing the theological rationale for things like self defense, civil disobedience, etc., as they have done historically ( eg, the Black Robed Regiment)
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The problem with so many anti-Federal Vision pastors is that they just don’t know the Bible very well
The language, imagery, and categories of the Bible remain largely foreign to them
They have a system of theology but they are obviously uncomfortable with a lot of the Bible’s language and their system cannot accommodate it
That was certainly evident in
@douglaswils
recent interview/debate with a URC pastor
I appreciate the good will gesture to make this happen but it did not inspire confidence in the direction of the Reformed church in America
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Pastors, teach the hard parts of the Bible. Especially the hard parts.
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Compared to historic Reformed theology, most Reformed pastors today tend towards a kind of antinomianism. Our forefathers were willing to make much stronger assertions about the necessity of obedience. They were more fully committed to sounding like the Scriptures and less worried about being accused of legalism.
Here is Samuel Rutherford on the role of good works in salvation:
“Good works are understood to have a causative power for eternal life in three ways…..
- That they might have an inferior and causal instrumental power conferred upon them by the grace of God, just as running is a cause of the crown which is received, contending a cause of the victory, and diet a cause of health. Neither may one be said to distinguish accurately here between a means and a cause, or between a way and a cause: for while good works are means, they are not passive, but active: a means here is an inferior cause.”
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Meg Basham has demonstrated that many leading evangelical pastors and institutions were pushed to the left by the lure of money and prestige
This is ONLY really a problem if those positions on the left are wicked and unbiblical
If those positions on the left are good and true, then the evangelical shift leftward is a good thing and those who shifted that direction should defend their move
But if those positions on the left are indeed wrong, then what’s happened is a travesty of massive proportions
The fact that so many of these evangelical leaders who got called out have denied that they shifted to the left or they’re being misunderstood tells you all you need to know
It’d be much better for them to confess that they got duped, admit they allowed themselves to be influenced by the progressive gaze, and announce they will now repent and seek to make amends
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The leftward drift of the Republican Party is a good (and sad) illustration of Conquest’s Second Law
The leftward shift of the Republican party is not the cause of America’s decline, but more the fruit of it There are many conservatives who do not realize how far gone mainstream America is spiritually
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I think Christians in past eras would find the modern notion that you need to read a book (or many books) to teach you how to be married very odd
What could possibly be more natural than marriage?
How can a book teach you to be a husband or wife?
Unfortunately cultural trends and pressures have made it difficult for a man and woman to be happily married
Obviously pastors have always taught on the biblical passages that address marriage
But they usually did so in passing – it was not an obsession – teaching on family life was simply not as necessary in the past because the people had not marinated in anti-creational, anti-biblical ideologies like we do today – plus there was a good bit of folk wisdom passed on from one generation to the next
Today we have more books, seminars, X accounts, and sermons on marriage than ever before – and yet our marriages are much more of a struggle than in past generations
Marriage done right makes life far easier and happier than it would otherwise be
To get an idea of what I have in mind regarding marriage in past generations, look at the relevant sections of Leland Ryken’s Worldly Saints
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The core tasks of the church, at least the church’s leadership, are fundamentally masculine, such as liturgical leadership (1 Tim 2), shepherding (which includes the unpleasant work of discipline/excommunication), and polemics (correcting error)
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The Christian nationalist project has zero chance of success if pastors do not get behind it and preach it
As has been said, the pulpit is the prow of culture
Besides, it’s pietistic preaching that got us into this mess in the first place
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The “federal vision” was largely a retrieval project, recovering dimensions of historic Reformed theology that have been lost in modern popularizations
FV views on baptism, ecclesiology, justification, faith, and even apostasy can find solid precedent in the Reformed tradition
Even the thing considered most novel about FV, paedocommunion, has some precedent in the tradition (Musculus) and obviously an ancient pre-Reformation pedigree ( Augustine, Cyprian, etc.)
The Reformed tradition in the past allowed for quite a bit of variety in expression and even substance on many of these questions
FV was just picking up on threads of conversations that existed in the tradition in earlier generations…
Arguably FV is more in line with Westminster on key points than those NAPARC denominations that criticized/rejected FV
That’s certainly true on the issue of sacramental efficacy where most conservative Presbyterian pastors do not uphold the teaching of their own catechism
The same is likely true on the issue of a future dimension of justification
Other issues, like apostasy or the imputation of Christ’s active obedience, are arguably not confessional issues at all – or FV views fall well within what the Confession was designed to allow, even if modern American Presbyterians have constricted allowed views on those issues
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T. H. Huxley, who became known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” embraced the theory of evolution precisely because it gave an excuse for rejecting biblical teaching He was looking for a way out from under biblical authority, as he explains: “Yet I found that, whatever route I took, before long I came to a tall formidable-looking fence. Confident as I might be in the existence of an ancient and indefeasible right of way, before me stood the thorny barrier with its comminatory notice board – “No thoroughfare – By order, Moses.”… The only alternatives were to give up my journey which I was not minded to do – or to break the fence down and go through it.” Evolutionary theory was embraced as a way to justify ethical autonomy – which is exactly what Romans 1:18ff would lead us to expect
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Good overview of Reformed political options. Rigney is exactly right to argue we need an explicitly Christian state that enforces both tables (including sexual crimes). We could quibble over the ways in which he summarizes different views but over all he was very fair.
Towards the end, Rigney acknowledges a lot of people are a mash up of different options. I think that’s probably true of me. I can agree with huge swaths of C2K, but I do think many of its dualisms are problematic and are what allowed it to get hijacked. I also think some that Rigney puts into the C2K camp are not a near fit, eg, Wolfe seems to want a natural law-only politics, and doesn’t want pastors to preach anything political, both which are significant departures from the tradition. Also, I have quite a bit of sympathy with the theonomic/reconstructionist project, but I think reliance on “nature” ( that is, wisdom) is inevitable. The Torah was never intended to be a complete civil law code, even for Israel. I am a Van Tillian, but not a Van Tillian purist; I do not think there is anything in Van Til’s overall program that forbids the use of data/evidence from outside the Bible, provided we use it within a biblical framework. Following Van Til, I believe in a revelation so epistemology, but one in which nature and Scripture for a single system. So, yeah, I guess I am somewhat eclectic.
My view of Kuyper is that he adapted historic Reformed political principles (however imperfectly) for the new situation in Holland, much as American Presbyterians adapted the WCF to the new political situation in America. Rigney takes a different, more negative view of Kuyper. I suppose that calls for further study on my part. Kuyper did become somewhat pluralistic (structurally or idealistically), and that raises question about how consistent he was with his own “every square inch” quote.
There are two issues Rigney did not cover but which I think should be part of this discussion. First, what is the role, if any, of the church? Does the church take up public space or is it more like a private club? Is it one sphere among the many spheres, or does it have some kind of centrality amongst the other spheres? Does the church have tools, weapons, or resources that can produce and maintain an explicitly Christian national consciousness and public square? And what about political preaching, eg, Calvin’s heavily politicized sermons on Deuteronomy and 1-2 Samuel or the American tradition of Election Day sermons? It seems to me Wolfe wants a natural law-only nationalism, thus it makes sense he does think preachers/pastors have anything to offer politically. But is that so?
Second, while Rigney describes the various Reformed political theologies on offer today, it would be interesting to cross-reference them with actual history. How did C2K actually play out in Calvin’s Geneva, Knox’s Scotland, etc.? What about colonial and then constitutional America? Doug Kelly, Rushdoony, Singer, North, etc., have all done work on these kinds of questions, but they should be integrated into the discussion somehow. I don’t think a pure C2K (the way it is often described) was ever put into practice but that can likely be said of the other views as well. I agree with Rigney that some of these political theologies are accommodationist (especially R2K, which just seems to be a castrated, effeminate version of C2K), but even those that are still have to figure out how to adapt and apply their principles to the world as it actually exists, not as we might wish it exists.
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There’s always a lot of pressure to be a “know it all” in the Reformed world – a tendency greatly exaggerated by social media. We should all resist the temptation to comment on things that we actually don’t know much about.
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The problem with Tim Keller on LGBTQ is not that he held the wrong beliefs – other than having a massive blind spot regarding Revoice, I don’t doubt he held basically orthodox views on LGBTQ
The problem is not his beliefs It’s that he would not preach those beliefs Homosexuality has been one of the main battle fronts in the culture for a generation, and Keller simply would not engage the enemy from his pulpit In fact, given his status and influence, he basically taught a whole generation of evangelical and Reformed preachers that there is no good way to address homosexuality in public preaching
That’s the real problem with Keller’s legacy when it comes to LGBTQ issues
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Success is dangerous – you might become prideful
But not being successful is also dangerous – you might envy those who are successful
In a fallen world, everything is dangerous, and temptation lurks around every corner
The temptations vary with circumstance
But the reality of spiritual warfare in some form is a constant
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We really should not talk about “parenting” as if raising children was gender neutral endeavor
Instead, we should talk about “mothering” and “fathering”
Mothers and fathers are (obviously) not interchangeable and play very different roles in the lives of their children
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The church in America today does not face a quantity problem — we have plenty of Christians, plenty of local churches, plenty of Christian ministries, plenty of radio stations and publishing houses, a massive social media presence, and so on.
We do not lack in numbers or resources What the church in America today faces is a quality problem — the quality of our lives, the quality of our preaching, the quality of our worship and music, the quality of our cultural engagement, the quality of our mission and mercy work, and so on, is sorely lacking.
This is doubly or triply true in the Bible Belt, where there are more low quality Christians and churches than anywhere else.
Fewer Christians, who lived higher quality Christian lives, and who attended higher quality Christian churches, with higher quality preaching and worship, would be far more effective than the millions upon millions of Christians, and thousands upon thousands of churches, that we presently have.
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I plan to telegram these words from my deathbed: “I’m so thankful for the resurrection of Christ. No hope without it.”
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Aristotelian Christians will be concerned with the telos – the end, the goal – of everything And that means their theology will be woven through with their eschatology – because eschatology is about teleology, their whole theology will be colored and shaped by their eschatological convictions
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What we need is preaching that proclaims the truth on controversial issues in a loving way
Every sinner saved by grace knows that he should show compassion to other sinners, whatever their sin might be There is no room for smug self-righteousness
But refusing to speak the truth about sin in the most hotly contested areas in the culture is simply not loving
We cannot go silent in those very areas where truth is most needed
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You know why we got clown world? Because we’ve had clown church for a long time
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Parents, if you don’t catechize your children in biblical truth, Satan will happy to give them his own catechesis
Your children WILL be discipled The only question is, “who will do the discipling?”
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Effeminacy may be considered (from one perspective) the “original sin” in Genesis 3. Adam was given the distinctively masculine task of guarding and keeping the garden (which imaged his bride). When the satanic invader entered the garden, Adam should have smashed his head. Instead, he stood by and watched as the serpent attacked his wife. Adam’s failure to crush the head of the serpent allowed his wife to be deceived by the devil. This is to say that, bound up in the fall, is the failure of a man to act as a man, to engage in a manly and godly act of violence by destroying the serpent. Adam allowed the fall to happen by becoming a pacifist when he should have gone to war; he became effeminate when he should have been manly. Our culture’s wide-ranging embrace of effeminacy and feminism (movements which essentially make men womanly and women manly) is a sign of darkness and rebellion. Our confusion about sex and sex roles is incredibly debilitating. The church’s calling includes discipling men in true masculinity and women in true femininity.
For more: https://pastor.trinity-pres.net/essays/Revoice_Article_2018.pdf
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The secularization of American public life is due to a failure of ecclesiology
American Christians have tended to have a very low ecclesiology, which diminished the role of the church, and therefore Christian faith in the life of the nation
This is why so many Christians in America make so little difference
The problem is not quantity, it’s quality – America has more than enough Christians to transform our nation, but we don’t have the *right kind* of Christians
The American church has largely been fractured, privatized, and weak – so, for example, she has rejected the practice of church discipline which means she has negated her own authority and ceded all judicial action to the state
The American church, at least since the Second Great Awakening, has preached a diluted gospel, has replaced militant psalms with sappy hymns, and has settled for “religious liberty” rather than aiming at a discipled nation We have allowed the supposed pluralism of the first amendment to replace “Jesus is Lord”
American Christians have all too often made America, rather than the church, central to their identity and their understanding of God’s purposes in history
We allowed “making the world safe for democracy” to replace the Great Commission in the national consciousness
The first settlers here saw their new civilization as the next chapter in the unfolding story of Christendom, promoting ordered liberty under the rule of Christ – at some point, we switched out that story for the story of secular liberalism and the ever increasing autonomy of the disordered individual
We allowed a secular civil religion to take the place of the Triune God – we still invoke God’s name in the Pledge of Allegiance and on our money, but this is an unknown god, not the Triune God of Scripture, which means we pay public homage to a false deity
Because we would not have Mother Church, we got the Nanny State
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We have a moral obligation to continue using fossil fuels
To stop using them would be catastrophic, leading to poverty and starvation for millions
We have no alternative energy source that can match fossil fuels right now
See @AlexEpstein‘s work for more info
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“But God still wishes in these days to build his spiritual temple amidst the anxieties of the times. The faithful must still hold the trowel in one hand and the sword in the other, because the building of the church must still be combined with many struggles.” – John Calvin
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If you go against the grain of reality, you are going to get splinters.
Feminism has promised women that liberation from their divine design – from marriage, from submission to a husband, from children, from home – would make them happy It was a lie.
The data proves it.
Harrison Butker was right: women have been lied to most of all.
Women who pursue equality with men rather than their divine calling are going to be unhappy – and there’s not any pill, therapy, or career success that can alter that for the vast majority of women.
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Nothing makes a wife more unhappy than being married to a man who thinks “happy wife, happy life” is good advice
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As the church goes, so the world goes
When the salt loses its saltiness and the light gets hidden under a bushel, the world rots and darkens
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Feminism makes women miserable – it’s well documented:
https://nationalreview.com/2021/08/why-dont-we-tell-women-whats-making-them-miserable/…
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-false-science-of-feminism/…
https://americanmind.org/salvo/what-women-want/…
https://frontpagemag.com/marxist-feminisms-ruined-lives-mallory-millett/…
https://eviemagazine.com/post/feminism-made-me-miserable-so-i-left…
https://eviemagazine.com/post/how-i-went-from-feminist-to-feminine…
Etc.
It’s all in Yenor, really. He’s the one to read on this.
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The Puritan settlers who first ventured to America’s shores were thoroughly ecclesiocentric and theocratic. They inherited this church-centered view of society under Christ’s lordship from Calvin, Bucer, Knox, and the other shining lights of the Reformation, who had in turn inherited it from the Constantinian/Augustinian order of Medieval Christendom. The Puritan settlers came not simply to escape religious persecution or to seek wealth, but to establish a “city on a hill,” a holy commonwealth that would serve as a model for other nations within Christendom to follow. In a sense, they came because they wanted to play their part in the unfolding drama of Christendom. That is America’s founding heritage.
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“Therefore, he who would find Christ must first of all find the church. How would one know where Christ and his faith were, if one did not know where his believers are? And he who would know something of Christ, must not trust himself, or build his own bridges into heaven through his own reason, but he must go to the church, visit, and ask of the same…for outside of the church is no truth, no Christ, no salvation. The Holy Christian Church is the principal work of God, for the sake of which all things were made. In the Church, great wonders daily occur, such as the forgiveness of sins, triumph over death,…the gift of righteousness and eternal life.” — Martin Luther
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Chesterton wrote, “The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues…. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
Chesterton explained wokeness a full century before it happened. The essence of wokeness is “the old Christian virtues gone mad.” Wokeness is the weaponization of Christian virtues against the Christian faith itself. Wokeness is the counterfeiting of Christian virtue, it’s anti-Christian vice cloaked and disguised in Christian garb.
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I’m not against women voting. I just wish they were better at it!
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In my lifetime, America has gone from a nation with such astounding confidence (overconfidence even) that she had quasi-messianic aspirations as the world’s “last, best hope” (a Lincolnism that has been repeated by many presidents since, both verbatim and in substance), to a nation so filled with self-loathing, so utterly lacking in confidence, so unsure herself, so wracked with guilt and shame, that she is on the verge of annihilating herself. The America of my youth in the 1980s and into the 1990s was cocky and full of purpose. The America of today is ashamed of her own existence.
America in the 1980s was a lot more fun than the 2020s – but it was deeply flawed, and the seeds that are bearing bad fruit were already planted back then. But the rapidity with which Americans have altered their self-understanding on such a massive scale is noteworthy. Cultures can change – for better or for worse – very rapidly.
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As someone has pointed out: The + sign in the LGBTQ+ string is our culture’s altar to an unknown god. But it is becoming increasingly clear that at least one idol that lurks under the + sign is pedophilia. The sexualization of children is increasing at a rapid rate in our culture.
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Whether you like the Haunted Cosmos podcast or not, you gotta admit there’s a lot of weird stuff in the Bible that we really don’t know what do with. Unbelieving, secular materialists will dismiss it all as non-sense Bible believers cannot do that. 1/11
I don’t think the Nephilim (giants) resulted from demons marrying human women. I think the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 are Sethites who fall by intermarrying with wicked Cainite women. But, reading the Bible’s unfolding story, it is very plain that there were giants all over the place in the ancient world, before and after the flood. 2/11
In 1 Samuel, it really does seem that the ghost of Samuel got called up by the Witch of Endor (even she was surprised). There is no rebuke when someone thinks that Peter’s ghost has shown up at the house. 3/11
The Bible does seem to make reference to sea monsters and dragons – and maybe unicorns too (and numerous ancient cultures also have stories and myths about such creatures, just like they do the flood). 4/11
As a Bible believer, I think an axe head floated one time and a man got swallowed by a fish. Pharaoh’s wizards could do some pretty strange things. The Red Sea parted. A donkey spoke. A invisible hand wrote on the wall. Fire fell from heaven to destroy whole cities. A woman got turned into a pillar of salt. Manna fell from heaven and water flowed from a rock. Angels have made themselves visible to men, sometimes recognizably, sometimes not. Ezekiel got to peer into heaven, and Paul was taken to the third heaven. The Apostle John got to see some very strange things. 5/11
The Bible talks about principalities and powers. It talks about spiritual war. It describes angels fighting. It calls us to spiritual warfare with demons. Who can really explain, definitively and in detail, what any of this means? 6/11
Calvin believed God uses angels to “run the world,” to execute his providential decrees in the creation. 7/11
Obviously not every weird thing that has supposedly happened is credible. We should maintain a healthy skepticism of far-fetched claims when they come from outside the Scripture. But enough weird stuff happens in Scripture that we can acknowledge there is a lot about the cosmos we do not understand It’s unlikely that the only weird things to ever happen in the history of the world got recorded in the Bible. 8/11
Obviously, a pastor should not build his ministry around investigating the strangest stuff in the Bible. That would not be productive or serve his congregation well. Nor should a pastor be overly dogmatic about these things. I do not make my own reading of Genesis 6 (the Sethite view) a test of orthodoxy and I know good men (even in my own denomination) who take a different view. 9/11
We should be wise and discerning in dealing with all of this. We should not spend too much time on things that are only revealed to us in tantalizingly incomplete ways in Scripture. But we should not completely ignore the “deep weird” in Scripture either. There is some value to be found in searching these things out, provided we do so sensibly and within the bounds of creedal orthodoxy. 10/11
One thing I appreciate about Lewis is that he took the medieval cosmology seriously (eg, Discarded Image). I shared a few more thoughts about all of this a while back in this “Enchanted Cosmos” blog post https://tpcpastorspage.com/2023/08/02/sermon-follow-up-living-in-an-enchanted-cosmos/… 11/11
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