“Mothers, the godly training of your offspring is your first and most pressing duty.” — Charles Spurgeon
—
“We all want progress, but if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive…” —C.S.Lewis
—
If we would successfully resist Satan, we must keep close communion with Christ. The sheep are never so safe from the wolf as when they are near the shepherd.
— Charles Spurgeon
—
Theologically, Western civilization was built on Christian faith. Practically speaking, it was built on whiskey and nicotine.
—
“The Puritans exemplified maturity; we don’t. Spiritual warfare made the Puritans what they were. They accepted conflict as their calling, seeing themselves as their Lord’s soldier-pilgrims…not expecting to be able to advance a single step without opposition of one sort or another.…
Today, however, Christians in the West are found to be on the whole passionless, passive and one fears, prayerless. Cultivating an ethos that encloses personal piety in a pietistic cocoon, they leave public affairs to go their own way and neither expect nor, for the most part, seek influence beyond their own Christian circle…[but] the Puritans labored for a holy England and New England – sensing that where privilege is neglected and unfaithfulness reigns, national judgment threatens.”
– J. I. Packer
—
Two signs of a healthy church: men are singing and babies are squealing.
—
Many problems with the modern welfare state have been pointed out by conservatives. But one of the biggest is the moral hazard it creates. Welfare subsidizes immorality – and you always get more of what you subsidize and less of what you penalize. Welfare subsidizes fornication and fatherlessness. Welfare subsidizes laziness. Welfare subsidizes wild and foolish risk-taking. The problem is not some kind of safety net (though the vast majority of welfare should be through the church, families, and private charities). The problem is having too large of a safety net encourages reckless and godless behavior. It insulates people against the consequences of their bad actions. In fact, welfare often encourages and rewards bad decisions. Welfare destroys the moral feedback loop found in Proverbs, so fools never learn their lessons – and others don’t learn from watching the fool suffer the consequences of his folly. There is a reason the Bible says he doesn’t work shouldn’t eat and the mercies of the wicked are cruel. Welfare is an illustration of toxic empathy. However well-intended, those good intentions do not cancel out its disastrous effects on society.
—
John Owen, Vol. 5, p. 150 (modernized), on good works as a necessary condition of remaining in a state of justification:
“However, there is no grace or duty, required either by the law or by the gospel, that does not oblige believers to render them, both as to substance and manner of performance. Where these duties are omitted, we acknowledge that the guilt of sin is contracted; and it is accompanied by such torment that some will not own up to or allow them to be confessed to God himself. For that reason in particular, the faith and grace of believers is constantly and deeply exercised in godly sorrow, repentance, humiliation for sin, and confession of it before God, once the guilt of it is apprehend-ed. These duties are so necessary to the continuation at our justification that a justified estate cannot coexist with the sins and vices that oppose them. Thus the apostle affirms that “if we live after the flesh, we shall die,” Rom. 8:13. Someone cannot live who does not avoid things that might destroy his natural life, like fire. But these graces and duties are not the things that life depends on. Nor do our best duties affect the continuation of our justification, other than preserving us from things that are contrary to and destructive of it. The sole question is what the continuation of our justification depends on, ignoring what duties are required of us in the way of our obedience. If someone were to say informally that the continuation of our justification depends on our own obedience and good works, or that they are the condition for its continuation, then I readily agree. God does indispensably require good works and obedience in everyone who is justified; a justified estate is inconsistent with their neglect.”
Note how Owen distinguishes merit or causality from means or conditions. Works can be necessary to justification without causing justification.
—
“And here it must be observed, that when we say anything is necessary for obtaining this or that end, there is intimated by the very expressions, not the necessity of causality, but of order… Good works are necessary for retaining and preserving a state of justification, not as causes, which by themselves effect or merit this preservation, but as means or conditions, without which God will not preserve in men the grace of justification.”
—John Davenant on justification by faith and the necessity of obedience
—
Secularism’s claim to neutrality is a psyop that has been all too effective on unthinking Christians.
—
The left has no problem bringing Christ, Christianity, and the Bible into public policy, provided they’re used to prop us leftwing policy positions.
—
“Culture will never conquer nature; for it is always invincible.”
— Cicero
—
Abortion is not a complicated issue. It is not a nuanced issue. It is simple and clear cut.
—
As more guys in the PCA get deeper into historical Reformed theology, FV will be more and more vindicated.
Here’s an example: https://x.com/james_d_baird/status/1982204032241242245
—
The main link between baptism and circumcision is that they both have to do with access. Circumcision granted access to the Passover, baptism grants access to the Lord’s Supper.
—
“I know of no valid biblical, theological, or historical reason for denying any baptized Christian access to the table.
After all, they are in the family by virtue of their baptism. Why should they not be allowed to eat at the family’s table? If the main requirement to be invited to eat with Jesus is simply that one be hungry, I suppose children know as much about that as adults. Maybe they know even more. Even the youngest Christian knows about cake at birthday parties, refreshments at school, and mama’s oatmeal cookies. That’s not all we hope they will one day know about the Lord’s Super — but it is certainly the place to begin knowing. Hunger has no age limit. “Let the children come to me,” said Jesus (Mt. 19:15), “the hungry ones of whatever age”….
“One reason that baptized children belong at the Lord’s Table is that they also need to keep at it. From our youngest years, we start forming the habits of discipleship. From our first sputtering emergence from the baptismal font, we start learning how to confess, forgive, reach out, face the truth, be converted, be fed.”
— William Willimon (Sunday Dinner, p 69, 100)
—
“Remove Christ from the Scriptures and there is nothing left.”
—Martin Luther
—
An undisciplined man is an irresponsible man.
A disciplined man lives in true freedom.
Undisciplined freedom is not freedom at all – it’s slavery. Disciplined freedom is true freedom.
—
“One of the main responsibilities of a leader is to confront difficult, awkward issues quickly and with clarity, charity, and resolve. What kind of issues am I talking about? Everything from a team member’s annoying mannerisms to poisonous interpersonal dynamics and politics. There isn’t a leader out there who hasn’t balked at a moment when they should have ‘entered the danger’ and had a difficult conversation about these things. This makes sense, because I know that almost no chief executive likes to do this. Most loathe it. And yet, when leaders dodge these situations, they jeopardize the success of the team and the organization as a whole.”
— from The Motive, a leadership parable by Patrick Lencioni (HT: Nathan Spearing)
—
Discipline beats motivation every time because discipline relies on settled character and virtue, while motivation relies on emotions and feelings.
—
A self-disciplined man is a man who can do the right thing even when it is hard. He can say “no” even when his flesh is saying “yes,” but God’s law says “no.” And he can “yes,” even when his flesh wants to say “no” but God commands him to say “yes.”
This is a rule for life: Do hard things, and keep doing hard things, until they are no longer hard to do. When doing the hard thing is a matter of habit, a matter of second nature, you have become a virtuous man. Do the hard thing long enough, and the hard thing becomes easy – or at least easier.
—
A man who cannot rule himself is not fit to rule others. Self-leadership is the key to leading others.
A society that lacks self-governing men will be ruled by tyrants. As Chesterton said, if we do not keep the 10 commandments, we will have to keep the 10,000 commandments.
—
The humility to receive correction is the key to growing in wisdom.
—
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
— Faramir
“A real soldier does not fight because he has something that he hates in front of him. He fights because he has something that he loves behind his back.”
— Chesterton
—
The problem with the coward is that he does not love anything enough to defend it. He does not love anything enough to die for it. The courageous man has fears, but his love of what must be defended casts out and overcomes his fears.
—
James Baird’s new book “King of Kings” is very solid – an excellent, succinct introduction to the basics of Christian (Reformed) political theology. I’d put it right up there with Doug Kelly’s historical study, “The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World” as primer on these issues.
ADDENDUM: The book brackets out questions of theonomy, natural law, etc. You have to go elsewhere for those discussions. But the book makes a compelling case that the state has a duty to promote the true religion as a way of promoting the public good. That was the aim of the book, and it succeeds. If we can get agreement of that, we can do a lot. Much more could be said about the use of biblical law, the role of the church, etc., but it’s a short, succinct intro, and for people who are just getting into these questions, it’s a helpful read.
ADDENDUM: The book doesn’t really develop an ecclesiocentric perspective, but it’s only about 75 pages. If state has a duty to promote the true religion, that includes some kind of positive relationship with the church – and he points out how that worked in American history, with a proper understanding of 1A and state-level establishments, religious test oaths, etc. But the Spiritual authority of the church, the political aspects of the Great Commission, the politics of the gospel message and of the sacraments, ways in which the church’s government interacts with and overlaps with civil society, etc., is left out. The book’s thesis is narrow – it focuses on the state’s obligation to acknowledge God – and that’s a good starting point. You really can’t get a state that acknowledges God without a church (mainly pastors) calling for it to happen.
ADDENDUM: “Doesn’t Christian politics require theonomy?”
I think a Christian politics *will* default to some kind of “general equity theonomy” – it pretty much always has in the past. I think a lot of Christians today have accidentally become fairly theonomic, without having ever heard of “theonomy,” just out of instinct (and because it’s the most obvious alternative to progressive craziness). I was just pointing out that Baird’s short book does not try to answer the question.
Christians would get to a general equity theonomy position a lot faster if pastors would actually preach OT law, showing the wisdom of its principles. Vern Poythress’ book The Shadow of Christ in a law of Moses is helpful, along with all the classic sources. Constantine, Theodosius, Alfred, Calvin’s Geneva, Blackstone, the New England Puritans, etc. all used principles from Torah to shape policy and penology, so becoming acquainted with history is also helpful.
I did appreciate Baird’s emphasis on prudence. Following Althusius, he points out that a Christian magistrate might have to permit for a season what he cannot prevent. Even if we have an ideal Christian republic in mind, politics remains “the art of the possible,” and much of that ideal will be unrealized until the people are primed for it. The most dedicated theonomic magistrate in America today still has to work within the constraints of the system and the character deficiencies of the people he governs.
—
Why is it so important for Christians to be covenantal and postmillennial (besides the fact that these doctrines are biblical)? Because rival worldviews are covenantal and postmillennial in their own way. Progressivism, Marxism, Islam, etc. are all worldviews that claim ownership of children and expect global victory.
For Christians, the covenant promises mean that God claims our children. He makes promises to a 1000 generations. “I will be a God to you and your children after you.”
To be postmillennial means we believe the Great Commission will be fulfilled, in history, before Jesus’ final coming. The nations will be discipled. Cultures will be Christianized. Kings and their people will bring their treasures into Christ’s kingdom. “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.”
—
We must never allow any form of tribalism trump the unity believers have in Christ. All “identities” in identity politics must be subordinated to the gospel. The answer to the failure of the secular post-war consensus is the gospel, not some kind of racial identity politics or secular nationalism.
—
“The case for European colonialism is simple. It is the case for humanity itself, for the ways that human beings have always acted rationally to better their situations in life, and those of their children. It is the case for having a teacher, a coach, or a model. It is the case for having opportunity. It is the case for peace, progress, and running water. It is the case for living in a place where life is better and escaping from a place where life is worse. It is the case for human agency and freedom. In short, it is the case for a humble submission to the facts of life rather than the worked up intellectual fantasies of the scholar class.”
— Bruce Gilley
—
Colonialism was, on the whole, good. Foreign aid is, on the whole bad.
—
Taking a risk = betting on yourself
—
Joseph Story on the proper interpretation of the first amendment:
“Probably at the time of the adoption of the constitution, and of the amendment to it, now under consideration, the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and the freedom of religious worship. An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation…
It yet remains a problem to be solved in human affairs, whether any free government can be permanent, where the public worship of God, and the support of religion, constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state in any assignable shape…
The real object of the amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to an hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government. It thus cut off the means of religious persecution…”
—
John Adams’ 1813 letter to Thomas Jefferson on America’s Christian founding:
“ The general principles in which the fathers achieved independence, were the only principles on which that beautiful assembly of young men could unite, and these principles only could be intended by them in their address, or by me in my answer. And what were these general principles? I answer, the general principles of Christianity, in which all those sects were united, and the general principles of English and American liberty…”
—
“[Culture is changed by] the regenerating power of God and the work of the Holy Spirit in and through us. Not revolution but regeneration, not coercion but conversion, is our way of changing the world and furthering the Kingdom of God. This is the heart of Christian reconstruction.”
— Rushdoony, Roots of Reconstruction, p 281f
—
Abortion remains legal because the progressives have trained us that sex without consequences is a human right. Sex is such an idol in our culture that people will trample dead babies underfoot to get the orgasm they think they deserve.
—
Ezekiel 17:22-24
[22] Thus says the Lord GOD: “I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar and will set it out. I will break off from the topmost of its young twigs a tender one, and I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain. [23] On the mountain height of Israel will I plant it, that it may bear branches and produce fruit and become a noble cedar. And under it will dwell every kind of bird; in the shade of its branches birds of every sort will nest. [24] And all the trees of the field shall know that I am the LORD; I bring low the high tree, and make high the low tree, dry up the green tree, and make the dry tree flourish. I am the LORD; I have spoken, and I will do it.”
Matthew 13:31-32
[31] He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. [32] It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
—
“We could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing, and washing machines to eyeglasses, antibiotics, and disposable diapers. We enjoy fresh, safe milk and meat, and vegetables and tropical fruits heaped in snowbound cities. When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry. When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence, as one would for a church procession. What power of conception, what grandiosity: these cranes tie us to ancient Egypt, where monumental architecture was first imagined and achieved. If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts. A contemporary woman clapping on a hard hat merely enters a conceptual system invented by men. Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Even Thoreau’s Walden was just a two-year experiment. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.”
― Camille Paglia
—
I had a similar experience, with the caveat that I am a “high church” Protestant. I do not think all evangelicals would feel equally at home in the fathers. Chemnitz is particularly also helpful sorting out these issues, especially sola Scriptura in the early church.
—
Illegal immigrants are living on stolen land.
—
“All of liberalism comes down to ‘screw you, dad.’”
— Michael Knowles
—
1 Corinthians 14:35 and 1 Timothy 2:9ff prohibit women from liturgical and ecclesiastical leadership, whether they hold office or not. Pastoral and governing offices are clearly forbidden, but exercising the functions of office without out being ordained into formal office are also forbidden. Liturgical leadership is masculine. Church governance and shepherding are masculine tasks.
—
An old post on John Murray:
It’s very surprising and disappointing that John Murray seems to be almost completely neglected these days It’s like he has fallen off everyone’s radar
The Westminster Seminary professor was one of Reformer theology’s brightest lights during the 20th century
His Principles of Conduct is full of insight and valuable discussions, even if he got a few things wrong (as I believe he did)
His Redemption Accomplished and Applied is a classic of Reformed soteriology, rooted in union with Christ His commentary on Romans is still hugely important
But I think Murray’s most important contributions are found in his 4 volume Collected Writings
These works include his superb article on definitive sanctification and his ground breaking essay recasting the visible church/invisible church distinction into much more helpful historical church/eschatological church categories
But perhaps his best contribution is the essay “The Atonement and the Free Offer of the Gospel”
Many of Murray’s writings may be considered proto-FV, but especially this one
He paves the way for the category of a non-elect covenant member
He lays the groundwork for a robust doctrine of apostasy (covenant breaking)
He argues forcefully that all benefits the non-elect enjoy in this world accrue to them from the atonement of Christ
In other words, Jesus is the Savior of all men, especially the elect
The design and extent of the atonement is not limited to the elect
Yes, it is efficacious for final salvation only to the elect, but Jesus purchased non-saving blessings at the cross as well
Every good thing a non-elect person enjoys in this life flows to him from the cross
The cross is the only reason an unbeliever alive today is not already in hell
Jesus provided at least a temporary covering for everyone
To put it another way, even common grace is mediated through Jesus to the world
With regard to non-elect covenant members (a crucial issue in debates over paedobaptism with Refomed Baptists), Murray’s terse but insightful discussion of Hebrews 10:29 is very helpful
Here is a quote from Murray (though I urge everyone interested in these discussions to read the whole essay):
“Furthermore, we must remember that all the good dispensed to this world is dispensed within the mediatorial dominion of Christ. He is given all authority in heaven and in earth and he is head over all things. But he is given this dominion as the reward of his obedience unto death (cf. Phil. 2:8, 9), and his obedience unto death is but one way of characterizing what we mean by the atonement. Thus all the good showered on this world, dispensed by Christ in the exercise of his exalted lordship, is related to the death of Christ and accrues to man in one way or another from the death of Christ. If so, it was designed to accrue from the death of Christ. Since many of these blessings fall short of salvation and are enjoyed by many who never become the possessors of salvation, we must say that the design of Christ’s death is more inclusive than the blessings that belong specifically to the atonement.
This is to say that even the non-elect are embraced in the design of the atonement in respect of those blessings falling short of salvation which they enjoy in this life. This is equivalent to saying that the atonement sustains this reference to the non-elect and it would not be improper to say that, in respect of what is entailed for the non-elect, Christ died for them.
We have in the Scripture itself an indication of this kind of reference and of the sanctifying effect it involves in some cases. In Hebrews 10:29 we read: ‘Of how much sorer punishment, think ye, shall he be accounted worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?’ The person in view we must regard as one who has abandoned his Christian profession and for whom there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment’ (Heb. 10:26, 27). It is the person described in Hebrews 6:4, in terms of the transforming effects experienced but who falls away and cannot be renewed unto repentance. In 2 Peter 2:20-22 the same person is described as having escaped the defilements of the world’, as having ‘known the way of righteousness’, but as having turned back and returned as the dog to his vomit or the sow to wallowing in the mire. This is— terrible to contemplate! —the apostate. Our particular interest now is that he is represented as sanctified in the blood of Christ. Whatever may be the particular complexion of the sanctification in view, there can be no question but that it is derived from the blood of Christ and, if so, it was designed to accrue from the blood of Christ.
The benefit was only temporary and greater guilt devolves upon the person from the fact that he participated in it and then came to count the blood by which it was conveyed an unholy thing. But, nevertheless, it was a benefit the blood of Christ procured, and procured for him. We must say that, to that extent Jesus shed his blood for his benefit. Other passages are probably in the same category. But this one suffices to show that there are benefits accruing from the death of Christ for those who finally perish. And in view of this we may say that in respect of these benefits Christ may be said to have died for those who are the beneficiaries. In any case it is incontrovertible that even those who perish are the partakers of numberless benefits that are the fruits of Chris’s death and that, therefore, Christ’s death sustains to them this beneficial reference, a beneficial reference, however, that does not extend beyond this life.”
—
The Great Commission in action:
—
Posts from March 12 and July, 11, 2025, on the Britain and the British before the gospel came to them:“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.”
ADDENDUM: Caesar, in writing home, said of the Britons, “They are the most ignorant people I have ever conquered. They cannot be taught music.” Cicero, in writing to his friend Atticus, advised him not to buy slaves in England, “because,” said he, “they cannot be taught to read, and are the ugliest and most stupid race I ever saw.””
ADDENDUM: Druids certainly practiced human sacrifice early on; some historians believe they also practiced cannibalism. They were definitely savages. Julius Caesar, who led the first Roman landing in 55 B.C., said the native Celts “believe that the gods delight in the slaughter of prisoners and criminals, and when the supply of captives runs short, they sacrifice even the innocent.” First-century historian Pliny the Elder went further, suggesting the Celts practiced ritual cannibalism, eating their enemies’ flesh as a source of spiritual and physical strength. Of course, the Celts had no written language so they left no records of their own. Look it up yourself:
https://nationalgeographic.com/culture/articl
ADDENDUM: Caesar’s description: “All the Britons, indeed, dye themselves with woad, which produces a blue color and makes their appearance in battle more terrible. They wear long hair and shave every part of the body save the head and the upper lip.”
Herodian described the Celts this way: “They are without clothes but with necks and waist adorned with iron, valuing the metal as an ornament and a display of wealth as for gold to other Barbarians. They also draw (grafaís) patterns and pictures of various animals on their bodies and this why they’re naked as for not cover them.”
—
I like to say, “Romans 6 is gospel too” Lloyd-Jones used to say, “You haven’t preached the gospel unless the antinomian objection of Romans 6:1 is raised”
My counterpoint is that the antinomian objection means you have not yet finished preaching the gospel Paul’s answer
—
The English Calvinists (known as Puritans) were the pioneers of the modern scientific revolution. The early membership of the British Royal Society (the oldest continuously existing scientific adcademy in the world, founded in 1660) was heavily Puritan. Dyke explains:
“Merton pointed out that “among the original list of members of the Royal Society in 1663, 42 of the 68 for whom information pertaining to religious leanings is available, were clearly Puritan.”…This indication of the preponderance of Puritans among English scientists in the seventeenth century is all the more striking when consideration is given to the fact that the Puritans were never more than about 4 percent of the population.”
—
A post from November 2024 on patriarchy and spousal abuse:
“Evangelical feminist dogma that patriarchy leads to spouse abuse is denied time after time in scholarly studies. After analyzing a number of studies of domestic violence, Canadian psychologist Donald G. Dutton of the University of BritishColumbia concluded, “no direct relationship exists between patriarchy and wife assault.”4 He wrote “…patriarchy does not elicit violence against women in any direct fashion. Rather, it may provide the values and attitudes that personality-disordered men can exploit to justify their abuse of women. This distinction is an important one….”
While it is evil for any Christian husband to justify violence against his wife by appealing to the Biblical doctrine of father-rule, such self-justification is a far cry from the feminists’ claim that this doctrine is the cause of the abuse. Samuel Johnson warned against the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy when he wrote, “It is incident to physicians, I am afraid, beyond all other men, to mistake subsequence for consequence.”
But the absence of a causative relationship between patriarchy and spouse abuse is just the tip of the iceberg of problems created for feminists by the growing body of evidence which demonstrates that domestic violence is not intrinsically male. The November 23, 1999 New York Times ran the following headline, “Crackdown on Abusive Spouses, Surprisingly, Nets Many Women.” The article began:
‘Defenders of battered women long struggled to persuade authorities to crack down on brutal men who reigned by the fist at home. But those crackdowns have produced an unexpected consequence: in some places, one-quarter or more of arrests for domestic assault are not of men but of women.’
Those who are serious about addressing domestic violence must turn away from their exclusive focus on fathers and husbands and their blame game attacking God’s father-rule. We must consider how best to teach mothers and wives that battering their husbands and children is no way to solve their emotional problems. Worse, it dishonors God.” (https://warhornmedia.com/2020/10/26/wom)
—
The Reformation recovered the independence of the British church from the papacy:
—
“How can anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life? The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly, but what use it all that if in the very centre of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth…
Yet in Her own buildings, in Her own ecclesiastical art and music, in Her hymns and prayers, in Her sermons and in Her little books of devotion, the Church will tolerate, or permit a pious intention to excuse work so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling, so insincere and insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent craftsman….
God is not served by technical incompetence; and incompetence and untruth always result when the secular vocation is treated as a thing alien to religion.”
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos?
—
Jesus took the Genesis creation account as literal history (cf. Matthew 19, Mark 10). You should too.
Paul took the Genesis creation account as actual history (cf. 1 Timothy 2). You should too.
—
A. A. Hodge of Princeton, who was himself a missionary in India in his early years, correctly saw the major change in missionary strategy which the new (in his day) premillennial prophetic viewpoint had brought about, compared to what earlier postmillennial missionaries had done:
“[Premillennial] missionaries have a style of their own. Their theory affects their work in the way of making them seek exclusively, or chiefly, the conversion of individual souls. The true and efficient missionary method is, to aim directly, indeed, at soul winning, but at the same time to plant Christian institutions in heathen lands, which will, in time, develop according to the genius of the nationalities. English missionaries can never hope to convert the world directly by [individual] units.” (from Iain Murray, The Puritan Hope, p. 204f)
In other words, the Great Commission requires discipling both individuals and institutions – which makes sense, given that institutions reflect the belief systems of those who administer them.
In Matthew Henry’s commentary on the Great Commission, he says the commission means “that Christianity should be twisted in with national constitutions, that the kingdoms of the world should become Christ’s kingdoms, and their kings the church’s nursing-fathers.” In other words, Henry understood that the fulfillment of the commission would result in Christian nations with a generally Christian people and a generally Christian culture.
—
I have yet to see any opponents of “Christian Nationalism” explain how a nation can be discipled (per the Great Commission) without becoming what could be called a Christian nation.
The explicit goal of the Great Commission is discipled nations – which are Christian nations.
This is just basic stuff. It’s not complicated. It’s Christianity 101. It takes a M.Div to screw up something this obvious.
ADDENDUM: I’m not interested in fighting over a label, so call it what you want. I’ve suggested “Christian Republicanism” as an alternative since “republican” language is used in the US Constitution. But that term is tainted and confusing in ways too.
The background to “nations” in the Great Commission has to come from the OT, where there is obviously a political element included (eg, Psalm 2, Isaiah 60, etc.). According to Acts 17:26, “nations” have borders – again suggesting a political element. The Great Commission has individual and institutional aspects.
The term “Reconstruction” in “Christian Reconstructionism” was considered problematic too some decades ago because it could be confused with the “Reconstruction” period in America’s history. The term got defined differently by CR advocates and served its purpose for a time. I imagine the same will be true of the CN label. “Nationalism” has baggage but it can also be reclaimed and redefined.
This is my take on CR and CN:
theopolisinstitute.com/notes-on-chris…
ADDENDUM: The background to and pattern of the Great Commission is established by what God did with old covenant Israel. That’s the blueprint: God baptized the nation of Israel as they crossed the Red Sea, then brought them to Sinai where he taught them his commands. The Great Commission is really a call to Israelize the Gentile nations. This biblical-theological pattern trumps attempts to truncate the commission, such as saying it’s really only about baptizing and discipling a remnant of individuals in nations, or its only about non-political “people groups,” or it’s only about personal discipleship and not also institutional and cultural discipleship. In addition, teaching the nations everything Jesus has commanded will entail teaching the whole Bible, which covers political and cultural issues anyway.
ADDENDUM: There a lot that could be said, and has been said to address these arguments elsewhere. I’m not repeating all that. All I will say here is that fulfillment of the Great Commission depends on both quantity and quality. Even if “ethnos” is taken merely as individuals from nations, and any geo-political aspect is sidelined, it still requires a sufficient number of conversions such that we can say the nation itself was discipled. And for the nation to be discipled by being taught all Jesus commands will be qualitatively transformative in every area of life, inescapably.
I live in a city with lots of Christians – thousands upon thousand of believers live here. But I do not live in a discipled city, because we still fall short, quantitatively and qualitatively, of what the GC requires. There is still much work to be done.
ADDENDUM: Nation-states consist of individuals. When Israel was baptized in the Red Sea, individuals got baptized. A lot of confusion in this discussion over means and end result. No one has ever argued that a nation must be converted all at once (though there may be a few examples of that historically). As a father, if disciple my family, I do that by getting them baptized one by one. Each member of the family has to be taught Jesus’ commandments. The result is a “discipled family.”
ADDENDUM: There were nations in the sense of identifiable people groups with a shared government, borders, language, culture, etc. Sure, some aspects of nationhood have changed over history, and will again, but even within Matthew’s gospel we see this. For example, Matthew 10:18, 20:25, 24:7, and so on, indicate nations are people with rulers. In the book of Acts, Paul very much desires to preach to kings and is told when he in converted/commissioned that he will preach to rulers; Paul wants to be like David, Daniel, etc. from the OT, preaching to civil authorities. Revelation says the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of Christ because he King of kings and Lord of lords. Paul gives instruction for Christian magistrates in Romans 13 even though none existed at the time. The Reformed confessions all call on civil rulers to privilege the church and the Christian religion, which I take to be one aspect of fulfilling the GC. Etc.
ADDENDUM: There were nations in the sense of identifiable people groups with a shared government, borders, language, culture, etc. Sure, some aspects of nationhood have changed over history, and will again, but even within Matthew’s gospel we see this. For example, Matthew 10:18, 20:25, 24:7, and so on, indicate nations are people with rulers. In the book of Acts, Paul very much desires to preach to kings and is told when he in converted/commissioned that he will preach to rulers; Paul wants to be like David, Daniel, etc. from the OT, preaching to civil authorities. Revelation says the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of Christ because he King of kings and Lord of lords. Paul gives instruction for Christian magistrates in Romans 13 even though none existed at the time. The Reformed confessions all call on civil rulers to privilege the church and the Christian religion, which I take to be one aspect of fulfilling the GC. Etc.
ADDENDUM: Obviously, my postmil eschatology colors the way I see the GC. A nation is not fully discipled until the people of that nation have been taught to obey all of Jesus’ commands. I think Jesus’ commands cover not just individual lives, but social and political life as well. My understanding of what a “discipled nation” is flows from that. If there can be a Christian (or discipled) family, there can be a Christian (or discipled) nation.
The GC means discipling people in a nation to such an extent that the nation itself can legitimately be called a “discipled nation.”
ADDENDUM: Revelation 7 describes a multitude drawn “from” every nation. But this is a composite vision, a picture of the saved across history. If 500 years from now China is a largely discipled nation, in which the vast majority are Christians, in would be correct, looking back across history, to say a multitude “from” China had been redeemed. This does not preclude the possibility of China having become a Christian nation at some point in history, nor does it mean that never any more than a small remnant of Chinese were converted at every point in history.
—
Columbus Day is a reminder that when Christians celebrate church history, we do not just celebrate great theologians, pastors, and scholars, like Luther and Calvin. Our “Hall of Faith” includes explorers, conquerors, warriors, statesmen, artists, scientists, businessmen, and others who, by faith, accomplished great things. The Christian faith is not confined to the four walls of the church and the great men of Christian history have not just been church leaders, but political leaders, military leaders, etc. This is so because the Christian faith does not just aim at getting souls into heaven but building Christendom on earth. Today, we salute that great Christian hero who brought the glories of Christian civilization to a new hemisphere.
—
Faithful Christians confront the world. Third-way Christians try to accommodate the world.
Do you want more Charlie Kirks? Or more Russell Moores and David Frenches?
—
The mission of the church is not merely to avoid evil but conquer it.
—
I chose to be a Calvinist. I’m not sure why God predestined some people to be Arminians.
—
Today is Columbus Day, and Christopher Columbus is certainly a man worthy of remembrance and celebration.
Of course, in this “politically correct” era, it is commonplace to attack Columbus. We have seen attempts to turn this day into “Indigenous Peoples Day” (why would we celebrate people who practiced constant tribal warfare, human trafficking/slavery, and human sacrifice?). We have seen Columbus statues torn down in recent years. Because Columbus represents Western civilization, traditional masculinity/”the patriarchy,” and the Christian faith, he is an easy target for today’s progressive degenerates to attack.
While Columbus was not a perfect man (obviously), he was a great man and may certainly be considered a Christian hero, as his courageous exploration was very much tied to seeking to spread the gospel to new lands and peoples.
Edwin Friedman described the greatness of Columbus as a leader this way:
“Columbus is the very embodiment of[leadership]. Not only was he one of the most imaginative men of all time, but he was also one of the most determined, as well as the great example of the principle that vision is not enough. Almost two millennia previously the Greeks also knew the world was round, but Columbus was the first to say, ‘Follow me westward as a way to go east.’ To be determined, decisive, visionary, and still keep your wits about you may be what it takes to reorient any marriage, family, organization, society, or civilization.”
David Chilton describes Columbus’ triumph this way:
“Not one historian in a hundred knows what really motivated Christopher Columbus to seek a western route to the Indies. Trade? Yes, that was part of the reason. More than this, however, it was an unfulfilled prophecy. Before he began his expeditions, Columbus crammed his journals with quotations from Isaiah and other biblical writers in which he detailed the numerous prophecies that the Great Commission to disciple all the nations of the world would be successful…He figured that if the Indies were to be converted, a sea route would be a much more efficient way to bring them the Gospel. And he credited his discoveries not to the use of mathematics or maps, but rather to the Holy Spirit who was bringing to pass what He had foretold.”
—
Spiritually speaking, I want to convert progressives. Politically speaking, I want to defeat progressives.
—
The problem with so much “third way” thinking is that it tries to be above the fray when God wants us in the fray
—
“You’re not choosing a girlfriend, you’re choosing your son’s mother.”
— Eric Jorgenson
—
Inflation due to printing more money is a form of taxation without representation.
—
This talk from Helen Andrew’s is very good. I used some of her stats in my talks in Wichita. My only disagreement: I think it’s going to take more than just doing away with feminist DEI to get things to snap back into their natural shape. I think men are going to actually have to confront and restrain and train women under their authority. The modern Western/American woman has gone feral and has to be re-domesticated.
—
Separating politics from religion would have been incomprehensible to people in the first century, especially first century Jews, for whom *everything* was religious. Jesus came preaching a kingdom. He claimed all authority is his before he departed. Those are political claims.
—
Genesis 18:17-19 is a good text for tying together mission inside and outside the household – note the “so that” in v. 19. Abraham is to disciple his household so that the nations might be discipled (as promised back in chapter 12).
—
The world celebrates female rebellion and laughs at masculine virtue.
We do not hold women accountable and we demonize men who try to.
—
Feminine nature is primarily designed to nurture, care, comfort, glorify, help. Masculine nature is designed primarily to rule, protect, provide, cultivate, build.
—
Masculinity is drawn to femininity.
Masculinity draws out her femininity.
Femininity is drawn to masculinity.
Femininity draws out his masculinity.
—
A man’s mission is a matter of vocation and vision, planning and plodding, dominion and discipline.
As a man, your duties are not unbearable burdens to carry, but an honor to fulfill.
—
We want life to be easier. God wants us to make us stronger.
We want to lower the hoop. God wants us to jump higher.
God calls us to do many things which require more strength than we presently have. Why? Because God wants us to strengthen ourselves in him, like David did in a trying situation (cf. 1 Samuel 30:6).
—
A note on the culture war:
It’s important to note the distinction between how we deal with cultural and political issues from how we treat people we interact with people in our daily lives. This elementary, but sometimes those want Christian to somehow transcend or escape the culture war fail to make this distinction.
I oppose illegal immigration but I am kind to every immigrant I meet in daily life (it’s obviously impossible to know someone’s legal status in such cases). The fact that I think we should deport millions of people has never led me to personally harm any of them, nor will it ever do so.
I abhor LGBTQ but that has never led me to mistreat a sodomite I’ve encounter in real life. I have told them forthrightly what I think of their perverted lifestyle, but always in love. Being clear and being kind are not mutually exclusive categories.
I despise abortion and all manifestations of feminism, and I’ve had some intense discussions with feminists, online and in person. But I always try to be courteous and respectful when dealing with another person, even one with whom disagree.
And so on.
Yes, we are at war – ultimately a spiritual war. Fighting that war for the Christian involves two key weapons, truth and love. We must have both or we are fighting shorthanded. In fact, it’s impossible to truly have love without truth and vice versa.
Speaking the truth firmly, bluntly, and directly is not at all incompatible with speaking the truth in love. Indeed, they usually go together. It is unloving to refuse to speak truth to those who desperately need to hear it. Was Paul unloving to sodomites when when he said their actions call down God’s wrath? Was he unloving when he told the Galatian Judaizers to not stop at circumcision, but go the whole way and castrate themselves? Was Jesus unloving when he pronounced woes on the Pharisees?
There is a time for gentle rhetoric – a soft answer turns aside wrath. And there is a time for harsher rhetoric – sometimes the weightiness of the truth can be communicated in no other way.
—
From Lewis’ “Reply to Professor Haldane” recorded in the “Of Other Worlds” collection of essays:
“I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretentions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity as some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And as Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to a theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by rulers with the force of religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents.”
Am I sinning if I prefer theocracy to democracy as those terms are defined here? If I am not sinning, who cares? There is no standard so I can actually do whatever I want. If I am sinning, it can only because God commands one form of government rather than another – which means theocracy of some sort is inescapable. We cannot ever get away from God. If I am obligated to prefer democracy, that obligation must come from God, which means even my preference for democracy is at root theocratic.
—
If we do not develop our boys to be masculine leaders, society will descend into chaos.
If you lose the men, all is lost.
—
Romans 1:18ff shows that late stage societies embrace LGBTQ. When a society openly approves of women in leadership, confuses the sexes, and promotes sodomy, the end of that society as it has existed is drawing near. Such societies have been sapped of masculine vitality and energy. They are being judged.
—
Feminism champions women’s choices until and unless they choose a traditional form of life. Then those women are vilified. If women want want their grandmothers had, they are considered traitors to the feminist cause.
—
The culture war matters because spirutual problems manifest themselves as cultural and political problems.
—
Wokeness is simply feminism gone public.
—
A man’s mission is a matter of vocation and vision, planning and plodding, dominion and discipline.
—
What’s you favorite example of winsomeness in the Bible?
Is it Jesus pronouncing woes on the Pharisees in Matthew 23?
Is it Amos calling the wicked wives in Israel cows of Bashan?
Is Paul calling out the sin of sodomy as the unnatural use of the body that provokes God’s wrath?
Is it Elijah taunting the priests of Baal?
Is it Paul telling the Judaizers to castrate themselves?
Is it John the Baptist calling the Pharisees and Saducees a brood of vipers?
There so many examples, it’s hard to choose.
—
Third-wayism is the just the fear of man translated into a philosophy of ministry.
Third-wayers would rather offend God than man.
—
It’s worth noting those influenced by Charlie Kirk ended up as political/cultural conservatives and those influenced by Tim Keller ended up as political/cultural progressives. The legacy of Kirk is a multitude of young men returning to church. The legacy of Keller is Russell Moore, David French, and Francis Collins.
—
From 8/23/24:
Dating advice for young Christian men and women:
Besides marrying a like-minded believer, marry someone who is happy
If they’re not happy without you, they won’t be happy with you
—
People who say we should keep politics and religion separate understand neither.
ADDENDUM: What about Lewis’ “Meditation on the Third Commandment”?
It’s not really directly relevant to my comment. Lewis never argues that politics is religiously neutral or that we shouldn’t do political theology. He pointed the problems that Christian political parties tend to run into – and at that level, I have no disagreement. Given that Lewis was an Anglican, a state church, I assume he understood very well that politics and religion are never totally separable, even if the connection is messy.
Iirc, Lewis advises relying on reason and writing the equivalent of your Congressmen. Neither of those is very promising today – reason has been killed by postmodernism and Congress is basically useless. Oh, and then he says you can always seek to convert your neighbor and build a Christian majority – which is the most practically political thing we can do. With that I agree.
ADDENDUM: “Isn’t it arrogant to think you can speak for God in the public square?”
This criticism applies to everyone. If someone thinks we live on stolen land, they are implying the state is under a higher law that it should obey. If someone says the state should be kind to immigrants they are arrogantly imposing their standard of morality on the whole nation. If someone says they state should care the poor, they are claiming to know God’s will for how our tax dollars should be spent. Etc. The question, as always, is, “What has God actually said?” And there is a place we can go to find those answers.
—
I’m not a huge fan of the label “Christian nationalism” but it’ll do for now as a placeholder for the sake of discussion until something better comes along. The CN discussion is necessary and important.
In the meantime, one thing that I think is missing from a lot of CN discussion is its ultimate grounding. It is wonderful to show that the CN program is rooted in the political theology of the 16th century Reformers, so it’s really a return to our theological roots. It’s wonderful to demonstrate that most of the “scary” CN agenda has already been a reality for much of American history (and for much of the history of Western civilization), and so it’s really not anything new or unproven.
But what is of supreme importance is to show that CN flows out of the gospel. Jesus Christ, the God-man, the eternal Son and Word of the Father, was made flesh, entering our history and humanity. He was nailed to a tree by the powers that be in church (Israel) and state (Rome). He died for our sins, taking the wrath and curse we deserve as a substitutionary sacrifice. By dying he defeated death and crushed Satan’s head. On the third day, he rose again from the dead, still fully human, but now in glorified flesh. His resurrection was his vindication and his triumph. After appearing to his disciples for forty days, he ascended into heaven to take his seat on the throne of the cosmos, possessing all authority in heaven and on earth, and ruling as King of kings and Lord of lords. In heaven, he makes intercession for his people. Fifty days after his resurrection, he poured out his Holy Spirit to empower his church to fulfill the mission he gave them, the mission of claiming all nations as his possession, baptizing them and teaching them the entire Bible. Over the course of history, despite many ups and downs, despite a great deal of unfaithfulness even amongst those who claim to be his followers, his kingdom will grow and he will inherit the nations as his redemptive possession. He saves all who call upon his name in faith and repentance, granting new life and the forgiveness of sins. At the last day, there will be a resurrection of the dead when he comes again in glory to be the judge of all people, sending away those who have rebelled against his rule into the lake of fire, and bringing those who have followed him into the eternal glory of the new creation. The salvation Christ bring us entirely the work of God’s grace, from beginning to end, though it includes our grace-empowered faith and obedience. The salvation Jesus brings transforms, restores, and renews individuals, families, and nations.
This gospel is the basis of Christian nationalism. CN is the product of this theology. Jesus is King, and he rules by means of his Word. Jesus is King, and the Bible is his law. The nations belong to Jesus by right. He is the Creator. He is the Redeemer. He is the Ruler. He is the Judge. He is lord over all; every square inch of creation belongs to him. He died to purchase the nations and he will get what he paid for. Nations that serve him in history will be blessed; those that refuse him will be shaken down.
CN is not about making an idol of politics; it is the antidote to political idolatry. CN is not obsessed with the state; it is the refutation of statism in all forms. Nations, like individuals, are required to submit to Christ as King. They are required to submit to his law. They are required to acknowledge the Bible as his Word and the church as his body and bride.
The Bible is not just a book that tells us how to receive salvation as individuals. It also contains blueprints for social and political life. God intended the Torah to be a model of wisdom not just for Israel, but for the nations.
CN is not a Christian version of Sharia law. Jesus is the true Lord over all. He is the gracious Savior. His law is full of mercy, wisdom, and righteousness. No other law compares to his law. No counterfeit comes close to what Jesus offers us. His rule is good for men, women, and children; people of all colors; and every nation, tribe, and family.
Yes, we should point to historical examples of CN that have existed in the past. Western civilization in general, and America’s early history in particular, are flawed but real illustrations of what CN looks like in concrete form. Some form of CN has produced the apex of human history and civilization thus far. But the real grounding of the CN project is Jesus himself and his gospel. Politics is always religious. There is no neutrality; every nation has a G/god, whether explicit or implicit. All civil law is rooted in some moral philosophy, whether biblical or otherwise. Blessed is the nation that makes God its Lord.
Love your neighbor. Support Christian nationalism.
ADDENDUM: I would say MAGA is more friendly to a Christian social vision, includes more faithful Christians in its administration, and is a whole lot better than the only realistic alternative at this time. Christians can make use of MAGA, though it’s obviously flawed and sub-Christian in all kinds of ways.
ADDENDUM: What about calling it “Christian Republicanism”? While this language does not have the same pushback against globalism, “republic” terminology has the advantage of being rooted in American history and the Constitution (“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…”). The “nationalism” label requires a PR campaign to explain it.
—
“One is that it gives those considering the Christian faith the strong impression that to be converted, they need not only to believe in Jesus but also to become members of the (fill in the blank) Party.”
— Tim Keller
The problem with this quote is NOT that all Christians must land at one place on the political spectrum or in the same political party. It’s true that no current political party completely aligns with the Christian faith – and most politically aware Christians I know recognize this fact and have no problem criticizing their party or the candidates they voted for. For my part, I voted for the Republican ticket in the last two presidential elections, but have not hesitated to criticize Trump or other Republicans when they do something dumb or evil. I appreciate Trump’s “deal” with evangelicals on abortion, but it falls far short of the goal, which would be to outlaw abortion pills, criminalize all forms of abortion, etc. I didn’t vote Republican in recent elections because they’re perfect, or even close to perfect; I voted Republican because it is vastly better than the only other realistic alternative.
So what’s the problem with what Keller says? I don’t think rightwing evangelicals are actually giving anyone the impression Keller warns about, so it’s not a real issue. But more to the point, Keller gives the impression that someone can become a Christian without repenting of having advocated for evil political policies. And that’s false. When someone becomes a Christian, everything is on the table. Becoming a Christian will – or should – radically change their politics, just as it’s going to change what they do with money, sex, power, etc. There are political views advocated by the Democrat party that are so utterly evil and abhorrent that supporting them requires repentance. And this fact should not be hidden. It should be openly acknowledged. Christ is lord over everything, including the political realm (I’m tempted to say especially the political realm). Christians who advocate for transgender policies or same-sex “marriage” should be disciplined by their churches; holding such views is completely incompatible with being a Christian. The reality is the political right, however flawed, is not morally equivalent to the political left, which is destructive and wicked. So, yes, there are some people who, in the process of becoming a Christian, will need to repent of political positions they have held. They will need to repent of how they voted in the past. They will need to submit their policy views to Scripture, just like every other part of life. We should not hide that when we talk to people about the gospel or preach the gospel. Repentance is part of the message, and people need to repent of their particular sins particularly. They need to repent of their political sins.
In our climate, it is true some people might think we are trying to get them to convert primarily from one party to another rather to than convert from idolatry to Christian faith. We should clarify that if there’s any confusion. Becoming a political conservative will not save anyone. But we should also make it clear that becoming a Christian will entail adopting different political positions because Christ’s lordship over life and culture is comprehensive and the Bible speaks very clearly to many of the most politically polarizing issues of the day. It is distressing, but sadly some people would rather cling to their political views rather than come to Christ. As Keller himself would have said, that indicates they have made an idol out of their politics.
ADDENDUM: Would you say to your church that those voting for Democrats today are in sin and deserve church discipline?
I would deal with it like other pastoral issues. Find out why they think they do. Find what they think about the main issues. What do they think they’re supporting by voting for Dems? Then go from there in calling them to repentance. Some people are confused, naive, or misinformed. Others are actually advocating evil. I’d dig into before resorting to discipline. Discipleship is a process. But they should be getting teaching from the pulpit that will also be addressing these things.
Now, if it’s a politician running for office on the Dem platform, yes, that would be a case for moving to church discipline right away.
ADDENDUM: The problem is that Dem policies end up hurting the poor. The “war on poverty” only created more poverty. Mass immigration hurts the poor. “Free” health care makes health care worse and less accessible for everyone. Etc.
What the poor need to bring them out of their poverty is a vibrant economy that creates job opportunities. Dem policies don’t do that. Dems seems to have no idea how wealth is actually created; all the seem to care about is redistributing it.
I don’t even hear Dems talk about caring for the poor much anymore. They talk about abortion, gays, and transgenders. They talk about immigrants. The poor have fallen way down their list of priorities.
Yes, Christians should be willing to help the poor. But to think that the welfare state is the only – or best – way to do that is dumb and not backed up by the evidence.
—
If we are not willing to offend others with truth, we will live under the tyranny of the easily offended.
—
It’s a shame many Christians end up having to choose between a church that has good preaching and a church that has good liturgy.
—
The r2k version of the spirituality of the church ironically destroys the spirituality of the church.
—
The culture war is just about fighting evil. Surely fighting evil is something Christians can agree we should be doing, right? It’s evil to kill babies and mutilate genitals of children. It’s evil to subsidize immorality and fatherlessness with public money. It’s evil to not punish real criminals. It’s evil for the state to promote sodomy and tell people of the same sex they can “marry.” Why is this controversial?
—
We have created a whole economy predicated on fake jobs to get women out of the home and into the HR department. Helen Andrews gave an interesting talk on this at NatCon. Her solution: stop artificially favoring women over men in college, the job market, etc., and culture will revert to factory settings. I’m not convinced that’s a sufficient solution, but I do think her talk is worth listening to:
—
On the cross, the God-man experienced God-forsakenness in his humanity.
—
The same justice that necessitated Jesus’ death as our sin-bearer necessitated his resurrection as the sinless one.
—
I reject racial identity politics because frankly everyone else does too. Conservative blacks are treated by other blacks, as if they aren’t really black. I’ve had white supremacist attack me, and the fact that I’m just as white as they are does not matter. In the end for all of us, ideology trumps skin color.
—
Men argue. Women police tone.
—
Third-wayism has demonstrated the truth of Conquest’s Second Law. Conquest’s Second Law states, roughly, “Any organization that is not explicitly constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.” This is exactly what has happened to churches and pastors that have tried to take the third way. They have not remained neutral or “in the middle.” They have drifted leftward. Moral and spiritual entrpy is real. This is why Scripture uses so many martial metaphors for the church’s mission and the Christian life. Those who are not purposeful in fighting the good fight end up losing.
The same thing has happened in the PCA with feminism, as Michael Foster has shown. Churches that have not fought against feminism have drifted into feminism. Institutions that do not explicitly teach and uphold and enforce conservative principles will eventually adopt progressive principles. In a fallen world, it will always be easier to compromise, to drift into corruption, than it will be to stand firmly for righteousness. Drifting requires no effort; standing firm and fighting does. All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
C. S. Lewis captured this dynamic well, showing that no person or institution ever remains stationary: “If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family—anything you like—at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing.”
In short, if you don’t fight the left, you become the left.
—
Why does Paul give instructions to the civil magistrate in Romans 13? It’s not as if Caesar was sitting in the congregation of the Roman church, waiting to be told by an apostle what to do. This tells us something important about how Paul understood his own ministry as an apostle and the mission of the church.
Paul knew the OT. He knew the prophets predicted that kings would convert and kiss Messiah (Psalm 2). He knew the kings of the earth were destined to bring their national and cultural treasures into the kingdom of the Messiah (Isaiah 60). He knew this had been foreshadowed by Gentile kings who had converted in the old covenant era, a kind of typological preview of what would come in a much fuller way in the new covenant. He knew the king of Ninevah led his city in repentance. He knew Darius had evangelized the entire Medo-Persian empire, calling on his subjects to fear and worship Daniel’s God. Paul had a twofold ambition in his ministry: He wanted to be a pioneer missionary, not laying on another man’s foundation, but taking the gospel to places it had never gone, even though the missionary frontier is always the most dangerous place to go (Romans 15). And he knew he was destined to preach to kings, so he made it his ambition to preach to Caesar, even if he did so in chains (Acts 9).
Paul expected that someday many magistrates would be converted; and when that happened, he knew a Christian magistrate would desire to wield his sword Christianly. Paul was laying the groundwork for Christendom, even if it was a few generations off. Christendom may have only been a dream at the time, a glint is Paul’s eye, but he knew it was coming and he was preparing for it. “Hey, just in case you ever get an emperor in Rome who desires to know what God wants him to do, I’ll throw in some instructions in my letter to you, the church at Rome. That way when the ruler of the Roman Empire becomes a church member, he can understand what his role is. He should bless and protect the righteous – especially the church – and he should be a terror to evil doers. He should understand he bears the sword to avenge God’s wrath against wickedness, and he should understand that he is God’s deacon.” Unless Paul believed in and expected the conversion of nations as such, including their rulers, there is no reason for him to tell magistrates what to do in a letter addressed to the church. There was no magistrate sitting in the pew at the time, but he knew that would change. Paul was speaking truth to power long before those in power cared to listen. he knew someday, they would – and with it, Christendom would be born.
Paul was perhaps hoping for a Constantine-like conversion of Caesar in his own day; it took a few centuries but it finally happened, and over time, subsequent magistrates, from Theodosius to Alfred to Gustavus Adolphus to John Winthrop and beyond, all wove Christian principles into their governance.
—
Every letter of LGBTQXYZ makes a mockery of the biblical sex ethic. Every letter in the acronymn is based on sexual autonomy and experimentation which flaunts God’s law and God’s design. Christians should not flirt with any of the letters in any kind of way. We must firmly and explicitly oppose each one.
—
From preaching a lot of OT narrative, this is my conclusion:
We must preach OT typologically/Christologically. Jesus said the whole OT is about him. It’s all gospel in preview form. That dimension of the text has to be preached. We do not need to impose a Christian reading on the OT; it was always already about Christ. Jesus is the greater Noah, the greater Moses, the greater Joshua, the greater Samson, the greater David, the greater Solomon, etc. All of the OT figures are prefigures – they prefigure Christ. God was preparing the way by giving his people gospel blueprints.
But OT narratives are also full of moral wisdom and instruction. The characters are often examples, either good or bad. Practical lessons are embedded in the narratives. We should especially highlight the positive examples from OT stories, the way Paul does in the “hall of faith” in Romans 11. God uses those OT stories to give us blueprints for living faithfully.
Thus, we must preach the OT typologically and practically.
Doing typology with application produces antinomianism.
Doing application without typology treats the OT as a sub-Christian, legalistic book.
And what holds together typology and application is union with Christ.
—
Postmillennialists believe heaven will be crowded.
—
“The greatest menace to the Christian Church today comes not from the enemies outside, but from the enemies within, it comes from the presence within the Church of a type of faith and practice that is anti – Christian to the core.”
J. Gresham Machen Declared in 1923
—
I don’t know about “ever” but this a good reminder that societies are very malleable and truth is worth fighting for.
—
The war on women began when the serpent whispered to Eve, “Has God really said?”
—
Phylis Schlafly used to begin her speeches, “I want to thank my husband for giving me permission to be here tonight.”
—
From Uri Brito: “Herman Bavinck says that the opposite of Christendom is heathendom.”
—
When the communists took over Russia in the Russian Revolution, they knew they could not simply outlaw religion altogether. Russia was an Orthodox nation, with deep roots in the Eastern Christian tradition. The communists recognized that coercing people into abandoning their faith would likely backfire and only make them even more loyal to it.
But they knew they could capture the next generation if they used the schools to propagate their atheistic worldview. And that’s what they did. Schools are always on the front lines in any kind of culture war. When the older generation died off, the Soviets had complete control of the culture because they had indoctrinated the youth into the demented worldview of Marxism.
The Soviet strategy was used in the US as well. The schools were used to capture and indoctrinate the youth into the worldview of Marxism. Marxists were already infiltrating American educational institutions earlier in the 20th century, but the takeover intensified in the 1960s. In 1962, a SCOTUS ruling prohibited officially sponsored prayers in public schools. Prayer in government schools was ruled unconstitutional, despite having been a part of American public education from the earliest days of our nation’s history.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair brought an infamous case that cemented the death of Christian influence on education the following year. O’Hair is an interesting case study. O’Hair admired Soviet Russia so much that, before filing her lawsuit, she tried to emigrate to the Soviet Union, not once but twice. Eventually, the Communist Party in Russia advised her that she could do more good for their cause as a litigant in America. And so she stayed put, went to court, and one woman was able to hijack and permanently secularize the school system of the entire nation. The Bible, which had been part of the American system of education from our earliest days as nation, was driven out of education. While Christian influence in the public school system was already waning by the time O’Hair won her court case in 1963, her legal victory before SCOTUS officially ended mandatory Bible reading in American public education and established secularism as the official religion of our nation’s public schools.
—
A short essay on women in combat, drawing on material from Helen Andrews:
When a civilization loses its understanding of what it means to be a man or a woman, every institution that depends on order and sacrifice begins to unravel. Few places reveal that more clearly than the modern military, where the push to erase sexual distinctions has turned the calling of arms into a social experiment. The 1978 case of the Navy’s Love Boatand the later story of Captain Linda Bray are not isolated curiosities—they are moral parables of a culture that has forgotten God’s design.
When female sailors sued the Navy for the right to serve aboard ships during deployment, a federal judge ruled in their favor. The Navy obeyed, assigning women to a repair ship called the Vulcan. Within weeks, sailors had renamed it The Love Boat. The very scenario the Navy feared unfolded: before the ship left port, three women were pregnant. The problem was not just policy—it was human nature. Scripture teaches that men and women are drawn to one another by divine design (Genesis 2:22–24), and that their union is meant for covenant and life, not for chaos aboard a warship. The Love Boat became an emblem of what happens when we defy creation order in the name of equality.
A decade later, Captain Linda Bray was heralded as the first woman to lead American troops in combat during the 1989 invasion of Panama. The press called her a hero, claiming she had led men through hours of fighting. But the story was soon revealed as political theater. Bray herself later admitted that she had not been in the heat of the battle, and her military career ended tragically after severe injuries from carrying loads too heavy for her body. The truth beneath the propaganda was plain: God made men and women equal in dignity, but not identical in form or function. The differences are not social constructs; they are rooted in the divine design.
In Scripture, men are called to be protectors and women to be life-bearers. The man’s strength and willingness to sacrifice himself are meant to guard the life that woman nurtures (Ephesians 5:25–29, 1 Peter 3:7). When a society sends its women to the front lines, it overturns this sacred order. It asks the life-givers to become life-takers, and it relieves men of the very duty that defines their manhood. This is not liberation—it is inversion.
The ancient virtues of courage, honor, and protection—once rooted in chivalry and animated by biblical truth—have been replaced by a counterfeit gospel of sameness. Modern egalitarianism preaches that there are no essential distinctions between the sexes. But God’s Word declares otherwise: “Male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). These distinctions are not barriers to justice but the architecture of creation itself.
When a nation disregards that order, it invites confusion and judgment. The Love Boat incident mocked the holiness of sexuality by placing men and women in temptation’s path and calling it equality. The story of Linda Bray turned a propaganda victory into a spiritual defeat, exalting an illusion over truth. In both cases, the fruit was disorder—a direct consequence of rejecting God’s design for man and woman.
A biblical people should mourn, not celebrate, the sight of women in combat. On some occasions, it signals that men have abdicated their calling to protect (thought there is no evidence of that in either of the cases examined here), and that women have been deceived into bearing burdens they were never meant to carry. War is the realm of death; women were created to bring forth life. To send them into battle is to scorn the Creator’s wisdom and to turn glory into shame.
A society that sends its daughters to war has forgotten the first truths of Genesis and the heart of the Gospel. For in Christ, equality does not mean sameness—it means harmony. Just as Christ laid down His life to save His Bride, men are called to lay down theirs to protect women and children. To reverse that order is not progress; it is rebellion.
The Love Boat and Linda Bray are not just historical episodes—they are warnings. When we deny God’s created order, we lose our sense of identity, our moral compass, and ultimately, our humanity. The question is not whether women can fight, but whether we still know what we are fighting for.
—
In her opposition to ERA in the 1970s, Phylis Schlafly predicted pretty much everything we see today. Schlafly understood where an androgynous society would lead. She said the elimination of male and female spaces (including bathrooms!) would make women less safe. People thought she was crazy to suggest men would enter woman’s restrooms, but history has vindicated her. She predicted gender neutrality would destroy women’s sports. She warned that no-fault divorce laws would undermine the institution of marriage. She foresaw that sending women into the public workforce en masse would destroy the man’s role and responsibility as provider and would thus undermine family structure. She pointed out that when men are told they are not needed, they tend to drop out as productive members of society. Likewise, she said the welfare state would continue to expand and subsidize sexual immorality and the resulting fatherlessness, which is bad for everyone, especially children. She argued feminist policies would largely eliminate the possibility of women staying home to raise their children by normalizing the two-income family; in other words, in a “gender equal” society, women would have fewer choices rather than more choices. She warned that full equality would necessitate young women registering for the draft. She foretold the destruction that eliminating sexual differentiation would create across the board in society.
A few quotes from 1977:
“When the women’s liberationists ridicule the ‘restroom argument,’ they are simply proving that ERA is an elitist upper-middle class cause that has no relevance to the big majority of working women. The restroom argument is meaningful to the woman who works in industry. She knows, that the women’s restrooms are much pleasanter places than the men’s and are often equipped with couches. They are places where she can escape for a few moments of rest each day from the drudgery of a manual labor job. She knows that pro-labor legislation has mandated rest periods and rest areas for women, and that this is part of her right to be treated like a woman. In the states where the courts have voided all protective labor legislation, company after company has enthusiastically cut operating costs by removing the couches and reducing the size of women’s restrooms.”
“ERA is a two-edged sword. If the girls have a right to try out for boy’s teams, then boys have a right to try out for girls’ teams.”
“George Gilder demonstrates in his book Sexual Suicide that the family is the institution that has civilized the male. It enables female stability and nurture to prevail over masculine mobility and violence. Man’s role as family provider gives him the incentive to curb his primitive nature. Everyone needs to be needed. The male satisfies his sense of need through his role as provider for the family. If he is deprived of this role, he tends to drop out of the family and revert to the primitive masculine role of hunter and fighter. The women’s liberation movement to the contrary, there are male and female roles. It is just as hurtful to a man to be deprived of his role as provider and protector as it is to a woman to be deprived of her maternal role. It is just as hurtful to a husband to be deprived of his right to have a wife who is a mother for his children as it is to a wife to be deprived of her right to be a full-time homemaker.”
While the ERA movement was defeated in the 70s, largely because of her work turning women against it, over time, most its provisions were adopted and most of what she warned about has come to fruition.
—
“During the last thirty years there has been a tremendous defection from the Christian Church …
What is the cause of this tremendous defection? For my part, I have little hesitation in saying that it lies chiefly in the intellectual sphere. Men do not accept Christianity because they can no longer be convinced that Christianity is true. It may be useful, but is it true? Other explanations, of course, are given. The modern defection from the Church is explained by the practical materialism of the age. Men are so much engrossed in making money that they have no time for spiritual things. That explanation has a certain range of validity. But its range is limited. It applies perhaps to the boomtowns of the West, where men are intoxicated by sudden possibilities of boundless wealth. But the defection from Christianity is far broader than that. It is felt in the settled countries of Europe even more strongly than in America. It is felt among the poor just as strongly as among the rich. Finally, it is felt most strongly of all in the universities, and that is only one indication more that the true cause of the defection is intellectual. To a very large extent, the students of our great Eastern universities—and still more the universities of Europe—are not Christians. And they are not Christians often just because they are students. The thought of the day, as it makes itself most strongly felt in the universities, is profoundly opposed to Christianity, or at least it is out of connection with Christianity.
…I do not mean that most men reject Christianity consciously on account of intellectual difficulties. On the contrary, rejection of Christianity is due in the vast majority of cases simply to indifference. Only a few men have given the subject real attention. The vast majority of those who reject the gospel do so simply because they know nothing about it. But whence comes this indifference? It is due to the intellectual atmosphere in which men are living. The modern world is dominated by ideas which ignore the gospel. But it is out of all connection with it. It not only prevents the acceptance of Christianity. It prevents Christianity even from getting a hearing.”
— J. Gresham Machen
—
J. Gresham Machen on education:
“When one considers what the public schools of America in many places already are—their materialism, their discouragement of any sustained intellectual effort, their encouragement of the dangerous pseudoscientific fads of experimental psychology—one can only be appalled by the thought of a commonwealth in which there is no escape from such a soul-killing system.”
“I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the Gospel on the street corners and at the ends of the Earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism.”
“If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might as well give them everything else as well.”
“But what miserable makeshifts all such measures, even at the best, are! Underlying them is the notion that religion embraces only one particular part of human life. Let the public schools take care of the rest of life — such seems to be the notion — and one or two hours during the week will be sufficient to fill the gap which they leave. But as a matter of fact the religion of the Christian man embraces the whole of his life. Without Christ he was dead in trespasses and sins, but he has now been made alive by the Spirit of God; he was formerly alien from the household of God, but has now been made a member of God’s covenant people. Can this new relationship to God be regarded as concerning only one part, and apparently a small part, of his life? No, it concerns all his life; and everything that he does he should do now as a child of God.
It is this profound Christian permeation of every human activity, no matter how secular the world may regard it as being, which is brought about by the Christian school and the Christian school alone. I do not want to be guilty of exaggerations at this point. A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearings of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part, but all, of the curriculum of the school. True learning and true piety go hand in hand, and Christianity embraces the whole of life — those are great central convictions that underlie the Christian school.”
“Always there have been tyrants in the world; almost always tyranny has begun by being superficially beneficent, and always it has ended by being both superficially and radically cruel. But while tyranny itself is nothing new, the technique of tyranny has been enormously improved in our day; the tyranny of the scientific expert is the most crushing tyranny of all. That tyranny is being exercised most effectively in the field of education. A monopolistic system of education controlled by the State is far more efficient in crushing our liberty than the cruder weapons of fire and sword.”
—
Mercy to the wicked is cruelty to the innocent.
—
Helper, submission – will she be wind in his sails or a weight that drags him down?
—
Men should know how to work with their hands, their head, and their words.
David, even as a young man, is an example of this. This is how David is described in 1 Samuel 16:18:
“One of the young men answered, “Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, who is skillful in playing, a man of valor, a man of war, prudent in speech, and a man of good presence, and the LORD is with him.”
Note how wide-ranging David’s skill-set is. He is already a man of competence and dominion at an early age. He can work with his hands – he is skillful in battle and with musical instruments. He can work with his head – he is prudent and has good presence. He can work with words – his speech (no doubt including his song lyrics) reflects his wisdom.
David is like a human Swiss Army knife; his masculinity is versatile, practical, useful. He is a true warrior-poet, a Bronze Age Renaissance man. He is a man of grit and grace, a well-rounded man who is both a good man and good at being a man. He combines character with competence, and virtue with virility. He is virtuous and valorous. He is wise and well-rounded. He has gravitas (“presence”) and prudence far beyond his years.
To top it all off, most importantly, the Lord is with him. His competence, confidence, and character are all by grace through faith.
—
Feminism is the belief that women will find fulfillment in life living the way men do, in terms of career, public life, and sex. It is belief in the inherent superiority of women. It is the belief that men have always oppressed women. It is the belief that male rule is inherently tyrannical and abusive. Feminism brands all expressions of masculinity, whether in boys or men, as toxic and in need of suppression.
In other words, feminism is a pack of lies.
—
If feminists really cared about women, they would focus on immigration and rape statistics in Europe. They would focus on the treatment of women in Muslim countries. Didn’t Gloria Steinam say a special place in hell is reserved for women who don’t help other women?
—
Feminism shields women from accountability and confrontation for their sins. So, for example, under the feminist gaze, there are no bad mothers. A mother who puts the little ones in daycare and goes off to work is considered just as good as (and maybe better than) a mother who stays at home to care for her children. Success for women can only be measured in male terms. There are no “successful mothers” because success is never found in the domestic sphere.
Ironically, feminism promised happiness but delivered misery. Paradoxically, the more feminist society becomes, the less happy women are. This is because feminism runs against the grain of created nature. It is a social (and often sexual) exchange of the natural use of woman for an unnatural use.
—
A woman who is a wife and a mother is not *only* a wife and mother. She is *centrally* and *primarily* a wife and a mother. But ahe can play other roles and wear other hats. She can work for pay outside the home, with the blessing of her husband, provided it does not interfere with primary role in the home. This is not a compromise with feminism; it is wisdom.
—
Premarital sex makes women crazy. It negatively impacts men too, of course, but women are generally more sensitive to its impact. A society full of women who have slept around before marriage is a society full of feral women who (understandably) come to resent men in general. Add on top of that the guilt and shame that come from abortion, and it’s a recipe for disaster.
There is no way to heal our society without repenting of the sexual revolution, especially the normalizing of fornication. There is no such thing as consequenceless sex. God has packed sex full of meaning; it is always weighted with consequences. When we rebel against God’s design, we pay a price.
—
We have addressed the problem of father hunger, resulting from widespread fatherlessness. But we have still not reckoned with mother hunger, stemming from mothers who do not stay at home with their young children so they can properly bond with and nurture them in their most formative years. Daycare is no substitute for mom.
For example, it’s well established that children in daycare have much higher cortisol (stress) levels. They often develop attachment and relational issues later in life. Young children need the presence and attention and nurture of their mom. God does not command women to be “homemakers” (Titus 2) to oppress them, but to fulfill them and their children. Motherhood matters.
—
Much of what’s gets called and diagnosed as “mental illness” today is really just the bad fruit of embracing anti-creational, anti-natural, anti-God ideologies that trap people in prisons of victimhood, resentment, envy, and anger. People who adopt wokeness, feminism, and other forms of progressivism are always going to have much higher rates of “mental illness” because their worldview feeds it. We can argue cause and effect here, but the spike in “mental illness” in recent years disproportionately shows up in those on the cultural and political left for a reason. In many cases, what people need is not a pill or a therapist, but repentance from having embraced evil ideologies.
Here’s an interview that gets at one aspect of the problem: youtu.be/eC5RoJw134E?si…
—
Anyone who loves liberty must hate modern notions of equality.
—
In response to a question about why so many Christians are apathetic about abortion:
In my state (Alabama), there is strong opposition to abortion on the whole, but it’s still flawed. Abortion is basically outlawed, but not consistently criminalized. Performing an abortion is a felony (up to 10 years prison + possible fines), but procuring one is not necessarily criminal (since women who seek abortions are often considered “the second victims,” rather than accomplices to murder). The law is a little fuzzy there. Abortion pills can be obtained by mail, from what I understand, but this technically illegal too. Helping transport someone to another state for the purpose of getting an abortion could be considered a criminal action under the law, but I don’t know of any such cases being tried in courts. I don’t know how consistently these laws are enforced.
Further, there are massive resources available from crisis pregnancy centers in much of the state, so there is no excuse. Christians in Alabama give a lot of money to pro-life causes and ministries. Women who want help should be able to find it.
I think the problem in general really comes down to pastors failing to preach and teach on abortion in a clear and comprehensive way, and populations that do not care enough to hold civil magistrates and legislatures accountable. For far too many, abortion is necessary to make women “free” and “equal” with men. Abortion is a necessary component in a promiscuous and career-focused lifestyle for women. In the feminist worldview, abortion is necessary to keep the playing field level. I do not think the abortion issue can be fully dealt with until (a) it is consistently treated as murder for all involved, and (b) we roll back feminism’s influence by restoring sexual morality/marriage and glorifying the woman’s primarily domestic/maternal vocation.
—
Many in the early church had a strong understanding of substitutionary atonement and justification by faith. An example of this very Protestant understanding of the heart of the gospel is found in Mathetes’ “Epistle to Diognetus”:
“But when our wickedness had reached its height, and it had been clearly shown that its reward, punishment and death, was impending over us; and when the time had come which God had before appointed for manifesting His own kindness and power, how the one love of God, through exceeding regard for men, did not regard us with hatred, nor thrust us away, nor remember our iniquity against us, but showed great long-suffering, and bore with us, He Himself took on Him the burden of our iniquities, He gave His own Son as a ransom for us, the holy One for transgressors, the blameless One for the wicked, the righteous One for the unrighteous, the incorruptible One for the corruptible, the immortal One for those who are mortal. For what other thing was capable of covering our sins than His righteousness? By what other one was it possible that we, the wicked and ungodly, could be justified, than by the only Son of God? O sweet exchange! O unsearchable operation! O benefits surpassing all expectation! That the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous One, and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors!”
—
Successful societies respect men.
—
Sexism is a virtue because men and women really are different.
—
In modern feminism, women want equal treatment when it suits them and special treatment when it suits them.
In modern feminism, men have responsibilities and women have rights. For example, abortion gives a woman the choice to be a mother or not, but the man has no say in whether or not he will be a father. The man’s responsibility is determined by the woman’s right/choice.
—
Don’t try to be nicer than God. You cannot out-compassion the Heavenly Father.
—
The Great Commission is not “mission impossible.” Everything Jesus commands us to do in Matthew 28 was already promised through old covenant prophets.
—
The basis of the Great Commission is Jesus’ comprehensive lordship – all authority is heaven and earth has been given to him. The result of the Great Commission will be discipled nation – nations ordered under and submissive to Jesus’ comprehensive lordship because they have been taught everything he commanded.
—
The left calls good “evil,” evil “good,” and fascists “anti-fascists.”
—
“You can vote your way into communism, but you’ll have to shoot your way out.” This is true.
—
Christian education matters because the schools are alwys the frontlines in the culture war. The fight over education is the fight over the future.
—
A summary of a story told by Iain Murray:
George Whitefield was once among a group of pastors and they were discussing the burdens of ministry, how consoling it was to consider that this life would soon be over. One man, the oldest man at the table, William Tennent remained silent amongst them. Whitefield finally turned to Tennent and asked, “Well! Brother Tennent, you are the oldest man amongst us, do you not rejoice to think that your time is so near at hand when you will be called home and freed from all the difficulties attending this chequered scene?”
Tennent replied, “I have no wish about it.” Whitefield pressed him. Tennent responded, “No sir, it is not pleasure to me at all, and if you knew your duty it would be none to you. I have nothing to do with death; my business is to live as long as I can—as well as I can—and to serve my Lord and Master as faithfully as I can until he should think proper to call me home.”
Tennent captured the posture we should have to the trials and tasks assigned us in the life. There is a kind of other-worldliness or heavenly-mindedness that draws us away from our duties. Our focus should not be on the whistle that will blow at the end of the workday, but on getting the job done while the day lasts. Our preoccupation is not to be the glories of the future but the duties of the present. Yes, we should give thought to the heavenly bliss to come, but never in way that distracts us from the task at hand. Do your assigned work until the Lord calls you home.
“Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes.” (Matthew 24:46)
—
“Alfred found learning dead and he restored it, education neglected and he revived it, the laws powerless and he gave them force, the church debased and he raised it, the land ravaged by a fearful enemy from which he delivered it. Alfred’s name shall live as long as mankind shall respect the past.”
— from the inscription on the statue of King Alfred in Wantage
—
Very often it has come to my mind what men of learning there were formerly throughout England.. and how nowadays… we would have to seek them outside… Thanks be to God Almighty that we now have any supply of teachers… As often as you can, free yourself from worldly affairs so that you may apply that wisdom which God gave you wherever you can. Remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves didn’t cherish learning nor transmit it to other men
– King Alfred the Great
—
Since through God’s authority and my own you have enjoyed the office and status of wise men, yet you have neglected the study and application of wisdom. For this reason, I command you either to relinquish immediately the offices of worldly power that you posses, or else to apply yourselves much more attentively to the pursuit of wisdom
– King Alfred the Great
—
Among King Alfred’s last words:
“I desire to leave to the men that come after me a remembrance of me in good works.”
—
Charles Dickens, on the character and contributions of King Alfred, in his “Child’s History of England”:
“I pause to think with admiration of the noble king, who, in his single person, possessed all the Saxon virtues; whom misfortune could not subdue, whom prosperity could not spoil, whose perseverance nothing could shake; who was hopeful in defeat, and generous in success; who loved justice, freedom, truth, and knowledge; who, in his care to instruct his people, probably did more to preserve the beautiful Saxon language than I can imagine; without whom the English tongue in which I tell this story might have wanted half its meaning.”
—
Paraphrasing George Orwell:
“People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
What Orwell actually said (riffing off of Kipling): “It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, ‘making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep’…Men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”
—
Leftism is the religion of self-idolatry and self-hatred. How can it be both? Leftism believes the way to happiness and fulfillment is by inverting God’s design at every point. It idolizes the self even as it despises the self.
Thus, leftism teaches men to hate their masculinity, women to hate their femininity, Americans to hate their country, Westerners to hate their civilization, mothers to hate their children, and so on it.
This is why leftism is so toxic. It is the very nature of leftism to deny the creation because it rejects the Creator. It is the very nature of leftism to call evil good and good evil.
—
Antinomianism has likely sent as many people to hell as legalism.
There is a ditch on both sides of the gospel.
Today, antinomianism is obviously the bigger problem. It’s hard to argue the biggest problem in our culture is people trying too hard to obey God in order to earn his favor.
—
A repost from June ‘25:
I’m not a capital “T” Theonomist (though I could probably pass as a general equity theonomist), but I do want to push back on something I’ve seen repeated a few times. Sometimes it is claimed Theonomy is just Christianized Libertarianism, and therefore a species of Modern Liberalism. Along with this goes the claim that Theonomists were/are captivated by the postwar consensus and propositional nationhood.
This simply isn’t true. In terms of substance and rhetoric, there is something of a link between Theonomy and Libertarianism in that both value free markets (as opposed to the coercion of a state-planned, centrally managed economy). Both value private property (the 8th commandment) and are suspicious of “big government” controlling our lives.
But that’s where any similarities end. Theonomy is actually anti-Liberal in terms of the way we use that category today. (A claim could be made that Theonomy is generally compatible with classical liberalism but I won’t go into that here.) Theonomists always wanted the state to apply the principles of God’s law that are suited to political and social life, including the punishments Torah gives for various crimes. Theonomists wanted blasphemy laws and Sabbath (Lord’s Day) laws. Theonomists wanted adultery and sodomy to be civil crimes, worthy of capital punishment. Theonomists always rejected the “place at the table” pluralism that drove contemporaneous movements, like the Religious Right and Moral Majority. Theonomists never claimed they wanted an established church, and they certainly held to jurisdictional distinctions between church and state (sphere sovereignty). But they wanted society as a whole to be shaped by Christian norms. They wanted all of society to be formally brought under the lordship of Christ. They did not see the state as an agent of salvation or regeneration – the ministry of Church brings those blessings – but a Christianized state was essentially the outflow of the Church successfully carrying out the Great Commission to disciple the nation.
Theonomists were somewhat divided on the issue of immigration, but when Theonomy was at its peak, the open borders immigration crisis was no where close to what we’ve seen in recent years. Theonomy generally focused on things Torah emphasizes like immigrants being required to live by the same law as Israelites (assimilation) and not being allowed to proselytize. Many Theonomists, like Rushdoony and North, were careful students of American history. While they differed in their interpretation of that history (Rushdoony stressed America’s Christian founding, while North pointed to the flaws and inconsistencies, concluding that the founding fathers pushed for a kind of “political polytheism”), they did not push propositional nationhood. They understood a nation is a people with a shared culture, language, history, and identity. Many Theonomists were Southern sympathizers regarding the War Between the States, but not uniformly so.
Theonomy got a lot right – and the current Christian Nationalism movement gets many of those same things right. In the 1980s, Theonomists were excited about Reagan and the possibility of a “conservative revolution” much the same way Christian Nationalists are hopeful about Trump and MAGA. It remains to be seen if Christian Nationalism can succeed where Theonomy failed (though note some would say it has not failed, it’s still an ongoing movement that may have lost momentum but lives on).
Theonomy definitely raised awareness about the teaching of the Bible and the Calvinist tradition on political theology. The movement failed to get traction for many reasons, but internal splits and divisions over issues like hermeneutics and the centrality of the church vs the family played a role. In addition, difficult personalities, unhelpful and unnecessarily harsh rhetoric, and relational ruptures also played a role. Theonomy lacked the leadership needed to build a politically viable coalition. Christian Nationalists would do well to learn from these problems and avoid them.
—
The “No king” protests against Trump’s supposed tyranny are obviously ridiculous. While there are valid concerns about the overreach of executive power in America, given our constitutional balance of powers, these concerns are not new with Trump. And those aren’t the concerns driving the left anyway. The irony is that what leftists want is precisely a king – an almighty state that will take care of them. Just look at the outcry over the loss of food stamps and welfare programs, especially those that help illegals. “We don’t want a king, we just want a government that will redistribute wealth from productive hardworking citizens to the lazy and the law-breaking. We don’t want a king, we just want free education and health care. We don’t want a king, we just want the state to take responsibility for our lives and provide cradle to grave security. We don’t want a king, we just want the state to give us cellphones. We don’t want a king, we just want a guaranteed income for everyone. We don’t want a king, we just want the state to change weather patterns. We don’t want a king, we just want a state that plays god by redefining marriage and pays for abortion on demand. We don’t want a king, we just want a state that will cancel all our debts and protect us from the consequences of all our bad decisions.” The motto of leftism is “In the state we trust.”
The left rejects the true purpose of the state – which is to be a minister of civil justice, an avenger of God’s wrath in the civil realm, terrorizing the evil and protecting the righteous, according to God’s law – and instead ascribes functions to the state that properly belong to the family and church. The leftist agenda has always been to subvert the family and turn the state into a surrogate husband and father. The leftist agenda has always been to subvert the church, with its false gospel of salvation through the state’s “social gospel,” replacing deacons with bureaucrats and social workers and replacing true preachers of Christ’s grace with the message of salvation through taxation. The leftist agenda promotes a kingdom, but it’s not the kingdom of God.
—
John Adam’s explains that the Great Awakening was the real source of the American War for Independence:
“But what do We mean by the American Revolution? Do We mean the American War? The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People. A Change in their Religious Sentiments of their Duties and Obligations… This radical Change in the Principles, Opinions Sentiments and Affection of the People, was the real American Revolution. By what means, this great and important Alteration in the religious, Moral, political and Social Character of the People of thirteen Colonies, all distinct, unconnected and independent of each other, was begun, pursued and accomplished, it is surely interesting to Humanity to investigate, and perpetuate to Posterity.”
—
“Story-telling represents a functional Calvinism…Every storyteller stands in a comparable relation to the world he has created as God stands in relation to the world he created.”
— Doug Wilson
—
“There’s there’s no category for happily married middle-aged liberal woman.”
“I think men care about their wives being happy much more than wives care about their husbands being happy.”
— Tucker Carlson
—
“For a woman, the essence of femininity is hero worship—the desire to look up to man.”
“For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero-worship—the desire to look up to man. ‘Man-worship,’ if you wish to call it that, is an emotion that goes beyond admiration for a man’s virtues, and reaches the feeling of devotion to the highest value one can find on earth: to the man who represents this value.”
“Psychologically, the difference between the love of a man for a woman and that of a woman for a man is the difference between benevolent protector and admiring devotee.
The man experiences the highest form of pride in the woman who reflects his greatness. The woman experiences the highest form of pleasure in the man she admires.”
“It means that the desire to look up to a hero is an expression of the fact that the woman’s deepest desire is to see herself as an object of a hero’s love… to be loved by the kind of man she admires most.”
“For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero worship—the desire to look up to man. This does not mean dependence, inferiority, or that she is second-rate; it means that she wants the highest, the best, in man—and that she admires it. The President is the symbol of the nation, the highest representative of all men. To regard a man as her leader, her hero, is psychologically natural to a woman. But to be leader of men would be a psychological contradiction of her nature.”
“She had never known the kind of pride she felt in being owned by him—not owned as a possession, but as a choice… She felt an exalted pride in his pride, the pride of being the woman he wanted.”
“Man’s sexual response is to the woman who reflects his deepest values… a celebration of his own greatness. Woman’s sexual response is to the man who embodies her highest values… an act of worship…In sex, man experiences his own value; woman experiences the value of the man she worships. There is no equality in the sense of identical experience—but there is equality in moral worth.”
— Ayn Rand
—
“To speak plainly, everything wonderful about our society today sits upon the foundation of Christianity.”
— James Baird
—
Proof women are more easily deceived:
- Horiscopes
- Bikinis
—
Men want to lust. Women want to be listed after.
Even in our sin, the sexes are complementary.
—
“Modernism, which denies and abolishes every difference, cannot rest until it has made woman man and man woman, and, putting every distinction on a common level, kills life by placing it under the ban of uniformity.”
— Abraham Kuyper, on modernity’s egalitarianism
—
Just a reminder: Terry Bradshaw won 4 Super Bowls, calling his own plays. He should be considered among the all-time greats.
—
It’s good to be an American.
—
Christian nationalism, rightly defined, is just Jeremiah 29:7 applied to the nation in which a Christian lives. Christians should seek the good of their nation, as God defines the good.
—
[David in the psalms] shows that his reign was an image and type of the kingdom of Christ, to teach and assure the faithful that Christ, in spite of the whole world, and of all the resistance which it can make, will, by the stupendous and incomprehensible power of the Father, be always victorious.
— John Calvin, commentary on the Psalms
—
Many of the same people (leftists) who tell Christians we can’t “impose morality” through civil law when it comes to issues like abortion are all too eager to impose their (im)morality on us with the welfare state. But forcing people to “generous” or “charitable” is not actually moral. It amounts to state-sanctioned theft.
Many of the same people (leftists) who tell Christians we can’t “impose morality” through civil law tell us we live on stolen land, we have an obligation to stop climate change no matter the cost, if we don’t recycle we are evil, and the nation of Israel is committing genocide. Leftists need to decide: Is the state a moral agent or not? If so, where does the standard of morality come from? If not, who cares what the state does?
—
My response to a conversation about racial identity politics, based on this post: https://x.com/greeneman6/status/1983944246035091831?s=46&t=au-C34qTtl4rGPFr5igkAw
Greene is definitely smart – I love a lot of his writing.
He says some good things there – especially the way conservatives have failed to deal with the concerns of young people (though I’d argue leftists have aggravated the situation far more, eg, unlimited immigration).
But I still don’t know how racial identity politics is supposed to work for us as whites.
For example, if you lived in Virginia, who would you vote for in the governor’s race? The white liberal? Or the black conservative? (Bracket out that both candidates are females.)
I’d argue the black candidate is better for whites (and all Virginians).
Worldview > skin color
Ideology trumps race every time. Every. Single. Time.
Just look at how blacks treat black conservatives like Sowell and Clarence Thomas. Blacks in general don’t celebrate their achievements despite shared skin color because of their politics. It’s not enough to be black to be considered black. It’s the same with feminism, which is a form of gender-based identity politics. For feminists, it’s not enough to simply be a woman. She must be a woman who makes the right choices (e.g., prioritizing career over motherhood) to be included in “the club.” Feminists say they are pro-woman, but will viciously attack other women who do not share their ideology. They will criticize women who make different lifestyle choices, even as they claim to be pro-woman and pro-choice. It’s not *really* about the identity, it’s about the ideology. Only the right kind of woman can be considered part of “Team Woman.”
David Greene puts white and Christian alongside each other like they are of the same weight/value in our political calculations. But they’re not. Race is real but it is too thin of category to spin a whole politics out of it. “Christian,” on the other hand, is a much thicker category and definitely includes a political theology/philosophy. The point is not that a category like “white” or “black” doesn’t exist – in some sense, they are biological realities and, depending on where we land on the nature vs nurture spectrum, could create a range of possibilities for a person or a culture (though I would be quick to add that racial categories are more dynamic than static in many ways, e.g., IQ levels are not fixed over time, but malleable to at least some degree based on other factors). The point is that categories like “black” and “white” just do not carry enough freight to do the job we need to do. They have some small degree of importance but cannot become the defining feature of our politics.
White is a biological category, Christian a religious/theological category. I know what a Christian politics is, but what is a white politics?
There are lots of whites with whom I simply cannot engage in collective action because our politics and religion are so completely different. I’m not going to vote for someone just because of their skin color. Douglas Wilson and Joe Biden are both white both but they do not share a politics or worldview. Is their common whiteness enough of a foundation to build a politics upon? A civilization? Obviously not.
I have no objections at all with “Christian identity politics.” I engage in it all the time. It IS my politics. I think faithful Christians constitute a significant identity group in America, if you want to put it that way.
I am an advocate of Christian nationalism – I want a nation shaped by biblical law and Christian social customs.
I’m all for “Christian identity politics.”
“Christian” is a much thicker identity than “white” (or “black,” for that matter) when it comes to politics. If we have to weigh how heavy each of these categories is, “Christian” is far, far heavier than “white.”
As a Christian, I advocate for free association, ending DEI, enforcing immigration laws and locking down borders, criminalizing abortion and sodomy, ending no fault divorce, going off fiat currency, etc. I’m happy to band together with anyone of any skin color who wants the same things for the sake of political action – and obviously that will mostly be fellow Christians. If only there were more of us…
Identity politics is never actually about the identity, it’s always about an ideology, cleverly disguised. Again: Biden can tell blacks “you’re not really black unless you vote for me.” But obviously there were blacks who did not vote for Biden and their skin is just as black now as it was before. “Black” is actually being used as a proxy for an ideology that Biden wants all black people to embrace because it serves his political interests. I have been attacked by white supremacists — but why would they attack another white person if skin color is really the only thing that matters. We have the same skin color, yet I’m excluded bcause I don’t think they way they want me to think. For white supremaciists, it’s not enough to be white. You have to think like they want you to think. The same things happens with gender identity. Feminism – the original form of identity politics in America – is supposed to be all about women supporting other women. But if a woman makes the wrong choices – if she decides to be a submissive wife and a stay-at-home-mom – those feminists will attack her, often viciously. It’s not enough to be a woman; you have to be the right kind of woman.
In every one of these cases, the identity – black, white, female – is not enough to be included in the group. The very identity that is being singled out excludes people who share that identity if they don’t think the right way. Something else is going on. What is it? It’s Marxism. Classical Marxists could never get the lower classes in America to join the revolution because everyone knew they had it pretty good here, even if others had more. So cultural Marxism was developed to provoke a different kind of revolution. Instead of class warfare, we’d have gender and racial warfare. By singling out these identities and pitting them against other identities, Marxists could still get their desired division, and with it, revolution. But these racial and gender identities are really just Marxist ideology cleverly disguised. Identity politics is always inherently Marxist if it is anything more a defensive posture. Identity politics is not really about the identity as such; otherwise, blacks would celebrate the achievements of a Thomas Sowell or Clarence Thomas even if they disagree with them politically — but they don’t. The identity categories are just useful for driving a wedge. The identity categories are useful for advancing an agenda that would otherwise be much more difficult to advance. Again, I say: No one actually does identity politics. We are all ideologues.
Further, has identity politics actually helped any of the group identities that get singled out? Has black identity politics actually made things better for blacks? It appears not. Instead the black family has been blown apart, with all the resulting social pathologies. Many blacks have become permanent dependents upon (= slaves of) the federal government. Likewise with feminism. Has feminism made women happier? Every study says no. The more the feminist political agenda is accomplished, the more miserable, lonely, and embittered women become. Identity politics always hurts the identity that has been singled out because it is not aimed at actually serving the identity group in question but advancing a Marxist platform. And Marxism is bad for everyone.
So, again, I ask: How is a white identity politics going to work? Do we really think it will make life better for white people when it has backfired for every other group that has tried it?
It’s true that in a “democracy” collective action is the way to get things done. But the question is, “What kind of cllective are we forming?”
Close to 50% of whites in America don’t agree with my politics. If whites get attacked as whites (which is happening — see the Great Replacement theory and Jeremy Carl’s “The Unprotected Class”), it is understandable that group will defend itself as a group. In that sense, a kind of defensive identity politics might be inevitable. But there is no good way to go on the offensive with an identity politics based on race or sex.
Again, I ask proponent of white identity politics: How is race going to serve as social glue? How does being white constitute a political program? Again: What is “white identity politics”? When whites deeply disagree with each other, how can race become the basis of a shared politics? Whites might be the lone bulwark – but the lone bulwark against what? White liberalism?
Blacks can engage in collective action as a race to a degree precisely because 80% of them are going to vote the same way – because they think the same way. A lot of that is due to their peculiar history in America, though it still has not proven to be good for them. Whites are far more diverse. It’s just not a comparable situation with whites. Whites cannot band together as a racial identity group because we disagree with each other and ideology is thicker than race.
Obviously I despise the self-loathing of liberal whites, especially white females. I loved Jeremy Carl’s book. But his proposed solutions to the problem of anti-whiteness are not really race based but ideology based – and I think that’s for the reasons I give above.
Now, if Mamdani gets elected mayor of NYC and starts penalizing whites for being whites, eg, higher taxes, then I could see whites forming a race-based coalition and fighting back. But even then, many whites would no doubt accept the higher taxes since they hold to critical race theory and the doctrine of “white privilege.” And perhaps some non-whites with a sense of justice and basic fairness would come alongside whites and join them in pushing back. I suppose to some degree this would be like the kind of thing blacks did when they were being systematically mistreated and formed an identity group around getting equal treatment. When a group as a group gets singled out for mistreatment, that group can organize itself for protection — no doubt about that. It’s a defensive measure. But in general, I do not think race alone generates any kind of political philosophy. It’s just too thin of a category. Either race is actually proxy for a much deeper category including religion and culture, in which case it’s not *really* race-based identity politics, or it is a pretty empty category and can’t really help us solve the problems in front of us.
Bottom line: I do not advocate for racial identity politcs because, in the end, virtually no one else does. Ideology trumps race. Religion trumps race. Worldview trumps race.
TPC Pastor's Page 