The Obstacles to True Catholicity

 Why, a friend asks on social media elsewhere, do we divide over baptism, rather than things abundantly addressed in Scripture, like patriarchal leadership in the home, and headcoverings? The context was a suggestion that nondenominational churches are truly “catholic”, in that they try to set aside unnecessary divisions between believers. But anybody who knows history, I would suggest, knows that this is always a failed experiment. Here’s my response, which I’m posting here as well so as to get more mileage out of it.

*************

You see baptism in the Gospels, see it talked about in the epistles, and you see baptism after baptism in Acts. So I would disagree with the idea that it isn’t a major issue. You also have baptism in many texts, and head coverings only in one - though that’s not to suggest the latter isn’t important.

I’ll add too that I grew up in a group that emphasized male headship and head coverings - the Plymouth Brethren. I was at church multiple times a week. I was involved in multiple ministries. I heard more sermons on 1 Corinthians 11 than I could possibly remember. And yet I was well into adulthood before I understood justification by faith alone, because nobody taught it. The teachers, who were all laymen, didn’t know how to tackle the soteriological texts. Lots of practical, last-half-of-the-epistles teaching, very little or none from the first halves of the epistles. None of them knew Greek or Hebrew, and they had no regard for or knowledge of the historic Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or Reformed approaches to soteriology.

The Plymouth Brethren started with the stated intention of meeting simply in the Lord’s name, around the Lord’s table, apart from denominational distinctions. But pretty quickly they developed Dispensationalism, about which they became dogmatic. They developed factions over church government - the closed or exclusive set under John Nelson Darby, versus the open group associated with George Muller. The two men became heatedly opposed to one another and never reconciled before their deaths. Darby’s group wouldn’t let Christians from other groups break bread with them, but Muller’s group would. If a person in one group unknowingly fellowshipped with somebody in the other group, their own group would excommunicate them, even if they were one of the founding fathers of that group. Darby allowed for household baptisms, whereas the Muller group didn’t.

Darby, incidentally, taught against the idea of the imputation of Christ’s active obedience to the believer in salvation. If I was to say that to a modern Plymouth Brethren person, they would be uncomprehending. They would think I was speaking Latin to them.

But hey, they have all agreed on male headship and head coverings.

If people are going to be taking God and His Word seriously, division in a fallen world is going to take place sometimes. The goal should be to try to mortify our own sin, so that it doesn’t get in the way. Still, there has to be an understanding of what issues are primary, secondary, and tertiary, or else any Christian group will go off the rails. We won’t even always get that right. But it won’t help to be unrealistic about what’s achievable.

The Civilization that Didn’t Die

 It was clear to anybody listening that the Trump administration, in its conflict with Iran, was being very particular in its targets. Certain targets were being avoided and saved in case Iran absolutely refused to cooperate. Those end of the line targets were the bridges and power plants, as the major infrastructure. We were told this outright a couple of weeks ago.

Over the weekend, the president, because of Iran refusing passage through the Straight of Hormuz, threatened their infrastructure again, the bridges and power plants. Destroy the infrastructure, destroy the civilization. And because Iran was attacking our civilization by keeping oil from us, Trump threatened theirs.

Then move forward to the president’s statement yesterday about the destruction of a civilization. Trump was not planning on bombing Iran’s civilians. That wasn’t what he was saying at all, and anyone following his train of thought and the flow of events knew this. His point was the same - if we take out your infrastructure, mass casualties on the level of civilization collapse will be the result. It would be a literal case of bombing a people back into the Dark Ages. And even though he didn’t want to do that, it’s America first, and he had a duty to America. His modus operandi is always to threaten worse than he plans or desires to do, but to always hold on to the possibility that the worst might be necessary. And in such a situation, one must have the will to do it.

He is very thoughtful, deliberate, and methodical about what he does. Those who continue to believe he is just crazy will never really understand.

The Slavery of the Developed World

 They’ve tried eliminating automobile ownership, instead pushing for all “public” (I.e. government) transit. If you do “own” a vehicle, they want you to pay on it forever so that it’s a long-term uncancelleable rental until it breaks down. They want to be able to charge you a monthly fee to use certain features. And they want to be able to shut it down remotely at will without your consent. 

In certain vehicles, like John Deere combines, they want you to never actually own the vehicle, and they don’t want you to be able to repair it yourself.

In video games now, they want to charge you constantly for access to certain features.

They’ve tried pushing a clothes for rent service, to keep you dependent on them to clothe yourself.

They want you to be trapped in a regular food delivery service of preplanned meals, rather than figuring out how to cook like an adult.

Buying a house is now outrageous. They want perpetual renters.

They want you living on plots too small to grow your own food.

They don’t want you to eat meat. They’d rather you ate their preprocessed garbage.

If they can keep you busy and exhausted, you won’t have the time and energy to think for yourself, question or resist their authority, or do anything to improve your life and escape their grasp.

They don’t want strong, moral, independently thinking individuals. They want weak, malleable workers.

They don’t want private ownership. They want slaves.

I don’t have a problem with corporations at all. But I do have a problem with slavers.

The Greatest Story Ever Told

 Watching The Greatest Story Ever Told. It was made with a cast of Hollywood stars - Charlotte Heston, Robert Blake, Sydney Poitier, Angela Lansbury, Telly Savalas as Pilate, John Wayne as the centurion at the Cross. With all the sins of Hollywood at the time, the weight of Christian culture still remained, and the film, with all its faults, had the gravitas appropriate to our Lord’s life and death.

But I wouldn’t trust Hollywood to make a film like it today. In the Golden Age of Hollywood, most actors at least had a Christian upbringing they couldn’t quite escape, no matter how much they strayed. The mainline churches still carried influence as well, for good or ill. 

The fall of Hollywood was inevitable, though. The sixties revolution just brought to the front of the stage what had been going on for decades behind the curtain, and gave it justification.

It’s easier to tear down than it is to build, and the losses are great. Hopefully future generations of Americans in entertainment can recover what has been lost over the past sixty years.

The Curse of an Early Death Undone

 Elsewhere on social media, I some time back suggested, coming from a Postmillennial perspective and in light of current scientific advancements, the possibility of a lengthening of the average years of human life prior to Christ’s return, as an effect of the reversal of the curse as achieved through His death and resurrection. Some folks weren’t convinced. Here, in an appendix to his book “Days of Vengeance”, David Chilton argues for a reversal himself:

“Until the ark was completed, the world was safe from the great flood. The people seemed to be prospering. Methuselah lived a long life, but after him, the lifespan of mankind steadily declined. Aaron died at age 123 (Num. 33:39). Moses died at age 120 (Deut. 31:2). But this longevity was not normal, even in their day. In a psalm of Moses, he said that “The days of our years are three score years and ten; and if by reason of strength they before score years, yet is their strength, labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away“ (Ps. 90:10). The common curse of God could be seen even in the blessing of extra years, but long life, which is a blessing (Ex. 20:12), was being removed by God from mankind in general.

The Book of Isaiah tells us of a future restoration of long life. This blessing shall be given to all men, saints and sinners. It is therefore a sign of extended common grace. It is a gift to mankind in general. Isaiah 65:20 tells us: “There shall be no more than an infant of days, nor an old man that has not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be cursed.” The gift of long life shall come, though the common curse of long life shall extend to the sinner, whose long life is simply extra time for him to fill up his days of iniquity. Nevertheless, the infants will not die, which is a fulfillment of God‘s promise to Israel, namely, the absence of miscarriages (Exodus 23:26). If there is any passage in scripture that absolutely refuse the amillennial position, it is this one. This is not a prophecy of the New Heavens and New Earth in their post-judgment form, but it is a prophecy of the pre-judgment manifestation of the preliminary stages of the New Heavens and New Earth - an earnest (down payment) of our expectations. There are still sinners in the world, and they shall receive long life. But to them, it is an ultimate curse, meaning a special curse. It is a special curse because of this exceptionally long life is a common blessing – the reduction of the common curse. Again, we need the concept of common grace to give significance to both special grace and common curse. Common grace (reduced common curse) brings special curses to the rebels.”

Carrie Prejean Boller and Tucker Carlson

 I watched a couple of extended clips today from Tucker Carlson in his conversation with Carrie Prejean Boller. While I know of Mrs. Boller, I haven’t generally made a habit of keeping up with her, or any of the more well-known conservative commentators over the past few years.

In addition, I’m not entirely sure what to make of Tucker these days. He seems to have become an enemy of the President and his administration. And I honestly have neither the time nor the energy to keep up with the “he said, she said” of it all. What all he may be guilty of, if anything, is beyond me to judge.

Nonetheless, I did resonate with Mrs. Boller’s experience with being called an anti-Semite for not unquestioningly supporting Israel in every move they make. And the use of Scripture to defend such accusations is familiar.

For those in Dispensationalist circles, this is all standard stuff. I have friends and acquaintances who would consider me a heretic, or at the very least won’t hear anything I have to say about Scripture, because the big issue in Scripture is supporting Israel. To not support Israel, they erroneously believe, is to be a liberal, theologically speaking. There’s a whole history of how Postmillennialism came to be associated with theological liberalism through the late 19th and early 20th century in America, which John Jefferson Davis covered in his book on Postmillennialism. I had an acquaintance, now deceased, who once referred to Postmillennialism specifically as liberalism, in a conversation at my old Dispie church before I left it in 1999. Essentially, Postmillennialism became attached to the Social Gospel in the mainline churches’ departure from historic Christianity. And Fundamentalism, in its anti-intellectualism, still is lost in that milieu, is ignorant in many ways of the world of the Church outside of its own circles, and ignorant of what theological liberalism is and why non-Dispie theology became branded as such to begin with. Spend all your time letting the world go to pot waiting on the Rapture and inside your bubble, and you become unqualified to speak about the culture.

Scholarship is chronologically-bound, and you can only live off of older scholarship for so long. The world moves on, even if we don’t.

Getting Your Own System Right

 According to Dispensationalism, God has two peoples, Israel and the Church, and can only work with one of them at a time. After Israel rejected Jesus in the first century, the apostles turned to the Gentiles, and God rejected Israel temporarily and began working with the Church. The current period we are in is a parenthesis, the Church Age. Until the Rapture occurs and the Church is taken to heaven, God cannot work with Israel and is not working with them. And none of the passages about Israel are in play again until after the Rapture. So none of the verses being quoted about Israel by Dispensationalists, in memes or otherwise, are applicable to the state that today calls itself Israel, nor are they applicable at the present to any Jewish person living right now.

So according to Dispensationalism, the Israel we have in the Middle East today IS NOT THE BIBLICAL ISRAEL. The establishing of the state today known as Israel wasn’t the promised return to the land. It isn’t their return to Yahweh that is foretold.

It’s simply the case that Dispies don’t know the system of theology they claim to hold to.

Martin Luther and Jack Chick

 Watching Rick Steve’s documentary on Martin Luther. One of the things he highlights is how Luther spread his ideas through his tracts or pamphlets. Not everything has to be a long book. Especially on the Reformed side of things, everybody wants to write a long tome. But I’ve benefited much from shorter books and pamphlets through the years. I think of anything from Our Daily Bread monthly devotionals on the Dispie and Bible church side of things, to the booklets from the Chapel Library, reprinting Puritan works. The beauty of Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening is how much Spurgeon was able to say in one page.

But Steves also mentions that Lucas Cranach illustrated Luther’s pamphlets with his often hilarious pictures of figures like the pope and other church leaders. So basically, Luther was publishing theologically dense comic books. The entertainment aspect was a part of their popularity and success. That, with them being in a language people could read, a sense of freedom from the burden of the Church and having to save one’s self, and just the appeal that we all find in the notion of rebellion against oppressive authority, helped fuel the Reformation.

All that said, maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on the late Jack Chick.

No Neutrality

 If you do not have a Christian government, you will have a pagan government. If you do not have a Christian family, you will have a pagan family. If you do not have a Christian business, you will have a pagan business. If you do not have a Christian, you have a pagan.

There is no neutrality. Either you acknowledge Jesus as king and serve Him, or you are in rebellion against Him, and are inviting His judgment upon you.

“Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”

Bible Translations

 Thinking on Bible translations…the debates scholars, armchair or otherwise, get into over Bible translations are important. But you often get conservative evangelical types arguing over literal equivalence vs. dynamic equivalence, sometimes unhelpfully. Once you’ve spent some time translating Greek, you come to realize that sometimes word for word translating doesn’t work, and you have to translate some passages according to meaning, or they won’t be readable. Everybody would do better reading the whole Bible in an overview way with something like the NIV or NLT. And beyond that, some folks just aren’t going to be Bible scholars. Get a readable translation, and just start reading. If you’ve got the mind of a scholar, you can shape up your direction in time, as you’re ready for it.

Falling Down

 Watching “Falling Down”, with Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall, for the first time today. What was set in California in 1993 wasn’t as true then in North Carolina - the rudeness, the traffic, the loss of Christian ethics and morality, the coldness of modern life. But it is becoming moreso today, particularly in the growing cities. Community dies, family dies, business and work dominate, neighborhoods are merely places to sleep at night. Friendship and family get in the way of profit margins. Love cannot exist where people are simply complicated machines rather than the image of God.

But the wicked are like the troubled sea,
When it cannot rest,
Whose waters cast up mire and dirt.

“There is no peace,”
Says my God, “for the wicked.”

Holding Man and His Laws Accountable to God

 All laws and rules in society - family, church, civil government, corporations - by necessity must be derived from and be in accordance with the Law of God. Otherwise, they have no validity and should not exist. And they must serve the purpose laid out by Scripture - for the love of God and man.

You can always tell the unspiritual man by the fact that he fails to understand the purposes of the law. The consequence is always legalism and a lack of love.

Every Wind of Doctrine, Podcast Style

In his latest episode, Tucker Carlson has apparently discovered Dispensationalism, and he’s alarmed that some Jewish people want to rebuild the temple. Ground breaking stuff.

Look, I grew up Dispie, so I’ve been hearing that my whole life, over half a century. Just do it and get it over with, for Pete’s sake. Bring on the Rapture. Fry that red heifer up. Buck Williams has a plane to catch.

Somebody send Tucker some Reformed Postmillennial literature before he gets any crazier.

Israel and Palestine

 I’ve watched the debate among Americans over Israel and Palestine for years, concerning which side wears the white hats, and which side wears the black. Everybody is so sure they know, and everybody is certain the other side is the one committing atrocities, and that despite most individuals never having set foot on the continent or having the inside information they think they do. It never seems to occur to anybody that maybe each party, in fact every party involved, is guilty of some terrible things. “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

It was interesting to listen to the mainstream news reporting on Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack when it happened. At first, the media reported that Hamas had attacked an outdoor rave in Israel. But, realizing that everybody knew what a rave meant - Jewish people attacked while high and sleeping with people they weren’t married to - “rave” got changed to “music festival”. At that time I happened across a video of the event prior to the attack. A rather prominent statue of the Buddha at the event was hard to ignore. But, Hamas is evil. On that we all agree.

Does Israel somewhat have America by the nape of the neck? Maybe, but nobody has proven it to me yet. I do know, though, that relationships of all types are usually more complicated and intertwined than that. Simple minds settle on simple explanations. And yet Scripture says, “in understanding, be men.”

You are Here

WWII recovery =>

Mission creep =>

American imperialism =>

A world that hates America =>

Globalist imperialism under George Bush Sr. =>

Blowback in the form of 9/11 =>

More imperialism under George W. Bush =>

An America with an increasingly guilty conscience elects a racially diverse globalist Marxist named Barack Obama =>

Obama opens the borders, increases the socialism of the State, and stokes internal strife, creating chaos =>

America elects a strongman who is unable to stop the chaos =>

The oligarchy steals an election and puts a puppet king, Joe Biden, in the presidency =>

The oligarchy spits on its predecessor opponents led by the Bushes by letting their imperialism fail dramatically =>

Competing unbelieving, anti-Christian, and incompetent parties fight for the rule of a crumbling empire, while it continues to be assaulted from both inside and out (you are here)

The above was originally written in September of 2024. The one modification I would make would be to acknowledge the degree that the current administration is blatantly Christian. God has been merciful to us in this. We have much to be grateful for.

Yet we are living at the end of an empire, which like Rome is crumbling slowly. The system is broken when you have its enemies as legislators. And Trump is one of the strongmen at the end of the empire, held up by the people as its savior.

Which, incidentally, Loki is at the end of Loki season two. I know the real intellectuals will appreciate a Marvel reference. See my reference to season one and Machiavelli a few months back.

Real freedom, reserved rights, requires individual responsibility. And we have gradually cast that off, abandoning freedom in Christ for the slavery of sin.

Defending the Administration’s Actions

 To connect the dots with the past couple of weeks…you have a somewhat loose international system involving Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and China, for years carrying out illegal activity against targets within the borders of western nations. And one such set of activities involves those nations working with Mexican cartels to traffic drugs and people across our borders with Mexico and Canada. Their goal is the destruction of the U.S. as a sovereign state, and the destruction of our people, which they have been doing successfully. Is this in part blowback for our illicit international meddling? Yes. Oil in the Middle East, western secular globalist ambitions, etc. The ongoing Ukraine situation is due to NATO beating on Putin’s front door to force western economic and cultural control on Russia. Putin is evil, but we are hardly any better. His reactions have some grounding in reality. The same thing was true with Assad in Syria. He protected Christians, while the UK is currently imprisoning people who criticize Islam on social media. The US for years has knowingly allowed transgender people to come here as refugees from Muslim countries where their lives were supposedly in danger because of their perversion. And our relevant government organizations have openly said so on their social media accounts. We have invited the evil here with fanfare, and given it our tax dollars. But while the west’s evil is true, allowing the destruction of our own society isn’t a reasonable response. Our self-defense is the right response. And what Trump has been doing, while it may seem to be offensive, is actually defensive. The war was already going on. And that would be my response to those who may think I am abandoning my generally antiwar, libertarian principles. I am still opposed to the traditional Neocon regime change practice. Hopefully President Trump will stand by his word, and let Iran pick their new leaders. And hopefully they will choose wisely.

In Purgatory with Madame Web

 I’m forcing myself to watch “Madame Web” once through, over however many sessions it takes. Doing this during Lent is probably appropriate, now that I think about it. I’m about halfway through. I should be fully sanctified and in a state of sinless perfection by the time I’m done.

I’ll give them this. They show you exactly what it would look like if four of the most shallow women you’ve ever met were to find themselves on the run from a guy in a spider costume. So, points for accuracy.

Marvel’s Thunderbolts: Mental Health and the Death Spiral

 Re-watching Marvel‘s Thunderbolts movie for the first time. What a great movie. When they originally announced this cast, I wasn’t really interested. But they proved me wrong and knocked it out out of the park. 

The only thing missing is a major one, and it’s the most important thing of all. And that’s Jesus. The movie did a beautiful job addressing mental health issues. But without God’s love, brought to its fullness in the work of Christ and brought to application by the Holy Spirit, wrestling with mental health issues is a pointless spiral, winding around and around until one’s life is over. It serves no purpose, and does nothing fruitful in the end.

America’s Christian Founding

 Evangelicals - “This country was founded by Christians.”

Yes. Of course, none were Dispensationalists, because that theology wasn’t invented yet. No Pre-Trib Rapture believers among them. The majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution came from Anglican/Episcopalian backgrounds, which meant robes, liturgy, infant baptism, catechisms and confessions, pre-written prayers - a whole list of things that Evangelicals count as unbiblical and terrible. A huge chunk of them were Calvinists, which meant predestination, something else a lot of Evangelicals consider heresy. Many came from denominations that believed that God gives salvation through the sacraments, and not just through the preaching of the Word alone.

For many, there is a whole history of the Church that Christ established that they know nothing about. And the only right approach to it is to seek to learn about it, with humility. It may very well be that your little corner of that broader Church has a few things wrong.

The Victorious King Returns: On 1Thessalonians 4:13-18

 The Dispensationalist just assumes that since the saints meet Jesus in the air, then that means they all turn around and go back to heaven. But 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 doesn’t say that, and there is no passage in Scripture that does. They simply assume it. But what’s happening in that passage is the illustration of a king returning to His kingdom, victorious in battle, and His loyal subjects going out to greet Him as He returns. They all then celebrate His coming, and return with Him into the city. They don’t then all leave to go somewhere else. The same imagery is used in Jesus’s procession into Jerusalem the week before His crucifixion. To miss the classical imagery is to misunderstand the flow of events.

When False Gods Win

 The Muslim Zohran Mamdani is now the mayor of New York, and the Muslim call to prayer is being sounded out loud in the streets of New York. Just as in London, the religion of the descendants of Ishmael seeks to drown out the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Byzantium, having become Constantinople, becomes Istanbul.

Pretty soon Leftists are going to be wishing to hear church bells again. Shut out the one true God to make room for vapid secularism, and eventually something worse, invaders with their false religion, will overrun you and conquer you, enslaving you to them. There is no middle ground that will sustain. It  is either the table of Christ or the table of demons. There is no neutrality.

As the spiritual heirs of Jacob, we need more men wrestling with God, men who then will not fear to meet Esau when the day comes.

Fundamentalism, Dispensationalism, and the Damage Done

 Praying the Sinner’s Prayer (which isn’t in Scripture) over and over again. Getting baptized multiple times because you were afraid you weren’t sincere enough or even really saved the times before that. Afraid you were a “Carnal Christian” and that there was some secret sin you had committed, which you didn’t know about or couldn’t remember and therefore couldn’t confess, hindering your prayers and your fellowship with God, leaving you separated from Him and His help. The biggest concern you had that week was the guilt you had over listening to some secular music. If you’re “really spiritual”, wouldn’t you want to listen to Christian music instead? But not Contemporary Christian music, because it sounded like the Devil’s music. And then people leave the Church altogether, burnt out and traumatized for life. And the Fundamentalists go on as if no one is to blame or nothing happened. “Well, it’s the end times, you know. People will fall away. It certainly isn’t something we did.”