Pietism’s Eternal Failing

 Again, I’m still not leaving the Reformation to become Roman Catholic - which you always seem to have to clarify up front.  But when it comes to the universal Christian Church impacting the world, nobody in the world notices when the PCA, or any other conservative Reformed denomination, elects a new moderator. But everybody notices when Rome chooses a new Pope. And it isn’t per se due to compromise, or because the Pope is the Antichrist. It’s two thousand years of consistent existence, within physical space, and whatever good has come out of it in spite of all the bad, both doctrinally and morally.

The fact that the CREC has grown and is making the impact it is is due to years of consistent, faithful plodding, and a refusal to confine salvation to the church building, the interior working of God in men’s hearts, and the family.

Pietism will always want to linger because of what it gets right. It will never fully flourish because of what it gets wrong.

The Trump Statue

 Honestly, the golden Trump statue reminds me more than anything else of the Ronald McDonald statues at the franchises when I was young. And I think it would have been surprising to have made it through the Trump era, given his ego, without a statue or two. To his credit, at least it wasn’t something he commissioned. I suppose having a Trump arch and a Trump ballroom has been enough to keep him occupied architecturally. That isn’t to say I don’t find it troublesome. The golden calf comparisons are being made, which are somehow not being brought into consideration when addressing the matter of Obama’s “presidential library”. How often people are thrown off by mere aesthetics. Perhaps it’s because we have the Tower of Babel to compare Obama’s monstrosity to. Either way, Biblical typology tells us they’re all the same thing - edifices and images to the glory of man, all of which will one day crumble and return to dust. The glory of God against whom they compete will prevail, no matter how hard man may strive.

Israel’s Harlotry and Idolatry

 Explain Ezekiel 23:20, a friend asks - 

It’s a metaphor for Israel’s repeated harlotry with the foreign nations and their false gods, turning away from Yahweh their true husband toward other lovers in idolatry. And what is true on a national or corporate level metaphorically - adultery - is true on an individual level, as shown from the golden calf incident at Sinai on forward throughout Old Covenant Israel’s history.

Social Media Madness

 If I could set straight some of my stranger social media friends (people I don’t know personally):

1.) The sho@ting this past weekend wasn’t staged. It was real and not planned by the administration. What is up with this loopy extreme conspiracy thinking? You still don’t get Trump if you think he would put a room full of innocent folks at risk like that.

2.) Ericka Kirk is a real grieving widow trying to deal with a position she never asked to be in and trying to get on with her life. Nobody close to Charlie planned his de@th. Candace Owens is an obsessed, rejected huckster looking to make Ericka’s life miserable. Do folks not understand how people - here particularly scorned women - work?

3.) The earth isn’t flat. Columbus, like most educated people in his day, knew it wasn’t flat. The Old Testament confirms this, and the ancient Greeks knew it wasn’t flat.

“Touch grass” is another one of those trending phrases that make me feel nauseous every time I hear them. But some folks need to camp out in their backyards in it until they get some common sense again.

Concerning “Hyperpatriarchy”

Adding the word “hyper” to any idea you oppose is always a great bit of propaganda. But I will refer to the movement as “Hyperpatriarchy” anyway, simply for the sake of clarity. When it comes to so-called Hyperpatriarchy, I believe there’s a severe ignoring of recent history in these debates.

First, you have government welfare programs which encourage irresponsibility. The consequence? Boys raised by mothers without fathers.

Then you have no fault divorce. The same consequence.

The Sexual Revolution kicks off in the sixties. The women who live promiscuously then go on to teach boys in public schools, carrying all their bitterness toward men with them. Feminism and the consequences for boys spreads like weeds.

TV goes from Father Knows Best, to single mothers on “Alice” and “Rhoda”, to idiot males like Al Bundy and Homer Simpson. Whereas once strong males like John Wayne were extolled, we eventually found ourselves in beta male millennial territory. Society and the Church praise women as princesses and queens (which they reiterate to each other in everyday life), but men get regularly castigated for failures real and imagined.

Women leave their roles as mothers to work full time jobs. They are easier for companies to manage than men, and they accept lower pay, so they begin to take the leadership positions in companies. As I said recently, society is run by female middle managers.

You have women running male sports leagues now. There are hardly any male-only spaces any more.

American women have been so masculinized by modern culture that they have lost traditional - and I would say natural - feminine characteristics. “Passport bros” exist for a real reason. It isn’t just their imagination. Are tattoos feminine?

Men have been beaten down in their homes, beaten down in their schools, beaten down in their churches, and beaten down in the media. Why is everybody acting so surprised at their response?

The Tyrant’s Tools

 Controlling a populace as a tyrant:

Get neighbors to snitch on each other. Call it “accountability.”

Offer them incentives to do so, and/or enforce punishments if they don’t. If you offer incentives, make them just out of reach.

Turn people against each other in so doing. Destroy families, friendships, and any other healthy relationships, and so prevent them from forming and growing. 

Maintain complete control through fear.

Crush free thought.

Governments, businesses, HOA’s - all sorts of organizations do it, and people don’t realize how it affects them.

“Friendship is a fifth column against the State. The government doesn’t even want you to have friends.” - Rod Rosenbladt

Israel as the Church

 So there’s the claim often made by Dispensationalists that there is no place in the Old Testament or the New in which “Israel” means “the Church”.

“Ekklesia”, which is the Greek word used in the New Testament for the Church, is used in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, to refer to Israel. So there’s one bit of historical data. Beyond that, the repeated problem I have seen in Dispensationalism, and Evangelicalism more broadly, is missing the forest for the trees. It’s a matter of translating words and interpreting verses while simply not being able to understand the broader passages or follow the flow of argument that, say Paul for instance in this case, is making. It’s basically not being able to read a book or a piece of text and follow what the author is getting at. If you can’t understand context, you can’t understand text. And outside of the Dispensational issue, all of your preaching and teaching is going to suffer, even when teaching the basics of the Christian life from Scripture, if you have this problem.

And then there’s the whole issue of being so dogmatically committed to a position that you could never entertain the possibility that you’ve been wrong. That’s another problem in itself, one that is very common as well.

The New Age Masquerade

 The United States - and really, the West as a whole - is largely run by female (feminist) middle managers, who follow the irresistible sinful urge to emasculate any males under their auspices.

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Saul turned away from Yahweh and toward the witch at Endor when he fell out of favor with God due to his unrepentant sin.

This is an eternal principle. People are spiritual by nature, and if they are persisting in unrepentant sin but long for something spiritual, they will turn to anything but God and Biblical Christianity - which, really, just means false religions behind which stand the demonic. The endless sales of crystals and Eckhart Tolle books are really about young women who don’t want to give up living with their boyfriends.

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I’ve worked with a lot of women through the years. The most common fig leaf I’ve encountered? “We are living together. But it’s because we know we’re meant to be together and we’re going to get married.”

Me: “When’s the wedding?”

Them: “Oh, we haven’t picked a date yet. We’ll know when the time is right.”

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.

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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.