Moralism and the Horrible Freeing Ubiquitousness of Sin

Moralism and the Horrible Freeing Ubiquitousness of Sin

Jun 19, 2024 | Theology

Sin is all pervasive, ubiquitous. Like oxygen, in a fallen world it is everywhere.

In my first 5 plus years as a Christian I tried very hard to be more moral, to do what is right and be obedient to God, but I wasn’t very good at it. Thus, guilt was a constant companion. Then in February 1984 I was exposed to Reformed theology, soteriology to be exact, and realized my self-focus was a kind of morbid introspection. Christianity for me had been a matter of will, and if I could just determine strongly enough that I would overcome sin, by golly, I would overcome it! I knew I was a sinner and that perfection was not possible, but I guess I felt like it should be. I knew very well of forgiveness, the cross, and Christ as my Savior, so I had what the famous hymn calls blessed assurance. Nonetheless, there was always this nagging thing called sin that dogged my every step.

When I was introduced to Calvinism the best way I can explain it is that it was upside and down and inside out from how I had been looking at Christianity and my Christian life. Simplistically put, my focus shifted from me to God. My journey since, over 40 years, has taught me a lot about myself and sin, and specifically that sin is my constant companion. As my title implies, there is something terribly freeing about that. I came to call what I had been doing previously the fatal externalizing of sin, as if sin was merely what I do and not who I am. Or more accurately according to the Apostle Paul, sin inheres in my flesh, in Greek, sarx-σάρξ, and thus it is inescapable.

One conclusion I came to fairly early on is that if we see sin merely as something we do, and that it is primarily a matter of our will, then what we’re in effect doing is trivializing sin. Viewed this way, sin isn’t a mystery, terrible and profound beyond our comprehension, but something with enough effort we can control. That’s why I came to call it a fatal externalizing of sin because when it becomes an issue of our will, we are trivializing both sin and God’s salvation of us in Christ. The more profoundly deep and disturbing and powerful sin is, the more profound is the salvation from it. We can’t defeat sin by our will power, ever, as Paul makes abundantly clear in Romans 7. The struggle makes us a complete conundrum to ourselves, as Paul says, I don’t understand what I do. What I want to do I don’t do, and what I don’t want to do I do. He comes to the end in complete turmoil declaring himself a wretched man and asks, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” And he replies, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” He alone is our hope. But what exactly does that mean for how we live our Christian lives?

Before I get to that, I started thinking about all this when I came across this passage on sin from Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. He’s basically making a point about the profound nature of sin:

If we search the remotest past, I say that none of the saints, clad in the body of death (cf. Rom. 7:24), has attained to that goal of love so as to love God “with all his heart, all his mind, all his soul, and all his might” [Mark 10:30 and parallels]. I say furthermore, there was no one who was not plagued with concupiscence. Who will contradict this? Indeed, I see what sort of saints we imagine in our foolish superstition; the heavenly angels can scarcely compare with them in purity! But this goes against both Scripture and the evidence of experience. (VII, 5)

Calvin delineates three uses of the law and is speaking here of the law as a mirror that makes us painfully aware of our own sin compared to the holy law of God. The word concupiscence is not used anymore, but it means ardent desire, often sexual, but it’s much broader than that. What Calvin has in mind is the Tenth Commandment:

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

The Tenth Commandment reveals to us that sin is a matter of desire as much as a matter of action. We can possibly get away with coveting without our neighbor knowing, but God knows, and in due course it will destroy us. No sin stays hidden or internal for long, which is why God warns us against it.

Daily Repentance
It wasn’t too many years ago that I realized the significance of Martin Luther starting his 95 Thesis with the foundational nature of repentance to the Christian life:

(1) When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” [Matthew 4:17], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

How could the Christian’s entire life be one of repentance unless their entire life was one of sin? Repentance is only necessary where there is sin. Most Christians, however, don’t appear to be rank sinners, anymore than they appear as disheveled and dirty bums. I’ve remarked to my wife many times over the years how incredibly kind and decent Christians are who I’ve come across at churches over 45 years, yet to our secular Christ hating elites Christians are hypocritical, narrow minded, homophobic, self-righteous bigots. I’ve never really met any of those, but I suppose one day I might.

Before I get to this ever present dynamic in the Christian life, I want to share the next two of Luther’s 95 thesis that clarify his meaning:

(2) This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.
(3) Yet it does not mean solely inner repentance; such inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortifications of the flesh.

First, Luther was just beginning to question the Catholic Church, of which he was a priest in good standing, so he needed to differentiate repentance from penance. He still believed in the latter at this point, but it was important not to confuse the two. Repentance doesn’t require a priest or someone else’s forgiveness because it is a requirement of right relationship to God in Christ. We might even say that the forgiveness in Christ is conditional. I know that will give some Christians pause, but it is simply biblical. One example is a verse all Christians should have memorized, 1 John 1:9:

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

If we do not confess our sins to God, that is agree with Him that whatever it is we have done or think or feel, is sin, then He will not forgive and purify us. It means forgiveness is conditional.

Second, Luther is saying in thesis 3 that “inner repentance” by itself is worthless if it is not accompanied by outer holiness and obedience to God’s law, i.e., “mortifications of the flesh.” Faith without works is dead is Christianity 101 (James 2). In Romans 6 Paul expresses his horror at the notion some were pushing that grace gives us license to sin. Christianity if it is real, and real in our lives, must make a stark difference in how we live, even if for some people it doesn’t appear much different on the outside, in their moral lives. Even the nicest little old ladies and the respectful young men that help them across the street are rank sinners deserving of hell, or sin isn’t sin. For those of us who don’t have the problem of appearing better than we are, there is hope for real change, which I will address below.

In my own Christian walk as I learned all this, and not too many years ago, I began to practice daily repentance every morning. It was probably around the time, 2012, when I made a commitment that every morning I would read the Bible and get on my knees and pray, one that I have kept ever since. I hadn’t come across Luther’s take on repentance yet, but part of my daily routine was a passage of Scripture I learned as a teenage Catholic in Mass one Sunday, Luke 18. Even at 16 or 17 years old I knew I had a lot more in common with the tax collector than the Pharisee. Like him I could beat my breast and ask, “God have mercy on me a sinner.” I remember the thought popping into my mind: “I can do that!” Given I knew I was a sinner and proficient at it, going away justified was appealing to me.

Christ is Our Righteousness and Sanctification
Which brings me to Christ as our righteousness. Sometime after I started daily repentance, I heard someone say something I’d known pretty much all my Christian life, but which struck me with a force I hadn’t felt before: The wrath of God was fully satisfied in Christ. This meant God could no longer be angry with me. The word propitiation is used four times in the epistles, Romans, Hebrews, and twice in I John. Here is one of the latter:

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

The Greek word is defined as:

(a) a sin offering, by which the wrath of the deity shall be appeased; a means of propitiation, (b) the covering of the ark, which was sprinkled with the atoning blood on the Day of Atonement.

Some translations use atonement instead, but that word doesn’t convey the concept of wrath or magnified anger. Sin is so horrific in its destructive effects on God’s creation, especially his greatest creation, man, that anger is the only appropriate response.

A critical point must be made in this regard. We live in a moral world of right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice. Every human being knows wrongs must be punished for justice to reign, and if they are not that is terribly morally wrong. In a court of law, if judges decide not a punish a law breaker because they just don’t feel like it, everyone knows that judge must be terminated or society will fall apart and chaos will reign. We don’t have to be taught that justice is required for peace, which requires punishment that brings atonement, reconciliation, or restitution, paying back for the wrong committed. How much more is this dynamic required for a holy infinite God and his rebellious creatures! If God simply forgives man without punishment, there is no justice and God would be like the judge who deserves to be fired. The entire earth would be filled with chaos because people would have no incentive to change; God will forgive me, no big deal. But the wages of sin is death because all sin does is bring death and destruction, its horrible wages.

To get a better grasp on just how serious God takes all this sin business, take some time to read again (and if you haven’t read it yet, you need to read it, now!), Isaiah 53. This was written 700 years before the passion of Christ, and it is brutal. Only God himself in the person of his son could pay the infinite price He required, and in order for God’s justice to be met and his wrath satisfied, appeased, it had to be done exactly this way.

Transformation is God’s Job
Which brings us to I Corinthians 1:30. I was aware of this verse much of my Christian life, but at some point post 2012, it struck me with a force I’d never encountered before:

And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

The standard which God requires for right relationship to Him, perfect righteousness, or always doing right as Calvin describes love, is Jesus. We trust that he is that impossible standard for us, no more guilt, shame, or needing to measure up to a standard we can never match anyway. And that’s only the beginning. Christ is also our sanctification, or the process of progressively becoming more like God Himself in Christ.

This was really the mind blower for me because as born-again, Protestant Christians, justification, how we’re made right with God, is the doorway into the Christian life. Once we walk through that, we’re in. The challenge though, is as soon as we hit the foyer, Romans 7 slaps us upside the head. Or at least it should, if we understand that sin is more than merely outward conformity to the law. I will say it as clearly as I can: We cannot overcome sin. That brothers and sisters is impossible. But you know who can? In Paul’s response to this dilemma: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” It is he who can rescue us from this body of death, both now in this life, and in the forever resurrected life to come.

This reminds me a something I read in Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology very early in my Reformed journey: Christianity is the work of God in the soul of man. Which means it is a supernatural work, a work beyond the natural, beyond what we ourselves can do. In a lightbulb moment talking to a family member some years ago I said our transformation is God’s business. I can’t change myself, not possible. If I think I can, I’m in for frustration and disappointment. Because Jesus is my sanctification, however, I am promised a real change in my being only the Holy Spirit living in, with, and through me can accomplish. All the pressure is off, and daily repentance reminds me that it is “not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit says the Lord Almighty.” (Zech. 4:6)

Lastly, the deeper and more profound the nature of sin, the deeper and more profound is the forgiveness, mercy, and grace of God I experience in the love He has poured into my heart by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5). I am totally unworthy, yet receive the lavish riches of his grace. Knowing this experientially in my life, not only am I compelled to love others, but God is making me able to love others, helping me to want to love others, especially those I don’t want to love. This is how we change the world.

 

Why We Need More Hypocritical Christians

Why We Need More Hypocritical Christians

Jun 12, 2024 | Western Civilization

Since I recently wrote on Christian Nationalism, I need to address a criticism some Christians have of the concept: hypocritical Christians.

This criticism comes mostly from thoughtful Baptists who are consistent with their theological presuppositions and worry that in a Christian nation many or most people who profess Christianity won’t really be born-again, regenerate Christians. That is undoubtably true, and that concern is what I will address in this post. I will argue that is irrelevant to the concept of a Christian nation, and in fact a good thing, thus the title of this post.

We have no way of knowing who the true Christians among the populations of Christian nations of the past were, nor do we know that today. I make it a habit not to presume upon the state of someone’s soul or relationship to the Living God, unless they make it absolutely clear what state that is. I trust those who claim the name of Jesus that they are sincere, even if I disagree with their theology, or even if their life doesn’t reflect it to the degree I think it should. I leave the souls of the non-Christians up to God to deal with as he sees fit. As Hebrews says, “Just as man is appointed to die once, and after that to face judgment,” (Heb. 9:27), so I leave the judging to God.

When I started thinking about writing Going Back to Find the Way Forward in early 2022, I struggled with what as conservative and Evangelical Christians we’re trying to accomplish. What exactly is a Christian society or nation? What does such a thing look like? Is it fifty-one percent of the people being professing Christians? I was always frustrated because I knew intuitively what makes a nation Christian isn’t just the number of Christians. I’m not sure there’s ever been a time in Western history where the vast majority of people in the nations of Christendom were Christians, yet the people, Christian or not, considered themselves living in Christian nations. Most Christians seem to believe if we just convert enough people things will magically change for the better. It doesn’t work that way. What I’ve learned in the last two plus years is the way I think it does work, and more on that to follow.

The Confusion of the Church and the Kingdom
One of the reasons Christians are confused about this, as I was for most of my Christian life, is that I conflated the church and the kingdom of God. To me the church was the kingdom and the kingdom was the church. Anything or anyone outside of the church was not part of God’s kingdom, and it was only where the church or Christians were that made a place God’s kingdom. This is certainly a reflection of Baptist theology which is pretty much ubiquitous in modern Evangelicalism. I didn’t realize as a Presbyterian I had categories to see such a perspective as distorted and unbiblical. Of course Baptists will disagree with me on that.

What’s the difference between the two theological perspectives that merges kingdom and church or doesn’t? For me it was embracing postmillennialism that caused me to realize why as a Presbyterian I should see the church and the kingdom as two distinct and separate, though interrelated entities. The church is the main driver of advancing the kingdom of God in the world, and the kingdom lived out in the life of the church is brought outside of the walls of the church by faithful Christians applying God’s law and word and the gospel to every square inch of life. In the words of Jesus, we are salt and light in a fallen world, and Jesus used such metaphors because what we do in the world matters, as salt we really do enhance flavor and preserve, and as light we really do make darkness flee. In other words, as disciples of King Jesus, what we do actually changes things, pushes back the effects of the fall, and advances God’s kingdom.

First let’s address Baptist theology. For most of the history of the church until the Reformation, all Christians were baptized as infants because Christians were part of the national community of Christians. In Christendom 1.0, as Doug Wilson calls it, church and state were conflated, so in effect the church was the state and the state was the church. Baptism was what introduced you as a community member and citizen. If you were not baptized you were not part of the Church or the community, and thus not part of the nation, not a citizen. This all changed with what’s come to be known as the Radical Reformation, and the introduction into Christendom of the Anabaptists. This was very early in the Reformation, and Anabaptists refused to baptize babies, an extremely unpopular sentiment in those days, and many paid for it with their lives. The reason it was perceived as so dangerous and capital punishment was seen as a reasonable response, was because it threatened the essential order of a society. Religion wasn’t a personal and individual thing in the Middle Ages, but a family and community and societal thing, something that encompassed every area of life.

As you can imagine in such societies, there were a lot of hypocritical Christians, or what I’ve heard some call them, nominal Christians, or Christian in name only. That is undoubtably true, and yet all these people considered themselves living in a Christian nation and culture. This also highlights the concept of the visible and invisible church coming out of the Reformation. Not every baptized member of a church is in fact a born-again Christian, as Jesus says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matt. 7:21) This applies to Baptists who don’t baptize infants, and Presbyterians who do, but also for that matter Catholics, Orthodox, and Lutherans. Just because someone is baptized and belongs to a church, doesn’t mean their profession of faith is real. God will determine that at the end of time.

Hypocrisy is a Fact of Life: The Only Question is Which Hypocrisy
Do you ever wonder how many woke hypocrites there are? That may sound like an odd question, but think about it. Contrary to the First Amendment, the established religion of America is secularism, and woke, a form of cultural Marxism we’re all too familiar with now, is the most powerful denomination. Few people, though, are secular progressive absolutist woke leftists, yet the woke have no problem imposing their views and policies on an unwilling society. As Christopher Caldwell documents in The Age of Entitlement, because of the Civil Rights Act and other laws passed during 60s, the leftist agenda has been pushed on an unwilling populace from the top down. All the so called “rights” regarding race and sexual perversion were never embraced or welcomed by the vast majority of Americans, until the courts shoved it all down their throats. The examples are legion, and I encourage every American who wants to get our country back to read that book, what I now consider probably the most important book of the 21st century.

Let’s establish one indisputable fact: every human being is a hypocrite. We are all sinners and thus imperfect. That means we can’t live up to our own standards, let alone those of a holy God. We say and believe things, and often act contrary to what we believe. This is just as true for secular people who claim not to be religious, although they too live by faith. They have certain values and beliefs and can’t live up to those all the time either. Just ask one if they are perfect, and they will instantly say no, which means they are hypocrites too.

The greatest illusion in the age of secularism is the myth of neutrality. Because all people live by faith and are thus religious, and because societies are made up of religious people, all of a society’s laws and values are a reflection of their religious faith. Culture is simply religion externalized. There is no morally or religiously neutral nation. The question must always be asked about a nation’s laws: by what standard? Where do a nation’s laws and standards, what is embraced and what is stigmatized, considered right and wrong, come from? Ultimately, there are only two choices, God or man, revelation or reason.

Many scholars and historians seem to miss a very basic fact about America’s founding, that America was founded as a Christian nation. When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration about a Creator, about nature and nature’s God, he and every person who read it knew this Creator and God was the God of the Bible, of Genesis to Revelation. There was not one secularist among the founding generation, and none were doctrinaire Deists. All of America’s founders were Englishmen until they became Americans, and they were fighting for the rights of Englishmen that came down to them from King Alfred the Great in the 9th century, to Magna Carter in 1215, and through the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Every one of those 900 years was bathed in Christianity with God’s law as the foundation of the development of English common law and the rights afforded to citizens because of it.

America was founded as a Protestant Christian nation, and it will only be re-founded to the degree that Christianity again becomes the dominant religious foundation of the nation. As Doug Wilson says, it is either Christ or chaos. Too many conservatives and Christians buy into the myth of neutrality, and that secular pluralism in some kind of classical liberalism is the answer to the current chaos of Marxist wokeness. If you start talking about God’s law, the Bible and Christianity, and God forbid, Christian nationalism, they all start warning everyone against the horror of theocracy, as if the meaning of that word is self-evident. It is not. But yes, God must rule our nation because only if He does, will we regain the liberty our founders fought and died for. Otherwise with secularism, we have tyranny and the will to power, the bitter taste of what America is experiencing now.

Culture, Plausibility Structures, Law, and Faith, and the Disaster of Pietism
A movement in Germany in the 16h century arose to purify the German Lutheran church which came to be called Pietism. In due course it leaked out and infected all forms of Protestant Christianity, especially through the efforts and ministry of John Wesley. The Second Great Awakening in the 19th century was primarily a Pietistic awakening, which in due course turned conservative Bible believing Christianity primarily into a form of fundamentalism. When I was a young Christian in the late 70s and 80s, I learned about Evangelical Christians who I differentiated from the fundamentalists. The former were more culturally engaged and intellectually oriented, while the latter were not. I considered myself an Evangelical because of the influence of Francis Schaeffer very early in my faith journey. Today, however, there is no distinction and few if any embrace what has become post-9/11 a pejorative term, fundamentalism. All conservative protestants are now Evangelicals.

Why do I say that Pietism is a disaster? Because it turned Christian faith inward, making it primarily personal and not societal. Wesley and Pietistic Christians until the raise of fundamentalism very much believed their faith should affect the morals of society, but that was the problem—it was moralistic. Christianity for them was primarily about ethics, right and wrong, doing good verses doing bad, rather than metaphysics, or Christian worldview. Here is a good definition of this term:

The branch of philosophy which studies fundamental principles intended to describe or explain all that is, and which are not themselves explained by anything more fundamental; the study of first principles.

For 1500 years until the rise of Pietism, all Christians saw their faith as totalizing, as an encompassing authority and standard of every area of life, both personal and societal. Pietism was a monumental change in perspective that slowly but completely took over Protestant Christianity, making it increasingly irrelevant to anything more than the Christian’s personal faith journey. The advocates of the Enlightenment, the other side of the Pietistic coin, were all too happy to see Christianity retreat from societal influence, and in due course Christian Western civilization ceased to exist. Now we have woke Western civilization.

This means the culture, plausibility structures, and the law, are all dominated and driven by the secular religion of the Marxist woke faith. On a practical level we live in societies where the social conditions of are no longer conducive to belief in God and Christianity, but in the secular alternatives. Aaron Renn calls this negative world. Up until the 1980s Christianity was seen as a positive good for society. Then as secularism came to dominant the culture, Christianity became something neutral, neither good nor bad, but as the 21st century turned into its second decade, we now live in negative world where Christianity is seen by cultural elites as positively dangerous and regressive. Witness the secular pagan left going nuts over Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker affirming motherhood and the traditional conception of the family. If some famous football player had said the same things in 1995 when he was born, in neutral world, nobody would have noticed.

The mission for Christians and the church in the 21st century, then, is to re-Christianize the culture and build the plausibility structures that makes Christianity plausible to more people, which leads to the growth of the church (more people saved) and the advance of God’s kingdom. We want the social conditions to be conducive to belief in God and Christianity, and that means we reject Pietism and a merely personal faith. On a practical level, per Jesus’ instructions in the Great Commission, our job is to disciple our nation, and teach it and all the people in it, everything Jesus commanded us. In due course as the culture shifts in our direction, that will mean more hypocritical or nominal Christians, which is exactly what we should want. The alternative is the hypocritical woke Marxists we live with now. As Jesus said about the poor, the hypocrites we will always have among us. The question is which kind of hypocrites do we prefer.

 

Recognizing the Spirit of God-Christology

Recognizing the Spirit of God-Christology

Jun 5, 2024 | Theology

For the first more than five years of my Christian life, theology was non-existent. There seemed to be this sense that theology was a distraction at best, and a waste of time at worst. If not overtly taught, I still picked up that theology would get in the way of the most important thing in the Christian life, my personal relationship with Jesus. That was mediated through the Bible alone, not books about the Bible. The Holy Spirit would enlighten me to the truth as I read, and that was all the theology I needed. In this version of Christianity, we read books about this relationship with Jesus, and how to live the holy life, but systematic study of doctrine was non-existent. Then I was introduced to Reformed theology at the ripe old age of 24, and it was as if I’d gone from street level up to the hundredth floor and could now see the panorama of the entire city.

One of the first things I learned is a word I’d never heard before, hermeneutics, or the general principles of interpreting a text. It came from Aristotle and can apply to any text, but given the importance of the Bible to the history of the world, it’s been associated almost exclusively with biblical interpretation. To say my Bible-and-me focus invited interpretive problems would be an understatement; it was a recipe for misinterpretation. Christians will obviously never agree on every interpretation, but once we agree the Bible is the authoritative, inspired infallible word of the Living God, the disagreements are relatively minor.

As we come to the text of Scripture, we need to keep these four things in mind if we are to interpret it rightly:

  1. Authorial intent: what we can assess the author intended when he wrote the words.
  2. Audience understanding: what the intended audience would have been expected to believe the words meant. This means context counts, specifically the moment in history in which it was written.
  3. Scripture interprets Scripture: never read a text in isolation from the rest of Scripture.
  4. Scripture is all about Christ (Luke 24): the overarching theme of God’s revelation to us is Jesus.

To fully benefit from the scope of redemptive history revealed to us in Scripture, we must understand how the puzzle pieces fit into the overall big picture. The pieces can only give us a limited picture, and an easily distorted one. Fortunately, we’re not in this alone, which is why we must read more than just the Bible. We have easy access to books, and the Internet, to help us grow in our understanding of the big picture, and all the little pictures that make it up. If we are to obey the imperative of Scripture itself to grow in our knowledge, then we will want to take advantage of the great minds who have come before us, as well as those of our contemporaries. The treasures are endless.

Christology: The Study of Jesus
The life of Jesus is one such puzzle, and people have been taking pieces of Jesus and distorting the picture for 2,000 years. It is important to understand that first century Jews had no categories for a Messiah like Jesus. Jews had been waiting for a Messiah for 400 years, and nobody expected who the Messiah turned out to be. For all of them, family, friends, and foes, Jesus was a conundrum. For 1,500 years Jews had proclaimed the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

Now here comes Jesus of Nazareth taking prerogatives belonging only to God, like forgiving sin and commanding nature. No wonder they were confused. His resurrection helped them make some sense of who Jesus was, but it took the church 300 years before there was a consensus that Jesus was who all Christians now believe he is, the God-man.

There were a variety of Christological heresies, but all erred in one of two directions. They either emphasized Jesus’ Humanity at the expense of his divinity, or his divinity at the expense of his humanity. The most substantial and dangerous of these heresies was Arianism, a form of Unitarian theology that asserts Jesus is not divine, but a created being. In the early 4th century it seemed like the whole world was buying into Arianism. But God raised up a man named Athanasius who stood fast against this heresy, gaining the appellation Athanasius contra mundum, or against the world. He stood against the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the time and was instrumental in the Council of Nicaea in 325 which established basic Christological orthodoxy and produced the Nicene Creed recited in churches throughout the world ever since. The orthodox doctrine of Christ is succinctly explained by Charles Hodge in his Systematic Theology:

The Scriptural Facts Concerning Christ
The facts which the Bible teaches concerning the person of Christ are, first, that He was truly man, i.e., He had a perfect or complete human nature. Hence everything that can be predicated of man (that is, of man as man, and not of man as fallen) can be predicated of Christ. Secondly, He was truly God, or had a perfect divine nature. Hence everything that can be predicated of God can be predicated of Christ. Thirdly, He was one person. The same person, self, or Ego, who said, “I thirst,” said, “Before Abrham was, I am.” This is the whole doctrine of the incarnation as it lies in the Scriptures and in the faith of the church.

Everything in Christianity turns on this doctrine, that Jesus was fully God and fully man in one person. Our salvation depends on it.

The Testimony of Scripture is Clear
Despite the church grappling with this issue for hundreds of years, this was the New Testament witness from the beginning. The Apostle John writes (I John 1:4):

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3 but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.

John’s exhortation to “test the spirits” is how we know if a teaching is orthodox or heresy. And it follows if the incarnation is true, if God became a man, then the gospels are factually historical, miracles and all. It’s breathtaking as well when you consider that God paid the penalty, death, for man’s offense against Himself by becoming fully like the one who committed the offense. This fact is why there is no other religion on earth comparable to it, not to mention it claims all the others are lies and it alone is the truth about the nature of reality.

Tomes have been written on Christology, but I will highlight a few passages that declare the unequivocal divinity of Christ.

Paul says in Colossians 1

15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Some think “firstborn” is indicating Jesus isn’t eternal like the Father, but all orthodox theologians in the history of the church agree this is in reference to the resurrection, as Paul says in v. 18, that Jesus is “the firstborn from among the dead.”

I Corinthians 1:30  and Jeremiah 23 are a powerful incarnational combination. Paul declares that, “Christ is our righteousness,” and in a Messianic passage, Jeremiah declares that Yahweh, Israel’s covenant making God, is “our righteousness:

5 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch,
a King who will reign wisely
and do what is just and right in the land.
6 In his days Judah will be saved
and Israel will live in safety.
This is the name by which he will be called:
The Lord Our Righteous.

Paul is definitively asserting that Jesus of Nazareth is Yahweh, Israel’s covenant making God!

Paul also makes the connection clear in Philippians when he says in Philippians 2,

9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

This is a clear reference to Isaiah 45 when Yahweh, Israel’s God, declares,

Before me every knee will bow;
by me every tongue will swear.

Without an anti-supernatural bias, the gospels also clearly portray Jesus of Nazareth as both man and God, which is why Paul can so definitely assert that Jesus is God.

I will end this brief survey with the words every true Christian should proclaim, confessing of Jesus with Doubting Thomas, “My Lord and my God!” In reply Jesus promises: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Test the Spirits: It Takes Work
Few people are called to be theologians or pastors, but Christianity is a religion of a book, and thus we are enjoined throughout that book to grow in our knowledge of the faith. Too many Christians think that is for others, intellectual types or pastors and such, but it is for every single Christian. Given we live in the 21st century when knowledge is inexpensive, often free, and easy to get, we have no excuse to not “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.”

The question for every Christian is whether we see Christianity as a spectator or as a participant, are we on the field, in the battle, or just observing from the cheap seats. Obviously, that’s a rhetorical question, but we might want to make ourselves familiar with the Bereans. Paul and his companions had been in Thessalonica, in modern day Greece, and the Jews in that city were none too happy, so they were kicked out and sent on their way. They travelled to the city of Berea, two days walk, and the Jews there were of a different sort (Acts 17:11):

Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

Noble, I like that word. It speaks of qualities that are admirable, dignified, regal, and all of us would rather be seen as this than the alternative. And what made the Bereans (the only time they are mentioned in the New Testament) noble is that they were not willing to just take Paul’s word for it. Christianity doesn’t work that way, or shouldn’t. Keep in mind whenever the New Testament speaks of Scripture, graphé or the writings in Greek, they are speaking of the Old Testament. The entirety of New Testament Christianity is built on the foundation of the Old Testament writings, and since all of it is about Jesus, the ultimate biblical hermeneutic, the Bereans felt compelled to see if the writings really did testify that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah.

That too is our charge, except now we have the New Testament and 2000 years of Christian history to look back on to examine and test the spirits, as John exhorts us to do. For those of us who are Protestants, our ultimate authority is not in any church or man, but in Scripture, and it is up to each one of us to examine the Scriptures to see if what we’re being taught is true. We’re not in this alone, however, as if it’s just us and the Bible. We have an advantage over the Bereans in that we have the great creeds of the church, the Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, as well as the Protestant confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries, such as the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Belgic Confession (1559), The Canons of Dort (1618-19), and the most famous, the Westminster Standards (1643-1649). The Baptists have the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith. These are all from the Reformed tradition, but modern Evangelicals can espouse most everything in them.

From the very beginning, as John’s exhortation implies, anti-Christs have been a part of the church’s experience. The narrative of the fall in Genesis 3 tells us that our experience against evil in this fallen world is to be a constant feature of existence. The offspring of the serpent is given the ability to strike the heel of the woman’s offspring, which is Christ and his church, but Christ and his church (his body) will in turn be able to strike the offspring of the serpent’s head. The damage we can inflict on our mortal enemy is far worse than he can inflict on us, but it takes diligence, persistence, and dare I say work, to do that.

In our secular age that often looks different than previous eras. The cults of today bear little resemblance to the Jim Jones or David Koresh’s of the world. They look more like Hollywood movie stars or “influencers” on the Internet, business titans, or politicians, all thoroughly secular. Though they are not overtly “religious” they are all religious nonetheless, and the spirit of antichrist is everywhere. So in the face of this vacuous secularism we declare with John that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh from God, and is God, and at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father, now and forever.

 

Are You a Christian Nationalist?

Are You a Christian Nationalist?

May 29, 2024 | America

Some time back I asked on Twitter if people would call themselves Christian nationalists or not. There were a variety of responses from yes to no to everywhere in between. Here is one representative of the in between.

Until there is strong agreement on what it means, I will not embrace a term that is also claimed by groups that I would never support, endorse, or fellowship with.

Here’s another from a yes:

I’m a Christian. I think biblically based public policy is the best recipe for human flourishing.

I absolutely agree that a biblically based public policy is not only the best, but ultimately the only recipe for human flourishing. This got me thinking about how I would describe myself, and what exactly I do believe in this regard.

First the term. We all know it is leftist dog whistle to imply Christians and nationalists are white supremacists without saying it. This also tells us the left fears both Christians and nationalists because they are a threat to their God-less Marxist, globalist agenda. If you’ve never read Karl Marx’s little Communist Manifesto, you may not know that Marx and his progeny have four enemies that must, in his words, be “abolished” if the revolution is to succeed and communism is to lead inexorably to a classless Utopia where all are equal:

  1. Private property
  2. The family
  3. The nation-state
  4. Religion, i.e., Christianity

Of the four, Christianity is the most dangerous to their diabolical project because from it the other three are derived and sustained.

I will explain below the tentative conclusions I’ve come to about my own political philosophy and what might describe me at this point in time, but first some preliminaries.

The Nation-State
The nation-state is one of the many gifts of Christian Western civilization. I wonder how many Americans know that the idea of a nation with identifiable sovereign borders is a relatively new phenomena in the history of the world. Prior to the seventeenth century, borders were determined by military power, and as power dynamics shifted among peoples, so did borders. This began to change in the seventeenth century as the result of a European peace treaty called the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). The basic idea of the Westphalian system is that each state, or nation has an equal right to sovereignty.

So taken for granted by most people, this arrangement is assumed to be the natural order of things—it is not. The reason is because of sinful man’s penchant for building towers of Babel (Gen. 11). Babel teaches us that hubris will always tend to make people consolidate power to unbiblical tyrannical ends unless they are countered with forces that limit their power, something America’s Founders understood better than any thinkers the world has ever known.

Because the nation-state is un-natural, it is fragile, and in our day is uniquely under assault by transnationalist globalist elites who see borders as inhibiting their Babel-like agenda. Put simply, nationalism is an obstacle to the goals of the globalist technocratic elite, the builders of a modern globalist babel. Given this natural sinful tendency to centralize and absolutize power, Christians are obligated to be nationalists, and need to recognize the Satanic threat of globalism.

A nation is more than borders, much more. It is first a local experience because loyalty and commitment comes from the bottom up: first the family, then the locality, town, or city, then the county, the state, and finally the nation. The organic nature of the nation is described well by Stephen Wolfe:

[T]he nation, properly understood, is a particular people with ties of affection that bind them to each other and their place of dwelling; and thus nationalism is the nation acting for its national good, which includes conversation of those ties of affection.

Affection is the operative word. We can’t have a real personal devotion and loyalty to an abstraction like a United Nations or European Union. Affection is only possible with what we know in some measure personally, intimately. The neighbors we see every day, or the parents at school, or people in the grocery store, it is they who we develop a connection with, not people on a screen on the other side of the world. This sense of peoplehood, if you will, is inevitable and necessary in a world full of nations.

The concept of the nation, or specific people groups, is an important biblical concept, the word being used well over 600 times. In fact, when Jesus gave what we’ve come to call the Great Commission to the eleven in Matthew 28, he told them to make disciples of all nations (ethnos in Greek), not all people (anthropos in Greek). In Acts 17 the Apostle Paul lays out the case for the God ordained nature of nations:

26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.

You can’t get more biblically unequivocal than that!

The Kingdom, the Church, and the Nation
Related to the issue of a Christian nation, is the problem of the modern confusion in conflating the Church with the kingdom of God. Until recently I believed the kingdom was the church, and the church the kingdom. This is not true. The kingdom of God or heaven is God’s rule or reign on earth brought by God’s redeemed people, not by church bodies as such. It is also not just saved Christians who advance God’s kingdom on earth, but saved Christians who apply their biblical and Christian worldview to every square inch of life, a la Abraham Kuyper who said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” God’s kingdom is also advanced by non-Christians who embrace Christian values and assumptions about the nature of reality and apply them. Worldviews have consequences, and our job as faithful Christians is to inculcate the Christian worldview into the culture, which is a people’s beliefs externalized and applied. The ultimate goal is people imbibing a Christian worldview instead of the poison of the secular woke cultural Marxism they currently do. No culture, like its government, is worldview neutral.

For a long time, I struggled with what as conservative and Evangelical Christians we’re trying to accomplish. What exactly is a Christian society or nation? What does such a thing look like? Is it fifty-one percent of the people being professing Christians? I was always frustrated because I knew intuitively what makes a nation Christian isn’t just the number of Christians. I’m not sure there’s ever been a time in Western history where the vast majority of people in the nations of Christendom were Christians, yet the people, Christian or not, considered themselves living in Christian nations. Most Christians seem to believe if we just convert enough people things will magically change for the better. It doesn’t work that way.

Joseph Boot in Mission of God relates well how this kingdom-church confusion creates a false dilemma:

Believers tend to think that they are confronted with a very restricted choice in these matters: either pursue a return to a form of the ecclesiastical culture of Christendom where power and authority over various cultural and political matters is restored to a particular church denomination, or accept that we now live in a post-Christian age where the only thing Christians can realistically hope for is being one of many interest groups in a diverse, multicultural society, perhaps with a seat at the table—a chair pulled out for us by a humanistic secular state now to be embraced as the norm for human society.

The second view dominates modern Evangelicalism.

The problem, other than these not being the only two choices, and I would argue neither is the Christian choice, is that both lead to totalitarianism. Neither Christian nor pagan (i.e., secular) totalitarianism lead to good results as the historical evidence makes painfully clear. However, going beyond these two limiting choices we realize there are indeed only two ultimate choices—the rule of God or the rule of man—God or paganism. It is abundantly clear how the latter works, but there is unfortunately an abundance of confusion about how the former would work in the modern world. The rule of God in a nation isn’t really difficult to understand, but ignorance and secular programming makes it so. Bringing such a reality to pass is another story.

The Necessity of Sphere Sovereignty
The concept of sphere sovereignty is critical in the never-ending battle against the spirit of Babel. The concept is as simple as it is contested by those who embrace that spirit. It was first introduced by the great Dutch theologian, statesman, and journalist Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) in a public address at the inauguration of the Free University of Amsterdam. The question comes down to authority and who wields it. Absolute sovereign authority rests in God alone, and He has delegated His authority on earth to human beings; “so that on earth one actually does not meet God Himself in things visible, but that sovereign authority is always exercised through an office held by men.” In this he asks two pertinent questions:

And in that assigning of God’s Sovereignty to an office held by man the extremely important question arises: how does that delegation of authority work? Is that all embracing Sovereignty of God delegated undivided to one single man; or does an earthly Sovereign possess the power to compel obedience only in a limited circle; a circle bordered by other circles in which another is Sovereign?

These spheres interact and overlap in society, but one sphere must never usurp the authority of the other. The only way this possibly works, and thus the only possibility of true liberty in any society, is the acknowledgement of the absolute Sovereignty of Christ. Kuyper explains why.

But behold now the glorious Freedom idea! That perfect and absolute Sovereignty of the sinless Messiah at the same time contains the direct denial and challenge of all absolute Sovereignty on earth in sinful man; because of the division of life into spheres, each with its own Sovereignty.

Stephen Wolfe explains it well in The Case for Christian Nationalism:

[I]t follows that every sphere of life requires a suitable authority, with a suitable power, to make determinations. For this reason, God has granted specific types of power by which the authorities of each sphere make judgments. The family has the pater familiar with patria potestas (“fatherly power”); civil life has the civil magistrate with civil power; the instituted church has the minister with spiritual power, and the individual has a power unto himself. The nature of each sphere dictates the species of power required. These powers and their differences are not arbitrary but arise from the nature of each sphere.

Although as a Thomist he attributes this to “natural law,”16 there is nothing natural about it. It is only when those in power acknowledge the power of God in Christ as the ultimate authority that the state will recognize its limits.

What Do I Call Myself?
When I was 24 and decided I was going off to graduate school to become an academic and scholar, which obviously didn’t work out, I thought political philosophy would probably be the path I took. Since that didn’t happen, I never felt compelled to develop my own distinctly Christian political philosophy. It wasn’t until I started writing my latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, that I realized I needed to do just that. Given I was now going to publicly put myself out there in the battle to save America from its Marxist enemies, and hopefully bring along Christians in the fight, I could no longer depend on others to do my thinking for me. I had to figure out what my Christian faith compelled me to believe about how human beings govern themselves. That’s another way of saying, have my own political philosophy.

It’s clear from the above that I am both a Christian and a nationalist. I believe every Christian given God’s revelation in creation and Scripture is compelled to obviously be the former, but also the latter. The only other option is to be a globalist, and Babel teaches us that is not an option. Another word I’ve come to embrace since I’ve been become aware of and have been listening to Steve Bannon over the last several years is populist. The word gets a bad rap because it is associated with the rabble, with the passions of the people to rebel against any and all authority, to in effect be the authority. Another word for that is anarchy, or as the ancient Greeks called it, Democracy. According to Aristotle, there are three forms of government, and each can be good or bad, and it can by laid out this way:

Who Rules?   Good form             Bad form
one person         monarchy                  tyranny
few people          aristocracy                oligarchy
many people      polity/timocracy      democracy

Timocracy is basically rule by property owners, something we know America’s Founders adopted. Democracy, which America is not (we’re a representative republic), is 51 percent rule.

In their genius, America’s Founders decided to adopt each form of rule in the American republic to hopefully keep the country from going to the bad form of government. Unfortunately, the progressives in the early 20th century came up with the idea of a “living” constitution, which is no constitution at all, and by the 1960s and the Civil Rights revolution, the Constitution was dead. This is laid out in painful clarity and detail by Christopher Caldwell in The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, one of the most important books of the 21st century.

America has become an oligarchy, or as we now know it, the deep state, a rule by unaccountable “experts” who only care about maintaining and extending their power. This fact, we’re all too painfully aware of now is why we need to bring back the polity (maybe one day God willing timocracy too), and thus why I’ve embraced populism. I will repeat, America is a representative republic, the democracy side, which means our elected representatives are accountable to us, their constituencies. Both parties, or as we disparagingly call them now, the Uniparty, despise their bosses, us. They and we have forgotten that the very first words of our governing document, the Constitution, begins with, “We the people . . . “ Re-founding America is only going to happen if We take back our government from the oligarchy.

Thus, I would now describe myself as a nationalist populist Christian conservative.

 

Why I Disagree with Doug Wilson on Charter Classical Schools

Why I Disagree with Doug Wilson on Charter Classical Schools

May 22, 2024 | America

Doug Wilson is not a fan of charter classical schools, to say the least, and I am.

It’s an odd form of disagreement because in so many ways I completely agree with him, in an ideal world. Of course, he and others would argue that without agreeing with him, we’ll never get close to that ideal world. They could be right, but I don’t think so, or I wouldn’t be writing this.

The title of the piece is typical brilliant Doug Wilson metaphor: “Classical Charter Schools as a Cut Flowers Display.” We all know that as beautiful as cut flowers can be, their beauty is fleeting; no soil, no roots, no life. His argument is that charter classical schools without Christ are like cut flowers, or to change the metaphor, like a dead man walking, on death row not long for this world. He believes Christians in charter classical education are in effect trying to prop up the failed experiment in secularism that has been such an unmitigated disaster for America and the Western world.

I think the reason for the disagreement is because of an approach to apologetics, defending the veracity of the Christian faith, called presuppositionalism, which Wilson embraces.

Three Broad Approaches to Defending Christianity
From the first Easter, Christians have been under attack. When Jesus’ followers proclaimed he had come back from the dead to establish a new religion out of a very old one, pagans and their fellow Jews did not give them a warm reception. So, Christians had to defend the veracity of their faith from the beginning.

Prior to the 20th century, Christians just defended Christianity without thinking of apologetics categories. That changed with the rise of presuppositionalism starting with a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Cornilius Van Til (1895-1987), the founding father of presuppositionalism. Because he and his followers declared their approach as the biblical and only correct approach, other apologists were compelled to identify and defend their approaches. I will briefly outline them here before I get to how I think this discussion impacts how we look at charter classical schools.

Before I do, I will say I am personally a whatever works apologist. In practice, I’m presuppositional because a fact of existence is that we can’t escape our assumptions in every thought we have, and those assumptions determine what we think and often the conclusions we come to.

Presuppositionalism —This approach teaches that we must start with the assumption that Christianity is true and the Bible is the revelation of the Triune God because we can’t escape our assumptions about God and the ultimate nature of things. Wherever we start will determine where we end up. If we argue outside of specifically Christian presuppositions, whatever knowledge we present to a sinner, they will suppress the truth by their wickedness” (Romans 1:18). So, any other approach than theirs will be futile. At least that’s the concept.

However, I’ve found over the years having listened to hundreds of testimonies that people very often come to the right conclusions from very wrong assumptions. So I ask, how can there be only one right, biblical way to defend the faith if other approaches accomplish the same thing? My flexible understanding of apologetics separates me from the doctrinaire presuppositionalist.

Classical — I was introduced to this approach in seminary by a book called Classical Apologetics: A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics by R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley. It frustrated me because they were as dogmatic as the presuppositionalists that theirs was the only proper way to defend the faith. Basically, it starts with the proofs for God’s existence going back to the brilliant Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, what Thomas called the five ways. It argues that we must first establish God’s existence, theism, because any historical evidence will only make sense once we’ve established God exists.

Evidential —This approach leans on historical and philosophical evidence but focuses primarily on the former, defending the reliability of the biblical text, and the stories it contains. Philosophy contributes to the evidence, while the classical approach is more purely philosophical.

We could add a fourth approach that takes from these three called the cumulative case method. As in a court of law, an argument is developed with different strands of evidence developing a beyond a reasonable doubt case.

Wilson Believes Charter Classical Schools are Destined to go Woke
Doug Wilson is a doctrinaire presuppositionalist, and I believe this determines his understanding of the frailty of the charter (public) classical education movement. I’m very familiar with this movement because my daughter, Gabrielle, a graduate of Hillsdale College, taught for eight years at a charter classical school, and has worked for two years in their Barney Charter School Initiative.

I believe something like this is of great value as Christians learn to battle and defeat the poison of secularism toward re-Christianizing our nation. I would point out that Hillsdale College would not agree with me that that is the ultimate goal, but challenging that is not the point of this post. Arguing for the value of their project is.

The reason Wilson thinks charter classical schools are destined to go woke is because they are not confessionally and overtly Christian. That’s basically his argument.

Charter schools remove Christ, the gospel, the holy apostles, and any mention of this astounding grace of God. And so when you take Christ out of this story, what do you have? Now all you have are dead, white guys, and nothing in the story whatever about unmerited grace.

This assumes, however, that the only revelation of God to man is in Christ, and as a good presuppositionalist, Wilson believes without Scripture and Christ, any other knowledge is of no ultimate value. I doubt he would put it that way, but with presuppositionalism it is all or nothing.

I, on the other hand, I would argue that Romans 1 tell us that creation reveals God:

20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Material reality reveals God, and He cannot be escaped. Paul says, in effect, that people suppress the truth because they love their wickedness more. I don’t believe, contra the presuppositionalist, that this suppression means they don’t in some way possess real knowledge of God, even if it is not saving knowledge.

Does Christ Inoculate Against Wokeness?
If an organization, or church, is avowedly Christian, does that mean, as Wilson says, that they are protected from going woke? History tells us it does not.

Christian organizations that proclaim the unmerited grace in Christ, as Wilson insists charter classical schools must, have gone woke. One infamous example is CRU, once called Campus Crusade for Christ. In fact, this headline at Not the Bee tells us just how woke they’ve become, “CRU, formerly Campus Crusade for Christ, fired two of its employees after they voiced concerns about the group’s stance on LGBT issues.”

Many Christian denominations and organizations have gone “woke” throughout post-Enlightenment history. J. Gresham Machen, the founder of my Alma Mater, Westminster Seminary Philadelphia, fought the Presbyterian Church for much of his life until he was basically kicked out for being an orthodox Bible believing Christian. The Presbyterian Church, started by the great Scottish Reformer John Knox, most certainly didn’t start out “woke,” and wasn’t for much of its history until it embraced Enlightenment inspired German biblical criticism of the 19th century. Then the inevitable result was a different religion, as Machen wrote about in his 1923 book, Christianity and Liberalism. We can see from the experience of the New Testament Church that people proclaiming the Christian faith doesn’t mean they won’t infect the church with heresy. Speaking of antichrists among the people of God the Apostle John says in his first epistle:

 19 They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.

Unfortunately, as history shows, the heretics don’t always go “out from us,” but pervert the teaching of the gospel from within. The once dominant mainline denominations are a lamentable example, but because of their heresy they are a shell of their former orthodox selves.

Goodness, Beauty, and Truth: Another form of Apologetics
Which brings us to the classical education mantra of goodness, beauty, and truth. If a classical school is actually classical, it takes its marching orders from the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Christians via the Middle Ages. Classical education by definition is rooted in Western history, which is primarily Christian history, and solid charter schools do not ignore that fact, but charter schools are public schools so they can’t proselytize the Christian faith.

What they do proselytize, however, is the objective nature of goodness, beauty, and truth. C.S. Lewis, certainly not a presuppositionalist, wrote about the concept of what he called the Tao in his classic little book, The Abolition of Man. This universal concept of objective values in reality is also known as natural law, or in specifically Christian terms, creation law, or natural revelation. I don’t like the term natural law because in our secular age natural means without God, regardless of what the person believes using it.  Lewis wrote this book in the early 1940s when secularism’s influence was becoming ubiquitous, but not yet affirmed as the default worldview of the West. He decided to use the Tao because his argument about the objective moral values in reality is found in every culture on earth and in every time. This specific passage is relevant for our discussion:

Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can overarch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny, or an obedience that is not slavery.

In other words, something beyond mere human preference is necessary if we’re to escape the inevitable tyranny produced by a merely material universe in the will to power, might makes right, dominating peoples and nations. Put another way, God’s moral law is the only source of true liberty.

As I argue in Going Back to Find the Way Forward, the dividing line in Western culture is truth. Those who believe truth is real, that there is an objective nature to reality, in Lewis’s word, the Tao, believe there is something to which the state, those in power, are accountable, the truth. To those who don’t believe in truth or the Tao, “the narrative” is all, and anything is justified toward its ideological ends.

This brings us to the objective nature of values, or to the concrete reality of goodness, beauty, and truth, and it’s apologetics value. The triune reality of these three values can’t but point to the Trine God who is those things. Those who see them and believe in them and fight for them whatever they believe, are closer to God than those who don’t. They build in a person’s mind what sociologists call a plausibility structure, or a state of mind in which these things actually exist, are believable; they are not mere preferences. God to such people is far more plausible as the explanation of all things than mere chance and matter colliding. I would further argue that people immersed in a worldview of the Tao and its objective nature are less susceptible to going woke than Christians who uncritically swallow the secular zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, the climate of the times. Ours is not only distinctly chilly to God, but it inculcates materialist assumptions into Christians without them even being aware of it. 

This is why Wilson’s argument against charter classical schools doesn’t hold any water. Again, I do agree with him that the ideal is for parents is to send their children to a Christian classical school, or home school them, but that is simply not an option for tens of millions of Christian families. And what about all those children who come from secular families? Do we just abandon them to Marxist indoctrination? Keep in mind, fifty million children every day attend public schools, and that isn’t going to change in the foreseeable future. At some point government or “public” schools must be, in Marx’s term, abolished, but in the meantime, charter classical schools are a possible option.

But is It Really Classical?
As I said, my daughter worked at a charter classical school, and her husband still does. Neither of them have been satisfied that this school is fully classical. I’m not talking about schools like that. I’m talking about schools like those Hillsdale College establishes that understand and teach the Tao in all they do. Here is what the Barney Charter schools believe and teach:

Classical education is a model of K-12 instruction that is rooted in the liberal arts and sciences, offers a firm grounding in civic virtue, and cultivates moral character:

  • It emphasizes the centrality of the Western tradition in the study of history, literature, philosophy, and the fine arts.
  • It features a rich and recurring examination of the American literary, moral, philosophical, political, and historical traditions to equip students for citizenship.
  • Its curriculum is balanced and strong across the four core disciplines of math, science, literature, and history, with explicit phonics instruction leading to reading fluency and explicit grammar instruction leading to language mastery.
  • Well-educated and articulate teachers are central to the classroom, in contrast to conventional “student-centered learning” models.
  • The school culture demands moral virtue, decorum, respect, discipline, and studiousness among the students and faculty—and simultaneously produces a spirit of wonder and a desire to know that which is good, true, and beautiful.

In short, classical education offers K-12 students the sort of rigorous education that undergraduate students receive at Hillsdale College.

I would suggest students who graduate from such schools are far more open to the gospel than their unfortunate compatriots at regular public schools, and are less susceptible to woke indoctrination.