Plausibility Structures and the Importance of Jordan Peterson

Plausibility Structures and the Importance of Jordan Peterson

Aug 7, 2024 | Culture, Uncategorized

Since I became active on Twitter earlier this year, mainly to promote my new book and work, I’ve noticed that Christians can be narrow minded and dogmatic. And lest you think I’m bagging on my fellow Christians, these less than appealing traits come naturally to sinners regardless of what they believe. Such myopia, the inability to see beyond their own certitude, is why I often see people saying that Peterson is not an orthodox Bible-believing Christian, therefore he’s either dangerous or not worth listening to. I could not disagree more. I believe God is using him as an important piece of the puzzle to re-Christianize America and the West. I believe this, strongly, because of a concept most Christians have never heard of; plausibility structures. This post will be a short primer on the importance of this concept for our specific time in history, living in what Aaron Renn calls “negative world,” and the importance of Jordan Peterson.

In my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I explore plausibility structures in some detail, which is the idea of the reality generating mechanism of a culture. The term was coined by sociologist Peter Berger in his books, The Social Construction of Realty (with Thomas Luckman) and The Sacred Canopy. As a sociological construct (i.e., what it means to live with and among human beings and the culture and meanings they create), it simply means what seems true to us, and the social structures that contribute to that seeming.

A simple example is that for secular people God seems no more real than Santa Clause. Whether God is real, is not the point; what seems real is. Society creates the plausibility structures that contribute to God being plausible to us, or not. These structures are built into our educational systems, media, entertainment, etc. They are the secular air we breathe, and they affect us in ways big and small without our being aware of it. Christians are not immune to it either. In the West, God is persona non‑grata; if he exists at all he is merely a personal preference. I am convinced most people reject Christianity or never entertain it, because it just doesn’t seem real to them. For most, whether it is true or not is beside the point.

The sociology of knowledge is the study of how a life lived among persons in society affects their perception of reality, the “seemingness” of it. Reality isn’t just there; in some sense it is socially constructed, and the plausibility of our faith to us is directly related to the idea of a socially constructed reality. Christians affirm objective reality, that meaning inheres in things apart from our perceptions or experiences of them. Reality, however, is mediated to us in a variety of ways, through our senses, our psychology, our upbringing, interactions with other people, and society itself. This mediation means that although we affirm that objective reality exists, it must be interpreted by us, to us, and for us. Pure human objectivity does not, and cannot exist. Yet most human beings take reality for granted, as if their view of it was perfectly objective, no interpretation needed. All the while they are ignorant that interpretation is not an option; it is going on all the time whether they acknowledge it or not.

Secularism: There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
Western post-Christian secular culture no longer shares our Christian presuppositions. God, it is asserted and assumed, is not part of reality in any objective sense. He is wholly subjective, likely a projection of our wishful thinking, a purely personal phenomenon, and as such His existence has no bearing on society.  This perspective, however, starts with the secular world’s understanding of faith.

Secular cultural messaging denies that irreligious people need faith because faith is defined as something required only by religious people. Secular, non‑religious people, however, don’t embrace something called unbelief, but rather some other faith. All people live by faith, but we live in a culture that defines objectivity in a way that prejudices it against religious belief. Scientists and those who live by its light, we are told, can be purely objective, while religious folks by definition can’t be. This “objectivity double standard” allows the culture to define objective reality against us because in this view religious people can’t be objective. Secular people technically may not be “religious” in that they don’t go to church, but they still have a worldview based on faith commitments, which is why there is no such thing as an unbeliever. Finite creatures of limited knowledge can only exist by faith, by trusting the knowledge or expertise or insights or authority of others.

Secular irreligious people don’t know this, and many Christians unfortunately don’t know it either. To the secular, the Christian faith is less believable, less credible, than the secular faith they embrace which seems more credible, more plausible. This faith takes many forms, be it agnosticism, atheism, or an indifference to the claims of Christ, but it is faith, a trust in something, nonetheless. It seems more plausible to such people that God is either not worth pursuing, or even if He’s there it doesn’t much matter, or that any meaning to be had is in this life alone. None of this is merely rational or logical, and I would argue it rarely is. What they believe has more to do with what seems real to them than what is actually real. Society and culture in many ways determine this.

The Social Construction of Reality
In order to work under the rubric of “science,” sociologists have to bracket questions of truth or ultimate meaning. So when they say that reality is a social construction, they are not saying that it is only a social construction. What they are saying is that human beings interpret reality, give meaning to it, in social settings, and that social settings in turn affect that meaning. In the words of Berger and Luckmann:

Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world. As sociologists we take this reality as the object of our analysis.

The key phrase here is “reality interpreted.” Reality isn’t self‑interpreting. Looking at the world through our eyes is not unlike how we experience a movie or TV show. The director constructs a reality, i.e., meaning, for us through various mechanisms at his or her disposal, and they are all deliberately, painstakingly used. After laying out an extensive list of what goes into making these virtual fictional worlds meaningful for us, Ted Turnau in his book Poplogetics says:

Each of these techniques adds meaning and texture for the imaginative landscape projected by the film, a world that the filmmaker constructs for our imagination.

Our world, however, is inundated with far more meaning than any film; it’s a veritable Niagara Falls of significance. And it doesn’t take a director to manipulate sound, light, or camera angles; we just have to wake up in the morning. The meaning exists out there, and we hunger for it as we hunger for stories told to entertain us.

Reality, however, isn’t merely something socially determined for us. The idea of the realness of reality, if you will, its objective nature, is both biblical and classical. In the Bible this is assumed from beginning to end, and Plato and Aristotle believed and argued that things have meaning in and of themselves apart from our subjective experience of them. The only other view of meaning, the default of most in the West, is that we are sovereign meaning creators because reality is what we make of it. Ernst Becker, a cultural anthropologist writing in the 60s and 70s, in his book the Structure of Evil writes that there was a “problem of creating meaning,” and that man is “the meaning creating animal.” His fundamental assumption about the nature of reality was that “man maximizes his Being by creating rich, deep, and original human meanings.” Even though in some sense we do create meaning, the difference for the Christian is that meaning is primarily there to be discovered. Our attempt to interpret it is to get as close as we can to the thing that is actually there, but as finite limited creatures we will always be one step away.

Whose Interpretation?
Even though as Christians we affirm objective reality, our everyday existence in the world is a constant encounter with a plethora of circumstances and experiences that must be, in one way or another, interpreted and attached with meaning. Berger and Luckman use the term, “Subjectively meaningful.” This reality is meaningful to us, and as such it must form some kind of “coherent world”; it must be comprehensible, it must make sense to us.

Everything, however, turns on the interpretation, which is “the action of explaining the meaning of something.” Interpretation, then, is where the true battle for the soul of Western civilization lies. Who gets to interpret reality? It is either God in Christ in Scripture, or secularism by default. The biggest challenge for the rise of a new Christendom is secular culture. As Berger points out in The Sacred Canopy:

One of the most obvious ways in which secularization has affected the man in the street is as a “crisis of credibility” in religion. Put differently, secularization has resulted in a widespread collapse of the plausibility of traditional religious definitions of reality.

And he wrote that in 1967! It wasn’t too many years prior that a universe without God would have been inconceivable for average Americans. Among Western society’s cultural elites after the Enlightenment it was totally conceivable, and it only broke out into the wider culture with a bang in the 1960s. Sociology helps us to understand how wider social currents, like secularization, get internalized into individuals.

The interpretation process and how human beings derive meaning from the world is interactive. Berger and Luckman:

It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity.

They call it a paradox that human beings construct a world that they “then experience as something other than a human product.” At first blush, concepts like “humanly produced, constructed objectivity” may appear arcane, but it is important for this discussion and Christianity’s influence in our secular world. This “seeming” process happens because all of us interact socially. In producing a world in our perceptions we externalize it, then interacting with it we objectify it, and finally we internalize it as “reality.” In effect our perceptions become reality for us, whether they reflect objective reality or not. You might want to read that sentence again, and think about it a bit. As Christians it is a good idea in our knowing and what we think we know to exercise some epistemological humility (I Cor. 8:2). I have written about that in detail previously.

Christians Should Not Take “Reality” for Granted: Says Who?
What does all of this have to do with Jordan Peterson? Everything! Reality and how people perceive it is in some way always socially defined. The dialectic process of a world becoming “real” to us is never ending. Christians can never take “reality” for granted because the question is always, “Says who?” That is, who serves as the definers of reality, secular culture or God. In The Sacred Canopy, Berger puts it this way: “The fundamental coerciveness of society lies not in its machineries of social control, but in its power to constitute and impose itself as reality.” The power of this imposition occurs when reality becomes taken for granted. We should never let reality be “taken for granted,” never assume reality is there to be seen for just the way people instinctively think it is. This is where Peterson comes in as a powerful question mark on this secular-taken-for-granted reality people inhabit in the 21st century.

Our Job as Christians battling secularism is to be consistently defining reality biblically. If we don’t, the hostile secular culture will always do the defining, and Christianity will lack a compelling plausibility to most people. The cultural air breathed throughout the West is plausibly secular. It is much easier for most people to believe in an irrelevant God (few are philosophical atheists) than the providential God of Scripture who ordains and defines all things. The challenge for Christians and Christianity at this moment in history, in “negative world,” is that we don’t have any cultural credibility. In fact, as Renn’s phrase implies, the dominant secular culture sees Christianity as positively harmful and dangerous. In this environment it is, practically speaking, extremely difficult to gain cultural traction. Most of us have little culture defining power, except in the very narrow pocket of our personal lives. Then, in God’s providence steps Jordan Peterson, himself a secular, Canadian liberal academic psychologist, and a most unlikely driver of a new Christian cultural consensus.

Too many myopic Christians focus on Peterson’s lack of historical Christian orthodoxy, as if that really matters for the cultural job God has called him to. It doesn’t. It’s almost a sport now, parsing Peterson’s words to see when he’ll finally take the plunge and declare with his mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in his “heart that God raised him from the dead,” so that he will finally be saved (Rom. 10:9). And being a man of many words, it’s a robust sport! It seems The Hound of Heaven is after him, though, given his wife is a convert to Catholicism, and his daughter an outspoken born-again Christian. Not to mention how many people challenge him on his conception of Christianity. But at this point, whatever the form and nature of this conception, his job is much bigger than his own salvation. I know that’s not a very Evangelical thing to say, but it’s true.

 

 

The reason Peterson is so important is because the “conceptual machinery” that elites in a society impose on the masses must be unmasked so that the underlying assumptions are always questioned. The secular culture like a machine grinds its notions, or concepts, into our plausibility field, so to speak, to make reality seem a certain way. This seeming must be questioned. As the popular bumper sticker in the olden days demanded, we must “Question Authority.” We as Christians in a culture hostile to our Faith must always question the authority of the definers: “Says who?” That is Jordan Peterson, and God has given him a huge platform to do that. This short video is a good example of how effectively he does that.

He also has credibility among cultural elites who are not leftists. Not being a run of the mill conservative Evangelical has helped him gain an impressive traction among people who would otherwise not find Christianity plausible at all. I’ve heard quite a few stories of people who have come to Christ because of him, so his lack of orthodoxy hasn’t kept people from being influenced by him to embraced Christ as Lord and Savior. The battlefield in our secular age is immense, and much of it happens, as Burger and Luckman say, on a “pretheoretical level,” that is prior to people even thinking. What Peterson is doing so well is again making the Christian worldview a player on the secular world’s stage, making it plausible for an increasing number of people. That means they will take it more seriously as a possible answer for the crying needs of our time. Secularism is not working, an experiment birthed in the Enlightenment that has proved wanting at every level. Let’s pray for Jordan that he makes it all the way to the only one who can save him from sin and death.

What’s A Matter with Church Growth Movements Anyway?

What’s A Matter with Church Growth Movements Anyway?

Jul 31, 2024 | History

In the conservative Evangelical and Reformed circles I’ve run in over the years, I’ve come across a lot of skepticism and criticism of church growth movements. I’ve always questioned what seemed to me a knee jerk reaction, even if the criticisms could be justified at some level. Do these critics not want their churches to grow? Do they think churches growing and the number of Christians increasing is a bad thing? Certainly they can’t, but the criticisms remain.

In a recent church service our pastor shared some verses in Acts that talk about the church growing as if it were a good thing, as if it’s actually part of God’s plan. And now that I’m postmillennial in my eschatological perspective, I believe a growing, victorious church is what God planned from the beginning. God reveals to the Patriarchs that his plans are a church growing, numbers that can’t be counted, like dust of the earth, sand on the seashore, and stars in the sky. That sure makes it seem like church growth should be the norm, not an exception to the rule of small churches.

Prior to my eschatological conversion, I believed more people would be damned to hell than would be saved. It was probably this verse from Matthew 7 more than any other that “proved” it to me:

13 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

This seemed so obvious to me it was beyond debate, and nobody I knew or read questioned it. Only a few find it, what’s to debate?

Then there is Jesus’ parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew 22. He prefaces it by saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like . . . .” So clearly, I thought, the parable is about “going to heaven” when we die. My mind always seemed to go there rather than the resurrection. I knew and believed the ultimate end of God’s plan is not a spiritual disembodied reality in a place called heaven, but a material reality in a new heavens and earth where His people will have new, resurrected bodies. But since I believed, and still do, that our souls maintain consciousness when we die, then we do go to heaven. But is that what Jesus is really talking about? He ends with these words that seem to leave no doubt:

14 “For many are called, but few are chosen.”

The gospel proclamation is the invitation to the wedding feast, and it goes out to all people, but only a few will respond and thus be the chosen. Again, this seemed beyond debate. Then, as I say, postmillennialism dropped out of the sky on my head, and I wasn’t so sure.

Jesus’ Ministry to the Jews
Most Christians miss the fundamental fact about Jesus’ life and ministry: it was primarily directed to Jews. He was Israel’s Messiah, sent to the lost sheep of Israel. Twice in Matthew Jesus uses that phrase. In the first he is sending out the twelve apostles to proclaim the good news and these are his instructions (Matt. 10):

5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. 7 As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’

The second time he uses the phrase is in Matthew 15. A desperate Canaanite woman cries out to Jesus’ disciples to help her demon-possessed daughter, and he basically blows her off. Why?

24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

He makes an exception in her case because of the depth of her faith, but this statement is deeply profound and should affect not only how we interpret his parables, but his entire ministry. He was the Jews’ Messiah, a Savior they had been anticipating for 400 years. Unfortunately, the Jewish religious professionals rejected their Messiah, and Israel faced the ultimate judgment of God in AD 70. I will get to the theological significance of that in a moment.

Because Jesus was speaking and ministering primarily to Jews, we can’t interpret the meaning of the wide and narrow gate to apply to anyone beyond its Jewish context. It is the same with the parables. Their meaning can have universal application, but we can’t assume that is always the case as is the default in modern Evangelicalism. The number one principle in biblical hermeneutics, or biblical interpretation, is that context determines the meaning of the passage. When viewed as written to Jews in the first century in light of their 2,000 year history, statements like wide and narrow gates and many are called and few are chosen take on a whole new meaning, and in a similar manner the parables.

The Theological Significance of the Destruction of the Temple
For all of my Christian life until recently I didn’t understand the theological significance of AD70 when the Roman General Titus and the Roman army decimated Jerusalem and completely destroyed the Jewish temple. By AD66 the Jews had had enough of Roman rule, and for the next three years revolted against the Romans. By 69 when Titus took over the army from his father, Vespasian, who was called back to Rome to become emperor by the Senate, the army had pushed the entire Jewish rebel army back into Jerusalem. During the Passover of 70, the Romans allowed Jews to go into Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, which would be the last of the Jewish Old Covenant era, but they would not let them leave. The siege was brutal with starvation and death rampant.

We have great detail of the war from Josephus, a former Jewish rebel who defected to the Roman side to save his life. He became an historian who wrote priceless accounts of the end of the Jewish nation. Wanting to save the temple and the Jewish way of life, Josephus tried to negotiate a truce between the Romans and Jewish rebels, but neither side trusted him, so it didn’t work. In August of 70, the Romans breached the final defenses of the city, and massacred most of the remaining population, completely destroying the temple in the process. Some scholars believe Titus didn’t intend for that to happen, but the Roman soldiers were so furious with the Jews that they were out of control and destroyed everyone and everything. I heard someone refer to what happened in Jerusalem as “grotesque butcheries,” horrors that are unimaginable even to those familiar with brutality of modern warfare.

The question is, what did it mean, something most Christians don’t ask, nor did I until recently. Those familiar with the Synoptic gospels will be familiar with the Olivet Discourse, recorded in Matthew 24 and 25, Mark 13, and Luke 21. Jesus is speaking to his disciples approximately 40 years prior to AD70 and we’re told the following:

Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. 2 “Do you see all these things?” he asked. “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

This must have stunned his disciples because the temple was a massive complex. To think not one stone would be left on another was unfathomable. Nonetheless they ask Jesus,

3 As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

Most Christians being premillennial dispensationalists interpret “end of the age” as referring to the end of time, but Jesus says (v. 34) that “this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” Forty years later, they happened. The age Jesus is speaking of is the Old Covenant age which Jesus came to fulfill, and since “the Jews” (i.e., their leaders) rejected Jesus, God brought judgment on the nation. This had been the message of the prophets, and now it had been fulfilled. The destruction of the temple and the sacrificial system that went with it communicated in no uncertain terms the message of the book of Hebrews, that one greater than Moses had come.

There is no space to get into a detailed understanding of these challenging passages, but it is clear some applied to that generation only, and some to another time in the future. But when Jesus is speaking about wide and narrow gates, or few being chosen, he is specifically speaking to Jews of that generation, not gentiles in the age of gospel proclamation. In fact, the Old Covenant’s failure to produce a growing generational church is the reason there needed to be a New Covenant. Bulls and goats were only types and shadows of a coming reality, signs pointing forward that most Jews couldn’t read. Think of God’s Old Covenant people as a small speck of light at one place on earth four thousand years ago, obscure and invisible. God slowly grew His people, but the growth plan never took. Then Jesus. Today there are over two billion specks of light all over the earth, and dust, sand, and stars are looking more realistic every day. What Christ accomplished on the cross, his resurrection confirmed, and ascended to the right hand of the Father to fulfill, sending his Holy Spirit to guarantee it. We’re on the winning team, brothers and sisters; we just need to get to work!

Church Growth is the Plan
I’ve noticed in some of the churches I’ve attended over the years people praying for their churches to grow, but not doing anything to make them grow. As if God will magically just bring people to Christ and their church without Christians doing anything. All throughout redemptive history God uses sinful, imperfect human beings to do His work and advance His kingdom. In this case it’s evangelism. Few churches have pastors dedicated to evangelism, yet Paul charges Timothy that he is to “do the work of an evangelist” as he discharges all the duties of his ministry (2 Tim. 4:5). Elsewhere he asks how people can believe in one who they have not heard, and how they can hear without someone preaching or proclaiming it to them? (Rom. 10:14). Yet I rarely hear evangelism encouraged or training made available. I recently wrote a post called, “Be More Annoying for Jesus,” because I believe all Christians at some level should be eager that everyone they encounter know they are followers of the way, the truth, and the life. I recently listened to this podcast about this problem in Reformed churches, and it is an excellent discussion of the problem that applies to all Christian traditions.

It should not be a problem given the message of Acts about a growing church and how it happens. We’ve established, albeit in a cursory manner, that growth has always been the plan. I’ve heard people of a pessimistic bent bemoaning the rotten state of things say, well at least like in Elijah’s day God has reserved a remnant of the faithful, as if the church is only a remnant instead of the dominating cultural force God made it to be. In fact, Christian Western civilization was a result of what we see happen in Acts. Here are the verses I spoke of above.

Acts 2:
41 Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.
47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Acts 6:
7 So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.

Acts 9:
31 Then the church throughout Judea, Galilee and Samaria enjoyed a time of peace and was strengthened. Living in the fear of the Lord and encouraged by the Holy Spirit, it increased in numbers.

Acts 12:
24 But the word of God continued to spread and flourish.

Acts 16:
5 So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew daily in numbers.

Acts 19:
20 In this way the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power.

We now live on the other side of Christian dominance in the West, what some call trash world or negative world, and the tendency is to think because of that growing the church and numbers of Christians is a pipe dream, or at best an uphill struggle. I beg to differ. Think about the lay of the land Christians faced who Luke was writing about in Acts. The odds against them succeeding were apparently insurmountable. The entire Roman Empire and Jewish establishment was against them, and persecution common, yet just over 300 years later Christianity was pronounced as the official religion of the Roman Empire. I guarantee you nobody saw that coming, yet the church remained faithful in prayer, proclamation, and community. I believe we learn by this that growth is something that should be planned and sought and worked for, and celebrated when it happens. As I often say, work like it depends on us, and pray because it depends on God.

 

The Most Important Book of the 21st Century: “The Age of Entitlement”

The Most Important Book of the 21st Century: “The Age of Entitlement”

Jul 24, 2024 | America, Uncategorized

I heard several people reference how important a book The Age of Entitlement is, but I had no idea just how important I would come to see it. The title actually kept me from reading it for a while given I have a bunch of other books to read, and I thought I knew what it would be about. We live in an age when people feel entitled for a variety of reasons, and I figured it would be exploring this well-trod ground. The subtitle also gave me that impression, “America Since the Sixties.” Our culture that decade starting with the youth, the now much maligned baby boomers, pulled a collective tantrum, and I, me, mine, and me, myself, and I became the new Trinity American culture would come to worship. That preoccupation with the self was what I thought the book was about, but it’s much worse than that.

What is it about, and why do I think it is so important? And so important, I think it’s possibly the most important book of our troubled century? A turning point which had been brewing a long time in America was reached in 1964 with a concept and phrase most Americans see as unproblematic and positive, civil rights. Sixty years ago on July 2, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law against the votes of southern Democrats and with the help of Republicans. It was signed by the new president, Lyndon Johnson, and as soon as the ink dried everything in America had changed. Or it would shortly do so, and in ways that would in Barack Obama’s infamous 2008 declaration, fundamentally transform America. The means by which that transformation was unleashed that day was by a word now sacrosanct and unquestioned on the American left, diversity. The seeds of DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and woke, was planted that day, and would become in due course a jungle of lies and dysfunction that would make America the unrecognizable mess it is in 2024.

Is the Constitution Dead? 

This video seems to be “controversial” in social media circles because it appears some people think the constitution that was bequeathed to us by America’s founders is not dead. It is impossible looking at current day America to conclude the constitution of 1787 is alive and well, unless you believe the constitution is playdough you shape into anything you want, which is exactly what it has become. The reason goes back to the progressives of the late 19th century. They came to believe the government of a   homogeneous population was no match for a modern industrial society. Woodrow Wilson saw the U.S. Constitution as an antiquated document for another time not up to the new realities of “modern government.” From Wilson would flow into the progressive bloodstream the idea of a “living constitution,” a playdough constitution if you will, which is of course no constitution at all.

Holding the firm conviction that with science and technology no problem seemed too big to overcome, progressives were determined to apply this mindset to government. Something called “scientific” management or planning by “experts” would become the rallying cry of the new century, and this mentality took over American government with the presidency of Wilson in 1913. As an academic, Wilson wrote a paper in 1887 arguing for “the science of administration,” which speaks to this rule by “experts.” This idea of ruling became the rage in the progressive era of the early twentieth century.

Because these “experts” knew so much better than everyone else, society, and thus people, progressives believed, could be molded from the top down. Law ceased to be what Scripture said it was, a means to restrain evil people and their wickedness (Romans 13), and became a mechanism to create a certain kind of society. Law was now a means of salvation from the depredations and vicissitudes of life; if Jesus isn’t your Savior, government will be. Slowly throughout the 20th century, law became a means to an end of the liberal vision of what a good society looked like. Man’s law was now salvation instead of the means to protect our liberties. Law, and it’s extension, administrative fiat, became a means of coercion to determine how we think and act, of course for our own good.

The founding generation, and why America became great in the first place, had a completely different notion of how a society became good. It wasn’t top down, created by government or law, but bottom up, from the people. They believed people could not be coerced to be good, virtuous citizens, but must have the liberty to choose to be good. Thus, the importance every single person of that generation placed on religion, specifically, Christianity. We could quote the founding generation all day long about the importance of “religion,” meaning Protestant biblical Christianity, but the most popular quotation to make the point comes from the second president of the United States, John Adams:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Again, and there is zero debate on this point, Adams was referring to the Christian religion. The syllogism writes itself:

  • America’s Constitution requires a moral and religious people.
  • America is no longer religious or moral.
  • America’s Constitution is dead.

But instead of the secular elite burning the old Constitution and writing a new one, they pulled a bait and switch. The Constitution had been tinkered with previously during the Civil War and the New Deal, but at least it could be argued it was the same animal, related to the original. What happened with the Civil Rights Law of 1964 gutted the original Constitution and replaced it with a fake, a counterfeit that bears very little resemblance to the original.

The New Constitution: Rule from the Top Down
The first section of Caldwell’s book is called, “The Revolutions of the 1960s.” Notice the plural. What exploded in the 1960s expressed itself in a variety of ways, the Kennedy assassination in November 1963 unleashing these forces in revolutionary ways. Not coming from a specifically Christian perspective, Caldwell doesn’t address the massive elephant in the room, secularism. None of these revolutions would have happened without its slow creeping rise throughout the 20th century. Ultimately, the only thing that will hold the state at bay is Almighty God revealed in the Old and New Testaments. When Jesus said, “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” (Matt. 22:21), he revealed the only means to limit the state: God. No God, means unlimited state. Secularism, and the Pietism that enables it, means no God because a merely personal God stuck within the church walls and in the home is culturally in effect an invisible and powerless God.

The most obvious revolution was sexual, which caused everyone to miss the depth of the race revolution, specifically in civil rights law. This didn’t mean the two weren’t intimately connected, as we’ve seen in the last 10 years. First, race had to be established as the fundamental narrative of the American Republic. Since the 1960s, Caldwell writes, “slavery is at the center of Americans’ official history, with race the central concept in the country’s official self-understanding.” This was not the case before the 60s. After this, he writes, “the constitutional republic was something discussed as if it were a mere set of tools for resolving larger conflicts about race and human rights.” The radical nature of this change is lost on most Americans, few if any knowing how unpopular the race revolution was. The ideology of anti-racism became all-consuming for America’s liberal elites even as most Americans resisted the re-formation of their country in the name of race. They didn’t have a choice. Legally, this was going to happen, like it or not, and polls show they didn’t like it at all. They would be made to like it, or pay, literally and figuratively.

What the Civil Rights Act did was embolden and incentivize “bureaucrats, lawyers, intellectuals, and political agitators to become the ‘eyes and ears,’ and even foot soldiers, of civil rights enforcement.” This means, “more of the country’s institutions were brought under the act’s scrutiny. . . . with new bureaucracies to enforce them.” The obsession of American government was to mold the whole of society “around the ideology of anti-racism.” In due course it all took on an inevitable life of its own. This race consciousness was also pushed culturally through education and Hollywood; it could not be escaped. Out of this milieu inevitably grew the concept of diversity as an unquestioned moral good, which means any kind of sameness is a moral evil that must be eradicated, which is why Obama could say diversity is “one of our greatest strengths.” This would never stop with race, and soon the relations between men and women, and sex itself became a focus of the diversity police. The sexual revolution went well beyond sex and debauchery. Although nobody could conceive of such a thing at the time, once the Civil Rights Act was passed, two people of the same sex getting “married” was a foregone conclusion.

As I said above, these radical changes had been brewing for a while, through the latter 19th and for the entire 20th century. The entire capture of America (and the West) by secularism was inevitable once the poison of the Enlightenment was unleashed in the 17th century. That too like race consciousness was a top down affair, intellectuals slowly pushing God aside until they finally shoved him out the window in the 19th century. What was unique about the 20th century was adding the idea coming out of progressivism of “rule by experts,” also pushed by the intellectual classes. The plebians, the lower and middle classes, could never be allowed to run their own lives and obviously make a mess of them and society as well, so the “experts” would come to the rescue. America is no longer a self-governing republic, but a society with a total state.

Want Your Constitution Back? Vote for Donald Trump
The fact that Donald Trump is the only man standing between America and the tyranny of the deep state proves that God has a sense of humor. Like many others, I was not a fan of Trump and thought his candidacy was a joke. He had no more chance of winning the presidency than the man in the moon. As with scotch, Trump was an acquired taste for me but now I like both, a lot. As I say in Going Back to Find the Way Forward, Trump is the red pill that keeps on giving. Just recently we had the conviction that “was heard ‘round the world,” and there was a run on red pills. People who wouldn’t in a million years vote for Trump, are now voting for Trump. Thank you, deranged Marxist leftists, and your Democrat Party. 

In my book I explore how the history of England and the common law lead directly to America, something we don’t learn from so called, “public education.” We have to go back to Alfred the Great in the 9th century to see the beginnings of the American Republic. For almost a thousand years the “rights of Englishmen” Americas founding generation fought for was slowly developed from Magna Carta in 1215 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In God’s providence, the great Puritan migration to New England from the 1620s through the early 1640s set the predicate for America’s founding: no Pilgrims or Puritans, no America. Of course, secularists deny that and claim America was a result of the so called Enlightenment, but that is a very simplistic distortion. I deal with this in detail in the book, so if you want details on all this, you’ll have to get the book.

As Christianity and the church made its slow decline into irrelevance, so did the liberties of Americans. As government power increased, so did the independent self-governing nature of Americans slowly atrophy as well. This decline also went hand-in-hand with the rise of what we now call, “the administrative state,” the bureaucratic apparatus that effectively governs almost all of our lives. It is pernicious and evil, and destroys the possibility of true liberty. This is the reason Trump is the mortal enemy of the left: he is an existential threat to their power, and they love their power. Since they ditched truth a long time ago to embrace postmodernism and “the narrative,” i.e., whatever protects or extends their power, all they have is the aphrodisiac of power and the will to power.

Trump has the gift of rubbing the right people the wrong way, and what most terrifies his enemies is that no matter what they’ve thrown at him, they can’t stop him. They know he did not become the success he is, and the most well-known human being on earth by accident. He learns from his mistakes, and he made a lot in his first term. He was naïve and gullible, as hard as it is for Trump haters to imagine that. From all the people I’ve heard who interact with and know him, they say he’s a genuinely nice guy. But he’s also a killer who not only knows “the art of the deal,” but knows how to win. Winners always learn from their mistakes because they really like to win.

Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower on Monday June 16, 2015. He was a gift to the “fake news” media that didn’t stop giving. They didn’t take him seriously until he defeated Hillary Clinton, something that should endear him to every American patriot forever. From that moment he had to be destroyed, and we’re all familiar with the unprecedented efforts by the Uniparty to do that. I say that because the Republicans we complicit, hating him almost as much as the Democrats. None of what happened to Trump would have happened without their full cooperation, even if much of it was done by omission. It was this that finally fully opened my eyes to the con in Con Inc., and why I no longer consider myself a conservative. As I explained recently, I am now a nationalist populist Christian conservative.

The lawfare, a word most of us had never heard of until Trump, is the final nail in the constitutional coffin. And in spite of Trump taking up all the oxygen in the room, Democrat lawfare is ubiquitous; abusing the law is how Democrats gain and maintain power. It has literally nothing to do with justice or Our DemocracyTM. Peter Navarro, who served in Trump’s White House, is serving a four-month prison sentence for something that nobody in the history of America ever has. Steve Bannon, another alum of the administration, and a primary driver of the MAGA movement, is now serving a similar four-month sentence for the same thing. They are trying to throw Rudy Giuliani in prison, among others, and the travesty of the J6 prosecution has destroyed the lives of many innocent patriotic Americans. And to top it off, many lawyers in Trump’s orbit, or who defend patriots, are threatened with a pernicious process to have them debarred. It’s so Orwellian it’s hard to believe it is all actually happening, but it is.

If you’ve ever read the Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, you’ll notice that these rights were specifically designed to limit the scope and power of the government, not the people. In fact, the Tenth Amendment says this specifically:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Civil Rights Act basically took white out, pun intended, and made this amendment completely disappear. Ridding America of civil rights law is a long term project, but if we want a shot at getting our constitution back, it will only happen if Donald Trump is Elected in November.

The Left’s Obsession with Fascism and Nazi’s and Donald Trump

The Left’s Obsession with Fascism and Nazi’s and Donald Trump

Jul 17, 2024 | America, Uncategorized

I finished this piece prior to the assassination attempt on President Trump, and I had no idea how timely it would be: July 13, 2024, another day that will live in infamy. I added his name to the title because he is the quintessential example of the obsession. God clearly saved Trump’s life, even as another young man, Corey Comperatore, gave his life to protect his family. This is what you get when you call someone Hitler for nine years. To the left, Trump is an existential threat to Our DemocracyTM, an authoritarian tyrant that must be stopped, and one could go on. You can hear these three alone every ten minutes on MSNBC. I don’t want to believe this was intentional, but is there really another explanation? The only other option is complete and total incompetence, and I’ll be waiting for evidence and mea culpas, max mea culpas if that turns out to be the truth.

None of this should surprise us because the left has been obsessed with Fascism and Nazi’s for a very long time? Everyone who opposes them are Fascists and Nazi’s, even as the tactics they use against their enemies are fascistic and worthy of Nazis. They are skillful and shameless in their use of projection (accusing others of doing what they do) and hypocrisy, having turned it into an art form. This piece I saw the other day from some leftist is a perfect example: “Why Aren’t We Talking About Trump’s Fascism?” And the dude is serious! I’m convinced now they really believe it. There was, of course, zero evidence of fascism from Trump in his four years in office, but so what. He’s a Fascist! And if they can they are going to put him in prison on trumped up charges, as they’ve done to his followers, just like actual Fascists. That is projection. We’ll see where the lawfare goes after they almost killed him.

Have you ever noticed that this obsession is reflected in the products that come out of Hollywood? There are a zillion, give or take a few, movies and TV shows either about Nazi’s or where Nazi’s are the bad guys. If it’s not the actual World War II Nazi’s, it’s Neo-Nazi’s, who are of course the personification of ultimate evil, White Nationalists. Oh the horror! By contrast, the world champions of butchery and genocide, the communists, are rare in Hollywood productions. Why this obsession and contrast? We have two German scholars and their reaction to World War II to thank for this, Theodor Adorno (1903–69) and Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979).

Anyone interested or engaged in the 21st century culture wars needs to know about the Frankfurt School. In 1923, a group of Marxists established the Institute for Social Research as what we call today a “think tank” associated with the University of Frankfurt in Germany. In due course it came to be referred to as the Frankfurt School, out of which the world was given what we now call cultural Marxism. We can thank Adolf Hitler for bringing the cultural Marxism wrecking ball to America. If the Institute for Social Research had remained in Germany, cultural Marxism may have stayed isolated in Europe. However, when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 with many in the school being Jewish, it relocated to New York City in 1935 and set up shop at Columbia University. It shouldn’t surprise us that Marxists would find a welcoming home at an American university in 1935—secular academia always welcomes subversive ideas first.

The primary insight of the cultural Marxists wasn’t that class-based economic oppression didn’t bring the fruit of revolution Marx promised, but that the revolutionary consciousness required would clearly not arise spontaneously; it must be assiduously cultivated via culture. They recognized Western societies produced cultures that were almost completely resistant to revolution. Marxist revolutionary consciousness had to find its way into the worldview of the average prosperous Westerner, and that could only happen through the transformation of the culture.

What the economic and cultural Marxists had in common, though, was their antipathy to Christianity because it stood in their way. Christianity and its cultural influence must be taken down, specifically through the eradication of traditional norms and institutions. The purpose of the Institute would be to unmask all the institutions and organs of culture that promoted and maintained the shared value systems responsible for the public support of those institutions and culture, most especially the family and religion. Paul Kengor in The Devil and Karl Marx identifies the strategy to accomplish this:

Rather than organize the workers and the factories, the peasants and the fields and the farms, they would organize the intellectuals and the academy, the artists and the media and the film industry. These would be the conveyor belts to deliver the fundamental transformation.

The film industry was captured by the cultural Marxists, and thus we get Nazi’s everywhere.

The process of transformation would be helped tremendously by someone who came between Marx and the Frankfurt school who had a profound influence on the continuing secularization of Western culture, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Marx didn’t have the discipline of psychology which developed later in the nineteenth century, nor Freudian teaching on sexuality, but the cultural Marxists did. Kengor calls what the Frankfurt school developed a kind of Freudian-Marxism, the worst of the ideas of the nineteenth century wedded with some of the worst of the twentieth. Both the older and newer Marxists believed religion, i.e., Christianity, and the family had to be “abolished,” as Marx put it, but the old way just didn’t work. The Soviets did everything they could to snuff out both, including murdering tens of millions of their own people—religion and the family, however, just wouldn’t go away. Bishop Fulton Sheen said communists failed to convince the world there is no God. Rather, they succeeded only in convincing the world there is a devil. 

Repressive Tolerance, Adorno and Anti-Fascism
After the war most of the faculty went back to Germany to re-establish the school, but Marcuse decided to stay in America. Adorno returned to Germany as well but returned to America in the early 50s for a time in order to not lose his American citizenship. Although he returned to Germany after a time, he had a significant impact on the culture wars in America. Marcuse though was the most significant figure to come out of the Frankfurt school. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1940, and is most famously known as the father of the “New Left” and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, he was influential in the growth of political correctness and the wokeness of our time. The “Old Left” were those who embraced the old orthodox forms of Marxism, and especially that as practiced in the Soviet Union. Young Marxist radicals by contrast were disaffected with Soviet Communism and looking for new ways to bring down the capitalist West, and the cultural approach of Frankfurt would come to dominate American Marxism through the pen of Marcuse. 

His essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” is the inspiration for what we now call “cancel culture.” Only certain accepted speech can be tolerated because actual tolerance is “repressive.” Written as part of a book called A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Marcuse argues that “tolerance today is in many of its most effective manifestations serving as a cause of oppression.” From the perspective of a cultural Marxist, of course it is. The perverse logic of Marcuse as a cultural Marxist has to be read to be believed. In this upside down, inside out world, tolerance “actually protects the already established machinery of discrimination.” Free speech and the First Amendment are considered dangerous; a common trope on the left is “speech is violence.” If that is true, of course it must not be tolerated, and we’ll see why from Marcuse’s perspective.

Part of his argument will serve to introduce us to Theodor Adorno. What Adorno did in 1950 allowed Marcuse to develop “the Nazi argument.” It was a diabolically genius move paying cultural dividends to this day. First Marcuse lays his cards on the table:

Liberating tolerance . . . would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the left.

How convenient, but we’ll see why he says this when we get to Adorno. Then he gives us the punch line:

In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.

It’s a short trip from this to “speech is violence,” and by definition it can only be speech from the right. This led to a common phrase the New Left used in their protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, “No free speech for Fascists.” Thus what we know as cancel culture is a necessity to keep the right from doing what Fascists and Nazi’s always do. Not cancelling people on the right and their speech would be a dereliction of duty, the First Amendment be damned. Of course, all the political violence is on the left, but that is justified violence because it’s used against the Fascist right. A group using violence today can be called Antifa, for anti-fascists, with a straight face. You can’t make this stuff up!

Adorno was the one who made this connection in his 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality. Dinesh D’Souza in his book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left has a section titled, “The Deceitful Origin of ‘Anti-Fascism.’” He writes that after World War II, “Nazism became the very measure of evil. So Marcuse and Adorno knew that anything associated with Nazism or fascism would automatically be tainted. They set about putting this obvious fact to political use on behalf of the political Left.” Fascism in this distortion of reality would now be associated with capitalism and moral traditionalism, which as we’ve seen must be “abolished.” 

D’Souza argues persuasively that Marxism and fascism are ideologies of the left, but because of Adorno they came to be associated with two different ends of the ideological and political spectrum. In his book Adorno introduced the F-Scale, in D’Souza’s words:

The basic argument was that fascism is a form of authoritarianism and that the worst manifestation of authoritarianism is self-imposed repression. Fascism develops early and we can locate it in young people’s attachments to religious superstition and conventual middle-class values about family, sex, and society.

So a la Marx, religion and the family must be “abolished.” The book and ideas were swallowed hook, line, and sinker by an already liberal academia and media, becoming the accepted perspective that fascism was a phenomenon of the right. It’s a complete lie, but that’s what Marxists do. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, Hollywood was blatantly patriotic, but when the New Left exploded on the scene brining its cultural Marxism with them, it was only a matter of time until the Nazi’s were frequent guests on the big and small screen. Keep in mind, from the perspective of the woke leftists who make movies and TV shows, all references to Fascism and Nazi’s are a reflection on conservative, religious, traditional, patriotic, dare I say, MAGA Americans. That is how they see you, and me, as threats to Our DemocracyTM.

Wokeness Takes Over American Culture and the Solution
In a well-known exchange in The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway wrote: “‘How did you go bankrupt?’ Bill asked. ‘Two ways,’ Mike said. ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’” Gradually and suddenly perfectly describes the apparent suddenness of woke ideology completely taking over American culture the last handful of years. Like most people I was surprised but I shouldn’t have been. Not only had the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxism come to America in the 1930s, but as it took root with the leftist radicals in the ‘60s and ‘70s, those people went into academia and brought their cultural Marxism with them. From there many went into education and programmed a generation of children who are now adults into the woke Marxist worldview. This process has been going on for decades and it was only a matter of time before we experienced the cultural and governing effects we now have.

The modern-day cultural Marxists, the wokesters, have been programmed, or more accurately brainwashed, into Marx’s dialectical worldview of critique and crisis—or conflict theory. In a nutshell according to Marx, those with wealth and power try to hold on to it by any means possible, mainly by suppressing the poor and powerless. A basic premise of conflict theory is that individuals and groups within society will always work to maximize their own wealth and power. It’s an ugly view of reality which creates ugly people. All relationships are power struggles. Vladimir Lenin argued that the oppressed cannot of their own accord sufficiently understand the depths of their oppression and, therefore, need an intellectual class continually reminding them to be angry and feel hated.  Leftists push this emotional narrative of outrage which becomes axiomatic and unchallengeable—those who do must be silenced.

Wealth and economic power are no longer part of the oppression equation because the left, the cultural Marxists, are incredibly wealthy and have all the cultural and political power. So the “poor and powerless” of Marx are transferred to the culturally oppressed which has nothing to do with economics. There are many in the parade of victims we’re familiar with, including “people of color” which makes white people, especially males, the oppressors. Religious minorities are oppressed as well, which makes Christians (in the West) the oppressors. The most popular of the oppressed are the sexual minorities like lesbians, homosexuals, transgendered, etc. which makes heterosexuals the oppressors. There is even something comically evil called intersectionality which creates a hierarchy of oppression. At the top of the oppression scale would be white heterosexual Christian males, the worst of the worst, especially those married with families. Next in line would be heterosexual women again married with families. Single women regardless of their sexuality are always lower on the scale (meaning they are more easily oppressed) than married women. Any person of color regardless of sexual preference, marital status, or religious conviction is always lower on the scale, and so on. In addition, in the woke narrative any form of inequality is equivalent to oppression, and the full oppression matrix is the means to the end of total societal transformation into a Marxist Utopia, or whatever. In practice there is no such thing, so perpetual revolution via perpetual criticism is the result—misery forever. 

How do we counter wokeness and the cultural Marxists? It has to happen on three levels simultaneously: the political, the legal, and the cultural. If Christians really want this to change, it is going to take more than complaining, which we are all really good at. It is going to take work, involvement, and as the great Steve Bannon always says, action, action, action! Thankfully, since Trump and the Great Awakening we’ve been experiencing, conservatives and Christians are getting this like never in modern times, and it is extremely encouraging. We must remember, however, this secular, Marxists takeover of Western culture has been several hundred years in the making, and we are not going to change the direction of this massive societal ocean liner overnight.

Unfortunately, Pietism has had a pernicious influence on too many Christians who think engaging in politics and cultural pursuits is not “spiritual.” Too many Christians think supporting one particular political party perverts the gospel, when what really perverts the gospel is thinking it only applies to our personal, religious lives. Too many Christians think engaging in the “culture wars” is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (I heard a pastor at a church we attended once say exactly that!), a diversion from saving souls and doing the true, spiritual work of the kingdom. This is the same kind of pernicious piety that truncates the gospel and Christianity as if it applied to only a narrow slice of life. It was the great Dutch theologian and statements, Abraham Kuyper, who rebuked such narrow-minded Christian thinking, famously saying:

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!

Cultural Marxism and wokeness lead to misery and societal decay, as we see all around us, while Christianity and God’s law leads to blessing and societal flourishing. If we want America to flourish again and God to bless our land, we will take Christ out of our churches into every square inch of existence, including all that is political, legal, and cultural.

 

Christians Granted on Behalf of Christ to Suffer for Him: To What End?

Christians Granted on Behalf of Christ to Suffer for Him: To What End?

Jul 10, 2024 | Theology

Nobody likes to suffer. Nobody likes pain. Discomfort discomforts us. Why do we complain? Because we don’t like something. Why don’t we like something? Because we only seem harm in it, not benefit. We are under the impression if everything in our lives is going our way, is to our liking, then that is good. When things don’t, that is bad. Why do we think this? Because the stuff that is not good is generally unpleasant, and unpleasant is well, unpleasant! When we become Christians, however, this way of thinking, a worldly, secular, God-less way, should stop. Of course, we can’t go cold turkey because we’re used to seeing the world this way, and complaining comes naturally. Take a look at the Israelites after God brings them out of the bondage of their Egyptian slavery. They complain about dying of thirst and hunger in the desert, and long to go back to the “fleshpots” of Egypt. We mock them for such stupidity, as if we would do any differently. We would not! We’re complainers too. It’s one of the features of being a sinner.

What is the most common question in the history of humanity? Why God? And because there is no answer outside of the truth revealed to us in Scripture and in Christ, we think the only answer is, just because; deal with it. Because people don’t get the answer they want, many get angry at God and reject him. I have the answer though, and while it doesn’t make life any easier, it’s a wonderful way to live.

I’ve only been at this Christianity thing for 45 or so years, so I’m just getting started, but God has taught me a few things along the way, the process always a version of pain and frustration, mostly little and petty, sometimes more than a little. Some time ago I was speaking to a family member about the travails of his life, and an apt phrase came to mind I’d never heard before that I remember. I told him, what you’re going through is the “pain of sanctification.” That, brothers and sisters, is called life. I hate to break it to you, but if everything is going well, and life is easy, that’s not good. We learn nothing floating downstream. There is no sanctification in ease. It is the natural friction of life that builds spiritual strength. Life is like climbing a mountain, mostly up. Just when you get to the peak and take a little breath, you look up and notice there is a higher mountain up ahead. Ugh.

This seemingly unfortunate fact of existence is why we are enjoined throughout Scripture to give thanks, sometimes exhorted, others commanded. It won’t surprise us that the word thanks or thanksgiving is found most often in the book of Psalms. The one verse that convicts me most is from the Apostle Paul in I Thessalonians 5:18:

Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

Although Paul is often blunt, this is unusually blunt. And he prefaces this command with two others, “16 Rejoice always, 17 pray continually.” Those are three pretty all-encompassing adverbs! All, always, continually. Doesn’t leave us much wiggle room now does it. We get a magazine from Voice of the Martyrs every month, and these commands take on a different hue at that level of suffering. For most of us who live in material prosperity and liberty, we’ll never know that kind of suffering, but Paul’s commands apply to all of us equally no matter what God calls us to or he allows or causes life to throw at us.

I started doing down the sanctification rabbit hole when I read Philippians 1 earlier this year, and parked for a bit on verse 27 where Paul says, “conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” I wondered what Paul meant when he wrote those words, and what he was thinking what such a manner looks like. When I got to verse 29 is when I took the dive:

29 For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him, 30 since you are going through the same struggle you saw I had, and now hear that I still have.

Is there, I wondered, some connection between living in a worthy manner and suffering.

John Calvin Gives the Answer
That name does strange things to some people, as we say nowadays, triggers them. For those of you who might be guilty of that, just ignore the name and focus on the content. Most people who don’t like Calvin or Calvinism have never read him, and if they did they would be pleasantly surprised when he doesn’t at all fit their negative stereotype. Sorry, but I had to defend my man Calvin because so many think they know what he believes, and they have no idea.

Anyway, I’m reading very slowly through Isaiah with Calvin. The morning I read Phillipians 1, I also read a passage as he is working his way through chapter two. You’ll notice reading through Isaiah that God’s judgment against Israel is a consistent theme. We tend not to apply it to our lives because, after all, we believe in Jesus, and as Paul says, we are “in Christ,” so God’s wrath and judgment was fully poured out on him for us. Correct, but we’re still confronted with the inconvenient fact of our sin, which as we are all aware doesn’t go away, at least not easily or without a struggle. That process is the pain of sanctification.

Isaiah 2 is a magnificent Messianic chapter, and depending on your understanding of the term, “last days,” will determine how you interpret it. Being postmillennial I see it as having commenced when Jesus rose from the dead, ascended to the right hand of God, and sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost. I believe these stirring words from this chapter were fulfilled on that day:

2 In the last days

the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
    as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
    and all nations will stream to it.

3 Many peoples will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
    to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
    so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
    the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
4 He will judge between the nations
    and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
    and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
    nor will they train for war anymore.

5 Come, descendants of Jacob,
    let us walk in the light of the Lord. 

I don’t have the space to argue the postmillennial position here, but if you’re curious why I would think something so counter intuitive to modern Evangelicals, read The Millennium by Loraine Boettner and Victory in Jesus: The Bright Hope of Postmillennialism by Greg Bahnsen.

The fundamental fact of redemption is that Jesus accomplished all this in his first advent, and the working out of that redemption of His people and His earth applies not only to the church, but to the entire world. Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords. Remember, John tells us that God so loved the entire world, the cosmos, so not just the individual people who make up His body, His people. And as we know, God is never in a hurry, and his working redemption in history is a very slow incremental process, like a mustard seed becoming the biggest tree in the garden, and yeast working its way through a huge batch of dough (Matt. 13). We’re only 2000 years in, but my what God has accomplished so far is magnificent. Imagine what he can do in the next 2000!

Which brings us to judgment and Calvin, and the purpose of it in the Christian life, or sanctification. Calvin takes verse four specifically to be about this fact, that God is judging “between the nations” to bring peace on earth, good will toward men, a reminder of yuletide. Calvin tells us the word rendered “settle disputes” means to expostulate, sometimes to correct, and likewise to prepare. He continues:

But the ordinary interpretation is most suitable to this passage in which the Prophet speaks of the reformation of the Church. For we need correction, that we may learn to submit ourselves to God; because, in consequences of our obstinacy which belongs to our nature, we shall never make progress in the word of God, till we have been subdued by violence.

Have you ever thought you, wretched sinner that you are, need to be subdued by violence? Me neither. That seems kind of harsh, but as he says, we are obstinate little buggers, and God often has to go to extremes to get our attention. I know he does with me. This is the reason I would never want to be young again; I’ve gone through enough “violence” for one lifetime. I would also change none of it because God is making me the man he wants me to be, like it or not! And most of the time, I do not. Although I trust because of the results maybe others like me a little more.

As an aside, Calvin throughout his writing refers to the OT saints as “the Church.” We, Calvin and I, and Presbyterians in general, believe God’s people prior to the coming of their Messiah are part of the same covenant community of God’s people after his death and resurrection. So Israel was the Church, God’s “called out” ones, Greek ekklésia- ἐκκλησία, as clearly Israel was.

What is the Purpose of Suffering in the Christian Life?
Given a cross on which people were brutally tortured and crucified is at the heart of the Christian religion, it doesn’t surprise us that suffering is as well. Suffering, however, is something human beings don’t even like to think about, let alone endure, but think about and endure it we must. The problem is that our understanding of suffering is too narrow because we think it is primarily physical in nature, but it can be psychological and emotional as well, and whatever the suffering might entail, for the Christian none of it is in vain. 

We also don’t think of suffering as a blessing, but as something that is primarily negative, and to be avoided . As I said above, nobody likes to suffer, but as Paul says suffering has been granted to us by God. That doesn’t sound like a negative, does it. The Greek word Paul uses for granted is where we get our English word charisma, and it means to show favor or kindness. Thinking of suffering as a favor is counter intuitive to us, even nonsensical, but that is the Christian understanding of suffering. For a Christian, suffering is an unpleasant, inconvenience, and sometimes bad can be good because God promises all of it is for our good and His glory. Nothing that happens in the Christian’s life is in vain.

Which brings me to one of the most important blessings of the Christian life, our God-given telos, the Greek word for purpose. The origin of the concept comes from Aristotle and his four causes. For The Philosopher, as Aquinas called him, a cause was the reason for the existence of a thing. So let’s use a mundane example to explain the idea, a table.

  • Formal Cause-The idea or concept of the table in the mind of its creator.
  • Material Cause-The physical stuff, wood, out of which the table will be made.
  • Efficient Cause-The person doing the crafting of the table.
  • Final Cause-The purpose, or telos, of the thing for what it will be used.

For the Christian, our telos, the cause of our existence is God, and not just any divine being, but God in Christ. Big difference, as we’ll see. The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks: What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever. The only true fulfillment comes from our relationship to our Creator in Christ and through Christ. God is our formal, material, efficient, and final cause.

By contrast, people who have imbibed secularism like the air they breathe, and its Darwinian assumptions, have no formal cause or final cause. Add to that depressing fact that the material of which they are made comes from nothing for no reason at all, and the efficient cause of their existence is chance because circumstances with no purpose do the crafting. The final cause, the purpose of their existence as they see it, is their fulfillment and happiness. This vision of their reality doesn’t offer much of either of those. In America, upwards of 50,000(!) people every year successfully kill themselves, and many more try. Millions are addicted to various medications to ease their anxiety and depression. The telos of chance is a fickle God indeed.

All Things Work for Our Good
To finish this up let’s go back to Calvin and his blunt assessment that God needs to subdue us “by violence.” We learn in Hebrews 5 that Jesus “learned obedience from what he suffered,” and if so for the Son of God in the flesh, how much more we who are by nature self-centered rebellious little cretins who want to be our own gods. We have to be continually reminded of this inconvenient fact of our beings because our capacity for self-deception is endless. Thus the necessity of suffering in our lives. And just because it isn’t physical doesn’t mean it isn’t any less traumatic.

The title of this section is from Romans 8:28. I often joked with my children as I was raising them in our generational faith, that surely, Paul didn’t mean all. I mean, maybe 98 percent, but all? That’s crazy. Unless, of course, God is God, and in fact our Savior. Paul tells us he is confident “that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6). God finishes what he starts because He is God. God is sovereign, which means all powerful, which means, his will cannot be thwarted even by we rebellious sinners. Your theology may not allow you to believe this because we see people, and ourselves for that matter, resisting God all the time. But do we not take into account that too is not beyond God’s sovereign control of all things? He is not in control of only some things, or he would not be sovereign, and we would be. That is not an option. It’s one or the other. 

Instead of trying to figure how all this works, how God is sovereign and yet we are accountable beings who have agency and whose choices really matter, we can let God be God and trust him. It all comes down to trust in the character of God, his goodness and love, and his absolute power. Either you believe this or you do not. I can promise you something if you do, Isaiah 26:3: 

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. 

If we want perfect peace, we’ll trust in Him, even through our suffering. I didn’t say it would be easy. Something to remember: work like it depends on you, pray because it depends on God.