Notable Quotation: Abraham Kuyper’s Prophecy of the 20th Century

Notable Quotation: Abraham Kuyper’s Prophecy of the 20th Century

Jul 26, 2022 | Notable Quotations, Uncategorized

I recently finished reading Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism for the first time. If you’re not familiar with the man, I’ve put a brief bio below. The reason I’m posting this extensive quote is because when I read it, it blew me away. The lectures were given in 1898 at the seminary my wife and I attended, Westminster in Philadelphia. What astounded me was his prophetic prediction the 20th century, the coming destruction well under way at the end of the 19th century. He saw with an astute moral clarity, the rise of a noxious secularism, and the sad and bloody demise of Christian Western civilization. He lived through World War 1, experienced the beginning of the end in his lifetime.

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After this manner, then, we in Europe at least, have arrived at what is called modern life, involving a radical breach with the Christian traditions of the Europe of the past. The spirit of this modern life is most clearly marked by the fact that it seeks the origin of man not in creation after the image of God, but in evolution from the animal. Two fundamental ideas are clearly implied in this:

  1. that the point of departure is no longer the ideal or the divine, but the material and the low;
  2. that the sovereignty of God, which ought to be supreme, is denied, and man yields himself to the mystical current of an endless process a regressus and processus in infinitum.

Out of the root of these two fertile ideas a double type of life is now being evolved. On the one hand the interesting, rich, and highly organized life of University circles, attainable by the more refined minds only; and at the side of this, or rather far beneath it, a materialistic life of the masses, craving after pleasure, but, in their own way, also taking their point of departure in matter, and likewise, but after their own cynical fashion, emancipating themselves from all fixed ordinances. Especially in our ever-expanding large cities this second type of life is gaining the upper hand, overriding the voice of the country districts, and is giving a shape to public opinion, which avows its ungodly character more openly in each successive generation.

Money, pleasure, and social power, these alone are the objects of pursuit; and people are constantly growing less fastidious regarding the means employed to secure them. Thus, the voice of conscience becomes less and less audible, and duller the luster of the eye which on the eve of the French Revolution still reflected some gleam of the ideal. The fire of all higher enthusiasm has been quenched, only the dead embers remain. In the midst of the weariness of life, what can restrain the disappointed from taking refuge in suicide? Deprived of the wholesome influence of rest, the brain is over-stimulated and over-exerted till the asylums are no longer adequate for housing the insane.

Whether property be not synonymous with theft, becomes a more and more seriously mooted question. That life ought to be freer and marriage less binding, is being accepted more and more on an established proposition. The cause of monogamy is no longer worth fighting for, since polygamy and polyandry are being systematically glorified in all products of the realistic school of art and literature. In harmony with this, religion is, of course, declared superfluous because it renders life gloomy. But art, art above all, is in demand, not for the sake of its ideal worth, but because it pleases and intoxicates the senses.

Thus, people live in time and for temporal things, and shut their ears to the tolling of the bells of eternity. The irrepressible tendency is to make the whole view of life concrete, concentrated, practical. And out of this modernized private life there emerges a type of social and political life characterized by a decadence of parliamentarism, by an even stronger desire for a dictator, between pauperism and capitalism, whilst heavy armaments on land and on sea, even at the price of financial ruin, become the ideal of these powerful states whose craving for territorial expansion threatens the very existence of the weaker nations.

Gradually the conflict between the strong and the weak has grown to be the controlling feature of life, arising from Darwinism itself, whose central idea of a struggle for life has for its mainspring this very antithesis. Since Bismarck introduced it into higher politics, the maxim of the right of the stronger has found almost universal acceptance. The scholars and experts of our day demand with increasing boldness that the common man shall bow to their authority. And the end can only be that once more the sound principles of democracy will be banished, to make room this time not for a new aristocracy of nobler birth and higher ideals, but for the coarse and overbearing kratistocracy of a brutal money power.

Nietzsche is by no means exceptional, but proclaims as its herald the future of our modem life. And while the Christ, in divine compassion, showed heart-winning sympathy with the weak, modern life in this respect also takes the precisely opposite ground that the weak must be supplanted by the strong. Such, they tell us, was the process of selection to which we, ourselves, owe our origin, and such is the process which, in us and after us, must work itself out to its ultimate consequences.

—Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, Pages 135-137

Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) was one of the most extraordinary individuals of his time. A prolific intellectual and theologian, he founded the Free University in Amsterdam and was instrumental in the development of Neo-Calvinism. He was also an active politician, serving as a member of Parliament in the Netherlands beginning in 1874 and serving as Prime Minister from 1901 to 1905.

At this intersection of church and state, he devoted much of his writing towards developing a public theology. His passion was to faithfully understand and engage culture through a Christian worldview. The most famous example is his articulation of the doctrine of common grace. His work has influenced countless others, including Francis Schaeffer, Cornelius Van Til, and Alvin Plantinga.

CRU Goes Full-On Woke

CRU Goes Full-On Woke

Jul 21, 2022 | Culture, Uncategorized

I Knew when Campus Crusade for Christ changed their name to CRU in 2011 it wasn’t a good sign. I can understand that the word crusade had some negative connotations in the Middle East, but only because Muslims and too many Christians accepted a faulty interpretation of The Crusades as Christian oppression of Muslims. The story is much more complicated and fails to consider that Islam is a religion of military conquest. Be that as it may, Campus Crusade had done just fine with that name for the previous 60 years, and it didn’t seem to hamper its mission. What this name change reflected is a bowing down to cultural shibboleths in the name of Christian sensitivity and compassion. They are not the only Christian organization or church to destroy their real counter-cultural witness in the name of good intentions, not by far.

Fast forward to 2019 and CRU’s annual conference. The reason I choose 2019 is because 2020 and ‘21 probably didn’t happen, and I just happen to come across the following video learning about CRU going full-on woke (thank you, Maya!). When you watch, you’ll see a compilation of videos that a young man, Jon Harris, put together, and you simply have to see/hear it to believe it. When you do, you’ll understand why I put the adjectival phrase full-on before woke.

Jon does some commentary after the video, and one thing he says is that there is no gospel in any of this. This is a tragedy, considering what the actual mission of Campus Crusade was for sixty years prior to 2011. I have no idea how quickly wokeness took over the leadership of the organization, but clearly, they’ve fully bought into wokeness. The reason there can be no gospel is because the entire woke ideology is born of Marxism, specifically the bastardized version now known as cultural Marxism. At the heart of Marxism is two things. One is perpetual grievance against societal and cultural “power structures,” whatever they or that might be, so the people will have what follows from that, revolutionary consciousness 24/7. There can be no forgiveness, mercy, or grace because that mitigates against the fundamental goal of Marxism, which is peretual revolution. I’m not saying any of this is well thought out, especially by well-meaning, sincere Christians, but this drives them whether they know it or not.

I recently read a book called, Awake, Not Woke by Noelle Mering. In it she calls wokeness “an ideology of rupture,” which is spot on. From her introduction, she continues, “The term woke refers to the state of being alert and attuned to the layers of pervasive oppression in society . . . . Specific acts of injustice are used to serve the larger goal of furthering the ideology that sees all of human interaction as a power contest . . . . [It] is an ideology with fundamentalist and even cult-like characteristics that is on a collusion course with Christianity.” CRU might want to consider if such a contention is true or not. Mering says the ultimate target of the woke revolt is God himself in Christ. Ouch! If it’s true. CRU staff and leadership who buy wokeness, would likely deny all or most of this, or that they are even “woke,” but you watch/listen to the video, and you come to your own conclusion.

Notable Quotation

Notable Quotation

Jul 11, 2022 | Notable Quotations, Uncategorized

Semantics, like skepticism and empiricism, is a direct consequence of the disappearance of epistemology and the subsequent discovery of the inadequacy of rationalism. The rationalists believed that the truth could be found by the use of reason and logic alone because they had assumed that the world was rational and logical. Because the world is not rational and logical, they had failed. The skeptics accordingly doubted the capacity of the mind to know; the empiricists rejected the use of reason and tried to deal with the world by the senses alone; the semanticists tried to deal with the world by bringing its lack of logic and rationality into the mind itself. They did this, not by rediscovering the rules of epistemology but by changing the rules of logic. To them the old logic—Aristotelian logic, as they called it—was the source of all modern confusion, error, frustration and insanity. Accordingly, they tried to replace it by a non-Aristotelian logic whose basic innovation was that it rejected the principle of contradiction. The abandoning of this principle—which they called the “either-or principle”—meant that they rejected all rigid categories or definitions and were prepared to act with vague, variable and over-lapping definitions whose content varied during use in order to reflect the admitted dynamic quality of the external world.

—Carroll Quigley, “Epistemology, Semantics, and Doublethink”

 

Eisenhower, the Military-Industrial Complex, and a Christian Response

Eisenhower, the Military-Industrial Complex, and a Christian Response

Jun 13, 2022 | Uncategorized

Ever since Donald Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, it seems like I’ve been swallowing a consistent diet of red pills. The red pill reference, for those who don’t know, comes from the hit 1999 movie The Matrix with Keanu Reeves. As the character Neo, Reeves is given the choice by Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne, of two pills, blue or red. If he decides to take the blue pill, he will remain in the surface world that seems like the real world to everyone, but is actually an illusion. If he takes the red pill, he will go down an Alice in Wonderland-like rabbit hole called The Matrix and learn about a simulated reality in which everyone is trapped but doesn’t know it. Things are not what they seem. The list of the things that were not what they seemed to me is long and seems to be growing longer.

One of the more recent is American foreign policy. I’ve always been patriotic, and part of that was supporting the American military, which I still do. I supported all the wars America has fought, and thought they were necessary and good. That’s what I was told by those who surely wouldn’t lie to me. When Trump in the very first debate of the primary said the Iraq war was a terrible mistake, a disaster, I felt uncomfortable, as I think many conservatives did who supported it. We knew Trump was right but hated to admit it. I thought we had to get rid of Saddam, even though we found no weapons of mass destruction. I believed the CIA was mistaken, but surely, they weren’t purposefully lying to get us into war?

After six years of lies coming out of the FBI and CIA, I am no longer so sure about that given what Eisenhower warned about in his famous words, the Military-Industrial Complex. It is apparently a beast that must be fed no matter how much misery, destruction, and death it takes to feed it. Look at the tens of millions of people who died or were maimed and displaced because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And what exactly was accomplished in exchange for all that blood and treasure? Arguably, it made things far worse.

I’ve been familiar with that phrase most of my life, and even knew that it came from the president’s farewell address, but I’d never actually listened to or read it. I knew his words came as a warning about that complex, but never really considered what it might mean, and how seriously we ought to take his warning. Recently, I finally decided to read it for myself. When President Eisenhower gave the televised address on January 17, 1961, I was all of five and a half months old, so I don’t quite remember it. Reading it after all these years made me wonder why I, and so many of those of us who consider ourselves “conservatives,” never really took his warning seriously. We should have. War is a business that makes a lot of people a lot of money and gives a lot of people a lot of power, which is exactly what Eisenhower warned against:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

 

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must ask ourselves since Eisenhower left office, which of the wars have been justified by the only reason for war: self-defense. I am upset that the military-industrial complex has been trying to get us into another war in the Ukraine, especially having sent $40 billion dollars we don’t have to enable it to continue. I wrote our senators with that complaint because both voted for sending the money. One of them replied that he was absolutely convinced supporting Ukraine is in our “national self-interest.” I used to not question that concept, but now I do. What does that even mean on the other side of the world? And who decides what is in our “national self-interest”?

Our first president gave us a similar warning in his farewell address:

Hence likewise they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which under any form of government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

It can be argued that we’ve had an overgrown military establishment since Eisenhower, and that the temptation to fight “forever wars” is great, but why as Christians should we care about all this? Because Christianity is a full orbed view of all of reality, or what has come to be known as a worldview. Liberty and republican government bequeathed to us by America’s founders are direct result of our Christian worldview. If there was no Christianity, there would have been no America, no such thing as rights of individuals apart from the state. Our Declaration of Independence states that our rights come from God not government, and our constitution gives us the right to hold our government, and those who govern, accountable. That includes how our money is spent to defend us against enemies, foreign and domestic.

The day of conservatives uncritically accepting what the “military-industrial complex” says is in our self-interest, is over. The point of carrying a very big stick is so we never have to use it against the bullies of the world. Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump both knew that. The former won the Cold War because of it, and the latter defeated international terrorism. As Christians we need to take much more seriously our responsibility as citizens of a self-governing republic. Just voting and complaining is not enough. God in his providence enabled the genius of our founders to give us a republic unlike any the world has ever known. As Franklin said at the constitutional convention, we have been given a republic if we can keep it. I would argue it is worth keeping for the generations to come, and that means it is worth fighting for.

I will have more thoughts in my next post about how we can each do that.

The Dividing Line in Western Culture? The Truth

The Dividing Line in Western Culture? The Truth

Jun 11, 2022 | Uncategorized

I wrote a piece earlier this year about how Tim Keller like many Evangelical leaders believes there is some kind of moral equivalence between “the extreme left, and the extreme right.” Contra Keller, I argue that there is no “radical right” today, while the entire left is demonstrably radical by any definition of the word. This, however, isn’t an argument about definitions of radical, but rather what separates the two sides of the political/cultural divide in the 21st century West. That separation is at the heart of what determines whether civilization is possible, or not, and comments about “extreme” or “radical” or “far” one way or the other are beside the point. What is not, is truth. In our time, that is the only relevant divide; not party or position or policy, not liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, or even Christian or not, as obviously critically important as all those are. Why I believe this is because my fundamental conviction about reality is that Truth exists and is a found in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who proclaimed himself, “the way and the truth and the life.” So, truth is about much more than statements of fact, or the way things are; it is a person.

Western culture decided to jettison that person a long time ago, and thus truth. Almost the entire world today is “western,” in that it has embraced secular Enlightenment rationalism. Because of that, it partakes of the disease of that philosophy’s logical conclusions, which disease has been germinating for several hundred years: the death of truth. Once the West rejected Christ, and thus Christiandom, it was only a matter of time before it rejected truth. Of course, truth cannot die because reality is defined by it and him, but we’ve entered the world of full-blown postmodernism where all that counts is “the narrative.”

Whatever that narrative might be, it is pushed by all the dominant levers of cultural and political power. It comes in the form of “racism” or “white privilege” or “gun violence” or Ukraine or “climate change” or the January 6 “insurrection” or covid, or the political class’s cause de jeur. To the left, which has completely taken over the Democrat Party and the media, all is politics, and the ideological agenda is all, so “the narrative” must serve that agenda. If anyone questions “the narrative” they must be “othered” for promoting “disinformation” and silenced. That means there can be no debate with “the narrative,” which is what happens when truth is sacrificed to ideology. People of the left will pay lip-service to truth, but the totalitarian nature of their politics gives lie to that. There can be no debate in an empire of lies built on narratives; those who question the narrative are the enemy.

Only in a world where truth is acknowledged to exist, and sought as an ultimate good, can there be debate and tolerance of divergent views. As soon as truth is thrown under the bus, all that is left is “the will to power.” Everything in the society of the left is a power dynamic, one oppressed group against another, privilege vying for power. Whoever wins controls “the narrative” and determines “the truth.” This is Marxism 101, or applied to society as a whole, cultural Marxism. There can be no compromise with Marxism. Anyone who tries to compromise with it, will be complicit with it, and eventually coopted by it. The only way to defeat it is truth, the affirmation of its existence, and the pursuit of it as the highest good. In this war, Christians must always affirm not truth in the abstract, but that truth is the person of God in Christ, that truth ultimately matters and is ultimately real because truth is God himself, and it only exists because God himself exists.

Which brings us to why truth is the dividing line of our time. Our elites are cultural Marxists, which has caused the liberals among them to flee for their cultural and political lives. To me, this is one of the most encouraging things to come out of the takeover of government and culture by the woke mob. What separates these liberals from the left is that they actually believe in truth, that it exists, that it is the highest good, and must be pursued, the “narrative” be damned. There has been a run on red pills by liberals over the last several years. You can see the shock on their faces, and hear it in their voices, that so many of the people they once considered their allies, have rejected and “othered” them simply because they seek and want to know the truth. These liberals are willing to call out “the narrative” as a lie or distortion, and the Marxists will never forgive them.

There are many examples of this, but one of the most amazing to me is feminist author Naomi Wolf. I’ve watched her often on Steven Bannon’s War Room for well over a year now, and her transformation has been remarkable. And because truth is a person, she has even had something of a spiritual awakening, as can be seen in this remarkable interview she did with Tal Bachman some months back. Others who have been red pilled are Joe Rogan, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Journalist Bari Weiss, who resigned from the New York Times because of it, and many others. Even Bill Maher almost sounds reasonable at times. And I’ve come to consider Elon Musk a cultural ally because, as he explained in a TED interview a couple months ago, he is obsessed with truth. That is a good obsession!

Why should we be thrilled with this growing cultural divide?

  1. On a temporal plane, we now have allies we would have never had before to fight with us against the Marxists in our midst. In a way they would have never been before, they are now committed to the Constitution, and liberty and justice for all.
  2. On a spiritual plane, it creates a more welcoming cultural environment for Christianity and the gospel. The true liberals, the ones who have been red pilled, have seen the ugly implications of postmodernism and the corresponding embrace of a politics of “the narrative” and rejection of truth. They will naturally be more open and accepting of Christianity. The virulently secular anti-Christian culture won’t change overnight, but a premium put on truth will make a difference in the long run.
  3. God is exalted and Christ is glorified when truth itself is exalted. To those who believe in and seek truth, Christians can plausibly point to and argue for he who is the Truth as Lord and Savior.
A Testimony That Made Me Cry

A Testimony That Made Me Cry

May 14, 2022 | Uncategorized

Since my last three posts were on the Omnipotence of Love, I figured this would be a good follow-up to those given it’s a masters class on how God’s love is omnipotent.

For much of my Christian life I wasn’t a fan of Christian testimonies. Many people that come from the Reformed tradition I embrace tend to think of testimonies as too subjective. What counts, they say, is the objective truth we find about our salvation in Scripture. I agree, but human beings are not objective creatures; we are subjective creatures. We are us! What we experience and feel and think and wonder about and doubt and hope, and so on, is important to us. Insisting that only the objective declaration of truth counts doesn’t take into account the full orbed nature of life lived as God’s highest form of created being, and the full orbed nature of God. We can only experience him subjectively. And as I’ve learned from literally every testimony I’ve listented to, each person touched by the Spirit of God goes directly to Scripture. All of a sudden they know they need to read the Bible, and they want to!

For some God ordained reason, and I praise him for it, a few years ago I decided to take advantage of the 21st century Gutenberg Press, and started listening to testimonies on the Internet. It’s blown me away. One of the things it has confirmed for me is that my Reformed perspective on the faith is very well founded. I can sum up that perspective in two words: God saves. He doesn’t ask our permission. He saves us. He doesn’t cajole us or try to persuade us, or even give us a choice: he saves us. This is why Jesus was given his name, because he would save his people from their sins. When I learned about Reformed theology for the first time at 24, I began to see how true the title of the 19th century poem was about my faith journey: The Hound of Heaven. From a very young age, I thought about God and death and hell and eternal life. When I was presented with the gospel as a freshman in college, I tried to run away; he wouldn’t let me. And no matter how much I’ve messed up in life, he has continued to “hound” me. Praise God!

I always think of this poem when I’m listening to testimonies. A recent morning as I was listening to yet another story, this of a young woman coming to trust Christ as her Lord and Savior, the Hound of Heaven metaphor was especially powerful. I had a hard time seeing the eggs and Canadian bacon through my tears. The omnipotence of God’s love was perfectly exemplified in her coming to Christ. As a confirmed Calvinist, I believe in all the letters in TULIP, but I especially believe in the L in the middle many people find most difficult: Limited Atonement. Simply, Christ died for the elect, for those he chose to save, not for everybody who would ever live. Also simply, if he died for everybody, everybody would be saved, and no orthodox Christian believes that. It is God choosing us that makes salvation actual, not just possible.

This means Christ actually accomplished redemption for his people on the cross; he redeemed them. An actual transaction was made, not a possible one; he purchased us! We were bought with a price, not an offer if we should choose to accept it. We don’t have a choice! Thanks be to God. He died to fulfill the reason he was given his name, to save his people from their sins. Not to try to save them or give them the option. We call what Jesus did on the cross redemption accomplished. The testimony of this young woman, and all the testimonies of every saint who’s ever lived, is redemption applied. Her name is Adrienne Johnson, and I think if you listen to her testimony, how broken and hopeless and in despair she was, you might just cry too when you hear how God rescued her from the dominion of darkness, and brought her into the kingdom of the son he loves. The video is a brief overview of her story, and you can hear the extended version I listened to at the Side B Podcast.