Author: Matt Powell

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Christianity’s revolutionary view of women.  Most of the people arguing against Christianity aren’t really arguing against Christianity.  They want most of the benefits that Christianity has brought to the world- like equality for women, for example.  They just want it without having to be Christians.  To evaluate Christianity, it does no good to imagine what kind of world you might create without it.  It’s necessary to look at the world as it actually existed without it.

Christianity’s major contribution to Silicon Valley.

The Corporate Slave Class versus the courage to be truly free.

Life under ISIS.

Peak Leftism.

A conservative urban agenda.  Why have we let the socialists take over and destroy so many of our finest engines of capitalism and culture?

Accusation of Judgmentalism as Admission of Guilt

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When I hear someone say, “Don’t judge me!” and get angry because they think people are judging them, it seems what they are really saying is, “I know I’m doing wrong, I just don’t want to be reminded of it.”

After all, when a Muslim tells me it’s wrong to eat pork or a Mormon says I shouldn’t drink caffeine, I just smile and say, “I don’t agree with your principles.”  Those are their principles.  They don’t bother me.  If an exclusive Psalmodist says I shouldn’t sing anything but the Psalms in worship, I don’t accuse them of being judgmental, I just think they’re wrong.  But that’s not the reaction of someone who is accused of sexual immorality or laziness or something like that.  They say, “Don’t judge me!”  I take that as an admission that they are doing wrong, but just don’t want any attention called to the fact.

Don’t Fret, Christian. This is All For You.

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God is concerned with the salvation of His elect, for His glory.  That is His whole purpose and will.  I try to remind myself of that constantly, especially when I am feeling discouraged.

When I think of how few there are it seems sometimes that respond to the gospel, I remember that the right way to look at that is that God has infinite resources, and what a wonder that He is willing to lavish such tremendous resources on however many it is He chooses to save!  Just think, Christian, that though the world may not and does not know this, the whole of human history, all of politics, all the rage and thunder of war and strife, all has the purpose of bringing you to salvation and preparing you for the world He intends for you to inhabit in the future!  What a glorious truth.

God doesn’t need me to save people.  If He uses me to contribute to the salvation of a few, then that is a tremendous honor for me, and furthermore contributes to my own sanctification and holiness.  So He uses me, not for His benefit, but for mine.  So who am I to complain or be discouraged if He uses me to benefit many or few?  His will for me is perfect either way, and nothing will prevent Him from bringing home all His people.

So too, if America has decisively turned away from the gospel, that is no cause for us to despair unless we see God’s salvation in earthly terms.  Someone, no friend of Christianity, recently said that he suspects Christians mostly are upset at the recent Supreme Court ruling because of their loss of a dominant position in the culture.  And I think he’s partly right.  If instead we looked at it as just part of God’s sovereign plan to bring about the redemption of His elect, then we would recognize that even in this, we can have comfort.  It might not be fun for a while, but God’s will is nonetheless being done, and it’s all for His elect.  He doesn’t need America to accomplish His plans any more than He needs me.  He has used America to spread and foster the gospel in many ways in the past.  Now He may use America to bring persecution to His people, for the fires of persecution have always refined and purified His church.  When He is done with America, when America has served His purposes with regard to His elect, He will sweep America off the stage of history like a teacher wipes off her chalkboard.  The teacher has plenty of chalk.

This is all for you, Christian, and for me.  It’s all preparatory to what’s coming.  Keep your eyes on things above, not things on the earth.  Be active and busy in promoting good, in taking dominion, in preaching the gospel.  Not because God needs you, and not because you think your work on this earth will endure.  It won’t; it’s all going to be burned with fire, with all its works.  But it matters, because it’s all God’s plan to redeem His people and to prepare them for that glorious future in the new heavens and earth, our true home.

Lessons from the past of an OPC church

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In Pressing Toward the Mark:  Essays commemorating Fifty Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church,  there is an essay on the history of an OPC church at Leith, ND (p. 369) from its founding until its close in  1983.  It was a moving essay overall, but a few things really jumped out at me as particularly interesting, perhaps only to me.

First, in 1950 a conflict in the church arose over Sabbath observance, due to the church service conflicting with the town’s softball team’s schedule.  This was by necessity (on the church’s side) because the pastor had to preach three different services on Sunday, pushing the final service into the early afternoon.  The implications of this controversy ran deep.  There was the question of Sabbath observance, of course, but perhaps even more profound was the question of where the church’s primary loyalty was, to the town or to the denomination and its Presbyterian distinctives.  With difficulty, the pastor persuaded the church to be true to its doctrinal commitments, but the controversy left deep scars in the church’s relationship with the community, which viewed any challenge on community solidarity from outside elements with great suspicion.  This breach was somewhat eased by the next pastor who always organized and performed an Easter and Christmas cantata, which was viewed as a great service to the town.

Though I am no Sabbatarian, I often struggle with the degree to which people’s activities take them away from church.  I also am very familiar with this small-town dynamic, and the sense that a church which is committed to its doctrinal distinctives and its identity in its regional body will be viewed as an outsider to the community.  What surprised me was the degree to which these dynamics were present even sixty years ago in rural America.  I thought sporting events scheduled for Sunday were a relatively recent phenomenon, but apparently not.  I can’t help but thinking this is a much more pronounced problem today, as our culture becomes more non-Christian, but it may have been an even more difficult problem then, since it was so much more subtle.  Everyone was a Christian, they just didn’t want you to be fanatical about it.  Being a fanatic is about the only way to be any kind of real Christian today, though.  The battle lines are much more clear, I think.

Another surprising note was that they had a doctrinal conflict with a nearby RCUS church in Heil, which had a strong Neo-Kohlbrueggian influence, including apparently a denial of the physical resurrection, on the grounds that the sinful flesh had to be utterly destroyed.  I did not know this to be a teaching of Kohlbruegge, though I am no student of his, but that flatly denies our own creeds as well, particularly Heidelberg Catechism question 57.  The essay included a note about one pastor finding out that practice in the local church often varied widely from the theory he was taught in seminary, an experience I find to be just as true in the RCUS as in the OPC.

Principles or Pressure?

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From The Commentator, in 2011, when Vaclav Havel died:

The central insight of Power of the Powerless is described in an image Havel created that spread like wildfire in dissident circles across the communist world. He asked his readers to imagine a communist era shopkeeper putting the slogan “Workers of the World Unite” inside his shop window along with the onions and the carrots.

What is he up to?

“The slogan is really a sign,” Havel explains. “and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally it might be expressed this way: “I, the Greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon… I have the right to be left in peace.”

The communist party does not need people to believe in its ideology, but it does need them to pay homage to it. Society as a whole thus becomes infused with lies and deceit.

How many of those rainbows I see on Facebook are the same thing?  How many people now voting for and supporting gay marriage have really had a change of heart?  Is it possible for so many millions of people to have such a fundamental change in outlook in just ten years?  Or is it just the pressure of the elites to go along to get along, so those that didn’t have much principle to begin with see which way the wind is blowing?

Thank God for the Rainbow

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bright-rainbow

 

I thank God for the rainbow, the symbol of His faithfulness.  Even though every imagination of man’s heart is only evil continually, yet He is faithful.  He promised He would not destroy the world again, like He did in the Great Flood, not because He overreacted to our rebellion, but because He is merciful and gracious.  But that mercy is never in conflict with His justice, so He would send a true solution to our sin and misery, our Savior Jesus Christ, on whose cross justice and mercy kiss.

I thank God for the rainbow.  In times of darkness and evil, it reminds me of God’s salvation.

As long as we’re banning vestiges of racism, let’s ban the Democratic Party

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So if flying the Confederate stars and bars is now a horrible thing to do, because of what the flag stood for a hundred and fifty years ago, why don’t people demand the banning of the Democrat party, since that party stood for racism just fifty years ago?  The Democrat party was a white supremacist organization for most of its history, and I frankly suspect that it still is, using welfare simply to dominate minorities and imprison them as permanent subservient clients of the state.  It was Democratic governors in the era of Jim Crow and segregation that put those flags up as an act of defiance against the rest of the country demanding they stop treating blacks as second-hand citizens.  The reinvention of the Democratic party as the champion of minorities is scarcely less than two generations old, and since all their policies just hurt poor minorities, at some point maybe we need to consider the possibility that this is not because of their incompetence, but their malice.

I wish that Republican governors of the South would say, “Yes, let’s take down this vestige of Democrat Party white supremacist rule in the south.”

I’m not a southerner, and don’t really have a dog in this fight.  I think the people of the South should make the decision.  And I absolutely cannot stand the hypocrisy of people using the Charlotte shooting as an opportunity to take political shots at completely irrelevant issues.

Divinizing the Will

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The idea that the human will can ever be completely free, in the sense of an ability to choose beliefs or behavior totally free of influence from outside, is to divinize the will.  Everything about us as creatures is contingent- dependent on other things, our surroundings, our own nature.  Absolute independence is an attribute of God alone.  To predicate absolute independence of the human will is to predicate divinity of the human will, obviously a terrible error.

Love your Neighbor

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My deepest condolences to the victims of the shooting in Charleston and their families and loved ones.  They were believers and they are my brothers and sisters.

I’m also glad to hear that the suspect is in custody.  If he is guilty, as seems very likely, then I pray that he receive the death penalty for his crime.  In God’s great grace and mercy I also pray that he repent of his evil before that happens, but that’s God’s business.

I read recently that one of the greatest contributions of Christianity from a societal perspective, and the thing that made western civilization possible, was that Christianity teaches people not to seek simply to do good to those in their tribe or in-group, but to see all as in the image of God regardless of tongue, tribe or family, and all worthy of respect, justice and love.  Christians have of course been very slow to implement this in a thorough way, but all repentance takes time.  What is remarkable is not that Christians fail at this principle of loving others even outside of your own kin-group, for that failure is universal to humanity.  What is remarkable is that they ever succeed in doing so.  That’s what’s truly unique.  This consensus, of the equal dignity of all human beings, as unevenly and imperfectly implemented as it was, was a big part of the foundation of western civilization and a big part of what made it so successful.

Our own fixation on race and ethnicity is destroying this consensus that made western civilization possible.  If a white man is constantly having his whiteness thrown in his face and treated as a member of a tribe and collectively guilty for the sins of that tribe in the past, why should we be surprised if he actually comes to identify with that tribe?  And do you expect him to hate himself and his identity which has been forced on him?  Are you surprised when he starts thinking of all the failures of other tribes, since this is the social reality you have constructed for him, and that he would then go hold some members of that other tribe collectively guilty for the sins which other members of that tribe have committed?

This young man, it appears, was a white supremacist.  This is an abominable position which has nothing at all to do with Christianity, though many Christians have held it in the past and present.  There’s a lot about him we don’t know yet, though I’m sure we’ll find out in the days to come.  I have already read people using this attack to denigrate whole groups of people, just as others used events in Ferguson or McKinney or other places to denigrate whole groups.  If you think it horrible that he held those black people collectively guilty for the sins of completely different black people, wouldn’t it be a good idea to stop holding white people collectively guilty for the sins of different white people?  Including long-dead ones?

In Deuteronomy 24:16, 2 Chronicles 25:4, and Ezekiel 18:20, among other places, the Bible specifically rejects collective guilt.  A man dies for his own sins, not for the sins of his fathers.  This man needs to be held responsible for his sins and punished according to God’s law.  But he will be used, by those with axes to grind and careers to advance, to attack whole ethnic groups as being somehow responsible for his crimes.  Ideas have consequences, and lies contrary to God’s law always lead to death in the end.  The love of Christ is the answer, the only answer the world has ever found, to the tribalism and chauvinism that has worked so much misery throughout the history of the world.  Jesus told us (Matthew 5:43-48) to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us, to bless those that curse us.  He told us not to do good only to our friends, for even pagans do that, but to love our enemies.

There are many today that believe that the consensus of equal treatment and doing good even for those outside our immediate ingroup can be maintained even in the absence of the Christianity which created that consensus.  I am skeptical.  All of history seems to be against the proposition, and it strikes me as an exceedingly foolish experiment to run, given what’s at stake.  Nonetheless, I expect we’re going to find out.

If we insist that this incident draws no larger conclusions about the white population in general, then let us return the favor, and the next time a black man commits a crime, draw no larger conclusions about black men in general.  If we want to teach our young people not to obsess about race like this young man did, then let’s stop obsessing about race.  Let’s reinforce the Biblical message that in Christ, we are all united in His mercy, forgiveness and love, and outside of Christ we are all equally hopeless and condemned.  That is the distinction that matters.

Signalling

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Slate Star Codex is one of my favorite blogs, even if I find myself disagreeing with the (somewhat) liberal atheist proprietor a good deal.  Scott Alexander is extremely perceptive and interesting to read.  I’ve learned a lot.

One concept he talks about a lot is signalling.  Signalling is the idea that people do a lot of what they do just to signal to others that they are a particular kind of person, especially that they are virtuous, intelligent, wealthy, or members of a particular in-group.  That last may be the most important of all- tribal loyalty.  Another word that’s long been used for this is the shibboleth, coming from Judges 12, when the Ephraimites were at war with Gilead.  When the Gileadites got the upper hand, in order to identify who were from Ephraim they made them say the word “shibboleth”, which in the Ephraimite dialect sounds like “sibboleth”.  So the way they said the word signaled what group they were part of.  Similarly if you hear someone say they were “blessed” by some good thing, that’s a pretty good signal that they’re Christians since that’s language Christians often use.

The more difficult something is, the better a signal it is.  As Scott Alexander quotes from another source, if someone wears eyeglasses, that’s not a very good signal for wealth because eyeglasses are useful.  But if they wear a diamond ring, that’s a much better signal since diamond rings have no use.  He uses this concept to explain why big stories (like Ferguson or the UVA rape case) that go viral are so often proved false or are otherwise very controversial.  If activists promote obvious cases of rape that everybody agrees are horrible, then that generates very little controversy and very little signalling.  If you think that ISIS is horrible, then you’re just like every other sane person.  But if you think college fraternities are all hotbeds of rape or that every police department is racist, then you’re sending a much stronger signal about your tribal identity and your commitment to certain kinds of politics.

That got me thinking about us Christians, and how much time we spend arguing about the relatively minor points of disagreement.  I also think about how often it’s precisely those areas of doctrine about which there is the most doubt or argument which people will hold to and champion the most.  Sabbath, six-day creation, different views of worship, predestination, different views of baptism or eschatology.  The “distinctives”, in other words.  Now I think there are good and valid arguments in a lot of those cases.  I am a six-day creationist, for example, and I think it’s an important discussion.  But I have to ask myself, do I hold to six-day creation out of conviction, or because it signals to everyone just what a serious and committed Christian I am?  Six-day creation is especially useful as a signal, since it’s so countercultural right now.  Being against slavery is not counter-cultural, so there’s no signaling involved.  Nobody will know what a serious and committed Christian I am by being against slavery, because everyone’s against slavery.  That commitment is pretty much zero-cost.  Being a six-day creationist on the other hand is high cost in our present culture, in terms of the way it’s perceived.

Of course the Bible talked about all of this a long time ago.  This is what Jesus calls “hypocrisy”- stage-acting, a religion which is intended for public consumption.  It was precisely those things which signaled what passionate, devoted Jews they were, those things which cost them the most, which the Pharisees spent all their time talking about.

 5 “And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. (Mat 6:5 NKJ)

If the goal of our religion is societal, the way we are perceived by others, family, community, etc- then we will invariably fall into signaling, posturing and the like.  Or, to use the Biblical word, hypocrisy.  Our faith needs to be God-directed, not man-directed.  Then we’ll strive for a genuine religion, not just one for show.