Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For September 6, 2023

 August 30

To R. Scott Clark and his article on how the current direction of the Church is affected by some of the same problems and troublemakers that so bothered the Church in the past. This appeared in Heidelblog.

I welcome the collapse of Christendom with open arms. Why? It is because now the Gospel cannot be blamed for atrocities committed by the state or tolerated by society. That doesn't mean that we should be satisfied with the injustices that we see today. Rather, the justice concerns held under Christendom tolerated gross corporate sins while using shame and punishment to reign in people's individual sexual sins.

Though Clark reminds us of how some things from the past will continue to haunt us, there is an important omission in his list of troubles. What Clark forgot to mention is that for at least the past few centuries, the dominant branch of the Church in various nations have thrown their support behind wealth and power. That most noticeably occurred in the pre revolutionary times of France, Russia, and Spain. And the results of that misplaced support were that the reputation of the Gospel suffered great harm while the Church suffered unnecessary persecution after those revolutions succeeded. 

That same siding with wealth and power has been occurring here for quite a while. It is demonstrated by the margin by which the Church has been supporting the Republican Party--even when Donald Trump was the Republican Presidential candidate. It's not that the Democratic Party offers that many incentives for the Church to support it. And I am not downplaying the significance of the abortion issue. But the Republican Party's candidates provide the most morally questionable positions on how businesses should be allowed to operate. 

Cuts in regulations that protect workers and the environment as well as cuts in taxes promote social injustices as well as both threaten government programs for the vulnerable and continually shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the lower economic classes. Here we should note that the form of Capitalism employed now is not the same form employed from WW II to around the 1970s and 1980s. And none of that mentions the religiously conservative Christian support for militarism and hegemony.

Many of my fellow religiously conservative Christians are rightly critical of Critical Theory and Post Modernism. But what they neglect to notice is that both are, in part, responses to Christendom. And so both Critical Theory and Post Modernism, despite their flaws, still speak prophetically against the Church for as long as the Church continues with some of the same sins it practiced during Christendom.

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August 31

To Heidelblog for the title it gave to the portion of Harrison Perkins's  article on Signs, Seals, and Means of Grace. Since Perkins's article cites the Augustinian traction of the sacraments, the title that Heidelblog gave this post was Augustine Contra The Postmodernists.

Harrison Perkins's full article can be found at:

https://issuu.com/modernreformation/docs/sola-359-2023_05_mr_final_2_singles/s/23257929

Before we condemn Post Modernism's response to the past, we need to see what it is reacting to. Seeing that won't justify Post Modernism's response. But understanding what Post Modernism is reacting to just very might make us look at a non-magic mirror to see some of what we need to repent of.

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Sept 5

To Adrian Walker and the reposting of his article on how liberal economics have failed and how that could be remedied through changes in ideology and the size of businesses. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog. 

 

Though Walker's criticisms of Liberal economics were mostly on target, his proposed solutions could be beneficially altered by Socialistic approaches. 

How could that be if Socialism is what Walker said it was? It is because Walker's views on Socialism are based on faulty models. Let's take the former Soviet Union for example.

From its beginning Lenin did not take a socialistic approach to governing the Soviet Union. That is because, unknown to conservatives, it takes more than just centralized planning to make socialism. 

Socialism, as pointed out by Rosa Luxemburg's criticisms of Lenin, is where workers are in charge and structure of the government is more horizontal than what Lenin employed. Luxemburg called Lenin's regime a dictatorship based on a 'bourgeois model.' She said that because of the structure of Lenin's government.

Now Marx's main error in analyzing and proposing a solution to the bourgeois economy and political situation of his day was his binary thinking. According to him, there were two classes and that the proletariat should be the rulers of the nation rather than bourgeoisie.

What binary thinking prohibits in Marx's case here was a collaborative structure such as what they have in Germany with their codetermination laws. Working in collaboration could also put an end to the oppression of the bourgeoisie. In other words, what we need is a redistribution of power so that power, whether in a small or large government or business, isn't centralized in one economic class. Rather, we need business and governmental structures that redistribute power to the other economic classes with the hope that the heterogenous class structures would force those from all classes to work not only for their own interests, but for the interests of others.

Walker's solution is to both reduce the size of businesses so that they become more localized and promote a Christian economic ideology among those in charge. But outside of a centralized mandated effort, which he opposes, Walker's solution is not feasible here in America especially because of the diversity in our nation.