Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For March 29, 2017

March 21

To Collin Hansen and his blogpost review of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option in the light of Trump’s Presidency. This appeared in the Gospel Coalition website.


I haven't read his book but I have read some of Dreher's articles on the Benedict Option. The weakness I find with his approach which should have some bearing on how we agree with his approach or react to what he sees is that he believes that Christians should maintain a privileged place in society resulting in some degree of Christian supremacy over culture and society. This supremacy, historically speaking, has led to the marginalization of many people and that marginalization has not just been based on race. It is good that Hansen brought up past racism. But other bases for marginalization include economic class, religion, and sexual orientation and identity.

If we religiously conservative Christians could only be content with sharing society with others as equals rather than as being treated as a privileged group, we could see that today's culture wars are both unnecessary and harmful for all involved.

So the real question here goes to Dreher's analysis of culture and the presuppositions he carries in analyzing culture. For if we Christians want to have some degree of supremacy in controlling culture, then Dreher's analysis and solution have some legitimacy even though it causes Christians to appear like children who take their games home from friends because they lost in those games. But if we focused on sharing society with others as equals, especially with those from the LGBT community, then the only need we would have to address is to apologize for the how we have wronged the LGBT community in the past and ask about what measures must we take to address those wrongs prior to the pendulum hitting us in the face from its reversing direction. And we don't have to compromise on what the Scriptures say about sexuality and marriage to apologize.

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To Kevin deYoung and his blogpost that claims that those in need as portrayed in Jesus’s parable of the sheep and the goats refers to fellow Christians only. This appeared in then Gospel Coalition website

But the charge to love one’s neighbor, according to the Good Samaritan parable, means that we must show charity to all who are vulnerable who come our way. And in an age of technology-enabled connectedness and governments that are more accountable to its people, then our neighbors include more and more people and thus opposing our government from caring for the vulnerable is to make Cain’s rhetorical question to God the basis for our political ideology.

IN addition, we should note the original definition of stakeholder before we oppose government as it tries to help those in need.


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March 22

To R. Scott Clark and his blogpost quote of Andrew Sullivan on how intersectionality has become a religion. This appeared in the Heidelblog.

With how the Bible describes our sinfulness, I don't see any problem with considering the validity of concepts Sullivan associates with intersectionality. We know that identity-based oppression is a fact of history and life. And the only ones who should feel threatened by such ideas are those who cherish their association with privileged groups. They are often described by the OT prophets as those who either neglect or oppress the vulnerable. So certainly those who are privileged should be challenged on either their active participation in or silent complicity with oppressing other groups.

Where intersectionality has become a religion according to Sullivan is not necessarily in the concepts they espouse, but in their response to those who promote opposing ideas. At the speaking event Sullivan described in his article, some of those who adhere to intersectoinality not only prevented a controversial speaker, Charles Murray, from speaking, the manner in which they shut down the event reminded Sullivan of a religion. And that should not surprise us in today's world of  highly insular, ideological groups. It's the insularity that, more than anything else, contributes to a self-righteous intolerance by and even the religiosity of many of today's ideological groups.

What failed to be mentioned in the quote above is how Sullivan describes Trump as being just as much an enemy of truth as those who both adhere to intersectionality and disrupted the speaking event that Sullivan described. We should note that Sullivan commented on how Trump too disregards any facts that challenge his ideology. And it is here that Sullivan ties together those who disrupted the speaking event with Trump. For he states that neither side allows for any facts to exist which challenge their own orthodoxies. Thus, from different ideological perspectives, those who believe in intersectionality and Trump himself mimic each other in how they respond to challenges. They mimic each other not necessarily by tactics used but by only allowing for any reality that challenges their ideologies.

So the question becomes why does this blogpost only quote Sullivan when he describes intersectionality and not Trump?

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March 24

To Bruce Ashford and his blogpost review of a book by David Koyzis on making idols out of our politics. This appeared in the Gospel Coalition website.


Two points to make here. Being a socialist, I felt that socialism was misrepresented that was because it was treated as a monolith based on one of its oldest models. We should note that many who have thought about and promoted socialism since Marx, realize that Socialism existed before Marx only he added some particular flavors to it, have some different views than his. Some have followed the Trotsky/Stalin division though I am not sure whether that is the best way to describe that division. Others have taken away the utopian and there are those who have minimized Socialism's materialism while add to that its relational aspects such as seen in the promotion of various degrees of worker control at the workplace and in government. While some want to define socialism around a particular ideology, others focus on socialism as a practice. BTW, when the following revolves around materialism, we could easily say that socialism and capitalism are two sides of the same materialist coin. Both seek a relative or absolute utopia based on the distribution of goods.

And though I can't speak for liberals, conservatives, and nationalists because of how I saw socialism oversimplified, my suspicion is that liberals, conservatives, and nationalists might feel the same misrepresentation of their pet ideologies due to oversimplification that I experienced when read what was said in the above article about socialism.

There is one point I agree with article about though I will put that agreement in my own words. The more ideological we are, the more prone we are to make our political approach into an idol. And how idolatrous we are in our political ideologies can be measured not just in how it changes our relationship with and view of God, but in how we treat others as well. The more we demonize others and think of our own group as having everything to teach and nothing to learn from others, the more our political ideologies have become our idols.

BTW, the line above that says everything to teach and nothing to learn is adapted from a Martin Luther King Jr. line. And I mention that because as Ashford cites the author he is reviewing, David Koyzis, he replicates a King practice that is suggested, if not implied, by resisting the urge to make any political ideology into an idol. That is, as King noted, from comparing America's Capitalism with Russia's Communism, both had unique contributions to make and unique flaws to correct. Thus, we should work with all political ideologies to develop hybrids that emphasize the strengths of each ideology.

But something else has to be said to us religiously conservative Christians. We have to recognize that society is not the Church. And thus, we have evaluate how we should share society with others prior to working with those who adhere to other ideologies in shaping society. For the more we religiously conservative Christians presume a privileged place where we demand some degree of supremacy over others in determining society's laws and mores, the more we will appear to others as those who have made their pet political ideologies into idols appear to us. That is the more we will come across to unbelievers as those who have everything to teach and nothing to learn. In contrast to that, the more we strive to share society with unbelievers as equals, the more we will naturally exhibit the humility Ashford writes about at the end of his article.

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March 25

To Joseph Pearce and his blogpost about how he grew up as a racist but was converted and now sees some of the reactions against the traditions and beliefs of Western Civilization as being racist and, in some people, ethno-massochistic. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.

On the one hand, I respect the personal sharing Pearce did in this article. On the other hand, one doesn't have to be a White Supremacist to be a racist. Racism exists on a continuum. Though growing up in an all white neighborhood for most of my youth, I never became a "White Supremacist." But after reflecting on my college days, I realize that I was what I call a passive racist back then. It's not that I was an aggressive racist, but I had racist views stemming from ignorance and that governed how I interpreted and reacted to Black Americans at college. Hopefully I've fully corrected that but I have too much of a conflict of interest to objectively evaluate myself here.

And though we shouldn't believe that all White men were White Supremacists when looking at the history of Western Civilization, but that isn't the issue. We should realize that racism permeated the Western Civilization from its empires and colonialism to its practice of slavery and slave trading, to its ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples from different lands, to its ethnocracy from the assumption of racial privilege which returns us to White Supremacy though such can be a softer version of White Supremacy than how we usually think of it..

However, we need to understand that what could be called an overreaction to the racism, which Pearce has noted, that is so much a part of almost every aspect of Western Civilization is not racist. Btw, I am calling the banning or burning of books or the total rejection of Western Civilization an overreaction. Rather, it is rooted in an all-or-nothing thinking approach to an outcome-based truth system that simply says if a belief system has produced any abusive behavior, then the belief system is totally false. This kind of reaction is what we see in phobias that are the result of suffering traumas rather than any ethno-masochism. For this kind of reaction is more directed at culture than race. So what we are seeing there is simply the foundation of Post Modernism with its rejection of historical metanarratives because of much of the fruit of those metanarratives. Thus, the supremacy sought in Post Modernism is found in its total rejection of and, by some, its attempts to cleanse ourselves of the metanarratives of Modernism and Pre Modernism rather than in any reactive racism.

And trying to tie racism to Marxism is done pejoratively here. Such is a set up for establishing the supremacy of one's non-Marxist traditions of thought while no specifics are provided to establish the alleged association. But where we do see supremacy showing its ugly face is when a group, whether that group is based on cultural identity, ideology, economic class, race, national identity, sexual orientation, religion, and so forth believes that it cannot afford to share society as equals with those who are different in a diverse society.

And this returns us to the beginning. Whereas Pearce has gone through quite a personal transformation that merits much respect, he seems to overstate his case about being cleansed from supremacist ways of thinking. But for that matter, who has been totally cleansed of all kinds of supremacist ways of thinking? We can find out by how willing we are to share society with others as equals. And we can only share society with others as equals when, using the phraseology of Martin Luther King Jr., we reject the notion that our own group has everything to teach others and have nothing to learn from them.

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To Devin Ryan and his blogpost claiming that it is time for Russia and the others to bury Lenin rather than allowing his body to still be displayed in the Kremlin. This burying of Lenin would cut all favorable associations with him. This appeared in the Acton Blog.

We need to realize that some conflicts consist of evil vs evil. Such was the case when Lenin and the Bolsheviks hijacked the Russian Revolution. The first Revolution saw a provisional government overthrow the Tsar at that time. The provisional government then failed because it followed the will of the capitalists who wanted Russia to continue to fight in WW I. It also saw the Capitalists as having control of the nation. Thus, the conditions that led to the February Revolution of 1917 continued and that led to the October Revolution. We should note that during Russia's pre-revolutionary times, the Church supported the Tsars and the status quo. Though I am unaware of who the Church supported during the reign of the Provisional Government, it opposed the Socialists. Now while Lenin denounced religion, other socialists, like Rosa Luxemburg, called on the Russian Church to support the Socialists for everyone's good.

At the same time, we should note that Socialists like Rosa Luxemburg denounced Lenin's regime calling it a bourgeoisie dictatorship. Others have said that he simply practiced his own version of how the Tsars ruled. Other Socialists were cleansed from the scene by a power hungry Lenin who felt threatened by diversity and dissent. His reach for power included disbanding the soviets and Russia's Constituent Assembly. Other Socialists supported his hijacking because of the Counter Revolution and the crises that followed the Revolution. In essence, those who hijacked the Revolution were Bolsheviks. And thus what we have here is a complex picture of Socialism rather than a simple one that serves as a basis for the pejorative use of the word 'socialism.'

What we saw in Stalin was Lenin-gone-wild while what we saw in Lenin was Stalin-lite.  In either case, there was no proletariat dictatorship that was essential to what Marx taught. So it would be difficult to claim that under Lenin or Stalin, Marxist Socialism failed since it wasn't practiced. It wasn't until you get to Gorbachev who, btw rejected Stalin but embraced what Lenin taught, that you begin to see the Socialist concern for democracy being put on display in Russia. Should note that while not practicing Socialism, Lenin still tended to espouse Socialist beliefs and some just rationalize his totalitarian rule because of the crises that Russia was experiencing back then.

But returning to Lenin, both the Church and Lenin were on the wrong side of history. The Church was on the wrong side because of its support of those with wealth and power, including support for the Tsar, prior to the Revolution. Lenin was on the wrong side of history as he replaced one dictatorship with another. Thus, if we are going to cut all sentimental ties to Lenin, which is why he would be buried, the same goes for the Tsars. The result of both burials would be that bolsheviks and many from the Russian Orthodox Church would be ideologically orphaned.


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March 27

To Joe Carter and his blogpost on the role of Christian journalism and how that is carried out at The Gospel Coalition. This appeared on the Gospel Coalition website.

The crux of many conflicts among Christians and between Christians and nonChristians is what is meant by a 'restoration of creation'? Does it mean that we start to impose Christian values and Church laws on society? And we should also look at the why of this restoration. Does that why revolve around us and the enjoyment of our new life?

Those are pertinent questions because we are sharing that creation with nonChristians. And what  happens when we overreach in that restoration of creation is that we start to use society as a supplemental disciplinary arm of the Church. We know from the Scriptures that unbelievers are not subject to Church discipline. But if we try too hard to assist God in restoring creation, won't unbelievers become obstacles and then we will try to use civil laws to remove those obstacles? And thus, we will be using society as a supplemental disciplinary arm of the Church on those who are not subject to Church discipline.

The most pertinent question that involves the third point of Keller's three-point outline is: How should we Christians share society with others? Does God want his people to claim a privileged place in society so we can enjoy places of supremacy in order for Him to use us to restore creation? Or should we share society with others as equals and work side by side with them in creating a society with equality and justice? In addition, based on that third point, must the world revolve around us Christians because we are God's people? Those are all pertinent questions for any Christian journalist or ministry because the answers to those questions will determine what is advocated and what is described by those doing Christian journalism.

Are We Christians Trying Too Hard To Fit A Stereotype? Part IV

For the near future, some of the articles posted on Fridays will consist of reviews of Christian writings from 2 perspectives. The first perspective will be that of the view of the role of the Church in America as described by the report, The Crisis Of Democracy. This report is a view of the role of the Church from a liberal viewpoint. This perspective is an observation of the past which was interrupted during the protest years of the 1960s. That time was described by the report as having an 'excess of democracy.' And that view says the following (click here for the source):

In the past, those institutions which have played the major role in the indoctrination of the young in their rights and obligations as members of society have been the family, the church, the school, and the army. The effectiveness of all these institutions as a means of socialization has declined severely. The stress has been increasingly on individuals and their rights, interests, and needs, and not on the community and its rights, interests, and needs.

 The second perspective is an observation, not an ideological declaration, about the Church made from the Left in Russia prior to its October, 1917 Revolution--we should note that Russia also underwent a February, 1917 Revolution. This perspective was written by Vlad (a.k.a., Vladimir Lenin) and it went like this (click here for the source):

Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze,   in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.

The reason for reviewing Christian writings from these two perspectives is to determine whether today's writings show that the Church has changed since the times in which those observations were made. And for the record, I just want to say that I am not a fan of Lenin regardless of how I refer to him.

Today's review will consist of applying the above quotes to the end of a sermon preached by B.B. Warfield (click here for bio) and quoted in a blogpost by Justin Taylor on the Gospel Coalition website (click here for the blogpost). Note that what is being evaluated is what is being quoted from Warfield, not Warfield himself and what he said at other times.

In the part of the sermon being quoted, Warfield is describing the kind of self-sacrificial attitude Christians must have when they serve those in need and involve themselves in the world. Please click the above link to the blogpost to read how Warfield describes a very laudible kind of humble and sacrificial attitude that serves as an imitation of Christ in how He came into the world to serve. What is ironic here is that regardless of how worthy the kind of attitude Warfield describes is to have, by itself that attitude is a siren song that ends on the rocks of social injustice and thus the possible dishonoring of the Gospel. In other words, unless what Warfield describes lies in conjunction with other concerns, it will only compound the problems people face rather than help them.

First, we should look at least part of what Warfield said--that is for those who did not click the link. What Warfield said includes the following:

Wherever men suffer, there will we be to comfort.

Wherever men strive, there will we be to help.

Wherever men fail, there will be we to uplift.

Wherever men succeed, there will we be to rejoice.

Self-sacrifice means not indifference to our times and our fellows: it means absorption in them.

It means forgetfulness of self in others.

Certainly the above describes the ideal Christian on his/her best days of imitating Christ. But the question becomes how does what Warfield said address Vlad's concerns? In other words, though the Christian, in imitating Christ, might be an ideal example of life to those around him/her, in the end, if all we do is to both encourage those who succeed and help and comfort those who are victims of the system employed by the status quo, will we not merely resemble the street sweepers who clean up after a parade? And yes, we will be helping those who are suffering, but we will not be working for the prevention of future pain and abuse. This is the value of Vlad's statement as well as the statement from The Crisis Of Democracy. For it challenges us Christians  in being willing to sacrifice ourselves to prevent others from suffering the same problems we are cleaning up after today.

In fact, unless we challenge those who oppress others to repent, not only might we be securing praise from others for our noble efforts, we are costing those who oppress others opportunities to change.

With that being said, if we do not challenge an abusive system and those who maintain it to repent without having the same self-sacrificial attitude that Warfield describes above, then we risk sabotaging our efforts at affecting change. For challenging those with wealth and power to repent with anger and self-righteousness not only further hardens the hearts of those who are well rewarded in this life for their shrewdness, it does the same to those who ride in on their coattails. Thus, just as the self-sacrificial attitude that Warfield implores us Christians to have is insufficient by itself for us to live out our faith, it is essential to the living out our of faith.

But if how Warfield calls us to be is imitating Christ, then aren't we saying that imitating Christ is insufficient to follow Him if we so criticize Warfield's quote above ? Not at all. Why? Because we don't imitate Christ in everything He did. Though we are called to sacrifice ourselves for others as Christ came to sacrifice Himself for others, we can never make the sacrifice He made. Our sacrifice is not to atone for sins, but it is to reflect Christ's love for us to others. For while Christ knew that the end of His ministry culminated in His sacrifice on the cross, we do not know when the end of our ministry will come regardless of any sacrifice we are making at the time. In addition, our job is to make disciples of others and those others include those with wealth and power whose position in life is the result of exploiting others. Just as we are called to help the oppressed, we are also called to preach repentance to the oppressor. And here we might want to consider how it dishonors the Gospel when only nonChristians are calling on those who oppress and exploit others to repent.