Why My Moralism Is More Legitimate Than Your Moralism

R. Scott Clark (click here for personal info) recently wrote an article on theological liberalism and that included the conflict with and distinction from what J. Gresham Machen wrote. Machen did a wonderful job in distinguishing theological liberalism from Christianity. According to Clark, three areas in which Machen showed the difference between Christianity theological liberalism was in the area of the supernatural, moralism, and in comparing Jesus to Paul (click here for the article). 

Though the focus of this article will be on moralism, something needs to be said regarding the areas of the supernatural and in comparing Jesus to Paul. 

Regarding supernaturalism, the theological liberalism of Machen's day, and today too much of theological liberalism denies the supernatural and reduces all of reality to the physical. Such a denial cuts at the heart of the Gospel as Machen noted. For without the supernatural intervention of God in history through Jesus Christ, we have neither the vicarious atonement of the righteous one for sinners nor is there the resurrection from the dead for our salvation and the proof that Jesus Christ is God's only begotten son.

Regarding the comparison of Jesus to Paul, Clark makes the point that theological liberalism has wanted to eliminate how Paul showed that he was a follower of Jesus by what he said about Him. Once theological liberals could sever Paul from Jesus, they could make Jesus into any kind of person they want to.

However, we should note one thing here, there seems to be some differences in what Jesus and Paul taught about our obligations in how we treat each other. While Jesus talked about taking those who persisted in unspecified sins before the Church for discipline and possible excommunication, Paul tells believers in Corinth to suffer mistreatment from fellow believers rather than taking each other to court. He said that to protect the reputation of the Gospel and because God will judge those who mistreat others in the Church. Likewise, just as we have the story of Nicodemus and how he promised to repay those he cheated according to the Law of Moses, Paul simply tells those who steal to stop and work to contribute to others.

While what Jesus said in the Gospels went along with the law, what Paul said in several instances showed a difference back then in how Jewish believers  regarded the law from how Gentile believers responded to the Law.

But the issue that this article wants to focus on here is the moralism issue. For it seems that when theological liberals and other unbelievers exhort society to pursue justice, some theological conservative Christians counter with cries of 'moralism.' And that moralism label is meant to discredit and dismiss what unbelievers are saying.

Clark illustrates, in this article, one of the major problems that come with these conservative brushing off of theological liberalism's calls for justice. How does Clark do that? He does that by pointing to rules on sexual behavior that theological liberals reject. So why can conservatives like Clark call social rules promoted by theological liberals 'moralism' while what conservatives understand of Biblical sexual morality as being obligatory? That is question that may not be answered here. For while the Bible speaks clearly as to what is allowed and disallowed in terms of how we sexually act, social justice issues promoted by theological liberals more often than not deal with the Commandments that prohibit murder or theft.

When Clark describes the sexual morality supported by theological liberalism, he writes as if the sexual moral sky is falling because of the current state that allowed for same-sex marriages. In addition, Clark gets specific in talking about sexual morals when he mentions same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, sexual abuse, and a future that will logically bring polygamy and pederasty. Of course that future is logically deduced rather than witnessed by observation.

But Clark gives no such specific examples of social justice either in Machen's day or now. At the most, he equates those promoting social justice with the Methodist teetotalers of Machen's day, which is more historical than trivial since Machen's promotion to be Professor of Apologetics was blocked in a committee of the Presbyterian Church's General Assembly because of his opposition to the 18th Amendment that eventually made Prohibition the law of the land (see  https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/j-gresham-machen-the-politically-incorrect-fundamentalist  ).  Machen also opposed the creation of the Federal Department of Education, the Child Labor Amendment, and any attempt to establish a Christian culture. In the cases of the first two instances, Machen, a political Libertarian, was afraid of the sacrifice of individual freedom to a growing government. With the latter, Machen was a afraid that Christian culture would fail to respect minorities. 

Machen also opposed socialism because it would, in his opinion, result in the elimination of individual freedoms. Then again, Machen wrote that in 1923 in his book Christianity and Liberalism where his one possible exposure to Marxist socialism was Lenin and Bolshevism. The problem there is that Lenin ruled as a totalitarian, or a different kind of Tsar, rather than as a Marxist Socialist. A socialist contemporary of Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, made a similar point though she also excused the Lenin and the Bolsheviks because of the revolutionary endeavors and the then current hardships it faced (see  https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch08.htm  )

When we look at today's social justice issues, we see that it involves much more than any past views on public consumption of alcohol. They involve racial inequality, the marginalization of the LGBT community in society, sexism, climate change, income and wealth disparities, economic exploitation, imperialism, and militarism, the last two which Machen opposed. In essence, social justice is concerned with social injustices that violate the the Commandments that prohibit it murder and theft. And yet, as previously mentioned, Clark compares those working for social justice to the Methodist teetotalers back when the Prohibition Amendment was being considered.

Clark then follows Machen's example of claiming that those working for social justice as have rejected the good news of the Gospel in favor of the law--Machen said the same about those advocating the social gospel in his day. But is such a claim true? Consider that the Gospel preaches grace and mercy as ways sinful people can favorably face a just God. Social justice is concerned with stopping current injustices and creating a more just society especially for those who have been oppressed. BTW, we should note that Machen, despite his own racism and opposition to social justice, expressed concern for those who were oppressed. Facing God is not an issue in social justice because social justice is dealing with people and the here and now. So how does promoting social justice imply a rejection of the Gospel?

What is there in the Gospel that prohibits one from working for social justice? Does believing in Jesus for the forgiveness of one's sins mean that one cannot not be concerned with and work to help fix racial inequality, the marginalization of the LGBT community in society, sexism, climate change, income and wealth disparities, economic exploitation, imperialism, or militarism? 

Can one believe the Gospel Machen taught and still work for social justice? For those who answer with a 'no,' we should note that we are playing an association game. Just as many unbelievers today might understandably but wrongly associate the rejection of working for legitimate social justice concerns with religiously conservative Christianity, so to did Machen, at least to some extent, and Clark now associate the working for social justice with theological liberalism. 

What we might be seeing in Clark and many like him is not just a whole hearted embracing of Machen's theology, it is also a mix that includes a whole hearted embracing of Machen's political libertarianism and enjoying the place of supremacy that Christianity has had in America since its beginning. That is not the same as calling America a Christian nation. That is because the idea that we can have a Christian nation is not supported by the New Testament.

In rejecting today's calls for social justice, Clark just might be reacting the way that we normally react to any calls for change in situations in which one feels comfortable. Change requires more internal energy from us than anything else we do. So besides how Clark seems to easily associate calls for social justice with theological liberalism, another reason for Clark's position here is a very natural resistance to certain changes.

There are other things could be said but we will leave it at that. Many religiously conservative Christians are having quite a difficult time in seeing the social justice movements of today as being anything other than a religious heresy. But they unwittingly do so perhaps in part for the same reasons we all have for resisting change. In addition, he does so because, perhaps like Machen to an extent, he has pronounced social justice as being antithetical to Gospel as a way of pronouncing it guilty by association.

 

Comments Which Conservatives Block From Thier Blogs for October 21, 2015

Oct 19

To Brian Cosby's blogpost on troubling passages in the Scriptures that can cause embarrassment. This appeared in the Gospel Coalition website.

Unlike the writer of the above article, I've never been embarrassed by the Bible. But after teaching a World's Religion class for the first time, I can safely say that I was constantly embarrassed by Church history and the many instances of Christians' inhumanity to man.

As for the Bible, there some troubling parts that I can easily admit that I don't know the answer to and there are other troubling parts that I can give at least a partial answer to. In particular, the participation in the wars and violence which was commanded by God points to the seriousness of sin and how God can react to sin according to a particular time period in redemptive history.

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To Denny Burk and his blogpost talking about Albert Mohler's book on same-sex marriage and how one review reduced the book to the single of issue of whether Christians should attend same-sex marriage. This appeared in Denny Burk's blog.

Certainly, we cannot be silent regarding same-sex marriage. We must tell people what the Scriptures say: that same-sex sexual relations are unbiblical as is same-sex marriage. But it is also possible for us to overreact to what we cannot be silent about.

Noting that I have not read Mohler's book, but am solely reacting to Burk's article, what seems to be the point here is that Mohler's book deals with a loss of Christian privilege in society where certain Christian values caused the marginalization in society of particular groups of people such as those from the LGBT community. And here, the full accectance of the LGBT community as equal members of society could be an issue that is being piggybacked with any biblical opposition to same-sex marriage causing us to overreact to our changing times. And when that occurs, the culture shock is causing many to overreact to the changing status of same-sex marriage in society.

As for the headline issue on Mohler's book, I agree that Christians should not attend same-sex marriages as invited guests. But the same cannot be said of our participation as business owners.

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Oct 20

To Joe Carter and his blogpost about how foreign aid to nations can keep poor nations poor. This appeared in the Acton blog.

What is forgotten in this discussion is how some foreign aid, such as loans, comes with conditions that maintains leaders who cooperate those lending the money. This allows other gov'ts or elites from the private sector to gain a control over the gov't of so that those who make the loans benefit from a country's resources more than the people do. And we don't have to go to 3rd world countries to see how this works. The loans being made to Greece not only sabotages Greece's economy by preventing a wider distribution of wealth through austerity measures, the payments made on the loans funnels money out of the Greece and into the hands of foreign investors.

See, it is the conditions on which loans or foreign aid is made that most often causes such aid to keep nations poor, and not the aid itself. Treaties, like NAFTA or the TPP, foreign aid, and loans can act as an economic form of gunboat diplomacy. BTW, that the TPP can replace gunboat diplomacy is actually found in the text of the TPP. And here we should note what history teaches us about what happens when changes in a nation threaten the interests of foreign investors: Iran in '53, Guatemala in '54, Chile in '73, ...

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To Joseph Sunde and his blogpost criticizing Bernie Sanders' economic positions as threatening economic freedom. This post contains a video that claims that economic freedom is strongly correlation with the wealth of a nation and its living standards. This appeared in the Acton blog.

It seems that this article practices the same sin that Bernie Sanders does when it comes to explaining our economic woes: it uses a scapegoat. For Sanders, and for my Occupy Movement as well, the scapegoat consists of x% of the wealthiest people in our nation. For this article, it is the government as it interferes with the economic freedom of its citizens. And the two main ways that the government interferes with this freedom is through overspending and regulations. But in making this criticism, what the article misses are the contributions made to the economy by these two practices.

Regarding overspending, as with Reagan, President Bush greatly increased the national debt by overspending. But what did he overspend on and who benefited from this spending? Bush overspent on the military when he started two unfunded wars. But it wasn't just the military he spent money on, it include paramilitary and other contractors who were suppose to either support our military or rebuild what was destroyed. During Bremer's provisional authority gov't, billions of dollars went unaccounted to the contractors  who were suppose to rebuild Iraq. In the meantime paramilitary contractor companies were making huge profits along with contractor companies that supplied support services to our military. And we should also remember the arms and other manufacturers who profited from the military's use of their products. So the question becomes this: Where would our economy be if there were no wars from which certain companies could profit? This is an important question considering what percentage of manufacturing jobs that rely on our nation's military ventures. We could also look at medicare and how the government overspent there partially because Medicare is prohibited from negotiating pharmaceutical prices. Who is benefiting from this prohibition? And finally, we can also ask about the role that the Bush tax cuts played in his doubling of the national debt.

At the same time, we might want to ask who benefits from regulations? For example, who benefits from OSHA regulations? Who benefits from labor regulations? Who benefits from environmental regulations? And so on. To attack regulations simply because there ar so many, and assuming that some regulations are not good ones,  forgets who benefits from regulations. Suppose we gut these regulations, who pays the price? Workers can easily pay the prices when we eliminate OSHA and labor regulations. Everyone pays the price when we eliminate environmental regulations. And the problem becomes the costs that follow  the elimination of regulations.

Now the differences between the contributions listed above involves the identity of the primary beneficiaries of the above contributions as well as their sustainability. How many people benefit from the increased spending that comes with waging wars and rebuilding nations? After answering that we need to ask the following question: Is relying on such spending good for the nation and sustainable economically? For it seems that the former set of contributions fail in terms of either benefiting the general population or being sustainable. The latter set of contributions conditionally succeed in both.

It should follow then that scapegoating the gov't for infringing on economic freedom as the cause for  our wealth is rather oversimplistic. This is especially true since some of the nations involved in the comparison in the video could be divided into those nations that exploit others for their natural resources and those nations that are exploited. For there seems to be a positive correlation between the wealth of a nation and its role as being an exploiter of other nations.

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To Denny Burk and his blogpost consisting of the new Star Wars trailer and his question of where is Luke Skywalker in the poster and trailer. This appeared in Denny Burk's blog.

The more important question to where is Luke Skywalker is this: Does the Church sometimes join the dark side when it seeks a privileged position in society in order to control it?

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To R. Scott Clark and his Oct 19th response to my comment stating that the person criticizing moralism did so from the context of discussing salvation. This appeared in the Heidelblog.

But then when we criticize moralism, shouldn't we be explicit in stating the context in which moralism has legitimate applications? And if the answer to that question is 'yes,' wouldn't suggest that even liberal versions of the social gospel have a legitimate place and thus criticisms of it should at least be somewhat nuanced? For again, when we condemn moralism while nonChristians are exhibiting a greater moralism in society than we do, the credibility of the Gospel and God's Word are damaged.

Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For March 12, 2014

March 9

To Dr Jay Richards and his video posted by Justin Taylor on the Gospel Coalition's blog



1.   Was the old Soviet Union a socialist state? The assumption is that, starting with Lenin, the Soviet Union was following Marxism and Socialism. 

Before determining whether the Soviet Union was a socialist state, consider what was said in the following two links

    i.    http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch08.htm
         Reading just the first paragraph would suffice

    ii.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xpbgfkF9yk
          Here, Noam Chomsky challenges the popular perception that Lenin and the Soviet Union direction that followed was Socialist at all. In addition, he describes why both the Soviet Union and the West called what was practiced in the Soviet Union, Socialism

2.   By establishing the Soviet Union as the opposite of American Capitalism and be stating that the only alternative to the Soviet Union was what was practiced in the Soviet Union, he has established a false dichotomy. There are a number of different anti-capitalist models such as anarchism, socialism, and communism. We'll note that fascism and capitalism  stand in contrast to those models. And each model has various flavors. So fleeing to American Capitalism simply because the Soviet Union model failed is living in a false dichotomy. 

3.   Richards stresses the importance of freedom for vibrant economy. But freedom for whom? If the workers are not in control of production, are they free? If the community doesn't have a say in how businesses that reside in the community, is the community free? And what about protection? Do consumers, workers, and communities lose protection when businesses are given more freedom.

    We have to ask if what Richards is really promoting is privileges, not freedom. That is because freedom for a select few cannot be freedom because it is not for all. Liberty - equality = privilege.

4.   Giving the businesses privileges over the rest of us puts those owning businesses in an at best paternalistic relationship with the rest. The relationship is paternalistic if the privileged side takes care of those who are underprivileged. But the privileged have advantages and call the shots and the underprivileged are to tolerate their inferior status for the  sake of keeping their benefits. Now where is the freedom in that?

5.   Yes, gov'ts break laws. But they don't do so without businesses--remember that Hitler was put in power with the help of leaders of big business. And there are a number of ways those with wealth and the gov't interact. Regardless of these ways, both are competing to win the loyalty of the rest by claiming they best represent the rest of us.

6.   What Richards misrepresented about our founders is that they opted for a strong federal gov't that would protect the minority with wealth from the rest. One can verify this by reading the Constitutional debates. This means that the founders, since they were opting for strong gov't, may not have been committed to limited gov't. BTW, Richards substituted anarchy for anarchism. In anarchism, there is great cooperation and can be a high degree of organization, there is just no centralized authority that has coercive abilities.

7.   BTW, if one wants to examine the reasons why Asian countries have benefitted better from globalization than many Latin American countries is because many Asian countries have well-regulated economies while many Latin American countries have allowed the free-flow of capital. In addition, there are two kinds of private property: personal and capital or business. So we should note that different laws should be set up for each kind of private property. The attempt to overlook this distinction at the end of point #5.

8.   The win-win game Richards talks about does not exist. Every great economic power in today's world has gained economic wealth partially through colonization, theft, and exploitation. Remember that America started with ethnically cleansing the land of its indigenous population and slavery. Then it moved to empire and controlling who was leading certain countries with resources. Other European countries had their own empires too.

9.   His point on the church is not historically supported. Rather, the Church, especially conservative churches, have generally supported those with wealth and power. That is true of America for the past couple centuries and it was true of France. It was also true of pre-revolutionary Russia. And it was true of Germany.

10.  BTW, we should note that comparative advantage address is not good for every kind of product. During the last 15 to 20 years, Hairian farmers were forced to compete with American Agribusiness and were forced out of business. This left Haiti without the ability to provide its own food and this results in Haiti having food shortages when the price of either foreign food itself or transporting imported food rises. But this also puts many Haitians out of work. The same is true for other countries that have succumbed to comparative advantage or the specialization of labor by country.

11.  Finally, and this is a Reformed theology criticism, Richards needs to better distinguish God's creativity from human creativity. It isn't that God didn't keep all of the creativity and left some for us as Richards said. Rather, God is the source of all creativity while our creativity is derived from him. This is part of the creator-creature distinction.

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March 10

To Derek Richmawy's blogpost on ideological moralism. This was posted on the Gospel Coalition's blog


There are two sides to this. There is certainly the temptation for all, Christian or not, who are involved with moral causes to become like the pharisee in Jesus' parable of the two men praying. The pharisee spent his time blowing his own horn while externalizing evil. The other side is that we Christians relegate to mere ideological moralism those nonChristians who, as mentioned in Romans 2:14-15, don't have God or His Word but from their conscience do what is right, though neither perfectly nor all of the time. And we minimize what they say and do for the same reasons the previously mentioned pharisee did.

It seems to me that if we really believe that we are sinners and are saved by grace and are not caught up in the externalization of evil trap, we would feel convicted when we see nonChristians love our neighbor more than we do. And there are plenty of times that happens especially when we confuse the  parts of our culture which we enjoy with Christianity.

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To Joseph Pearce's blogpost on giving atheism credit for the guillotine and the gas chamber. This post appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.


Certainly atheism is not innocent, but if we look at all of history, we find that perhaps we should use the kind of scoring they use in the NHL. That is because not only does the goal scorer get credit, so does the person(s) who passes the puck. The latter get an assist.
The guillotine just didn't result from spontaneous generation. Rather, it was used as a humanitarian alternative to previous methods of execution used when the clergy played a prominent role (the 1st estate) in French society. Before the revolution, methods by which people were executed included burning at the stake (also see Calvin's Geneva), hanging, being pulled apart by 4 horses, and being beheaded by a sword or axe. The guillotine was seen as humanitarian because of its efficiency and quickness. And the desire for a more humanitarian way of performing executions came from the enlightenment.

But if we want to look at the ant-Christian reaction by those in the revolution, we must first see the role that the Church played in subjecting much of the 3rd estate to poverty. So we have consider how much of the French Revolution's rejection of the Church was due to a rejection of theism and how much was due to a rejection of how the 1st estate controlled society. Sometimes, context is important.

Likewise in Germany, we could say that the Church earned another assist in the development and use of the gas chambers mostly on Jews but also on others. Remember that for centuries, Germany held a Church inspired "eliminationist" anti-Semitic attitude. This was significantly inspired by Martin Luther's pamphlet called, "The Jews And Their Lies" (in particular see the end of page 39-47 of http://www.resist.com/Instauration/OtherPubs-20120723/TheJewsAndTheirLies-Luther.pdf). While Luther called for the elimination of the Jews in Germany, Hitler added the means and drew inspiration from Hitler. And even without Hitler, for centuries the Church practiced a harsh anti-Semitism such that by the 1800s, Jews started to organize the current Modern Zionist enterprise.

And don't forget that the Church gave us the inquisition, the burning of witches and heretics at the stake (Geneva), and even the persecution of fellow believers (see the Puritans' persecution, including the killing, of Quakers). Then we have the Church's support for the ethnic cleansing of America's indigenous people from America and a partial support for slavery. We can count that if we don't wish to include European wars over religion or claiming that the Christian God was on the side of their country (see WWI).

One more point, if socialism is defined by proletariat rule, then the totalitarian rule of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are disqualified from being called socialist. The kind of state that Marxists envisioned as being in control was partially democratic. It was democratic in the way the representatives were selected. But it was not a fully democracy because only the workers and soldiers were qualified to be representatives. But to the opportunistically simple-minded, state control equals socialism even when the state that is  in control is not socialist. 

What this blogpost serves as an example of by its externalization of evil and whitewashing of faults is that of a cult. According to this post, only those outside the movement can be evil and have faults. Those true conservatives who are believers could never abuse others or push for war.

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March 11


To Joe Carter's blogpost featuring Milton Friedman's comments on how business can be the enemy of free markets. This appeared on the Acton blog.


The good thing about what was said is that a Free Market economist stated a role for government. That government needs to keep others from having excessive power. That requires gov't to have an adequate size to do so. Those who worry about the size of gov't, if they are consistent, will worry about the size of all other entities including those in business.

The bad thing is the assumption that the free market is always good. It seems that the free market is like the Pope; it speaks infallibly. Unfortunately, comparative advantage and free markets can rob people of being self-suffienct--Haiti is an example here in terms of food. For doesn't history teach us that one way a country can build its productive resources is through protection?