An Open Letter to Andy Williams – Or Just Say No to Noël

[updated 12/23/12]

One was more than a little disappointed to read the current Ref21 website headline article, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” by Mr. Hays, (which  has since been superseded by an article on the Newton school shooting. Digging around even further, we did find two excellent articles by Roy Blackwood, Reforming Your Bible Study and The Exercise.)

While it is well enough written as far as it goes, it evades the real question regarding the celebration of Christmas among evangelically confessional churches, at least the presbyterian. IOW “invidious associations” of paganism, popery or partying upon  the holiday are not of the essence of a principled concern or objection from Scripture.

Rather  the P&R churches, contra the Lutheran or  Anglican, understand the good and necessary consequences of the Second Commandment to be that ‘whatsoever is not commanded – explicitly or implicitly in Scripture – is forbidden in the worship of God’. In other words, what is called the Regulative Principle of Worship (RPW). Thus the Larger, Shorter and Heidelberg Catechisms on the Second Commandment and the Westminster Confession Chapt. 21 On Religious Worship, if not also the Belgic Confession Art. 32 Of the Order and Discipline of the Church.

Consequently  as the Appendix to the Westminster Assembly’s Directory of Worship states, “Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued”. “No warrant” as in “uncommanded”.  And if uncommanded, forbidden.

Again, while we are commanded in Scripture to observe Christ’s resurrection  once a week, not once a year at Easter – that is after all the reason for the switch from the seventh  to the first day when it comes to the 4^th commandment – and his death  in the Lord’s Supper, we are never commanded to observe or celebrate his birth whatever the associations it might have for us,  sentimentally or culturally notwithstanding.

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The Problem with Propaganda/Rap

Propaganda's  rap/song is  still making the rounds, as well as waves  these days with  heavyweights like Joel Beeke and Thabiti Anyabwile weighing in either on it or Jonathan Edwards's defense of a fellow slave holding minister. Props considers the Puritans to be hypocrites on slavery and is critical of the modern reformed love for them. Yet the problem with propaganda is just that . . .  it's propaganda.

This Just In

But what else is new? If  the essence of propaganda or a half truth is that it contains enough of the truth to convince somebody that it is the whole truth, then good enough buddy, let's go for it. So, lemme see, before we found out that The some Puritans puritans  approved of slavery, if not owned slaves, we learned the same things regarding the Puritans and Ye Burning of Ye Olde Witches. Or Calvin executing  Servetus. With his bare hands no less. (I think the Big P's reference to 'slave ship chaplains' had something maybe to do with John Newton, who was a captain,  not a chaplain, that  eventually repudiated the slave trade.) The point being in all of this, is that  slavery was endemic to the times, just like witch hunting and the civil execution of heretics.

The corresponding and salient distinction lost in all the noise is that while Christians engaged in what are now reprobated activities - and properly so -  Puritanism/Christianity is also  pretty much what got rid of them. Which somehow got left out of the song, due to poetic license, no doubt.  Or is that the license of  propaganda?

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Mirror, Mirror On the Wall, Who’s the Biggest Racist of Them All?

(updated 2/17/12)
Not Ron Paul (unless Voddie Baucham don't have a clue) or even  the Newt Gingrich in the recent Repuglican debate. Rather we know that those who criticize Paul for not reading his 20 year old  newsletters, can't be anybody -- mainstream media or member of Congress -  involved with passing the Patriot Act, the TARP Bailout or ObamaCare, all of which  were "Too Big to Read". In other words, for one, we're talking major mainstream hypocrisy.

More Smoke and Mirrors

Two,  even if Paul or the Newt was the Great Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan  and they're not, the dubious honor of being the biggest racist just might be reserved for the present occupant of the big white house on Pennsylvania Ave. who still hasn't got around to telling anybody what he was doing sitting for twenty years in what could be called the black version of KKK church.

Which  is to say, it just  goes to show how far education in the government schools  has been eroded if the lesson of Edgar Allen Poe's Purloined Letter doesn't cause some lights to go on for the media, which has generally been in the tank for the darling  incumbent,  who is incapable of doing any  wrong. That, while the same  media again has only been capable of smearing someone as a racist if they dare to question their golden boy, if not Goldman Sachs Candidate No.1 - as compared to  Goldman Sachs Candidate No. 2, Mitt "Obamalite" Romney. Which is perhaps why some refer to members of the mainstream  press by the vulgar term of press-titutes.

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The State of the Union According to Tolkien

[Updated  2/11/11]  

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient;

Article II, Section 3 of the United States Constitution

To summarize the recent State of the Union Address Jan. 25, 2011 by the President of the United States of America to a joint session of Congress is not difficult. It was already stated over fifty years ago on the opening pages to J.R.R.Tolkein's classic trilogy, the Lord of the Rings:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie

In other  words, to translate the latest Saruman speak and WashingtonDC.orc talk: More Big Government as the Savior of all our  Economic Woes and American Sorrows. 

And, of course, upon delivery of this august address, there was great rejoicing all through the House of Congress and the Cable TV Studios. Implicitly it was understood that the Great Ogre of Unemployment with his Hordes of Underemployment would not dare to show their faces within the city limits of  the national version of Mordor on the Potomac. (Likewise faint hearts should not fear, Nationalsozialistische HealthCare for all will still be enforced freely and rationed  as prudently and carefully as every case may require.)  Neither did anyone have the unmitigated gall to interrupt and insist that someone was a liar as has happened in the past, regardless if lies, half truths or inaccuracies prevailed.

Yet as others have asked, is there any constitutional mandate for what was presented as the resolution of the problems that are facing the nation? But to ask is to answer, you silly goose. Perish the thought. May it never be.

Twin Siamese Parties

Still the real problem with all this, is not how does one go about electing a new president, or a new congress, but rather how does one elect a new electorate to replace the old electorate who voted for the incumbents. The same,  who largely, the Tea Party not excepted, promise more of the same old same old that got us here in the first place.  In case we haven't figured it out yet,  what was pretty much a  Republican version of a Stalinist personality cult preceded this administration's version  -  of  the exact same thing. Neither is it mentioned in polite society or  acknowledged by the  corporate bought and paid  for media,  but the two political parties in America are actually Siamese twins.

Socialist Parties
Tweedledum and Tweedledee   may be separate entities for tax purposes,  but by and large, they are still both firmly  rooted in the trunk  of  the Dire Necessity of More Big Government  Management/Control of the Economy -  whether indirect, through corporate collusions and  cartels (fascism) or direct, through  actual ownership of business, i.e. Government Motors (communism). In other words, whether direct or indirect, government control of the  economy is  of the  essence and definition of socialism, however it escapes the talking heads. Ben Gleck can't understand that Social Security is a socialist program, however much that Jon Stewart  Leibowitz might chide him about it on the Daily Show because at the least, both of them are really in  favor of the fascist version of socialism,  with respective emphases  on either warfare or welfare. But it's all ice cream, regardless of the flavor.

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Of Pimps, Prostitutes and Prima Donnas: The PCA and the Federal Vision

(updated 1/31/11)


A Report from the Friends of the First Amendment Society
As the Federal Vision more and more is starting to resemble a  theological gong show, no doubt the Larger Catechism on the Ninth Commandment will be permanently drug  (sic) out of  cold storage and "hurt feelings" will be the de facto response to anything resembling plain and blunt speech, which in its turn will be labeled  intemperate "hatespeech" and consequently dismissed via Geo. Orwell's memory hole. Even those who oppose the FV run the risk of being sucked in, as the following items might indicate. 


Likewise, the title above has already transgressed the thin red line for the discerning reader, but we takes our chances in these days of declining literacy, theological or otherwise. That Scripture itself refers to heresy, idolatry or apostasy in terms of whoring around is, of course, completely beyond the pale of modern moderate calvinism and the finer sort of tea parties to which brazen faced women are seldom invited. But to continue.


The Green Hobbit Society

Over at the Green Baggins website, there was a discussion, entitled  Misdirected Apology?,  concerning  what passes for an apology by Mr. J Meyers to the Missouri Presbytery (MOP) of the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA). This,  regarding his previous utterances, public and private as per  the Federal Vision theology currently perturbing the modern P&R churches - which incidentally, MOP absolved him of all connection  -   in that the PCA, along with the majority of other N. American P&R churches (NAPARC), has declared the FV to be off limits.

Nevertheless Mr. Meyers in 2007 signed the Joint Federal Vision Statement, which makes for a prima facie case that Prov. 30:20 contains the substance of Mr. Meyers's apology, if it does not contain, at the very least, a wholesale, full scale repudiation of the JFVS - which it did not:

Such is the way of an adulterous woman; she eateth, and wipeth her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness.

Likewise any discussion or critique of that same apology is misdirected/mistaken if it fails to aknowledge the obvious. To put it very mildly. Which is pretty much what happened at Bilbo's blog.

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Plainly and Simply Crazy

Further Remarks on Frank Schaeffer’s
Impatience with Fundamentalism and 
Infatuation with Mysticism
Due to Studied Ignorance of the  Protestant Reformation

While this is not a complete book review,  just an examination of the Prologue  which can be read for free on the internet,  to Frank Schaeffer's latest book, some things are still a dead giveaway. Schaeffer still tells us what he thinks as  bluntly as he used to in the old days when, as “Frankie”, an angry young evangelical, he wrote A Time for Anger, The Myth of Neutrality in 1982.

Yet for those who appreciated his father, the well known Christian pastor, theologian, philosopher  and best selling author Francis Schaeffer, even as separate and apart  from his  political activism with Frank in getting the Religious Right started and Reagan elected in 1980, these have not been happy days since Francis died in 1984.   Among other things, Frank ended up joining the Greek Orthodox Church in 1990. 

 

Unfortunately that means when he is not voting for or playing the Byzantine  sycophant to Barack Obama - see for example his Open Letters to the Republican "traitors"   and the President -   he’s been busy castigating both his parents  and his past involvement with   the Religious Right. Ergo his book  Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back (2007).

Patience with God
Now however, in his latest title of 2009,    Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism), while Frank is beyond being crazy for God,  he’s still crazy -  as in irrational. (But that’s  OK because it’s part of being both religious and experience oriented according to Frank.) His latest tells us of his irritation with and  rejection of both evangelical and the secular “New Atheism” fundamentalism as opposed to his fascination with Kierkegaard’s philosophical existentialism, if not again Eastern Orthodoxy, which always hovers in the background.

In other words, his thesis is that these two mysticisms, philosophical and theological,  thoroughly refute  the various contemporary fundamentalisms, religious or otherwise. Uncertainty, paradox and experience are the ultimate truths that rebut those who arrogantly claim to know different  ultimate truths. While this makes for a  bizarre and eclectic  melange of a substitute for those same evangelical fundamentalist  certainties, it comes at the expense of the genuine Reformation alternative. Hence the following.

Mr. Schaeffer is either genuinely ignorant of,  if not that he deliberatively chooses to ignore, Biblical Christianity,  at least  as it was understood and confessed at the Protestant Reformation in the Reformed Faith by the Presbyterian and Reformed churches in concocting his rebuttal of fundamentalism. Of course, Mr. Schaeffer is entitled to his opinion on these matters; that is beyond question. That his arguments are new, of substance and persuasive is an entirely different matter. Consequently an examination and critique of both  evangelical fundamentalism on the one hand and existentialism and Eastern Orthodoxy on the other is in order, as below and  in contrast to Mr. Schaeffer's evasion of the orthodox and Biblical solution to the issues he raises.

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8/10/01 A Reply to Credenda Agenda

Leithart, Schlissel, Wilson  and Hal Lindsey  vs. 
The Westminster Assembly, Ursinus, O.T. Allis, R.L. Dabney and John Knox 

[Something else grubbed up from the archives and  formatted for the web, in light of Mr. Schlissel's latest confusion on the RPW.]

Letter to the Editor
Credenda Agenda
Mr. Doug Wilson
August 10, 2001

Dear Sir,

In order to forestall any incipient prelacy in the New World order, Moscow, Idaho style, the Credenda Agenda, if not its good Editor, need to stop hem-hawing around and clarify its position on worship. Specifically this means explicitly affirming the historic reformed exposition of the Second Commandment commonly known as the Regulative Principle of Worship (the RPW hereafter): "Whatsoever is not commanded in Scripture is forbidden in the worship of God."

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6/25/01 A Reply to Messiah's Update on the Four R's:

Romanism, Reconstructionism, the RPW and Rom. 3

1/11/10
As was alluded to in the previous on Mr. Schlissel's latest, been there, done that  is the short hand response. Of course, shortly after the old letter below  was mailed, our active and congenial acquaintance with the mailing list for  Messiah's Community Church Update ceased and desisted.

Along with worship issues, the  influence of N.T. Wright's covenantal nomism can also  be seen developing in Mr. Schlissel's gloss of Rom. 3 as not applying to the Jews, at least not as totally depraved according to the classic view of reformed theology and the confessions. The gospel is all about the covenant or ethics or ecclesiology; not justification, how a man might be right with God. Now of course the Federal Vision is in full blossom; Schlissel, Wilson, Jordan, Lusk, Barach and Wilkins all came out of the closet at the Auburn Avenue Pastors' Conferences beginning in 2002.

June 25, 2001
Messiah’s Update
2662 East 24th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11235

Dear Mr. Schlissel

A few comments regarding past Updates that the generosity of Messiah’s has deposited in our mailbox.

If we are going to insist that Romanists are in the covenant but unfaithful to its terms, informing them of those terms includes informing them that Rome has apostatized from the covenant. Funny how that got left out of the April 2001 letter. And if we’re going to quote Calvin in the first place, go on to include his concluding remarks in the same chapter. “But, on the other hand, because those marks, which we ought chiefly to regard in this controversy, are obliterated, I affirm, that the form of the legitimate Church is not to be found either in any one of their congregations, or in the body at large (Inst. IV:2:12).” The differences between Rome and Protestantism were worth dying for at the Reformation. And still are.

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In A Theological Daze And Confusion About Days of Thanksgiving

Or More Befuddlements, Old and New on Reformed Worship from the Rev. S. Schlissel
[updated 1/31/10]

There are any number of things that can be said about Steven Schlissel’s two and a half page pastoral letter “Thanksgiving Reflections” posted Dec. 1, ‘09 at his Just Another Blog in the Wheel site as anybody might have guessed that is familiar with his point of view. Schlissel's latest not only opposes the historic doctrine of reformed worship, otherwise known as the Regulative Principle of Worship (RPW), but is also in favor of celebrating the annual national Day of Thanksgiving in America as it is now observed.

Worse than his disagreement with the RPW though, is that he still cannot - or will not - define it properly. He  continues to restrict the RPW to only what is explicitly commanded in Scripture  and denies that there are any commands implied as  good and necessary consequences of the approved examples of  worship in the Bible.

Schlissel's Misrepresentation Develops into Judaizing
But that is not enough nor is Mr. Schlissel content to rest on his laurels in only repeating himself. His suppression of the truth about the RPW, only leads to his  further expression of error in arguing  for Thanksgiving on the basis  of the Old Testament ceremonial  feastdays.  But this is to turn the whole idea of an example of approved worship in Scripture inside out and on its head. Unfortunately Mr. Schlissel appears to be entirely clueless that these OT holydays are completely  abolished in the NT as categorically fulfilled in Christ. Neither the days themselves or  any post NT Christian imitations are permissable.

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Addendum on the Free Offer

[revised 2/22/09]

As per the previous post, what is at issue in the disagreement over the free offer of the gospel, is whether God "desires" the salvation of the reprobate in any other than a preceptive sense. In other words, if God really desired all men to repent and believe in Christ, it would be a done deal. What God desires must come to pass, for God has no unfulfilled desires or intentions. But such is not the case. So what is the explanation? While it pleases God that men repent and believe the gospel, his secret will or decree is not that the salvation of all men comes to pass. Nevertheless the gospel is to be preached -offered- to all men and salvation promised to all who believe on Christ.

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