Via Moderna
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Updates and commentary. The site software does not support a proper blog so old posts that do not fit on the page are not retained. Commentary on recently encountered publications Reports on recent news and interviews of special interest Observations on current trends and events These are far from being ordinary times. There is massive concentration of ownership of news and entertainment media, used to promote a unified propaganda line (including designated opposition with partial truths). This also is the means for censorship of a vast range of opposition viewpoints. This is accompanied by election manipulation, medicine as genocide, and justice as lawfare against those who seek to defend freedom. In the midst of this is fake Christianity, which claims that to speak of these things would be outside the narrow spiritual mission of the churches. As far as Via Moderna is concerned, it is the function of Christianity to deal in reality.
Sunday 29 September 2024
Another follow-up interview at USAWatchdog.com with Karen Kingston
updates the status of lawsuits about the Jab. See also:
https://karenkingston.substack.com/
The second edition of Theosophy, Van Til, and Bahnsen, is available in
English. Some material has been deleted, some added. It is about 60
pages longer than the first edition. So far the apologetics industry simply
pretends that it does not exist.
The problem is that “Reformed” theology today is not particularly
Reformed. The ecclesiology is basically Congregationalist/Baptist. The
covenant theology is some combination of Kuyper or Kline, and not the
system of Westminster or the scholastic era. Many “alternative”
movements, stying themselves Reformed, are cobbled together from
Kuyper and the Heiser Mythology.
Thursday 27 June 2024
In this summer’s Southern Baptist convention, when it came to electing
their president for the subsequent year, the conservatives could only
manage about 30% of the vote. Now, post-convention, they are talking
about how they can make a comeback. In effect, they are discussing how
they can divert their efforts over the next decade from the kingdom of
God to trying to recover control of denominational structure that has
repudiated them. The biggest reason they can give is that the Southern
Baptists have the biggest foreign missions program in the world and that
it is impossible to rebuild it outside of the Southern Baptist organization.
Just how do they know that those missionaries and their teachings are
any better than the organization that sends them? Meanwhile, of course,
liberals are hell-bent on destroying the society that supports the
Southern Baptist organization and all those missionaries.
Over at Lamb’s Reign, Joel McDurmon is proclaiming his self-liberation
from Christian Reconstruction. McDurmon is the son-in-law of Gary
North, and once headed up American Vision, until his growing
revisionism and movement toward wokism threatened the survival of
that organization, at which point the board of directors brought back
Gary DeMar. He, in turn, plunged the organization into controversy with
full-praeterism. Not that it is necessarily an improvement even on the
woke from. Contrast these two statements: James White referenced
that young girl, Jocelyn, who was raped and murdered by people
that the Biden regime have invited – they’ve opened the border and
said “come and invade us”. We are living in the days of the largest
public act of treason that I can think of in any historical situation. I
cannot think of anyone who more openly, boldly and on a grand
scale – I am talking about facilitating the invasion of millions of
people – you just wait for the day …. when there is a string of
terrorist attacks in the United States that make 9/11 look like child’s
play. And I’m going to tell you right now, they got here through the
border opened up by the Biden regime to fundamentally change
the nature of the United States of America.… It’s going to happen, its
inevitable, but right now they are just murdering and raping and
pillaging, and that is exactly what the regime wants. — James White,
Diving Line, June 26, about 4 and a half minutes in.
Compare this with Gary DeMar,
Churches near the border should set up large tents and welcome
those who are crossing. Bring translators, Bibles, food, clothing,
baby supplies, etc. Present the Gospel. Get help from Samaritan
Ministries. Instead of sending missionaries to their countries, God is
bringing them to us. — 21 September 2021
How do we explain this? Gary DeMar belongs to the Tyler branch of
Reconstruction, and Gary North had always infused it with his libertarian
ideology. He called for open borders and citizenship for anyone who
would affirm the Trinity. Tyler Reconstruction was not about discipling
the nations but abolishing them in favor of a globalist vision. Thus, in
some key aspects, one did not have to change views to go from Tyler
Reconstruction to woke. We did point out some of this in the first issue
of Contra Mundum in 1991, in the review of Political Polythism but I
never noticed that any Reconstructionists cared about it at the time.
Monday 10 June 2024
In a recent video, “Social Justice Cancel Culture: Alive and Well in the
PCA”, the point was made that the woke, or “social justice cancel culture”
has become the established position in the Presbyterian Church in
America. That is, the issue is no longer the danger of letting it in, but of
how to survive in the PCA if one opposes it. This raises the question of
how this came about. Attempts to answer this question generally fail
because the explanation does not go back far enough.
The PCA was formed when the Southern Presbyterian Church decided to
join the northern liberal Presbyterians to form today’s Presbyterian
Church USA. Obviously, this meant that liberals had gained control of the
Southern Presbyterian Church in order to bring about this decision. The
churches exiting the Southern denomination to form the PCA were thus
a coalition of losers. Even then, some politicing had to be done to get
enough congregations to go over to the new denomination (PCA). On the
one hand, the new denomination was represented as holding to the
traditional theology of the Westminster Confession while on the other
Arminian and dispensational ministers and congregations were
recruited, and promised that room would be made for them within the
doctrinal position of the new denomination. That the main component
of the PCA was Southern Presbyterian churches meant that part of what
made up the PCA and constituted its sense of identity were elements
distinctive to the Southern Presbyterian tradition rather that of
Prebyterianism as such. These were a conversionist theology that tended
to undermine covenantal understandings of family and church and the
spirituality of the church idea which restricted the area where the
church was supposed to speak authoritatively, and in effect let the
culture determine what was “spiritual” and thus under the purview of the
church. (On the matter of the covenant, the best explanation of the
theological differences is the book by Lewis Bevens Schenck, The
Presbyterian Doctrine of Children in the Covenant.) There were some
non-southern congregations and groups that also came into the new
PCA, and this meant another problem in the identity of this
denomination. Some congregations have now exited the PCA to form the
Vanguard Presbyterian Church which is self-conscious and forthright
about its commitment to the traditional southern identity.
The fundamental doctrinal disunity of the PCA since its formation meant
that the dynamic that had brought down the northern Presbyterians
decades before would also play itself out in the PCA. That is, there is a
non-confessional evangelical contingent that needs to protect itself from
confessional discipline and which will ally itself with liberals to achieve
this. In addition to this, there is the attraction of institutionalism, the
desire to be a large influential and respected denominations, with
associated schools, boards, commissions as well as having prominent
“big steeple” churches in important urban locations. This is to a degree
also the legacy of the Southern Presbyterian background, as that
denomination was a prestige denomination in the south and thus
influenced the self-concept of the larger founding congregations in the
PCA.
In fact, there never was a time when the PCA was sound. For those
seeking evidence of long-standing problems, a review of PCA coverage in
old issues of Contra Mundum will serve this purpose. Major episodes of
PCA dysfunction have been the effort of the central bureaucracy to
whitewash the Christian Reformed Church (because both the CRC and
PCA were in NAPARC, from which the CRC was eventually suspended),
and the failure to deal with the Federal Vision heresy.
The PCA is far from alone in its current problems. The Evangelical Free
Church has been exhibiting high-handedness in its attempt to crush the
Biblically faithful pastors (see Erastian Church Compromise in the EFCA).
One might attribute the more evidently egregius nature of this,
compared to the PCA, to the prevalence of pietistic twits in the EFCA,
were it not that the same undiguised behavior was manifested in the
Lutheran Missouri Synod in the recent and highly publicized Ryan
Turipseed case.
Friday 12 April 2024
Can the Reformed world survive itself? There are many indications that it
has become its own worst enemy. Step by step it is falling more deeply
under the influence of kook theology.
1. There was, starting a century ago, the invasion of Presbyterianism by
the neo-calvinists with their aberrant three-covenant theology.
2. This was always associated, to varying degrees, with the theosophical
speculations of Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven, which got a grip on many
"intellectuals" in the Reformed world.
3. The idealogy of much of northern Presbyterianism (i.e. OPC and
sympathetic elements of the PCA) was Van Tillianism, though Cornelius
Van Til was never a competent philosopher, nor a competent theologian,
nor an exegete for that matter. In fact, he taught that it was illegitimate to
create a systematic theology by deduction from exegesis. All that was
permitted was to try to organize exegetical material as best as possible.
4. Westminster, California escaped this only by building on Meredith
Kline's inverted neo-calvinism, for which the three-covenent theology
was still the foundation. The result was something even further from
Reformed thought.
5. Some Reformed Baptists, trying to find something to say to the
modern world, have adopted the sphere sovereignty covenants from
neo-calvinism, on the assumption that they can pick up various ideas
without implicating themselves in a system of thought. These Reformed
Baptists, however, continue their habit of picking up things, now by
taking up the current craze for Nephilim, hollow earth, and similar ideas.
6. Also coming into the Reformed Baptist world is the critique of
ecclesiocentrism based on the recognition that the Biblical teaching on
the Kingdom is much wider than the institutional church and the clerical
sphere of operations. Well and good; but there are other realizations that
follow not far behind this. For example, there are no clergy in the Bible.
The pastor is a spiritual gift, not an office, and the elder is much more an
organic office than the institutional model embedded in traditional
Reformed denominations derived from the old world of Europe. Will
Reformed Theology be able to carry on without its institutional
ecclesiology?
7. An alternative to this is being offered in the form of a return to
Thomist, as though this sort of pre-scientific medievalism offered an
intellectual foundation for anything other than apostocy to Rome.
We can step back into history and look at the prelude to this. New
England was congregational because it was built in recognition of the
failure of the hierarchical church model in union with the state. In New
England, there was the option of doing what the English Puritans claimed
they wanted which was to purify the Church of England model, but with
the opportunity that America offered to start over, they did something
different.
The next notable divergence was the Great Awakening and the incentive
it offered for Jonathan Edwards to begin the creation of Edwardian
Calvinsim. This laid the foundations for the New England New Divinity
and that, in turn, laid the foundations for Charles Finney's humanistic
departure from Reformed precedents. In other words, much of
Evangelicalism as we know it today, particularly the most aberrant side of
it in the Charismatic kookery, begin this way. Edwards remains the hero
for many neo-Puritans, who refuse to recognize the extent to which he is
the founder the the popular theologies they so much oppose, or think
they do.
The lesson here is that even mild aberrations can get out of control
before people can conceive what the effects will be. Today's aberrations
are much more than mild.
Thursday 15 February 2024
The Divided Knowledge book is now published in French.
A continuing question about apologetics for many decades now has
been why it has been dominated by guru centered movements, most
notably Van Tillianism. More recently the disciples of Thomas Aquinas
have been vying for this spot. These movement are professor-led, but the
explanation cannot be that they are academic apologetics movements.
There are some very academic approaches that do not have this
characteristic. For example, the Reformed Epistemology people have
been highly academic, even more professional philosophers than
practitioners of apologetics, but do not have this authority worship. It is
not academics as such that produces the phenomenon.
We see it, rather, in seminaries where the professors are not training
philosophers but clergy. In these places there is some critical thought
inculcated in certain areas, particularly Biblical theology where there are
still many new and contending perspectives, and originality it still
admired and rewarded. But in apologetics a different tradition was
established early, where professors of dubious competence were
allowed to ride their hobby horses and indoctrinate students.
This is tied to another characteristic that this apologetics took on, which
was the confidence that there was a method which put an absolute
foundation under Christian belief, and if mastered this gave a certain
way to handle all intellectual opposition.
Of course, Van Til, his successors, and their followers are most associated
with this. Over on the other side of theology, the Evangelicals had
Norman Geisler and the evidentialists, but they never were able to build
the same combination of confidence and narrow-mindedness to rival
what the Van Til movement had. But now there are an increasing
number of Thomist professors, of very questionable philosophical ability,
entering the affray on behalf of that movement. Most significant is that
they are a much wider group, attracting many baptists. They can also
draw on a reserve of papist has-been philosophy. As well as their
strength this is also their weakness, as it becomes repartition of the dead
past, unable to face real critical thought. This aspect of Thomism, as the
pre-fab philosophy, attracts twits, as is readily seen in recent
publications and pronouncements.
Saturday 3 February 2024
The Divided Knowledge book is shipping, though it takes Amazon about
six weeks to get the hard cover edition delivered. I am hoping to get
across a few simple points in the book.
1)
The Thomists haven’t much of a clue when it comes to analyzing Van
Til. They assume an Enlightenment foundationalist model of
knowledge. This shows that they have a very shallow understanding
of their own Thomism as well. Nor do they understand how his
sources and assumptions, for example aspects of Idealism that Van
Til never questioned, structurally affected his system.
2)
The Thomists, and for that matter the Van Tillians, do not grasp the
difference between Reformed two-covenant theology, and neo-
Calvinist three-covenant theology.
3)
Neither side understands the role of Van Til in clarifying the
implications of three-covenant theology, and thereby making way
for the developments by Meredith Kline, whose theology, as well as
that of the Radical Two-Kingdom theology, remains neo-calvinist at
the most fundamental level.
4)
The Thomists do not understand the natural law tradition that they
tout so much. Actually it is natural law traditions.
In fact, this book and its predecessor are merely quick attempts to point
out some basic issues, but issues that are overlooked by the experts.
They do not try to be general overviews or master critiques of Van Til’s
thought. Whatever importance they have is in showing how allowing this
theology to dominate certain institutions has made them into pseudo-
Reformed entities.
More could have been said about the Natural Law. For example, there is
Jacques Ellul’s point (in The Theological Foundation of Law) that natural
law is the stage in the development of law, found historically in various
cultures, but that this has nothing to do with natural law philosophy.
Further, natural law philosophy has nothing to do with actual bodies of
law or jurisprudence. Besides this, advocates and critics do not take
proper account of the very different ideas of natural law, both within the
medieval background, and between such natural law theories and
modernistic attempts to give a non-theist foundation, and how those
differences affect the major programmatic distinction between giving an
account of law, and discovering what it is as a body of law, and working
out a judicial application. This exploration will have to await some other
occasion.
Thursday 14 December 2023
Soon to be available is another book following up on the philosophical influences on Cornelius Van Til. This includes a review of the essays on reason in the Davenant House publication promoting a revival of the Via Moderna immanentist tradition in opposition to presuppositionalism. Divided Knowledge is a critique of both. Both are at bottom very weird speculations imposed on Christianity. Monday 11 August 2023 Kash Patel gave a very good interview on the x22report. He is promoting a new book Government Gangsters. I just read a book that came out several years ago: The World Is Christ’s: a critique of two kingdoms theology. The book itself isn’t so great. It is interesting for two reasons, the philosophical commitments of the author and who is backing the book. It was written by Willem J. Ouweneel, a Dooyeweerdian. He has written many other books laying aspects of this type of thought. As a Dooyeweerdian his is committed to Dooyeweerd’s ground-motive analysis of all other points of view. That is, Dooyeweerd started from what he claimed was reflection on the suprarational (in the supratemporal) root of experience. All other points of view were based on a starting point in temporal experience. This, he claimed, made that temporal starting point a false absolute (also called autonomous thought) which generated what Dooyeweerd called an apostate ground-motive. He then interpreted intellectual history in terms of these ground-motives, of which he claimed there were three. Ouweneel aproaches topics though the whole book by claiming everyone else is mistaken because they are proceeding from one of these, the scholastic ground-motive. For what is wrong with this see my Theosophy, Van Til and Bahnsen. One of the blurbs used to promote the book is by John Frame, who is also quoted throughout the book. Frame says; “In any case, this book will have to be the starting point for any further discussion of the matter. I will not respect future articles and books on this subject unless they show a thorough understanding of Ouweneel’s argument.” So has Frame taken back his rejection of Dooyeweerdianism? It looks like it. The publisher is Joseph Boot’s Ezra Press. Boot is also quoted in the book. It Boot also a Dooyeweerdian? Does he base his apologetics work on the ground-motive nonsense? Boot is being promoted these days by Baptists such as Joel Webbon. Are Baptists going Dooyeweerdian? This isn’t even Christianity!
Quattrocento
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Blog
Updates and commentary. The site software does not support a proper blog so old posts that do not fit on the page are not retained. Commentary on recently encountered publications Reports on recent news and interviews of special interest Observations on current trends and events These are far from being ordinary times. There is massive concentration of ownership of news and entertainment media, used to promote a unified propaganda line (including designated opposition with partial truths). This also is the means for censorship of a vast range of opposition viewpoints. This is accompanied by election manipulation, medicine as genocide, and justice as lawfare against those who seek to defend freedom. In the midst of this is fake Christianity, which claims that to speak of these things would be outside the narrow spiritual mission of the churches. As far as Via Moderna is concerned, it is the function of Christianity to deal in reality.
Posted: Monday 3rd March 2023
New Website
Sunday 29 September 2024
Another follow-up interview at USAWatchdog.com with
Karen Kingston updates the status of lawsuits about the
Jab. See also: https://karenkingston.substack.com/
The second edition of Theosophy, Van Til, and Bahnsen, is
available in English. Some material has been deleted,
some added. It is about 60 pages longer than the first
edition. So far the apologetics industry simply pretends
that it does not exist.
The problem is that “Reformed” theology today is not
particularly Reformed. The ecclesiology is basically
Congregationalist/Baptist. The covenant theology is some
combination of Kuyper or Kline, and not the system of
Westminster or the scholastic era. Many “alternative”
movements, stying themselves Reformed, are cobbled
together from Kuyper and the Heiser Mythology.
Thursday 27 June 2024
In this summer’s Southern Baptist convention, when it
came to electing their president for the subsequent year,
the conservatives could only manage about 30% of the
vote. Now, post-convention, they are talking about how
they can make a comeback. In effect, they are discussing
how they can divert their efforts over the next decade
from the kingdom of God to trying to recover control of
denominational structure that has repudiated them. The
biggest reason they can give is that the Southern Baptists
have the biggest foreign missions program in the world
and that it is impossible to rebuild it outside of the
Southern Baptist organization. Just how do they know that
those missionaries and their teachings are any better than
the organization that sends them? Meanwhile, of course,
liberals are hell-bent on destroying the society that
supports the Southern Baptist organization and all those
missionaries.
Over at Lamb’s Reign, Joel McDurmon is proclaiming his
self-liberation from Christian Reconstruction. McDurmon
is the son-in-law of Gary North, and once headed up
American Vision, until his growing revisionism and
movement toward wokism threatened the survival of that
organization, at which point the board of directors
brought back Gary DeMar. He, in turn, plunged the
organization into controversy with full-praeterism. Not
that it is necessarily an improvement even on the woke
from. Contrast these two statements: James White
referenced
that young girl, Jocelyn, who was raped and
murdered by people that the Biden regime have
invited – they’ve opened the border and said “come
and invade us”. We are living in the days of the largest
public act of treason that I can think of in any
historical situation. I cannot think of anyone who
more openly, boldly and on a grand scale – I am
talking about facilitating the invasion of millions of
people – you just wait for the day …. when there is a
string of terrorist attacks in the United States that
make 9/11 look like child’s play. And I’m going to tell
you right now, they got here through the border
opened up by the Biden regime to fundamentally
change the nature of the United States of America.…
It’s going to happen, its inevitable, but right now they
are just murdering and raping and pillaging, and that
is exactly what the regime wants. — James White,
Diving Line, June 26, about 4 and a half minutes in.
Compare this with Gary DeMar,
Churches near the border should set up large tents
and welcome those who are crossing. Bring
translators, Bibles, food, clothing, baby supplies, etc.
Present the Gospel. Get help from Samaritan
Ministries. Instead of sending missionaries to their
countries, God is bringing them to us. — 21
September 2021
How do we explain this? Gary DeMar belongs to the Tyler
branch of Reconstruction, and Gary North had always
infused it with his libertarian ideology. He called for open
borders and citizenship for anyone who would affirm the
Trinity. Tyler Reconstruction was not about discipling the
nations but abolishing them in favor of a globalist vision.
Thus, in some key aspects, one did not have to change
views to go from Tyler Reconstruction to woke. We did
point out some of this in the first issue of Contra
Mundum in 1991, in the review of Political Polythism but I
never noticed that any Reconstructionists cared about it at
the time.
Monday 10 June 2024
In a recent video, “Social Justice Cancel Culture: Alive and
Well in the PCA”, the point was made that the woke, or
“social justice cancel culture” has become the established
position in the Presbyterian Church in America. That is,
the issue is no longer the danger of letting it in, but of how
to survive in the PCA if one opposes it. This raises the
question of how this came about. Attempts to answer this
question generally fail because the explanation does not
go back far enough.
The PCA was formed when the Southern Presbyterian
Church decided to join the northern liberal Presbyterians
to form today’s Presbyterian Church USA. Obviously, this
meant that liberals had gained control of the Southern
Presbyterian Church in order to bring about this decision.
The churches exiting the Southern denomination to form
the PCA were thus a coalition of losers. Even then, some
politicing had to be done to get enough congregations to
go over to the new denomination (PCA). On the one hand,
the new denomination was represented as holding to the
traditional theology of the Westminster Confession while
on the other Arminian and dispensational ministers and
congregations were recruited, and promised that room
would be made for them within the doctrinal position of
the new denomination. That the main component of the
PCA was Southern Presbyterian churches meant that part
of what made up the PCA and constituted its sense of
identity were elements distinctive to the Southern
Presbyterian tradition rather that of Prebyterianism as
such. These were a conversionist theology that tended to
undermine covenantal understandings of family and
church and the spirituality of the church idea which
restricted the area where the church was supposed to
speak authoritatively, and in effect let the culture
determine what was “spiritual” and thus under the
purview of the church. (On the matter of the covenant, the
best explanation of the theological differences is the book
by Lewis Bevens Schenck, The Presbyterian Doctrine of
Children in the Covenant.) There were some non-
southern congregations and groups that also came into
the new PCA, and this meant another problem in the
identity of this denomination. Some congregations have
now exited the PCA to form the Vanguard Presbyterian
Church which is self-conscious and forthright about its
commitment to the traditional southern identity.
The fundamental doctrinal disunity of the PCA since its
formation meant that the dynamic that had brought down
the northern Presbyterians decades before would also
play itself out in the PCA. That is, there is a non-
confessional evangelical contingent that needs to protect
itself from confessional discipline and which will ally itself
with liberals to achieve this. In addition to this, there is the
attraction of institutionalism, the desire to be a large
influential and respected denominations, with associated
schools, boards, commissions as well as having prominent
“big steeple” churches in important urban locations. This
is to a degree also the legacy of the Southern Presbyterian
background, as that denomination was a prestige
denomination in the south and thus influenced the self-
concept of the larger founding congregations in the PCA.
In fact, there never was a time when the PCA was sound.
For those seeking evidence of long-standing problems, a
review of PCA coverage in old issues of Contra Mundum
will serve this purpose. Major episodes of PCA
dysfunction have been the effort of the central
bureaucracy to whitewash the Christian Reformed Church
(because both the CRC and PCA were in NAPARC, from
which the CRC was eventually suspended), and the failure
to deal with the Federal Vision heresy.
The PCA is far from alone in its current problems. The
Evangelical Free Church has been exhibiting high-
handedness in its attempt to crush the Biblically faithful
pastors (see Erastian Church Compromise in the EFCA).
One might attribute the more evidently egregius nature of
this, compared to the PCA, to the prevalence of pietistic
twits in the EFCA, were it not that the same undiguised
behavior was manifested in the Lutheran Missouri Synod
in the recent and highly publicized Ryan Turipseed case.
Friday 12 April 2024
Can the Reformed world survive itself? There are many
indications that it has become its own worst enemy. Step
by step it is falling more deeply under the influence of
kook theology.
1. There was, starting a century ago, the invasion of
Presbyterianism by the neo-calvinists with their aberrant
three-covenant theology.
2. This was always associated, to varying degrees, with the
theosophical speculations of Dooyeweerd and
Vollenhoven, which got a grip on many "intellectuals" in
the Reformed world.
3. The idealogy of much of northern Presbyterianism (i.e.
OPC and sympathetic elements of the PCA) was Van
Tillianism, though Cornelius Van Til was never a
competent philosopher, nor a competent theologian, nor
an exegete for that matter. In fact, he taught that it was
illegitimate to create a systematic theology by deduction
from exegesis. All that was permitted was to try to
organize exegetical material as best as possible.
4. Westminster, California escaped this only by building
on Meredith Kline's inverted neo-calvinism, for which the
three-covenent theology was still the foundation. The
result was something even further from Reformed
thought.
5. Some Reformed Baptists, trying to find something to say
to the modern world, have adopted the sphere
sovereignty covenants from neo-calvinism, on the
assumption that they can pick up various ideas without
implicating themselves in a system of thought. These
Reformed Baptists, however, continue their habit of
picking up things, now by taking up the current craze for
Nephilim, hollow earth, and similar ideas.
6. Also coming into the Reformed Baptist world is the
critique of ecclesiocentrism based on the recognition that
the Biblical teaching on the Kingdom is much wider than
the institutional church and the clerical sphere of
operations. Well and good; but there are other realizations
that follow not far behind this. For example, there are no
clergy in the Bible. The pastor is a spiritual gift, not an
office, and the elder is much more an organic office than
the institutional model embedded in traditional Reformed
denominations derived from the old world of Europe. Will
Reformed Theology be able to carry on without its
institutional ecclesiology?
7. An alternative to this is being offered in the form of a
return to Thomist, as though this sort of pre-scientific
medievalism offered an intellectual foundation for
anything other than apostocy to Rome.
We can step back into history and look at the prelude to
this. New England was congregational because it was built
in recognition of the failure of the hierarchical church
model in union with the state. In New England, there was
the option of doing what the English Puritans claimed they
wanted which was to purify the Church of England model,
but with the opportunity that America offered to start
over, they did something different.
The next notable divergence was the Great Awakening and
the incentive it offered for Jonathan Edwards to begin the
creation of Edwardian Calvinsim. This laid the foundations
for the New England New Divinity and that, in turn, laid
the foundations for Charles Finney's humanistic departure
from Reformed precedents. In other words, much of
Evangelicalism as we know it today, particularly the most
aberrant side of it in the Charismatic kookery, begin this
way. Edwards remains the hero for many neo-Puritans,
who refuse to recognize the extent to which he is the
founder the the popular theologies they so much oppose,
or think they do.
The lesson here is that even mild aberrations can get out
of control before people can conceive what the effects
will be. Today's aberrations are much more than mild.
Thursday 15 February 2024
The Divided Knowledge book is now published in French.
A continuing question about apologetics for many
decades now has been why it has been dominated by guru
centered movements, most notably Van Tillianism. More
recently the disciples of Thomas Aquinas have been vying
for this spot. These movement are professor-led, but the
explanation cannot be that they are academic apologetics
movements. There are some very academic approaches
that do not have this characteristic. For example, the
Reformed Epistemology people have been highly
academic, even more professional philosophers than
practitioners of apologetics, but do not have this authority
worship. It is not academics as such that produces the
phenomenon.
We see it, rather, in seminaries where the professors are
not training philosophers but clergy. In these places there
is some critical thought inculcated in certain areas,
particularly Biblical theology where there are still many
new and contending perspectives, and originality it still
admired and rewarded. But in apologetics a different
tradition was established early, where professors of
dubious competence were allowed to ride their hobby
horses and indoctrinate students.
This is tied to another characteristic that this apologetics
took on, which was the confidence that there was a
method which put an absolute foundation under Christian
belief, and if mastered this gave a certain way to handle all
intellectual opposition.
Of course, Van Til, his successors, and their followers are
most associated with this. Over on the other side of
theology, the Evangelicals had Norman Geisler and the
evidentialists, but they never were able to build the same
combination of confidence and narrow-mindedness to
rival what the Van Til movement had. But now there are an
increasing number of Thomist professors, of very
questionable philosophical ability, entering the affray on
behalf of that movement. Most significant is that they are a
much wider group, attracting many baptists. They can also
draw on a reserve of papist has-been philosophy. As well
as their strength this is also their weakness, as it becomes
repartition of the dead past, unable to face real critical
thought. This aspect of Thomism, as the pre-fab
philosophy, attracts twits, as is readily seen in recent
publications and pronouncements.
Saturday 3 February 2024
The Divided Knowledge book is shipping, though it takes
Amazon about six weeks to get the hard cover edition
delivered. I am hoping to get across a few simple points in
the book.
1)
The Thomists haven’t much of a clue when it comes
to analyzing Van Til. They assume an Enlightenment
foundationalist model of knowledge. This shows that
they have a very shallow understanding of their own
Thomism as well. Nor do they understand how his
sources and assumptions, for example aspects of
Idealism that Van Til never questioned, structurally
affected his system.
2)
The Thomists, and for that matter the Van Tillians, do
not grasp the difference between Reformed two-
covenant theology, and neo-Calvinist three-covenant
theology.
3)
Neither side understands the role of Van Til in
clarifying the implications of three-covenant
theology, and thereby making way for the
developments by Meredith Kline, whose theology, as
well as that of the Radical Two-Kingdom theology,
remains neo-calvinist at the most fundamental level.
4)
The Thomists do not understand the natural law
tradition that they tout so much. Actually it is natural
law traditions.
In fact, this book and its predecessor are merely quick
attempts to point out some basic issues, but issues that
are overlooked by the experts. They do not try to be
general overviews or master critiques of Van Til’s thought.
Whatever importance they have is in showing how
allowing this theology to dominate certain institutions has
made them into pseudo-Reformed entities.
More could have been said about the Natural Law. For
example, there is Jacques Ellul’s point (in The Theological
Foundation of Law) that natural law is the stage in the
development of law, found historically in various cultures,
but that this has nothing to do with natural law
philosophy. Further, natural law philosophy has nothing to
do with actual bodies of law or jurisprudence. Besides this,
advocates and critics do not take proper account of the
very different ideas of natural law, both within the
medieval background, and between such natural law
theories and modernistic attempts to give a non-theist
foundation, and how those differences affect the major
programmatic distinction between giving an account of
law, and discovering what it is as a body of law, and
working out a judicial application. This exploration will
have to await some other occasion.
Thursday 14 December 2023
Soon to be available is another book following up on the philosophical influences on Cornelius Van Til. This includes a review of the essays on reason in the Davenant House publication promoting a revival of the Via Moderna immanentist tradition in opposition to presuppositionalism. Divided Knowledge is a critique of both. Both are at bottom very weird speculations imposed on Christianity. Monday 11 August 2023 Kash Patel gave a very good interview on the x22report. He is promoting a new book Government Gangsters. I just read a book that came out several years ago: The World Is Christ’s: a critique of two kingdoms theology. The book itself isn’t so great. It is interesting for two reasons, the philosophical commitments of the author and who is backing the book. It was written by Willem J. Ouweneel, a Dooyeweerdian. He has written many other books laying aspects of this type of thought. As a Dooyeweerdian his is committed to Dooyeweerd’s ground-motive analysis of all other points of view. That is, Dooyeweerd started from what he claimed was reflection on the suprarational (in the supratemporal) root of experience. All other points of view were based on a starting point in temporal experience. This, he claimed, made that temporal starting point a false absolute (also called autonomous thought) which generated what Dooyeweerd called an apostate ground-motive. He then interpreted intellectual history in terms of these ground- motives, of which he claimed there were three. Ouweneel aproaches topics though the whole book by claiming everyone else is mistaken because they are proceeding from one of these, the scholastic ground-motive. For what is wrong with this see my Theosophy, Van Til and Bahnsen. One of the blurbs used to promote the book is by John Frame, who is also quoted throughout the book. Frame says; “In any case, this book will have to be the starting point for any further discussion of the matter. I will not respect future articles and books on this subject unless they show a thorough understanding of Ouweneel’s argument.” So has Frame taken back his rejection of Dooyeweerdianism? It looks like it. The publisher is Joseph Boot’s Ezra Press. Boot is also quoted in the book. It Boot also a Dooyeweerdian? Does he base his apologetics work on the ground-motive nonsense? Boot is being promoted these days by Baptists such as Joel Webbon. Are Baptists going Dooyeweerdian? This isn’t even Christianity!
Posted: Wednesday 12th March 2014
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Posted: Monday 20th January 2014
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