Updates & obiter dicta

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Saturday 19 August 2023

There is an interview with Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche on Fearless Nation. This week a new Veteran’s Administration clinic opened just down the street, and I went to the opening event. A lot of federal bureaucrats made speeches. One told us that “it takes a village” to build a Veteran’s Administration clinic. The mayor gave a speech. The RINO congressman gave a speech. An Indian chief was brought out to say a prayer in the Lakota language blessing the place. There were no Christian prayers, not even from the mayor, whose previous job had been to be a Wesleyan Methodist minister. The latest Inside Russia is titled “Stalin is Back and Sanctified by Russian Church” Some town put up an new statue of Stalin and the Eastern Orthodox priest came to say a prayer to consecrate it. He said that Stalin had provided the Eastern Orthodox with many new martyrs to pray to. Someone should tell Andrew Torba over at Gab that the next time he posts one of his pictures of an Eastern Orthodox church he should add an icon of St. Stalin.

Sunday 6 August 2023

Dr. Pierre Kory was interviewed on USAWatchdog about vaccine injuries and treatments. A few days ago Ed Dowd was interviewed about vaccine injury evidence and statistics. I am not hearing anything from all those people who claim that the church should speak out on issues. Do they not think that the attempt by civil government to carry out genocide against their people is such as issue? Have they spoken about it and somehow I have missed it? As far as I can tell, the hot topic in that crowd is getting to be speculation about the Nephilim.

Saturday 5 August 2023

A church down the street set up a stand today to wash and bless motorcycles arriving for the Sturgis motorcycle rally. God, though, did not cooperate, and it rained all day.

Friday 28 July 2023

Legislative changes at the state level to promote abortion, transsexual surgery on minors, pedophilia, and censorship are discussed by Sarah Westall and Dave Janda. Recently a number of reaction videos have come to my attention, which were made by various personalities who wanted to respond to Abraham Piper, son of the famous Baptist performer. These videos seem to be all about a year old. This Abraham Piper seems to be fairly ignorant and stupid on the whole, and he is only taken seriously because of who is father is. The age of the videos indicates that there was a brief reaction, and then the subject was dropped. The responders want to say what AP is wrong about, but they all seem to miss the important point. Abraham Piper was brought up in a false religion, and whatever his intellectual deficiencies, Piper was perceptive enough to spot the essential point: that he was brought up in a false religion. The religion of John Piper, the father, is a religion of emotionalism. He is a baptist pietist, with a charismatic theology overlaid on top of it. In Piper’s religion one gins up some emotions, and then claims that it was God that you were experiencing. Abraham Piper came to realize that this was fake. But this shows how it is possible to construct a fake religion within the confines of creedal orthodoxy (though John Piper was not that either, having fudged on the doctrine of justification). We then must ask how common it has been and is now within Evangelicalism to move the center of religion onto phony experience, and make this the essence, while maintaining the doctrinal appearance of orthodoxy? This mentality leads to an inversion of values and priorities, as is made clear on this episode of Wretched Radio.

Thursday 29 June 2023

A very important interview with Dr. Eads is on Greg Hunter’s channel for June 24. It covers the high rate of disease including rapidly developing cancers resulting from the COVID-19 injections. Much more dubious, to my mind, is the June 27 interview with Martin Armstrong. This Armstrong has a computer (probably actually a database) that he named Socrates, which is the source of Armstrong’s prognostications. As soon as Hunter hears the word “computer” he assumes infallibility. Hunter is also in awe of Clif High’s database. Over at Sarah Westall’s channel there is an interview with a Seth Holehouse. Where Hunter becomes extremely credulous in the presence of charismatic “prophets”, Westall’s gullibility is new-agers. Nevertheless this Holehouse makes some valuable points. His topic is who is really behind all the trouble we are seeing, namely the role of the globalist/deep state crowd vs the commies. Holehouse notes that some of the Alternative media has taken to regarding Putin, Xi, Kim Jong Un as the future saviors who will destroy the globalists (for example the guy who runs x22report). But this is pure self-deception. Also, I should note these same parties think the Russians are the good-guys in the Ukraine war. They point to the biolab facilities that the US built there. These are reopened Russian bio-warfare facilities. I think a far more reliable view of Russia is found here.

Saturday 20 May 2023

The paperback editions of Theosophy, Van Til and Bahnsen, can now be ordered at Amazon. The hardback should be available in a few days. It is a simple little book pointing out how Neo-Calvinism isn’t Reformed, nor does it make sense. This extends to the Westminster Seminary theologies based on it.

Wednesday 17 May 2023

For several years in the 1950s Frederick Nymeyer wrote in his journal Progressive Calvinism about what was wrong with Neo-Calvinism. At the time it was a Dutch and American Christian Reformed phenomenon. For twenty years we have made this material available, not that it appears to have influenced anyone. The situation today is far different, in that Neo-Calvinism has split into different streams, where people have hacked off the parts that did not suit their agendas and have combined Neo-Calvinist ideas with a very heterogeneous selection of other ideas. What was Neo-Calvinism originally? It was the discarding of the old systematic theology and social system, a vision of Christendom, to replace it with something new that was thought to answer the challenge of the modern age. This featured a modification of covenant theology to add a third track to God’s program, the common grace track. So a common grace covenant had to be found, which for Abraham Kuyper was the covenant with Noah. Thus Neo-Calvinism became tricovenantal, in distinction from the Reformed bicovenantal position. This common grace administration freed the Reformed concept of political and economic engagement from its ties to God’s redemptive program, and pushed aside the institutional church so that the church no longer had to be embedded in the system of institutions which made up the official social order. Instead it became an ‘interest’, something that could lobby for its share of government largesse and delegation power beside all the other interests. In America various groups latched on to aspects to Neo-Calvinism as they found it useful for their respective projects. Cornelius Van Til adopted the Neo- Calvinist philosophy (which had developed from theosophy, while pretending Calvinism), and he also became a promoter of the tricovenantalism. In the Dutch denominations, tricovenantalism flourished as a pretext to take in political and economic agendas that were popular with opinion makers (that is, they tended left) and make them Reformed. Among the Presbyterians, tricovenantalism became the pretext for saying that politics, economics and other cultural matters were distinct from the covenant of grace, and therefor not the concern of the church. An idea of cultural transformation, that appealed to Kuyper, but discarded his theological framework, went forward under a monocovenantal scheme. The glue holding this together was a commitment to certain figures and their “thought”. Chief among these was Cornelius Van Til, promoter of Neo-Calvinist epistemology, of tricovenantalism, of common grace as a central principle, but also of Norman Shepherd’s idea of justification, and whose followers soon turned toward monocovenantalism. Another figure combining these elements was R. J. Rushdoony, principally by confusing things. Without these personalities, the movements they influenced will fall apart as force of their legacy fades, because the ideas have no essential unity. Just consider Christian Reformed leftism and culture echoing, theonomic and presuppositional cultural transformation, and Radical Two-Kingdom theology. All are streams out of Neo-Calvinism. It is actually the Christian Reformed who are the most true to the whole concept. What is most notable is that one way or the other they throw away the Reformed Federal theology for tricovenantal or bicovenantal alternatives into which they can better accommodate their agendas. Each of these has developed its own way of pretending that it is actually the Reformed tradition. At this point along comes Stephen Wolfe with his The Case for Christian Nationalism to remind everyone what the Reformed social vision was. So much squawking from those who are exposed! How long can they keep this up instead of admitting that what calls itself Presbyterian or Reformed today is something different from the foundations up, and really does not belong in common denominations, seminaries or other institutions?

Wednesday 10 May 2023

A couple of books are forthcoming, and should be available in two or three weeks. It was always evident that Cornelius Van Til said a lot of crazy things. But other than that there are people who like the sort of thing and think it is spiritual and there are people who do not, there was not much more to say. But the appearance of J. Glenn Friesen’s, Neo-Calvinism and Christian Theosophy a few years ago, and now the new edition, changed that. Now we can see the reason for Van Til’s positions, how they trace back to Dooyeweerd, and in turn how the model of the knower in these systems comes from Dutch theosophy. If that sounds like a bad thing it is because it is a bad thing. It is, though, part of a bigger problem with neo-Calvinism, and that is discussed in the book as well. In addition to the examination of neo-Calvinism, there is an analysis of presuppositionalism as a form of foundationalism.

Monday 13 March 2023

There is now a website, https://hyperpreterism.com/, dedicated to opposing hyperpreterist doctrine, and it includes a seven point statement that readers are invited to sign. The statement has the appearance of being hastily drawn up. Here are a few thoughts on the statement. Also there is something strange about how this suddenly blew up into a big thing. Hyperpreterism is the view of a few small cults. The last cult alarm was over the Federal Vision, and that was alarming because it arose in the “respectable” denominations, that is the ones with the seminaries full of heavy-hitter theologians, which were supposed to be proof against this sort of thing. Also it accompanied a rise in advocacy of the New Perspectives on Paul, which had an overlapping group of supporters. Now the big cult threat, bigger than the Federal Vision, is the Radical Two-Kingdom Theology, and its glad handing of the genocidal deep state, but instead people are stirred up over preterism.

Saturday 11 March 2023

The Preterism stir. A controversy has arisen over Gary DeMar’s stand, or non-stand (as he has not answered certain questions) on preterism, especially its implications for the Last Judgment. There is an open letter on Kenneth Gentry’s website addressing the issue. When an issue of this magnitude arises in which some prominent teacher’s commitment to basic creedal doctrines is questioned, the Christian public had legitimate concerns: who is involved, on either side? Who is going along? Are they going along because they too have fallen from orthodoxy, and do not want to reveal this to their followers? Are they going along simply to avoid taking a stand and making enemies? Contra Mundum has long featured Spanish translations of Gary DeMar articles, sent in by some contributors. They are by far the most popular items on the site. (The reason, strangely, is that the Google search engine likes one of them and promotes it.) So readers could reasonably wonder about Contra Mundum, particularly as we have in the past axed heretics such as Jordan and Leithart. The letter of concern is signed by Andrew Sandlin, Ken Gentry, Doug Wilson, Jeffery Ventrella, Phillip Kayser, John Frame, Ardel Caneday, Jeff Durbin, James White, Brian Mattson, Keith Sherlin, Jason Bradfield, Sam Frost, and Uriesou Brito. Half of them have or have had translations of their items on this site. Ardel Caneday wrote an article for the print version of Contra Mundum, Fall 1992. It transpires that two recent actions, not based on this topic, have partly addressed the Contra Mundum stand on these questions. First, as mentioned in the Blog post just prior to this one, the more prominent “take a stand” and advocacy material has been moved to an new site, Via Moderna, though still linked here for now. This clarifies that Contra Mundum serves to introduce (critically) certain positions (or call them perspectives or worldviews) that claim to represent the Christian position on culture. These are all Reformed or Reformed-influenced, as we see little value in trying to dig out something from the Romanist, Lutheran or Arminian positions. DeMar is a representative of a significant international movement, Christian Reconstruction, which readers need to be able to read in order to confidently understand it, and so the articles remain in place for now. The other action is a publication of a somewhat lengthy Overview of Millennial Systems, with an appended review of Riddlebarger’s Man of Sin. There is a distinction between preterist interpretations of some text or texts, and presterism as an eschatological systems. Any of the main systems could take some text here or there as a reference to events around 70 AD. It is hard not to. The review of Riddlebarger’s book may suggest disapproval of such eclectic interpretation, but the problem with Riddlebarger is that he interprets the same texts in multiple ways: one way to satisfy what the text says in context, and another way to fit into his amillennial system, and maybe a third way to cover all bases. The problem with millennial systems is that they tend to sweep all texts into a single interpretive bin, unless like Riddlebarger they simply abandon consistency. But let us take a few steps back and look at the whole issue of movements gone heretical and the response. David Chilton was the first big name in Tyler Reconstruction to go full preterist. Gary North denounced Chilton as a heretic, but continued to promote his (earlier) books. Yet Gary North was a promoter of Norman Shepherd’s defection from orthodoxy on the central doctrine of justification. Ray Sutton, the inventor of the key Tyler doctrine of the five point covenant went full high church sacramental (see this interview), and has now even banned the teaching of Calvinism at his seminary. James Jordan co-invented the Federal Vision theology, with multiple heresies including the New Perspectives on Paul, and Peter Leithart also went Federal Vision, and has taken over Jordan’s Biblical Horizons. In fact, among the major figures of Tyler Reconstrution, to remain orthodox has been the exception. Then, too, Christian Reconstruction, like the Westminster Seminaries before it, have always incorporated the theosophy structured philosophy of Cornelius Van Til and theology of Meredith Kline (see the review of McAtee’s book pp. 6-8). So why is a stand being taken now on this bridge, and by these people? It was under Doug Wilson’s watch that Shepherdism and the Federal Vision went through his CREC denomination, and Leithart was allowed to run wild. Uriesou Brito is associated with Leithart’s Theopolis, and Caneday is co-author of the quasi-Arminian book The Race Set Before Us: A Biblical Theology of Perseverance Assurance. Then there is the argument by Ken Gentry that full preterism cannot affirm Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed. Neither can premillennialism (see Shedd’s Dogmatic Theology, p. 863).

Thursday 9 March 2023

The Via Moderna material has been moved off of Contra Mundum to a new website. This allows a partial separation from the function of Contra Mundum, especially in its non-English pages, to present a variety of viewpoints with with the readers might not otherwise become easily acquainted, with the more personal expression and advocacy now at www.via-moderna.com. It also brings back some older material of still possible interest from some defunct websites.

Thursday 19 January 2023

Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism marks a big change in Christian political thought. It is not a change in the sense of issuing in something new, but rather a turning away from more than a century of speculative inventions to return to traditional Reformed thought. This brings both theoretical and practical advantages and problems. The theoretical problem is that traditional Reformed thought is the Via Antiqua, that is it is Thomist and Aristotelian. Because of this Wolfe elaborates his political theory in terms of the nature-grace dualism. The state, in the political area which is that of nature, takes man as far toward God as natural action can go, but then the church comes along and, in the area of its action which is that of grace, completes this. Thus nature and grace cooperate in a synergistic relationship. The theoretical advantage is that Wolfe takes us away from neocalvinism and all its contrivances. Frederick Nymeyer commented that Abraham Kuyper’s intellectual tendency was to make a fundamental error and the balance it with a compensating error the opposite direction. Three bad ideas by Kuyper were 1) Common grace, 2) Antithesis and 3) Sphere sovereignty. Instead of these Nymeyer proposed 1) Natural laws and the providence of God, 2) Obedience to the law of God, and 3) Freedom and responsibility of individual in group action. (See Progressive Calvinism, October 1956, pp. 299-305.) To see what is wrong with Kuyperian neocalvinist thinking we can take a lesson from the pagans, from Plato’s Parmenides diologue, where Socrates suggests his idea of the ideal forms as the source of universals in the world, that is of similarity of things. While Socrates was speaking, Pythodorus thought that Parmenides and Zeno were not altogether pleased at the successive steps of the argument; but still they gave the closest attention and often looked at one another, and smiled as if in admiration of him. When he had finished, Parmenides expressed their feelings in the following words: – — Socrates, he said, I admire the bent of your mind towards philosophy; tell me now, was this your own distinction between ideas in themselves and the things which partake of them? and do you think that there is an idea of likeness apart from the likeness which we possess, and of the one and many, and of the other things which Zeno mentioned? — I think that there are such ideas, said Socrates. Parmenides proceeded: And would you also make absolute ideas of the just and the beautiful and the good, and of all that class? — Yes, he said, I should. — And would you make an idea of man apart from us and from all other human creatures, or of fire and water? — I am often undecided, Parmenides, as to whether I ought to include them or not. — And would you feel equally undecided, Socrates, about things of which the mention may provoke a smile? – I mean such things as hair, mud, dirt, or anything else which is vile and paltry; would you suppose that each of these has an idea distinct from the actual objects with which we come into contact, or not? — Certainly not, said Socrates; visible things like these are such as they appear to us, and I am afraid that there would be an absurdity in assuming any idea of them, although I sometimes get disturbed, and begin to think that there is nothing without an idea; but then again, when I have taken up this position, I run away, because I am afraid that I may fall into a bottomless pit of nonsense, and perish; and so I return to the ideas of which I was just now speaking, and occupy myself with them. When Socrates introduced the ideal forms as the explanation of all similarity, he drew back from the implications, that there would have to be forms of the evil and ugly things, with equal status in the realm of forms, which has come to be called Plato’s heaven. In the same way, Kuyper’s common grace and sphere sovereignty convey power, authority, and independence to all the areas of activity in the world including all the associations. But the implication is that criminal gangs operate on common grace and sphere sovereignty like everything else, each with its unique and direct authority from God. This is the problem of introducing abstract, speculative explanations. Either they explain everything or they explain nothing. Wolfe avoids the modern errors by falling back on the Thomistic pagan-Christian synthesis. The practical disadvantage for Wolfe’s political philosophy is that all this is new and strange to modern readers, not because it really is new and strange but because they are uneducated. Even those who went to Christian colleges were taught modern and post-modern political theory, not the Christian ideas. All this old Thomist or Althusian stuff is not easy to assimilate either. It would be a long uphill battle to teach it to people. The advantage is in its distinction from the bad ideas, whether modern, neocalvinist or post modern. Wolfe’s Christian Nationalism takes one far away from all the ideas that people are beginning understand to be a trap they must escape. There are implications of Wolfe’s doctrine against other ideologies promoted as the Christian view. Christian Reconstruction started as a self-conscious Kuyperianism to which specific content from the Bible was added. But then it developed its own conceptions. R. J. Rushdoony stayed closer to reality, but the Tyler branch under Gary North became an increasingly radical ideology driven movement which tried to develop a distinctive covenant theology united with libertarian economic and political theories, which culminated in an anti-nationalism. Wolfe’s claim that his Christian Nationalism is, in fact, the working out of the Christian, that is biblical, view and is historically the Christian view, implies that Tyler Reconstruction is in fact anti-Christian. On the other side, while Wolfe and Radical Two Kingdom theology (R2KT) both appeal to natural law, Wolfe’s Thomistic scheme integrates the realm of the natural and that of the supernatural, while the R2KT keeps them apart, trying to make the church safe for the fashionable political ideologies.

Sunday 8 January 2023

Greg Hunter has an interview with John Titus, on the perilous state of the banking and credit system. As said before, Hunter often runs solid interviews, but at other times features prophesy kooks. Hunter seems to be attached to some sort of dispensational outlook. A few small experiments on social media to determine how extensive the response to the Christian nationalism idea is have suggested that there is not much support there. Andrew Torba, the grand poobah of Gab, put a lot of effort into promoting Christian nationalism. But it seems to have attracted nitwit advocates of pagan nationalism as much as anything, as well as the usual dispensational and anabaptist haters of any sort of responsibility. Torba used to like to quote David Chilton and Doug Wilson, but these days seems more into Eastern Orthodoxy. Recent reading in books trying to lay out a view of civil government along Reformed lines has led to a few observations. 1) There is an unresolved conflict of paradigms, these are: a) Covenantal structures (three) that are the only divinely authorized forms of authority that man can wield in the world, that is the Church, the State, and the family. b) Abraham Kuypers sovereign spheres, which are a speculative philosophical projection that he tries to weld onto the authorized divine authorities of (a). Any organization, however, generates its own sphere, and these can’t really be harmonized with the idea of three covenantal authorities. c) the Augustianian model of two Cities, the City of God vs the City of Man, with goes along with the idea of the Kingdom of God, one authority covenant, not three. Traditional Christian ideas were much different. There were more authorities than the three, for example there were the employer, the household etc. As late as the Putney debates in 1647, there was an unwillingness to recognize any sort of employee or servant as a fully free person eligible to participate in voting or holding civil office. Medieval society, of course completely mixed the civil, family and economic areas in feudalism, and in the Church the economic was also so combined that it became essential for the monarchs to try to control church appointments. Also, the ideas of the State and the institutional Church as we know them today evolved during the middle ages. Writers speak of what Paul said about the State, whereas in fact Paul had no such concept, and spoke of rulers. But these Reformed theories are built by projecting medieval and modern ideas backward. There is also a confusion between concepts (a) and (b) and the Augustianian model (c). A writer having made a production of three divinely authorized authorities and their absolute sphere sovereignty boundaries, will talk about the church being called out as a society and as its being called to create its own courts to handle civil disputes in competition with the state, with sphere sovereignty suddenly forgotten. Another problem is that the propensity to associate and form a government seems inherent in human nature, but sometimes these theories of government posit that government was imposed by God on humanity as an external curb on human nature at some point in the course of history, generally though to be after Noah’s flood, over an original individualist situation. Of course a Biblical exegetical basis is claimed for the theories, but how much of this exegesis is based on interpreting the texts in terms of references to the assumed categories?

Sunday 1 January 2023

John Campbell has come out with another interesting video on the COVID shots, Reanalysis of mRNA trial data. In this talk he points out how the “adverse effects” of the shots are well beyond those that caused vaccines to be withdrawn in the past. But more significantly he alludes to what he is not permitted to say, to data that is being withheld contrary to the public good, to the fact that the past assumption that one could trust peer reviewed journals no longer holds, and that researchers now have to publish in strange foreign journals to get their ideas out. So Campbell is going to the limit of what is allowed on Youtube. But how does he know where that boundary is? Others who have been censored by Youtube have been completely mystified by why one video is taken down and another passed. Now a video has popped up on the Campbell phenomenon, Dr. John Campbell’s Awakening: The End of evidence based Medicine. But that is also on Youtube! Sarah Westall has a talk on big tech censorship and control, and who the companies are.