Updates & obiter dicta

Blog

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.

Monday 26 December 2022

There is deep involvement of the British government and its officials with Moderna as Moderna undergoes a massive world-wide expansion. John Campbell has a report on this. He gets into Moderna and the investments of Sunak about two thirds of the way through the presentation. (The first part about the spread of infection and the death rate - extremely low - in China.) Huge investments are being made for plants that will only go into production two years from now. So clearly Moderna and connected globalists believe that they are completely safe operating they way they are. Of course, if Campbell told the whole truth about this he would not be on Youtube. He has always been very careful to guard what he says to give an appearance of science-based objectivity while staying just inside the official information parameters that the deep state permits. This is a good place to relate an anecdote that I think is extremely revealing about the mentality of the Christian public. Someone I met in an informal coffee group had invested in Moderna, and was very happy about how his investment was turning out. He had had all the COVID shots, and he made sure he got the shots made by his company, Moderna. He mentioned the he had avoided the locations where he heard people had been dying after getting the shots. He is a member of the Assemblies of God, and whenever the bad state of things today comes up he says he wishes Jesus would come back soon and fix it. So …1) He knows the shots kill and got them anyway. 2) He is happy to make money off of it. 3) He thinks that fixing things is Jesus’s job, and he has no responsibility.

Sunday 25 December 2022

Karen Kingston was interviewed again by Greg Hunter: Karen Kingston is a biotech analyst and former Pfizer employee who has researched and written about many aspects of Covid 19 and the so-called vaccines. It’s now become obvious, with dramatically rising death and injuries, the CV19 injections were bioweapons passed off as lifesaving vaccines. Kingston is one of those people who say that there was never a virus. What do they think is going on in China this week? But I am going to continue to take antiviral things like Vitamin D, Zinc etc. I have been on an anti-viral regimen and I have not caught COVID or anything else. There is an interesting talk by “Amazing Polly” on Elon Musk, the New Age and Technocracy attempting some sort of merge as the New World Order. Yet, at the same time, a lot of opposition to the New World Order - opposition in the sense of real sourced news - is also coming from people with New Age thinking (or, in another significant group, the Charismatics). Both sides, the pro-NWO and the anti-NWO have their own sort of millennialism, in the case of the anti group there are supposed to be a huge amount of suppressed technology (free, unlimited energy, cancer cures, etc.) the will be released as soon as the NWO is defeated. So how did these kooks take over the leadership? So is Elon Musk a good guy? Remember that the mainstream media and establishment social media are now completely discredited. New tricks are needed. See what The Corbett Report has to say about Musk, and Behind the Twitter Files Hype.

Wednesday 21 December 2022

Greg Hunter has an excellent interview with Catherine Austin Fitts of the Solari Report. “At this point, and I hate to say it, but we are in full scale implosion. The corruption is that bad. That’s why I am telling you what we need is sovereignty. The federal government is not going to deliver. . . . The financial coup has reached a point where if you want sovereignty, the only person who can deliver that is your state governor and your legislature. . . . If you’ve got a great state AG, if you have great legislature, if you have a great governor, you better start supporting them. They are the people that can protect your sovereignty. You need governmental sovereignty if you are going to have individual sovereignty, and you better do it now. You have no time to be entertained by Joe Biden, Trump and Hunter Biden.” There is an important interview with Thomas Renz on the X22Report on COVID and on election fraud. “It’s all the same players.” Wordbridge Publishing has announced the forthcoming book Saved to be Warriors: Exposing the Errors of Radical Two-Kingdom Theology by Rev. Bret McAtee. Those familiar with his Iron Ink blog know he is not one to pull his punches.

Saturday 17 December 2022

Greg Hunter did an interview with Dr. Betsy Eads. She is fed up with the refusal of Trump and his team to come out against the clot shots. “. . . We are in the millions (of vax deaths) in America right now, and I am projecting a tsunami of deaths coming in the next two years.” At least DeSantis is now calling for a grand jury investigation. Meanwhile the Senate passed a defense bill including rescinding the mandate for members of the military to get the shot. Senator Ron Johnson tried to add a provision that would reinstate military members who were discharged for not getting the shot, but Mitt Romney of Utah, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and Susan Collins of Maine voted against the amendment. Liz Crokin and Mary O’Neill were interviewed on the X22report about deep state involvement in child trafficking. This still does not interest the press, not even the religious press. The Gateway Pundit asks Are U.S. Bishops Complicit in the Trafficking and Exploitation of Migrant Children? They reference the activities of the The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops migration refugee services. “In the final analysis, the U.S. Catholic Church, under the direction of our bishops, is KNOWINGLY involved in the trafficking of illegal aliens. Whether knowingly or not, the Church is also LIKELY involved in the trafficking of migrate children in which they are being exploited for sex and/or labor. This will eventually open the Catholic Church to both criminal and civil lawsuits.” This grabbed my attention because I actually worked for them one summer, several decades ago.

Saturday 10 December 2022

There is another interview with Karen Kingston by Greg Hunter.   Kingston has uncovered documents that prove everybody knew or should have known the deadly effects of these criminal injections. Kingston says documents with the drug makers, FDA and CDC listed the deadly and debilitating “side effects” of the injections. Kinston shows that vaccine makers gave a list to the FDA of “side effects” or “possible adverse event outcomes” from the injections. Kinston says, “Common side effects should be muscle aches, headaches, fever and pain. With these injections, common side effects are Guillain-Barre, . . . inflammation of your brain and your spinal cord, meningitis, stroke, narcolepsy, anaphylaxis, heart attack, myocarditis, pericarditis, auto immune disease, death, pregnancy and birth outcomes, fetal injuries, fetal mutations, spontaneous abortion. . . and vaccine enhanced disease. . . . So, they knew this was not mild side effects. . . . This is not me speaking. This is literally their documents. . . .This information is just the tip of the iceberg, which show how really sick and perverse these CV19 injections are.” Also there is a interview on the X22Report with Dr. Eric Napute, on the attempts of the Federal Government to silence him through legal harassment. The X22Report sometimes has very good interviews, but the daily updates by the site manager are full of his own wishful thinking. He is not, however, one of those people who invent “inside sources” which provide “intel”, as is the case with so many Aternative media grifters. I got five books on the Plymouth Brethren and John Nelson Darby, and have been going through them. There would be too much effort for too little benefit to review them. One interesting discovery, however, is that when Darby invented the Secret Rapture he had in mind only the true church, that is a few hundred Brethren, not yet even the Plymouth Brethren, being secretly raptured. All the false churches, that is any with a local church government, clergy or denominational structure, would go through the tribulation. Darby and his companions also believed that the Reformers had only thought about the doctrine of justification, and not the nature of the church or of prophesy, and that the Brethren were the first people to think about this. This shows the utter naivety with which they began the construction of their theology. The root of all their theology was their ecclesiology. Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, is now the focus for discussion of that topic. There are two new articles on it at American Reformer: “Hail Caesar?” by Timon Cline, which examines Wolfe’s claim to represent the Reformed tradition, and “Our Christian Nationalist History” by Cory Higdon, which examines Wolfe’s clams about the American founding. There is enough diversity in either case for someone to contrive a case for or against Wolfe’s thesis, by selective use of sources. The question, then, is how broad and fair are each of these authors in the use of historical materials? We can raise some doubts about Higdon’s article right away. He teaches at a Baptist seminary, and makes way too much of the importance of Baptists and other dissenters in the colonies. Also he raises the overused and misinterpreted issue of the half-way covenant, as indicating a decline in Christian commitment, when in fact the issue was the Congregationalists’ peculiar doctrine of experiential conversion as a requirement for church membership. Due to the exposure the popularity of Wolfe’s book is giving to these issues, the evangelicals and the two-kingdom crowd will feel forced to respond as well, in their usual slanted way. Here at Contra Mundum we were covering this thirty years ago. For another perspective see Ruben Alvarado’s new book, Trojan Horse: Natural Rights and America’s Founding.

Wednesday 30 November 2022

There is now an interview with Dr. Joe Neusma on practices and protocols for treatment of those who have had the COVID shots, on the Sarah Westall website. American Reformer again has taken on the Presbyterian Church in America’s intellectual, David French, in an article by Jonathan Ashback, “David French’s Politics of Cruelty.” Ashback’s line of criticism is that “a poorly thought-out niceness is one of the most reliable motivations to cruelty.” I don’t think I would have discussed French in terms of niceness. I think he is aligning himself with what he thinks is the winning side. A lot of interesting and useful videos are appearing from Right Response Ministries, which has the insight and courage to take on many important issues. A particularly interesting one is an interview with Dr. James White, about the inroads that the Via Antiqua is making among baptists. It is no longer just the Presbyterians having to take it from the natural law people at Escondido. In another video Cornelius Van Til Vs. Thomas Aquinas | Why Many Reject Postmil & Theonomy, however, they engage with the rise of Thomism among baptists and recommend returning to Van Til. But it was the dominance of Van Til and people like him, with their ill informed ideas about the history of theology and philosophy, that created the intellectual vacuum that the Via Antiqua is now filling. Spanish language readers will like to know that Stephen Perk’s Disciple the Nations, has been out of a few months now as Discipulando Las Naciones as a PDF download, at kuyper.org. Also we now have the review of Kim Riddlebarger’s book on the Antichrist, The Man of Sin, along with an overview of the millennial systems and some suggestions about how to think about them. It is also in Spanish.