A Kinist Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, Part 5

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.

As we’ve covered, Christ’s incarnation is the issue upon which all the foundations of social order stand or fall. If His incarnation communicated anything less than a union of perfect God and man without confusion of one with the other, religious, cultural, and moral relativism would necessarily result, nullifying Christ’s every claim to Lordship over His creation, and relegating Christ to the obscurity of equality in and among the pantheon of recognized world religions in the shadow of the unitary god-state.

Be that as it may, the Christian insistence upon orthodoxy is not based upon ethical consequentialism, but upon the truth for its own sake, which is to say, God’s authority. For Christ is the Truth (John 14:6), and perception of the ill ethical portents inherent in the various subordinationist heresies only clarify what we already know from biblical doctrine: that these things are proven true by absolute impossibility of the contrary. If Christ be not Lord (a la the Athanasian clarification), lordship has no true meaning, and the highest authority is arbitrary force, which is to say, the imperial god-state. Babel.

To such things the Christian cannot acquiesce, for they spell an abolition of all legitimate authority, and thereby an end of all metaphysics, and the death of all meaning. From these despondencies we are preserved by the Holy Spirit, the Great Comforter who assures us place and meaning in this life and the life to come. In His holy counsels, the Christian spies the meanings behind things, that nothing in God’s design exists without purpose. The Christian so armed knows never to “despise the day of small things” (Zech. 4:10), least of which to “despise the domestics of thy seed” (Isa. 58:7).

This leads us directly into the question of Christ’s physical descent. This matter of His physical constitution, though well-established doctrine, is the subject of much Alienist speculation and tinkering of late. The creed plainly says he was born according to the flesh of His mother, Mary. But in aims of avoiding certain Kinist implications, Reformed Alienists have, pursuant of an egalitarian theory of marriage, taken to suggesting absurdly heretical alternatives to the orthodox view of the hypostatic union. These hyper-patriarchy-bent Alienists have argued that a woman, regardless of background, always becomes part of her husband’s people upon marriage, as biblical genealogies are reckoned solely in terms of male lineage, not female; and this, they argue, renders all question of matrilineal descent moot, thus making miscegenation, irrespective of its lawfulness, absolutely impossible. While the father’s lineage is to be honored, the lineages of mothers do not matter; only their domestic capital does. There can be no unlawful mixing of ancestries, for the woman’s ancestry mysteriously disappears into the man’s.

This view is in keeping with certain strains of Talmudism, but Jews popularly abandoned this view roughly 2000 years ago in favor of the inverse position, that matrilineal descent is all that matters. Now, ask yourself what else happened around that time. National Israel murdered her rightful King, and for it, Christ avenged Himself upon them, wiping the whole nation from the earth at the hands of Germanian mercenaries in the employ of General Titus, leaving only satellite communities of Jewish converts in diaspora without Judaean support. Those splinter cells were then forced by Providence to concede the old Christian argument for the importance of matrilineal descent, because their bottlenecked population could ill afford to lose one support, and as they tell it, if a child is born of a woman you know its relation, while paternity is less obvious. Of course, this ad hoc provision freed Jewish men of any religious obligation to bastards they might sire with Gentile women.

So when the hyper-patriarchy Alienists go groping about for a means to oppose the traditional doctrine of marriage and take up arguing the old Pharisee case that matrilineal lines are irrelevant, the direct implication is a denial of Christ’s Kingship, as well as His lawful membership in the nation of Israel. Even if unwittingly, their denial of the meaningfulness of the mother’s line is a denial of the Messiah, because Jesus’s only claim to the throne is by way of His mother.

The foremost heresy with which they are distracted isn’t Judaizing, though. More often, it’s gnosticism. But on the subject of the incarnation, we can see how these two errors distinctly overlap and intertwine.

In either case, Ezekiel’s lamentation for the princes of Israel refutes them directly:

What is your mother? A lioness:
She lay down among the lions;
Among the young lions she nourished her cubs. (19:1)
Your mother was like a vine in your bloodline,
Planted by the waters,
Fruitful and full of branches
Because of many waters.
She had strong branches for scepters of rulers.
She towered in stature above the thick branches,
And was seen in her height amid the dense foliage. (19:10-11)

Aside from proving the significance of our maternal heritage, Ezekiel emphasizes the importance of physical heritage in general by invoking “bloodlines.” There is simply no way to spiritualize away such overt endorsements of kinship. It’s the point of the passage. According to Ezekiel, matrilineal pedigree establishes scepters and kingdoms. This would explain the redundant scriptural admonitions against giving your daughters to foreigners as well against taking foreign women for your sons (Gen. 28:6; Ex. 34:15-16; Num. 25:6-11; Deut. 7:1-3; Josh. 23:12-13; Judges 3:5-8; 1 Kings 11:1-2; Ezra 9:1-2,12; Ezra 10:2-3,10-11; Neh. 10:30; Neh. 13:25-27, etc.). Or, as it pertained to the tribe of Levi, “he shall only take a woman of his own people to wife” (Lev. 21:14). Yes, some have suggested that because this passage addresses Levites, thus it pertains to that tribe singularly. But these are the same people who insist that the principle of “one law for citizen and stranger”(Ex. 12:49; Lev. 24:22; Num. 9:14) abolishes all tribal distinctions in law. They cannot have it both ways. The inter-testamental author, Tobit, exposits the matter thus:

Beware of all whoredom, my son, and chiefly take a wife of the seed of thy fathers, and take not a strange woman to wife, which is not of thy father’s tribe: for we are the children of the prophets, Noe, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: remember, my son, that our fathers from the beginning, even that they all married wives of their own kindred, and were blessed in their children, and their seed shall inherit the land. Now therefore, my son, love thy brethren, and despise not in thy heart thy brethren, the sons and daughters of thy people, in not taking a wife of them: for in pride is destruction and much trouble, and in lewdness is decay and great want: for lewdness is the mother of famine (Tobit 4:12-13).

Tobit was far from alone in this understanding, as we find this to have been the view espoused by all the greatest luminaries of Christendom as well. As Clark’s groundbreaking code book of biblical law states it:

And under Mosaic law, the right to marry a woman was regarded as “appertaining” to one of her kindred. A woman who possessed an “inheritance” was entitled to marry whom she thought best, “only to the family of the tribe of her father.”¹

Mosaic law forbids the marriage of a man to a woman to whom he is closely related, or to a “strange woman” – one of another race or nation.²

The “one law for citizen and stranger” principle, as it is disjointedly invoked by Alienists, preys upon modern ignorance of Scripture and all our fathers’ work in such matters. Rightly understood, “one law for the Israelite and the stranger” is a declaration of jurisdiction, otherwise known in the Magna Carta as “the law of the land.” It prohibits foreign peoples from claiming any immunity to the law in our bounds. It asserts jurisdiction, nothing more. This is clear from the simple impossibility of the alternative: we cannot rationally take it to mean that the recognition of nationality is unlawful when the law itself highlights the very distinctions they claim it denies. And aside from the principle itself, the law explicitly precludes aliens, as such, from leadership, land ownership, suffrage, and marriage with Israelites. As is usual, the Alienist interpretation renders the law a violation of itself.

No, the law commands us to acknowledge and honor the contributions of our mothers no less than of our fathers: “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee” (Ex. 20:12). The Jews of Jesus’s day lost the land in direct correlation to their dismissing Christ’s genealogical claim to the throne through Mary.

Though both of the royal genealogies found in the gospels start from Joseph, by name, St. Paul assures us that Jesus was “the seed of David after the flesh” (Rom. 1:3). Within the church, there have been two major wings of interpretation on this subject, though they are so close to the same position that it is almost completely semantical: one has always traced St. Luke’s account as pertaining to Mary, not Joseph. Any caring to study it will find the Lucan text listing Joseph’s father as Heli, rather than Jacob (as in Matthew’s account), and the Lucan genealogy references Joseph as Heli’s son-in-law. Meanwhile, the alternate view has it that both genealogies trace to Joseph, but one traces through strict descent while the other traces through instances when a kinsman-redeemer filled the gap, or when adoptions were pursued according to the case law for the daughters of Zelophehad (Num. 27; 36). Either way, both views rely on the law pertaining to the daughters of Zelophehad, which prevented the inheritance of any daughter-heirs from transferring to a different Israelite tribe by forbidding intertribal marriages outright. As Eusebius tells us:

And the lineage of Joseph thus being traced, Mary, also, at the same time, as far as can be, is evinced to be of the same tribe, since, by the Mosaic law, intermarriages among different tribes were not permitted. For the injunction is, to marry one of the same kindred and the same family, so that the inheritance may not be transferred from tribe to tribe.³

As well as justifying Christ’s claim to the purple, we find Christendom to have understood these details of adoption law interwoven in Jesus’s incarnation to provide the template for all Christian adoption. American law, up until quite recent times, therefore followed suit, restricting adoptions to the circumstance of whole households (father and mother) of a single racial stock adopting children only of the like makeup.

Christ’s incarnation, then, directly militates against the modern infatuation with interracial adoptions, because such do not qualify as licit adoption. Rather, the scriptural language for such arrangements is slave-trading or man-stealing; and in modern vernacular, it is essentially human-trafficking. Some countries, such as Russia and certain African nations, coming round to Christian principle, have outlawed “adoption” of their people’s children by Westerners. Christianized Africans have even begun calling it for what it is: the slave trade revisited.

Though a seeming digression from our subject, the issue of adoption law is a necessary implication of the royal genealogy and Jesus’s physical essence provided in Mary. Indeed, as we see the creed at this point laid down in favor of Alienist gnosticism, the social catastrophe which we see unfolding before our eyes is a mirror reflection of the heresy wrought in men’s souls. Rather than society improving with the churches’ advance into Alienism, we see both the church and broader society spiraling in on themselves, an unmistakable integration downward into the void.

But even as of this late date, Alienists continue regurgitating the same defeated Marcionite arguments contra orthodoxy. They insist that Christ’s heredity was meaningless, fictional, or (most comically) meaningful only in that it demonstrates how meaningless heredity is. To this end they argue two, or, sometimes three propositions: (1) that Christ’s genealogy includes many non-Israelites and non-Semites, (2) that Israel was always a non-ethnic, propositional nation, and (3) that race/ethnicity is a fictitious concept. Never mind that these propositions are each mutually exclusive and nullify each other entirely. And never mind that each have been roundly refuted from the text repeatedly.

If they wish us to believe that the purpose of the meticulous royal genealogy is to show heredity irrelevant, what they really ask of us is to believe that the chronicles of Jesus’s life amount to a cautionary tale, demonstrating not so much how to live, but how not to. Which is to say that they see the incarnation itself as the definition of folly and His revelation as absurdity. All of which, of course, is quite blasphemous.

If they insist that Israel was always a propositional nation (a creedal empire), it directly negates their assertion that Ruth and Rahab were of distinctly different ethnicity from Israel. If Israel were a non-ethnic entity, we would be unable to draw appraisal of any relative ethnic proximity to them with any other group. If not an identifiable ethnicity, no one could come from an ethnicity different from their own. Moreover, if, as they allege, all racial and ethnic identity is fictitious, their other two propositions, along with the biblical genealogies and all the scriptural talk of families, tribes, nations, and races, are rendered meaningless. So, on this score, they must, at bare minimum, eventually choose which of these fallacious propositions they are most enamored of if they ever hope begin a coherent conversation of the matter.

Short of tracing out a fuller apologia here for the confirmation of Rahab and Ruth, we can be certain that the details of the narratives and the relevant Israelite laws – not to mention Rahab’s inclusion in the Hebrew hall of fame in the book of Hebrews – prove that they were in fact actual Hebrews, not Canaanites or Venusians, as Alienists imagine. The purpose of the royal genealogies, as Christians have always understood them, is to justify Jesus’s line as having no Canaanites, nor Ammonites, nor other traces which might otherwise render Him ineligible for the throne or citizenship (Deut. 17:15; 23:2).

If we dispose of this default historical and orthodox view, with it goes the entirety of Rutherfordian social theory, as Lex, Rex cites Deut. 17:15 more frequently than any other passage of Scripture as the bedrock of the Protestant position against Roman imperialism. Worse, we wind up conceding the arguments of the gnostics, the Judaizers, and all the secular textual critics, who argued the Alienist case well before our contemporary Alienists. Concession to the Alienist view is a rejection of the core of the Christian faith – that Jesus of the tribe of Judah, the root of Jesse, was the purely descended scion of Israel, the incontestable blood claimant and heir apparent to the throne of David, the pure paschal Lamb without blemish or spot, come to depose the usurper, Herod, the half-blood Idumean, and his puppet regime under the Roman empire. Alienism substitutes that perfect Christ with another, a spotted, blemished one, imperfect in his generations, whose genealogy is included only as a mockery of genealogy, which they imagine to boast of his mamzer status and of his disregard for any legal-hereditary requirements for the crown. They posit Christ the usurper who, if he depose Herod (the lesser usurper), does so by might, not right.

But as with the popular antinomian view of Christ as a Sabbath-breaker, there is no imputation of righteousness forthcoming from the law-breaking Christ proposed of Alienists. The Alienist Christ could but leave men in their sins because their Christ himself is in need of a Savior. Their law-breaking Christ posits a capricious and lawless god at war with himself – one seeking to pull down his own rule.

The true Christ is one of flesh and blood, born of the substance of Mary, His genealogy guarded according to the law (Deut. 23:2), His inheritance secured by his mother’s having married, faithfully, a man of her father‘s tribe. Jesus was a man of place, nation, clan, and station, like Noah, “perfect in His generations,” (Gen. 6:9) who “came unto His own, though His own received Him not” (John 1:11). He commanded His apostles, therefore, to evangelize the Israelite ahead of the Samaritan, and the Samaritan ahead of the Greek (European); afterward, He admonished Christians through the pen of St. Paul to emulate Paul’s walk as he emulated Christ (1 Cor. 11:1), and Paul thus went on to write of his profound love for his “kinsmen according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:3), then calling on Christians of all tribes to take special care of their own (1 Tim. 5:8).

This is the Christ who made man in the context of a family. This is the Christ who made the ethnicities, distinguished them, and separated them according to hereditary taxonomy, natural affections in language, in custom, and by law. This is the Christ high-born to the tribe of Judah, one of the last remaining of the royal line of the last lingering tribe of Israel, otherwise fallen to imperial displacement and racial admixture with alien peoples. This is the Christ who promises His people that the leaves of the tree of life in heaven are for the healing of the nations, and that the races of men will continue eternally distinct in heaven.

To the embarrassment of the Alienist, Christ did not come as a cosmopolitan metrosexual of nondescript race, but as a man of perfect distinctions. Only one come in the perfect distinctions of men could stand as the federal representative of mankind. It is precisely in the particularism of his family, tribe, nation, and race that we see His universal representation of mankind.

As the perfect hypostasis of God and man, Jesus loved Mary as one of His elect and as a distinguished instrument of His Providence, but also, as His mother, descended of David.

 

Read Part 6

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