“Thus saith the Lord, ‘Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.’”
~Jeremiah 6:16
I know.
We oft sound like a broken record. We have bombarded our readers with testimony of the Reformers and all fathers past to demonstrate the normative assumption of Kinism throughout Christian history.
Despite this, though, our opponents just keep whistling in the dark, denying all of it and condemning us for daring to notice.
Once cloistered away, however, in their safe spaces, the same folks turn with growing regularity to concede the case. But only to issue anathemas over the fathers of their own communions, and repent of the newly discovered sin of ‘racism’ that typified orthodox Christianity throughout history.
Even so, their overtures of confession never equate to acknowledgment of the point when we raise it. They admit it for the purposes of leftist virtue signalling, but deny it when we remind them of their radical break with Christianity as it was known by all their fathers past. In fact, when we raise the point, they insist we are the ones teaching something new. Double-mindedness has become to them a default article of faith on the matter.
But it gets worse.
Not only did the pre-civil rights era Church presuppose Kinism as fundamental Christianity, many of our contemporary opponents themselves used to preach Kinism, and now pretend as if they cannot even conceive of it, let alone having taught it.
Yes, we’ve covered the fact that Joel McDurmon used to openly endorse the law of kin-rule as essential doctrine, only to deny it, and to deny ever having taught it now.
But another such Janus-faced pulpiteer whose record actually took me by surprise is John Piper. Today he preaches a social theory of the most extreme antifa-type liberalism — of abolition of national borders and ethnic distinctions pursuant of a purposeful erasure of Whites by miscegenation. But back in 1993 the man wrote a book titled Let The Nations Be Glad. The concluding chapter of which is The Supremacy of God among “All the Nations”. The whole of this book was a refutation of the new doctrine of ‘people blindness’ having recently overtaken American missions in the 1970s, which was then creeping its way through the American Church, a blindness which denies the legitimate “existence of separate peoples” (p.
171) and posits the Kingdom as built upon interchangeable individuals. Yes, this book is a pointed apologetic against Alienism in favor of the faith which preceded it — that faith today known as Kinism.
Plot twist: John Piper was a Kinist.
He walks through all the NT usages of the word ethnos (pp. 174-177), as well as the phrase panta ta ethne (i.e., “all the ethnicities”, pp. 171-181), and their correspondence to the Abrahamic covenant (Gen. 12:1-3; 17:4-5) wherein God promised to bless the kol mishpahot (Heb.)/pasai hai phalai (Grk.) — “all the clans of the earth” — through Abraham (p. 182), and to make him “the father of a multitude of nations” (pp. 190-191).
He even underscores the countervailing clan dimension of biblical nationalism, just as Kinists (alone) do still:
“‘[A]ll the families of the nations.’ ‘Family’ does not carry our modern meaning of nuclear family but something more like a clan. . . .
This hope [of Christ’s advent and millennium] was expressed in people group terminology again and again (peoples, nations, tribes, families, etc.).” (p. 184)
Truth be told, he proves this by exhaustive citation from Old and New Testaments. Some examples:
“All the nations whom thou hast made shall come and worship before thee, O Lord; and shall glorify thy name.” (Ps. 86:9)
“”The Lord records as He registers the peoples, ‘This one was born there’”. (Ps. 87:6)
“And I heard a great voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be His peoples (Grk., laoi), and God Himself will be with them.” (Rev. 21:3)
On this last passage he comments:
This is a surprising and remarkable glimpse of the new heaven and new earth. It pictures peoples, not just people, in the age to come. . . . Therefore John (recording the angelic voice) seems to make explicit (in distinction from Leviticus 26:12, laos) that the final goal of God in redemption is not to obliterate the distinctions of the peoples but to gather them into one diverse but unified assembly of ‘peoples.’ (p.200)
He sees Romans 15 as Paul’s own examination of this same topic from an array of OT texts proving Paul’s understanding of missions to be expressly “people group focused” (pp. 192-195).
Most definitively, he tells us:
Another thing we notice as we ponder this question is that the diversity of the nations has its creation and consummation in the will of God. Its origin was neither accident nor evil. And its future is eternal: the diversity will never be replaced by uniformity. The evidence for this is found in Acts 17:26 and Revelation 21:3.
To the Athenians Paul said, ‘[God] made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation.’ This means that the origin of the peoples is not in spite of, but because of, God’s will and plan. He made the nations. He set them in their place. And He determines the duration of their existence. The diversity of the nations is God’s idea. Therefore for whatever reason He focuses the missionary task on all the nations, it is not a response to an accident of history. It is rooted in the purpose He had when He determined to make the nations in the first place.
God’s purpose to have diversity among nations is not a temporary one only for this age. In spite of the resistance of most English versions the standard Greek texts of the New Testament now agree that the original wording of Revelation 21:3 requires the translation: ‘and I heard a great voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold the dwelling of God is with men, and He will dwell with them and they will be His peoples.’ Most versions translate: ‘They will be His people.’ But what John is saying is that in the new heavens and the new earth the humanity described in Revelation 5:9 will be preserved: persons ransomed by the blood of Christ ‘from every tribe and tongue and people and nation.’ This diversity will not disappear in the new heavens and new earth. God willed it from the beginning. It has a permanent place in His plan.” (pp. 214-215)
*Gasp!* John! What would Lecrae say?
This, my friends, is Kinism.
Not only are Kinists the only ones today who take this position, but this — ethnonationalism as integral to God’s eternal design — is the central controversy distinguishing us today. And whenever we assert these same verities which Piper has here we are denounced as unbelievers for it. Most curiously, even Piper himself now condemns us for maintaining the same position he so conclusively defended as recently as the 1990s! And so far as I can see, he has nowhere recanted these writings. Just as with the breadth of all our fathers’ writings on the matter, the Pipers of the world simply pretend as if they never believed or taught those things in the first place, and that their own nationalist/Kinist writings never happened.
But some will no doubt reply that we have simply misread Piper and that his book must actually argue against the nationalist mandate. How do I know this? Because in debate with us this is precisely the recourse they have taken with the whole counsel of our fathers past. Piper’s still being this side of the sod isn’t likely to derail their habituated response.
But any intrepid enough to survey the material for themselves will find all the rhetoric of the new Alienist orthodoxy conspicuously absent from the book in question. Piper even refutes many seminal Alienist arguments directly. Not least of which in the case of the import of God’s segregation of the ethnicities by a division of tongues at Babel: where Alienists insist this divinely imposed apartheid was a curse later to be withdrawn at Pentecost, Piper then taught the opposite; specifically, footnote 42 on p.214 takes what is now known as the Kinist view of these things — that the segregation imposed at Babel was a mercy rather than curse, and that ethnonationalism was God’s design for mankind from the beginning, and for eternity.
Let the Nations Be Glad is a wonderful example of normative Christian thought with respect to social order, the Kingdom, the Great Commission, and missiology. But its substance is sadly repudiated now by the nigh totality of modern pulpits, and even the man who penned it. And so ensorcelled are they by the zeitgeist, they will even deny that it says what it plainly says.
At least until they can scurry away from the commentary of Kinists for one of their self-flagellation fests.
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