Welcome back, folks. Ehud here again.
This is a podcast about Christ’s Kingdom, Kinism, and all things relative thereto. Kinism, of course, being that radical notion that the Great Commission does not abolish the nations, but rather, redeems them.
Today’s topic comes courtesy of an elder brother long since past, the renowned “father of church history,” bishop of Caesarea, and church father, Eusebius.
In his late-third-century magnum opus, Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius describes Christ’s Advent and its significance in terms that would strike abject horror in the hearts of modern churchmen:
About the time of our Lord, agreeable to prophecy, those rulers ceased that had formerly governed the nation of the Israelites by regular succession, and Herod was the first foreigner that reigned over them.
At the time that Herod was king, who was the first foreigner that reigned over the Israelite people, the prophecy recorded by Moses received its fulfillment, viz. ‘That a prince should not fail of Judah, nor a ruler from his loins, until [H]e should come for whom it was reserved.’ [cited from the Septuagint] The same, he also shows, would be the expectation of the nations. The prediction was evidently not accomplished, as long as they were at liberty to have their own native rulers, which continued from the time of Moses down to the time of Augustus. Under him, Herod was the first foreigner that obtained the government of the Israelites. Since, as Josephus has written, he was an Idumean by his father’s side, and an Arabian by his mother’s. . . . The government of the Judaeans, therefore, having devolved on such a man, the expectation of the nations was now at hand, according to prophecy; because with him terminated the regular succession of governors and princes, from the time of Moses. . . .
From this time also, the princes and rulers of Judah, i.e., of the Judaean nation, ceasing, by a natural consequence, the priesthood, which had descended from a series of ancestors in the closest succession of kindred, was immediately thrown into confusion. Of this, you have the evidence of Josephus; who shows that when Herod was appointed king by the Romans, he no longer nominated the chief priests from the ancient lineage, but conferred the honour upon certain obscure individuals.”
~Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, chapter 6
You hear that? That’s the sound of Joel McDurmon choking on a sixty dollar cohiba.
Without delving too far into hagiography, we aren’t speaking of some obscure writer here: this is Eusebius, the foremost source on early Christian history, a church father himself, and writing under the most critical gaze of those same august fellows who would shortly convene the Nicene Council. And he testifies that this was, in his day, the universal understanding of Christ’s Advent, and had been from prior to the Lord’s birth: that the world anticipated the coming of Messiah to reclaim the throne from foreign-bred usurpers. This, Eusebius tells us, was ‘the expectation of the nations’ by which they recognized the coming of Messiah — His prophesied reclamation of the throne and priesthood from the first alien occupation of those offices in Israel’s history. The narrative of His coming was understood universally as the blood-heir retaking and redeeming throne and altar from the hand of alien peoples. Which is to say, the Gentiles knew to expect Jesus’s coming principally by His vindication and restoration of the law of kin-rule (Deut. 1:13; 17:15; 18:15, 18).
And that was the sound of Bojidar racking the slide on his Makarov as he denounces the Nicene fathers for “pagan dogs.”
And he’s not alone. Not only is this kin-rule redemption no longer taught from our contemporary pulpits, it is expressly denounced there–not forgotten, denounced–and not as a case of some mistaken emphasis, or misconception, but to hear the impastors, irreverends, and menaceters today tell it, as being precisely and viciously antithetical to the gospel.
Yes, under Alienist occupation the churches now teach this Eusebean view of Advent to be, not just error, but the zenith of all possible heresy, that newly discovered sin of “racism.”
But prior to the mid-twentieth century introduction of cultural Marxism, none among our churchmen ever found occasion to denounce the fathers’ view of the matter. Indeed, as there are no extant rebuttals to Eusebius’s foundational writing on this point, it is apparent none throughout the centuries took any qualm with it, at least not strongly enough to bother. None dissembled on the fact that “He came unto His own and they received Him not” (John 1:11) meant that though born of them purely, He was rejected by His own kinsmen, the Israelites, seduced as they were to that Babylonian mystery cult known today as Judaism.
Truly, the very inclusion of the royal genealogy in the Gospels serves no purpose if not to confirm Christ’s unblemished descent as the blood-heir of the house of Judah and the scepter of David. Relative to which, Eusebius continues:
[A]s the lineage of the Israelites contributed nothing to Herod’s advantage, he was goaded by the consciousness of his ignoble extraction [i.e., by his being a mixed-breed foreigner], and committed all these records [the genealogies] of their families to the flames. Thinking that himself might appear of noble origin, by the fact that no one else would be able to trace his pedigree by the public records. . . . A few however, of the careful, either remembering the names, or having it in their power in some other way, by means of copies, to have private records of their own, gloried in the idea of preserving their noble extraction. Of these were the above mentioned persons, called desposyni [i.e., Christ’s relatives according to the flesh] on account of their affinity to the family of our Saviour . . . as far as I and every impartial judge would say, no one certainly could discover a more obvious interpretation . . . 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.
~Ibid., chapter 7
You just know Russell Moore and John Piper are somewhere binge-watching episodes of 7th Heaven, and drowning their sorrows in chocolate. Rest assured, though, they only eat fair trade cocoa picked by dusky hands. That consecrates it, after all.
Yes, having learned from the wise men of the east that there was come a blood-scion of Zion, and supplemental to his dispatch of soldiers against the Christchild, Herod ordered all the genealogies of Israel burned. But the royal line kept and hid their own copies, and these contraband records were hallowed in the gospels of Matthew and Luke as vindication of Christ’s pedigree over against the alien half-breed which had, by imperial diktat, usurped the throne in the person of Herod.
The word translated “genealogy” in the gospels is genea, the definition of which given in Strong’s Concordance is “birth, lineage, descent“; and is translated elsewhere in Scripture as “nature” and “natural.” It is the Greek root of not only our word genealogy, but genes, genetic, generate, etc. Which is to say, then, that the royal genealogies are by definition nothing less than a confirmational writ of racial nobility.
And this is precisely what Eusebius and the historical church saw in them–the vindication of the race of the ethnos of Jacob and the tribe of Judah against foreign imperial power; and thereby, forever vindicating the limited and pluriform identities of the nations under God, against all Babel-esque schemes of homogenization; which, by its very nature, is contrary to God’s design for society: nationalism upon tribalism upon familism.
The inclusion of these outlawed genealogies in the gospels, then, was itself nothing short of a statement of overt belligerence against, and authoritative repudiation of what is today termed Alienism, the gnostic idea that physical lineage is meaningless, and that any concern for it is somehow contrary to Christianity.
But churchmen who have committed presently to obfuscating the law of kin-rule that “you shall set no stranger over you, nor anyone who is not thy brother,” (Deut. 17:15) will neither hear Eusebian explanation of the Incarnation.
Case in point, I had recent occasion to discuss the matter with an Alienist out of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He was quite sure that the admonition to appoint only a ‘brother’ over you in Deuteronomy 17:15 was a stipulation limiting governance to orthodox believers; and that, entirely irrespective of lineage. This conclusion he dispensed with an air of superiority and condescension befitting some plumed aristocrat.
Thanks be to God that the Scripture defines this term ‘brother’ with respect to the office of king in David’s coronation ceremony in 2 Samuel 5:1: “Then all the tribes of Israel came to David at Hebron and spoke, saying, ‘Indeed we are your bone and your flesh.’” To which David reciprocated in the same terminology, saying, “You are my brethren, you are my bone and my flesh. Why then are you the last to bring back the king?’ And say to Amasa, ‘Are you not my bone and my flesh?’” (2 Sam. 19:12-13).
And the Reformation Study Bible footnote on 2 Sam.5:1 typifies the understanding of all the historic exegetes in describing this idiom of ‘bone and flesh’ as nothing more or less than “an expression of kinship.”
Never mind that those who opt to spiritualize the word ‘brethren’ in Deuteronomy 17:15 let slip even that standard in their own politics: they find no reason to oppose a Mormon in the person of Mitt Romney, a Hindu in Nikki Haley, or the cabal of Jews who make up the GOP intelligentsia. Rather, they tend to actually applaud and abet the ascent of heathens over us! As seen in recent elections, even those identifying as theonomists are, under Alienism, resolved to vote for anyone they deem “qualified for the job” and that, irrespective of creed.
So their opting for a spiritualized interpretation of the term ‘brethren’ in Deuteronomy 17 then proves only a pretense against the plain and traditional understanding of the text, but not definitive of their own civic convictions. Which, in turn, demonstrates also that those who insist on racial pluralism in the name of spiritual homogeneity will necessarily cave on the latter too. Because other races are, by their own histories and native perspectives, inclined to very different creeds. In fact, even when claiming the same creed as we, they hold it in different ways, with different emphases, and interpretations particular to their respective racial vantages. The black OPC Christian will not see our forebears who brought the gospel to his people and introduced him to civilization as true Christians. He will almost certainly hold all our colonial (which is to say Reformation-era) forbears as the greatest devils in history and their Knoxian nationalism and clan-based consortship as the darkest heresy of all–so called ‘racism.’ We needn’t guess at these things; they scream them from every platform we allow them. And even many of our own now parrot those foreign pronouncements out of equal parts fear and false guilt.
Either way, though, there is no harbor left the Alienist to feign that the Kinist understanding is some Johnny-come-lately aberration. If the church fathers testify that “the religion introduced by Christ among all nations, was neither unexpected nor strange,” (Ibid., ch. 4) but anticipated on the basis of Messiah redeeming the kin-rule of Israel, and therein, the principle of kin-rule itself, no one can call it strange. Not without voiding all credibility.
We, “the isles of the nations” prophesied to await His law, saw special significance in the fact that He, the blood-heir of Israel, redeemed the throne, invalidating the foreign tetrarch interlopers installed by the same empire which occupied all our Japhethic nations. And as God enfleshed, His vindication of kin-rule not only confirmed His identity to us, but validated the kin-rule of our own respective nations too. Christ freed us spiritually from sin, death, and hell; and societally, from the perennial drift thereto in the divinized state of empire.
And thus was established Christendom’s law of nations, that all our rulers should be kindred bairns under the common law of Christ, King of all kings who freed the nations from the shadow of Babel’s tower.
And Paul Washer wept. Amen.
Until next time, don’t let them grind you down. Look the Alienist in the eye and laugh.
This is Ehud, signing off.
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