A common digression lately taken by liberals with respect to the Reformed doctrines of inheritance, family, nation, and race, is to say, “If Kinism is the historic Faith, why isn’t it elaborated in the creeds? Why not even in the most elaborate creed of church history — the Westminster Confession?”
Since I have obliquely addressed this question elsewhere, I’ll take the liberty of quoting myself:
They ignore the actual character of creedalism as it has expressed itself in time: as predominantly a consortium of reactionary rulings. Confessions have always arose in response to errors of their age. They define the Christian faith always so as to distinguish biblical orthodoxy from the vacillations of the zeitgeist.
But, as with subjects such as pedophilia or so-called “gay marriage,” dedicated apologetics contra miscegenation, racial and social egalitarianism, or borderless one-worldism were not deemed as needing to be addressed simply because none could foresee a day in which churches would en masse begin promoting such moral aberrations.
Even so, no one should think the Westminster Confession discloses nothing on the matter. Truly, traditionalists have always seen it as everywhere presupposing Kinism. So this, then, is an exposition of that fact.
The WCF opens with a treatise On The Holy Scripture, wherein we read:
The Scriptures … are to be translated in to the vulgar language of every nation unto which they come, that, the Word of GOd dwelling plentifully in all, they may worship Him in an acceptable manner. (WCF 1:8)
Insistence on translation of the text into the tongues of the nations assumes and sanctions nationalism and separate cultures under God. This is over against the Roman (not to mention Alienist) policy which denied the legitimacy of separate nations and cultures. This was one of the seminal points of conflict between Protestantism and Romanism, our doctrine of the nations. And as treated inside the WCF’s section on Scripture, it is apparent that Protestants conceived our doctrine of separate nations and cultures as integral to our doctrine of the Word itself.
Many of our fathers were martyred for the crime of translating the Scripture into the vulgar tongues of the nations. Which is to say, the abiding distinction of the nations in Christ’s Kingdom was no secondary or unimportant issue to them, but essential; and per its placement in the Confession, integral to the Protestant doctrine of Scripture.
In chapter 2, Of God and of the Holy Trinity, the doctrine of divine simplicity is briefly outlined:
There is but one only, living, and true God … a most pure spirit … without body, parts, or passions. (WCF 2:1)
While there are many spirits, no other entity but God is without parts and passions. Certainly not man. Neither can redeemed man in glory lay claim to these things.
But our modern Alienists do impute these attributes to redeemed humanity, even here on earth where bodies, parts, and passions are undeniable.
Sure, they may profess orthodox subscriptionism and even recite the confession, but speaking to ecclesiology, anthropology, law, and society they always smuggle all the aforesaid attributes of God into their description of redeemed mankind. Yes, it is completely normative now for them to speak of Christians as being a purely spiritual nation/family united in Christ without any distinction allowed. On the basis of which, they denounce all natal identification and allegiances as “carnality,” or, per Bojidar Marinov, “paganism”.
This is their Holy Grail. Never mind that reimagining nations, tribes, and families as interracial/aracial entities, and all Christians as one man, utterly confounds the concept of each category and the scriptural usage of them.
But worse, this incorporealizing of man and society is one of the signal doctrines which defined classic gnosticism and differentiated it from Christianity. Preaching that our physical component is meaningless or evil is patent gnosticism.
And like all iterations of humanism, it blurs the Creator/creature distinction. For by swapping the Christian doctrine of Christ’s federal representation for the gnostic idea of racial integration and ontological leveling of men in Christ, their claim of identity with the Second Person of the Godhead means integration into God Himself. Thus declaring mankind and God one and the same.
Incidentally, the alternate name for this theosis is satanism. Because, just as Lucifer suggested to our first parents, it (quite falsely) offers all men the throne of God.
In chapter 3, Of God’s Eternal Decree, we read:
As God hath appointed the elect unto glory, so has He, by the eternal and most free purpose of His will, foreordained all the means thereunto. (WCF 3:6)
When it comes to lineage, and variable tendencies of different groups, moderns simply deny that there are any ‘means thereunto’.
Calvin however, dedicated a whole chapter (bk. 3, chpt. XXI) of his Institutes of the Christian Religion to a primary means of election, which he identified as national origin. This is what Van Til in his most famous essay, “Why I Believe in God,” identified as “the accident of birth.” Van Til therein called God “the All-Conditioner” who providentially organizes means in a conspiracy of what the confession terms “effectual calling” upon the souls of His elect.
This confluence of means includes all the mediate and personal preconditions which impel each of us to Christ — things such as circumstances of ethnicity, family, region, language, friendships, life events, education, inherited traits like chemistry, and, of course, race. Though the Alienist masquerading as Calvinist insists this position minimizes or detracts from God’s sovereign election, these things were, prior to cultural Marxism, always taken as ordained means of that very election.
Neither does the Confession shrink from the inverse consequence of reprobation. As we read,
The rest of mankind God was pleased … to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath. (WCF 3:7)
This speaks to the unequal states of existence to which God ordained men not just in eternity, but in this life also. And though these unequal states do not accord exactly, they overlap profoundly, and the unequal distribution of God’s favor between the races in time and eternity are of one conceptual and theological cloth. It was God’s sovereign choice to send the apostles on their missionary journeys first to Israel’s kindred in Asia Minor, and from there to the Japhethite tribes of Europe who became, to the near total exclusion of all others, the custodians of the covenant for two millennia.
It is precisely the emphasis of God-ordained inequality in Calvinism which historically and presently insults other races and liberals.
To this end, the confession recounts that God desired “to create, or make of nothing, the world, and all things therein whether visible or invisible, … and all very good.” (WCF 4:1) While God did not create any differentiable races in the beginning, neither did He create your family on the sixth day. But that does not make us shrink at all from confessing God to have created us. The races, then, like your family, and you personally, were nascent in that initial creation, and began to manifest in the second generation when God made a visible distinction between Sethites and Cainites (the mark of Cain, Gen.4:11-16); and later, between the sons of Noah (especially in the marking of Hamites). Clearly, a species of indifferentiable clones was never God’s intent. It was His pleasure to create mankind with distinct races incipient. Or as St. Paul explains,“And He has made from one blood every ethnos [ethnicity] of men to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26a), germinal in Adam, “and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him” (Acts 17:26b-27). Meaning that the purpose of what biologists call the “speciation” of mankind and its segregation was a central means to the furtherance of godliness. Which, as we’ve said, is exactly what Calvin and the Reformers took from it.
Chapter 5, Of Providence, begins by underscoring some of the aforesaid: “God the great Creator of all things doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least …” (WCF 5:1)
If God disposes different kinds of things to the expression of their kinds and behaviors, none may rightly object to pointing out the dispositions of different peoples. Which St. Paul did as much in regard to the Cretins as both Jeremiah (13:23) and Isaiah (ch. 18) did with respect to the Ethiop.
The habits of men no less than the migratory patterns of geese “He ordereth … to fall out, according to the nature of secondary causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.” (WCF 5:2) And in regard to nations no less than sheep and goats, “God, in His ordinary providence, maketh use of means …” (WCF 5:3) No less than anything else in our identity and experience, genetics are included in such means. No coherent survey of redemptive history is possible without reference to the Semite people, the Canaanite people, and the Japhethites prophesied to inherit the tents of Shem. (Gen. 9)
Think of the absurdity of the alternative posited by the Alienists: though they concede all things to be designed of God, and therefore teleological in nature, their ideology makes an exception of human genetics and physicality. Human DNA and heredity, according to them, has no proximate teleology in it, other than perhaps, as an indifferentiable corporate malignancy to be ignored and/or denounced mandatorily. They either posit human genes as the only particles in the cosmos beyond any telic import, or as evil itself. Neither of which are Calvinist, nor rudimentarily Christian positions, but gnostic. To gainsay the teleology of genes and ethnicity is to repudiate the Christian cosmos.
Section 7 of the same chapter says, “The providence of God … taketh care of His church, and disposeth all things to the good thereof.” This ‘disposition’ of things to the good of His church is exemplified in Noah’s prophesy (Gen. 9) that the Japhethites would be the primary inheritors of the latter Kingdom; and so we have in the Christian era. And concurring with that Japhethite emphasis of Christendom, God also forcibly segregated the races at the fall of the tower of Babel (Gen. 10-11), translated the whole of Scripture into European tongue and concept with the Septuagint and NT, and emphasized European missions in the NT. It was under this conspiracy of circumstance that the Church was built. All of which, the Confession says, was organized for the good of the Church and according to God’s good pleasure. Which is exactly what Augustine argued on the matter long prior — that God’s distinction and segregation of Shemites, Japhethites, and Hamites was to the good of Christ’s Kingdom.
This sheds light on why all efforts to extend Reformation thought to other races are uniformly met with the rebuke of covenant theology and history for their implications on social order. And that not just by those outside the Reformed fold, but even by the scant number of minorities within. For the Blacks and Browns in Reformed circles nigh exclusively occupy themselves with reimagining all in terms of an instinctual cultural Marxism and Afro- or Indiocentrism. This is the explicit mission of Reformed Blacks of America (RBA) no less than the Reformed African American Network (RAAN), and the default of Mestizos as well. Even when they don the moniker of Reformed, they generally define it as some form of liberationist overthrow of the White man, which is to say, historic Christendom.
But much as Alienist rage, “We’re all the same!”, the Confession overtly affirms the reality of inherited tendencies and behavior:
They [our first parents] being the root of all mankind, the guilt of sin was imputed; and the same death in sin, and corrupted nature, conveighed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation. (WCF 6:3)
This is what is known as federal theology — the doctrine that both sins and virtues of the fathers are visited upon their posterity ‘by ordinary generation’ (genetically) to many generations. As with traits of appearance, behavior, aptitude, and tendency are also passed down in the blood. The Irishman tends to the bottle and merry contention, but so too does he bend toward genius in poetry, song, and story; the German tends toward stoicism and grudges, but also to engineering, precision, efficiency, and coequal genius in the arts. The African character, by contrast, is defined by impulsiveness, mirth, and mania. And no matter the continent on which he resides, nor the age, he has ever defined the uttermost extremities of barbarism. But in him is a native genius for rhythm, acuity for melody, and a gregarious dynamism all his own, not to mention gifts of an athletic nature. Because kind produceth after kind. This is so on the racial level as much as on the familial level, because the two are but magnitudes of the same thing. Predilections, talents, and handicaps of parents are manifest in their offspring prior even to any enculturation. Federal theology provides anthropology and sociology their own essential foundations. And apart from the substrate doctrine of lineal curses and blessings, the only alternative is pure gnostic abstraction — heresy.
Yet the Alienist rears up indignant still: “But Jesus’s blood washes away all the curses born in the blood of men! So Christians all have one and the same nature and tendencies! So you must be misreading the divines!”
Thankfully, the fathers anticipated this mad rejoinder and rebuked it aforehand: “This corruption of nature, during this life, doth remain in those that are regenerated; and although it be, through Christ, pardoned, and mortified; yet both itself, and all the motions thereof, are truly and properly sin.” (WCF 6:5)
Yes, the official Westminister position on the matter is that traits of character are not only heritable by ‘nature’ (genetically), but also that they are not removed from us by regeneration.
The same chapter concludes with a definition of sin:
Every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression of the righteous law of God… (WCF 6:6)
This raises the question — where is noticing inherited traits (the essence of race realism), which Alienists insist is grievous sin, condemned in the law of God? And by what monumental cognitive dissonance do they ignore this supposed infraction in the Confession itself?
Read Part 2
| Tweet |
|
|
|
