You’ve heard of the October Revolution and the Arab Spring. Well, we may call this the Ereb Spring Revolution. Because SBC’s blasphemous MLK50 conference just so happened to be coordinated with American (Re)Vision’s ultimatum demanding all Reconstructionists to jointly anathematize Dr. Peter Hammond and Rev. John Weaver for the mythical sin of ‘racism’. And that, with the implied threat that those who decline to join the revolutionaries would be their next targets.
Whilst simultaneously consigning all the most orthodox thinkers of our day and the virtual whole of the pre-1965 Church to hell, they posthumously induct overt heathen such as MLK into the canon of Reconstructionism. Never mind that MLK’s worldview was the antithesis of Rushdoony’s. Jo and Bo apparently regard MLK’s denials of original sin, the virgin birth, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and substitutionary atonement as inconsequential in light of his service to weightier matters. Those weightier matters being cultural Marxism, of course.
And we cannot deny what is right before us: surreal as it is, they seem to have followed the pattern of Bernays, Alinsky, and all the warlocks of propaganda, dispatching programmed operatives with scripted talking points. Yes, gaggles of them suddenly popped up on every Facebook page and forum reciting the same new argument. One such dispatch hangs on a new interpretation of 1 Timothy 4:1-3:
Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;
Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.
Acolytes of the new Jo-Bo interpretation smash the caps lock key: ‘FORBIDDING TO MARRY’. This, they assure us, is an apostolic anathema issued directly and specifically against Kinism. Period. End of discussion. Quad erat demonstrandum.
But slow down there, skippy. This interpretation entirely flies in the face of all orthodox exegesis of that passage. Of which Calvin says,
Not long after the death of the apostle, arose Encratites, (who took their name from continence,) Tatianists, Catharists, Montanus with his sect, and at length Manichaeans, who had extreme aversion to marriage. . . .
In the fifth book of Eusebius, there is a fragment taken out of the writings of Apollonius, in which, among other things, he reproaches Montanus with being the first that dissolved marriage, and laid down laws for fasting.[1. Calvin’s commentary on 1 Timothy 4.]
St. Irenaeus tells us in Against Heresies that the Gnostics affirmed Basilides’s words that “marriage and bearing of children are from Satan.” From the Nag Hammadi to the Diatessaron, from the Essenes and Therapeutae to the Montanists and Cathars, an anti-marriage stance has typified the Gnostic cults. Which is in keeping with Paul’s further admonition to be on guard against “knowledge [Grk. root gnosis] falsely so called” (1 Tim. 6:20). Of which the Pulpit Commentary says:
The knowledge which is falsely so called. There is a very similar intimation of the growth of an empty philosophy, whose teaching was antagonistic to the teaching of Christ in Colossians 2:8, and with which St. Paul contrasts the true γνώσις [gnosis] in ver. 3. This was clearly the germ (called by Bishop Lightfoot “Gnostic Judaism”) of what was later more fully developed as the Gnostic heresy.
Which further confirms that the issue in 1 Timothy 4:3 is the Gnostic tendency to celibacy, not disallowance of particular sorts of unions on the basis of their being unequal yokes — a concern taken for granted by all Christians as a duty of the clan, community, and folk under Christ.
While Luther, Melanchthon, Wycliffe, and Calvin found immediate application of this passage against Rome’s priestly celibacy, none of the Reformers noted any application against the anti-miscegenation laws at center of the 700-year war to expel Africans and Arabs from the European continent. And the idea that the Reformers might have accidentally overlooked the ‘sin of racism’ in that great re-segregation known as the Reconquista. This anti-miscegenation policy of Christendom literally shaped their immediate social context. The mass expulsion of Moors, Turks, and all shades of mulattos (even if converted) raged hot up to the turn of the sixteenth century and formed the very backdrop of the Reformation. But not one solitary Reformer objected to these practices.
In fact, they had so little problem with this segregationist policy that Melanchthon opens his Augsburg Confession with a denunciation of “the Turk, that most atrocious, hereditary, and ancient enemy.” The Reformers had no inkling whatever that stereotyping racial minorities — even if on an explicitly ‘hereditary’ basis — could be sin of any sort.
Because the ‘sin of racism’ was yet to be invented. That would come only with the Marxists coining the term ‘racist’ (racistov) circa 1930 and the famed ‘long march through the institutions‘ of Christendom to subvert and convert them to the faith of cultural Marxism.
Nor did the Reformation fathers imagine any case against the covenantal-patriarchal prerogative of Christians to give (or withhold) their daughters relative to the equal-yoking of a given husband (house-bond). It was taken for granted by all that it was the father’s responsibility to steward the bride-grooming of his children in keeping with the legacy of his clan and people. This was the substance of the trustee family that Rushdoony taught to be the centerpiece of Christian society.
But I digress.
Conversely, to take 1 Timothy 4 as the Alienists insist – as referring to any who object to the validity of certain unions – also fatally undercuts the Alienist. Because if granted, it proves entirely too much. Think of it — if objecting to marriages based on the identity of the prospective partners were truly the thing condemned by the apostle, it would grant not just miscegenation, but cross-language unions, polygamy, polyandry, sodomite marriage, incest, pedophilia, and who knows what all else.
Furthermore, this libertine turn granting marriage to mean everything ultimately ends with it meaning nothing. So despite arguing the opposite direction of the old Gnostic celibates, the Alienist argument ends in exactly the same place — the erasure of marriage.
More interesting still, the anti-marriage position of the old Gnostic cults was predicated on their central conviction that physicality is either evil or irrelevant. Which just so happens to be the selfsame presupposition that our modern Alienists proclaim as part and parcel of their gospel.
I must say, though, having confronted a number of them with these answers, their rejoinders are no less coordinated than the initial allegation. They simply rage, curse, and announce their intent to do us harm by any and all means open to them.
Pray for the good brothers whom they are targeting.
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