Category Archives: Christianity

What Exactly Did the Reformation Reform?

Article by Frank van Dun

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century reformed nothing but it changed everything. It was a crucially important factor in the demise of Medieval Latin Christendom and its rapid transformation in what we now know as Europe or, more generally, the West. Philosophically and religiously it rede­fined and revolutionized Western civilization, for, what characterizes a civiliza­tion is not so much what people do (which is pretty much the same always and everywhere) as what they conscientiously believe they ought to do: its fundamental scheme of justification and rectification — in a word, its conscience.

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The Naughty Boy of Evangelicalism

Offers a good, concise description of the three basic types of Christians

Doug Wilson, on his Website “Blog and Mablog” describes the condition of evangelical Christianity in today’s world, following the pattern first formulated by Gary North:

First, those believers who have a yen for power may be called friends-of-the-regime. They do not make claims of control over your life directly, but they certainly want to be on the good side of those who do. They want to be fully cooperative with them, believing that helping the tyrants forge your chains should be called something like “loving your neighbor.” These are the pastors and elders who want to assume the very best about the latest contradictory fog bank from the CDC, and who assume the very worst about the consciences of their own most faithful parishioners.

Second, those believers who are keeping their head down until the rapture are seeking a way of escape. Or, if dispensational theology is not their bag, this kind of person might retreat into pietism or confessionalism. The pietist wants to keep his own personal nose clean until God sees fit to take him out of this dirty world, and so he wants to escape unnoticed in this world until he can escape unnoticed to a better world. And the escapist confessionalist wants to sit in the red sports car of the historic Reformed tradition, fire that baby up, put the clutch all the way in, all the way to the floor, and, together with R. Scott Clark, make vroom vroom noises.

And then, third, we have those with a mind for dominion. These are the believers who seek to labor under the grace of God, seeking to have God load those labors up with what I call Deuteronomic blessings in this life, and in the life to come, all of Christ. This third group is the historic Reformed position. It was held by John Calvin, Pierre Viret, Martin Bucer, John Knox, the Westminster divines, Jonathan Edwards, Abraham Kuyper, and, quite humbled to be included in such an august listing, and not quite sure how I came to be added to it, me.

He adds some thoughts about how things are going currently:

The now thoroughly discredited leadership of the evangelical movement has been our Neville Chamberlain, and our last two years of chaos have been Hitler’s invasion of Poland. I speak in a dark parable. But the coming leadership of evangelicalism will need to be Churchillian—or we perish.

Malthusianism vs. Covenantalism

Text by Gary North

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth (Gen. 1:28).

That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies (Gen. 22:17).

And thou saidst, I will surely do thee good, and make thy seed as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude (Gen. 32:12).

The message is clear: the primary blessing in history is an expanding population of covenant-keepers. Man’s dominion assignment from God mandates population growth. God’s covenantal promise to Abraham involved a multiplication of his heirs. World dominion and population growth are linked.(1)

This fact is no longer taken seriously by most Protestant Christians. It is, however, taken very seriously by the zero population growth movement, which sees man as the cancer of the world. Man’s dominion over nature is seen as the ultimate threat to nature. Bill McKibben has stated this theology well: “We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.” Nothing but man: this is blasphemy in the minds of modern pantheists and nature-worshippers.

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Gary North, RIP

Obituary by Craig Bulkeley

When Gary Kilgore North passed away on February 24, 2022, at the age of 80, he left behind a massive storehouse of Christian scholarship without parallel in the modern church. For nearly fifty-five straight and solid years he applied himself as a craftsman with single-mind devotion to researching, writing, and speaking about God’s world from the perspective of God’s Word. While he lived his work benefited his large readership around the world. For generations to come it will be of great use to the Church of his Lord Jesus Christ.

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More obituaries:

By Timothy Terrell

By Friday Odey

By Bionic Mosquito

By Daniel Silliman (Christianity Today)

By John Reasnor

By Mark Skousen, who writes: “There are people in one’s life that you wish you could talk or write to after they die. Gary North is one of them.”

The memorial service, 26/03/2022

Lovely People

A short graphic novel about bunnies living in a social credit system

~Note from the artist/author: In 2020 I gave my life into the hands of Jesus and it pressed my [sic!] to stop being a coward and create this comic. The comic is meant to illustrate, in an easy to comprehend way, how social credit systems function so that more people can be mentally prepared. It’s written from a Christian worldview (as a fresh convert at the time) but is made for both Christians and non-Christians. Hopefully it gives you something. ~

It basically is a lighter version of George Orwell’s “1984”. It took me about 30 minutes to read.

Here it is.

The Bible is a Textbook on Life

Seeing life from God's perspective

You’ve heard people claim that the Bible is not a textbook on particular topics. While that’s generally true, the Bible is a book about all of life. Everything that it speaks of is useful and true for all times and all people. Humanity needs special revelation in order to see life from God’s perspective, rather than through our own sinful perspective. In this final part of the interview between Gary North and Cal Beisner, they discuss Christian education and how we move forward.

It contains these words, spoken by Cal Beisner, which he says he occasionally asks people in Q&A sessions after one of his talks (scroll to 14:15 min):

“Who in his right mind ever thought it made any sense whatsoever to entrust to the government the shaping of the minds of the people by whose consent it is supposed to govern? [. . .] What does consent mean, if the government determines what we thing? [. . .] Government education and liberty are incompatible in the long term.”

(Interview part 1)

(Interview part 2)

It Takes Time

The short term may look bad, but the long term is glorious

In this second part of the interview between Dr. Gary North and Cal Beisner, the discussion turns to long-term and short-term views. A long-term victorious outlook will yield much different results than a short-term pessimistic outlook. Thinking through the consequences of the Christian worldview on every topic of human existence takes time. This will not happen when the church is convinced that its time on earth is short.