An article by Charlie Peters on spiked-online.com.
Excerpt:
Perhaps these governors of dwindling flocks have noticed that the only two growing religions in Britain today are Islam and progressivism. They can’t preach the former, so they have dived head-first into associating themselves with the latter at every available opportunity.
Re “dwindling flocks”, see also here.
North writes about ‘The Two Most Important Books in My Life‘.
Excerpts:
Rushdoony’s thinking was shaped by his commitment to Van Til’s Bible-based defense of the faith. But he did not share Van Til’s Dutch Reformed amillennialism, which teaches that Christians will always be in a defensive minority condition. Rushdoony was a postmillennialist, which had been the common view of American Presbyterianism until after the Civil War. It teaches Christian victory in history before the Second Coming.
[…]
It was only with my book on Exodus 20, meaning the Ten Commandments, did the covenant model begin to shake my thinking. I wrote The Sinai Strategy from 1985 to 1986. It reflects the five-point model. But I did not do this self-consciously. I was working with Sutton’s manuscript. I had developed a sense of the model. My book was structured as if I had fully understood Sutton’s model. I didn’t. I structured the Ten Commandments in terms of Sutton’s five-point covenant model: two five-point sections, each with the same five-point order. The first five commandments are priestly; the second five commandments are kingly. That only became clear to me when the book had already been typeset.
Continue readingI’ve recently posted an article by Doug Wilson about Gary North. Now Bionic Mosquito (B. M.) has written an interesting article on Doug Wilson.
Quotes:
Who is Doug Wilson? Douglas James Wilson (born 1953) is a conservative Reformed and evangelical theologian, pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, faculty member at New Saint Andrews College, and author and speaker.
What does he say about himself?
Theology that Bites Back: I want to advance a Chestertonian Calvinism on education, sex and culture, theology, politics, book reviews, postmodernism, expository studies, along with other random tidbits that come into my head. In theology I am an evangelical, postmill, Calvinist, Reformed, and Presbyterian, pretty much in that order.
Not someone the mainstream would embrace. Also, not someone that many Christians would embrace.
Regarding the basic, inescapable triad of religions (that of power, escape, and dominion), B. M. writes (and quotes):
Continue readingThe 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.
Continue reading here.
I will comment on this later.
I also refer to Jordan Peterson’s lecture on Cain and Abel.
A text worth reading not just for Catholic 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.
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.
Continue reading here.
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.
Continue reading here.
More obituaries:
By Friday Odey
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
~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.