Category: Articles

‘Healing the Damage Caused by Bad Theology’ (Martin Selbrede)

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Martin Selbrede | heroinamerica

“We’re only passing through… The world is not my home… Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world…”

We’ve all heard the excuses: the bad theology that justifies Christian inaction, impotence, and irrelevance. We know all the cliches. Polishing the brass on the sinking ship, etc. City of God vs. City of Man. The result is a “retreatist theology” and a Christian, most likely a Protestant, “constantly ready to flee.”

Martin Selbrede finds a corrective in the work of Cornelius van der Waal, who died in 1980. In The World, Our Home, van der Waal analyzed all the bad theology–“surrender theology”–that has seeped into Christian churches since the Reformation.

https://chalcedon.edu/magazine/healing-the-damage-caused-by-bad-theology

We are not called to hand the whole shooting match over to the devil and his servants! We are called to fulfill the Great Commission, to win ground for Christ’s Kingdom–we are called not to mourn, not to cower in the pews, but to work.

Over and over against we are called upon to straighten out the bad theology and put our churches back on course. Our home is the world: that’s why God put us there. The earth is the LORD’s. And we are His servants and His stewards.

Why that should be so hard to remember… well, I don’t know.

‘Deplorables, Cancel the Jan. 6 PSYOP!’

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Ilana Mercer (Author of Into the Cannibal's Pot)

This is something that must be said, and I can’t say it any better than Ilana Mercer did yesterday in her townhall.com column (https://townhall.com/columnists/ilanamercer/2022/01/07/deplorables-cancel-the-january-6-psyop-n2601542).

The rioters, looters, and other criminals who spent the whole of last summer rampaging in Democrat cities all over the country know the Party has their backs. Offenders, if they were arrested at all, were released almost immediately–usually without any charges being filed. Presstitute nooze media called the carnage “mostly peaceful protests,” Far Left celebrities lined up to pay their bail (if bail was even required), and on Jan. 6 the whole mob of them came out with hysterical warblings about “the threat to our democracy” posed by those millions of us who are convinced there was something radically wrong with our 2020 elections. So “our” protesters sit in solitary confinement without trial while theirs, with the full blessing of the Party, go on to ever greater crimes.

Is there anything the Democrat Party won’t do to acquire and keep political power? Their dream of a one-party socialist authoritarian state leads them on and on.

If we don’t get very, very serious about winning this year’s elections, we  can probably kiss our republic goodbye.

God help us.

 

‘Joy to the World Because Our King Reigns’

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Joy to the World inspired this wonderful essay by Mark Rushdoony.

https://chalcedon.edu/blog/joy-to-the-world-because-our-king-reigns

Yes, as Mark points out, our world is in a heap of trouble just now. Our culture is polluted with a deep spiritual pollution. Our “leaders” push self-destructive, even suicidal, policies. Rebelling against God, they are in rebellion against reality itself. That’s what “transgender” is all about.

But the Christmas hymn presents the truth in all its power: Jesus Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords, reigning both in heaven and on the earth; and He has already lifted the curse. Evil will play itself out.

Thank you, Mark, for reminding us.

‘What Part of Christmas Don’t They Understand?’ (2014)

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

See the source image

I wasn’t able to write a Newswithviews column this week. I worked so hard, finishing The Witch Box, that other jobs just piled up on me.

So here’s one from Christmas Day, seven years ago:

https://newswithviews.com/Duigon/lee282.htm

What? A Christmas column inspired by 1 Corinthians Chapter 1?

You bet.

Merry Christmas, everybody–and here’s to the day, by the grace and power of God, we get our freedom back.

My Newswithviews Column, Dec. 2 (‘Hostile Government’)

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Our government doesn’t like us much. In fact, it despises us.

Which explains a lot of the nooze we see today.

Hostile Government

It’s as if a foreign power conquered us, and ground us down under their alien “woke” ideology. And anyone who rises up against it will be sorry!

I do remember when the people on the school board were your friends and neighbors.

Now it’s more like a bunch of comissars imported via time machine from the Soviet Union, circa 1950.

And the rest of the government’s worse.

R.J. Rushdoony, ‘Religious Liberty’

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Amazon.com: R. J. Rushdoony: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

(This important essay on the roots of religious liberty, by R.J. Rushdoony, first appeared in 1991 in Roots of Reconstruction.)

This piece is a little long, but well worth reading and considering. It traces the origin of American religious liberty to Martin Luther and the Reformation: when Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, a staunch Catholic, extended his projection to Martin Luther, Protestant religious reformer–and Luther extended his protection to Frederick. Between them they declared the Biblical basis for religious liberty.

https://chalcedon.edu/magazine/religious-liberty

Liberty is so much more than “freedom to sin”! For Rushdoony it was a theological fact. And so it ought to be for us.

As our country’s founders so well knew, government naturally seeks at all times to extend its power–which God’s law limits. Rushdoony wrote at a time when many different government agencies were forcefully encroaching on religious liberty.

And that has not changed.

A firm Biblical understanding of and belief in religious liberty is the best protection of religious liberty. As Luther himself said, “He that believes most will protect most.”

And our freedom needs protection.

‘The World the Libs Would Build’ (2017)

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

See the source image

Let’s revisit a Newswithviews column from four years ago–when all Democrats could do about enslaving us was to dream about it and rant against our president.

The World The Libs Would Build

Now, though, they can do much more than dream! In just eight months they’ve ruptured our borders, returned us to being energy-dependent on not-so-friendly foreign countries, trashed our economy, lit a bonfire of inflation–and all of that is nothing, compared to what they want to do! Building a one-party socialist failed state hell-hole is their dream; and now they’re working on making it a horrible reality.

In just eight months, look at what they’ve done to us…

 

The Two Roads to Destruction

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Martin Selbrede | heroinamerica

This new essay by Martin Selbrede is about a conflict that can only be resolved by following God’s word–the tension between “the one and the many.”

https://chalcedon.edu/magazine/dialectical-culture

Simply put, if “the one” prevails, you wind up with tyranny–and a loss of meaning in  all but the mushiest and most useless sense. But if “the many” prevail against the one, you wind up with anarchy (leading eventually, as it always does, to a dictatorship) and the cult of Me. It is the continual tension between social order and individual liberty.

Both must be limited: but only the Bible teaches that.

There is no hope for us in following only humanistic, statist prescriptions for order and justice. These always strand us in our state of Original Sin.

This is a challenging essay, but stay with it. That little light bulb over your head might come on.

Why Is Government So Awful?

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Dr. Punyamurtula Kishore – CBS Boston

Dr. Punyamurtala Kishore

Providence! I was musing on this question–how does government get to be so awful, that it actively abuses its citizens and favors their enemies?–when it occurred to me that I’d forgotten to post Martin Selbrede’s article, He Fought the Good Fight, from the Chalcedon website.

https://chalcedon.edu/magazine/he-fought-the-good-fight

Dr. Punyamurtala Kishore was persecuted and imprisoned because his sobriety-based approach to treating opioid addiction was much more successful than the conventional more-drugs-to-treat-drugs approach. For his success, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts sought to destroy him.

Dr. Kishore died earlier this summer.

Although they took away his freedom, they couldn’t stop other states from embracing Dr. Kishore’s model and successfully applying it.

But to come to Martin’s point:

Isaiah 57:1-2, The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart: and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He shall enter into peace: they shall rest in their beds, each one walking in his uprightness.

By contrast, the closing verses of Isaiah 56 describe the sloth, the ignorance, the carelessness, and the folly of leaders, false shepherds, who wouldn’t know a righteous man if they tripped over him.

Government gets awful as it grows to be more and more dominated by self-absorbed, foolish, ignorant, careless, shallow, venal, greedy, crooked leaders. Political science courses never explained it, but Scripture surely does. It gets to be that the leaders will persecute any righteous men or women in their midst–if they’re aware of them at all.

Dr. Punyamurtala Kishore, servant of God, benefactor of the public–well done, thou good and faithful servant! Well done.

A Man Talking Sense

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Armstrong Williams, Author at The Washington Informer

Armstrong Williams

Hmm… a man is a woman with a penis, a woman is a man with a vagina, 2+2 doesn’t equal 4 anymore, all white people are born racists…

The other day, Armstrong Williams talked sense about all this. I hope he hasn’t been arrested.

https://townhall.com/columnists/armstrongwilliams/2021/07/15/is-this-normal-n2592538

“We are quickly being pushed,” he wrote, “by the Democratic Party and their cronies in the mainstream [sic] media and in big tech towards a society that does not have standards…”

Bullseye.

In recent years the wrecking ball has been “gay rights” followed by transgender mania; and of course “race” is always an excuse to wreck society. The Left homes in on micro-minorities and puts them on high pedestals–and woe to anyone who won’t bow down!

I think Mr. Williams understands that this is war. Us vs. Far Left Crazy–and the loser dies.

I can’t even imagine the kind of society those wackos want to impose on us. Pray we never have to find out.