Axe to the Root with Bojidar Marinov

Host Bojidar Marinov Description Every time someone says, “this is the real problem,” or “this is the real conflict,” it doesn’t say much about the problem or the conflict he is describing – that problem or conflict may be real, and it may not be real. But the truth is, it says a lot about the real worldview of the person saying it. Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 88 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will talk about movies.  Specifically, Captain Marvel. (So, you are warned, there will be spoilers ahead.) Actually, not about the movie so much but about the reactions to it. And specifically, the reactions to it among some churchian celebrities and their followers. I usually stay away talking about movies and literature and art, except in a very general way, as to their place in the Dominion Covenant. You might want to check Episode 49 of the Axe to the Root Podcast, titled “Art in a Covenantal Frame.” Not that I have nothing particular to say about specific pieces of art and literature and movies; I think I do, and I like art and literature and movies and I like to decipher the ethical/judicial meaning of movies and books and pieces of art. My children and I have had many interesting conversations over the years. In fact, those are perhaps our most favorite conversations, given that family reading of fiction remained the most cherished family past time till their late teenage years, and right before the oldest ones went to college. Yes, believe it or not, I kept reading aloud stories and novels to my children long after they could read them on their own. With the youngest now, as she is still at home, we watch movies and sometimes we spent hours discussing their ethical/judicial value. So, there, it is not that I am indifferent to movies and fiction books and I have nothing to say; I just believe that there are others who are better qualified than me to say it in a much more exciting and insightful way. But this case is different. It’s not that the movie is anything special as artistic value. It is a fine movie, to be sure. Not really a masterpiece of the greatest kind, but not the worst out there. It fits nicely into the larger picture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it provides what it was meant to provide: an origin story. The story was consistent with the rest of the cinematic universe, and it was believable . . . well, believable within the context of that universe. I think it did not exploit all the possibilities for a dramatic effect at the point of the protagonist’s conversion; that scene in Maria Rambeau’s house where Carol Danvers learned that the Skrulls were not villains but refugees persecuted by the same empire that sent her to fight them, could have been a little longer, more dramatic, and more fraught with tension, soul-searching, and anger (suppressed or not) at the revelation that one had been lied to. I know that’s what I would do if I was faced with such challenge against the morality of all my beliefs and actions so far. But, then again, women are different from men; it is possible that a woman can make that transition faster than a man, I don’t know. We do see in the Bible women who are capable of making logical conclusions much quicker than men do. Either way, the movie in general was good. Do I want to watch it again? Yes, absolutely. It is enjoyable in many respects and as a whole. So, what did I like in the movie? Or, let’s be more comprehensive: what did I see in the movie? What was it that made it a good movie, and enjoyable at that, for a person like me who always tries to judge things based on a covenantal perspective? There were two ethical/judicial themes in the movie, one major and one minor, or, rather, auxiliary to the major one. The major theme was the individual moral conscience of man (and I use “man” in the Biblical, generic sense, including women in it) vs. the collectivist demands of a militaristic, expansionist empire. The movie starts with Vers: an extremely powerful woman whose body is modified to control and manipulate physical processes down to nuclear level. She can absorb energy in her body and the release it in the form of electromagnetic (photon) blasts. She can go “binary,” which means her body physics can transform into pure energy after which she can basically cut through anything, including space ships. She doesn’t know the source of that power, but what we learn is that that power itself is the source of some pride and self-confidence. However, that’s not the main ethical problem. A worse source of pride is that she is a member – the most powerful member, at that – of the most elite unit of the most elite military of the most powerful empire in the universe, the Kree Empire. Think about being a member of the most decorated special unit of the Navy Seals of the United States. Woohoo, by Jingo, we are the best and we kick you-know-what around the globe! Them ragheads, gooks, russkies, anyone, stand no chance. And, of course, we fight for freedom! I mean, I can’t figure out how my freedom ended up in the mountains of Afghanistan or the sands of Iraq, and I can’t figure out why the more I fight, the less freedom we have at home, but who cares, we really kick ass, man! Proud to be an elite soldier for the greatest empire there is. And the enemies she is fighting are really ragheads: ugly (compared to our heroes-warriors who are all handsome and tall and athletic and a delight to the eye), and their main weapon is taqqiah: able to disguise themselves so as to look entirely like members of our glorious free western civilization, and infiltrate it and build their Dearborns, Michigan in it. I mean, what’s not to make your proud: fighting for this glorious civilization (just look at all our technologies and buildings and how big we are, being the elite of the elite, beautiful beings compared to the enemy, fighting an enemy that is ugly and uses taqqiah . . . and we know what they do to their goats, right? (Or whatever passes for goats among the Skrulls.) The only dark spot in her ambition and pride are these recurring dreams – or memories? – that she can’t get rid of. They are certainly part of something deep in her, but since she has lost her memory in an accident several years before, she can’t put the pieces back together. But that’s OK. Her benevolent parental boss – the Deep State . . . I mean, the Supreme Intelligence of the empire – is there to help her get rid of those nightmares. Just ignore them. They only hinder your full potential. You just obey and comply, and you’ll be good. Think Jason Bourne: another story about an individual artificially enhanced in service of an empire, whose bosses are still powerless to destroy the moral conscience the image of God carries with it, despite all the enhancement, special training, and amnesia. Things go downhill, however, after she is tricked and captured by the enemy. To her surprise, she discovers that the enemy has not taken advantage of her incapacitation to kill her or torture her. They only want to revive her memories. Ironic, isn’t it. Her benevolent government bosses want her to suppress her conscience; the enemies – who should be expected to kill her – want to help her revive that conscience. The proud warrior is confused. To make matters worse, in the ensuing battle, she falls to earth, the original place of her memories (she doesn’t know it yet, but she feels it), and while fighting alone against a host of Skrulls (aided only by a few confused and helpless humans), she gradually comes to discover two things. First, that she had been fighting for an oppressive regime against a victimized people who have been nothing more than refugees from that regime. And, second, she discovers her true identity: Vers is really Carol Danvers, a test pilot for the US Air Force who supposedly died 6 years earlier in a test flight crash with her mentor and instructor Dr. Wendy Lawson – the woman of her dreams and nightmares – who was an engineer for the Air Force, but her true identity was Dr. Mar-Vell, a renegade Kree scientist who was helping Skrull refugees by designing a powerful engine for them to be able to escape the Kree attacks and find a world for themselves to settle in safety. Carol Danvers acquired her powers from absorbing the energy of the explosion from the engine she destroyed after the crash, following the orders of Mar-Vell. So in terms of the ethical conflict between her individual conscience and the collectivist demands of the Empire, the circle is now closed: Carol Danvers returned to take the place of her original mentor. Her discovery of her true identity brings to light the minor ethical/judicial theme. That theme was present in Vers’s nightmares from the very beginning of the movie, but given her memory loss, made no sense; it was multiple flashes of a girl or a young woman failing at different tasks, from playing in the playground to the ropes course at what seems to be a boot camp; and every time, she stands up and gets back to it again with a look of determination om her face. That minor theme turns out to be the old conflict between individual determination and ambition and the established and cherished social customs, stereotypes, and prejudices. Think of the movie Hidden Figures where the protagonists were looked down upon because they were black and female. Think of Facing the Giants, where the Eagles were considered the underdog by default. The ethical solution to this conflict should be obvious to everyone who has even an ounce of moral conscience: only dedication and hard work can overcome stereotypes and prejudice. After all, this is what modern Christians and conservatives in general tell those who are trapped in the vicious cycle of ghetto poverty: “hard work and dedication will surely help you get out of it, no matter how much prejudice and discrimination you face.” Right? Carol Danvers has lived through it: she has had to deal with every bit of prejudice and discrimination, through all the social stereotypes of what a woman can and can’t do. And she dealt with it through hard work and dedication. You would expect that all Christians and conservatives would cheer for her. (As we will see, that’s not the case.) Unfortunately, having been unwittingly involved in a space conflict much larger than anything she had faced before, she is killed. Or at least that’s how it appears to her bosses on earth, at any rate. There is a moral caveat here, however. Dedication, when devoid of a moral compass, can become an unhealthy and idolatrous ambition. While that is not the central theme of the movie, hints of such moral deterioration can be seen in the pre-crash Carol Danvers: she almost looks like she has lost her human face. She acts artificially at times, and some of her responses seem a little too much pre-played. She always acts as if she is there to prove something, or to prove herself. The problem persists and becomes even worse when the “re-born” Vers works for Starforce; she is constantly trying to prove herself against her own commander, and before the Supreme Intelligence. Once on earth, meeting Nick Fury and other agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., she continues her showing off, and especially showing off her powers. She uses her signature photon blasts a little too liberally, even just to show who she is, and she is not even trying to hide the pride of who she is. “You are a Kree,” Nick Fury says, “a race of noble warriors?” Vers is quick to correct him with prideful emphasis in her voice: “Heroes. A race of noble warriors heroes.” Her ambition may not be necessarily bad, but it always has an unhealthy streak in it, and once she had the power she craved, it was now going much worse. But, as should be expected, returning to her humble beginnings makes her rethink that and reform her moral character. She is now ultimately powerful, having removed the device suppressing her powers, and yet, when her former commander challenges her to one last fight, she replies, “I have nothing to prove to you.” She doesn’t need any showing off anymore, and she doesn’t need a showdown; instead of flying straight for the Kree Empire to finish it off, she commits herself to humbly serve those whom she has persecuted before. Here again, the moral circle is completed, and she has found redemption. From the trailers for Endgame I expected that that moral problem would still be there to haunt her, but I was wrong. Her conversion seems to be complete. So, this is what I saw in the movie: the ethical/judicial themes. But then again, that’s what I have been trying to train my senses in for the last 25 years: to discern good and evil. That’s what Hebrews 5:14 tells me is the mark of a mature man. And 1 Cor. 2:15 tells me that the characteristic of a spiritual man is that he judges all things: that is, discerns good and evil in all things. So, trying to be obedient to this mandate to be mature, I have been trying to subject all my judgments of everything in the world around me to one and only paradigm: good vs evil. And, of course, the sub-paradigms that follow from it: righteousness vs. wickedness, obedience vs. disobedience, justice vs. injustice, depravity vs. reformation, death vs. redemption, judgment vs. salvation, etc. Anything else in the universe and in human experience is just furniture and background that serves the main paradigm: power, beauty, harmony, efficiency, productivity, intellect, art, health, genetics, ancestry, science, imagination, all these are inconsequential, and in themselves carry no significance. Their only purpose is to be made to serve the Covenant, which means to serve the cause of righteousness and justice. Outside such service, they have no meaning. That’s one way we can detect idolatry: when a religion or ideology tells us that some other paradigm is just as important as the paradigm good vs. evil, and we need to adjust our senses to discern those other paradigms at the same level as good and evil. (For example, the complaint of the Federal Vision movement against Christian Reconstruction was that it was too “woodenly restricted to judicial issues.” According to its ideologues, there were other paradigms that deserved equal attention, like liturgy. Where that led them, we will discuss in a future episode.) You know how atheists and secularists insist that morality is relative and that there is no objective fixed standard for what is moral and what is immoral. They are willing to concede everything else in the Bible – beauty, wisdom, art, literature, even the beneficial effects of monotheism – but tell them that there is a sovereign divine immutable code of ethics, and watch the fireworks. Why? Because, that’s what defines God’s Covenant: the standard for good and evil. Nothing else. It is its very heart. That’s why I have worked to train my senses to always judge everything based on that standard. Including Captain Marvel. And in this, I don’t care about the metaphysics of the characters. They can be women or men, or Vogons, or dancing mushrooms, for all I care. I will still judge the movie based on the immutable code of ethics of the Bible. There are pagan ways of judging a movie, of course. Or of judging anything whatsoever. These are ways based on paradigms different from the issues of good and evil. For example, ontology: judge everything based on metaphysics (origin, genetics, material structure, etc.). Remember the 1995 movie, The Tuskegee Airmen? That bomber captain, the Texas boy? He couldn’t believe that blacks could fly them planes so well as to save his poor behind from two German Messerschmidts up there. Why? Because they just can’t do it. (To his credit, by the end of the movie, he changed his mind and specifically requested that the Tuskegee Airmen take him to Berlin and back. Redemption means changing your worldview from metaphysics to ethics.) Another pagan paradigm used in such judgments is power: who is given power and who isn’t. Both Communist and Nazi propaganda were obsessed with power; just google Nazi or Soviet propaganda posters and then pay attention to who is depicted as being muscular and tall and strong, and who is depicted as being short and fat, with crooked legs and feeble arms. Any identity politics, that is, any double standard based on any factor different from objective ethics – race, ethnicity, party loyalty, social status, economic status, institutional membership, beauty, intellect, etc. – is pagan by default. (It is for this reason that in 1 Cor. 11 Paul admonishes his readers to wait for each other so that there are no divisions based on such factors; the only allowable divisions are those based on interpretations of the Word.) Given that, one would expect that Christians would meet Captain Marvel with approval. Not that the movie is an overtly Christian movie; but it does meet the criteria for covenantal content by making ethics its center; and it resolves ethical problems in the right way, and demonstrates redemption. But that was not the case. Over the last several weeks, after the release of the movie, I had the sad opportunity to read quite a few comments and articles on the movie, all from Christians, that blasted the movie for its perceived ideology. In none of these comments or articles did I ever see a single ounce of covenantal – that is, ethical/judicial – approach; in fact, I could swear that the authors of all these comments and articles had formed a cabal to blast the movie based on every single worldview available to mankind today, just not from a Biblical worldview. Among those comments I read things like this: “For a woman to become a hero, she needs to become a man.” Or this: “The idea of a woman saving men is unnatural, and that’s why Brie Larson’s character is so awkward and unnatural. She almost never smiles. And she is artificial.” (Like, that’s exactly what she is trying to portray in Vers, right?) Things that makes you shake your head in disbelief and put you in a quandary: What are these people talking about, and how exactly did they see that in the movie? Another one, based on perceived power dis-balance (and we will shortly get to that paradigm of power): “Men are portrayed as weak in that movie.” Where do these people get all this nonsense? (We will see shortly.) The most popular one I have seen was published on the Desiring God Ministries web page, titled, “Behold Your Queen: The Real Conflict in Captain Marvel,” by someone Greg Morse. I usually don’t read Desiring God’s website: the quality is quite low, the worldview is limited to a few topics, and the so-called “gospel” they present is truncated to the level of a mystical religion, just as R.J. Rushdoony said in his Foundations of Social Order. But this article caught my eye because of the bombastic claim in it: “the real conflict” in Captain Marvel. You know, like there are false conflicts that other people are worried about, but the author has discovered the real one, so he is telling us what it is. You should know, every time someone says, “this is the real problem,” or “this is the real conflict,” it doesn’t say much about the problem or the conflict he is describing – that problem or conflict may be real, and it may not be real. But the truth is, it says a lot about the real worldview of the person saying it. And since worldviews are informed by religions, what Greg Morse actually did is not so much tell us about the “real conflict” in Captain Marvel, but about his own real religion. So I decided to read that article to find out what Greg Morse’s real religion is. And, by implication, to discover what the real religion of Desiring God Ministries is. It is always helpful to find out what god exactly it is that people desire. Greg Morse does not mince words. He is quite open about his religion. Here is his assessment of the “real” conflict in Captain Marvel, in Greg Morse’s own words: As I consider Disney’s new depiction of femininity in Captain Marvel, I cannot help but mourn. How far we’ve come since the days when we sought to protect and cherish our women. The great drumroll of the previous Avenger movies led to this: a woman protecting men and saving the world. The mightiest of all the Avengers — indeed, after whom they are named — is the armed princess turned feminist queen, who comes down from the tower to do what Prince Charming could not. Am I nitpicking? It is a movie after all. I wish it were. Instead of engaging the movie’s ideology as mere fiction, a fun escape to another world, we have allowed it to bear deadly fruit on earth. Along with Disney, we abandon the traditional princess vibe, and seek to empower little girls everywhere to be strong like men. Cinderella trades her glass slipper for combat boots; Belle, her books for a bazooka. Does the insanity bother us anymore? OK, before we get to the real part, he knows what he is going to say is nonsense, so he starts with a cheap emotional appeal: “How far have we come from the days we sought to protect and cherish our women.” He is not asking the women what they would consider “protecting and cherishing.” If he had asked them, he might have found a quite disturbing fact: women actually loved the movie. I am yet to meet a single woman who thought that the movie undermined the call to protect and cherish our women. Looks like, even before we get to the “real” conflict, Morse’s problem is his own problem, of a man who just doesn’t care what women think and say. “I am going to protect you and cherish you my way, and I won’t care what you think or want.” Right here, a real man could just stop Morse in his tracks by retorting, “Why don’t we first listen to our women, if we are going to really cherish them? And when was that time when you sought to protect and cherish them? How did it work? If you were so good at it, why do our women today ignore your emotional appeal? Could it be that you failed? 200 hundred proven sexual predators among the leadership of the Southern Baptist churches alone over the last 20 years, and 700 victims of their violence and abuse . . . and those are only of whom we know. Who knows how many were out there in the other denominations that were never caught or exposed? How many of those predators were truly disciplined and how many were protected by their celebrity status? Does that sound like protecting and cherishing our women? Or does it sound like your idyllic days you sought to protect and cherish your women are simply a figment of your imagination and a propaganda pitch? May be that’s why our women want what that movie offers them in a fiction form. The truth is, your idyllic days never existed; you never cared about our women. You only pretend to care about them when something else that you really cherish is at stake.” I am digressing here. But from Morse’s words, we know what exactly is at stake. It is power. Or, rather, the distribution of power in the society. Listen to his language: “The mightiest of all the Avengers . . . the armed princess . . . seek to empower little girls everywhere to be strong like men.” See that? In the three sentences where he introduces his “real” conflict – as he sees it – he repeats four versions of “power”: mighty, armed, empower, strong. There is nothing about ethics, good and evil, redemption, moral conscience, etc. It is all about power. Or, more precisely, power given to the wrong kind of person. And that wrong kind of person is not defined by their ethical or covenantal status before God, but by their ontological, metaphysical essence. Power is given to women in that movie, you know. But by right, power doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us men, so that we can protect women. We are supposed to keep women weak, otherwise how could we protect them? You give women the power to protect themselves, and the world goes upside down. Greg Morse’s issue is nothing unusual. It’s just that the manner of some men is upon him: men who feel intimidated when a more powerful man is at the same party as them. They feel excluded, worthless, meaningless, by comparison. Now imagine what happens when there is a powerful woman around. That must be the end of the world. Or, at least, it is the end of those good old days when people like Greg Morse cherished and protected our women. But now that the women are becoming powerful, Morse can’t cherish them and protect them. Some may not like my sarcasm, but it is well-deserved. If your cherishing and protecting women is predicated upon keeping women weak and preventing their empowerment, logically, your real agenda is not cherishing and protecting them. And what is more important, your religion is not the Biblical faith. It is something else. It is the religion of power. Greg Morse’s take on what the “real” conflict is reveals his true religion: it is a religion of power. Issues of justice and righteousness are not a real conflict to him. Only power is. Who is allowed to be powerful and who isn’t. Beyond that, no conflict is real. We shouldn’t be surprised, of course. For the last 100 years – or may be 200 years – the religion of power has been the main religion of the American churches. From its wholehearted support for slavery in the 19th century, through the equally wholehearted support for the segregation in the 20th century, to the equally wholehearted support today for whatever unjust policies the political parties advocate, the leadership of the American churches has always been obsessed with power and enamored with power. And not just the leadership. The vast majority of church-goers just love power, and their practical and political ethics always revolves around the concept of keeping their particular identity tribe in power. Even the issue of salvation is often tied to political power; Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas has repeated multiple times now that those who don’t vote for Trump are not saved. And, guess what, despite the glaring heresy in his statement, not a single soul at the Southern Baptist Convention has raised a voice of concern over Jeffress’s ideology, let alone call for his resignation, excommunication, or separation from the Southern Baptist Churches. Jeffress is a man of influence, after all, and influence is power; who cares if he spouts obvious heresies? Modern ecclesiology also revolves around power from beginning to end: the ethical and judicial issues of the Law of God are of very little concern; what is always important is the protection of “authority” (that’s the pet name for institutional power). The modern doctrine of local mandatory church membership is power religion at its finest: you are not a real Christian unless you submit under the institutional power of other men. When it comes to treatment of the weakest and the least among their own congregations, the religion of power is, again, on full display. We as Protestants like to talk about the sexual abuse scandals among the Roman Catholic clergy, but our own churches have been full of the same, if not worse. But that’s not the worst of it; it’s not just that the victims have been abused, they have also been silenced by means of institutional power. “Do not bring public accusations, you will ruin the life of that man.” Because the life of a powerful man is worth more than the life of a defenseless victim. Sexual abuse is not the only instance of power religion in practice; financial abuse is another one. Just recently, when the students at Jon MacArthur’s The Master’s Seminary demanded information about some seemingly false claims about the Seminary’s accreditations, MacArthur’s answer was that they should shut up, because it was not their business to know. (Despite the fact that they are the ones paying.) Just shut up and leave everything to men in power, you peasants. Everyone should know and be satisfied with their stations in life. So that’s what we got by keeping women weak: their devaluation and objectification. And certainly not their cherishing or protection. So the days Morse fantasizes about have never actually been. But that’s OK to Morse; it’s not really a real conflict. Power was still in the hands of the right people. That led to injustice, of course, at a grand scale, but injustice is a rather lesser conflict, or no conflict at all. Not the “real” one, for sure. Morse says that we have allowed the ideology of the movie (as he imagines that ideology, revolving around power) to “bear deadly fruit on earth.” And that “deadly fruit” is, what do ya think? It is “empowering little girls everywhere to be strong like men.” Ya know, “deadly fruit” as in thousands of empowered little girls roaming around the planet murdering tens and hundreds of millions? Last time I checked, those tens and hundreds of millions were murdered by men under ideologies that actually agreed with Greg Morse on women’s station in life. The patriarchal monarchical empires of Europe in the early 20th century gave WWI. The notoriously machistic Nazi regime gave us WWII. (The Nazis didn’t even accept women as members of the Nazi Party, nor did they allowed women in government positions. The Nazi view of the place of women was quite the same as Morse’s.) Modern persecution of Christians around the globe is mainly done by Muslims, and we know their view of the place of women in the society. So what “deadly fruit” is Morse talking about, again? The real deadly fruit is that of his own ideology. As the church believes, so the world goes, even the unbelieving world. So when the church and its leaders are committed not to the Biblical faith but to a power religion (even if it is under a thin veneer of Christian theology), we should expect the world and its leaders to be committed to the same power religion, with our without the veneer. We should expect, therefore, to see Morse’s religion replicated in the world around us, and especially in the governments and their policies around us. In Christendom, the official transition to religion of power as the official policy-making ideology of governments started with Napoleon: “There are only two forces that unite men: fear and interest.” While in the 19th century, governments were still a bit shy to display that religion openly, that shyness disappeared with WWI; it was a war entirely fought based on the concept of who has more power, not on what the right thing to do was. Stalin continued the same obsession with power over ethics (we wouldn’t expect a professed atheist to worry too much about ethics, would we. When in the 1930s, Stalin was asked by the French socialist Pierre Laval for an advice on how to win the Pope to his side so that he could win the hearts of the French Catholics, Stalin’s reply was short: “How many divisions does the Pope have?” The Nazis’ obsession with power is well-known; one just needs to watch Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda movie about Hitler, The Triumph of the Will, to get a grasp of how obsessed they were with power. In fact, that’s the very defining feature of all totalitarian regimes; other dictators have also been quite open about their addiction to power. Think Mao, “Politics comes out of the barrel of a gun”; and indeed, politics in the world today is almost entirely predicated on who has the bigger guns, not on who shows a greater level of service and help. Perhaps all these examples seem a bit too abstract to you. Well, then, look at American politics in the last several decades, and especially in the last couple of years. And no, not only the leftists, that is, the Democrat Party. The other leftists – the Republicans – are entirely obsessed with power. Donald Trump’s rhetoric has been based solely on the paradigm of power and who wields that power. “Make America great again” is not about making America the moral leader of the world again, a nation that uses its wealth and power to oppose dictators, help the oppressed, welcome the stranger to share in its greatness, and generally use its blessings from God to bless others. It is about a constant anxiety that others out there may be taking advantage of us in some nefarious ways, so let’s overpower them and show them who’s the boss here. It is “greatness” based on power, not true greatness based on service and moral leadership. It is the psychology of a sociopath who would rather live alone and rejected by all just to make sure he doesn’t do something by mistake to benefit or empower other people than himself. This is power religion in its ultimate madness, in its American version. The constant warmongering and gloating over our ability to inflict death is another example; think Ted Cruz, “I don’t know if the sand in the desert can glow in the dark, but we will find out.” It’s in the South Carolina’s conservative evangelical booing of Ron Paul when he laid out his principle of foreign policy: “Do unto others as you want done unto you.” That’s a heresy under the religion of power; we do unto others according to our might, not according to your outdated ethical code of Semitic desert shepherds of 2,000 years ago. It’s in the worship of police. It’s in the calls for shooting women and children at the border whose “crime” is that they want to find safety. Our civil government at every level has abandoned its function to protect justice and has turned into an arena of competing powers – and that is only because those who profess to be “Christians” have made the religion of power their true religion, abandoning the cause of the Gospel, while paying lip service to the Gospel. And that’s the way they treat women, as well. Because women are weaker, and whoever is weaker, must have no voice in a world of powers. And certainly don’t try to empower women: if they have been created weaker, that must be for a purpose, so don’t try to empower them; you will tilt the balance of power. That’s Morse’s “real” conflict. Unfortunately for Morse, this is not going to end well for him and his ilk. Obsession with power, and worship of power, always ends badly in the Bible, and those who crave power end up victims of the same power they craved. Jesus warned the disciples that they should not succumb to the temptation of resorting to power to deal with the enemies of the Gospel (Luke 9:55-56), and when Peter did resort to power, Jesus gave Him the Biblical principle: “All who draw the sword will die by the sword.” In Revelation 17, that principle is applied to the Apostate Church, the Harlot that is Babylon: she rides on the Beast (which is the political power), but then the Beast turns around and tears her apart; in fact, the very horns of the Beast (symbols of power) are those who are said to hate the harlot and eat her flesh and burn her with fire. Whatever your eschatological position on Revelation may be, at least this one is sure: an apostate church is a church that rides on the Beast (power) and eventually gets destroyed by that same power. Perhaps this is one of the reason, or the very reason why the church in America has lost so much of its influence in the society, and has been impotent to preach the Gospel with true spiritual power. The more the church has relied in the Beast to sustain and carry it, the more the Beast has been turning upon her. We like to blame Satan, the world, the liberals, the Democrats, the millennials, the feminists, Hollywood, the mythical “cultural Marxism,” but in reality, it is our own worship of power that has destroyed our witness, and has turned the society over to idols. And we have been on the losing side. God said to Israel in the Old Covenant: “You want to worship the gods of the nations? I will put you under the law systems of the gods of the nations, to see how you like it.” He might be saying the same to the church today: “You want to rely on political power for self-preservation? I will put you under that political power to see how you like it.” So if, Morse wants to see where the real deadly influence is, it is not empowering the weakest in our society. It is in his obsession with power . Empowering the weak is actually the Biblical standard. Including the women. Women are created physically weaker, that goes without saying, and the Bible says it. But there is no law against empowering them. Their weaker state is not something we should uphold as a religious standard. To the contrary, we should teach our girls to overcome their weakness and indeed, be as strong as men. Because some day a man may approach them with evil intentions, and they need to be prepared to inflict as much pain and destruction on the criminal as to make him abandon his evil intentions. This is real cherishing and protecting our women; keeping them weak so that some men can feel important is selfishness, not cherishing and not protecting. Women should be taught to fight, and they should be taught, as much as possible, to break skulls for God. Or spaceships, why not? Greg Morse, with his obsession with power, is on the losing side of history. On the winning side of history is service: those who are powerful, using their power not to establish their own importance, but to empower the weak: widows, orphans, foreigners, the poor, and, of course, women. That’s why he and his ilk are losing the cultural war in America, and the feminists are winning it. The reversal will come only when the church reverses its view of power, and outdoes the enemies of God in empowering the weak. As long as we as a church are obsessed with the distribution of power, we will be on the losing side. Matt. 25:34-46 continues to be a valid warning to all of us, especially to those who claim to be professing Christ: Whatever we do to the weakest among us will determine what will be done to us on the final day. And that’s the truly real conflict in Greg Morse’s article. The books I will assign for reading this week is Frank McDonough, Sophie Scholl. Read and remember: women can be stronger than men. So strong as to bravely go where no man has gone before, and lay down their lives where no man dared to. And men who want women weak in order to look strong themselves are not really strong; they are selfish weaklings. A strong man is a man for whom empowered women are not a threat to his own masculinity, and he is still capable of cherishing and protecting them. In your prayer and givings, remember Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe. We are not obsessed with distribution of power. We empower all, especially the weakest among us. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless y’all. 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Captain Marvel and the Madness of Power Religion Host Bojidar Marinov Description Every time someone says, “this is the real problem,” or “this is the real conflict,” it doesn’t say much about the problem or the conflict he is describing – that problem or conflict may be real, and it may not be real. But the truth is, it says a lot about the real worldview of the person saying it. Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 88 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will talk about movies.  Specifically, Captain Marvel. (So, you are warned, there will be spoilers ahead.) Actually, not about the movie so much but about the reactions to it. And specifically, the reactions to it among some churchian celebrities and their followers. I usually stay away talking about movies and literature and art, except in a very general way, as to their place in the Dominion Covenant. You might want to check Episode 49 of the Axe to the Root Podcast, titled “Art in a Covenantal Frame.” Not that I have nothing particular to say about specific pieces of art and literature and movies; I think I do, and I like art and literature and movies and I like to decipher the ethical/judicial meaning of movies and books and pieces of art. My children and I have had many interesting conversations over the years. In fact, those are perhaps our most favorite conversations, given that family reading of fiction remained the most cherished family past time till their late teenage years, and right before the oldest ones went to college. Yes, believe it or not, I kept reading aloud stories and novels to my children long after they could read them on their own. With the youngest now, as she is still at home, we watch movies and sometimes we spent hours discussing their ethical/judicial value. So, there, it is not that I am indifferent to movies and fiction books and I have nothing to say; I just believe that there are others who are better qualified than me to say it in a much more exciting and insightful way. But this case is different. It’s not that the movie is anything special as artistic value. It is a fine movie, to be sure. Not really a masterpiece of the greatest kind, but not the worst out there. It fits nicely into the larger picture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it provides what it was meant to provide: an origin story. The story was consistent with the rest of the cinematic universe, and it was believable . . . well, believable within the context of that universe. I think it did not exploit all the possibilities for a dramatic effect at the point of the protagonist’s conversion; that scene in Maria Rambeau’s house where Carol Danvers learned that the Skrulls were not villains but refugees persecuted by the same empire that sent her to fight them, could have been a little longer, more dramatic, and more fraught with tension, soul-searching, and anger (suppressed or not) at the revelation that one had been lied to. I know that’s what I would do if I was faced with such challenge against the morality of all my beliefs and actions so far. But, then again, women are different from men; it is possible that a woman can make that transition faster than a man, I don’t know. We do see in the Bible women who are capable of making logical conclusions much quicker than men do. Either way, the movie in general was good. Do I want to watch it again? Yes, absolutely. It is enjoyable in many respects and as a whole. So, what did I like in the movie? Or, let’s be more comprehensive: what did I see in the movie? What was it that made it a good movie, and enjoyable at that, for a person like me who always tries to judge things based on a covenantal perspective? There were two ethical/judicial themes in the movie, one major and one minor, or, rather, auxiliary to the major one. The major theme was the individual moral conscience of man (and I use “man” in the Biblical, generic sense, including women in it) vs. the collectivist demands of a militaristic, expansionist empire. The movie starts with Vers: an extremely powerful woman whose body is modified to control and manipulate physical processes down to nuclear level. She can absorb energy in her body and the release it in the form of electromagnetic (photon) blasts. She can go “binary,” which means her body physics can transform into pure energy after which she can basically cut through anything, including space ships. She doesn’t know the source of that power, but what we learn is that that power itself is the source of some pride and self-confidence. However, that’s not the main ethical problem. A worse source of pride is that she is a member – the most powerful member, at that – of the most elite unit of the most elite military of the most powerful empire in the universe, the Kree Empire. Think about being a member of the most decorated special unit of the Navy Seals of the United States. Woohoo, by Jingo, we are the best and we kick you-know-what around the globe! Them ragheads, gooks, russkies, anyone, stand no chance. And, of course, we fight for freedom! I mean, I can’t figure out how my freedom ended up in the mountains of Afghanistan or the sands of Iraq, and I can’t figure out why the more I fight, the less freedom we have at home, but who cares, we really kick ass, man! Proud to be an elite soldier for the greatest empire there is. And the enemies she is fighting are really ragheads: ugly (compared to our heroes-warriors who are all handsome and tall and athletic and a delight to the eye), and their main weapon is taqqiah: able to disguise themselves so as to look entirely like members of our glorious free western civilization, and infiltrate it and build their Dearborns, Michigan in it. I mean, what’s not to make your proud: fighting for this glorious civilization (just look at all our technologies and buildings and how big we are, being the elite of the elite, beautiful beings compared to the enemy, fighting an enemy that is ugly and uses taqqiah . . . and we know what they do to their goats, right? (Or whatever passes for goats among the Skrulls.) The only dark spot in her ambition and pride are these recurring dreams – or memories? – that she can’t get rid of. They are certainly part of something deep in her, but since she has lost her memory in an accident several years before, she can’t put the pieces back together. But that’s OK. Her benevolent parental boss – the Deep State . . . I mean, the Supreme Intelligence of the empire – is there to help her get rid of those nightmares. Just ignore them. They only hinder your full potential. You just obey and comply, and you’ll be good. Think Jason Bourne: another story about an individual artificially enhanced in service of an empire, whose bosses are still powerless to destroy the moral conscience the image of God carries with it, despite all the enhancement, special training, and amnesia. Things go downhill, however, after she is tricked and captured by the enemy. To her surprise, she discovers that the enemy has not taken advantage of her incapacitation to kill her or torture her. They only want to revive her memories. Ironic, isn’t it. Her benevolent government bosses want her to suppress her conscience; the enemies – who should be expected to kill her – want to help her revive that conscience. The proud warrior is confused. To make matters worse, in the ensuing battle, she falls to earth, the original place of her memories (she doesn’t know it yet, but she feels it), and while fighting alone against a host of Skrulls (aided only by a few confused and helpless humans), she gradually comes to discover two things. First, that she had been fighting for an oppressive regime against a victimized people who have been nothing more than refugees from that regime. And, second, she discovers her true identity: Vers is really Carol Danvers, a test pilot for the US Air Force who supposedly died 6 years earlier in a test flight crash with her mentor and instructor Dr. Wendy Lawson – the woman of her dreams and nightmares – who was an engineer for the Air Force, but her true identity was Dr. Mar-Vell, a renegade Kree scientist who was helping Skrull refugees by designing a powerful engine for them to be able to escape the Kree attacks and find a world for themselves to settle in safety. Carol Danvers acquired her powers from absorbing the energy of the explosion from the engine she destroyed after the crash, following the orders of Mar-Vell. So in terms of the ethical conflict between her individual conscience and the collectivist demands of the Empire, the circle is now closed: Carol Danvers returned to take the place of her original mentor. Her discovery of her true identity brings to light the minor ethical/judicial theme. That theme was present in Vers’s nightmares from the very beginning of the movie, but given her memory loss, made no sense; it was multiple flashes of a girl or a young woman failing at different tasks, from playing in the playground to the ropes course at what seems to be a boot camp; and every time, she stands up and gets back to it again with a look of determination om her face. That minor theme turns out to be the old conflict between individual determination and ambition and the established and cherished social customs, stereotypes, and prejudices. Think of the movie Hidden Figures where the protagonists were looked down upon because they were black and female. Think of Facing the Giants, where the Eagles were considered the underdog by default. The ethical solution to this conflict should be obvious to everyone who has even an ounce of moral conscience: only dedication and hard work can overcome stereotypes and prejudice. After all, this is what modern Christians and conservatives in general tell those who are trapped in the vicious cycle of ghetto poverty: “hard work and dedication will surely help you get out of it, no matter how much prejudice and discrimination you face.” Right? Carol Danvers has lived through it: she has had to deal with every bit of prejudice and discrimination, through all the social stereotypes of what a woman can and can’t do. And she dealt with it through hard work and dedication. You would expect that all Christians and conservatives would cheer for her. (As we will see, that’s not the case.) Unfortunately, having been unwittingly involved in a space conflict much larger than anything she had faced before, she is killed. Or at least that’s how it appears to her bosses on earth, at any rate. There is a moral caveat here, however. Dedication, when devoid of a moral compass, can become an unhealthy and idolatrous ambition. While that is not the central theme of the movie, hints of such moral deterioration can be seen in the pre-crash Carol Danvers: she almost looks like she has lost her human face. She acts artificially at times, and some of her responses seem a little too much pre-played. She always acts as if she is there to prove something, or to prove herself. The problem persists and becomes even worse when the “re-born” Vers works for Starforce; she is constantly trying to prove herself against her own commander, and before the Supreme Intelligence. Once on earth, meeting Nick Fury and other agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., she continues her showing off, and especially showing off her powers. She uses her signature photon blasts a little too liberally, even just to show who she is, and she is not even trying to hide the pride of who she is. “You are a Kree,” Nick Fury says, “a race of noble warriors?” Vers is quick to correct him with prideful emphasis in her voice: “Heroes. A race of noble warriors heroes.” Her ambition may not be necessarily bad, but it always has an unhealthy streak in it, and once she had the power she craved, it was now going much worse. But, as should be expected, returning to her humble beginnings makes her rethink that and reform her moral character. She is now ultimately powerful, having removed the device suppressing her powers, and yet, when her former commander challenges her to one last fight, she replies, “I have nothing to prove to you.” She doesn’t need any showing off anymore, and she doesn’t need a showdown; instead of flying straight for the Kree Empire to finish it off, she commits herself to humbly serve those whom she has persecuted before. Here again, the moral circle is completed, and she has found redemption. From the trailers for Endgame I expected that that moral problem would still be there to haunt her, but I was wrong. Her conversion seems to be complete. So, this is what I saw in the movie: the ethical/judicial themes. But then again, that’s what I have been trying to train my senses in for the last 25 years: to discern good and evil. That’s what Hebrews 5:14 tells me is the mark of a mature man. And 1 Cor. 2:15 tells me that the characteristic of a spiritual man is that he judges all things: that is, discerns good and evil in all things. So, trying to be obedient to this mandate to be mature, I have been trying to subject all my judgments of everything in the world around me to one and only paradigm: good vs evil. And, of course, the sub-paradigms that follow from it: righteousness vs. wickedness, obedience vs. disobedience, justice vs. injustice, depravity vs. reformation, death vs. redemption, judgment vs. salvation, etc. Anything else in the universe and in human experience is just furniture and background that serves the main paradigm: power, beauty, harmony, efficiency, productivity, intellect, art, health, genetics, ancestry, science, imagination, all these are inconsequential, and in themselves carry no significance. Their only purpose is to be made to serve the Covenant, which means to serve the cause of righteousness and justice. Outside such service, they have no meaning. That’s one way we can detect idolatry: when a religion or ideology tells us that some other paradigm is just as important as the paradigm good vs. evil, and we need to adjust our senses to discern those other paradigms at the same level as good and evil. (For example, the complaint of the Federal Vision movement against Christian Reconstruction was that it was too “woodenly restricted to judicial issues.” According to its ideologues, there were other paradigms that deserved equal attention, like liturgy. Where that led them, we will discuss in a future episode.) You know how atheists and secularists insist that morality is relative and that there is no objective fixed standard for what is moral and what is immoral. They are willing to concede everything else in the Bible – beauty, wisdom, art, literature, even the beneficial effects of monotheism – but tell them that there is a sovereign divine immutable code of ethics, and watch the fireworks. Why? Because, that’s what defines God’s Covenant: the standard for good and evil. Nothing else. It is its very heart. That’s why I have worked to train my senses to always judge everything based on that standard. Including Captain Marvel. And in this, I don’t care about the metaphysics of the characters. They can be women or men, or Vogons, or dancing mushrooms, for all I care. I will still judge the movie based on the immutable code of ethics of the Bible. There are pagan ways of judging a movie, of course. Or of judging anything whatsoever. These are ways based on paradigms different from the issues of good and evil. For example, ontology: judge everything based on metaphysics (origin, genetics, material structure, etc.). Remember the 1995 movie, The Tuskegee Airmen? That bomber captain, the Texas boy? He couldn’t believe that blacks could fly them planes so well as to save his poor behind from two German Messerschmidts up there. Why? Because they just can’t do it. (To his credit, by the end of the movie, he changed his mind and specifically requested that the Tuskegee Airmen take him to Berlin and back. Redemption means changing your worldview from metaphysics to ethics.) Another pagan paradigm used in such judgments is power: who is given power and who isn’t. Both Communist and Nazi propaganda were obsessed with power; just google Nazi or Soviet propaganda posters and then pay attention to who is depicted as being muscular and tall and strong, and who is depicted as being short and fat, with crooked legs and feeble arms. Any identity politics, that is, any double standard based on any factor different from objective ethics – race, ethnicity, party loyalty, social status, economic status, institutional membership, beauty, intellect, etc. – is pagan by default. (It is for this reason that in 1 Cor. 11 Paul admonishes his readers to wait for each other so that there are no divisions based on such factors; the only allowable divisions are those based on interpretations of the Word.) Given that, one would expect that Christians would meet Captain Marvel with approval. Not that the movie is an overtly Christian movie; but it does meet the criteria for covenantal content by making ethics its center; and it resolves ethical problems in the right way, and demonstrates redemption. But that was not the case. Over the last several weeks, after the release of the movie, I had the sad opportunity to read quite a few comments and articles on the movie, all from Christians, that blasted the movie for its perceived ideology. In none of these comments or articles did I ever see a single ounce of covenantal – that is, ethical/judicial – approach; in fact, I could swear that the authors of all these comments and articles had formed a cabal to blast the movie based on every single worldview available to mankind today, just not from a Biblical worldview. Among those comments I read things like this: “For a woman to become a hero, she needs to become a man.” Or this: “The idea of a woman saving men is unnatural, and that’s why Brie Larson’s character is so awkward and unnatural. She almost never smiles. And she is artificial.” (Like, that’s exactly what she is trying to portray in Vers, right?) Things that makes you shake your head in disbelief and put you in a quandary: What are these people talking about, and how exactly did they see that in the movie? Another one, based on perceived power dis-balance (and we will shortly get to that paradigm of power): “Men are portrayed as weak in that movie.” Where do these people get all this nonsense? (We will see shortly.) The most popular one I have seen was published on the Desiring God Ministries web page, titled, “Behold Your Queen: The Real Conflict in Captain Marvel,” by someone Greg Morse. I usually don’t read Desiring God’s website: the quality is quite low, the worldview is limited to a few topics, and the so-called “gospel” they present is truncated to the level of a mystical religion, just as R.J. Rushdoony said in his Foundations of Social Order. But this article caught my eye because of the bombastic claim in it: “the real conflict” in Captain Marvel. You know, like there are false conflicts that other people are worried about, but the author has discovered the real one, so he is telling us what it is. You should know, every time someone says, “this is the real problem,” or “this is the real conflict,” it doesn’t say much about the problem or the conflict he is describing – that problem or conflict may be real, and it may not be real. But the truth is, it says a lot about the real worldview of the person saying it. And since worldviews are informed by religions, what Greg Morse actually did is not so much tell us about the “real conflict” in Captain Marvel, but about his own real religion. So I decided to read that article to find out what Greg Morse’s real religion is. And, by implication, to discover what the real religion of Desiring God Ministries is. It is always helpful to find out what god exactly it is that people desire. Greg Morse does not mince words. He is quite open about his religion. Here is his assessment of the “real” conflict in Captain Marvel, in Greg Morse’s own words: As I consider Disney’s new depiction of femininity in Captain Marvel, I cannot help but mourn. How far we’ve come since the days when we sought to protect and cherish our women. The great drumroll of the previous Avenger movies led to this: a woman protecting men and saving the world. The mightiest of all the Avengers — indeed, after whom they are named — is the armed princess turned feminist queen, who comes down from the tower to do what Prince Charming could not. Am I nitpicking? It is a movie after all. I wish it were. Instead of engaging the movie’s ideology as mere fiction, a fun escape to another world, we have allowed it to bear deadly fruit on earth. Along with Disney, we abandon the traditional princess vibe, and seek to empower little girls everywhere to be strong like men. Cinderella trades her glass slipper for combat boots; Belle, her books for a bazooka. Does the insanity bother us anymore? OK, before we get to the real part, he knows what he is going to say is nonsense, so he starts with a cheap emotional appeal: “How far have we come from the days we sought to protect and cherish our women.” He is not asking the women what they would consider “protecting and cherishing.” If he had asked them, he might have found a quite disturbing fact: women actually loved the movie. I am yet to meet a single woman who thought that the movie undermined the call to protect and cherish our women. Looks like, even before we get to the “real” conflict, Morse’s problem is his own problem, of a man who just doesn’t care what women think and say. “I am going to protect you and cherish you my way, and I won’t care what you think or want.” Right here, a real man could just stop Morse in his tracks by retorting, “Why don’t we first listen to our women, if we are going to really cherish them? And when was that time when you sought to protect and cherish them? How did it work? If you were so good at it, why do our women today ignore your emotional appeal? Could it be that you failed? 200 hundred proven sexual predators among the leadership of the Southern Baptist churches alone over the last 20 years, and 700 victims of their violence and abuse . . . and those are only of whom we know. Who knows how many were out there in the other denominations that were never caught or exposed? How many of those predators were truly disciplined and how many were protected by their celebrity status? Does that sound like protecting and cherishing our women? Or does it sound like your idyllic days you sought to protect and cherish your women are simply a figment of your imagination and a propaganda pitch? May be that’s why our women want what that movie offers them in a fiction form. The truth is, your idyllic days never existed; you never cared about our women. You only pretend to care about them when something else that you really cherish is at stake.” I am digressing here. But from Morse’s words, we know what exactly is at stake. It is power. Or, rather, the distribution of power in the society. Listen to his language: “The mightiest of all the Avengers . . . the armed princess . . . seek to empower little girls everywhere to be strong like men.” See that? In the three sentences where he introduces his “real” conflict – as he sees it – he repeats four versions of “power”: mighty, armed, empower, strong. There is nothing about ethics, good and evil, redemption, moral conscience, etc. It is all about power. Or, more precisely, power given to the wrong kind of person. And that wrong kind of person is not defined by their ethical or covenantal status before God, but by their ontological, metaphysical essence. Power is given to women in that movie, you know. But by right, power doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us men, so that we can protect women. We are supposed to keep women weak, otherwise how could we protect them? You give women the power to protect themselves, and the world goes upside down. Greg Morse’s issue is nothing unusual. It’s just that the manner of some men is upon him: men who feel intimidated when a more powerful man is at the same party as them. They feel excluded, worthless, meaningless, by comparison. Now imagine what happens when there is a powerful woman around. That must be the end of the world. Or, at least, it is the end of those good old days when people like Greg Morse cherished and protected our women. But now that the women are becoming powerful, Morse can’t cherish them and protect them. Some may not like my sarcasm, but it is well-deserved. If your cherishing and protecting women is predicated upon keeping women weak and preventing their empowerment, logically, your real agenda is not cherishing and protecting them. And what is more important, your religion is not the Biblical faith. It is something else. It is the religion of power. Greg Morse’s take on what the “real” conflict is reveals his true religion: it is a religion of power. Issues of justice and righteousness are not a real conflict to him. Only power is. Who is allowed to be powerful and who isn’t. Beyond that, no conflict is real. We shouldn’t be surprised, of course. For the last 100 years – or may be 200 years – the religion of power has been the main religion of the American churches. From its wholehearted support for slavery in the 19th century, through the equally wholehearted support for the segregation in the 20th century, to the equally wholehearted support today for whatever unjust policies the political parties advocate, the leadership of the American churches has always been obsessed with power and enamored with power. And not just the leadership. The vast majority of church-goers just love power, and their practical and political ethics always revolves around the concept of keeping their particular identity tribe in power. Even the issue of salvation is often tied to political power; Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas has repeated multiple times now that those who don’t vote for Trump are not saved. And, guess what, despite the glaring heresy in his statement, not a single soul at the Southern Baptist Convention has raised a voice of concern over Jeffress’s ideology, let alone call for his resignation, excommunication, or separation from the Southern Baptist Churches. Jeffress is a man of influence, after all, and influence is power; who cares if he spouts obvious heresies? Modern ecclesiology also revolves around power from beginning to end: the ethical and judicial issues of the Law of God are of very little concern; what is always important is the protection of “authority” (that’s the pet name for institutional power). The modern doctrine of local mandatory church membership is power religion at its finest: you are not a real Christian unless you submit under the institutional power of other men. When it comes to treatment of the weakest and the least among their own congregations, the religion of power is, again, on full display. We as Protestants like to talk about the sexual abuse scandals among the Roman Catholic clergy, but our own churches have been full of the same, if not worse. But that’s not the worst of it; it’s not just that the victims have been abused, they have also been silenced by means of institutional power. “Do not bring public accusations, you will ruin the life of that man.” Because the life of a powerful man is worth more than the life of a defenseless victim. Sexual abuse is not the only instance of power religion in practice; financial abuse is another one. Just recently, when the students at Jon MacArthur’s The Master’s Seminary demanded information about some seemingly false claims about the Seminary’s accreditations, MacArthur’s answer was that they should shut up, because it was not their business to know. (Despite the fact that they are the ones paying.) Just shut up and leave everything to men in power, you peasants. Everyone should know and be satisfied with their stations in life. So that’s what we got by keeping women weak: their devaluation and objectification. And certainly not their cherishing or protection. So the days Morse fantasizes about have never actually been. But that’s OK to Morse; it’s not really a real conflict. Power was still in the hands of the right people. That led to injustice, of course, at a grand scale, but injustice is a rather lesser conflict, or no conflict at all. Not the “real” one, for sure. Morse says that we have allowed the ideology of the movie (as he imagines that ideology, revolving around power) to “bear deadly fruit on earth.” And that “deadly fruit” is, what do ya think? It is “empowering little girls everywhere to be strong like men.” Ya know, “deadly fruit” as in thousands of empowered little girls roaming around the planet murdering tens and hundreds of millions? Last time I checked, those tens and hundreds of millions were murdered by men under ideologies that actually agreed with Greg Morse on women’s station in life. The patriarchal monarchical empires of Europe in the early 20th century gave WWI. The notoriously machistic Nazi regime gave us WWII. (The Nazis didn’t even accept women as members of the Nazi Party, nor did they allowed women in government positions. The Nazi view of the place of women was quite the same as Morse’s.) Modern persecution of Christians around the globe is mainly done by Muslims, and we know their view of the place of women in the society. So what “deadly fruit” is Morse talking about, again? The real deadly fruit is that of his own ideology. As the church believes, so the world goes, even the unbelieving world. So when the church and its leaders are committed not to the Biblical faith but to a power religion (even if it is under a thin veneer of Christian theology), we should expect the world and its leaders to be committed to the same power religion, with our without the veneer. We should expect, therefore, to see Morse’s religion replicated in the world around us, and especially in the governments and their policies around us. In Christendom, the official transition to religion of power as the official policy-making ideology of governments started with Napoleon: “There are only two forces that unite men: fear and interest.” While in the 19th century, governments were still a bit shy to display that religion openly, that shyness disappeared with WWI; it was a war entirely fought based on the concept of who has more power, not on what the right thing to do was. Stalin continued the same obsession with power over ethics (we wouldn’t expect a professed atheist to worry too much about ethics, would we. When in the 1930s, Stalin was asked by the French socialist Pierre Laval for an advice on how to win the Pope to his side so that he could win the hearts of the French Catholics, Stalin’s reply was short: “How many divisions does the Pope have?” The Nazis’ obsession with power is well-known; one just needs to watch Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda movie about Hitler, The Triumph of the Will, to get a grasp of how obsessed they were with power. In fact, that’s the very defining feature of all totalitarian regimes; other dictators have also been quite open about their addiction to power. Think Mao, “Politics comes out of the barrel of a gun”; and indeed, politics in the world today is almost entirely predicated on who has the bigger guns, not on who shows a greater level of service and help. Perhaps all these examples seem a bit too abstract to you. Well, then, look at American politics in the last several decades, and especially in the last couple of years. And no, not only the leftists, that is, the Democrat Party. The other leftists – the Republicans – are entirely obsessed with power. Donald Trump’s rhetoric has been based solely on the paradigm of power and who wields that power. “Make America great again” is not about making America the moral leader of the world again, a nation that uses its wealth and power to oppose dictators, help the oppressed, welcome the stranger to share in its greatness, and generally use its blessings from God to bless others. It is about a constant anxiety that others out there may be taking advantage of us in some nefarious ways, so let’s overpower them and show them who’s the boss here. It is “greatness” based on power, not true greatness based on service and moral leadership. It is the psychology of a sociopath who would rather live alone and rejected by all just to make sure he doesn’t do something by mistake to benefit or empower other people than himself. This is power religion in its ultimate madness, in its American version. The constant warmongering and gloating over our ability to inflict death is another example; think Ted Cruz, “I don’t know if the sand in the desert can glow in the dark, but we will find out.” It’s in the South Carolina’s conservative evangelical booing of Ron Paul when he laid out his principle of foreign policy: “Do unto others as you want done unto you.” That’s a heresy under the religion of power; we do unto others according to our might, not according to your outdated ethical code of Semitic desert shepherds of 2,000 years ago. It’s in the worship of police. It’s in the calls for shooting women and children at the border whose “crime” is that they want to find safety. Our civil government at every level has abandoned its function to protect justice and has turned into an arena of competing powers – and that is only because those who profess to be “Christians” have made the religion of power their true religion, abandoning the cause of the Gospel, while paying lip service to the Gospel. And that’s the way they treat women, as well. Because women are weaker, and whoever is weaker, must have no voice in a world of powers. And certainly don’t try to empower women: if they have been created weaker, that must be for a purpose, so don’t try to empower them; you will tilt the balance of power. That’s Morse’s “real” conflict. Unfortunately for Morse, this is not going to end well for him and his ilk. Obsession with power, and worship of power, always ends badly in the Bible, and those who crave power end up victims of the same power they craved. Jesus warned the disciples that they should not succumb to the temptation of resorting to power to deal with the enemies of the Gospel (Luke 9:55-56), and when Peter did resort to power, Jesus gave Him the Biblical principle: “All who draw the sword will die by the sword.” In Revelation 17, that principle is applied to the Apostate Church, the Harlot that is Babylon: she rides on the Beast (which is the political power), but then the Beast turns around and tears her apart; in fact, the very horns of the Beast (symbols of power) are those who are said to hate the harlot and eat her flesh and burn her with fire. Whatever your eschatological position on Revelation may be, at least this one is sure: an apostate church is a church that rides on the Beast (power) and eventually gets destroyed by that same power. Perhaps this is one of the reason, or the very reason why the church in America has lost so much of its influence in the society, and has been impotent to preach the Gospel with true spiritual power. The more the church has relied in the Beast to sustain and carry it, the more the Beast has been turning upon her. We like to blame Satan, the world, the liberals, the Democrats, the millennials, the feminists, Hollywood, the mythical “cultural Marxism,” but in reality, it is our own worship of power that has destroyed our witness, and has turned the society over to idols. And we have been on the losing side. God said to Israel in the Old Covenant: “You want to worship the gods of the nations? I will put you under the law systems of the gods of the nations, to see how you like it.” He might be saying the same to the church today: “You want to rely on political power for self-preservation? I will put you under that political power to see how you like it.” So if, Morse wants to see where the real deadly influence is, it is not empowering the weakest in our society. It is in his obsession with power . Empowering the weak is actually the Biblical standard. Including the women. Women are created physically weaker, that goes without saying, and the Bible says it. But there is no law against empowering them. Their weaker state is not something we should uphold as a religious standard. To the contrary, we should teach our girls to overcome their weakness and indeed, be as strong as men. Because some day a man may approach them with evil intentions, and they need to be prepared to inflict as much pain and destruction on the criminal as to make him abandon his evil intentions. This is real cherishing and protecting our women; keeping them weak so that some men can feel important is selfishness, not cherishing and not protecting. Women should be taught to fight, and they should be taught, as much as possible, to break skulls for God. Or spaceships, why not? Greg Morse, with his obsession with power, is on the losing side of history. On the winning side of history is service: those who are powerful, using their power not to establish their own importance, but to empower the weak: widows, orphans, foreigners, the poor, and, of course, women. That’s why he and his ilk are losing the cultural war in America, and the feminists are winning it. The reversal will come only when the church reverses its view of power, and outdoes the enemies of God in empowering the weak. As long as we as a church are obsessed with the distribution of power, we will be on the losing side. Matt. 25:34-46 continues to be a valid warning to all of us, especially to those who claim to be professing Christ: Whatever we do to the weakest among us will determine what will be done to us on the final day. And that’s the truly real conflict in Greg Morse’s article. The books I will assign for reading this week is Frank McDonough, Sophie Scholl. Read and remember: women can be stronger than men. So strong as to bravely go where no man has gone before, and lay down their lives where no man dared to. And men who want women weak in order to look strong themselves are not really strong; they are selfish weaklings. A strong man is a man for whom empowered women are not a threat to his own masculinity, and he is still capable of cherishing and protecting them. In your prayer and givings, remember Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe. We are not obsessed with distribution of power. We empower all, especially the weakest among us. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless y’all. 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Host Bojidar Marinov Description Every time someone says, “this is the real problem,” or “this is the real conflict,” it doesn’t say much about the problem or the conflict he is describing – that problem or conflict may be real, and it may not be real. But the truth is, it says a lot about the real worldview of the person saying it. Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 88 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will talk about movies.  Specifically, Captain Marvel. (So, you are warned, there will be spoilers ahead.) Actually, not about the movie so much but about the reactions to it. And specifically, the reactions to it among some churchian celebrities and their followers. I usually stay away talking about movies and literature and art, except in a very general way, as to their place in the Dominion Covenant. You might want to check Episode 49 of the Axe to the Root Podcast, titled “Art in a Covenantal Frame.” Not that I have nothing particular to say about specific pieces of art and literature and movies; I think I do, and I like art and literature and movies and I like to decipher the ethical/judicial meaning of movies and books and pieces of art. My children and I have had many interesting conversations over the years. In fact, those are perhaps our most favorite conversations, given that family reading of fiction remained the most cherished family past time till their late teenage years, and right before the oldest ones went to college. Yes, believe it or not, I kept reading aloud stories and novels to my children long after they could read them on their own. With the youngest now, as she is still at home, we watch movies and sometimes we spent hours discussing their ethical/judicial value. So, there, it is not that I am indifferent to movies and fiction books and I have nothing to say; I just believe that there are others who are better qualified than me to say it in a much more exciting and insightful way. But this case is different. It’s not that the movie is anything special as artistic value. It is a fine movie, to be sure. Not really a masterpiece of the greatest kind, but not the worst out there. It fits nicely into the larger picture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it provides what it was meant to provide: an origin story. The story was consistent with the rest of the cinematic universe, and it was believable . . . well, believable within the context of that universe. I think it did not exploit all the possibilities for a dramatic effect at the point of the protagonist’s conversion; that scene in Maria Rambeau’s house where Carol Danvers learned that the Skrulls were not villains but refugees persecuted by the same empire that sent her to fight them, could have been a little longer, more dramatic, and more fraught with tension, soul-searching, and anger (suppressed or not) at the revelation that one had been lied to. I know that’s what I would do if I was faced with such challenge against the morality of all my beliefs and actions so far. But, then again, women are different from men; it is possible that a woman can make that transition faster than a man, I don’t know. We do see in the Bible women who are capable of making logical conclusions much quicker than men do. Either way, the movie in general was good. Do I want to watch it again? Yes, absolutely. It is enjoyable in many respects and as a whole. So, what did I like in the movie? Or, let’s be more comprehensive: what did I see in the movie? What was it that made it a good movie, and enjoyable at that, for a person like me who always tries to judge things based on a covenantal perspective? There were two ethical/judicial themes in the movie, one major and one minor, or, rather, auxiliary to the major one. The major theme was the individual moral conscience of man (and I use “man” in the Biblical, generic sense, including women in it) vs. the collectivist demands of a militaristic, expansionist empire. The movie starts with Vers: an extremely powerful woman whose body is modified to control and manipulate physical processes down to nuclear level. She can absorb energy in her body and the release it in the form of electromagnetic (photon) blasts. She can go “binary,” which means her body physics can transform into pure energy after which she can basically cut through anything, including space ships. She doesn’t know the source of that power, but what we learn is that that power itself is the source of some pride and self-confidence. However, that’s not the main ethical problem. A worse source of pride is that she is a member – the most powerful member, at that – of the most elite unit of the most elite military of the most powerful empire in the universe, the Kree Empire. Think about being a member of the most decorated special unit of the Navy Seals of the United States. Woohoo, by Jingo, we are the best and we kick you-know-what around the globe! Them ragheads, gooks, russkies, anyone, stand no chance. And, of course, we fight for freedom! I mean, I can’t figure out how my freedom ended up in the mountains of Afghanistan or the sands of Iraq, and I can’t figure out why the more I fight, the less freedom we have at home, but who cares, we really kick ass, man! Proud to be an elite soldier for the greatest empire there is. And the enemies she is fighting are really ragheads: ugly (compared to our heroes-warriors who are all handsome and tall and athletic and a delight to the eye), and their main weapon is taqqiah: able to disguise themselves so as to look entirely like members of our glorious free western civilization, and infiltrate it and build their Dearborns, Michigan in it. I mean, what’s not to make your proud: fighting for this glorious civilization (just look at all our technologies and buildings and how big we are, being the elite of the elite, beautiful beings compared to the enemy, fighting an enemy that is ugly and uses taqqiah . . . and we know what they do to their goats, right? (Or whatever passes for goats among the Skrulls.) The only dark spot in her ambition and pride are these recurring dreams – or memories? – that she can’t get rid of. They are certainly part of something deep in her, but since she has lost her memory in an accident several years before, she can’t put the pieces back together. But that’s OK. Her benevolent parental boss – the Deep State . . . I mean, the Supreme Intelligence of the empire – is there to help her get rid of those nightmares. Just ignore them. They only hinder your full potential. You just obey and comply, and you’ll be good. Think Jason Bourne: another story about an individual artificially enhanced in service of an empire, whose bosses are still powerless to destroy the moral conscience the image of God carries with it, despite all the enhancement, special training, and amnesia. Things go downhill, however, after she is tricked and captured by the enemy. To her surprise, she discovers that the enemy has not taken advantage of her incapacitation to kill her or torture her. They only want to revive her memories. Ironic, isn’t it. Her benevolent government bosses want her to suppress her conscience; the enemies – who should be expected to kill her – want to help her revive that conscience. The proud warrior is confused. To make matters worse, in the ensuing battle, she falls to earth, the original place of her memories (she doesn’t know it yet, but she feels it), and while fighting alone against a host of Skrulls (aided only by a few confused and helpless humans), she gradually comes to discover two things. First, that she had been fighting for an oppressive regime against a victimized people who have been nothing more than refugees from that regime. And, second, she discovers her true identity: Vers is really Carol Danvers, a test pilot for the US Air Force who supposedly died 6 years earlier in a test flight crash with her mentor and instructor Dr. Wendy Lawson – the woman of her dreams and nightmares – who was an engineer for the Air Force, but her true identity was Dr. Mar-Vell, a renegade Kree scientist who was helping Skrull refugees by designing a powerful engine for them to be able to escape the Kree attacks and find a world for themselves to settle in safety. Carol Danvers acquired her powers from absorbing the energy of the explosion from the engine she destroyed after the crash, following the orders of Mar-Vell. So in terms of the ethical conflict between her individual conscience and the collectivist demands of the Empire, the circle is now closed: Carol Danvers returned to take the place of her original mentor. Her discovery of her true identity brings to light the minor ethical/judicial theme. That theme was present in Vers’s nightmares from the very beginning of the movie, but given her memory loss, made no sense; it was multiple flashes of a girl or a young woman failing at different tasks, from playing in the playground to the ropes course at what seems to be a boot camp; and every time, she stands up and gets back to it again with a look of determination om her face. That minor theme turns out to be the old conflict between individual determination and ambition and the established and cherished social customs, stereotypes, and prejudices. Think of the movie Hidden Figures where the protagonists were looked down upon because they were black and female. Think of Facing the Giants, where the Eagles were considered the underdog by default. The ethical solution to this conflict should be obvious to everyone who has even an ounce of moral conscience: only dedication and hard work can overcome stereotypes and prejudice. After all, this is what modern Christians and conservatives in general tell those who are trapped in the vicious cycle of ghetto poverty: “hard work and dedication will surely help you get out of it, no matter how much prejudice and discrimination you face.” Right? Carol Danvers has lived through it: she has had to deal with every bit of prejudice and discrimination, through all the social stereotypes of what a woman can and can’t do. And she dealt with it through hard work and dedication. You would expect that all Christians and conservatives would cheer for her. (As we will see, that’s not the case.) Unfortunately, having been unwittingly involved in a space conflict much larger than anything she had faced before, she is killed. Or at least that’s how it appears to her bosses on earth, at any rate. There is a moral caveat here, however. Dedication, when devoid of a moral compass, can become an unhealthy and idolatrous ambition. While that is not the central theme of the movie, hints of such moral deterioration can be seen in the pre-crash Carol Danvers: she almost looks like she has lost her human face. She acts artificially at times, and some of her responses seem a little too much pre-played. She always acts as if she is there to prove something, or to prove herself. The problem persists and becomes even worse when the “re-born” Vers works for Starforce; she is constantly trying to prove herself against her own commander, and before the Supreme Intelligence. Once on earth, meeting Nick Fury and other agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., she continues her showing off, and especially showing off her powers. She uses her signature photon blasts a little too liberally, even just to show who she is, and she is not even trying to hide the pride of who she is. “You are a Kree,” Nick Fury says, “a race of noble warriors?” Vers is quick to correct him with prideful emphasis in her voice: “Heroes. A race of noble warriors heroes.” Her ambition may not be necessarily bad, but it always has an unhealthy streak in it, and once she had the power she craved, it was now going much worse. But, as should be expected, returning to her humble beginnings makes her rethink that and reform her moral character. She is now ultimately powerful, having removed the device suppressing her powers, and yet, when her former commander challenges her to one last fight, she replies, “I have nothing to prove to you.” She doesn’t need any showing off anymore, and she doesn’t need a showdown; instead of flying straight for the Kree Empire to finish it off, she commits herself to humbly serve those whom she has persecuted before. Here again, the moral circle is completed, and she has found redemption. From the trailers for Endgame I expected that that moral problem would still be there to haunt her, but I was wrong. Her conversion seems to be complete. So, this is what I saw in the movie: the ethical/judicial themes. But then again, that’s what I have been trying to train my senses in for the last 25 years: to discern good and evil. That’s what Hebrews 5:14 tells me is the mark of a mature man. And 1 Cor. 2:15 tells me that the characteristic of a spiritual man is that he judges all things: that is, discerns good and evil in all things. So, trying to be obedient to this mandate to be mature, I have been trying to subject all my judgments of everything in the world around me to one and only paradigm: good vs evil. And, of course, the sub-paradigms that follow from it: righteousness vs. wickedness, obedience vs. disobedience, justice vs. injustice, depravity vs. reformation, death vs. redemption, judgment vs. salvation, etc. Anything else in the universe and in human experience is just furniture and background that serves the main paradigm: power, beauty, harmony, efficiency, productivity, intellect, art, health, genetics, ancestry, science, imagination, all these are inconsequential, and in themselves carry no significance. Their only purpose is to be made to serve the Covenant, which means to serve the cause of righteousness and justice. Outside such service, they have no meaning. That’s one way we can detect idolatry: when a religion or ideology tells us that some other paradigm is just as important as the paradigm good vs. evil, and we need to adjust our senses to discern those other paradigms at the same level as good and evil. (For example, the complaint of the Federal Vision movement against Christian Reconstruction was that it was too “woodenly restricted to judicial issues.” According to its ideologues, there were other paradigms that deserved equal attention, like liturgy. Where that led them, we will discuss in a future episode.) You know how atheists and secularists insist that morality is relative and that there is no objective fixed standard for what is moral and what is immoral. They are willing to concede everything else in the Bible – beauty, wisdom, art, literature, even the beneficial effects of monotheism – but tell them that there is a sovereign divine immutable code of ethics, and watch the fireworks. Why? Because, that’s what defines God’s Covenant: the standard for good and evil. Nothing else. It is its very heart. That’s why I have worked to train my senses to always judge everything based on that standard. Including Captain Marvel. And in this, I don’t care about the metaphysics of the characters. They can be women or men, or Vogons, or dancing mushrooms, for all I care. I will still judge the movie based on the immutable code of ethics of the Bible. There are pagan ways of judging a movie, of course. Or of judging anything whatsoever. These are ways based on paradigms different from the issues of good and evil. For example, ontology: judge everything based on metaphysics (origin, genetics, material structure, etc.). Remember the 1995 movie, The Tuskegee Airmen? That bomber captain, the Texas boy? He couldn’t believe that blacks could fly them planes so well as to save his poor behind from two German Messerschmidts up there. Why? Because they just can’t do it. (To his credit, by the end of the movie, he changed his mind and specifically requested that the Tuskegee Airmen take him to Berlin and back. Redemption means changing your worldview from metaphysics to ethics.) Another pagan paradigm used in such judgments is power: who is given power and who isn’t. Both Communist and Nazi propaganda were obsessed with power; just google Nazi or Soviet propaganda posters and then pay attention to who is depicted as being muscular and tall and strong, and who is depicted as being short and fat, with crooked legs and feeble arms. Any identity politics, that is, any double standard based on any factor different from objective ethics – race, ethnicity, party loyalty, social status, economic status, institutional membership, beauty, intellect, etc. – is pagan by default. (It is for this reason that in 1 Cor. 11 Paul admonishes his readers to wait for each other so that there are no divisions based on such factors; the only allowable divisions are those based on interpretations of the Word.) Given that, one would expect that Christians would meet Captain Marvel with approval. Not that the movie is an overtly Christian movie; but it does meet the criteria for covenantal content by making ethics its center; and it resolves ethical problems in the right way, and demonstrates redemption. But that was not the case. Over the last several weeks, after the release of the movie, I had the sad opportunity to read quite a few comments and articles on the movie, all from Christians, that blasted the movie for its perceived ideology. In none of these comments or articles did I ever see a single ounce of covenantal – that is, ethical/judicial – approach; in fact, I could swear that the authors of all these comments and articles had formed a cabal to blast the movie based on every single worldview available to mankind today, just not from a Biblical worldview. Among those comments I read things like this: “For a woman to become a hero, she needs to become a man.” Or this: “The idea of a woman saving men is unnatural, and that’s why Brie Larson’s character is so awkward and unnatural. She almost never smiles. And she is artificial.” (Like, that’s exactly what she is trying to portray in Vers, right?) Things that makes you shake your head in disbelief and put you in a quandary: What are these people talking about, and how exactly did they see that in the movie? Another one, based on perceived power dis-balance (and we will shortly get to that paradigm of power): “Men are portrayed as weak in that movie.” Where do these people get all this nonsense? (We will see shortly.) The most popular one I have seen was published on the Desiring God Ministries web page, titled, “Behold Your Queen: The Real Conflict in Captain Marvel,” by someone Greg Morse. I usually don’t read Desiring God’s website: the quality is quite low, the worldview is limited to a few topics, and the so-called “gospel” they present is truncated to the level of a mystical religion, just as R.J. Rushdoony said in his Foundations of Social Order. But this article caught my eye because of the bombastic claim in it: “the real conflict” in Captain Marvel. You know, like there are false conflicts that other people are worried about, but the author has discovered the real one, so he is telling us what it is. You should know, every time someone says, “this is the real problem,” or “this is the real conflict,” it doesn’t say much about the problem or the conflict he is describing – that problem or conflict may be real, and it may not be real. But the truth is, it says a lot about the real worldview of the person saying it. And since worldviews are informed by religions, what Greg Morse actually did is not so much tell us about the “real conflict” in Captain Marvel, but about his own real religion. So I decided to read that article to find out what Greg Morse’s real religion is. And, by implication, to discover what the real religion of Desiring God Ministries is. It is always helpful to find out what god exactly it is that people desire. Greg Morse does not mince words. He is quite open about his religion. Here is his assessment of the “real” conflict in Captain Marvel, in Greg Morse’s own words: As I consider Disney’s new depiction of femininity in Captain Marvel, I cannot help but mourn. How far we’ve come since the days when we sought to protect and cherish our women. The great drumroll of the previous Avenger movies led to this: a woman protecting men and saving the world. The mightiest of all the Avengers — indeed, after whom they are named — is the armed princess turned feminist queen, who comes down from the tower to do what Prince Charming could not. Am I nitpicking? It is a movie after all. I wish it were. Instead of engaging the movie’s ideology as mere fiction, a fun escape to another world, we have allowed it to bear deadly fruit on earth. Along with Disney, we abandon the traditional princess vibe, and seek to empower little girls everywhere to be strong like men. Cinderella trades her glass slipper for combat boots; Belle, her books for a bazooka. Does the insanity bother us anymore? OK, before we get to the real part, he knows what he is going to say is nonsense, so he starts with a cheap emotional appeal: “How far have we come from the days we sought to protect and cherish our women.” He is not asking the women what they would consider “protecting and cherishing.” If he had asked them, he might have found a quite disturbing fact: women actually loved the movie. I am yet to meet a single woman who thought that the movie undermined the call to protect and cherish our women. Looks like, even before we get to the “real” conflict, Morse’s problem is his own problem, of a man who just doesn’t care what women think and say. “I am going to protect you and cherish you my way, and I won’t care what you think or want.” Right here, a real man could just stop Morse in his tracks by retorting, “Why don’t we first listen to our women, if we are going to really cherish them? And when was that time when you sought to protect and cherish them? How did it work? If you were so good at it, why do our women today ignore your emotional appeal? Could it be that you failed? 200 hundred proven sexual predators among the leadership of the Southern Baptist churches alone over the last 20 years, and 700 victims of their violence and abuse . . . and those are only of whom we know. Who knows how many were out there in the other denominations that were never caught or exposed? How many of those predators were truly disciplined and how many were protected by their celebrity status? Does that sound like protecting and cherishing our women? Or does it sound like your idyllic days you sought to protect and cherish your women are simply a figment of your imagination and a propaganda pitch? May be that’s why our women want what that movie offers them in a fiction form. The truth is, your idyllic days never existed; you never cared about our women. You only pretend to care about them when something else that you really cherish is at stake.” I am digressing here. But from Morse’s words, we know what exactly is at stake. It is power. Or, rather, the distribution of power in the society. Listen to his language: “The mightiest of all the Avengers . . . the armed princess . . . seek to empower little girls everywhere to be strong like men.” See that? In the three sentences where he introduces his “real” conflict – as he sees it – he repeats four versions of “power”: mighty, armed, empower, strong. There is nothing about ethics, good and evil, redemption, moral conscience, etc. It is all about power. Or, more precisely, power given to the wrong kind of person. And that wrong kind of person is not defined by their ethical or covenantal status before God, but by their ontological, metaphysical essence. Power is given to women in that movie, you know. But by right, power doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us men, so that we can protect women. We are supposed to keep women weak, otherwise how could we protect them? You give women the power to protect themselves, and the world goes upside down. Greg Morse’s issue is nothing unusual. It’s just that the manner of some men is upon him: men who feel intimidated when a more powerful man is at the same party as them. They feel excluded, worthless, meaningless, by comparison. Now imagine what happens when there is a powerful woman around. That must be the end of the world. Or, at least, it is the end of those good old days when people like Greg Morse cherished and protected our women. But now that the women are becoming powerful, Morse can’t cherish them and protect them. Some may not like my sarcasm, but it is well-deserved. If your cherishing and protecting women is predicated upon keeping women weak and preventing their empowerment, logically, your real agenda is not cherishing and protecting them. And what is more important, your religion is not the Biblical faith. It is something else. It is the religion of power. Greg Morse’s take on what the “real” conflict is reveals his true religion: it is a religion of power. Issues of justice and righteousness are not a real conflict to him. Only power is. Who is allowed to be powerful and who isn’t. Beyond that, no conflict is real. We shouldn’t be surprised, of course. For the last 100 years – or may be 200 years – the religion of power has been the main religion of the American churches. From its wholehearted support for slavery in the 19th century, through the equally wholehearted support for the segregation in the 20th century, to the equally wholehearted support today for whatever unjust policies the political parties advocate, the leadership of the American churches has always been obsessed with power and enamored with power. And not just the leadership. The vast majority of church-goers just love power, and their practical and political ethics always revolves around the concept of keeping their particular identity tribe in power. Even the issue of salvation is often tied to political power; Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas has repeated multiple times now that those who don’t vote for Trump are not saved. And, guess what, despite the glaring heresy in his statement, not a single soul at the Southern Baptist Convention has raised a voice of concern over Jeffress’s ideology, let alone call for his resignation, excommunication, or separation from the Southern Baptist Churches. Jeffress is a man of influence, after all, and influence is power; who cares if he spouts obvious heresies? Modern ecclesiology also revolves around power from beginning to end: the ethical and judicial issues of the Law of God are of very little concern; what is always important is the protection of “authority” (that’s the pet name for institutional power). The modern doctrine of local mandatory church membership is power religion at its finest: you are not a real Christian unless you submit under the institutional power of other men. When it comes to treatment of the weakest and the least among their own congregations, the religion of power is, again, on full display. We as Protestants like to talk about the sexual abuse scandals among the Roman Catholic clergy, but our own churches have been full of the same, if not worse. But that’s not the worst of it; it’s not just that the victims have been abused, they have also been silenced by means of institutional power. “Do not bring public accusations, you will ruin the life of that man.” Because the life of a powerful man is worth more than the life of a defenseless victim. Sexual abuse is not the only instance of power religion in practice; financial abuse is another one. Just recently, when the students at Jon MacArthur’s The Master’s Seminary demanded information about some seemingly false claims about the Seminary’s accreditations, MacArthur’s answer was that they should shut up, because it was not their business to know. (Despite the fact that they are the ones paying.) Just shut up and leave everything to men in power, you peasants. Everyone should know and be satisfied with their stations in life. So that’s what we got by keeping women weak: their devaluation and objectification. And certainly not their cherishing or protection. So the days Morse fantasizes about have never actually been. But that’s OK to Morse; it’s not really a real conflict. Power was still in the hands of the right people. That led to injustice, of course, at a grand scale, but injustice is a rather lesser conflict, or no conflict at all. Not the “real” one, for sure. Morse says that we have allowed the ideology of the movie (as he imagines that ideology, revolving around power) to “bear deadly fruit on earth.” And that “deadly fruit” is, what do ya think? It is “empowering little girls everywhere to be strong like men.” Ya know, “deadly fruit” as in thousands of empowered little girls roaming around the planet murdering tens and hundreds of millions? Last time I checked, those tens and hundreds of millions were murdered by men under ideologies that actually agreed with Greg Morse on women’s station in life. The patriarchal monarchical empires of Europe in the early 20th century gave WWI. The notoriously machistic Nazi regime gave us WWII. (The Nazis didn’t even accept women as members of the Nazi Party, nor did they allowed women in government positions. The Nazi view of the place of women was quite the same as Morse’s.) Modern persecution of Christians around the globe is mainly done by Muslims, and we know their view of the place of women in the society. So what “deadly fruit” is Morse talking about, again? The real deadly fruit is that of his own ideology. As the church believes, so the world goes, even the unbelieving world. So when the church and its leaders are committed not to the Biblical faith but to a power religion (even if it is under a thin veneer of Christian theology), we should expect the world and its leaders to be committed to the same power religion, with our without the veneer. We should expect, therefore, to see Morse’s religion replicated in the world around us, and especially in the governments and their policies around us. In Christendom, the official transition to religion of power as the official policy-making ideology of governments started with Napoleon: “There are only two forces that unite men: fear and interest.” While in the 19th century, governments were still a bit shy to display that religion openly, that shyness disappeared with WWI; it was a war entirely fought based on the concept of who has more power, not on what the right thing to do was. Stalin continued the same obsession with power over ethics (we wouldn’t expect a professed atheist to worry too much about ethics, would we. When in the 1930s, Stalin was asked by the French socialist Pierre Laval for an advice on how to win the Pope to his side so that he could win the hearts of the French Catholics, Stalin’s reply was short: “How many divisions does the Pope have?” The Nazis’ obsession with power is well-known; one just needs to watch Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda movie about Hitler, The Triumph of the Will, to get a grasp of how obsessed they were with power. In fact, that’s the very defining feature of all totalitarian regimes; other dictators have also been quite open about their addiction to power. Think Mao, “Politics comes out of the barrel of a gun”; and indeed, politics in the world today is almost entirely predicated on who has the bigger guns, not on who shows a greater level of service and help. Perhaps all these examples seem a bit too abstract to you. Well, then, look at American politics in the last several decades, and especially in the last couple of years. And no, not only the leftists, that is, the Democrat Party. The other leftists – the Republicans – are entirely obsessed with power. Donald Trump’s rhetoric has been based solely on the paradigm of power and who wields that power. “Make America great again” is not about making America the moral leader of the world again, a nation that uses its wealth and power to oppose dictators, help the oppressed, welcome the stranger to share in its greatness, and generally use its blessings from God to bless others. It is about a constant anxiety that others out there may be taking advantage of us in some nefarious ways, so let’s overpower them and show them who’s the boss here. It is “greatness” based on power, not true greatness based on service and moral leadership. It is the psychology of a sociopath who would rather live alone and rejected by all just to make sure he doesn’t do something by mistake to benefit or empower other people than himself. This is power religion in its ultimate madness, in its American version. The constant warmongering and gloating over our ability to inflict death is another example; think Ted Cruz, “I don’t know if the sand in the desert can glow in the dark, but we will find out.” It’s in the South Carolina’s conservative evangelical booing of Ron Paul when he laid out his principle of foreign policy: “Do unto others as you want done unto you.” That’s a heresy under the religion of power; we do unto others according to our might, not according to your outdated ethical code of Semitic desert shepherds of 2,000 years ago. It’s in the worship of police. It’s in the calls for shooting women and children at the border whose “crime” is that they want to find safety. Our civil government at every level has abandoned its function to protect justice and has turned into an arena of competing powers – and that is only because those who profess to be “Christians” have made the religion of power their true religion, abandoning the cause of the Gospel, while paying lip service to the Gospel. And that’s the way they treat women, as well. Because women are weaker, and whoever is weaker, must have no voice in a world of powers. And certainly don’t try to empower women: if they have been created weaker, that must be for a purpose, so don’t try to empower them; you will tilt the balance of power. That’s Morse’s “real” conflict. Unfortunately for Morse, this is not going to end well for him and his ilk. Obsession with power, and worship of power, always ends badly in the Bible, and those who crave power end up victims of the same power they craved. Jesus warned the disciples that they should not succumb to the temptation of resorting to power to deal with the enemies of the Gospel (Luke 9:55-56), and when Peter did resort to power, Jesus gave Him the Biblical principle: “All who draw the sword will die by the sword.” In Revelation 17, that principle is applied to the Apostate Church, the Harlot that is Babylon: she rides on the Beast (which is the political power), but then the Beast turns around and tears her apart; in fact, the very horns of the Beast (symbols of power) are those who are said to hate the harlot and eat her flesh and burn her with fire. Whatever your eschatological position on Revelation may be, at least this one is sure: an apostate church is a church that rides on the Beast (power) and eventually gets destroyed by that same power. Perhaps this is one of the reason, or the very reason why the church in America has lost so much of its influence in the society, and has been impotent to preach the Gospel with true spiritual power. The more the church has relied in the Beast to sustain and carry it, the more the Beast has been turning upon her. We like to blame Satan, the world, the liberals, the Democrats, the millennials, the feminists, Hollywood, the mythical “cultural Marxism,” but in reality, it is our own worship of power that has destroyed our witness, and has turned the society over to idols. And we have been on the losing side. God said to Israel in the Old Covenant: “You want to worship the gods of the nations? I will put you under the law systems of the gods of the nations, to see how you like it.” He might be saying the same to the church today: “You want to rely on political power for self-preservation? I will put you under that political power to see how you like it.” So if, Morse wants to see where the real deadly influence is, it is not empowering the weakest in our society. It is in his obsession with power . Empowering the weak is actually the Biblical standard. Including the women. Women are created physically weaker, that goes without saying, and the Bible says it. But there is no law against empowering them. Their weaker state is not something we should uphold as a religious standard. To the contrary, we should teach our girls to overcome their weakness and indeed, be as strong as men. Because some day a man may approach them with evil intentions, and they need to be prepared to inflict as much pain and destruction on the criminal as to make him abandon his evil intentions. This is real cherishing and protecting our women; keeping them weak so that some men can feel important is selfishness, not cherishing and not protecting. Women should be taught to fight, and they should be taught, as much as possible, to break skulls for God. Or spaceships, why not? Greg Morse, with his obsession with power, is on the losing side of history. On the winning side of history is service: those who are powerful, using their power not to establish their own importance, but to empower the weak: widows, orphans, foreigners, the poor, and, of course, women. That’s why he and his ilk are losing the cultural war in America, and the feminists are winning it. The reversal will come only when the church reverses its view of power, and outdoes the enemies of God in empowering the weak. As long as we as a church are obsessed with the distribution of power, we will be on the losing side. Matt. 25:34-46 continues to be a valid warning to all of us, especially to those who claim to be professing Christ: Whatever we do to the weakest among us will determine what will be done to us on the final day. And that’s the truly real conflict in Greg Morse’s article. The books I will assign for reading this week is Frank McDonough, Sophie Scholl. Read and remember: women can be stronger than men. So strong as to bravely go where no man has gone before, and lay down their lives where no man dared to. And men who want women weak in order to look strong themselves are not really strong; they are selfish weaklings. A strong man is a man for whom empowered women are not a threat to his own masculinity, and he is still capable of cherishing and protecting them. In your prayer and givings, remember Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe. We are not obsessed with distribution of power. We empower all, especially the weakest among us. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless y’all. 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Host Bojidar Marinov Description The only real asset the producer has at the point of sale and negotiation is the personality of his salesman. Or, the reputation of his salesman. Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 87 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I want to pick up a topic again that we discussed about two years ago: namely, sales. If you remember, in our episode, “Sales from a Biblical Perspective,” I presented the thesis that sales are not only a legitimate part of the economy, they are actually one of the most important parts of the economy. Why is that? let’s look at a short answer before we continue with the important topic: the underlying issue is this: Is the economy driven by the objective needs of the consumers, or is it driven by the entrepreneurship, innovation, and productivity of the producers? If it is driven by the objective needs of the consumers, then there would be no need for salesmen: everyone knows what they need, they just go out and try to find it. The problem with this, however, is that it can’t explain why the economy grows. Why are people buying so many things they have no direct need for? People have survived without electricity for centuries; how come, all of a sudden, everyone “needs” it? How come everyone today “needs” a cell phone? After all, some of us older people didn’t even know we “needed” one for decades. If needs are objective, how is it that most of what we think we “need” today hasn’t been around for centuries, and everyone survived? The answer is, of course that our “needs” are not real objective needs. They are subjective desires the moment we learn what is possible out there. And then, in our hearts, we transform them into “needs.” When we learn that it is possible to have ceiling fans, we now “need” them. When we learn that it’s possible to have air-conditioning, we now “need” that one, too. When we learned that it was possible to have mobile phones, we started “needing” them, too. When it became possible for mobile phones to connect to the internet in every place, we started “needing” that internet connection, too. (I personally resisted that “need” for some time, but I also succumbed to it, eventually.) If you are around my age (48) or older, you have surely been asked by your children or grandchildren, “How did you all live without Internet, or without cell phones, or without computers, or without [you fill the blank]?” From our perspective, of course, life was normal, and we had no need for all these things. I mean, it is nice to have them around because they make our life easier, but they are certainly not indispensable. A “need,” therefore, is not objective reality; it is psychological conditioning. And that psychological conditioning doesn’t need any skillful psychological techniques. All it needs is break the news to the consumers about new stuff on the market. Next thing you know, the market develops a “need” for it. That’s where salesmen come in. They are the middle men who break that news. They are the ones who inform the buying public about the new possibilities offered by the producers. Von Mises pointed out that on the market, information is the most valuable commodity. The right information gives you the opportunity to make the right the decisions and thus become more efficient. Salesmen are the agent for spreading that information. In a sense, they are democratizing it, making it cheap and available to everyone. Or, if you want to use a Biblical word, think of salesmen as the “evangelists” of the business world. They bring some sort of “good news” to their customers: “There’s a way to make your life easier at a lower price.” I know, I know, we all hate salesmen, especially those that appear at our door, but hate them or not, the truth is, all of the improvements in our homes and lives that make them better and more comfortable than homes and lives 200 years ago have come to us because some salesman many years ago decided to overcome his fear of knocking on people’s doors, and brought the good news of this or that improvement, for the scanty probability of making a few bucks on a sale. So, hate them as much as you want, but respect their work. It’s hard work. Anyway, after having established the legitimacy – in fact, the necessity – of salesmen in a Biblical economy, I was asked the question: “How does a salesman establish and build his reputation?” It’s a question of enormous significance. After all, a salesman is not sitting in some office communicating primarily with his co-workers and his boss. A salesman is supposed to be out there communicating with those who make the decision to buy: the customers. As he is out there with the customers, he himself, his person, is the face of his company. His product may be the greatest product ever, it may be at the perfect price, and it might turn out to be the most profitable purchase his customers may make, but to all these factors, one more factor must be added before there is a purchase: the reputation of the salesman. Because, let’s be honest, all the other factors are only potentials for the future; they can’t be tested until the purchase is made and the customer is in a position to use the product. So the only real asset the producer has at the point of sale and negotiation is the personality of his salesman. Or, the reputation of his salesman. The question is great, and we know need to think of this: what makes the reputation of a salesman? And we need to think about it in a Biblical manner, from a Biblical worldview. We need to make sure that whatever presuppositions we place at the foundation of our view, need to be Biblical presuppositions. I am not saying that a salesman is supposed to go around reciting Biblical verses or singing psalms. (Although, as a curious fact, some time ago some pastor responded to one of my articles that what we need is not more people in the marketplace with a Biblical worldview, but more psalm-singers. Once we had all offices packed up with psalm-singers who sing the psalms every day, Christian business is going to flourish. You can’t make this stuff up, I tell ya.) But a salesman, especially a Christian salesman, is under obligation to understand the only worldview that can guarantee success, and apply that worldview to his job. And when he applies it, his reputation will grow. “Keep and do these commandments, because they are your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the nations” (Deut. 4:6). So, what is it that builds the reputation of a salesman from the perspective of the Biblical worldview? We need to start from the beginning, from the complete picture. Without knowing the whole picture, a salesman is lost, even if he is the most skillful salesman ever. So, first, he needs to have a comprehensive view of the world around him and of its economic needs in God’s plan. I know, I know, this sounds kinda of too excessive. A salesman surely doesn’t have to be a philosopher or a theologian? No, not any more than anyone else. But he still should understand the world in its bigger picture – like anyone else should. Without such understanding of the world, we are left without any guidance as to where our place is, and, in fact, without any standard whatsoever about a place, even. Many of the problems in our society today are due to the fact that the majority of Americans have been taught a fragmented view of reality. And I don’t mean just that they were taught such fragmented view of reality in their government schools. It is everywhere. They were taught such a view in their families, in their churches, on their FOX News or CNN or MSN TV channels (whichever was constantly on in their homes), in their cinema theaters, on their commercials, etc. Americans today go about their business informed by an eclectic mish-mash of ideas, and they are capable sometimes of saying things that are, in their logic, inconsistent with themselves, without even stopping for a second to consider how deeply self-contradicting they are. (Think about the modern “conservative” views on immigration, or the modern leftist views on police and gun-control laws.) A salesman, however, if he is to build a long-term reputation, can’t afford to have a fragmented view of reality; he has to demonstrate consistency in his understanding, especially in his understanding of how his work and his products relate to the society and the economy in general. And if he is a Christian, he has to demonstrate consistency with the Biblical worldview, and especially with the Dominion Covenant. This is easier to say theoretically, but what does it imply in practice? What would it mean to have a comprehensive worldview? It means this (listen carefully): A salesman is supposed to know what products he should sell, and what products he should avoid attaching his name to. Let me repeat it: A salesman is supposed to know what products he should sell, and what products he should avoid attaching his name to. It doesn’t look much on the surface; and many salesmen don’t stop to think much about it. But if you are a Christian and you are looking to have a long-term career in sales, you need to make sure you always understand that the nature of the product you are selling is not morally neutral. And not only if you are looking to have a long-term career in sales; but also if you are looking to start a business in the future. Or engage in activism. Or anything that would involve your personal reputation. There are products that a righteous salesman shouldn’t be selling in the first place, no matter how attractive the pay is. Now, when you hear that, your first thought is, “drugs.” That’s because your brain was conditioned by statist propaganda. If you are a Southern Baptist, your thought is, “tobacco and alcohol.” Or may be you are thinking, “guns.” Or other goods like that which our society considers not goods but “evils.” Now, these could be “evils” in certain circumstances, and we will cover that part, but they are not what I have in mind here. What I mean is that a salesman needs to start from the Dominion Covenant and consider, for every product he is asked to sell, “Does selling this product help expand the dominion of mankind, or does it work against it?” The answer is not always easy, and sometimes it takes sometime to figure it out. I must say, personally, I have not been a good example; I have taken up to sell things that now, looking back, I shouldn’t have. And that was mainly because I was still not aware of all these principles I am talking about here. The answer is not always easy in every single case, but some guidelines can help all of us. From the perspective of the Dominion Covenant, what is good and wholesome and healthy to produce and sell is what increases the economic worth of the buyers or the consumers. Whatever decreases it, should be avoided. And when I say “increase the economic worth,” this doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes them richer in money; we are rather focused on overall productivity here. It can be used to satisfy legitimate personal needs and desires so that the person can be more productive tomorrow. Food, beverages (even alcoholic ones), medicines, a house, household appliances, furniture, chemicals, clothes, art, entertainment (most of it, with some exceptions), computers and computer programs – all these are lawful and legitimate, and should be a lawful target for a good salesman to sell. Industrial materials for their production, machines, engineering and engineering solutions, science – all these are also lawful. Services as well: banking, education, consultation in many areas, legal services, maintenance, etc. No need to cover all the possible areas; in our world today, with the gigantic division of labor and the development of technologies, there are thousands goods and services that make real contribution to the prosperity of modern man, and are therefore lawful to sell. The question is: “What are those that are not lawful to sell?” Not that they are not legal to sell, but what are those that are not lawful, under a Biblical worldview informed by the Dominion Covenant, to sell? Of course, we can start with some obvious examples: recreation drugs. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe they should be illegal, nor do I believe the government has a Biblical mandate to control such commerce or penalize people for what they put in their bodies. But whether taking recreational drugs is a crime or not, it is still sin: it is a deliberate attempt at twisting the reality of the mind and escaping the reality of God’s created world. Why using them recreationally (not talking medically) is sin, is not the topic of this episode. But whether you agree that they are sin or not, one thing is sure: habitual use of drugs and addiction to them makes a person incapable of fulfilling the Dominion Covenant. Or, at the very least, it handicaps him. A salesman who cares about his reputation would stay away from them – even if they were legal to sell. Another example is Ponzi schemes of different sorts. I had a friend many years ago, he and I graduated at the same time from the Naval Academy. He was a very well-spoken guy and his ability to persuade people was much greater than mine. However, when we met several years after we graduated, he was selling “shares” in one of those Ponzi schemes that were so common in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism; people in Eastern Europe didn’t know anything about such schemes and were falling for them, thinking these were “investments.” Eventually, they all failed, and my friend was left with a reputation of having worked for one of those schemes. Ponzi schemes don’t produce new economic value. What they produce is fraud and re-distribution of wealth from the gullible to the fraudsters. In this, I would include the multiple government programs that are nothing less than Ponzi schemes financed by taxpayers. Stay away from Obamacare, even if it promises good return to the salesman. Stay away from selling war bonds, treasury bonds, etc. stay away from selling consumer debt – like credit cards. These do not work for the Dominion Covenant but against it. Ever driven down the freeway and seen a billboard that advertises a lawyer who offers “divorce in 5 minutes”? I hate those. But my personal emotion is not what is important. I know divorce is an inevitable part of life after the fall, and I know that there are legitimate and lawful reasons for divorce, even when for Christians. But divorce in 5 minutes? Divorce that takes less time to do than decide your order in a restaurant? Divorce should be a long process where the husband and the wife go through a painful but needed reassessment of their relationship and only take the step after much agony and considerations. And even then, their lawyer, for the sake of his own soul, must make sure he is not being an accomplice in sin by offering a fast and easy way out. Offering quick and easy divorce is certainly against the principles in the Bible, that much should be clear. In this case, given that the billboard company is the “salesman,” or the advertiser, their willingness to supply the space is an example of selling the wrong product. Another example could be working for those spam calling companies we all are plagued by these days. I have used some of those calls to talk to the boys and girls hired by these companies, trying to explain to them why they have taken a job that is immoral, and will eventually waste their time. Another example would be working in any capacity as a salesman or PR or promoter for government services that are immoral by default – like the prison-industrial complex, or the surveillance agencies. It would only be lawful for a Christian salesman to work for these if his purpose is to get inside information and expose them to the public, like Edward Snowden, or the way the multiple sources that supply information to Wikileaks. Working for the gambling industry, or for businesses that sell sinful behavior (like strip clubs) is out of question. Etc. While my examples are by no means exhaustive, the principle must still be obvious: anything that adds economic or psychological or spiritual value to the society is worth selling. Anything that destroys value or worth should be avoided. The second thing a salesman needs to have in order to build his reputation is understanding of purpose. And I am not talking about the general philosophical concept of purpose here, as in the teleology of the universe, the overall purpose and direction of the universe. I am talking about the specific teleology, the meaning of life, the reason for existence of the individual man. If you have listened to Axe to the Root so far, and if you have read Christendom Restored.com, you know how important it is for a Christian to understand the concept of individual purpose and to apply it. In fact, I believe any church that does not self-consciously work to arm every individual believer with the ability to discover his individual purpose under God’s Covenant, any church that just boils the Christian life to impersonal generalities like “attend church every Sunday and just be a good man,” is a church that has doomed itself to extinction. A family that is not organized around a common purpose – ministry or business or something else – is a family that will have a lot of difficulties staying together, even if the spouses are the most faithful Christians you can find. When Paul was mentoring Timothy, he didn’t just tell him to live a good life and go to church. He reminded him of the specific prophecy concerning Timothy’s individual ministry and purpose, and told him to always remember that. Jesus didn’t just keep His disciples around to teach them general theology and good life; He taught them their individual purpose in His kingdom. If there is such a thing as discipleship in the Bible, it has more to do with the individual purpose of the disciples, not with some general notions of how to live a Christian life. Living a Christian life is important, and ethical boundaries are important, but without a knowledge about one’s individual purpose, about the specific corner of the Garden a person is expected to take ownership of and turn it into a city, ethical boundaries and general principles mean nothing. A salesman works with people. People are his field of work. Himself first, of course. And then his clients. So before he starts his work, he needs to understand his own individual purpose in life, and thus choose what products he wants to sell. It may be Biblically lawful to sell a product, but it may not be wise and advisable for the specific situation and the specific purpose of the salesman himself. Many years ago, when I was a missionary in Bulgaria, I also worked as a salesman for different companies (including Procter & Gamble, for example). I once saw a job ad that looked quite promising so I went to the information meeting to find out what it was about. At the meeting, I found out that the leadership of the company was all my old pals from the Naval Academy, and that had I applied, I would certainly get the job. It was good fixed salary plus generous commissions plus new company car plus vacation. The only problem was, it was a beer company. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am the last person on the planet who would tell you selling beer is wrong. The problem was, I had a higher calling – my mission work – and taking up a job like this would jeopardize my reputation with Christians and churches in Bulgaria who, at the time, were still quite pietistic and looked down on businesses selling beer. (The situation has changed over the last 20 years.) So I had to withdraw my application. There is always a higher calling, and my area of sales must agree with it. Otherwise, in the long term, a salesman will lose his reputation and he won’t be able to pursue his higher calling. But then, the same applies to his customers. I have often seen successful salesmen who brag that they could “sell refrigerators to Eskimos.” Perhaps they could. But if I was an employer, I would certainly not hire such a person. To my mind, such a person is bragging that they don’t give the smallest Indian coin – a dam – about the specific individual circumstances and purpose of their customers. They would sell them even things that would not benefit them, and would not benefit their well-being. Such salesmen have not taken seriously their job as being servants and mediators between the producer and the customer. They have assumed the position of manipulators and users. Having such a person on the field selling your product will guarantee that he will go not where your product is mostly needed – serving the purpose of your target market – but to those most vulnerable to his manipulation techniques. In the long term, the reputation of the salesman will suffer, and the reputation of his company as well. In the United States, nowhere has this truth been more obvious than in the business of credit cards and mortgages. Credit cards originally developed as a means of safer and faster transactions – as opposed to carrying a bunch of paper bills in your wallet – and were mainly sold to richer people, those who could afford to pay and normally had means high enough to not worry about living beyond their means. Eventually, salesmen expanded their target to individuals and families who had no such high means, but were eager to have a credit card. The lure of being able to pay for anything you want, even if you didn’t have the means for it, eventually led to the enslavement of millions of Americans to consumer debt. This will eventually lead to a backlash against the credit card companies; and in fact, there is evidence that such backlash has already started: the younger generations are much less open to have credit cards and accumulate consumer debt than their parents. In general, the rule is the same as in the first principle: do not sell to people anything that will cripple their ability to be productive and do their part of the Dominion Covenant. Try to understand the situation of your customer. See if your product helps them in their individual purpose in life. If it doesn’t, stay away from a sale. They may still insist to buy from you, and if so, your responsibility is to be honest and explain that the product may not work for them as intended, in their particular situation. Only then you can sell. But in general, keep your integrity by being a servant, not a manipulator. Once a salesman is mindful of the first two rules – one, have a comprehensive view and know what is lawful to sell, and two, have an understanding of purpose and know in what situations and circumstances he should push his product and in what not – he is also under obligation to obey the general ethical rules of the market. What is the most common violation of ethics on the market? It’s fraud. It is so common, most buyers are automatically prepared to deal with it in just a casual way. And so common that most sellers instinctively engage in it without even realizing it. Thus, the market rule that has also become a legal rule in our modern world, is caveat emptor, that is, “let the buyer be aware.” That is, it is the buyer’s responsibility to make sure that the product or property he is buying will really be fit for the ordinary purposes he wants it. In most court cases where the seller has been challenged for the unfitness of his product, the seller won, and the buyer was left to pick up the tab. Proving fraud in business transactions is very difficult under our legal system today, so every seller is just assured that he doesn’t have to be careful when he advertises his product, and every buyer is just instinctively aware of the fact that the seller may be lying. Now, I am not saying that the laws should be changed to force every seller to full disclosure under the threat of liability. Such laws could never be enforced anyway; there are limits that God has put on government, and such laws are outside the governments’ power to enforce. But the legality of an issue I snot the same as the ethics of it. And a righteous salesman who is concerned about his reputation long-term will always make sure that he is a servant, which means, he will always make sure that he offers his customers as much disclosure as they need in order to get informed about his product. Again, a salesman is not legally obligated to disclose everything. But he has a moral duty before God to do it. Caveat emptor may be the legal rule of the state. Servanthood must be the salesman ethical rule. A salesman, therefore, is under duty to get informed about the customer’s specific needs before the customer is informed about the product. Now, many salesmen do that anyway, but in most cases, the goal is to get information about what sales points he could use to make the sale. (I am ashamed to say, at least part of Procter & Gamble’s sales training was committed to such techniques. Not all of it, but at least part.) I have seen some comical situations in this regard. For example, a supermarket owner who was concerned about aesthetics: how different products will look in terms of color arrangement on his shelves. So the salesman went into a long explanation why his brands of detergents, softeners, and shampoos had the best color combination for such shelves. He ended up selling the least popular brands on his list, the ones that moved the worst in the local market. The buyer never called again. In his zeal to move his least movable products, the salesman ended up losing a customer. The principle applies to everything, and, as I said, it is casually violated by almost everyone in our market today. Our American universities are perhaps some of the worst offenders, offering courses and degrees that eventually make no sense on the market. True enough, we do need good teaching on philosophy, on the humanitarian disciplines, etc., but no university really tells the prospective students, “this specific degree is not really worth its money on today’s market, you better re-direct your efforts into business, engineering, science, or communications, where the cost is worth it.” It is for this reason we have such a problem with student debt today, coupled with the problem of severe discrepancy between the specialties needed on the market and the degrees universities are producing in droves. You want to know why tech and engineering companies are forced to hire abroad or to outsource? You want to know why a simple house repair costs so much? That’s where the problem is. Eventually, younger people are beginning to see through the smoke and mirrors and increasingly decide to not spend their money on higher education. Of course, the buyer should always be aware, but it is also true that universities have a moral duty to present the realistic worth of their education. And so is every salesman. Present the realistic worth of your product, not what you believe will make your prospective customers make the purchase. Try to figure out what the customer needs it for. If you figure your product may not be the best fit, say it. He may still want to buy it, but you have done your duty. The next principle is related to the previous one: make sure both you and your customer gain from the transaction, not just you. Or, to make it short, don’t be greedy. My brother-in-law, who was a very successful businessman for two decades before he passed away, used to say to both his customers and his suppliers, “If we get poorer, let’s get poorer together. If we get richer, let’s get richer together.” And he stuck to that principle all his productive life. Now, there is no Biblical law against making the maximum profit possible from your business. “All that the traffic can bear” is the motto of most salesmen and businessmen, and there is nothing wrong with such motto, as it is. But there is an important ethical difference: It is one thing to try to get the maximum value for your product. It a another ballgame altogether to take advantage of your customers’ ignorance to get out of them more than the market’s alternatives are. It is on you, before God, to make sure that your customer leaves your office with a better value than he would leave anyone else’s office – or at least the same value. Remember the movie Flywheel. Ignore the many technical problems with that movie, and perhaps the few theological problems. The movie taught this important ethical principle. Jay Austin was in the right business (used cars) in the right community (rather low-income), and was selling the right cars to the right people. Except that, he was overcharging them, taking advantage of their lack of information. Not that it was illegal or anything; but it was immoral, for he was using his more powerful position (better information) to manipulate them. Eventually, it all resulted in almost bankruptcy. In the final account, he decided to make things right with the people he overcharged. The final scene was a battle between his old reputation (based on overcharging customers) and his new reputation (based on him reimbursing his customers for what he had overcharged them). The principle of getting richer together is not a principle that should be handily dismissed. A company I used to work for exemplified that principle quite well. Destin FL, where I lived for a couple of years, is known as one of the richest places in the nation; businesses can afford to sell at higher prices there. However, the company I worked for – a plumbing supply company – kept its prices as low as possible to maintain the same rate of profit as anywhere else. It was a small family-owned company which had been able to stand its ground for half a century against larger competitors by just being mindful of the alternatives, and refusing to become greedy in a market full of temptations. A righteous and ethical salesman, therefore, will be aware not only of what the customers need for their purposes, but also of the alternatives they can find, and will work to make sure that they are not robbed of a better deal, if the market allows it. Again, not that he is legally obligated to do it; but his reputation won’t be based on his legality but on his ethics. Indeed, the easier spread of information is forcing companies to adopt such ethics; think of those commercials where companies announce that if you bring them a proof for lower price for the same product at their competitors, they will sell it to you at the lower price. Eventually, the market forces you to be ethical or die out. So a good salesman still needs to be aware of that ethical principle and always avoid the temptation of greed. There shouldn’t be a government law against trying to get the maximum price for your product, but the Bible still warns us that “He who withholds grain, the people will curse him, but blessing will be on the head of him who sells it” (Prov. 11:26). And the last principle is view towards the future. Sounds like a no-brainer, but there it is, salesmen tend to be some of the most short-sighted and short-term-oriented people on the planet. (And all professional salesmen here say, “Amen.”) It’s in the very nature and psychology of the work of a salesman: your success is measured by whether you make that sale today. The psychology is so strong that some of us salesmen can’t even look at ourselves in the mirror if we don’t meet that sales target for the week, even though, in the majority of the cases, it is not our fault. You go to work the next Monday and you feel terrible when your name is not there on the board as someone who has met their sales targets. So that encourages you to become even more short-term-oriented and this week really meet that target no matter what, no holds barred. Eventually you feel compelled to take actions that you normally won’t take, and start telling your customers things that you normally wouldn’t say, just to manipulate them to buy. The world of sales is a tough world, and it has its tough challenges, and very few are morally strong enough to stand the pressure. What is the solution to this? The solution is to remember that there is such a thing as “future.” And in the future, you as a salesman will have to meet those prospective customers again. Your success with them will depend not on one single sale but on building a relationship of trust. Sometimes it means longer time. Sometimes it means that you won’t meet your arbitrary goals. Sometimes it means that you will have to suffer humiliation in your office or – most of the time – in your own mind. Your heart of a servant should be more concerned with establishing those relationships than with exploiting people. The idea that customers exist only to help you meet your goals amounts to objectification of other human beings. They do not exist to serve you. You are there to serve them. Objectification is never a good basis for establishing long-term reputation. Think of a sex-offender. While we may questions some of the methods of the modern state to isolate known sex-offenders, one thing is clear: once you have committed the crime, you need to carry the consequences of your damaged reputation. People won’t trust you. They won’t let you near their kids. You will feel awkward in their company knowing that, in their minds, they always assess and re-assess every single one of your reactions to things. Once you are known to objectify human beings for your lusts and purposes, that reputation will haunt you for the rest of your life. The same applies to salesmen. If you care about your reputation you have to care about the future. If you care about the future, you can’t afford to view your customers like walking ATMs. Back in the 1990s, such objectification of the customer was part of the sales colleges of many of the large corporations. We were taught techniques that amounted to pure manipulation. (Employees were objectified just as much as the customers, so it was a principle across the board.) Only in the late 1990s and the early 2000s did the business world start realizing that is strategy did not work long-term. Then, after 2005, small local companies started using the advantages of the Internet to challenge the market shares of the giants, and they did it by offering that personal relationship that the giants lacked, that is only capable of establishing long-term trust. I was told recently that the sales college at Procter & Gamble had changed significantly since the 1990s, and it much more personal and relation-oriented than before, and that the manipulation techniques have been erased from the course. That’s good. To summarize, a salesman reputation must be always based on the Dominion Covenant. A salesman is a mediator, and as a mediator, he is supposed to understand both sides and serve both sides. To do this successfully, he needs to have, first, a comprehensive view of God’s universe and especially of the Dominion Covenant. He is supposed to know what goods and services are lawful under that covenant and are not. (Hint: it’s not the same as what goods and services are legal under government laws.) Second, he is supposed to understand the concept of individual purpose, both for himself and for his customers. Which means, he needs to know what field he is supposed to be involved in, and also, which customers are really served by his products and services. And avoid pushing his products where they are not useful. Third, a salesman needs to have a very strong position against the most common sin on the marketplace: fraud. Not only what passes for fraud legally, but what is also deliberate withdrawal of information which may help the customer make an informed decision. Fourth, a salesman needs to understand the concept of mutual profit (or loss, for that matter). While there is nothing wrong with getting the maximum value for your product, taking advantage of other people’s weaker economic position in terms of money power or information brings curse. The right principle is to always make sure that both parties profit from the transaction. How do you know if they do? Consult the alternatives. And, fifth, always build relationships for the future, rather than profit for today. Objectifying your customers only goes so far. And a business is only profitable when it continues beyond the “so far.” And in all this, a salesman needs to always remember that what is “legal” should not define his ethics. Legality is not the basis for morality, and a reputation is not based on abiding by the minimum legal requirements. It is built on on going above and beyond, and using your power and position to serve other people in ways they can’t serve themselves. One’s customers, too. The book I will assign for reading this week is Wisdom and Dominion, Book 9 of Gary North’s economic commentary on the Bible. If you have read the other books of that commentary, or other books by Gary North, this book will sound a bit off balance to you: it is more focused on practical living than on economic theory or any theory whatsoever. But that’s the nature of Christian Reconstruction: our purpose is not to create another theoretical ivory tower for seminary professors to stretch and create numberless irrelevant classes for seminary students. In there, you will find a lot of wisdom needed for your career as a salesman. And not only as a salesman, but as a businessman as well – for a business can’t work unless you learn how to sell. And finally, in your prayers and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe by translating and publishing books on the application of the Gospel to every area of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post The Reputation of a Salesman appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

The Reputation of a Salesman Host Bojidar Marinov Description The only real asset the producer has at the point of sale and negotiation is the personality of his salesman. Or, the reputation of his salesman. Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 87 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I want to pick up a topic again that we discussed about two years ago: namely, sales. If you remember, in our episode, “Sales from a Biblical Perspective,” I presented the thesis that sales are not only a legitimate part of the economy, they are actually one of the most important parts of the economy. Why is that? let’s look at a short answer before we continue with the important topic: the underlying issue is this: Is the economy driven by the objective needs of the consumers, or is it driven by the entrepreneurship, innovation, and productivity of the producers? If it is driven by the objective needs of the consumers, then there would be no need for salesmen: everyone knows what they need, they just go out and try to find it. The problem with this, however, is that it can’t explain why the economy grows. Why are people buying so many things they have no direct need for? People have survived without electricity for centuries; how come, all of a sudden, everyone “needs” it? How come everyone today “needs” a cell phone? After all, some of us older people didn’t even know we “needed” one for decades. If needs are objective, how is it that most of what we think we “need” today hasn’t been around for centuries, and everyone survived? The answer is, of course that our “needs” are not real objective needs. They are subjective desires the moment we learn what is possible out there. And then, in our hearts, we transform them into “needs.” When we learn that it is possible to have ceiling fans, we now “need” them. When we learn that it’s possible to have air-conditioning, we now “need” that one, too. When we learned that it was possible to have mobile phones, we started “needing” them, too. When it became possible for mobile phones to connect to the internet in every place, we started “needing” that internet connection, too. (I personally resisted that “need” for some time, but I also succumbed to it, eventually.) If you are around my age (48) or older, you have surely been asked by your children or grandchildren, “How did you all live without Internet, or without cell phones, or without computers, or without [you fill the blank]?” From our perspective, of course, life was normal, and we had no need for all these things. I mean, it is nice to have them around because they make our life easier, but they are certainly not indispensable. A “need,” therefore, is not objective reality; it is psychological conditioning. And that psychological conditioning doesn’t need any skillful psychological techniques. All it needs is break the news to the consumers about new stuff on the market. Next thing you know, the market develops a “need” for it. That’s where salesmen come in. They are the middle men who break that news. They are the ones who inform the buying public about the new possibilities offered by the producers. Von Mises pointed out that on the market, information is the most valuable commodity. The right information gives you the opportunity to make the right the decisions and thus become more efficient. Salesmen are the agent for spreading that information. In a sense, they are democratizing it, making it cheap and available to everyone. Or, if you want to use a Biblical word, think of salesmen as the “evangelists” of the business world. They bring some sort of “good news” to their customers: “There’s a way to make your life easier at a lower price.” I know, I know, we all hate salesmen, especially those that appear at our door, but hate them or not, the truth is, all of the improvements in our homes and lives that make them better and more comfortable than homes and lives 200 years ago have come to us because some salesman many years ago decided to overcome his fear of knocking on people’s doors, and brought the good news of this or that improvement, for the scanty probability of making a few bucks on a sale. So, hate them as much as you want, but respect their work. It’s hard work. Anyway, after having established the legitimacy – in fact, the necessity – of salesmen in a Biblical economy, I was asked the question: “How does a salesman establish and build his reputation?” It’s a question of enormous significance. After all, a salesman is not sitting in some office communicating primarily with his co-workers and his boss. A salesman is supposed to be out there communicating with those who make the decision to buy: the customers. As he is out there with the customers, he himself, his person, is the face of his company. His product may be the greatest product ever, it may be at the perfect price, and it might turn out to be the most profitable purchase his customers may make, but to all these factors, one more factor must be added before there is a purchase: the reputation of the salesman. Because, let’s be honest, all the other factors are only potentials for the future; they can’t be tested until the purchase is made and the customer is in a position to use the product. So the only real asset the producer has at the point of sale and negotiation is the personality of his salesman. Or, the reputation of his salesman. The question is great, and we know need to think of this: what makes the reputation of a salesman? And we need to think about it in a Biblical manner, from a Biblical worldview. We need to make sure that whatever presuppositions we place at the foundation of our view, need to be Biblical presuppositions. I am not saying that a salesman is supposed to go around reciting Biblical verses or singing psalms. (Although, as a curious fact, some time ago some pastor responded to one of my articles that what we need is not more people in the marketplace with a Biblical worldview, but more psalm-singers. Once we had all offices packed up with psalm-singers who sing the psalms every day, Christian business is going to flourish. You can’t make this stuff up, I tell ya.) But a salesman, especially a Christian salesman, is under obligation to understand the only worldview that can guarantee success, and apply that worldview to his job. And when he applies it, his reputation will grow. “Keep and do these commandments, because they are your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the nations” (Deut. 4:6). So, what is it that builds the reputation of a salesman from the perspective of the Biblical worldview? We need to start from the beginning, from the complete picture. Without knowing the whole picture, a salesman is lost, even if he is the most skillful salesman ever. So, first, he needs to have a comprehensive view of the world around him and of its economic needs in God’s plan. I know, I know, this sounds kinda of too excessive. A salesman surely doesn’t have to be a philosopher or a theologian? No, not any more than anyone else. But he still should understand the world in its bigger picture – like anyone else should. Without such understanding of the world, we are left without any guidance as to where our place is, and, in fact, without any standard whatsoever about a place, even. Many of the problems in our society today are due to the fact that the majority of Americans have been taught a fragmented view of reality. And I don’t mean just that they were taught such fragmented view of reality in their government schools. It is everywhere. They were taught such a view in their families, in their churches, on their FOX News or CNN or MSN TV channels (whichever was constantly on in their homes), in their cinema theaters, on their commercials, etc. Americans today go about their business informed by an eclectic mish-mash of ideas, and they are capable sometimes of saying things that are, in their logic, inconsistent with themselves, without even stopping for a second to consider how deeply self-contradicting they are. (Think about the modern “conservative” views on immigration, or the modern leftist views on police and gun-control laws.) A salesman, however, if he is to build a long-term reputation, can’t afford to have a fragmented view of reality; he has to demonstrate consistency in his understanding, especially in his understanding of how his work and his products relate to the society and the economy in general. And if he is a Christian, he has to demonstrate consistency with the Biblical worldview, and especially with the Dominion Covenant. This is easier to say theoretically, but what does it imply in practice? What would it mean to have a comprehensive worldview? It means this (listen carefully): A salesman is supposed to know what products he should sell, and what products he should avoid attaching his name to. Let me repeat it: A salesman is supposed to know what products he should sell, and what products he should avoid attaching his name to. It doesn’t look much on the surface; and many salesmen don’t stop to think much about it. But if you are a Christian and you are looking to have a long-term career in sales, you need to make sure you always understand that the nature of the product you are selling is not morally neutral. And not only if you are looking to have a long-term career in sales; but also if you are looking to start a business in the future. Or engage in activism. Or anything that would involve your personal reputation. There are products that a righteous salesman shouldn’t be selling in the first place, no matter how attractive the pay is. Now, when you hear that, your first thought is, “drugs.” That’s because your brain was conditioned by statist propaganda. If you are a Southern Baptist, your thought is, “tobacco and alcohol.” Or may be you are thinking, “guns.” Or other goods like that which our society considers not goods but “evils.” Now, these could be “evils” in certain circumstances, and we will cover that part, but they are not what I have in mind here. What I mean is that a salesman needs to start from the Dominion Covenant and consider, for every product he is asked to sell, “Does selling this product help expand the dominion of mankind, or does it work against it?” The answer is not always easy, and sometimes it takes sometime to figure it out. I must say, personally, I have not been a good example; I have taken up to sell things that now, looking back, I shouldn’t have. And that was mainly because I was still not aware of all these principles I am talking about here. The answer is not always easy in every single case, but some guidelines can help all of us. From the perspective of the Dominion Covenant, what is good and wholesome and healthy to produce and sell is what increases the economic worth of the buyers or the consumers. Whatever decreases it, should be avoided. And when I say “increase the economic worth,” this doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes them richer in money; we are rather focused on overall productivity here. It can be used to satisfy legitimate personal needs and desires so that the person can be more productive tomorrow. Food, beverages (even alcoholic ones), medicines, a house, household appliances, furniture, chemicals, clothes, art, entertainment (most of it, with some exceptions), computers and computer programs – all these are lawful and legitimate, and should be a lawful target for a good salesman to sell. Industrial materials for their production, machines, engineering and engineering solutions, science – all these are also lawful. Services as well: banking, education, consultation in many areas, legal services, maintenance, etc. No need to cover all the possible areas; in our world today, with the gigantic division of labor and the development of technologies, there are thousands goods and services that make real contribution to the prosperity of modern man, and are therefore lawful to sell. The question is: “What are those that are not lawful to sell?” Not that they are not legal to sell, but what are those that are not lawful, under a Biblical worldview informed by the Dominion Covenant, to sell? Of course, we can start with some obvious examples: recreation drugs. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe they should be illegal, nor do I believe the government has a Biblical mandate to control such commerce or penalize people for what they put in their bodies. But whether taking recreational drugs is a crime or not, it is still sin: it is a deliberate attempt at twisting the reality of the mind and escaping the reality of God’s created world. Why using them recreationally (not talking medically) is sin, is not the topic of this episode. But whether you agree that they are sin or not, one thing is sure: habitual use of drugs and addiction to them makes a person incapable of fulfilling the Dominion Covenant. Or, at the very least, it handicaps him. A salesman who cares about his reputation would stay away from them – even if they were legal to sell. Another example is Ponzi schemes of different sorts. I had a friend many years ago, he and I graduated at the same time from the Naval Academy. He was a very well-spoken guy and his ability to persuade people was much greater than mine. However, when we met several years after we graduated, he was selling “shares” in one of those Ponzi schemes that were so common in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism; people in Eastern Europe didn’t know anything about such schemes and were falling for them, thinking these were “investments.” Eventually, they all failed, and my friend was left with a reputation of having worked for one of those schemes. Ponzi schemes don’t produce new economic value. What they produce is fraud and re-distribution of wealth from the gullible to the fraudsters. In this, I would include the multiple government programs that are nothing less than Ponzi schemes financed by taxpayers. Stay away from Obamacare, even if it promises good return to the salesman. Stay away from selling war bonds, treasury bonds, etc. stay away from selling consumer debt – like credit cards. These do not work for the Dominion Covenant but against it. Ever driven down the freeway and seen a billboard that advertises a lawyer who offers “divorce in 5 minutes”? I hate those. But my personal emotion is not what is important. I know divorce is an inevitable part of life after the fall, and I know that there are legitimate and lawful reasons for divorce, even when for Christians. But divorce in 5 minutes? Divorce that takes less time to do than decide your order in a restaurant? Divorce should be a long process where the husband and the wife go through a painful but needed reassessment of their relationship and only take the step after much agony and considerations. And even then, their lawyer, for the sake of his own soul, must make sure he is not being an accomplice in sin by offering a fast and easy way out. Offering quick and easy divorce is certainly against the principles in the Bible, that much should be clear. In this case, given that the billboard company is the “salesman,” or the advertiser, their willingness to supply the space is an example of selling the wrong product. Another example could be working for those spam calling companies we all are plagued by these days. I have used some of those calls to talk to the boys and girls hired by these companies, trying to explain to them why they have taken a job that is immoral, and will eventually waste their time. Another example would be working in any capacity as a salesman or PR or promoter for government services that are immoral by default – like the prison-industrial complex, or the surveillance agencies. It would only be lawful for a Christian salesman to work for these if his purpose is to get inside information and expose them to the public, like Edward Snowden, or the way the multiple sources that supply information to Wikileaks. Working for the gambling industry, or for businesses that sell sinful behavior (like strip clubs) is out of question. Etc. While my examples are by no means exhaustive, the principle must still be obvious: anything that adds economic or psychological or spiritual value to the society is worth selling. Anything that destroys value or worth should be avoided. The second thing a salesman needs to have in order to build his reputation is understanding of purpose. And I am not talking about the general philosophical concept of purpose here, as in the teleology of the universe, the overall purpose and direction of the universe. I am talking about the specific teleology, the meaning of life, the reason for existence of the individual man. If you have listened to Axe to the Root so far, and if you have read Christendom Restored.com, you know how important it is for a Christian to understand the concept of individual purpose and to apply it. In fact, I believe any church that does not self-consciously work to arm every individual believer with the ability to discover his individual purpose under God’s Covenant, any church that just boils the Christian life to impersonal generalities like “attend church every Sunday and just be a good man,” is a church that has doomed itself to extinction. A family that is not organized around a common purpose – ministry or business or something else – is a family that will have a lot of difficulties staying together, even if the spouses are the most faithful Christians you can find. When Paul was mentoring Timothy, he didn’t just tell him to live a good life and go to church. He reminded him of the specific prophecy concerning Timothy’s individual ministry and purpose, and told him to always remember that. Jesus didn’t just keep His disciples around to teach them general theology and good life; He taught them their individual purpose in His kingdom. If there is such a thing as discipleship in the Bible, it has more to do with the individual purpose of the disciples, not with some general notions of how to live a Christian life. Living a Christian life is important, and ethical boundaries are important, but without a knowledge about one’s individual purpose, about the specific corner of the Garden a person is expected to take ownership of and turn it into a city, ethical boundaries and general principles mean nothing. A salesman works with people. People are his field of work. Himself first, of course. And then his clients. So before he starts his work, he needs to understand his own individual purpose in life, and thus choose what products he wants to sell. It may be Biblically lawful to sell a product, but it may not be wise and advisable for the specific situation and the specific purpose of the salesman himself. Many years ago, when I was a missionary in Bulgaria, I also worked as a salesman for different companies (including Procter & Gamble, for example). I once saw a job ad that looked quite promising so I went to the information meeting to find out what it was about. At the meeting, I found out that the leadership of the company was all my old pals from the Naval Academy, and that had I applied, I would certainly get the job. It was good fixed salary plus generous commissions plus new company car plus vacation. The only problem was, it was a beer company. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am the last person on the planet who would tell you selling beer is wrong. The problem was, I had a higher calling – my mission work – and taking up a job like this would jeopardize my reputation with Christians and churches in Bulgaria who, at the time, were still quite pietistic and looked down on businesses selling beer. (The situation has changed over the last 20 years.) So I had to withdraw my application. There is always a higher calling, and my area of sales must agree with it. Otherwise, in the long term, a salesman will lose his reputation and he won’t be able to pursue his higher calling. But then, the same applies to his customers. I have often seen successful salesmen who brag that they could “sell refrigerators to Eskimos.” Perhaps they could. But if I was an employer, I would certainly not hire such a person. To my mind, such a person is bragging that they don’t give the smallest Indian coin – a dam – about the specific individual circumstances and purpose of their customers. They would sell them even things that would not benefit them, and would not benefit their well-being. Such salesmen have not taken seriously their job as being servants and mediators between the producer and the customer. They have assumed the position of manipulators and users. Having such a person on the field selling your product will guarantee that he will go not where your product is mostly needed – serving the purpose of your target market – but to those most vulnerable to his manipulation techniques. In the long term, the reputation of the salesman will suffer, and the reputation of his company as well. In the United States, nowhere has this truth been more obvious than in the business of credit cards and mortgages. Credit cards originally developed as a means of safer and faster transactions – as opposed to carrying a bunch of paper bills in your wallet – and were mainly sold to richer people, those who could afford to pay and normally had means high enough to not worry about living beyond their means. Eventually, salesmen expanded their target to individuals and families who had no such high means, but were eager to have a credit card. The lure of being able to pay for anything you want, even if you didn’t have the means for it, eventually led to the enslavement of millions of Americans to consumer debt. This will eventually lead to a backlash against the credit card companies; and in fact, there is evidence that such backlash has already started: the younger generations are much less open to have credit cards and accumulate consumer debt than their parents. In general, the rule is the same as in the first principle: do not sell to people anything that will cripple their ability to be productive and do their part of the Dominion Covenant. Try to understand the situation of your customer. See if your product helps them in their individual purpose in life. If it doesn’t, stay away from a sale. They may still insist to buy from you, and if so, your responsibility is to be honest and explain that the product may not work for them as intended, in their particular situation. Only then you can sell. But in general, keep your integrity by being a servant, not a manipulator. Once a salesman is mindful of the first two rules – one, have a comprehensive view and know what is lawful to sell, and two, have an understanding of purpose and know in what situations and circumstances he should push his product and in what not – he is also under obligation to obey the general ethical rules of the market. What is the most common violation of ethics on the market? It’s fraud. It is so common, most buyers are automatically prepared to deal with it in just a casual way. And so common that most sellers instinctively engage in it without even realizing it. Thus, the market rule that has also become a legal rule in our modern world, is caveat emptor, that is, “let the buyer be aware.” That is, it is the buyer’s responsibility to make sure that the product or property he is buying will really be fit for the ordinary purposes he wants it. In most court cases where the seller has been challenged for the unfitness of his product, the seller won, and the buyer was left to pick up the tab. Proving fraud in business transactions is very difficult under our legal system today, so every seller is just assured that he doesn’t have to be careful when he advertises his product, and every buyer is just instinctively aware of the fact that the seller may be lying. Now, I am not saying that the laws should be changed to force every seller to full disclosure under the threat of liability. Such laws could never be enforced anyway; there are limits that God has put on government, and such laws are outside the governments’ power to enforce. But the legality of an issue I snot the same as the ethics of it. And a righteous salesman who is concerned about his reputation long-term will always make sure that he is a servant, which means, he will always make sure that he offers his customers as much disclosure as they need in order to get informed about his product. Again, a salesman is not legally obligated to disclose everything. But he has a moral duty before God to do it. Caveat emptor may be the legal rule of the state. Servanthood must be the salesman ethical rule. A salesman, therefore, is under duty to get informed about the customer’s specific needs before the customer is informed about the product. Now, many salesmen do that anyway, but in most cases, the goal is to get information about what sales points he could use to make the sale. (I am ashamed to say, at least part of Procter & Gamble’s sales training was committed to such techniques. Not all of it, but at least part.) I have seen some comical situations in this regard. For example, a supermarket owner who was concerned about aesthetics: how different products will look in terms of color arrangement on his shelves. So the salesman went into a long explanation why his brands of detergents, softeners, and shampoos had the best color combination for such shelves. He ended up selling the least popular brands on his list, the ones that moved the worst in the local market. The buyer never called again. In his zeal to move his least movable products, the salesman ended up losing a customer. The principle applies to everything, and, as I said, it is casually violated by almost everyone in our market today. Our American universities are perhaps some of the worst offenders, offering courses and degrees that eventually make no sense on the market. True enough, we do need good teaching on philosophy, on the humanitarian disciplines, etc., but no university really tells the prospective students, “this specific degree is not really worth its money on today’s market, you better re-direct your efforts into business, engineering, science, or communications, where the cost is worth it.” It is for this reason we have such a problem with student debt today, coupled with the problem of severe discrepancy between the specialties needed on the market and the degrees universities are producing in droves. You want to know why tech and engineering companies are forced to hire abroad or to outsource? You want to know why a simple house repair costs so much? That’s where the problem is. Eventually, younger people are beginning to see through the smoke and mirrors and increasingly decide to not spend their money on higher education. Of course, the buyer should always be aware, but it is also true that universities have a moral duty to present the realistic worth of their education. And so is every salesman. Present the realistic worth of your product, not what you believe will make your prospective customers make the purchase. Try to figure out what the customer needs it for. If you figure your product may not be the best fit, say it. He may still want to buy it, but you have done your duty. The next principle is related to the previous one: make sure both you and your customer gain from the transaction, not just you. Or, to make it short, don’t be greedy. My brother-in-law, who was a very successful businessman for two decades before he passed away, used to say to both his customers and his suppliers, “If we get poorer, let’s get poorer together. If we get richer, let’s get richer together.” And he stuck to that principle all his productive life. Now, there is no Biblical law against making the maximum profit possible from your business. “All that the traffic can bear” is the motto of most salesmen and businessmen, and there is nothing wrong with such motto, as it is. But there is an important ethical difference: It is one thing to try to get the maximum value for your product. It a another ballgame altogether to take advantage of your customers’ ignorance to get out of them more than the market’s alternatives are. It is on you, before God, to make sure that your customer leaves your office with a better value than he would leave anyone else’s office – or at least the same value. Remember the movie Flywheel. Ignore the many technical problems with that movie, and perhaps the few theological problems. The movie taught this important ethical principle. Jay Austin was in the right business (used cars) in the right community (rather low-income), and was selling the right cars to the right people. Except that, he was overcharging them, taking advantage of their lack of information. Not that it was illegal or anything; but it was immoral, for he was using his more powerful position (better information) to manipulate them. Eventually, it all resulted in almost bankruptcy. In the final account, he decided to make things right with the people he overcharged. The final scene was a battle between his old reputation (based on overcharging customers) and his new reputation (based on him reimbursing his customers for what he had overcharged them). The principle of getting richer together is not a principle that should be handily dismissed. A company I used to work for exemplified that principle quite well. Destin FL, where I lived for a couple of years, is known as one of the richest places in the nation; businesses can afford to sell at higher prices there. However, the company I worked for – a plumbing supply company – kept its prices as low as possible to maintain the same rate of profit as anywhere else. It was a small family-owned company which had been able to stand its ground for half a century against larger competitors by just being mindful of the alternatives, and refusing to become greedy in a market full of temptations. A righteous and ethical salesman, therefore, will be aware not only of what the customers need for their purposes, but also of the alternatives they can find, and will work to make sure that they are not robbed of a better deal, if the market allows it. Again, not that he is legally obligated to do it; but his reputation won’t be based on his legality but on his ethics. Indeed, the easier spread of information is forcing companies to adopt such ethics; think of those commercials where companies announce that if you bring them a proof for lower price for the same product at their competitors, they will sell it to you at the lower price. Eventually, the market forces you to be ethical or die out. So a good salesman still needs to be aware of that ethical principle and always avoid the temptation of greed. There shouldn’t be a government law against trying to get the maximum price for your product, but the Bible still warns us that “He who withholds grain, the people will curse him, but blessing will be on the head of him who sells it” (Prov. 11:26). And the last principle is view towards the future. Sounds like a no-brainer, but there it is, salesmen tend to be some of the most short-sighted and short-term-oriented people on the planet. (And all professional salesmen here say, “Amen.”) It’s in the very nature and psychology of the work of a salesman: your success is measured by whether you make that sale today. The psychology is so strong that some of us salesmen can’t even look at ourselves in the mirror if we don’t meet that sales target for the week, even though, in the majority of the cases, it is not our fault. You go to work the next Monday and you feel terrible when your name is not there on the board as someone who has met their sales targets. So that encourages you to become even more short-term-oriented and this week really meet that target no matter what, no holds barred. Eventually you feel compelled to take actions that you normally won’t take, and start telling your customers things that you normally wouldn’t say, just to manipulate them to buy. The world of sales is a tough world, and it has its tough challenges, and very few are morally strong enough to stand the pressure. What is the solution to this? The solution is to remember that there is such a thing as “future.” And in the future, you as a salesman will have to meet those prospective customers again. Your success with them will depend not on one single sale but on building a relationship of trust. Sometimes it means longer time. Sometimes it means that you won’t meet your arbitrary goals. Sometimes it means that you will have to suffer humiliation in your office or – most of the time – in your own mind. Your heart of a servant should be more concerned with establishing those relationships than with exploiting people. The idea that customers exist only to help you meet your goals amounts to objectification of other human beings. They do not exist to serve you. You are there to serve them. Objectification is never a good basis for establishing long-term reputation. Think of a sex-offender. While we may questions some of the methods of the modern state to isolate known sex-offenders, one thing is clear: once you have committed the crime, you need to carry the consequences of your damaged reputation. People won’t trust you. They won’t let you near their kids. You will feel awkward in their company knowing that, in their minds, they always assess and re-assess every single one of your reactions to things. Once you are known to objectify human beings for your lusts and purposes, that reputation will haunt you for the rest of your life. The same applies to salesmen. If you care about your reputation you have to care about the future. If you care about the future, you can’t afford to view your customers like walking ATMs. Back in the 1990s, such objectification of the customer was part of the sales colleges of many of the large corporations. We were taught techniques that amounted to pure manipulation. (Employees were objectified just as much as the customers, so it was a principle across the board.) Only in the late 1990s and the early 2000s did the business world start realizing that is strategy did not work long-term. Then, after 2005, small local companies started using the advantages of the Internet to challenge the market shares of the giants, and they did it by offering that personal relationship that the giants lacked, that is only capable of establishing long-term trust. I was told recently that the sales college at Procter & Gamble had changed significantly since the 1990s, and it much more personal and relation-oriented than before, and that the manipulation techniques have been erased from the course. That’s good. To summarize, a salesman reputation must be always based on the Dominion Covenant. A salesman is a mediator, and as a mediator, he is supposed to understand both sides and serve both sides. To do this successfully, he needs to have, first, a comprehensive view of God’s universe and especially of the Dominion Covenant. He is supposed to know what goods and services are lawful under that covenant and are not. (Hint: it’s not the same as what goods and services are legal under government laws.) Second, he is supposed to understand the concept of individual purpose, both for himself and for his customers. Which means, he needs to know what field he is supposed to be involved in, and also, which customers are really served by his products and services. And avoid pushing his products where they are not useful. Third, a salesman needs to have a very strong position against the most common sin on the marketplace: fraud. Not only what passes for fraud legally, but what is also deliberate withdrawal of information which may help the customer make an informed decision. Fourth, a salesman needs to understand the concept of mutual profit (or loss, for that matter). While there is nothing wrong with getting the maximum value for your product, taking advantage of other people’s weaker economic position in terms of money power or information brings curse. The right principle is to always make sure that both parties profit from the transaction. How do you know if they do? Consult the alternatives. And, fifth, always build relationships for the future, rather than profit for today. Objectifying your customers only goes so far. And a business is only profitable when it continues beyond the “so far.” And in all this, a salesman needs to always remember that what is “legal” should not define his ethics. Legality is not the basis for morality, and a reputation is not based on abiding by the minimum legal requirements. It is built on on going above and beyond, and using your power and position to serve other people in ways they can’t serve themselves. One’s customers, too. The book I will assign for reading this week is Wisdom and Dominion, Book 9 of Gary North’s economic commentary on the Bible. If you have read the other books of that commentary, or other books by Gary North, this book will sound a bit off balance to you: it is more focused on practical living than on economic theory or any theory whatsoever. But that’s the nature of Christian Reconstruction: our purpose is not to create another theoretical ivory tower for seminary professors to stretch and create numberless irrelevant classes for seminary students. In there, you will find a lot of wisdom needed for your career as a salesman. And not only as a salesman, but as a businessman as well – for a business can’t work unless you learn how to sell. And finally, in your prayers and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe by translating and publishing books on the application of the Gospel to every area of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post The Reputation of a Salesman appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description The only real asset the producer has at the point of sale and negotiation is the personality of his salesman. Or, the reputation of his salesman. Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 87 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I want to pick up a topic again that we discussed about two years ago: namely, sales. If you remember, in our episode, “Sales from a Biblical Perspective,” I presented the thesis that sales are not only a legitimate part of the economy, they are actually one of the most important parts of the economy. Why is that? let’s look at a short answer before we continue with the important topic: the underlying issue is this: Is the economy driven by the objective needs of the consumers, or is it driven by the entrepreneurship, innovation, and productivity of the producers? If it is driven by the objective needs of the consumers, then there would be no need for salesmen: everyone knows what they need, they just go out and try to find it. The problem with this, however, is that it can’t explain why the economy grows. Why are people buying so many things they have no direct need for? People have survived without electricity for centuries; how come, all of a sudden, everyone “needs” it? How come everyone today “needs” a cell phone? After all, some of us older people didn’t even know we “needed” one for decades. If needs are objective, how is it that most of what we think we “need” today hasn’t been around for centuries, and everyone survived? The answer is, of course that our “needs” are not real objective needs. They are subjective desires the moment we learn what is possible out there. And then, in our hearts, we transform them into “needs.” When we learn that it is possible to have ceiling fans, we now “need” them. When we learn that it’s possible to have air-conditioning, we now “need” that one, too. When we learned that it was possible to have mobile phones, we started “needing” them, too. When it became possible for mobile phones to connect to the internet in every place, we started “needing” that internet connection, too. (I personally resisted that “need” for some time, but I also succumbed to it, eventually.) If you are around my age (48) or older, you have surely been asked by your children or grandchildren, “How did you all live without Internet, or without cell phones, or without computers, or without [you fill the blank]?” From our perspective, of course, life was normal, and we had no need for all these things. I mean, it is nice to have them around because they make our life easier, but they are certainly not indispensable. A “need,” therefore, is not objective reality; it is psychological conditioning. And that psychological conditioning doesn’t need any skillful psychological techniques. All it needs is break the news to the consumers about new stuff on the market. Next thing you know, the market develops a “need” for it. That’s where salesmen come in. They are the middle men who break that news. They are the ones who inform the buying public about the new possibilities offered by the producers. Von Mises pointed out that on the market, information is the most valuable commodity. The right information gives you the opportunity to make the right the decisions and thus become more efficient. Salesmen are the agent for spreading that information. In a sense, they are democratizing it, making it cheap and available to everyone. Or, if you want to use a Biblical word, think of salesmen as the “evangelists” of the business world. They bring some sort of “good news” to their customers: “There’s a way to make your life easier at a lower price.” I know, I know, we all hate salesmen, especially those that appear at our door, but hate them or not, the truth is, all of the improvements in our homes and lives that make them better and more comfortable than homes and lives 200 years ago have come to us because some salesman many years ago decided to overcome his fear of knocking on people’s doors, and brought the good news of this or that improvement, for the scanty probability of making a few bucks on a sale. So, hate them as much as you want, but respect their work. It’s hard work. Anyway, after having established the legitimacy – in fact, the necessity – of salesmen in a Biblical economy, I was asked the question: “How does a salesman establish and build his reputation?” It’s a question of enormous significance. After all, a salesman is not sitting in some office communicating primarily with his co-workers and his boss. A salesman is supposed to be out there communicating with those who make the decision to buy: the customers. As he is out there with the customers, he himself, his person, is the face of his company. His product may be the greatest product ever, it may be at the perfect price, and it might turn out to be the most profitable purchase his customers may make, but to all these factors, one more factor must be added before there is a purchase: the reputation of the salesman. Because, let’s be honest, all the other factors are only potentials for the future; they can’t be tested until the purchase is made and the customer is in a position to use the product. So the only real asset the producer has at the point of sale and negotiation is the personality of his salesman. Or, the reputation of his salesman. The question is great, and we know need to think of this: what makes the reputation of a salesman? And we need to think about it in a Biblical manner, from a Biblical worldview. We need to make sure that whatever presuppositions we place at the foundation of our view, need to be Biblical presuppositions. I am not saying that a salesman is supposed to go around reciting Biblical verses or singing psalms. (Although, as a curious fact, some time ago some pastor responded to one of my articles that what we need is not more people in the marketplace with a Biblical worldview, but more psalm-singers. Once we had all offices packed up with psalm-singers who sing the psalms every day, Christian business is going to flourish. You can’t make this stuff up, I tell ya.) But a salesman, especially a Christian salesman, is under obligation to understand the only worldview that can guarantee success, and apply that worldview to his job. And when he applies it, his reputation will grow. “Keep and do these commandments, because they are your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the nations” (Deut. 4:6). So, what is it that builds the reputation of a salesman from the perspective of the Biblical worldview? We need to start from the beginning, from the complete picture. Without knowing the whole picture, a salesman is lost, even if he is the most skillful salesman ever. So, first, he needs to have a comprehensive view of the world around him and of its economic needs in God’s plan. I know, I know, this sounds kinda of too excessive. A salesman surely doesn’t have to be a philosopher or a theologian? No, not any more than anyone else. But he still should understand the world in its bigger picture – like anyone else should. Without such understanding of the world, we are left without any guidance as to where our place is, and, in fact, without any standard whatsoever about a place, even. Many of the problems in our society today are due to the fact that the majority of Americans have been taught a fragmented view of reality. And I don’t mean just that they were taught such fragmented view of reality in their government schools. It is everywhere. They were taught such a view in their families, in their churches, on their FOX News or CNN or MSN TV channels (whichever was constantly on in their homes), in their cinema theaters, on their commercials, etc. Americans today go about their business informed by an eclectic mish-mash of ideas, and they are capable sometimes of saying things that are, in their logic, inconsistent with themselves, without even stopping for a second to consider how deeply self-contradicting they are. (Think about the modern “conservative” views on immigration, or the modern leftist views on police and gun-control laws.) A salesman, however, if he is to build a long-term reputation, can’t afford to have a fragmented view of reality; he has to demonstrate consistency in his understanding, especially in his understanding of how his work and his products relate to the society and the economy in general. And if he is a Christian, he has to demonstrate consistency with the Biblical worldview, and especially with the Dominion Covenant. This is easier to say theoretically, but what does it imply in practice? What would it mean to have a comprehensive worldview? It means this (listen carefully): A salesman is supposed to know what products he should sell, and what products he should avoid attaching his name to. Let me repeat it: A salesman is supposed to know what products he should sell, and what products he should avoid attaching his name to. It doesn’t look much on the surface; and many salesmen don’t stop to think much about it. But if you are a Christian and you are looking to have a long-term career in sales, you need to make sure you always understand that the nature of the product you are selling is not morally neutral. And not only if you are looking to have a long-term career in sales; but also if you are looking to start a business in the future. Or engage in activism. Or anything that would involve your personal reputation. There are products that a righteous salesman shouldn’t be selling in the first place, no matter how attractive the pay is. Now, when you hear that, your first thought is, “drugs.” That’s because your brain was conditioned by statist propaganda. If you are a Southern Baptist, your thought is, “tobacco and alcohol.” Or may be you are thinking, “guns.” Or other goods like that which our society considers not goods but “evils.” Now, these could be “evils” in certain circumstances, and we will cover that part, but they are not what I have in mind here. What I mean is that a salesman needs to start from the Dominion Covenant and consider, for every product he is asked to sell, “Does selling this product help expand the dominion of mankind, or does it work against it?” The answer is not always easy, and sometimes it takes sometime to figure it out. I must say, personally, I have not been a good example; I have taken up to sell things that now, looking back, I shouldn’t have. And that was mainly because I was still not aware of all these principles I am talking about here. The answer is not always easy in every single case, but some guidelines can help all of us. From the perspective of the Dominion Covenant, what is good and wholesome and healthy to produce and sell is what increases the economic worth of the buyers or the consumers. Whatever decreases it, should be avoided. And when I say “increase the economic worth,” this doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes them richer in money; we are rather focused on overall productivity here. It can be used to satisfy legitimate personal needs and desires so that the person can be more productive tomorrow. Food, beverages (even alcoholic ones), medicines, a house, household appliances, furniture, chemicals, clothes, art, entertainment (most of it, with some exceptions), computers and computer programs – all these are lawful and legitimate, and should be a lawful target for a good salesman to sell. Industrial materials for their production, machines, engineering and engineering solutions, science – all these are also lawful. Services as well: banking, education, consultation in many areas, legal services, maintenance, etc. No need to cover all the possible areas; in our world today, with the gigantic division of labor and the development of technologies, there are thousands goods and services that make real contribution to the prosperity of modern man, and are therefore lawful to sell. The question is: “What are those that are not lawful to sell?” Not that they are not legal to sell, but what are those that are not lawful, under a Biblical worldview informed by the Dominion Covenant, to sell? Of course, we can start with some obvious examples: recreation drugs. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe they should be illegal, nor do I believe the government has a Biblical mandate to control such commerce or penalize people for what they put in their bodies. But whether taking recreational drugs is a crime or not, it is still sin: it is a deliberate attempt at twisting the reality of the mind and escaping the reality of God’s created world. Why using them recreationally (not talking medically) is sin, is not the topic of this episode. But whether you agree that they are sin or not, one thing is sure: habitual use of drugs and addiction to them makes a person incapable of fulfilling the Dominion Covenant. Or, at the very least, it handicaps him. A salesman who cares about his reputation would stay away from them – even if they were legal to sell. Another example is Ponzi schemes of different sorts. I had a friend many years ago, he and I graduated at the same time from the Naval Academy. He was a very well-spoken guy and his ability to persuade people was much greater than mine. However, when we met several years after we graduated, he was selling “shares” in one of those Ponzi schemes that were so common in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism; people in Eastern Europe didn’t know anything about such schemes and were falling for them, thinking these were “investments.” Eventually, they all failed, and my friend was left with a reputation of having worked for one of those schemes. Ponzi schemes don’t produce new economic value. What they produce is fraud and re-distribution of wealth from the gullible to the fraudsters. In this, I would include the multiple government programs that are nothing less than Ponzi schemes financed by taxpayers. Stay away from Obamacare, even if it promises good return to the salesman. Stay away from selling war bonds, treasury bonds, etc. stay away from selling consumer debt – like credit cards. These do not work for the Dominion Covenant but against it. Ever driven down the freeway and seen a billboard that advertises a lawyer who offers “divorce in 5 minutes”? I hate those. But my personal emotion is not what is important. I know divorce is an inevitable part of life after the fall, and I know that there are legitimate and lawful reasons for divorce, even when for Christians. But divorce in 5 minutes? Divorce that takes less time to do than decide your order in a restaurant? Divorce should be a long process where the husband and the wife go through a painful but needed reassessment of their relationship and only take the step after much agony and considerations. And even then, their lawyer, for the sake of his own soul, must make sure he is not being an accomplice in sin by offering a fast and easy way out. Offering quick and easy divorce is certainly against the principles in the Bible, that much should be clear. In this case, given that the billboard company is the “salesman,” or the advertiser, their willingness to supply the space is an example of selling the wrong product. Another example could be working for those spam calling companies we all are plagued by these days. I have used some of those calls to talk to the boys and girls hired by these companies, trying to explain to them why they have taken a job that is immoral, and will eventually waste their time. Another example would be working in any capacity as a salesman or PR or promoter for government services that are immoral by default – like the prison-industrial complex, or the surveillance agencies. It would only be lawful for a Christian salesman to work for these if his purpose is to get inside information and expose them to the public, like Edward Snowden, or the way the multiple sources that supply information to Wikileaks. Working for the gambling industry, or for businesses that sell sinful behavior (like strip clubs) is out of question. Etc. While my examples are by no means exhaustive, the principle must still be obvious: anything that adds economic or psychological or spiritual value to the society is worth selling. Anything that destroys value or worth should be avoided. The second thing a salesman needs to have in order to build his reputation is understanding of purpose. And I am not talking about the general philosophical concept of purpose here, as in the teleology of the universe, the overall purpose and direction of the universe. I am talking about the specific teleology, the meaning of life, the reason for existence of the individual man. If you have listened to Axe to the Root so far, and if you have read Christendom Restored.com, you know how important it is for a Christian to understand the concept of individual purpose and to apply it. In fact, I believe any church that does not self-consciously work to arm every individual believer with the ability to discover his individual purpose under God’s Covenant, any church that just boils the Christian life to impersonal generalities like “attend church every Sunday and just be a good man,” is a church that has doomed itself to extinction. A family that is not organized around a common purpose – ministry or business or something else – is a family that will have a lot of difficulties staying together, even if the spouses are the most faithful Christians you can find. When Paul was mentoring Timothy, he didn’t just tell him to live a good life and go to church. He reminded him of the specific prophecy concerning Timothy’s individual ministry and purpose, and told him to always remember that. Jesus didn’t just keep His disciples around to teach them general theology and good life; He taught them their individual purpose in His kingdom. If there is such a thing as discipleship in the Bible, it has more to do with the individual purpose of the disciples, not with some general notions of how to live a Christian life. Living a Christian life is important, and ethical boundaries are important, but without a knowledge about one’s individual purpose, about the specific corner of the Garden a person is expected to take ownership of and turn it into a city, ethical boundaries and general principles mean nothing. A salesman works with people. People are his field of work. Himself first, of course. And then his clients. So before he starts his work, he needs to understand his own individual purpose in life, and thus choose what products he wants to sell. It may be Biblically lawful to sell a product, but it may not be wise and advisable for the specific situation and the specific purpose of the salesman himself. Many years ago, when I was a missionary in Bulgaria, I also worked as a salesman for different companies (including Procter & Gamble, for example). I once saw a job ad that looked quite promising so I went to the information meeting to find out what it was about. At the meeting, I found out that the leadership of the company was all my old pals from the Naval Academy, and that had I applied, I would certainly get the job. It was good fixed salary plus generous commissions plus new company car plus vacation. The only problem was, it was a beer company. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am the last person on the planet who would tell you selling beer is wrong. The problem was, I had a higher calling – my mission work – and taking up a job like this would jeopardize my reputation with Christians and churches in Bulgaria who, at the time, were still quite pietistic and looked down on businesses selling beer. (The situation has changed over the last 20 years.) So I had to withdraw my application. There is always a higher calling, and my area of sales must agree with it. Otherwise, in the long term, a salesman will lose his reputation and he won’t be able to pursue his higher calling. But then, the same applies to his customers. I have often seen successful salesmen who brag that they could “sell refrigerators to Eskimos.” Perhaps they could. But if I was an employer, I would certainly not hire such a person. To my mind, such a person is bragging that they don’t give the smallest Indian coin – a dam – about the specific individual circumstances and purpose of their customers. They would sell them even things that would not benefit them, and would not benefit their well-being. Such salesmen have not taken seriously their job as being servants and mediators between the producer and the customer. They have assumed the position of manipulators and users. Having such a person on the field selling your product will guarantee that he will go not where your product is mostly needed – serving the purpose of your target market – but to those most vulnerable to his manipulation techniques. In the long term, the reputation of the salesman will suffer, and the reputation of his company as well. In the United States, nowhere has this truth been more obvious than in the business of credit cards and mortgages. Credit cards originally developed as a means of safer and faster transactions – as opposed to carrying a bunch of paper bills in your wallet – and were mainly sold to richer people, those who could afford to pay and normally had means high enough to not worry about living beyond their means. Eventually, salesmen expanded their target to individuals and families who had no such high means, but were eager to have a credit card. The lure of being able to pay for anything you want, even if you didn’t have the means for it, eventually led to the enslavement of millions of Americans to consumer debt. This will eventually lead to a backlash against the credit card companies; and in fact, there is evidence that such backlash has already started: the younger generations are much less open to have credit cards and accumulate consumer debt than their parents. In general, the rule is the same as in the first principle: do not sell to people anything that will cripple their ability to be productive and do their part of the Dominion Covenant. Try to understand the situation of your customer. See if your product helps them in their individual purpose in life. If it doesn’t, stay away from a sale. They may still insist to buy from you, and if so, your responsibility is to be honest and explain that the product may not work for them as intended, in their particular situation. Only then you can sell. But in general, keep your integrity by being a servant, not a manipulator. Once a salesman is mindful of the first two rules – one, have a comprehensive view and know what is lawful to sell, and two, have an understanding of purpose and know in what situations and circumstances he should push his product and in what not – he is also under obligation to obey the general ethical rules of the market. What is the most common violation of ethics on the market? It’s fraud. It is so common, most buyers are automatically prepared to deal with it in just a casual way. And so common that most sellers instinctively engage in it without even realizing it. Thus, the market rule that has also become a legal rule in our modern world, is caveat emptor, that is, “let the buyer be aware.” That is, it is the buyer’s responsibility to make sure that the product or property he is buying will really be fit for the ordinary purposes he wants it. In most court cases where the seller has been challenged for the unfitness of his product, the seller won, and the buyer was left to pick up the tab. Proving fraud in business transactions is very difficult under our legal system today, so every seller is just assured that he doesn’t have to be careful when he advertises his product, and every buyer is just instinctively aware of the fact that the seller may be lying. Now, I am not saying that the laws should be changed to force every seller to full disclosure under the threat of liability. Such laws could never be enforced anyway; there are limits that God has put on government, and such laws are outside the governments’ power to enforce. But the legality of an issue I snot the same as the ethics of it. And a righteous salesman who is concerned about his reputation long-term will always make sure that he is a servant, which means, he will always make sure that he offers his customers as much disclosure as they need in order to get informed about his product. Again, a salesman is not legally obligated to disclose everything. But he has a moral duty before God to do it. Caveat emptor may be the legal rule of the state. Servanthood must be the salesman ethical rule. A salesman, therefore, is under duty to get informed about the customer’s specific needs before the customer is informed about the product. Now, many salesmen do that anyway, but in most cases, the goal is to get information about what sales points he could use to make the sale. (I am ashamed to say, at least part of Procter & Gamble’s sales training was committed to such techniques. Not all of it, but at least part.) I have seen some comical situations in this regard. For example, a supermarket owner who was concerned about aesthetics: how different products will look in terms of color arrangement on his shelves. So the salesman went into a long explanation why his brands of detergents, softeners, and shampoos had the best color combination for such shelves. He ended up selling the least popular brands on his list, the ones that moved the worst in the local market. The buyer never called again. In his zeal to move his least movable products, the salesman ended up losing a customer. The principle applies to everything, and, as I said, it is casually violated by almost everyone in our market today. Our American universities are perhaps some of the worst offenders, offering courses and degrees that eventually make no sense on the market. True enough, we do need good teaching on philosophy, on the humanitarian disciplines, etc., but no university really tells the prospective students, “this specific degree is not really worth its money on today’s market, you better re-direct your efforts into business, engineering, science, or communications, where the cost is worth it.” It is for this reason we have such a problem with student debt today, coupled with the problem of severe discrepancy between the specialties needed on the market and the degrees universities are producing in droves. You want to know why tech and engineering companies are forced to hire abroad or to outsource? You want to know why a simple house repair costs so much? That’s where the problem is. Eventually, younger people are beginning to see through the smoke and mirrors and increasingly decide to not spend their money on higher education. Of course, the buyer should always be aware, but it is also true that universities have a moral duty to present the realistic worth of their education. And so is every salesman. Present the realistic worth of your product, not what you believe will make your prospective customers make the purchase. Try to figure out what the customer needs it for. If you figure your product may not be the best fit, say it. He may still want to buy it, but you have done your duty. The next principle is related to the previous one: make sure both you and your customer gain from the transaction, not just you. Or, to make it short, don’t be greedy. My brother-in-law, who was a very successful businessman for two decades before he passed away, used to say to both his customers and his suppliers, “If we get poorer, let’s get poorer together. If we get richer, let’s get richer together.” And he stuck to that principle all his productive life. Now, there is no Biblical law against making the maximum profit possible from your business. “All that the traffic can bear” is the motto of most salesmen and businessmen, and there is nothing wrong with such motto, as it is. But there is an important ethical difference: It is one thing to try to get the maximum value for your product. It a another ballgame altogether to take advantage of your customers’ ignorance to get out of them more than the market’s alternatives are. It is on you, before God, to make sure that your customer leaves your office with a better value than he would leave anyone else’s office – or at least the same value. Remember the movie Flywheel. Ignore the many technical problems with that movie, and perhaps the few theological problems. The movie taught this important ethical principle. Jay Austin was in the right business (used cars) in the right community (rather low-income), and was selling the right cars to the right people. Except that, he was overcharging them, taking advantage of their lack of information. Not that it was illegal or anything; but it was immoral, for he was using his more powerful position (better information) to manipulate them. Eventually, it all resulted in almost bankruptcy. In the final account, he decided to make things right with the people he overcharged. The final scene was a battle between his old reputation (based on overcharging customers) and his new reputation (based on him reimbursing his customers for what he had overcharged them). The principle of getting richer together is not a principle that should be handily dismissed. A company I used to work for exemplified that principle quite well. Destin FL, where I lived for a couple of years, is known as one of the richest places in the nation; businesses can afford to sell at higher prices there. However, the company I worked for – a plumbing supply company – kept its prices as low as possible to maintain the same rate of profit as anywhere else. It was a small family-owned company which had been able to stand its ground for half a century against larger competitors by just being mindful of the alternatives, and refusing to become greedy in a market full of temptations. A righteous and ethical salesman, therefore, will be aware not only of what the customers need for their purposes, but also of the alternatives they can find, and will work to make sure that they are not robbed of a better deal, if the market allows it. Again, not that he is legally obligated to do it; but his reputation won’t be based on his legality but on his ethics. Indeed, the easier spread of information is forcing companies to adopt such ethics; think of those commercials where companies announce that if you bring them a proof for lower price for the same product at their competitors, they will sell it to you at the lower price. Eventually, the market forces you to be ethical or die out. So a good salesman still needs to be aware of that ethical principle and always avoid the temptation of greed. There shouldn’t be a government law against trying to get the maximum price for your product, but the Bible still warns us that “He who withholds grain, the people will curse him, but blessing will be on the head of him who sells it” (Prov. 11:26). And the last principle is view towards the future. Sounds like a no-brainer, but there it is, salesmen tend to be some of the most short-sighted and short-term-oriented people on the planet. (And all professional salesmen here say, “Amen.”) It’s in the very nature and psychology of the work of a salesman: your success is measured by whether you make that sale today. The psychology is so strong that some of us salesmen can’t even look at ourselves in the mirror if we don’t meet that sales target for the week, even though, in the majority of the cases, it is not our fault. You go to work the next Monday and you feel terrible when your name is not there on the board as someone who has met their sales targets. So that encourages you to become even more short-term-oriented and this week really meet that target no matter what, no holds barred. Eventually you feel compelled to take actions that you normally won’t take, and start telling your customers things that you normally wouldn’t say, just to manipulate them to buy. The world of sales is a tough world, and it has its tough challenges, and very few are morally strong enough to stand the pressure. What is the solution to this? The solution is to remember that there is such a thing as “future.” And in the future, you as a salesman will have to meet those prospective customers again. Your success with them will depend not on one single sale but on building a relationship of trust. Sometimes it means longer time. Sometimes it means that you won’t meet your arbitrary goals. Sometimes it means that you will have to suffer humiliation in your office or – most of the time – in your own mind. Your heart of a servant should be more concerned with establishing those relationships than with exploiting people. The idea that customers exist only to help you meet your goals amounts to objectification of other human beings. They do not exist to serve you. You are there to serve them. Objectification is never a good basis for establishing long-term reputation. Think of a sex-offender. While we may questions some of the methods of the modern state to isolate known sex-offenders, one thing is clear: once you have committed the crime, you need to carry the consequences of your damaged reputation. People won’t trust you. They won’t let you near their kids. You will feel awkward in their company knowing that, in their minds, they always assess and re-assess every single one of your reactions to things. Once you are known to objectify human beings for your lusts and purposes, that reputation will haunt you for the rest of your life. The same applies to salesmen. If you care about your reputation you have to care about the future. If you care about the future, you can’t afford to view your customers like walking ATMs. Back in the 1990s, such objectification of the customer was part of the sales colleges of many of the large corporations. We were taught techniques that amounted to pure manipulation. (Employees were objectified just as much as the customers, so it was a principle across the board.) Only in the late 1990s and the early 2000s did the business world start realizing that is strategy did not work long-term. Then, after 2005, small local companies started using the advantages of the Internet to challenge the market shares of the giants, and they did it by offering that personal relationship that the giants lacked, that is only capable of establishing long-term trust. I was told recently that the sales college at Procter & Gamble had changed significantly since the 1990s, and it much more personal and relation-oriented than before, and that the manipulation techniques have been erased from the course. That’s good. To summarize, a salesman reputation must be always based on the Dominion Covenant. A salesman is a mediator, and as a mediator, he is supposed to understand both sides and serve both sides. To do this successfully, he needs to have, first, a comprehensive view of God’s universe and especially of the Dominion Covenant. He is supposed to know what goods and services are lawful under that covenant and are not. (Hint: it’s not the same as what goods and services are legal under government laws.) Second, he is supposed to understand the concept of individual purpose, both for himself and for his customers. Which means, he needs to know what field he is supposed to be involved in, and also, which customers are really served by his products and services. And avoid pushing his products where they are not useful. Third, a salesman needs to have a very strong position against the most common sin on the marketplace: fraud. Not only what passes for fraud legally, but what is also deliberate withdrawal of information which may help the customer make an informed decision. Fourth, a salesman needs to understand the concept of mutual profit (or loss, for that matter). While there is nothing wrong with getting the maximum value for your product, taking advantage of other people’s weaker economic position in terms of money power or information brings curse. The right principle is to always make sure that both parties profit from the transaction. How do you know if they do? Consult the alternatives. And, fifth, always build relationships for the future, rather than profit for today. Objectifying your customers only goes so far. And a business is only profitable when it continues beyond the “so far.” And in all this, a salesman needs to always remember that what is “legal” should not define his ethics. Legality is not the basis for morality, and a reputation is not based on abiding by the minimum legal requirements. It is built on on going above and beyond, and using your power and position to serve other people in ways they can’t serve themselves. One’s customers, too. The book I will assign for reading this week is Wisdom and Dominion, Book 9 of Gary North’s economic commentary on the Bible. If you have read the other books of that commentary, or other books by Gary North, this book will sound a bit off balance to you: it is more focused on practical living than on economic theory or any theory whatsoever. But that’s the nature of Christian Reconstruction: our purpose is not to create another theoretical ivory tower for seminary professors to stretch and create numberless irrelevant classes for seminary students. In there, you will find a lot of wisdom needed for your career as a salesman. And not only as a salesman, but as a businessman as well – for a business can’t work unless you learn how to sell. And finally, in your prayers and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe by translating and publishing books on the application of the Gospel to every area of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post The Reputation of a Salesman appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description Why do foreign missions need to start with books? Assigned reading: Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 86 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will be talking about my favorite topic: foreign missions. Let me tell you a secret about myself: whatever else you thought I was, I am first and foremost a missionary at heart; I want to see foreign cultures evangelized for Christ, and I want to see true message and true challenge to all the cultures to submit to Christ. Now, contrary to what most Christians say today, I don’t think everyone should be a missionary – at least not in the traditional sense. Christendom needs more than just make everyone a missionary, and the more it grows, the more it will require a division of labor. It needs financial experts, entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, lawyers, writers, artists, etc. In a sense, of course, all these are part of the greater mission task of the church, because they all speak of the superiority of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; and we will have a future episode of Axe to the Root that will speak to the fact that evangelism is much more than simply preaching and trying to attract people’s attention with psychological methods. But even then, the task of bringing the truth of the Word to other cultures is still a very specific task, and there are people called to it, and they should be particularly trained to do it. Evangelist, after all, is a special ministry in the New Testament (Eph. 4:11), and I also believe that the ministry mentioned as “apostles,” is actually what we call today “missionaries.” The modern church has surrounded the word “apostle” with an almost mythical and magical meaning, to mean some superheroes of the early church who can’t be seen around today, but that is an ideology only adopted in the last century and a half. For most of its history, the church simply called its missionaries “apostles,” and no one saw any problem with it: Patrick, Apostle to Ireland, the Twelve Apostles to Ireland, Boniface, Apostle to the Germans, Cyril and Methodius, Apostles to the Slavs, John Eliot, Apostle to the Indians, John Knox, Prophet and Apostle of Scotland, etc. So, the biblical ministry of apostles is simply missionaries, and the word “missionary” was first used to replace “apostle” by Jesuits in the 16th century with the purpose to establish “apostle” as a very special post or office in the church which ceased in the 1st century. Modern Protestants and especially cessationists have just adopted the Jesuit use of the word. Either way, my purpose here is not to insist on the restoration of the Biblical word “apostle”; and, indeed, “apostle” and “missionary” mean the same thing anyway, one in Greek, the other in Latin. My point is that even in the Bible, a missionary still has to be a person with a special kind of ministry, someone who is first called before he is “sent” (which is the meaning of “missionary”). Anyway, for the practical purposes of our topic today, it doesn’t really matter whether you insist on the modern word “missionary” or want the original Biblical word in Greek, “apostle.” My point was that while every single Christian is a missionary of a sort, bringing the Kingdom of God to his area of work and social activity, still, there are people who have a special gift and call of being missionaries. Over the last three years, since I started this Axe to the Root podcast, I have used it to advertise the mission organization I started almost 20 years ago, Bulgarian Reformation Ministries. As a matter of fact, I have been on the mission field for much longer, 26 years, and BRM is simply an US-based non-profit representative of what we have been doing in Bulgaria for 26 years. Since I started advertizing BRM here, a number of listeners have been asking me questions about the nature of our mission. And since I have made claims that our mission is very different from what modern missions are, I have been asked the question, “How is it different?”, multiple times. Different reasons for asking the question: most people want to know what makes it different because they donate to missions and they want to make sure they understand what they need to be looking for in a mission; a few because they are called to go to the mission field and they want to know of successful models to mimic and implement – and our model has been quite successful. Believe it or not, there were a few individuals who wanted to understand my mission methods because they believed they could be replicated in either politics or business; and it may as well be the case, given that the same Biblical principles should apply to every area. So, this episode is a partial response to at least one of the questions I have been asked. Not to all of them, to be sure, because it will take more than just one episode to do it. Only one question, which has been asked many times: “Why books?” I have been quite insistent that a true mission must be more focused on books than on planting churches. Or even on “making disciples.” In fact, I even believe that putting books on the market is a better tool of making disciples than planting a church and having people gather once a week or even three times a week. (Actually, to be precise, I don’t believe in the hype of “discipleship” semantics as a special way of training people. But that I will leave to a future episode. For now, let’s focus on the question, “Why books?”) You know how modern missions work, for the most part. About 15 to 20 years ago, the International Mission Board did a survey on the amount of money the world’s churches donate to foreign missions every year. The total was about $2.8 billion. The lion’s share of it, as is to be expected, fell on the shoulders – and the purses – of US Christians: $2.5 billion. The other big supporters of foreign missions were the UK and South Korea. So, let’s acknowledge the truth: American Christians are not stingy when it comes to foreign missions: they contribute between 80% and 90% of all the support for them. Translated in gold at current prices, $2.5 billion is 60 tons of gold every year, for foreign missions. That’s probably as much as the whole church paid for missions between AD 30 and 1900. And we today pay as much every year. No matter how critical we can be of the American church, this is something worth celebrating and praising. There’s a “but,” though. And that “but” is in the fact that while American Christians are so generous when it comes to foreign missions, they are just as gullible as to how that money is spent. Suffice to say, there is next to zero control and accountability when it comes to missions. And the results are obvious: just look at the world today and tell me, how much impact have our missions had? Have we changed the world to the better? Where are the christianized nations as the result of our money that we have spent? Where are the cultures that converted from paganism to Christianity as the result of the money we have spent? Missionaries in the past went out and converted whole nations. Where is this today? Why are we spending that much money if there is no visible result? In an early episode of Axe to the Root titled, “Denethor Ministries,” I asked the same question about donating money to our domestic ministries: Why are we spending so much money on them if the results are negative? We could have spent the money on booze and have better results. And the same applies to the mission field. Every time I look at modern missions and the way they are done, I think of Waylon Jennings’s song, “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” No, I am not a big fan of country music, but I have a friend who deserves to be mentioned here, Joe Driscoll, who believes that Waylon is the greatest country singer ever. And since I trust Joe, I decided to hear some of Waylon’s songs. And Joe was right. So I am a Waylon’s fan now. But I digress. So you probably know the song: Lord it’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar Where do we take it from here? Rhinestone suits and new shiny cars It’s been the same way for years We need a change So, yeah, that’s how I feel about missions when I watch modern missionaries work on the mission field. Especially modern Presbyterian and Baptist missionaries, but many others as well. Charismatics, for the most part, are a bit better, but only by a bit. For the last 60 or 70 years, a certain model has been established for missions: large bureaucratic mission organizations associated with this or that large denomination in the US, dispensing endorsements for candidates for missionaries to go visit churches of those denominations, taking certain percentage of the donations, and then, after the missionary goes to the mission field, they are closely monitored and controlled to follow the policies – and the politics – of their mission organization. Of course, the endorsement is only given after the missionary has spent a good amount of money on seminary education, which is not cheap (getting a seminary education may be more expensive than getting an advanced engineering degree at an elite university). So the missionary is pretty much chained to obey the rules, otherwise, without an endorsement and the money that comes with it, he may have trouble paying his student debts. Which is OK, though, because if he follows the rules, the money is not small; and I have seen missions where dozens of missionaries “serve” in a country, living in mansions for $1,500 a month, while the local population survives on $150 a month. So I am looking at this gigantic scheme and I am thinking, “Are y’all sure Paul done it this way?” Don’t get me wrong, it’s not about the money. Now, I do think that it is a wise tactics to try to get down to the economic level of your listeners – not for manipulation reasons, but to understand their real problems and try to find real solutions. That’s why Charismatic missionaries are eating the lunch of all the other denominations on the mission field, because their missionaries try to live in the same conditions as the locals. Paul specifically said that in his missions, he was poor while enriching many people (2 Cor. 6:10). But still, it is not an ethical imperative to be poor. There is nothing wrong with a missionary and his family to be rewarded for the sacrifices they make living away from home, in a foreign land. So, that’s OK, we are not paying our missionaries too much. The problem is not in how much money missionaries are paid or spend, it is in what message they are taking to the mission field. I have already talked about this in a previous episode of Axe to the Root, Episode 35 titled simply, “Missions.” Modern missions are the product of modern seminaries – after all, all these bureaucratic giants of missionary organizations don’t grant you an endorsement before you have graduated from that seminary. But modern seminaries – especially in the last 50-60 years – have shrunk the scope of their teaching to a few subjects related to basic soteriology, personal psychology (counseling), and largely unapplied systematic theology. They have failed to address the whole man, in the comprehensive world of his endeavors (economic, social, judicial, educational, scientific, etc.), producing graduates that are convinced that the Word of God has nothing to say on all these other areas, or whatever it has to say has no bearing on the truncated set of intellectual propositions they call “the gospel.” As a result, modern missions have failed to address the whole man. They have remained confined to the periphery, in terms of addressing the culture. As a result, in general, the Christianity brought by the missionaries has been relegated to the periphery. Only where missions and churches have returned to addressing the whole man, they have been able to capture the hearts and minds of many people. But, as I said, we have already covered this issue in general in an earlier episode. Now we are talking about books and the place of books in missions. Why are books important? Several years ago, Vishal Mangalwadi, the foremost Christian philosopher, thinker, writer, and social reformer of India, published a book: The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. It is an amazingly insightful look into the very heart and soul of the West, and how and what formed the West to become what it is today. Modern historians are keen to look for the soul of the Western civilization in ancient Greece and Rome, and probably the earlier days of the pagan Celts and Germans, but Mangalwadi points to the fact that the heart and soul of those cultures – if they even had a heart or a soul in the first place, which is doubtful for some of them – was radically different from what we have in the West today. He in fact traces the heart and soul of the Western civilization to another culture, namely, ancient Israel. And then he continues to show, in an amazingly skillful manner, how the Bible was the book that created that heart and soul of the European civilization. Mangalwadi left no stone unturned in his quest: he examined the philosophy and the epistemology (that’s theory of knowledge) of the West, individual and corporate identity, authority and service, the nature of man, rationality, he even covered technology, science, medicine, the concept of heroism, social change, even economics and the concept of wealth, education and the university, etc., etc., etc. Amazing how an Indian can see what our own “Reformed” celebrities in the US not only don’t see, but sometimes vehemently deny. In chapter 11 of that book, he makes a claim that is one of the most insightful claims made by a modern Christian author ever: he says that among all these other areas, literature was a special area that the Bible gave to the West. Not that the world didn’t have literature before Christianity; there were, of course, many books written in the ancient and the classical world, and there were even libraries. The Great Library of Alexandria is estimated to have had anywhere between 40,000 and 400,000 scrolls. Mangalwadi, however, pointed to the fact that Christianity changed the very nature of the stories told. There was no meaningful self-criticism in those stories, and therefore nothing that can contribute to the ethical-judicial growth and maturity of the culture. Christianity changed the stories all the way to the very root of their meaning and purpose: the notions of heroism, growth, victory, sacrifice, etc, were changed completely. Pagan stories glorified powerful men who achieved their fame through power, domination, and sacrificing others for their cause. Christianity changed the stories to glorify God by presenting weak and fragile human beings whose heroism was proven by service, brokenheartedness, humility, and self-sacrifice. I have written about it in my article on “The Two Aurelii,” on the Christendom Restored .com site. Mangalwadi points to the rise of European – and especially English – literature, and then he even points to the influence of Christianity in modern secular literature: what he calls a “religious sensibility” in the writings of even the most committed modern atheists. And he doesn’t limit it to Europe; he also examines the history of literature in his native India and shows how the Bible had enormous, even if rather unacknowledged, impact on what is known as the “Indian Renaissance.” Mangalwadi is right on all this, but I am sure you will be asking the question: “Is that all?” Is that the reason I believe books are so important for missions: so that the local readers have the right fiction stories to read? Is this what I mean when I say that a missionary must be a translator, and must work first and foremost for building an intellectual foundation for his mission in the future? Is this what Bulgarian Reformation Ministries is doing: translating stories? If that’s the case, then it ain’t much. Most of the Western stories are already translated in Bulgarian anyway, over the last couple of centuries. Why do I bother to mention this, and why do I bother to insist on books so much? The answer is: “No this isn’t all.” I believe that Mangalwadi is right, but being a humanities professor, he omitted a very important part of the aspect of literature, one which is less glossy and spectacular than the fiction part of it, but way more important in building the Christian civilization which replaced the pagan civilization. It is so obscure to modern Christian commentators that none of them mention it; and yet, our modern world is more shaped by that part of the aspect of literature than anything else. What is this important part of literature? Technical literature. The “how to do” manuals. The “how to build” instruction books. The “how to solve problems” textbooks for leaders and businessmen. The “how to find answers” encyclopedias to inspire scientists and engineers to seek to improve their knowledge of creation and their mastery of its powers. The “how to judge” law books that take on the issues of applied justice in our local communities and the specific practical relationships between an individual and individual, and between an individuals and the social institutions. I bet you never thought about this. And I bet you never knew this problem existed. I can surely bet most of my listeners are not even aware that today, reference books and manuals and how-to guides are about 60+% of all the literature that is published. You thought it was the fiction books and the stories that were the bulk of it, right? No, buddy. In the 20th century, before the arrival of the internet, the largest book publishing business was in publishing cook books. Even today, with the Internet, every kitchen in every American home still has a special shelf large enough to hold several fat cook books. Not every home had a book shelf in the living room, but every kitchen had cook books. The same applied to technical manuals and reference books: every garage had them. Every law firm had them. Every office had them. Let me explain to you what the problem was, covenantally, why it was an important religious problem, and how Christianity solved it, and what tenet of Christianity made it solve it. Some time ago, I was present at a lecture by a theologian who was part of the “federal vision” movement. (I am not sure if it exists anymore, but the younger ones of my listeners can google it.) He was praising a particular method of education called “Classical Education.” Now, I have my beef with the concept of Classical Education but I am not going to share it here in this episode. What is important, however, that teacher took the position that the main subjects we needed to teach our children were what is known as the “liberal arts”: literature, history, music, language, philosophy, may be some general sciences like mathematics and physics but only in the most general, theoretic way. His point was that the ancients (Classic Greece and Rome) view these sciences as the right kind of education for free men (hence liberal arts, nothing to do with leftist ideologies). The practical disciplines – engineering, applied math and sciences, professional and technical disciplines, etc. – were below the level of a true gentleman, of a true free person, so in the classical world they were left to the slaves or to the lower classes.  After all, the slaves and the lower classes were those who were expected to really work for a living and to try to deal with technical and professional issues. The elite of the land – the free men – were not supposed to be bothered by such things, except in a very general way, and only in the way of managing and controlling all those slaves and common folk. (I am not kidding, this was in the lecture.) So his sales pitch was to the parents of Christian children that they should give their kids a really liberal education – again, nothing to do with modern politics, just education for free men, for the elite – while leaving technical and professional education for the unwashed masses. Etc., etc. I am not going to continue with all the details of his lecture, suffice to say that a certain supposedly “Christian” educational institution which follows that principles has produced dozens of such graduates educated along these principles, and they are quite irrelevant to the world today. But that is a matter of another episode. What is important is that the lecturer was right about the philosophy of learning, education, and knowledge of the Classical world. That’s true, that’s how the Greeks and the Romans thought. You could have those Roman patricians teach their children history and philosophy etc, but engineering or entrepreneurship or science or applied technical skills they left to their slaves and to the plebeians. The pagan world was a world where being a servant was a despised station in life; and therefore any education or training that would train a person for a life of servitude was considered below the level of the distinguished elite. But literature in the Classical world was a past time of the elite. The ordinary plebeian on the street, or the slave, had no time to read books (if they were literate in the first place), let alone the time to produce them, even if they were simple technical manuals for their jobs. It was only the nobles, the patricians, who had the time to compose books and the money to produce them and buy them. Whatever lore was among the common folk and the slaves had to be spread by memorization and recital. Writing and literature was only characteristic to the ruling classes. Worse than that, in some places, the laws explicitly banned certain classes from being educated enough to read. In Sparta, it was a capital crime to teach a slave to read or write. In Athens, the slaves could be taught, but they were banned from knowing the laws. In Rome, for centuries, the patricians kept the lower classes from having any knowledge of the laws. (Every time the plebeians revolted and asked for political rights, the patricians responded, “You can’t have political rights, you don’t know the laws.” While they themselves were those who kept the plebeians uneducated about the laws. But they still used them as soldiers in the military.) Even in modern times, laws against educating the slaves were passed in the Southern states in the US: look, for example, at the North Carolina law of 1831 that threatened severe fines and prison and even lashes for teaching slaves to read. And since books and reading and literature was a play of the elite, and the elite never bothered with technical and professional stuff, technical and professional literature never developed. Of course, Rome and Greece have always been hostile to any idea of technological progress, and their rulers killed many more inventions – and inventors – than they adopted in practice, so there is that. But also, there wasn’t even the idea that literature could be used to spread the knowledge of how to do things and solve problems. That would mean servanthood. And the elite of the classical world wasn’t interested in that. It wasn’t liberal enough for them. In addition, technical knowledge was seen also as a form of power among the lower classes, and especially among the privileged guilds among them. So such technical knowledge was very rarely written down; it was always transmitted by direct verbal training in apprenticeship. Even among those who possessed such knowledge and could have written it, it was unusual to see them spend the time and effort to write it down. In fact, it applied to theoretical science as well. We all know about Pythagoras, but very few know that Pythagoras never practiced mathematics as education and knowledge that should be made available to large masses of people. He had a cult of like-minded people around him and they practiced mathematics only as as sort of magic that would give them arcane knowledge about the  secret nature of reality. They concealed their theoretical findings in riddles and charades so that no common man was capable of knowing what they were discussing. The same attitude to knowledge was common to all classes; technical professionals jealously guarded their knowledge and expertise, and only revealed it to apprentices who were sworn to keep it secret and continue the legacy of their masters. No matter how large a literature the classical civilization had created, Christianity dwarfed it within just a century or two of its founding. By the end of the second century, Christian theologians and apologists had written more books than anything the classical world had seen by that time. And, unlike pagan literature, these books were not kept for the elite. The churches trained their members to read and write – even the slaves. After all, it was a religion of the Book, and being a Christian hinged on how well the worshipers could read and understand written texts. Christian books of all sorts were being written and copied and spread throughout the small Christian community in the Empire. Bishops in those days traveled with their chests full of books, and young men were specifically trained to copy books as soon as they arrived to their church. The first monastery communities were not always ascetic, they were simply people devoted to preserving the knowledge of the many books written and published among Christians at the time. This first wave of literature was, to a great extent, simply a mirror of the pagan literature: the majority of those works were theological, philosophical, or biographies and auto-biographies. The goal was to produce a new worldview, completely different from the pagan worldview, and to paint a picture of the world that was opposite to the picture pagans knew for centuries. But even in those early centuries, Christian authors started to break the chains of the older conventions in writing. Gradually, Christianity started producing also manuals for practical living. Of course, even the first Christian biographies and autobiographies were meant to be such manuals. After all, since the “heroes” were not the super men of the pagan myths but weak, fallible men to whom the majority of readers could relate, this inevitably created the expectations that reading and learning from the life of a hero of the faith will give answers to many ethical and practical questions many people were asking. But there was more. The first manuals for successful and righteous family life appeared. The upbringing of children was of special interest to the early church fathers – something the classical world cared nothing about. Practical advice for the conduct of spouses in the families was a common topic. By the end of the 2nd century, “how to” books appeared on different other issues – like how to treat one’s Christian slaves, for example. The first books of legal instructions appeared for judges. By the end of the 4th century, Augustine was already writing on how Christian rulers were supposed to rule, and what course of action really makes a state Christian. It was in the 4th century, as the Classical civilization entered its decline, when interest to more technical topics appeared – not just legal or family or dispute resolution issues, but also on financial solutions, business solutions, and even technology and science. Augustine’s The City of God had an unexpected impact: on one hand, it was simply philosophy and history, depicting the cosmic conflict on earth between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. On the other hand, however, it left the conclusion that Christians were now supposed to actually build a city – since the City of God Augustine was talking about was not a city in heaven but one on earth (but with heavenly origin). So the question was now: How do we build that city, in practice? How do we build such a civilization that will be opposite to the earthly city, and will be successful? What also helped was that Christianity flatly rejected the elitist attitude of the pagans. Where the Roman elite stuck to their liberal arts because the technical arts were too “servantish” for them, Christianity gladly accepted that challenge. Authority came through service, and Christians had no problem with being servants. Even their bishops – the elite – were expected to be servants to people in need. (Whether they were or not is a different issue.) So for Christians, making literature about practical living and work and solutions was not something undesirable; to the contrary, it was a fulfillment of their task of being servants to the world. The final completion of that transition came in the first two decades of the 7th century. Isidore of Seville, a Bishop of the church in what is today Spain (the Visigothic Kingom at the time) compiled and published the first known encyclopedia in the western world: The Etymologies. The work was started by his older brother, Leander, who was a bishop before him, and used his fortune and power to compile a massive library of all kinds of texts, before the final dissolution of the classical world. Based on his brother’s library, Isidore set out to compile all the philosophical and practical – note this, and practical – knowledge the world had by that time. The result was a 20-volume encyclopedia. It contained philosophy and theology and history, etc. but half of that encyclopedia was devoted to topics that were never large topics in the literature before: how to do agriculture, animals and plants and their practical value, construction, medicine, metals and stones, technical tools and their use, types of food, clothes, ships and navigation, etc. , etc., etc. There was even a chapter on the types of games and their practical relation to warfare and jurisprudence, and even international law. Right there, in that book, the real power of Christian literature was revealed. For the first time in history, knowledge was not fragmented into separate pieces for each social class and caste. It was not idolized as some sort of a deity of its own. It was not hidden as occult magic away from the eyes of the unwashed masses. If you want to know where the Christian civilization really started, in practice, it was there, in 7th century Spain, with Isidore. Was his book important? Listen to this: 850 years after he wrote his book, Johan Gutenberg in Germany invented the movable type. Within the first 100 years after this invention, the most produced books was the Bible. The second most produced was Isidore’s Etymologies. Within 100 years, about 80 different editions of it appeared. We can surely say that a book that is still a bestseller 900 years after its publication is an influential book. And indeed, between AD 600 and 1500 The Etymologies were the central book to which rulers, entrepreneurs, legislators, financiers, builders, scientists, and many others went for consultation when they needed knowledge. The Etymologies were certainly not exhaustive, but they gave the format in which practical knowledge was to be compiled and presented. The book was the main source of knowledge and education for counselors of kings and princes and popes from Charlemagne to Louis XIV. Today, historians and archeologists still discover copies of it in different monasteries – the earliest of them coming from Ireland, translated in the old Gaelic language. What is not very well known today is that missionaries in the centuries after Isidore went out not so much with theological knowledge about abstract things – although, that was important – but with books that had practical knowledge about practical solutions. Cyril and Methodius, when they started their mission to the Slavs, translated volumes of books on solutions for agriculture, trades, industry, and many other topics – including details like pruning trees and conserving food. The same was true for other missionaries. In fact, as late as the 19th century, the majority of European missionaries went out as practical problem-solvers rather than as theoretical evangelists – think David Livingstone, for example, who went to Africa prepared to deal with a number of practical problems, from fighting slavery to curing malaria. In the late 19th century, Christian missionaries to Egypt were converting local populations by simply starting free schools for girls from poor families, teaching them reading, writing, and trades for gainful employment later in life. In fact, the mission effort in the world didn’t change to the modern purely theoretical and truncated so-called “discipleship” until after WWI – although, admittedly, the seeds for this deadly pietism in missions were planted as early as the mid-19th century. And here we get to my point about books and missions. If I am right about missions: that a mission is not about planting churches or converting individuals (although, both are a small part of a true mission), but about building a completely new culture (the City of God) to replace the old pagan culture (the city of man), then the main effort a missionary is supposed to focus on is disseminating practical knowledge of “how to.” How to change the laws and customs of a nation; how to run the courts; how to run the economy; how to build businesses; how to do science; how to create new technologies and apply them; how to make your family successful; how to raise your kids; how to do education; how to establish true community fellowship (not simply a “church” where all is focused on some ritual once a week), etc., etc. The task of a missionary then becomes to build a new literature, a literature that would establish the intellectual foundation for a new civilization. Not just what that new culture should believe about God and His salvation, but also how that belief is applied in practice, to the everyday life and work of the individual men and their institutions in that culture. Since all of life is religious (remember, culture is religion externalized), then all of pagan life is idolatry – including its thoughts and practices and institutions and policies. For a missionary to be faithful to his task, he needs to issue a challenge against all this idolatry: thoughts, practices, institutions, policies. In order to do that, he needs to present the alternative of salvation in all these areas: thoughts, practices, institutions, policies. He needs to start building a civilization. And that only happens through first giving the culture the books to build it. Books that say how it is done. And that’s what our mission in Bulgaria is doing. And what all other mission should be focusing on: creating that intellectual foundation. Without books and a foundation of practical literature, a mission is only spinning its wheels in the air. It gets nowhere, and eventually dies. And my desire, as someone who is a missionary deep in my heart, is to see every nation on earth have such a mission. It is not my job – and neither is it your job – to go to every nation individually to start such a mission. But we need to diligently seek people who are called to do it, and support them faithfully. The book I will assign for reading this week is Vishal Mangalwadi’s The Book That Made Your World. Read it, but remember, he is not telling even half of the story. There is much more. And that much more needs to be implemented today. And while thinking about it, think also of Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to . . . what? You got it: to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe. It is by no means the only such mission anymore: new such missions have appeared in other places – the Czech Republic, Costa Rica, Brazil, etc. They all deserve your support. But I will, of course, root for my mission. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post Books and Missions appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description Why do foreign missions need to start with books? Assigned reading: Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 86 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will be talking about my favorite topic: foreign missions. Let me tell you a secret about myself: whatever else you thought I was, I am first and foremost a missionary at heart; I want to see foreign cultures evangelized for Christ, and I want to see true message and true challenge to all the cultures to submit to Christ. Now, contrary to what most Christians say today, I don’t think everyone should be a missionary – at least not in the traditional sense. Christendom needs more than just make everyone a missionary, and the more it grows, the more it will require a division of labor. It needs financial experts, entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, lawyers, writers, artists, etc. In a sense, of course, all these are part of the greater mission task of the church, because they all speak of the superiority of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; and we will have a future episode of Axe to the Root that will speak to the fact that evangelism is much more than simply preaching and trying to attract people’s attention with psychological methods. But even then, the task of bringing the truth of the Word to other cultures is still a very specific task, and there are people called to it, and they should be particularly trained to do it. Evangelist, after all, is a special ministry in the New Testament (Eph. 4:11), and I also believe that the ministry mentioned as “apostles,” is actually what we call today “missionaries.” The modern church has surrounded the word “apostle” with an almost mythical and magical meaning, to mean some superheroes of the early church who can’t be seen around today, but that is an ideology only adopted in the last century and a half. For most of its history, the church simply called its missionaries “apostles,” and no one saw any problem with it: Patrick, Apostle to Ireland, the Twelve Apostles to Ireland, Boniface, Apostle to the Germans, Cyril and Methodius, Apostles to the Slavs, John Eliot, Apostle to the Indians, John Knox, Prophet and Apostle of Scotland, etc. So, the biblical ministry of apostles is simply missionaries, and the word “missionary” was first used to replace “apostle” by Jesuits in the 16th century with the purpose to establish “apostle” as a very special post or office in the church which ceased in the 1st century. Modern Protestants and especially cessationists have just adopted the Jesuit use of the word. Either way, my purpose here is not to insist on the restoration of the Biblical word “apostle”; and, indeed, “apostle” and “missionary” mean the same thing anyway, one in Greek, the other in Latin. My point is that even in the Bible, a missionary still has to be a person with a special kind of ministry, someone who is first called before he is “sent” (which is the meaning of “missionary”). Anyway, for the practical purposes of our topic today, it doesn’t really matter whether you insist on the modern word “missionary” or want the original Biblical word in Greek, “apostle.” My point was that while every single Christian is a missionary of a sort, bringing the Kingdom of God to his area of work and social activity, still, there are people who have a special gift and call of being missionaries. Over the last three years, since I started this Axe to the Root podcast, I have used it to advertise the mission organization I started almost 20 years ago, Bulgarian Reformation Ministries. As a matter of fact, I have been on the mission field for much longer, 26 years, and BRM is simply an US-based non-profit representative of what we have been doing in Bulgaria for 26 years. Since I started advertizing BRM here, a number of listeners have been asking me questions about the nature of our mission. And since I have made claims that our mission is very different from what modern missions are, I have been asked the question, “How is it different?”, multiple times. Different reasons for asking the question: most people want to know what makes it different because they donate to missions and they want to make sure they understand what they need to be looking for in a mission; a few because they are called to go to the mission field and they want to know of successful models to mimic and implement – and our model has been quite successful. Believe it or not, there were a few individuals who wanted to understand my mission methods because they believed they could be replicated in either politics or business; and it may as well be the case, given that the same Biblical principles should apply to every area. So, this episode is a partial response to at least one of the questions I have been asked. Not to all of them, to be sure, because it will take more than just one episode to do it. Only one question, which has been asked many times: “Why books?” I have been quite insistent that a true mission must be more focused on books than on planting churches. Or even on “making disciples.” In fact, I even believe that putting books on the market is a better tool of making disciples than planting a church and having people gather once a week or even three times a week. (Actually, to be precise, I don’t believe in the hype of “discipleship” semantics as a special way of training people. But that I will leave to a future episode. For now, let’s focus on the question, “Why books?”) You know how modern missions work, for the most part. About 15 to 20 years ago, the International Mission Board did a survey on the amount of money the world’s churches donate to foreign missions every year. The total was about $2.8 billion. The lion’s share of it, as is to be expected, fell on the shoulders – and the purses – of US Christians: $2.5 billion. The other big supporters of foreign missions were the UK and South Korea. So, let’s acknowledge the truth: American Christians are not stingy when it comes to foreign missions: they contribute between 80% and 90% of all the support for them. Translated in gold at current prices, $2.5 billion is 60 tons of gold every year, for foreign missions. That’s probably as much as the whole church paid for missions between AD 30 and 1900. And we today pay as much every year. No matter how critical we can be of the American church, this is something worth celebrating and praising. There’s a “but,” though. And that “but” is in the fact that while American Christians are so generous when it comes to foreign missions, they are just as gullible as to how that money is spent. Suffice to say, there is next to zero control and accountability when it comes to missions. And the results are obvious: just look at the world today and tell me, how much impact have our missions had? Have we changed the world to the better? Where are the christianized nations as the result of our money that we have spent? Where are the cultures that converted from paganism to Christianity as the result of the money we have spent? Missionaries in the past went out and converted whole nations. Where is this today? Why are we spending that much money if there is no visible result? In an early episode of Axe to the Root titled, “Denethor Ministries,” I asked the same question about donating money to our domestic ministries: Why are we spending so much money on them if the results are negative? We could have spent the money on booze and have better results. And the same applies to the mission field. Every time I look at modern missions and the way they are done, I think of Waylon Jennings’s song, “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” No, I am not a big fan of country music, but I have a friend who deserves to be mentioned here, Joe Driscoll, who believes that Waylon is the greatest country singer ever. And since I trust Joe, I decided to hear some of Waylon’s songs. And Joe was right. So I am a Waylon’s fan now. But I digress. So you probably know the song: Lord it’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar Where do we take it from here? Rhinestone suits and new shiny cars It’s been the same way for years We need a change So, yeah, that’s how I feel about missions when I watch modern missionaries work on the mission field. Especially modern Presbyterian and Baptist missionaries, but many others as well. Charismatics, for the most part, are a bit better, but only by a bit. For the last 60 or 70 years, a certain model has been established for missions: large bureaucratic mission organizations associated with this or that large denomination in the US, dispensing endorsements for candidates for missionaries to go visit churches of those denominations, taking certain percentage of the donations, and then, after the missionary goes to the mission field, they are closely monitored and controlled to follow the policies – and the politics – of their mission organization. Of course, the endorsement is only given after the missionary has spent a good amount of money on seminary education, which is not cheap (getting a seminary education may be more expensive than getting an advanced engineering degree at an elite university). So the missionary is pretty much chained to obey the rules, otherwise, without an endorsement and the money that comes with it, he may have trouble paying his student debts. Which is OK, though, because if he follows the rules, the money is not small; and I have seen missions where dozens of missionaries “serve” in a country, living in mansions for $1,500 a month, while the local population survives on $150 a month. So I am looking at this gigantic scheme and I am thinking, “Are y’all sure Paul done it this way?” Don’t get me wrong, it’s not about the money. Now, I do think that it is a wise tactics to try to get down to the economic level of your listeners – not for manipulation reasons, but to understand their real problems and try to find real solutions. That’s why Charismatic missionaries are eating the lunch of all the other denominations on the mission field, because their missionaries try to live in the same conditions as the locals. Paul specifically said that in his missions, he was poor while enriching many people (2 Cor. 6:10). But still, it is not an ethical imperative to be poor. There is nothing wrong with a missionary and his family to be rewarded for the sacrifices they make living away from home, in a foreign land. So, that’s OK, we are not paying our missionaries too much. The problem is not in how much money missionaries are paid or spend, it is in what message they are taking to the mission field. I have already talked about this in a previous episode of Axe to the Root, Episode 35 titled simply, “Missions.” Modern missions are the product of modern seminaries – after all, all these bureaucratic giants of missionary organizations don’t grant you an endorsement before you have graduated from that seminary. But modern seminaries – especially in the last 50-60 years – have shrunk the scope of their teaching to a few subjects related to basic soteriology, personal psychology (counseling), and largely unapplied systematic theology. They have failed to address the whole man, in the comprehensive world of his endeavors (economic, social, judicial, educational, scientific, etc.), producing graduates that are convinced that the Word of God has nothing to say on all these other areas, or whatever it has to say has no bearing on the truncated set of intellectual propositions they call “the gospel.” As a result, modern missions have failed to address the whole man. They have remained confined to the periphery, in terms of addressing the culture. As a result, in general, the Christianity brought by the missionaries has been relegated to the periphery. Only where missions and churches have returned to addressing the whole man, they have been able to capture the hearts and minds of many people. But, as I said, we have already covered this issue in general in an earlier episode. Now we are talking about books and the place of books in missions. Why are books important? Several years ago, Vishal Mangalwadi, the foremost Christian philosopher, thinker, writer, and social reformer of India, published a book: The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. It is an amazingly insightful look into the very heart and soul of the West, and how and what formed the West to become what it is today. Modern historians are keen to look for the soul of the Western civilization in ancient Greece and Rome, and probably the earlier days of the pagan Celts and Germans, but Mangalwadi points to the fact that the heart and soul of those cultures – if they even had a heart or a soul in the first place, which is doubtful for some of them – was radically different from what we have in the West today. He in fact traces the heart and soul of the Western civilization to another culture, namely, ancient Israel. And then he continues to show, in an amazingly skillful manner, how the Bible was the book that created that heart and soul of the European civilization. Mangalwadi left no stone unturned in his quest: he examined the philosophy and the epistemology (that’s theory of knowledge) of the West, individual and corporate identity, authority and service, the nature of man, rationality, he even covered technology, science, medicine, the concept of heroism, social change, even economics and the concept of wealth, education and the university, etc., etc., etc. Amazing how an Indian can see what our own “Reformed” celebrities in the US not only don’t see, but sometimes vehemently deny. In chapter 11 of that book, he makes a claim that is one of the most insightful claims made by a modern Christian author ever: he says that among all these other areas, literature was a special area that the Bible gave to the West. Not that the world didn’t have literature before Christianity; there were, of course, many books written in the ancient and the classical world, and there were even libraries. The Great Library of Alexandria is estimated to have had anywhere between 40,000 and 400,000 scrolls. Mangalwadi, however, pointed to the fact that Christianity changed the very nature of the stories told. There was no meaningful self-criticism in those stories, and therefore nothing that can contribute to the ethical-judicial growth and maturity of the culture. Christianity changed the stories all the way to the very root of their meaning and purpose: the notions of heroism, growth, victory, sacrifice, etc, were changed completely. Pagan stories glorified powerful men who achieved their fame through power, domination, and sacrificing others for their cause. Christianity changed the stories to glorify God by presenting weak and fragile human beings whose heroism was proven by service, brokenheartedness, humility, and self-sacrifice. I have written about it in my article on “The Two Aurelii,” on the Christendom Restored .com site. Mangalwadi points to the rise of European – and especially English – literature, and then he even points to the influence of Christianity in modern secular literature: what he calls a “religious sensibility” in the writings of even the most committed modern atheists. And he doesn’t limit it to Europe; he also examines the history of literature in his native India and shows how the Bible had enormous, even if rather unacknowledged, impact on what is known as the “Indian Renaissance.” Mangalwadi is right on all this, but I am sure you will be asking the question: “Is that all?” Is that the reason I believe books are so important for missions: so that the local readers have the right fiction stories to read? Is this what I mean when I say that a missionary must be a translator, and must work first and foremost for building an intellectual foundation for his mission in the future? Is this what Bulgarian Reformation Ministries is doing: translating stories? If that’s the case, then it ain’t much. Most of the Western stories are already translated in Bulgarian anyway, over the last couple of centuries. Why do I bother to mention this, and why do I bother to insist on books so much? The answer is: “No this isn’t all.” I believe that Mangalwadi is right, but being a humanities professor, he omitted a very important part of the aspect of literature, one which is less glossy and spectacular than the fiction part of it, but way more important in building the Christian civilization which replaced the pagan civilization. It is so obscure to modern Christian commentators that none of them mention it; and yet, our modern world is more shaped by that part of the aspect of literature than anything else. What is this important part of literature? Technical literature. The “how to do” manuals. The “how to build” instruction books. The “how to solve problems” textbooks for leaders and businessmen. The “how to find answers” encyclopedias to inspire scientists and engineers to seek to improve their knowledge of creation and their mastery of its powers. The “how to judge” law books that take on the issues of applied justice in our local communities and the specific practical relationships between an individual and individual, and between an individuals and the social institutions. I bet you never thought about this. And I bet you never knew this problem existed. I can surely bet most of my listeners are not even aware that today, reference books and manuals and how-to guides are about 60+% of all the literature that is published. You thought it was the fiction books and the stories that were the bulk of it, right? No, buddy. In the 20th century, before the arrival of the internet, the largest book publishing business was in publishing cook books. Even today, with the Internet, every kitchen in every American home still has a special shelf large enough to hold several fat cook books. Not every home had a book shelf in the living room, but every kitchen had cook books. The same applied to technical manuals and reference books: every garage had them. Every law firm had them. Every office had them. Let me explain to you what the problem was, covenantally, why it was an important religious problem, and how Christianity solved it, and what tenet of Christianity made it solve it. Some time ago, I was present at a lecture by a theologian who was part of the “federal vision” movement. (I am not sure if it exists anymore, but the younger ones of my listeners can google it.) He was praising a particular method of education called “Classical Education.” Now, I have my beef with the concept of Classical Education but I am not going to share it here in this episode. What is important, however, that teacher took the position that the main subjects we needed to teach our children were what is known as the “liberal arts”: literature, history, music, language, philosophy, may be some general sciences like mathematics and physics but only in the most general, theoretic way. His point was that the ancients (Classic Greece and Rome) view these sciences as the right kind of education for free men (hence liberal arts, nothing to do with leftist ideologies). The practical disciplines – engineering, applied math and sciences, professional and technical disciplines, etc. – were below the level of a true gentleman, of a true free person, so in the classical world they were left to the slaves or to the lower classes.  After all, the slaves and the lower classes were those who were expected to really work for a living and to try to deal with technical and professional issues. The elite of the land – the free men – were not supposed to be bothered by such things, except in a very general way, and only in the way of managing and controlling all those slaves and common folk. (I am not kidding, this was in the lecture.) So his sales pitch was to the parents of Christian children that they should give their kids a really liberal education – again, nothing to do with modern politics, just education for free men, for the elite – while leaving technical and professional education for the unwashed masses. Etc., etc. I am not going to continue with all the details of his lecture, suffice to say that a certain supposedly “Christian” educational institution which follows that principles has produced dozens of such graduates educated along these principles, and they are quite irrelevant to the world today. But that is a matter of another episode. What is important is that the lecturer was right about the philosophy of learning, education, and knowledge of the Classical world. That’s true, that’s how the Greeks and the Romans thought. You could have those Roman patricians teach their children history and philosophy etc, but engineering or entrepreneurship or science or applied technical skills they left to their slaves and to the plebeians. The pagan world was a world where being a servant was a despised station in life; and therefore any education or training that would train a person for a life of servitude was considered below the level of the distinguished elite. But literature in the Classical world was a past time of the elite. The ordinary plebeian on the street, or the slave, had no time to read books (if they were literate in the first place), let alone the time to produce them, even if they were simple technical manuals for their jobs. It was only the nobles, the patricians, who had the time to compose books and the money to produce them and buy them. Whatever lore was among the common folk and the slaves had to be spread by memorization and recital. Writing and literature was only characteristic to the ruling classes. Worse than that, in some places, the laws explicitly banned certain classes from being educated enough to read. In Sparta, it was a capital crime to teach a slave to read or write. In Athens, the slaves could be taught, but they were banned from knowing the laws. In Rome, for centuries, the patricians kept the lower classes from having any knowledge of the laws. (Every time the plebeians revolted and asked for political rights, the patricians responded, “You can’t have political rights, you don’t know the laws.” While they themselves were those who kept the plebeians uneducated about the laws. But they still used them as soldiers in the military.) Even in modern times, laws against educating the slaves were passed in the Southern states in the US: look, for example, at the North Carolina law of 1831 that threatened severe fines and prison and even lashes for teaching slaves to read. And since books and reading and literature was a play of the elite, and the elite never bothered with technical and professional stuff, technical and professional literature never developed. Of course, Rome and Greece have always been hostile to any idea of technological progress, and their rulers killed many more inventions – and inventors – than they adopted in practice, so there is that. But also, there wasn’t even the idea that literature could be used to spread the knowledge of how to do things and solve problems. That would mean servanthood. And the elite of the classical world wasn’t interested in that. It wasn’t liberal enough for them. In addition, technical knowledge was seen also as a form of power among the lower classes, and especially among the privileged guilds among them. So such technical knowledge was very rarely written down; it was always transmitted by direct verbal training in apprenticeship. Even among those who possessed such knowledge and could have written it, it was unusual to see them spend the time and effort to write it down. In fact, it applied to theoretical science as well. We all know about Pythagoras, but very few know that Pythagoras never practiced mathematics as education and knowledge that should be made available to large masses of people. He had a cult of like-minded people around him and they practiced mathematics only as as sort of magic that would give them arcane knowledge about the  secret nature of reality. They concealed their theoretical findings in riddles and charades so that no common man was capable of knowing what they were discussing. The same attitude to knowledge was common to all classes; technical professionals jealously guarded their knowledge and expertise, and only revealed it to apprentices who were sworn to keep it secret and continue the legacy of their masters. No matter how large a literature the classical civilization had created, Christianity dwarfed it within just a century or two of its founding. By the end of the second century, Christian theologians and apologists had written more books than anything the classical world had seen by that time. And, unlike pagan literature, these books were not kept for the elite. The churches trained their members to read and write – even the slaves. After all, it was a religion of the Book, and being a Christian hinged on how well the worshipers could read and understand written texts. Christian books of all sorts were being written and copied and spread throughout the small Christian community in the Empire. Bishops in those days traveled with their chests full of books, and young men were specifically trained to copy books as soon as they arrived to their church. The first monastery communities were not always ascetic, they were simply people devoted to preserving the knowledge of the many books written and published among Christians at the time. This first wave of literature was, to a great extent, simply a mirror of the pagan literature: the majority of those works were theological, philosophical, or biographies and auto-biographies. The goal was to produce a new worldview, completely different from the pagan worldview, and to paint a picture of the world that was opposite to the picture pagans knew for centuries. But even in those early centuries, Christian authors started to break the chains of the older conventions in writing. Gradually, Christianity started producing also manuals for practical living. Of course, even the first Christian biographies and autobiographies were meant to be such manuals. After all, since the “heroes” were not the super men of the pagan myths but weak, fallible men to whom the majority of readers could relate, this inevitably created the expectations that reading and learning from the life of a hero of the faith will give answers to many ethical and practical questions many people were asking. But there was more. The first manuals for successful and righteous family life appeared. The upbringing of children was of special interest to the early church fathers – something the classical world cared nothing about. Practical advice for the conduct of spouses in the families was a common topic. By the end of the 2nd century, “how to” books appeared on different other issues – like how to treat one’s Christian slaves, for example. The first books of legal instructions appeared for judges. By the end of the 4th century, Augustine was already writing on how Christian rulers were supposed to rule, and what course of action really makes a state Christian. It was in the 4th century, as the Classical civilization entered its decline, when interest to more technical topics appeared – not just legal or family or dispute resolution issues, but also on financial solutions, business solutions, and even technology and science. Augustine’s The City of God had an unexpected impact: on one hand, it was simply philosophy and history, depicting the cosmic conflict on earth between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. On the other hand, however, it left the conclusion that Christians were now supposed to actually build a city – since the City of God Augustine was talking about was not a city in heaven but one on earth (but with heavenly origin). So the question was now: How do we build that city, in practice? How do we build such a civilization that will be opposite to the earthly city, and will be successful? What also helped was that Christianity flatly rejected the elitist attitude of the pagans. Where the Roman elite stuck to their liberal arts because the technical arts were too “servantish” for them, Christianity gladly accepted that challenge. Authority came through service, and Christians had no problem with being servants. Even their bishops – the elite – were expected to be servants to people in need. (Whether they were or not is a different issue.) So for Christians, making literature about practical living and work and solutions was not something undesirable; to the contrary, it was a fulfillment of their task of being servants to the world. The final completion of that transition came in the first two decades of the 7th century. Isidore of Seville, a Bishop of the church in what is today Spain (the Visigothic Kingom at the time) compiled and published the first known encyclopedia in the western world: The Etymologies. The work was started by his older brother, Leander, who was a bishop before him, and used his fortune and power to compile a massive library of all kinds of texts, before the final dissolution of the classical world. Based on his brother’s library, Isidore set out to compile all the philosophical and practical – note this, and practical – knowledge the world had by that time. The result was a 20-volume encyclopedia. It contained philosophy and theology and history, etc. but half of that encyclopedia was devoted to topics that were never large topics in the literature before: how to do agriculture, animals and plants and their practical value, construction, medicine, metals and stones, technical tools and their use, types of food, clothes, ships and navigation, etc. , etc., etc. There was even a chapter on the types of games and their practical relation to warfare and jurisprudence, and even international law. Right there, in that book, the real power of Christian literature was revealed. For the first time in history, knowledge was not fragmented into separate pieces for each social class and caste. It was not idolized as some sort of a deity of its own. It was not hidden as occult magic away from the eyes of the unwashed masses. If you want to know where the Christian civilization really started, in practice, it was there, in 7th century Spain, with Isidore. Was his book important? Listen to this: 850 years after he wrote his book, Johan Gutenberg in Germany invented the movable type. Within the first 100 years after this invention, the most produced books was the Bible. The second most produced was Isidore’s Etymologies. Within 100 years, about 80 different editions of it appeared. We can surely say that a book that is still a bestseller 900 years after its publication is an influential book. And indeed, between AD 600 and 1500 The Etymologies were the central book to which rulers, entrepreneurs, legislators, financiers, builders, scientists, and many others went for consultation when they needed knowledge. The Etymologies were certainly not exhaustive, but they gave the format in which practical knowledge was to be compiled and presented. The book was the main source of knowledge and education for counselors of kings and princes and popes from Charlemagne to Louis XIV. Today, historians and archeologists still discover copies of it in different monasteries – the earliest of them coming from Ireland, translated in the old Gaelic language. What is not very well known today is that missionaries in the centuries after Isidore went out not so much with theological knowledge about abstract things – although, that was important – but with books that had practical knowledge about practical solutions. Cyril and Methodius, when they started their mission to the Slavs, translated volumes of books on solutions for agriculture, trades, industry, and many other topics – including details like pruning trees and conserving food. The same was true for other missionaries. In fact, as late as the 19th century, the majority of European missionaries went out as practical problem-solvers rather than as theoretical evangelists – think David Livingstone, for example, who went to Africa prepared to deal with a number of practical problems, from fighting slavery to curing malaria. In the late 19th century, Christian missionaries to Egypt were converting local populations by simply starting free schools for girls from poor families, teaching them reading, writing, and trades for gainful employment later in life. In fact, the mission effort in the world didn’t change to the modern purely theoretical and truncated so-called “discipleship” until after WWI – although, admittedly, the seeds for this deadly pietism in missions were planted as early as the mid-19th century. And here we get to my point about books and missions. If I am right about missions: that a mission is not about planting churches or converting individuals (although, both are a small part of a true mission), but about building a completely new culture (the City of God) to replace the old pagan culture (the city of man), then the main effort a missionary is supposed to focus on is disseminating practical knowledge of “how to.” How to change the laws and customs of a nation; how to run the courts; how to run the economy; how to build businesses; how to do science; how to create new technologies and apply them; how to make your family successful; how to raise your kids; how to do education; how to establish true community fellowship (not simply a “church” where all is focused on some ritual once a week), etc., etc. The task of a missionary then becomes to build a new literature, a literature that would establish the intellectual foundation for a new civilization. Not just what that new culture should believe about God and His salvation, but also how that belief is applied in practice, to the everyday life and work of the individual men and their institutions in that culture. Since all of life is religious (remember, culture is religion externalized), then all of pagan life is idolatry – including its thoughts and practices and institutions and policies. For a missionary to be faithful to his task, he needs to issue a challenge against all this idolatry: thoughts, practices, institutions, policies. In order to do that, he needs to present the alternative of salvation in all these areas: thoughts, practices, institutions, policies. He needs to start building a civilization. And that only happens through first giving the culture the books to build it. Books that say how it is done. And that’s what our mission in Bulgaria is doing. And what all other mission should be focusing on: creating that intellectual foundation. Without books and a foundation of practical literature, a mission is only spinning its wheels in the air. It gets nowhere, and eventually dies. And my desire, as someone who is a missionary deep in my heart, is to see every nation on earth have such a mission. It is not my job – and neither is it your job – to go to every nation individually to start such a mission. But we need to diligently seek people who are called to do it, and support them faithfully. The book I will assign for reading this week is Vishal Mangalwadi’s The Book That Made Your World. Read it, but remember, he is not telling even half of the story. There is much more. And that much more needs to be implemented today. And while thinking about it, think also of Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to . . . what? You got it: to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe. It is by no means the only such mission anymore: new such missions have appeared in other places – the Czech Republic, Costa Rica, Brazil, etc. They all deserve your support. But I will, of course, root for my mission. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post Books and Missions appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description “Why the Chinese have it wrong.” Assigned reading: Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 85 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will take on the most ancient civilization on earth today. Most ancient not in the sense that it has been around before all the others – that wouldn’t be true, for it was a rather late comer in the early days. Most ancient only in the sense that of all today’s existing cultures, it can trace itself in time as an uninterrupted cultural legacy farther back than any other modern culture. There were cultures existing before it was formed, but none of them survived for such a long time. Or some modern cultures may look back and imagine that they have something to do with some culture two millennia ago, but in reality, they have nothing in common. (Think modern Egyptians and ancient Egypt, or modern French and the ancient Gauls, etc.) This culture has remained stable for so long that a modern representative of that culture can actually look at a literary artifact of three thousand years ago and read what is written with only a little trouble. How many people can you find in Ireland that can read the Ogham alphabet that was used only 1,400 years ago? Or how many Norwegians or Swedes can read their Runic alphabet that was in use at the time of the Reformation, 500 yeas ago? I don’t even want to mention Cyrillic, the alphabet of my native language, Bulgarian, which was created only about 1,200 years ago; and I even have trouble reading some of the texts written 400 years ago. And this culture we are going to be talking about has an uninterrupted literary tradition that is older that any name of any nation or any geographical toponym in Europe. Even Hellas, the native name of modern Greece, the oldest surviving name in Europe, is younger than than the literary tradition of that culture. So, while there is a dark side to that consistency over the ages – and we will shortly see what it is – it still commands a certain level of respect. It’s the Chinese culture. We have to hand it to the Chinese; they arethe oldest existing culture today. We can legitimately overlook their other boasting: scientific or technological discoveries, or philosophical systems, or systems of social and military organization, etc. I mean, those are great, if they were true, it’s just they were never developed into large-scale civilizational advances, so we can easily ignore them. (For example, the ancient Greeks invented a steam engine but they used it for religious special effects, not for any useful work. So we say that it was invented by James Watt and others in England in the 18thcentury. He put it to work right away.) But as far as culture is concerned – which means, the overall norms and habits and cultural expectations and especially ethical-judicial principles – a modern Chinese would feel much more at home with the Chinese of 2,000 years ago, than any modern Englishman would with the Angles of 2,000 years ago, or any modern Russian would feel with the Russians of 2,000 years ago. For one, he would be able to read the street signs, right? It surely is impressive, isn’t it? Now, whether it is something to be proud of is a completely different issue, and we will get to it in a few minutes. Anyway, that is the culture I am going to be talking about today; or rather, will be using as an example of an ethical-judicial principle about the advance of civilizations. It ain’t gonna be easy, though, and here I want to start with a disclaimer. I will be talking partly about the Chinese culture, and about some of its collective psychology. I know there are Chinese folks among our listeners, and there are some among then that grew up in that culture. They know it inside out: all its details, nuances, backgrounds, contexts, biases, prejudices internally and externally, all the things that I can’t know exhaustively simply because I have not grown in it. To be sure, I have always tried to be a sincere and unbiased student of Asia and its cultures and history ever since I got involved in Eastern martial arts and had interest in Eastern religions. (That before I became a Christian.) I even took a basic course in Chinese characters – not to learn them in depth, but to understand the principle behind them. But I am a European who is learning from other Europeans; and, unfortunately, most of the studies of East Asian cultures come from European observers. For some reason, there are very few Chinese, Japanese. Korean, or Vietnamese writers who undertake the task of explaining their cultures to Europeans. In psychological terms, East Asian cultures are rather shy and introvert, and opposed to the extrovertness of the European cultures, not to mention the sometimes crass self-promotion and bragging of the American culture. Thus, I plead guilty from the very beginning: you will certainly find fault with some of my analysis. But I also want you to understand: The truth of the conclusions in this episode is not affected by how detailed my knowledge of China is. I am only using China as an example; but I could use any other culture, and the conclusions will be the same. The reason China is a good example is because it has been the culture that, in the last century, has had a very keen interest in the question of how civilizations advance. But I am getting ahead of myself here. Three years ago, in March 2016, a Chinese chemist named Sun Weidong delivered a lecture to a diverse audience of professors, students, and just ordinary science enthusiasts at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, a large city (about 8 million population) in Eastern China. But he didn’t talk about chemistry. He talked about history. Not strange, by the way, given that much of his scientific career has been related to radiometric analysis of different historical artifacts. The strange part was the content of the lecture itself. Sun started his lecture with a passage from one of the most venerated historical texts in Chinese historiography, the Shi Ji, simply, The Historical Record, known to Western historians as Records of the Grand Historianby Si Ma Chien, a palace historian for the Han Dynasty in 2nd century BC. Si Ma was a very interesting and colorful personality himself, and we know a lot about his life, but I will resist the temptation to give details here. Suffice to say, he is considered the father of Chinese historiography, and his Record is considered the “foundational text of the Chinese civilization.” It is truly believed that through it, Si Ma really created the Chinese civilization as a civilization, by giving it intellectual cohesion that would make it survive as a culture for two more millennia, even in the midst of constant civil wars and foreign invasions, and even foreign rule for several centuries. In it, Si Ma put together, from earlier sources, the history of the Chinese civilization, starting from its early mythical origins in the Yellow Emperor (and even the three god-kings before him) before the 3rdmillennium BC, going through all the early dynasties before the Han dynasty, writing down a number of biographies of important historical figures compiled from a multitude of earlier sources, some of them lost to us today. The Record is written in more than half million Chinese characters (that’s separate words, folks), and is longer than the Old Testament, while, unlike the Old Testament, is written by one man only. If you want to delve into ancient Chinese history, the book is free online, in Chinese-English interlinear. The text that Sun Weidong quoted was from Si Ma’s history of the Xia Dynasty, the first Chinese dynasty that followed directly after the mythical period of the Three God-Kings and the Five Emperors. The Xia Dynasty itself is half-mythical, half-historical. You know how every culture on earth has its own myths and legends about the Great Flood; well, in Si Ma’s history, that flood happened during the Xia Dynasty; clearly wrong, but no doubt he simply recorded it faithfully from older records. The text in question here, however, is not the Great Flood but the geography and topography of the empire of that first Chinese dynasty, considered the mother dynasty of the Chinese nation. Here is the text in question: “Northwards, the stream is divided and become the Nine Rivers. Reunited, it forms the opposing river and flows into the Sea.” Sun then asked the question: “There is only one major river in the world that flows northwards. Which one is it?” A member of the audience replied, “The Nile.” Then Sun showed a map of the Nile River and its delta: truly, a stream that flows northward and is divided into nine tributaries, some of which “re-unite” into “opposing” (that is, “on the other side”) rivers. He then continued with his thesis: according to him, the roots of Chinese culture should be sought not in any natural cultural evolution of the local population, but were planted sometime in the mid-2nd millennium BC by migrants from Egypt. The Xia Dynasty, he believes, was in fact the Hyksos: a Semitic nation that ruled Egypt as “foreign rulers” in the 17ththrough the 16thcenturies BC, declined in power in the mid-16thcentury BC and was expelled by a popular uprising, after which the native rule over Egypt was restored. (Just to mention, he, of course, follows the modern accepted secular chronology of Egypt. I think that chronology is mistaken: the Hyksos’s rule was in the 15th– 13thcenturies BC, and the Hyksos were the Biblical Amalekites. But this discrepancy is not important to my thesis here.) The Hyksos were known to have had advanced bronze weapons before most other cultures, and they are also known to have developed superior seafaring technology. Sun argues that they might have sent expeditions as far as China, and also, that after the fall of their rule in Egypt and after they were expelled from Egypt and much of the Middle East, some of them, or many of them, have ended up on the coast of Eastern China, bringing with them their history and their technologies, which they then laid as the foundation of the later Chinese culture. So the Yellow Emperor and the pantheon of deities and mythical rulers that gave the beginnings to the Chinese nation should be sought not in China but in Egypt. Sun did not leave it to one piece of evidence only; he had others. He himself started working on the theory back in the 1990s when he was still a young PhD student charged with the task of doing radiometric analysis of bronze artifacts of the late Xia and early Shang Dynasties. As a chemist, he was surprised to find out that the chemical composition of the alloys did not match the radioactivity of any of the metals found in Asia. They instead matched exactly the characteristics of bronze alloys found in Egypt. Which meant that the metal must have come from the same mines, namely, North Africa. At the time, his supervisor did not allow him to publish his data; there was a political reason for it. He was simply transferred to a different task. More than 20 years later, however, Sun is a world-class scientist: In addition to his degrees from the University at Hefei and his professorship at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, he also got a PhD at the Australian National University at Canberra, and is also a Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute at Meinz in Germany, and a Regional Vice President of the Society of Economic Geologists for Asia. So he could publish his thesis without fears that he could be silenced. Of course, to his earlier findings we can add a lot of other evidence that seems to point to Western origins of the Chinese culture; but I will mention this a little bit later. I know, I know, this is an unusual story but you are all wondering; why am I telling it? What is so important about it in a podcast that aims at bringing covenantal, that is ethical-judicialanalysis. So what is the covenantal part in it? It was the response of his listeners and in the response of the Chinese public in general. See, in Europe or in the Americas, such hypotheses about historical origins are often presented, but their interested audience is usually limited to a small community of academics and history buffs. There are a number of similar origin theories in Eastern Europe among the different ethnic peoples there, and yet, even there, they are rather ignored by the majority of the population. Really, very few people today care where the Angles and the Saxons came from, or how much Celtic blood do the inhabitants of Spain or Northern Italy have, or whether the modern Polish nation came from the Sarmatians, or whether the ancient homeland of the Bulgars was in the Altai Mountains or in the Western Tian Shan. Such people with such interests are usually either history buffs, or university professors, or marginal groups with nationalist and/or racist leanings who are trying to fabricate some sort of collective identity and sense of superiority for themselves. But in China, Sun Weidong’s hypothesis gained a lot of attention, even among people who wouldn’t normally go out of their way to dig deeper into the mysteries of ancient history. Sun’s thesis was published online and it immediately drew a lot of comments. A lot, I mean, hundreds of thousands of people. Under the title, The Ancestors of the Chinese People Came from Egypt, it was published on the Chinese travel site Kooniao, and from there, re-posted and republished on dozens of other platforms, like portals, online forums, message boards, etc. Kooniao also setup a separate web page for comments titled “Chinese People Came from Egypt,” which produced thousands of responses. And these responses have not been all one-sided. Some, of course, have been direct denial and even mockery of Sun’s hypothesis. But a marginal majority have been favorable, or at least careful to not dismiss the hypothesis just because it currently sounds ridiculous to the modern Chinese ears. Either way, the response was, well, gigantic, by all measures. You go to any Western website or forum that discusses origins, and you will only find a dozen of die-hard enthusiasts who participate. In China, this issue seems like an issue of life and death to hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. This is the phenomenon I want to examine here, namely, the unusually active, almost obsessive-compulsive interest of Chinese people with the ancient origins of their culture. Truly enough, as a friend of mine mentioned once, the native Chinese mentality is fundamentally racist, so there is that element, but there is an even deeper issue there and, when examined, it supersedes the native racism as a factor in determining the Chinese interest with history. And in fact, while this other factor may still be racial in its presuppositions, it is rather opposite to racism in that it is rather a racial inferiority complex. (Yes, it is possible for a culture to have both racial superiority and racial inferiority complex.) Or, if you don’t like such psychologizing, call it “soul-searching” in the sense of the Chinese culture seeking a way out of quagmire in which it has put itself in the past, and is trying to break free of it. It is like the Chinese people subconsciously believe that their culture has gotten lost somewhere on the way between its ancient origins and today, and they are trying to trace its steps back to the point where they left the right path so that it can step on firm land again. And the sense is growing that the ancient-ness of the culture is not an automatic solution to all the problems; it is the direction that has been taken later that is the issue. And hundreds of millions of Chinese are trying to figure out where things went wrong, and why, and how it all can be fixed. That feeling has been growing on the Chinese people for almost 800 years now. Between Si Ma Chien’s 2ndcentury BC and AD 13thcentury, the valleys of Yangtze and Huang-he were the most populated region of the world, containing between 30 and 40 percent of the wold’s population. The three other high concentrations of population – India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt – were too far away for the Chinese to worry about them; and the surrounding peoples were too small to compare. China could afford to spare some of its work force to build a massive wall on the northern border to keep out the barbarians, and the rest of its history was pretty much internal struggles for power and cultural and economic development without much thought of the outside world. Then, all of a sudden, in the early 13thcentury, this all changed: the demographically miniature tribes of the Mongols poured through the Great Wall and conquered all of China within just a few years, defeating the powerful armies of the Jin dynasty. The Mongols ruled China for over 150 years before they were expelled in 1368 and replaced by native Han rulers – the Ming Dynasty – for about 3 centuries. Then again, another tribe of barbarians that were supposed to be held back by the Great Wall, the Manchus in today’s northeast China, poured south, defeated the already weakened Ming Dynasty, and established another foreign rule over China which lasted for 3 centuries, between 1636 and 1911. So between 1220 and 1911, China was ruled by foreign rulers for 4 and a half centuries out of 7. That’s a bit too much for a nation that has 1/3 of the population of the world, isn’t it? But that wasn’t all. In the 18th century, Europeans started appearing in the Chinese seas and ports, and by the 19thcentury, their merchants and missionaries had almost taken over the coastal cities.  To the amazement of the Chinese who had always taken pride in their culture and civilization, these “devils” (gway-low, the original Cantonese word for foreigner, meaning literally “ghost man”) appeared way more civilized than the Chinese themselves. They had superior learning and knowledge about the world, superior education, superior technologies, superior military and industrial organization, and, as a result, superior power. Step by step, they were capable of seizing control of China’s trade, economy, and even politics, defeated China in several wars on her own soil, and by the spreading of Christianity, were turning the minds and hearts of a growing number of people inland than any imperial propaganda has ever been able to. By 1900, the imperial bureaucracy was their hostage in the large cities, and through it, the ruling Qing Dynasty was their hostage. The 19thcentury, thus, was a century of deep national humiliation for the native Han people of China. Being heirs of the most ancient of all civilizations and being mindful of a glorious cultural past that made all of Asia copy their culture to get out of its barbarism 1,000 years ago, they were now ruled by a foreign, barbarian dynasty, who in turn was so weak that it was hostage to distant foreign rulers, who were not even present but controlled China through their merchants and missionaries. It was even worse. In the 19thcentury racial theories were en vogue among the increasingly secularized Western elite, and the civilizational level and practices of the different cultures were all evaluated in terms of racial characteristics. Since Asians seemed to Europeans to be culturally backwards, the “yellow race” was postulated to be genetically inferior to the “white race.” Chinese were now taking advantage of the open borders that the Western civilization forced on the whole world (Europe had been open borders for 1400 year up to that point) and were trying to pursue happiness in other lands, like America, only to find out that they were now considered second class humans, or even subhumans by some. “Chinamen” were dehumanized in many places, barred from good jobs, and pretty much closed in ghettos (China towns). Oppressed in their own land, dehumanized abroad: that was the story of the Chinese during much of the 19thcentury and the early 20thcentury. No wonder the Boxer Rebellion (Yi He Tuan, the Righteous Unity in Chinese) was so violent and cruel in its aim of exterminating all Westerners in China. The follow-up after the European victory only confirmed to the Chinese that they were not considered more than animals: European soldiers raped tens of thousands of Chinese women and pillaged even towns and villages that never supported the Boxers. If you want to understand modern China and its relationship with the West, you have to go first through the Western treatment of China in the 19thand early 20thcentury. If that treatment was anything close to Christian and Biblical, we would have a different history in the 20thcentury. That treatment left a serious scar on the Chinese cultural mentality; and for the whole 20thcentury, China has been on a quest to recover its civilizational identity in order to restore its civilizational power. In the 20thcentury, China tried two of the main European ideologies dominant in the world at the time. The leaders of the anti-imperial revolution of 1911 and the founders of the Chinese Republic were all Christians but they were all trained in secular colleges, so their real ideology was secular humanism and nationalism. In their clash with the other European ideology that captured the minds and hearts of many Chinese – Marxism – Marxism eventually won, being able to give better hope to the majority of the people. Marxism, however, proved to be incapable of building a great civilization, so in the 1980s, the Chinese Communists slowly but surely started turning to another Western ideology: secular technocratic statism. None of them seem to work, though. So the hope is placed on something else: in some direct physical lineage to civilizations even older than China. There must be something in the very inner nature of Chinese people, something  that goes back beyond the failed civilization of today and its predecessors. Some inner nature that would give a promise, a prophecy, a predestination that the Chinese culture will rise again from the ashes and will indeed become again the real Zhongguo, the “Central Kingdom” of the world. The hope is that once the Chinese discover that inner genetics that made them great in the past, they will recover the impetus of becoming great again in the future, and will become great again. The current period of being considered the world’s barbarians and savages will then be considered only a deviation, once the Chinese culture discovers its true identity and rises again from the ashes. They just need to find that identity. And Sun Weidong’s theory played to that desire. That’s why so many people responded to it. This is not the first time this has happened. The quest for Chinese roots in the West was prominent in the 19thcentury, especially among the growing middle-class intelligentsia in China that was becoming increasingly anti-imperial and pro-Western. In 1892, Albert Terrien de Lacouperie, a French historian and linguistics scholar, published a book titled The Western Origin of the Early Chinese Civilizationin which he claimed that the Chinese civilization was brought to China by Babylonian migrants, and the Yellow Emperor – the likely mythical ancestor of the Chinese race – was actually a Mesopotamian tribal leader. The theory was faulty and earned a lot of refutations in Europe within just a few years after its publication, but it appealed strongly to the native Han people in their resentment against the Manchu ruling dynasty which was considered Barbarian. The book was translated into Chinese and widely circulated in China, and Lacouperie’s theory of Sino-Babylonianism was even taught for a time in Chinese schools and universities, until it was replaced by nativist nationalism in the 1920s. Faulty or not, Chinese intellectuals needed something to restore their confidence in their own culture against both the Manchus and the Europeans, and an ancient connection to the oldest recorded civilization in history was a very convenient tool. Almost as if that discovery was to turn a magic golden key to the civilizational advance of the Chinese nation. If we find out we are directly related to the Babylonians, we will surely become great again. No, wait, if we find out that we are directly related to the Egyptian civilization, we will surely become great again. Since we come from those great civilizations, we are surely capable of catching up with America and the West. And, of course, the opposite opinion, which is essentially the same, really, with just an opposite sign: No, our culture is our own, native culture, and if we just dig deep enough in it and find that magic stuff that we Chinese are made of, we will become great again. It’s not the Egyptians or the Babylonians or the West, it is something that we have and only we have. And therefore we can catch up with the West without looking to the West for support. This line of thought was behind the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project that the Chinese government started in 1996, hiring 200 specialists to determine with greater accuracy the dating of the earliest Chinese dynasties. It spent $1.5 million on it, a significant sum given the average income and price levels in China at the time; the project, however, had no other practical purpose than to propagandize the greatness of the ancients to create an impetus for action among the moderns. Just another attempt to discover the magical DNA in the Chinese people that would ensure their catching up with the West. Is there anything wrong with such attempts, from a covenantal perspective? Everything. Everything is wrong with such projects. They will never work, and they will only additionally confuse and disorient the Chinese people, making them look for hope in idols that offer no hope, while ignoring the true hope before them. Both parties are wrong: Weidong and the West-leaning intellectuals, and the government’s nativists and nationalists. Neither party knows what really causes the advance of a civilization. And thus, neither party is on the right track. For those of our listeners who have heard my old sermon of some time ago, “What Is Man?”, you will recognize the antithesis here. The antithesis is between a metaphysical (static) view and definition of man and an ethical (dynamic) definition and view of man. Paganism views man and defines man based on a view of man’s “inner nature”: something inside man that makes him what he is. Whatever that nature is, man cannot escape it, whether by his own effort or by the effort of anyone else, be it another man or god; that nature will always define man and will predestine and ordain his actions. Man’s moral imperative in life, therefore, is not to pursue a purpose or a destiny but to “discover his true self,” that is, to discover who he is and comprehend it with his mind. That true self may be found most probably in what he was handed down from his ancestors in terms of physical heritage (mainly genetics), which is the basis for all the cults to the ancestors, including modern racial theories. But it could be many more things. It could be the line up of the heavenly bodies at the time of his birth which would magically affect the inner make-up of a man and pre-ordain him for life. It could be his economic status, as in Marxism. It could be the climate conditions in which he has grown up, or the form of his skull, or the subconscious memories that conditioned him from his childhood. In a more primitive form, such metaphysical beliefs about man are present in the totemistic beliefs of primitive tribes: like the belief that a tribe comes from a wolf or from a bear or from another animal, and, based on that, define the nature of the men in the tribe as following from the nature of their totem animal. When this metaphysical view of man is expanded to man’s society, it creates a sociology that is very characteristic to all paganism: a metaphysical view of society, namely, that a society is supposed to be built upon the shared “nature” characteristics of a group of people, and people who do not share such “nature” characteristics would be an “impurity” to that society. Once you have people with shared nature, however, an elite of rulers is expected to discover that inner nature of all these people – just like an individual is supposed to discover his true nature – and then organize the society accordingly. It goes without saying that an individual who has some “nature” traits that are different, would be, er, a deviation, and may face some consequences: like, for example, special attention from the IRS or police or the NSA all the way to re-education camp. Either way, we should expect that a sociology based on the metaphysical view of man would be obsessed with some impersonal factor that gives the magical key to the advance of civilizations. So what is that impersonal factor? Where can we find it? And when I say “magical,” I am not using it metaphorically. Even the most “rational” pagan ideologies eventually resort to the magical, believe it or not. Nazi Germany sent several expeditions to Tibet – the alleged homeland of the Aryan peoples – to try to study the conditions that created the superior race; and thousands of young Nazis were send to learn from the lamas in Tibet. Communist regimes encouraged the proliferation of the so called “extrasense experts” and even put them on government pay with the purpose of getting an insight into the psychology of man. Against the backdrop of such institutionalized insanity, the Chinese obsession with the ancestors seems rather trivial. But it is still the same metaphysical religion. And it never produces results. Why? Because man is never defined metaphysically but always ethically. And therefore his civilization is not the product of man’s metaphysical nature but of his ethics. If you have been immersed in rationalistic philosophies and religions, there is one thing that bugs you every time you read the Bible: The Bible is never interested in defining man as he is. (As a matter of fact, there is really no definition of the world in general as it is.) We have a description of how man was created. We have no description whathe is made of, or whathe is, really. We have no mention of some metaphysical element that makes man different from the rest of the creation; in fact, if anything, the Bible says that man was made out of dust – that is, he is metaphysically no different from the nature around him. (The woman was different, however: unlike man and the animals, she was not made out of dust.) And yet, the Bible places an enormous emphasis on the uniqueness of man as a creature – to the point that the author of Hebrews makes the angels serving spirits to that creature made out of dust (Heb. 1:14). Man is elevated above all the creation, but we are not told what exactly is put in him that makes his so special: true, God breathed the breath of life in his nostrils and this is how the dust became man, but we are not told anything about what that breath of life may be. In the first chapter, we are told that God made man after His own image, but what is that image? What metaphysical characteristic of man defines God’s image? Is it his mind? Couldn’t be, otherwise people of lesser intellectual qualities would have less of the image of God, and we know that can’t be true. Is it his emotions? Well, then, people of more emotions would be more godly than those who are calmer, right? What is it that defines man as the image of God? We don’t have that answer. Or, rather, we have it, but it is not in the form of a metaphysical or ontological definition. It is something else. The image of God in man is defined as a task. That is, man is defined not statically, as a “nature,” but dynamically, as a task. Or, if you want a pun, here it is: man is defined not as a “being” but as a “doing”: it is not what he is that defines the image of God, but what he is created to do. Here’s the text in Genesis 1: Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them have dominion. . . . The next chapter continues by describing man entirely in terms of his task. In fact, the whole Bible continues by describing man entirely in terms of his task. We are told nothing of man as nature; the only time when God asks the question, “What is man?”, He asks it to ridicule those who think man is something without God and without the task God has given him. But man is entirely described in relation to his task of dominion. (As a side note, we have the same about God: We are told nothing about the inner nature of God. But we know God through His works.) And since the task given to man is ethical – it is only defined in terms of good vs. evil, obedience vs. disobedience, righteousness vs. wickedness – the Biblical definition of man is entirely ethical: man is a creature made to worship God and to obey God’s Dominion Mandate for him on earth. It is that simple. We will never know our “true nature.” We are never given that “true nature” in the Bible. But we will always have our task, which defines our true ethical nature before God. And what we are before God will be defined by how faithfully we go about obeying His covenant. What does that look like when translated into sociology? Pay attention now, here is the Biblical verse for you: See, I have taught you statutes and judgments just as the LORDmy God commanded me, that you should do thus in the land where you are entering to possess it. “So keep and do them,for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ “For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as is the LORDour God whenever we call on Him? “Or what great nation is there that has statutes and judgments as righteous as this whole law which I am setting before you today? (Deut. 4:5-8). A culture is only as great as is the socially dominant ethics of its people and its institutions. Not greater than that. How people view good and evil and do righteousness, and how they set up their institutions to do justice is the only thing that determines the future course of a civilization. All other civilizational factors depend on it: economics, business, art, literature, science, technology, financial power, education, psychology and mental health, the life of the local communities and social cohesion, etc., etc., etc. Since man is entirely defined by his ethical standing, his whole civilization is entirely defined by its ethical standing. But what is often missed by non-Christians – and sometimes by Christians alike – is that ethical commitment is not part of man’s inner nature. Or, to be precise, the right ethical commitment, the one that makes man righteous and just and his culture great, is not something he is born with nor does he inherit it in his genes. Man is born with an ethical commitment he has inherited covenantally from Adam, and it is the wrong ethical commitment. But to acquire the right ethical commitment, man must make the right ethical choice, and he must make it self-consciously, againsthis own nature. Digging deeper to discover his true nature won’t help man become great; it will only drive him to despair, if he is honest. So in order to make his culture great, man must forsake his inner nature and everything it involves: heritage, conditioning by his environment or his family, the subconscious, the lures of his economic status. That’s what the Bible means by “crucifying the flesh”: Not that the literary biological flesh should be mortified, but that the metaphysical nature of man must be denied any say in what a man believes and thinks and desires, and only his ethical will speaks and rules. And that ethical will needs to be radically changed – newborn – in order for man to achieve that. Admittedly, man can be passed down some training in righteousness from his parents, if they were righteous; but in the final account, the decision must be on individual level first, and must be re-committed to with every generation, for a civilization to prosper. The greatness of a civilization is a matter of self-conscious ethical choice of the millions of individuals who constitute that civilization. When Europe excelled as a culture, it was not because Europeans had anything superior in their nature or in their past to look up to. To the contrary, Celts and Germans and Greeks and Latins and Slavs have always been primitive Barbarians with a past that held nothing to be proud of. But the rise of the Western civilization came when a religion hit the West, a religion that was capable of changing minds and hearts like nothing before, and it was that religion that turned the Barbarians into civilized people’s. The pace of civilizing Europe for 2,000 years depended on how closely Europeans stuck to that religion. When they deviated from it, they became more Barbarian, when they recovered it and grew in it, they became more civilized. When in the 20thcentury they abandoned that religion and returned to the superstitions of their barbaric forefathers, they turned into the same barbarians they had been 2,000 years before. The greatness of the European civilization has never been about nature. It has always been about ethical choice. If the Chinese want to know where the greatness of their own civilization was in the past, it was in the same thing. Thousands of years ago, they were closer to the original source of that same religion: Noah. The Chinese culture may have inherited something from Noah that they were capable of keeping for more generations than anyone else. The Exodus of Israel from Egypt must have also had quite a ripple effect around the world; after all, the largest and most powerful empire of the ancient world fell under the wrath of God; so the giving of the law on the Mount Sinai must have been a news that reached all over the world. Also, given the accepted chronology of the Xia and the Shang dynasties, they must have existed around the times of Solomon; and we know that Solomon’s glory and fame was known throughout the world to all the kings, and all the kings were seeking the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom (2 Chr. 9:23). The Xia and the Shang Dynasties must have been affected by those events, and must have adopted, at least partially, the ethics and the justice of God’s Law, as God predicted. I have mentioned before that Eusebius, the church historian of the 4thcentury, claims that the whole world knew of the Law of Moses and that Law was the foundation for all civilized cultures. And we know from the Bible itself that the Magi who visited the newborn King came from the East (Matt. 2:1). How far east, we are not told. It could have been Persia, but we know from ancient Chinese sources that Persian Zoroastrianism had deep influence on the Chinese culture. So, the combined influence of the inherited memory from Noah and his sons, the world sensation of the destruction of Egypt and the thundering of the Law from the mountain, and the fame and glory of Solomon’s wisdom were the real root factors for the greatness of the Chinese culture and civilization. China grew in population and influence and power not because it had superior genetics or superior magic qualities. It grew because it managed to maintain the ethics and justice of the Law of God for a long time. The Shang Dynasty – the second official on the list of Chinese Dynasties and the first that is proven to have existed historically – did have an official religion that believed in one Supreme God Creator (Shang Di) – although that official religion was mixed with pagan practices like divination and sacrifices to idols. However, for all we know today of that dynasty, it was the real root of the modern Chinese culture. And it was also the longest ruling Chinese dynasty, covering a period of 554 years, longer than any other dynasty in the written history of mankind. In short, China was great because it followed a great God. It followed Him imperfectly, as much as a pagan nation can in the centuries before Christ, but it still allowed a lot of His influence to rule its society. And, just like the European civilization, the moment that influence was lost, China deteriorated to the same barbarism it despised in the surrounding cultures. And eventually, got conquered by them and humiliated by them, and viewed as the world’s barbarians by nations who just appeared on the map a couple of hundred years ago. God is not mocked. And He is still not mocked. So the Chinese have it wrong. Civilizations do not advance because of some magical quality of their people. Genetics, climate, ancestry, ancient-ness, origin mean nothing. The only thing that makes a people great is faith in the God of the Bible and obedience to His Covenant. Sun Weidong’s theory may be right or may be wrong. It doesn’t matter. China’s future of greatness is not in its history. It is where the greatness of Europe and the West was: In the history of another nation, the ancient Hebrews and the faith that came out of it, Christianity. And that’s where the Chinese need to be looking at for answers. The book I will assign for reading this week is The Formation of Christendom, by Judith Herrin. It is an amazing historical study; you will be surprised how much the early missionaries were aware that they were building a civilization, not just planting churches. And it is a book that should be read by all the Chinese who are concerned about their culture. That is what needs to be replicated in China. And, of course, you still need to read R.J. Rushdoony’s The Foundations of Social Order– but you knew that already. Keep Bulgarian Reformation Ministries in your prayers and giving. We are a missionary organization devoted to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Europe through translating and publishing books that apply the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every area of life. Yes, we are self-consciously building a civilization, not just planting churches, mark that. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate to a work that has proven effective over the last 20+ years. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post The Advance of Civilizations appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description “Why the Chinese have it wrong.” Assigned reading: Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 85 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will take on the most ancient civilization on earth today. Most ancient not in the sense that it has been around before all the others – that wouldn’t be true, for it was a rather late comer in the early days. Most ancient only in the sense that of all today’s existing cultures, it can trace itself in time as an uninterrupted cultural legacy farther back than any other modern culture. There were cultures existing before it was formed, but none of them survived for such a long time. Or some modern cultures may look back and imagine that they have something to do with some culture two millennia ago, but in reality, they have nothing in common. (Think modern Egyptians and ancient Egypt, or modern French and the ancient Gauls, etc.) This culture has remained stable for so long that a modern representative of that culture can actually look at a literary artifact of three thousand years ago and read what is written with only a little trouble. How many people can you find in Ireland that can read the Ogham alphabet that was used only 1,400 years ago? Or how many Norwegians or Swedes can read their Runic alphabet that was in use at the time of the Reformation, 500 yeas ago? I don’t even want to mention Cyrillic, the alphabet of my native language, Bulgarian, which was created only about 1,200 years ago; and I even have trouble reading some of the texts written 400 years ago. And this culture we are going to be talking about has an uninterrupted literary tradition that is older that any name of any nation or any geographical toponym in Europe. Even Hellas, the native name of modern Greece, the oldest surviving name in Europe, is younger than than the literary tradition of that culture. So, while there is a dark side to that consistency over the ages – and we will shortly see what it is – it still commands a certain level of respect. It’s the Chinese culture. We have to hand it to the Chinese; they arethe oldest existing culture today. We can legitimately overlook their other boasting: scientific or technological discoveries, or philosophical systems, or systems of social and military organization, etc. I mean, those are great, if they were true, it’s just they were never developed into large-scale civilizational advances, so we can easily ignore them. (For example, the ancient Greeks invented a steam engine but they used it for religious special effects, not for any useful work. So we say that it was invented by James Watt and others in England in the 18thcentury. He put it to work right away.) But as far as culture is concerned – which means, the overall norms and habits and cultural expectations and especially ethical-judicial principles – a modern Chinese would feel much more at home with the Chinese of 2,000 years ago, than any modern Englishman would with the Angles of 2,000 years ago, or any modern Russian would feel with the Russians of 2,000 years ago. For one, he would be able to read the street signs, right? It surely is impressive, isn’t it? Now, whether it is something to be proud of is a completely different issue, and we will get to it in a few minutes. Anyway, that is the culture I am going to be talking about today; or rather, will be using as an example of an ethical-judicial principle about the advance of civilizations. It ain’t gonna be easy, though, and here I want to start with a disclaimer. I will be talking partly about the Chinese culture, and about some of its collective psychology. I know there are Chinese folks among our listeners, and there are some among then that grew up in that culture. They know it inside out: all its details, nuances, backgrounds, contexts, biases, prejudices internally and externally, all the things that I can’t know exhaustively simply because I have not grown in it. To be sure, I have always tried to be a sincere and unbiased student of Asia and its cultures and history ever since I got involved in Eastern martial arts and had interest in Eastern religions. (That before I became a Christian.) I even took a basic course in Chinese characters – not to learn them in depth, but to understand the principle behind them. But I am a European who is learning from other Europeans; and, unfortunately, most of the studies of East Asian cultures come from European observers. For some reason, there are very few Chinese, Japanese. Korean, or Vietnamese writers who undertake the task of explaining their cultures to Europeans. In psychological terms, East Asian cultures are rather shy and introvert, and opposed to the extrovertness of the European cultures, not to mention the sometimes crass self-promotion and bragging of the American culture. Thus, I plead guilty from the very beginning: you will certainly find fault with some of my analysis. But I also want you to understand: The truth of the conclusions in this episode is not affected by how detailed my knowledge of China is. I am only using China as an example; but I could use any other culture, and the conclusions will be the same. The reason China is a good example is because it has been the culture that, in the last century, has had a very keen interest in the question of how civilizations advance. But I am getting ahead of myself here. Three years ago, in March 2016, a Chinese chemist named Sun Weidong delivered a lecture to a diverse audience of professors, students, and just ordinary science enthusiasts at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, a large city (about 8 million population) in Eastern China. But he didn’t talk about chemistry. He talked about history. Not strange, by the way, given that much of his scientific career has been related to radiometric analysis of different historical artifacts. The strange part was the content of the lecture itself. Sun started his lecture with a passage from one of the most venerated historical texts in Chinese historiography, the Shi Ji, simply, The Historical Record, known to Western historians as Records of the Grand Historianby Si Ma Chien, a palace historian for the Han Dynasty in 2nd century BC. Si Ma was a very interesting and colorful personality himself, and we know a lot about his life, but I will resist the temptation to give details here. Suffice to say, he is considered the father of Chinese historiography, and his Record is considered the “foundational text of the Chinese civilization.” It is truly believed that through it, Si Ma really created the Chinese civilization as a civilization, by giving it intellectual cohesion that would make it survive as a culture for two more millennia, even in the midst of constant civil wars and foreign invasions, and even foreign rule for several centuries. In it, Si Ma put together, from earlier sources, the history of the Chinese civilization, starting from its early mythical origins in the Yellow Emperor (and even the three god-kings before him) before the 3rdmillennium BC, going through all the early dynasties before the Han dynasty, writing down a number of biographies of important historical figures compiled from a multitude of earlier sources, some of them lost to us today. The Record is written in more than half million Chinese characters (that’s separate words, folks), and is longer than the Old Testament, while, unlike the Old Testament, is written by one man only. If you want to delve into ancient Chinese history, the book is free online, in Chinese-English interlinear. The text that Sun Weidong quoted was from Si Ma’s history of the Xia Dynasty, the first Chinese dynasty that followed directly after the mythical period of the Three God-Kings and the Five Emperors. The Xia Dynasty itself is half-mythical, half-historical. You know how every culture on earth has its own myths and legends about the Great Flood; well, in Si Ma’s history, that flood happened during the Xia Dynasty; clearly wrong, but no doubt he simply recorded it faithfully from older records. The text in question here, however, is not the Great Flood but the geography and topography of the empire of that first Chinese dynasty, considered the mother dynasty of the Chinese nation. Here is the text in question: “Northwards, the stream is divided and become the Nine Rivers. Reunited, it forms the opposing river and flows into the Sea.” Sun then asked the question: “There is only one major river in the world that flows northwards. Which one is it?” A member of the audience replied, “The Nile.” Then Sun showed a map of the Nile River and its delta: truly, a stream that flows northward and is divided into nine tributaries, some of which “re-unite” into “opposing” (that is, “on the other side”) rivers. He then continued with his thesis: according to him, the roots of Chinese culture should be sought not in any natural cultural evolution of the local population, but were planted sometime in the mid-2nd millennium BC by migrants from Egypt. The Xia Dynasty, he believes, was in fact the Hyksos: a Semitic nation that ruled Egypt as “foreign rulers” in the 17ththrough the 16thcenturies BC, declined in power in the mid-16thcentury BC and was expelled by a popular uprising, after which the native rule over Egypt was restored. (Just to mention, he, of course, follows the modern accepted secular chronology of Egypt. I think that chronology is mistaken: the Hyksos’s rule was in the 15th– 13thcenturies BC, and the Hyksos were the Biblical Amalekites. But this discrepancy is not important to my thesis here.) The Hyksos were known to have had advanced bronze weapons before most other cultures, and they are also known to have developed superior seafaring technology. Sun argues that they might have sent expeditions as far as China, and also, that after the fall of their rule in Egypt and after they were expelled from Egypt and much of the Middle East, some of them, or many of them, have ended up on the coast of Eastern China, bringing with them their history and their technologies, which they then laid as the foundation of the later Chinese culture. So the Yellow Emperor and the pantheon of deities and mythical rulers that gave the beginnings to the Chinese nation should be sought not in China but in Egypt. Sun did not leave it to one piece of evidence only; he had others. He himself started working on the theory back in the 1990s when he was still a young PhD student charged with the task of doing radiometric analysis of bronze artifacts of the late Xia and early Shang Dynasties. As a chemist, he was surprised to find out that the chemical composition of the alloys did not match the radioactivity of any of the metals found in Asia. They instead matched exactly the characteristics of bronze alloys found in Egypt. Which meant that the metal must have come from the same mines, namely, North Africa. At the time, his supervisor did not allow him to publish his data; there was a political reason for it. He was simply transferred to a different task. More than 20 years later, however, Sun is a world-class scientist: In addition to his degrees from the University at Hefei and his professorship at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, he also got a PhD at the Australian National University at Canberra, and is also a Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute at Meinz in Germany, and a Regional Vice President of the Society of Economic Geologists for Asia. So he could publish his thesis without fears that he could be silenced. Of course, to his earlier findings we can add a lot of other evidence that seems to point to Western origins of the Chinese culture; but I will mention this a little bit later. I know, I know, this is an unusual story but you are all wondering; why am I telling it? What is so important about it in a podcast that aims at bringing covenantal, that is ethical-judicialanalysis. So what is the covenantal part in it? It was the response of his listeners and in the response of the Chinese public in general. See, in Europe or in the Americas, such hypotheses about historical origins are often presented, but their interested audience is usually limited to a small community of academics and history buffs. There are a number of similar origin theories in Eastern Europe among the different ethnic peoples there, and yet, even there, they are rather ignored by the majority of the population. Really, very few people today care where the Angles and the Saxons came from, or how much Celtic blood do the inhabitants of Spain or Northern Italy have, or whether the modern Polish nation came from the Sarmatians, or whether the ancient homeland of the Bulgars was in the Altai Mountains or in the Western Tian Shan. Such people with such interests are usually either history buffs, or university professors, or marginal groups with nationalist and/or racist leanings who are trying to fabricate some sort of collective identity and sense of superiority for themselves. But in China, Sun Weidong’s hypothesis gained a lot of attention, even among people who wouldn’t normally go out of their way to dig deeper into the mysteries of ancient history. Sun’s thesis was published online and it immediately drew a lot of comments. A lot, I mean, hundreds of thousands of people. Under the title, The Ancestors of the Chinese People Came from Egypt, it was published on the Chinese travel site Kooniao, and from there, re-posted and republished on dozens of other platforms, like portals, online forums, message boards, etc. Kooniao also setup a separate web page for comments titled “Chinese People Came from Egypt,” which produced thousands of responses. And these responses have not been all one-sided. Some, of course, have been direct denial and even mockery of Sun’s hypothesis. But a marginal majority have been favorable, or at least careful to not dismiss the hypothesis just because it currently sounds ridiculous to the modern Chinese ears. Either way, the response was, well, gigantic, by all measures. You go to any Western website or forum that discusses origins, and you will only find a dozen of die-hard enthusiasts who participate. In China, this issue seems like an issue of life and death to hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. This is the phenomenon I want to examine here, namely, the unusually active, almost obsessive-compulsive interest of Chinese people with the ancient origins of their culture. Truly enough, as a friend of mine mentioned once, the native Chinese mentality is fundamentally racist, so there is that element, but there is an even deeper issue there and, when examined, it supersedes the native racism as a factor in determining the Chinese interest with history. And in fact, while this other factor may still be racial in its presuppositions, it is rather opposite to racism in that it is rather a racial inferiority complex. (Yes, it is possible for a culture to have both racial superiority and racial inferiority complex.) Or, if you don’t like such psychologizing, call it “soul-searching” in the sense of the Chinese culture seeking a way out of quagmire in which it has put itself in the past, and is trying to break free of it. It is like the Chinese people subconsciously believe that their culture has gotten lost somewhere on the way between its ancient origins and today, and they are trying to trace its steps back to the point where they left the right path so that it can step on firm land again. And the sense is growing that the ancient-ness of the culture is not an automatic solution to all the problems; it is the direction that has been taken later that is the issue. And hundreds of millions of Chinese are trying to figure out where things went wrong, and why, and how it all can be fixed. That feeling has been growing on the Chinese people for almost 800 years now. Between Si Ma Chien’s 2ndcentury BC and AD 13thcentury, the valleys of Yangtze and Huang-he were the most populated region of the world, containing between 30 and 40 percent of the wold’s population. The three other high concentrations of population – India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt – were too far away for the Chinese to worry about them; and the surrounding peoples were too small to compare. China could afford to spare some of its work force to build a massive wall on the northern border to keep out the barbarians, and the rest of its history was pretty much internal struggles for power and cultural and economic development without much thought of the outside world. Then, all of a sudden, in the early 13thcentury, this all changed: the demographically miniature tribes of the Mongols poured through the Great Wall and conquered all of China within just a few years, defeating the powerful armies of the Jin dynasty. The Mongols ruled China for over 150 years before they were expelled in 1368 and replaced by native Han rulers – the Ming Dynasty – for about 3 centuries. Then again, another tribe of barbarians that were supposed to be held back by the Great Wall, the Manchus in today’s northeast China, poured south, defeated the already weakened Ming Dynasty, and established another foreign rule over China which lasted for 3 centuries, between 1636 and 1911. So between 1220 and 1911, China was ruled by foreign rulers for 4 and a half centuries out of 7. That’s a bit too much for a nation that has 1/3 of the population of the world, isn’t it? But that wasn’t all. In the 18th century, Europeans started appearing in the Chinese seas and ports, and by the 19thcentury, their merchants and missionaries had almost taken over the coastal cities.  To the amazement of the Chinese who had always taken pride in their culture and civilization, these “devils” (gway-low, the original Cantonese word for foreigner, meaning literally “ghost man”) appeared way more civilized than the Chinese themselves. They had superior learning and knowledge about the world, superior education, superior technologies, superior military and industrial organization, and, as a result, superior power. Step by step, they were capable of seizing control of China’s trade, economy, and even politics, defeated China in several wars on her own soil, and by the spreading of Christianity, were turning the minds and hearts of a growing number of people inland than any imperial propaganda has ever been able to. By 1900, the imperial bureaucracy was their hostage in the large cities, and through it, the ruling Qing Dynasty was their hostage. The 19thcentury, thus, was a century of deep national humiliation for the native Han people of China. Being heirs of the most ancient of all civilizations and being mindful of a glorious cultural past that made all of Asia copy their culture to get out of its barbarism 1,000 years ago, they were now ruled by a foreign, barbarian dynasty, who in turn was so weak that it was hostage to distant foreign rulers, who were not even present but controlled China through their merchants and missionaries. It was even worse. In the 19thcentury racial theories were en vogue among the increasingly secularized Western elite, and the civilizational level and practices of the different cultures were all evaluated in terms of racial characteristics. Since Asians seemed to Europeans to be culturally backwards, the “yellow race” was postulated to be genetically inferior to the “white race.” Chinese were now taking advantage of the open borders that the Western civilization forced on the whole world (Europe had been open borders for 1400 year up to that point) and were trying to pursue happiness in other lands, like America, only to find out that they were now considered second class humans, or even subhumans by some. “Chinamen” were dehumanized in many places, barred from good jobs, and pretty much closed in ghettos (China towns). Oppressed in their own land, dehumanized abroad: that was the story of the Chinese during much of the 19thcentury and the early 20thcentury. No wonder the Boxer Rebellion (Yi He Tuan, the Righteous Unity in Chinese) was so violent and cruel in its aim of exterminating all Westerners in China. The follow-up after the European victory only confirmed to the Chinese that they were not considered more than animals: European soldiers raped tens of thousands of Chinese women and pillaged even towns and villages that never supported the Boxers. If you want to understand modern China and its relationship with the West, you have to go first through the Western treatment of China in the 19thand early 20thcentury. If that treatment was anything close to Christian and Biblical, we would have a different history in the 20thcentury. That treatment left a serious scar on the Chinese cultural mentality; and for the whole 20thcentury, China has been on a quest to recover its civilizational identity in order to restore its civilizational power. In the 20thcentury, China tried two of the main European ideologies dominant in the world at the time. The leaders of the anti-imperial revolution of 1911 and the founders of the Chinese Republic were all Christians but they were all trained in secular colleges, so their real ideology was secular humanism and nationalism. In their clash with the other European ideology that captured the minds and hearts of many Chinese – Marxism – Marxism eventually won, being able to give better hope to the majority of the people. Marxism, however, proved to be incapable of building a great civilization, so in the 1980s, the Chinese Communists slowly but surely started turning to another Western ideology: secular technocratic statism. None of them seem to work, though. So the hope is placed on something else: in some direct physical lineage to civilizations even older than China. There must be something in the very inner nature of Chinese people, something  that goes back beyond the failed civilization of today and its predecessors. Some inner nature that would give a promise, a prophecy, a predestination that the Chinese culture will rise again from the ashes and will indeed become again the real Zhongguo, the “Central Kingdom” of the world. The hope is that once the Chinese discover that inner genetics that made them great in the past, they will recover the impetus of becoming great again in the future, and will become great again. The current period of being considered the world’s barbarians and savages will then be considered only a deviation, once the Chinese culture discovers its true identity and rises again from the ashes. They just need to find that identity. And Sun Weidong’s theory played to that desire. That’s why so many people responded to it. This is not the first time this has happened. The quest for Chinese roots in the West was prominent in the 19thcentury, especially among the growing middle-class intelligentsia in China that was becoming increasingly anti-imperial and pro-Western. In 1892, Albert Terrien de Lacouperie, a French historian and linguistics scholar, published a book titled The Western Origin of the Early Chinese Civilizationin which he claimed that the Chinese civilization was brought to China by Babylonian migrants, and the Yellow Emperor – the likely mythical ancestor of the Chinese race – was actually a Mesopotamian tribal leader. The theory was faulty and earned a lot of refutations in Europe within just a few years after its publication, but it appealed strongly to the native Han people in their resentment against the Manchu ruling dynasty which was considered Barbarian. The book was translated into Chinese and widely circulated in China, and Lacouperie’s theory of Sino-Babylonianism was even taught for a time in Chinese schools and universities, until it was replaced by nativist nationalism in the 1920s. Faulty or not, Chinese intellectuals needed something to restore their confidence in their own culture against both the Manchus and the Europeans, and an ancient connection to the oldest recorded civilization in history was a very convenient tool. Almost as if that discovery was to turn a magic golden key to the civilizational advance of the Chinese nation. If we find out we are directly related to the Babylonians, we will surely become great again. No, wait, if we find out that we are directly related to the Egyptian civilization, we will surely become great again. Since we come from those great civilizations, we are surely capable of catching up with America and the West. And, of course, the opposite opinion, which is essentially the same, really, with just an opposite sign: No, our culture is our own, native culture, and if we just dig deep enough in it and find that magic stuff that we Chinese are made of, we will become great again. It’s not the Egyptians or the Babylonians or the West, it is something that we have and only we have. And therefore we can catch up with the West without looking to the West for support. This line of thought was behind the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project that the Chinese government started in 1996, hiring 200 specialists to determine with greater accuracy the dating of the earliest Chinese dynasties. It spent $1.5 million on it, a significant sum given the average income and price levels in China at the time; the project, however, had no other practical purpose than to propagandize the greatness of the ancients to create an impetus for action among the moderns. Just another attempt to discover the magical DNA in the Chinese people that would ensure their catching up with the West. Is there anything wrong with such attempts, from a covenantal perspective? Everything. Everything is wrong with such projects. They will never work, and they will only additionally confuse and disorient the Chinese people, making them look for hope in idols that offer no hope, while ignoring the true hope before them. Both parties are wrong: Weidong and the West-leaning intellectuals, and the government’s nativists and nationalists. Neither party knows what really causes the advance of a civilization. And thus, neither party is on the right track. For those of our listeners who have heard my old sermon of some time ago, “What Is Man?”, you will recognize the antithesis here. The antithesis is between a metaphysical (static) view and definition of man and an ethical (dynamic) definition and view of man. Paganism views man and defines man based on a view of man’s “inner nature”: something inside man that makes him what he is. Whatever that nature is, man cannot escape it, whether by his own effort or by the effort of anyone else, be it another man or god; that nature will always define man and will predestine and ordain his actions. Man’s moral imperative in life, therefore, is not to pursue a purpose or a destiny but to “discover his true self,” that is, to discover who he is and comprehend it with his mind. That true self may be found most probably in what he was handed down from his ancestors in terms of physical heritage (mainly genetics), which is the basis for all the cults to the ancestors, including modern racial theories. But it could be many more things. It could be the line up of the heavenly bodies at the time of his birth which would magically affect the inner make-up of a man and pre-ordain him for life. It could be his economic status, as in Marxism. It could be the climate conditions in which he has grown up, or the form of his skull, or the subconscious memories that conditioned him from his childhood. In a more primitive form, such metaphysical beliefs about man are present in the totemistic beliefs of primitive tribes: like the belief that a tribe comes from a wolf or from a bear or from another animal, and, based on that, define the nature of the men in the tribe as following from the nature of their totem animal. When this metaphysical view of man is expanded to man’s society, it creates a sociology that is very characteristic to all paganism: a metaphysical view of society, namely, that a society is supposed to be built upon the shared “nature” characteristics of a group of people, and people who do not share such “nature” characteristics would be an “impurity” to that society. Once you have people with shared nature, however, an elite of rulers is expected to discover that inner nature of all these people – just like an individual is supposed to discover his true nature – and then organize the society accordingly. It goes without saying that an individual who has some “nature” traits that are different, would be, er, a deviation, and may face some consequences: like, for example, special attention from the IRS or police or the NSA all the way to re-education camp. Either way, we should expect that a sociology based on the metaphysical view of man would be obsessed with some impersonal factor that gives the magical key to the advance of civilizations. So what is that impersonal factor? Where can we find it? And when I say “magical,” I am not using it metaphorically. Even the most “rational” pagan ideologies eventually resort to the magical, believe it or not. Nazi Germany sent several expeditions to Tibet – the alleged homeland of the Aryan peoples – to try to study the conditions that created the superior race; and thousands of young Nazis were send to learn from the lamas in Tibet. Communist regimes encouraged the proliferation of the so called “extrasense experts” and even put them on government pay with the purpose of getting an insight into the psychology of man. Against the backdrop of such institutionalized insanity, the Chinese obsession with the ancestors seems rather trivial. But it is still the same metaphysical religion. And it never produces results. Why? Because man is never defined metaphysically but always ethically. And therefore his civilization is not the product of man’s metaphysical nature but of his ethics. If you have been immersed in rationalistic philosophies and religions, there is one thing that bugs you every time you read the Bible: The Bible is never interested in defining man as he is. (As a matter of fact, there is really no definition of the world in general as it is.) We have a description of how man was created. We have no description whathe is made of, or whathe is, really. We have no mention of some metaphysical element that makes man different from the rest of the creation; in fact, if anything, the Bible says that man was made out of dust – that is, he is metaphysically no different from the nature around him. (The woman was different, however: unlike man and the animals, she was not made out of dust.) And yet, the Bible places an enormous emphasis on the uniqueness of man as a creature – to the point that the author of Hebrews makes the angels serving spirits to that creature made out of dust (Heb. 1:14). Man is elevated above all the creation, but we are not told what exactly is put in him that makes his so special: true, God breathed the breath of life in his nostrils and this is how the dust became man, but we are not told anything about what that breath of life may be. In the first chapter, we are told that God made man after His own image, but what is that image? What metaphysical characteristic of man defines God’s image? Is it his mind? Couldn’t be, otherwise people of lesser intellectual qualities would have less of the image of God, and we know that can’t be true. Is it his emotions? Well, then, people of more emotions would be more godly than those who are calmer, right? What is it that defines man as the image of God? We don’t have that answer. Or, rather, we have it, but it is not in the form of a metaphysical or ontological definition. It is something else. The image of God in man is defined as a task. That is, man is defined not statically, as a “nature,” but dynamically, as a task. Or, if you want a pun, here it is: man is defined not as a “being” but as a “doing”: it is not what he is that defines the image of God, but what he is created to do. Here’s the text in Genesis 1: Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them have dominion. . . . The next chapter continues by describing man entirely in terms of his task. In fact, the whole Bible continues by describing man entirely in terms of his task. We are told nothing of man as nature; the only time when God asks the question, “What is man?”, He asks it to ridicule those who think man is something without God and without the task God has given him. But man is entirely described in relation to his task of dominion. (As a side note, we have the same about God: We are told nothing about the inner nature of God. But we know God through His works.) And since the task given to man is ethical – it is only defined in terms of good vs. evil, obedience vs. disobedience, righteousness vs. wickedness – the Biblical definition of man is entirely ethical: man is a creature made to worship God and to obey God’s Dominion Mandate for him on earth. It is that simple. We will never know our “true nature.” We are never given that “true nature” in the Bible. But we will always have our task, which defines our true ethical nature before God. And what we are before God will be defined by how faithfully we go about obeying His covenant. What does that look like when translated into sociology? Pay attention now, here is the Biblical verse for you: See, I have taught you statutes and judgments just as the LORDmy God commanded me, that you should do thus in the land where you are entering to possess it. “So keep and do them,for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ “For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as is the LORDour God whenever we call on Him? “Or what great nation is there that has statutes and judgments as righteous as this whole law which I am setting before you today? (Deut. 4:5-8). A culture is only as great as is the socially dominant ethics of its people and its institutions. Not greater than that. How people view good and evil and do righteousness, and how they set up their institutions to do justice is the only thing that determines the future course of a civilization. All other civilizational factors depend on it: economics, business, art, literature, science, technology, financial power, education, psychology and mental health, the life of the local communities and social cohesion, etc., etc., etc. Since man is entirely defined by his ethical standing, his whole civilization is entirely defined by its ethical standing. But what is often missed by non-Christians – and sometimes by Christians alike – is that ethical commitment is not part of man’s inner nature. Or, to be precise, the right ethical commitment, the one that makes man righteous and just and his culture great, is not something he is born with nor does he inherit it in his genes. Man is born with an ethical commitment he has inherited covenantally from Adam, and it is the wrong ethical commitment. But to acquire the right ethical commitment, man must make the right ethical choice, and he must make it self-consciously, againsthis own nature. Digging deeper to discover his true nature won’t help man become great; it will only drive him to despair, if he is honest. So in order to make his culture great, man must forsake his inner nature and everything it involves: heritage, conditioning by his environment or his family, the subconscious, the lures of his economic status. That’s what the Bible means by “crucifying the flesh”: Not that the literary biological flesh should be mortified, but that the metaphysical nature of man must be denied any say in what a man believes and thinks and desires, and only his ethical will speaks and rules. And that ethical will needs to be radically changed – newborn – in order for man to achieve that. Admittedly, man can be passed down some training in righteousness from his parents, if they were righteous; but in the final account, the decision must be on individual level first, and must be re-committed to with every generation, for a civilization to prosper. The greatness of a civilization is a matter of self-conscious ethical choice of the millions of individuals who constitute that civilization. When Europe excelled as a culture, it was not because Europeans had anything superior in their nature or in their past to look up to. To the contrary, Celts and Germans and Greeks and Latins and Slavs have always been primitive Barbarians with a past that held nothing to be proud of. But the rise of the Western civilization came when a religion hit the West, a religion that was capable of changing minds and hearts like nothing before, and it was that religion that turned the Barbarians into civilized people’s. The pace of civilizing Europe for 2,000 years depended on how closely Europeans stuck to that religion. When they deviated from it, they became more Barbarian, when they recovered it and grew in it, they became more civilized. When in the 20thcentury they abandoned that religion and returned to the superstitions of their barbaric forefathers, they turned into the same barbarians they had been 2,000 years before. The greatness of the European civilization has never been about nature. It has always been about ethical choice. If the Chinese want to know where the greatness of their own civilization was in the past, it was in the same thing. Thousands of years ago, they were closer to the original source of that same religion: Noah. The Chinese culture may have inherited something from Noah that they were capable of keeping for more generations than anyone else. The Exodus of Israel from Egypt must have also had quite a ripple effect around the world; after all, the largest and most powerful empire of the ancient world fell under the wrath of God; so the giving of the law on the Mount Sinai must have been a news that reached all over the world. Also, given the accepted chronology of the Xia and the Shang dynasties, they must have existed around the times of Solomon; and we know that Solomon’s glory and fame was known throughout the world to all the kings, and all the kings were seeking the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom (2 Chr. 9:23). The Xia and the Shang Dynasties must have been affected by those events, and must have adopted, at least partially, the ethics and the justice of God’s Law, as God predicted. I have mentioned before that Eusebius, the church historian of the 4thcentury, claims that the whole world knew of the Law of Moses and that Law was the foundation for all civilized cultures. And we know from the Bible itself that the Magi who visited the newborn King came from the East (Matt. 2:1). How far east, we are not told. It could have been Persia, but we know from ancient Chinese sources that Persian Zoroastrianism had deep influence on the Chinese culture. So, the combined influence of the inherited memory from Noah and his sons, the world sensation of the destruction of Egypt and the thundering of the Law from the mountain, and the fame and glory of Solomon’s wisdom were the real root factors for the greatness of the Chinese culture and civilization. China grew in population and influence and power not because it had superior genetics or superior magic qualities. It grew because it managed to maintain the ethics and justice of the Law of God for a long time. The Shang Dynasty – the second official on the list of Chinese Dynasties and the first that is proven to have existed historically – did have an official religion that believed in one Supreme God Creator (Shang Di) – although that official religion was mixed with pagan practices like divination and sacrifices to idols. However, for all we know today of that dynasty, it was the real root of the modern Chinese culture. And it was also the longest ruling Chinese dynasty, covering a period of 554 years, longer than any other dynasty in the written history of mankind. In short, China was great because it followed a great God. It followed Him imperfectly, as much as a pagan nation can in the centuries before Christ, but it still allowed a lot of His influence to rule its society. And, just like the European civilization, the moment that influence was lost, China deteriorated to the same barbarism it despised in the surrounding cultures. And eventually, got conquered by them and humiliated by them, and viewed as the world’s barbarians by nations who just appeared on the map a couple of hundred years ago. God is not mocked. And He is still not mocked. So the Chinese have it wrong. Civilizations do not advance because of some magical quality of their people. Genetics, climate, ancestry, ancient-ness, origin mean nothing. The only thing that makes a people great is faith in the God of the Bible and obedience to His Covenant. Sun Weidong’s theory may be right or may be wrong. It doesn’t matter. China’s future of greatness is not in its history. It is where the greatness of Europe and the West was: In the history of another nation, the ancient Hebrews and the faith that came out of it, Christianity. And that’s where the Chinese need to be looking at for answers. The book I will assign for reading this week is The Formation of Christendom, by Judith Herrin. It is an amazing historical study; you will be surprised how much the early missionaries were aware that they were building a civilization, not just planting churches. And it is a book that should be read by all the Chinese who are concerned about their culture. That is what needs to be replicated in China. And, of course, you still need to read R.J. Rushdoony’s The Foundations of Social Order– but you knew that already. Keep Bulgarian Reformation Ministries in your prayers and giving. We are a missionary organization devoted to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Europe through translating and publishing books that apply the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every area of life. Yes, we are self-consciously building a civilization, not just planting churches, mark that. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate to a work that has proven effective over the last 20+ years. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post The Advance of Civilizations appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description When R.J. Rushdoony said that theocracy is the closest thing to radical libertarianism that can be had, he was not speaking figuratively, nor was he speaking politically. He was speaking literally, based on a thorough analysis of Biblical Law and the social order it prescribed. Assigned reading: R.J. Rushdoony, Law and Liberty M. Stanton Evans, The Theme Is Freedom Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 84 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will work to bury an ideological fiction. In a sense, intellectually, I will be burying a corpse, given that that fiction has been dead for a long time – no one who believes in that ideology has been capable of producing a single piece of theological, philosophical, or logical (that is, presuppositional) evidence in favor of it. Every single line of support for it has been simply an instinctive irrational reaction, never a consistent logical conclusion. Over the years, I have asked many questions about that ideology, pointing to its inconsistency and lack of intellectual life in it. I have never gotten answers to my questions. I have pointed to Biblical examples and doctrines that refute it. I have pointed to books and articles by theologians who refute it, and give the Biblical presuppositions that refute it. The thing is dead and has never been alive. But it has its worshipers. So I will try to bury it with this episode. The ideological fiction I want to bury is this: Libertarianism is antithetical to theocracy. Or, to put it differently, that no Biblically consistent Christian can be a libertarian. Or, that if you follow the Bible to the tee, you can’t end up with a libertarian social order. Or, that a libertarian social order can’t be Christian. Or, that if we do not have a state that intervenes in people’s lives to prevent sin, we will eventually have chaos and destruction. Or, that in order for a society to prosper in righteousness and justice, we need a civil government empowered to tax and control and regulate its subjects for the higher purposes of God. Now, there are two sides to this ideology. One side is the secular libertarians who are committed to libertarianism – or so they say – but want to keep God and the Bible out of it. Von Mises was such, Murray Rothbard was such, Ayn Rand had some not so friendly things to say about Christianity (although, she agreed with it that liberty and capitalism can be only based on a system of ethics, which von Mises and Rothbard denied). Such secular libertarians have the concept that in order for a society to be free, it needs to be atheist, or, at the very least, any faith in God must remain at a personal level, while the society must be conceptually atheist or at least agnostic concerning any deities. Those are not my opponents in this episode. I have pointed out many times before that secularism and libertarianism can’t work together, and secular libertarianism inevitably has to end up in some form of mild statism, or some other form of institutional control of some men over others. See, for example, Lew Rockwell’s, Hermann Hoppe’s, and other secular libertarians’ belief in government control over immigration, which is nothing more than just another form of socialism. I have talked about it in my article, “Lew Rockwell and the Mild Statism of Secular Libertarianism” on the ChristendomRestored.com website. We will see a little bit later why all secularism or paganism inevitably has to produce some form of statism or power religion. My target in this episode is the other side of that ideology, those Christians who claim to be “conservative” and “Bible-believing” and “Reformed” and what-not, who claim to take all of their ideas from Scripture, and yet, they continue denouncing libertarianism, and continue supporting one or another form of statism with the claim that it is “according to the Bible.” And they continue declaring that libertarianism is antithetical to the Bible and ridicule everyone who proposes libertarian solutions to the problems of today’s world. Those same Christians who take the text of Romans 13 and defend modern political theories and practices whose origin is not Romans 13 but rather Revelation 13; but because they have adopted a religious faith in the right of the state to control people’s lives, they never stop to figure out the difference. To such professing Christians I want to present the evidence that Biblical theocracy is not antithetical to libertarianism, but, contrary to their assertions, libertarianism is the only logical political system that can be consistently based on a Biblical worldview; and also, that a Christian consistent with his Bible can arrive to only one possible political and social system: libertarianism. What we call today libertarianism is simply the political theory of the Bible. It is rooted in the Bible, and there is no other possible root for it. Granted, some secularists have taken the fruit and have abandoned the root, but that doesn’t mean we as Christians should be blind to the true origin of libertarianism as a political philosophy. After all, the same applies to science: some secularists have claimed that science must be separate from the Bible, but we don’t say that science is antithetical to the Bible, right? In the same way, a presuppositional analysis of the Biblical worldview and its application to political science and social theory leads us to the conclusion that the only righteous society that the Bible describes and prescribes is a libertarian society, free of any government control, and only subject to some very limited instances of human institutional judgment (not control but judgment). The rest of this episode will be such presuppositional analysis based on several fundamental points of the Biblical worldview, namely, the Biblical views of the nature of God and reality, of the nature of man and his purpose in God’s Covenant, and the meaning and nature of God’s law. In all of them, as we develop the antithesis between the Biblical and the pagan/secular worldviews, we will see that libertarianism as a political philosophy stems directly from the Biblical teachings about society; and we will also see that, as Rushdoony has pointed many times, paganism and secularism are inescapably statist in their views, and there is no chance of ever constructing a consistent secular or pagan society without having at least some degree of statism, that is, institutional control of some men by other men. Before we start, however, let me first lay the foundation with definitions for the two main terms we are using here: theocracy and libertarianism. Theocracy is, quite simply, a society under the rule of God. In a sense, every society is under the rule of God, of course, even those who oppose God and are under His judgment in history.(Being under God’s judgment is still being under His rule, right?) But the term here denotes a society that is self-consciously and deliberately submitted to God in everything it does: from its foundational premises and publicly accepted religious and intellectual principles, through the personal conduct of its members and its economic structure, all the way to its systems of justice and public trust and stewardship. A theocratic society is a society where, when its people are asked, “who is the ruler of your society?” or “what is the foundational principle of your society?, respond, “Jesus Christ and His Gospel.” It is important to understand that a theocratic society is not a society where church ministers rule (as is the commonly accepted mythology about the term). That would be a priestocracy, not a theocracy. It is not where the state controls and regulates people based on officially religious principles; that would be religious socialism. (Read the book The Socialist Phenomenon by Igor Shafarevich.) Theocracy is pure and simple, “God rules,” as the term signifies, and it has to do only with God’s direct rule over His creation and over mankind, not with men ruling over other men. Libertarianism, on the other hand, is a political philosophy that establishes the freedom of the individual to act as the highest value and the highest priority of all political and social endeavor. When we say “the individual,” we mean the individual vs. any sort of collective or any sort of power, whether family, church, or state. That means that in any single case where a decision must be made between the individual acting out of his own free will, and a collective or another sort of power forcing its will upon the individual under some threat of punishment or compulsion, libertarianism takes the side of the individual and denies the collective any moral authority to act or to force the individual to comply. Thus, libertarianism is about the liberty of the individual to act. Remember, libertarianism is just a political philosophy and its exclusive area of interest is the balance of power in the society between individuals and collectives. It is not a moral philosophy; it doesn’t declare declare what acts are moral and permissible by the individual. It still acknowledges that there are immoral acts committed by individuals that should be stopped, and some even recompensed and punished; but within the limits of acceptable personal behavior, libertarianism denies any collective or any government the moral ground to control or regulate the life of the individual. Whether it is what the individual will put in his body, where he will live, what arbitrary geographical border he will cross, who he will be hired by and who he will hire, what kind of business he will engage in, what prices he will attach to the product of his labor or to his property, what he will do with the money he earns and at what price, etc., all these should remain entirely within the sphere of self-government, and no other human government should be allowed to make any decisions for the individual himself. If there are any governments, their business should be to protect the individual against immoral acts by other individuals, not become immoral themselves. So, with these definitions, how do we proceed? How do we prove that libertarianism as a political philosophy follows from the Biblical view of theocracy as the rule of God in the society? We start where every good presuppositionalist must start: with the nature of God and the nature of reality. I know that most of our listeners are Christians, and specifically Reformed Christians. So, stop for a minute and try to imagine the world of a pagan. Or of an atheist – for they are the same world. That pagan/atheist world had its origin in chaos. No, I didn’t make this up. Chaos is actually the name the ancient Greek mythology gives to the existence before there were any men or gods or other beings. That’s what it was called: Chaos, a void, emptiness, abyss, darkness disorder. Or, if you are an atheist, it started from the Big Bang: quintillions upon quintillions joules of disorganized, chaotic pure energy flying in all directions without any recognizable order. Out of that chaos, the first gods somehow appeared; or, out of the Big Bang, the laws of nature somehow appeared. So these gods, or laws of nature, started bringing order to the chaos, using their power to overcome the natural state of chaos and entropy. Eventually, the world was gradually brought to some form of order, but the battle continues even today. The natural, original state of the universe is chaos. And the struggle is to maintain order in the midst nature natural inclination to chaos. In such a universe, the ruling paradigm, therefore, is order vs. chaos. And order is achieved only through superior power; so power is by default good. And not only it is by default good, it must be constantly exercised and applied, or the world will go back to chaos. Things must be kept under constant control, because they can’t be trusted to run their natural course. The same with society: society must be kept under control, because it can’t be trusted to run its natural course. So, in reality, the ruling paradigm is power vs. chaos. You let your guard down for a little bit, you get chaos. I am sure you have heard the argument: if we have no government control, there will be chaos. And I am sure you have heard both non-Christians and Christians use that same argument. Well, that’s where that argument comes from; this is its presuppositional foundation, an impersonal universe that started as a chaotic void, to which order was brought only through the efforts of powerful beings, or powerful collectives. If we don’t exercise power every day to control everything that happens and everything people do, we will have the world and society reverting back to their original state, namely, chaos. (For those of you who are fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you probably remember Alexander Pierce’s line in Winter Soldier: “Society’s at a tipping point between order and chaos.” That’s not just a movie quote. That has been the propaganda pitch of every dictator in history.) Now, let’s hear the antithesis. The world the Bible presents is a complete opposite to the world of the pagan and the atheist. The Biblical world started orderly, and order is its natural condition. There is no need for man to exercise power to maintain God’s world in order; God does it Himself, and nobody and nothing – whether some god or a collective of men – can create anymore order in the world around us than what God has already created and is sustaining through His providence. But order is not even the issue in the Biblical worldview; nor is the paradigm “order vs. chaos” of any interest to Biblical authors. Nowhere does God say, we need some order here, otherwise we are going to descend into chaos. The issue is ethics and justice. The created world was assessed by God as good, not as “orderly.” Goodness is the natural original condition of the world; the world fell from this original condition because of sin, not because of disorder. Thus, its current state is unnatural, but the unnatural part in it is sin. The world is still just as orderly as it has always been, because order does not depend on man’s efforts, and it is superior to man’s efforts. Man can’t do anything to bring more order in the universe, whether as an individual or as a collective. We have enough order and we have always had it. It is just that that order works against man because God’s order works against sin. And therefore man needs not more power but a return to righteousness. Thus, the reigning paradigm – in fact, the only paradigm – of the Biblical worldview is ethical/judicial: good vs. evil, righteousness vs. wickedness, justice vs. injustice. In such universe, there is no concern with order because order in itself has no necessary moral meaning. Order can be good, and it can be evil. Exercise of power can be good, and it can be evil. Control can be good, and control can be evil. Power has no inherent value. If some exercise of power is evil, the pagan – and the apostate Christian with him – would reply, “It is better to maintain some power, even if it is evil, than have chaos.” A Biblical Christian would reply, “If that is the dilemma, then chaos is better than a lawless order.” But, of course, chaos is not even a possibility and it has never been. Order has always been the only possibility. It is just that we need a restoration of the Law of God, so that God’s order doesn’t work against man anymore, but for man. Does it become clear how libertarianism follows from the Biblical worldview? Since ethics is the foundational paradigm in that worldview, and ethics is inescapably personal and individual, then a society can only be maintained when it is personal and individualistic. Power control of some people over others, and the elevating of power to the position to dictate ethics, will solve no ethical problems – it will only make them worse, and thus, will go against the original natural state of the world: “very good.” On the other hand, if you are a pagan or an atheist, you can only rely on power to maintain your world. Therefore, those men who have power, are supposed to exercise it over those men who don’t. Otherwise, you know, “chaos.” But what about the nature of man himself? Yeah, in the abstract, we may argue about the nature of God and the nature of reality, but part of that nature is the nature of man. Does the nature of man as presented by the Bible support a libertarian ideology, or does it support a statist ideology of control of men over other men? What is man in the atheist/pagan worldview? No one knows. There is really no meaningful definition of man that would make him different than, let’s say, a pile of rocks or an ash heap. I mean, atheists and pagans can come up with tons of definitions and they can pretend these definitions do give some meaning to the word man that has any value, but in the final account, there is really no definition. Or, at least, there is really no definition that would give man meaning and purpose in his life. I have talked about it in a sermon, long time ago, titled, “What Is Man?” A pagan or an atheist can come up with all kinds of meanings and purposes, but none of them are objective, they do not define man, and they are all just figments of their imagination. In the final account, man is nothing, really. But if man is nothing, then he is nothing in the cosmic struggle of order against chaos. Can we trust man that he would do his part on making the world more orderly? No. We can’t even define his part, let alone expect him to do it. Therefore, someone more powerful than him must set meaning and purpose for man. Someone, that is, a government of a sort. The option of letting man make up his own meaning and purpose is not viable; that would be chaos. Unless that man is powerful enough to be able to fight chaos himself; but then, that man should be expected to force others to comply with his fight against chaos, and use them as his pawns. So man has two options before him: either be powerful enough to be god, or become a pawn in the games of powerful gods. Otherwise, what good is a weak lone man in the struggle against chaos? But in the Biblical worldview, man has a purpose that is objective and comes from a source far above man or even far above the universe itself. Man is not left at the mercy of his own imagination, and man is not left at the mercy of other men to decide for him what his purpose is supposed to be. When God created man, He created him an individual, not a collective, and he gave him individual purpose. The dominion covenant was given to mankind as a whole, but that was covenantally, as an ethical imperative, not collectively, as a power structure. Adam and Eve were meant to be a team, of course, but even in that team, both of them had independent and direct access to God, no one acted as an “umbrella” or as a “representative” of the other before God. Each one got their “orders” directly from God, and no one needed a human intermediary agency to tell them what their purpose under God was. Under the Biblical view of man, therefore, man’s purpose in the world is an issue entirely between him and God, directly, personally, and without any intermediate agency. For other men or men’s institutions to want a piece in that relationship means only one thing: that they want to replace God. Institutional control over men’s actions (and again, we are talking control here, not judgment, which is a different issue) is therefore idolatry in action and practical policy, as far as the Bible is concerned. The only way a person can be consistently Christian and Biblically-obedient is to denounce any control of men by other men. Any ideology that insists on human institutions controlling the actions of individual men is an ideology that goes straight against the Dominion Covenant and against the Biblical view of man. A Christian who is consistently Biblical in his worldview and in his understanding of the Dominion Covenant and the nature of man, must be inescapably libertarian, that is, against any institutional control of man by other men. The two points we talked about so far – the nature of God and the nature of man – are rather philosophical, even if they have inescapable ethical ramifications. But is there direct ethical evidence in the Bible that God wants that individuals are free of institutional control? What about the nature of law? How does the antithesis on this point – the nature of law – play out in our understanding of the Biblical political theory? What is “law” in the pagan/atheistic worldview? Well, to start with, there are the laws of nature – nature, as the most ubiquitous and most powerful deity, has the most powerful laws, and through them, it keeps everyone in subjection. You can’t escape those laws, no matter what you do. Both gods and men, and powerful men, must submit to those laws; there is no escape from them. Without those laws, as you already know, there will be chaos; so Mother Nature forces everyone to obey them, no matter what they do, whether they want it or not. There is no ethical aspect to those laws; you don’t to choose to obey them or not. You just obey them, period. And since those laws of nature are so powerful and keep chaos at bay, they must be translated somehow into laws of society, so that society is protected against chaos. Hence, we have the notion of “natural law” used by the majority of philosophers and theologians. Or, for those who don’t like the notion of “natural law,” the use of “scientific” is an upgrade: we just base our societal laws on “science.” Like, Marxism had its social theory for the perfect society called “Scientific Socialism” or “Scientific Communism.” It’s not magic, you know; it is science. We study nature scientifically, and we come to the scientifically most perfect society, y’know. Anyway, the point is, for the rulers of society to prevent chaos, they need to mimic Mother Nature; their laws must mimic her laws, and they can’t allow for any free exercise of individual will. That would be chaos. Of course, one problem with “natural law” for human society (or with the “scientific law” too, for that matter) is that no one has that holy book of “natural law” that specifically spells that law. We have conjectures by armchair philosophers about what it may say vaguely and generally, but when it comes to specific applications to specific cases of justice and government, no one knows what exactly that “natural law” is saying. So, in the final account, the specifics are left to men to make up. Or, to be more precise, to powerful men to make up. The more powerful a person is – especially politically powerful – the more he gets to decide the specific applications of “natural law.” And rightly so; after all, it is nature that made them powerful. For what other reason but to entrust to them the interpretation of the vague “natural law” to specific social applications, right? Thus, from the perspective of the pagan and the atheist view of law, there is no room for individuals to live freely; they must submit to those who, by the nature of their power, are entitled to interpret “natural law” for everyone else. Individual liberty would mean individual interpretations, and that would, of course, lead to chaos. Is this the case with the Biblical Law? Not at all. The Biblical Law has three characteristics that make it antithetical to pagan or atheist law. First, Biblical Law is detailed in its applications. It is not a general, vague idea which human legislators need to translate to specific cases. True, it has the general principles in a sort of hierarchical structure: the two greatest commandments at the top (Matt. 22:37-40), then the Ten Commandments, but then, God gave in His Word an abundance of case applications plus specific historical rulings (precedents) to make it clear for anyone who reads what the Law commands in every case. And, more than that, the Law not only spells good vs. evil in specific situations, it also spells the specific earthly sanctions that need to be applied and if there should be earthly sanctions; and it also gives the institutional structure to apply those earthly sanctions, where they are needed. There is no guessing and no conjectures when it comes to the Law of God applied, and the details are not left to powerful men to impose on others. Second, Biblical Law is explicitly individualistic and personal. From the two greatest commandments, through the Ten Commandments, to the concrete commandments and stipulations in the case laws, every commandment is given in second person singular: thou instead of the plural you. Even while speaking the Ten Commandments from the mountain to the gathered multitude of the Israelites (Ex. 20), God still spoke in second person singular, to every one individually, not to the nation as a collective. The Law doesn’t even make sense applied collectively in vast parts of its narrative when applied to collectives, and neither does it make sense in terms of institutional enforcement. How do you enforce “love” through institutional action? How do you enforce the commandments that speak to the heart through institutional action? More than that, the Law has specific limits on government institutions as to how much power they can accumulate. The priestly class was not allowed to have any inheritance in Israel (Deut. 10:9; 18:1, Joshua 18:7, and many other passages), thus, not allowed to have independent economic power but depend on the prosperity of everyone else in the nation. A centralized political power – should one ever arise in Israel – was not allowed to accumulate military might (Deut. 17:14-17). And when the people of Israel wanted to establish such centralized political power, God specifically condemned it as the result of their apostasy from Him, and warned them that their king would become their tyrant. And, third, all this Law was public. Not only the Ten Commandments were thundered from the mountain to the whole nation, but Moses read the Law to all Israelites, and, in addition, the Law was supposed to be publicly read in its entirety to the whole nation once every seven years. Even the surrounding Gentile nations were expected to know the Law of God (Deut. 4:5-8). I know, this doesn’t sound much to us today who live in the shadow of Christendom. But in the day of Moses, knowledge of the laws was a privilege of the ruling classes, and they jealously kept that knowledge secret from the common citizens. Most of the pagan nations in the antiquity were ruled by decree, not by any fixed law anyway. Those that had a fixed law, prohibited teaching the law to the lower classes. In Sparta, teaching the slaves to read and to know the law was a capital crime. In Rome, every time the plebeians revolted and demanded rights and equality, the patrician class responded that they couldn’t have equality because they were not entrusted with knowing the laws. In Israel, however, knowing the Law was not only a privilege for even the lowest person, it was mandatory for all. And there were no special rules or laws that were peculiar to the ruling class. Thus, interpretation and application of the Law was not an exclusive prerogative of a ruling class. It was given to individuals first. The government – any government, church or state – had a very limited say, and a very limited function. (And we will shortly see what it is.) Thus, for all practical purposes, from the perspective of the nature of law as exhibited in the Bible, the Bible sees man’s society as comprised mainly of free individuals to whom the ethics of the law is addressed. There is no government that is supposed to be an ethical mediator between men and God, interpreting or re-interpreting the Law of God, or establishing the lines of good and evil through man-made decrees. No matter what governments and powerful men declare as “law,” God’s Law speaks to individuals, and only God’s Law is the boundary between good and evil. Man’s laws do not qualify as laws. Here a question would arise: What is then the function of government at all? If I am saying that individuals are not to be controlled and regulated and ruled by governments, what is the purpose of the civil government in the Bible? We still have something that look like government, and the New Testament surely tells us to obey the government. How does this comport with what I said about the individualist nature of the Law of God and of the nature of reality and man in general? Here we come to the next point in the presuppositional analysis of theocracy and libertarianism, namely, the nature of judgment. Given what we said earlier about the nature of reality and the nature of man in the pagan and atheist worldview, it shouldn’t be hard to figure what the purpose and function of civil government – or of any government whatsoever – should be: a government is supposed to act as concentrated power of multitude of men in order to prevent chaos. The enemies of social order, then, will be those who oppose the government. But more than that, the enemies of social order would be those who fail to do what the government tells them to do; for any disobedience to government control and regulations would be by default collaboration with chaos. If a person practices a trade, or opens a lemonade stand, or feeds the poor, or crosses a border to find better life for his family, or hires someone who has crossed a border, or consumes a certain substance, all without a government permit, that in itself is already a crime, being outside government control. The only legitimate victim of all crimes, therefore, is the state; crimes against individuals are only of concern if they threaten the order and the survival of the state. Where crimes against individuals are of no concern to the state and its power – like, for example, abortion or slavery – they are decriminalized. In the final account, the most important court trials are some individual being sued by state entity: whether the United States, or some state, or a county, etc. And do not assume that the “separate branches” of government power help individuals against the executive state: to the contrary, courts rule more and more in favor of the state against the individuals. Obviously, given that the courts depend on the executive state for their money. When we go to the Bible’s system of justice, however, we discover a very different picture. First of all, the Bible speaks of two fundamental levels of justice. One is God’s justice. The other is man’s justice under the Law of God. You all probably never thought of it as a gigantic antithesis to the secularist/pagan system of judgment and justice. But it is. It is enormous. Let me explain why, and why it is relevant to our topic here. The court of God – which is in constant proceedings during history, but will also sit in judgment once for a final verdict at the end of history – is presided by the perfect, all-knowing, and all-powerful Creator, who is also the Author of the perfect Law. In that court, every single action and word, and even the thoughts of our hearts, will be exposed and judged. But we know that that judgment will be righteous and just, because it will be rendered by a righteous and just Judge in Whom there is no partiality. As our Creator, and as the Author of the most perfect Law (and that Law is not just His creation, it is His very moral character), He is entitled to perfect obedience from us, and, as such, He is entitled to judge every single word, deed, and thought, that are disobedient. In God’s Court, there is no difference between private sin and public crime; all sins are crimes there, and nothing escapes. The court of man, on the other hand, is only limited to history, and is only limited to a few cases. In none of these cases is the state or the church a victim of the crime; the victim is always an individual. The Biblical courts were not meant to judge “crimes against the state” or against the church or against any other government entity. They were only meant to judge crimes against individuals. Thus, in none of the Biblical cases is there anything like payment to the state or slavery to the state as a punishment. The principle is always restitution, and that restitution is always to an individual, never to the state or to the church. Although, given that individuals can voluntarily agree to covenant into social or economic entities that act as individuals – like corporations – Biblical Law will by default take corporations to court or will allow corporations to sue for damages. But we need to understand here that a corporation is not a civil or ecclesiastical government; it has no authority to enforce its decisions on outsiders by the power of the sword or by excommunication. So in case of deliberate theft by a corporation, for example, the Biblical courts would rule double restitution from the corporate treasury; but how that loss will be split individually between the owners of the corporation will be decided between those owners. God’s Court, thus, judges all sin. Man’s courts are only allowed to judge crimes, and that on a very strict evidence basis. And that only crimes against individuals, or voluntary associations of individuals. But that’s not all. There is also a judicial relationship between God’s court and man’s courts. God judges nations, and guess what he judges them for: for how their courts and rulers have treated individuals, and especially the weak and the needy. He judges nations in history for the laws they pass and how these laws conform to His Law; no nation can escape that judgment, and no nation can find excuse in some “legal” process. For example, the fact that the United States have adopted their immigration laws, or their legalization of abortion, or their police laws, through a legal process won’t save the nation from judgment. And neither will it save those individuals who agree with such laws, or enforce such laws, or remain silent and passive in the face of such laws. “I was just following orders” is not a valid excuse in God’s court for any individual; and neither is “That was the law of the land.” Individuals who have agreed with or even enforced such unjust laws will be condemned for failing to oppose them, or to sabotage them, or to use their power and authority to change them or make them null and void. It is this two-tiered system of God’s judgment that makes Biblical Christianity unique in its view of justice. You have probably heard the argument, “A religion that believes in an all-powerful judging God is a totalitarian religion.” That’s stupid babbling. Only such a religion can be the true foundation for individual liberty, because only such a religion provides for true justice upon powerful men who have used their power to wrong those weaker than them. And only such a religion provides for effective deterrent on government tyranny, and only such a religion provides justification for righteous rebellion against tyrannical governments. We have one more point left: the control of the future. Now, if you have listened to Axe to the Root episodes so far, you don’t need to be told why control of the future is an important factor in the society. In fact, you already know that a civilization is not so much defined by its history – which most people believe, in their ignorance – but by its beliefs and expectations about the future. As Gary DeMar quipped once, “The present doesn’t determine the future; rather, the future determines the present.” If you want to understand our civilization today, try to understand its view of the future, and try to understand who controls the future. The battle for the future defines all social struggles in the world, and those who emerge victorious, capable of capturing the future, have captured the civilization today. Who controls the future under a pagan/secularist worldview? No one, really. In fact, the question is irrelevant. Remember, a pagan or a secularist can’t even define the future. The future is not something that can be experienced now, and since all the whole knowledge of paganism and atheism is based on experience (as opposed to faith, as in Christianity), a pagan or an atheist has no way to define the future which can’t be experienced. He may borrow the idea of “future” from Christianity, or he may have some vague conjecture of what it may be, but based on a consistently pagan or atheist worldview, any attempt at defining the future is useless. Thus, whatever there is, is the present. There is no future. And since future is what gives purpose, and since purpose is what drives individuals, there is really no legitimate purpose to which an individual can look. All that remains is what it is, now. And whoever is in power, now. (As a side note, if you want to understand the mind-boggling commitment of secularists to abortion and all other means of cutting their own offspring, it is right there, in their lack of any concept for the future.) What does the Bible say? The Bible is an eschatological book from the very beginning; it points to the future, and it explicitly directs the reader’s attention to the future. Even the first institution – the family – was created with an explicit eschatological function and task: “be fruitful and multiply.” R.J. Rushdoony mentioned pointed to this in a few places: the family is first and foremost an eschatological unit. Man and woman are so defined as to be distinct from each other not by any other characteristic but their functions in procreation. (Not by psychology or intellect or emotions or social status or power status, as many modern pagans inside and outside the Church like to claim.) Eve was declared to be the “mother of all living” before there was any mother or any motherhood at all (Gen. 3:20), and the concept of father and mother and the separation of their children into adulthood was described before there were any children or fathers or mothers (Gen. 2:24). Thus, from the very beginning, the Christian worldview is not only interested in children and the future, it bases its whole ideology on it. It is not that children and purpose and the future are simply “important” to Christianity. They are the very essence of it. Take away children and the future, and you take away Christianity. But there is an important point here: In the Bible, children are given to individuals. True, these individuals are in a family unit, but they are still individuals in their function in procreation and raising the children. There are no government collectives in the Bible giving birth to children and raising children. Children are exclusively the prerogative of two distinct individuals in a family. In addition, inheritance, namely, the transfer of accumulated wealth for the future, is inescapably individualistic. No government is charged with such transfer of wealth, and no government is allowed to tax it. (For those who try to use Rom. 13 to argue for the legitimacy of taxation, quit twisting one single verse. The full message of the Bible forbids such interpretation.) Individuals are not only uniquely charged by God to transfer wealth to future generations, their individual will is called by the same name God calls His covenant. In Heb. 9:16, the word used for the legal document we call “will” or “testament” is the same word used in the rest of the Greek text for “covenant”: diatheke. There is no other legal concept that is called with the same name. There is no social contract or social covenant in the Bible, there is no local church covenant in the Bible, there is nothing institutional on earth that God calls by the same name as his Covenant . . . except for the last will and testament of an individual by which he transfers wealth to his heirs in the future. The future, in short, which plays such an important part in the Biblical worldview, is entirely entrusted to individuals. God doesn’t trust either church or state to take care of the future. To summarize, everything in the Biblical worldview points ot the fact that the social and political organization mandated by the Bible is essentially libertarian, and it doesn’t allow for any institutional control over individuals by any institutional entity or government, be it state or church. When R.J. Rushdoony said that theocracy is the closest thing to radical libertarianism that can be had, he was not speaking figuratively, nor was he speaking politically. He was speaking literally, based on a thorough analysis of Biblical Law and the social order it prescribed. A thorough antithesis applied to all areas of analysis clearly shows that any anti-libertarian ideas must come from pagan or atheist presuppositions. While a consistent Christian can’t be anything else but libertarian. The nature of God and reality, the nature of man, the nature of God’s Law, the nature of judgment, and the control of the future, in all these areas it is obvious that in order for a person to be consistently Christian, he must be as closely radical libertarian as possible. Anything less than that would mean surrender to pagan presuppositions, and eventually abandoning the Christian faith in its social and political applications. In the final account, since state control of individuals is inevitably based on anti-Christians presuppositions, a society that has allowed such state control, even for the best of reasons, will see itself drifting away from the Biblical faith. And the United States today is the prime example. This week I will assign two books for reading. The first, of course, is R.J. Rushdoony’s Law and Liberty. If you haven’t read it yet, I will ask with the sternest voice I can: Why? What are you waiting for? The second book is titled The Theme is Freedom, and it was written by M. Stanton Evans, a conservative political commentator and journalist of the old school conservatism who knew that the heart of conservatism is libertarianism, and the foundation for libertarianism is Christianity. (Unlike modern “conservatives” who are indistinguishable from socialists.) I had the opportunity to meet him in person back in 2001 in Washington DC and to ask him for permission to translate this book in Bulgarian. I haven’t gotten to translate it, yet, but I you surely need to read it, for the book has some very valuable insights about the connection between Christianity and the American view of freedom. In your prayer and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe through translating and publishing books that bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every area of life. Including liberty and including the conflict between the individual and the state. Remember, just about 30 years ago, Eastern Europe was able to escape the political grip of one of the most murderous expressions of modern paganism: Communism. And paganism, let me tell you, is not libertarian. All paganism is statist and collectivist to the core. Fighting statism and collectivism is part of our preaching the Gospel, and I am calling you to help me in that task. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our monthly newsletter, and donate. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post Theocracy and Libertarianism appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description When R.J. Rushdoony said that theocracy is the closest thing to radical libertarianism that can be had, he was not speaking figuratively, nor was he speaking politically. He was speaking literally, based on a thorough analysis of Biblical Law and the social order it prescribed. Assigned reading: R.J. Rushdoony, Law and Liberty M. Stanton Evans, The Theme Is Freedom Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 84 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will work to bury an ideological fiction. In a sense, intellectually, I will be burying a corpse, given that that fiction has been dead for a long time – no one who believes in that ideology has been capable of producing a single piece of theological, philosophical, or logical (that is, presuppositional) evidence in favor of it. Every single line of support for it has been simply an instinctive irrational reaction, never a consistent logical conclusion. Over the years, I have asked many questions about that ideology, pointing to its inconsistency and lack of intellectual life in it. I have never gotten answers to my questions. I have pointed to Biblical examples and doctrines that refute it. I have pointed to books and articles by theologians who refute it, and give the Biblical presuppositions that refute it. The thing is dead and has never been alive. But it has its worshipers. So I will try to bury it with this episode. The ideological fiction I want to bury is this: Libertarianism is antithetical to theocracy. Or, to put it differently, that no Biblically consistent Christian can be a libertarian. Or, that if you follow the Bible to the tee, you can’t end up with a libertarian social order. Or, that a libertarian social order can’t be Christian. Or, that if we do not have a state that intervenes in people’s lives to prevent sin, we will eventually have chaos and destruction. Or, that in order for a society to prosper in righteousness and justice, we need a civil government empowered to tax and control and regulate its subjects for the higher purposes of God. Now, there are two sides to this ideology. One side is the secular libertarians who are committed to libertarianism – or so they say – but want to keep God and the Bible out of it. Von Mises was such, Murray Rothbard was such, Ayn Rand had some not so friendly things to say about Christianity (although, she agreed with it that liberty and capitalism can be only based on a system of ethics, which von Mises and Rothbard denied). Such secular libertarians have the concept that in order for a society to be free, it needs to be atheist, or, at the very least, any faith in God must remain at a personal level, while the society must be conceptually atheist or at least agnostic concerning any deities. Those are not my opponents in this episode. I have pointed out many times before that secularism and libertarianism can’t work together, and secular libertarianism inevitably has to end up in some form of mild statism, or some other form of institutional control of some men over others. See, for example, Lew Rockwell’s, Hermann Hoppe’s, and other secular libertarians’ belief in government control over immigration, which is nothing more than just another form of socialism. I have talked about it in my article, “Lew Rockwell and the Mild Statism of Secular Libertarianism” on the ChristendomRestored.com website. We will see a little bit later why all secularism or paganism inevitably has to produce some form of statism or power religion. My target in this episode is the other side of that ideology, those Christians who claim to be “conservative” and “Bible-believing” and “Reformed” and what-not, who claim to take all of their ideas from Scripture, and yet, they continue denouncing libertarianism, and continue supporting one or another form of statism with the claim that it is “according to the Bible.” And they continue declaring that libertarianism is antithetical to the Bible and ridicule everyone who proposes libertarian solutions to the problems of today’s world. Those same Christians who take the text of Romans 13 and defend modern political theories and practices whose origin is not Romans 13 but rather Revelation 13; but because they have adopted a religious faith in the right of the state to control people’s lives, they never stop to figure out the difference. To such professing Christians I want to present the evidence that Biblical theocracy is not antithetical to libertarianism, but, contrary to their assertions, libertarianism is the only logical political system that can be consistently based on a Biblical worldview; and also, that a Christian consistent with his Bible can arrive to only one possible political and social system: libertarianism. What we call today libertarianism is simply the political theory of the Bible. It is rooted in the Bible, and there is no other possible root for it. Granted, some secularists have taken the fruit and have abandoned the root, but that doesn’t mean we as Christians should be blind to the true origin of libertarianism as a political philosophy. After all, the same applies to science: some secularists have claimed that science must be separate from the Bible, but we don’t say that science is antithetical to the Bible, right? In the same way, a presuppositional analysis of the Biblical worldview and its application to political science and social theory leads us to the conclusion that the only righteous society that the Bible describes and prescribes is a libertarian society, free of any government control, and only subject to some very limited instances of human institutional judgment (not control but judgment). The rest of this episode will be such presuppositional analysis based on several fundamental points of the Biblical worldview, namely, the Biblical views of the nature of God and reality, of the nature of man and his purpose in God’s Covenant, and the meaning and nature of God’s law. In all of them, as we develop the antithesis between the Biblical and the pagan/secular worldviews, we will see that libertarianism as a political philosophy stems directly from the Biblical teachings about society; and we will also see that, as Rushdoony has pointed many times, paganism and secularism are inescapably statist in their views, and there is no chance of ever constructing a consistent secular or pagan society without having at least some degree of statism, that is, institutional control of some men by other men. Before we start, however, let me first lay the foundation with definitions for the two main terms we are using here: theocracy and libertarianism. Theocracy is, quite simply, a society under the rule of God. In a sense, every society is under the rule of God, of course, even those who oppose God and are under His judgment in history.(Being under God’s judgment is still being under His rule, right?) But the term here denotes a society that is self-consciously and deliberately submitted to God in everything it does: from its foundational premises and publicly accepted religious and intellectual principles, through the personal conduct of its members and its economic structure, all the way to its systems of justice and public trust and stewardship. A theocratic society is a society where, when its people are asked, “who is the ruler of your society?” or “what is the foundational principle of your society?, respond, “Jesus Christ and His Gospel.” It is important to understand that a theocratic society is not a society where church ministers rule (as is the commonly accepted mythology about the term). That would be a priestocracy, not a theocracy. It is not where the state controls and regulates people based on officially religious principles; that would be religious socialism. (Read the book The Socialist Phenomenon by Igor Shafarevich.) Theocracy is pure and simple, “God rules,” as the term signifies, and it has to do only with God’s direct rule over His creation and over mankind, not with men ruling over other men. Libertarianism, on the other hand, is a political philosophy that establishes the freedom of the individual to act as the highest value and the highest priority of all political and social endeavor. When we say “the individual,” we mean the individual vs. any sort of collective or any sort of power, whether family, church, or state. That means that in any single case where a decision must be made between the individual acting out of his own free will, and a collective or another sort of power forcing its will upon the individual under some threat of punishment or compulsion, libertarianism takes the side of the individual and denies the collective any moral authority to act or to force the individual to comply. Thus, libertarianism is about the liberty of the individual to act. Remember, libertarianism is just a political philosophy and its exclusive area of interest is the balance of power in the society between individuals and collectives. It is not a moral philosophy; it doesn’t declare declare what acts are moral and permissible by the individual. It still acknowledges that there are immoral acts committed by individuals that should be stopped, and some even recompensed and punished; but within the limits of acceptable personal behavior, libertarianism denies any collective or any government the moral ground to control or regulate the life of the individual. Whether it is what the individual will put in his body, where he will live, what arbitrary geographical border he will cross, who he will be hired by and who he will hire, what kind of business he will engage in, what prices he will attach to the product of his labor or to his property, what he will do with the money he earns and at what price, etc., all these should remain entirely within the sphere of self-government, and no other human government should be allowed to make any decisions for the individual himself. If there are any governments, their business should be to protect the individual against immoral acts by other individuals, not become immoral themselves. So, with these definitions, how do we proceed? How do we prove that libertarianism as a political philosophy follows from the Biblical view of theocracy as the rule of God in the society? We start where every good presuppositionalist must start: with the nature of God and the nature of reality. I know that most of our listeners are Christians, and specifically Reformed Christians. So, stop for a minute and try to imagine the world of a pagan. Or of an atheist – for they are the same world. That pagan/atheist world had its origin in chaos. No, I didn’t make this up. Chaos is actually the name the ancient Greek mythology gives to the existence before there were any men or gods or other beings. That’s what it was called: Chaos, a void, emptiness, abyss, darkness disorder. Or, if you are an atheist, it started from the Big Bang: quintillions upon quintillions joules of disorganized, chaotic pure energy flying in all directions without any recognizable order. Out of that chaos, the first gods somehow appeared; or, out of the Big Bang, the laws of nature somehow appeared. So these gods, or laws of nature, started bringing order to the chaos, using their power to overcome the natural state of chaos and entropy. Eventually, the world was gradually brought to some form of order, but the battle continues even today. The natural, original state of the universe is chaos. And the struggle is to maintain order in the midst nature natural inclination to chaos. In such a universe, the ruling paradigm, therefore, is order vs. chaos. And order is achieved only through superior power; so power is by default good. And not only it is by default good, it must be constantly exercised and applied, or the world will go back to chaos. Things must be kept under constant control, because they can’t be trusted to run their natural course. The same with society: society must be kept under control, because it can’t be trusted to run its natural course. So, in reality, the ruling paradigm is power vs. chaos. You let your guard down for a little bit, you get chaos. I am sure you have heard the argument: if we have no government control, there will be chaos. And I am sure you have heard both non-Christians and Christians use that same argument. Well, that’s where that argument comes from; this is its presuppositional foundation, an impersonal universe that started as a chaotic void, to which order was brought only through the efforts of powerful beings, or powerful collectives. If we don’t exercise power every day to control everything that happens and everything people do, we will have the world and society reverting back to their original state, namely, chaos. (For those of you who are fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you probably remember Alexander Pierce’s line in Winter Soldier: “Society’s at a tipping point between order and chaos.” That’s not just a movie quote. That has been the propaganda pitch of every dictator in history.) Now, let’s hear the antithesis. The world the Bible presents is a complete opposite to the world of the pagan and the atheist. The Biblical world started orderly, and order is its natural condition. There is no need for man to exercise power to maintain God’s world in order; God does it Himself, and nobody and nothing – whether some god or a collective of men – can create anymore order in the world around us than what God has already created and is sustaining through His providence. But order is not even the issue in the Biblical worldview; nor is the paradigm “order vs. chaos” of any interest to Biblical authors. Nowhere does God say, we need some order here, otherwise we are going to descend into chaos. The issue is ethics and justice. The created world was assessed by God as good, not as “orderly.” Goodness is the natural original condition of the world; the world fell from this original condition because of sin, not because of disorder. Thus, its current state is unnatural, but the unnatural part in it is sin. The world is still just as orderly as it has always been, because order does not depend on man’s efforts, and it is superior to man’s efforts. Man can’t do anything to bring more order in the universe, whether as an individual or as a collective. We have enough order and we have always had it. It is just that that order works against man because God’s order works against sin. And therefore man needs not more power but a return to righteousness. Thus, the reigning paradigm – in fact, the only paradigm – of the Biblical worldview is ethical/judicial: good vs. evil, righteousness vs. wickedness, justice vs. injustice. In such universe, there is no concern with order because order in itself has no necessary moral meaning. Order can be good, and it can be evil. Exercise of power can be good, and it can be evil. Control can be good, and control can be evil. Power has no inherent value. If some exercise of power is evil, the pagan – and the apostate Christian with him – would reply, “It is better to maintain some power, even if it is evil, than have chaos.” A Biblical Christian would reply, “If that is the dilemma, then chaos is better than a lawless order.” But, of course, chaos is not even a possibility and it has never been. Order has always been the only possibility. It is just that we need a restoration of the Law of God, so that God’s order doesn’t work against man anymore, but for man. Does it become clear how libertarianism follows from the Biblical worldview? Since ethics is the foundational paradigm in that worldview, and ethics is inescapably personal and individual, then a society can only be maintained when it is personal and individualistic. Power control of some people over others, and the elevating of power to the position to dictate ethics, will solve no ethical problems – it will only make them worse, and thus, will go against the original natural state of the world: “very good.” On the other hand, if you are a pagan or an atheist, you can only rely on power to maintain your world. Therefore, those men who have power, are supposed to exercise it over those men who don’t. Otherwise, you know, “chaos.” But what about the nature of man himself? Yeah, in the abstract, we may argue about the nature of God and the nature of reality, but part of that nature is the nature of man. Does the nature of man as presented by the Bible support a libertarian ideology, or does it support a statist ideology of control of men over other men? What is man in the atheist/pagan worldview? No one knows. There is really no meaningful definition of man that would make him different than, let’s say, a pile of rocks or an ash heap. I mean, atheists and pagans can come up with tons of definitions and they can pretend these definitions do give some meaning to the word man that has any value, but in the final account, there is really no definition. Or, at least, there is really no definition that would give man meaning and purpose in his life. I have talked about it in a sermon, long time ago, titled, “What Is Man?” A pagan or an atheist can come up with all kinds of meanings and purposes, but none of them are objective, they do not define man, and they are all just figments of their imagination. In the final account, man is nothing, really. But if man is nothing, then he is nothing in the cosmic struggle of order against chaos. Can we trust man that he would do his part on making the world more orderly? No. We can’t even define his part, let alone expect him to do it. Therefore, someone more powerful than him must set meaning and purpose for man. Someone, that is, a government of a sort. The option of letting man make up his own meaning and purpose is not viable; that would be chaos. Unless that man is powerful enough to be able to fight chaos himself; but then, that man should be expected to force others to comply with his fight against chaos, and use them as his pawns. So man has two options before him: either be powerful enough to be god, or become a pawn in the games of powerful gods. Otherwise, what good is a weak lone man in the struggle against chaos? But in the Biblical worldview, man has a purpose that is objective and comes from a source far above man or even far above the universe itself. Man is not left at the mercy of his own imagination, and man is not left at the mercy of other men to decide for him what his purpose is supposed to be. When God created man, He created him an individual, not a collective, and he gave him individual purpose. The dominion covenant was given to mankind as a whole, but that was covenantally, as an ethical imperative, not collectively, as a power structure. Adam and Eve were meant to be a team, of course, but even in that team, both of them had independent and direct access to God, no one acted as an “umbrella” or as a “representative” of the other before God. Each one got their “orders” directly from God, and no one needed a human intermediary agency to tell them what their purpose under God was. Under the Biblical view of man, therefore, man’s purpose in the world is an issue entirely between him and God, directly, personally, and without any intermediate agency. For other men or men’s institutions to want a piece in that relationship means only one thing: that they want to replace God. Institutional control over men’s actions (and again, we are talking control here, not judgment, which is a different issue) is therefore idolatry in action and practical policy, as far as the Bible is concerned. The only way a person can be consistently Christian and Biblically-obedient is to denounce any control of men by other men. Any ideology that insists on human institutions controlling the actions of individual men is an ideology that goes straight against the Dominion Covenant and against the Biblical view of man. A Christian who is consistently Biblical in his worldview and in his understanding of the Dominion Covenant and the nature of man, must be inescapably libertarian, that is, against any institutional control of man by other men. The two points we talked about so far – the nature of God and the nature of man – are rather philosophical, even if they have inescapable ethical ramifications. But is there direct ethical evidence in the Bible that God wants that individuals are free of institutional control? What about the nature of law? How does the antithesis on this point – the nature of law – play out in our understanding of the Biblical political theory? What is “law” in the pagan/atheistic worldview? Well, to start with, there are the laws of nature – nature, as the most ubiquitous and most powerful deity, has the most powerful laws, and through them, it keeps everyone in subjection. You can’t escape those laws, no matter what you do. Both gods and men, and powerful men, must submit to those laws; there is no escape from them. Without those laws, as you already know, there will be chaos; so Mother Nature forces everyone to obey them, no matter what they do, whether they want it or not. There is no ethical aspect to those laws; you don’t to choose to obey them or not. You just obey them, period. And since those laws of nature are so powerful and keep chaos at bay, they must be translated somehow into laws of society, so that society is protected against chaos. Hence, we have the notion of “natural law” used by the majority of philosophers and theologians. Or, for those who don’t like the notion of “natural law,” the use of “scientific” is an upgrade: we just base our societal laws on “science.” Like, Marxism had its social theory for the perfect society called “Scientific Socialism” or “Scientific Communism.” It’s not magic, you know; it is science. We study nature scientifically, and we come to the scientifically most perfect society, y’know. Anyway, the point is, for the rulers of society to prevent chaos, they need to mimic Mother Nature; their laws must mimic her laws, and they can’t allow for any free exercise of individual will. That would be chaos. Of course, one problem with “natural law” for human society (or with the “scientific law” too, for that matter) is that no one has that holy book of “natural law” that specifically spells that law. We have conjectures by armchair philosophers about what it may say vaguely and generally, but when it comes to specific applications to specific cases of justice and government, no one knows what exactly that “natural law” is saying. So, in the final account, the specifics are left to men to make up. Or, to be more precise, to powerful men to make up. The more powerful a person is – especially politically powerful – the more he gets to decide the specific applications of “natural law.” And rightly so; after all, it is nature that made them powerful. For what other reason but to entrust to them the interpretation of the vague “natural law” to specific social applications, right? Thus, from the perspective of the pagan and the atheist view of law, there is no room for individuals to live freely; they must submit to those who, by the nature of their power, are entitled to interpret “natural law” for everyone else. Individual liberty would mean individual interpretations, and that would, of course, lead to chaos. Is this the case with the Biblical Law? Not at all. The Biblical Law has three characteristics that make it antithetical to pagan or atheist law. First, Biblical Law is detailed in its applications. It is not a general, vague idea which human legislators need to translate to specific cases. True, it has the general principles in a sort of hierarchical structure: the two greatest commandments at the top (Matt. 22:37-40), then the Ten Commandments, but then, God gave in His Word an abundance of case applications plus specific historical rulings (precedents) to make it clear for anyone who reads what the Law commands in every case. And, more than that, the Law not only spells good vs. evil in specific situations, it also spells the specific earthly sanctions that need to be applied and if there should be earthly sanctions; and it also gives the institutional structure to apply those earthly sanctions, where they are needed. There is no guessing and no conjectures when it comes to the Law of God applied, and the details are not left to powerful men to impose on others. Second, Biblical Law is explicitly individualistic and personal. From the two greatest commandments, through the Ten Commandments, to the concrete commandments and stipulations in the case laws, every commandment is given in second person singular: thou instead of the plural you. Even while speaking the Ten Commandments from the mountain to the gathered multitude of the Israelites (Ex. 20), God still spoke in second person singular, to every one individually, not to the nation as a collective. The Law doesn’t even make sense applied collectively in vast parts of its narrative when applied to collectives, and neither does it make sense in terms of institutional enforcement. How do you enforce “love” through institutional action? How do you enforce the commandments that speak to the heart through institutional action? More than that, the Law has specific limits on government institutions as to how much power they can accumulate. The priestly class was not allowed to have any inheritance in Israel (Deut. 10:9; 18:1, Joshua 18:7, and many other passages), thus, not allowed to have independent economic power but depend on the prosperity of everyone else in the nation. A centralized political power – should one ever arise in Israel – was not allowed to accumulate military might (Deut. 17:14-17). And when the people of Israel wanted to establish such centralized political power, God specifically condemned it as the result of their apostasy from Him, and warned them that their king would become their tyrant. And, third, all this Law was public. Not only the Ten Commandments were thundered from the mountain to the whole nation, but Moses read the Law to all Israelites, and, in addition, the Law was supposed to be publicly read in its entirety to the whole nation once every seven years. Even the surrounding Gentile nations were expected to know the Law of God (Deut. 4:5-8). I know, this doesn’t sound much to us today who live in the shadow of Christendom. But in the day of Moses, knowledge of the laws was a privilege of the ruling classes, and they jealously kept that knowledge secret from the common citizens. Most of the pagan nations in the antiquity were ruled by decree, not by any fixed law anyway. Those that had a fixed law, prohibited teaching the law to the lower classes. In Sparta, teaching the slaves to read and to know the law was a capital crime. In Rome, every time the plebeians revolted and demanded rights and equality, the patrician class responded that they couldn’t have equality because they were not entrusted with knowing the laws. In Israel, however, knowing the Law was not only a privilege for even the lowest person, it was mandatory for all. And there were no special rules or laws that were peculiar to the ruling class. Thus, interpretation and application of the Law was not an exclusive prerogative of a ruling class. It was given to individuals first. The government – any government, church or state – had a very limited say, and a very limited function. (And we will shortly see what it is.) Thus, for all practical purposes, from the perspective of the nature of law as exhibited in the Bible, the Bible sees man’s society as comprised mainly of free individuals to whom the ethics of the law is addressed. There is no government that is supposed to be an ethical mediator between men and God, interpreting or re-interpreting the Law of God, or establishing the lines of good and evil through man-made decrees. No matter what governments and powerful men declare as “law,” God’s Law speaks to individuals, and only God’s Law is the boundary between good and evil. Man’s laws do not qualify as laws. Here a question would arise: What is then the function of government at all? If I am saying that individuals are not to be controlled and regulated and ruled by governments, what is the purpose of the civil government in the Bible? We still have something that look like government, and the New Testament surely tells us to obey the government. How does this comport with what I said about the individualist nature of the Law of God and of the nature of reality and man in general? Here we come to the next point in the presuppositional analysis of theocracy and libertarianism, namely, the nature of judgment. Given what we said earlier about the nature of reality and the nature of man in the pagan and atheist worldview, it shouldn’t be hard to figure what the purpose and function of civil government – or of any government whatsoever – should be: a government is supposed to act as concentrated power of multitude of men in order to prevent chaos. The enemies of social order, then, will be those who oppose the government. But more than that, the enemies of social order would be those who fail to do what the government tells them to do; for any disobedience to government control and regulations would be by default collaboration with chaos. If a person practices a trade, or opens a lemonade stand, or feeds the poor, or crosses a border to find better life for his family, or hires someone who has crossed a border, or consumes a certain substance, all without a government permit, that in itself is already a crime, being outside government control. The only legitimate victim of all crimes, therefore, is the state; crimes against individuals are only of concern if they threaten the order and the survival of the state. Where crimes against individuals are of no concern to the state and its power – like, for example, abortion or slavery – they are decriminalized. In the final account, the most important court trials are some individual being sued by state entity: whether the United States, or some state, or a county, etc. And do not assume that the “separate branches” of government power help individuals against the executive state: to the contrary, courts rule more and more in favor of the state against the individuals. Obviously, given that the courts depend on the executive state for their money. When we go to the Bible’s system of justice, however, we discover a very different picture. First of all, the Bible speaks of two fundamental levels of justice. One is God’s justice. The other is man’s justice under the Law of God. You all probably never thought of it as a gigantic antithesis to the secularist/pagan system of judgment and justice. But it is. It is enormous. Let me explain why, and why it is relevant to our topic here. The court of God – which is in constant proceedings during history, but will also sit in judgment once for a final verdict at the end of history – is presided by the perfect, all-knowing, and all-powerful Creator, who is also the Author of the perfect Law. In that court, every single action and word, and even the thoughts of our hearts, will be exposed and judged. But we know that that judgment will be righteous and just, because it will be rendered by a righteous and just Judge in Whom there is no partiality. As our Creator, and as the Author of the most perfect Law (and that Law is not just His creation, it is His very moral character), He is entitled to perfect obedience from us, and, as such, He is entitled to judge every single word, deed, and thought, that are disobedient. In God’s Court, there is no difference between private sin and public crime; all sins are crimes there, and nothing escapes. The court of man, on the other hand, is only limited to history, and is only limited to a few cases. In none of these cases is the state or the church a victim of the crime; the victim is always an individual. The Biblical courts were not meant to judge “crimes against the state” or against the church or against any other government entity. They were only meant to judge crimes against individuals. Thus, in none of the Biblical cases is there anything like payment to the state or slavery to the state as a punishment. The principle is always restitution, and that restitution is always to an individual, never to the state or to the church. Although, given that individuals can voluntarily agree to covenant into social or economic entities that act as individuals – like corporations – Biblical Law will by default take corporations to court or will allow corporations to sue for damages. But we need to understand here that a corporation is not a civil or ecclesiastical government; it has no authority to enforce its decisions on outsiders by the power of the sword or by excommunication. So in case of deliberate theft by a corporation, for example, the Biblical courts would rule double restitution from the corporate treasury; but how that loss will be split individually between the owners of the corporation will be decided between those owners. God’s Court, thus, judges all sin. Man’s courts are only allowed to judge crimes, and that on a very strict evidence basis. And that only crimes against individuals, or voluntary associations of individuals. But that’s not all. There is also a judicial relationship between God’s court and man’s courts. God judges nations, and guess what he judges them for: for how their courts and rulers have treated individuals, and especially the weak and the needy. He judges nations in history for the laws they pass and how these laws conform to His Law; no nation can escape that judgment, and no nation can find excuse in some “legal” process. For example, the fact that the United States have adopted their immigration laws, or their legalization of abortion, or their police laws, through a legal process won’t save the nation from judgment. And neither will it save those individuals who agree with such laws, or enforce such laws, or remain silent and passive in the face of such laws. “I was just following orders” is not a valid excuse in God’s court for any individual; and neither is “That was the law of the land.” Individuals who have agreed with or even enforced such unjust laws will be condemned for failing to oppose them, or to sabotage them, or to use their power and authority to change them or make them null and void. It is this two-tiered system of God’s judgment that makes Biblical Christianity unique in its view of justice. You have probably heard the argument, “A religion that believes in an all-powerful judging God is a totalitarian religion.” That’s stupid babbling. Only such a religion can be the true foundation for individual liberty, because only such a religion provides for true justice upon powerful men who have used their power to wrong those weaker than them. And only such a religion provides for effective deterrent on government tyranny, and only such a religion provides justification for righteous rebellion against tyrannical governments. We have one more point left: the control of the future. Now, if you have listened to Axe to the Root episodes so far, you don’t need to be told why control of the future is an important factor in the society. In fact, you already know that a civilization is not so much defined by its history – which most people believe, in their ignorance – but by its beliefs and expectations about the future. As Gary DeMar quipped once, “The present doesn’t determine the future; rather, the future determines the present.” If you want to understand our civilization today, try to understand its view of the future, and try to understand who controls the future. The battle for the future defines all social struggles in the world, and those who emerge victorious, capable of capturing the future, have captured the civilization today. Who controls the future under a pagan/secularist worldview? No one, really. In fact, the question is irrelevant. Remember, a pagan or a secularist can’t even define the future. The future is not something that can be experienced now, and since all the whole knowledge of paganism and atheism is based on experience (as opposed to faith, as in Christianity), a pagan or an atheist has no way to define the future which can’t be experienced. He may borrow the idea of “future” from Christianity, or he may have some vague conjecture of what it may be, but based on a consistently pagan or atheist worldview, any attempt at defining the future is useless. Thus, whatever there is, is the present. There is no future. And since future is what gives purpose, and since purpose is what drives individuals, there is really no legitimate purpose to which an individual can look. All that remains is what it is, now. And whoever is in power, now. (As a side note, if you want to understand the mind-boggling commitment of secularists to abortion and all other means of cutting their own offspring, it is right there, in their lack of any concept for the future.) What does the Bible say? The Bible is an eschatological book from the very beginning; it points to the future, and it explicitly directs the reader’s attention to the future. Even the first institution – the family – was created with an explicit eschatological function and task: “be fruitful and multiply.” R.J. Rushdoony mentioned pointed to this in a few places: the family is first and foremost an eschatological unit. Man and woman are so defined as to be distinct from each other not by any other characteristic but their functions in procreation. (Not by psychology or intellect or emotions or social status or power status, as many modern pagans inside and outside the Church like to claim.) Eve was declared to be the “mother of all living” before there was any mother or any motherhood at all (Gen. 3:20), and the concept of father and mother and the separation of their children into adulthood was described before there were any children or fathers or mothers (Gen. 2:24). Thus, from the very beginning, the Christian worldview is not only interested in children and the future, it bases its whole ideology on it. It is not that children and purpose and the future are simply “important” to Christianity. They are the very essence of it. Take away children and the future, and you take away Christianity. But there is an important point here: In the Bible, children are given to individuals. True, these individuals are in a family unit, but they are still individuals in their function in procreation and raising the children. There are no government collectives in the Bible giving birth to children and raising children. Children are exclusively the prerogative of two distinct individuals in a family. In addition, inheritance, namely, the transfer of accumulated wealth for the future, is inescapably individualistic. No government is charged with such transfer of wealth, and no government is allowed to tax it. (For those who try to use Rom. 13 to argue for the legitimacy of taxation, quit twisting one single verse. The full message of the Bible forbids such interpretation.) Individuals are not only uniquely charged by God to transfer wealth to future generations, their individual will is called by the same name God calls His covenant. In Heb. 9:16, the word used for the legal document we call “will” or “testament” is the same word used in the rest of the Greek text for “covenant”: diatheke. There is no other legal concept that is called with the same name. There is no social contract or social covenant in the Bible, there is no local church covenant in the Bible, there is nothing institutional on earth that God calls by the same name as his Covenant . . . except for the last will and testament of an individual by which he transfers wealth to his heirs in the future. The future, in short, which plays such an important part in the Biblical worldview, is entirely entrusted to individuals. God doesn’t trust either church or state to take care of the future. To summarize, everything in the Biblical worldview points ot the fact that the social and political organization mandated by the Bible is essentially libertarian, and it doesn’t allow for any institutional control over individuals by any institutional entity or government, be it state or church. When R.J. Rushdoony said that theocracy is the closest thing to radical libertarianism that can be had, he was not speaking figuratively, nor was he speaking politically. He was speaking literally, based on a thorough analysis of Biblical Law and the social order it prescribed. A thorough antithesis applied to all areas of analysis clearly shows that any anti-libertarian ideas must come from pagan or atheist presuppositions. While a consistent Christian can’t be anything else but libertarian. The nature of God and reality, the nature of man, the nature of God’s Law, the nature of judgment, and the control of the future, in all these areas it is obvious that in order for a person to be consistently Christian, he must be as closely radical libertarian as possible. Anything less than that would mean surrender to pagan presuppositions, and eventually abandoning the Christian faith in its social and political applications. In the final account, since state control of individuals is inevitably based on anti-Christians presuppositions, a society that has allowed such state control, even for the best of reasons, will see itself drifting away from the Biblical faith. And the United States today is the prime example. This week I will assign two books for reading. The first, of course, is R.J. Rushdoony’s Law and Liberty. If you haven’t read it yet, I will ask with the sternest voice I can: Why? What are you waiting for? The second book is titled The Theme is Freedom, and it was written by M. Stanton Evans, a conservative political commentator and journalist of the old school conservatism who knew that the heart of conservatism is libertarianism, and the foundation for libertarianism is Christianity. (Unlike modern “conservatives” who are indistinguishable from socialists.) I had the opportunity to meet him in person back in 2001 in Washington DC and to ask him for permission to translate this book in Bulgarian. I haven’t gotten to translate it, yet, but I you surely need to read it, for the book has some very valuable insights about the connection between Christianity and the American view of freedom. In your prayer and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe through translating and publishing books that bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every area of life. Including liberty and including the conflict between the individual and the state. Remember, just about 30 years ago, Eastern Europe was able to escape the political grip of one of the most murderous expressions of modern paganism: Communism. And paganism, let me tell you, is not libertarian. All paganism is statist and collectivist to the core. Fighting statism and collectivism is part of our preaching the Gospel, and I am calling you to help me in that task. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our monthly newsletter, and donate. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post Theocracy and Libertarianism appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description What is the Prophetic Ministry supposed to do, and why is it so hated by the modern church celebrities? Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 83 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will practice some resurrection. That is, we will resurrect a topic that has long been dead in our churches, and especially in our Reformed churches. Namely, the topic about the Prophetic Ministry. Not just about prophecy, or just about the spiritual gifts. We want to talk about the Prophetic Ministry. What is it, Biblically, what is its purpose, what should it look like today, and, most important, why has this topic been silenced and forgotten by today’s churches – and especially, by the leaders and celebrities in today’s churches. And, perhaps, if we have the time, we may want to look into the issue, what we need to to do to restore it in the Church today. (I am sure we won’t have the time, for I need to make a very long introduction, but perhaps in a future episode.) I said we are going to be talking about the Prophetic Ministry, not about prophecy or the other gifts, but we need to start with prophecy and the other gifts – because we cannot resolve the issue of the Prophetic Ministry before we resolve the issue of the gifts of the Spirit and their validity and application today. So let me first shortly get this issue dealt with and out of the way before we move to the topic at hand. Those of you who have listened to previous episodes, specifically “Modern Presbyterianism: Under the Feet of Men” and “The Spiritual Gifts,” know that I am an unrepentant Charismatic. Not just a “continuationist,” which denotes a rather passive acceptance of the continuation of gifts, but a Charismatic. That is, I believe that the Bible specifically instructs us that the spiritual gifts as they are described in several chapters in the New Testament are central to the way the Holy Spirit works in the Church in the New Testament era, and they are also central to our knowledge of God, and specifically to His immanence. We are not just admonished to accept them as “continuing,” we are explicitly commanded to actively and earnestly desire all the gifts, and especially the gift of prophecy, because the more of the gifts we have, the more the Church grows in maturity. The only detailed description of a church service in the Bible (1 Cor. 14) is entirely predicated on the free practice of the gifts of the Spirit. Now, obviously, the Bible doesn’t say that a service that doesn’t have them is necessarily invalid, or that a church that doesn’t practice them every day is necessarily invalid. But what is clear – again, from Scripture – is that a church that deliberately forbids them or declares them “ceased” has a serious problem with trusting and believing Scripture, and therefore is not a Sola Scriptura church, no matter how vociferously it may claim the title. I know, I know, within the Reformed tradition, I rather stick out. (Perhaps not completely; a few Reformed theologians of the last 100 years have been continuationists.) And I have had my share of flak for voicing publicly my disagreement with the un-Biblical beliefs of the majority of those who pass for “Reformed” in this specific area of their theology. And, boy, have I heard all kinds of bizarre and laughable arguments why Scripture should not be taken at face value for what it says on the spiritual gifts. The most common of them, of course, is not Biblical (there are no Biblical arguments in favor of cessationism anyway) but sensational and experientialist: namely, “We don’t see today any prophets and healers, therefore the gifts must have ceased.” Because, you know, our temporary experience trumps the Bible; whatever the Bible says, we need to first see it, and if we don’t see it around us, it must have ceased, right? That’s what sola fide and sola scriptura means, right? Kinda ironic when it comes from folks who accuse Charismatics of “experientialism.” Then there is an attempt at Biblical argument from 1 Cor. 13:8-10, that when “the perfect” comes, the gifts will be done away; and “the perfect,” you know, is the completion of the canon. But what exactly in the text can make anyone believe that “the perfect” is the completion of the canon? Even Greg Bahnsen, himself an avowed cessationist, admitted that was not a good argument; and until the early 1900s, every single theologian commenting on that verse said that “the perfect” comes either at the end of history or with the earthly death of the individual. Calvin himself, commenting on that verse, calls it “stupid” to believe that “the perfect” comes in an intermediate time in history. But if this verse is not a good argument, there is no other verse that even mentions cessation of the gifts. Where is the Biblical evidence of those who beat themselves in the chest that they are “sola scriptura”? Then the turn comes for arguments that, for anyone unbiased, sound like they have come from a lunatic asylum. For example, that in Acts, the gifts are mentioned more in the beginning of the book but less or no mention of them is made at the end of the book. What kind of an argument is that? Paul told the Roman church in Rom. 1:11 that he longed to see them so that he could impart some spiritual gift to them. But he didn’t get to Rome until two years before his death. “Sorry guys, I promised to impart gifts to you, but it’s the end of the period, no spiritual gifts anymore.” Then comes the argument about “they were only for one purpose and it has expired.” Like, “only to witness to the Jews.” Or, “only to fill the gap until we have Scripture.” None of these “only reasons” are ever found in Scripture, but the mythology persists. Meanwhile, Scripture contains multiple real reasons and functions for the gifts: establishment, encouragement, edification, growth to maturity, power to witness, public worship, evidence for unbelievers, judgment, confirmation of elders, vision, purpose, protection, guidance . . . how many of these have expired in the first century? (On a side note, ever wondered why all the “Reformed” ministries we have today – including some of the best, like R.C. Sproul – have been preaching the same milk for 30+ years, and there has been no growth? Meanwhile, Charismatics are already busy building Kingdom institutions while our so-called “Reformed” are flocking to G3 conferences to hear the same stuff on substitutionary atonement and the grace of God that they have been hearing for decades.) Then comes the argument that if we have prophecy today, it must be as Scripture and therefore will rival Scripture – despite obvious Biblical verses that show that there have been prophets whose prophecies were not Scripture. Calvin says about this that prophecy is simply “the application of Scripture to present use.” Much like engineering is the application of science to present use. If engineering doesn’t compete with science, because they serve different functions, prophecy does not compete with Scripture, because they serve different functions. Paul told Timothy that “all Scripture is profitable,” and yet, Paul also twice told that same Timothy to remember the prophecies concerning him and his ministry and gift. Was Paul contradicting himself? Then semantics comes into play: They were “apostolic” gifts, you know. That is, they were only for the apostles. Well, sola scriptura doesn’t mention anything about “apostolic” gifts, but it surely calls them spiritual gifts, that is, they belong to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit has not expired in the first century, as far as I can tell. Or what about the argument that the tongues must be intelligible human languages? Paul explicitly says in 1 Cor. 14:2 that one speaks in tongues, “no one understands.” Etc., etc., etc., I am not going to try to cover all of that lunacy in every single detail. Sometimes I wonder, how deep a hole can a person dig for themselves just to avoid the clear obvious message of the Bible? When all these fail, of course, there comes a more “moderate” cessationism: for example, that God still does miracles today and He gives prophecies and stuff, but they are no more given as “gifts” to specific people, just scattered among many people. But the text in 1 Cor. 12:4-11 specifically says that the Holy Spirit gives them as gifts to specific people; and it is part of the whole concept of the church as a body with different parts. How do you hold to that position without logically destroying the whole concept of the Body as described in Scripture? What sola scriptura principle allows you to ditch a clear Biblical text in favor of your own imagination? But we will shortly see why the concept of the personal gifts is so repulsive to modern churchmen. To summarize: cessationism is one of the most un-Biblical doctrines to ever hit Christianity. While it came out of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, it has produced nothing more than irrational babbling by people who refuse to even read what the Bible clearly says on the issue. The result is that when you try to search sermons by so-called “Reformed” pastors on “prophecy,” you discover that the only “prophecy” they speak about is not the New Testament view of prophecy, but only the eschatological chapters about the end times. And there is nothing on the Prophetic Ministry. What I want to do here is fill this gap. And explain why these preachers are silent on this topic. And what needs to be done to restore the Biblical teaching and practice. Obviously, the New Testament speaks about prophets, and speaks about the Prophetic Ministry. Ephesians 4:11-16 is clear that prophets are one of the ministries together with apostles, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, for the edification and the growth of the body. There are prophets mentioned in different passages: Agabus (Acts 11:28; Acts 21:10), the four daughters of Philip (Acts 21:9), multiple unnamed members of the congregations at Corinth (1 Cor. 12-14) and Antioch (Acts 11:27; 13:1). There is abundant indication that prophets were a distinct ministry in the church, and they were known by the fact that they were prophets; these were not just random people who randomly uttered a prophecy once in their lives. Their utterances had enough authority that even the apostles listened to what they said and took guidance from them (Acts 11:27-30; 21:10-14; 1 Tim. 1:11; 4:14). Prophets continued to exist in the era after the 1st century, despite many modern claims to the opposite. True, the church authorities tried to suppress them – and we will shortly see why – but they persisted anyway. Tertullian speaks of prophets in his own day (AD 2nd-3rd century). Augustine, in his early conversion from Manicheism denies there were any gifts in his day – but, keep in mind, gnosticism was strictly rationalist and cessationist. Later in life, however, as he got more orthodox, Augustine changed his mind and testified that the gifts were still valid and operational in his day, including the prophetic gift. The church continued to acknowledge the prophetic ministry for many centuries, especially after the Reformation. I have mentioned in a previous episode about Reformed Scotland and England, and the abundance of miraculous and prophetic manifestations, as testified by many accounts of the time, including Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Scots Worthies by John Howie. John Knox was acknowledge as “the Prophet and Apostle of Scotland” for his ministry to his country. Etc., no need to detail all the historical records here. The question, however, is this: what was that prophetic ministry they had, and what was it based upon? The New Testament doesn’t give any detailed description of it; it doesn’t tell us how the prophets prophesied, how other people knew they were really prophets, nor how anyone decided how far their authority went. Of our modern debates – should we trust prophets or kill them, and how do we know they are real prophets – do not exist in the New Testament. Looks like the authors just assume their readers know what it is and how to deal with it. Paul, in fact, admonishes his readers to earnestly desire the spiritual gifts and especially prophecy, and he warns them to not despise prophecies. He doesn’t even tell them to first test the veracity of the prophet! How did they even know what a prophet looks like, let alone test if he was a true prophet? The answer is: From the Old Testament. Yes, the New Testament’s prophetic ministry was no different from the Old Testament’s prophetic ministry. It was the same ministry. It just continued over. It didn’t change a bit; it was the same as they always knew it. In fact, they had Old Testament prophets in their own culture, in Israel, and the Church just incorporated the ministry into its own ministry. That’s why Paul didn’t have to explain anything. The converted Jews knew what a prophet was, and they knew how to value the prophetic ministry and to accept prophetic utterances. And they taught the converted Gentiles. It was a full continuity from the Old Testament. The prophetic ministry has always been part of God’s Covenant and His work with His people. It wasn’t anything new limited to a few decades for some isolated single purpose. It was God’s design for the whole history of His covenant people. Now, if you are anything like the average modern Christian, especially the average Reformed Christian, you are probably stunned at these words. What you were taught on this subject just doesn’t compute. First, you were taught that the function of the Old Testament prophetic ministry was to write the Old Testament Scripture. You know, we have the books of the prophets, therefore that’s what the Old Testament prophets were. But in the New Testament, we don’t have those same prophets anymore, because we don’t have Scripture written by them. Because everything that a prophet says is a word from God, must necessarily be included in the Word of God, and that’s how we have the Old Testament. Thus, if you have sat under the teaching of modern “Reformed” teachers, they have instilled in your mind a sort of Dispensationalist discontinuity between the Old and the New Testament in respect to the prophetic ministry. Old Testament prophets wrote Scripture. New Testament prophets were different, and they simply filled the gap until the church had the Canon. Now that the church has the Canon, we don’t need prophets anymore. Therefore, the prophetic ministry is not needed anymore, it has ceased, and whatever claims to be prophetic ministry today can’t be valid. But what is the Biblical truth? When we open to study the Old Testament concerning prophets, we discover the following: There was an abundant number of prophets in the Old Testament, so abundant that OT Testament Israel was used having them around, and even the surrounding nations were used to go to the prophets of Israel to ask for advice. The prophets were not limited to those writing Scripture; those who wrote Scripture were a very small minority among the prophets whose names we know. And those prophets whose names we know are only a small minority of all the prophets mentioned in the Bible, whose names we don’t even know. To meet a prophet in the Old Testament was as common experience as meeting a Levite; God never left His covenant people without prophets, even in the times when He was not giving Scripture. A number of men in the Bible were declared to be prophets. Abraham was a prophet (Gen. 20:7). So were the patriarchs after him and the whole family of Jacob (Ps. 105:15). Moses’s brother Aaron was a prophet (Ex. 7:1). Moses himself was, of course, a prophet (Deut. 18:15; 34:10; Hos. 12:13). Joshua was a prophet, too, being laid hands on by Moses (Deut. 34:9). The seventy elders of Israel were prophets (Num. 11:16-29). In the days of David, there were a number of prophets, like Nathan (2 Sam 7:2), Gad (2 Sam. 24:11), Asaph and Jeduthun (1 Chr. 25:3). Oh, but it gets even worse. There were women prophetesses. Yes, boys, the Old Covenant was real tough time for men. You could be a dignified patriarch having a life of dignified authority “serving” as umbrella for women and children as their direct connection to God, and all of a sudden you could meet a woman who actually spoke word from the Lord, and she could speak to you with authority, leaving you in a quandary, “Do I submit to the authority of this woman, or do I disobey the Lord and His word?” (On a side note, it will get even worse when we get to the final judgment and some of us patriarchs realize that there are women sitting in judgment of us men, Matt. 12:42; Luke 11:41. So enjoy today’s intermediate time of blessedness.) Miriam was a prophetess (Ex. 15:20). Deborah was a prophetess (Judges 4:4). Yeah, I know, some people claim that women were given such authority because men had apostatized, but you can hardly claim that Miriam’s time lacked godly men. When King Josiah’s priests found the Book of the Law in the Temple (2 Kings 22; 2 Chr. 34), and he sent the priests to inquire of the Lord, they went to the prophetess Huldah to hear a word from God. There is a prophetess mentioned in the New Testament who rightly belongs to the Old Covenant: Anna, the daughter of Penuel (Luke 2:36). Her namesake in the Old Testament, Hannah, the wife of Elkanah (1 Sam. 1), was not specifically designated as a prophetess, but her song in 1 Samuel 2 is a prophecy against the powerful of the day, and she is rightly celebrated by the Rabbis as one of the women prophets of the Old Testament. (See Joel McDurmon’s commentary on 1 Samuel for a detailed covenantal treatment of Hannah and her prophecy.) Isaiah’s wife was a prophetess (Isaiah 8:3); some say that she was only called so because she was his wife, but the rest of the Bible doesn’t support such interpretation of the word “prophetess.” Then there are multiple other prophets mentioned whose names are not even given. In Judges 6:7-9, a prophet came to Israel to rebuke them, right before the rise of Gideon. 1 Kings 13 speaks of the interaction between two prophets, one whose name is known (Ahijah, from chapter 11), the other one unnamed, just “the old prophet.” More importantly, starting from the time of Samuel, there were groups or “schools” of prophets who either lived in the same place, or traveled around and prophesied. Apparently, the presence of the Holy Spirit was so heavy around them that any person, even if he wasn’t anything close to spiritual or prophetic, could acquire a prophetic spirit for a while and prophesy. That happened twice to King Saul; once in 1 Sam. 10:9-12, when he was still a young man, and the second time in 1 Sam. 19:22-24, when he was now a king and was trying to catch and kill David. Both times his prophesying under the influence of the spirit of the prophets became a proverb in Israel: “Is Saul also among the prophets?” Such “companies” or “schools” of prophets existed in many cities: see, for example, 2 Kings 2, where a number of cities are listed that had such “schools.” Apparently, the institution of the prophetic ministry was firmly established among the covenant people and its existence was taken for granted. What started as an individual family ministry (Moses, Aaron, and Miriam were all said to be prophets) developed into a cultural phenomenon that even the pagan nations acknowledged as valid and truthful, and as a sign of the presence of God in Israel (2 Kings 5:15; Jonah 3). Even while there was no Scripture written, in the centuries between Malachi and John the Baptist, there were still prophets in Israel who spoke word from God, as is clear from the examples of Anna and Simeon (Luke 2:25-38). This is the reason why people flocked to the ministry of John the Baptist to get baptized: they were not surprised that another prophet had arisen in Israel. The novelty of his ministry was that he declared to be the last prophet before the Messiah came, not that he was a prophet. Thus, the prophetic ministry had always existed among the covenant people – and by prophetic ministry I mean not the truncated definition for it used by modern cessationists who only call “prophets” those who wrote Scripture, and believe they were limited to the first century AD. I mean the prophetic ministry as a ministry established by God for a specific purpose, for the needs of the covenant community, needs that were present before the coming of Christ in the Old Covenant era, and, obviously from the New Testament, were to be present in the New Covenant era as well, given that the Holy Spirit continued that ministry in the Church as the New Israel. The New Covenant believers didn’t need anyone to explain to them what a prophet was supposed to be – they knew it from centuries of experience before them. They only needed to know the rules for the ministry (as in 1 Cor. 14), but they didn’t need to know what a prophet was and what he was supposed to do to be a prophet. But what is it that a prophet is supposed to do? Do we have a detailed description in the Bible to know? Do we have examples? Do we have anything that would lead us to the conclusion of how the prophetic ministry is supposed to work, and what that work is supposed to accomplish? We surely do. In fact, we have one person who personifies the prophetic ministry to all history, a person who was very special to God in his earthly life, but even more in his death so that God didn’t even allow him to die in the way of all flesh, but kept him from even tasting death. No, it is not Jesus Christ, even though Christ is greater than that person and than anyone else, and He is our Great Prophet. But I am speaking of a man who was predestined by God to become the very name and person of God’s prophetic ministry: Elijah. It should be clear and obvious that Elijah was the very impersonation of the prophetic ministry in the same way Moses was the impersonation of the Law. The New Testament, in dozens of verses, speaks of Jesus’s ministry as the fulfillment of the Law of the Prophets (Matt. 5:17; Luke 16:16, John 1:45, Rom. 3:21 and multiple other verses and passages). In order to make the continuity clear, Jesus ascended to a high mountain and there, in the presence of three of his disciples, met in person with Moses (the Law) and Elijah (the Prophets). The two men were very special and precious, for they were two of the only three men in history who did not taste earthly death (Enoch being the first of the three; but his ministry deserves a special episode). Elijah, obviously, was the personification of the Prophets; which contradicts many modern theories that the “prophets” must have meant the books of the prophets, starting from Isaiah and ending in Malachi. Elijah himself never wrote a book. His life was a subject of a book, but the majority of his prophecies were not recorded, and in fact, if anything is recorded is not so much his prophecies but his miracles. So there is more to the Prophetic Ministry of which Jesus speaks than simply the books of the prophets in the Old Testament, and it is encoded in the life and work of Elijah. But there is more: The appearance of Elijah on the mountain confused the disciples. They knew, from the Old Testament, that Elijah was supposed to come before Messiah came; that prophecy was very clear in the last book of the Old Testament, the book of Malachi, in 3:1 and 4:5. But here they saw Elijah only appearing to Jesus and them on the mountain, but not really returning to Israel. Jesus’s answer to them in Matthew 17:11-13 and Mark 9:11-13 is the center of what we are talking about here: “Elijah is indeed coming and will restore all things; but I say to you that Elijah already came, and they did not recognize him. . . .” Pay attention here. Elijah was the Prophetic Ministry in the Old Testament. He – or the ministry he personifies – was prophesied to return, which he did, in the person of John the Baptist, but Jesus said more: He is coming, and will restore all things. Folks, the Prophetic Ministry did not end with John the Baptist. It is coming, and it will restore all things. Jesus declared the validity of the prophetic ministry for a specific purpose. We just need to figure out what that “restoration of all things” is supposed to be. And the life of Elijah can give us that clue. Not much is told us about his life. Elijah is given an abrupt and powerful introduction in 1 Kings 17: one prophecy directly to King Ahab, one economic miracle in making the Sidonian widow rich, and one resurrection in raising her son, all in just the first chapter. We don’t know how he came to be so powerful in the Spirit; his previous life is just summarized in the words, “Elijah the Tishbite, of the settlers of Gilead.” The choice of words is curious, for the word “settlers” is “toshab,” literally “sojourners, foreigners.” Everywhere else in the Bible the word is used for foreigner. The word “Tishbite” is the same word of the same root; the name of his town would have been “Tishbeh,” or “Foreigners’ Town.” The same word – “foreigner, sojourner” – is repeated twice in the introduction, and then nothing else is given about his origin or early life. Apparently, however, by the events of 1 Kings 17, Elijah had already established his reputation as a prophet, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to get an audience with the king. In the next chapter, Obadiah said that Ahab had been searching for Elijah everywhere; and later in the chapter Ahab calls Elijah “the troubler of Israel.” Elijah was already dangerous by the time he is presented to us. He must have prophesied and done miracles before that which were not recorded in Scripture. However, we don’t need details about his whole life to make a conclusion about what his ministry was – just like we don’t need to make up stories about the early life of Jesus Christ in flesh in order to know what His ministry was. In the life of every person, there is a culmination point, a metaphorical or sometimes even literal hill, or a mountain, that he needs to ascend to get the essence of his real ministry before God. For Jesus, of course, it was Calvary – even if you didn’t know much about the rest of his life, Calvary tells you what He came for. For Moses, it was his stay on the Mount Sinai – twice of 40 days each – where he met the Lord in person, then saw the Lord carve the Ten Commandments on stone with His own finger, then saw Him again carve them on the second stone tablets Moses had chiseled out. Where did Elijah have the culmination of his ministry? On that same Mount Sinai (or Horeb) where Moses met God twice. (Actually, three times, given that the burning bush in Ex. 3 was also on Mount Horeb.) After his meeting with Ahab, and after his victory over the 450 prophets of Baal on the Mount Carmel, he received a threat from Jezebel in 1 Kings 19:2: “I will kill you the way you killed my prophets.” So he fled south to Judah (a separate kingdom, at the time), left his servant there and continued even further south. I have heard a number of modern commentators claim that Elijah did it out of fear and shouldn’t have fled, but the text is clear that an angel was feeding him during that time, because “the journey was too great” for Elijah. God wanted Elijah on the mountain to meet Him in person, for God had for him the greatest task of his ministry. Eventually, after 40 days and nights, Elijah ascended on the mountain, supposedly the same place where Moses met God. The story that follows is similar to that of Moses in Ex. 33:17-23: Moses was allowed to experience the full presence of God, and Elijah was brought there to experience it, too. But the two stories also differ greatly, and that’s where we find the essence and purpose of the Prophetic Ministry. Moses explicitly asked to see God’s glory and face. Elijah didn’t need that; he only complained to God that his ministry had failed. God told Moses that He would put him in a cleft and protect him with His hand, because no man can see God’s face and live, but Moses was able to see God’s back as God’s glory was passing by – whatever it was, it was a phenomenon of gigantic proportions. Elijah was told to stand on the mountain and he saw everything that was happening around him. A strong wind rending the mountains and breaking the rocks before the Lord; then an earthquake, then a fire. Elijah was there, seeing everything; but the text says, the Lord was not in either one of these, so he stood on the mountain, waiting. And then there was the sound of a gentle voice. It was then that Elijah covered his face with his mantle and hid back in the cave. No man can see God’s face and survive. And Elijah knew that God was in the gentle voice. So he hid his face and found shelter in the cave. You want a parable of how a prophet sees God? There is your parable. To everyone else, God would be in those big phenomena with the power of nuclear blasts. When Israel was with Moses at the foot of that same mountain, god thundered from the mountain and the people were paralyzed by fear; to them, God was in the thunder and the darkness. To a prophet, strong wind and earthquake and fire are background noise; he is not moved by them, not scared by them, not impressed by them. What can scare him is a gentle voice. That is how God speaks to him; in a voice that no one else can hear. There are no crowds waiting for him at the foot of the mountain; no one even knows he is there on that mountain. The nearest settlement is 40 days and 40 nights away, there is no one around, but the prophet and God. No wonder people don’t usually understand prophets; the mentality required for the prophetic ministry is certainly not the mentality that gets you through the busy everyday life of the average person in the society. As we look at Elijah’s life, it looks the life of bipolar person – oscillating between extrovert aggressiveness against the whole society and behavior that today would be defined as autistic. But there is a good reason for it: Elijah’s life was controlled by the sound of a gentle voice that has always been the presence of God in his life. He could recognize God where no one else would, and he could ignore the background noise without any effort. Because the sound of a gentle voice is where God meets a prophet. Now that the personal meeting of God was there, God was to give Elijah the culmination task of his ministry, a task that would define what Elijah was supposed to be as God’s prophet, and by implication, what the Prophetic Ministry in general is supposed to do. God asks him the same question: “What are you doing here?” Elijah answers with the same report about the failure of his ministry: “Israel has forsaken Your covenant, they have torn down Your altars, killed Your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they seek to end my life as well.” Then God gives His instructions, paraphrased (listen carefully): “Go back, anoint a king over Syria (a pagan nation), then anoint a king over Israel (the covenant community), then anoint a spiritual authority over Israel, the next prophet after you.” I hope you all get what is happening here. Elijah had no formal authority in Syria. Neither did he have any formal authority in Israel, for that matter. And yet, God gave him the task to go and sanction a coup-d’etat in Syria, then a coup-d’etat in Israel. Change the governments in both nations, God said, and then appoint yourself a successor. And then God promised that there will be bloodshed committed by all these three. Whoever escapes the sword of your protegee in Syria will be slain by your protegee in Israel. And whoever escapes your protegee in Israel, will be killed by your protegee in the prophetic ministry. So, go, you got work to do. Interestingly enough, Elijah went about the task in the opposite order: he first went to find Elisha and take him as his disciple and successor. That in the very same chapter, 1 Kings 19:19-21. But Elijah never got to do the rest of it. The story of his life continues for 5 more chapters before he got taken to heaven. All this time he was in Israel, and he never approached Jehu to anoint him. Also, all this time Syria was in war against Israel, and Elijah never went to Syria to anoint Hazael as king. What’s going on here? God met with Elijah personally on the mountain to give him tasks, and Elijah didn’t even bother to finish them? What kind of a man of God was he, anyway? The answer and the solution to the quandary can be seen in the fact that it was actually Elisha, his appointed successor, who finished the other two tasks. He went to Damascus in 2 Kings 8 and prophesied to Hazael that he would become king. (He even told him to lie to his master, the lawful king of Syria, in v. 10.) Then, in the next chapter, 2 Kings 9, Elisha returned to Israel to anoint Jehu as king. Elijah’s tasks were accomplished by Elisha. Why? Because that was meant to show us that what God gave Elijah was not just his personal task, an isolated occurrence, but that was to be the very meaning and purpose of the prophetic ministry in general. What specific prophet would accomplish it was of no consequence, as long as there was a prophet to do it. This is what all prophets were called to do, and commanded to do. So what was it? The purpose of the prophetic ministry was – and still is – to provide God’s checks and balances to earthly authorities. A prophet was someone without earthly power, and without any earthly means of enforcing his will. In the eyes of the people, and especially in the eyes of the formal powers, he had nothing to back his claims or demands: no armies, no legislative bodies, no committees, no church sessions, no procedures for deliberations and decisions. To their eyes, he was a “lone ranger,” someone who just went around creating trouble. (“Troubler of Israel,” remember?) And yet, without all this earthly power of arms or majorities, the prophet was supposed to be someone with enough courage to stand up to all these earthly powers and declare a new order of power, and anoint new governments. He was the man who goes around and encourages coups in both church and state, because he saw when human hierarchies degenerated into serving themselves, and therefore needed to be replaced. In this respect, the prophet was the man who declared a restoration of God’s true hierarchy: God at the top, all men and earthly powers under Him. And those earthly powers who did not serve God, were declared covenantally dead, and therefore doomed to extinction. That the prophet was supposed to not have earthly power but appear weak to earthly powers was the explanation why Elijah fled when Jezebel threatened his life. He didn’t flee because he was afraid; remember, that was the same guy who stood on the mountain in the middle of wind so strong that it was breaking the rocks to pieces. He fled because his job was not to fight earthly battles against earthly authorities; his job was to fight God’s battles God’s way. It was also the reason why John the Baptist – the Elijah who was to come, according to Jesus – decided to go to the wilderness and dress in simple clothes. In Luke 7:25-30 and Matt. 11:8-15, Jesus specifically contrasts men of earthly power with the prophets: “What did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? Those are found in palaces. But what did you go out to see? A prophet? You found him, and you found Elijah who was to come.” That the prophet was supposed to be a check and balance – and even a judge – on human powers, church and state, was clear from the ministry of all Old Testament prophets. When one looks at the life of John the Baptist, the same is obvious: that greatest of all prophets did not simply preach a religious message, he challenged the king himself, and lost his life because of that. Jesus did the same to the Pharisees many times, until they killed Him, too. The prophetic ministry was very specifically directed against the powers of the day. It was not simply predicting future events. In fact, it has never been about predicting future events – such predictions have always been only incidental to it. The Prophetic Ministry was about challenging earthly powers, and about the restoration of true hierarchy in both the world and the church. It was God’s division of powers in action, His checks and balances. You can now understand why the Enlightenment reacted with such violent rhetoric against any supernatural revelation today. The Enlightenment was a movement to restore the supremacy of human power over the society, and deny God His authority over men and their societies. To acknowledge the validity of ongoing supernatural revelation today would mean to acknowledge the validity of the Prophetic Ministry. To acknowledge that validity would mean to acknowledge the validity of God’s checks and balances on human powers. Such acknowledgment the new pagans could not afford to make. So the solution was rationalism: a religion of the supremacy of the human mind, which eventually boiled down to the supremacy of the decisions of a small elite of central planners. The war against the supernatural was, on one hand, a war against God and His Word, but also, a war against God’s prophetic ministry: the only authority on earth that could present real challenge to human powers. But you can also understand why the modern church bureaucrats have adopted cessationism as their operational ideology. It is not because of some concern for the authority of the Word of God: prophecy, as Calvin pointed out, is not in the same category as Scripture, so it can’t compete with Scripture. The real reason is that the powers in the modern churches – including Protestant, including those who claim to be Reformed – resent God’s system of division of powers and of checks and balances in the church. Their agenda is to subject the visible church to human powers only and thus bar God from exercising His real authority in His Church. The presence of prophets has always been a problem for the formal leadership in the church; prophets have always been “troublers of Israel.” They truly are. And that’s why they have been suppressed. But the suppression of God’s prophetic ministry – men without formal power who speak in the authority of the Holy Spirit – has not been without consequences. That the churches in the West have grown more tyrannical, and yet weaker and less influential in the society was not caused by the power of paganism to defeat Christianity. (If paganism had any power, it would have defeated Christianity in the 1st century, when paganism was at the culmination of its power, and Christianity was still young.) The one fighting against the modern church is the Holy Spirit Himself, and He is fighting against it because it has rejected His principle of checks and balances of power. Just like Israel that killed the prophets sent to her, the modern church is killing the prophetic ministry with its rationalistic ideology; and by killing the prophetic ministry, she is killing the opportunity for correction and growth God has decreed. We are wondering why the world has been dismantling our formerly Christian culture, why such a majority of Christians are so apathetic and unable to challenge social sins like abortion, abuse, adultery, government tyranny, etc. But the lack of power in the church can have only one source: the Spirit has withdrawn from it. And if He has withdrawn, that’s because it no longer represents Him. And if we want it to represent Him, we need to listen. He has His prophets somewhere out there, and we have failed to listen to them. And we have failed to challenge our leaders in the churches, and we have failed to slaughter the prophets of Baal. So, we need to restore the prophetic ministry. To be honest, I still don’t know how that would look like. But I know that we need to start searching the Bible and stand silent before God so that He can speak to us. As R.J. Rushdoony said in his Systematic Theology, the Holy Spirit has not stopped speaking to us today. But, I am afraid, we have trusted our pastors and preachers and conference celebrities for far too long, and we have stopped listening to Him. Remember, the restoration of all things needs the return of Elijah (Matt. 17:11; Mark 9:12). This week the assignment will be not a book but a lecture series: Evangelizing Man and His Institutions, by Dennis Peacocke. When you listen to it, pay attention to his concept of “prophetic evangelism.” Dennis Peacocke’s tapes were instrumental to my mission and ministry in Bulgaria back in the 1990s. What I learned from him was immeasurably valuable. He is a Charismatic, but even if you are a cessationist (still), you will find him helpful. In your prayers and giving, remember Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to building the intellectual foundation of the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe through translating and publishing books that apply the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every area of life. Including government. We know that eventually, God will restore the prophetic ministry to Eastern Europe, and will use His prophets to challenge the powers of the day. But in order for that to happen, we need to have the critical amount of literature which will give the alternative to the present secular order. Help us finish that job. Visit bulgarianreformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. Stream/Download The post The Prophetic Ministry appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description What is the Prophetic Ministry supposed to do, and why is it so hated by the modern church celebrities? Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 83 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will practice some resurrection. That is, we will resurrect a topic that has long been dead in our churches, and especially in our Reformed churches. Namely, the topic about the Prophetic Ministry. Not just about prophecy, or just about the spiritual gifts. We want to talk about the Prophetic Ministry. What is it, Biblically, what is its purpose, what should it look like today, and, most important, why has this topic been silenced and forgotten by today’s churches – and especially, by the leaders and celebrities in today’s churches. And, perhaps, if we have the time, we may want to look into the issue, what we need to to do to restore it in the Church today. (I am sure we won’t have the time, for I need to make a very long introduction, but perhaps in a future episode.) I said we are going to be talking about the Prophetic Ministry, not about prophecy or the other gifts, but we need to start with prophecy and the other gifts – because we cannot resolve the issue of the Prophetic Ministry before we resolve the issue of the gifts of the Spirit and their validity and application today. So let me first shortly get this issue dealt with and out of the way before we move to the topic at hand. Those of you who have listened to previous episodes, specifically “Modern Presbyterianism: Under the Feet of Men” and “The Spiritual Gifts,” know that I am an unrepentant Charismatic. Not just a “continuationist,” which denotes a rather passive acceptance of the continuation of gifts, but a Charismatic. That is, I believe that the Bible specifically instructs us that the spiritual gifts as they are described in several chapters in the New Testament are central to the way the Holy Spirit works in the Church in the New Testament era, and they are also central to our knowledge of God, and specifically to His immanence. We are not just admonished to accept them as “continuing,” we are explicitly commanded to actively and earnestly desire all the gifts, and especially the gift of prophecy, because the more of the gifts we have, the more the Church grows in maturity. The only detailed description of a church service in the Bible (1 Cor. 14) is entirely predicated on the free practice of the gifts of the Spirit. Now, obviously, the Bible doesn’t say that a service that doesn’t have them is necessarily invalid, or that a church that doesn’t practice them every day is necessarily invalid. But what is clear – again, from Scripture – is that a church that deliberately forbids them or declares them “ceased” has a serious problem with trusting and believing Scripture, and therefore is not a Sola Scriptura church, no matter how vociferously it may claim the title. I know, I know, within the Reformed tradition, I rather stick out. (Perhaps not completely; a few Reformed theologians of the last 100 years have been continuationists.) And I have had my share of flak for voicing publicly my disagreement with the un-Biblical beliefs of the majority of those who pass for “Reformed” in this specific area of their theology. And, boy, have I heard all kinds of bizarre and laughable arguments why Scripture should not be taken at face value for what it says on the spiritual gifts. The most common of them, of course, is not Biblical (there are no Biblical arguments in favor of cessationism anyway) but sensational and experientialist: namely, “We don’t see today any prophets and healers, therefore the gifts must have ceased.” Because, you know, our temporary experience trumps the Bible; whatever the Bible says, we need to first see it, and if we don’t see it around us, it must have ceased, right? That’s what sola fide and sola scriptura means, right? Kinda ironic when it comes from folks who accuse Charismatics of “experientialism.” Then there is an attempt at Biblical argument from 1 Cor. 13:8-10, that when “the perfect” comes, the gifts will be done away; and “the perfect,” you know, is the completion of the canon. But what exactly in the text can make anyone believe that “the perfect” is the completion of the canon? Even Greg Bahnsen, himself an avowed cessationist, admitted that was not a good argument; and until the early 1900s, every single theologian commenting on that verse said that “the perfect” comes either at the end of history or with the earthly death of the individual. Calvin himself, commenting on that verse, calls it “stupid” to believe that “the perfect” comes in an intermediate time in history. But if this verse is not a good argument, there is no other verse that even mentions cessation of the gifts. Where is the Biblical evidence of those who beat themselves in the chest that they are “sola scriptura”? Then the turn comes for arguments that, for anyone unbiased, sound like they have come from a lunatic asylum. For example, that in Acts, the gifts are mentioned more in the beginning of the book but less or no mention of them is made at the end of the book. What kind of an argument is that? Paul told the Roman church in Rom. 1:11 that he longed to see them so that he could impart some spiritual gift to them. But he didn’t get to Rome until two years before his death. “Sorry guys, I promised to impart gifts to you, but it’s the end of the period, no spiritual gifts anymore.” Then comes the argument about “they were only for one purpose and it has expired.” Like, “only to witness to the Jews.” Or, “only to fill the gap until we have Scripture.” None of these “only reasons” are ever found in Scripture, but the mythology persists. Meanwhile, Scripture contains multiple real reasons and functions for the gifts: establishment, encouragement, edification, growth to maturity, power to witness, public worship, evidence for unbelievers, judgment, confirmation of elders, vision, purpose, protection, guidance . . . how many of these have expired in the first century? (On a side note, ever wondered why all the “Reformed” ministries we have today – including some of the best, like R.C. Sproul – have been preaching the same milk for 30+ years, and there has been no growth? Meanwhile, Charismatics are already busy building Kingdom institutions while our so-called “Reformed” are flocking to G3 conferences to hear the same stuff on substitutionary atonement and the grace of God that they have been hearing for decades.) Then comes the argument that if we have prophecy today, it must be as Scripture and therefore will rival Scripture – despite obvious Biblical verses that show that there have been prophets whose prophecies were not Scripture. Calvin says about this that prophecy is simply “the application of Scripture to present use.” Much like engineering is the application of science to present use. If engineering doesn’t compete with science, because they serve different functions, prophecy does not compete with Scripture, because they serve different functions. Paul told Timothy that “all Scripture is profitable,” and yet, Paul also twice told that same Timothy to remember the prophecies concerning him and his ministry and gift. Was Paul contradicting himself? Then semantics comes into play: They were “apostolic” gifts, you know. That is, they were only for the apostles. Well, sola scriptura doesn’t mention anything about “apostolic” gifts, but it surely calls them spiritual gifts, that is, they belong to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit has not expired in the first century, as far as I can tell. Or what about the argument that the tongues must be intelligible human languages? Paul explicitly says in 1 Cor. 14:2 that one speaks in tongues, “no one understands.” Etc., etc., etc., I am not going to try to cover all of that lunacy in every single detail. Sometimes I wonder, how deep a hole can a person dig for themselves just to avoid the clear obvious message of the Bible? When all these fail, of course, there comes a more “moderate” cessationism: for example, that God still does miracles today and He gives prophecies and stuff, but they are no more given as “gifts” to specific people, just scattered among many people. But the text in 1 Cor. 12:4-11 specifically says that the Holy Spirit gives them as gifts to specific people; and it is part of the whole concept of the church as a body with different parts. How do you hold to that position without logically destroying the whole concept of the Body as described in Scripture? What sola scriptura principle allows you to ditch a clear Biblical text in favor of your own imagination? But we will shortly see why the concept of the personal gifts is so repulsive to modern churchmen. To summarize: cessationism is one of the most un-Biblical doctrines to ever hit Christianity. While it came out of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, it has produced nothing more than irrational babbling by people who refuse to even read what the Bible clearly says on the issue. The result is that when you try to search sermons by so-called “Reformed” pastors on “prophecy,” you discover that the only “prophecy” they speak about is not the New Testament view of prophecy, but only the eschatological chapters about the end times. And there is nothing on the Prophetic Ministry. What I want to do here is fill this gap. And explain why these preachers are silent on this topic. And what needs to be done to restore the Biblical teaching and practice. Obviously, the New Testament speaks about prophets, and speaks about the Prophetic Ministry. Ephesians 4:11-16 is clear that prophets are one of the ministries together with apostles, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, for the edification and the growth of the body. There are prophets mentioned in different passages: Agabus (Acts 11:28; Acts 21:10), the four daughters of Philip (Acts 21:9), multiple unnamed members of the congregations at Corinth (1 Cor. 12-14) and Antioch (Acts 11:27; 13:1). There is abundant indication that prophets were a distinct ministry in the church, and they were known by the fact that they were prophets; these were not just random people who randomly uttered a prophecy once in their lives. Their utterances had enough authority that even the apostles listened to what they said and took guidance from them (Acts 11:27-30; 21:10-14; 1 Tim. 1:11; 4:14). Prophets continued to exist in the era after the 1st century, despite many modern claims to the opposite. True, the church authorities tried to suppress them – and we will shortly see why – but they persisted anyway. Tertullian speaks of prophets in his own day (AD 2nd-3rd century). Augustine, in his early conversion from Manicheism denies there were any gifts in his day – but, keep in mind, gnosticism was strictly rationalist and cessationist. Later in life, however, as he got more orthodox, Augustine changed his mind and testified that the gifts were still valid and operational in his day, including the prophetic gift. The church continued to acknowledge the prophetic ministry for many centuries, especially after the Reformation. I have mentioned in a previous episode about Reformed Scotland and England, and the abundance of miraculous and prophetic manifestations, as testified by many accounts of the time, including Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Scots Worthies by John Howie. John Knox was acknowledge as “the Prophet and Apostle of Scotland” for his ministry to his country. Etc., no need to detail all the historical records here. The question, however, is this: what was that prophetic ministry they had, and what was it based upon? The New Testament doesn’t give any detailed description of it; it doesn’t tell us how the prophets prophesied, how other people knew they were really prophets, nor how anyone decided how far their authority went. Of our modern debates – should we trust prophets or kill them, and how do we know they are real prophets – do not exist in the New Testament. Looks like the authors just assume their readers know what it is and how to deal with it. Paul, in fact, admonishes his readers to earnestly desire the spiritual gifts and especially prophecy, and he warns them to not despise prophecies. He doesn’t even tell them to first test the veracity of the prophet! How did they even know what a prophet looks like, let alone test if he was a true prophet? The answer is: From the Old Testament. Yes, the New Testament’s prophetic ministry was no different from the Old Testament’s prophetic ministry. It was the same ministry. It just continued over. It didn’t change a bit; it was the same as they always knew it. In fact, they had Old Testament prophets in their own culture, in Israel, and the Church just incorporated the ministry into its own ministry. That’s why Paul didn’t have to explain anything. The converted Jews knew what a prophet was, and they knew how to value the prophetic ministry and to accept prophetic utterances. And they taught the converted Gentiles. It was a full continuity from the Old Testament. The prophetic ministry has always been part of God’s Covenant and His work with His people. It wasn’t anything new limited to a few decades for some isolated single purpose. It was God’s design for the whole history of His covenant people. Now, if you are anything like the average modern Christian, especially the average Reformed Christian, you are probably stunned at these words. What you were taught on this subject just doesn’t compute. First, you were taught that the function of the Old Testament prophetic ministry was to write the Old Testament Scripture. You know, we have the books of the prophets, therefore that’s what the Old Testament prophets were. But in the New Testament, we don’t have those same prophets anymore, because we don’t have Scripture written by them. Because everything that a prophet says is a word from God, must necessarily be included in the Word of God, and that’s how we have the Old Testament. Thus, if you have sat under the teaching of modern “Reformed” teachers, they have instilled in your mind a sort of Dispensationalist discontinuity between the Old and the New Testament in respect to the prophetic ministry. Old Testament prophets wrote Scripture. New Testament prophets were different, and they simply filled the gap until the church had the Canon. Now that the church has the Canon, we don’t need prophets anymore. Therefore, the prophetic ministry is not needed anymore, it has ceased, and whatever claims to be prophetic ministry today can’t be valid. But what is the Biblical truth? When we open to study the Old Testament concerning prophets, we discover the following: There was an abundant number of prophets in the Old Testament, so abundant that OT Testament Israel was used having them around, and even the surrounding nations were used to go to the prophets of Israel to ask for advice. The prophets were not limited to those writing Scripture; those who wrote Scripture were a very small minority among the prophets whose names we know. And those prophets whose names we know are only a small minority of all the prophets mentioned in the Bible, whose names we don’t even know. To meet a prophet in the Old Testament was as common experience as meeting a Levite; God never left His covenant people without prophets, even in the times when He was not giving Scripture. A number of men in the Bible were declared to be prophets. Abraham was a prophet (Gen. 20:7). So were the patriarchs after him and the whole family of Jacob (Ps. 105:15). Moses’s brother Aaron was a prophet (Ex. 7:1). Moses himself was, of course, a prophet (Deut. 18:15; 34:10; Hos. 12:13). Joshua was a prophet, too, being laid hands on by Moses (Deut. 34:9). The seventy elders of Israel were prophets (Num. 11:16-29). In the days of David, there were a number of prophets, like Nathan (2 Sam 7:2), Gad (2 Sam. 24:11), Asaph and Jeduthun (1 Chr. 25:3). Oh, but it gets even worse. There were women prophetesses. Yes, boys, the Old Covenant was real tough time for men. You could be a dignified patriarch having a life of dignified authority “serving” as umbrella for women and children as their direct connection to God, and all of a sudden you could meet a woman who actually spoke word from the Lord, and she could speak to you with authority, leaving you in a quandary, “Do I submit to the authority of this woman, or do I disobey the Lord and His word?” (On a side note, it will get even worse when we get to the final judgment and some of us patriarchs realize that there are women sitting in judgment of us men, Matt. 12:42; Luke 11:41. So enjoy today’s intermediate time of blessedness.) Miriam was a prophetess (Ex. 15:20). Deborah was a prophetess (Judges 4:4). Yeah, I know, some people claim that women were given such authority because men had apostatized, but you can hardly claim that Miriam’s time lacked godly men. When King Josiah’s priests found the Book of the Law in the Temple (2 Kings 22; 2 Chr. 34), and he sent the priests to inquire of the Lord, they went to the prophetess Huldah to hear a word from God. There is a prophetess mentioned in the New Testament who rightly belongs to the Old Covenant: Anna, the daughter of Penuel (Luke 2:36). Her namesake in the Old Testament, Hannah, the wife of Elkanah (1 Sam. 1), was not specifically designated as a prophetess, but her song in 1 Samuel 2 is a prophecy against the powerful of the day, and she is rightly celebrated by the Rabbis as one of the women prophets of the Old Testament. (See Joel McDurmon’s commentary on 1 Samuel for a detailed covenantal treatment of Hannah and her prophecy.) Isaiah’s wife was a prophetess (Isaiah 8:3); some say that she was only called so because she was his wife, but the rest of the Bible doesn’t support such interpretation of the word “prophetess.” Then there are multiple other prophets mentioned whose names are not even given. In Judges 6:7-9, a prophet came to Israel to rebuke them, right before the rise of Gideon. 1 Kings 13 speaks of the interaction between two prophets, one whose name is known (Ahijah, from chapter 11), the other one unnamed, just “the old prophet.” More importantly, starting from the time of Samuel, there were groups or “schools” of prophets who either lived in the same place, or traveled around and prophesied. Apparently, the presence of the Holy Spirit was so heavy around them that any person, even if he wasn’t anything close to spiritual or prophetic, could acquire a prophetic spirit for a while and prophesy. That happened twice to King Saul; once in 1 Sam. 10:9-12, when he was still a young man, and the second time in 1 Sam. 19:22-24, when he was now a king and was trying to catch and kill David. Both times his prophesying under the influence of the spirit of the prophets became a proverb in Israel: “Is Saul also among the prophets?” Such “companies” or “schools” of prophets existed in many cities: see, for example, 2 Kings 2, where a number of cities are listed that had such “schools.” Apparently, the institution of the prophetic ministry was firmly established among the covenant people and its existence was taken for granted. What started as an individual family ministry (Moses, Aaron, and Miriam were all said to be prophets) developed into a cultural phenomenon that even the pagan nations acknowledged as valid and truthful, and as a sign of the presence of God in Israel (2 Kings 5:15; Jonah 3). Even while there was no Scripture written, in the centuries between Malachi and John the Baptist, there were still prophets in Israel who spoke word from God, as is clear from the examples of Anna and Simeon (Luke 2:25-38). This is the reason why people flocked to the ministry of John the Baptist to get baptized: they were not surprised that another prophet had arisen in Israel. The novelty of his ministry was that he declared to be the last prophet before the Messiah came, not that he was a prophet. Thus, the prophetic ministry had always existed among the covenant people – and by prophetic ministry I mean not the truncated definition for it used by modern cessationists who only call “prophets” those who wrote Scripture, and believe they were limited to the first century AD. I mean the prophetic ministry as a ministry established by God for a specific purpose, for the needs of the covenant community, needs that were present before the coming of Christ in the Old Covenant era, and, obviously from the New Testament, were to be present in the New Covenant era as well, given that the Holy Spirit continued that ministry in the Church as the New Israel. The New Covenant believers didn’t need anyone to explain to them what a prophet was supposed to be – they knew it from centuries of experience before them. They only needed to know the rules for the ministry (as in 1 Cor. 14), but they didn’t need to know what a prophet was and what he was supposed to do to be a prophet. But what is it that a prophet is supposed to do? Do we have a detailed description in the Bible to know? Do we have examples? Do we have anything that would lead us to the conclusion of how the prophetic ministry is supposed to work, and what that work is supposed to accomplish? We surely do. In fact, we have one person who personifies the prophetic ministry to all history, a person who was very special to God in his earthly life, but even more in his death so that God didn’t even allow him to die in the way of all flesh, but kept him from even tasting death. No, it is not Jesus Christ, even though Christ is greater than that person and than anyone else, and He is our Great Prophet. But I am speaking of a man who was predestined by God to become the very name and person of God’s prophetic ministry: Elijah. It should be clear and obvious that Elijah was the very impersonation of the prophetic ministry in the same way Moses was the impersonation of the Law. The New Testament, in dozens of verses, speaks of Jesus’s ministry as the fulfillment of the Law of the Prophets (Matt. 5:17; Luke 16:16, John 1:45, Rom. 3:21 and multiple other verses and passages). In order to make the continuity clear, Jesus ascended to a high mountain and there, in the presence of three of his disciples, met in person with Moses (the Law) and Elijah (the Prophets). The two men were very special and precious, for they were two of the only three men in history who did not taste earthly death (Enoch being the first of the three; but his ministry deserves a special episode). Elijah, obviously, was the personification of the Prophets; which contradicts many modern theories that the “prophets” must have meant the books of the prophets, starting from Isaiah and ending in Malachi. Elijah himself never wrote a book. His life was a subject of a book, but the majority of his prophecies were not recorded, and in fact, if anything is recorded is not so much his prophecies but his miracles. So there is more to the Prophetic Ministry of which Jesus speaks than simply the books of the prophets in the Old Testament, and it is encoded in the life and work of Elijah. But there is more: The appearance of Elijah on the mountain confused the disciples. They knew, from the Old Testament, that Elijah was supposed to come before Messiah came; that prophecy was very clear in the last book of the Old Testament, the book of Malachi, in 3:1 and 4:5. But here they saw Elijah only appearing to Jesus and them on the mountain, but not really returning to Israel. Jesus’s answer to them in Matthew 17:11-13 and Mark 9:11-13 is the center of what we are talking about here: “Elijah is indeed coming and will restore all things; but I say to you that Elijah already came, and they did not recognize him. . . .” Pay attention here. Elijah was the Prophetic Ministry in the Old Testament. He – or the ministry he personifies – was prophesied to return, which he did, in the person of John the Baptist, but Jesus said more: He is coming, and will restore all things. Folks, the Prophetic Ministry did not end with John the Baptist. It is coming, and it will restore all things. Jesus declared the validity of the prophetic ministry for a specific purpose. We just need to figure out what that “restoration of all things” is supposed to be. And the life of Elijah can give us that clue. Not much is told us about his life. Elijah is given an abrupt and powerful introduction in 1 Kings 17: one prophecy directly to King Ahab, one economic miracle in making the Sidonian widow rich, and one resurrection in raising her son, all in just the first chapter. We don’t know how he came to be so powerful in the Spirit; his previous life is just summarized in the words, “Elijah the Tishbite, of the settlers of Gilead.” The choice of words is curious, for the word “settlers” is “toshab,” literally “sojourners, foreigners.” Everywhere else in the Bible the word is used for foreigner. The word “Tishbite” is the same word of the same root; the name of his town would have been “Tishbeh,” or “Foreigners’ Town.” The same word – “foreigner, sojourner” – is repeated twice in the introduction, and then nothing else is given about his origin or early life. Apparently, however, by the events of 1 Kings 17, Elijah had already established his reputation as a prophet, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to get an audience with the king. In the next chapter, Obadiah said that Ahab had been searching for Elijah everywhere; and later in the chapter Ahab calls Elijah “the troubler of Israel.” Elijah was already dangerous by the time he is presented to us. He must have prophesied and done miracles before that which were not recorded in Scripture. However, we don’t need details about his whole life to make a conclusion about what his ministry was – just like we don’t need to make up stories about the early life of Jesus Christ in flesh in order to know what His ministry was. In the life of every person, there is a culmination point, a metaphorical or sometimes even literal hill, or a mountain, that he needs to ascend to get the essence of his real ministry before God. For Jesus, of course, it was Calvary – even if you didn’t know much about the rest of his life, Calvary tells you what He came for. For Moses, it was his stay on the Mount Sinai – twice of 40 days each – where he met the Lord in person, then saw the Lord carve the Ten Commandments on stone with His own finger, then saw Him again carve them on the second stone tablets Moses had chiseled out. Where did Elijah have the culmination of his ministry? On that same Mount Sinai (or Horeb) where Moses met God twice. (Actually, three times, given that the burning bush in Ex. 3 was also on Mount Horeb.) After his meeting with Ahab, and after his victory over the 450 prophets of Baal on the Mount Carmel, he received a threat from Jezebel in 1 Kings 19:2: “I will kill you the way you killed my prophets.” So he fled south to Judah (a separate kingdom, at the time), left his servant there and continued even further south. I have heard a number of modern commentators claim that Elijah did it out of fear and shouldn’t have fled, but the text is clear that an angel was feeding him during that time, because “the journey was too great” for Elijah. God wanted Elijah on the mountain to meet Him in person, for God had for him the greatest task of his ministry. Eventually, after 40 days and nights, Elijah ascended on the mountain, supposedly the same place where Moses met God. The story that follows is similar to that of Moses in Ex. 33:17-23: Moses was allowed to experience the full presence of God, and Elijah was brought there to experience it, too. But the two stories also differ greatly, and that’s where we find the essence and purpose of the Prophetic Ministry. Moses explicitly asked to see God’s glory and face. Elijah didn’t need that; he only complained to God that his ministry had failed. God told Moses that He would put him in a cleft and protect him with His hand, because no man can see God’s face and live, but Moses was able to see God’s back as God’s glory was passing by – whatever it was, it was a phenomenon of gigantic proportions. Elijah was told to stand on the mountain and he saw everything that was happening around him. A strong wind rending the mountains and breaking the rocks before the Lord; then an earthquake, then a fire. Elijah was there, seeing everything; but the text says, the Lord was not in either one of these, so he stood on the mountain, waiting. And then there was the sound of a gentle voice. It was then that Elijah covered his face with his mantle and hid back in the cave. No man can see God’s face and survive. And Elijah knew that God was in the gentle voice. So he hid his face and found shelter in the cave. You want a parable of how a prophet sees God? There is your parable. To everyone else, God would be in those big phenomena with the power of nuclear blasts. When Israel was with Moses at the foot of that same mountain, god thundered from the mountain and the people were paralyzed by fear; to them, God was in the thunder and the darkness. To a prophet, strong wind and earthquake and fire are background noise; he is not moved by them, not scared by them, not impressed by them. What can scare him is a gentle voice. That is how God speaks to him; in a voice that no one else can hear. There are no crowds waiting for him at the foot of the mountain; no one even knows he is there on that mountain. The nearest settlement is 40 days and 40 nights away, there is no one around, but the prophet and God. No wonder people don’t usually understand prophets; the mentality required for the prophetic ministry is certainly not the mentality that gets you through the busy everyday life of the average person in the society. As we look at Elijah’s life, it looks the life of bipolar person – oscillating between extrovert aggressiveness against the whole society and behavior that today would be defined as autistic. But there is a good reason for it: Elijah’s life was controlled by the sound of a gentle voice that has always been the presence of God in his life. He could recognize God where no one else would, and he could ignore the background noise without any effort. Because the sound of a gentle voice is where God meets a prophet. Now that the personal meeting of God was there, God was to give Elijah the culmination task of his ministry, a task that would define what Elijah was supposed to be as God’s prophet, and by implication, what the Prophetic Ministry in general is supposed to do. God asks him the same question: “What are you doing here?” Elijah answers with the same report about the failure of his ministry: “Israel has forsaken Your covenant, they have torn down Your altars, killed Your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they seek to end my life as well.” Then God gives His instructions, paraphrased (listen carefully): “Go back, anoint a king over Syria (a pagan nation), then anoint a king over Israel (the covenant community), then anoint a spiritual authority over Israel, the next prophet after you.” I hope you all get what is happening here. Elijah had no formal authority in Syria. Neither did he have any formal authority in Israel, for that matter. And yet, God gave him the task to go and sanction a coup-d’etat in Syria, then a coup-d’etat in Israel. Change the governments in both nations, God said, and then appoint yourself a successor. And then God promised that there will be bloodshed committed by all these three. Whoever escapes the sword of your protegee in Syria will be slain by your protegee in Israel. And whoever escapes your protegee in Israel, will be killed by your protegee in the prophetic ministry. So, go, you got work to do. Interestingly enough, Elijah went about the task in the opposite order: he first went to find Elisha and take him as his disciple and successor. That in the very same chapter, 1 Kings 19:19-21. But Elijah never got to do the rest of it. The story of his life continues for 5 more chapters before he got taken to heaven. All this time he was in Israel, and he never approached Jehu to anoint him. Also, all this time Syria was in war against Israel, and Elijah never went to Syria to anoint Hazael as king. What’s going on here? God met with Elijah personally on the mountain to give him tasks, and Elijah didn’t even bother to finish them? What kind of a man of God was he, anyway? The answer and the solution to the quandary can be seen in the fact that it was actually Elisha, his appointed successor, who finished the other two tasks. He went to Damascus in 2 Kings 8 and prophesied to Hazael that he would become king. (He even told him to lie to his master, the lawful king of Syria, in v. 10.) Then, in the next chapter, 2 Kings 9, Elisha returned to Israel to anoint Jehu as king. Elijah’s tasks were accomplished by Elisha. Why? Because that was meant to show us that what God gave Elijah was not just his personal task, an isolated occurrence, but that was to be the very meaning and purpose of the prophetic ministry in general. What specific prophet would accomplish it was of no consequence, as long as there was a prophet to do it. This is what all prophets were called to do, and commanded to do. So what was it? The purpose of the prophetic ministry was – and still is – to provide God’s checks and balances to earthly authorities. A prophet was someone without earthly power, and without any earthly means of enforcing his will. In the eyes of the people, and especially in the eyes of the formal powers, he had nothing to back his claims or demands: no armies, no legislative bodies, no committees, no church sessions, no procedures for deliberations and decisions. To their eyes, he was a “lone ranger,” someone who just went around creating trouble. (“Troubler of Israel,” remember?) And yet, without all this earthly power of arms or majorities, the prophet was supposed to be someone with enough courage to stand up to all these earthly powers and declare a new order of power, and anoint new governments. He was the man who goes around and encourages coups in both church and state, because he saw when human hierarchies degenerated into serving themselves, and therefore needed to be replaced. In this respect, the prophet was the man who declared a restoration of God’s true hierarchy: God at the top, all men and earthly powers under Him. And those earthly powers who did not serve God, were declared covenantally dead, and therefore doomed to extinction. That the prophet was supposed to not have earthly power but appear weak to earthly powers was the explanation why Elijah fled when Jezebel threatened his life. He didn’t flee because he was afraid; remember, that was the same guy who stood on the mountain in the middle of wind so strong that it was breaking the rocks to pieces. He fled because his job was not to fight earthly battles against earthly authorities; his job was to fight God’s battles God’s way. It was also the reason why John the Baptist – the Elijah who was to come, according to Jesus – decided to go to the wilderness and dress in simple clothes. In Luke 7:25-30 and Matt. 11:8-15, Jesus specifically contrasts men of earthly power with the prophets: “What did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? Those are found in palaces. But what did you go out to see? A prophet? You found him, and you found Elijah who was to come.” That the prophet was supposed to be a check and balance – and even a judge – on human powers, church and state, was clear from the ministry of all Old Testament prophets. When one looks at the life of John the Baptist, the same is obvious: that greatest of all prophets did not simply preach a religious message, he challenged the king himself, and lost his life because of that. Jesus did the same to the Pharisees many times, until they killed Him, too. The prophetic ministry was very specifically directed against the powers of the day. It was not simply predicting future events. In fact, it has never been about predicting future events – such predictions have always been only incidental to it. The Prophetic Ministry was about challenging earthly powers, and about the restoration of true hierarchy in both the world and the church. It was God’s division of powers in action, His checks and balances. You can now understand why the Enlightenment reacted with such violent rhetoric against any supernatural revelation today. The Enlightenment was a movement to restore the supremacy of human power over the society, and deny God His authority over men and their societies. To acknowledge the validity of ongoing supernatural revelation today would mean to acknowledge the validity of the Prophetic Ministry. To acknowledge that validity would mean to acknowledge the validity of God’s checks and balances on human powers. Such acknowledgment the new pagans could not afford to make. So the solution was rationalism: a religion of the supremacy of the human mind, which eventually boiled down to the supremacy of the decisions of a small elite of central planners. The war against the supernatural was, on one hand, a war against God and His Word, but also, a war against God’s prophetic ministry: the only authority on earth that could present real challenge to human powers. But you can also understand why the modern church bureaucrats have adopted cessationism as their operational ideology. It is not because of some concern for the authority of the Word of God: prophecy, as Calvin pointed out, is not in the same category as Scripture, so it can’t compete with Scripture. The real reason is that the powers in the modern churches – including Protestant, including those who claim to be Reformed – resent God’s system of division of powers and of checks and balances in the church. Their agenda is to subject the visible church to human powers only and thus bar God from exercising His real authority in His Church. The presence of prophets has always been a problem for the formal leadership in the church; prophets have always been “troublers of Israel.” They truly are. And that’s why they have been suppressed. But the suppression of God’s prophetic ministry – men without formal power who speak in the authority of the Holy Spirit – has not been without consequences. That the churches in the West have grown more tyrannical, and yet weaker and less influential in the society was not caused by the power of paganism to defeat Christianity. (If paganism had any power, it would have defeated Christianity in the 1st century, when paganism was at the culmination of its power, and Christianity was still young.) The one fighting against the modern church is the Holy Spirit Himself, and He is fighting against it because it has rejected His principle of checks and balances of power. Just like Israel that killed the prophets sent to her, the modern church is killing the prophetic ministry with its rationalistic ideology; and by killing the prophetic ministry, she is killing the opportunity for correction and growth God has decreed. We are wondering why the world has been dismantling our formerly Christian culture, why such a majority of Christians are so apathetic and unable to challenge social sins like abortion, abuse, adultery, government tyranny, etc. But the lack of power in the church can have only one source: the Spirit has withdrawn from it. And if He has withdrawn, that’s because it no longer represents Him. And if we want it to represent Him, we need to listen. He has His prophets somewhere out there, and we have failed to listen to them. And we have failed to challenge our leaders in the churches, and we have failed to slaughter the prophets of Baal. So, we need to restore the prophetic ministry. To be honest, I still don’t know how that would look like. But I know that we need to start searching the Bible and stand silent before God so that He can speak to us. As R.J. Rushdoony said in his Systematic Theology, the Holy Spirit has not stopped speaking to us today. But, I am afraid, we have trusted our pastors and preachers and conference celebrities for far too long, and we have stopped listening to Him. Remember, the restoration of all things needs the return of Elijah (Matt. 17:11; Mark 9:12). This week the assignment will be not a book but a lecture series: Evangelizing Man and His Institutions, by Dennis Peacocke. When you listen to it, pay attention to his concept of “prophetic evangelism.” Dennis Peacocke’s tapes were instrumental to my mission and ministry in Bulgaria back in the 1990s. What I learned from him was immeasurably valuable. He is a Charismatic, but even if you are a cessationist (still), you will find him helpful. In your prayers and giving, remember Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to building the intellectual foundation of the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe through translating and publishing books that apply the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every area of life. Including government. We know that eventually, God will restore the prophetic ministry to Eastern Europe, and will use His prophets to challenge the powers of the day. But in order for that to happen, we need to have the critical amount of literature which will give the alternative to the present secular order. Help us finish that job. Visit bulgarianreformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. Stream/Download The post The Prophetic Ministry appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description “The image of God in man laughs at Malthus’s closed-universe paganism. The end of history will not be economic. It will come not because we have run out of resources . . . . The end will be covenantal: it will come because the church has fulfilled the Great Commission and has made the whole world submit to Christ, and has made all His enemies His footstool. Assigned reading: Paul and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Bomb Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 82 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will cover one of the greatest fears of our time, and the religious foundation of that fear. In previous episodes we saw that fear is the most powerful emotion people experience, and, judging from its prominence in the Bible, it is also the most important. We also saw that fear itself has a religious foundation and nature; and more than that, it is also a religion itself. (Ever been in a situation where you tell people paralyzed by fear that they shouldn’t be afraid, only to see them lash at you as if you were some sort of a heretic?) In 1798, an English pastor and scholar, Thomas Robert Malthus, published a book: An Essay on the Principle of Population. On the surface, it was just another scholarly thesis that came out of the Enlightenment. Of the right wing of the Enlightenment, to be precise, the one prevalent in England and Scotland and Prussia and Hanover, not the left wing, prevalent in France and Italy. The Enlightenment’s standards for all scholarship were that it was supposed to be as technical and mathematical as science, and, most importantly, free of any ethical values and considerations. Yes, even the right wing Enlightenment, the one that was driven by church ministers (as was Malthus himself) and used religious language and rhetoric as its justification. From this Enlightenment perspective, Malthus’s book was the perfect scholarly thesis. His topic was simple: the relationship between food production and population growth. It wasn’t anything new, to be sure, others before had tried that topic as well. It was a particularly common topic among the educated elite of revolutionary France – after all, that’s how the French Revolution started, with the people starving because of an alleged depletion of the resources for  food production. A few revolutionary leaders argued that for France to remain full and content, about a quarter of the population should be exterminated to match the land available for food production. These ideas were, however, a little too extreme even for the French taste at the time; besides, most of their proponents – like Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton – were themselves guillotined. Similar ideas were floated in Prussia as well, although the Prussian monarchy, always in need of more soldiers, never took them seriously. So Malthus was not writing in a vacuum, the topic had already become “hot” among Enlightenment theorists on both right and left. He was, however, destined to become the father of a whole new trend with his theory. Why? Because he was much better educated than all previous writers, he was capable to write about in a perfectly technical, rather disinterested way (quite creepy, given the horrible bloodthirsty advice he was giving the political elite), and he was writing in a country that was politically stable and socially stratified, where scholars and church ministers like him had quite an audience and influence. He had the privilege of coming from a well-educated family, as well. His father, Daniel Malthus, was a non-Conformist (probably from an old Puritan family) and personal friend of men like David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Thomas took orders in the Church of England, contrary to his father’s religious views, probably to avoid the non-conformist disabilities and be able to take positions as a college professor. There was also another point where he disagreed with his father: unlike his father, who was a staunch optimist about the future, Thomas was a pessimist. And his book was the ultimate expression of his pessimistic views. In a very short sentence, the thesis of the Essay on the Principle of Population is that the prospects for humanity are bleak. Why? Because, as Malthus explained in mathematical terms, while the world’s population grows geometrically, the means for food production only grow arithmetically. That is the simplest and most popular way of presenting his thesis. In reality, however, his thesis was a little more complicated. He had to make it more complicated in order to add respectable Christina religious language to it, in order to conceal his true intentions. A fuller explanation of his thesis would be this: There is a certain number of population that matches the available resources for food production. However, when food production increases, mankind – and especially the lower classes of mankind – are not wise enough to maintain the same stable rate of human reproduction with the purpose of achieving higher standard of life. Instead, they are stupid enough to start reproducing more and more, exponentially. Eventually that exponential human reproduction catches up with and even overtakes food production, and people, even with the new and higher level of food production, are left much poorer and hungrier than before. That point where human reproduction catches up with food production has come to be called Malthusian catastrophe by sociologists, and the level at which the excess population stops growing due to shortage of food is called Malthusian trap. In short, all that Malthus’s analysis promised humanity was inevitable suffering in the future, marked by short periods of prosperity which, because of the very nature of humanity – especially of the poorer humanity – will inevitably lead to more and worse suffering. When he came to his policy proposals, he had to conceal the true nature of his religion under a lot of pious verbiage. He used long-winded phrases and metaphoric language for regular phrases (for example, “virtuous affection” instead of “marriage,” etc.) to satisfy the spirit of the time and especially the academic spirit of the time; but to make his proposals acceptable, he had to pretend that his motives were honest and virtuous. When asked why God would create a world of limited resources for a growing population, his answer was that this was so that God teaches us prudence in procreation. But under the verbose expression of love and concern for the poor and needy, he practically declared that the political elite must do everything they could to prevent the masses from achieving any sort of prosperity, even if that meant artificially created shortages. He was in favor of government taxes on food so high as to keep sufficiency of food beyond the reach of the average family; in his view, the masses of people needed to be kept at the brink of starvation even in years of abundant crops. In his pious language, it was better to be poor than foolish and use the abundance for more irresponsible procreation. He didn’t even shy of recommending violent death as a final measure; since natural famine and pestilence didn’t always do their job in regulating the population, he believed governments should finish the job by starting wars just for the sake of thinning out the population. In the final account, behind the seemingly dispassionate academic language, there was evil. His proposals, no matter how dressed they were in religious lingo, smacked of the ideology of the ancient pagan empires, especially the Biblical Assyria. The last time Europe had encountered such ideas and policies was in the last three decades of the 14th century when Tamerlane, a distant relative of Genghis Khan, tried to restore the Mongol Empire. Tamerlane was so systematic in exterminating whole populations that he beat even Genghis Khan himself. However, ever since the 14th century, no one in the known world ever used such policies nor advocated for them, not even the Ottoman Turks. (They had their share of atrocities but, in general, the Sultans viewed conquered populations as sheep to be bred and milked and sheared, not as vermin to be destroyed.) Malthus brought back to life ideas that everyone before him thought should have passed away with the passing of paganism. I will touch later on the influence of Malthus’s ideas in the last two centuries, and especially in our day. But before we do that, we need to first look into the religious origin of these ideas, and especially into the religious climate these ideas both require, and help create or recreate. Where did he get his ideas from? Is it possible that a Christian scholar come up with such ideology of cruelty? Is there really a Christian justification for Malthusianism, and Malthus claimed? Or could there be something else behind it, religiously? We all know that ideas have consequences. But I have argued before, in some of my articles, that ideas are themselves consequences of something deeper and greater than ideology – namely, faith. Ideology is always based on some religion, and even when we present our ideas in a seemingly rational and unbiased and academic form, they are still religious in their origin. There is still some deep moral commitment, some deep religious impulse that drives our ideology. I can bring in tons of quotes from Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen here to illustrate what I am talking about, but I prefer this short phrase by Dennis Peacocke which beautifully explains presuppositional epistemology in general and my argument here: “The mind only justifies what the heart has already chosen.” So, what was it that Malthus’s heart had chosen that his mind masterfully justified in that book? I have a name for the religion behind his thesis: Paganism of a Closed Universe. Or, a Closed-Universe Paganism, if you wish. Those who have studied physics know that I am borrowing a term from physics: Closed System. A closed system is a system that doesn’t allow the transfer of mass or energy in or out of the system. In the same way, a closed universe is a universe that does not allow any transfer of energy in or out of the universe. All that there is, is inside the universe; if there is anything or anyone outside that universe – like a God or something – it or He is irrelevant to the system and its working, and can neither bring anything in nor take anything out of it. For the people within the system, they are stuck with whatever energy and other resources they already have available, and nothing more. From there, good luck. If we are to be consistent, of course, all paganism is closed-universe paganism. Yes, yes, I know, there have been pagans in the last two centuries who did not believe in a closed universe, and have been rather optimistic about humanity. But, as I will later mention, they have all been like that only because of the residues of Christian worldview they have adopted from their culture. But when paganism is consistent, without any influence from Christianity, it must necessarily be closed-universe. Why am I saying this? What is paganism, ultimately? It is the rejection of the belief in one God, Creator of heaven and earth, Who is outside time and space and controls time and space. For paganism to make any sense, such God must be entirely excluded from existence. Or, at the very least, of any consideration. He must be irrelevant to the universe in which we live. Such a God is dangerous to any paganism. Why? Because, by definition, He must be radically different from humans, who live inside the universe. God Who is outside the universe and intervenes in the universe is a God Who can not be grasped or comprehended by humans – and especially by human rulers, which is the more important part of it. He would be, therefore, a God that can’t be controlled or manipulated by humans. He wouldn’t need human permission to exist or to be relevant or to have any influence in human societies. Even worse, He wouldn’t need the permission of human authorities to do it. Once such a god is allowed to exist or be relevant to human thought and action, all the other gods cease to be relevant. Oh, and did I mention, all human authorities cease to be relevant, except if they cease to be authorities and become servants of that God. Paganism then, even if it uses the same word for its magical beings (“god”), is radically different from Christianity. As a matter of fact, given that very important difference, atheism is not different from any religion; it is right there, in the same basket as all paganism. It basically believes the same things as any paganism. For paganism to exist as a system of thought and belief, it needs gods who are inside the universe itself. The universe first existed, preferably in the form of chaos. (For if there was order in the beginning, that might smack of a pre-existent God Creator.) For whatever reason, movements within that original chaos produce the first divine beings – but, remember, those divine beings came out of that pre-existing universe. They are creations, just like man is. They are not radically different than man; they are just more powerful beings who can use their power to overpower the chaos they came from . . . and overpower other beings like them, as well. Like, other gods. Or humans, who are much weaker. Humans, however, may not be that weak. They may be capable of finding ways within the universe of manipulating these gods, these more powerful beings, to do their bidding. Or, at least, convince them to help in their human causes and agendas and ambitions and aspirations. After all, these gods are themselves creations of the universe itself, and who knows if there are mechanisms in that universe of controlling those gods? The gods themselves are still discovering their potential; what of humans find a potential way of controlling the gods. And, even better, what if powerful human rulers discover these ways, and use the gods to establish their power over an increasing multitudes of people? We are used to think of paganism as something that is basically the same as Christianity – it’s just their gods are rather smaller and weaker. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The reality is, paganism is very deliberately opposed to Christianity. Why? Because paganism needs its weak gods; they are needed to serve men and especially human rulers. Pagans elect their gods and don’t allow anything to be a god unless they have approved of it and it has proven to be useful to them. (Read Tertullian’s Apology to have a good laugh of how he presents and mocks pagans for their religions. Also, read Greek mythology to see the real development of all such paganism to its logical end.) So far so good. Christianity chooses to have a God out of this universe Who intervenes in the universe, and pagans – and atheists and agnostics with them – choose to declare such a God either non-existent or irrelevant to whatever happens within the universe. That is, both of these categories – and they are actually one and the same category, anti-Christians – have to postulate a universe that is closed to any outside being. No transfer of energy is allowed, inward or outward. No communication is allowed, inward or outward. No exchange of information is allowed, inward or outward. We all live in a closed system, and there is no recourse above and outside the universe. If you have a problem and no resources within the universe can solve it, too bad for ya. You have no one to complain to. Well, perhaps you can complain to your gods, but, remember, they are just as limited within the same universe as you are, and are subject to the same ultimate limitations. Their ceiling may be higher than yours, but it is certainly not higher than the end of the universe. And they can’t overcome their own nature of created being. Or, rather, haphazardly evolved. To quote Colin Feltham from his book, Keeping Ourselves in the Dark, We evolved haphazardly within a random universe; no purpose underpins us, no God watches over us, and no assured glorious future awaits us. . . . We can make ourselves as comfortable as possible, as doctors tell their terminally ill patients, but we are sadly incurable. Now stop and think: If that closed universe was a reality, could man really hope that such universe really contains solutions to his problems? I mean, perhaps solutions to some individual problems may exist in the same haphazard manner he and his gods have evolved. But can he hope that there is a systematic solution to all his problem in a manner that is both predictable and practical? Why would there be such a solution? Why would anyone expect that a universe that spawned man as a secondary byproduct would care to contain solutions for him? Why would there be any relation between the needs of a product of chance, and the inner workings and nature of the universe? It doesn’t make sense, does it, to really expect the impersonal universe to be so benign and favorable to the personal man. In such a view, there can be no hope for long-term progress or long-term prosperity. At least, no intellectually consistent hope. Perhaps there might be some temporary growth, for a relatively short time, based on factors that are purely random. Perhaps mankind may discover a new continent out there that has wide plains with arable land. Perhaps there may be an improvement in the climate which will last for a few hundred years. Perhaps somewhere, randomly and by accident, some new device will be found that will increase productivity – although, there is no reason to believe that that can happen on a systematic and predictable basis. But mankind is stupid, in general, and every time such positive event occurs, men will use it not to increase their personal prosperity but to produce more offspring. And then, of course, the opposite trend will hit, and humans will suffer once more, and worse than before. In the final account, all resources will be spent, and humanity will disappear. A pagan who is consistent with his view of a closed universe has no reason to believe that that closed universe holds anything but more misery and eventually extinction. In short, there is a good reason why, in every pagan mythology, the Golden Age is in the past, not in the future; obviously, given the presuppositions of all paganism, there is no reason to believe that the future holds any systematic improvement for mankind. Time to push the antithesis now. What does Christianity say about this? What is the Christian view of long-term population growth, resource availability, and prosperity? What is the Christian view of the universe: is it open or closed? Is there a source of resources that we can draw on, that we don’t have available now, or are we chained to whatever we see around us today? As I have always said, the Christian worldview is covenantal, and covenantal means ethical/judicial. That means, we can’t grasp God as He is, but we can know Him from His works and, more importantly, from His commandments. When it comes to population growth, His commandment is given at the very beginning of the Bible, as part of the Creation Covenant with man: “be fruitful and multiply.” Population growth is not a technical question to be decided in the context of economic factors; it is the ultimate covenantal – and therefore the ultimate moral, judicial, economic, aesthetic, environmental, etc. – imperative that mankind is under obligation to obey. Fail to obey that one, and nothing else matters. You can find any excuse in all kinds of factors, and try to control population growth, or condemn population growth, or present population growth as evil or dangerous or foolish; but the commandment remains: Be fruitful and multiply. There may be temporary measures for times of trouble, as Paul mentions in 1 Cor. 7, but as a principle, and in the long run, population growth is a command, and failing to obey the command will make God change the whole context – economic, financial, environmental, political, etc. – that the worst consequences will come no matter how well you have planned against them. That’s the nature of covenant theology and covenant reality: Disobedience never brings the results it has been rationalized for. But what about prosperity? God specifically says that prosperity will come with population growth. Deuteronomy 28:11 is perfectly clear about the parallel growth of both: “The LORD will make you abound in prosperity, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your beast and in the produce of your ground, in the land which the LORD swore to your fathers to give you.” See that? Abound both in prosperity and in the offspring of your body. Not one or the other but both. So mankind is explicitly commanded to be fruitful and multiply, and it is explicitly told that high birth rates will go together with increasing prosperity. That is the given presupposition behind the Christian view of population and resources; the truth that the Christian heart is commanded to chose. Only then, the Christian mind is expected to rationalize it, based on the Biblical evidence. That’s the way covenantal thinking works. Then how does a Christian answer the pagan objection? How does a Christian rationalize his beliefs on this issue when countering the pagan argument that population growth depletes the available resources, and therefore increasing prosperity is impossible with increasing population? The answer, of course, is this: Our universe is not closed. Therefore, the limit on resources is not internal to it; it doesn’t depend on anything inside the universe. It depend on an external source. Transfer of energy between the inside and the outside of the universe is possible, and has happened many times. In fact, that’s the regular way our universe operates. How can we say this? The first and most obvious reason we can say this is because the Bible is clear that God can intervene in His universe with an infinite amount of resources and energy, as He wants. Now, there are some even in Christian circles who claim that because God has finished His creating the world, therefore He is not creating anymore energy to put in it when He pleases. All that the universe is driven by is the laws of nature operating on the resources of nature as God has established them in the beginning. Such a claim, however, flatly contradicts the Biblical record. God intervenes in history with a multitude of miracles . . . and what is a miracle if not God intervening in His universe with His own, freshly created energy? The objection may be, “Well, He is only directing already created energy, not creating new energy.” The answer to this is, Even if it was so, energy control in itself requires energy. Resources control requires resources. In fact, we can argue that there is nothing really “natural” in the universe. What we consider “natural laws” are nothing more than the statistically most common and predictable way God governs His universe; but He always preserves for Himself the power and the privilege to change His ways of governing as He pleases. Thus, what we call “miracles.” All this is good as a conjecture, but will God really intervene miraculously to produce more resources for an obedient and growing population? Can we safely bet on such intervention. Absolutely. In fact, it is specifically promised in the very next verse after Deut. 28:11 I just read earlier. It is in the next verse, 12: “The LORD will open for you His good storehouse, the heavens, to give rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hand. . . .” So God promised that He would personally intervene in the universe to transfer more resources into it. That’s a promise. He will make our fields and our work in them more productive by miraculous intervention. that’s what an open universe is all about. But there is more. It is not just about His direct intervention. It is more than that. The word “productive” I just mentioned is another clue. “Productivity” has to do with the ratio of resources used to capital goods and sevices produced. The less resources, and the more goods and services, the higher the productivity. God promised that He would directly open His storehouse and would improve productivity. But He has still another way – and indirect way – to intervene in the universe and improve productivity. Namely, through His image. Man was created in His image, and thus, man carries what theologians and philosophers may want to call a “divine spark” in man. I personally dislike the term, but I can use it for the limiter purposes I have here. That “divine spark” in man is not divinity in itself – man can’t comprehend God, can’t grasp God, and man can’t approach divinity or God. (I wiull talk about the practical importance of this fact in a future episode.) But man can know God through His works, and can know God’s works, and can know how God works in His universe. Specifically, man can understand how resources work and how they transform into real, useful goods and services. And man can then control and regulate – that is, take dominion – that process, and learn how to make it more productive. In short, because of the image of God in man, man can grow in knowledge and discover newer ways of transforming energy into goods, and raw resources into food, and thus overcome what now seems to be a necessary limit on the expansion of mankind. Or even shorter: the image of God in man laughs at Malthus’s closed-universe paganism. The end of history will not be economic. It will come not because we have run out of resources – although, the limit on resources may theoretically point to an end of history. The end will be covenantal: it will come because the chuch has fulfilled the Great Commission and has made the whole world submit to Christ, and has made all His enemies His footstool. This is the end and the purpose of the Gospel teaching. So, on one hand, we have paganism (and atheism with it), which is by its very nature closed-universe – at least those pagans who are consistent with their paganism. On the other hand, we have Christianity, which is by its very nature open-universe – at least those Christians that are consistent with their Christianity. Over the centuries, the closed-universe worldview of paganism has been declining with the growth of Christianity. We should expect, then, that in the last century and a half, with the decline of the Christian faith in the West, we should see a resurgence of the pagan view of a closed universe. Do we see such resurgence? We surely do, and that in many forms. Malthus was only an early prophet of the newly revived closed-universe paganism. He was followed by many others. Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin, the two intellectual fathers of modern evolutionism and “natual selection” were deeply influenced by Malthus. Darwin’s subtitle to his book, The Preservation of Favoured Races, was strictly Malthusian, based on the idea of species and races, including human races, striving to grab a larger chunk of the available limited resources. Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer applied Malthusian analysis to society. Both colonial wars and World War I were entirely motivated by the intellectual belief that each nation and race were fighting for survival in an evolutionary framework which required that the remaining few resources were allocated to those who were most powerful to get them. Hitler’s rise in Germany can’t be understood without understanding the prevalent Malthusian view in Germany that without “living space” (“Lebensraum”), the German nation would be condemned to extinction. Several historians of Nazi Germany have pointed out Hitler’s obsession with “scarce resources”; much of his political rhetoric against foreign countries and Jews was motivated by his belief that there was a world Jewish conspiracy to deprive Germany of the resources she rightly had a claim on. Contrary to what many people imagine, Malthusianism was the worldview at the heart of almost all politics and political ideologies in the 19th and the 20th century, and, as we will see, it continues to govern today’s politics as well, including the politics and the views of Donald Trump. Karl Marx was a strange exception to that rule. He criticized Malthus for his views. But remember, as we have seen before, Marx was deeply influenced by the optimism of the Christian worldview, and he had tried to include a secularist version of it in his system. Those of you who have listened to a previous episode, “The Oxymoron of Cultural Marxism,” know that the technological development of the tools of production is the active element in the evolution of man and man’s society. Marx couldn’t explain why tools will develop to higher productivity, he just took it for granted after having borowed it fom the Christian worldview. But after taking it for granted, he criticizes Malthus on the basis of that belief: that Malthus didn’t take in account the evolution in productivity which technology can bring about. Marx was right about it, of course, but he was inconsistent. In everything lelse, he still stuck to a closed-universe paganism. When he got, for example, to explain his projected “crisis of capitalism,” he said that it would be a crisis of “surplus production,” when capitalists will have produced more than the working masses could buy, which would lead to mass bankruptcy, mass impoverishment, and consequently, a socialist revolution. Strangely enough, in this prediction, he didn’t seem to remember his own expectations that the same technology that will lead to greater productivity and “sulrplus production” will allow both lower prices and higher wages, and thus the result will be not a crisis but increased prosperity. And the very idea that “surplus production” will lead to poverty is rather laughable, if you think about it. So while theoretically Marx objected to Malthus, in pactice, he was just as Malthusian as anyone else, and so were his followers, for the most part. The most vehement Malthusians in the United States have always been the labor unions; for a long time, the concept of “depleting resources” was a central concept of their ideology, and all their activism was directed at keeping those shrinking resources in the hands of a few people. The 20th century, however, saw some other examples of closed-universe paganism that we don’t always connect to a closed universe; and many of them are still with us today, and still dictate the policies of our politicians, and, I am ashamed to say, the political views of the majority of Christians in the US. One of them, of course, is birth control. Now, eugenics has been a prevalent part of Western politics ever since the 1850s; socialist countries like Sweden had stict eugenicist policies for decades. Nazi Germany practiced birth control on a large scale: Whole populations were sterilized or exterminated, while “Nordic race” women were sometimes forced to sleep with “Nordic race” men and have children. The main proponent of birth control in the English-speaking world was, of course, Margaret Sanger, and her writings are full of references to Malthus. In fact, she became a renown speaker for what was called at the time – mark the name – The Neo-Malthusian Society, and the conferences she spoke at were directly named Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conferences. And Sanger herself proudly bore the name Malthusian scientist. Over the last one century, Planned Parenthood gradually dropped the conspicuous relation to Malthus, but their ideology has remained essentially Malthusian. Another area where closed-universe paganism has been raising its ugly head has been environmental sciences and activism. Now, there is nothing wrong with environmental sciences and with a concern about the pollution; after all, you all surely remember a recent episode of Axe to the Root titled, “Technology and the Environment.” But environmental sciences that study to protect the environment in the context of population and economic growth is one thing. Environmentalism that tries to stop growth in the name of “protecting nature” is another thing. The very concept of “protecting nature” is already pagan because it assumes that mankind and its economic progress are not part of nature. And since nature outside man is the normative foundation, then the universe is even double-closed: there can be no legitimate intervention by God to improve things, and there can be no legitimate intervention by man to improve things. The only “improvement” is a return to a world with zero growth. Modern environmentalism often aligns with the socialists in modern politics, and, in fact, it has a great deal of overlapping. One thing is common for both of them, and that is a hatred for capitalism. We all have seen how many times proponents of the different environmentalist scares (the ozone hole, global warming, etc.) have admitted that their agenda amounts to nothing lkess than destruciton of capitalism. There is a good reason for that: They all associate capitalism with freedom of competition, and rightly so. Most of us have this idea that what socialists hate about capitalism is the profits. In reality, what they hate is competition. Environmentalists also hate competition, and there is a philosophical reason for it: if the universe is closed and resources are limited, then pushing one competitor out of the market will mean total control over scarce resources by the successful competitor. Now, under the open-universe view of Christianity, competition is not about control over resources; such control is meaningless in a world of constantly increasing productivity where resources play smaller and smaller role – smaller and smaller quantities – in producing more and more output. Competition is about determining the best possible use of resources, while re-directing inefficient effort to better use. In the simplest terms, if two cobblers make shoes and one makes them faster and at a lower price, the other cobbler is in the wrong business. There is another niche on the market that needs his skills, and shoes are not it. Thus, competition, under the open-universe view, only makes the world more efficient and increases the many different ways people can serve their neighbors. Perhaps the inefficient cobbler’s real market skill is to produce something else, or to be a musician, or an inventor, or who knows what else. When pushed out of the market of making shoes, he is forced to find the best application of his true abilities. The closed universe ideology’s hatred of competition is expressed in many different ways, but the two most common today are the fear of free immigration and the fear of free trade. Trade restrictions (tariffs and quotas) have always been justified with “protecting our producers against unfaor competition.” There is, of course, nothing “unfair” in the compeition – unfair is only the government compulsion on the consumers to pay higher prices. But closed-universe paganism always sees competition as “unfair,” based on its foundational presuppositions. If you want to understand Donald Trump’s ideas about China and the trade wars, you need to understand that in his mind, there is no such thing as a win-win situation: If China is making profit, then it must be only because America is losing. The way to make America win, we need to make China lose. Zero-sum game is just another logical extension of the zero growth ideology. Immigration restrictions are, of course, the twin brother of trade restrictions. After all, goods and labor are the two principal economic resources. And just like trade protectionism, immigration restrictions have always been sold as protecting the domestic population against competition. Whether it is competition for scace jobs, or competition for welfare, or political and cultural competition for whose values will control the society, the philosophy behind immigration restrictions have always been one or another version of closed-universe paganism: We just don’t have that many resources for so many people to come and comopete for them. Thus, immigration restrictions are simply another form of that paganism, together with abortion, socialist control of the economy, and environmentalist zero-growth policies. With the resurgence of the closed-universe paganism, Malthus’s influence on modern politics has increased. Almost solely responsible for the growth of that influence is an American physician and political activist whoise name is not very well-known among the general public, and certainly not among the Christian and conservative public. That is mostly because he is a far left activist, and has kept low profile for the last 50 years. His name is John Tanton, and he has been a devout follower of Thomas Maltus and Margaret Sanger. Tanton is a radical believer in zero growth: so radical, in fact, that in many lectures and articles he has blasted the environmentalist concept of “sustainable growth” as “unrealistic” and “oxymoron.” In his view, no growth is sustainable; only complete stagnation and zero gowth can be sustainable. Tanton started his political activism back in the 1960s, with financial and political support from the billionaire Warren Buffet and a leftist politician, the Democrat Eugene McCarthy. Tanton started with being instrumental in founding and expanding several local chapters for the Sierra Club (a leftist environmental organization) and Planned Parenthood. He also became the president of an organization called Zero Population Growth (it changed its name to Population Connection in 2002): the organization is committed to fight population growth and advocates, US government support for abortion worldwide, sex education in schools, and government population control, including mandatory abortions. In 1979, Tanton left Zero Population Growth and directed some of his effort towards reducing and even stopping immighration to the United States. He started several organizations, with each one desiged to targer a specific niche of the political market – conservatives, liberals, libertarians, socialists, etc. Among his immigration control organizations are the Federation for American Immigration Reform (designed to appeal to the leftist part of the spectrum and the trade unions), NumbersUSA, and Center for Immigration Studies (both designed to appeal to the Christian and conservative part of the spectrum). Those of you who have been immersed in the immigration debate of the last several years, you may remember the “gum-ball illustration” of why immigration is bad. That “illustration” was entirely the work of John Tanton. Tanton also held racist and eugenicist views, and at least for a short time in the 1960s advocated for mass sterilization for certain racial groups based on IQ results. (He stopped using that argument after the 1960s.) His work has been so successful, that he has been able to lure even Christians to abandon their traditional views on population control and immigration, and adopt his pagan worldview. The conservative shift on immigration can be almost entirely ascribed to his efforts. In one man, we have all of the closed-universe paganism, making a comeback: environmentalism, eugenics, population control, zero growth, trade and immigration control, fear of competition. And churches and Christians have been deceived to buy into it. The apostasy from Biblical Christianity has led to the emergence of the closed-universe paganism again, and it is the dominating idea of our society today. To restore the Gospel preaching in our day, and to restore Christendom, we need to attack paganism in every area. And the paganism of a closed universe is part of it. I know, most of you all still can’t figure out how we are supposed to do that. But give this episode some time to ferment in your minds. You will start seeing the problem more clearly, now that you know of it. The reading assigned for this week is The Population Bomb by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. This is a book written by our opponents, keep that in mind. It was piblished in 1968 and it predcited mass starvationin the world in the 1970s and the 1980s, based on the ideas of the closed-universe paganism of which we talked in this episode. Of course, reading the predictions in the book from the perspective of our rising prosperity today when the wold throws away more food every year than it produced back in 1968 will be a fun experience. But while reading, also pay attention to the worldview behind it. Keep in mind that, at the time, it was powerful enough to shape policies, and continues to shape policies even today, 40 years after the book has been proven to be pure garbage. Never underestimate the power of a worldview, even if that worldview has been proven wrong many times. In your prayer and financial support for ministries, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe through translating and publishing Christian books on the application of the Gospel to every area of life. Yes, including economics and economic analysis; and, yes, the Gospel speaks to those issues, too. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post Paganism, Conservationism, and Fear of Competition appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description “The image of God in man laughs at Malthus’s closed-universe paganism. The end of history will not be economic. It will come not because we have run out of resources . . . . The end will be covenantal: it will come because the church has fulfilled the Great Commission and has made the whole world submit to Christ, and has made all His enemies His footstool. Assigned reading: Paul and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Bomb Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 82 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will cover one of the greatest fears of our time, and the religious foundation of that fear. In previous episodes we saw that fear is the most powerful emotion people experience, and, judging from its prominence in the Bible, it is also the most important. We also saw that fear itself has a religious foundation and nature; and more than that, it is also a religion itself. (Ever been in a situation where you tell people paralyzed by fear that they shouldn’t be afraid, only to see them lash at you as if you were some sort of a heretic?) In 1798, an English pastor and scholar, Thomas Robert Malthus, published a book: An Essay on the Principle of Population. On the surface, it was just another scholarly thesis that came out of the Enlightenment. Of the right wing of the Enlightenment, to be precise, the one prevalent in England and Scotland and Prussia and Hanover, not the left wing, prevalent in France and Italy. The Enlightenment’s standards for all scholarship were that it was supposed to be as technical and mathematical as science, and, most importantly, free of any ethical values and considerations. Yes, even the right wing Enlightenment, the one that was driven by church ministers (as was Malthus himself) and used religious language and rhetoric as its justification. From this Enlightenment perspective, Malthus’s book was the perfect scholarly thesis. His topic was simple: the relationship between food production and population growth. It wasn’t anything new, to be sure, others before had tried that topic as well. It was a particularly common topic among the educated elite of revolutionary France – after all, that’s how the French Revolution started, with the people starving because of an alleged depletion of the resources for  food production. A few revolutionary leaders argued that for France to remain full and content, about a quarter of the population should be exterminated to match the land available for food production. These ideas were, however, a little too extreme even for the French taste at the time; besides, most of their proponents – like Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton – were themselves guillotined. Similar ideas were floated in Prussia as well, although the Prussian monarchy, always in need of more soldiers, never took them seriously. So Malthus was not writing in a vacuum, the topic had already become “hot” among Enlightenment theorists on both right and left. He was, however, destined to become the father of a whole new trend with his theory. Why? Because he was much better educated than all previous writers, he was capable to write about in a perfectly technical, rather disinterested way (quite creepy, given the horrible bloodthirsty advice he was giving the political elite), and he was writing in a country that was politically stable and socially stratified, where scholars and church ministers like him had quite an audience and influence. He had the privilege of coming from a well-educated family, as well. His father, Daniel Malthus, was a non-Conformist (probably from an old Puritan family) and personal friend of men like David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Thomas took orders in the Church of England, contrary to his father’s religious views, probably to avoid the non-conformist disabilities and be able to take positions as a college professor. There was also another point where he disagreed with his father: unlike his father, who was a staunch optimist about the future, Thomas was a pessimist. And his book was the ultimate expression of his pessimistic views. In a very short sentence, the thesis of the Essay on the Principle of Population is that the prospects for humanity are bleak. Why? Because, as Malthus explained in mathematical terms, while the world’s population grows geometrically, the means for food production only grow arithmetically. That is the simplest and most popular way of presenting his thesis. In reality, however, his thesis was a little more complicated. He had to make it more complicated in order to add respectable Christina religious language to it, in order to conceal his true intentions. A fuller explanation of his thesis would be this: There is a certain number of population that matches the available resources for food production. However, when food production increases, mankind – and especially the lower classes of mankind – are not wise enough to maintain the same stable rate of human reproduction with the purpose of achieving higher standard of life. Instead, they are stupid enough to start reproducing more and more, exponentially. Eventually that exponential human reproduction catches up with and even overtakes food production, and people, even with the new and higher level of food production, are left much poorer and hungrier than before. That point where human reproduction catches up with food production has come to be called Malthusian catastrophe by sociologists, and the level at which the excess population stops growing due to shortage of food is called Malthusian trap. In short, all that Malthus’s analysis promised humanity was inevitable suffering in the future, marked by short periods of prosperity which, because of the very nature of humanity – especially of the poorer humanity – will inevitably lead to more and worse suffering. When he came to his policy proposals, he had to conceal the true nature of his religion under a lot of pious verbiage. He used long-winded phrases and metaphoric language for regular phrases (for example, “virtuous affection” instead of “marriage,” etc.) to satisfy the spirit of the time and especially the academic spirit of the time; but to make his proposals acceptable, he had to pretend that his motives were honest and virtuous. When asked why God would create a world of limited resources for a growing population, his answer was that this was so that God teaches us prudence in procreation. But under the verbose expression of love and concern for the poor and needy, he practically declared that the political elite must do everything they could to prevent the masses from achieving any sort of prosperity, even if that meant artificially created shortages. He was in favor of government taxes on food so high as to keep sufficiency of food beyond the reach of the average family; in his view, the masses of people needed to be kept at the brink of starvation even in years of abundant crops. In his pious language, it was better to be poor than foolish and use the abundance for more irresponsible procreation. He didn’t even shy of recommending violent death as a final measure; since natural famine and pestilence didn’t always do their job in regulating the population, he believed governments should finish the job by starting wars just for the sake of thinning out the population. In the final account, behind the seemingly dispassionate academic language, there was evil. His proposals, no matter how dressed they were in religious lingo, smacked of the ideology of the ancient pagan empires, especially the Biblical Assyria. The last time Europe had encountered such ideas and policies was in the last three decades of the 14th century when Tamerlane, a distant relative of Genghis Khan, tried to restore the Mongol Empire. Tamerlane was so systematic in exterminating whole populations that he beat even Genghis Khan himself. However, ever since the 14th century, no one in the known world ever used such policies nor advocated for them, not even the Ottoman Turks. (They had their share of atrocities but, in general, the Sultans viewed conquered populations as sheep to be bred and milked and sheared, not as vermin to be destroyed.) Malthus brought back to life ideas that everyone before him thought should have passed away with the passing of paganism. I will touch later on the influence of Malthus’s ideas in the last two centuries, and especially in our day. But before we do that, we need to first look into the religious origin of these ideas, and especially into the religious climate these ideas both require, and help create or recreate. Where did he get his ideas from? Is it possible that a Christian scholar come up with such ideology of cruelty? Is there really a Christian justification for Malthusianism, and Malthus claimed? Or could there be something else behind it, religiously? We all know that ideas have consequences. But I have argued before, in some of my articles, that ideas are themselves consequences of something deeper and greater than ideology – namely, faith. Ideology is always based on some religion, and even when we present our ideas in a seemingly rational and unbiased and academic form, they are still religious in their origin. There is still some deep moral commitment, some deep religious impulse that drives our ideology. I can bring in tons of quotes from Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen here to illustrate what I am talking about, but I prefer this short phrase by Dennis Peacocke which beautifully explains presuppositional epistemology in general and my argument here: “The mind only justifies what the heart has already chosen.” So, what was it that Malthus’s heart had chosen that his mind masterfully justified in that book? I have a name for the religion behind his thesis: Paganism of a Closed Universe. Or, a Closed-Universe Paganism, if you wish. Those who have studied physics know that I am borrowing a term from physics: Closed System. A closed system is a system that doesn’t allow the transfer of mass or energy in or out of the system. In the same way, a closed universe is a universe that does not allow any transfer of energy in or out of the universe. All that there is, is inside the universe; if there is anything or anyone outside that universe – like a God or something – it or He is irrelevant to the system and its working, and can neither bring anything in nor take anything out of it. For the people within the system, they are stuck with whatever energy and other resources they already have available, and nothing more. From there, good luck. If we are to be consistent, of course, all paganism is closed-universe paganism. Yes, yes, I know, there have been pagans in the last two centuries who did not believe in a closed universe, and have been rather optimistic about humanity. But, as I will later mention, they have all been like that only because of the residues of Christian worldview they have adopted from their culture. But when paganism is consistent, without any influence from Christianity, it must necessarily be closed-universe. Why am I saying this? What is paganism, ultimately? It is the rejection of the belief in one God, Creator of heaven and earth, Who is outside time and space and controls time and space. For paganism to make any sense, such God must be entirely excluded from existence. Or, at the very least, of any consideration. He must be irrelevant to the universe in which we live. Such a God is dangerous to any paganism. Why? Because, by definition, He must be radically different from humans, who live inside the universe. God Who is outside the universe and intervenes in the universe is a God Who can not be grasped or comprehended by humans – and especially by human rulers, which is the more important part of it. He would be, therefore, a God that can’t be controlled or manipulated by humans. He wouldn’t need human permission to exist or to be relevant or to have any influence in human societies. Even worse, He wouldn’t need the permission of human authorities to do it. Once such a god is allowed to exist or be relevant to human thought and action, all the other gods cease to be relevant. Oh, and did I mention, all human authorities cease to be relevant, except if they cease to be authorities and become servants of that God. Paganism then, even if it uses the same word for its magical beings (“god”), is radically different from Christianity. As a matter of fact, given that very important difference, atheism is not different from any religion; it is right there, in the same basket as all paganism. It basically believes the same things as any paganism. For paganism to exist as a system of thought and belief, it needs gods who are inside the universe itself. The universe first existed, preferably in the form of chaos. (For if there was order in the beginning, that might smack of a pre-existent God Creator.) For whatever reason, movements within that original chaos produce the first divine beings – but, remember, those divine beings came out of that pre-existing universe. They are creations, just like man is. They are not radically different than man; they are just more powerful beings who can use their power to overpower the chaos they came from . . . and overpower other beings like them, as well. Like, other gods. Or humans, who are much weaker. Humans, however, may not be that weak. They may be capable of finding ways within the universe of manipulating these gods, these more powerful beings, to do their bidding. Or, at least, convince them to help in their human causes and agendas and ambitions and aspirations. After all, these gods are themselves creations of the universe itself, and who knows if there are mechanisms in that universe of controlling those gods? The gods themselves are still discovering their potential; what of humans find a potential way of controlling the gods. And, even better, what if powerful human rulers discover these ways, and use the gods to establish their power over an increasing multitudes of people? We are used to think of paganism as something that is basically the same as Christianity – it’s just their gods are rather smaller and weaker. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The reality is, paganism is very deliberately opposed to Christianity. Why? Because paganism needs its weak gods; they are needed to serve men and especially human rulers. Pagans elect their gods and don’t allow anything to be a god unless they have approved of it and it has proven to be useful to them. (Read Tertullian’s Apology to have a good laugh of how he presents and mocks pagans for their religions. Also, read Greek mythology to see the real development of all such paganism to its logical end.) So far so good. Christianity chooses to have a God out of this universe Who intervenes in the universe, and pagans – and atheists and agnostics with them – choose to declare such a God either non-existent or irrelevant to whatever happens within the universe. That is, both of these categories – and they are actually one and the same category, anti-Christians – have to postulate a universe that is closed to any outside being. No transfer of energy is allowed, inward or outward. No communication is allowed, inward or outward. No exchange of information is allowed, inward or outward. We all live in a closed system, and there is no recourse above and outside the universe. If you have a problem and no resources within the universe can solve it, too bad for ya. You have no one to complain to. Well, perhaps you can complain to your gods, but, remember, they are just as limited within the same universe as you are, and are subject to the same ultimate limitations. Their ceiling may be higher than yours, but it is certainly not higher than the end of the universe. And they can’t overcome their own nature of created being. Or, rather, haphazardly evolved. To quote Colin Feltham from his book, Keeping Ourselves in the Dark, We evolved haphazardly within a random universe; no purpose underpins us, no God watches over us, and no assured glorious future awaits us. . . . We can make ourselves as comfortable as possible, as doctors tell their terminally ill patients, but we are sadly incurable. Now stop and think: If that closed universe was a reality, could man really hope that such universe really contains solutions to his problems? I mean, perhaps solutions to some individual problems may exist in the same haphazard manner he and his gods have evolved. But can he hope that there is a systematic solution to all his problem in a manner that is both predictable and practical? Why would there be such a solution? Why would anyone expect that a universe that spawned man as a secondary byproduct would care to contain solutions for him? Why would there be any relation between the needs of a product of chance, and the inner workings and nature of the universe? It doesn’t make sense, does it, to really expect the impersonal universe to be so benign and favorable to the personal man. In such a view, there can be no hope for long-term progress or long-term prosperity. At least, no intellectually consistent hope. Perhaps there might be some temporary growth, for a relatively short time, based on factors that are purely random. Perhaps mankind may discover a new continent out there that has wide plains with arable land. Perhaps there may be an improvement in the climate which will last for a few hundred years. Perhaps somewhere, randomly and by accident, some new device will be found that will increase productivity – although, there is no reason to believe that that can happen on a systematic and predictable basis. But mankind is stupid, in general, and every time such positive event occurs, men will use it not to increase their personal prosperity but to produce more offspring. And then, of course, the opposite trend will hit, and humans will suffer once more, and worse than before. In the final account, all resources will be spent, and humanity will disappear. A pagan who is consistent with his view of a closed universe has no reason to believe that that closed universe holds anything but more misery and eventually extinction. In short, there is a good reason why, in every pagan mythology, the Golden Age is in the past, not in the future; obviously, given the presuppositions of all paganism, there is no reason to believe that the future holds any systematic improvement for mankind. Time to push the antithesis now. What does Christianity say about this? What is the Christian view of long-term population growth, resource availability, and prosperity? What is the Christian view of the universe: is it open or closed? Is there a source of resources that we can draw on, that we don’t have available now, or are we chained to whatever we see around us today? As I have always said, the Christian worldview is covenantal, and covenantal means ethical/judicial. That means, we can’t grasp God as He is, but we can know Him from His works and, more importantly, from His commandments. When it comes to population growth, His commandment is given at the very beginning of the Bible, as part of the Creation Covenant with man: “be fruitful and multiply.” Population growth is not a technical question to be decided in the context of economic factors; it is the ultimate covenantal – and therefore the ultimate moral, judicial, economic, aesthetic, environmental, etc. – imperative that mankind is under obligation to obey. Fail to obey that one, and nothing else matters. You can find any excuse in all kinds of factors, and try to control population growth, or condemn population growth, or present population growth as evil or dangerous or foolish; but the commandment remains: Be fruitful and multiply. There may be temporary measures for times of trouble, as Paul mentions in 1 Cor. 7, but as a principle, and in the long run, population growth is a command, and failing to obey the command will make God change the whole context – economic, financial, environmental, political, etc. – that the worst consequences will come no matter how well you have planned against them. That’s the nature of covenant theology and covenant reality: Disobedience never brings the results it has been rationalized for. But what about prosperity? God specifically says that prosperity will come with population growth. Deuteronomy 28:11 is perfectly clear about the parallel growth of both: “The LORD will make you abound in prosperity, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your beast and in the produce of your ground, in the land which the LORD swore to your fathers to give you.” See that? Abound both in prosperity and in the offspring of your body. Not one or the other but both. So mankind is explicitly commanded to be fruitful and multiply, and it is explicitly told that high birth rates will go together with increasing prosperity. That is the given presupposition behind the Christian view of population and resources; the truth that the Christian heart is commanded to chose. Only then, the Christian mind is expected to rationalize it, based on the Biblical evidence. That’s the way covenantal thinking works. Then how does a Christian answer the pagan objection? How does a Christian rationalize his beliefs on this issue when countering the pagan argument that population growth depletes the available resources, and therefore increasing prosperity is impossible with increasing population? The answer, of course, is this: Our universe is not closed. Therefore, the limit on resources is not internal to it; it doesn’t depend on anything inside the universe. It depend on an external source. Transfer of energy between the inside and the outside of the universe is possible, and has happened many times. In fact, that’s the regular way our universe operates. How can we say this? The first and most obvious reason we can say this is because the Bible is clear that God can intervene in His universe with an infinite amount of resources and energy, as He wants. Now, there are some even in Christian circles who claim that because God has finished His creating the world, therefore He is not creating anymore energy to put in it when He pleases. All that the universe is driven by is the laws of nature operating on the resources of nature as God has established them in the beginning. Such a claim, however, flatly contradicts the Biblical record. God intervenes in history with a multitude of miracles . . . and what is a miracle if not God intervening in His universe with His own, freshly created energy? The objection may be, “Well, He is only directing already created energy, not creating new energy.” The answer to this is, Even if it was so, energy control in itself requires energy. Resources control requires resources. In fact, we can argue that there is nothing really “natural” in the universe. What we consider “natural laws” are nothing more than the statistically most common and predictable way God governs His universe; but He always preserves for Himself the power and the privilege to change His ways of governing as He pleases. Thus, what we call “miracles.” All this is good as a conjecture, but will God really intervene miraculously to produce more resources for an obedient and growing population? Can we safely bet on such intervention. Absolutely. In fact, it is specifically promised in the very next verse after Deut. 28:11 I just read earlier. It is in the next verse, 12: “The LORD will open for you His good storehouse, the heavens, to give rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hand. . . .” So God promised that He would personally intervene in the universe to transfer more resources into it. That’s a promise. He will make our fields and our work in them more productive by miraculous intervention. that’s what an open universe is all about. But there is more. It is not just about His direct intervention. It is more than that. The word “productive” I just mentioned is another clue. “Productivity” has to do with the ratio of resources used to capital goods and sevices produced. The less resources, and the more goods and services, the higher the productivity. God promised that He would directly open His storehouse and would improve productivity. But He has still another way – and indirect way – to intervene in the universe and improve productivity. Namely, through His image. Man was created in His image, and thus, man carries what theologians and philosophers may want to call a “divine spark” in man. I personally dislike the term, but I can use it for the limiter purposes I have here. That “divine spark” in man is not divinity in itself – man can’t comprehend God, can’t grasp God, and man can’t approach divinity or God. (I wiull talk about the practical importance of this fact in a future episode.) But man can know God through His works, and can know God’s works, and can know how God works in His universe. Specifically, man can understand how resources work and how they transform into real, useful goods and services. And man can then control and regulate – that is, take dominion – that process, and learn how to make it more productive. In short, because of the image of God in man, man can grow in knowledge and discover newer ways of transforming energy into goods, and raw resources into food, and thus overcome what now seems to be a necessary limit on the expansion of mankind. Or even shorter: the image of God in man laughs at Malthus’s closed-universe paganism. The end of history will not be economic. It will come not because we have run out of resources – although, the limit on resources may theoretically point to an end of history. The end will be covenantal: it will come because the church has fulfilled the Great Commission and has made the whole world submit to Christ, and has made all His enemies His footstool. This is the end and the purpose of the Gospel teaching. So, on one hand, we have paganism (and atheism with it), which is by its very nature closed-universe – at least those pagans who are consistent with their paganism. On the other hand, we have Christianity, which is by its very nature open-universe – at least those Christians that are consistent with their Christianity. Over the centuries, the closed-universe worldview of paganism has been declining with the growth of Christianity. We should expect, then, that in the last century and a half, with the decline of the Christian faith in the West, we should see a resurgence of the pagan view of a closed universe. Do we see such resurgence? We surely do, and that in many forms. Malthus was only an early prophet of the newly revived closed-universe paganism. He was followed by many others. Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin, the two intellectual fathers of modern evolutionism and “natural selection” were deeply influenced by Malthus. Darwin’s subtitle to his book, The Preservation of Favoured Races, was strictly Malthusian, based on the idea of species and races, including human races, striving to grab a larger chunk of the available limited resources. Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer applied Malthusian analysis to society. Both colonial wars and World War I were entirely motivated by the intellectual belief that each nation and race were fighting for survival in an evolutionary framework which required that the remaining few resources were allocated to those who were most powerful to get them. Hitler’s rise in Germany can’t be understood without understanding the prevalent Malthusian view in Germany that without “living space” (“Lebensraum”), the German nation would be condemned to extinction. Several historians of Nazi Germany have pointed out Hitler’s obsession with “scarce resources”; much of his political rhetoric against foreign countries and Jews was motivated by his belief that there was a world Jewish conspiracy to deprive Germany of the resources she rightly had a claim on. Contrary to what many people imagine, Malthusianism was the worldview at the heart of almost all politics and political ideologies in the 19th and the 20th century, and, as we will see, it continues to govern today’s politics as well, including the politics and the views of Donald Trump. Karl Marx was a strange exception to that rule. He criticized Malthus for his views. But remember, as we have seen before, Marx was deeply influenced by the optimism of the Christian worldview, and he had tried to include a secularist version of it in his system. Those of you who have listened to a previous episode, “The Oxymoron of Cultural Marxism,” know that the technological development of the tools of production is the active element in the evolution of man and man’s society. Marx couldn’t explain why tools will develop to higher productivity, he just took it for granted after having borrowed it from the Christian worldview. But after taking it for granted, he criticizes Malthus on the basis of that belief: that Malthus didn’t take in account the evolution in productivity which technology can bring about. Marx was right about it, of course, but he was inconsistent. In everything else, he still stuck to a closed-universe paganism. When he got, for example, to explain his projected “crisis of capitalism,” he said that it would be a crisis of “surplus production,” when capitalists will have produced more than the working masses could buy, which would lead to mass bankruptcy, mass impoverishment, and consequently, a socialist revolution. Strangely enough, in this prediction, he didn’t seem to remember his own expectations that the same technology that will lead to greater productivity and “surplus production” will allow both lower prices and higher wages, and thus the result will be not a crisis but increased prosperity. And the very idea that “surplus production” will lead to poverty is rather laughable if you think about it. So while theoretically, Marx objected to Malthus, in practice, he was just as Malthusian as anyone else, and so were his followers, for the most part. The most vehement Malthusians in the United States have always been the labor unions; for a long time, the concept of “depleting resources” was a central concept of their ideology, and all their activism was directed at keeping those shrinking resources in the hands of a few people. The 20th century, however, saw some other examples of closed-universe paganism that we don’t always connect to a closed universe; and many of them are still with us today, and still dictate the policies of our politicians, and, I am ashamed to say, the political views of the majority of Christians in the US. One of them, of course, is birth control. Now, eugenics has been a prevalent part of Western politics ever since the 1850s; socialist countries like Sweden had strict eugenicist policies for decades. Nazi Germany practiced birth control on a large scale: Whole populations were sterilized or exterminated, while “Nordic race” women were sometimes forced to sleep with “Nordic race” men and have children. The main proponent of birth control in the English-speaking world was, of course, Margaret Sanger, and her writings are full of references to Malthus. In fact, she became a renown speaker for what was called at the time – mark the name – The Neo-Malthusian Society, and the conferences she spoke at were directly named Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conferences. And Sanger herself proudly bore the name Malthusian scientist. Over the last one century, Planned Parenthood gradually dropped the conspicuous relation to Malthus, but their ideology has remained essentially Malthusian. Another area where closed-universe paganism has been raising its ugly head has been environmental sciences and activism. Now, there is nothing wrong with environmental sciences and with a concern about the pollution; after all, you all surely remember a recent episode of Axe to the Root titled, “Technology and the Environment.” But environmental sciences that study to protect the environment in the context of population and economic growth is one thing. Environmentalism that tries to stop growth in the name of “protecting nature” is another thing. The very concept of “protecting nature” is already pagan because it assumes that mankind and its economic progress are not part of nature. And since nature outside man is the normative foundation, then the universe is even double-closed: there can be no legitimate intervention by God to improve things, and there can be no legitimate intervention by man to improve things. The only “improvement” is a return to a world with zero growth. Modern environmentalism often aligns with the socialists in modern politics, and, in fact, it has a great deal of overlapping. One thing is common for both of them, and that is a hatred for capitalism. We all have seen how many times proponents of the different environmentalist scares (the ozone hole, global warming, etc.) have admitted that their agenda amounts to nothing less than destruction of capitalism. There is a good reason for that: They all associate capitalism with freedom of competition, and rightly so. Most of us have this idea that what socialists hate about capitalism is the profits. In reality, what they hate is competition. Environmentalists also hate competition, and there is a philosophical reason for it: if the universe is closed and resources are limited, then pushing one competitor out of the market will mean total control over scarce resources by the successful competitor. Now, under the open-universe view of Christianity, competition is not about control over resources; such control is meaningless in a world of constantly increasing productivity where resources play smaller and smaller role – smaller and smaller quantities – in producing more and more output. Competition is about determining the best possible use of resources, while re-directing inefficient effort to better use. In the simplest terms, if two cobblers make shoes and one makes them faster and at a lower price, the other cobbler is in the wrong business. There is another niche on the market that needs his skills, and shoes are not it. Thus, competition, under the open-universe view, only makes the world more efficient and increases the many different ways people can serve their neighbors. Perhaps the inefficient cobbler’s real market skill is to produce something else, or to be a musician, or an inventor, or who knows what else. When pushed out of the market of making shoes, he is forced to find the best application of his true abilities. The closed universe ideology’s hatred of competition is expressed in many different ways, but the two most common today are the fear of free immigration and the fear of free trade. Trade restrictions (tariffs and quotas) have always been justified with “protecting our producers against unfair competition.” There is, of course, nothing “unfair” in the competition – unfair is only the government compulsion on the consumers to pay higher prices. But closed-universe paganism always sees competition as “unfair,” based on its foundational presuppositions. If you want to understand Donald Trump’s ideas about China and the trade wars, you need to understand that in his mind, there is no such thing as a win-win situation: If China is making profit, then it must be only because America is losing. The way to make America win, we need to make China lose. Zero-sum game is just another logical extension of the zero growth ideology. Immigration restrictions are, of course, the twin brother of trade restrictions. After all, goods and labor are the two principal economic resources. And just like trade protectionism, immigration restrictions have always been sold as protecting the domestic population against competition. Whether it is competition for scarce jobs, or competition for welfare, or political and cultural competition for whose values will control the society, the philosophy behind immigration restrictions have always been one or another version of closed-universe paganism: We just don’t have that many resources for so many people to come and compete for them. Thus, immigration restrictions are simply another form of that paganism, together with abortion, socialist control of the economy, and environmentalist zero-growth policies. With the resurgence of the closed-universe paganism, Malthus’s influence on modern politics has increased. Almost solely responsible for the growth of that influence is an American physician and political activist whose name is not very well-known among the general public, and certainly not among the Christian and conservative public. That is mostly because he is a far left activist, and has kept low profile for the last 50 years. His name is John Tanton, and he has been a devout follower of Thomas Malthus and Margaret Sanger. Tanton is a radical believer in zero growth: so radical, in fact, that in many lectures and articles he has blasted the environmentalist concept of “sustainable growth” as “unrealistic” and “oxymoron.” In his view, no growth is sustainable; only complete stagnation and zero growth can be sustainable. Tanton started his political activism back in the 1960s, with financial and political support from the billionaire Warren Buffet and a leftist politician, the Democrat Eugene McCarthy. Tanton started with being instrumental in founding and expanding several local chapters for the Sierra Club (a leftist environmental organization) and Planned Parenthood. He also became the president of an organization called Zero Population Growth (it changed its name to Population Connection in 2002): the organization is committed to fight population growth and advocates, US government support for abortion worldwide, sex education in schools, and government population control, including mandatory abortions. In 1979, Tanton left Zero Population Growth and directed some of his effort towards reducing and even stopping immigration to the United States. He started several organizations, with each one designed to target a specific niche of the political market – conservatives, liberals, libertarians, socialists, etc. Among his immigration control organizations are the Federation for American Immigration Reform (designed to appeal to the leftist part of the spectrum and the trade unions), NumbersUSA, and Center for Immigration Studies (both designed to appeal to the Christian and conservative part of the spectrum). Those of you who have been immersed in the immigration debate of the last several years, you may remember the “gum-ball illustration” of why immigration is bad. That “illustration” was entirely the work of John Tanton. Tanton also held racist and eugenicist views, and at least for a short time in the 1960s advocated for mass sterilization for certain racial groups based on IQ results. (He stopped using that argument after the 1960s.) His work has been so successful, that he has been able to lure even Christians to abandon their traditional views on population control and immigration and adopt his pagan worldview. The conservative shift on immigration can be almost entirely ascribed to his efforts. In one man, we have all of the closed-universe paganism, making a comeback: environmentalism, eugenics, population control, zero growth, trade and immigration control, fear of competition. And churches and Christians have been deceived to buy into it. The apostasy from Biblical Christianity has led to the emergence of the closed-universe paganism again, and it is the dominating idea of our society today. To restore the Gospel preaching in our day, and to restore Christendom, we need to attack paganism in every area. And the paganism of a closed universe is part of it. I know, most of you all still can’t figure out how we are supposed to do that. But give this episode some time to ferment in your minds. You will start seeing the problem more clearly, now that you know of it. The reading assigned for this week is The Population Bomb by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. This is a book written by our opponents, keep that in mind. It was published in 1968 and it predicted mass starvation in the world in the 1970s and the 1980s, based on the ideas of the closed-universe paganism of which we talked in this episode. Of course, reading the predictions in the book from the perspective of our rising prosperity today when the world throws away more food every year than it produced back in 1968 will be a fun experience. But while reading, also pay attention to the worldview behind it. Keep in mind that, at the time, it was powerful enough to shape policies, and continues to shape policies even today, 40 years after the book has been proven to be pure garbage. Never underestimate the power of a worldview, even if that worldview has been proven wrong many times. In your prayer and financial support for ministries, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization committed to building the intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe through translating and publishing Christian books on the application of the Gospel to every area of life. Yes, including economics and economic analysis; and, yes, the Gospel speaks to those issues, too. Visit BulgarianReformation.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and donate. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post Paganism, Conservationism, and Fear of Competition appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description Jesus had a view of the future that scandalized both Gentiles and Jews. Assigned Reading: Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview by Gary North Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 81 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will talk about one of the most bizarre concepts the world has ever known. Namely, the future. OK, I know, I lost you right here, at the very beginning. The future is a bizarre concept??? How come? What do you mean, Bo? The future sounds to me as one of the most natural concepts a man can have. We are born thinking of the future, dreaming about the future, imagining what we are going to be in the future, planning for the future. No person has ever found difficult to think of the future and eagerly expect the future. Why would it be “bizarre,” if everyone is so familiar and so comfortable with the concept of the future? What are you talking about? Not so quick. Let’s start thinking here. I suggest that we have always accepted the concept of a the future as natural and normal without thinking why it should be natural and normal. Most of us never even thought what the future is, as a concept. When we dig into that concept, and into the way it is produced and perceived by our minds and hearts, we may discover that it is not as natural and normal as we may have first thought. May be it’s not even not normal, it may be a severe aberration, a mental monstrosity, if the “naturalness” of our minds is to be our standard for “normalcy.” Perhaps we need to stop and consider the possibility that “future” is simply an illusion which we have been poisoned with from an early age. Perhaps it is even a propaganda device meant to manipulate us and control us for certain purposes? Who knows what we can discover if we start thinking about the concept of the future instead of just accepting it on faith. Then again, we may discover that it is just a normal and natural concept, as we have always thought, right? But whatever we discover, it is still worth to start thinking about that concept of the future. It may help us learn things about ourselves and about how our minds operate. And if we learn things about ourselves, we may learn things about our Christian faith. And, as John Calvin said in the first book of his Institutes, once we learn more about ourselves, we end up learning about God. So, what is future? Specifically, what is it as a concept of thought, of philosophy, of psychology, of practical ideology? How do we define it, and where does it comes from? Is it part of our nature to think of the future as a separate category; do all people instinctively adopt it as part of their thought models? Or is it something that we learn from our parents because they learned it from others before them; and therefore, if we had parents from a different culture that didn’t have the concept of future, we wouldn’t even think about it as a valid reality? Reformed Christians, and especially presuppositionalists among my listeners may be fascinated to learn that despite the prevalence of that concept in our every day lives, and in our formal philosophical and ideological systems and endeavors, the concept of the future has been amazingly under-represented in philosophical and psychological studies. Not that there aren’t any studies on it, but the existing ones are way too few for such a common concept, and they are usually limited in scope. Even if you go to Wikipedia and read the article on “Future,” you will see that that article is quite short, with a few sketchy paragraphs on each of the disciplines of physics, philosophy, and religion, and half of the article devoted to side issues like art styles, and music and literary genres that have adopted the concept as foundational (like futurism and science fiction). It even lacks serious references for additional reading: no books, only a few references to marginal encyclopedias and newspaper articles. To compare, the article on “Mysticism,” for example, is about 8 times longer, very detailed and comprehensive, and has about 150 references, all to serious academic studies. And yet, how often is mysticism present as a topic in serious discussions as opposed to the future? The discrepancy is not only in Wikipedia; it is everywhere. Philosophers discuss a whole lot of other subjects, but they somehow always evade discussing the future as a philosophical concept, even though the future is one of the most common concepts the modern man deals with, every day. There were attempts, of course, few and far between. Roger Evered, a British engineer and educator who immigrated to the US in the 1960s, worked as aerospace engineer at McDonnell Douglas, and later taught at several universities and at the Postgraduate Naval College, did try to tackle future as a philosophical concept. His doctoral dissertation with the University of California in Los Angeles in 1973 was titled, “Conceptualizing the ‘Future’: Implications for Strategic Management in a Turbulent Environment.” He later went on to teach Strategic Management, and had to tackle the concept again. Most of his treatment of the concept of the future, however, remained limited to the area of strategic management. Not that there is any problem in such specific application of the concept; but it certainly tends to limit the scope, and Evered ended taking more things for granted than he analyzed and explained. After him, no one really tried to explain the concept from a philosophical perspective. The deepest studies ever tackled the concept in the context of consumer behavior; the 1980s and the 1990s were the culmination of studies on consumer behavior, and expectations of the future were central to any understanding of how the consumers would react to new products or commercials. Still, no scholar dared touch the concept from a more general, philosophical starting point. In that period, the term “philosophy of time” became popular. But despite its popularity, no one really sat down to even give a definition of the concept of the future, let alone study it as a concept. The philosophy of time studies focused mainly either on realism – the metaphysical relation between past, present, and future – or on nominalism – human perception of time and the theory of time preferences (the last one especially important for the study of political economy and entrepreneurship and investment). Again, nothing wrong with these studies, in fact, they are important both practically and theoretically, but . . . a definition of “future” was still not given, and neither was a study of the concept itself presented. The concept of the future was taken for granted, as if it has already been defined and studied, and only its relationship with other concepts was examined. Unique, huh? There is really no other such concept in philosophy that has been treated in such a lousy way. In fact, if anything, secular philosophers have often criticized Christians for not being able to define God (not that God is definable in human terms in the Christian worldview in the first place); and yet, here they are taking for granted a concept that they have never even tried to define. Now, there is a good reason why modern philosophy – especially modern secular philosophy – is incapable of even beginning to define the concept of the future. That reason is that modern philosophy has fallen victim to its foundational premise: that whatever definition or logical rule we use, it cannot refer us us back to anything supernatural, or to any other and higher reason or mind outside and above the human mind and human experience. Everything man uses to define himself and the world around himself must be based on “natural” assumptions, meaning naturalistic assumptions. All the foundations for our definitions must be grounded in man’s direct sensory experience. You know the regular atheist excuse for an argument: “If I can’t see your God, then He is either non-existent or irrelevant.” Philosophers know that such excuse is rather primitive and low-brow, and they seldom use it directly, it is still, as a philosophical presupposition, embedded deeply into the modern secular thought. So when it comes to definitions of things that require some open display of non-sensory faith, philosophers are rather timid to take up the challenge. And indeed, think about it. How can we define the future based on the modern secular thought that requires sensory experience before there is a definition? Why should we be even mindful about the future? Has anyone experienced it? Has anyone seen it? I used that argument with atheists many times: Do you believe there is future? Have you seen it? Can you describe it? Can you define it? The answers were always quite lame, logically. The complaints secularists raise about the Christian God apply to the concept of the future as well: it is only a figment of our imagination, only a conjecture, an extrapolation from misinterpreted evidence (and all of that evidence comes from another imaginary, the concept of the past, but I won’t go there in this episode), no one has seen it or experienced it, really. There is no natural reason for us to even believe there is future, or that it has any relevant significance to anything we do or say or think. The only possible answer to this is that even if we haven’t experienced the future so far, we will surely experience it tomorrow, when it comes . . . but so what? When it comes, it won’t be future anymore, it will be present. To base our definitions on mental expectations, not sensory experience, would be to resort to faith – and why would a secularist philosopher want to base his philosophy on faith? I mean, once you resort to faith for one thing, who knows in how many more definitions you will let faith dictate your perceptions and definitions, and then . . . what is the defense against Christianity and its faith-based philosophy? So, no wonder secularist philosophers avoid defining the future as a concept. They may talk about it, they may take it for granted in their so-called “studies” or “discussions,” they may even try to predict it, but they never know what it is. And it is not just modern secular philosophers. All pagan religions follow the same pattern. Well, of course, all pagan religions are by default naturalistic, given that their “gods” are simply part of the universe itself, and therefore are under the same limitations as man in terms of definitions. How can a pagan god, limited in his very being to the position of simply another being within space and time, experience the future so that he can define it? He may look into a crystal ball and kinda make guesses and predictions and prophecies about it; but would that be a true experience of the future? No. Even if those prophecies were true, and the future happens to be exactly what they prophesied, it would still be no sensory experience of the future; only a word of faith. So pagan religions never talk about the future, it is never a concept that they either define or visualize. In fact, to a great extent, it is something they are afraid of. My favorite example of the classical world is the Aeneid. The Aeneid was a poem written by the Roman poet Virgil, a close friend of the Roman Emperor Octavian Augustus. Augustus, by all accounts, was a very unique Roman, even by the standard of the times. He was the adopted son of Julius Caesar, and these two men – Julius and Octavian – were about the highest and best representation of what was considered traditional Roman moral virtues. If it wasn’t for these two men, the Roman people would never accept the transformation of Rome from republic into empire. But at the time, the Republic had lost its popular appeal because of the corruption and the civil strife and the oppression by the upper classes; while Caesar, and after him Octavian, made it look like an empire will always have at the top a person of exquisite moral qualities plus the political will to implement and achieve a better vision for society. Indeed, from the vision and the courage of Julius Caesar and the practical genius of Octavian Augustus, the Roman Empire was born and was so successful, that 2000+ years later it is still studied as the ultimate example of successful government. (Whether it was or not is a different issue; we are talking perception here.) After his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, was assassinated by a conspiracy of senators who wanted the restoration of the Republic, the civil war in Rome started again. Octavian was only 19 at the time. For the next 14 years, he had to fight first against the assassins who had assembled a large army, and then against his own ally Mark Anthony. He was 33 when he defeated his last enemy, and set out to build an empire that would embody the vision of Caesar. Having come from a lower background (his clan, the Octavia, were plebeians), adopted into the nobility by Caesar, Octavian knew the importance of mass propaganda. So he commissioned his friend, Virgil, to produce a poem that would make Caesar’s and Octavian’s reign to seem like the culmination of the destiny of Rome. Virgil started in 29 BC, and worked on it for 10 years. The result was the Aeneid. I must admit, I have a weakness for it. It is one of the most beautiful historical epics ever written. I only wish I could enjoy its meter in the original Latin; unfortunately, I am not so proficient in the language to appreciate it. I have only read it in the Bulgarian translation, and parts of it in an English translation. It is such a good story that quite a few people are asking, “why in the world hasn’t it been made into a blockbuster movie”? Indeed. You want to have a real feel of Classical literature? Trust me on that, forget Homer. Virgil is better, even though he set out to only imitate Homer. Yes, in the final account he did create government propaganda for his friend Octavian, and that government propaganda was so powerful that Octavian ruled for 45 years as the sole ruler of Rome completely undisturbed by any rival. The masses were so devoted to him that when in his old age he retired from his position of consul for life, the plebs of Rome rioted, believing that it was an aristocratic conspiracy to take him down from power. But government propaganda or not, it was beautiful. There are no such examples today. Anyway, back to the story. The Aeneid was the story of Aeneas, the legendary – or perhaps not so legendary – ancestor of Romulus the founder of Rome, and of the Roman race in general. Aeneas was a Trojan, the son of a mortal prince and the goddess Aphrodite, who fled after the destruction of Troy. He is mentioned in Homer’s Iliad only as a secondary character, although with a hint for a yet-unknown destiny. After he escapes the destruction in Troy, he visits several countries, including Carthage, until he gets to Italy, where he settles among the locals and establishes his line. The beautiful mythology of the early beginning of Rome is intertwined with hints and even direct retrospective prophecies about Julius Caesar and his son Octavian, and their dynasty and the fulfillment of the destiny of Aeneas. The final motif of the poem would have been very clear to any Roman citizen who read it or listened to it: The time has come for the seed of Aeneas to be manifested, and this seed is Octavian Augustus. Sounds heroic and optimistic, right? Sounds like full of bright expectation for the future. Like a promise for growth, and progress, and many more good things in the future, now that the true heir of Aeneas has come. Rome is finally on the right foot and in the right hands, and who knows what unspeakable blessings the future will contain. Nope. To the contrary, the tone of the poem is quite pessimistic about man, the nature of man, society of man, and history. While on the surface, especially for us moderns, it may look like this is an uplifting story that holds many bright promises, it is actually a story of decline. It is a story that demonizes change and the future, and every step in it delivers newer and newer blows to the hopes and expectations of its protagonists. It contains deep admiration for the past and its golden ages; but it never mentions the future. It takes it for granted that whatever new things come, they won’t make the world better than it was. Aeneas, in the final chapters of the book, has no faith in the future. Despite his abilities and power and strength, his only fight is to survive among enemies, and nothing in the tone of the poem indicates any expectation of future glories and improvement. Then what was the promise for the people of Rome in it, and what was the appeal of Octavian’s reign? It was not progress. It was stagnation. The more things changed before that, the worse the world had become. Octavian came with the promise that nothing will ever change again. The old golden age was gone. A new one was not coming. The only hope was that time would somehow freeze and there won’t be future. And that’s what Octavian promised to do. In fact, that was a major part of his propaganda campaign. His main adversary, Mark Anthony, served him with the main propaganda pitch by fleeing to Egypt and becoming a lover to Cleopatra; all that Octavian had to do is declare that Anthony wanted to introduce changes, and bring Egyptian customs to Rome. Right there, Anthony lost all his appeal with the people of Rome. No one wanted changes. Everyone was afraid of what the future would bring. Octavian’s promise of eternal stability and no future changes was all that the people wanted. The Aeneid was not unique. The pagan world hated the notion of change and development. Time was, of course, philosophically understood, but, still hated. Parmenides of Elea denied the existence of time and change whatsoever; it was an illusion, he thought. Heraclitus of Ephesus went in the opposite direction and said that nothing stays the same, everything changes, but he never postulated any specific goal and purpose and end of those changes. So, in principle, his concept of time was just as stagnant as that of Parmenides. They hated the future and change so much that whenever anything new appeared, they made sure they destroyed it. When an inventor showed Emperor Tiberius a new metal he created out of dust – which must have been aluminum – Tiberius had him executed. The steam engine was known for two centuries in the ancient world but no attempts have been made to put it to productive use. The Chinese culture made an amazing number of discoveries very early in its history, and yet, the government and the culture never applied them to mass use, and in fact, by the early 20th century, the average Chinese lived no differently than his ancestors 20 centuries earlier. And I am sure I don’t have to explain to my listeners the Buddhist and Zen-Buddhist views on time. In short, time is an illusion for them. As is all existence, of course. The Jews, of course, were the sore thumb. They not only believed in time, they eagerly expected the future. They counted the years to that future. Their prophets tried to examine it, and some even to fast forward to it. Some, like Simeon and Hannah, lived in the Temple waiting to see the future. But their view was still stagnant. Given that the future was focused on a specific single event: the coming of the Messiah. What after that? The Jews didn’t know. The New Testament says that they were trying to figure out what after that, but were never given that revelation by the Holy Spirit. Their faithfulness was supposed to consist in discerning the time when the Messiah came – not that they were exemplary in it, but that’s another topic altogether – and then the Messiah would tell them what after that. So, in a sense, God left them with a stagnant view of the future on purpose, but it was still a view of the future that was unique for the ancient world. The wise men of Matt. 2:1 were not some obscure group; the whole known world at the time knew that the Jews had a view of the future different from anyone else, and acknowledged their uniqueness in this regard. They were still groping in the dark, like everyone else, as to the time of redemption, but they at least knew redemption was surely coming. Christ not only delivered the redemption. He also delivered a view of the future shocking to everyone, including the Jews. On one hand, he was the fulfillment of the expectations of the Jews. On the other hand, however, he was the destruction of their expectations. From a Jewish perspective, history was supposed to end right there, at the coming of the Messiah. He was supposed to defeat His enemies and establish the Throne of David, and rule over the world. And the world was supposed to enter the same stagnant state that the Aeneid postulated about the reign of Augustus: everything would be perfect, nothing would change anymore. That’s what the disciples expected of Jesus, as is obvious from their reactions to His eschatological passages: “Are you going to restore the Kingdom now?” Or, “Who of us will be greater in the coming Kingdom?” Jesus, however, had a different view of the future, one that would shock both Gentiles and Jews. He scandalized the Gentiles by saying all their past to which they clung so religiously was nothing. That the future was that mattered. That change is not demonic and dark, but is the only way they can enter the Kingdom of God and find purpose. That God had prepared for them – if they trusted in Him – unspeakable blessings, that the past knew nothing about. All your poets, philosophers, kings, heroes, gods and semi-gods were blind. There was no Golden Age in your past. The future is what matters. That was a war. When you read all the Roman edicts against the Christians, what is the main argument there, sometimes repeated three or four times in the same edict? That Christians did not follow the ancient ways and did not honor the past and the ancestors. They had higher expectations of something the Gentiles did not understand: the future. The scandal was much graver for the Jews, however. They were OK with a faith in the future. The scandal that Jesus brought to them was not that the future is important. It was that the event they have been waiting for was not the end of history but rather its beginning. That, of course, was rather humiliating for a nation that had grown proud of its heritage; to them, it would mean that they were simply the fodder, the consumable for God’s plan for history, not the real focus and purpose. There would be many more centuries of history, and this time, the Jews would not be able to claim the title of a special nation, but would have to take a place as one of all the other nations in the Kingdom of God. In fact, even worse, they were to take a third place, according to Isaiah 19:24 (after Egypt and Assyria), a clear indication that, in the New Covenant, the nation of Israel would lose its special status. Either way, the vision Jesus introduced of the future was a shocking novelty, and Christians were specifically persecuted for it. We won’t understand it unless we understand that for the pagan world, the future was demonic and was to be feared. In fact, all change was demonic and was to be feared. And here was this new religion which not only disrespected the past but it also promised cosmic and gigantic changes on earth, and its followers were actively involved to make those changes and to build that new civilization they wanted, the Kingdom of God. They were somehow sure that those changes would bring something new and better, and were so committed to bring them about that they were willing to die for the privilege. Even an avowed enemy of Christianity like Karl Marx acknowledged this unique view of history and the future. In his address to the Hague Congress in 1872, he said the following (take note of the language of “new” and “old”): Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build up the new organization of labor; he must overthrow the old politics which sustain the old institutions, if he is not to lose Heaven on Earth, like the old Christians who neglected and despised politics. That’s where he got his idea of change and optimism for the future: from the Biblical idea of Heaven on Earth. And then he rightly mocks Christians for abandoning their own idea. But the reality is, before modern Christians abandoned that idea, the only bearer of a true concept of the future – or of any concept of the future at all – was Christianity. Everywhere where Christianity touched, it was met with opposition not so because people were hostile to the idea of a Savior Who gave His life for His people, but because they realized that Christianity meant death to their concept of history. It demanded a full break up with the past, a full commitment to the future, and an uncompromising belief in the benefits of change. Any change. In culture after culture, we see the same motif as we saw in the Roman edicts against Christians: “Christians abandon the heritage of the past and dishonor the ancestors.” When King Boris I moved to Christianize Bulgaria in the 9th century, that was the only objection of his nobles: This is a war against our past. And my native country wasn’t an exception. No matter where you are from, when you look back at the history of your ancestors, you will see the same pagan refrain: Your Christianity dishonors our past. Yes, it does. It does it because it presents to you a God who is above time and has created time, and He controls past and present and future. And He commands you to abandon your past and your pagan heritage, and instead of heritage and looking back, He invites you to adopt a hope, a faith, and looking forward. Your past is worth nothing. What is worth everything is the things that God has prepared for you, what no eye has seen and no ear has heard, and no human mind has conceived (Isaiah. 64:4; 1 Cor. 2:9). Christianity radically shifted the focus of men from the past to the future, and thus created a radically new mentality, one that has never existed before. And it scared the daylights out of the pagan culture. Or, rather, scared the darkness out of it. You want to know where the original idea of progressivism came? It was from Christianity. Modern Progressives have simply stolen the idea and have stripped it of its Christian roots. And, they have only done it because Christians have abandoned the idea of progress. This new concept – of the future – didn’t catch right away. For centuries after the birth of the Christian Church, many fathers of the church still tried to preserve the past, and specifically this most sublime creation of the pagan past, the Roman Empire. Even Augustine, for all his optimism, saw the preservation of the Empire as necessary for the preservation of the civilization. They still believed in change, but they were still afraid of it. The most radical proponents of change, of course, were the missionaries outside the borders of the civilized world; they had nothing to lose. Isidore of Seville, working with the old Roman pagan aristocracy and the new Arian political elite in Spain, clearly saw the coming of a future era of prosperity after the Dark Ages of the crumbling Empire; that’s the reason he set out to preserve all the available knowledge of the old world in his Etymologies. By the 13th century, a number of scholars in Christendom were already clearly envisioning that new wold, and some even predicted the rise of science and technology, which was an unknown concept to the ancients. Roger Bacon in the 13th century laid the foundation for systematization of science. Another Bacon, Francis, postulated the specific rules for the scientific method in the 17th century. In the same period, Christendom gave the beginning of a new genre, utopian and futuristic literature, with works of Thomas More (Utopia) and Tommaso Campanella (The City of the Sun). Even occultism at the time switched to long-term prophecies of the future – like those of Nostradamus – something occultists of previous centuries never tried to do. Those were fiction, but there were also attempts at scientific forecast of future progress. In the Netherlands in the 16th century, for a time, the Dutch West India Company hired scientists and mathematicians to try to analyze and forecast future explorations and trade profits with the purpose of planning. Italian maritime insurance agencies in the Mediterranean also had their forecasting teams trying to predict profits and losses from the political news in the area. In fact, one can say, this new mass orientation to the future was the single most powerful psychological and sociological factor behind the Reformation, behind the English and the American Revolutions, and even behind the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The ancient world had its insurrections and revolts against oppressive governments, but none were really successful. The reason? The masses had no idea what they were supposed to achieve. Probably the best documented one was the slave uprising led by Spartacus in 73-71 BC. The slaves, led by this brilliant tactician, defeated powerful Roman armies several times, but were unsure of what exactly they wanted to do. They moved north to escape through the Alps to Gaul, then turned back, crossed all the way south to Sicily, then moved west to Brundisium, where they were finally defeated. What was their purpose? No one knows; and it is possible that they themselves didn’t. They had no past to lean on, as their Roman enemies; and they had no idea of the future. But in Christendom, especially after the 15th century, more and more people viewed the future and change as something positive, and therefore had an idea of what they wanted of the future. We can never understand the Reformation, or any of the changes that followed, without understanding this basic fact of the development of the European thought: more and more people were conscious of the concept of the future, and were eager for change. It also changed their view of children. The ancient world viewed children as an asset for their parents, and for the ancestors. In the most radical forms of that belief, children were sacrificed for the purposes of the parents or of the state. In Homer’s Iliad, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter to appease the gods and get what he needs to proceed with his military plans. We know from the Bible the sin of Phoenicia where infants were burned to Molech for the purposes of the state. Carthage, a Phoenician city, continued the same tradition; according to some ancient sources, the great Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca had a twin who was sacrificed by his parents to the gods, so that the other twin could grow to be a great leader in the service of the Carthaginian empire. The Romans themselves, influenced by the Hebrew teachings through their second king, Numa Pompilius, detested such child sacrifices; and yet, even though the state didn’t demand religious sacrifices of children (they were specifically forbidden), the custom still gave the father of the family the right to kill his own son – even if he was already an adult – if he found the son to be unworthy of service to the ancestors. Children were frequently employed in gladiatorial games, as slaves, and even as participants in sexual orgies; during the persecutions against Christians, children were raped, tortured, and thrown to the beasts together with the adults. There was no special consideration of childhood in Rome; no one saw children as anything special to be protected. You know those popular modern essays of fathers who issue threats and warnings to young men who would date or court their daughters; and the father’s prideful declaration of how he would meet the young man with his shotgun and his .45 at the door. Or the modern constant bashing and brow-beating of the younger generation, because, of course, we of the older generation were so much better than them. (See the Axe to the Root episode on “Bashing Millennials.”) That was Rome, too. Such distrust and resentment and disparagement of the younger generation is a very specific characteristic of a people who either never thought of the future, or have lost their vision of it. If want to know what a culture thinks of the future, see how it treats its young people. Does it trash them, bash them, and distrust them? That culture has lost its vision of the future. Does it trust them, uplift them, encourage them, arms them with purpose and vision? That culture has broken its chains with the past, has abandoned its idolatry of the ancestors, and has adopted an optimistic outlook. It is for this reason why, when we look at the days of Christendom in Europe and North America, we see that the majority of the important figures in those centuries were men in their 20s and 30s. Luther was 34 when he nailed the 95 theses. Calvin was 21 when he broke openly with the Roman Catholic Church, and he was 27 when he fled Paris and settled in Geneva. By that time, he already had written half of his Institutes – at least the first version. The majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were young men that today wouldn’t even be seriously considered for political office. Men joined the military or the Navy at unbelievably young ages – some even starting at 9, and some reaching commanding ranks by the age of 16. This speaks much about these young men, but it speaks even more about the society around them which saw no issue with giving them authority over older men. Benjamin Franklin was 70-year-old at the time of the American Revolution, and he worked with young men 50 years his junior, and discussed politics with them, and issued proclamations with them, and we never ever see him even mentioning this gigantic age gap between him and his co-workers and co-conspirators. Never even a condescending word or a patronizing tone. Same thing with George Washington or some of the other older men among the revolutionaries. To compare, Lafayette was only 20 when he joined the Revolution; and yet, we see no hint of any distrust or patronizing of the Frenchman by any American Founding Father. The future even became an obsession in the 19th century. After 1848, futurism as a style of art and politics and literature became prominent in everything. The first science fiction novels and the first futuristic postcards appeared in those days. Europe was gradually abandoning Christianity, but it still had a strong momentum in the Christian worldview. It is highly ironic, that in those days, even those who were the most strongly committed to “conservatism,” were still men who defined their “conservatism” as “making progressive reforms.” My favorite example of that era is William von Humboldt, the brother of the great explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt. William had a saying, Alles Neue ekelt mich an, “All that is new disgusts me.” And yet, this implacable reactionary was responsible for the most progressive educational reforms in Europe, in the Kingdom of Prussia, which, within just a few years, completely transformed the educational climate in Prussia and all of Germany. If even the most conservative and reactionary figures saw it necessary and desirable to bring about wide-sweeping changes, you know Europe had a very strong, and a very healthy view of the future. Ironically, during that period, it was the church that had dropped the ball. Pessimistic eschatologies – amillennialism and premillennialism were already creeping in. By the beginning of the 20th century, the church had surrendered to pessimism. And with it, the Western civilization. But that’s a matter of another episode. But I need to say our modern world today is very far from the optimism of those days. Granted, the momentum created by Christianity has continued for 200 years, despite false theologies, despite the resurgence of paganism and secular humanism, despite the two world wars and the Cold War. I suspect, since the Kingdom of God grows in history, that optimism will never again face. It will be manifested in different forms, not necessarily theological or philosophical. Despite the ruling theoretic pessimism in academic and seminary circles, the majority of the people still continue investing in businesses and stocks, scientists and inventors continue their discoveries and developments, and people still buy the newest technological toys. Politicians and media spew their scares and fear-manipulation campaigns, and some people still buy them – despite evidence to the contrary – and yet, in practice, even they don’t act accordingly in practice. The concept of the future and the optimism that comes with it are still here. But, if ideas have consequences, we don’t know for how long. And we need to change our thinking back to what the Bible says about the future, and abandon our neo-pagan pessimism and fear. The book I will assign for reading this week is Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview. The title says it all. You just need to read it. And, if you have been with Axe to the Root by now, you don’t need an introduction to who Gary North is. In your prayers and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to building the intellectual foundation for the future (did you hear that word, future?), for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe, through translation and publishing of books that apply the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all areas of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com. subscribe to the newsletter, and donate. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post How Christianity Invented the Future appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description Jesus had a view of the future that scandalized both Gentiles and Jews. Assigned Reading: Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview by Gary North Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 81 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will talk about one of the most bizarre concepts the world has ever known. Namely, the future. OK, I know, I lost you right here, at the very beginning. The future is a bizarre concept??? How come? What do you mean, Bo? The future sounds to me as one of the most natural concepts a man can have. We are born thinking of the future, dreaming about the future, imagining what we are going to be in the future, planning for the future. No person has ever found difficult to think of the future and eagerly expect the future. Why would it be “bizarre,” if everyone is so familiar and so comfortable with the concept of the future? What are you talking about? Not so quick. Let’s start thinking here. I suggest that we have always accepted the concept of a the future as natural and normal without thinking why it should be natural and normal. Most of us never even thought what the future is, as a concept. When we dig into that concept, and into the way it is produced and perceived by our minds and hearts, we may discover that it is not as natural and normal as we may have first thought. May be it’s not even not normal, it may be a severe aberration, a mental monstrosity, if the “naturalness” of our minds is to be our standard for “normalcy.” Perhaps we need to stop and consider the possibility that “future” is simply an illusion which we have been poisoned with from an early age. Perhaps it is even a propaganda device meant to manipulate us and control us for certain purposes? Who knows what we can discover if we start thinking about the concept of the future instead of just accepting it on faith. Then again, we may discover that it is just a normal and natural concept, as we have always thought, right? But whatever we discover, it is still worth to start thinking about that concept of the future. It may help us learn things about ourselves and about how our minds operate. And if we learn things about ourselves, we may learn things about our Christian faith. And, as John Calvin said in the first book of his Institutes, once we learn more about ourselves, we end up learning about God. So, what is future? Specifically, what is it as a concept of thought, of philosophy, of psychology, of practical ideology? How do we define it, and where does it comes from? Is it part of our nature to think of the future as a separate category; do all people instinctively adopt it as part of their thought models? Or is it something that we learn from our parents because they learned it from others before them; and therefore, if we had parents from a different culture that didn’t have the concept of future, we wouldn’t even think about it as a valid reality? Reformed Christians, and especially presuppositionalists among my listeners may be fascinated to learn that despite the prevalence of that concept in our every day lives, and in our formal philosophical and ideological systems and endeavors, the concept of the future has been amazingly under-represented in philosophical and psychological studies. Not that there aren’t any studies on it, but the existing ones are way too few for such a common concept, and they are usually limited in scope. Even if you go to Wikipedia and read the article on “Future,” you will see that that article is quite short, with a few sketchy paragraphs on each of the disciplines of physics, philosophy, and religion, and half of the article devoted to side issues like art styles, and music and literary genres that have adopted the concept as foundational (like futurism and science fiction). It even lacks serious references for additional reading: no books, only a few references to marginal encyclopedias and newspaper articles. To compare, the article on “Mysticism,” for example, is about 8 times longer, very detailed and comprehensive, and has about 150 references, all to serious academic studies. And yet, how often is mysticism present as a topic in serious discussions as opposed to the future? The discrepancy is not only in Wikipedia; it is everywhere. Philosophers discuss a whole lot of other subjects, but they somehow always evade discussing the future as a philosophical concept, even though the future is one of the most common concepts the modern man deals with, every day. There were attempts, of course, few and far between. Roger Evered, a British engineer and educator who immigrated to the US in the 1960s, worked as aerospace engineer at McDonnell Douglas, and later taught at several universities and at the Postgraduate Naval College, did try to tackle future as a philosophical concept. His doctoral dissertation with the University of California in Los Angeles in 1973 was titled, “Conceptualizing the ‘Future’: Implications for Strategic Management in a Turbulent Environment.” He later went on to teach Strategic Management, and had to tackle the concept again. Most of his treatment of the concept of the future, however, remained limited to the area of strategic management. Not that there is any problem in such specific application of the concept; but it certainly tends to limit the scope, and Evered ended taking more things for granted than he analyzed and explained. After him, no one really tried to explain the concept from a philosophical perspective. The deepest studies ever tackled the concept in the context of consumer behavior; the 1980s and the 1990s were the culmination of studies on consumer behavior, and expectations of the future were central to any understanding of how the consumers would react to new products or commercials. Still, no scholar dared touch the concept from a more general, philosophical starting point. In that period, the term “philosophy of time” became popular. But despite its popularity, no one really sat down to even give a definition of the concept of the future, let alone study it as a concept. The philosophy of time studies focused mainly either on realism – the metaphysical relation between past, present, and future – or on nominalism – human perception of time and the theory of time preferences (the last one especially important for the study of political economy and entrepreneurship and investment). Again, nothing wrong with these studies, in fact, they are important both practically and theoretically, but . . . a definition of “future” was still not given, and neither was a study of the concept itself presented. The concept of the future was taken for granted, as if it has already been defined and studied, and only its relationship with other concepts was examined. Unique, huh? There is really no other such concept in philosophy that has been treated in such a lousy way. In fact, if anything, secular philosophers have often criticized Christians for not being able to define God (not that God is definable in human terms in the Christian worldview in the first place); and yet, here they are taking for granted a concept that they have never even tried to define. Now, there is a good reason why modern philosophy – especially modern secular philosophy – is incapable of even beginning to define the concept of the future. That reason is that modern philosophy has fallen victim to its foundational premise: that whatever definition or logical rule we use, it cannot refer us us back to anything supernatural, or to any other and higher reason or mind outside and above the human mind and human experience. Everything man uses to define himself and the world around himself must be based on “natural” assumptions, meaning naturalistic assumptions. All the foundations for our definitions must be grounded in man’s direct sensory experience. You know the regular atheist excuse for an argument: “If I can’t see your God, then He is either non-existent or irrelevant.” Philosophers know that such excuse is rather primitive and low-brow, and they seldom use it directly, it is still, as a philosophical presupposition, embedded deeply into the modern secular thought. So when it comes to definitions of things that require some open display of non-sensory faith, philosophers are rather timid to take up the challenge. And indeed, think about it. How can we define the future based on the modern secular thought that requires sensory experience before there is a definition? Why should we be even mindful about the future? Has anyone experienced it? Has anyone seen it? I used that argument with atheists many times: Do you believe there is future? Have you seen it? Can you describe it? Can you define it? The answers were always quite lame, logically. The complaints secularists raise about the Christian God apply to the concept of the future as well: it is only a figment of our imagination, only a conjecture, an extrapolation from misinterpreted evidence (and all of that evidence comes from another imaginary, the concept of the past, but I won’t go there in this episode), no one has seen it or experienced it, really. There is no natural reason for us to even believe there is future, or that it has any relevant significance to anything we do or say or think. The only possible answer to this is that even if we haven’t experienced the future so far, we will surely experience it tomorrow, when it comes . . . but so what? When it comes, it won’t be future anymore, it will be present. To base our definitions on mental expectations, not sensory experience, would be to resort to faith – and why would a secularist philosopher want to base his philosophy on faith? I mean, once you resort to faith for one thing, who knows in how many more definitions you will let faith dictate your perceptions and definitions, and then . . . what is the defense against Christianity and its faith-based philosophy? So, no wonder secularist philosophers avoid defining the future as a concept. They may talk about it, they may take it for granted in their so-called “studies” or “discussions,” they may even try to predict it, but they never know what it is. And it is not just modern secular philosophers. All pagan religions follow the same pattern. Well, of course, all pagan religions are by default naturalistic, given that their “gods” are simply part of the universe itself, and therefore are under the same limitations as man in terms of definitions. How can a pagan god, limited in his very being to the position of simply another being within space and time, experience the future so that he can define it? He may look into a crystal ball and kinda make guesses and predictions and prophecies about it; but would that be a true experience of the future? No. Even if those prophecies were true, and the future happens to be exactly what they prophesied, it would still be no sensory experience of the future; only a word of faith. So pagan religions never talk about the future, it is never a concept that they either define or visualize. In fact, to a great extent, it is something they are afraid of. My favorite example of the classical world is the Aeneid. The Aeneid was a poem written by the Roman poet Virgil, a close friend of the Roman Emperor Octavian Augustus. Augustus, by all accounts, was a very unique Roman, even by the standard of the times. He was the adopted son of Julius Caesar, and these two men – Julius and Octavian – were about the highest and best representation of what was considered traditional Roman moral virtues. If it wasn’t for these two men, the Roman people would never accept the transformation of Rome from republic into empire. But at the time, the Republic had lost its popular appeal because of the corruption and the civil strife and the oppression by the upper classes; while Caesar, and after him Octavian, made it look like an empire will always have at the top a person of exquisite moral qualities plus the political will to implement and achieve a better vision for society. Indeed, from the vision and the courage of Julius Caesar and the practical genius of Octavian Augustus, the Roman Empire was born and was so successful, that 2000+ years later it is still studied as the ultimate example of successful government. (Whether it was or not is a different issue; we are talking perception here.) After his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, was assassinated by a conspiracy of senators who wanted the restoration of the Republic, the civil war in Rome started again. Octavian was only 19 at the time. For the next 14 years, he had to fight first against the assassins who had assembled a large army, and then against his own ally Mark Anthony. He was 33 when he defeated his last enemy, and set out to build an empire that would embody the vision of Caesar. Having come from a lower background (his clan, the Octavia, were plebeians), adopted into the nobility by Caesar, Octavian knew the importance of mass propaganda. So he commissioned his friend, Virgil, to produce a poem that would make Caesar’s and Octavian’s reign to seem like the culmination of the destiny of Rome. Virgil started in 29 BC, and worked on it for 10 years. The result was the Aeneid. I must admit, I have a weakness for it. It is one of the most beautiful historical epics ever written. I only wish I could enjoy its meter in the original Latin; unfortunately, I am not so proficient in the language to appreciate it. I have only read it in the Bulgarian translation, and parts of it in an English translation. It is such a good story that quite a few people are asking, “why in the world hasn’t it been made into a blockbuster movie”? Indeed. You want to have a real feel of Classical literature? Trust me on that, forget Homer. Virgil is better, even though he set out to only imitate Homer. Yes, in the final account he did create government propaganda for his friend Octavian, and that government propaganda was so powerful that Octavian ruled for 45 years as the sole ruler of Rome completely undisturbed by any rival. The masses were so devoted to him that when in his old age he retired from his position of consul for life, the plebs of Rome rioted, believing that it was an aristocratic conspiracy to take him down from power. But government propaganda or not, it was beautiful. There are no such examples today. Anyway, back to the story. The Aeneid was the story of Aeneas, the legendary – or perhaps not so legendary – ancestor of Romulus the founder of Rome, and of the Roman race in general. Aeneas was a Trojan, the son of a mortal prince and the goddess Aphrodite, who fled after the destruction of Troy. He is mentioned in Homer’s Iliad only as a secondary character, although with a hint for a yet-unknown destiny. After he escapes the destruction in Troy, he visits several countries, including Carthage, until he gets to Italy, where he settles among the locals and establishes his line. The beautiful mythology of the early beginning of Rome is intertwined with hints and even direct retrospective prophecies about Julius Caesar and his son Octavian, and their dynasty and the fulfillment of the destiny of Aeneas. The final motif of the poem would have been very clear to any Roman citizen who read it or listened to it: The time has come for the seed of Aeneas to be manifested, and this seed is Octavian Augustus. Sounds heroic and optimistic, right? Sounds like full of bright expectation for the future. Like a promise for growth, and progress, and many more good things in the future, now that the true heir of Aeneas has come. Rome is finally on the right foot and in the right hands, and who knows what unspeakable blessings the future will contain. Nope. To the contrary, the tone of the poem is quite pessimistic about man, the nature of man, society of man, and history. While on the surface, especially for us moderns, it may look like this is an uplifting story that holds many bright promises, it is actually a story of decline. It is a story that demonizes change and the future, and every step in it delivers newer and newer blows to the hopes and expectations of its protagonists. It contains deep admiration for the past and its golden ages; but it never mentions the future. It takes it for granted that whatever new things come, they won’t make the world better than it was. Aeneas, in the final chapters of the book, has no faith in the future. Despite his abilities and power and strength, his only fight is to survive among enemies, and nothing in the tone of the poem indicates any expectation of future glories and improvement. Then what was the promise for the people of Rome in it, and what was the appeal of Octavian’s reign? It was not progress. It was stagnation. The more things changed before that, the worse the world had become. Octavian came with the promise that nothing will ever change again. The old golden age was gone. A new one was not coming. The only hope was that time would somehow freeze and there won’t be future. And that’s what Octavian promised to do. In fact, that was a major part of his propaganda campaign. His main adversary, Mark Anthony, served him with the main propaganda pitch by fleeing to Egypt and becoming a lover to Cleopatra; all that Octavian had to do is declare that Anthony wanted to introduce changes, and bring Egyptian customs to Rome. Right there, Anthony lost all his appeal with the people of Rome. No one wanted changes. Everyone was afraid of what the future would bring. Octavian’s promise of eternal stability and no future changes was all that the people wanted. The Aeneid was not unique. The pagan world hated the notion of change and development. Time was, of course, philosophically understood, but, still hated. Parmenides of Elea denied the existence of time and change whatsoever; it was an illusion, he thought. Heraclitus of Ephesus went in the opposite direction and said that nothing stays the same, everything changes, but he never postulated any specific goal and purpose and end of those changes. So, in principle, his concept of time was just as stagnant as that of Parmenides. They hated the future and change so much that whenever anything new appeared, they made sure they destroyed it. When an inventor showed Emperor Tiberius a new metal he created out of dust – which must have been aluminum – Tiberius had him executed. The steam engine was known for two centuries in the ancient world but no attempts have been made to put it to productive use. The Chinese culture made an amazing number of discoveries very early in its history, and yet, the government and the culture never applied them to mass use, and in fact, by the early 20th century, the average Chinese lived no differently than his ancestors 20 centuries earlier. And I am sure I don’t have to explain to my listeners the Buddhist and Zen-Buddhist views on time. In short, time is an illusion for them. As is all existence, of course. The Jews, of course, were the sore thumb. They not only believed in time, they eagerly expected the future. They counted the years to that future. Their prophets tried to examine it, and some even to fast forward to it. Some, like Simeon and Hannah, lived in the Temple waiting to see the future. But their view was still stagnant. Given that the future was focused on a specific single event: the coming of the Messiah. What after that? The Jews didn’t know. The New Testament says that they were trying to figure out what after that, but were never given that revelation by the Holy Spirit. Their faithfulness was supposed to consist in discerning the time when the Messiah came – not that they were exemplary in it, but that’s another topic altogether – and then the Messiah would tell them what after that. So, in a sense, God left them with a stagnant view of the future on purpose, but it was still a view of the future that was unique for the ancient world. The wise men of Matt. 2:1 were not some obscure group; the whole known world at the time knew that the Jews had a view of the future different from anyone else, and acknowledged their uniqueness in this regard. They were still groping in the dark, like everyone else, as to the time of redemption, but they at least knew redemption was surely coming. Christ not only delivered the redemption. He also delivered a view of the future shocking to everyone, including the Jews. On one hand, he was the fulfillment of the expectations of the Jews. On the other hand, however, he was the destruction of their expectations. From a Jewish perspective, history was supposed to end right there, at the coming of the Messiah. He was supposed to defeat His enemies and establish the Throne of David, and rule over the world. And the world was supposed to enter the same stagnant state that the Aeneid postulated about the reign of Augustus: everything would be perfect, nothing would change anymore. That’s what the disciples expected of Jesus, as is obvious from their reactions to His eschatological passages: “Are you going to restore the Kingdom now?” Or, “Who of us will be greater in the coming Kingdom?” Jesus, however, had a different view of the future, one that would shock both Gentiles and Jews. He scandalized the Gentiles by saying all their past to which they clung so religiously was nothing. That the future was that mattered. That change is not demonic and dark, but is the only way they can enter the Kingdom of God and find purpose. That God had prepared for them – if they trusted in Him – unspeakable blessings, that the past knew nothing about. All your poets, philosophers, kings, heroes, gods and semi-gods were blind. There was no Golden Age in your past. The future is what matters. That was a war. When you read all the Roman edicts against the Christians, what is the main argument there, sometimes repeated three or four times in the same edict? That Christians did not follow the ancient ways and did not honor the past and the ancestors. They had higher expectations of something the Gentiles did not understand: the future. The scandal was much graver for the Jews, however. They were OK with a faith in the future. The scandal that Jesus brought to them was not that the future is important. It was that the event they have been waiting for was not the end of history but rather its beginning. That, of course, was rather humiliating for a nation that had grown proud of its heritage; to them, it would mean that they were simply the fodder, the consumable for God’s plan for history, not the real focus and purpose. There would be many more centuries of history, and this time, the Jews would not be able to claim the title of a special nation, but would have to take a place as one of all the other nations in the Kingdom of God. In fact, even worse, they were to take a third place, according to Isaiah 19:24 (after Egypt and Assyria), a clear indication that, in the New Covenant, the nation of Israel would lose its special status. Either way, the vision Jesus introduced of the future was a shocking novelty, and Christians were specifically persecuted for it. We won’t understand it unless we understand that for the pagan world, the future was demonic and was to be feared. In fact, all change was demonic and was to be feared. And here was this new religion which not only disrespected the past but it also promised cosmic and gigantic changes on earth, and its followers were actively involved to make those changes and to build that new civilization they wanted, the Kingdom of God. They were somehow sure that those changes would bring something new and better, and were so committed to bring them about that they were willing to die for the privilege. Even an avowed enemy of Christianity like Karl Marx acknowledged this unique view of history and the future. In his address to the Hague Congress in 1872, he said the following (take note of the language of “new” and “old”): Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build up the new organization of labor; he must overthrow the old politics which sustain the old institutions, if he is not to lose Heaven on Earth, like the old Christians who neglected and despised politics. That’s where he got his idea of change and optimism for the future: from the Biblical idea of Heaven on Earth. And then he rightly mocks Christians for abandoning their own idea. But the reality is, before modern Christians abandoned that idea, the only bearer of a true concept of the future – or of any concept of the future at all – was Christianity. Everywhere where Christianity touched, it was met with opposition not so because people were hostile to the idea of a Savior Who gave His life for His people, but because they realized that Christianity meant death to their concept of history. It demanded a full break up with the past, a full commitment to the future, and an uncompromising belief in the benefits of change. Any change. In culture after culture, we see the same motif as we saw in the Roman edicts against Christians: “Christians abandon the heritage of the past and dishonor the ancestors.” When King Boris I moved to Christianize Bulgaria in the 9th century, that was the only objection of his nobles: This is a war against our past. And my native country wasn’t an exception. No matter where you are from, when you look back at the history of your ancestors, you will see the same pagan refrain: Your Christianity dishonors our past. Yes, it does. It does it because it presents to you a God who is above time and has created time, and He controls past and present and future. And He commands you to abandon your past and your pagan heritage, and instead of heritage and looking back, He invites you to adopt a hope, a faith, and looking forward. Your past is worth nothing. What is worth everything is the things that God has prepared for you, what no eye has seen and no ear has heard, and no human mind has conceived (Isaiah. 64:4; 1 Cor. 2:9). Christianity radically shifted the focus of men from the past to the future, and thus created a radically new mentality, one that has never existed before. And it scared the daylights out of the pagan culture. Or, rather, scared the darkness out of it. You want to know where the original idea of progressivism came? It was from Christianity. Modern Progressives have simply stolen the idea and have stripped it of its Christian roots. And, they have only done it because Christians have abandoned the idea of progress. This new concept – of the future – didn’t catch right away. For centuries after the birth of the Christian Church, many fathers of the church still tried to preserve the past, and specifically this most sublime creation of the pagan past, the Roman Empire. Even Augustine, for all his optimism, saw the preservation of the Empire as necessary for the preservation of the civilization. They still believed in change, but they were still afraid of it. The most radical proponents of change, of course, were the missionaries outside the borders of the civilized world; they had nothing to lose. Isidore of Seville, working with the old Roman pagan aristocracy and the new Arian political elite in Spain, clearly saw the coming of a future era of prosperity after the Dark Ages of the crumbling Empire; that’s the reason he set out to preserve all the available knowledge of the old world in his Etymologies. By the 13th century, a number of scholars in Christendom were already clearly envisioning that new wold, and some even predicted the rise of science and technology, which was an unknown concept to the ancients. Roger Bacon in the 13th century laid the foundation for systematization of science. Another Bacon, Francis, postulated the specific rules for the scientific method in the 17th century. In the same period, Christendom gave the beginning of a new genre, utopian and futuristic literature, with works of Thomas More (Utopia) and Tommaso Campanella (The City of the Sun). Even occultism at the time switched to long-term prophecies of the future – like those of Nostradamus – something occultists of previous centuries never tried to do. Those were fiction, but there were also attempts at scientific forecast of future progress. In the Netherlands in the 16th century, for a time, the Dutch West India Company hired scientists and mathematicians to try to analyze and forecast future explorations and trade profits with the purpose of planning. Italian maritime insurance agencies in the Mediterranean also had their forecasting teams trying to predict profits and losses from the political news in the area. In fact, one can say, this new mass orientation to the future was the single most powerful psychological and sociological factor behind the Reformation, behind the English and the American Revolutions, and even behind the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The ancient world had its insurrections and revolts against oppressive governments, but none were really successful. The reason? The masses had no idea what they were supposed to achieve. Probably the best documented one was the slave uprising led by Spartacus in 73-71 BC. The slaves, led by this brilliant tactician, defeated powerful Roman armies several times, but were unsure of what exactly they wanted to do. They moved north to escape through the Alps to Gaul, then turned back, crossed all the way south to Sicily, then moved west to Brundisium, where they were finally defeated. What was their purpose? No one knows; and it is possible that they themselves didn’t. They had no past to lean on, as their Roman enemies; and they had no idea of the future. But in Christendom, especially after the 15th century, more and more people viewed the future and change as something positive, and therefore had an idea of what they wanted of the future. We can never understand the Reformation, or any of the changes that followed, without understanding this basic fact of the development of the European thought: more and more people were conscious of the concept of the future, and were eager for change. It also changed their view of children. The ancient world viewed children as an asset for their parents, and for the ancestors. In the most radical forms of that belief, children were sacrificed for the purposes of the parents or of the state. In Homer’s Iliad, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter to appease the gods and get what he needs to proceed with his military plans. We know from the Bible the sin of Phoenicia where infants were burned to Molech for the purposes of the state. Carthage, a Phoenician city, continued the same tradition; according to some ancient sources, the great Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca had a twin who was sacrificed by his parents to the gods, so that the other twin could grow to be a great leader in the service of the Carthaginian empire. The Romans themselves, influenced by the Hebrew teachings through their second king, Numa Pompilius, detested such child sacrifices; and yet, even though the state didn’t demand religious sacrifices of children (they were specifically forbidden), the custom still gave the father of the family the right to kill his own son – even if he was already an adult – if he found the son to be unworthy of service to the ancestors. Children were frequently employed in gladiatorial games, as slaves, and even as participants in sexual orgies; during the persecutions against Christians, children were raped, tortured, and thrown to the beasts together with the adults. There was no special consideration of childhood in Rome; no one saw children as anything special to be protected. You know those popular modern essays of fathers who issue threats and warnings to young men who would date or court their daughters; and the father’s prideful declaration of how he would meet the young man with his shotgun and his .45 at the door. Or the modern constant bashing and brow-beating of the younger generation, because, of course, we of the older generation were so much better than them. (See the Axe to the Root episode on “Bashing Millennials.”) That was Rome, too. Such distrust and resentment and disparagement of the younger generation is a very specific characteristic of a people who either never thought of the future, or have lost their vision of it. If want to know what a culture thinks of the future, see how it treats its young people. Does it trash them, bash them, and distrust them? That culture has lost its vision of the future. Does it trust them, uplift them, encourage them, arms them with purpose and vision? That culture has broken its chains with the past, has abandoned its idolatry of the ancestors, and has adopted an optimistic outlook. It is for this reason why, when we look at the days of Christendom in Europe and North America, we see that the majority of the important figures in those centuries were men in their 20s and 30s. Luther was 34 when he nailed the 95 theses. Calvin was 21 when he broke openly with the Roman Catholic Church, and he was 27 when he fled Paris and settled in Geneva. By that time, he already had written half of his Institutes – at least the first version. The majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were young men that today wouldn’t even be seriously considered for political office. Men joined the military or the Navy at unbelievably young ages – some even starting at 9, and some reaching commanding ranks by the age of 16. This speaks much about these young men, but it speaks even more about the society around them which saw no issue with giving them authority over older men. Benjamin Franklin was 70-year-old at the time of the American Revolution, and he worked with young men 50 years his junior, and discussed politics with them, and issued proclamations with them, and we never ever see him even mentioning this gigantic age gap between him and his co-workers and co-conspirators. Never even a condescending word or a patronizing tone. Same thing with George Washington or some of the other older men among the revolutionaries. To compare, Lafayette was only 20 when he joined the Revolution; and yet, we see no hint of any distrust or patronizing of the Frenchman by any American Founding Father. The future even became an obsession in the 19th century. After 1848, futurism as a style of art and politics and literature became prominent in everything. The first science fiction novels and the first futuristic postcards appeared in those days. Europe was gradually abandoning Christianity, but it still had a strong momentum in the Christian worldview. It is highly ironic, that in those days, even those who were the most strongly committed to “conservatism,” were still men who defined their “conservatism” as “making progressive reforms.” My favorite example of that era is William von Humboldt, the brother of the great explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt. William had a saying, Alles Neue ekelt mich an, “All that is new disgusts me.” And yet, this implacable reactionary was responsible for the most progressive educational reforms in Europe, in the Kingdom of Prussia, which, within just a few years, completely transformed the educational climate in Prussia and all of Germany. If even the most conservative and reactionary figures saw it necessary and desirable to bring about wide-sweeping changes, you know Europe had a very strong, and a very healthy view of the future. Ironically, during that period, it was the church that had dropped the ball. Pessimistic eschatologies – amillennialism and premillennialism were already creeping in. By the beginning of the 20th century, the church had surrendered to pessimism. And with it, the Western civilization. But that’s a matter of another episode. But I need to say our modern world today is very far from the optimism of those days. Granted, the momentum created by Christianity has continued for 200 years, despite false theologies, despite the resurgence of paganism and secular humanism, despite the two world wars and the Cold War. I suspect, since the Kingdom of God grows in history, that optimism will never again fade. It will be manifested in different forms, not necessarily theological or philosophical. Despite the ruling theoretic pessimism in academic and seminary circles, the majority of the people still continue investing in businesses and stocks, scientists and inventors continue their discoveries and developments, and people still buy the newest technological toys. Politicians and media spew their scares and fear-manipulation campaigns, and some people still buy them – despite evidence to the contrary – and yet, in practice, even they don’t act accordingly in practice. The concept of the future and the optimism that comes with it are still here. But, if ideas have consequences, we don’t know for how long. And we need to change our thinking back to what the Bible says about the future, and abandon our neo-pagan pessimism and fear. The book I will assign for reading this week is Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview. The title says it all. You just need to read it. And, if you have been with Axe to the Root by now, you don’t need an introduction to who Gary North is. In your prayers and giving, consider Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to building the intellectual foundation for the future (did you hear that word, future?), for the future Christian civilization in Eastern Europe, through translation and publishing of books that apply the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all areas of life. Visit BulgarianReformation.com. subscribe to the newsletter, and donate. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post How Christianity Invented the Future appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description You have heard it said that the Biblical role of the civil government is to provide safety. But is this true? Assigned Reading: Philip Howard, Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 80 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will examine a modern cult, so prevalent in our society that even professed Christians fall for it and worship at its altar. It is a cult that follows straight from the idolatry which I described in a previous episode of Axe to the Root, titled “Fear as a Motivator.” Fear is the religion of many Americans today, and of many church-goers; and it is a religion actively promoted by the government and from the pulpits. And this religion of fear leads to the cult I will describe below. And since I said in that aforementioned episode that we as Christians should reject the religion of fear, the conclusion is that we should reject the cult that follows from it as well. But I shouldn’t get ahead of my own topic. I was listening recently to a song by a punk rock group from Bosnia (a country on the Balkans), Dubioza Kolektiv. The title of the song is “The Anthem of Our Generation.” Now, since this is a punk rock group, you might not want to know the whole lyrics of the song (not everything in it is repeatable in a good company), but in general, the lyrics is an amazingly insightful characterization of the psychology of our generation today, and specifically of our inclination to worry about a number of irrelevant things. The conclusion of the song, expressed in the chorus, is this: “This is the anthem of our generation: We worry for a living.” Or, perhaps a better translation, “We live by worrying.” Either way, the meaning is clear: Our time is about the most secure time in history, a time of prosperity the world has never seen before, of the lowest crime rate and rapidly growing longevity, and a time when technology has made the life of billions of people so easy and comfortable that we can hardly find a single person in the West – and increasingly, in the whole world – who knows what it is to not have food, clothes, or shelter. And yet, we worry about everything: or, rather, we worry about things that to previous generations would seem ridiculously irrelevant: we worry about what kind of clothes we should wear in what situations, we worry about glaciers and the non-existent global warming, we worry about boogeymen like immigration and terrorism (when the chance of being killed by a terrorist is something like one in several million), etc. etc., etc. And because we worry so much about all these things, politicians and media have grasped that the best way to control us is to reiterate and exaggerate those petty worries we have to the level of gigantic threats, and then come and save us from them. And this, indeed, is the very tactics of modern politics: scare people into submission. To quote H.L. Mencken, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” But, of course, do not be quick to condemn the politicians for using fear to manipulate us. Remember that they only respond to what we have always adopted as our mode of operation; or, as Dubioza Kolektiv said it, as our mode of living. Namely, worry. When we as individuals are given over to constant worry, then don’t expect politicians to use anything else to control us but magnify those worries into full-scale fear campaigns. So, what do politicians offer to solve our problems, then? Safety. Obviously, for you to put them in power and keep them in power and close your eyes for their immorality and corruption and taxes and violations of your liberties, they need to promise you something to soothe your worries. What is that something? Safety from the hobgoblins that keep you worried at night. Once you are offered that safety, you would be willing to close your eyes for everything else, right? Thus, the cult of safety has become the largest and most cherished cult in our day; a cult that is deliberately supported by government action and by the media narratives. What is it that you want the most? Obviously, safety. What do you want the government to provide for you? Obviously, safety. What would you be willing to sacrifice for, including sacrifice your liberty? Obviously, safety. Safety is the main consideration, above all, especially safety from those imaginary hobgoblins that torment our hearts every day. Safety has become our obsession today . . . and no, don’t blame the millennials and their “safe spaces.” Everyone, including the older generation and specifically modern conservatives worship at the altar of safety. And we will see how. But let’s first go to the Bible and let’s see where in the Bible we see the cult of safety. Amazingly enough, the search leads us to the very beginning of the Bible, to the story of Cain and Able. Cain got jealous and killed his brother. When God confronted him for it, he remained unrepentant, so God had to declare a curse on him: “Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you cultivate the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you; you will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth” (Gen. 4:11, 12). Cain’s reply? He complained that his punishment was too great to bear. And he ended his reply with the following complaint: “. . . and whoever finds me will kill me.” Pay attention to what actually happened. The man had just murdered his own brother. He was just confronted by God Himself about it. Did God execute him right away as He should have done under His Law and promise? No, He gave him more life, even if that life was cursed. Cain’s eternal judgment was at stake. God just gave him more time to consider his sin and repent. And instead of showing gratitude and taking advantage of the opportunity, Cain complains that in that life on grace he is given, he doesn’t feel safe. (“Dude, seriously?”, as modern kids would say.) Justice and righteousness mean nothing to him. The man can’t see beyond his ego. Even in his disobedience to God, and even in being unrepentant for the most heinous sin a man can commit, he cares about his own comfort of feeling safe from the people around him. Here we see the first instance in the Bible of the cult of safety. It is such a clear example of the cult that we can derive the definition of that cult from it: the cult of safety is a commitment to being free of any real or imaginary danger, over and against a commitment to righteousness and justice. Let me repeat that last part, so that you don’t miss it: over and against a commitment to righteousness and justice. This is important to remember when we discuss the cult of safety of modern America. The cult of safety is not simply seeking safety through doing the right thing. It is a very specific and deliberate religious commitment to rejecting righteousness and justice in favor of man-made safety and security. That’s what Cain did. He had committed one of the worst possible crimes and sins ever; his eternal state was to be one of the worst ever. And yet, he didn’t care about righteousness and justice. He cared about feeling safe from other humans. God is full of grace, even to unrepentant sinners. (Although, His grace to them is rather heaping coals upon their heads.) So God granted Cain the safety he wanted. He put a sign on him (the same word as for a “sigh of the covenant”) and warned the world that whoever kills him, will be avenged sevenfold. So Cain had the safety from other humans he wanted. He didn’t of course, have true safety, for his covenantal standing before God was still quite unfavorable. That “sign of the covenant” upon him was not forgiveness; he was only marked by God as his property, as in, “Leave him to Me, I want to have the personal pleasure of repaying him when the time comes.” So what did Cain do when he received such grace from God? You would think that out of simple gratitude, he would kneel before God with a contrite heart and offer his repentance for murdering his own brother. And then try to live life as close to God’s Law as humanly possible. No. He leaves the presence of God, he goes to another land, and the first thing he does is build a walled city. No repentance, no regard for justice, no regard for his covenantal standing before God or for his eternal state – and also, no faith in the promises of God. The man was promised immunity against vengeance, while in this life. He doesn’t trust it. He must make sure he builds his own protection against his perceived threats: his own walled city. That, my friends, is the best description of the life of a covenant-breaker. He rebels against God and commits a sin against God. Then he is confronted about it but remains unrepentant. Then he complains about the just judgment he receives. His first thought is not, “I am justly condemned.” His first thought is, “How do I get a safe space from the demons that haunt me?” God gives him temporary grace. The covenant-breaker, however, doesn’t trust it, leaves the presence of God and builds his own safe space, surrounded by walls, gates, and other immigration restrictions. Safety in his own devices, safety over justice and righteousness, safety at the expense of his covenantal standing before God. That’s the Safety Cult of the enemies of God. The same chapter in Genesis – chapter 4 – gives us also the solution of the covenant keepers. Now, granted, Adam and Eve did break God’s Covenant, but apparently, in their judgment, there was also repentance and redemption, for they never complained about their judgment as Cain did. And more than that, they acknowledged that whatever was given to them was from God. In verse 25, Eve said, “God has appointed me another offspring in place of Abel, for Cain killed him.” Did you get that? Cain was not their offspring anymore; he was a covenant breaker. But he was still on the earth, except that he started his own line, and it was now separate from Adam and Eve who did not acknowledge him as their offspring. Cain felt threatened by Adam and Eve and their offspring; but in reality, he was the dangerous one, the murderer. Adam and Eve should have felt threatened by him. They should have taken their own measures to assure safety. Did they? Yes. But, in contrast to Cain who demanded a special sign of protection and then went out and build his own city outside the presence of the Lord, the story of Adam and Eve in the chapter ends with, “Then they began to call upon the name of the Lord.” Our translations say, “Then men began to call upon the name of the Lord,” but the word “men” is not in the original Hebrew text. This sentence is not about all men everywhere, including Cain’s family. This sentence applies to Adam and Eve in the context of the previous passage, and it is a clear counterpoint to Cain’s measures to assure his own safety. Covenant-breakers build walled cities. Covenant-keepers call upon the name of the Lord. This antithesis is quite important in the Bible, given that we see it being developed further and further. The cult of safety did not stop with Cain. It evolved to much worse and more monstrous applications. Just a few verses after Cain’s walled city is mentioned, one of his descendants, Lamech, brags to his two wives about killing a boy for striking him. And then Lamech issues a warning to the world, “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” Of course, the sentiment here is much more complex, and it’s a desire for power, but notice that at the bottom of it, there is a reaction against possible danger that Lamech expects from other people. Safety, which for Cain was simply a complaint, has evolved to a paranoid obsession with Lamech, and he is now willing to commit murder in the name of his own safety. None of this, of course, created any real safety for Cain, Lamech, or their posterity. They all died in the Flood, and Cain’s city, named after his son, is no more. Only a remnant survived of the posterity of those who called upon the name of the Lord, and the safety of that remnant was not in what they built but the grace of God. But their own posterity didn’t learn the lesson; they continued leaving the presence of the Lord and building their own means of safety. In chapter 10 of Genesis, Nimrod became a mighty one on the earth, and guess what he did: that’s right, he started building walled cities. Why would a mighty one in a world of non-mighty people need walled cities? That’s right, because he is afraid, and he wants a safe space from all these other people. Once you abandon God, no matter how mighty you are, you are constantly in fear of other people; that’s why Deuteronomy 28:65-67 makes it clear that one of the curses for those who have apostatized from God is constant dread and trembling of heart. And more power doesn’t solve that problem; even the mightiest ones, when they have abandoned God, are paralyzed by fear day and night, and they continue building walled cities in order to cast the fear away. But, as with Cain, man-made safety never works. Israel didn’t learn the lesson either. From the very beginning, God made it clear that the only true safety they could find was not in walled cities or mighty armies, but in their faithfulness to God. Abram was told to leave the safety of his home city and travel through different countries and live in tents, without any man-made protection, and yet, God preserved him. The same applied to his son and grandson. When Israel moved to Egypt, under Jacob, they were protected under the mighty empire of Egypt, but only for a short time. Eventually the safety the government on the Potomac . . . I mean, on the Nile, provided, turned into slavery – like all safety provided by any government. To give them real safety, God took them out of that man-provided safety/slavery and threw them in the wilderness, in the open, where all kinds of dangers lurked, and where roving bands of Amalekites, the most savage tribesmen of the time, could attack them at any time (Num. 13:29; 14:45). And yet, they were much safer in the wilderness under God than they were in Egypt under Pharaoh. And they were only in danger when they abandoned God, not when they didn’t build fortifications or didn’t have a mighty army. And yet, once in the Promised Land, they abandoned God again. And the history of Israel from Joshua to Solomon is an example how the nation was sliding further and further away from God, and while sliding away from God, it was given over to worry about its safety and to building up armies. The Law of God forbade the king from amassing horses and chariots, that is, weapons of war; it also forbade the king from taking many wives, which at the time meant many foreign alliances. The safety and security of the Hebrew nation was to be in the hands of God, not in the hands of the king. The king was charged with justice, not with safety and security; he was supposed to judge the nation, and that’s why when Solomon prayed to God, God was pleased, because Solomon “did not ask for the lives of his enemies” but prayed for discernment to judge. Apparently, in God’s eyes, the civil government’s role is not to provide safety but to provide justice. Safety is God’s prerogative. God even gave them an example with Himself and His own sanctuary. For many years, while Israel was still in the midst of her enemies, God still “dwelt in a tent,” to use His own expression in 2 Samuel 7:6. That tent was in Shiloh, and since Shiloh was not a big city, the Tabernacle was certainly outside the walls, in the open. God didn’t feel unsafe for His Ark of the Covenant, even in the presence of His enemies. And neither should His covenant people, if they remained faithful. But Israel did not remain faithful. Even in the time of the Judges, some judges started amassing donkeys and then horses. By the time of Solomon, Israel had become a truly apostate state in its view of safety and security. Solomon may have been sincere in his desire to acquire discernment how to judge, but his heart was not perfectly pure before God, for as soon as he established himself in power, he started acquiring wives and started building a professional army. As if half of his heart was after God, and the other half was the heart of an apostate who was trying to steer away from God and God’s Law, and build his own kingdom. Just like Nimrod and the other pagan kings, Solomon undertook to build an empire, and in the process of building, he focused on securing that empire with man-made safety policies. It is noteworthy that throughout the history of Israel, God never told them to build new walls. To the contrary, when Jericho was taken and destroyed, God warned against re-building it – even though Jericho was a fortress situated in a very strategic place, and its rebuilding would have protected Israel militarily, if God cared about it. In Joshua 6:26, Joshua pronounced a terrible curse upon anyone who took up to rebuild Jericho: that he would lay the foundations with the death of his firstborn, and he would set up the gates with the life of his youngest. It was double the curse on the Egyptians who only lost their firstborns. And yet, despite that curse, in the time of Ahab, Hiel of Bethel rebuilt the city (1 Kings 16:34). And, of course, he lost his firstborn and his youngest. Apparently, when Israel was at her lowest moral state, the cult of safety trumped love for one’s family members. There was only one exception to building walls, and that was the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem under Nehemiah. However, what is notable is that there was no direct command from God about it, even though God was favorable to Nehemiah’s undertaking to rebuild the wall (Neh. 2:18). Of course, that rebuilding of the wall of the earthly Jerusalem is used by the modern worshipers of the cult of safety, but there was something very interesting happening while the wall was being rebuilt: God was promising something else. God told the prophet Zechariah, in Zechariah 2:4, that “Jerusalem will be inhabited without walls.” Zechariah the Prophet is very important for us in this story, given that he was the main prophet during the Ezra-Nehemiah period, when the Temple and the wall were built. He was prophesying of the coming Christ and the Church. In his own time, Christ was symbolized by the High Priest Joshua (the same name as Jesus): in the third chapter of his prophecy, Zechariah sees the High Priest Joshua (Jesus), lifted before God in filthy garments, and Satan trying to accuse him. God rebukes Satan, and then clothes Joshua (Jesus) in festal robes, and declares to Joshua that he would rule over God’s House, a clear reference to Hebrews 3:6 where Christ is appointed over God’s House. And if the symbol is not clear to some, God specifically declares in Zechariah 3:8 that the High Priest Joshua is a symbol of the coming Branch, who is, obviously, Jesus. So, if in chapter 3 God was saying that Zechariah’s prophecy was about Jesus and the future Temple of Jesus’s redemtion work, then in chapter 2 Jerusalem is the New Testament Church. And it is about the New Testament Church that God said, “Jerusalem will be inhabited without walls, because I will be a wall of fire around her, and will be a glory in her midst.” Everything you are doing here is temporary, God was telling the generation of Ezra and Nehemiah. Your weakness is temporary. Your need for protective walls is temporary. Even your need for a Temple is temporary; very soon, this Temple won’t matter and the whole religious system based on it won’t matter anymore. Everything you are building here is good but it is only the last leg of the journey. You will soon be home, and this all will be demolished. Through Zechariah, God was telling Ezra, Nehemiah, and the High Priest Joshua that they were building the last stage of the Hebrew civilization. They were just a holdout, a last stronghold of a world that was passing away, and in order for them to not lose heart, God was giving them their purpose in His plan: to serve as the last symbol and herald of the coming glorious world in Christ. Which also means that their building of the wall of Jerusalem was to be only a temporary symbol. And just like Joshua the High Priest was to be only a symbol of the coming Great High Priest, Jesus, so also the wall around Jerusalem they were building was to be only a symbol of God’s wall of protection around God’s people in the new world. In the new world, there would be no more earthly high priests, no more earthly temples, and no more earthly, man-made walls. God would be all in all. There was another manifestation of the cult of safety in the ancient world that we are seldom aware of: namely, occultism. Most of us are conditioned to assume that pagan religions are basically the same as the Christian faith, it’s just the gods they believe in are different. But such is not the case. The nature of those religions is completely different, and the motivation of their adherents is competely different. The Christian religion is a religion, first and foremost, of gratitude to God; His worshipers approach Him not as someone Who needs their service or supplications but as someone who they need to be complete as human beings, and especially as spiritual beings. They can’t even define themselves without Him, so their worship is an act of complete surrender in gratitude and joy. In comparison, in the pagan worldview, human beings can be completely independent and complete apart from their gods; but realistically, they are forced to live in a world of unpredictable and mischievous spiritual beings and forces who need to be placated, enlisted as allies, or spiritually controlled, so that they don’t do harm to humans. (Or perhaps do harm to the right humans.) In such a setting, the life of man becomes a constant struggle for safety against those spiritual beings and forces; a struggle he is supposed to wage every day and every minute of the day using special knowledge of rituals and incantations that give him special powers over the spiritual realm. The average ancient Egyptian lived his life navigating through innumerable such dangers using spells and incantations. He had a spell for waking early in the morning and another one for going to bed. He had to avoid stepping on the threshold of another person’s house; or crossing paths with a cat. He had an incantation for starting a journey (to bind the evil spirits on the road) and another one for coming back home (to prevent evil spirits that may have been following him from entering his house). Things were not different in Greece and Rome. In his study, The Ancient City (which I have mentioned many times in this podcast, and it is time for you to find it and read it), Fustel des Coulanges shows that the veneration of the ancestors that marked the classical pagan religions was motivated by fear. The spirits of the ancestors were believed to live in the boundaries of their property, and they were believed to be rather malicious and vindictive towards their posterity; thus, all the family rituals were meant as a safety mechanism to either placate them or neutralize them. The same applied to all the superstitions that were supposed to keep the mischievous house spirits, the Roman Manes, Pares, and Lares, at bay. In fact, every pagan culture believed in such house spirits, and every single culture had its own safety rules and rituals to prevent mischief from them: from avoiding certain actions (like whistling in the house) to full-fledged religious annual rituals to cast those spirits out (like the Kukeri, Kalogeros, or Capra annual festivals in the Balkans and in Italy). Amazingly, many of these occult superstitions have remained to this very day even in cultures that have been otherwise deeply affected by Christianity. The story of the cult of safety in the antiquity is very long, but we will have to cut it short for our purposes, and move on with our topic. What is important to remember is that for paganism, the world is fraught with danger, and therefore all religious and liturgical activity is meant to be a safety mechanism against those dangers. The cult of safety in the ancient world was both religious and political; it viewed as possible danger both the stranger and the spiritual beings believed to inhabit the world. In fact, many ancient languages had similar words for “foreigner” and “evil spirit”; for example, in Cantonese, gwailou, literally meaning “ghost man,” used to the be the common term for “foreigner.” In the context of all this, the Cross dealt a severe blow to the cult of safety. The Roman Empire was able to conquer the known world using the cult of safety and manipulating the conquered peoples: on one hand, it offered a political and religious salvation from the perceived dangers of the world, and on the other hand, it threatened death for disobedience. (“It’s for your safety,” the mantra of modern American cops.) But the new religion that came out of Palestine produced a new breed of people: men and women, and even children, who didn’t care about their own safety. They wouldn’t be moved even if they were threatened with torture and death. The doctrine of resurrection from the dead was known to produce such results, and that’s why it was especially distasteful to the Greeks, because it created people who wouldn’t obey the rulers. Rome was able to hound gigantic mobs on the Christians by appealing to the “safety of the state and the people” (a constant refrain in all edicts against Christianity), but it was never able to scare Christians into submission by appealing to their own safety. A culture where every move of every individual and of every institution was to secure them against real or imaginary dangers, suddenly met a culture where both individuals and groups despised safety for a greater purpose. The new culture, thus, was devastating to the old one; it destroyed the very foundation upon which the old culture based its social order. From being despised, Christians grew to be respected for their courage in the face of danger. A number of early church fathers mention the fact that in many places, persecutions died out not because pagans ran out of Christians to persecute, but because they developed respect for and even superstitious fear of those seemingly feeble men and women and chidlren who wouldn’t do anything to gain more safety. In fact, the church even went into offensive from the very beginning. A few years ago I pointed out in an article that by the standards of the time, Paul’s discussion on the role of civil government in Roman 13 was not, as many today imagine, a concession to the authority of the Roman state. To the contrary, it was an ideological attack on every single tenet of the Roman political theory. And it didn’t stop with Paul; Christian apologists continued assaulting both the political theory of Rome and the pagan religious doctrine that supported it. Tertullian, the most charismatic (in all meanings of the word) of the early church writers, literally mocked the pagans for their religion and superstitions, all in the middle of ongoing persecutions. The small band of Christians was on the offense exactly because they didn’t care about safety, and the mighty empire and its pagan religions was on the defense exactly because it was paralyzed by the cult of safety. In the final account, Christians won. Why? Because, “they didn’t love their lives unto death.” There is no other way to victory. The subsequent history of the church proved that truth abundantly. Whenever the chuch entrusted its safety to Christ, it was prospering and growing. The greatest mission revivals followed periods when the church cast aside all worries about its own survival, and produced men who had no fear of the unknown, and no desire to stay safe. The mission explosion in the 5th through the 9th centuries saw missionaries who willingly crossed borders previously considered dangerous (unsafe) to cross. The Crusades were a period when even talking about personal or collective safety was considered dishonorable; women filed for divorce if their husbands showed even the slightest sign of cowardice. Such was the practice later among the Puritans as well; a wife had the legal right to divorce her husband for two reasons: if he couldn’t produce offspring, and if he showed cowardice. The disasters of the 14th century, of which we talked in previous episodes, so desensitized Christendom that for the next three or four centuries, death was not considered a big deal. That freed European hearts and minds to leave the geographical confines of Christendom and traverse the world as missionaries, explorers, merchants. Samuel Johnson, one of the greatest man of letters England has ever produced, quipped in the 1760s, “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.” The statement deserves criticism from a Biblical perspective, but the reality is, that was the mentality of most Europeans at the time; living dangerously, without regard for safety, was considered honorable even by the “lower”classes in the society. And Christendom expanded. But in the 19th century, with the resurgence of paganism in European thinking, Europe started experiencing a reversal back to the cult of safety. It started, of course, with the return of occultism. The ideology of the ruling classes in Europe had been shifting from Christianity towards rationalist deism before the 19th century, and rationalist deism was at the foundation of both the left-wing and the right-wing Enlightenment (think France and Scotland, but also Prussia, Italy and the Americas). The French Revolution was the political culmination of that rationalist thinking. Once it was over, the European elite turned to other anti-Christian philosophies. Some turned to crass materialism, like Feuerbach, or rationalist idealism, like Hegel. But the majority of the aristocracy turned to pagan occultism and mysiticism. A lot of it came from India, China, and Japan, with the government officials who served the colonial powers in those areas. In Germany and Scandinavia, and partly in England as well, much of it came from the Romanticist movement which exalted the “ancient ways and traditions.” It laid the foundation for the later racist and nationalist movements in Europe, and was the direct ideological reason for the two world wars. But the real motivation – individual motivation – for it was the loss of pesonal sense of safety. Christianity was not accepted as a valid worldview anymore; so the sense of personal insecurity in a world that was unknown and unknowable was growing, and people resorted to the old remedies: trying to control the unknown world through occult means. “Magical protection” or “spiritual protection” became popular words in Europe, and the buzzword for a number of successful marketing campaign. Europe abandoned Christianity, resorted to paganism, and with it, resorted back to the cult to safety. More than that, some new forms of the cult to safety appeared, this time in the church: the demonization of foods and beverages. Now, asceticism has always been a thing in the church, and there have always been excesses. But in general, most ascetics viewed fancy food and drinks as a distraction from spiritual focus, not so much as demons to fight. In Egypt, monks refrained from meat, but did not consider meat sinful per se. In Europe. Monasteries actually preserved agriculture during the dark ages of the 5th through the 9th centuries; and as a result, the fanciest foods and beverages could be found in the monasteries. But in the 19th century, a number of Protestant denominations and quasi-Protestant sects deviated into some serious paranoia about foods and drinks. It was not your regular fasting-type restriction, or recommended temperance. It was a wholesale demonization of certain foods and beverages as “detrimental” to one’s spiritual health. It was in the 19th century that Baptists started the transformation from the cigar-smoking, wine-drinking Charles Spurgeon and the bourbon-maker Elijah Craig to the modern teetotaling Baptists. Over the course of one generation, alcohol was gradually seen more and more as a substance to be avoided at all cost, because it was dangerous. Similar obsessions with foods and beverages took over the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Jehova’s Witnesses, and number of other sects. Obsession with the dangers of alcohol and tobacco was strongest, however, among the liberal elites in the large cities on the US East Coast, especially among the Universalist and Unitarian churches. It was those churches that led the crusade that ultimately ended in the Prohibition. In England, at the time, a similar crusade was rising against opium and other narcotics. Even though the addiction rate was negligible (compared to alcohol addiction levels of a century prior), different groups made gigantic efforts to make it as if all of England was going down the drain because of the Chinese opium dens in London. By the middle of the century, the Prohibition in the United States was over, but the spirit of the cult of safety simply transfered over to the new hobgoblin: the narcotics. In the 1960s, the US government started its most expensive and least sucessful war ever, the War on Drugs, which continues to this very day. The cult of safety took positions in the government policy of the times as well. It is commonly accepted today that the historical source of the modern welfare state is Marxist socialism. But that is not true. The origins of the welfare state are actually quite conservative and anti-socialist. In France, it was Emperor Napoleon III and his pamphlet, On the Extinction of Poverty, that laid the foundation for the welfare state in France. In Germany, the Prussian state developed a government “safety net” for its citizens, from government-provided education to government-provided jobs, to government provided pension system and health-care system. The Scandinavian countries adopted the same policy as early as the 1890s. Austria-Hungary adopted pension systems and healthcare systems for a significant part of its urban population in the 1870s. Even England, traditionally resistant to any such “egalitarian” measures, eventually started surrendering, and in the second half of the 19th century, different government welfare measures were introduced, including government schools and a government retirement system. All of this was, of course, with the purpose to provide “safety” for the general population; a safety which, later, will turn into slavery, as it was in the days of Israel in Egypt. At the time, however, almost no thinker opposed it. The only significant voice that did it on principled grounds was Frederick Bastiat in France; he pointed to the encroahcment of liberty that such “safety” was bringing in its wake. There were other voices, like Herbert Spencer in England, but Spencer opposed the cult of safety based on the bizarre theory of social darwinism, namely, that the unfit must be left to die so that the fittest survive; this was one of the earliest applications of Darwin’s theory to the social realm. The masses of people loved their safety, and did not understand the real loss for the society and for themselves that it was bringing. It was in that period that an institution was established in the West, one that had never existed in Christendom: the police. I will not go into detail here, we have talked about police in a previous episode, “Should We Have Police?” Suffice to say, police was entirely the product of the Enlightenment and its secular ideology, that man can, through science, take the place of God and provide what only God could provide. And what police was meant to provide, again, was safety and security. Safety became an obsession for the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. Nazism, the second most destructive ideology of the 20th century, was a clear representation of the cult of safety. As a few historians of Nazi Germany have pointed out, in the 1920s and the 1930s, the common perception in post-war Germany was that the rest of the world was determined to destroy Germany and the Germans. What Hitler promised, and what shot him up to power, was not world domination, but that he would protect Germans from the dangerous dark powers who surrounded Germany. He was offering Germany safety from the demons of anti-German conspiracy. The official propaganda language was full of phrases that presented Germany as heroically fighting for its survival against the world. Communism was no different; again, there were the dark capitalist forces out there, and here we were, the heroic Communist nations, pushing against evil. Even the GULags were officially established with the prupose of “defending the socialist order.” The Communist secret police was labeled as “safety” or “security” in all Eastern European nations: KGB in the Soviet Union, Committee for State Security, Stasi in East Germany, State Security, Securitate in Romania, etc. This paranoia of always being menaced by foreign hobgoblins remained such an integral part of the Russian mindset, and even today, Putin’s government sells its foreign wars against smaller countries as “defense against aggression.” To see how prevalent the cult of safety has become in the United States for the last one century, one has to read and compare two inaugural addresses separated by 100 years: That of Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 and that of George W. Bush in 2005. Both were significant because each address were given after a shocking terrorist event: Roosevelt’s address was given after the assassination, on September 5, 1901, of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz, son of Polish immigrants; Bush’s was given after the bombing, on September 11, 2001, of the towers of the World Trade Center, allegedly by Muslim terrorists from Saudi Arabia. Both acts shocked America, and both acts were still quite alive in the thinking of the American public. But when one reads Roosevelt’s address, it contains no signs of any promise to the American public that the government would provide for their safety; Roosevelt appeals to the independent and courageous spirit of America, and expects that Americans will continue to value their liberty and will continue expanding without fear, and without waiting to be patronized by the government, Bush, on the other hand, builds his entire address on the concept that the American people are like little children who need to be protected, who need safety against the dangerous forces of the world around them, so his government is there to offer that safety and security they need and crave. And indeed, 2001 was the year that changed American perceptions about safety like never before. And especially the perceptions of American Christians. As late as the 1980s and the early 1990s, for Christians and conservatives in general, America was still America the Powerful who could change the hearts and the minds of all, and bring even its mightiest enemy, the Soviet Union, to its knees, by sheer example, not by war. Refugees from Communist countries were accepted with joy, even if there was a danger that some of them could be spies. Granted, that confidence was secular, for it placed its faith in a nation rather than the faith that founded that nation; but it was still a secularist version of that earlier Christian optimism and courage about the world. Even as late as 1999, in debates with Al Gore, that same George W. Bush was still speaking in the older terms, like someone who trusted that there was no danger big enough to warrant fear and obsession with safety. (It was Al Gore who was using such language.) But by that time, the Christian faith was abandoned, and when it was abandoned, any significant event could shatter that confidence. And such event happened, on September 11th. With no true Biblical faith to support the confidence, American Christians resorted to the cult of safety almost overnight. You ever heard the argument, “The role of the government is to provide safety”? It is the most prevalent argument these days among American Christians, right? Guess what: There is no such Biblical role for the government. Not a single Biblical verse supports such a concept. Biblically, all sins and crimes come from the heart of man; therefore, danger can be predicted only by the One Who knows the heart of man, and prevented only by the One Who can change the heart of man. The civil government can’t read men’s hearts, and can’t change men’s hearts. Biblically, it can only register actual crimes and punish actual crimes; it can’t predict who and where will commit a crime, in order to provide safety. Thus, the only way for the government to provide safety is to take away the liberty of people to act; for any action is a possible threat to safety. (Think gun control: providing safety by taking guns away from all, including non-criminals.) Thus, from the government’s perspective, the only real threat to safety is liberty; and therefore the only way for the government to provide safety is by taking away liberty. The Founding Fathers understood this concept quite well, and that was the foundation of Benjamin Franklin’s statement that, paraphrasing, “Those who would give up liberty for safety, deserve neither, and will get neither.” Only God can provide safety without taking away liberty, because only God can read minds and hearts, and change minds and hearts. However, to understand this, one needs to be immersed deeply into the Christian faith and into a comprehensive Biblical view of the world, of man, and of man’s society. Once the Christian faith is abandoned – and it is, by the majority of the church-goers in the United States – then the safety that faith provides is lost, and man needs to build his own altar to safety, and to seek safety through his own means, or through the means of his most powerful institution, the state. And that’s how the cult of safety is born, and maintained in our nation. From this cult of safety, we have all the modern statist practices supported by church-goers and conservatives. From the cult of safety follows the worship of politics, and the expectation that politics – especially at the highest levels, in Washington DC – will solve the problems of America. From the cult of safety follows the worship of police and other institutions of government oppression and tyranny. From the cult of safety follow all the laws regulating the use of foods and substances; and from it follow all the laws regulating economic activity; after all, after all, we can’t let people be too free in their undertakings, for that might make other people unsafe. From the cult of safety, again, follow our modern immigration laws, and, more importantly, the support for those laws by church-goers and conservatives. Look at the latest election campaign: So obsessed are they with their safety, that the whole Republican campaign revolved around the unspeakable dangers from a few thousand men, women, and children who are fleeing an oppressive government. For the modern apostate American, the world is full with the darkest demons who are out there to get him, with hobgoblins lurking behind every corner. His senses are so addicted to fear and worry that even when he is presented with facts that the dangers are overblown, he reacts violently in anger. Under the cult of safety, any mention that he is not in danger is a blow to the cult, and therefore a heresy. The perception of danger has to be maintained, otherwise the cult becomes superfluous. And modern apostate Americans – and especially church-goers – would rather keep their cult than return to their Biblical roots. Paganism has returned to American churches, in its full force. And, to quote benjamin Franklin, because they have sought safety ate the expense of their God-given liberty, they have lost both liberty and safety. So next time you see an assault on Christian liberty, keep in mind, it is not the unbelievers who are to blame. For reading this week, I will assign an article and a book. The article is “Terrorism: Biblical Analysis and Solutions,” on ChristendomRestored.com. Pay attention to what I say there about fear and its Biblical significance. The book is rather off-topic, for the most part, but it has an interesting treatment of the modern cult of safety, and that is where ot matters the most, child rearing – for child rearing is where the cult is first being “encultured” into the our minds. Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law, by Philip Howard. Pay attention to the connections he makes between the cult of safety and the modern legal and political system. In your prayers and donations, keep Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to expanding the Kingdom of God in Eastern Europe through translating and publishing books applying the Gospel to every area of life. We do not teach our readers to seek safety in man-made walls, we teach them to expand the Kingdom of God while seeking only the safety God provides for His people. And that’s why we have bene growing and scoring victories. Help us continue this trend. Visit Bulgarian Reformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post The Cult of Safety appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.

Host Bojidar Marinov Description You have heard it said that the Biblical role of the civil government is to provide safety. But is this true? Assigned Reading: Philip Howard, Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law Listen Transcript Welcome to Episode 80 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will examine a modern cult, so prevalent in our society that even professed Christians fall for it and worship at its altar. It is a cult that follows straight from the idolatry which I described in a previous episode of Axe to the Root, titled “Fear as a Motivator.” Fear is the religion of many Americans today, and of many church-goers; and it is a religion actively promoted by the government and from the pulpits. And this religion of fear leads to the cult I will describe below. And since I said in that aforementioned episode that we as Christians should reject the religion of fear, the conclusion is that we should reject the cult that follows from it as well. But I shouldn’t get ahead of my own topic. I was listening recently to a song by a punk rock group from Bosnia (a country on the Balkans), Dubioza Kolektiv. The title of the song is “The Anthem of Our Generation.” Now, since this is a punk rock group, you might not want to know the whole lyrics of the song (not everything in it is repeatable in a good company), but in general, the lyrics is an amazingly insightful characterization of the psychology of our generation today, and specifically of our inclination to worry about a number of irrelevant things. The conclusion of the song, expressed in the chorus, is this: “This is the anthem of our generation: We worry for a living.” Or, perhaps a better translation, “We live by worrying.” Either way, the meaning is clear: Our time is about the most secure time in history, a time of prosperity the world has never seen before, of the lowest crime rate and rapidly growing longevity, and a time when technology has made the life of billions of people so easy and comfortable that we can hardly find a single person in the West – and increasingly, in the whole world – who knows what it is to not have food, clothes, or shelter. And yet, we worry about everything: or, rather, we worry about things that to previous generations would seem ridiculously irrelevant: we worry about what kind of clothes we should wear in what situations, we worry about glaciers and the non-existent global warming, we worry about boogeymen like immigration and terrorism (when the chance of being killed by a terrorist is something like one in several million), etc. etc., etc. And because we worry so much about all these things, politicians and media have grasped that the best way to control us is to reiterate and exaggerate those petty worries we have to the level of gigantic threats, and then come and save us from them. And this, indeed, is the very tactics of modern politics: scare people into submission. To quote H.L. Mencken, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” But, of course, do not be quick to condemn the politicians for using fear to manipulate us. Remember that they only respond to what we have always adopted as our mode of operation; or, as Dubioza Kolektiv said it, as our mode of living. Namely, worry. When we as individuals are given over to constant worry, then don’t expect politicians to use anything else to control us but magnify those worries into full-scale fear campaigns. So, what do politicians offer to solve our problems, then? Safety. Obviously, for you to put them in power and keep them in power and close your eyes for their immorality and corruption and taxes and violations of your liberties, they need to promise you something to soothe your worries. What is that something? Safety from the hobgoblins that keep you worried at night. Once you are offered that safety, you would be willing to close your eyes for everything else, right? Thus, the cult of safety has become the largest and most cherished cult in our day; a cult that is deliberately supported by government action and by the media narratives. What is it that you want the most? Obviously, safety. What do you want the government to provide for you? Obviously, safety. What would you be willing to sacrifice for, including sacrifice your liberty? Obviously, safety. Safety is the main consideration, above all, especially safety from those imaginary hobgoblins that torment our hearts every day. Safety has become our obsession today . . . and no, don’t blame the millennials and their “safe spaces.” Everyone, including the older generation and specifically modern conservatives worship at the altar of safety. And we will see how. But let’s first go to the Bible and let’s see where in the Bible we see the cult of safety. Amazingly enough, the search leads us to the very beginning of the Bible, to the story of Cain and Able. Cain got jealous and killed his brother. When God confronted him for it, he remained unrepentant, so God had to declare a curse on him: “Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you cultivate the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you; you will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth” (Gen. 4:11, 12). Cain’s reply? He complained that his punishment was too great to bear. And he ended his reply with the following complaint: “. . . and whoever finds me will kill me.” Pay attention to what actually happened. The man had just murdered his own brother. He was just confronted by God Himself about it. Did God execute him right away as He should have done under His Law and promise? No, He gave him more life, even if that life was cursed. Cain’s eternal judgment was at stake. God just gave him more time to consider his sin and repent. And instead of showing gratitude and taking advantage of the opportunity, Cain complains that in that life on grace he is given, he doesn’t feel safe. (“Dude, seriously?”, as modern kids would say.) Justice and righteousness mean nothing to him. The man can’t see beyond his ego. Even in his disobedience to God, and even in being unrepentant for the most heinous sin a man can commit, he cares about his own comfort of feeling safe from the people around him. Here we see the first instance in the Bible of the cult of safety. It is such a clear example of the cult that we can derive the definition of that cult from it: the cult of safety is a commitment to being free of any real or imaginary danger, over and against a commitment to righteousness and justice. Let me repeat that last part, so that you don’t miss it: over and against a commitment to righteousness and justice. This is important to remember when we discuss the cult of safety of modern America. The cult of safety is not simply seeking safety through doing the right thing. It is a very specific and deliberate religious commitment to rejecting righteousness and justice in favor of man-made safety and security. That’s what Cain did. He had committed one of the worst possible crimes and sins ever; his eternal state was to be one of the worst ever. And yet, he didn’t care about righteousness and justice. He cared about feeling safe from other humans. God is full of grace, even to unrepentant sinners. (Although, His grace to them is rather heaping coals upon their heads.) So God granted Cain the safety he wanted. He put a sign on him (the same word as for a “sign of the covenant”) and warned the world that whoever kills him, will be avenged sevenfold. So Cain had the safety from other humans he wanted. He didn’t of course, have true safety, for his covenantal standing before God was still quite unfavorable. That “sign of the covenant” upon him was not forgiveness; he was only marked by God as his property, as in, “Leave him to Me, I want to have the personal pleasure of repaying him when the time comes.” So what did Cain do when he received such grace from God? You would think that out of simple gratitude, he would kneel before God with a contrite heart and offer his repentance for murdering his own brother. And then try to live life as close to God’s Law as humanly possible. No. He leaves the presence of God, he goes to another land, and the first thing he does is build a walled city. No repentance, no regard for justice, no regard for his covenantal standing before God or for his eternal state – and also, no faith in the promises of God. The man was promised immunity against vengeance, while in this life. He doesn’t trust it. He must make sure he builds his own protection against his perceived threats: his own walled city. That, my friends, is the best description of the life of a covenant-breaker. He rebels against God and commits a sin against God. Then he is confronted about it but remains unrepentant. Then he complains about the just judgment he receives. His first thought is not, “I am justly condemned.” His first thought is, “How do I get a safe space from the demons that haunt me?” God gives him temporary grace. The covenant-breaker, however, doesn’t trust it, leaves the presence of God and builds his own safe space, surrounded by walls, gates, and other immigration restrictions. Safety in his own devices, safety over justice and righteousness, safety at the expense of his covenantal standing before God. That’s the Safety Cult of the enemies of God. The same chapter in Genesis – chapter 4 – gives us also the solution of the covenant keepers. Now, granted, Adam and Eve did break God’s Covenant, but apparently, in their judgment, there was also repentance and redemption, for they never complained about their judgment as Cain did. And more than that, they acknowledged that whatever was given to them was from God. In verse 25, Eve said, “God has appointed me another offspring in place of Abel, for Cain killed him.” Did you get that? Cain was not their offspring anymore; he was a covenant breaker. But he was still on the earth, except that he started his own line, and it was now separate from Adam and Eve who did not acknowledge him as their offspring. Cain felt threatened by Adam and Eve and their offspring; but in reality, he was the dangerous one, the murderer. Adam and Eve should have felt threatened by him. They should have taken their own measures to assure safety. Did they? Yes. But, in contrast to Cain who demanded a special sign of protection and then went out and build his own city outside the presence of the Lord, the story of Adam and Eve in the chapter ends with, “Then they began to call upon the name of the Lord.” Our translations say, “Then men began to call upon the name of the Lord,” but the word “men” is not in the original Hebrew text. This sentence is not about all men everywhere, including Cain’s family. This sentence applies to Adam and Eve in the context of the previous passage, and it is a clear counterpoint to Cain’s measures to assure his own safety. Covenant-breakers build walled cities. Covenant-keepers call upon the name of the Lord. This antithesis is quite important in the Bible, given that we see it being developed further and further. The cult of safety did not stop with Cain. It evolved to much worse and more monstrous applications. Just a few verses after Cain’s walled city is mentioned, one of his descendants, Lamech, brags to his two wives about killing a boy for striking him. And then Lamech issues a warning to the world, “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” Of course, the sentiment here is much more complex, and it’s a desire for power, but notice that at the bottom of it, there is a reaction against possible danger that Lamech expects from other people. Safety, which for Cain was simply a complaint, has evolved to a paranoid obsession with Lamech, and he is now willing to commit murder in the name of his own safety. None of this, of course, created any real safety for Cain, Lamech, or their posterity. They all died in the Flood, and Cain’s city, named after his son, is no more. Only a remnant survived of the posterity of those who called upon the name of the Lord, and the safety of that remnant was not in what they built but the grace of God. But their own posterity didn’t learn the lesson; they continued leaving the presence of the Lord and building their own means of safety. In chapter 10 of Genesis, Nimrod became a mighty one on the earth, and guess what he did: that’s right, he started building walled cities. Why would a mighty one in a world of non-mighty people need walled cities? That’s right, because he is afraid, and he wants a safe space from all these other people. Once you abandon God, no matter how mighty you are, you are constantly in fear of other people; that’s why Deuteronomy 28:65-67 makes it clear that one of the curses for those who have apostatized from God is constant dread and trembling of heart. And more power doesn’t solve that problem; even the mightiest ones, when they have abandoned God, are paralyzed by fear day and night, and they continue building walled cities in order to cast the fear away. But, as with Cain, man-made safety never works. Israel didn’t learn the lesson either. From the very beginning, God made it clear that the only true safety they could find was not in walled cities or mighty armies, but in their faithfulness to God. Abram was told to leave the safety of his home city and travel through different countries and live in tents, without any man-made protection, and yet, God preserved him. The same applied to his son and grandson. When Israel moved to Egypt, under Jacob, they were protected under the mighty empire of Egypt, but only for a short time. Eventually the safety the government on the Potomac . . . I mean, on the Nile, provided, turned into slavery – like all safety provided by any government. To give them real safety, God took them out of that man-provided safety/slavery and threw them in the wilderness, in the open, where all kinds of dangers lurked, and where roving bands of Amalekites, the most savage tribesmen of the time, could attack them at any time (Num. 13:29; 14:45). And yet, they were much safer in the wilderness under God than they were in Egypt under Pharaoh. And they were only in danger when they abandoned God, not when they didn’t build fortifications or didn’t have a mighty army. And yet, once in the Promised Land, they abandoned God again. And the history of Israel from Joshua to Solomon is an example how the nation was sliding further and further away from God, and while sliding away from God, it was given over to worry about its safety and to building up armies. The Law of God forbade the king from amassing horses and chariots, that is, weapons of war; it also forbade the king from taking many wives, which at the time meant many foreign alliances. The safety and security of the Hebrew nation was to be in the hands of God, not in the hands of the king. The king was charged with justice, not with safety and security; he was supposed to judge the nation, and that’s why when Solomon prayed to God, God was pleased, because Solomon “did not ask for the lives of his enemies” but prayed for discernment to judge. Apparently, in God’s eyes, the civil government’s role is not to provide safety but to provide justice. Safety is God’s prerogative. God even gave them an example with Himself and His own sanctuary. For many years, while Israel was still in the midst of her enemies, God still “dwelt in a tent,” to use His own expression in 2 Samuel 7:6. That tent was in Shiloh, and since Shiloh was not a big city, the Tabernacle was certainly outside the walls, in the open. God didn’t feel unsafe for His Ark of the Covenant, even in the presence of His enemies. And neither should His covenant people, if they remained faithful. But Israel did not remain faithful. Even in the time of the Judges, some judges started amassing donkeys and then horses. By the time of Solomon, Israel had become a truly apostate state in its view of safety and security. Solomon may have been sincere in his desire to acquire discernment how to judge, but his heart was not perfectly pure before God, for as soon as he established himself in power, he started acquiring wives and started building a professional army. As if half of his heart was after God, and the other half was the heart of an apostate who was trying to steer away from God and God’s Law, and build his own kingdom. Just like Nimrod and the other pagan kings, Solomon undertook to build an empire, and in the process of building, he focused on securing that empire with man-made safety policies. It is noteworthy that throughout the history of Israel, God never told them to build new walls. To the contrary, when Jericho was taken and destroyed, God warned against re-building it – even though Jericho was a fortress situated in a very strategic place, and its rebuilding would have protected Israel militarily, if God cared about it. In Joshua 6:26, Joshua pronounced a terrible curse upon anyone who took up to rebuild Jericho: that he would lay the foundations with the death of his firstborn, and he would set up the gates with the life of his youngest. It was double the curse on the Egyptians who only lost their firstborns. And yet, despite that curse, in the time of Ahab, Hiel of Bethel rebuilt the city (1 Kings 16:34). And, of course, he lost his firstborn and his youngest. Apparently, when Israel was at her lowest moral state, the cult of safety trumped love for one’s family members. There was only one exception to building walls, and that was the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem under Nehemiah. However, what is notable is that there was no direct command from God about it, even though God was favorable to Nehemiah’s undertaking to rebuild the wall (Neh. 2:18). Of course, that rebuilding of the wall of the earthly Jerusalem is used by the modern worshipers of the cult of safety, but there was something very interesting happening while the wall was being rebuilt: God was promising something else. God told the prophet Zechariah, in Zechariah 2:4, that “Jerusalem will be inhabited without walls.” Zechariah the Prophet is very important for us in this story, given that he was the main prophet during the Ezra-Nehemiah period, when the Temple and the wall were built. He was prophesying of the coming Christ and the Church. In his own time, Christ was symbolized by the High Priest Joshua (the same name as Jesus): in the third chapter of his prophecy, Zechariah sees the High Priest Joshua (Jesus), lifted before God in filthy garments, and Satan trying to accuse him. God rebukes Satan, and then clothes Joshua (Jesus) in festal robes, and declares to Joshua that he would rule over God’s House, a clear reference to Hebrews 3:6 where Christ is appointed over God’s House. And if the symbol is not clear to some, God specifically declares in Zechariah 3:8 that the High Priest Joshua is a symbol of the coming Branch, who is, obviously, Jesus. So, if in chapter 3 God was saying that Zechariah’s prophecy was about Jesus and the future Temple of Jesus’s redemtion work, then in chapter 2 Jerusalem is the New Testament Church. And it is about the New Testament Church that God said, “Jerusalem will be inhabited without walls, because I will be a wall of fire around her, and will be a glory in her midst.” Everything you are doing here is temporary, God was telling the generation of Ezra and Nehemiah. Your weakness is temporary. Your need for protective walls is temporary. Even your need for a Temple is temporary; very soon, this Temple won’t matter and the whole religious system based on it won’t matter anymore. Everything you are building here is good but it is only the last leg of the journey. You will soon be home, and this all will be demolished. Through Zechariah, God was telling Ezra, Nehemiah, and the High Priest Joshua that they were building the last stage of the Hebrew civilization. They were just a holdout, a last stronghold of a world that was passing away, and in order for them to not lose heart, God was giving them their purpose in His plan: to serve as the last symbol and herald of the coming glorious world in Christ. Which also means that their building of the wall of Jerusalem was to be only a temporary symbol. And just like Joshua the High Priest was to be only a symbol of the coming Great High Priest, Jesus, so also the wall around Jerusalem they were building was to be only a symbol of God’s wall of protection around God’s people in the new world. In the new world, there would be no more earthly high priests, no more earthly temples, and no more earthly, man-made walls. God would be all in all. There was another manifestation of the cult of safety in the ancient world that we are seldom aware of: namely, occultism. Most of us are conditioned to assume that pagan religions are basically the same as the Christian faith, it’s just the gods they believe in are different. But such is not the case. The nature of those religions is completely different, and the motivation of their adherents is competely different. The Christian religion is a religion, first and foremost, of gratitude to God; His worshipers approach Him not as someone Who needs their service or supplications but as someone who they need to be complete as human beings, and especially as spiritual beings. They can’t even define themselves without Him, so their worship is an act of complete surrender in gratitude and joy. In comparison, in the pagan worldview, human beings can be completely independent and complete apart from their gods; but realistically, they are forced to live in a world of unpredictable and mischievous spiritual beings and forces who need to be placated, enlisted as allies, or spiritually controlled, so that they don’t do harm to humans. (Or perhaps do harm to the right humans.) In such a setting, the life of man becomes a constant struggle for safety against those spiritual beings and forces; a struggle he is supposed to wage every day and every minute of the day using special knowledge of rituals and incantations that give him special powers over the spiritual realm. The average ancient Egyptian lived his life navigating through innumerable such dangers using spells and incantations. He had a spell for waking early in the morning and another one for going to bed. He had to avoid stepping on the threshold of another person’s house; or crossing paths with a cat. He had an incantation for starting a journey (to bind the evil spirits on the road) and another one for coming back home (to prevent evil spirits that may have been following him from entering his house). Things were not different in Greece and Rome. In his study, The Ancient City (which I have mentioned many times in this podcast, and it is time for you to find it and read it), Fustel des Coulanges shows that the veneration of the ancestors that marked the classical pagan religions was motivated by fear. The spirits of the ancestors were believed to live in the boundaries of their property, and they were believed to be rather malicious and vindictive towards their posterity; thus, all the family rituals were meant as a safety mechanism to either placate them or neutralize them. The same applied to all the superstitions that were supposed to keep the mischievous house spirits, the Roman Manes, Pares, and Lares, at bay. In fact, every pagan culture believed in such house spirits, and every single culture had its own safety rules and rituals to prevent mischief from them: from avoiding certain actions (like whistling in the house) to full-fledged religious annual rituals to cast those spirits out (like the Kukeri, Kalogeros, or Capra annual festivals in the Balkans and in Italy). Amazingly, many of these occult superstitions have remained to this very day even in cultures that have been otherwise deeply affected by Christianity. The story of the cult of safety in the antiquity is very long, but we will have to cut it short for our purposes, and move on with our topic. What is important to remember is that for paganism, the world is fraught with danger, and therefore all religious and liturgical activity is meant to be a safety mechanism against those dangers. The cult of safety in the ancient world was both religious and political; it viewed as possible danger both the stranger and the spiritual beings believed to inhabit the world. In fact, many ancient languages had similar words for “foreigner” and “evil spirit”; for example, in Cantonese, gwailou, literally meaning “ghost man,” used to the be the common term for “foreigner.” In the context of all this, the Cross dealt a severe blow to the cult of safety. The Roman Empire was able to conquer the known world using the cult of safety and manipulating the conquered peoples: on one hand, it offered a political and religious salvation from the perceived dangers of the world, and on the other hand, it threatened death for disobedience. (“It’s for your safety,” the mantra of modern American cops.) But the new religion that came out of Palestine produced a new breed of people: men and women, and even children, who didn’t care about their own safety. They wouldn’t be moved even if they were threatened with torture and death. The doctrine of resurrection from the dead was known to produce such results, and that’s why it was especially distasteful to the Greeks, because it created people who wouldn’t obey the rulers. Rome was able to hound gigantic mobs on the Christians by appealing to the “safety of the state and the people” (a constant refrain in all edicts against Christianity), but it was never able to scare Christians into submission by appealing to their own safety. A culture where every move of every individual and of every institution was to secure them against real or imaginary dangers, suddenly met a culture where both individuals and groups despised safety for a greater purpose. The new culture, thus, was devastating to the old one; it destroyed the very foundation upon which the old culture based its social order. From being despised, Christians grew to be respected for their courage in the face of danger. A number of early church fathers mention the fact that in many places, persecutions died out not because pagans ran out of Christians to persecute, but because they developed respect for and even superstitious fear of those seemingly feeble men and women and chidlren who wouldn’t do anything to gain more safety. In fact, the church even went into offensive from the very beginning. A few years ago I pointed out in an article that by the standards of the time, Paul’s discussion on the role of civil government in Roman 13 was not, as many today imagine, a concession to the authority of the Roman state. To the contrary, it was an ideological attack on every single tenet of the Roman political theory. And it didn’t stop with Paul; Christian apologists continued assaulting both the political theory of Rome and the pagan religious doctrine that supported it. Tertullian, the most charismatic (in all meanings of the word) of the early church writers, literally mocked the pagans for their religion and superstitions, all in the middle of ongoing persecutions. The small band of Christians was on the offense exactly because they didn’t care about safety, and the mighty empire and its pagan religions was on the defense exactly because it was paralyzed by the cult of safety. In the final account, Christians won. Why? Because, “they didn’t love their lives unto death.” There is no other way to victory. The subsequent history of the church proved that truth abundantly. Whenever the chuch entrusted its safety to Christ, it was prospering and growing. The greatest mission revivals followed periods when the church cast aside all worries about its own survival, and produced men who had no fear of the unknown, and no desire to stay safe. The mission explosion in the 5th through the 9th centuries saw missionaries who willingly crossed borders previously considered dangerous (unsafe) to cross. The Crusades were a period when even talking about personal or collective safety was considered dishonorable; women filed for divorce if their husbands showed even the slightest sign of cowardice. Such was the practice later among the Puritans as well; a wife had the legal right to divorce her husband for two reasons: if he couldn’t produce offspring, and if he showed cowardice. The disasters of the 14th century, of which we talked in previous episodes, so desensitized Christendom that for the next three or four centuries, death was not considered a big deal. That freed European hearts and minds to leave the geographical confines of Christendom and traverse the world as missionaries, explorers, merchants. Samuel Johnson, one of the greatest man of letters England has ever produced, quipped in the 1760s, “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.” The statement deserves criticism from a Biblical perspective, but the reality is, that was the mentality of most Europeans at the time; living dangerously, without regard for safety, was considered honorable even by the “lower”classes in the society. And Christendom expanded. But in the 19th century, with the resurgence of paganism in European thinking, Europe started experiencing a reversal back to the cult of safety. It started, of course, with the return of occultism. The ideology of the ruling classes in Europe had been shifting from Christianity towards rationalist deism before the 19th century, and rationalist deism was at the foundation of both the left-wing and the right-wing Enlightenment (think France and Scotland, but also Prussia, Italy and the Americas). The French Revolution was the political culmination of that rationalist thinking. Once it was over, the European elite turned to other anti-Christian philosophies. Some turned to crass materialism, like Feuerbach, or rationalist idealism, like Hegel. But the majority of the aristocracy turned to pagan occultism and mysiticism. A lot of it came from India, China, and Japan, with the government officials who served the colonial powers in those areas. In Germany and Scandinavia, and partly in England as well, much of it came from the Romanticist movement which exalted the “ancient ways and traditions.” It laid the foundation for the later racist and nationalist movements in Europe, and was the direct ideological reason for the two world wars. But the real motivation – individual motivation – for it was the loss of pesonal sense of safety. Christianity was not accepted as a valid worldview anymore; so the sense of personal insecurity in a world that was unknown and unknowable was growing, and people resorted to the old remedies: trying to control the unknown world through occult means. “Magical protection” or “spiritual protection” became popular words in Europe, and the buzzword for a number of successful marketing campaign. Europe abandoned Christianity, resorted to paganism, and with it, resorted back to the cult to safety. More than that, some new forms of the cult to safety appeared, this time in the church: the demonization of foods and beverages. Now, asceticism has always been a thing in the church, and there have always been excesses. But in general, most ascetics viewed fancy food and drinks as a distraction from spiritual focus, not so much as demons to fight. In Egypt, monks refrained from meat, but did not consider meat sinful per se. In Europe. Monasteries actually preserved agriculture during the dark ages of the 5th through the 9th centuries; and as a result, the fanciest foods and beverages could be found in the monasteries. But in the 19th century, a number of Protestant denominations and quasi-Protestant sects deviated into some serious paranoia about foods and drinks. It was not your regular fasting-type restriction, or recommended temperance. It was a wholesale demonization of certain foods and beverages as “detrimental” to one’s spiritual health. It was in the 19th century that Baptists started the transformation from the cigar-smoking, wine-drinking Charles Spurgeon and the bourbon-maker Elijah Craig to the modern teetotaling Baptists. Over the course of one generation, alcohol was gradually seen more and more as a substance to be avoided at all cost, because it was dangerous. Similar obsessions with foods and beverages took over the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Jehova’s Witnesses, and number of other sects. Obsession with the dangers of alcohol and tobacco was strongest, however, among the liberal elites in the large cities on the US East Coast, especially among the Universalist and Unitarian churches. It was those churches that led the crusade that ultimately ended in the Prohibition. In England, at the time, a similar crusade was rising against opium and other narcotics. Even though the addiction rate was negligible (compared to alcohol addiction levels of a century prior), different groups made gigantic efforts to make it as if all of England was going down the drain because of the Chinese opium dens in London. By the middle of the century, the Prohibition in the United States was over, but the spirit of the cult of safety simply transfered over to the new hobgoblin: the narcotics. In the 1960s, the US government started its most expensive and least sucessful war ever, the War on Drugs, which continues to this very day. The cult of safety took positions in the government policy of the times as well. It is commonly accepted today that the historical source of the modern welfare state is Marxist socialism. But that is not true. The origins of the welfare state are actually quite conservative and anti-socialist. In France, it was Emperor Napoleon III and his pamphlet, On the Extinction of Poverty, that laid the foundation for the welfare state in France. In Germany, the Prussian state developed a government “safety net” for its citizens, from government-provided education to government-provided jobs, to government provided pension system and health-care system. The Scandinavian countries adopted the same policy as early as the 1890s. Austria-Hungary adopted pension systems and healthcare systems for a significant part of its urban population in the 1870s. Even England, traditionally resistant to any such “egalitarian” measures, eventually started surrendering, and in the second half of the 19th century, different government welfare measures were introduced, including government schools and a government retirement system. All of this was, of course, with the purpose to provide “safety” for the general population; a safety which, later, will turn into slavery, as it was in the days of Israel in Egypt. At the time, however, almost no thinker opposed it. The only significant voice that did it on principled grounds was Frederick Bastiat in France; he pointed to the encroahcment of liberty that such “safety” was bringing in its wake. There were other voices, like Herbert Spencer in England, but Spencer opposed the cult of safety based on the bizarre theory of social darwinism, namely, that the unfit must be left to die so that the fittest survive; this was one of the earliest applications of Darwin’s theory to the social realm. The masses of people loved their safety, and did not understand the real loss for the society and for themselves that it was bringing. It was in that period that an institution was established in the West, one that had never existed in Christendom: the police. I will not go into detail here, we have talked about police in a previous episode, “Should We Have Police?” Suffice to say, police was entirely the product of the Enlightenment and its secular ideology, that man can, through science, take the place of God and provide what only God could provide. And what police was meant to provide, again, was safety and security. Safety became an obsession for the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. Nazism, the second most destructive ideology of the 20th century, was a clear representation of the cult of safety. As a few historians of Nazi Germany have pointed out, in the 1920s and the 1930s, the common perception in post-war Germany was that the rest of the world was determined to destroy Germany and the Germans. What Hitler promised, and what shot him up to power, was not world domination, but that he would protect Germans from the dangerous dark powers who surrounded Germany. He was offering Germany safety from the demons of anti-German conspiracy. The official propaganda language was full of phrases that presented Germany as heroically fighting for its survival against the world. Communism was no different; again, there were the dark capitalist forces out there, and here we were, the heroic Communist nations, pushing against evil. Even the GULags were officially established with the prupose of “defending the socialist order.” The Communist secret police was labeled as “safety” or “security” in all Eastern European nations: KGB in the Soviet Union, Committee for State Security, Stasi in East Germany, State Security, Securitate in Romania, etc. This paranoia of always being menaced by foreign hobgoblins remained such an integral part of the Russian mindset, and even today, Putin’s government sells its foreign wars against smaller countries as “defense against aggression.” To see how prevalent the cult of safety has become in the United States for the last one century, one has to read and compare two inaugural addresses separated by 100 years: That of Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 and that of George W. Bush in 2005. Both were significant because each address were given after a shocking terrorist event: Roosevelt’s address was given after the assassination, on September 5, 1901, of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz, son of Polish immigrants; Bush’s was given after the bombing, on September 11, 2001, of the towers of the World Trade Center, allegedly by Muslim terrorists from Saudi Arabia. Both acts shocked America, and both acts were still quite alive in the thinking of the American public. But when one reads Roosevelt’s address, it contains no signs of any promise to the American public that the government would provide for their safety; Roosevelt appeals to the independent and courageous spirit of America, and expects that Americans will continue to value their liberty and will continue expanding without fear, and without waiting to be patronized by the government, Bush, on the other hand, builds his entire address on the concept that the American people are like little children who need to be protected, who need safety against the dangerous forces of the world around them, so his government is there to offer that safety and security they need and crave. And indeed, 2001 was the year that changed American perceptions about safety like never before. And especially the perceptions of American Christians. As late as the 1980s and the early 1990s, for Christians and conservatives in general, America was still America the Powerful who could change the hearts and the minds of all, and bring even its mightiest enemy, the Soviet Union, to its knees, by sheer example, not by war. Refugees from Communist countries were accepted with joy, even if there was a danger that some of them could be spies. Granted, that confidence was secular, for it placed its faith in a nation rather than the faith that founded that nation; but it was still a secularist version of that earlier Christian optimism and courage about the world. Even as late as 1999, in debates with Al Gore, that same George W. Bush was still speaking in the older terms, like someone who trusted that there was no danger big enough to warrant fear and obsession with safety. (It was Al Gore who was using such language.) But by that time, the Christian faith was abandoned, and when it was abandoned, any significant event could shatter that confidence. And such event happened, on September 11th. With no true Biblical faith to support the confidence, American Christians resorted to the cult of safety almost overnight. You ever heard the argument, “The role of the government is to provide safety”? It is the most prevalent argument these days among American Christians, right? Guess what: There is no such Biblical role for the government. Not a single Biblical verse supports such a concept. Biblically, all sins and crimes come from the heart of man; therefore, danger can be predicted only by the One Who knows the heart of man, and prevented only by the One Who can change the heart of man. The civil government can’t read men’s hearts, and can’t change men’s hearts. Biblically, it can only register actual crimes and punish actual crimes; it can’t predict who and where will commit a crime, in order to provide safety. Thus, the only way for the government to provide safety is to take away the liberty of people to act; for any action is a possible threat to safety. (Think gun control: providing safety by taking guns away from all, including non-criminals.) Thus, from the government’s perspective, the only real threat to safety is liberty; and therefore the only way for the government to provide safety is by taking away liberty. The Founding Fathers understood this concept quite well, and that was the foundation of Benjamin Franklin’s statement that, paraphrasing, “Those who would give up liberty for safety, deserve neither, and will get neither.” Only God can provide safety without taking away liberty, because only God can read minds and hearts, and change minds and hearts. However, to understand this, one needs to be immersed deeply into the Christian faith and into a comprehensive Biblical view of the world, of man, and of man’s society. Once the Christian faith is abandoned – and it is, by the majority of the church-goers in the United States – then the safety that faith provides is lost, and man needs to build his own altar to safety, and to seek safety through his own means, or through the means of his most powerful institution, the state. And that’s how the cult of safety is born, and maintained in our nation. From this cult of safety, we have all the modern statist practices supported by church-goers and conservatives. From the cult of safety follows the worship of politics, and the expectation that politics – especially at the highest levels, in Washington DC – will solve the problems of America. From the cult of safety follows the worship of police and other institutions of government oppression and tyranny. From the cult of safety follow all the laws regulating the use of foods and substances; and from it follow all the laws regulating economic activity; after all, after all, we can’t let people be too free in their undertakings, for that might make other people unsafe. From the cult of safety, again, follow our modern immigration laws, and, more importantly, the support for those laws by church-goers and conservatives. Look at the latest election campaign: So obsessed are they with their safety, that the whole Republican campaign revolved around the unspeakable dangers from a few thousand men, women, and children who are fleeing an oppressive government. For the modern apostate American, the world is full with the darkest demons who are out there to get him, with hobgoblins lurking behind every corner. His senses are so addicted to fear and worry that even when he is presented with facts that the dangers are overblown, he reacts violently in anger. Under the cult of safety, any mention that he is not in danger is a blow to the cult, and therefore a heresy. The perception of danger has to be maintained, otherwise the cult becomes superfluous. And modern apostate Americans – and especially church-goers – would rather keep their cult than return to their Biblical roots. Paganism has returned to American churches, in its full force. And, to quote benjamin Franklin, because they have sought safety ate the expense of their God-given liberty, they have lost both liberty and safety. So next time you see an assault on Christian liberty, keep in mind, it is not the unbelievers who are to blame. For reading this week, I will assign an article and a book. The article is “Terrorism: Biblical Analysis and Solutions,” on ChristendomRestored.com. Pay attention to what I say there about fear and its Biblical significance. The book is rather off-topic, for the most part, but it has an interesting treatment of the modern cult of safety, and that is where ot matters the most, child rearing – for child rearing is where the cult is first being “encultured” into the our minds. Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law, by Philip Howard. Pay attention to the connections he makes between the cult of safety and the modern legal and political system. In your prayers and donations, keep Bulgarian Reformation Ministries, a mission organization devoted to expanding the Kingdom of God in Eastern Europe through translating and publishing books applying the Gospel to every area of life. We do not teach our readers to seek safety in man-made walls, we teach them to expand the Kingdom of God while seeking only the safety God provides for His people. And that’s why we have bene growing and scoring victories. Help us continue this trend. Visit Bulgarian Reformation.com, subscribe to the newsletter, and donate. God bless you all. Stream/Download The post The Cult of Safety appeared first on Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Podcast Network.