Sadly, the above is not a surprise to many of us who have followed Michael’s career over the years.

That doesn’t mean he wasn’t at one time convincing.  Even the late  John Robbins once awarded Sudduth with The Clark Prize in Apologetics (an award he stopped giving out after his experience with Michael who went on to make his living from the Roman state-church).

Michael’s dive into syncretism and mysticism has been evident for years.  Now that he has abandoned the faith entirely this is just the next logical move.

For Michael’s complete testimony concerning his personal savior Krishna, see:

From Christianity to Vaishnavism: The Move Eastwards.

Now, the focus of the meeting, at least according to byFaith, was to “ease denominational tension” that has been caused, not by false teaching and the false gospel that continues to spread like cancer virtually unabated throughout the PCA, but by bloggers and a narrow minded faction within presbyteries (read TRs) who are evidently too concerned with orthodoxy when examining candidates seeking ordination in the PCA.  According to one nameless attendee; “At the presbytery level, pockets of the PCA have become overly concerned with measuring orthodoxy.”   Oh, my.  We can’t have that.  Of course, this raises the question what else should those at the presbytery level be concerned with when examining candidates for ministry besides measuring a candidate’s level of orthodoxy?  Admittedly, there are other variables that need to be taken under consideration when someone is seeking ordination like can he teach or does he become tongue-tied or break into a sweat when speaking before a room full of people.  Beyond that his personal character, maturity in the faith, along with his ability to manage his family are all areas to be examined.  However, I would have thought that measuring the orthodoxy of prospective pastors would be the primary concern of those at the presbytery level.   In fact,  PCA BCO 21 requires a “careful examination” (would that be same as a precise examination) of a candidate’s “knowledge of the Greek and Hebrew languages, Bible content, theology, the Sacraments, Church history, the history of the Presbyterian Church in America, and the principles and rules of the government and discipline of the church.”

According to one nameless attendee, not only does precision in orthodoxy leads to “idolatry,” but having a strict standard of orthodoxy has caused men to leave the denomination, “which means we’re limiting our tools for building the kingdom.”  Call me crazy, but I fail to see how Christ’s kingdom is limited by requiring precision and a high level of orthodoxy in ministerial candidates.  Frankly, I think the requirements in the PCA are too low and prospective candidates should also be examined on their knowledge of philosophy and the laws of logic.

Until reading this article, I never realized the PCA was limiting their “tools for building the kingdom” by excluding unorthodox candidates from the ministry.  Aren’t there already enough homes for such men outside the PCA?  I see stupid and unorthodox pastors on TV every day. I’ve even attended some of their churches.  Certainly some of these candidates for ministry can and should make their living somewhere else, hopefully outside of the ministry.  I guess not according to those anonymous “denominational leaders” attending this secret meeting in Atlanta.  Is the church really suffering from too much precision in orthodoxy?  Give me a break.  I thought Christ’s kingdom was being destroyed and weakened by a lack of orthodoxy particularly in the ministry.  I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that the PCUSA hasn’t faired very well since they abandoned precision in orthodoxy and replaced it with some nebulous and unbiblical idea of “love.”  That didn’t seem to faze one nameless PCA elder who complained: “The proper goal –rather than that level of precision—should be love.”

For the record, I did a quick search of the Scriptures along with the PCA’s BCO and could find no example where church business is to discussed and debated under the Chatham House rule.  But, hey,  I guess I’m just a stickler for precision. 

Precision and orthodoxy aside, the main reason for this meeting was to address the real evil causing tension and division within the PCA; bloggers.   According to byFaith, “A number of men believed that online publications have hurt.”  Interestingly, there was no discussion if those hurt by online publications deserved to be hurt.  Just the fact that someone is  “hurt” by something written about them doesn’t mean that what was written is therefore untrue much less sinful.  Last I checked Jesus said many hurtful things to those who deserved to be hurt, as did Paul after him.  I hardly think whether or not someone has been hurt is much of a standard to judge anything, but I guess those meeting in Atlanta aren’t really concerned with standards, as standards, particularly when it comes to matters of Christian orthodoxy, lead to “idolatry.”

But what examples could these hurt souls provide in support their claim concerning the destructive nature of blogging that has caused so much tension in the PCA to warrant  secret meeting of 50 elders and “denominational leaders” cloaked in the anonymity of the Chatham House rule?  One nameless attendee did provide what he thought was a prime example:

One blogger wrote that a man in the denomination made him “want to throw up,” presbyteries have been characterized as “feminized,” and one blogger referred to his brother as a “purple robed, miter-wearing papist.”

Can you guess who that mystery blogger is?  Yep, you guessed it.  Actually, I confess I wished I used the phrase “purple robed, miter-wearing papist” as I think it is quite good.  Instead, here is what I wrote:

Yet, while the vast majority of FV and No Perspectives false teachers at least play the game of trying to appear as good P&R men in order to fool the feeble minded washcloths that make up the majority of femminized Presbyteries throughout the PCA, OPC and beyond, Otis came across one particular FV man complete with purple vestments and wearing a mitre.   His name is Craig Higgins of Trinity Presbyterian Church (PCA) of Rye, New York. You’ll notice on the church’s website that none other than former WTS  professor, Peter Enns,  is listed as their “Visiting Scholar” and who “comes to Trinity Church and teaches several times each year.”  Those poor people.  [For those interested in reading my entire piece of vile nastiness see Papists in PCA Clothing].

The irony in all this is that I’m not even PCA.  I left the PCA a few years ago after I became convinced over a number of years that the leadership in the PCA was ill-equipped, unable, and unwilling to effectively deal with what byFaith once called “the issue for this generation.”  I even outlined many of the reasons why I left and how I think the problem might be reversed, by God’s grace, in my book, Can the PCA Be Saved?  I still think that is an open question, despite secret meetings protecting men (and I say “men” reservedly) who hurl bombs at their Christian brothers while cowering in the anonymity of the “Chatham House Rule.”

Now, just because I’m no longer in the PCA (actually I was an officer, a deacon) that doesn’t mean I still don’t love the denomination and pray that God might raise up some men who might turn the PCA from it’s headlong and protracted dive into apostasy.  Admittedly, I do believe God has raised a few such men (one of whom is a former Federal Vision pastor himself), but I tend to think it is all too little too late. That’s not to say that God doesn’t work in funny ways, so who knows?  Frankly, if the Meyers, Leithart, and Lawrence cases are all disposed of correctly, which at this point will most likely require direct action by the SJC seeing that the respective presbyteries of these men continue to protect and defend them and their doctrines, I would rejoin the PCA in a heartbeat.  Tomorrow in fact.  Until such time, when I see one FV false teacher after another exonerated of teaching heresy by one presbytery after another I really don’t see ever rejoining the PCA as an option if only as a matter of conscience.

As much as I love the PCA I don’t want to be a member of a denomination that allows the preaching of a false gospel along side the true one with impunity (that ought to warm the hearts of the anonymous attendees meeting in Atlanta and encourage them to continue to do precisely nothing as the Gospel continues to be shred in the PCA).

Further, if anyone was hurt by what I wrote above, why didn’t they call, email, or even write me?  Isn’t that what the FV men are constantly whining about?  Don’t they always cry even from the floor of the GA; “Didn’t you call so-and-so to see if you understood him correctly before writing or saying what you did?”  Well, no one has called me.  Of course, I realize that while I’m not PCA those in the PCA have no obligation to try and correct me, assuming I am in need of correction here.   However, I am friends with a number of PCA elders who I respect very much and consider them in every way my spiritual superiors, even if they’re still figuring out that the PCA is a lost cause.  Frankly, there are a number of PCA elders who are fans of my blog and have written and talked to me privately thanking me for any number of posts and articles over the years.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t have my critics, but it does mean that if someone disagrees with something I’ve said, or even with how I said it, they should man up, put their name to their criticisms, and make their case (preferable from Scripture if they’re really interested in correction and not censorship).  Heck, they can even start their own blog and have at it.

I suppose the better question might be what sparked my “purple robed, miter-wearing papist” crack in the first place?  Shouldn’t this be relevant to the discussion?  To that question PCA pastor Craig Higgins had written (along with a number of other alarming and very un-orthodox things that were brought to light by Pastor John Otis on the Aquila Report blog):

Therefore, if we are to work toward the visible unity of the Church,  we should, I am increasingly convinced, defer to the wisdom of the majority in the Great Tradition and embrace the ministry of bishops.

One last comment: In Ut Unum Sint, Pope John Paul II has invited all the churches to discuss how the Petrine office should function in a reunited Church, and Reformed churchmen should welcome this conversation. Our idea of concentric circles of conciliar accountability would lead us to teach that, if the Church were visibly united around the world, there would need to be an ecumenical council, meeting as necessary to govern and guide the Church. The above argument for a (reformed) episcopacy would also lead us to teach that such a council would need a “presiding bishop,” serving as primus inter pares among his brothers, and historically such a position of honor has fallen to the bishop of Rome.

Now, think about this.  Those in the PCA thought it necessary to meet in secret and on the condition of anonymity in order to decry my blog which described one of their own as an “FV man complete with purple vestments and wearing a mitre,” yet they are not offended, much less outraged, by this same PCA pastor getting all moist about the prospects of the visible church being one day united under “the first among equals,” even the bishop of Rome.  Have those “denominational leaders” attending this secret meeting in Atlanta lost their anonymous minds?

I admit, I have never been much for conspiracy theories, but if I were I would guess that soon there will be an organized effort within the PCA to formally ban blogging and online discussions that are anyway critical of the PCA or any of its “denominational leaders.”  I’m quite sure that self-styled “first among equals” in Rome would approve.

For example, under Fallacies of Definition Wikipedia lists defining a word with a synonym:

A definition is no good if it simply gives a one-word synonym. For example, suppose we define the word “virtue”—an important word in ethic— by just using the word “excellence.” It might be perfectly true that all virtues are excellences and all excellences are virtues, but the word “excellence” itself is not a good definition of “virtue” in philosophy. One can always simply ask, “But what does ‘excellence’ mean?” Surely, if one has a basic confusion about what “virtue” means, then one may also have a basic philosophical confusion about what “excellence” might mean.

Now, Clark wrote his book long before there was a Federal Vision controversy, but what he pointed out, and what a lot of people on both sides of the FV divide continually fail to grasp, is that faith or belief (which are both translations in Scripture of the same Greek word pistis) is synonymous with the word trust.  Seems obvious enough to anyone who speaks English.  That’s because to believe someone or to have faith in someone is to trust in what they say and to trust someone is to believe or have faith in what they say.  In response to R.C. Sproul’s confused but typical (mis)understanding of saving faith, John Robbins argued:

Notice that Sproul here uses the verbs “believe” and “trust” interchangeably, as synonyms. This is both good English and sound theology. Belief, that is to say, faith (there is only one word in the New Testament for belief, pistis) and trust are the same; they are synonyms. If you believe what a person says, you trust him. If you trust a person, you believe what he says. If you have faith in him, you believe what he says and trust his words. If you trust a bank, you believe its claims to be safe and secure. Strictly speaking, trust is belief of propositions in the future tense, such as “he will be good to me” or “this bank will keep my money safe.” This is important, because Sproul’s incorrect analysis of saving faith, his splitting it up into three parts, the third part being trust, depends on denying that belief and trust are the same thing. But here he correctly implies they are the same by using the words interchangeably.

In contrast, a man who is unconcerned with having fallacies litter his theology and who I am quite sure gets all tingly at the sound of Latin (after all it is the traditional language of the religious elites particularly those members of the Roman priesthood), is Federal Visionist James Jordan.   Jordan, like all Federal Visionists, makes good use of the tautological nature of the three fold definition of faith by attaching a meaning to the idea of “trust” or “fiducia” which is not  synonymous with the word “faith.”  Writing on Doug Wilson’s blog, Jordon stews:

The followers of Gordon Clark say that faith is notitia and assensus, but not fiducia. They have been objecting to historical Calvinism ever since the 1930s. They object to the so-called FV for the same reason: We say that faith involves loyalty, fiducia.

Notice, for Jordon  trust is not belief in propositions in the future tense, such as “he will be good to me” or “this bank will keep my money safe.”  No, for Jordon and his fellow FVists to trust means to be loyal.  And, for Federal Visionists being loyal means to live our lives in conformity to the demands of the covenant that God has imposed on us by virtue of the magic waters of baptism and the mumblings of an FV priestling.  It’s not receiving and resting on Christ’s righteousness alone — His covenant faithfulness — completely outside of us or apart from anything that might be wrought in us as a result of our own ongoing sanctification.  Rather, justification by faith — even faith alone — includes our ongoing sanctification which is the instrument of our justification (something the FV men divide into two part; initial justification via the waters of baptism and final justification on the basis of our works or ongoing loyalty).

Well, in contrast to the FV false teachers who eagerly exploit the popular confusion over saving faith, Augustine very much shared Clark’s definition of faith (a fact that only got passing mention in Clark’s book).  While reading Augustine’s treatise, The Predestination of the Saints, I came across the following:

For who cannot see that thinking is prior to believing? For no one believes anything unless he has first thought that it is to be believed. For however suddenly, however rapidly, some thoughts fly before the will to believe, and this presently follows in such wise as to attend them, as it were, in closest conjunction, it is yet necessary that everything which is believed should be believed after thought has preceded; although even belief itself is nothing else than to think with assent. For it is not every one who thinks that believes, since many think in order that they may not believe; but everybody who believes, thinks,—both thinks in believing, and believes in thinking. Therefore in what pertains to religion and piety (of which the apostle was speaking), if we are not capable of thinking anything as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God, we are certainly not capable of believing anything as of ourselves, since we cannot do this without thinking; but our sufficiency, by which we begin to believe, is of God.

The above is Clark in a nutshell.  Augustine like Clark clearly distinguish between understanding or thinking as that which precedes belief (simply because one cannot believe what they don’t first understand) and thinking with assent is to believe.   Of course, a person can understand or think correctly about many things and not believe them, and concerning the gospel Augustine notes that “many think in order that they may not believe.”  But no one can think correctly concerning the truth of the gospel and believe it without God first causing them to  assent to that truth.  That’s because as Paul tells us in Ephesians 2 belief (or faith for those who prefer the Latin translation of the Greek word pistis)  “is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”  And, as John tells us in the prologue to his Gospel:

“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name:  who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”

With that one caveat aside, I recently downloaded Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian Writings and just finished the rather lengthy introduction by B. B. Warfield.  I probably shouldn’t even have started this as I have also recently purchased Augustine’s massive City of God  and I’m barely through the first book.  Besides, I didn’t even think I would be remotely interested in the Pelagian controversy as the doctrines of original sin and free will have been settled, at as far as I’m concerned, centuries ago even if the belief in free will is alive and well if only in the form of semi-Pelagianism (something Augustine wrestled with toward the end of his life) or in its slightly more refined “Evangelical” form of synergism,  Arminianism.

That said, what immediately caught my attention was how early in the controversy Pelagius was able to avoid prosecution and even had his teachings temporarily vindicated through a clever manipulation of the meaning of the word “grace.”  Quoting Augustine Warfield writes:

“For if these bishops had understood that he meant only that grace which we have in common with the ungodly and with all, along with whom we are men, while he denied that by which we are Christians and the sons of God, they not only could not have patiently listened to him, — they could not even have borne him before their eyes.” The letter then proceeds to point out the difference between grace and natural gifts, and between grace and the law, and to trace out Pelagius’ meaning when he speaks of grace, and when he contends that man can be sinless without any really inward aid. It suggests that Pelagius be sent for, and thoroughly examined by Innocent, or that he should be examined by letter or in his writings; and that he not be cleared until he unequivocally confessed the grace of God in the catholic sense, and anathematized the false teachings in the books attributed to him.

When initially examined, Pelagius affirmed God’s grace in salvation, but what he meant by “grace” is the natural endowment of a soul free from the stain of sin at birth and possessing a free and undetermined will which is able to choose either good or evil.  Augustine was keenly aware of how this subterfuge worked:

And they found such a device as this….’Because I defend man’s free will, and say that free will is sufficient in order that I may be righteous,’ says one, ‘I do not say that it is without the grace of God.’ The ears of the pious are pricked up, and he who hears this, already begins to rejoice: ‘Thanks be to God! He does not defend free will without the grace of God! There is free will, but it avails nothing without the grace of God.’ If, then, they do not defend free will without the grace of God, what evil do they say? Expound to us, O teacher, what grace you mean? ‘When I say,’ he says, ‘the free will of man, you observe that I say “of man”?’ What then? ‘Who created man?’ God. ‘Who gave him free will?’ God. ‘If, then, God created man, and God gave man free will, whatever man is able to do by free will, to who grace does he owe it, except to His who made him with free will?’

It guess it is true that as much as things change they stay the same.  Heretics in every century are expert in employing words in ways that their opponents will accept as orthodox while at the same time attaching meanings to those words that are anything but.  A good recent example is how Federal Visionists have been able to exploit the relative ambiguity around the meaning of the word “faith” which has allowed them to appear, at least to some, as if they were affirming the central doctrines of the Gospel, even justification by faith alone.  Like Pelagius, these false teachers have been amazingly resourceful in subverting the traditional tri-fold definition of saving faith by including works (or obedience) as an integral definitional and “fiducial” component of faith.   A good example of this subterfuge, and since I mentioned him earlier,  is Douglas Jones’ claim in the pages of Doug Wilson’s Credenda Agenda that knowing is doing.  Jones asserts:  “In contrast to this prevailing view of knowledge as merely mental, Scripture assumes that knowledge is primarily a kind of bodily doing.”  It shouldn’t be hard to see how from Jones’ epistemological perversion of knowledge as a “kind of bodily doing,” that men like Wilson arrive at the notion that believing is also doing and justification by faith alone really means justification by faith plus works or simply justification by our own faithfulness.

Another interesting facet arising from the Pelagian controversy was Augustine’s flirtation with traducianism or the belief that the creation of the soul is not a separate and immediate work of God (creationism) but rather is a result of natural generation.  As many of the readers of this blog may already know, Gordon Clark was very much a defender of traducianism (see The Biblical Doctrine of Man).  The reason the origin of the soul was important is because Pelagius argued that since God immediately created the soul of every man it follows that man cannot be born with the stain of Adam’s sin without making God sin’s author.  One way around this argument was traducianism.  Warfield again:

God is good, just, omnipotent: how, then can we account for the fact that “in Adam all die,” if souls are created afresh for each birth? “If new souls are made for men,” [Augustine] affirms, “individually at their birth, I do not see, on the one hand, that they could have any sin while yet in infancy; nor do I believe, on the other hand, that God condemns any soul which He sees to have no sin;” “and yet, whosoever says that those children who depart out of this life without partaking of the sacrament of baptism, shall be made alive in Christ, certainly contradicts the apostolic declaration,” and “he that is not made alive in Christ must necessarily remain under the condemnation of which the apostle says that by the offense of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation.” “Wherefore,” he adds to his correspondent, “if that opinion of yours does not contradict this firmly grounded article of faith, let it be mine also; but if it does, let it no longer be yours.” So far as obtaining light was concerned, Augustin might have spared himself the pain of this composition: Jerome simply answered that he had no leisure to reply to the questions submitted to him.

What is interesting in all this is the role the law of contradiction played in Augustine’s thinking.  Here he tells Jerome that if creationism contradicts the doctrine of original sin, a “firmly grounded article of faith,” Jerome should abandon it.   If, on the other hand, Jerome could demonstrate that creationism did not contradict original sin then Augustine too would accept it.  What a far cry from Cornelius Van Til who argued in An Introduction to Systematic Theology that “Christians should . . . never appeal to the law of contradiction as something that . . . determines what can or cannot be true.”  By his reply, Jerome would have probably been a Van Tillian.   In fairness, it seems Augustine never did come to any hard and fast position on the creation of souls and seemed to waffle between a number of different theories.  For myself, one of the things that makes traducianism so attractive is that it necessitates the virgin birth as the contagion of sin is conveyed by ordinary generation through the line of Adam.  The virgin birth breaks that line.

The other aspect in the battle against Pelagianism, arguably the high point, is that through this controversy Augustine further crystallized his understanding of God’s sovereignty in salvation culminating in his treatise, The Predestination of the Saints, where he corrects some of his earlier errors concerning the role of free will and the nature of grace.  It is interesting how some of the arguments used against Augustine in the early part of the 5th century are still used today against the Reformed doctrine of predestination today.  For example, the Pelagians argued:

“…if we believed that without any preceding merits He had mercy on whom He would, and whom He would He called, and whom He would He made religious;” that “it was unjust, in one and the same case, to deliver one and punish another;” that, if such a doctrine is preached, “men who do not wish to live rightly and faithfully, will excuse themselves by saying that they have done nothing evil by living ill, since they have not received the grace by which they might live well….”

The first part of this objection rests on the question of fairness and that it would be unjust for God to choose one person for salvation over another.  In their minds this would make “God an acceptor of persons.”  In response, Augustine argued:

“But why those also are created who, the Creator foreknew, would belong to damnation, not to grace, the blessed apostle mentions with as much succinct brevity as great authority. For he says that God, ‘wishing to show His wrath and demonstrate His power,’ etc. (Romans 9:22). Justly, however, would he seem unjust in forming vessels of wrath for perdition, if the whole mass from Adam were not condemned.”

For myself, this was the only way I could initially get my mind around the question of God’s sovereign choice in salvation when I first wrestled with this doctrine years ago as I was kept up nights working through Clark’s Predestination and searching the Scriptures.  It is only against the backdrop of original sin and the universal depravity of man that predestination made any sense to me.  That’s because if God were “fair” He would be perfectly just in condemning the whole lot of us to an eternity in Hell. The fact that He has mercy on anyone on account of the finished work of His Son is really the miracle of grace which is precisely what Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism sought to undermine and is what Augustine sought to maintain.

The other objection raised is that predestination will unwittingly promote sin as “men who do not wish to live rightly and faithfully, will excuse themselves by saying that they have done nothing evil by living ill, since they have not received the grace by which they might live well….”  This is basically the same argument the Apostle Paul anticipates overthrows in Romans 6 and the fallacy that we can “continue in sin that grace may abound.”

Concerning the Semi-Pelagians, Warfield writes:

Its representatives were ready, as a rule, to admit that all men were lost in Adam, and no one could recover himself by his own free will, but all needed God’s grace for salvation. But they objected to the doctrines of prevenient and of irresistible grace; and asserted that man could initiate the process of salvation by turning first to God, that all men could resist God’ grace, and no grace could be given which they could not reject, and especially they denied that the gifts of grace came irrespective of merits, actual or foreseen. They said that what Augustin taught as to the calling of God’s elect according to His own purpose was tantamount to fatalism, was contrary to the teaching of the fathers and the true Church doctrine, and, even if true, should not be preached, because of its tendency to drive men into indifference or despair.

Again, it is amazing to me how arguments leveled against even the preaching of predestination in the 5th Century have been repeated in every generation right up to today.  How many times have we heard that, even if true, the preaching of predestination should be avoided.  That’s not to say that great care shouldn’t accompany its preaching, but the tendency, even in many Reformed churches, is to avoid it entirely.

While there are many commendable aspects to Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian writings, that is not to say that even the great Augustine was without fault.  Warfield explains:

The saddest corollary that flowed from this doctrine was that by which Augustin was forced to assert that all those who died unbaptized, including infants, are finally lost and depart into eternal punishment. He did not shrink from the inference, although he assigned the place of lightest punishment in hell to those who were guilty of no sin but original sin, but who had departed this life without having washed this away in the “laver of regeneration.” This is the dark side of his soteriology; but it should be remembered that it was not his theology of grace, but the universal and traditional belief in the necessity of baptism for remission of sins, which he inherited in common with all of his time, that forced it upon him. The theology of grace was destined in the hands of his successors, who have rejoiced to confess that they were taught by him, to remove this stumbling-block also from Christian teaching; and if not to Augustin, it is to Augustin’s theology that the Christian world owes its liberation from so terrible and incredible a tenet. Along with the doctrine of infant damnation, another stumbling-block also, not so much of Augustinian, but of Church theology, has gone. It was not because of his grace.

. . . Along with the doctrine of infant damnation, another stumbling-block also, not so much of Augustinian, but of Church theology, has gone. It was not because of his theology of grace, or of his doctrine of predestination, that Augustin taught that comparatively few of the human race are saved. It was, again, because he believed that baptism and incorporation into the visible Church were necessary for salvation. And it is only because of Augustin’s theology of grace, which places man in the hands of an all-merciful Savior and not in the grasp of a human institution, that men can see that in the salvation of all who die in infancy, the invisible Church of God embraces the vast majority of the human race, — saved not by the washing of water administered by the Church, but by the blood of Christ administered by God’s own hand outside of the ordinary channels of his grace.

In any case, while we can happily leave aside aspects of Augustine’s ecclesiology there is still plenty of relevant meat to be found in a 5th Century controversy and, provided you have a Nook or a Kindle under your tree,  you can find it all for free.

In a recent piece titled The Bible, Blowback and the Bomb, I used the rhetoric from the November 22 Republican foreign policy debate to discuss the dangers inherent in the militarist foreign policy favored by most of the candidates.  But bellicosity was not the only bit of foolishness on display that night.  Another ritual abuse of the US taxpayer, foreign aid or foreign assistance as the State Department likes to call it, was a subject of some debate as well.

Most of the Republican candidates seemed to agree that foreign aid, if used in the service of a good cause and given to the right people, was sound policy.  This, of course, is the same view held by the Democrats.  The difference between the two parties is not over whether foreign aid is a good thing – they both agree that it is – but merely over who should receive it.  For their part, Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton have made clear whose interest they believe should be served at taxpayers’ expense:  the homosexual lobby.

A piece in the New York Times has reported that,

The Obama administration announced on Tuesday that the United States would use all the tools of American diplomacy, including the potent enticement of foreign aid, to promote gay rights around the world.

Now that’s what I call your tax dollars at work.  But despite the high profile announcement, the administration was rather vague about how it actually plans to implement this new strategy.  For the article adds,

Neither Mr. Obama nor Mrs. Clinton specified how to give the initiative teeth.  Caitlin Hayden, the National Security Council’s deputy spokeswoman, said the administration was ‘not cutting or tying’ foreign aid to changes in other nation’s practices.

Color me cynical, but this strikes me as laughable.  Think of how often the federal government has threatened to withhold highway funds from this or that state unless it goes along with the latest diktat from Washington on some generally unrelated issue.  Do they really expect anyone to believe it will work differently in this case?  The old saying is still applicable, “he who pays the piper calls the tune.”

This initiative is an example of what the Obama administration has termed “smart power,” a policy that emphasizes development and diplomacy as a complement to American military power.  In other words, smart power’s aim is to provide a welfare carrot to go along with the warfare stick.  Or put it still another way, the Obama administration’s policy is if you can’t bomb ‘em, bribe ‘em.

So just how smart is this “smart power”?  In the eyes of those who wield it, “smart power” appears the very height of wisdom.  But God calls their wisdom foolishness, and he does so for at least two reasons.  In the first place, the Bible nowhere sanctions foreign aid.  The job of governors is to punish evil doers (Rom. 13:4), not take money from citizens and then to give it to foreign governments for the purpose of social engineering (or for any other reason for that matter).  When magistrates go beyond their limited, biblical mandate to punish evil doers and instead seek to use public money to advance pet projects, they are guilty of breaking the eighth commandment, God’s prohibition against theft.

Second, the objective of the administration’s “smart power” initiative – the advancement of the homosexual rights agenda – is sinful in itself regardless of the source of the money, because homosexuality, or sodomy as it is also know, is a sin.  The Bible calls it an abomination.  And those who engage in sodomy, as the Westminster Larger Catechism correctly notes, are guilty of breaking the seventh commandment.

But this is not the whole story, for not only does the Bible consider homosexuality a sin, but also designates it a crime.  Not all sins were crimes in the law of Moses.  Only those sins to which the law also attached civil penalties were crimes in ancient Israel.  This was the case with sodomy, for the law both condemned homosexuality as an abomination and enjoined the death penalty for those convicted of it (Lev. 20:13).  But Mrs. Clinton disagrees, for the article quotes her saying, “it should never be a crime to be gay.”

In addition to the above Biblical considerations, there is also the small matter of the US Constitution, for nowhere does it sanction foreign aid whether in the service of the homosexual agenda or for any other cause.  Perhaps this is one reason why Hillary Clinton decided to announce the administration’s initiative in Geneva at the United Nations Human Rights Council rather than at a domestic venue.  Further, she appealed to the authority of the UN Declaration on Human Rights as a basis for her assertions about homosexual rights rather than to anything in the Constitution.

This is a serious breach of the oath of office sworn by the president and the secretary of state.  When a president is sworn into office, he takes the oath specified in Article 2 of the Constitution,

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States.

The oath for secretary of state is similar.  According to Article 3 of the Constitution,

The senators and representatives…and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this constitution.

There is no language in these oaths about upholding a UN declaration.  When presidents and secretaries of state swear to do one thing, and instead do something quite different, they have broken their oaths of office and are guilty before God of bearing false witness, the ninth commandment.

As if it weren’t enough that US foreign aid is without warrant in the Bible, serves political agendas hateful to God, and abuses the US taxpayer, there is a practical problem with it as well:  it generally fails to help the very people who are said to be in need.  Ron Paul gave voice to this problem when he replied to a question about foreign aid by saying,

I think the aid is all worthless.  It doesn’t do any good for most of the people. You take money from poor people in this country and you end up giving it to rich people in poorer countries.

If anyone doubts the truth of this statement, let him read Graham Hancock’s 1994 book, The Lords of Poverty, for an exposé of the foreign aid racket.

At this point I would like to be very clear about one thing, I am not calling for a conservative Republican version of “smart power.” I am not asking Evangelicals to rally to the cause of “moral power” or to take up some modernized version of the now embarrassing “white man’s burden” of yesteryear.  For as John Robbins pointed out in his essay Truth and Foreign Policy, the philosophical justification for the “smart power” initiatives of Obama and Clinton has its roots in the misguided efforts of Christians during the Progressive Era.  According to Robbins, President William McKinley offered that one reason he decided to annex the Philippines was,

there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all [the Philippines], and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace to do the best we could by them.

There was no justification in the Bible for McKinley’s decision.  Instead basing his policy toward the Philippines on Scripture, McKinley relied on his interpretation of contemporary events to guide him. But events provide no ethical help for decision making, only the propositions of Scripture can do this.  It seems that had McKinley been in king David’s shoes, he would have listened to his men and murdered Saul in the cave rather than obeying God and refusing to lift his hand against the wayward Israelite king(1 Sam.24).

Let there be no mistake about it, the current US foreign policy of bribery and bellicosity will come to an end.  Either the American people will end it at the ballot box, or an economic collapse or military defeat will do the job for them.  The US has no ethical mandate to rule the world.  The Christian and Constitutional position on foreign aid is this:  end it, don’t mend it.  The sooner Americans come to understand and believe this, the sooner our nation can rid itself of its current failed foreign policy and return to a biblical, sane and constitutional approach to international relations.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

For further reading see Not Yours to Give by Davy Crockett (yes, that Davy Crockett).

There are good reasons why the new boss is same as the old boss and why we are routinely fooled again.  These two pieces explain why.

Here is a small sample from the Robbins piece that succinctly contrasts a very popular and even religious foreign policy with the biblical one:

Alfred Thayer Mahan, the apologist of naval power at the turn of the century, thought of America’s “unwilling acquisition of the Philippines” in these terms: “[T]he preparation made for us, rather than by us…is so obvious as to embolden even the least presumptuous to see in it the hand of Providence.” Circumstances not only justify the action, sometimes they lend it divine authority.

Had King David been guided by Mahan’s notion of the guiding hand of Providence, rather than by the Biblical idea of obedience to God’s laws, Old Testament history would have been quite different. When King Saul was trying to kill David, and David was fleeing from him and his troops, Saul

“came to the sheepfolds by the road, where there was a cave; and Saul went in to attend to his needs. (David and his men were staying in the recesses of the cave.) Then the men of David said to him, ‘This is the day of which the Lord said to you, “Behold, I will deliver your enemy into your hand, that you may do to him as it seems good to you.”’ And David arose and secretly cut off a corner of Saul’s robe. Now it happened afterward that David’s heart troubled him because he had cut Saul’s robe. And he said to his men, ‘The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my master, the Lord’s anointed, to stretch out my hand against him, seeing he is the anointed of the Lord.’ So David restrained his servants with these words, and did not allow them to rise against Saul. And Saul got up from the cave and went on his way.”

Here was the “guiding hand of Providence” if ever it had displayed itself. It led Saul into the cave where David and his men were hiding. David could have killed Saul while he napped. David’s men, like Alfred Mahan, urged him to seize the moment; they even quoted a prophecy to lend the sanction of God to their opinion. But David, who was truly a man after God’s own heart, knew that they were wrong. His obligation was to obey God’s command not to harm the king. He could not tell what God’s purposes were by reading the circumstances. As it turned out, God’s purpose, or one of God’s purposes, was to test David to see whether he would obey God rather than leaning on his own understanding of circumstances. David passed the test; his men would have failed had David not restrained them.

For the most part, the Republican foreign policy debate held November 22 was a contest among the candidates for the title of who could bomb, sanction, no-fly zone, and occupy the greatest number of countries with the biggest, most expensive military toys. The underlying premise – that the US has the right, indeed the obligation, to do all these things – went unchallenged except by one individual.  I would like to explore this premise further, but before I do, I wish to make two points.

First, the Bible is the sole source of truth about how to conduct foreign policy.  It likely seems odd to most people, even to most Christians, to suggest that the Bible has anything to say about foreign policy, let alone to suggest that it is the sole source of truth on the subject.  Secularists despise the Bible for its message.   In their view it is unscientific, unloving, unforgiving, judgmental, out of date, racist, sexist and homophobic.  Christians, who rightly reverence the Bible as the word of God, are accustomed to think of it as a book on how to get saved and live a life pleasing to God.  Of course the Bible is about those things, but there is much more to it than that.  The Bible has a monopoly on truth.  All truth, including the truth about how to conduct foreign policy.  For the Scripture says that in Christ are hidden “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” including the wisdom and knowledge necessary to conduct foreign policy.

Second, rulers and the nations they govern are not sovereign.  Governors are subject to the law of God just as much as are private citizens.  There is a tendency among some to suppose that there is one law for rulers and another for everyone else.  Governors, so goes the argument, have a special dispensation to lie, steal, blaspheme and murder if they do so in the pursuit of some stated greater good.  But the Bible tells us that, “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad” (2 Cor. 5:10).  There are no exceptions for governors.  Elsewhere Paul, writing about rulers, states, “for he is God’s minister to you for good” (Rom.13:4).  If rulers are God’s ministers, then they are responsible to God, that is to say they are answerable to him for their actions, not only those taken as private citizens, but also those as rulers.  And God has only one set of ethical principles:  the Ten Commandments.  These apply to all men everywhere, regardless of their station in life.

Since it addresses how we are to relate to others, of special interest in this case is the so-called second table of the law where we are enjoined to honor our father and mother, not murder, not commit adultery, not steal, not bear false witness and not covet.  Christ summed up these commandments by telling us to love our neighbor as ourselves, or as he said in another place, “Whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 7:12).  Unlike what the comparative religion types will tell you, this is not the same statement as was made by others before Christ, for Christ grounds his injunction in the Law and the Prophets, something Confucius and others who supposedly held to the same idea did not do.  This principle, simple enough for a child to understand, seems completely lost on most of our leading politicians and intellectuals, not to mention the entire American foreign policy establishment.

As an example of what can happen when we ignore the Bible when making foreign policy decisions, consider the case of Iran.  I’m old enough to remember when Iranian revolutionaries raided the American embassy in Tehran in 1978 and the ensuing hostage crisis.  What I also remember from that time is all the pictures of the angry mobs in Iran chanting and carrying signs around that read, “death the America the great Satan,” and other things of that sort.  I was shocked.  I couldn’t fathom why Iranians hated America so much.  As far as I knew, I had never hated Iran or done anything to offend Iranians.  Clearly, I thought to myself, these are not rational people.  It wasn’t until years later that I found out that the animosity expressed by the Iranian mobs in 1978 had its origin 25 years earlier in the 1953, when the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of the elected government of Iran and installed the Shah, a US puppet.  It turns out that the Iranian revolution and the hatred that fueled it were textbook examples of what students of foreign policy call “Blowback,” defined as the unintended consequences of interventionist American foreign policy.  And the echoes of 1978 are still resounding today, for, if we take our Secretary of State at her word, we could end up dropping an atomic bomb for the first time since 1945 in order to prevent a still hostile, Islamic fundamentalist, Iranian government from going nuclear.

To further illustrate this point, ask yourself this question, would you want a foreign country, China let’s say, overthrowing the Obama administration in a coup and installing some puppet president?  For my part, as much as I don’t like Obama, I like even less the idea of the Chinese dictating to the US who occupies the White House.  I would never stand for it, and, I suspect, neither would most Americans.  With that in mind, is it so hard to understand that people in other nations may resent like treatment at the hands of the CIA regardless of how many schools or hospitals the US builds for them?

Now please don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending fundamentalist Islam as a good idea or extolling the virtues of Sharia law.  Far from it.  I am thankful to God to live in a nation that does not suffer under those twin burdens.  But the Bible nowhere sanctions the imperialist foreign policy that this country has followed for the past one hundred years, let alone the doctrine of preventive war that is so popular today among so-called conservatives.  The US federal government has no right to start wars against foreign nations to stop them from getting the bomb, make the world safe for democracy, defend Israel, secure natural resources, stop human rights abuses, establish voting rights, or most of the other reasons that have been offered as justifications for war by people in high places, including most Republican presidential candidates.

The Bible tells us “to mind our own business” and to make it our “ambition” to lead a quiet life (1 Thess. 4:11).  This is good advice for individuals.  It’s good advice for nations too.  Those who wield or would like to wield the levers of power tell us that we must, “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here,” as a way of justifying the immoral and unconstitutional wars being conducted by the US federal government.  This is a lie.  The truth is, much of the animosity and resentment directed toward the United States has been caused by the belligerent policies of an out of control federal government pursuing the folly of an American Empire.

Now most Americans would be shocked at the suggestion  that we have an empire.  But we do, and like the British version, the sun never sets on it.  It’s just that unlike the British, we’re not honest enough to call it what it is.  Maybe that has something to do with how the US got its start.  After all, it’s an embarrassing historical fact that a nation born out of revolt against an empire has now become the world’s leading imperial power.  That’s not the sort of thing one advertises.

Empires are expensive and tend to end badly.  Ours is consuming our financial resources at an unsustainable rate, to say nothing of the damage it is doing to our military personnel put in harm’s way to defend it.  The US is going bankrupt, and our foolish foreign policy is a major cause of this.  Unless Americans force a change of direction by supporting politicians who advocate a Christian foreign policy based on the Golden Rule rather than those who support the failed policies of the ruling establishment, we can expect, in the words of Chalmers Johnson, to continue suffer the sorrows of empire.

By Brandon Adams

I recently received an email update from Monergism Books announcing new titles they have available. One of them is Isaac Watts’ “Logic: The Right Use of Reason in the Inquiry After Truth”

Description: Isaac Watts is well known as the author of more than 750 beloved hymns. What most people don’t realize is that his work on logic was a standard textbook for nearly 200 years.

The Puritans were convinced that the ability to think clearly was of the utmost importance for interpreting the Bible correctly, and especially for those entering the ministry. In their minds, if a man could not think clearly, he could not interpret the Bible correctly.

In our day, common sense is not very common and clear thinking is not very clear. This book will help discipline the mind and train the reader to discern proper thinking and argumentation in seeking truth.

They nearly had me sold, until I read the only endorsement:

“Fuzzy thinking is one of the great sins of our age. Christians who seek to return to the clear-mindedness which characterized the church of previous generations will certainly welcome the reurn of this great text on logic by Isaac Watts. The clear devotion of Watts’ hymns came from a clear mind–and that was no accident.”
–Doug Wilson, National Board of the Association of Classical and Christian Schools

Talk about irony. Robbins once commented: “Indeed, one could use Wilson’s whole book as a source of examples of logical fallacies when teaching logic.” (NRAT p. 78). Wilson himself noted: “For various reasons, many of them very sad, my mind does not work the way a logic teacher’s mind ought to work” (“The Great Logic Fraud”, from The Paideia of God, p. 78)

As Robbins and Gerety note in Not Reformed At All (p. 29):

The point is not whether Wilson holds to this or that point of the “historic Reformed faith as represented by the Westminster Standards” (even while artfully misrepresenting those Standards), but whether or not his opinions contradict or undermine the system of truth summarized in those Standards and taught in the Scriptures. Christianity is a logical, propositional system, not an aggregate of disjointed thoughts and metaphors; and Wilson’s dislike of logical systems, propositions, and of logic itself, is well known. Wilson is opposed to all systems, especially theological systems. He is even opposed to arithmetic.*

*In 1999 Wilson published an essay titled “The Great Logic Fraud” in his book The Paideia of God. It expresses his revolt against excellence, precision, and logic. That essay belies any claim Wilson might make to believe the system of truth in the Westminster Confession. In the essay, Wilson even denies that 2 + 2 = 4 is true. His exact words are, for those who might find my accusation incredible, “Because of our realist assumptions in mathematics, we have come to believe that 15 + 20 = 35 is true. But it is evidently not true” (85).

Robbins provided further explanation on the Trinity Foundation website:

“Because of our realist assumptions in mathematics, we have come to believe that 15 + 20 = 35 is true. But it is evidently not true. 15 unicorns plus 20 unicorns will not get you 35 unicorns, try as you may. Of course, on the other hand, 15 turnips plus 20 turnips will result in 35 turnips, and it will do so every time. The structure of the addition table is sound, and the ‘argument’ is valid. And if unicorns existed, we would wind up with 35 of them. But this means the argument is valid, not true.” –– Douglas Wilson, “The Great Logic Fraud,” The Paideia of God, 85.

Comment: Wilson did not write this revealing essay to make the trivial point that arguments are valid (or invalid) and propositions are true (or false). He wrote it to deny that the proposition, “Fifteen plus twenty equals thirty-five” is true. Arithmetic, like logic, Wilson says, is a “great fraud.”

And Anthony C0letti added the following comment to Doug Wilson’s blog entry response:

There was a question on a e-mail list I subscribe to about whether you support a “classical education”. I’ve come to the conclusion you support a classical education while rejecting classical logic.

I posted on the list: “Wilson appears to support a classical education while rejecting classical logic by making a claim on existential import as a requirement for defining truth. 2+2=4 is not true according to Wilson because it is not linked to “real” objects. He would say 2 unicorns and 2 unicorns does not equal 4 unicorns. It seems to me that existential import is irrelevant to truth – otherwise there could be no abstract truth regarding concepts like freedom and loyalty. One could not say it is true that ‘one should love his neighbor’ because love is an abstract concept – like unicorns.”

The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth

This comment in Not Reformed At All directly precedes the section discussing Wilson’s obsession with “objective” “photographability”.

See also: Doug Wilson and the Problem of Propositionalism

You can read the SJC’s Judicial Panel’s arguments here.  I think their recommendation sustaining the complaint is a pretty good indicator of how the SJC might decide (and certainly should decide) in the Leithart case, although it’s not a given as already noted.   I only wonder if Meyers is stupid enough to stick around and face a trial  or whether he’ll pull a Wilkins.  Either way, the writing is on the wall and it’s time for these FV men to go.