Death of the Tea Party

As someone who was just given the left-foot of fellowship from the Tea Party Facebook page for simply wondering out loud why Ron Paul was missing from their GOP presidential candidate polls and Tea Party news feeds, the biggest danger I see for the Tea Party is that they get co-opted by the Republican Party.  My guess is it’s already too late.

I’ve worked professionally in the grassroots conservative politics for more than twenty years and I can say that the death knell for all previous constitutionally conservative uprisings in the past has been that sooner or later all of these movements have become just another cog in the Republican Party’s political machinery.

That’s why the Tea Party needs to know when to walk away from the Republican party and constantly remind themselves that the Republican Party has been just as much an enemy to limited constitutional government as have the Democrats.  Frankly, the Republican Party is far more dangerous.  That’s because Republicans, unlike the Democrats, like to pretend they’re constitutional conservatives especially during elections.

Those in the Tee Party need to keep reminding themselves what we got when Republicans were in power and when they could actually do something to limit the size, scope, and reach of the federal government.

Instead of dismantling the Department of Eduction, we got No Child Left Behind.  Instead of free market reforms to healthcare like expanding and promoting medical savings accounts and allowing insurance companies to compete across state lines, we got Prescription Meds for Seniors and the litigious Americans with Disabilities Act.  Instead of returning to laissez-faire capitalism we got TARP and the “too big to fail” myth (both under the Republican sponsored Keynesian lie that we needed a little socialism in order to save capitalism).  Instead of scaling back or even putting an end to foreign entanglements abroad and returning to individual liberty at home we got more unconstitutional wars, the misnamed “Patriot Act,” and the incompetent and unconstitutionally invasive (been to an airport lately?) TSA.  Instead of ending the Federal Reserve  and returning to a system of sound money (as opposed to the current Machiavellian system of uneven weights and measures that is artificially propped up by petrol dollars), we got Alan Greenspan (Reagan) and Ben Bernanke (W).

So, if the next GOP presidential nominee is either of the two I think it will be, the best thing the Tea Party can do is tell its members to stay home on election day or vote for a constitutionally consistent third party candidate.

My guess is like good Republicans they won’t do either.

Clark Quick Quote

From the most recent Trinity Review:

“Let it be noted, in case [Dewey M]. Beegle or anyone else should miss the point, that evangelicals, defined historically as those who hold to sola scriptura and sola fide, do not assert the truth of 2 Kings on the basis of Assyrian inscriptions; nor do they assert the truth of Satan and Michael, or David and Daniel, on the basis of archaeological or historical investigations. Evangelicals assert the inerrancy of the whole Bible on the ground of its own claims. The Biblical teaching is axiomatic. It is not deduced from previous external axioms.

But this does not make evangelicals “conveniently blind.” They are very happy to face the “facts” of Assyrian inscriptions and other archaeological debris. But what they find in them is neither proof nor disproof of Biblical infallibility. What they find in them is ad hominem arguments discomfiting to the liberals – no more, no less. Of course, evangelicals have a priori axioms. The liberals also depend on inde­monstrable assertions. Every philosophic system must have a starting point, or else it does not start. But sometimes the liberals talk as if they had discovered “facts” without starting from historiographical assumptions.

…In the nature of the case archaeology never will be able to prove that the Bible is inerrant. Too many cultural or historical minutiae are beyond recall, not to mention the utterly foreign sphere of theological doctrine. But only an inerrant critic can expect to prove that the Bible errs.”

Magic Underwear

Last time Mitt Romney ran for president I remember seeing bizarre stories about the superstitious Mormon practice of wearing magic underwear. This is from a Wikipedia article on Mormon temple garments:

According to the LDS Church, the temple garments serve a number of purposes. First, the garment provides the member “a constant reminder” of the covenants they made in the temple. Second, the garment “when properly worn…provides protection against temptation and evil”.  Wearing the garment is also “an outward expression of an inward commitment” to follow Jesus Christ.[26] General authority Carlos E. Asay adds that the garment “strengthens the wearer to resist temptation, fend off evil influences, and stand firmly for the right.”[28]

Something to keep in mind next time you see Mitt in the next Republican debate . . . or if he ever makes it to the White House.

Also interesting is this little Mike Wallace clip from an old 60 Minutes story on LDS:

Federal Vision Re-Run

One of the original Federal Vision schismatics, CREC false teacher and deposed PCA pastor, Burke Shade, is in the news again this week.  Shade evidently excommunicated a former member for non-attendance because they evidently had the good sense to freely leave his apostate church.  Concerning this  fortunate former member Shade wrote:

By this excommunication, we are declaring that you are no longer a Christian, and that you are no longer a part of the company of the saved. Please turn away from your self-destructive path and turn back to Christ as your Lord and Savior. Should you desire to repent of your refusal to worship Jesus Christ, please contact us, so that you may be restored to Jesus Christ and this body.

What a blessing to be cast out by a dictatorial, unimportant, and petty little antichrist like Shade.  Whoever this person is they should be praising God for being free from Shade and the CREC.  It’s almost as good as if the pope himself, who the Westminster Confession correctly once identified as “that antichrist,” were to pronounce you “anathema.”  What a blessing.

As some might recall, Shade was deposed from the ministry in the PCA’s Illiana Presbytery in 1999.  As reported in a PINS article written at the time:

[Shade] was accused of the following: erroneous views of baptism and of evangelization; spreading injurious reports against two of the church’s ruling elders; failure to be in subjection to lawful church authority; and “countenancing activity on the part of both some members and some officers of the congregation . . . that disrupted the peace of the church and divided it.” He pled “guilty” in November, 1998, to two of the specifications, believing that he had to do so because he had already privately confessed to these matters before formal charges were brought. The court on that basis voted to suspend him from office and the Lord’s Supper. The court later found him guilty of “apparently” holding to an erroneous view of baptism, and of countenancing an un-Biblical view of evangelism. He was censured by admonition, and by being instructed not to teach on those matters until a Presbytery committee could counsel with him. At the April 17th session, the Presbytery found him guilty of the fourth charge (“countenancing activity . . . that disrupted the peace of the church and divided it”), and voted to depose him from office.

It’s interesting to review some of this old history, because it appears Shade and his supporters were ahead of the curve when it comes to the FV modus operandi. Now, remember this was all before the Federal Vision heresy had an official name (a name advocates of this false gospel coined themselves).  Prior to that time the heresy was called a number of different names from Shepherdism to Neo-legalism, but all describing the same anti-Christian system.  In a final bit of irony, Doug Wilson’s false church, the CREC, justified their welcoming this defrocked FV false teacher as “a pastor in good standing” in their Romeward denomination because in their examination of the trial they could find nothing substantively wrong with Shade’s theology.   Instead they had problems with the trial as conducted by the Illiana presbytery. Big surprise.  Wilson’s protege, Doug Jones, said the Illiana presbytery’s conviction of Shade was “a scar upon [their] reputation.”  Gotta love it.

However, I did enjoy the Illiana’s reply to the CREC’s whitewash where they observed:

As far as we can tell, Mr. Shade has not repented but is in fact enjoying the fruits of the division by leading a group that is more to his liking. We would like nothing better than to restore Mr. Shade upon his genuine repentance and bring unity in the Church, all to the glory of God. We had hoped that other sister reformed churches would honor our discipline of Mr. Shade and help him come to repentance rather than offer him escape.

As John Robbins observed in a 2006 Trinity Review:

…Burke Shade, now a “pastor” affiliated with Douglas Wilson’s sect, CREC, Illiana Presbytery [PCA] deposed him from office. Hardly anyone has heard of that case outside of that Presbytery, since the Presbytery did not understand that Shade, a follower of James Jordan, was part of a much larger problem in the PCA.

The CREC has been thumbing their nose at the courts of the PCA for years.   To their credit the Illiana presbytery was ahead of the curve in dealing with the false gospel of the FV.  For a helpful time line of the Shade case see: Diary of a Pirated Church.

*The picture of Shade above was taken at the 2008 Auburn Avenue Pastor’s Conference where the speakers included Peter Leithart, Doug Wilson, Steve Wilkins and Jeffrey Meyers.