[Empires of Dirt]

Defining the terms. “Secularism refers to the idea, popular for the last few centuries, that it is in fact possible for nations to be religiously neutral. This impressive trick is managed by having everyone pretend that secularism does not bring with it its very own set of ultimate commitments. But it does bring them, and so secularism has presented us with its very own salvation narrative, in which story the Enlightened One arose to deliver us from that sectarian strife and violence. The horse and rider were thrown into the sea, and this is why you can’t put that Christmas tree up in the county courthouse. American Exceptionalism is the idea that America is more of a creed than a nation. This kind of American exceptionalism makes a certain kind of civic religion possible, a quasi-sacramental approach which all consistent Christians reject as, in equal turns, blasphemous and silly. American exceptionalism in this sense is currently the high church form of secularism. American exceptionalism should not be defined as the grateful recognition that we live in a nation that has been enormously blessed in many ways. What might be called normal patriotism is not idolatrous, but is simply natural affection. Radical Islam is a Christian heresy, but one of the features that it retained in its departure from the truth was the idea that religious claims are total and absolute. Islam functioned in this way for many centuries, competing head to head with the Christians, before the Enlightenment arrived in order to demote all forms of religious totalism (except for its own). Muslims who have accepted the claims of this secularism are now called ‘moderate’ Muslims, while Muslims who are faithful to the older, all-encompassing claims of Islam are called radical Muslims. The word radical comes from the Latin radix, which means root. Radical Muslims have gone to the root of the matter, and they are the ones who at least understand the nature of the conflict. If Allah is God, then follow him. If he isn’t, then we shouldn’t,”

On Idolatry. “Idolatry is an account of the world. It is not stand-alone worship of some god who is not God, who is being worshipped for its own sake. No, the idol is connected to an account of the world. This means that when we reject the idolatry, as we must do, we are still not in a position to reject the thing of which that idol is erroneously thought to be lord. We reject Aphrodite, not sexuality. We reject Mammon, not money. We reject Ceres, not wheat farming. We reject Poseidon, not joining the Navy.”

On Liberty. “Individual liberty is a good thing, a blessed thing. It is a gift of God and can only be sustained over time when a people extend gratitude to the one who gives it to us. Secularism, in all its forms, is therefore the enemy of liberty. Some forms of secularism set themselves against liberty overtly—the idols of the collective, for example. We oppose them, too, because we are anti-Communist, and we are anti-Communist because we love Jesus. Other forms of secularism set up a goddess of liberty over against the collective, and we reject that form of idolatry also. We reject the god of chains, because he will put is in chains, and we reject the goddess of untrammeled liberty and autonomous individual freedom… because she will put us in chains.”

“[The] biblical Christian has a natural point of appeal above every human institution—whether that institution be popular elections, that fortress of fraud we call the Congress, the faux-imperial White House, or the black-robed SCOTUS Nazgul who ghoulishly prey on the unborn. One of them singly, or all of them together, can be withstood by one courageous man with an open Bible. ‘You mat not, as Yahweh reigns, do this thing.’ To take such a stand would require courage, as John the Baptist had to have in order to rebuke Herod, but to take such a stand cannot depend on a convoluted set of political contradictions. Life is simple. God outranks the king. The king is to do what God says, not the other way around.”

On Moral Relativism. “One of the central characteristics of our cultural disease is our societal relativism. This is the end result of what C.S. Lewis called the poison of subjectivism, and it results in the abolition of man. ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!’ (Is. 5:20) But this moral inversion is not something that can be achieved in a day. Before you reverse good and evil, you must flatten good and evil, and before you flatten good and evil, you must flatten greater evil and lesser evil and greater good and lesser good. Moral egalitarianism is a rot that proceeds slowly. Woe unto them that call lesser evil greater evil, and greater evil lesser evil; that put darkness for twilight, and twilight for darkness; that put white for off-white, and off-white for white!”

Three Views on Christ’s Relation to Culture. “What are the possible relations that this risen Christ could possibly have to the secular city? And which is the right one? 1. Christ the isolationist. In this view, the world is going to Hell, and we are called to live in the lifeboat commune populated by those who know the ship is going down. The mentality that drives this is radically sectarian, which is why the lifeboats are usually pretty small, and getting smaller. Not infrequently, it ends with pure churches of one member each bobbing around on their individual inner tubes. 2. Christ the conference grounds organizer. Here the world is also going to Hell, but it will be a while yet, and we have to live the bulk of our lives out ‘there.’ So arrangements have been made for our restorative ‘getaways,’ and we periodically retreat to these conference grounds for talks that cheer us up before we have to go back out into the world, in order to live in the way that our masters out there tell us to. 3. Christ the figurehead. In this setup, Christ is given the preeminent place of honor, religiously speaking, but the fundamental rules by which the affairs of state are governed are the ancient ways of death… 4. Christ the imperial slave. Empires are pragmatic and pretty easygoing. Any religious group numerous enough to constitute a constituency will be invited to participate in International Religious Awareness Week. Their amusement park ride ‘of faith’ will be commended along with all the other rides, and the one rule is that the pluralistic state gets to set the ticket price, organize everything, print the brochures, and take in the receipts. 5. Christ the Lord. This is the view set forth in the pages of the Scriptures. All authority has been given to Him, and we, the children of men, have to do what He says. For starters, we begin with ‘repent and be baptized.’ We then move on to learning to do ‘everything He has commanded.’”

On Sharia Law. “Why should we resist the encroachment of Sharia law based on our Western values? What is the opposite of Western values? That would be Eastern values, and can anybody give me a good reason why we should prefer one position over another on the basis of geography? Western values have value only if they are a coded way of referring to something else. And that something else cannot be another horizontal fact, like representative government, or women’s rights, or anything like that. That just pushes the question back a step. Why should we prefer those? And if we sat that Western values simply means ‘our values,’ then why should those outrank ‘their values’? In the ebb and flow of Darwinian struggle, ours sometimes loses to theirs. ‘Western values’ as an appeal works only if it is a coded reference to Christendom, and that only works if Christ is still there. Anything else is arbitrary, jingoistic, and stupid. Anything else is a couple of dogs fighting over a piece of meat. Right now, we are the bigger dog—but we are also a bigger dog in the middle of some kind of existential crisis… Western values are to be preferred in a conflict like this only if they are grounded in some way in the will of God. If they are not, then they will go down before the will of Allah like dry grass before the scythe. Islamism will go through deracinated Western values like a hot knife through butter. It goes back to Chesterton’s adage—if you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.”

“Some secularists want to laugh off the Muslims—pointing at the state of plumbing in places like Somalia. But contests like this are not determined by counting the guns. You cannot decide a war by comparing the relative size of the GDP. Who was stronger, the Roman Empire or the barbarians who overran it? Wars are not tautological—the stronger force is not whichever wins by definition… History is littered with examples of empires, nations, and cities that fell to inferior forces when by all rights they should not have… And Muslims generally know what they are doing—in the Ground Zero battle [to build a mosque] and ongoing efforts like it. What is that exactly? They are exposing the intellectual, theological, and ethical bankruptcy of secularism, and they are doing it on purpose. To answer their challenge, [intelligent persons] are reduced to saying that sacrilege is defined by what lots of people think, true or false doesn’t matter, or where lots of people died, right or wrong doesn’t matter either. Someone really does need to tell secularist America that her gods are genuinely pathetic. And currently, the Muslims are doing this because the Christians won’t. And the Christians who won’t do this are not so much in need of a different kind of theology as they are in need of a different kind of spine.”

The World as the Church’s Parish. “The Church should think of the entire world as her parish. It is out in the parish that people grow barley, repair automobile engines, cut flowers, make love, and, despite the late sixties, make war. The Church is the ministry of Word and sacrament… When the parishioners come to church, they are taught and instructed in their duties of discipleship, and they are fed and nourished so that they might have the strength to meet these duties… The bottom line is this. If the Church is not transforming the culture around her, then the culture around her is transforming the Church. There is no static equilibrium point. That means that the Church will either be prophetically addressing the problem of gay mirage, or it will be in the process of adoption gay mirage herself. Either the Church will speak about the carnage of abortion and God’s hatred of it, or the Church will be in the process of bringing that hated object into the sanctuary.”

Heavenly vs. Earthly Citizenship. “[Our] heavenly citizenship should eclipse our earthly citizenship all the time. I am not an American for six days and a Christian for one. Rather, I am a baptized Christian all the time, a husband all the time, a father all the time, a neighbor all the time, and a citizen all the time. And I have to figure out the hierarchical layers of these responsibilities, according to Scripture, and, you guessed it, I have to do this all the time.”

Problems in Faithfulness. “When you enroll in a math class, you will have math problems. Those math problems are not an argument for staying out of the class. When you resolve to follow Jesus Christ, you will have ‘following Jesus Christ’ problems. If He gives you victory, you will have victory temptations, like Gideon. If he gives you the opportunity to doubt Him wile in prison awaiting execution, like John the Baptist, you will have those kind of problems. We can fail at being well-fed. We can fail at being hungry. Or we can learn from the apostle Paul in both conditions. It is not the case that temptations engage us if we seek to engage in the culture wars, but not if we disengage. And the possibility of spiritual failure in both directions is not an argument for not taking up the cross that the Lords assigns to us. God wants some men to be Jeremiah and others to be Moses. He wants some to be King Alfred and others Bonhoeffer. Some godly men head up armies that lose and others head up armies that win. Both are called to do what they do in the world in the name of Jesus Christ, and with true evangelical faith. The kingdom of God is not a ‘one size fits all’ operation. This is not affected by whether the kingdom of God as a whole enjoys temporal and historical success in the world.”

“The fact that Jesus wants all His children involved in a bunch of different pursuits is a Trinitarian thing and not an example of confusion. The hierarchies are ranked differently—they are not all the same. The Lord wants about half of His children to be husbands and the other half to be wives. He wants some to love classical music and others to love music from the Delta. He wants them all to hate abortion and child porn. He wants some to love the Palouse country of Idaho and others to love the pine forests of the South. And we should do what He calls us to do.”

On Postmillennialism. “Progress is a biblical concept. Things have gotten better, they are better now, and they will continue to get better. Better than what? Well, better than they were. God is telling a story, and we are that many more chapters closer to the eucatastrophic denouement of His story. As we progress through His narrative, we should be able to tell what is going on. We should be reading with excitement, looking ahead at what is coming… P.J. O’Rourke once quipped that he could refute those who didn’t believe in progress in one word, that one word being dentistry. Let’s add some other areas in which, taking an average, things are improving. Whether it is in standards of living or literacy or health, the last century has seen remarkable improvements. We can do this even while taking into account those portions of the globe run by homicidal lunatics as well as the cozy places of American academia that were dedicated to the defense of said lunatics. Remember that we are not comparing things to an ideal Platonic state, but rather comparing them to [the] way they were before. And we are not looking at history in five-year increments, but rather in five-hundred-year increments. I would rather be alive now than in 1512, and I would have preferred 1512 to 1012. After all, in 1512, I would have had the opportunity to buddy up with Luther, and in 1012, I would have been stuck as an advisor to Harold the Not Conqueror… [If] I say something like this in Christian circles, the response will come back that I am pointing to ‘earthly’ improvements, not spiritual ones. Is this not a case of setting my mind on things below, clean contrary to Paul’s admonition to the Colossians? Not really. As Yogi Berra once put it, you can observe a lot by just watching. You want spiritual things? How about the astonishing rate at which Africa, China, and South America are being brought to Christ?... But [this] is only surprising to those who have adopted the non-Christian and unbelieving idea of decline… I believe that things are getting better over the long haul because of the prophet Isaiah and the Psalms of David, and not because Christianity Today, InterVarsity Press, and the Presbyterian Church in America have inspired me by a rock-ribbed Biblicism that grows stauncher by the year.”

“To say that Christ has conquered sin and the devil does not require us to maintain that the sin was trivial and the devil a midget in order for us to keep our gospel ‘believable’ to skeptical outsiders. Great views of sin should lead us to great views of salvation. Great but fearful views of sin can lead to the additional sin of hanging back, hesitant in unbelief. And because we do not label that unbelief as part of this sin, our views of sin are clearly not enough. Jesus Christ, Lord of the next Christendom, won a great victory before He was enthroned where He is currently enthroned, at the right hand of the Father. We do not honor that victory by acting as though it passed through history the same way Jesus passed through the wall of the upper room, without leaving a hole. No, He left a hole, all right. History has never been the same and can never be the same. Your great-great-grandchildren will live in a world that will be that much closer to the time when the leaves for the healing of the nations will be in the actual possession of every nation.”

On Christian Nations. “Christian republics and commonwealths are formed by preaching, baptizing, and discipleship and not by campaigning, legislating, pundit-blogging, and so on… [Here] are the options [for Jesus’ relationship to nations]: 1. Jesus doesn’t care whether or not nations are explicitly Christian. 2. Jesus is opposed to nations being explicitly Christian. 3. Jesus wants nations to be explicitly Christian. And here should be our response to these possibilities: 1. Well, if Jesus doesn’t care, that means we have the right to care. So let’s make this a Christian nation, shall we? 2. Let’s have a Bible study and find out why ‘disciple the nations’ really means ‘don’t disciple the nations, whatever you do.’ 3. Yes, Lord.”

The Church vs. the Kingdom. “The Church is at the center, Word and sacrament, and only sacred things are sacred. Because what the Church does is potent, this transforms the entire world—but it doesn’t turn the world into Church. That’s not the transformation. The Church turns the world into what the world ought to be. The Church doesn’t bring auto mechanics into the sanctuary. The Church teaches in such a way that auto mechanics grows and matures into what auto mechanics really should be like… So I don’t want the Church to be everything, and I don’t want the reformation of the Church to be the only item on the agenda—just the first and most important item on the agenda. When the reformation begins to take shape and numerous Christians are worshipping in the way Christians ought to be worshipping, those Christians—who happen to be politicians, auto mechanics, teachers, film directors, news anchors, poets, and cafeteria workers—will begin to live out the kind of Christian life they learned about the previous Sunday. That will effect the transformation of society, but not by turning that society into a giant worship service.”

The Gospel & World Conquest. “Two great Christian heresies—Marxism and Islam—borrowed something from the Christian faith which Christians should ask to have returned. They borrowed it and used it to great effect, and Christians, for some reason, allowed them to, neglecting it ourselves. That ‘thing’ they borrowed was a sense of inevitable victory for their cause. But they do not have the promises of such victory, and we do. Mainland China and Saudi Arabia will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea… How much more potent will it be when Christians understand that the gospel is all about world conquest and when they will be content with nothing less than world conquest?... This conquest will be accomplished by means of God’s weakness, not man’s strength, for our weapons are not carnal. This thing will be done—and it will be done—in the power of the Spirit by means of words and water, bread and wine. What are we doing? We are besieging strongholds, and the citadels of unbelief will fall. Every sermon is another swing of the battering ram, every baptism is an engine deployed to overthrow the devil, and every administration of the Supper is an inexorable offer of wine for the forgiveness of the world and bread for the life of the world. And the day is coming when they will receive it.”

Conservatives & Compromise. “One of the myths that has been spread about religious conservatives is that they don’t know how to bend or compromise (this being the supposed source of their propensity to violence), and the corresponding myth on the other side is that secularists are calm, cool, and collected, and ever ready to make adjustments as the demands of the present reality dictate. But our secularists are actually hard-line sectarians. They will brook no compromise on these issues. We do not have a parliamentary system where a secularist party can form a coalition with ultra-conservatives with funny hats. We have a winner-take-all system, and the absolute demand that secularists place on religious conservatives is avowed allegiance to the secularist arrangement. They make us take these oaths so many times and in so many ways that we scarcely notice them anymore.”

On Free Societies. “[Free] societies arose and grew out of Christian societies. I am arguing that there is a connection and that this is not mere coincidence. I am arguing for a return to the preconditions of civic freedom, and am not arguing for an abandonment of them. Unbelief does not guarantee free societies. Out of all the explicitly atheistic societies that formed over the course of the last century, how many of them were open and free societies? Ah…”

A Postmillenial Postscript. “The biblical story shows us [a certain] pattern again and again. This is God training us to think about history. God delivers His people, God’s people rejoice, God’s people forget Him and worship idols, God chastises them by bringing them into affliction, the people cry out to God, and God delivers His people. Rinse and repeat. Now there is an important qualification that has to be made about this pattern. There is a linear aspect to history, and there is a cyclical aspect to it. The linear aspect is fundamental, and the cycles are subordinate to that line. The line, overall, is going up, which means that each repeated cycle represents a new advance—we are better off at the end of the tenth cycle than we were at the end of the third one. To put it in tangible terms, we were far better off at the conclusion of Whitefield’s awakening than we were at the end of King Josiah’s reformation. Postmillenial thinking does not require us to believe that the kingdom improves every day in every way, or that the whole thing takes off like the space shuttle. It is more like five steps forward, three steps back, seven steps forward, six back, three steps forward, one step forward, and then two steps back.”

“[We] in the Church should defend against the world’s encroachments because we are involved in a spiritual war. In this war, I believe also that we are to show the relevance of living in the way we do so that more and more non-Christians will hear the gospel, lay down their arms, and surrender to Jesus Christ. In order to do this in a way that is not compromised, it is necessary to stay separate from the standards of the world. We are commanded not to love the world or the baubles found in the world.”

“Practical teaching from the Scriptures is teaching that is grounded in the text of Scripture, and is therefore protected from becoming a false gospel to the extent that the last three chapters of Ephesians—do this and do not do that—are grounded in the first three chapters. The most important word in that book is therefore, right at the beginning of chapter 4. Therefore, do these things. People who do them or preach doing them, but who don’t therefore do them, are disobeying the gospel. And those who luxuriate in the redemptive historical sweep of the first three chapters, but don’t let the sermon get into labor relations, Christian marriage, Christian education, church government, and so forth, are also disobeying the gospel.”

“Sinners always want salvation. The damned don’t want salvation—that is what it means to be damned. But sinners aren’t there yet, and so they are always casting about in search of a savior. Of course it has to be a flattering savior, one who will be whispering soothing words on the way to the bad place. This is because sinners want to be damned, sort of, eventually. At least they prefer approaching damnation to the only alternative, which is a real Savior, that is to say, Jesus. And their preference stays this way unless a real Savior intervenes.”

“We are warned in Scripture against that which we are in danger of committing. When John tells his dear children to keep themselves from idols, he tells them this because they might not keep themselves from doing that. We are told to love our wives because there will be temptations to love ourselves instead. And, coming back to the point just made, we are cautioned against the sin of being ashamed of Jesus and His words. What are these words? They are the words He gave us to teach to all the nations after we had baptized them. Why are we cautioned this way? Because there will be a temptation for Christians to be ashamed of Jesus, that’s why.”