If You're the One Throwing Stones, Can You Still be a Martyr?

Published on by D. G. Hart

The BeeBee’s latest swipe at 2k involves a couple of oddities. The first is their identification with Deacon Stephen, arguably the first Christian martyr:

Hart and VanDrunnen are identical in their commitment to avoid the slightest appearance of triumphalism. You need know nothing more about the R2K error than that. And nothing more about true Christian faith than that, in the pursuit of the triumph of the Cross of Jesus Christ, millions of men and women of God across two millenia have been martyred for their public witness to the holiness of God, the conviction of sin and righteousness and judgment of the Holy Spirit, and the universal Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Starting with our beloved Deacon, Stephen.

It sure seems to me that Tim Bee is doing a better impersonation of the persecutor Saul than Stephen. I mean, the aggression he dishes out is always going in one direction, with sweeping condemnations not only of 2k ideas but also of 2kers’ character and motives. Tim and David are hardly suffering from 2kers attacking them. And if Tim Bee wants to identify with triumphalism, then he has not listened very carefully to the guy who went from Saul, the guy holding the coats of stone throwers, to Paul, the martyr:

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1 Cor 1:22-25)

The BeeBees seem to think that public life, where the power is, is also a sign of the gospel’s power. No Christian witness before the magistrate, no triumph. It does explain their fondness for Doug Wilson who pines for a Christian society (Constantinianism) where faith came by conquest. I wonder if the Bee Bees are Christian enough to call for another round of Crusades.

The second oddity involves the Moscow Muhammad himself. I did listen to Doug Wilson and Dave VanDrunen’s lectures from last weekend at Covenant Presbyterian Church on Christ and culture. I was disappointed that recordings of the question and answer session were not available. But Wilson out of the blue in an entirely unrelated kerfuffle reported on a part of those exchanges which became fodder for the BeeBees:

This last weekend… I asked David VanDrunen …what God would think of a nation whose magistrate and people had become overwhelmingly (and sincerely) Christian, and who decided to confess Christ in the common realm, in the formerly secular realm. I asked if God would be displeased with that, and VanDrunen said yes, he thought God would be displeased with that.

When asked about VanDrunen’s follow up, Wilson replied:

. . . he said that it was because he wanted minorities (in this case, non-believers) to not be mistreated. The assumption behind that is that the secular state is more to be trusted with treating people right than Christians would be. But of course, Christians were the ones who invented civil liberties for all.

And with that, BeeBees and their minions are satisfied with Christian superiority, 2ker cluselessness, and the world’s debauchery. Never once did they consider, or Wilson with them, how silly such triumphalism is. I understand Wilson is a bit touchy about slavery, but he did bring the subject up once. At the conference in Vandalia, OH he also brought up segregation and how Christians were wrong to accept or defend the division of the races into separate public schools under Jim Crow. Perhaps he also knows something of the way that European Christians treated Jews, what Protestant magistrates did to Anabaptists, or what Constantine’s enforcers did to Arians. All of that goes away with an assertion that Christians invented civil rights? Did he learn nothing about rhetorical excess from his debates with Chris Hitchens?

Such dishonesty seems to go with the territory of thinking yourself a victim when you are really a bully.

10 thoughts on “If You're the One Throwing Stones, Can You Still be a Martyr?”

  1. Since “martyr” originally meant “witness”, there is in some people’s minds a question about whose blood is involved, that of the witness or that of the enemies over whom the “witness” has triumphed.

    But even some Kuyper folks can appreicate the difference between Doug Wilson and John Howard Yoder. One pretends to be in the coming postmillenial majority.

    http://www.bransonparler.com/1/post/2013/09/constantine-revisited-leithart-yoder-and-the-constantinian-debate.html

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  2. It’s no Martyr’s Mirror, but I would recommend Tripp York’s The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom (Scottsdale, PA: Herald, 2007)

    Followers of Christ are sometimes put to death by the powers that be because of the subversive nature of their testimony that Jesus is Lord. The otherness of the kingdom to which the martyr witnesses is supremely manifest in her submission to the cruel domination of the oppressor, testifying that this kingdom of Christ cannot be won or lost by human coercion.

    To be executed because of one’s allegiance to Christ is not an apolitical act, but Doug Wilson dismisses the theology of the cross as merely the “short-term” pessimism of amills and other peasants. When the Christian elite takes over the culture, competing anti-Christian allegiances will not be tolerated. This means that 2k ideology will not be tolerated…

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  3. These are quickly becoming the Gloria Allred of the Reformed world. Heck, Ms. Allred may even be more trustworthy.

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  5. Abel’s blood cries out for more blood, even though God spared Cain from his family. Christ’s blood has been poured out, his life give to death because of imputed sins, and the Atonement is not continuing but is Complete Already.

    I John 3:12 We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous.

    What is an evil deed? What is a righteous deed? Is the evil deed in I John the murder? Even though murder is an evil deed, I John explains that Cain murdered Abel because of previous motives. Cain murdered Abel because of Cain’s status as a condemned sinner and unbeliever in God’s gospel.

    Cain was a bad tree who thereby necessarily brought forth fruit which was all unacceptable to God.. So it’s not a matter of more or less but of either/or. There are those who abide in God’s gospel and those who do not. God will not accept the cooperating “merits” of the Romanists, no matter how much these Romanists give God the credit for enabling them.

    It is not morality that Romanism hates. It was not morality that Cain hated. Cain hated
    Abel’s gospel because that gospel said that even Cain’s best efforts to please God (the best of his fruits, with all sincerity) were an abomination to God.

    Cain’s works were evil, according to God’s gospel, which Abel believed. For this reason, Cain murdered Abel. For this reason, Romanists hate the true gospel and those who believe it.

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  7. So how does an OPC look at conference speakers DVD and Wilson, and decide “Yeah, for the sermon during Lord’s Day worship, let’s go with Wilson” ?!?

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  9. Wait, wasn’t Stephen killed by the leaders of a theocratical government (albeit one more or less subject to Rome)?

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