Tag: Ron Paul

Ron Paul, Two-K, and Manliness

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

Rabbi Bret may be surprised to learn that he is a sissy because he is supporting Ron Paul. That is the testosterone filled conclusion of the Brothers Bayly who in a recent post have asserted that two-kingdom advocates and Ron Paul supporters share a similar trait — distaff cowardice. (I am not making this up.)

Ron Paul is to national politics what R2K is to the salt and light of the Church. Both Paulites and R2Kites have never seen a battle they want to fight. So instead they come up with sophisticated reasons why Little Round Top is the wrong hill to defend and Colonel Chamberlain’s bayonet charge was over the top. The wrong man led the wrong troops in the wrong charge using the wrong weapons at the wrong time and the wrong location.

In fact, watch these men closely and you find the only battle they’re willing to fight is the battle opposing battles. But of course, I use the words ‘battle’ and ‘fight’ quite loosely because both require courage. I don’t write this to demean them, but so readers will see the connection between their techniques, commitments, and character.

They’re the skinny boy in the corner of the schoolyard shouting “Nanny nanny boo-boo” at the real boys over on the baseball diamond trying to catch the ball, swing the bat, hit something, and run. Over in the corner of the playground with his back to the wall is R2K’s favorite cultural icon, Woody Allen, making jokes about how he refuses to play baseball because baseball is a stupid game with stupid rules played by stupid boys. But of course, he did try to play baseball once, and when the ball was flying toward his face, he misjudged where to put his mitt, he took his eye off the ball, and the ball hit him square in the face, and it really really hurt. He’s never forgotten it and now he makes fun of boys who play baseball.

All the boys who play baseball think he’s a coward, but he’s always surrounded by the other boys who got punched in the face with a baseball and decided never to play baseball again. They laugh at his jokes. Then there are the girls who never wanted to play baseball and don’t know a coward when they see one, and they think he’s kinda cute and sweet. They pity him for being an outcast and one day that pity will cause them to allow him to kiss them.

On the level of politics, the Baylys are clueless and always have been since they supported George McGovern in 1972 (though Ron Paul is closer to McGovern on foreign policy than the Baylys know — talk about not fighting battles). They are less interested in resisting tyranny than they are in establishing a regime of justice and morality. They don’t mind ignoring the distinct responsibilities of institutions and the separate spheres established by documents like constitutions and confessions in order to apply their moral truths justly everywhere. This puts their moral idealism much closer to the French Revolution than to the American, and makes their he-mannish bravery sound more like Robespierre than Madison. To justify the reign of terror, Robespierre wrote: “Terror is only justice prompt, sever, and inflexible — it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.” Manly? Sure. Cruel? You bet. Despotic? No doubt.

On the level of biblical interpretation, I continue to wonder where their unrivaled affirmation of macho Christianity finds a warrant in Scripture. Was Jesus manly when he submitted to an unjust verdict and execution? Was our Lord feminized when he told his followers to forgive seventy-times-seven? Was Paul light in the loafers when he counseled moderation, self-control, and submission to authorities?

I get it. Jesus is going to return and will judge sins and the sinners who commit them. But the Baylys’ antics suggests yet another form of immanentizing the eschaton — a rush to judge, confront, and topple in the name of Christ here and now. They don’t seem to understand the inverse logic of the gospel. Christ defeats Satan by dying. The kingdom of grace beats the kingdom of Satan by forgiving sins. I don’t particularly understand what chromosomes have to do with this.

Postscript: I linked to one of the Baylys’ posts about men singing and how the church needs hymns on judgment and justice triumphing over wicked men for men to sing with gusto. This points to another part of the Baylys’ errors. They are also clueless culturally. They have never witnessed big, beefy men — namely, Welsh rugby players — while singing their national anthem.

Rabbi Bret Borrowing Capital from Those 2k Swiss Bank Accounts

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

On the one hand, I am touched that the good Rabbi would devote ten-plus paragraphs to refuting the a minor question I raised about epistemological self-consciousness. On the other hand, I am hurt that Bret shows more charity to Ron Paul than to me. Despite the crusty and vinegary exterior, I am really a pussy cat in person, without claws — the effects perhaps of living with cats for more than two decades — and not to be missed I can cry with the best of them, being the son of a private first-class Marine who was a weeper. I try to console myself that Bret is only opposed to 2k as a set of ideas; he does not dislike (all about) me.

Still, the tolerance that anti-2kers show to non-Reformed Protestants (e.g. Ron Paul) and even to non-Christian ideas (more below) is puzzling and suggests a level of personal antagonism that is unbecoming. In the case of Ron Paul, Bret tries to justify his intention to vote for the libertarian Republican as consistent with Christian faith because this proposed vote has received flak from a theonomist whom he apparently follows on Facebook. Bret explains:

I intend to vote for Rep. Ron Paul if I can I do acknowledge that there are issues he supports that I do not think are Christian. Paul’s recent vote supporting homosexuals in the military is not the vote a Christian man would have made. Also, Ron Paul’s fuzzy stand on illegal immigration is a head scratcher. I also would that Rep. Paul would clearly articulate that the Constitution as it currently stands outlaws Abortion, and because of that States should overturn laws on their books that are contrary to that Constitutional requirement. I also do not believe that Dr. Paul’s Libertarian instincts will work in a country that has been balkanized by both it’s legal immigration policy pursuit since 1965 and it’s benign neglect of illegal immigration. . . .

Our greatest need of the hour in order to restore biblical statecraft is for someone to slay the Leviathan State. This is the platform on which Dr. Paul is campaigning. Biblical statecraft will not be restored until the Leviathan state is slain. First things first. To suggest that any Christian who intends to vote for Ron Paul is abandoning biblical principles for voting and statecraft is like a Jew complaining that the person who stopped the rape of his wife was not circumcised. It is true that there are faults with Dr. Paul, but currently he is the gentleman who promises to help us with our most current and pressing problem. Mr. Ritchie just isn’t thinking correctly.

First things first? Does not the first table of the law come before the second table? Does not doing what is right in God’s eyes take precedence over what may be beneficial to the survival of the United States? In which case, could it be that Bret is letting his own political convictions dictate what comes first? As I’ve said a guhzillion times, Covenanters would not construe first things this way. They refused to vote, run for office, or serve in the military because the first thing — Christ’s Lordship — was not part of the U.S. Constitution. I disagree that the Constitution must include such an affirmation. But I greatly admire the Covenanters’ consistency and wish Rabbi Bret would be as hard nosed in the political realm as he is with (all about) me in the theological arena.

What seems to be operative here is that Rabbi Bret borrows selectively from 2k by using non-biblical standards for evaluating the United States’ political order. He says we must follow wisdom in the current election cycle. Well, what happened to the Bible as the standard for all of life? And just how do you get a license to practice such wisdom (when 2kers are the ones who issue them)?

Additional evidence of the Rabbi’s appeal to wisdom and implicit use of 2k comes in a good post he wrote about the differences between “classical” conservatism and neo-conservatism. I’ll paste here only one of the piece’s five points (though the entire post is worthwhile for those who don’t know the differences among conservatism):

Neo-conservatives believe that America is responsible to expand American values and ideology at the point of a bayonet. This was the governing ideology of progressive Democrats like Woodrow Wilson who desired to make the world safe for Democracy. However, before the Wilsonian motto of making the world safe for Democracy (a motto largely taken up by the Bush II administration) Wilson understood the American instinct for a humble foreign policy by campaigning in 1916 with the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” Before American entry into W.W. II the classically conservative approach to involvement in international affairs was one of modesty, as seen in the previous mentioned Wilson approach to campaigning in 1916. Classical conservatism, as opposed to neo-conservatism embraced the dictum of John Quincy Adams who once noted that, “America is a well-wisher of liberty everywhere, but defender only of her own.”

However, today’s conservatism is internationally militantly adventurous. What is sold by those who have co-opted the title of “conservative,” is the exporting of American values but the dirty little secret is that the American values that are being exported in the name of Democracy is just a warmed over socialism combined with some form of Corporate consumerism.

Good point, but where exactly is the justification for this from Scripture or the Lordship of Christ or the antithesis? I’m betting that loads of Christian Reformed Church ministers and laity who invoke the antithesis every bit as much as the Rabbi does, would never countenance Bret’s understanding of U.S. foreign policy. In which case, either the Bible speaks with forked tongue about a nation’s military involvement or all neo-Calvinists are dictating to special revelation what their “wise” observations of the created order and contemporary circumstances require. Why then are 2kers guilty of doing something illegitimate if Rabbi Bret or liberals in the CRC do the very same thing?

Which leads me back to the deep emotional wound mentioned at the outset. In his response to my post on epistemological self-consciousness, Bret says that it all comes down to this:

I mean that is what this boils down to isn’t it? Van Til repeatedly emphasized the necessity of epistemological self-consciousness while Darryl is suggesting that each man must do what is right in his own unique epistemological self consciousness. One epistemologically self-conscious Christian likes Kant, another epistemologically self conscious Christian likes Hegel. Vive la différence!

This is an odd summary of the entire difference since at the beginning of the post Bret says that the notion of the Lordship of Christ was hardly a Dutch Reformed idea, and then he goes on to say that it all comes down to a point made (as he understands it) about the Lordship of Christ by a Dutch-American. But aside from the intellectual hiccup, does Bret really not see that his own support for Ron Paul throws the antithesis to the wind. Paul doesn’t have to be a Reformed Christian affirming the Lordship of Christ to gain Bret’s support. Bret’s analysis of conservatism doesn’t need to follow the dictates of the antithesis in order for it to be wise. And yet, if I or other 2kers don’t follow the antithesis when recognizing a common realm of activity for believers and unbelievers, or when finding truths by which to negotiate this common terrain other than from Scripture (only because the Bible is silent, for instance, on basements or how to remove water from them), we are relativists and antinomians. (We don’t even get a little credit for putting the anti in antinomian.)

Until the critics of 2k can possibly create a world in which the antithesis applies all the time, they will be indebted to 2k for borrowed capital. The reason is that it is impossible to live in a mixed society if the sort of antithesis that will ultimately result in the separation of the sheep from the wolves is going to be the norm. The antithesis requires not only withholding support from Ron Paul, but also opposition to a political order that would allow him on the ballot (not to mention that difficult matter of what to do with Mitt Romney’s Mormons or Rick Santorum’s Roman Catholics). Bret believes that the “Escondido” theology will one day pass away like the Mercersburg Theology did. I too believe it will, whenever God chooses to separate believers from unbelievers. But until then, as long as we live with unbelievers, guys like Bret will need and use 2k theology. I only wish he’d show a little gratitude and start to pay off the debt. He is well behind in payments and snarky about it.

When Sappy Evangelicals Turn Tart

Published on by D. G. Hart80 Comments

I thought the Gospel Co-Allies were supposed to be nice. The only “mean” people in the American Protestant world are the seriously Reformed, supposedly. But a recent drive-by post by Justin Taylor about Ron Paul and racism demonstrates how appearances deceive.

If the sin of racism is indeed a gospel issue, and if Ron Paul is an evangelical, and if evangelicals were rightly bothered by the racist remarks of President Obama’s pastor—then wouldn’t it be a good idea for evangelicals, at the very least, to ask some questions about Ron Paul’s defense of his racist friends and racist newsletter that went out under his name?

That’s all the post includes. Justin is just wondering out loud, not taking a stand, just raising questions about Ron Paul and the implications of the Republican’s newsletters.

A couple of aspects are worthy of mention here:

First, Justin is not being very Matthew-eighteen-like. Are the followers of the Bible and nothing but the Bible supposed to raise suspicions about another believer’s reputation — even if only in the form of questions — so publicly?

Second, aside from the mean-spirited implications of this post, what indeed is up with sins rising to the level of “gospel issue”? I see that Taylor links to Piper’s book on race, once again hiding behind the earnestness of Minnesota’s Baptist alternative to Garrison Keillor’s Lutherans. But what does “gospel issue” mean? Is a sin that qualifies as a “gospel issue” so serious that sinners may not find comfort in the gospel? Is racism one of those sins? How about pederasty? How about other violations of the Decalogue? I was under the impression that one sin was just as bad in God’s sight as any other. So where do we find support for a special list of really, really — I mean really — bad sins? Is this what Taylor learned while studying with John Frame on the Christian life?

Or is this what happens when the gospel expands to include all of life? When it does so, does the gospel merely become law?

Just wondering out loud in response to Justin’s wondering. (Update: ironically Taylor’s next post was from Spurgeon on the sin of even listening to gossip.)