I’m really glad I’m not one of those people,” I thought to myself. The year was, I think, 1978 and I was 12 years old and in the 6th grade.
So what was it I was glad I wasn’t? Just who were those people?
Calvinists. Yes, the dreaded Calvinists
You see, I was reading my history textbook. You know, the kind of big, thick general history textbooks we used to have. The ones that started out talking about the Sumerians and ended somewhere around WWII.
This particular textbook had managed to find room for a paragraph or two on the Protestant Reformation. Part of me is tempted to blast the textbook writers for devoting one or two lousy paragraphs to the greatest Christian movement since the days of the apostles. But when I think about it, I shouldn’t be too harsh on them. After all, at least they mentioned the Reformation. I’m not sure if textbooks today would do even that. Further, the textbook writers managed to get at least one important detail right: the importance the Calvinists laid on of the doctrine of election.
It was the doctrine of election that offended me. It struck me as insufferable arrogant. To me, it sounded as if the Calvinists thought they were God’s chosen people because they were innately better than everyone else. Of course, that’s not what Calvinists taught then or teach now. But that was my assumption. Calvinists believed then and believe now that no one is worthy of God’s grace. That’s why it’s called grace! If sinners were in some way worthy of God’s grace, then grace would no longer be grace.
But I didn’t understand that then and wouldn’t until many years later.
I was a church kid growing up. Looking back on it, I believed many true things about God, but I didn’t know the Gospel of Justification by Faith (Belief) Alone.
One of the points I was confused on, and it’s a very common point of confusion in American evangelicalism, is the relationship between regeneration and faith.
In my 12-year-old self’s understanding, I thought that I first had to believe before I could be regenerated.
I’ll come back to this thought later, but for now, let’s leave it at that.
Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; strangers devour your land in your presence; and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers, Isaiah 1:7
“…because of Western civilization’s love of material comforts, there is an unwillingness to face unpleasant realities.”
Gordon H. Clark, A Christian View of Men and Things, p.53
Just yesterday, we celebrated the 244th anniversary of America’s independence from Great Britain, while, ironically enough, a substantial portion of the country found itself under house arrest due to dictates from various government officials. It’s almost as if we’ve come full circle.
Actually, it seems as if we’ve come more than full circle. Government was much smaller, and the tax and regulatory burdens were much less, under British colonial rule than they are now under own home-grown government. This is not to suggest that it was wrong to have fought the Revolutionary War, but it does say something about how far America has drifted from its limited government roots.
What has been the cause of this political sea change?
In his Forward to Gordon Clark’s A Cristian View of Men and Things, John Robbins explained it this way, “A Christian View of Men and Things presents the argument that the West is disappearing because Christianity, on which Western civilization was built, has already virtually disappeared in the West.”
It needs to be pointed out there that when Clark and Robbins speak of “Christianity,” they are talking about the plain statements and logical implications of the 66 Books of the Bible, the centerpiece of which is the doctrine of Justification by Faith (Belief) Alone. That is to say, they are talking about the Biblical Christianity of the Protestant Reformation.
There are other systems of thought that claim to be Christianity, Roman Catholicism for example, but which are not Christian, because they teach that sinful man in some sense is able to put God in his debt, as if salvation were the rightful wages of the sinner’s good works. These other systems are, in fact, not Christian at all, and their growing presence in the United States and elsewhere in the West are the collapse of the West.
Western Civilization is rapidly disappearing from the face of the Earth, yet almost no one, even among those who lament its disappearance, understand, as did Gordon Clark and John Robbins, the connection between the disappearance of Christianity and that of Western Civilization.
Writing about the Northern Kingdom in his day, the prophet Hosea commented, “Aliens have devoured his [Ephraim’s] strength, but he does not know it; yes, gray hairs are here and there on him, yet he does not know it. The kings and rulers of the Northern Kingdom, for which Ephraim was another name, lacked the discernment to realize the precarious position of the nation and to see that its collapse was nigh. Some scholars believe Hosea wrote from about 750 BC until just a few years before the dissolution of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC, when the Assyrians conquered the capital city of Samaria and took the inhabitants of the nation into captivity.
So why did the Northern Kingdom fall to Assyria? That is a very simple question to answer, one requiring no speculation: “[T]hey left all the commandments of the LORD their God” (2 Kings 17:16). It was because of this that “the LORD was very angry with Israel, and removed them from His sight” (2 Kings 17:18).
It is this author’s contention that we in the West, the heirs of the Reformation, are in a position not entirely different from that of ancient Israel. We have forsaken the Lord our God, his law and his gospel, and have followed after strange gods, which are not gods at all, but the work of the vain imaginations of men’s sinful hearts. John Robbins put it like this, “the collapse of the West can be viewed as the collapse of the of the attempted Thomistic (Roman Catholic) synthesis of human philosophy and Christ, and the West’s fatal choosing of non-Christian philosophy, not Christ” (A Christian View of Men and Things, 12).
It’s one thing to read about the collapse of the Hebrew Republic as documented in the pages of the Old Testament, or even about the collapse of the Roman Empire as recounted by Edward Gibbon. It’s altogether another thing when the civilization in collapse is your own and you have the opportunity to watch it live streamed in high definition.
In the opinion of this author, it is high time that American Christians, and Christians in other nations of the West, face the reality of the situation we are in, as unpleasant as it is, and prepare themselves for the likely further collapse of the West.
Things had hit an absolute low point for Job. He had lost his oxen and his donkeys and his sheep. Most of his servants were dead, killed by the edge of the sword. His sons and daughters had perished amidst the merriment of a banquet. To top it all off, Job himself had come down with painful boils which covered him from head to toe.
And with all this, what advice did Job get from the person closest to him, his wife? “Curse God and die,” she told him. The words shock us. They seem so out of place in the home of a believer. Scripture doesn’t tell us much about Job’s wife, but certainly she knew of her husband’s faith. And it seems not unreasonable to suppose that she herself shared that faith. But her words of advice to Job at his very lowest point were not, “let us go before the Lord and seek his council and his mercy.” Her reaction was not even one of silent empathy, as was that of Job’s friends when they first came to see him. No. What she did on that occasion was proffer some of the worst advice imaginable, “curse God and die.”
It’s easy from the comfort of my home and sipping a cup of coffee that I would never say such a thing. I could sit here and boast all day about what an unshakable tower of faith I would be were I faced with a similar situation. But if I were to speak in this way, I would very much be guilty of the sin of bearing false witness. Or to put it a little less gently, I’d be lying to you.
Lux Lucet 