“Funerals are a gauge of the impact of Gnosticism in Christianity. Underlying the Gnostic attitude in modern Christian funerals is the most troubling assumption of all: a theology of escape.”
Read the rest here.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
The Greatness of Victorious Eschatology
The modern conservative church has been plagued by pessimistic, unbelieving, and anorexic eschatology. The biblical hope of a glorious future on the earth should animate all we do.
Listen here.
The Creed of Leftism
1. There are no absolute, transcendent standards for this world and, therefore, humanity must create them.
2. The central standard humanity must create is the widest possible human autonomy. There must be no impediment to individual human choice as long as no one else is harmed.
3. The chief social goal is to create the just society, meaning the most extensive equality of results. A person should be entitled to the same benefits as everyone else, irrespective of birth, spiritual condition, family, work, and ethics.
4. Though individuals should be autonomous, they cannot be trusted to contribute willingly to the just society, so it is necessary for especially virtuous and gifted individuals, the elite, to employ political coercion to create that society.
5. Human life is valuable only to the extent that it reflects certain material qualities, and if specific lives like the unborn and the elderly cannot enjoy those qualities, those lives need not be preserved.
6. Human sexuality is a special form of autonomy, and political and cultural barriers to all adult consensual sex should be removed.
7. Linear history is the measure of ethical development, and ethical standards of the past should be continually superseded as society moves toward greater justice.
8. Individuals who do not support this general Leftist vision are morally retrograde and a drag on society and should be marginalized, stigmatized, and penalized.
New CCL e-book: “Total Revolution”
This is a book about what revolution is, how it came about, how it is transpiring right before our eyes, and what Christians can do to arrest and overcome it. This book presupposes the necessity of Christian society, not just Christian families and churches, foundational though they are. It addresses topics as diverse as the culture war, the separation of church and state, the altered meaning of liberalism, the true objectives of progressivism, the human types that make statism necessary, and the blight of political soteriology.
Get the e-book here.
Gospel or Salvation?
Many Christians calls themselves “evangelical,” but actually they’re soterians. They’re not Gospel Christians, but soteriological Christians. These two aren’t the same.
Read the article here.
The Degeneration into Political Soteriology
“This insurrection is sometimes called ‘conservative counter-revolution,’ but it never is. It claims to be restoring the moral order overturned by Leftists, but it is actually an attempt to reverse the new Leftist (dis)order after assimilating the revolutionary gains — and strategies — of Leftism. It is a variant of revolution whose eyes are hidden to this fact by its opposition to other specific tenets of Leftism. But its orientation to society is revolutionary; it adopts, usually unknowingly, the guiding tenet of Leftism.”
Read the rest of the article here.
Will You Help CCL this Year’s End?
Dear friends and supporters:
A number of you have already sent a generous year-end donation. Thank you deeply.
Most Christian ministries receive a large proportion of their income at the end of the year, and CCL is no exception. If you haven’t sent a donation yet, will you consider a tax-deductible donation via PayPal or Venmo?
You can also mail a check (postmarked no later than Dec. 31) to:
CCL, Box 100, Coulterville, CA 95311.
God uses you to keep us going — and expanding.
Christmas: Excarnation Versus Incarnation
This Advent and Christmas season we celebrate the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Incarnation literally denotes enfleshment. The eternal Son of God assumed humanity as a babe in Bethlehem in order to grow to adulthood and die for the sins of the world. This death and subsequent resurrection, the source of our salvation, presuppose incarnation. Without incarnation, there can be no salvation.
Excarnation
The opposite of incarnation is excarnation, a word coined by Charles Taylor[1] to describe the modern inclination to limit all the significant issues of reality to the mind. The body and material world are simply vehicles for reason and imagination. Excarnation is indebted to ancient Gnosticism, the first and most dangerous Christian heresy that afflicts the church and culture down to this very day.[2] While the Bible located the world’s ills in human sin, Gnosticism blamed them on creation itself. An ignorant, malign deity (the Demiurge) broke from the true God and created matter, including the human body, contrary to God’s desire. The true God tried to foil the Demiurge by covertly inserting sparks of divinity into the human bodies. To the Gnostics, the Fall is not from righteousness into sin, but from spirit into matter; and salvation is escape from the body and reversion to pure spirit. This means the human body and the material world are a prison from which the enlightened must escape. Jesus came not to save from sin, but to deliver from ignorance and impart knowledge (gnosis), by which the illuminated learn of their true, excarnated destiny. For Christians, man is rescued by God’s Son becoming man in assuming (and dying and rising in) a human body. For Gnostics, man is rescued by escaping from his body, after which the divine spark is released to return to the heavenlies. Man becomes God. Excarnation is the process of man’s salvation. This heresy the antithesis of biblical orthodoxy.
Excarnation in Culture
Excarnation is increasingly a guiding tenet of Western elites. There’s nothing Christian about it. The Bible teaches that God’s norms are interwoven in the cosmos. These include gravity and thermodynamics. They include economic laws of scarce resources. Moreover, they include his norms for human sexuality. Today’s elites don’t simply wish the rebel against these laws. They want to circumvent and then abolish them. They have figured out the only way to do this is to bypass reality itself. Their vision of the Good Society is one in which all people are equal in condition, and the “marginalized” are resituated as the apex of culture. If this means redefining reality, so be it. If the human body as biologically male or female is an impediment to human imagination, sex-“reassignment” surgery is an option. If some humans are smarter, better looking, stronger, or cleverer than others, laws must be imposed that penalize their giftedness and reduce them to the level of their inferiors. Eventually, this means that their gifts must be eliminated to create true equality. If women are naturally superior nurturers and men naturally superior soldiers, men must nurture babies and women must serve in combat. TV and movies must depict lithe 120-pound women as martial arts devotees vanquishing muscular 200-pound male warriors. The ridiculousness of the idea is irrelevant; it’s the reality-bending social vision that matters. The body forbids the exercise of the rebellious imagination, so the body must be circumvented and, if necessary, abandoned. Reality doesn’t conform to the elite vision of society, so reality is irrelevant. The excarnation paradigm sees the body simply as a vehicle for the person, the “authentic self.” The person, the real you and I, is inside the body, the “ghost in the machine.” The body is like an automobile that carts us around. There’s a radical disjunction between the authentic, self-aware person, and his body. The body is simply a tool, like a screwdriver or a fork, though a highly complex one. This anthropology (view of man) has momentous implications. For one thing, it means that if the self is not fully developed, the body is unimportant. This means that there should be no barrier to abortion and euthanasia and mercy killing. After all, it’s the self that’s important, not the body. If there is no authentic self (or person on the inside), the body is disposable. Remember: the body is only there as a vehicle for the person. [3] This is the grim price we pay as a society for implementing the excarnation vision.
Excarnation in the Church
The Bible does not exalt spirit over matter; Jesus is Lord of the invisible and visible world (Col. 1:15–17). Yet ever since pagan Greek ideas of the inferiority of the material world infected Christianity, the church has battled with excarnation. Even as the church prays, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt. 6:10), many Christians view the world outside the church — economics, politics, entertainment, education, and architecture — as inescapably “carnal” (fleshly) and unfit for Christian influence. So the church retreats to an excarnated spirituality. Prayer, interior dialogue, and contemplation of heaven are considered spiritual, while working to re-criminalize abortion, de-legitimize same-sex “marriage,” combat pornography, and reduce government theft programs in the form of confiscatory taxation are relatively unimportant and, in fact, a diversion from the church’s real, excarnated tasks. Escape from evil within the created order rather than confrontation with and victory over it is the excarnational agenda. Christianity is reduced to a “personal devotional hobby.”[4] But Advent stares us unflinchingly in the face with the truth that the present world, immaterial and material, is cursed by sin and is to be redeemed by the death and resurrection of our Lord. The most evil being in the universe is pure spirit, but Jesus was born and lived and died and rose from the dead and lives forever in a body. He is profoundly interested in the world, including the material world. He came healing the sick and exorcising demons from tortured bodies. To trust in the Messiah for salvation is to surrender oneself mind, soul, body — our entire self — to him (Rom. 12:1–2).
TV and movies depict lithe 120-pound women as martial arts devotees vanquishing muscular 200-pound male warriors. The ridiculousness of the idea is irrelevant; it’s the reality-bending social vision that matters.
He is as interested in purging sin from gansta rap and abortion clinics and fraudulent bond-rating agencies and Bauhaus architecture as he is from Christian hearts and families and churches. The cleansing power of the Gospel does not simply take souls to heaven; it transforms everything it touches.
Conclusion
This Advent season, relish the incarnational life and dismiss the excarnational vision. The body and the material world are not designed for our escape but for joy and victory. Jesus is Lord of all, and a God unashamed to be born into a barn amid farm animals is unashamed to care for and redeem every area of creation and culture presently under the dominion of sin. Christmas is a celebration of incarnation that made possible atoning bodily death and victorious bodily resurrection. Our future hope is not excarnation in a false medieval vision of angel babes and halos and harps in heaven but of the new heaven descended to a new earth purged from sin, where God will dwell eternally with us his people — on a profoundly material, but sinless, earth (Rev. 21:1–4).
[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Belknap, 2007), 288.
[2] Benjamin Walker, Gnosticism, Its History and influence (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England: Aquarian Press, 1983, 1989).
[3] Robert P. George, “Gnostic Liberalism,” First Things, December 2016, 33–38.
[4] Stephen C. Perks, The Great Decommission (Taunton, England: Kuyper Foundation, 2011), 20.
The Post-Resurrection Gospel Presupposes the Pre-Resurrection Kingdom
The reason that the life and message of Jesus Christ portrayed in the gospel accounts, particularly the Synoptics, seem so far removed from the post-resurrection Gospel of Paul and the other apostles to our thinking is that we wrongly see a chasm between the kingdom of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The former is actually the foundation and presupposition of the latter.
Jesus the Messiah embodies the in-breaking of God‘s kingdom evidenced most graphically by healings and exorcisms, which dominate the Synoptics right up the passion narratives.
Jesus incarnates God’s good news of vanquishing sin in the world and rescuing sinners. “Trust in the crucified and risen Lord” is possible because of the message “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”
Paul’s message summarized in 1 Corinthians 15:1f. is the focused intensification of the broad, sweeping truth that in Jesus Christ God is reversing what man lost in Eden and bringing the entire world back into line with God’s holy purposes.
Never feel perplexed that the gospels are almost filled with accounts of healings and exorcisms, while Acts and the rest of the New Testament seem to go in an entirely different direction, with the stress on salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.
The latter is the result of the former, is the natural consequence of the former, and impossible without the former.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is the gospel of the kingdom of God. No kingdom, no Gospel.
The 2020 Political Victory
“The 1619 Project and BLM are right — you must get rid of the United States as we’ve known it to produce ‘The Good [i.e., Godless] Society.'”
Read the article here.
CCL November 7 Symposium
2020 Vision for a Blurry Year
Topics:
- The upsides of a downside year
- Presidential election as chaos
- The political ideology of the COVID-19 drama
- Cultural Marxists in the streets
- The Supreme Court battle and the assault on Amy Coney Barrett
- Social justice goes to church — unmasked
- The wokeness of sports
No screaming insults, no sophomoric one-liners, no cancel culture, no rude interruptions — just reasoned, respectful discussion, warm rapport, and delectable food.
Get full information here.
Dead to Sin, Alive to God
If we’re true Christians, and living in sin, we’re like zombies: the living dead; we’re alive, but carrying around the residue of the defeat of death every‐ where we go.
Paul says this is no way to live. This is not the Christian life.
Listen here.
The Church After Covid – Why Bother Going Back?
The COVID-19 crisis, both the real crisis and the manufactured crisis, will subside, though much too quickly for the panic-porn purveyors in our major media outlets. Consequences of the crisis will, however, persist.
No, we will not feel the effects of the crisis in our economy for 70 years, as a September 3 USA Today story suggested, an idea so palpably ridiculous that only our major media could have suggested it. But social consequences of major historical events are inevitable, and the church will not escape those consequences. The fact that some of these consequences to the church are self-inflicted doesn’t mitigate them.
We might ponder both the short- and long-term effects of the COVID drama on the church, and three avenues come immediately to mind: closure, compromise, and courage.
Closure
First, many churches will close. Church attendance was consistently declining before COVID, and, according to Barna, 20% of the temporary closures will become permanent, as reported in an August 26 Christian Post story. The study offered the entirely reasonable explanation that the longer believers remain unassembled, the less church attendance means to them. They’re discovering they can get along quite well, thank you, without church, and would need a renewed, compelling reason to resume attending.
Long-time friend and now retired New Testament scholar Ardel Caneday offered a succinct reason:
During the past 20 years by posting videos of every Lord’s Day sermon online church leaders have made it attractive for people to disobey the admonition of Hebrews 10:25 — “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗴𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘂𝗽 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼𝗴𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another —and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” During the past 6 months by surrendering the holding of worship services to the whims of state governors and by live-streaming worship services online church leaders have exponentially accelerated the attractiveness for people not to obey the admonition of Hebrews 10:25. The longer they continue these practices the more de-churched people will become.
In 2012 Christianity Today reported that America contained approximately 384,000 churches. Of course, there’s no way to arrive at an accurate count, but even if this number is miscalculated by several thousand, it provides a benchmark for comparison. If the 2020 number is not greatly different, this would mean about 77,000 churches will not survive COVID.
A number of these churches, of course, shouldn’t survive. Liberal churches (for example) aren’t churches at all, and the quicker they die, the better.
But the loss of remaining churches, varying in spiritual virility and theological fidelity, will further feather Satan’s cap.
Compromise
Second, many churches that do survive will permanently alter their way of “doing” church. Zoom and other digital meetings widely, almost sweepingly, replaced in-person church — and will become a permanent “option.” The flagrant problem with this approach is that the expression “in-person church” is a redundancy: there’s no church that is not in person. The fact that this view is widely disputed or unknown testifies to the emaciated ecclesiology (doctrine of the church) in modern Christianity.
In the New Testament, “church” is the translation of ekklesia. This is not a unique theological word, but the common term denoting the assembly of citizens in the ancient Greek world called together to decide on important civic issues. Its defining feature is the assembly itself. No assembly or congregation, no ekklesia.
The new covenant ekklesia is the Lord’s blood-purchased citizens’ assembly. Without assembly, ekklesia is impossible. The English word “church,” by contrast, originally meant “the Lord’s house.” This is a sound, biblical metaphor for the ekklesia, but ekklesia is not identical to “church.” The ekklesia is the assembly, not the house itself, metaphorical or otherwise.
We often hear Christians declare that the church needs to get out of its Sunday building and “be the church” in the world. Whatever we may think about this idea, it fails to recognize that the church is the church precisely in its Lord’s Day meeting, whether that meeting is in a building or not.
To argue that a virtual church meeting is no less a meeting than an in-person meeting is self-contradictory. We call virtual meetings “virtual” because they are not actual. The point is not that they are universally less productive than in-person meetings. It’s simply that they are not actual meetings.
COVID ecclesial policy has, de-churched Christianity, in Dr. Caneday’s language.
Courage
Third, many faithful new churches will emerge, and many presently faithful ones will grow more robust. The abject failure of a vast majority of churches to recognize their own independent authority countering statist political edicts demanding shutdown will stimulate devout, thoughtful members to consider moving to or launching bolder, more biblical churches.
Many Christians recognizing the vital role of the church not simply in the individual Christian or family life but also the culture are suffering bitter disappointment at their present churches that cowered in the face of secular political edicts: “A righteous man who falters before the wicked [i]s like a murky spring and a polluted well” (Prov. 25:26). But this very disappointment has stimulated godly change.
None of us relishes difficult times, but they often force us into thoughts and decisions that more routine situations would not compel. If proverbial necessity is the mother of invention, hardships for Christians are the mother of holy redirection. That post-COVID redirection will translate into both new and renewed churches — uncompromising, theologically rigorous, worldview-ishly drenched, Christ-honoring churches.
Conclusion
We will one day ruminate on the COVID drama and not only deplore its ecclesial cravenness. We will, in addition, celebrate ecclesial revival. God has a history of birthing good out of evil: think of the Cross of Calvary …. Perhaps our children and grandchildren will mark COVID as the turning point from a sophomoric, anorexic Christianity to a mature, robust, world-conquering Faith.
Our Promissory God
Several decades ago a Canadian schoolteacher Everett Storms read the Bible through 27 times specifically counting God’s promises. The number he came up with is 7,487. We might dis‐ pute that number, but of this there must be no doubt: you can find thousands of God’s promises in the Bible. If you read nothing but divine promises in the Bible, you would be occupied for a very long time. If you removed the promises from the Bible, you would no longer have a Bible.
Listen here.
The Actual Culture War, October, 2020
Today’s progressives are in line with Marx’s vision….
They support radical egalitarianism in family and church and the wider society, because God’s order is based on benevolent hierarchies. They start right in Genesis 1:1 with the Creator-creature distinction; God himself is the highest, absolute hierarch. The egalitarians’ goal is to fashion the perfect society without God.
The war on hierarchies is actually a war on God; it’s God they’re really after.
Read the rest here.
What Whites Owe Blacks
Fledgling editor Timothy Dalrymple of Christianity Today (Astray?) has called for the evangelical church to pay blacks reparations for the Unites States’ history of slavery and 19th century ministers’ defense of it. Dalrymple invoked the biblical account of Zacchaeus to buttress his proposal ….
Read the rest here.
Pessimism Is Not a Strategy
“Hope is not a strategy” — this is an increasingly popular adage. It means that we can be hopeful all we want, but unless we have a plan and strategy in place to accomplish what we’re hoping for, that hope will likely be dashed.
This adage is a gleaming example of commonsensical, contra-biblical, worldly wisdom. According to the Bible, hope is in fact a strategy, one of the greatest strategies of all.
Read the rest of the article here.
Christian Culture 