i will say that, yes, i am quite unbalanced, but not in the bad way you may intend. i have very strong bias toward how we are to read the faith and how it comports with how we generally view the world in which it must trod through. and part of that is to find quite alien this ‘git er done’ piety. sorry, but i find that much too impious and irritating to a properly exilic or pilgrimmatic piety. i was reminded last night during the sermon of how paul has it in mind to convert slave girls, endure with all sorts of heresies, and maintain a rather sad and pathetic group of people that comprise the early church…versus seek the transformation of his world or conversions of the powers that be, the stars of the world.

like you, i am not sure what else to say either, except to feel free to have the last word here. you may want to git er done, but i think i am. all the best to your endeavors.

zrim

So, where this notion comes from that I believe in some concept of Entire Sanctification, I don’t know. It would help if we all actually read what was on the page.

Romans 6:3-6 - “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection,knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin;”

OUR OLD SELF WAS CRUCIFIED WITH HIM.

If you don’t like that, take it up with God. I don’t know what else to say.

The point of my comments was that stevez continues to demonstrate a very dismissive attitude to any comments about those things that separate us from unbelievers, and I’m arguing that he is demonstrating a very unbalanced perspective on this area of tension.

I also made reference numerous times to the Bible, Christ and the Holy Spirit as the source of any sanctification, yet you are citing comments in what could be construed as a corrective to comments that suggest that I was talking about all kinds of good that I am doing in my own power.

And quite frankly, in my view, that perspective wreaks of false humility, false guilt and self-flaggelation. How many times do I have to point to Christ and the Holy Spirit as the source and power for good before you’ll believe that I mean it? Are you one of those people, Darryl, who doesn’t let a Christian say anything at all about the good that is in him in case he falls prey to the temptation to pat himself on the back? Did Paul commit the unpardonable sin in Romans 15:14 when he told the Romans, “I myself also am convinced that you yourselves are full of goodness …”?

That attitude wreaks of Pharisaism, building a fence around God’s law to try to keep people from actually breaking His law and being guilty of pride for claiming any goodness.

Sorry, but that isn’t my religion. I would rather risk a bit of pride in the process of celebrating whatever good God is accomplishing in me rather than sleeping on a bed of nails in order to suppress real or perceived pride in my life. Sure, there’s an important place for contemplation in the Christian life, but I think the Church would be far more productive for God in this world if more of us lived by the motto: “Git ‘er done”!!!

So you may think “the issue isn’t whether or not the ungodly can do good, the issue is if they can account for it.” But I’m having a hard time believing that Reconstructionists can account for the good (or the not so good) of believers.

You ask: “Don’t we have to ask, if we want a Christian society we should be asking those who call themselves Christians to tell us how that ought to look?” Recons. are but one group that has provided very comprehensive modeling in this respect. You may not argree with it, but to imply that it isn’t done, indicates you are not widely read in this area or are guilty of misrepresentation here of the theological playing field before us in the year 2007.

You say: “Calvin said we got our graves with an unbeliever still in us…” If he meant that instead of meaning that we die with sin in us, then he was categorically wrong because Romans is clear that in the transaction that took place between Christ and His elect, not only did Christ die, but we also died. The old man is dead. Christians are at the root of their being, new men. That is one of the reasons we can’t lose our salvation. Salvation is not simply a change in a legal or a relational arrangement between a man and God, although it is both those things. We become new creatures in Christ. We aren’t dragging the old unbeliever behind us as we live as Christians.

This was foundational material to the fantastic discipleship course that RP elder-statesman Ken Smith recently taught in Ottawa in a course on discipling the new believer. He noted that many Christians are operational legalists who think the old man is still handcuffed to them and they are dragging him along and trying to dress him up instead of realising he’s dead and living free in Christ.

I’m afraid that, to me, your view wreaks of the “liberalism” of works righteousness. I see your view as knocking Christ to the ground and kicking sand in his eyes because it shows very, very little appreciation for the particulars of the work of salvation that God has promised to do in the lives of believers to transform them and perfect them in Christ. You are far too preoccupied with the ongoing sin and troubles in the lives of Christians and the areas in which we continue to resemble unbelievers instead of focusing on the newness, the victory and the righteousness in believers. In other words, you are denying the power of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. What about Romans 7 which indicates that at salvation the orientation of our minds has been transformed such that the mind of the Christian is at war with the pull towards sin that he experiences in his flesh?

zrim

This poses a challenge to those of us in the decentralist, localist, anti-modern camp who persist, by and large, in an intellectual ghetto. This raises the touchy subject of how habits of thought and life are generated, maintained, and passed on, and the role of an intellectual elite in guarding such habits. I see this in the homeschooling world all the time. People who are by and large living effective, localist, yeoman lives against the spirit of the age on the foundation of essentially populist anti-intellectualized political grievancances (characterized, for example, by anti-Darwinism, young-earth conspiracy theories, absurd readings of history, rampant biblicism, etc.). This lumpenproletariat stands in stark contrast to both the suburbobourgeoisie progressive Evangelicals of the right (and left) and the embedded intellectuals, neither of which really embrace anything approaching a decent resistance to the spirit of the age, despite all the fatwas against western decline and declension.

Now this is the stuff of high comedy! An army of reconstructionist ninjas! There is a classic late-night shoestring-budget movie to be made here, I’m sure of it.

Myself, with this book I’ve just written, I think I have been completely faithful to what I understand to be Biblical principles related to sphere sovereignty and church, state and family governance issues, yet I have written in such a way that I have received strong endorsements and positive responses from Charismatics, other Evangelicals, Catholics (and so far one politically conservative Jewish activist). Which tells me there is a theocratic impulse in all Christians but most of us have been “trained” to see it as evil and, therefore, to deny it. So, what is needed is someone who can articulate that theocratic impulse in a way that demonstrates the positive nature of it and explains it in a way that is understandable and bypasses the preconceptions against it. So the spirit of theocracy is still here and advancing. Lutherans look out !

BTW, Rich is into martial arts now and apparently also working on a book re. the martial arts and Christianity. And lifting weights. So he’s still as spry as ever, I think.

And yet, in the years since, I have wondered why the energy of Christian Reconstruction has never turned from book writing to active efforts to infiltrate the government and conduct para-military training camps?