What exactly was it?

Steve

As for Steve’s last point: how do you reconcile this with the advise given to kings at the end of Psalm 2?

Your position is at best an ahistorical form of Christianty. Your position is the most problematic because, although you think you are parroting Darryl your position is lacking the nuance that his includes.

I am afraid your position, as an ahistorical anomoly, is a far departure from Thornwell, Dabney, and Machen (often pointed to as defenders of the spirituality of the church.

Steve

So again, the question about missionaries going to China — it depends on which nation their coming from. Which for me is an argument about the degree to which culture shapes the cult, rather than the other way around. And while I’m at it, I don’t know what culture will look like when it’s the other way around — the cult shaping culture. Sounds like Bill agrees when he says the Christian is not a culture or an ethnicity.

Liberalism = transformationalism. Roman Catholicism = transformationalism. Neo-Calvinism = transformationalism. Federal Vision = tranformationalism. If you listen close enough you can hear the PRC supralapsarians muttering how those URC infralapsarians are transformationalists.

The devil has a new name.

The West has been blessed by its commitment to Christ. The power of the Dark Kingdom has not held sway as it has in much of the world. The rise of evil regimes like the French Jacobin, German Nazi, and Soviet Communist suggest a the danger of spiritual apostacy from Christendom’s metaphysical dream.

For whatever it may be worth, I took your question about sanctification to be probe my understanding about just how I view the Christian life. And I took it to anticipate that if I answered “yes” then what exactly is my beef with what I seem to want to call “subjective transformationism.” But, as much as you and others may howl, I think that the language of “transformation” used in the vernacular of this age(i.e. “the transformed life of a believer”) is just a whole different language from biblical revelation. In other words, the language of the former is still power language which appeals to the sarx, while the language of “sanctification” is just.plain.different. The former seems to still want to utilize the revealed Gospel for the purposes of the flesh to both self-justify and solve the problems of the here and now. “Sanctification” language is befuddled by this. And vice-versa, of course.

An anecdote: When I came home from college and announced my conversion and had “become a Christian” I was met with relative hostility from an unbelieving family, for various and complicated reasons. At the risk of sounding overly-simplistic, I say that, ultimately, unbelief simply cannot fathom nor accept belief. My father, classically smitten by all things purely scientific, eased up once he read a study somewhere that “those who clinge to religious belief are happier and more content, less given to stress, etc.” Since religion seems to serve a felt need of the sarx, namely to be “happy, healthy and whole,” maybe this wasn’t the smack in the face he thought. But his reasoning always struck me as very odd and still does. I believe because it’s true and have been born from above, not by what I may get out of it in fast cash value. Add to that the fact that I am still waiting for my “happiness, healthiness and wholeness” to kick in, since when I examine myself I seem to be still subject to the same humanity as everyone else. As believers, I think we do in fact “transcend,” but not in the ways the sarx seems to naturally assume. So when I hear the language of “subjective transformationism” I get really quesy. It may seem to be different from “objective transformationism,” but it really isn’t. It plays to the same crowd that wants to transcend humanity and resist death an dits attendant categories, whether it be the health and wealth/higher life Keswickian stuff, all the way over to the more moderated and socially acceptable mainstream of popular pieties which promise happier households and kingdoms, nobody wants to die. And, yet, die we must.

Steve

Now, I want to stress that I do not see the application of Christ’s Kingship over the nations as some kind of universal ideology. I do not think that the English, or Scottish, tradition was somehow THE Christian culture. Rather, I agree with Daryl when he says, “Christianity is not a culture or ethnicity. IT is a religion that exists alongside cultural and ethnic identities. It may change the wrinkles in those human expressions. But those identities remain, dare I say, independent of one’s Christian identity.’

Well, I almost agree. I would suggest that the our Christian identity does leven and mold our cultural and ethnic identity. Grace restores nature it does not destroy it.

England (and the West generally) was heavily influenced by the faith and the West is the better for it. To argue against this proposition is to argue like liberals…. based on ahistoric abstractions.