“Based on covenant history, the fact that God’s words now enrage His enemies is not a sign of failure. It is a sign of their imminent doom.”

With same sex marriage now legalized in many Western countries, and militant Islam ravaging the East, Christians might be wondering what God is doing. With the repeated failure of predictions of an imminent second coming, is the Bible any help to us at all in predicting what will happen next? I believe it is.

And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day,
for before this they had been at enmity with each other.
(Luke 23:12)

The New Testament writers often quote the Old Testament in crazy ways because they understood that God’s covenants are “harvest cycles.” They could refer to events in previous covenants and say, “Look, it’s happening again! See how God reunited Israel? Now He is reuniting Jew and Gentile!” (Hebrews 8:7-13)

The moral degradation of Western culture and the rise of militant Islam make perfect sense when understood in the light of sacred architecture and the “harvest” process it represents. So we will take a brief look into the Holy Place of the Tabernacle, observe how this pattern shaped the events of the first century, and quickly trace it to the madness of our own day.

The Holy Place

In the Holy Place were three articles of furniture which represented three offices: Priest, King and Prophet. These three describe a process of maturity. The Priest listens, the King acts, and the Prophet speaks. This is what was required of Adam in the Garden of Eden, and it also gives us three clear stages in the history and literature of ancient Israel.

The Table of Showbread is the Priest (manna and grapes in the wilderness), the Lampstand is the King (the light of the law for wisdom in governing) and the Incense Altar is the elders who advise in the courts of heaven and guide history on earth. Of course, Christ is the first one who truly united these three offices.

Since the Tabernacle layout is cross-shaped, these three items are two hands, left and right, and the bosom or breastplate in the center. This is why Christ holds seven stars in His right hand in Revelation 1 (the church rulers). He is the Tabernacle fulfilled. As His body, Christians are a royal priesthood, a combination of priest and king with a voice from heaven.

The First Century

The conflict between Priesthood and Kingdom, Church and State, can be traced throughout Scripture, seen very clearly in the hatred of Abel by Cain, and Jacob by Esau, and in the Egyptians’ regard of shepherds as detestable (Genesis 46:34). However, only a faithful combination of Priesthood and Kingdom results in a voice that is truly Prophetic. This is why the Ascension of Christ was followed by the Day of Pentecost and resulted in both the apostolic witness and the New Testament document.

However, Priesthood and Kingdom often collude against the true prophets. That is always the nature of Babel. The Jews hated the Romans, and yet Herod and Pilate became friends over the crucifixion of Christ. This was repeated “institutionally” a generation later, when Herodian worship (left hand) and Neronic rule (right hand) joined forces against the Christian church, the Body of Christ.

The Global Church

All of this helps us to understand the major tensions in the world today. On one hand, we have Islam, an insane parody of Priesthood, a religion which prohibits the wine, women and song of adulthood, everything Kingly and Prophetic. Holiness comes via coercion. One must listen and not question. It is a religion which puts everyone under the sword, a tyrannizing order like that of the Pharisees and Herods in first century Jerusalem. It expresses itself through bloodshed, circumcision for males and females, violence against girls and women, and jihad.

On the other hand, we have the Secular West, which no longer listens to God and has given itself to “kingly” sins, murder and adultery, the amassing of gold and war horses, and the infant sacrifice of abortion. Secular humanism is Kingdom taken to the extreme, the “guns, girls, and gold” prohibited by Moses (Deuteronomy 17:14-20) and amassed by Solomon, which began the downfall of Israel.

Islam and Secularism are vehemently opposed. Like the Roman Empire, secularism calls Muslims to assimilate. Like Jews under the Law of Moses, this is something Muslims under Sharia law are unable to do. In the wisdom of God, the two sides are forever set at enmity. One claims divine authority (Priesthood), the other claims infinite wisdom (Kingdom). Both invent history in order to claim the future (Prophecy).

In between these two perversions, one of Priesthood and the other of Kingdom, we have the Christian Church, a Body which unites true Priesthood and true Kingdom, a royal priesthood given the task of divine testimony to the world. Like Herod and Pilate, the only thing Islam and Secularism have in common is a hatred for Christianity, the fragrant bride in the bosom of Adam, the supernatural institution which, by the Spirit of the ascended Christ, is truly Prophetic.

It is easy to blame the Church for the degeneration of Western culture, but the prophetic witness in our culture has in reality been reasonably consistent. Based on Covenant history, the fact that God’s words now enrage His enemies is not a sign of our failure. It is a sign of their imminent doom.

Romans 1 tells us that cultural homosexuality is a sign of the end of a culture, the final proof that it has gone insane. But subsequent chapters also describe the hypocrisy and futility of a carnal priesthood. Paganism and Judaism were castrated forever, their “ministries” replaced by the enthronement of the fragrant firstborn from the dead.

This explains the natures of Islam and Secularism. In this age, everything is Christian. With paganism and Judaism disempowered, to have any real longevity, any idolatry must now be a distorted form of Christianity. Islam is Christianity without sacrament, without grace. Secularism is Christianity without discipline, without self-government. Islam and Secularism are thus the bipolar moods of Christless Christianity, schizoid faces of a global perversion of the prophetic Gospel. Christians in the East testify like Elijah against false Priesthood. Christians in the West, like the angels sent to Sodom, testify against false Kingdom. Sacrament and Govern-ment can only be united under the Word by the Spirit.

But both extremes are not only the enemies of the Gospel, they are the results of the Gospel. Islam and Secularism are rebellion against Christ taken to its logical conclusion in opposite directions: legalism or licentiousness. With no spiritual weapons, both “hands” are reduced to bearing the sword in their respective ways. They can be united only in death, and their current victories are suicides in disguise. As it was in the first century, the only solution to the enmity is faith in Christ.

The Whole World in His Hands

When God’s people persevere, God confuses their enemies and sets them against each other. Rome devoured Jerusalem, and then the New Jerusalem devoured Rome. The prophetic voice of Christ and His martyrs was vindicated. Released from the trappings of the old order, and possessing both the divine authority of the Jew and the earthly abundance of the Gentile, the Gospel began its transformation of the empire.

What does the future hold? If the events of the first century are repeated, the false kings will destroy the false priests, but the false kings will be entirely shaken up in the process, being humbled that they might bow the knee to Christ. Many saints will die but through their testimony they will eventually conquer the false kingdom from the inside. The Future belongs to the Bride.

When Sodom was destroyed, Sarah conceived. When Israel committed similar sins, Ruth and Hannah conceived. In God’s kingdom, the last days are only ever the last days of the old order. A bipolarity of Priesthood and Kingdom expressed in global culture means some kind of Prophetic resurrection across the world is at hand, a Christendom more faithful, wiser, and bigger than even the saints could imagine, the next “growth ring” of the kingdom of God.

The inheritance of Jesus includes both East and West, just as it included Jew and Gentile, set in opposition by the Law: divide and conquer, circumcise and baptize.

For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. (Ephesians 2:14-16)

With the Spirit of God in us, and the lessons of the millennia, God’s thoughts are not so high above ours any more. And that was always the plan: that all His people might be Prophets, wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

This essay is from Inquiétude: Essays for a People Without Eyes. The original version was published at Theopolis Institute.

How will the world judge God
when given the opportunity?

For God does know that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3:5)

You shall have no other gods before me. (Exodus 20:3)

Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’?” (John 10:34)

The aim of the testing of Adam was to qualify him to be a co-regent with God. Rich Bledsoe argues that the question of God’s existence is not ontological but ethical at heart. History is Man’s attempt to either eradicate God’s rule, or to make God co-regent with Man.

The account given of the creation and subsequent fall of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis shows the beginning of ethical selfism. Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, and God refers to them as those who have come to know good and evil. What this means is that they now have fallen away from knowing the will of God, and of being able to obey it, and they have now, like God, become the authors of morality. They themselves will be the determiners of what is good and of what is evil. Their own selves become the source, and this is now thrust upon them. From that time forward, the creation of morality will be an onerous, and impossible, human burden.

The modern world is now far more self-consciously “selfist” than the world was five minutes after the fall, and more so than it was in Jesus’ own day. The seed if implication has been developing over time. And just as selfism leads to darkness in regard to the very possibility of self-knowledge or of any knowledge of the world, it also leads to darkness in regard to actions that are good, and actions that are bad. The assumption behind human ethics now is that the world and humanity are self-complete without reference to God, and this always leads to self-looping vicious circles in regard to human actions, because humanity is not self-complete, but pretends that it is. We are saddled with this as a curse, but generally speaking, the human race understands it as its own highest glory.

…the Bible indicates that inquiries into the existence of God are never neutral theoretical musings. They rather always have a particular ethical edge about them. They are interrogations, and have the character of accusation about them. The deepest intention of questioning the existence of God is not ontological; rather, it is ethical. There is something prior to the question of existence, and the existence question is clouded. If I am god, and my determinations are final, then it is simply impossible for the God of the Bible to be God, or for Jesus to be God. The ethical accusation is that God is unjust, and has no right to be God since this is now my office. If he exists, then his sheer existence is blasphemy. If he exists, then he is my enemy. It is necessary either to mute his existence and remake him as less than the almighty God of the Bible, one who is smaller, who is satisfied to, at best, co-exist with me, or it is the case that he simply does not exist. If he does exist as the almighty God of the Bible, then this brings confusion and dissonance. If I cannot dismiss him, then I must accuse him. Dismissal is actually accusation, and in all likelihood there is a veering back and forth between the two. The mindset of fallenness is double-mindedness. In all cases, it is necessary to take things into one’s own hands, and become one’s own god determining good and evil for oneself.

Interestingly, God seems to take a step back and allow us to do just that. He says that he will give us a great privilege. He will allow us to create a law, and then he will judge us by that law. Whatever judgments we bring to those around us will become the same standard of judgment that he will test us by. We have accused God of being an unjust judge. So God allows the privilege, and lets us determine our own standard. Hence, Aristotle will be judged by his own golden mean, Kant by his own categorical imperative, Sartre, who wanted to legislate for the entire world in his every decision, will be judged in the same way. In other words, it is a very dangerous thing to have the very power of determining both good and evil; it is fraught with terrible ironies. Jesus warned us about this in one of the most misused and misunderstood of all biblical texts. “Judge not, that ye might not be judged” (Matt. 7:1). The modern world quotes this often as a biblical justification for complete ethical tolerance, but it means exactly what it ways. You will be judged as you judge, and we have now all had this burden inescapably thrust upon us.

…There is a further step to this quandary. Even beyond being judged by our own standards, God has said that he will even permit us to judge him. As a race, we have declared him “out of court.” We have determined that he is unjust. As we judge God, we too shall be judged, for we have declared that we are gods. “On that day when, according to my Gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (Rom 2:16). Jesus, who is the very word of God, was handed over to men to be judged. How will the world judge God when given the opportunity? Our judgment of him was self-damning. Here the reality of the divine law connects with the reality/unreality of man’s self-created law. On what basis of self-made law was Jesus crucified? Jesus was condemned because he claimed to be God, and because he claimed to be the true source of the judgment of good and evil. This was called blasphemy, and for this he was put to death. If this same standard is brought against his accusers, what is the result? It can only be death, for each judge tacitly made exactly the same claim. If you claim that God deserves to die because he claims to be God, then you too deserve to die because you make the same claim.

The result is that every god will damn himself and every mouth will be stopped, and all secrets will be judged by Christ Jesus.

Excerpts from Richard Bledsoe, Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved? Jesus Christ in the Obama and post-Obama Era, 26-31.

Secularism and Inquisition

“If I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptise terrorists” – Sarah Palin, April 2014

Despite its Messianic pretensions, the secular state has no authority over the spiritual realm, and militant Islam exposes this incompetence to us again and again. The “War on Terror” banner illustrates perfectly the failure of statists to comprehend, or perhaps to admit publicly, the true nature of our enemy.

This post has been slain and resurrected for inclusion in my 2015 book of essays, Inquietude.

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“Far more can be known about the early recorded history of mankind than is generally allowed, and what is revealed by this history is a story that is very different indeed from the one that we are used to hearing.”

Those who take Genesis 1-11 as literal history are considered ignorant by the “more respectable” echelons of Christian academia. But it turns out that it is these scholars who are the ignorant ones, and there is documentary evidence to prove it. Two thousand years of recorded history which corroborates the testimony of the Bible was deliberately ignored and is excluded from the modern curricula. Bill Cooper writes that this evidence is not difficult either to access or to read, which means that much of Christian scholarship has either been duped by secular historians about the historicity of Genesis, or is deliberately lying to the people of God.

Excerpts from Bill Cooper, After The Flood: The Early Post-Flood History Of Europe Traced Back To Noah.

In the Beginning

It is commonly thought in this present age that nothing is worthy of our belief unless first it can be scientifically demonstrated and observed to be true. This idea, known today as empiricism, has been around since the 1920s, and says basically that nothing is to be taken on trust, and that anything which lacks direct corroboration must be discarded from mankind’s fund of knowledge as simply not worth the knowing. Not surprisingly, a special case was made by those who had thought of the idea for including the Bible in this great process of deselection, and it was assumed without further enquiry that nothing in especially the earlier portions of the biblical record could be demonstrated to be true and factual. This applied particularly to the book of Genesis. There all was relegated, by modernist scholars at least, to the realms of myth and fiction, with very little of its contents being said to bear any relevance at all for 20th-century man. Not even a moral relevance was granted. In other words, we were solemnly assured in the light of modern wisdom that, historically speaking, the book of Genesis was simply not worth the paper it was printed on.

When I first came across this problem some thirty years ago, I found it most perplexing. On the one hand I had the Bible itself claiming to be the very Word of God, and on the other I was presented with numerous commentaries that spoke with one voice telling me that the Bible was nothing of the kind. It was merely a hotch-potch collection of middle-eastern myths and fables that sought to explain the world in primitive terms, whose parts had been patched together by a series of later editors. Modern scientific man need have nothing whatever to do with it.

Now, it was not possible for both these claims to be valid. Only one of them could be right, and I saw it as my duty, at least to myself, to find out which was the true account and which was the false. So it was then that I decided to select a certain portion of Genesis and submit it to a test which, if applied to any ordinary historical document, would be considered a test of the most unreasonable severity. And I would continue that test until either the book of Genesis revealed itself to be a false account or it would be shown to be utterly reliable in its historical statements. Either way, I would discover once and for all whether the biblical record was worthy of my trust or not. It seemed a little irreverent to treat a book that claimed to be the very Word of God in such a fashion. But if truth has any substance at all, then that book would surely be able to bear such a test. If Genesis contained any falsehood, error or misleading statement of fact, then a severe testing would reveal it and I would be the first to add my own voice to those of all the other scholars who declared the book of Genesis to be little more than fable.

With any ordinary historical document, of course, a simple error or even a small series of errors, would not necessarily disqualify it from being regarded as an historical account, or one that could at least be made use of by historians. But Genesis is no ordinary record. No ordinary document would claim inerrancy in its statements, and any document which did make such a claim for itself could expect a thorough and severe drubbing at the hands of scholars. But, if Genesis was indeed a true account of what had happened all those years ago, it if was indeed everything that it claimed itself to be, then the truth that it proclaimed could not be destroyed by any amount of testing. It could only be vindicated. In that regard at least, truth is indestructible.

…when, over my twenty-five years of research, that confirmatory evidence grew past 40% to 50%, and then 60% and beyond, it soon became apparent that modern wisdom in this matter was wide of the mark. Very wide of the mark indeed. Today I can say that the names so far vindicated in the Table of Nations make up over 99% of the list…

What I had not expected at the time was the fact that the task was to engage my attention and energies for more than twenty-five years. Nor had I expected the astonishing degree to which Genesis, particularly the tenth and eleventh chapters, was to be vindicated. These chapters are conveniently known to scholars as the Table of Nations, and the sheer breadth and depth of the historical evidence that was available for their study astonished me. It bore very little relation indeed to wheat I had been led to expect. But that was not the only surprise in store.

The test that I devised was a simple one. If the names of the individuals, families, peoples and tribes listed in the Table of Nations were genuine, then those same names should appear also int he records of other nations of the Middle East. Archaeology should also reveal that those same families and peoples are listed in Genesis (or not as the case may be) in their correct ethnological, geographical and linguistic relationships. I allowed for the fact that a good proportion of these names would not appear. Either the records that once contained them had long since perished, or the diversity of language and dialect had rendered them unrecognisable. Some would be lost in obscurity. It simply was not realistic to expect that every name would have been recorded in the annals of the ancient Middle East and would also have survived to the present day. I therefore would have been content to have found say 40% of the list vindicated. In fact that would have been a very high achievement given the sheer antiquity of the Table of Nations itself and the reported sparsity of the surviving extra-biblical records from those ancient times. But when, over my twenty-five years of research, that confirmatory evidence grew past 40% to 50%, and then 60% and beyond, it soon became apparent that modern wisdom in this matter was wide of the mark. Very wide of the mark indeed. Today I can say that the names so far vindicated in the Table of Nations make up over 99% of the list, and I shall make no further comment on that other than to say that no other ancient historical document of purely human authorship could be expected to yield such a level of corroboration as that! And I will add further that modern biblical commentators must make of it what they will.

But the test didn’t stop there. I had determined at the very beginning that the test was to be one of unreasonable severity, so even the astonishing level of vindication so far achieved did not fully satisfy the requirements of the test. The reason for this was simple. The Table of Nations was written in the Middle East. But all the records consulted by me in investigating that Table were also written in the Middle East. I therefore decided that the test should continue beyond those geographical bounds, and I carried the search into the records of the early peoples of Europe. I wanted to see firstly whether the same patriarchs mentioned in Genesis were evident in the most ancient genealogies and chronicles of the peoples of Europe, and I wanted also to assess the level at which these early peoples were aware of other events mentioned in Genesis. The important part of this test was that the documents and records consulted by me had to date from before the time that any given European nation was converted to Christianity. That was because it is too often alleged by certain scholars that the early Christian church, particularly the monastic community, was given to forgery and invention. So only documents that pre-dated the coming of Christianity and its forging monks to a particular nation whose records I was consulting would be considered. This part of the test was crucial and was to yield as great a level of vindication for the tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis as the first part of the test…

Where to begin?

History has never been so popular. The man in the street has never been so well informed about his past as he is today. And yet it is a sad and unhappy fact that for all that has been said, written and broadcast about the early and more recent history of mankind, there remains a very large body of historical evidence that is mostly poised over in silence by today’s scholars. And because it is passed over by today’s scholars, it never reaches today’s general public.

I say that this is sad because it is not as if this vast fund of knowledge is hard to get at. On the contrary, every fact that you are about to read is available to anyone who takes the trouble to look. And each fact can be obtained cheaply enough. It does not lie in obscure libraries about which no one has heard or to which none can gain access. Nor is it written in languages or scripts that cannot be deciphered. Indeed, scholars have been aware of the existence of this vast body of information for many years. So why is it passed over in such silence?

Why is it, for example, that no modern book on the early history of Britain goes back beyond the year 55 BC, the year when Julius Caesar made his first attempt to invade these islands? We may read in such books of this culture or that people, this stone age or that method of farming. But we will read of no particular individual or of any particular event before the year 55 BC. This has the unfortunate effect of causing us to believe that this is because there exists no written history for those pre-Roman times, and that when they landed in Britain the Roman encountered only a bunch of illiterate savages who had no recorded history of their own. But our conclusion would be wrong, for we will see as our study progresses that the Britons whom the Romans encountered were, on the admission of the Romans themselves, a people who could teach the Romans a thing or two about the finer arts of warfare, and who left a clear and written record of themselves dating back to the very earliest years of their existence as a nation.

These records still survive, and we shall be considering them in some detail. We shall also be examining many other ancient records that various peoples have left behind them and we shall note with interest the story that is told by each one of these documents. Far more can be known about the early recorded history of mankind than is generally allowed, and what is revealed by this history is a story that is very different indeed from the one that we are used to hearing. But where to begin?

When applied to the Table of Nations, this healthy historical research yields some surprising facts, surprising that is, in the light of what most commentaries go to such great lengths to assure us of, namely that Genesis is not be trusted as accurate history.

We must being our investigations with one of true oldest historical documents in the world. This document comprises the tenth and eleventh chapters of the book of Genesis and is known to scholars as The Table of Nations. However, when I use the word ‘document’, it must be understood that this in no way subscribes to the erroneous view propagated by Julius Wellhausen and his colleagues int he 19th century regarding the much-vaunted but still fashionable ‘documentary hypothesis’ of biblical criticism. That hypothesis was designed to be destructive of any impression that the Genesis record in particular was a reliable source of historical information, whereas the objective of our present study lies in entirely the opposite direction. But it does recognise the fact that the tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis consist of a self-contained unit of information that is complete even if read in isolation from the rest of the Genesis account. In that sense, at least, it forms a document that we may study in isolation. But how accurate is that document? Most scholars today would renounce it as unreliable, and some would dismiss it from any further discussion by attaching to it labels of ‘myth’ and ‘pious fiction’, favourite terms among modern scholars, thus assuring their readers that its study, and especially faith in its accuracy, is a waste of time. These terms and labels will become more familiar to us as we come across a great many extra-biblical records that substantiate rather than undermine the Genesis account, but their over-use by certain scholars has left the definite impression that the modernist protests too much, and when applied as often as they are to so many historical records, they become tired and meaningless phrases that convey no information at all. There is doubtless method in this academic madness, given the question that if Genesis cannot be relied upon when it comes to stating accurately simple historical facts, then how can it be relied upon when stating higher truths? But the over-use of such labels becomes wearisome and ultimately meaningless, and is of no service whatever to healthy historical research.

When applied to the Table of Nations, this healthy historical research yields some surprising facts, surprising that is, in the light of what most commentaries go to such great lengths to assure us of, namely that Genesis is not be trusted as accurate history. This became very clear when I first began my researches into the Table of Nations, and the nature of those researches is as follows.

When we consider the truly vast body of evidence from the Middle East that is conveniently ignored in modern commentaries on the book of Genesis, such wholesale omission will appear as hardly surprising. Yet perhaps the reader is unaware of the sheer scale of this omission…

Having constructed the Table of Nations into a simple genealogy, I wanted to see how many of its names were attested in the records of other nations in the Middle East, which indued for my purposes all the nations of Mesopotamia, Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and even Greece. It was an obvious procedure, but one that had not, as far as I was aware, been conducted before and the results published. I had already found certain individual names that were mentioned in scattered works of varying merit, often Victorian, but the whole had never been gathered together into one cohesive study. And so my research began. Over the years, little by little, pieces of corroborative evidence came together and a picture bang to build up that revealed the tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis to be an astonishingly accurate record of events. The Table of Nations had listed all the families and tribes of mankind in their correct groupings, whether those groupings were ethnological, linguistic or geographical. All the names, without exception, were accurate, and in more than twenty-five years of searching and analysing, I uncovered not one mistake or false statement of fact in the Table of Nations.

It has to be said here that such a result could simply not be expected or obtained from any comparable historical document, especially one as ancient as this. The Table of Nations embraces a sweeping panorama of history that is not only truly vast in its content but unique. Its like simply does not exist…

…throughout the Table of Nations, whether we talk about the descendants of Shem, Ham or Japheth, every one of their names is found in the records of the early surrounding nations of the Middle East, even the many obscure names of certain remote Arab tribes that are otherwise not evident in any modern history book of the times, and enough is available for a detailed history to be written about them. It is a phenomenon of immense implications. These records were mostly written (and then lost until their rediscovery in modern times) during the Old Testament period, during which time many of the peoples mentioned in them had vanished altogether from the historical scene or had been assimilated into other more powerful nations and cultures. Even those who retained their national or tribal identities soon lost all trace and memory of their own beginnings and went on to invent fantastic accounts of how they came to be. Indeed, the very early emergence of such mythological invention and the exceedingly rapid growth of paganism is a very telling point indeed against the modernist motion that Genesis is a late composition, for many of the names recorded with such astonishing accuracy in the Table of Nations, had disappeared from the historical scene many centuries before the time in which modernism would say that the Table of Nations was written. The Table of Nations, it thus seems, is a very ancient document indeed.

I cannot think of any other literate nation on earth that has managed to obliterate from its own history books two thousand years or more of recorded and documented history. Not even the censors of Stalinist Russia or Maoist China in their vigorous hey-day were this effective…

In time, of course, the true histories of several of these early nations became obscured beyond all recognition. Josephus was given good cause to complain that this had happened to the Greeks of his own day, and he lamented the fact that by obscuring their own history, they had obscured the histories of other nations also. Yet by no means all of the early nations were to follow this path. We shall see that many kept an accurate record down the centuries of their beginnings and wrote down the names of their founding patriarchs, bringing the records up to date with the advent of each new generation, and it is these records that provide us with such a surprising link between the ancient post-Flood era depicted in Genesis and the history of more modern times. These lists, annals and chronicles have been preserved and transmitted from generation to generation not by the nations of the Middle East this time, but by certain European peoples from times that long pre-dated the coming of Christianity, and it is most important that we remember the pre-Christian aspect of much of the following evidence, for it is too easily and too often alleged by modernist scholars that these records are the inventions of early Christian monks and are therefore worthless. Such claims of fraud will be examined in detail, particularly with regard to the records that the early Britons have left us and which are omitted in their entirety from modern history books, the media and the classroom.

When we consider the truly vast body of evidence from the Middle East that is conveniently ignored in modern commentaries on the book of Genesis, such wholesale omission will appear as hardly surprising. Yet perhaps the reader is unaware of the sheer scale of this omission, for the records of the early Britons, and that’s not counting the Irish Celtic, Saxon and continental records which we shall also be examining, cover not just a particular phase of history, but span more than two thousand years of it. I cannot think of any other literate nation on earth that has managed to obliterate from its own history books two thousand years or more of recorded and documented history. Not even the censors of Stalinist Russia or Maoist China in their vigorous hey-day were this effective, or even needed to be this effective, in doctoring their own official accounts. So how did this extraordinary circumstance come about, and who is responsible for it?

By way of a refreshing change, we cannot lay the blame entirely at the door of those evolutionary Victorian and later educationalists and philosophers who laid the foundations of our modern curricula. They are surely to blame for much else that is amiss, but this time the story begins long before their age and influence…

If you are interested in being young, thinking young, and having progressive, up-to-date opinions on all subjects, and if you are particularly interested in establishing “social justice,” beware.

From the blog of Richard Bledsoe:

How odd the world is. Pharisees gave the pretence of caring about the justice and righteousness given witness to in the Torah. But instead, God’s righteousness was subverted by giving priority to the “traditions of the elders,” and the Word of God was buried under a mass of habits, traditions, and precepts inherited from past fathers. In doing so, they actually “became like the nations around them,” because such traditions were the whole fabric of all of the ancient world outside of Israel. The Word of God is startling, surprising, and its reception, application, and result, could never be foreseen or predicted.

Revelation created something unheard of and impossible outside of Revelation. It created a future. There could be no future for ancient pagans, because all of life was a repetition of the traditions of the elders. Such repetition simply meant nothing new could ever happen. But, the Prophets, in particular, gave new promises of new life, of redemption, of renewal of all things in ways never dreamt of, never thought of before. God promised over and over, to “do a new thing.”

Jesus was the future. He was the startling New Man who would renew all things. He therefore opposed the Pharisees adherence to “the traditions of the elders” which buried the Torah under a mass of dead human precepts. He did so over and over, and in every instance of opposing “the traditions of the elders,” he does so by quoting the Hebrew revelation, what we now term The Old Testament.

As the Gospel has taken hold through history, we see a gradual overcoming of the habits of the ancient world. The Reformation was a re-affirmation of the text of Scripture (Old and New Testament) over against a whole lot of new “traditions of the elders” that had come to cling to the church over the centuries. The very heart of Martin Chemnitz’s Examination Of The Council Of Trent (published a generation after Luther) was the greatest of all defenses of Reformation Doctrine by showing that the very structure of Roman Catholic and Trentine theology, was that its structure was a virtual repetition of Rabbinical Theology. The Rabbis had a secret oral tradition that supposedly came down from Sinai, and Trent claimed an oral tradition that came down from the time of the Apostles. In both cases, the secret oral tradition (known only to the highest clergy in both cases) took practical precedent over the written text. But, Jesus who was the future, always forced the priority of the written text over all secret oral traditions. The Reformation forced the same issue. And, it must be said that Rome has been extensively forced back to the written text as it has tried to do war with the children of the French Revolution. The traditions of the elders were substantially what gave fuel to the Revolution in the first place.

Phariseeism has been disappearing. So is the world now, in an untrammelled way, becoming righteous?

I am skeptical. There may be forward movement, but in hardly an untrammelled way. There is a great new set-back. The devil is clever. If you can’t beat them, join them…

If the traditions of the elders have been the way of blocking the new future that will be created by the New Man in concert with His Word, then let us (says the Evil One) do the opposite.

What we care about now, what we will make the new public opinion (say the Principalities and the Powers) is youth and the future. All things (including the Word of God) can now be subordinated to Youth and a Utopian Future. But this utopian future created by the Planners of the Omnipotent State, is a world of perfect stagnation. It is remarkably like the static cyclical world of the traditions of the elders.

It is the novelists who have seen this. The “dystopias,” the brilliant satirizations of the coming leftist utopias, those great novels of Orwell (1984), Huxley (Brave New World) and most insightfully, CS Lewis (That Hideous Strength).

The new Phariseeism is established by lifting up youth and the future. And, the engine that propels it is the very concept of Righteousness and Justice that is derived from the Bible, from Christianity. In this way, a new hypocrisy is ensconsed. The text of the Word of God is effectively subordinated to The Up To Date Opinion, The New York Times editorial page.

If you are interested in being young, thinking young, and having progressive, up-to-date opinions on all subjects, and if you are particularly interested in establishing “social justice,” beware. You might be in the neighborhood of the new Pharisees. You might be party to creating a stagnant, unchanging world of perfect oppression. And it is all in the name of superior righteousness.

In Against Christianity (pp. 56-58), Peter Leithart writes:

One of the contributions of twentieth-century Catholic nouvelle theologie, and of Henri de Lubac and Hean Danielou in particular, was a rehabilitation of patristic and medieval typological exegesis of the Bible. Typological interpretation assumes that events and institutions of the Old Testament present, to use Augustine’s terminology, “latent” pictures of Christ. Typological interpretation, in short, sees the whole Bible as gospel, with the gospel narrowly conceived (the story of Jesus) as the culmination of a larger story.

Of equal importance is the insight that the Christ to whom the Old Testament testifies is the totus Christus, Head and body, Jesus and His Church. In this, the fathers and medieval theologians were fully in line with Paul, who wrote that the history of Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness were “things written for our instruction” (1 Cor. 10:11). The gospel is the story of the Church as well as the story of Jesus. Following the apostolic example, the fathers saw the brides and harlots of Old Testament history as the Church under various guises, and thus they could view Old Testament history as the story of Yahweh’s stormy betrothal with His headstrong bride, fulfilled now in the Father’s arranged marriage to His Son in the Spirit-prepared Church. Augustine made it a basic principle that the Psalms are now the words of the Savior, now the words of His people crying for salvation, now, mystically, both together. Psalms is the songbook of the whole Christ: in it Jesus speaks “of us, by us, in us, while we speak in Him.”

At its best, typological interpretation is quite different from allegory. While Greek allegorists interpreted myths as embodiments of timeless and abstract principles (thus turning the Bible into theology [1]), the fathers plundered the Old Testament to divine the patterns of history. When it has paid attention to the Old Testament at all, modern theology has approached it in a very different manner. Rejecting typology as fanciful and unscientific, many theologians have treated the Old Testament as a purely historical document with little or no religious significance for the Church. Others, no less hostile to typology, see the transition from Old to New as a change from a historical, material, bodily, and social religion to a timeless, spiritual, and individual one (i.e. Christianity).

Opposition to typology not only fuels Christianity but, because of that, assists in the establishment of secular modernity. If the hermeneutical trajectory is from the Old Testament events to the motions of the individual soul, then, as de Lubac argued, Christ’s coming has delivered the whole of public life over to the rough play of secular and impersonal forces. So Schleiermacher, the preacher of what Barth called “conciousness theology,” says that the Old Testament is to be utterly repudiated as part of the Christian Bible and, consistently, also castigates those who would wish to drag religion from the “depths of the heart into the civil world,” where, presumably, it can only be contaminated. A privatizing and spiritualizing hermeneutics thus helps outfit a public square that, if not entirely naked, wears a skimpy thing that scarcely covers what looks like an iron cage.

By emphasizing that the Church as a real historical institution and communion was prophesied and typified under the old order, typology makes clear that it is of the essence of the Church to deny that the public square is dressed in a flag and nothing but a flag.

If the Church is to recover the gospel, she is to recover typological interpretation and learn to repeat, without irony or embarrassment and as a political credo, the words of Paul: “Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.”

*   *   *   *   *

Typology is often seen as a marginal enterprise—cute, but not the stuff of serious biblical scholarship nor important to the Church’s mission. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Typology is one of the chief weapons in the Church’s war against Christianity.

Which is to say, typology is one of the chief weapons in the Church’s war against secular modernity.

If Dr Leithart’s title seems confusing, there’s a helpful review here:

“Christianity, Leithart argues, is a religion formed around a haphazard arrangement of modern values and practices.  It understands Christian community to be a religious layer on social life; it emasculates biblical religion through intellectualization and privatization.  Instead of confronting the language of existing culture with a robust language of its own, it offers theology, a sterile environment in which one speaks of God using clean terms, removing Him and His work from time in order to dissect timeless truths.  Theology merely adds religious words and phrases to the stock of existing language.”

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See also: Exhibit A – Typology, Typology, Symbol and the Christ, A Terrible Marvel and Typology’s War Against Modernity.

An interesting excerpt from James Jordan’s review of Wayne House and Thomas Ice’s, Dominion Theology: Blessing or Curse?: An Analysis of Christian Reconstructionism

The quietist is committed to inaction. The pietist, by way of contrast, is frequently active in social and charitable affairs, but what makes his position inadequate is that pietism is in general uninterested in social theory. (In general, pietist movements are not much interested in theology either.) There is no self-conscious reflection on the concerns of political philosophy in the broad sense. It is simply a matter of “doing good” here and there, without reflection. This is not bad, but it does not go far enough.

Pietism works fine in a society that is generally Christian, where the rules are agreed upon. With a background of Christian consensus, pietist movements were able to eliminate the slave trade in England, for instance. Pietism is largely impotent, however, in the face of radical secularism and demonism. Lacking both theology and social theory, it simply does not go deep enough to be able to face such problems.

Modern pietists seem to assume that modern pluralism provides the social fabric within which they can “do good” without having to reflect intensively on social theory. In reality, modern pluralism is a “naked public square.” It is not a social fabric, but the lack of one. It is the self-conscious assertion that no social fabric is necessary. Formerly, Christian society provided the social fabric, within which other religions were tolerated or given sanctuary, provided they did not attempt to overthrow the Christian social fabric. Pluralism is the opposite of this. It rejects the ideas of tolerance and sanctuary (which are found in the Mosaic law) in favor of the idea of social anarchy. For that reason, pluralism in practice is extremely intolerant, as we see more clearly every day.

Jesus was quite clear on the effects of such a position. He stated that when a demon is driven from a man, it wanders in dry places but eventually returns to its former house to see if the Holy Spirit has or has not been given residence. Finding it empty, the demon gets seven other demons, worse than himself, and these eight return to inhabit the man. In context, this statement was not made concerning an individual but a society: Israel (Matthew 12:43-45; cf. vv. 38ff.). It is a rule for society and it shows the long-term effects of a commitment to social neutrality or pluralism. A perfect illustration can be seen in the history of Germany. The Reformation cast the demon out, but Germany did not sustain her reception of the Spirit, and the result was the demonic octave of National Socialism. 

…contrary to dispensationalism and pluralism, the Christian social tradition has always been theocratic. Not theonomic, but theocratic — that is, committed to the belief that society cannot be neutral and should be in some sense Christian.

Available as part of the complete James Jordan collection from wordmp3.com

It is a weapon to crush the head, to bring death and resurrection in us, and in the world. It carves up nations like a sacrifice and makes them a pleasing aroma to God. It rebuilds cultures from the inside out, and is the fount of all western society, art, literature (and literacy), music, government and charity.

And western atheism is in reality a black leech hanging off this grandeur, a little horn with a big mouth, totally dependent on the longsuffering and mercy of Christ the ascended King. 

Secular humanism is but a perversion of Christianity. As a ‘Christianity without Christ’, and thus bankrupt, it can only ever survive on borrowed capital. It is a temporary wart.