Publisher's Corner

Foreword to Apostle of Liberty: The World-Changing Leadership of George Washington

2010-02-08T17:40:00.000-08:00

by David J. Vaughn

During a recent trip to Mount Vernon, my wife and I visited the nearby gift shop. As I browsed through the many books on Washington and colonial life, I was struck by the lack of attention given to Washington's religious faith. Only a few books seemed to suggest that religion was an important part of Washington’s life. Most suggested that he was either a deist or a lukewarm Anglican whose religion was primarily for public consumption.

For instance, historian Gordon Wood stated: “It is true that many of the distinguished political leaders of the Revolution were not very emotionally religious. At best, they only passively believed in organized Christianity and at worst they scorned or ridiculed it. Most were deists or lukewarm churchgoers and scornful of religious emotion and enthusiasm. Washington, for example, was a frequent churchgoer, but he scarcely referred to God as anything but ‘the Great Disposer of events’ and in all his voluminous papers he never mentioned Jesus Christ. Such is the accepted wisdom' of the academy.

What is shocking about this statement however is that everything asserted here is either false or only partly true. First Washington and the other Founders were predominantly religious men. Of the fifty-two delegates to the Constitutional Convention, twenty-eight were Episcopalians, eight were Presbyterians, and there were two each of Congregationalists, Lutherans, Dutch Reformed, Methodists, and Roman Catholics. Oh yes, there were three deists—at best. Washington, of course, was an Episcopalian his entire Life, regularly attended church, served as a vestryman (church trustee) and regularly donated generous sums a support a number of churches. While in the military, he often conducted worship services when a chaplain was not available. This is hardly a “passive” belief in organized Christianity.

Not only did Washington never scorn or ridicule Christianity, but while serving in the military he would not permit any under his command to show the least disrespect for God or Christianity. As he said in a September 14, 1775 letter to Col. Benedict Arnold: “I also give it in Charge to you to avoid all Disrespect to or Contempt of The Religion of the Country [Canada] and its Ceremonies. Prudence, Policy and a true Christian Spirit, will lead us to look with compassion upon their Errors [in doctrine] without insulting them. While we are contending for our own Liberty we should be very cautious of violating the Rights of Conscience in others, ever considering that God alone is the Judge of the Hearts of Men and to him only in this Case, they are answerable.”

While Washington observed his religious duties, he encouraged his troops do likewise. Consider his general order for May 15 1776: “The general commands all officers, and soldiers, to pay strict obedience to the Orders of the Continental Congress and by their unfeigned, and pious observance of their religious duties, incline the Lord, and Giver of Victory, to prosper our arms.

Notice Washington's use of “Lord” and “Giver of Victory.” Throughout his writings and speeches, Washington used a variety of names for God (not simply Wood’s claim of “Great Disposer of Events”) including “Almighty,” “Almighty God,” “Father of All Mercies,” “Creator,” “Gracious God,” “Jehovah,” “Lord” (Sic.) and “Wonder-working Deity.” And, oh, yes, he called God “Jesus Christ.” In a May 22, 1779, speech to the Delaware chiefs Washington said: “You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life and above all the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are.”

As for Washington's lack of religious emotion (that is the claim that he was “lukewarm”), one does not have to be a fanatic to be sincere. In fact, not only was his denomination High Church, but Washington was also temperamentally reserved. In addition, he was a polished gentleman who believed excessive displays of emotion (about anything not just religion) were an inappropriate breach of decorum. Washington actually tried to live by the rules of civility that he penned as a young man. Religious emotion (a better word is conviction) need not be extreme to be deep and sincere. As Chief Justice John Marshall who knew Washington, said: “Without making ostentatious professions of religion, he was a sincere believer in the Christian faith and a truly devout man.”

That a secular historian, who has no personal experience of religious faith should presume to judge the depth of a man’s religious devotion is a very telling example of humanistic hubris. Yet it only goes to show that in history, as in love, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In other words, we often see that which is most agreeable to our own inclinations. So I suppose given the secular bent of the modern (or should I say postmodern) intellectual class we should not be surprised that Washington’s religious faith is often downplayed or ignored.

Thankfully, however we have Stephen McDowell’s work in hand to set Washington’s religious faith in the context of his multifaceted life. You will discover that from his earlier days as a surveyor, to his military career, to his attainment of the highest office in the land Washington was guided by a profoundly religious view of life. He not only attended church, but Washington faithfully performed private devotions where he meditated on the Scriptures and prayed while on his knees (not very lukewarm to me). He sought God’s guidance and protection, and from all the accounts of his military battles, he received it. He sought God’s glory, and from his example as a gentleman, a statesman, and a Christian, he rendered it.

Contrary to the false picture of Washington that now prevails in the academy, through reading McDowell, you will come to know and honor the Washington that our forefathers knew and loved. And knowing him, you will have before you one of the finest examples of leadership the world has ever known—an example worthy of both your admiration and emulation. As Abigail, Adams said of him: “No man ever lived more deservedly beloved and respected...If we look through the whole tenor of his Life, History will not produce to us a Parallel.”

Copyright © 2007. Used by permission.

Proclamation for GEORGIA MARRIAGE WEEK

2010-02-01T22:03:00.000-08:00

February 7-February 14, 2010

WHEREAS:	God ordained the sanctity of marriage as a holy and sacred union between two people who promise to love, honor and respect each other and to give themselves faithfully to each other for as long as they both shall live; and
WHEREAS:	Marriage is one of the most vital institutions in our society and can be the bedrock for stable and loving families, so essential to American life. Based on mutual commitment, marriage partners strive daily to strengthen and maintain their unity; and
WHEREAS:	The relationship between a husband and a wife is like no other, creating a united entity out of what was once two separate lives, with dedication to each other fostering a bond strong enough to survive even the most critical moments; and
WHEREAS:	Marriage promotes the core values of work, responsibility, commitment, sobriety and relationships based upon mutual respect that Americans hold dear. The stability such a bond provides benefits spouses, as well as children, by leading them to live longer, healthier, and more satisfying lives; now
THEREFORE:	I, SONNY PERDUE, Governor of the state of Georgia, do hereby proclaim February 7-14, 2010 as MARRIAGE WEEK with February 14, 2010, as WORLD MARRIAGE DAY in Georgia. In witness thereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the Executive Department to be affixed this 20th of January in the year of our Lord two thousand ten.

New Initiative for National Marriage Week USA

2010-02-01T16:25:00.000-08:00

Announcing a New Initiative for National Marriage Week USA—February 7 to 14, 2010 To encourage marriage, reduce divorce rates, curtail poverty, and benefit children.

NEW YORK, NY. National Marriage Week USA (www.nationalmarriageweekUSA.org) announces a new initiative for the week leading up to Valentine’s Day 2010, and is putting forth a call to mobilize hundreds of diverse organizations to plan and prepare for awareness and activities for February 7 to 14, 2010. The goal is to elevate national attention on the need to strengthen marriage and ways to do it, and initiate new efforts to reduce the divorce rate and build a stronger marriage culture which in turn helps curtail poverty and benefits children.

National Marriage Week has long been an organized celebration in the UK, Germany, Ireland, Australia, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere internationally (www.marriage-weekinternational.com) with large rallies, resolutions and celebrations in Parliaments, concerted efforts for marriage education, and more. Marriage Week was brought to the U.S. by Smart Marriages in 2002. For 2010 a new initiative is being launched by National Marriage Week USA (NMWUSA) in an effort to focus solely on February 7 to 14 with an interactive website and coordination of national efforts at www.NationalMarriageWeekUSA.org
Chuck Stetson, chairman of National Marriage Week USA says “The alarming drop in marriage rates in America combined with high divorce rates are costly to the nation—financially costly to taxpayers and individuals, and emotionally costly to children. The nation needs to pay attention.”

“Marriage works,” says NMWUSA executive director Sheila Weber. “Research shows that marriage makes people happier, live longer, and build more economic security. Children with married parents perform better in school. There are proven ways to repair and restore marriages—but most folks don’t know where to go to get the help they need.”

Alarming new facts are in. A new Marriage Index, released jointly by the National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting (NCAAMP) and the Institute for American Values in October 2009, reveals a huge decline in national marriage indicators. One indicator shows 78 percent of adults were married in 1970, while only 57 percent of adults were married in 2008. Another indicator shows 40 percent of all children in America are now born out of wedlock in 2008; and 72 percent of African American children are now born without married parents.

“I am excited about the efforts of National Marriage Week USA to pull together business, government, and religious organizations to draw attention to solutions to the current problems created by divorce,” said marriage expert Gary Chapman, best-selling author of “Five Love Languages.” “If we can help couples learn how to create loving, supportive marriages, it will not only bring marital satisfaction, but will enrich the lives of children, and create a more productive society. Every couple can contribute to the solution. It begins by reading books, attending classes, and having productive communication with your own spouse. National Marriage Week USA offers multiple resources to help you,” said Chapman.

The “Let’s Strengthen Marriage” Campaign in early 2010 held a global webinar for pastors and leaders (www.marriagewebinar.org) which is archived for continued viewing. Participants are growing daily. Posting of Events all around the country is now growing at http://www.nationalmarriageweekusa.org/events/ and you can “Read What Others Are Doing” at http://www.nationalmarriageweekusa.org/testimony/.
Ways to get involved with National Marriage Week USA include:

Churches are encouraged to launch new marriage classes, sermon series, or host a major weekend marriage conference,
Clergy can form Community Marriage Policies with all the clergy in their town (cities with CMPs have lowered divorce rates),
Mayoral or Statewide Proclamations are available for National Marriage Week USA,
Businesses can create and distribute pocket-sized pamphlets on topics such as “What is a Healthy Marriage?”
Screenings of special marriage education DVDs or marriage related movies,
Use of the National Marriage Week USA logo for local ads and activities,
Schools can sponsor assemblies on healthy relationship skills.
Most importantly, folks are encouraged to work on their own marriage—with lots of ideas and resources for where to go for help at www.nationalmarriageweekUSA.org.

Used by Permission

Proposed Early Draft of Affirmations & Denials for: God’s Law for All Societies; Document #23

2010-01-25T16:19:00.000-08:00

by the Theological Committee of the International Church Council Project

WE AFFIRM that the Moral Law of God is a reflection of God’s holy, righteous and good nature and that these laws were written upon the hearts of mankind from the Garden and therefore apply to all of Adam’s descendants. These laws were later codified in the Ten Commandments and the case laws which are applications and extensions of the Ten Commandments.

WE DENY that the Moral Law was not in effect prior to the giving of the Ten Commandments through Moses. We further deny that the Ten Commandments apply to only a portion of the human race.
WE AFFIRM that God gave His Laws for all mankind in the Bible by means of inerrant, verbal inspiration and that those written Laws are absolute and universal and therefore are to be obeyed by all mankind. They apply to Christians, to unbelievers and to all social orders in all places at all times. Man is required always and everywhere to reverence God and obey His Law Word.

WE DENY that God intends His Laws in the Bible to apply only to Jews or Christians or to those who chose to obey those biblical laws. We further deny that there is any “neutral ground” in this universe where mankind may stand without being always and absolutely accountable to his Creator and under obligation to humble himself before God in the obedience of faith and worship.
WE AFFIRM that God’s Law applies to Christians, not as a basis for justification, but as the standard within which the justified-by-faith Christian lives when he lives in love, for “love is the fulfillment of the law” (Rom. 13:10). We further affirm that the Law of God applies to the unbeliever as the continuing and eternal standard for all morality and justice because God’s Law reflects God’s own, unchanging moral character, and all of Adam’s descendents have that Law of God written upon their hearts (Rom. 2:14).

WE DENY that God’s Law is not God’s required standard for the societies of all cultures of every nation because that Law is the moral requirement for every individual everywhere at all times and there cannot be a different moral requirement for the social order in which all those individuals live.
WE AFFIRM that the points of morality, justice and social order, which any society institutes into its civil codes of law, flow directly out of the religion and worldview of the leaders who are in power, and out of their designated influencers of that society.

WE DENY that civil laws do or can flow out of neutral, objective, non-religious sources or are uninfluenced by the worldview of the leaders of said society.
WE AFFIRM that the basic foundations of God’s Law in the Bible are set forth in His Ten Commandments (Exodus 20), and those Ten Commandments are explained, expanded and applied in what is called the biblical “case laws” and in passages such as Chapters 21, 22 and 23 in Exodus.¹ We further affirm that Western Civilization with its attending social, financial, scientific, and juridical benefits owes its formation and development to the Christian’s Bible and to Christian society’s commitment over the centuries to basing their societies laws upon the Ten Commandments which was the case in the development of the English “Common Law.”

WE DENY that an individual or society can remain strong, just, prosperous, creative or rational when that society ignores or hates the God of the Bible or disobeys His biblical commandments. History testifies profusely to the truth of this statement.
WE AFFIRM that there is a distinctive and identifiable Christian worldview. This Christian worldview includes a distinctive and identifiable Christian view of law, and that at the heart of these Christian views stands the Almighty Sovereign God of the Universe, who reveals Himself most clearly and completely in the Bible.

WE DENY that there is no distinctive, identifiable Christian worldview or view of law, and that any views are authentically Christian if they center on anything other than the Almighty Sovereign God of the Universe revealed in the Bible.²
WE AFFIRM that a society inevitably must choose between conflicting legal foundations and views of law and should choose Christian views and a Christian foundation because the Christian system is vastly superior to all alternatives: it is empirically defensible, internally logical, [and] comprehensive in scope.

WE DENY that a society may avoid choosing between conflicting legal foundations and views of law, and that any non-Christian system is superior or equal to the Christian system.³
WE AFFIRM that it is the vital and unavoidable responsibility of the true Christian community in every society to seek, in every Biblically consistent way, to hold its society’s views of law true to Biblical principles, and that when societies choose non-Christian views of law they can expect little long-term blessing from God and many severely adverse consequences.

WE DENY that the Christian community properly fulfills its calling to make disciples of every nation and to be salt and light to the world when it fails to do all in its power to hold society’s views of law true to Biblical principles.⁴
WE AFFIRM that the rejection or reduction of God’s Laws in the Bible is probably the most debilitating defect in the Body of Christ today and is the primary issue that has tragically reduced a majority of the Church to her present condition of being materialistic, self-serving, theologically confused, irrelevant, culturally impotent and antinomian.

WE DENY that any individual Christian, mission organization or church is pleasing to God or is biblically fulfilling Christ’s Great Commission if they are not insisting in their gospel presentation that God requires Christians to live in obedience to the commands in the Bible in both the Old and New Testaments (including but not limited to the Ten Commandments), and insisting that one’s true love for Christ, His Church and the advancement of His Kingdom on earth is measured by that Christian’s daily walk of obedience to the Bible more than mere “Christian talk” or the attainment of great theological learning.
WE AFFIRM that antinomianism (the disregard or dismissal of God’s Law as being applicable to people today) is a modern day curse and sickness within many professed, Bible-believing churches. Antinomianism must be corrected before such churches can accomplish their God-appointed destinies in fulfilling the Great Commission, and thus bringing forth God’s Kingdom on earth in all areas of society to whatever degree this may be accomplish before Christ’s return.

WE DENY that the following antinomian statements are biblical or are beneficial to the Church or to any society but rather that these false beliefs are demonic, destructive and damnable:
1. Old Testament laws and principles do not carry over into the New Testament period.
2. Some of the Old Testament moral laws and principles stand in opposition to the moral laws and principles of the New Testament or participate in some kind of “inferior” type of spirituality and morality.
3. The 'Law of Christ' is substantially different than the Old Testament moral law.
4. It is not God’s intention that either the Old Testament’s or the New Testament’s moral laws and principles should be institutionalized into civil law for any and all societies on earth today.
5. My personal understanding and sense of right and wrong (enlightened by my understanding of how the Holy Spirit is guiding my life) is a superior guide regarding morality and law (what is right and wrong) than any written text in the Bible.
WE AFFIRM that all commands in the Old Testament are to be “Maintained unless Modified” by the New Testament (such as the sacrificial and dietary laws which have been so changed).
WE DENY that laws in the Old Testament are “Rescinded unless Repeated” in the New Testament.
WE AFFIRM that the sovereign God providentially directs the course of human history, including civil law, which is a vital part of that history and requires that civil law conform to His standards; that with the consummation of history, including legal history, will come the final, eternal triumph of God’s Law, when eternal, universal, and perfect justice will prevail; and that this assurance gives Christians today ultimate hope even in the midst of the rampant violations of God’s Law in today’s world and imparts real meaning and eternal significance to man’s response to God’s Law in this present life.

WE DENY that history, including legal history, is a merely purposeless sequence of events; that the pattern and purposes of history deviate from what the Sovereign God has ordained; that there will be no final, eternal triumph of God’s Law; and that eternal, universal, and perfect justice will never prevail.⁵

Copyright © 2010. Used with permission of the International Church Council Project.
1. An example of the Ten Commandments being further defined is Deut. 19:4-13 wherein the case law there defines “You shall not murder” as being neither an accidental killing nor capital punishment.
2. Christian Worldview of Law, Coalition on Revival, 1989. Article 2 Affirmation & Denial word for word.
3. Christian Worldview of Law, Coalition on Revival, 1989. Article 3 Affirmation & Denial word for word.
4. Christian Worldview of Law, Coalition on Revival, 1989. Article 5 Affirmation & Denial word for word.
5. Christian Worldview of Law, Coalition on Revival, 1989. Article 6 Affirmation & Denial word for word.

GOD’S LAW FOR ALL SOCIETIES: “This is love, that we walk according to His commandments.”*

2010-01-25T15:38:00.000-08:00

by Eugene Clingman

“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; But when a wicked man rules, the people groan” (Proverbs 29:2*). And, “When the righteous rejoice, there is great glory; But when the wicked arise, men hide themselves” (Proverbs 28:12). It is clear from these two verses that God speaks to societal issues. Two things are evident in our society today – The righteous are not in authority, and wicked men have arisen. What is the answer? The answer is for the Church to return to God’s Law and to lead the nation to return to God’s Law. I am not talking about becoming justified or made righteous through the Law; it cannot be done; righteousness is obtained through faith in Christ and His atoning work. What I am talking about is the fact that the Law, written upon the heart of New Covenant people (Christians according to Jeremiah 31:31) is the standard of righteousness God requires for individual and nation. The Christian standard of the Law is love, and love is the fulfillment of the Law (Romans 13:10), but love is never less than the requirements of the Law. In other words we cannot say, “I am walking in love, therefore the Law does not apply to me.” But we may say, “I am walking in love which causes me to fulfill the Law and more besides. And if I fail to fulfill the righteous requirements of the Law, it is evidence that I am not walking in love – I have failed to attain in my actions, speech or thoughts that standard God has written upon my New Covenant heart. Clearly, the standard of the Law is never discarded or abrogated, and even when one is walking in love it is fulfilled, never set aside.

The Law cannot be discarded because it is a reflection of the righteous character of God. And God’s righteous character does not fluctuate and is never altered. Because His Law is a reflection of His righteous character, His Law is the standard required of all human beings. The Church has often failed to comprehend these things. The Law is often set aside in Evangelical circles and considered of no account for the Christian, and because it is of no account for the Christian, it is also, in their minds, of no account for the general culture. This is wrong thinking!

Because the Law of God was written upon the heart of man from the beginning of creation (Romans 2:14-15), upon Adam and his descendents, it pertains to every human being, and because to every human being individually, to every collection of human beings, and because to every collection of human beings, to every nation. There is one standard and only one.

In the Great Commission Christ told His Church to make disciples of all the nations – “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” Jesus gave a New Commandment – Love one another. We know that “Love is the fulfillment of the Law” (Romans 13:10). As we live life and as we disciple the nations let us remember the primary directive given us – teaching them to obey all things I have commanded you. Let us remember that this includes Love one another which in turn includes obedience to the Law of God, for love is not the setting aside of the Law, but the fulfillment of it. Every individual, every human institution, and every nation must be taught to love, which means also that they must be taught to obey the law of God, for if they do not obey the Law of God, it is irrefutable evidence that they do not yet love and are not yet Christ's disciples.

2 John 1:6 – “This is love, that we walk according to His commandments.”
Eugene Clingman is Executive Director of the International Church Council Project, an outreach ministry of the Coalition on Revival. Eugene is a frequent contributor to the Publisher’s Corner, and contributes to Nordskog Publishing in our marketing department.

* All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2010. Used with permission.

Fort Hood & Separation of Mosque and State

2009-12-28T11:22:00.000-08:00

by William J. Federer

Everyone has heard of "Separation of Church & State," but what about "Separation of Mosque & State"?

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan yelled "Allahu Akhbar," Arabic for "Allah is great," before killing 13 and wounding 31 at Fort Hood, Texas.

He had praised Muslim suicide bombers on the Internet; refused, in the name of Islam, to be photographed with female colleagues; listed his nationality as "Palestinian"; dressed as a fundamentalist Muslim when not in uniform and attended the same Mosque as the 911 terrorists.

Some question if Hasan's killing of U.S. soldiers was motivated by his belief in Islam.

But before we condemn as "hateful" those who dare ask such a question, it should be determined what is meant by the term "Islam."

Is Islam:

a religious system,
a political system, or
a military system?

The answer is all three, as Mohammed was:

a religious leader,
a political leader, and
a military leader.

One may ask, what relevance does Mohammed's life 1400 years ago have to us today?
Well, since Mohammad was the best Muslim, those striving to be better Muslims are trying to imitate him, just as Christians try to imitate Jesus, as in 'WWJD: What Would Jesus Do'.
Mohammed's life is called "the Sunna," which means "the way," or "the example."
By examining Mohammed's life, one gains insight into the motivations of his followers.

Mohammed was a religious leader in Mecca for 12 years, beginning in 610AD, making around 100 converts. When he became confrontational and threatening, the Meccans chased him out in 622AD.
Claiming to be a victim of harassment, Mohammed fled 200 miles north to the predominantly Jewish city of Medina. The Jews rejected Mohammed, so he went into the minority pagan neighborhoods where he made converts, gained a political following, and in a sense, acted as a community organizer.

With his new following, he went back to the Jews as a candidate of change, promising to be objective and fair as he was a newcomer to the city's heated partisan politics.

The Jews made a treaty and Mohammed became a political leader in Medina.
When Mohammed's followers back in Mecca began to threaten the city's political stability, they were chased out and their houses were confiscated. Fleeing as victims to Medina, Mohammed permitted them to rob the caravans headed to Mecca in retaliation for their harassment.

The Meccans then sent 1000 soldiers to protect their caravans, and Mohammed, with just 300, defeated them at the Battle of Badr in 624AD. This amazing victory, being outnumbered 3 to 1, convinced Mohammed he was to be a military leader. He won 66 battles and raids in the next 8 years before he died.

Mohammed even sent his warrior, Abdullah, in 625AD, to lie in order to infiltrate the military base of his enemy, chief Sofyan ibn Khalid. Abdullah convinced Sofyan of his loyalty, so Sofyan let down his guard. When the moment was right, Abdullah committed a terrorist attack, beheading Sofyan.

Since Mohammed was the best Muslim, those wanting to be better Muslims gravitate to following his example, religiously, politically...and militarily.

Most Americans do not care what religion someone has, or in which direction someone prays, or if someone believes in a paradise with 72 virgins.

But what Americans do care about is if their political freedom of speech is taken away; if their wives and daughters are threatened if not veiled; if nations, such as Israel, face extinction; or if terrorists attack their military bases.

It is political/military Islam that concerns Americans, not the religion of Islam.

When a political/military Muslim bows toward Mecca, he is effectively pledging allegiance to something other than the United States.

For the sake of discussion, let us not be concerned with religious Islam, and, for the moment, just examine political/military Islam.

Political/military Islam has two features:

A global conquest aspect, and
Wherever it takes over, non-Muslims are not equal to Muslims.

THE QUESTION IS:

What other political/military systems has America had to face in the last 60 years that had:

A global conquest aspect, and
Wherever they took over, non-adherents were not equal to adherents?

Beginning in the 1930's, Americans had to say: "We love Germans, but we have to identify and resist the political/military system of Nazism."

Why? Because it had a global conquest aspect and wherever it took over, non-Nazis, like Jews, were not equal.

During World War II, Americans had to say - "We love Japanese, but we have to identify and resist the political/military system of Hirohito's Imperialism," and "We love Italians, but we have to identify and resist the political/military system of Mussolini's Fascism."

During the Cold War, Americans had to say: "We love Russians, but we have to identify and resist the political/military system of Stalin and Khrushchev's Soviet Communism."

Americans had to say: "We love North Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Chinese, but we have to identify and resist the Communist political/military systems of Kim Il-sung, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong.

Why? Because Communism has a global conquest aspect and wherever it takes over, non-Communists are not equal.

Today, Americans love Arabs, Indonesians, Turks and Egyptians, but Americans have to identify and resist the political/military system of Islam.

Why?

It has a global conquest aspect, and
Wherever Islam takes over, non-Muslims are not equal to Muslims.

Political/military Islam, though, has been harder to identify and resist, as it can advance under the cloak of religion.

Could it be that some Muslims with a political/military agenda are taking advantage of the freedom extended to Muslims who are simply practicing the religion of Islam?

In order to prevent more tragic episodes as the killings at Fort Hood, maybe a little more attention should be given to the separation of Mosque and State.

© 2009, used with permission.

That "Miracle Message"

2009-12-14T15:05:00.000-08:00

by Annette Adams

Yes, it's time for that "Miracle Message" again:
"God really came down to this earth!"
'Didn't come like a king, rather did everything
To humble Himself in His birth.

God's love con-descended, estrangement was ended,
We all could become reconciled.
Though we were sin-blighted, His death re-united
Us to this great God-in-Christ-Child.

From manger to man covered such a short span,
But His presence we never shall lack.
For His promise: "I won't ever leave you"
Remains till the time He comes back.

His Spirit left with us, will lovingly give us
His peace when those troubles surround us.
His Word will renew us and keep Him close to us,
So "life will abound"—not confound us.

Yes, it's time for that "Miracle Message" again;
Those sweet Christmas bells can still toll;
And we can yet sing to our Savior and King,
For He's still—if you will—in control!

(1 Corinthians 5: 19 "... God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. .. '')
12/25/09

© 2009. Used with permission.

A CHRISTMAS STORY

2009-12-14T13:56:00.001-08:00

by Paul Myrant

I want to tell you a Christmas Story – a short, yet long kind of story; a story from long ago.
Now it’s not the story you’re thinking of, that happened so long ago.
No, this story took place a long, long, longgg time ago!

The twentieth century was full of great things:
We walked on the moon and watched from afar, we flew here and there and drove in a car.
We spoke through a wire and floated in space; but this story happened in a much different place.

There are great events in the ages of time; we were enlightened and reformed.
We painted and wrote of Crusades and Dark Ages and of the Romans’ great fall.
But the greatest event surpassed them all, a birth in a hidden cold manger.

Long before Daniel slept with the lions and Nebuchadnezzar ate grass.
Before David was king and Samuel conceived, and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were small
Before men built a tower and Noah a great zoo, before Cain took from Able the life he was due.
Before Eve gave to Adam the fruit of the tree – This story began in the heart of these three

Before the creation of Adam and Eve, the great dinosaurs and fish in the sea
Before there was life growing up, growing green, the flowers and trees, and plants with their seeds.
Before the foundation of the earth had been laid, before the sun and the moon and the stars had been made
Before light had appeared and the darkness erased, and the backdrop of space had been stretched into place.

This happened before the first Cherub sang and believed in his heart he was more than the king.
Before the heavenly hosts sang their songs without strife, before all of these things there was light, joy and life.
Immeasurable wisdom and abiding deep love, there was perfect contentment and peace up above.
Here lived a being so great and glorious, His power and might and story before us
Majestic beauty that had never been seen, love and great wisdom a glorious scene

This one knew nothing of being alone; no emptiness haunted this blissful throne.
Two others stood with Him alike in their ways, one in their nature, sharing their days.
They lived together clothed in pure light, perfect in splendor, Oh what a sight

Ageless and formless, no beginning, no end, from eternity past and beyond,
They know all things and have such great power, yet, still they lacked one thing in this tower.
There was no one to praise them, no one to know, no one forgiveness and love to show.
Who could understand the strength and the might, of the one who made the stars for the night?
Who made the sun to light the day and mortal men just out of the clay?

So they devised a plan to let someone know, about the glory they could show.
It really (WAS) is a perfect plan, complete in every way.
To be truly known, and loved and praised, someone would need to see,
Not from compulsion fear or dread, the beauty of the things They’d said.
So was given the right to choose; but with this came evil and life to lose.

In the choices that followed, there was grief and despair, many have said, this isn’t fair.
These choices led to the loss, of the best of all They’d done,
But still They loved the ones They called, Adam and his sons.

It would not be easy to redeem, the fallen sons of God.
For many would choose to turn away, thinking they had won.
Yet, for the sake of those They chose, They decided to send the Son.

It was long before that fatal day they knew They had to hang,
Upon a tree, without dignity, the one They called “the Son”.
So He set aside His robes of glory, His light and perfect joy.
He chose instead a manger stall, to be birthed into this story.

They chose a maiden pure and true, and she became the one,
That gave him birth, the glorious one, and showed him to the earth.
On that night so long ago, the angels sang for joy.
They told the shepherds of the birth, of this one who came from glory.

You would think that those He came to see, would welcome Him with glee;
Instead we laid His body on, two pieces of a tree
As we nailed His hands, and His feet, into pieces of His tree
He looked into the faces of the ones, He had brought to be.

Still we left Him there to bleed and die, just hanging in the sky.
and He took upon His broken form, the sins of all mankind.
He gave His life and paid the price in the fullness of His time.

© Paul Myrant 1986. Used with permission.

The Liberal’s Compromise: I win, You Lose...Then You Lose Some More....

2009-12-04T13:02:00.000-08:00

Chapter 3, from the book Confrontational Politics: How to Practice the Politics of Principle
by H.L. Richardson

What occurs when these contradictory ideologies come into contact with one another, when those believing in traditional American concepts of limited government are assaulted by some new socialist program advanced by the Liberals? Traditionalists, attempting to preserve the status quo, invariably react negatively, predictably. Humanists act - offering programs of socialized revision, expect disruptive change, in fact, look forward to reaction.

It's important to know how each side views the confrontation – as a positive or a negative? Who gains, who loses? Traditional Americans dislike conflict and withdraw from it as a matter of habit and training. On the other hand, the humanist looks upon confrontation as a necessity, a positive ingredient in advancing humanistic programs. They expect confrontation, plan for it and anticipate the predictable, negative reaction from their opposition, often using the reaction to further promote their cause. Conflict, therefore, is expected, welcomed, analyzed and then used to advance their goals.

Momentum is obviously on the side of the aggressors since they have the tactical advantage of initiating the attack. Before their intended opposition even knows a clash will occur, they've had the opportunity to plan strategy, organize support, select the field of battle, choose the appropriate time to launch the new program and frame the issue in such a manner as to put their program in the best light. (More on framing the issue in the next chapter.) They know opposition will be forthcoming, since their plans are usually expensive, assaultive to the constitution and enlarge the bureaucracy, all three an anathema to the traditionalist.

Controlling the initiative, the humanist knows that, how a program is presented, often predetermines the outcome. Propaganda-wise, they wrap the socialist "idea" in a semantic blanket of sophistry, warm cuddly humanitarianism, designed to put the opposition on the defensive. Without question, the aggressor has the immediate advantage.

Once the conflict is engaged, the Leftists anticipate the opposition's response and judge their effectiveness accordingly. The issue is pursued until the Conservative resistance becomes formidable and an overall negative result could occur. At that time, a dialectic, backward step is in order. A strategic retreat, giving up some ground.

The Liberal then offers a compromise, a partial solution is presented. Half, instead of the whole loaf, is offered. The Left suddenly creates the aura of appearing reasonable, moderating their request. Leftist dialectics is nothing more than planned retreat, a tactic used to confuse and throw the opposition off-guard. Lenin called it an important tool in accomplishing overall goals.

He used the analogy of a man driving a nail with a hammer, the backward stroke being just as important as the forward thrust of hitting of the nail. Ask for much more than expected and then, when the opposition builds, give in a little, play the good guy willing to concede. Switch from bad guy to good guy, be conciliatory, be sweetness and light, offer "compromise." Initiate the conflict then strategically back off.

Consider the bandit who sticks a gun in your ribs and demands your wallet then, with a kindly smile, says, "Shucks, I don't really need these." As he hands you your credit cards, he adds, "Aw, heck, I don't need these either." With that, he returns the children's snapshots and the wallet itself - minus the cash, of course. Later, you couldn't help telling the police he wasn't such a bad guy after all.

Most Americans will accept compromise in order to avoid a continuation of the confrontation. When the Left backs off, a sigh of relief is usually heard from the traditionalist. In fact, the weakest and least informed on left-wing tactics often dictate the terms of how much is lost, since the timid are the ones usually intimidated and most willing to see the hostilities end. In hopes of maintaining some of the status quo, this weakest link usually decides the amount abdicated and justifies acceptance with a begrudging, "We can live with that."

So, can the lamb live with the lion? He can - until the lion becomes hungry again and there are no more lambs left.

The humanists accept the "compromise," having gained some ground, not all that they ultimately wanted, but more than they had before the confrontation began. Once the "compromise" takes place, the status quo side happily retires from the fight, slightly disgruntled over the loss of territory but relieved that the conflict is over.

The camel's nose is under the tent.

The Left, with more recruits in their ranks and a foothold gained, patiently await the opportune time to start anew with more demands for more territory. This has been referred to as the "salami" technique, one slice at a time until the whole loaf is consumed. This is the way socialism has been infused within the body politic of America, one slice at a time, forward then backward motion. Lenin stated it best, "We advance through retreat."

It's unfortunate that there is only one definition for the word "compromise," there should be another: One for defining the many physical compromises we all make as a matter of daily living and, compromising of principle. Let me give you an example of the differences between the two. My wife and I decide to rent a video movie. She wanted a love-‘em-up and I want a shoot-‘em-up. Instead, to make us both happy, we rent a comedy. We both "compromised" our first desire and settled on a video we both could enjoy. No principle was involved, just a physical giving-in, each watering down a personal choice in order to maintain family harmony. All of us do this daily – especially if we want to stay married.

Compare this with a compromise of principle. I support the Second Amendment, believing all law-abiding Americans have a right to own firearms. The Left believes in the confiscation of all firearms, especially handguns. What compromise can there be between us? Any infringement on this right is a loss to Americans. As you can see, there is no "physical" ground where either of us can repair. By definition, compromise is a settlement of differences with mutual concessions being made by both parties; this is how the dictionary defines the word. Both sides give up something.

This is not how the Leftists "compromise." They will ask for 100 percent, then give in a little on their outlandish demands when opposition becomes formidable. They may call it compromise but what are they giving up? Absolutely nothing! In order to implement their humanist agenda, are they sacrificing anything? Are they relinquishing control or perhaps abandoning some other established bureaucracy in order to negotiate in good faith? Never. They relinquish nothing while insisting we compromise away a piece of our freedom.

When we object, they have the unmitigated gall to say we're not reasonable. When we strenuously resist, they call us names – extreme, right wing, ultra-conservative and worse. Unfortunately, we react angrily instead of calmly insisting they put something on the table. When the socialists promote more socialized medicine, does anyone stand up and ask, "In exchange for more control of medicine, what are you Liberals willing to give up – the Environmental Protection Agency? OSHA? Welfare? What are they willing to concede?

Such a question is rarely, if ever, posed by the Conservative. No one seems to think of it. When we give in to them, even an inch, we're not compromising; we're abdicating our rights and our honor. When our legislators do likewise, they are abdicating our rights at our expense.

We must stop using the term compromise when confronting the Left. It should not be a part of our vocabulary when dealing with the Left unless we humorously ask the question, "What are you putting on the table in exchange – HUD? – BATFE? – NEA?

We must put the picture in proper perspective. We're not out to rewrite our United States Constitution, abandon our freedoms or force our ideas on anyone…but they are. We Americans like the way our forefathers put this nation together. We are, by definition, protectors of the status quo. And why not? It's well worth maintaining. When you think about it, all we ask is to have the same rights and privileges that our fathers and grandfathers had and to have the same constitutional protections they enjoyed.
The problem is that this position is a defensive one, while the advantage favors those advocating change. The Left takes the time to draft the issue in the best terms, estimate the level of opposition and pick an advantageous time to launch their plan of action. They certainly have nothing to lose. For should they fail, they are no worse off than when they started. When they obtain only a small portion of what was originally wanted, they are still ahead of the game.

Just think of all the socialist program they have implemented – one step at a time. They advocate, we defend, and confrontation ensues. Then, the traditionalist is asked to "compromise." In order to see the hostilities end, we concede a little. Later, we concede a little more until all is gone.

There can be no compromises with the Left. We are ideologically at opposite ends of the spectrum with no arbitration possible. Either they win or we do. They will run the government or we will. That's the only choice open to either of us. They know it – shouldn't we?

The time has come for us to start asking for the abolishment of certain governmental agencies. Then, if we must, "compromise" and see only half of them disappear …this year. Before this can be accomplished, we need effective control of the legislative process.

The average American tends to see the participants in all these leftist "causes" as well-meaning folks trying to do some good. They see each cause as disjointed efforts with no central theme or network linking them together. Only when viewed as an overall movement to centralize and expand government does it make sense and the puzzle fits together. The various causes may appear to have nothing in common. Why would macho labor unions back candidates who are pro-gay? What can be the tie between the pro-abortionists and the anti-gun movement – what causes seem to be further apart?
Again, their agendas for people-control are identical. Both advocate more government and support similar candidates for office. The preponderance of their leadership are, for all intents and purposes, ideological soul mates, social reformers, hard-leftists of the first order – invariably imbued with situational ethics and humanist ideals. They are out to change America by demanding more and settling for less – one piece at a time.

Excerpted from the book Confrontational Politics: How to Practice the Politics of Principle, by Senator H.L. (Bill) Richardson (Ottawa, IL: Jameson Books, 2009).

© 2009. Used by permission.

Senator Richardson served in the California State Senate between 1966 and 1984. In 1975, he founded Gun Owners of America, and now serves as its chairman.

Author’s Biographical Brief
Bill Richardson is one of the good guys, a Christian family man, standing his entire career for the free Christian American republic. He served in the California State Senate, and is founder and present chairman of Gun Owners of America. He is the author of other books including Slightly to the Right and What Makes you Think We Read the Bills, which has been used as a California political textbook (Amazon.com Editorial Review).

“During his 22 years in the CA Senate, Richardson showed that a determined application of confrontational politics could produce victories – even when he was in the minority. Richardson organized multiple PAC’s that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for political donations. He led the charge to defeat 3 members of the CA Supreme Court, including the infamous Rose Bird. He then enacted a capital punishment law over the veto of Governor Jerry Brown. Richardson’s political machine launched State Senator George Deukmejian’s successful gubernatorial bid on the heels of the capital punishment movement. At the same time, the philosophical center of the legislature was shifted to the right. Richardson authored a state preemption of firearms law which just last year resulted in overturning the recently enacted San Francisco handgun ban. He also passed a law that declares that one’s home is one’s castle and can be defended with deadly force. Conservatives today are not in power nationally, but that does not mean that they cannot win battles. If they are going to be effective, Richardson’s lessons need to be studied and applied.”—Paul Weyrich, Free Congress Foundation (From the author’s blog; see also http://senhlr.blogspot.com/)

Thanksgiving Produces Thanks-Living

2009-11-23T12:56:00.000-08:00

by James and Barbara Rose
Christian Self Government produces Local Self Governing Christian Homes, Churches, Communities. Self Government is explained in I John 3:24: "He that keepeth his commandments DWELLETH IN HIM, and HE IN HIM. And hereby we know that HE ABIDETH IN US, by the Spirit which He hath given us." The internal gives rise to the external.
George Washington's and America's FIRST THANKSGIVING PROCLAMATION requested Americans to pray God… 1) "to pardon our national sins; 2) "to render our national government a blessing to all the people (HOW?) by being a government of wise (laws), just and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed, and 3) "to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion (which was Biblical Christianity at that time) and virtue (or the righteousness of Christ)…".
"The Pilgrim wanted LIBERTY for himself and his wife and little ones, and for his brethren, to WALK WITH GOD in a Christian life as the rules and motives of such a life were revealed to him from God's Word. For that he went into exile; for that he crossed the ocean; for that he made his home in a wilderness." (Leonard Bacon, 1874)
FOUR PRIMARY REASONS THE PILGRIMS CAME TO AMERICA

To protect their children from degeneracy and corruption. "Whoso keepeth the law is a wise son: but he that is a companion of riotous men shameth his father." Prov. 28:7 "…their dearest children…of best dispositions and gracious inclinations, were…oppressed with their heavy labors, … became decrepit in their early youth, and by the great licentiousness of youth in (Holland) and the manifold temptations of the place, were drawn away by evil examples into extravagant and dangerous courses, getting the reigns off their necks, departing from their parents, … tending to dissoluteness and the danger of their souls, to the great grief of the parents and dishonor of God." (William Bradford)

To propagate and advance the Gospel of the Kingdom of Christ "Go ye therefore and teach all nations,…" Matt. 28:19 "Lastly, and which was not least, a great hope and inward zeal they had of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some way thereunto, for the propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in to those remote parts of the world." (William Bradford)

"In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten…having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country, a voyage…do by these present solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation…" (Mayflower Document)

To obtain and preserve Religious Liberty. "Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made you free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." Gal. 5:1 "And some of the chief of that company (of Pilgrims) doubted not to obtain their suit of the king FOR LIBERTY IN RELIGION, and to have it confirmed under the kings broad seal, according to their desires." (William Bradford)

To be as "stepping-stones" unto others for the performing of so great a work.

"..yea, though they should be but even as stepping-stones unto others for the performing of so great a work." (William Bradford) "I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase." I Cor. 3:6

THE THREE MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE PILGRIMS TO AMERICAN CHRISTIANS

They believed in "Reformation without tarrying for any" – as demonstrated by an individual and personal responsibility to obey God's Word. To the Pilgrim it meant "voluntary conformity to the rules and principles given in the New Testament, without waiting for others to obey, without waiting for the Church to change, and especially not waiting for the King to reform the church. Reformation presupposes repentance, and the Pastor of the Pilgrim, Rev. John Robinson, exhorted the Pilgrim church to "daily renew our repentance with our God, especially for our sins known, and generally for our unknown trespasses…"
The Pilgrims were separatists and believed in the local, self governing, independent congregational form of church government. That is the form of church government to which we adhere. The Pilgrims "All had gained the intelligence that comes from the diligent study of the Bible and … were honest and earnest believers in the Christ of the New Testament. Such were the men and the women who were thus driven out of their native England, yet hunted and intercepted in their flight, as if they were criminals escaping from justice. Why did they suffer the spoiling of their goods, arrest, imprisonment, exile? They had caught from the Bible the idea of a church independent alike of the pope and the queen, independent of Parliament as well as of prelates (politicians), and dependent only on Christ. It was their mission to work out and organize that idea." (Leonard Bacon, Genesis of the New England Churches, 1874) Individual self government and independent self governing churches produced a free, independent local civil government under the Mayflower Compact.

THEY CAST ASIDE COMMUNISM IN LABOR AND SUPPLY FOR INDIVIDUAL ENTERPRISE. Did you know that the Pilgrims signed a contract with some London businessmen to obtain "their meat, drink and apparel and ALL PROVISIONS OUT OF THE COMMON STOCK AND GOODS of the said colony?" Agreeing to the condition that all property be publicly owned and that every person will get an equal share of their common labor and supplies – a form of communism / socialism in labor and supply --- was the only way they could obtain the funds to acquire the religious liberty they wanted. The Pilgrims strove for two years to keep this part of the contract but the result was such dissention, discord and want that their Governor cast off communism and established INDIVUDUAL ENTERPRISE. He assigned all the unmarried folks and orphans to live with more complete families, assigned each family their own plot of ground as their private property, and left every household to "shift for itself or suffer want."

Governor Bradford lists nine reasons why communism in labor and supply did not work:

taking away private property and sharing everything in common did not make them happy and flourishing – as if they were wiser than God.

communism in labor and supply breeds much confusion and discontent;

it retards employment;

the younger, able and stronger men complained that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without recompense or reward;

the most able men thought it unjust not to receive more food or clothing than he that was weak and less productive;

the older and "graver" or serious and solemn men did not like to be ranked as equal to the younger men in labor, food or clothing and saw such equality as an "indignity and disrespect";

neither husbands or wives wanted to be commanded to serve other men by fixing their food, washing their clothes – they saw this as a form of slavery;

the idea of all persons sharing alike, doing alike, being alike did not agree with "those relations that God hath set among men";

communal property and communism in labor and supply diminished the mutual respect that should be practiced between people;

The Governor wisely displaced communism/socialism for individual enterprise and industry and productively increased enormously, but God intended the Pilgrims learn to trust Him not their own wisdom by permitting a DROUGHT and heat wave to descend on the land for nearly two months during spring time. The corn withered away and the ground was parched so the Pilgrims "set apart a day of humiliation" and sought the Lord by humble and fervent prayer in their great distress—and the rains came.

Thank God together this Thursday in remembrance of how the Pilgrims taught, illustrated and demonstrated SELF GOVERNMENT – THE CORNERSTONE OF OUR NATION, AND THEIR THANKS LIVING GIFT TO US AS AMERICAN CHRISTIANS.
HOW THE PILGRIMS FREED THEMSELVES FROM COMMUNISM
"All this whille no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expecte any. So they begane to thinke how they might raise as much corne as they could, and obtaine a beter crope then they had done, that they might not still thus languish in miserie. At length, after much debate of things, the Govr (with ye advise of ye cheefest amongest them) gave way that they should set corne every man for his owne perticuler, and in that regard trust to them selves; in all other things to goe on in ye generall way as before. And so assigned to every family a parcell of land, according to the proportion of their number for that end, only for present use (but made no devission for inheritance), and ranged all boys & youth under some familie. This had very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corne was planted then other waise would have bene by any means ye Govr or any other could use, and saved him a great deall of trouble, and gave farr better contente. The women now wente willingly into ye feild, and tooke their litle-ons with them to set corne, which before would aledg weaknes, and inabilitie; whom to have compelled would have bene thought great tiranie and oppression.

The experience that was had in this comone course and condition, tried sundrie years, and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanitie of that conceite of Platos & other ancients, applauded by some of later times;—that ye taking away of propertie, and bringing in comunitie into a comone wealth, would make them happy and florishing; as if they were wiser then God. For this comunitie (so farr as it was) was found to breed much confusion & discontent, and retard much imploymet that would have been to their benefite and comforte. For ye yong-men that were most able and fitte for labour & service did repine that they should spend their time & streingth to worke for other mens wives and children, with out any recompence. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in devission of fictails & cloaths, then he that was weake and not able to doe a quarter ye other could; this was thought injuestice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and [97] equalised in labours, and victails, cloaths, &c., with ye meaner & yonger sorte, thought it some indignite & disrespect unto them. And for mens wives to be commanded to doe service for other men, as dresing their meate, washing their cloaths, &c., they deemd it a kind of slaverie, neither could many husbands well brooke it. Upon ye poynte all being to have alike, and all to doe alike, they thought them selves in ye like condition, and one as good as another; and so, if it did not cut of those relations that God hath set amongest men, yet it did at least much diminish and take of ye mutuall respects that should be preserved amongst them. And would have bene worse if they had been man of another condition. Let none objecte this is men's corruption, and nothing to ye course it selfe. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in his wisdome saw another course fiter for them."

Hall, Verna M.: The Christian History of the Constitution of the United States of America, Vol. I. Christian Self-Government. Founders Edition. San Francisco : Foundation for American Christian Education, 2006, S. 212; William Bradford, History of Plimouth Plantation.

America’s Thanksgiving: From Socialism to Prosperity

2009-11-21T12:16:00.000-08:00

by Marshall Foster

As our thoughts turn to Thanksgiving this year, it is a perfect time to recapture the true spirit of America’s Pilgrim ancestors. We are in a time of great trial, in many ways reminiscent of these faithful believers. It would be wonderful to share with our families and friends this Thanksgiving this brief story of the amazing sacrifice of these brave forerunners of our freedom. As we shall see, it cost them everything to lay the foundation of the most prosperous and free nation in history. Will the strength of our character be tested like theirs was?

The story begins in the small village of Scrooby as the Separatists (later called Pilgrims) began an underground church in the basement of a livery stable. These unlikely world changers desired to live a quiet life, raise their families and worship God according to the teachings of the Bible. But their biblical faith brought them face to face with the big government tyranny of their day.

King James I, the divine right tyrant of England, claimed absolute control over every person in his realm. He tortured, killed or exiled all who disagreed with him. He broke with the laws of England, to make all laws at his whim. (This is called “king’s law” and has been the tool of tyrants to keep almost all people in the world cowering in fear before them for 5,000 years.) The king was enraged that the Separatists dared to obey God rather than the king with regard to their worship and sacredly held beliefs. King James said “I will harry them out of the land - or else do worse.”

In 1607, the small Scrooby congregation sold all their possessions and tried to escape to Holland where there was a degree of religious freedom. They hired a Dutch sea captain. But once they were aboard his ship, he stole all that they had and turned them over to the king’s soldiers in the town of Boston, England. They were searched to their “innermost garments” and paraded through the streets. Then the men were dragged off to prison for nine months (which was often a death sentence). The women and children were left penniless and homeless on the streets.

A year later, these weary families were reunited. They attempted another escape by ship. As the men were on board the ship preparing to leave, they were forced by the Dutch captain at gunpoint to set sail and leave their families behind. The king’s troops came and captured the women and children on shore. Their wives and children pleaded for mercy from the king’s men, but instead were thrown in prison for a year. They were finally released and joined their husbands and fathers in exile.

Finally, the Pilgrim church was reunited in Holland and settled in Leyden. There for eleven years they enjoyed a degree of religious freedom. Their Cambridge trained pastor, John Robinson, was one of history’s foremost cultural reformers and Bible scholars. They learned from him what no other group of believers had ever put into practice. They discovered the secrets of civil, economic and religious liberty built upon the Bible and on 700 years of English Common Law.

But the heavy hand of poverty laid hard upon these exiles. The Dutch labor unions denied the English exiles any good jobs. Many of their children were forced into heavy sweatshop labor. They were heartbroken as their children began to be influenced by the immoral culture around them.

Finally, facing possible annihilation by a Spanish invasion, and having a deep concern for their children’s future, these faithful, tough pioneers decided to immigrate to the wilderness of America. They were facing almost certain death. But they chose to stand for the truth without compromise and for the hope that they and their posterity could experience liberty under God.

As the Pilgrims set sail for America, one of their two ships began to sink. They had to return to England and only a select group of volunteers boarded the Mayflower and continued the voyage in August of 1620. Sixty six days later, facing almost constant gales, the ship arrived off the coast of Cape Cod. The November storms and the Cape kept the captain from steering south to New York, their intended destination (the place of the king’s charter).

Now without a charter, they formed their own government. On November 11, 1620, forty six men gathered in the captain’s cabin and signed the Mayflower Compact. This was a government of the people – unique in all of history. It begins “In the name of God, Amen” and placed in the hands of the people the right to create laws and constitutions under God’s direction. This document became a basis for more than eighty colonial charters and covenants that laid the foundation for America’s Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Then, by God’s divine providence, after eighteen days scouring the Cape for water, they found a little harbor and a spring fed stream. It had been cleared of the overwhelming forests because it was the former village of the Pawtuxet Indians. Sadly, they had all died in a great plague several years before the Pilgrim’s arrival.

After coming ashore in the middle of a harsh winter, over half of the Pilgrims died by March of 1621. Most of the women died while protecting their children from the elements. They buried forty six settlers in common graves to disguise their weakness. The communal farming that had been forced on them by the merchants who had funded their voyage led to two years of near starvation. In the summer of 1623, they abandoned group socialism. Governor William Bradford gave each man a plot of ground to plant crops. In this biblical enterprise system, each man worked his own land which resulted in an explosion of productivity.

But no rain fell in July and August to water the crops and they faced certain death. They then repented for having forgotten to give God the glory. They declared a day of fasting and prayer for God’s deliverance. A gentle rain came that day and lasted for three days, restoring their crops and saving their lives. Governor Bradford declared a day of thanksgiving to God for His rain and provision. This story is the heart of our national holiday, Thanksgiving.

This year, we face our own form of drought. Many Americans have forgotten that it was God who made America free and prosperous. Let’s share America’s story with everyone we can, including our representatives at all levels of authority. Let’s encourage a return to the God of our ancestors. Is it not time to remember what our Pilgrim ancestors knew and did and to begin to rebuild our nation under God – one individual, one family, one community at a time?

Used by permission.
© From the Mayflower Institute Journal, November 2009
Order your Mayflower Institute Journal from:
Mayflower Institute
P.O. Box 4673,
Thousand Oaks, Ca 91359
805-523-0072
www.mayflowerinstitute.com
www.worldhistoryinstitute.com

Islam's world peace: Now or later?

2009-11-16T19:07:00.000-08:00

by William J. Federer

Islam is a religion of peace, but in the world of paradoxical definitions, perhaps some explanation is needed.

The word "Islam" means submission to the will of Allah.

A "Muslim" is one who has submitted.

Whereas most think world peace will be when people just learn how to get along, faithful Muslims think world peace will be when the whole world submits to the will of Allah.

In other words, world peace means world Islam.

To a fundamental Muslim, submission to Allah means submitting to Islamic law, called Shariah.

A jaw-dropping expose on the six-month undercover operation that revealed the true terror-supporting nature of CAIR: Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America. It's also available in electronic form at reduced price through Scribd.

Islamic Shariah law governs every aspect of human life, including:

What to eat
How to dress
when to pray
In what direction to pray
What position to be in when you pray
How many wives to have
The correct way to beat a wife
Who must accompany a woman in public
Who cannot be your friends
How to treat a non-Muslim infidel
Whether to drink alcohol
When to lie
When to kill an apostate
How to run a government
How to cut off the hand of a thief
How many times to whip a woman who has been raped
Whether one can listen to music
Whether one can play a musical instrument
What pets are permitted
How to wash parts of your body
The correct way to clean you teeth with a twig
And even what direction to face when using the restroom!

Islamic Shariah law is the complete submission of one's life, marriage, family, community and country to the will of Allah as revealed to Muhammad.

In its fullest sense, the word "Islam" actually means the opposite of the words "freedom" and "liberty."

But what about the majority of moderate Muslims?

Moderate Muslims believe the world will submit to Allah later, maybe at the end of the world, or maybe just figuratively.

Since it is so far off in the distant future, moderate Muslims have a more relaxed, patient attitude that allows them to get along in a friendly way with non-Muslim infidels.

Moderate Muslims can live comfortably in a free, democratic society.

Fundamental Muslims, on the other hand, think the world is in the process of submitting to Allah now. They are very excited and want to establish Shariah law, even justifying threats of violence and terrorism.

What are moderate Muslims, who believe the world will submit to Allah later, supposed to think when they see unprecedented acts of acceptance of Islam right now?

Such as:

U.S. Postal Service issuing Islamic postage stamps (September 2001; October 2002)
President Bush removing his shoes and visiting a mosque (Dec. 5, 2002)
President Bush putting a Quran in the Presidential Library (October 2005)
President Bush celebrating Ramadan for the first time in the White House (Oct. 18, 2005)
U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim, taking his oath of office upon a Quran (2007)
Presidential candidate Obama reciting Muslim prayers in Arabic, saying it is "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset" (New York Times, Feb. 27, 2007)
U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi putting on Muslim hijab veil during a trip to Syria (April 2007)
President Bush appointing a Muslim, Zalmay Khalilzad, to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (April 17, 2007)
President Bush removing his shoes and visiting a Mosque a second time (July 27, 2007)
U.S. First Lady Laura Bush putting on Muslim hijab veil during trip to Persian Gulf (Oct. 29, 2007, Jerusalem Post)
A second Muslim, Andre Carson, is elected to the U.S. Congress (2008)
Presidential candidate Obama mistakenly says in a George Stephanopoulos interview, "My Muslim faith" (Sep. 7, 2008)
President Barack Hussein Obama elected, whose middle name is that of Muhammad's grandson (November 2008)
President Obama bows to Saudi King Abdullah (April 1, 2009)
President Obama says America is not a Christian nation (April 6, 2009)
President appoints devout Muslim Arif Alikhan to key position in the Department of Homeland Security (May 6, 2009)
President Obama does NOT publicly recognize America's traditional National Day of Prayer (May 6, 2009)
President Obama says America is one of the largest Muslim countries (June 3, 2009)
President appoints Syrian-born devout Muslim Kareem Shora to key position in the Department of Homeland Security (June 5, 2009)
President Obama broadcasts a Ramadan message to Muslims of the world (Aug. 22, 2009)
President Obama publicly recognizes the Muslim Ramadan with a dinner at the White House (Sept. 1, 2009)
Hundreds of Muslims gather at the U.S. Capitol to bow toward Mecca (Sept. 25, 2009)
White House's first full-veiled Muslim woman adviser, Egyptian-born Dalia Mogahed, praised Shariah law as "gender justice" (Oct. 4, 2009, on London-based TV discussion program "Muslimah Dilemma," hosted by Ibtihal Bsis, a member of the extremist Hizb ut Tahrir party)
Again, the question is, what is a moderate Muslim, who believes the world will submit to Allah later, supposed to think when they see these unprecedented acts of acceptance of Islam right now, especially in a nation where 77 percent still identify themselves as Christian, 2 percent Jewish, etc., ... and only 0.6 percent Muslim? (Pew Religious Landscape Survey, 2008)

Understandably, the bipartisan actions of America's leaders showing tolerance and acceptance of Islam are exciting for Muslims, resulting in an increased enthusiasm for their faith.

As a result, many moderate Muslims are being persuaded that the world is submitting to Allah now rather than later.

Thus, the dilemma for the West is that the more it bends over backwards in unprecedented ways to show acceptance of Islam, the more moderate Muslims become enthused and gravitate to become fundamental Muslims.

They move from the moderate "LATER" peaceful camp into the fundamental "NOW" camp, which advocates Shariah law and justifies threats of violence and terrorism.

So in the world of paradoxical definitions, world peace means world Islam, and the more the West accepts Islam, the more it can expect threats of violence.

Now or later – are you ready for Islam's world peace?

___
Get the new DVD Radical Islam on the March, which features interviews with Nonie Darwish, Paul Diamond, Steven Emerson, William Federer, Frank Gaffney, David Lidington, Faisal Malick, Steven Masood, Douglas Murray, Robert Spencer, Dr. Jenny Taylor, Dr. James White, and Geert Wilders

William J. Federer is the author of the best-selling book, "What Every American Needs to Know About the Qur'an: A History of Islam & the United States," as well as "America's God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations" and "Treasury of Presidential Quotations."

The Star-Spangled Banner: Its message of Valor and Faith

2009-11-06T13:44:00.000-08:00

President James Madison commissioned Francis Scott Key, a lawyer from Maryland, to gain the release of Dr. William Beans, held captive by the invading British in the War of 1812. Key was impressed by a large American flag that had survived the overnight British bombardment of Fort McHenry. This sight thus inspired Key to write what has come to be known as the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Congress adopted this hymn as our National Anthem in 1931.

Though a perennial sports arena fixture, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is rarely appreciated in its entirety. Please take a moment to consider once more the moving lyrics of this ode to America and its defenders—the stout American military and the God of heaven Who is ultimately our only Protection. Let us, this Veteran’s Day, remember those who fought for American independence and liberty, and the God who has protected them and us. In this light, note especially the last verse.—ed.:

Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen thro' the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner: O, long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash'd out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O, thus be it ever when freemen shall stand,
Between their lov'd homes and the war's desolation;
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserv'd us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust"
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Socialism as a Perpetual Civil War

2009-11-05T17:00:00.000-08:00

by R. J. Rushdoony

From the Chalcedon Foundation book Law & Liberty 2nd Edition

Socialism and communism presuppose that their system represents the true order of the ages and is the answer to man's problems. This assumption is one that assumes man's problems to be not spiritual but material, not sin but environment. Change man's environment and you will then remake man, it is held. The answer to man's problems is therefore not the spiritual regeneration of man by Jesus Christ but the reorganization of society by the scientific socialist state.

Basic to the theory of scientific socialism is its infallibility concept. Every system of thought has an infallibility concept, but few are honest enough to admit it. Ultimate, final, and inerrant authority is vested somewhere in the system as the basic and assured arbiter of truth or reality. The scientific socialistic state sees scientific socialism as the infallible truth of history; its application ensures the perfect social order. If failures occur in scientific socialist states, it is not the fault of scientific socialism, which is by definition infallible and true, but of the hostile people, remnants of the capitalistic class, or traitorous members of the party. Because the scientific socialist state cannot blame itself, it must wage civil war against some portion of the state. Thus, first of all, socialism's answer to every problem is civil war. Someone is guilty, but never socialism itself.

Illustrations of this are many. The Soviet Union has faced a situation of continual purges. The purges of the 1930s stand out merely as being more dramatic than the routine ones. But every crisis in the Soviet Union demands a scapegoat, and war is therefore waged against some portion of the Party, the bureaucracy, or the masses.

In Communist China, according to a news report of Friday, March 24, 1967, pestilence broke out widely, with many contagious diseases spreading across the country. The Communist regime's answer to an already serious crisis was to threaten the doctors of China with a purge. The doctors were responsible, the Shanghai Radio declared, because they "had ignored Mao's health policies."¹ The consequence of such a policy, the purge of doctors in a country with a serious shortage of medical men, only aggravated a serious situation, but anything is preferable to admitting that socialism can make mistakes and be an erroneous theory.

In the United States, inflation is a product of the federal government's departure from a hard money standard, from gold to paper, and a product of its debt living or deficit financing. The guilt for inflation is essentially the federal government's guilt. But the blame is instead shifted by federal officials to the private sector: labor is creating inflation by demanding higher wages, and business is inflationary because it demands higher prices for goods, and threats are made of wage and price controls. The demands of capital and labor are, of course, the results of inflation and their steps to protect themselves against it, but the policy of socialism is to ascribe all guilt to the people, and all wisdom to the state, in every crisis.

In these and other cases, the answer always remains the same: the socialist state wages war on the people. Whenever the scientific socialist state makes a mistake, the people suffer.

The second aspect of this socialist civil warfare is that it is perpetual civil war because of perpetual failure. Socialism is incapable of solving any problem it addresses itself to in the economic sphere. Because its premises are unsound and wholly in error, its conclusions are consistently failures. But, since socialism is by definition the scientific answer to problems of society, socialism cannot blame itself. As a result, it wages perpetual civil warfare as its answer to perpetual failure.

Third, the consequence of this perpetual civil warfare is an ever-deepening crisis. Propaganda works to disguise the crisis. We are always told that the Soviet Union is making economic and industrial progress and is becoming a milder dictatorship, but the reality is that it has merely gone from crisis to crisis and has faced a growing food shortage as a tribute to its incompetence. The other socialisms of the world have similar troubles. The little Fabian Socialist State of Great Britain is sinking steadily into the economic consequences of its own policies, and other Fabian states face a growing monetary and economic crisis. Socialism is never the way out for socialism, but simply the guarantee of an economic dead end.

Fourth, this perpetual civil warfare can and will terminate in the death of the state, and possibly of the civilization as well. It is destructive of the public and private resources of the state; the socialist state can sometimes build stone monuments and edifices, but it cannot perpetuate a living social order; it can only kill the order it seizes or inherits. It has often been observed that it is only when a civilization is dying that it begins monumental building constructions. Prior to that time, its concern is more with life than show. We cannot therefore misread socialism's predisposition for monumental construction as a sign of life; it is tombstone construction.

Fifth, perpetual civil warfare means in some form perpetual violence or repressive force, and as a result, the use of terror is not only accepted but is often justified and exalted. Terror is defended and upheld as necessary to suppress the enemies of the people and to protect the state from destruction. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, spoke of terror as "the very bond of fraternity." Terror is made a moral principle and an inevitable requirement of history. As a result, "total terror" is practiced as a necessary and moral requirement of scientific socialism. Incredible brutality, barbarism, savagery, and degeneracy become the products of scientific socialism.² Thus, the perpetual civil warfare that the scientific socialist state wages against its people is also a form of total warfare. It is more radical than total warfare, in that normal total warfare is for a stated period of hostilities, whereas the socialistic civil war and its terroristic total warfare have no end. It is a perpetual threat to the people, and, in varying degrees, continuously practiced. The more the state approaches total socialism, to that same degree it also approaches total terror and total civil war. It is this aspect of perpetual and total warfare that has made socialists like George Orwell, author of 1984, turn from socialism in horror, without believing really in anything else. Theirs is not a conversion but simply revulsion from terror.

Such a situation, of course, breaks down the will to work and the will to live of the subject peoples. Hope of escape, or hope that the socialist regime will end, begins to grow weaker, and the result is all the greater slow-down in agricultural and industrial production. This decline in productivity creates a major crisis, and the socialist leaders must give the people some reason to believe that there is hope of a change, a "thaw," in the socialist terror and oppression. A cow, after all, will finally give no milk if it is not fed, and so the masses, like human cattle, are given enough fodder to make them productive again. Their previous sufferings are blamed on bad underlings, poor managers. Stalin, for example, placed the blame on minor officials who were supposedly too eager to attain perfect socialism overnight. In dealing with enforced collectivization of farms, in a Pravda statement of April 3, 1930, Stalin declared that the policy was a "voluntary one," but unfortunately some officials were using threats and pressure.³ It was after this statement that millions were starved to death for resisting collectivization, but Stalin in advance had cleared himself publicly of responsibility and also encouraged those who were hostile to feel freer to make a stand. Khrushchev also gave promises of a thaw, and then launched into the vicious terror in Hungary, and the still-continuing and greatest terror against Christians.

The purposes of these brief thaws and breathers are strategic: they serve to give a despairing populace hope for a change. This, then, is simply a sixth, aspect of socialism's civil warfare against its people. The thaw creates a deviation from socialist policy only for the purpose of reinforcing that policy.

This points clearly to a seventh aspect of socialism's perpetual civil war: truth is at all times a central casualty. Since there is no truth apart from the scientific socialist state, any device, any lie, any strategy which will further the socialist experiment is valid. The lie is spoken to delude the masses and the enemy; speech has as its purpose not the communication of truth but utility to the dictatorship of the proletariat as a weapon of warfare. Semantics therefore becomes a major concern of socialism. Language must be used; it is a superb weapon. Certain words have powerful meanings to many men, and one way of using men's minds against themselves is to misuse the words that have a particular meaning to them. To expect language to have the same content to a socialist as it does to a Christian is a delusion. For the socialist, language is instrumental; it is a tool of revolution. Instead of representing a means of communicating an objective order of truth, language is basically an instrument of power. For the socialist state to neglect to use language as an instrument of power is for it to be guilty of bourgeois sentiments and illusions.

This, then, is the course of action, perpetual civil warfare, required by the scientific socialist state to maintain its delusion of infallibility. This perpetual civil warfare is a consequence of its departure from God and its socialism. It is a suicidal course, one well described by our Lord of old, when He declared, "He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death" (Prov. 8:36).

Oakland Tribune, "China Hit by Outbreak of Pestilence," Friday, March 24, 1967, 1.
Albert Kalme, Total Terror (New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), and Harold H. Martinson, Red Dragon Over China (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1956).
W. R. Werner, ed., Stalin Kampf (New York, NY: Howell, Soskin, 1940), 252-257.

Used with permission.

UNDERSTANDING THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND: A CONVERSATION WITH G. EDWARD GRIFFIN

2009-11-05T16:34:00.000-08:00

The following interview was conducted by David McAlvany on July 28, 2009, and contains crucial information on the Federal Reserve System by the man who literally wrote the book on the subject: G. Edward Griffin. His book The Creature from Jekyll Island was first published in 1994, and its insights are more vital now than ever. If you haven’t been able to read the book, you’ll find this interview essential for understanding what has been going on in the U.S. over the past year in particular, and since 1913 in general. The interview is preceded by an introduction drawn from David McAlvany’s commentary in his July 21, 2009, McAlvany Weekly Commentary podcast at McAlvany.com.

In 1906, an earthquake hit the city of San Francisco. Gas lines burst, and four square miles – nearly half of the entire city – burned in what at the time was one of the country’s greatest catastrophes. The damage amounted to between $350 and $500 million.

Also in 1906, a financial earthquake hit U.S. markets when the Hepburn Act was passed in Congress and signed into law. That act allowed the Interstate commerce commission to set price controls on rail rates. When the act became law in the summer of 1906, the railroad stocks (which were at that time a very large component of the market) began to tank.

The consequences of any given piece of legislation really begins to hit home from 12 to 24 months after passage, so in the fall of 1907 the economy at large caught the Hepburn flu. United Copper, a company of which two successful investors by the name of Morse and Heinze were majority owners, was likewise affected, and came under pressure from short sellers. Morse and Heinze attempted to squeeze those short sellers out of their positions, but failed, and UC’s share price slumped from $60 to $10 in a matter of days. The two investors were bankrupted, and so were the banks they controlled – one in Montana and the other in New York. And the fall of these men had another, surprising, effect, as well.

Morse and Heinze had had a prior association with the third largest trust company in the country: the Knickerbocker Trust. That relationship had long been severed by mid-1907, but facts were not to get in the way of a good story. The past relationship led the general public to believe that the trust might also be in danger of insolvency. Though such was emphatically not the case, perception trumped reality and a run on the trust ensued.

As the trust scrambled to meet its depositors’ demands, JP Morgan both directly and indirectly pulled out the supports and credit lines to the Knickerbocker Trust, which subsequently collapsed. The Trust was a competitor, and Morgan’s attitude was apparently that if he couldn’t control it, he must destroy it.

Perhaps Morgan could not have foreseen the unintended consequences of his actions, but the 1907 banking crisis ended up resembling the 1906 San Francisco fire in at least one respect: it just kept burning … and burning … and burning. The 1907 panic turned into the worst by far of 13 banking panics that occurred between 1814 and 1914. Its impact was so significant in the public mind that it prepared the way for the implementation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.

In May of 1908, Congress passed the Aldrich-Vreeland Act, which established the National Monetary Commission to look into the causes of the panic, and recommend enhancements for bank regulation. Senator Aldrich spent nearly two years studying European banking models, and in November 1910 convened a private meeting at the Jekyll Island Club, off the coast of Georgia. Representatives of all the major New York banks were invited.

The National Monetary Commission published its final report in January, 1911. The proposal was for an independent central bank. It outlined the involvement of regional member banks working through a central clearinghouse – a system similar to the one that Former president Andrew Jackson had purposefully subverted in 1836. He allowed the charter of The Second Bank of the United States to expire because of concerns over corruption, insider dealings, destruction of the currency, constitutional illegality, and political subversion. The merits of reinstituting such a system were debated for nearly two years. A bill proposing one took the name of The Federal Reserve Act, and it was signed and enacted on the same day – December 22, 1913.

We take the Federal Reserve system for granted today. It operates in total secrecy, and has never been audited. But in an effort to bring transparency to the system, a formal and independent audit is being proposed in Congress as this is written – 100 Democrats and almost every Republican have signed onto this bill.

Where the Federal Reserve System takes us over the next 5-25 years will be determined under the current administration. In an attempt to dig into this more deeply we’ve asked G. Edward Griffin to join us for an interview on where we are today with the “Feral” Reserve System and what system changes, including an expansion of influence and control, will mean for us as individuals and in the market place. Changing rules in the middle of the game comes with a cost – let’s see if we can’t anticipate and be positioned ahead of these tectonic shifts.

Following is the interview of G. Edward Griffin that occurred on July 28, 2009. Participants in the interview were David McAlvany (D.M.); Kevin Orrick (K.O.) – David’s co-host on the McAlvany Weekly Commentary; and G. Edward Griffin (E.G.). The interview has been edited for publication.

D.M. The year 1907 was obviously similar in scope to the changes that we’ve seen in the 2006 to 2008 period: changes in the financial system, changes to the banking giants, changes to the constituents – the players, and what we eventually saw by 1913 was something that was signed into law on December 22. The Federal Reserve Act was something that forever changed the financial system and structure here in the United States. The way we do business, what we take for granted in terms of currency stability – those things can be predicated on what happened December 22, 1913. So what we want to do is explore with Mr. Griffin. Last week, we brought ourselves up to the 1913 period. But we didn’t really explore what the Federal Reserve is, what its creation was intended to do, or what its purpose was. So let’s start with that and see what the role of the Fed was intended to be. What is this organization?

E.G. I am delighted to hear intense interest in the historical detail of this because without that knowledge it’s pretty hard to understand what’s going on today. And of course if we don’t know what’s going on today, we have no chance at all to know what’s going to happen tomorrow – which is probably where most people's concern is.

We had a lot of banking problems in the United States and runs on the bank [prior to 1913]. The banks were all chartered by the various states, and the charters were all pretty much the same. The bottom line is that what we have in the form of the Federal Reserve System today was already in existence, more or less, at the state level and in all the various states. In other words it was a partnership between the state governments and the state banks, and that partnership was such that the banks were legally allowed to participate in what is called fractional reserve banking.

What this means is that they were able to issue banknotes that people accepted as money – paper currency issued by the banks themselves. But those notes were far in excess of the actual reserves which were held in the vaults of the banks. That worked for a while, until everyone wanted their money back. The people have money on deposit in the bank, usually with the confidence that, well, it’s my money, and if I need it for an emergency or if I don’t like the way this bank is operating – or if I just want to put it somewhere else, I can always go and get it. That’s the general promise of the bank. That’s what they call a demand deposit, but the point is that if more than 3, 4, or 5% of the depositors want their money back, the bank is exposed – because the bank doesn’t have that money. It’s loaned out. So those were the occasions where runs on the banks occurred; banks went bankrupt because they didn’t have the assets they claimed they did. Banks went out of existence; people lost their money; it was a terrible situation.

This was a periodic thing that went on throughout history. Certainly it was going on in America at that time, so now we come to 1913. The public was fed up with this. The banks were worried about it because they didn’t like being exposed in this fashion. They didn’t like having people all demanding their money back, and declaring bankruptcy.

So now we come to 1913, and this very mysterious trip to Jekyll Island – well, actually that happened in 1910. The Federal Reserve Act was passed into law in 1913. But the drafting of the act and all of the planning started in 1910 – at a very special, very private, and very secret meeting on Jekyll Island.

Now Jekyll Island has a mysterious sound to it, but it’s a real island. A lot of people assume that it was a mythological island, something like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It has that mysterious sound to it. But it’s a real island off the coast of Georgia, and in those days, 1910, the island was completely privately owned by a small group of billionaires from New York. People like JP Morgan, William Rockefeller, and their business associates. They went for the cold winter months to escape New York. They had beautiful homes there, and they had a beautiful clubhouse, which is still there. You can visit it today. It was in that clubhouse that the seven leaders of the financial world, literally – at least of the United States: the JP Morgans, the Rockefeller interests, the Kuhn Loeb companies, and people like that in international investment firms – that’s where they all went and they went in secret. They denied to anybody who inquired that they ever went to this meeting.

It wasn’t until quite a few years after the Federal Reserve System was passed into law and became revered by the population as a great American institution – only then did they begin to talk openly about it. But the underlying fact is that they did go there under conditions of great secrecy, and they drafted the Federal Reserve Act there, and then they brought it back to Washington, DC. It was passed into law after a great deal of debate, commotion, a lot of propaganda – all over a three-year period.

The significance of the secrecy is that the Federal Reserve Act was offered to the American people as a means of breaking the grip of the money trust. That was the phrase that was used in those days to sell this legislation because the American people were concerned about the financial grip the large investment firms and banks, insurance companies, etc. had on the economy. Primarily the problem centered around New York and Wall Street, and they wanted legislation that would control those forces and protect the American people.

Well, lo and behold, the very bill that was supposed to break the grip of the money trust turns out to have been written by the money trust – that’s what they did there. That was the reason for the secrecy. They didn’t want the world to know that this great anti-bank bill was written by the banks themselves. So, you begin to understand when you get into the historical details how much deception was built into the system at the very beginning. Even today most Americans think that the Federal Reserve System is a government agency, and was created to control the banks to benefit the American people.

It’s a complete deception because the truth of the matter is that the Federal Reserve System as it was created on Jekyll Island by these representatives of the very large banks was a cartel, not a government agency at all – a cartel no different than a banana cartel, a sugar cartel, or an oil cartel. It was a banking cartel, and they created the cartel agreement on Jekyll Island.

Then they said, how are we going to force all of the banks, the newcomers, and all of the American people to abide by our cartel agreement? That’s simple: We take the agreement, make it into legislation, and pass it into law. We get the bubblehead congressmen to pass our agreement into law and call it the Federal Reserve Act, and that’s exactly what they did. So the cartel agreement is put in place as a law, and you must abide by it or go to prison because it now has government support and enforcement.

The Federal Reserve System has the appearance of a government agency, and engages in a little bit of political involvement mostly for show, but the institution is primarily completely independent. In fact, instead of the Congress controlling the Federal Reserve System, as it ought to, it’s more the other way around. Now it’s the Federal Reserve System controlling Congress.

You can certainly see that recently with all of the expenditures of taxpayer money. The Congressmen vote without even reading these bills. They are just told what to do by the banks, the bank representatives, the Federal Reserve, and the Secretary of the Treasury – who always comes from the banks. They are just told what to vote for, and they just vote for it because they know that the real power lies in financial institutions.

So we’ve got a creation here: a cartel that was supposed to control the banks, but instead the banks are now controlling the government. And it is all done in the name of protecting the economy, working on behalf of the American citizens, preventing bank failures, and that sort of thing. Well, it does prevent bank failure. We have to give it credit for that. How does it do that? Simply by taking money out of the pockets of taxpayers and giving it to the failing banks whenever they get in trouble.

They call it a bailout program, or a stimulus package, or something like that, but when you look at the real essence, it’s plundering the American taxpayer and putting the money into the banks – replacing their ledgers whenever they lose a lot of money.

K.O. Well, Mr. Griffin, we’ve always enjoyed reading your book, and going back and referencing it. But I have to say Chapter 2 is probably one of the more condensed ways of understanding how the Federal Reserve actually sells what they’re doing. You said in Chapter 2 of The Creature from Jekyll Island that the name of the game is bailout. Could you explain briefly what that means?

E.G. Yes, I’m glad you like that chapter. I had a bit of fun creating it.
The banks know that they have their cartel agreement enforced by law, so they are not too concerned about losses. They know that no matter what decisions they make, if their loans go sour, they can absorb small losses. When the big losses come down the line, they know that they can go to Congress and say, "Hey, we need money to make up losses and we need it because it's in the interest of the American people. We don't want the economy to collapse; we don't want the banking system to collapse; we don't want corporations to go out of existence. Look at all the thousands of people who would lose their jobs, and a lot of these workers have families and children. The children won't have milk to drink." You know, all this heart-string stuff.

Basically they’re just trying to cover up the truth because they want taxpayer money to bail out their bad business decisions – but they always frame the issue in terms of protecting the nation. As a result, they're free to make loans to just about anybody.

Now, small loans they're very careful about. If you go into a bank to borrow some money for a car or house, they look you over very carefully – they look at your ability to pay. They are very cautious about that. But if you are a huge entity like a giant automobile company, or a city like New York City, or you’re huge like Mexico – and you're not just talking about borrowing ten or twenty thousand dollars or two hundred thousand dollars, but rather millions or billions of dollars, this becomes very attractive to the banks because they don't make money on anything except interest on loans. That's their whole business. They need to make huge loans and collect interest on these loans; that's their life blood. So they think: here's a loan to Mexico or here's a loan to China; think of the interest we can get off this loan. So they make bad loans, that's the bottom line.

Eventually, of course, some borrowers have trouble making the interest payments on those loans, and they start to get behind on their payments. What's the bank supposed to do with a country that's behind on its payments – or a large automobile company, or whatever? The banks can't really go and foreclose on an automobile company or a country, so the bank is kind of in a quandary.

So this is what they say: We're going to extend your payment period. We are going to make it easier for you; we're going to give you a break, and you won't have to pay this month – we'll extend the loan. In other words, we're going to extend the loan to the borrower so he can pay the interest, and we can continue to collect interest, but the corpus of the loan increases. The executives of the corporation or the political leaders of the country say: That's a hot deal; that's a way we can continue to have this money. And they use it for their purposes. We won't go into their purposes, but they get the loan extended and that works for a while.

After a while, though, they can't make the payments on the new loan either, so the banks say: I'll tell you what, let's just roll over the debt. We'll cancel it out. It’ll be a whole new debt, and it will be a larger debt, and we will expand the term from two years to five years. That works for a while, and then that starts to fizzle out. They keep doing that, over and over again.

These restructurings are primarily cosmetic, and finally the lenders have to have the taxpayers put some money into the pot to cover delinquent payments. When the banks get to that point, they go to Congress and come up with a sad story about how we need to protect America by bailing out these bad loans. Bailing them out will preserve jobs, keep people working, keep the economy strong, and keep the country that borrowed the money from becoming an enemy. After all if we force them into a tight spot with repayment demands, they may become enemies of America, and we don't need any more enemies.

So it's always framed as protecting and enhancing the interests of the American people. They get the American people on line through their Congressmen, who are pretty much captives of the whole system. Congress votes tax dollars for some kind of a stimulus program or some kind of a bailout program. But if you follow the buck, you'll always find that the buck goes into the coffers of the banks. The stimulus programs are there to allow the borrowers to continue to send the interest payments to the banks. That's where money ends up.

When Congress starts to resist, the banks go international for their money. They go to the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, and they say: This isn't really a national problem let's have these loans backed up or guaranteed by an international banking agency, and the American people cheer because they think: that's not our money; that's coming from the world somehow. But they don’t realize that much of that money comes from the United States, and once again it's their nice friendly politicians in Washington who are voting the money to the IMF so it can go toward the interest payments on these loans, and it just goes around and around like that.

And finally a government agency steps in, like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and they guarantee loans with money they don't have. So where will that money come from? It comes from the taxpayers. This is the game called "bailout" and we certainly see it playing out in full force today, not only in billions, but in trillions of dollars.

If you watch these Congressmen on C-Span as they talk about what they're going to do, you realize that these guys don't have a clue. They're just being herded along. They're being told by leaders of the banking industry that if they don't vote for these bailout programs immediately, the whole banking system will collapse. America will collapse. The world will collapse. And you don’t want that on your conscience, do you Mr. Congressman? And they say, oh, no sir. So they just vote without reading these bills. They don’t have any idea how it works, and they don’t care. They just want to cover their derrieres, so if everything goes badly they will say, don’t blame me, I voted to bail out the system.

Around and around it goes, and unfortunately the average voter doesn't understand the game either. So while he's cheering all these great moves, thinking they're for his benefit, you know there are other agencies taking money away as taxes. I'm talking about taking money away from the people through their taxes and through inflation, so the spectators are being run through the ringer royally. They don't even know it, and they think that what's happening is all for their benefit.

D.M. What we've described is a past-tense play that has been followed through in detail: rescheduling the debt, rolling it over, extending the payment periods, ultimately passing it on to the taxpayer, and allowing the FDIC to play its part. The book that you wrote sometime ago feels like it could be an exposé on the present-tense, though. This is the same playbook that has been in place, and has been utilized, not just in the last three years, but you go back through each of the financial crises of the last century. The Federal Reserve has implemented the same play, and ultimately passed the cost of its failures on to the taxpayers.

To close the loop, the real cost to taxpayers isn't that their effective tax rate went from, say, 20% to 25% – that's not the tax we're talking about. We're talking about the long-term decline of the dollar. We're talking about the fact that, in order to finance this scheme, the Fed has created an almost infinite sea of money. And the more money it creates, the less purchasing power the original stock of dollars has in the marketplace.

From 1913 to the present, we're looking at close to a 95-97% devaluation of the dollar, and that is how we have bailed the bankers out. That is how we have paid for this system. Some people got rich, and a lot of other people have gotten a lot poorer. There's a sociological commentary that can go with it and a political commentary as well, but in terms of economic commentary: the financial effect this has had on the American public is that we simply can't afford what we used to be able to afford. Three to five cents on the dollar is our purchasing power today.

E.G. Yes, I think that cannot be overstated. It takes a dollar today – not even a dollar, but a Federal Reserve note (which we call a dollar) – to buy what three cents would buy back when the Federal Reserve System was created. This is not an accident. That money went somewhere. That purchasing power went somewhere. It didn’t just disappear. It went somewhere.

Where did it go? It went into a pocket. It went to benefit the two partners in this scam: the government and the banks. They captured this lost purchasing power.

It's not merely an interesting phenomenon to read about. These people know full well – I call them monetary scientists – they know full well how to extract money from the American people without them even knowing it. Of course, that's the ideal way, if you're going to rob somebody. It's better to do it without them knowing it. Otherwise, they might resist, they might fight back. And the bankers don't want that.

That's the great value of inflation to the banks – and to the government, of course, which is a partner in this whole thing. You mentioned looking into the future of all this, and for those who like the second chapter in my book, I would urge them to go to the second-to-the-last chapter. That chapter is kind of a whimsical look into the future, and it was drafted in 1994. I just put my thinking cap on, and said, I wonder what it would be like if this trend continues. So I came up with this scenario.

I hadn't read it in many years, but when all of these bailouts began to happen in explosive quantities, I went back and reread this chapter. It blew my socks off. I didn't realize that it was possible to predict so accurately even the minor details, even the language being used to sell this scam. It's all there, and a lot of people say: Gee, you must have a crystal ball, you must be a genius. No, none of the above, all you need to know is what the game is and to know what they have done in the past. You can always predict the future if you know what the past is.

D.M. You’re right. It doesn’t take a crystal ball. It does take perspective.

The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor (MIA), September 2009; reprinted by permission. For more information on MIA, please call 1-877-622-5826 or go to www.MIAtoday.com.

October 31st: Reformation Day or Halloween?

2009-10-29T14:59:00.000-07:00

by James and Barbara Rose

October 31st is the day that Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Thesis to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany. From reading the Scriptures (Romans 1:17), he came to believe that justification by faith—not works—was the way of Salvation through Jesus Christ’s atoning death on the cross.

Halloween is also a “religious day” with roots in paganism and witchcraft. Celebrated on October 31st, Halloween “can be traced to the Druids, an order of priests in ancient Britain, who believed that on that evening, Samon, the lord of the dead, called forth evil spirits and spirits of the dead. They lighted great fires for sacrifices and protection. The sacrifices they required were human sacrifices from locals, with the promise that no harm would come to the household” ( Researched and compiled by the Challenge of America Ministry). “Later, ‘trick or treat’ meant begging for food for the village Halloween festivities in the name of their ancient gods” (Excerpts from “Christian Worldview, Vol. 4 No. 5, Sept./Oct. 1991). For Christians, celebrating Reformation Day is a positive alternative to Halloween.

Whether you celebrate the Reformation or not, it was providentially used in England to bring forth the Bible in English. “More than one hundred years before Luther, rose the ‘Morning-star of the Reformation,’ John Wycliffe, first in the line of evangelical reformers to whom the Gospel was the precious measure of reform. An important part of his ministry was to place the Bible in the heart of the individual. To do this, Wycliffe made one of the earliest translations of the Scriptures from the Latin into English (1382)” (Slater, Rosalie, Teaching and Learning America’s Christian History, the Principle Approach, FACE, p. 166). It was hand written with a quill pen. Wycliffe “published certain conclusions… that the New Testament or Gospel is a perfect rule of life and manners and ought to be read by the people” (Hall, Verna, The Christian History of the Constitution of the United States of America, Christian Self-Government (CHOC), FACE, p. 28A).

“William Tyndale is the Father of our present English Bible. It has been estimated that, (of Tyndale’s Bible—1525) that our Bibles retain at the present day something like eighty per cent in the Old Testament, and ninety per cent in the New. If this estimate may be accepted no grander tribute could be paid to the industry, scholarship, and genius of the pioneer whose indomitable resolution enabled him to persevere in labors prolonged through twelve long years of exile from the land that in his own words he so ‘loved and longed for’ (England) with the practical certainty of a violent death staring him all the while in the face” (Hall, CHOC, p.30). “After a sixteen month imprisonment, an ecclesiastical panel convicted Tyndale of heresy in August, 1536 and turned him over to the secular authority. In October of the same year he was executed, being first strangled and then burned at the stake.” (www.williamtyndale.com) William Tyandale’s last words were: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”

Myles Coverdale and John “Thomas Matthew” Rogers had remained loyal disciples the last six years of Tyndale's life, and they carried the English Bible project forward and even accelerated it. Coverdale finished translating the Old Testament, and in 1535 he printed the first complete Bible in the English language, making use of Luther's German text and the Latin as sources. Thus, the first complete English Bible was printed on October 4, 1535, and is known as the Coverdale Bible.

In 1539, Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, hired Myles Coverdale at the bequest of King Henry VIII to publish the “Great Bible.” It became the first English Bible authorized for public use, as it was distributed to every church, chained to the pulpit, and a reader was even provided so that the illiterate could hear the Word of God in plain English. It would seem that William Tyndale's last wish had been granted...just three years after his martyrdom (discipleaaron.christianexodus.us/libertypulpit/id80.htm).

Themes of the Reformation

SOLA FIDES - Faith alone
“The just shall live by faith.”
(Romans 1:17)

SOLA CHRISTO – Christ alone
“I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father,
but my me.”
(John 14:6)

SOLA SCRIPTURA – Scripture alone
“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God,
And is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction,
for instruction in righteousness:”
(II Timothy 3:16)

SOLA GRATIA – Grace alone
“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and not of yourselves: it is the
gift of God: not by works, lest any man should boast.”
(Ephesians 2:8, 9)

SOLI DEO GLORIA -- For the Glory of God Alone
“Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do,
do all to the glory of God.”

© 2009. Used by permission.

31 October Is Reformation Day

2009-10-29T14:25:00.000-07:00

by Peter Hammond

Saturday 31 October is the birthday of the Evangelical churches. On 31 October, 1517, Dr Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation with his bold stand at the Castle Church in Wittenberg.

Western civilisation has been blessed with the greatest freedoms, productivity and prosperity ever known in history. The liberty, standards of justice and creativity enjoyed in Western civilisation is a direct result of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century.

Our Lord Jesus Christ taught: “But seek first the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” Matthew 6:33

It was Martin Luther’s earnest quest for peace with God, and his intensive study of the Scriptures, which led him to challenge the unethical fund-raising tactics of the papacy and launch the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s love for the Word of God and his dedication to truth led him to challenge the entire ecclesiastical and political authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire.

“Unless I am convinced by Scripture, or by clear reasoning, that I am in error – for popes and councils have often erred and contradicted themselves – I cannot recant, for I am subject to the Scriptures I have quoted; my conscience is captive to the Word of God. It is unsafe and dangerous to do anything against one’s conscience. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. So help me God. Amen.”

In this incredibly courageous stand against the assembled, political and religious might of Europe, Luther argued for freedom of conscience based upon the authority of Scripture. Until that time, the prevailing practice was authoritarianism, both in church and state. All religions and cultures supported a monarchy, aristocracy and authoritarianism. However, Martin Luther and the Reformers maintained that, because of the depravity of man, no human authority could be trusted as absolute. He rejected ecclesiastical totalitarianism and championed the principle of Sola Scriptura – the Bible alone is our ultimate authority.

By translating the Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew into the common tongue, and making it widely available to both nobles and peasants, Luther championed universal education and literacy, the Priesthood of all Believers, freedom of conscience and religious liberty.

The Protestant doctrine of the Priesthood of all Believers became the foundation for modern representative republics. The equality of all men before God and the Law underlined the absolutism of monarchs and popes who set themselves above the Law.

Instead of the prevailing “Rex Lex” (the king is the law), the Reformers championed “Lex Rex” (the Law is king!). No one is above God’s Law. Jesus Christ is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Everyone is under God’s Law. Sola Scriptura eroded the foundations of ecclesiastical and political totalitarianism. The Protestant emphasis on the Priesthood of all Believers and the supreme authority of Scripture led to the concept of representative government and constitutional authority as the supreme law of the land.

By emphasising the Biblical doctrine of Faith as a gift of God, Luther undermined the Catholic Inquisition and provided the theological foundations for religious liberty and freedom of conscience.

The social implications of this religious Reformation were enormous. The doctrine of Sola Scriptura led to constitutionalism. The Priesthood of all Believers led to the concept of representative republics and democratic forms of government. Religious liberty and freedom of conscience led to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association and all the other out-workings of political and social freedom.

Ideas have consequences. There is no doubt that the Reformation in Europe during the 16th Century has to be seen as one of the most important epochs in the history of the world. The Reformation gave us the Bible – now freely available in our own languages.

Few people today realise that the first Bibles printed into English had to be printed in Germany and smuggled into England in bales of cotton from Holland. And that the first Bible translator, William Tyndale, was burned at the stake for the crime of translating the Bible into English. Seven mothers and fathers were burned alive at Coventry for teaching their own children The Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostles Creed - in English.

The sacrifices made by the Reformers and the far-reaching impact of their courageous application of the Word of God to every area of life, needs to be rediscovered. The Christian Church has made more positive changes on earth than any other force or movement in History.

Most of the languages of the world were first codified and put into writing by Christian missionaries. More schools and universities have been started by Christians than any other religion, nation or group. Christian Reformers and missionaries have succeeded in bringing about the abolition of slavery, cannibalism, child sacrifice and widow burning. Those countries which enjoy the most civil liberties are those lands where the Gospel of Christ has penetrated the most.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is life changing, history making and nation transforming. If it doesn’t change your life and the lives of those around you, then it’s not the Biblical Gospel.

The Reformers emphasised God’s Sovereignty, that Scripture alone is our final authority, that Christ alone is the Head of the Church, and that justification is by God’s Grace alone, on the basis of the finished work of Christ, received by Faith alone. The Reformers’ teaching on the depravity of man, the Covenant and church government have influenced positive political and social developments in liberty throughout the Western world and beyond, establishing checks and balances, the separation of powers and constitutional authority.

All of us are beneficiaries of this tremendous movement for Faith and Freedom. If you love liberty, you need to re-examine the history and principles of the Reformation. Visit www.ReformationSA.org for inspirational character studies and articles on the doctrines and events which God has used to transform whole nations and bring about the greatest spiritual Revivals ever known.

A wide variety of Reformation resources, including dynamic Reformation character studies, lectures and sermons on audio CD and MP3 and The Greatest Century of Reformation, The Power of Prayer Handbook, Reforming our Families, The Ten Commandments - God's Perfect Law of Liberty and The Apostles Creed - Firm Foundations for Your Faith books are available from The Reformation Society.

If you want to transform your community, and if you are praying for Revival, then contact The Reformation Society for resources you can use to inspire your family, school and congregation with examples of excellence.

“Will You not revive us again, that Your people may rejoice in You?” Psalm 85:6

Copyright 2009 Dr. Peter Hammond, used by permission
The Reformation Society
P O Box 74
Newlands 7725
Cape Town
South Africa
info@ReformationSA.org
www.ReformationSA.org

Leaving a Legacy of Victory

2009-10-29T13:39:00.000-07:00

by Marshall Foster

While many of our families are together this season, we have a wonderful opportunity to remember that we hold the keys to the future within our family “dynasties.” Psalm 108 (AMP) speaks of David’s “dynasty.” Throughout the centuries, the godly strategy of defeating evil has always been a bottom-up, generational, exponential, internal to external, family plan. God’s worldwide covenant of blessing was initiated through His servant Abraham. The Lord said He would not hide His plans from Abraham because He knew that Abraham would command and teach his children.

The most powerful force in America is not our government, our economy or our military. The force that has created the freest nations in history is the peaceful and virtually unreported armies of godly families. We can take leadership over all areas of society, if we mentor our families and friends to live out the Great Commission in the culture as well as the church. Here is a story to inspire and challenge your family. Notice the power of only a few individuals from one family tree that helped create two great nations.

John Knox, a former bodyguard and defrocked priest turned reformer, returned to his native Scotland, in 1560. He had spent 15 years in prison and exile. He preached the liberating gospel with such power from the pulpit of St.Giles Cathedral that much of his nation was converted. The culture and form of government itself was transformed in a decade.

Four generations later, one of John Knox’s great granddaughters married a minister named John Witherspoon. By this time, in the 1740’s, Scotland had once again entered a time of economic turmoil, famine and persecution from its powerful overlord to the south, England. The Witherspoon/Knox family endured trials and even imprisonment, as they worked to revive the true faith in their homeland. They persevered. Elizabeth and John had ten children. Five made it out of childhood.

Right before the founding of America, John and Elizabeth were called to America so that he could become the President of the College of New Jersey (Princeton University). In the 1760’s the Colonies were being pushed toward war with England. They were on the verge of either creating the world’s first constitutional republic or falling back into the European model of divine right kings and impoverished commoners. But if the Colonists were to succeed they would need political, military and spiritual leaders that would surpass any in history.

Witherspoon, as the head of the College of New Jersey, became the teacher of those future leaders. He combined a deep faith in the Biblical Christianity of the Reformation with an understanding of how to apply that faith to every academic discipline, including nation-building. During his tenure there were 478 graduates of his college. With only three professors including himself, John was able to mentor all who came to his school using the tutorial method in six academic fields. Then he was able to preach to them each Sunday in the church on campus. Of his graduates, at least 86 became active in civil government and included: one president (James Madison), one vice-president (Aaron Burr), 10 cabinet officers, 21 senators, 39 congressmen, 12 governors, a Supreme Court justice, and one attorney general.

Nearly one-fifth of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, one-sixth of the delegates of the Constitutional Convention, and one-fifth of the first Congress under the Constitution were graduates of the College of New Jersey. It can truly be said that John Witherspoon discipled his new nation by training the leaders, just as his ancestor, John Knox, had done in Scotland 200 years before.

Along with leading a college, and being a national leader of the Presbyterian Church, John threw his efforts into the political drive for freedom. He was elected to the Continental Congress and sat on 100 different committees. As the debate over independence raged in Philadelphia, on July 2, 1776, John stood to his feet and declared, “We are ripe for independence and in danger of becoming rotten for want of it—if we delay any longer!” He was the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence (22 others had ministerial training.) The British took their revenge out on him the next year as they ravaged his college and burned his personal and college libraries. He also lost two of his sons in the War for Independence.

John Witherspoon was an indispensable player used by God to help found this freest and most blessed of all nations. His words on a national day of prayer in 1776 still ring with the spiritual power of his relative, the fiery reformer of Scotland. “While we give praise to God, the supreme disposer of all events, for His interposition on our behalf, let us guard against the dangerous error of trusting in, or boasting of, an arm of flesh [human power]…. If your cause is just, if your principles are pure, and if your conduct is prudent, you need not fear the multitude of opposing hosts.”

John Witherspoon’s words and life speak to us from the “great cloud of witnesses.” This is our day on the stage of history. God is orchestrating world events and our lives so that “all things work together for good for those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”

I believe that around our dining tables this season are seated the “Knoxes” and “Witherspoons” of our day who will be used to disciple the nations in our time. May God give us the eyes to recognize them and the commitment to train them, while they are still in our sphere of influence!

From the Mayflower Institute Journal
© Copyright 2006
Mayflower Institute
P.O. Box 4673,
Thousand Oaks, Ca 91359
805-523-0072
http://www.mayflowerinstitute.com
http://www.worldhistoryinstitute.com

COLUMBUS means "CHRIST-BEARER"

2009-10-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

"No one should be afraid to take on any enterprise in the name of our Savior if it is right and the purpose is purely for His holy service." (Fols. 4-6 of Book of Prophecies by Christopher Columbus)

As a young boy, Columbus trusted Christ as his Savior and discovered the Ways of God. He felt that God wanted him to explore the world and find new land and people so that Christ could be proclaimed. He became an excellent sailor and businessman and overcame many problems with God's help, even mutiny and being bound in chains.

"All those who heard of my plan disregarded it mockingly and with laughter. . ... Who would doubt that this (idea for sailing west) . . . came from the Holy Spirit . . ." In Columbus' own writing, the "Book of Prophecies," we have evidence that "the Bible was the principal source of inspiration for the great Columbian enterprise." (Christopher Columbus: His Life and Discovery in the Light of His Prophecies by Kay Brigham. Libros CLIE, Spain, 1990 p. 53)

The Scripture that Columbus read and believed were the inspiration for his journey around the world. In a written statement from Columbus' own hand, he testified that it was from reading the book of Isaiah that he discovered that the world is round. Isaiah 40:22 "It is (God) that sits upon the circle of the earth." At a time when most believed that the earth was flat, it was the Scriptures that inspired Christopher Columbus to sail west. He wrote (from his diary, in reference to his discovery of "the New World"): "It was the Lord who put it into my mind. I could feel His hand upon me ... . . there is no question the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit because He comforted me with rays of marvelous illumination from the Holy Scriptures." (Ibid)

Republished courtesy of
AMERICAN CHRISTIAN HISTORY INSTITUE
Post Office Box 648, Palo Cedro, CA 96073
EAGLE'S AERIE

Samuel Eliot Morison on the Influence of Christopher Columbus in 1493

2009-10-12T12:12:00.000-07:00

by Ronald Kirk

On this Columbus Day 2009, let us consider the Prologue of Samuel Eliot Morison’s book Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus.¹In these few pages, Morison provides some astounding insight regarding Columbus’s impact on the outlook and consequent accomplishment of his own times.

First, Morison says that at the end of 1492 the prospect for Western Europe was depressing indeed. Christian civilization seemed to be contracting, while internal hostilities grew. For over a hundred years natural science stagnated and university enrollment shriveled. Institutions decayed, and cynicism, intellectual escapism and worship of a non-existent pagan golden age increased. Islam continued to grow, consuming Christian territory as it advanced. The Turks destroyed the Byzantine Empire, and conquered much of Greece, Albania and Serbia, and nearly took Vienna. Election of the infamous Rodrigo Borgia to the papacy reflected the base condition of the Roman Catholic church. With the essential collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the moral implosion of the church, Christians had little in the way of human encouragement. The result was a feeling "of profound disillusion, cynical pessimism and black despair."²

In 1493, Morison says the conclusion of the history of the world written in the book known as the Nuremberg Chronicle, asserts that the folio tome contains, "the events most worthy of notice from the beginning of the world to the calamity of our time" (emphasis added). Morison continues, "Lest any reader feel an unjustified optimism, the Nuremberg chroniclers place 1493 in the Sixth or penultimate Age of the world, and leave six blank pages on which to record events from the date of printing to the Day or Judgment."³

Just as with Savonarola’s imprecatory sermons at this time, the Nuremberg Chronicle includes a prophecy of the ending age, referencing God and Magog from the Book of Ezekiel, and a quotation from The Revelation 20:8 that indicates the next and final age will be worse even that their own evil time. Then, "The seventh angel will pour out the seventh vial, and the awful Day of Judgment, painted in the lurid colors of the Vision of Saint John, will conclude the history of a wicked world."⁴ These times were so appallingly bleak to those who lived them, they thought themselves to be living near to the end of the world.

Nonetheless, just as these extremely pessimistic thoughts were readied for publication, news of Christopher Columbus’s discovery in the New World came to Lisbon. Apparently, this news soon began to create a profound change in the outlook of Europe, according to Morison:

Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and astounding. "A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future" (Sir Charles Oman On the Writing of History P: 117).⁵

Bridging the gap between the Medieval past and the future, Christopher Columbus "became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory and accomplishment."

We see in pre-Columbian Europe a decadence and despair similar to that of our own age. With the present political climate and current, America arguably may soon cease to exist as we have known it. Much of the American church has spent the last several decades awaiting the rapture to remove the church from the dire evil consequences of the times.

Now here is a lesson for contemporary Christianity. Consider Samuel Morison—historian, man of the sea and United States Navy Admiral—who faced with his contemporaries one of the worst threats to western civilization in modern times: Hitler’s Germany and the Axis powers’ determination to conquer the world. Another grim time.

No doubt Morison wrote to encourage his contemporaries with his story of the intrepid, persevering and visionary Columbus. For in his first voyage, Columbus:

the Christ-bearer, would be the humble yet proud instrument of Europe's regeneration…He accomplished with a maximum of faith and a minimum of technique, a bare sufficiency of equipment and a superabundance of stout-heartedness, gave Europe new confidence in herself, more than doubled the area of Christianity, enlarged indefinitely the scope for human thought and speculation, and "led the way to those fields of freedom which, planted with great seed, have now sprung up to the fructification of the world.

In a world of now nearly 7 billion people,⁶ dependence upon the vision and ability of one man would be both naïve and dangerous. Naïve because true and lasting reform depends upon mankind’s general recognition of their Savior Jesus Christ, and His rightful kingdom. In Christ’s kingdom are many individuals saved by grace and entered into covenantal relationships—personal, civil and economic—of any and every kind. It is within this fabric of Christianity, through the benign influence of God’s people governed by the Word of God and His Holy Spirit, that civilization, liberty, justice and prosperity thrive. Dangerous because of the great temptation toward idolatrous dependence upon men. Such dependence always leads to oppression and tyranny, and further evil, not its remedy. For our own good, Christ will countenance no competition.

Rather, Morison’s characterization of Columbus should inspire us as individuals to take such leadership as Columbus exemplifies. We ought to rouse ourselves as our parents and grandparents did against the wickedness of men in World War II. We ought to rouse ourselves unto preparation according to God’s unique individual giftedness and calling. Thus the many may then contribute each his own vision and accomplishment, toward the recovery of the free and gracious society that Americans once knew, and even better.

Christ said that we must bear fruit. On this Columbus Day, let us, as he did, allow the Holy Spirit to inspire us to the great things He has determined to accomplish in us (Eph 2:10), to God’s glory and the blessings of men.

Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Little, Brown, and Company, 1942), 3-6.
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Central Intelligence Agency, The World Fact Book (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html).

To Be a Theocracy or Not to Be a Theocracy?

2009-09-30T10:38:00.000-07:00

by Ronald Kirk

Was early Christian America a theocracy? Should Christians desire a theocracy? What is a theocracy? What are the differences between the Biblical notion of theocracy and the American republic?

Part of the problem with these questions is the wild variation of meaning attached to the term theocracy. Meaning is further complicated by the negative connotation or spin propagated by its opponents, both Christian and non-Christian. For example, among militant non-Christians, it is great fashion to associate the term theocracy with the tyrannical Sharia law of Islam (though liberals are increasingly countenancing it). Christians often seem to interpret theocracy as a coercive, top-down civil order.¹ Another difficulty is theological confusion. For example, Noah Webster in his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language says that theocracy is: Government of a state by the immediate direction of God; or the state thus governed. Of this species the Israelites furnish an illustrious example. The theocracy lasted till the time of Saul. Noah Webster is my constant resort, but here I must disagree with him. Under God's providence, it is virtually impossible to externally enforce any civil order without the mediation of men. Thus, a direct theocracy is not possible. If it was, it would contradict God's purpose to bring volunteers unto Himself (Ps. 110:3). As it has always been God's intent to govern mankind, all of history might be considered a theocracy, though mostly of men in rebellion to it.

True enough, the term theocracy in its roots means essentially governed by God. And yes, ancient Israel is the only Biblical example of a would-be direct rule by God. God covenanted directly with Israel through Moses and later through His prophets. He gave His Law through Moses. However, even then this Law was not imposed from the top down. From the very beginning, the people gave unanimous and public consent to God's provisions for them (Ex. 19:7-8).

God did not wish to establish Himself among them through some divine-right king or man-god, as many of the ancient pagan rulers characterized themselves (e.g. Isaiah 14). Rather, God warned that such a king would end up a self-serving dictator (1 Sam. 8). This was never God's intent. Rather, God's rule is always in the form of a covenant with men, and godly men desire His benign rule. Certainly, God uses certain representative intermediaries including priests, prophets, judges and magistrates. In debased times, he even uses kings (1 Sam 8:6-7). Leaders are necessary according to capability of sinful men to live for God and on His terms. When the people are capable, God gives a restrained governor who rules in the fear of Him (Neh. 5:15). Ultimately, God purposes to establish a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Ex. 19:6, 1 Pet. 2:9).

Yes, early Israel—made to be slaves for 400 years in Egypt—acquired a slavish character. God therefore imposed a strict external discipline to help keep Israel separate from pagan influences, and with a full concentration on their sin, and their need of God. This so that His grace might prevail among them. God gives the kind of civil government their general character requires—dictatorship or even outright destruction if a poor character, or liberty and self-government to a people of virtuous character. Though external discipline over ancient Israel was necessary for their own good, the Great Commandments were to love God (Deut. 6:5) and love one's neighbor (Lev. 19:18).

Even under the good king David, Israel's status as a people governed by God depended on their personal virtue. David could never be the peoples' conscience, faith, character, or virtue. Neither could the priests be. The ritual and symbolic laws were disciplinary (educational) means taken by God to form a people—a people made of individuals willing and capable of loving God, and of self-government.

If Israel would not have resisted and rebelled, but rather let God so form them, the theocracy would have flourished. With many people standing for God in holiness, ready to live as He would have them, justice, liberty and goodness would flourish in society. Ultimately civil government would be a benign reflection of the people and would represent them. One of my favorite positive prophecies is that their nobles (leaders) would be from among them (i.e. true representatives—Jeremiah 30:21). The Israeli theocracy, though it left a positive legacy upon which God would build His Kingdom (in Christ), it was a failed theocracy. Grace must do what the Law cannot (Gal. 2:21).

In fact, it should be evident that a centralized or dictatorial power of government could never form a true theocracy. Why? Where does God's kingdom lie? It lies in the heart of men. Upon man's fall, God immediately implemented His eternal plan of redemption, a people prepared unto Him for eternity. This kingdom is first and necessarily internal. Even Jesus' disciples made the mistake of thinking at first that the kingdom should be a political one. Thus, they thought, Jesus would first defeat Rome, and then establish His rule on earth by force. This was not and is not His way (not in the Millennium either). In other words, God rules from the heart of man outward. Properly speaking every act of the Christian should come from the motive of God's love, with dependence upon His help. (Here is why early education is so critically important. Childhood is the time when the capacity for self-government is formed, and is best formed by constant, careful cultivation.)

Psalm 110, the most quoted Old Testament passage in the New Testament, indicates that Jesus will rule at the right hand of the Father, in the midst of His enemies, and through His volunteers (the peoples of God, Christ's body). This situation will remain until the Father makes all Jesus' enemies His footstool. The Bible says the last enemy is death.

To get to the core of the issue, theocracy essentially means a government by or under God. Is this not what we mean when we say Jesus is Lord? The kingdom can truly only be God's kingdom when it emerges in the real lives of His converted disciples. Internal qualities will express themselves. With this understanding, for Christians, divine-right kings and deified despots are completely excluded. We thus reject such an institutional theocracy. God's theocracy is through the covenantal union of many individuals, where He rules individually in each heart. Then, the people require little external government and liberty is the rule. “You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of men” (1 Cor. 7:23), not even Christian men.

Now we come to America…

Our founding fathers sought God to govern them—God is America's King—through self-restrained Christians intending to protect liberty and justice for everyone. This is theocracy in its fundamental sense. Anything short of this is destined to fail (under humanistic sin), for only when the righteous rule, do the people rejoice (Prov. 29:2).²

How do men know what is God's purpose—what content should rule in their individual and eventually their corporate lives? It is the Bible, taken as God's authoritative will. Paul said to walk in a manner worthy of our calling. How well we hit the mark, by faith and with the help of the Holy Spirit, determines how successful we will be. In ourselves, this is impossible. We depend upon God to bring the increase.

Again, the problem with any institutional theocracy is the very real and likely danger for do-gooder demagogues to make right through might, something our founders rejected absolutely. This appears to be the condition in the highest halls of American government at this time. That is exactly the Europe our founders escaped. They trusted God to trust Americans to do the right thing voluntarily. America's government is self-government (dependent upon God). If many individuals are themselves governed by God, they will govern on His behalf for everyone's good.

A theocracy in the unbiblical, pejorative sense is one where a man or group of men claim to speak for God and impose their view on others. This isn't even the theocracy of ancient Israel. When this occurred in Israel, it was rebellion, utter decadence and sin, and God judged it as such.

No one I know among those who believe in the early American view of theocracy seeks central control to force God on others. No, we seek government to return to its original purpose in America—to protect life, liberty and property—to provide justice, so that God's people may fulfill their individual callings in the context of a holy, covenantal community. Aside from the bully pulpit of moral authority such as Paul the Apostle applied to himself and so argued (the whole of 2 Corinthians), civil government has little legitimate authority beyond establishing justice. The Bible commands men to put evil away from their midst.³

By the way, America's founders never intended for America to be a democracy. America's present democracy is the result of the good guys avoiding responsibility and leaving a spiritual vacuum in the heart of American life. Democracy amounts to mob rule. Whoever can gain the majority, usually through ugly power-politics, can determine life for everyone else. I have read that the founders considered democracy the worst form of government.⁴ Rather, ours was a covenantal (constitutional), representative, republic. There are many differences between democracy and a Christian republic, but the essentials are local self-government, true representation, and limited government. The effect of the difference is the very difference between Europe's character and history, and early America's character and history. Europe became effete, while America grew quickly into the greatest nation ever known. This was true, though soon after the Constitution was founded, the foundations began to erode. The founders expected their children to grow in wisdom and grace to administer the republic. Instead, we have squandered its blessing on ourselves. Christians are essentially at fault, for from the time of the Constitution, Christians increasingly and until now virtually universally, abandoned the public sphere as unholy. Consequently, we now submit to the wicked ruling and the people groaning. From where will the righteous come to rule, if Christians do not universally assume stewardship of the great (internal and covenantal) theocracy America once represented?

The answer then is for Christian individuals to allow God's theocracy to rule in their hearts and lives, in all facets. For whether we eat or drink or whatever we do, we ought to do all to the glory of God. As increasing numbers of Christians so give their lives to Him and fulfill their callings within the spheres He has granted them, God will exert influence, by His Spirit, until His mountain fills the whole earth (Daniel 2:32). This means re-acquiring the Biblical knowledge, wisdom and skill necessary to administer free institutions in every sphere. Those capable of governing themselves may govern a family. Those capable of governing a family may govern a church. Those capable of governing a church may govern a city. Those capable of governing a city may govern a state or nation.⁵ After the home, the local church is the most apt place to begin to learn Christian liberty and leadership in practice (Eph. 4:11-13). With covenantal individuality, liberty with union, as the basic premise of the Kingdom, the implications to the institutional, local church should be obvious. Where else will the people of God in an extended community learn to be His representatives, His leaders, for the good of men and the glory of God?

As an educator of young people myself, one of my favorite poems is Julia Fletcher Carney's “Little Things”:

Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty oceans
And the pleasant land.
So the little moments,
Humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages
Of eternity.
So our little errors
Lead the soul away
From the paths of virtue
Far in sin to stray
Little deeds of kindness,
Little words of love,
Help to make earth happy
Like the heavens above.⁶

I think Mrs. Carney might have had Jesus' prayer in mind: “Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

(Special thanks to Karen B. for inspiring this article!)
© 2009, Nordskog Publishing, Inc.

The internet is rife with Christian, anti-theocratic and theonomic (referring to God's Law Word) blogs. For example, Theocracy Watch (http://www.theocracywatch.org/), with Church of Christ and Episcopal members (http://www.theocracywatch.org/about_us2.htm ).
See Jerry Newcombe, The Book that Made America: How the Bible Formed Our Nation (Ventura: Nordskog Publishing, Inc., 2009), for ample material as to the Biblical basis of America (http://nordskogpublishing.com/book-america.shtml ).
E.g. Deuteronomy 17:7, which is in the context of punishment for capital crimes. See Death Penalty on Trial: Taking a Life for a Life Taken (Ventura, CA.: Nordskog Publishing Inc., 2009), http://nordskogpublishing.com/book-death_penalty_on_trial.shtml.
For example, James Madison proclaimed in The Federalist Number 10, “Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” The Federalist, (Springfield, VA: Global Affairs Publishing Company, 1987), p. 49
This is essentially a paraphrase of a quote by Hugo Grotius, as found in Rosalie Slater, Teaching and Learning America's Christian History: The Principle Approach (San Francisco: Foundation for American Christian Education, 1975), p. 119, and reflects Proverbs 16:32.
From Burton Egbert Stevenson, The Home Book of Verse for Young Folks, (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, Inc., 1957), p. 110.

All Things are Possible: The Collective Faith Needed to Establish the Kingdom

2009-09-30T10:14:00.000-07:00

by Christopher J. Ortiz
Chalcedon Report, June 2009

If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. Mark 9:23

God said, "Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech" (Gen. 11:7). This was His divine response to the arrogant gesture on the part of man to "build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" (v. 4). God would not overturn the walls, as in Jericho, or flood the land, as in the time of Noah. He confounded their language, and the net result was the destruction of the city.

Whenever I read passages like Mark 9:23 about how all things are possible to them that believe, I think of the builders of Babel. Their unified ambition represents a form of faith that I've not considered as deeply as I should. It's the kind of faith that shapes history, whether for good, or evil.

Collective Faith

There are two basic ways most Christians understand faith. It is either an individual's confidence in God's promises (Rom. 4:18-22), or it represents the totality of the Christian belief system (Jude 3). However, a different form of faith operates within the collective hearts of humanistic men. It's a collective faith that is tragically absent from most of contemporary Christianity.

A collective faith involves the mutual hope of a group. It's not merely the concern of an individual, although it can begin with the thinking of individuals. Collective faith is the unified vision that fuels all of man's activities in order that a collective dream may be realized in history. This was Babel:

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Gen. 11:6

"Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do." Why? It is because nothing is impossible to them that believe. The collective faith of the builders of Babel would work to bring the impossible down to the realm of possibility. By this faith, they would attempt to move a mountain:

If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. Matt. 17:20

This is also where man's faith is futile. Whereas the spirit of antichrist drives universal man to build towers whose tops may reach to heaven, the City of God is a realized order that descends out of heaven from God (Rev. 21:10). Humanistic man may have faith for a world order, but he lacks the heavenly power to complete the project. However, the collective faith of God's people says, "Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it" (Ps. 127:1).

The meaning is not that Christians do not work for this city, but that the dream, power, and realization are supplied by the Almighty.

The Sower Sows the Word of the Kingdom

The Babelites were of one vision, and because of their ability to articulate and systematize the vision into doctrine, they could sustain a long-term building project. Therefore, God declared war on their vision by confounding the source of their power: their collective faith.

God destroyed their plans for the tower by destroying the multiplying capacity of their worldview. Without language, they could no longer propagate their dream.

St. Paul said that "God is not the author of confusion" (1 Cor. 14:33), but He is when it comes to foiling humanism's plans for a world order. However, the opposite is equally true and effective. Satan can "disrupt" the plans for the universal Kingdom of God, i.e., the Christian World Order, by a similar confusion:

When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he which received seed by the wayside. Matt. 13:19 (emphasis added)

The simplest way in which the word of the Kingdom is snatched from our hearts is by deeming it impossible. To most Christians, the suggestion of a universal Christian order without Christ's physical presence is as unlikely as a mountain moving into the sea. This is why we are defeated, and it's why humanistic man prevails in the building of his world order. His will to be as god recognizes no impossibility. What if we were of the same collective faith? Then, "nothing would be restrained from us, which we have imagined to do."

Our Lord has sown the word of the Kingdom with the objective of receiving a hundred-fold return of His reign in every sphere.

The Four Grounds

The parable of the sower is about our Lord seeking to establish His Kingdom by sowing that very word—or vision—into our hearts. His objective is a collective faith that would make world dominion—a seemingly impossible notion—a real possibility.

The four grounds of Matthew 13:18-23 illustrate for us the primary hindrances to that vision being cultivated within our hearts. There is the devil who comes to immediately steal the word away (v. 19); there is the rootlessness of those who cannot endure the persecution that comes from proclaiming the global rule of Christ (v. 21); and there are those who embrace the message but are removed from the battle because of the cares of the world or the deceitfulness of riches (v. 22)—the word is choked out by their occupation with other concerns or interests.

Those who have "good ground" hear, understand, and bring forth fruit in progressive stages. This is vital to note, because there will not be an external dominion without a corresponding development of that word within the lives of those who hear it. Remember, the parable states that the enemy "catcheth away that which was sown in his heart" (v. 19, emphasis added). This is not pietism—the heart is the power center for the collective faith.

We are Working Together to Create Good Ground

What is most needed is a collective faith on the part of God's people to seek first the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness (Matt. 6:33). This is the vision of the City of God—the Christian World Order. Until this is the resident belief of the majority of Christians, we will remain victims of the confounding of Satan with the resulting effect of being a scattered people unable to understand each other's speech, and therefore, unable to accomplish what we have imagined to do.

If we all believe, then all things become possible. Therefore, our primary objective should be to proclaim and secure the "word of the Kingdom" in as many as will receive it. If you consider the matter in this light, then organizations like Chalcedon, and a few others, become some of the most vital ministries in the world. We are the keepers of the flame, and the guardians of the brain trust. Our business is the word of the Kingdom.

This includes you, because you are as much a part of the work of Chalcedon as any staff member. Our callings are different, but the vision we serve is the same—we are collective in our faith but diverse in our expression.

This is why our mutual work must increase. We are contending with mass confusion (Babel) on the part of God's people. The world is filled with a multiplicity of churches, ministries, schools, and institutions, but each one advocates a different vision. If we were all to agree that our individual expressions work to serve this central calling of the advancing Kingdom, we would truly see the end of the contemporary Towers of Babel. Rushdoony wrote:

[T]he scattering of the ungodly, as at Babel (Gen. 11:1-9), is to prevent them from realizing their hopes of an anti-God order.¹

As it stands, it is the godly who are scattered, and it is the godly who are not realizing their hopes of a Christian social order. This can be changed, if we believe. It will not change overnight, and it will not be within our generation. Does that matter? The future depends upon our faithfulness now. Shall we leave future generations with little resources, or supply them with reams of literature and lectures from which they can continue the great campaign? By preserving and propagating the word of the Kingdom we are securing the seed that will eventually produce the hundred-fold return for our Lord. The choice is ours.

R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law: Law and Society (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1986), 198.

The Apostles’ Creed

2009-09-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

With Annotations by Christopher Hoops

Dr. R.J. Rushdoony, late president of Chalcedon Foundation, writes "The Apostles' Creed is like no other creed. …The faith of all other religions is in a body of ideas or claims concerning reality. … The Apostles' Creed is radically different: it offers a synopsis of history, created by God the Father Almighty, requiring salvation by Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, who entered the world, lived, died, and was resurrected in history, and is now the Lord and Judge of history. His holy congregation is operative in history, which culminates in the general resurrection and everlasting life. The whole Creed therefore is a declaration concerning history."¹

The following is a recitation of that great creed with added Scripture annotations from the Old Testament. These annotations illustrate that the Gospel—as described I Corinthians 15:1-4—originated in the Old Covenant, was believed on by the early church, and was truly the Faith of "the Fathers" (Acts 24:14; Mal. 4:6). Some New Testament references in italics highlight the fact that the New Testament writers frequently cite the Old Testament.

A creed is a statement of belief. Please understand, early Christians believed in something. They stood for something. As you read, note the first person pronoun "I" used in The Creed. The early Christian made a profession of Faith; he would say "I believe…" Believers often recited the Apostle's Creed as a baptismal confession. Under Roman rule, this affirmation could lead to one's death. For the Creed asserts salvation was to be found not in Rome or Caesar but in Christ alone and His rule over the nations of men. Ponder this fact as you consider the Creed.

I believe in GOD THE FATHER²

Genesis 1:1—"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
Exodus 3:14—"And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you."
Deuteronomy 6:4—" Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD."
Isaiah 9:6—"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace."
Psalm 68:6—"God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land."

ALMIGHTY…

Almighty means all powerful or sufficient. It is used no less than 57 times in the KJV of the Bible
Genesis. 17:1—"And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect."
Genesis 35:11—" And God said unto him, I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins."
Ruth 1:20—"And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me."
Ezekiel 10:5—"And the sound of the wings of the cherubim was heard even in the outer court, like the voice of Almighty God when He speaks."
(Note that 35 times throughout the Book of Job, God is referred to as "The Almighty.")

Maker of heaven and earth…

Genesis 1
Exodus 20:11—"For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it."
Proverbs 8:22-29—"The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth…"
Psalm 8:3—"When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained…"
Psalm 95:6—"Oh come, let us worship and bow down; Let us kneel before the LORD our Maker."

In the first Article we see God, the Father, as creator, "the Maker of heaven and earth." He is the Maker, sustainer and upholder of all things. He is revealed as "the Father." Though He made all things from nothing, "God the Father" is shown to be our divine parent and a personal God. Besides being Creator, Preserver, and Governor of His creation, our world, He is "Our Father" and we were created in His image, we are His children. He is called "the Almighty," the one true God and as such is our Sufficiency, Defender, Provider, Protector and Law-Giver. He is "all mighty." No one—nor all things together—is mightier than He. He made them and therefore all creation is subject to Him. In this article, an allusion to the Fourth Commandment is made (Ex. 20:11, "In six days the Lord made the heaven and the earth…"), and therefore the whole Law may be inferred.

And in JESUS CHRIST, His only Son…

Isaiah 7:14—"Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel."
Isaiah 9:6
Psalm 2:7—"I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee."
I Chronicles 22:10-11 (Heb. 1:5)—"He shall build an house for my name; and he shall be my son, and I will be his father; and I will establish the throne of his kingdom over Israel for ever."

Our LORD…

Psalm 110:1 (Matt. 22:14; Mk. 10:36; Lk. 20:42; Acts 2:34)—"The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool."

Who was conceived by the holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary…

Isaiah 7:14—"Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel."
Isaiah 9:6

Suffered under Pontius Pilate…

Isaiah 50:6—"I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting."
Isaiah 53:5—"But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed."

Was crucified…

Psalm 22:1—"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?"
Psalm 6:1-7—"O LORD, rebuke me not in thine anger, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure. Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak: O LORD, heal me; for my bones are vexed. My soul is also sore vexed: but thou, O LORD, how long? Return, O LORD, deliver my soul: oh save me for thy mercies' sake. For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks? I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears. Mine eye is consumed because of grief; it waxeth old because of all mine enemies."
Isaiah 53:7-9—"He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth."
Deuteronomy 21:23 (Gal. 3:13)—"His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day; (for he that is hanged is accursed of God); that thy land be not defiled, which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance."

Dead and buried…

Isaiah 53:9

He descended into Hell³…

Psalm 68:18 (Eph. 4:10)—"Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led captivity captive: thou hast received gifts for men; yea, for the rebellious also, that the LORD God might dwell among them." ("He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.")

The third day He rose from the dead…

Psalm 16:8-11 (Acts 2:34-35)—"I have set the LORD always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: my flesh also shall rest in hope. For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption."

He ascended into heaven…

Psalm 68:18
Psalm 110:1

And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty…

Psalm 16:8
Psalm 110:1

From thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead…

Psalm 96:10-13 (John 5:25-29; Acts 10:42; 2 Timothy 4:1; 1 Peter 4:5)—"Say among the heathen that the LORD reigneth: the world also shall be established that it shall not be moved: he shall judge the people righteously. Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof. Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein: then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice Before the LORD: for he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth: he shall judge the world with righteousness, and the people with his truth." (e.g. "I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom" 2 Timothy 4:1.)
Psalm 67:4—"O let the nations be glad and sing for joy: for thou shalt judge the people righteously, and govern the nations upon earth. Selah."

In this second article the whole life and ministry of Christ is depicted as an historical record. The Christ is revealed to the world, "He came unto his own" and as the gospel accounts tell us He suffered, died, rose from the dead and ascended to the throne of God. Moreover, just as the Scriptures foretold, the Savior would be both God and man, Jesus is revealed as "the Son of God," "the suffering servant," the "Lamb of God," the resurrected Lord, "Judge of all men" ruler of "the nations" as prophesied in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the man Christ Jesus in the New Testament (1 Cor. 15:1-4).

I believe in the HOLY GHOST…

Genesis 1:2—"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
Psalm 51:11—"Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me."

The Holy catholic⁴ Church…

Psalm 40:10 (Romans 1:16)—"I have not hid thy righteousness within my heart; I have declared thy faithfulness and thy salvation: I have not concealed thy lovingkindness and thy truth from the great congregation." ("For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.")

The communion of saints…

Deuteronomy 33:3—"Yea, he loved the people; all his saints are in thy hand: and they sat down at thy feet; every one shall receive of thy words."
Psalm 50:5—"Gather my saints together unto me; those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice."

The forgiveness of sins…

Jeremiah 31:34—"And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."

The resurrection of the body…

Job 19:26—"And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God."
Isaiah 26:19—"Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead."
Daniel 12:2—"And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt."
Hosea 13:14 (John 5:25-29; I Cor. 15:55)—"I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction: repentance shall be hid from mine eyes." ( John 5:25-29: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself; And hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man. Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.")

And the life everlasting…

Daniel 12:2 (In the NT the phrase "everlasting life" appears no less than 16 times in the Gospels and epistles. It is no doubt taken from Daniel 12:2.)

In this third article of the Creed the third Person of the Holy Trinity is introduced and confessed. Clearly the work of the Holy Spirit may be found in the catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, resurrection of the body and life everlasting. The New Testament tells us that Jesus would send "another helper," a "Comforter," the Holy Spirit, and it is His work in the earth among men to build a church and prepare them for eternity and "life everlasting."

What Doctrines are addressed in The Creed?⁵

The Doctrine of God (monotheism). The one all-powerful personal Creator God.
The Trinity. God is one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is revealed to us in the Creed by the three "Articles." Article One, God the Father. Article Two, God the Son, Article Three, the Holy Spirit.
Christology. Doctrine of Christ, His incarnation, His earthly life and ministry, sacrifice on the cross, Christ's resurrection and ascension to the God's throne and glory as the current ruling and reigning Heavenly Monarch over all creation. (Rev. 2:26-27)
Anthropology. the creation of man (with all other things), his (Adam's) fall and the effects of it on his posterity.
Pneumatology. Gr. pneuma, wind or Spirit, or doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity. No doubt the reference is to the "office and work of the Holy Spirit."⁶
Ecclesiology. "The fifth part of Theology"⁷ the doctrine of the Church, the church is viewed as a community, a "holy nation," a "royal priesthood" a "priesthood of believers."
Soteriology.⁸ The doctrines of Grace, Salvation and forgiveness of sins.
Eschatology,⁹ or doctrines of final things. Notice that there is no mention of a future "millennium." As well, no other ancient Church Creed mentions a future "reign of Christ." They do proclaim that He is presently "sitting at the right hand of God" (Ps. 110:1; which Scriptural fact is a fundamental tenet of post millennialism). The New Testament refers to the risen Christ as the "the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords" (1 Tim. 6:15), and that He currently "rules" over the nation of the earth. Furthermore, the Creed specifically mentions "Second coming of Christ," the resurrection of both the just and unjust simultaneously, eternal life (and death), with Christ as judge over all men, "the quick and the dead" (see Daniel 12:1-3; Hosea 13:14, 1 Cor. 15:55; John 5:25-29).

The Creed is the first Symbol of the Christian Church. It is the foundation of all Christian doctrine and faith. It is not the whole of our faith, but the "symbol" of it. The Creed has played no little part in the life of the Church catholic. It is the first symbol of the Eastern Church, the Coptic, Ethiopic, Western Roman and the Church of the Reformation. It is the one Creed which the universal Church agrees on, and the first of our two thousand years history to represent our holy Faith to the world. It offers to those who appreciate it the orthodoxy and unity of the catholic¹⁰ church. One of the sad events of the last century has been the almost universal non-use of the Creed in public worship. Many reformed churches and the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church still recite it, but the protestant churches, and Baptist churches almost never do. One of the great problems of Christendom today is it too often stands for nothing and is open to many foreign ideas. Orthodoxy, the true doctrines of the Christian Faith, is no longer dogmatic. A Christian form of relativism has become part of the Churches faith. We must stand for something—truth, dogmatic orthodoxy—or we will accept anything. There is only one faith, one God, one Savior. Stand therefore.

About the Author: Christopher Rory Hoops was Nordskog Publishing's founding theology editor and dear friend. He was also pastor to our present theology editor, who finds big shoes to fill therein. See more about Chris Hoops here on our website: http://nordskogpublishing.com/staff.shtml

Dr. R.J. Rushdoony, Foundations of Social Order; p. 4.
Dr. Rushdoony refers to this version as The Received Form, or Textus Receptus, adopted by the Western Church c. 700. We have taken this version of the Creed from The Foundations of Social Order, p. 3.
The phrase, "descended into hell" did not appear in the Creed until after AD 500, there is no reference to it in the Nicene Creed and is considered by some not a part of the original. See Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II, Chap. 16, regarding this article of the Creed. He goes into great length to defend it, give historic background to it, and show its critics their shortcomings in rejecting it.
Catholic in this sense means universal, not Roman Catholic
The following is not intended to be an exhaustive list of doctrines. Volumes have been written using the Creed as their outline, and Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion is one such example. There are many commentaries on The Apostles' Creed. My aim is to point out that the Church has always believed the doctrines handed down to us by the Apostles'. For the idea of "No doctrine but Christ" or "I do not believe in doctrine, only Jesus and the Bible," are nonsense and divisive tools of ignorance.
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Eerdman's Pub. Co., 1970, Chapter VIII, The Holy Spirit, Vol. I. page 523-24.
Ibid. page 32, "The idea or nature of the Church; its attributes; its prerogatives, its organization."
Ibid., "Including the purpose and plan of God in reference to the salvation of man; the person and work of the Redeemer; the application of redemption of Christ to the people of God, in their regeneration, justification, sanctification; and the means of grace."
Ibid., "The doctrines which concern the state of the soul after death; the resurrection; the second advent of Christ; the general judgment and end of the world; heaven and hell."
See footnote #4, catholic refers to the world wide or universal church not the western Roman Catholic Church with its Pope and cardinals.

Statist Medicine

2009-09-13T23:22:00.000-07:00

by R.J. Rushdoony

(Although written in the middle of “The Cold War”, this article on government-sponsored medicine is relevant to the health-care debate going on today. --Ed.)

An important book published recently is Alexander Podrabinek’s Punitive Medicine.¹ The author is now serving a sentence of exile in Siberia. This is a careful and documented account of the use of psychiatry for political purposes in the U.S.S.R.

Notable opponents of the communist regime are discredited by being sentenced to mental institutions, there to be drugged and tortured into submission. The psychiatrists act on orders from above. They justify this prostitution of their profession by saying that no man in his right mind would speak out, take a stand against, or contradict and challenge the state system and the official ideology. “Normalcy” and mental health to them means living with the system. To question or fight the system is for them not a normal act nor a sensible one; hence, it is a sign of mental problems.

Thus, mental health is defined by conformity to the Marxist order, not by a sound mind in relationship to God, and to men in and under God. Normalcy and mental health become whatever the state decrees and does. Such a definition is very close to that of the Western democracies and their schools; men are group directed, subject to group dynamics, and are trained to regard the behavior of those resisting the group as “deviant.” (One mother of an intelligent boy, whose father was a noted scientist, was called to the public school to discuss her “deviant” son. His “problem,” which brought him under suspicion, was a preference for reading over playground horseplay.) The group is the norm; society determines standards and mental health. The Marxists have simply put this humanistic standard under more disciplined direction: not the group, but the state, determines normalcy and mental health.

As a result, we have what Podrabinek calls “legalized lawlessness.”² The new psychiatric “hospitals” are less evil,³ but all grow in perversity with time, and sadism becomes the order of the day among doctors and guards.⁴ No doubt, the courage of the resisters is a reproach to them, and intensifies their sadism and evil. Added to this is the fact that orderlies use patients for sexual perversions.⁵

The Soviet definition of mental health as conformity leads to strange diagnoses such as these: “She is suffering from nervous exhaustion caused by justice-seeking;” “You have schizo-dissent,” and so on.⁶ “Soviet psychiatry does not allow any opportunity for conscientious refusal to adapt.”⁷

Very aptly, Juliana Geran Pilan calls all this “The Shame of Soviet Medicine.”⁸ The problem is not restricted to psychiatry but is common to all medicine in Marxist countries. For example, venereal diseases are dogmatically called “bourgeois.” How can a bourgeois infection exist in a socialist paradise? It not only exists but is very widespread, although not acknowledged. No statistics are given on V.D.; it has supposedly been abolished. Because it has been abolished, there are no clinics to treat it. The unhappy patient must go to the “dermatology” clinics for treatment! Dermatologists visiting the Soviet Union are assumed to be specialists in venereal diseases.

The same is true of narcotics. The newspapers like to write about “The Absence of Addicts in the Soviet Union: One More Proof of the Superiority of Communism Over Capitalism.” All the while, the use of drugs flourishes, and a drug culture is very real.⁹

The point is clear. Diseases and problems do not “exist” unless the Marxist state allows them an official existence or recognition. Medical training is controlled; doctors and psychiatrists are controlled; hospitals are controlled; drugs, like all medical practice, are a state monopoly. The medical profession serves the state, not the patient. Doctors are a part of a bureaucracy which has a state-controlled life and conscience.

Punitive medicine? Of course. It cannot be otherwise. As Podrabinek notes: “Punitive medicine is a tool in the struggle against dissidents who cannot be punished by legal means.”¹⁰

The most serious mistake we can make is to treat punitive medicine as a Soviet aberration. We should instead see it as the logical conclusion of all socialized medicine.

The advocates of socialized medicine believe that such a step would bring more medical care to the poor and needy. The fact is that, at least in the United States, the poor have usually had more medical services rendered to them than any other class. The fact of their poverty has made them the recipients of free services, or subject to very nominal fees, and hence they have more readily used doctors.

But the problem goes deeper. Ostensibly, socialized medicine will serve the people. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, in his book, In Critical Condition, The Crisis in America’s Health Care (1972), sees socialized medicine as “the choice of conscience.” “The government” will supposedly have a conscience and a concern for the poor which doctors ostensibly lack. Private practitioners, whom he sees as grasping businessmen, will somehow all become Good Samaritans when the federal government controls them. His picture is a passionate, selected, and extremely partial one. It is also very unrealistic.

There is no reason to believe that socialized medicine anywhere will serve the people any better or as good as private practice. On the contrary it will serve the federal government. Let us remember, after all, that the Sixteenth Amendment (the income tax) was voted into the U.S. Constitution in the name of helping the poor! The income tax was to be limited to “soaking the rich” and distributing the wealth. It would make a freer and happier America possible. The worker would come into his own, and there would be a better America after all.

There is no reason to suppose that a socialized and federalized medicine will be any more benevolent that the Internal Revenue Service. The I.R.S., after all, was created with at least equal idealistic motives. Anyone who can think of the I.R.S. as the people’s friend today does indeed have mental problems! Socialized medicine will be no better than the I.R.S., and potentially far worse. Any and everything which puts us into contact with a powerful state and its bureaucracy is dangerous, and socialized medicine will place us in a very close relationship to that power-state: at pregnancy and childbirth, in ill health and accidents, for a variety of required medical examinations, and much more. Also, as euthanasia becomes an accepted practice like abortion, the more the state knows about you, the less safe you are.

Already, of course, the hand of the state is very heavy upon all doctors. Medical schools are extensively subsidized and thereby federalized. Because of funding, the medical school looks as much to Washington, D.C., as it does to the general practitioner, or the surgeon, and their problems. Hospitals are also serving the state and are more ready to displease doctors and patients than federal authorities. What the state controls serves state purposes.

Thus, Alexander Podrabinek’s Punitive Medicine gives us merely the avant garde aspect of the new medical practice, socialized medicine.

It is a very logical development. The state is a punitive agency or institution. Its purpose is to punish or to vindicate. Its basic and truest instruments are the courts, the police, and the military. Their purpose is to punish or to vindicate. The life of the state is geared to punitive action. St. Paul, in Romans 13:1-4, makes clear that the true function of the ministry of justice (the state) is to be a terror to evil-doers. The state is the agency of coercion. The church’s function is to educate; industry’s function is to produce, and the medical professions’ function is to heal. To place the healing arm of society under the coercive or punitive arm is the height of folly and unreason.

No realm taken over by the state has escaped its coercive and punitive nature, to the detriment of its original function. Thus, before the states in America took over education, the United States had the world’s lowest illiteracy rate and a remarkably capable populace. Today, after a century and a half of Horace Mann’s evil “reform,” state control of education, we have our highest illiteracy rate in history. Jonathan Kozol, in Prisoners of Silence, gives us some very alarming estimates, from federal and other sources. The Office of Education estimates that fifty seven million Americans are unequipped to carry out the most basic tasks. This means over 35% of the entire adult population. Some place the figure as high as sixty four million. Perhaps twenty three to thirty four million of these are illiterate; the rest can barely function. Illegal aliens, who may number as high as eight million, are not in these statistics at all. Kozol is a liberal, a concerned liberal. How does the teachers’ bureaucracy deal with all criticisms of its incompetence? With evidences of illiteracy among teachers themselves? Typical of its reaction is an article on “New Right’s Attack on Teachers” in the Tennessee Teacher, April 1980. Well, it is all an ugly conspiracy! “Since we as teachers believe in public education and in professional dignity, then surely we see the New Right as very wrong—a dangerous threat to the freedoms we inherited and continue to espouse.” A bureaucracy calls itself the vessel of freedom! This is 1984 and newspeak indeed! It is also the voice of monopoly and unreason. Coercion remains in the public schools, because they are agencies of the state: compulsory attendance laws, the persecution of Christian Schools, and the like. But education is disappearing.

There is no reason to believe that socialized medicine will be any better. It will rather become punitive medicine.

Thus, the problem is not merely a Soviet problem: it is our problem as well.

The sphere of the state is the ministry of justice according to the Bible. Its activities are properly punitive, and its jurisdiction must be limited to those areas which are legitimately punitive. Healing is not one of these. When the state takes over all areas, coercion prevails in all areas. As a result, because no independent, uncoerced, and free voice exists, corruption is the bribe. Without it, the economy would collapse.¹¹ As Brokhin further observed: “There will be a Watergate-style scandal in the Soviet Union. No party boss ever has been or ever will be brought to trial and jailed for bribery, corruption, or theft. If one corrupt high official were ever sent to jail, all the rest would have to go too, almost without exception.”¹² Where charges of corruption are made in the U.S.S.R., they are a façade for a personal vendetta, or for coercing dissent.

American life—and medicine—needs to be preserved from statist controls. Punitive medicine is not an agency of healing but an aspect of total terror. Those who seek it should be viewed with distrust. At the very least, they suffer from moral and intellectual myopia.

An important book published in 1980 is Alexander Podrabinek’s Punitive Medicine. The author served a sentence of exile in Siberia. This is a careful and documented account of the use of psychiatry for political purposes (at the time in the USSR);
Ibid., 99.
Ibid., 34.
Ibid., 30ff.
Ibid., 31.
Ibid., 78.
Ibid., 77.
Reason Magazine, January 1980.
See Yuri Brokhin: Hustling on Gorky Street, pp. 74, 121.
Punitive Medicine, 63.
Ibid., 97.
Ibid., 102.

(From the Chalcedon Medical Report #8, an early Chalcedon Foundation newsletter, as republished in Dr. R.J. Rushdoony’s Roots of Reconstruction book (first published in 1970 and updated in new editions through 2003), pp. 499-503. )

© Used with permission of Chalcedon Foundation (http://chalcedon.edu)

The Demise of the Golden Goose?

2009-09-13T23:00:00.000-07:00

by Elizabeth Skoglund

As children many of us became familiar with the Aesop fable about the goose that laid the golden egg. A man and his wife owned this very special goose who morning by morning deposited a golden egg at their feet. From it the couple grew very rich.

But then one day they got a brilliant idea. Why not kill the goose and take out all of her eggs at once? That way they would be even more rich. Once the goose was killed, however, came the shocking reality. Not only had they killed the good for the perfect, but in so doing they had lost the good. There were no more golden eggs. And now there was no goose to lay a golden egg tomorrow.

We in the United States have a healthcare system which is probably the best in the world. Flawed, yes. But still the best. The greatest test of its efficiency lies in the fact that when people in other countries need special medical care they still try to come here, even when they can afford to go anywhere in the world.

Let’s keep the golden goose, feed her better, change her environment a little, but not kill her in order to get something we think might be better. We may end up with simply a dead goose, a failed healthcare system.

Various statistics indicate that many people are contented with their healthcare. We don’t hear about them too often. However, there are definite problems inherent in the system: those who are uninsured or under-insured; those with pre-existing conditions who are therefore denied insurance; and those who for one reason or another do not receive quality care, to name a few.

It is important, however, to understand the real issues relating to healthcare and not just be taken in by the rhetoric. The people of pre-World War II Germany did not possess any unique bent toward evil. But they had been subjected to many years of brainwashing by power-hungry leaders. The use of words slowly eroded morality and enabled evil to be dramatically unleashed.

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor himself and a man with unusual insight into the Holocaust, wrote:

I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.¹

In the late nineteenth century, Friedrich Neitzsche’s philosophy and composer Richard Wagner’s prejudices laid the cultural groundwork for the Holocaust. Hitler was deeply influenced by both men; it is said that he often listened to Wagner’s music while making major military decisions.

In his masterpiece on the Third Reich, William Shirer wrote:

I think no one who lived in the Third Reich could have failed to be impressed by Nietzsche’s influence on it. His books might be full, as Santayana said, of “genial imbecility” and “boyish blasphemies.” Yet, Nazi scribblers never tired of extolling him. Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and publicized his veneration for the philosopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man....

Finally, there was Nietzsche’s prophecy of the coming elite who would rule the world and from whom the superman would spring. In The Will to Power, he exclaims: “A daring and ruler race is building itself up…The aim should be to prepare a transvaluation of values for a particularly strong kind of man, most highly gifted in intellect and will. This man and the elite around him will become the ‘lords of the earth.’”

Such rantings from one of Germany’s most original minds must have struck a responsive chord in Hitler’s littered mind. At any rate he appropriated them for his own – not only the thoughts but the philosopher’s penchant for grotesque exaggeration, and often his very words. “Lords of the Earth” is a familiar expression in Mein Kampf. That in the end Hitler considered himself the superman of Nietzsche’s prophecy cannot be doubted...

“Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner,” Hitler used to say.”²

The facts of our current healthcare system do not support a nihilistic approach, a tearing down of the old and rebuilding something totally new – killing the golden goose! Based on the 2007 census data, 45.7 million people in the United States are uninsured; 13.4% are native-born citizens, while 43.6% are non-citizen immigrants. To address the issue of illegal immigrants first, while I believe that it is morally imperative for everyone on U.S. soil to receive medical care, if illegals were forced to obey immigration/citizenship laws then there would be a large decrease in the demands on an already overburdened healthcare system. That would be major reform for both the economy and the availability of healthcare.

Having come from an immigrant family, I remember first-hand the stories of hardship and anxiety they went through. Obtaining money for the journey; passing health tests in order to be a legal immigrant; leaving loved ones behind, knowing that because of the distance involved and because travel was less common in the early 1900’s they might never see their family again. Then there was the struggle for jobs, housing and just survival. They waited and then worked hard and made it. They did not have a sense of entitlement about anything, including healthcare, but, of course, as they became absorbed into American life they shared in such benefits.

Many illegal immigrants here today have also worked hard and contributed to American life. But they entered through the wrong door of illegality. Just because illegal status has become a prolonged state does not mean it becomes okay. Yet, I would agree, that perhaps some equitable plan could be worked out for those who in every other way have been an asset to this country. Others who are not in that position but have become a drain on our resources should be required to start in their own country in making application to come to the United States.

For those who are already legal inhabitants of the United States, whether immigrants or not, a requirement to obtain healthcare insurance should perhaps be put into effect, similar to the requirement for mandatory drivers’ insurance. This would eliminate the burden on emergency rooms by people who are young enough to feel invincible (“I’ll never get sick enough to need medical care”) and those young enough or stupid enough to prefer to spend their money on something other than medical insurance. This alone would have a positive impact on the economy as well as on the quality of healthcare.³

For those too poor to buy insurance, or not qualified because of preexisting conditions, governmental help could appropriately intervene. Let us be aware, however, that some such programs which already exist, such as Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) are not always utilized or even enrolled in by those who need it. If insurance were mandatory, these programs might become more widely used. It is also possible that improvement within these programs would make them more appealing.

If it has not already been done, the amount of monetary savings from the above changes would be important to evaluate. Then, with the money saved, some positive changes could be made to improve care, rather than trying to save money by dumbing down the quality of government programs, like Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP. Cutting costs unfairly, so that competent medical care is not available, is not an answer to our healthcare problems. Doctors will refuse people in these programs, forcing patients to accept inferior care and eroding the patients’ right to choose. Making sure we care for our own citizens and requiring personal responsibility from these citizens through mandating insurance coverage should help both the cost and quality of medical care. Rationing healthcare is not an answer, nor is healthcare without choice.

As individuals we must be vigilant in informing ourselves and others about the massive changes which are being considered – and we must continue to be vigilant since changes may not come all at once but rather increment by increment over the next few years. A slow decline could bring us to a point which we never expected could happen. Before 1930 the German people may never have dreamed that a mentally retarded child, their own child perhaps, could have been euthanized as a “defective,” as a “useless eater,” as “life unworthy of life.” “But they were euthanized. For in 1920 a jurist Karl Binding and a neurologist Alfred Hache published The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life which promoted euthanasia for those with incurable physical or mental illness and for the severely retarded. The Journal of the American Medical Association reviewed the book in that same year. The book claimed cost as one reason for euthanasia and left the ultimate decision up to the state or physician. At this point, endorsed by Hitler, the concept of “life unworthy of life” was introduced to the German people. The book was well accepted. In the words of the late Paul Ramsey, a medical ethicist, “Remote possibilities are soon proximate, and soon done.”

Imagine a family of five – a mother and father, two children, and Uncle Joe, who is getting on in years and has therefore moved in with the family after the death of his wife.

When he first joined the family, Uncle Joe was fast living and hard drinking, but so full of wit and good humor that no one minded his shortcomings. When he was drunk, he went to sleep. Besides, he worked hard during the day, made a good salary, and contributed generously to the family’s support.

Times are changing, however. The family needs the money less now. With the father’s salary increases and the mother’s new job, life has become relatively easy. More than that, Uncle Joe has ceased to be fun. Rather than sleeping off his drinking bouts, he shouts and demands. Furthermore, he is moving toward retirement age, and no one relishes the idea of having him home all the time. The children are older now, and they want separate bedrooms. The mother is tired of cleaning up after him.

And then Uncle Joe has a stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed and unable to speak.

Uncle Joe has changed. The family has changed. And nobody wants Uncle Joe around anymore.

A nursing home is not an option. The government no longer pays for that. And it seems a shame to waste Uncle Joe’s life savings when his quality of life is so poor anyway. Uncle Joe, as they had known him, wouldn’t want that! Furthermore, the children need that extra money for college.

One day the father asks Uncle Joe to go with him to the doctor’s office for a flu shot. While Uncle Joe sits in his wheelchair, and turns pages in old magazines in the waiting room, the father has a brief consultation with the doctor regarding the old man’s health and state of mind. A few papers are signed, and Uncle Joe bares his arm for his shot. Then the father returns home, alone.

It wouldn’t be that hard to do, with the right mind-set. After all, why doom a nice man like Uncle Joe to an alcoholic’s death? Didn’t we do as much for the family dog last year?

When this happens the impossible will have become possible. Fiction will have become fact. The golden goose will be gone forever.

Footnotes

Viktor E. Frankl, M.D., The Doctor and the Soul (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1973), xxi.
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), 100.
Regarding this suggestion and the several following, we would prefer a private solution, especially early Christian America’s practice of forming voluntary associations—the Isaiah 58 and Ephesians 4:12 work of the ministry—for every social need. Possible civil remediation would include tort reform—a return to sanity in the civil courts. Other non-statist solutions have been offered.—NPI Ed.

Nordskog Publishing (NPI) provides articles and essay byvarious authors as a public service. We believe they offer significant value intheir viewpoint. However, opinions expressed are the opinion of the author, anddo not necessarily reflect the opinions of NPI, nor of its editorialstaff. NPI assumes no liabilityfor the opinions of others.