@RScottClark I don’t understand the need to be labeled reformed by our particular baptist friends. I have been surprised by your charity to baptists despite your beliefs on the continuity of the covenant of grace. I think you are often be misrepresented on this topic. https://t.co/4Fc0Q3HM0B
Thanks to the @oasishealthapp I’ve switched from poisonous FairLife Protein Milk to Bourbon and I can’t even begin to explain how much healthier I feel.
The SBC wants all of the respect of a denomination, but none of the theological and ecclesiastical responsibility. That’s why it’s devolved to where the President of its flagship seminary is anathematizing the type of female participation that exists in most Bible studies.
That Christian Nationalism has been producing such egregious breaches of the second and third commandments should be a cause for reflection upon the true nature of the movement.
I’m not going to post it here because it is foul, but the Truth Social post from the President is disgraceful. It is sophomoric and destructive and beneath the office of the President.
We’ve come a long way from “Speak softy, and carry a big stick.”
“The tongue is a small part of the body, and yet it boasts of great things. See how great a forest is set aflame by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, the very world of iniquity; the tongue is set among our members as that which defiles the entire body, and sets on fire the course of our life, and is set on fire by hell.”
-James 3:5-6
If you don't know why this is not good, we can't help you. Image-driven movements cannot resist violations of the biblical prohibition on images of deity. Government agencies cannot "reflect." It is not the job of law enforcement/military agencies to "promote the true religion."
The leader of the Baptists coming in to side with the man universally recognized as the most ridiculously racist and antisemitic podcaster on the internet today.
@sassiterian I highly recommend a murder mystery party. You can go online and purchase a kit that sets up the plot and characters for you. It would be dependent on having a few friends who will really commit but it’s some of the most fun I’ve had at a birthday party.
Theocrats/CNs/Theonomists/etc fail to account for the progress of revelation and redemptive history. They all write as if the state of that people has not expired (WCF 19.4) but it has. This was true in the 16th century and in the 17th century.
We can see it in some of the most important Reformed writings of the period against tyranny. In his treatise On The Right of Magistrates Theodore Beza did this very thing. Our writers all recognized that national Israel was a temporary, typological institution but they all also assumed that there must be a state religion. That assumption, more or less demanded that they contradict their own reading of redemptive history. So, they talked about the king of France, as if he were king David and France, as if it were national Israel. It was incoherent and it remained so.
The early post-apostolic theologians did not write this way. They recognized that national Israel was a temporary institution. They did not regard Rome as a successor, nor did they think that God had covenanted with Rome nor did they ask the magistrate to do the things that Jacob asks below. They knew that the purity and peace of the church was the responsibility of the church and not the state. The only thing they asked of the state was to be allowed to meet freely. They asked to be excused from the state religion. The reason that we were martyred in the second and third centuries was because we refused to participate in the state religion. They never argued that Rome had the wrong state religion and that they should institute Christianity and enforce religious orthodoxy and punish religious heterodoxy.
After the death of Christ, there is no national people of God to whom he has made national promises nor is there a state which state he has empowered to enforce religious orthodoxy and punish heterodoxy.
The apostle Paul and the apostle Peter speak to this explicitly and implicitly. They expected a magistrate to punish civil, not religious crimes.
This is why we never see anyone in the New Testament, not Jesus, not any of the apostles ever ask the magistrate to protect any state from religious error.
It is the church's job alone to protect itself from error. One of the errors from which it should protect itself is the very idea of being advocated in Jacob's post.
History matters. I know Americans are generally allergic to it but the historical truth is that when we started to ask the magistrate to do this, something we did not do for hundreds of years after the ascension of Jesus, we have almost always regretted it.
History tells us that magistrates do not care about the peace and purity of the church. What they care about is power. They almost always use the church for their own ends and that almost never serves the church well.