Rabbit Cipher

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

@SovMichael @ConceptualJames
New guy on the scene here, figuring it's time to get involved.

Let's begin.

If you're a believer in our Lord Jesus Christ- please do not call yourself a Christian Nationalist, 1/6

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

@stephenehorn @BonifaceOption Not hard to do, considering the level of thought and discourse I see on here.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

Brother, You make compassion sound like a bioweapon, smuggled in by hospice nurses and Meals on Wheels volunteers.

Yes, compassion can be twisted - but the solution isn’t to torch the entire virtue. That’s like saying, “Courage has been misused by tyrants, so let’s outlaw bravery altogether.”

If your strategy for preserving civilization involves scorning care for the weak, you may protect your wallet, but you’ll lose your soul.

A society without mercy is not a fortress; it’s a museum of its own eventual ruin.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

Andrew, this sounds less like a sober warning and more like the late-night scribbles of someone who read Joe Rigney’s Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, misunderstood it completely, and decided empathy was the horseman of the apocalypse.

Let’s be clear: civilizations don’t fall because they cared too much for the weak. They fall when they trample them in the name of strength, efficiency, or ideological purity. Yes, I'll grant that empathy untethered from truth can become sentimentalism - but truth untethered from empathy becomes cruelty with a justification.

You want a civilization so armored against collapse that it forgets to be humane. But a “Christian” civilization/nation without compassion isn’t Christian at all - it’s just Rome in a nicer suit.

You’re worried empathy will bankrupt the nation. I’m worried apathy will bankrupt the Church.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

Awesome, the 1654 Baptist address to Cromwell-a fantastic example of nonconformists suddenly warming up to state power once it looked like *their* theology might have a seat at the table.

They pray for a government “established in righteousness,” which, translated, means: “govern as we interpret Scripture.” And their call to suppress “idolatry, atheism, and the contempt of ordinances”? That’s pretty rich-coming from a group that had spent years protesting state-imposed religion, now asking the state to impose theirs.

This is the perennial temptation of the godly minority: give them the reins, and soon they’re ready to sanctify the sword. Today it’s about suppressing blasphemy. Tomorrow it’s regulating who gets to sing Psalm 23 in public.

In sum: there's sincere piety, admirable zeal, but historically-and theologically- it's a cautionary tale. When the Church borrows the sword of the state, she always ends up cutting herself.

-A Presbyterian with a long memory and a short fuse for Lord Protectors.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

@Southernxhrist @PerfInjust Yes. Definitely.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

Let’s begin with this premise: that “resources are not limitless,” and therefore we must ask how much of the young’s labor is worth trading for a few more years of life for the elderly. A fair question-in a secular ethics class. But from a Christian pastor?

No, Andrew, we are not triage nurses at an atheist field hospital. We are Christ's brothers and sisters, not accountants. When did we trade in the image of the Good Samaritan for a cost-benefit analysis spreadsheet?

And invoking the COVID lockdowns here- what a twist! You see, Fred Butler wasn’t arguing for more Zoom school and Fauci bobbleheads. He was asking that we not start viewing his living, breathing wife as a budgetary liability. Your reply, while politely phrased, amounts to saying, “I hope she gets better, but she might be too expensive to justify.”

Now, you speak of youth and the future. But what future are we fighting for if it’s one where compassion is means-tested and love for the weak is priced per dialysis cycle? Is your vision of Christian civilization one where grandma is gently pushed toward the grave to make room for more iPads and stronger GDP?

And let’s talk about the Church, since you’re ostensibly a minister in it. The early Christians were known for rescuing abandoned infants and caring for plague victims-not asking whether the wheat supply justified saving them. They didn’t build Christendom by rationing mercy.

In the end, it’s not the elderly who are robbing the future. It’s the slow, creeping death of Christian compassion-killed not by scarcity, but by cynicism dressed up as stewardship.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

“Dry water”, very clever- a rhetorical flourish with all the substance of a meringue. The claim that nation and ethnicity are interchangeable might impress in a freshman debate round, but it wouldn’t survive ten minutes in a church history seminar-or, more importantly, a plain reading of Scripture.

Historically, nation has meant far more than shared ancestry. The Protestant world was stitched together by confessions, not chromosomes. The Reformers lived in places with more dialects than doctrinal unity some days, yet what bound them wasn’t blood but belief. If they’d waited for ethnic homogeneity before building a Christian society, we’d still be waiting for the Reformation to start.

And biblically? Israel leaves Egypt as a “mixed multitude.” Peter calls the church a “holy nation”-composed of every tribe and tongue, not one tight-knit ethnos. If “nation” must mean ethnic sameness, then Peter was writing nonsense. I’ll stick with Peter.

As for the remark about spotting a “solecism”-how quaint. These days, if a sentence has punctuation and a footnote of historical awareness, someone starts looking under the hood for suspicious machinery... so I'll write it off as a compliment.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

@shr_eax @PerfInjust Says the "cyberpastoralist".

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

Alright, I'll bite - that's an interesting accusation.

Let’s examine a rather glaring deviation from actual classical Protestantism-Wolfe’s insistence that a true Christian nation must be ethnically homogeneous. Not merely culturally coherent or religiously unified-no, ethnically uniform, by nature and design.

Now, anyone else reading this can already sense the pivot coming, can’t you? “Oh no, he doesn’t mean that-he just wants cultural stability and shared values!” Of course he does. That’s the Motte. But the Bailey, my friend, is where he waxes poetic about the nation as an ethnos, not merely a civitas. It’s all very Heidegger in a Geneva gown.

Calvin’s Geneva, on the other hand, was a theological Ellis Island—French refugees, Dutch exiles, Italian converts, and the occasional Englishman trying to figure out what a psalter was. Bucer’s Strasbourg? A polyglot patchwork of believers. None of them demanded “blood sameness.” They wanted doctrinal faithfulness, not DNA tests.

The Reformers didn’t teach that salvation runs along ethnic lines, nor did they build their political theology on folkish unity. They built it on covenants, not chromosomes.

So no-Wolfe’s ethnonationalism isn’t a retrieval of classical Protestantism. It’s more like an invention by selective citation, where Reformed categories are repurposed to prop up 19th-century nationalist romanticism, polished with enough scholastic jargon to pass the smell test in a Reformed bookstore.

It’s not that the Reformers wouldn’t recognize Wolfe’s project-it’s that they’d likely rebuke it for confusing the kingdom of Christ with the tribal preferences of men.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

Now, dear JD, I read your plea with the careful eye of a historian and the skepticism of a Calvinist. You’ve done your best to coat Webbon’s words in a fine evangelical varnish, but the grain underneath is still quite rough. Let’s be honest: if your friend didn’t want to be mistaken for a victim, he probably shouldn’t keep wrapping himself in the barbed wire of cultural martyrdom and posting his wounds like Instagram stories.

But let’s take your argument seriously. You say he didn’t call for harm-very well. But the modern game isn’t always played with bayonets and brickbats. Sometimes it’s played with dog whistles, passive-aggressive appeals to “our people,” and sermonettes that sound more like geopolitical Tinder bios: “Looking for a strong nation-state, must love tradition, distrust foreigners, and hate liberalism. Eschatology negotiable.”

You’re shocked-shocked-that people heard the rhetoric and said, “Wait a minute… this feels a bit Weimar, doesn’t it?” Well, when you start posting memes about crusaders and tweeting like Carl Schmitt ghostwrites your devotionals, people aren’t going to assume you’re just yearning for a simpler time with better liturgy and worse plumbing. They’re going to wonder why all your friends seem to be one degree of separation from a Telegram group called Benedict Option but with Tanks.

Now, as for the “decent Christian housewife in Texas,” I have no doubt she loves Jesus, cans peaches, and votes Republican. But she may not realize that the podcasters she shares with her small group Bible study are not just offering theology-they’re serving up political ideology with a thick layer of Christian buttercream. And when those ideas walk, talk, and gesture toward the language of 20th-century nationalist movements-well, the rest of us reserve the right to call it what it looks like.

So no, JD, I don’t think you’re all Nazis. But I do think if you don’t want the label, you might stop dancing so close to the wardrobe department at Triumph of the Will. And please/don’t accuse the rest of us of playing the nuclear card while your side’s out here reenacting the cultural Cold War in HD, complete with fallout shelters, jeremiads, and enough rhetorical radiation to give Reinhold Niebuhr a nosebleed.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

Goodie... the old false dilemma—either you oppose a nation defending itself, or you love dead soldiers. This is not argument; it’s emotional blackmail dressed in faux-patriotism.

If your theology can’t distinguish between honoring just defense and blindly enabling globalist adventurism, then your issue isn’t war-it’s moral confusion. No one I know is ‘cheering’ deployments. But pretending every conflict involving Israel is a ‘globalist blood feud’ is the kind of reductionism that gets people killed-or worse, radicalized.

Real patriots don’t exploit the suffering of veterans to score Twitter points. They grieve it and think clearly enough not to confuse Hamas propaganda with American foreign policy.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

@JoelWBerry The New Right loves self-defense-until Israel does it.

Suddenly the men who larp as crusaders and quote Joshua want ceasefires and “de-escalation.”

Maybe it was never about principle… just whose tribe was pulling the trigger.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

Stephen Wolfe, once again auditioning to be the chaplain of Völkisch Twitter, has offered us another one of his signature theological deep-dives-this time, all the way into the sewer. '2% of the population demand 100% of the wars,' he says, as if recycling anti-Semitic tropes from 1938 is somehow a courageous act of intellectual rebellion.

Now, I’ve seen bad takes. I’ve read poor theology. I’ve seen people confuse Calvin with Hobbes. But rarely do we get to witness a man use a statistic as a fig leaf for slander, while pretending it’s some kind of geopolitical insight. And from someone who just published a book about Christian nationalism, no less. Apparently, nationalism in his vision isn’t so much about loving your people as it is about blaming someone else’s.

Wolfe wants to be taken seriously as a Christian political thinker, but when pressed, he sounds less like Augustine and more like a guy quoting Stormfront footnotes with a Geneva Bible in hand.

Here’s a little lesson in Christian political theology, Stephen: the problem with the world isn't them - it's us. Sin runs through every people group, every tribe, every tongue - even those with Twitter bios full of ‘Christ is King’. And when your social commentary starts to mirror the rhetoric that got six million people exterminated, the issue isn’t Zionism. The issue is that you’ve traded in the Cross for a scapegoat.

But by all means, keep quoting 2% statistics like it’s a new thesis nailed to the Wittenberg door. Just know that Luther, for all his faults, would probably be throwing your manuscript into the Rhine - not publishing it in the name of Christ.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

Strange... coming from a man who wants to lead a national Christian revival from a pulpit made of internet sarcasm and Spurgeon memes. When someone calls out the very real stench of anti-Semitism wafting through his timeline, he doesn’t respond with repentance, clarification, or even Scripture… no, he pulls out Dwight Schrute. Because nothing says 'Reformer of Nations' like a mid-2000s sitcom character gesturing toward a coffin. Very Augustinian.

And when the accusation hits a little too close to home? Suddenly, Webbon isn’t a proud culture warrior anymore - he’s the victim, clutching his pearls and wondering how someone could possibly misinterpret his posts that consistently downplay Jewish suffering, mock Christian support for Israel, and flirt with language that would've made the 1930s a little too cozy. 'Leftist name-calling,' he cries, as though being called out for public foolishness is some new oppression unknown to church history.

When your entire brand is built on inflammatory rhetoric, and then you pretend to be shocked when people light matches, you’re not a martyr. You’re just flammable.

If Joel wants to keep playing pastor to the digital dissident right, he should at least be honest about his congregation. And if you’re getting mistaken for a Nazi more often than for a shepherd of Christ’s sheep, maybe - just maybe - it’s time to stop blaming the sheepdog and start checking your theology… and your Twitter likes."

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

Don't make him get his official DoD IQ test results off the fridge! Seriously though, I'm detecting some dark dad issues.

For someone in Jocko Willink's orbit, he sure has a thin skin.

https://t.co/pTlnZ4UC7x

[Martyr Made @martyrmade]

You want to post pictures of our IQ scores? I’ve got my result sheet from when the DoD administered the WAIS-IV in a drawer upstairs.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

Yes, Joel, and they also knew that bathing once a week was just fine. What you’re proposing here is the moral equivalent of saying, “Yes, Grandpa was a chain-smoking patriarch who thought leeches cured fever-but he hated divorce, and that’s what matters.” Commendable where commendable, yes. But don’t turn the family photo album into a theological blueprint.

And the old and beautiful “lesser sons of greater sires” chestnut. Joel, you seems to think that every generation is in a moral freefall unless we canonize the opinions of men whose favorite economic system was “child labor and no weekends.” Veneration is not the same as inspiration, and moral clarity in one area does not grant a plenary indulgence in anthropology.

Now, on to Charles Hodge.

God bless him-truly-but let’s not forget this is 19th-century Princeton we’re quoting, not Sinai. Hodge here offers a kind of theological phrenology with a respectable tie. He observes moral tendencies across ethnic lines and says, “Well, that seems accurate to me.” The problem? He mistakes generalization for revelation and observation for ordination. And Joel, rather conveniently, uses this to sanctify essentialist categories as if they were Beatitudes.

If you squint hard enough, you can almost see the ghost of Aristotle applauding from the back row: “Yes, yes! National virtues and vices—just like I said before Christ ruined everything with grace!”

So here’s the punchline, Joel: There’s a difference between honoring our fathers and baptizing their every assumption. Christ came to redeem us from both our sins and our tribal myths. Let’s not mistake ancestral myth-making for theological maturity. After all, isn’t it the lesser sons who keep trying to inherit without repentance?

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

@WC_Lawrence These are the same people that rightly blasted John Piper's emasculating stance against self-defense - and then proceeded to demand that Israel take it on the chin and wait to see if Iran was REEEEAAALLLLY building an atom bomb.

[Rabbit Cipher @RedRabbitCipher]

Here we go again, Joel Webbon - a man who wields theological categories like a broadsword in a library—loud, dramatic, and not particularly concerned with precision.

Joel, this is the kind of statement that gets standing ovations in YouTube comment sections and deep sighs at Reformed seminaries.

Let’s dig in.

First, “Evangelicals hate Christian Nationalism.”
Some do-especially the ones who’ve actually read Calvin and don’t think “baptizing the Constitution” is a sacrament. Others, however, are hosting conferences where the Apostles apparently forgot to found America. So no, they don’t hate Christian Nationalism-they just can’t define it without using the word “heritage” twelve times in one sentence.

Then, “Evangelicals love Judeo Nationalism.”
Not really. Most couldn’t distinguish Judeo Nationalism from a Jerusalem-themed Vacation Bible School. What they do love is thinking that defending modern Israel means Jesus will show up any minute now-preferably before student loan payments resume. It’s not theology, it’s eschatological cosplay.

So, “Make it make sense?”
Joel, my dear man-it doesn’t. Because evangelicalism, as it stands today, isn’t a system of thought; it’s a spiritual variety show. A little Billy Graham, a dash of Hal Lindsey, and a whole lot of Fox News prophecy segments. Expecting consistency here is like expecting liturgy at a megachurch fog machine demo.

And Christian Nationalism itself?
Well, it’s like trying to build a new Christendom out of tweets and t-shirts. A noble impulse, perhaps, but one that often confuses “the Great Commission” with “the Great Campaign Strategy.”