A church that agrees its nation's gross vices are merely "social issues" has surrendered the field, and is now told, by Dr. Joel Biermann and Dr. Jordan Cooper, that wanting it back is unreasonable.
“Christian Nationalism” in any dress is not the solution. It is simply the opposite error to Christian quietism and isolationism. Christian Nationalism belongs with the theology of Zwingli, Calvin, and the radical reformation.
We need to recover the Reformation’s understanding of the three estates of the temporal kingdom. This is not a “two kingdoms” issue, as many mistakenly frame it. It is how the three estates - the ordines politicus, domesticus (or oeconomicus, take your pick), and ecclesiasticus - interact. And note that in the Lutheran understanding of the three estates, the home comes first as the source of the other two.
A good start would be a careful reading of the three 1520 treatises of Luther that form the core of the Reformation - The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, To the Christian Nobility, and The Liberty of the Christian. These address the three estates specifically and meaningfully, and in my opinion, provide a template for the modern application of the three estates doctrine as we live out our temporal lives in the temporal kingdom even as we a fully citizens of the eternal one.
BTW, Dr. Biermann is correct in saying there is no “right to self-defense” in the Scriptures. But not for the reason he gives. There is no notion of “rights” at all in the Scriptures. The Declaration of Independence is not divinely inspired Scripture. “Rights” are a political construct and belong to the ordo politicus. The child in his or home does not claim “rights” and indeed has none. Nor does the congregation member in his church. We speak of duties, responsibilities, and gifts of grace. Not rights. The political “right” to self-defense is founded on the Scriptural concept of the sanctity of human life, which is at the heart of the 5th commandment. Similarly, the “right” to bear arms in the home is implicit in the right of the government to bear the sword. If the home cannot have a sword, neither can the government, since governing authority is derived from parental authority (see the 4th commandment).
Our problem is not that we have acquiesced to the age but that we have grown theologically sloppy in our thinking and have abandoned our Reformation roots for Calvinism and generic Protestantism. Before we can critique society, we need to get our own heads on straight about what life in the temporal kingdom looks like.
Indeed, we need to find out who, what, why, and how the Synod and CTCR became echo chambers for the broader cultural and political drift into godless hedonism.
I don't understand your (or Biermann's) point on rights. Biermann seems to use the "there are no rights" as a rhetorical means for attention and displays of piety for accusing others of making an idol of the self. But if rights are nothing more than setting forth how men treat one another, which means each man then in turn has a duty to treat other men in accordance, and the civil authority is to respect, protect, and enforce those rights and duties, how then does that differ from what Scripture teaches about how men are to treat one another and the purpose of civil authorities?
Take Biermann's claim that there is no right to life, which is upstream from his attack on the right to self-defense. He spoke of it as if people think this is a right asserted against God. I'm not surprised he would frame it in this way given his penchant for straw men, but that's not what it means to say there is a right to life (not to the Christian nor to the humanist). The right is in relation to other men. Whether you view is as God-ordained, natural rights/law, or some other construction, the right is always vis-a-vis your fellow man. And for the Christian looking at Scripture, God gave us life, we have a right to that life vis-a-vis other men, and other men have a duty not to unjustly take that life. The government wields the sword to protect life and punish murder.
Seems to me like Scripture does support that there is a right to life, a right to self-defense, and (a favorite of the LCMS) a right to not be slandered vis-a-vis our fellow men, not to mention other rights.
> how then does that differ from what Scripture teaches about how men are to treat one another and the purpose of civil authorities?
It does not. I think B is just pandering to the feminist and pacifist contingents in our congregants. Someone needs to throw them a lifeline, because people out in the wild (outside of church, within the US and the west) are fairly well along the way of waking up to violent attacks on our speech, our self protection, our gender roles, our homes, and our ability to practice Christ's religion. The true believers in woke insanity (and they exist, and are communing with you) can see that their way is losing favor, and they don't like it. I have no idea what B really thinks or believes but I don't need to in order to see what he is doing, politically.
Just like in the 50s and 60s when our church was swayed doctrinally by the foul feminist abortion communism free love wave, it's being swayed now by a needed correction to all that, again coming from the secular society. Too bad the church can't think for itself, and needs such a culturally driven corrective, but it cannot come too soon.
Absolutely, and that is why advocating against self defense of provider and protector, and against defense of baby, wife, child and dog, or even defense of life-sustaining property (where even some of the better civil laws are still lacking, but be patient) is actually reprobate. He is advocating a manifestly wicked position. I hope the circuit, the district, the synod, and B are reading this. Let Pr. H condemn B in the same words.
I respect your writings, Pastor and get your points. I appreciate your digging deeper than simple use of the word (rights).
But consider personal human rights of someone else, with respect to _you_ (only), imagining yourself as a lawless persons for a moment.
The other person has a right, versus you, to every article in the "second table."
Nobody has a right versus God, except at least in common translations, He actually gave us the right to become sons of God, and perhaps rights that flow from there.
Saying there are no rights resets against the current social sickness that finds perverse rights everywhere it looks, but isn't _reacting_ a temptation we all share, even those as knowledgeable as you?
The three estates cannot function in a godless society except as a carve-out that turns a denomination into Dreher's Benedict ghetto.
I am always mystified that some think Christian nationalism has to have a capital N, and that it always mimics Geneva with a terminus in the death of a Servetus.
Look at how the Goverment functioned in electoral Saxony in Luther's day or in the day of the Orthodox Lutheran Dogmaticians of the 17th Century. It would send any modern progressive running to the hills screaming about theocracy. What most today mean by Christian Nationalism is a lot milder then what was common among the Lutherans and doesn't go to the extremes of Geneva.
Yes, isn't it funny that our great reformation that we falsely blame for having to be passive about government matters and blame for our support of a government that cannot favor but onlyl disfavor Christianity - was protected by explicitly Christian rulers.
Your clarion call to the Western Church reminds me of that old Gary Larsen cartoon where a herd of cows are grazing in a field and one raises her head and declares "Hey, wait a minute! We're eating GRASS!"
As I reflect on the circumstances that lead to the enrollment of any saint into the "white robed army of the martyrs," I'm struck by the fact that, for the most part, Western "disciples of Christ" aren't really struggling under anything like the precursors necessary to join that army. We wouldn't dare to be offensive or to call out perverse moral behaviors for fear that we might be offensive or to lead people to conclude that God was anything other than a loving kindly old gentlemen that always offers us peppermints and hugs. I'm ashamed to see myself in the crowd of sheep that have watched the perverse parade you so beautifully catalog march by without so much as a whisper.
Jesus said “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles. When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved."
It's happening in China. It's happening in Africa. It's happening in the Middle East. Why is it not happening in Europe and America?
Jesus said "You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet."
We say that sin is caustic and destructive. We hear our Lord say that it is better to gouge out an eye or cut off a hand rather than going to hell intact. But we watch with bland acceptance as fellow human beings are destroying themselves in sin and say absolutely nothing.
Forgive us Father. Have mercy. Rouse us out of sinful sleep to light the lamps and sound the alarm to a dying and benighted world that the Kingdom of God is at hand! It'll likely get us killed, but that's what you called us to do!
The Bible is clear. In 1 Peter 3: 14 it teaches that God establishes Government to punish vice and promote virtue. A Government is legitimate to the degree that it fulfills this divine mandate. Modern secular government eats away at its legitimacy when it protects vice and punishes virtue.
“… treating the post-Christian future as ‘inevitable’ and the present secularity as where the country is simply headed, the characteristic posture of a whole handwringing class of churchmen who bewail the secularizing of the culture while refusing to see that the culture was surrendered. It was surrendered in no small part by the very ivory tower silence they now pretend is prudent realism.”
I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately, too, but my perspective, living in a “saltwater district,“ applies this also to the life of confessional Lutherans trying to survive in our saltwater districts. In the setting of deliberate surrender, silence, and in-action by Synod authorities (including current Synod authorities, as much as any other administration), we have had to spend substantial amounts of our lifetimes fighting costly battles just to be able to find a divine service out of our LCMS hymnal, and preaching that is not filled with leftist propaganda, so we can worship where we live. The same thing is happening with the moral decay in our geographic locations which district presidents, clergymen, and church workers freely bring into our LCMS congregations and institutions in our geographic locations, because they are permitted to do so without any interest or disciplinary oversight by Synod authorities who have decided that we, and fighting for our people, are not worth the fight, in their selective view of what battles are worth engaging their authority to fight.
I agree that Biermann‘s view is not one I would choose, but the present administration has done the same thing to many of us, so as far as elections and choices in church leadership, it is a choice between bad and worse. Obviously the present administration will continue because we have no other choice.
I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but it's a particular temptation to many of us to hate our own families more than we hate actual enemies.
If I may offer a suggestion without coming off as critical, the AI-generated preview image for this post (not shown in the post itself but in the posts list and in post previews) does not seem to be wholesome or modest. Yes, I know the article is about vice, but I think we would do well to only depict men and women in godly, wholesome, and modest ways.
Thanks for the feedback, which is appreciated. In this case, I will disagree on the grounds that a majority of the Synod seems to be slouching toward Gomorrah on these issues, fed by the CTCR's catechism over the decades. As with pro-life ministry, sometimes you have to show the dismembered corpse of a baby in order to awaken some to the reality of the act. There is no desire to shock or to be prurient, but the judgement call is that the illustration matches the intent of the story.
“Christian Nationalism” in any dress is not the solution. It is simply the opposite error to Christian quietism and isolationism. Christian Nationalism belongs with the theology of Zwingli, Calvin, and the radical reformation.
We need to recover the Reformation’s understanding of the three estates of the temporal kingdom. This is not a “two kingdoms” issue, as many mistakenly frame it. It is how the three estates - the ordines politicus, domesticus (or oeconomicus, take your pick), and ecclesiasticus - interact. And note that in the Lutheran understanding of the three estates, the home comes first as the source of the other two.
A good start would be a careful reading of the three 1520 treatises of Luther that form the core of the Reformation - The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, To the Christian Nobility, and The Liberty of the Christian. These address the three estates specifically and meaningfully, and in my opinion, provide a template for the modern application of the three estates doctrine as we live out our temporal lives in the temporal kingdom even as we a fully citizens of the eternal one.
BTW, Dr. Biermann is correct in saying there is no “right to self-defense” in the Scriptures. But not for the reason he gives. There is no notion of “rights” at all in the Scriptures. The Declaration of Independence is not divinely inspired Scripture. “Rights” are a political construct and belong to the ordo politicus. The child in his or home does not claim “rights” and indeed has none. Nor does the congregation member in his church. We speak of duties, responsibilities, and gifts of grace. Not rights. The political “right” to self-defense is founded on the Scriptural concept of the sanctity of human life, which is at the heart of the 5th commandment. Similarly, the “right” to bear arms in the home is implicit in the right of the government to bear the sword. If the home cannot have a sword, neither can the government, since governing authority is derived from parental authority (see the 4th commandment).
Our problem is not that we have acquiesced to the age but that we have grown theologically sloppy in our thinking and have abandoned our Reformation roots for Calvinism and generic Protestantism. Before we can critique society, we need to get our own heads on straight about what life in the temporal kingdom looks like.
Indeed, we need to find out who, what, why, and how the Synod and CTCR became echo chambers for the broader cultural and political drift into godless hedonism.
Pew sitters denying third use of the law.
Lutheran "comfort" teaching abused.
I confess as well, but I believe this is a correct diagnosis.
I don't understand your (or Biermann's) point on rights. Biermann seems to use the "there are no rights" as a rhetorical means for attention and displays of piety for accusing others of making an idol of the self. But if rights are nothing more than setting forth how men treat one another, which means each man then in turn has a duty to treat other men in accordance, and the civil authority is to respect, protect, and enforce those rights and duties, how then does that differ from what Scripture teaches about how men are to treat one another and the purpose of civil authorities?
Take Biermann's claim that there is no right to life, which is upstream from his attack on the right to self-defense. He spoke of it as if people think this is a right asserted against God. I'm not surprised he would frame it in this way given his penchant for straw men, but that's not what it means to say there is a right to life (not to the Christian nor to the humanist). The right is in relation to other men. Whether you view is as God-ordained, natural rights/law, or some other construction, the right is always vis-a-vis your fellow man. And for the Christian looking at Scripture, God gave us life, we have a right to that life vis-a-vis other men, and other men have a duty not to unjustly take that life. The government wields the sword to protect life and punish murder.
Seems to me like Scripture does support that there is a right to life, a right to self-defense, and (a favorite of the LCMS) a right to not be slandered vis-a-vis our fellow men, not to mention other rights.
> how then does that differ from what Scripture teaches about how men are to treat one another and the purpose of civil authorities?
It does not. I think B is just pandering to the feminist and pacifist contingents in our congregants. Someone needs to throw them a lifeline, because people out in the wild (outside of church, within the US and the west) are fairly well along the way of waking up to violent attacks on our speech, our self protection, our gender roles, our homes, and our ability to practice Christ's religion. The true believers in woke insanity (and they exist, and are communing with you) can see that their way is losing favor, and they don't like it. I have no idea what B really thinks or believes but I don't need to in order to see what he is doing, politically.
Just like in the 50s and 60s when our church was swayed doctrinally by the foul feminist abortion communism free love wave, it's being swayed now by a needed correction to all that, again coming from the secular society. Too bad the church can't think for itself, and needs such a culturally driven corrective, but it cannot come too soon.
Fine. I am cool with a duty to self defense since a duty is stronger then a right and more in line with the world view of the Large Catachism.
Absolutely, and that is why advocating against self defense of provider and protector, and against defense of baby, wife, child and dog, or even defense of life-sustaining property (where even some of the better civil laws are still lacking, but be patient) is actually reprobate. He is advocating a manifestly wicked position. I hope the circuit, the district, the synod, and B are reading this. Let Pr. H condemn B in the same words.
I respect your writings, Pastor and get your points. I appreciate your digging deeper than simple use of the word (rights).
But consider personal human rights of someone else, with respect to _you_ (only), imagining yourself as a lawless persons for a moment.
The other person has a right, versus you, to every article in the "second table."
Nobody has a right versus God, except at least in common translations, He actually gave us the right to become sons of God, and perhaps rights that flow from there.
Saying there are no rights resets against the current social sickness that finds perverse rights everywhere it looks, but isn't _reacting_ a temptation we all share, even those as knowledgeable as you?
I do say this in friendship and respect.
The three estates cannot function in a godless society except as a carve-out that turns a denomination into Dreher's Benedict ghetto.
I am always mystified that some think Christian nationalism has to have a capital N, and that it always mimics Geneva with a terminus in the death of a Servetus.
Just reactionary positions from doctors who really should know better.
I think they are scared of the shrill condemnation they would receive from women and cucked men if they spoke all of the truth.
> Dreher's Benedict ghetto.
Too small to even defend itself against violent attack. Not the answer.
1. Speak the truth.
2. Half the congregants scream. Be men and stand tall.
3. Maybe 10% actually leave. And by losing those 10% we will all be better off.
So how do we get a Christian nation if we are not allowed to talk about it, hope for it, are not in one, and a company approved version never existed?
Look at how the Goverment functioned in electoral Saxony in Luther's day or in the day of the Orthodox Lutheran Dogmaticians of the 17th Century. It would send any modern progressive running to the hills screaming about theocracy. What most today mean by Christian Nationalism is a lot milder then what was common among the Lutherans and doesn't go to the extremes of Geneva.
Yes, isn't it funny that our great reformation that we falsely blame for having to be passive about government matters and blame for our support of a government that cannot favor but onlyl disfavor Christianity - was protected by explicitly Christian rulers.
Your clarion call to the Western Church reminds me of that old Gary Larsen cartoon where a herd of cows are grazing in a field and one raises her head and declares "Hey, wait a minute! We're eating GRASS!"
As I reflect on the circumstances that lead to the enrollment of any saint into the "white robed army of the martyrs," I'm struck by the fact that, for the most part, Western "disciples of Christ" aren't really struggling under anything like the precursors necessary to join that army. We wouldn't dare to be offensive or to call out perverse moral behaviors for fear that we might be offensive or to lead people to conclude that God was anything other than a loving kindly old gentlemen that always offers us peppermints and hugs. I'm ashamed to see myself in the crowd of sheep that have watched the perverse parade you so beautifully catalog march by without so much as a whisper.
Jesus said “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles. When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved."
It's happening in China. It's happening in Africa. It's happening in the Middle East. Why is it not happening in Europe and America?
Jesus said "You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet."
We say that sin is caustic and destructive. We hear our Lord say that it is better to gouge out an eye or cut off a hand rather than going to hell intact. But we watch with bland acceptance as fellow human beings are destroying themselves in sin and say absolutely nothing.
Forgive us Father. Have mercy. Rouse us out of sinful sleep to light the lamps and sound the alarm to a dying and benighted world that the Kingdom of God is at hand! It'll likely get us killed, but that's what you called us to do!
The Bible is clear. In 1 Peter 3: 14 it teaches that God establishes Government to punish vice and promote virtue. A Government is legitimate to the degree that it fulfills this divine mandate. Modern secular government eats away at its legitimacy when it protects vice and punishes virtue.
“… treating the post-Christian future as ‘inevitable’ and the present secularity as where the country is simply headed, the characteristic posture of a whole handwringing class of churchmen who bewail the secularizing of the culture while refusing to see that the culture was surrendered. It was surrendered in no small part by the very ivory tower silence they now pretend is prudent realism.”
I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately, too, but my perspective, living in a “saltwater district,“ applies this also to the life of confessional Lutherans trying to survive in our saltwater districts. In the setting of deliberate surrender, silence, and in-action by Synod authorities (including current Synod authorities, as much as any other administration), we have had to spend substantial amounts of our lifetimes fighting costly battles just to be able to find a divine service out of our LCMS hymnal, and preaching that is not filled with leftist propaganda, so we can worship where we live. The same thing is happening with the moral decay in our geographic locations which district presidents, clergymen, and church workers freely bring into our LCMS congregations and institutions in our geographic locations, because they are permitted to do so without any interest or disciplinary oversight by Synod authorities who have decided that we, and fighting for our people, are not worth the fight, in their selective view of what battles are worth engaging their authority to fight.
I agree that Biermann‘s view is not one I would choose, but the present administration has done the same thing to many of us, so as far as elections and choices in church leadership, it is a choice between bad and worse. Obviously the present administration will continue because we have no other choice.
The present administration wasn't even interested in repealing the "Johnson amendment."
Too many MO scholars are living in a 16th century germanic principality, not in the US.
Pr. Cascione called them hyper-Euro-Lutherans
I've never understood the fascination with Anabaptists that some Lutherans have, but I do think it explains much.
https://youtu.be/Y6ym-fMvs2s?si=aqOvjmitepztSh3f
I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but it's a particular temptation to many of us to hate our own families more than we hate actual enemies.
Good article. Have you listened to any of the Frank Wright interviews in the past two weeks? Its analogous to this particular leftism.
Thanks. Have not listened to Frank, but will look him up.
If I may offer a suggestion without coming off as critical, the AI-generated preview image for this post (not shown in the post itself but in the posts list and in post previews) does not seem to be wholesome or modest. Yes, I know the article is about vice, but I think we would do well to only depict men and women in godly, wholesome, and modest ways.
Thanks for the feedback, which is appreciated. In this case, I will disagree on the grounds that a majority of the Synod seems to be slouching toward Gomorrah on these issues, fed by the CTCR's catechism over the decades. As with pro-life ministry, sometimes you have to show the dismembered corpse of a baby in order to awaken some to the reality of the act. There is no desire to shock or to be prurient, but the judgement call is that the illustration matches the intent of the story.
I think all AI imagery has an element of indecency inherent to it.
I assumed it was depicting the Whore of Babylon.
Correct. It is a version of William Blake's depiction. https://blakearchive.org/copy/biblicalwc?descId=but523.wc.01