Laurel,

The position that believes that the new testament wipes out all the obligations of the old is called Marcionism. There are some who view most of the old testament as outmoded and they are called Dispensationalist, A semi-Marcionism if you will.

The position that believes that the new testament and Christ confirmed and restored in full measure the older testamental obligations is called Covenantalism. Historically Reformed Churches have held firm to a Covenantal position but unfortunately today many Reformed people take a middle ground between Covenantalism and Dispensationalism. They claim Covenantalism but speak like a dispensationalist in many ways.

A full Covenantalist would be one who is Theonomic in his views of civil government, Torah Submissive in his views of self-government and Ecclesiastical Continuity in his views of church government, and Patriarchal in his views of family government. A full Covenantalist would only believe that the Temple and all the shadows and types of Christ bound in Rituals of the Temple have been externally set aside. But even a few have been brought over. For example, Circumcision into Baptism and Passover into Lord Supper.

Sadly not many Reformed people today are a full covenantalist.

Regarding Love, Love is the Law. To love God with all your soul and to love your neighbor as yourself is done by keeping the Moral Law found in the Torah and Prophets. Christ said “if you love me obey my commandments..” Sadly today people take and separate Law and Love and make Love some ethereal subjective thing but scripture teaches that Love is the Law and it is objective. Christ said ” Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” What he is saying is that these two commandments are the summary of the ten commandments and in other places we learn that the ten commandments are themselves a summary of the entire moral law found in the old testament.

Again, Christ said “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to confirm. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. “

But like I said, Many Covenantalist speak like a dispensationalist today if when they say they are Covenantalist and Reformed..  Trust me, I deal with it on a daily bases.

Theo

Laurel Loflund - 26 July 2010 08:29 PM

Shotgun:

Doesn’t argument #2 only hold up if one believes that the New Testament wipes out all the obligations the Old? (There’s a fancy name for this, but I don’t remember what it is.)

My understanding is that Reformed Churches do not believe that position; that the OT, while not a detailed guide to behavior/dress/dietary/circumcision law, still has much to say about how we should live. If you completely disregard the OT, the ten commandments become null and void, being replaced by the law of Love (which will allow you to do pretty much anything, because you’re forgiven).

Does anyone know what that’s called? I’m afraid my theological terminology is kind of weak.

Laurel

Shotgun - 26 July 2010 03:37 PM

Argument 1:  Mr. B. Marinov, (no doubt hoping to bully people into conformity with his view) was fond of implying that “kinism” and “Marxism” go hand in hand because Marx and the communists played-up the distinctions among people.  So, in some ambiguous and undefined way, the “kinist” (a term, I suppose, Mr. Marinov is powerless to define) is really a “Marxist.”

Actually, Marxists do exactly the opposite. In fact, the term “racism” was a Marxist shibboleth whose meaning was to point up the irrelevance of racial distinctions. According to Marx, distinctions of birth or lineage are “bourgeois” conceptions that would be swept away by the revolution of the proletariat. Marxism’s paradigm is the undifferentiated brotherhood of man. It achieves this through the erasure of all distinctions between them: of race, class, ethnicity. It is the logical outworking of egalitarianism. This is precisely what miscegenation does, in a more narrow and limited sense. Miscegenation is biological egalitarianism. It proposes to erase distinctions by the commingling of genetic lineages, opposition to which Kinism promulgates. It is a vapid and meaningless critique and bears no scrutiny whatsoever. It was written by someone who knows nothing about either Marxism or Kinism.

This is a supposedly serious rebuttal of our views?

Here’s something interesting I found on Wiki about a French intellectual, Ernest Renan.

From Wiki:

Renan’s definition of a nation has been influential. This was given in his 1882 discourse Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (“What is a Nation?”). Whereas German writers like Fichte had defined the nation by objective criteria such as a race or an ethnic group “sharing common characteristics” (language, etc.), Renan defined it by the desire of a people to live together, which he summarized by a famous phrase, “avoir fait de grandes choses ensemble, vouloir en faire encore” (having done great things together and wishing to do more). Writing in the midst of the dispute concerning the Alsace-Lorraine region, he declared that the existence of a nation was based on a “daily plebiscite.”

Karl Deutsch (in “Nationalism and its alternatives”) suggested that a nation is “a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours.” This phrase is frequently, but mistakenly, attributed to Renan himself. He did indeed write that if “the essential element of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common”, they “must also have forgotten many things. Every French citizen must have forgotten the night of St. Bartholomew and the massacres in the 13th century in the South.”

But later on, in another work (also cited on wiki) he says this:

Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor…A race of tillers of the soil, the Negro; treat him with kindness and humanity, and all will be as it should; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race. Reduce this noble race to working in the ergastulum like Negros and Chinese, and they rebel… But the life at which our workers rebel would make a Chinese or a fellah happy, as they are not military creatures in the least. Let each one do what he is made for, and all will be well

Sounds like he wanted the best of both worlds.

I’m interested in reading about his case for a propositional nation over and against the “more objectively based concepts of nations.”

Another very stupid attack, that does not even make any sense:

St Paul on the Kinists: “professing themselves to be Confederates, they became Lincolnites” St Abe believed in segregation; he wanted to ship the blacks back to Africa. He was almost as much a racist as Jeremiah Wright, and Jesse Jackson…  Actually, I have come across a reference to a white Moravian man marrying a black woman in the 1700s. Cf. Mark Noll, The rise of evangelicalism, p. 162. So the accusation that Unitarians in Lincoln’s time were the first to advocate “race ...mixing” is bunk… In fact, the Irish Unitarians [and indeed orthodox Presbyterians in 19th century Ireland and Scotland] were critical of the American Unitarians for enforcing a form of racial segregation when it came to serving the Lord’s Supper…

Are these Neo-Babalists poorly educated 12 year olds or something?

Faust - 28 July 2010 09:19 PM

Another very stupid attack, that does not even make any sense:

St Paul on the Kinists: “professing themselves to be Confederates, they became Lincolnites” St Abe believed in segregation; he wanted to ship the blacks back to Africa. He was almost as much a racist as Jeremiah Wright, and Jesse Jackson…  Actually, I have come across a reference to a white Moravian man marrying a black woman in the 1700s. Cf. Mark Noll, The rise of evangelicalism, p. 162. So the accusation that Unitarians in Lincoln’s time were the first to advocate “race ...mixing” is bunk… In fact, the Irish Unitarians [and indeed orthodox Presbyterians in 19th century Ireland and Scotland] were critical of the American Unitarians for enforcing a form of racial segregation when it came to serving the Lord’s Supper…

Are these Neo-Babalists poorly educated 12 year olds or something?

Many of them are, or are “seminary students” -which usually means a man who wants a sabbatical to grow a beard and become a “patriarch” of his family.

I find it very odd that these Neo-Babalists seem to have houses full of Confederate Flags pictures of Confederate Officials while at same time attacking anyone with a 1950’s view of race relations, much less an 1850’s view.

This whole thread is astounding to read. From an Orthodox writer, here is a statement that should shed some light:

““..[N]either the Old Covenant nor the New Testament were ‘legal agreements,’ rather they were spousal relationships. This was the great error into which the Old Israel fell, and which the prophets warned them about. Israel did not recognize and receive the Christ because He came to her as a heavenly bridegroom seeking his bride. Israel, conceiving the covenant as a ‘legal contract,’ anticipated a stern earthly ruler, come to enforce a violated treaty and establish his will be military and political means. It is for this same reason that Western Christianity fell into an idolatrous concept of atonement.

It is important for us to realize this fact: the Old Covenant was and the New Testament is, a spousal relationship. Only with this realization can we understand the nature of human gender as prophecy and revelation…” from my post http://thewhitechrist.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/the-season-of-incarnation-1/

As to whether or not Kinists are ‘incipient Marxists,’ I actually have Gary North to thank for clearing that one up for me! For it was North’s writing on Marx, and talking about the ‘Communist Rabbi’ that influenced Marx, that led me to reading other sources, one of which I quoted in a post over at my blog, which says:

“A Soviet (atheist) book on anthropology articulated the Marxist, soviet atheist position unambiguously, when Nesturkh stated: “The equality of races and nations is one of the most important elements of the moral strength and might of the Soviet state. Soviet anthropology develops the one correct concept that all the races of mankind are biologically equal. The genuinely materialist conception of the origin of man and of races serves the struggle against racism, against all idealist, mystic [i.e., Christian] conceptions of man, his past, present and future.”- found in Nesturkh, Mikhail, the Origin of Man, (Moscow, 1959), p. 3276(?) quoted in Weisman, op. cit. ‘

My comments follow-

‘Please note the preceding Bolshevik ideology noted that the Christian conception of man is contrary to their conceptions of the ‘vast working class.’ Note also that if Communism sees all men and races as ‘biologically equal,’ then the obverse is also true- Christendom once denied this very fact, for Soviet Atheism to work so hard to obliterate that mentality; which means that what I am articulating is/was the BIBLICAL POSITION on race!’

‘To corroborate this anthropological vision, with that of biblical/historical/Orthodox Truth, let us look at a scholar who long taught Dogmatic Theology in one of the great Orthodox seminaries in the West:’

‘ “Side by side with this term (catholikos) there was also used with the meaning of “universal,” the word oikoumenikos. These two terms were not mixed. The Ecumenical Councils received the title Oikoumenike Synodos, from oikoumenikos, meaning from all the inhabited earth — in actual fact, the land which belonged to Greco-Roman civilization.” – Fr. Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, (Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood), 1994, p.240. Emphases mine.]’

It would appear that the ‘world’ of the Gospel, and the ‘world of the writers of the first three centuries, speaking Greek, had different boundaries in mind, when the Gospels were penned. As well, those who scream the loudest about OTHERS being ‘marxists’ are, in all honesty, the ‘most marxist’ among us! And, as Christ has said, “Ye are either for me, or against me.” End of story.

I hope this helps.
- Fr. John