Unreconstructed Nation - A semi-nightly weblog by W.M. Godfrey


Notes on the Criticism of Kinism by Theonomists

On 02/07/12, In Doctrine of Nations, by W.M. Godfrey, View and Post Comments

There is absolutely clear and unequivocal scriptural support for the understanding of the term nation as relating to a group of descendants of a common ancestor. In fact, consanguinity was the biblical means for determination of access to the temple, of one’s standing within Israel, and whether an individual was eligible for marriage. There is no way to “spiritualize” this understanding of the former covenants (promises). Israel must be understood in this way, or the specific material aspects of the covenant of works are meaningless. It is well and good to say that the ceremonial laws of separation were abrogated in Christ, though there is some reason to dispute this, however such abrogation does not affect whether nations, using the example of Israel’s laws of separation, may write for themselves similar laws. Given the OT support for such statutes, they cannot, in themselves, be immoral. God’s law is always and everywhere the highest and best example of civil legislation. The modern state of Israel, in fact, possesses similar restrictions on citizenship, based on national origin, yet we hear little to no criticism by “theonomists” of these laws.

What criteria would “theonomists,” then, desire to be the example for their civil magistrates? God’s law is such a social boon that Paul regards nations that abide by it incidentally as “a law unto themselves,” blessed by their adherence. The question for the biblical doctrine of nations is just this: what can we, biblically, consider a “nation,” and it is this, among other questions, that Kinism seeks to answer in the same ways that our forefathers and scions in the church answered this question. To repudiate them is to repudiate the testimony of the Saints, and of the scripture itself, which describes in Acts 17:26-27 the divine purpose of national division. This separation may no longer have ceremonial functions within the context of covenant, but it still retains civil and political purpose. Nowhere in the NT do we see an abrogation of national (natal) sovereignty, and those “thoenomists” who are determined to oppose descent as a basis for national existence are required to state the terms and conditions on which national existence and sovereignty should be based. Mere geography? Mere political convention? And should they provide a condition short of nativity, it remains for them to answer the basis on which national unity is to be established, the peceableness that is a condition of beneficial social existence. Mere agreement to the rules by which one ideological interest may take dominion over another is not a basis for unity, it is a basis for disunity, a fracturing of the nation into red and blue. The scriptures ask, “what fellowship [unity] can light have with darkness”?

Kinists do not contend that descent or birthright is the only workable basis for national unity, merely that it is a necessary but insufficient condition. Other conditions are religious faith, and social custom. These are the three pillars of civil peace and unity, the absence of which results in conflict. Now, it is certainly possible, in a very limited and technical sense, to possess cultural unity where biological consanguinity is not present, but this is an extremely rare exception, and one that proves the rule. Cultures do not boil up out of the ground, or precipitate from the air, but pass along lines of descent, as fathers and mothers teach sons and daughters.

Kinists want nothing more than to be free to form a state which restricts citizenship to those of European descent. This is no different than access to legal standing as an Israelite being restricted to descendants of Abraham. It is the very reason why Israelites (and, it is important to remember, the Aaronic priest caste) kept family genealogies. Resettlement of Palestine following the Exilic Period was according to tribal line of descent. It was important for purposes of inheritance, as well as access to the physico-material aspects of the covenant promises, to determine who was Israel and who was not. It is the rule, rather than the exception in the history of European states and kingdoms, extending back into the gens and stirpes of Roman times, to make distinctions based on descent.

As for the supposedly negligible variations between races, genetic differences are not the only criterion one may consider in determining whether one is eligible for citizenship or marriage. Cultural-behavioral differences are equally significant. It does not matter what causal factors produce these differences. It is enough that they exist, and that we are not called on to sacrifice the safety and security of our own for the sake of a hypothetical future “racial reconciliation,” the outcome of which is highly uncertain, and which, in any case, would be nothing more than a private form of the kind of “social engineering” that “theonomist” supporters of biblical liberty decry. But beyond this, those who oppose the regulation of marriage according to the biblical principal of unequal yoking typically will quite seriously underestimate the degree of genetic differences between the races. Genetic science is showing us, whether one wants to acknowledge it or not,  many new ways in which the races differ from one another, from disease susceptibility to biological factors in behavioral tendencies.

One fact bears mention in this context. We have no qualms regarding the social-civil separation of men from women in many legal contexts. These regulations are unexceptional. We regard them as a matter of course. And yet, science has shown us that there is greater genetic variation between races than between men and women of the same race. But we balk at any legal distinction between races or ethnic groups? Really? How so, when such distinctions were codified into the OT law?

These are the realities of modern genetic science, and they are certainly factors that can legitimately inform ones decision making as a parent, and as a potential spouse. Clearly, according to well established precedent in common law in the West, as well as the social customs of Palestine during the time of Christ, the parents of prospective mates have the power to forbid certain couplings, and the civil government also reserves to itself such powers. This power of parents is well supported in the Decalogue, and further we meet with no abrogation or opposition by Christ with regard to the social custom of the period, which had long precedent within both Israelite and “Semitic” custom.

Kinism is, among other things, the principle of political self-determination. It answers ‘yes’ to the question of whether a people, constituted according to criteria they mutually determine and consent to, can establish themselves as a sovereign political entity, in the same manner as the British colonies did on the continent of North America in 1776, with their Declaration of Independence, and in the same manner that the Confederate States of America did with their articles of secession. It is not for other nations to determine what the criteria for nationality are, but to honor the right of a people to perpetuate their own national existence.

As for the nature of laws precluding interracial marriage, these laws are necessitated by populations that are previously mingled. In a Kinist state, citizenship is determined on the basis of descent, and geographic integrity is established. Since the very presence of a racial minority would be quite rare under such circumstances, these laws would be infrequently invoked. Racial minorites would, it must be insisted, have the option of being humanely resettled. Population migrations and resettlement are facts of history, and they can be conducted well or badly. Such displacement would be minor, since the regions that became candidates for nationalization would be largely homogeneous.

So any “theonomist” cannot in good conscience support the right of ethnic enclaves to form governments of their own: such as Bosnia-Herzogovena, or the Basque Separatists, or French Canada, or Southern Ireland, or any other people who have developed a “sense of themselves and their special and unique traits as a people” without consequently supporting the aims of Kinism, expressed as I have just described above. I’m sure those with a prior commitment to biological unitarianism will advance quibbles, but in their hearts they will certainly realize that they oppose political self-determination movements everywhere. There is certainly more to say, but I must leave it there for now.

One more point, and then I will leave you to think about what I’ve written. If Israel is exclusively spiritual, and was from the very beginning, then there are only two nations: Israel and non-Israel. This arrangement seems to make nonsense of many passages of scripture that speak of multiple nations. The promises of land, and the gathering of Israel into one contiguous geographic region are especially problematic for the exclusively spiritual understanding of Israel.

So, if we have admitted that there are in fact multiple nations, and not simply two (that of the elect and that of the reprobate), then we must answer on what basis is nationality properly established? On what basis the “sovereign” nationalism that we attest is the motive for our resistance to political unification to putative Christian nations?

We pride ourselves on our “democratic,” our “republican” sentiments. What of the right of a self-declared people to govern themselves? I leave you to ponder.

Kindred Spirits Guardini and Ruskin

On 01/27/12, In Doctrine of Nations, by W.M. Godfrey, View and Post Comments

I am reminded of how like things are brought together in the mind, and how, while separated by years and miles, these can share so close an affinity that one could think they originated in the same creative impulse and in the same creator. This fills us with hope (at least I am so filled), that there are threads in time that to the discerning will not be lost, and that right has a kind of invulnerability and immortality that will not permit its thought to be extinguished, no matter the efforts of systematizers and humanitarian busibodies of whatever stripe. By way of example, I have been thinking of the unanimity of spirit found in the painting by Ruskin titled “Lake, Land and Cloud (Near Como)” and the letters exchanged between Guardini and Louis Dupre during Guardini’s stay there at the lake. Could there be any closer commerce between two minds separated by the accidents of birth? In the shadows and dark outlines of poplar trees, in the weightless hulks of clouds, I am taken back to Guardini’s gentle humanity, his utter, unpretentious simplicity (for there can be much pretention in the manque of primitivism), and the difficulty of accepting life, absent the tendency to treat the moment, this moment, as somehow cumulative and directional. I am reminded here of the notion of “spiritual race” and how this certainly has meaning as an epiphenomenon of which the modern mind is almost completely ignorant. A critic of Guardini’s has written that he falsifies the “individuality” available to the modern man as a result of the new techniques of production. But I think that the critic misunderstands individuality, introducing confusion between mere multiplicity of choice and individuality of person. If individuality can be reduced to the process of selection among an array of products, then the term has lost all meaning, to my mind. What of the play of individuality of production, of being, rather than consumption. In this area, the modern man is utterly the poorer for his advancement. This view of man as consumer is an execrable bit of reductionism, reducing men to instrumentalities of economy. I can see this piece of reasoning all the hallmarks of that “libertarian” economism in which all things are “products,” and subject to the abstraction of price. This is the very monstrosity of “technique” against which Guardini inveighs, and I am convinced that the “libertarian” has no effective reply.

Countering The Cultural Theory of Academic Gaps

On 12/08/11, In Sociology, by W.M. Godfrey, View and Post Comments

Adding to the spate of recently published books supporting an environmental theory that accounts for the phenomenon of performance disparity in modern society was an offering by New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell entitled, Outliers, The Story of Success. Gladwell’s persuasiveness and popularity are rooted in a rhetorical technique that marshals selective anecdotal evidence in support of his pet social presuppositions. Among his cherished causes is the notion that genetic factors (such as intelligence) play little or no part in predicting success in modern economies, an assertion which tends to defy not only common observation, but also increasingly voluminous evidence from controlled studies. Gladwell’s insouciant and engaging style has the remarkable effect of suspending disbelief and projecting credibility just long enough that the anecdotal is taken by many as empirically unassailable. But looks are often deceiving. Evidence that tends to run counter to Galdwell’s hypothesis is, predictably, elided. Observations on the performance of separated twins and trans-racial adoptions are absent from Gladwell’s battery of charming stories.

Contrary to “culture” theory, ethnic academic gaps are nearly identical for trans-racially adopted children, and to the extent they are different they move in a direction counter to that predicted by culture theory. The gap between whites and Asians fluctuated from 19 to .09 in available National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data while the gap in the adoption data is from 0.33 to 3 times larger. This finding is quite consistent with the Sue and Okazaki paper showing that, contrary to popular anecdotes, the environmental values that lead to higher academic grades are actually found more often in white homes. This contradicts rather directly Gladwell’s contention that the explanatory variable for Asian performance in math is cultural and environmental.

To put it differently, Asian-Americans perform well in spite of cultural factors present in the home environment, and not because of them. And, though the population size in the study is smaller than one would prefer, it is telling that the disparity between black and white adopted children in the study was virtually identical (within just 4-6 points) to the gap between whites and blacks in the general population, just as in the Scarr adoption study.

The conclusions that present themselves run counter to the conventional explanations for differences in performance, despite Gladwell’s mountains of anecdotes. Clearly the convention derives from some other compulsion than objective handling of the relevant data, and speaks to the philosophical and social commitments of the author, who is personally and emotionally invested in “problematizing” differences in educational and economic outcomes that are easily explained by biological mechanisms. This problematization is characteristic of the liberal impulse to engineer “fair” (read equal) outcomes, and to both denigrate nature as the author of both opportunities and inexorable constraints in man: phenomena which are beyond effective melioration through government policy. 

Clark, E. A., & Hanisee, J. (1982). Intellectual and adaptive
performance of Asian children in adoptive American settings.
Developmental Psychology, 18, 595-599.

Frydman, M., & Lynn, R. (1989). The intelligence of Korean children
adopted in Belgium. Personality and Individual Differences, 12, 1323-1325.

Winick, M., Meyer, K. K., & Harris, R. C. (1975). Malnutrition and
environmental enrichment by early adoption. Science, 190, 1173-1175.

G. Cochran, J. Hardy, H. Harpending, Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (5), pp. 659-693 (2006).

A Note on Segregation

On 11/21/11, In Doctrine of Nations, by W.M. Godfrey, View and Post Comments

Injustice and segregation are not necessarily correlative. Separate spheres of life provide for regulated and purposeful contact between the races. It precludes the constant, incidental contact that breeds intimacy and breaks down resistance to integration. Segregation is, among other things, a psychological tactic, to keep the “other” as “other” against social forces that would transform them into “us”. Why? Because they ARE other, as history and science have shown.

Babeuvism and the Notion of Public Duty

On 11/21/11, In Doctrine of Nations, by W.M. Godfrey, View and Post Comments

In Babeuvism, as described by Aulard, we have an exemplar of state-slavery (the servile state) that commodifies men as means to its social ends. Article 3 of the document Analysis of the Doctrine of Babeuf reads:

“Nature has imposed on every man the obligation of labor; no one, without crime, can abstain from work.”

When considered carefully, this codicil is quite startling in its implications -as much in what it doesn’t say as in what it does. Initially we are struck by the presumption that the juridical law shall speak for nature itself. But does nature’s law require juridical enactment? Are its ‘judgments’ not immediately and irrevocably enacted, absent the involvement of courts? The implication is that such laws derive not from the codes or traditions of men, but from Nature herself, situating them in the context of a transcendent authority, yet without appeal to any God. Thus the law of nature is higher than man’s law, and assumes the dimension of universal jurisdiction. But there is more to be said about the nature of this obligation of work, avoidance of which is said to be “crime.”

To whom is this work owed? If it is to nature, then a man is entitled to prefer the redress of nature to work. Note, then, that in the place of the wholly natural redress of extinction is the juridical discipline appropriate to social disorder. Yet crime is a political-juridical conception that applies only to subjects under government. And so it’s here we see the key to the logic of Babeauvism: the invocation of nature as a transcendent source of social authority, but the denial of nature in the application of social technique to determine this order. The system of Babeau does not propose to return man to nature, or the state of inequality, but rather situates man in the synthetic state, which it then gives the name of nature, that it might borrow the ‘authority’ of nature.

Understood in this way, we can only refer such abstention from the compulsion of work a crime against the state. But what sort of crime? To fail to remit the obligation of work must be considered theft, then, but the theft of whose property, if, by the application of articles 4 and 6 we have abolished private property? Where there is no property, there can be no theft, except against the whole of the people, which, in toto, is deprived of my additional increment. So the question remains whose property we have misappropriated through our hypothetical sloth? It must be the property of the state, whose law it is that work is obligatory, and who is the juridical embodiment of the people as a whole. Thus the conclusion that Babeuvism establishes a state monopoly of labor, and the state is the inheritor of the value of that labor, on behalf of the abstraction referred to as the “people” who are, in fact, imbued with the transcendent authority and totalism of nature. Man as determinative of nature, and, in fact, nature itself, is the central theme of secular Humanism. It rejects nature qua nature, with its law wrought in sinew. This is made more clear in the Manifesto of Equals. Article 18 of the Act of Insurrection, promulgated by the Insurrection Committee of Public Safety reads:

“Public and Private Property is placed in the custody of the people.”

The custody of the people is of course political argot for the custody of political commisariats. We recognize brute force when presented with it. No idealistic plebiscite is intended here. Political utility governs. Article 19 gives the formula:

“Then duty of terminating the Revolution and of bestowing on the Republic liberty, equality, and the Constitution of 1793 will be confided to a national assembly, composed of a democrat for each department, appointed by the insergent people [Ed. who can “the people” be insugent against?] upon the nomination of the insurrection committee.”

In the present instance, it is proposed that a political committee will present nominees to the people, it is presumed, as “the people” are incompetent to locate and present their own nominees. As nearly as can be determined, the functional definition of a “people” capable of insurgency against itself (since there can be no one who escapes inclusion), is precisely those who support the Revolution. Those who do not support it are, de jure, not “the people” but non-human obstacles to be swept aside. Setting aside the rather puerile matter of the impossibility of complete coincidence in political and social opinion among the insurgent people, we come to the practicality of the effective composition of the people for political purposes, and find that it consists in none other than an elite cadres of provocateurs who presume to speak for all, and to dispose of the spoils of revolution.

Thus the managerial class that directs the operation of revolutionary activity becomes the elite which, by definition, cannot exist in a “democracy.” One point remains to be made in this connection concerning the constitution of the nation when it has been denatured by the importation of alien elements and the disregard for its territorial integrity. These twin-assualts on nationality per se, are effected by none other than the modern form of the same managerial elites we have just seen are presumed by Babeuvism, and in fact, by the state collectivism nessistated by the conditions of modernity itself. And just as with this former colectivism, so today the citizen of the denatured nation is a chattel of the state, for the individual cannot have property in himself. It is by this same inhuman logic that today we see the frequent calls for mandatory “national service” proceding from the political warrens of both the titular right and the left. The “public” to whom this duty is owed, is none other than the managerial class who are the incarnation of “the people.”

The Revitalization of Service and Excellence

On 10/31/11, In Sociology, by W.M. Godfrey, View and Post Comments

In our discussion of the revitalization of service we should not want it thought that we purpose the return of an abject position. This would be a grave misunderstanding. The true service which seeks a way back into the world is what is willing, and what, perhaps not eagerly, but voluntarily, recognizes position, and therein also knows worth, for not every man who is free is free to be fully a man. We can go even further. Freedom is not an absolute value in itself, but binary, with honor being its co-ordinate and correlative, each held within the gravity of the other.  In the world that is worth restoring, there is correlation between worth and position, and between position and birth. And, for some, manhood may only arrive in the form of a self-subjection to what is superior, to the system of value in which both excellence and that which falls short of it are fully possible, and not conditioned by our squeamishness with the reality of capacity itself, and its obvious variability.

This is the meaning of position that underlies right service.  In the world that now exists, as distinct from that which we should wish to exist, such recognition is rare, but it is not entirely absent, since man is still in the world, and the values of the world which was put to death have continued life in the minds of men. Where this recognition is absent, the ersatz world which is born is not long lived, for it is not a viable offspring of life, and its pulse must be maintained by dark ‘science’.  Where failure is impossible, excellence is likewise impossible. The relative dignity and manhood of self-subordination, in the acquiescence to excellence –no, the celebration of it–  takes its vitality from the degrees of excellence in which all participate, and, most wonderfully, where dignity is not a remittance by what is excellent to what is common, but by the system of value in which both are situated, a sure and inviolable station is secured, and though humble, it is as certain as that of what is great, and its certainty establishes both peace, and a kingly dignity that ennobles all who comprehend it, irrespective of birth or accomplishment. The meanest poverty is thereby raised in common esteem.

A Personal God and a People’s God

On 10/31/11, In theology, by W.M. Godfrey, View and Post Comments

If covenant theology is to be believed, God does not exclusively involve Himself with the individual consciousness, but also directs Himself to men in relation to one another. Collective consciousness, the vehicle of ‘culture,’ is not a paranormal or supernal capacity of man, nor is it the developmental product of an esoterica, but rather lies in the shared data that constitute our relations. That is, it is a subject of epistemology proper. The God of Scripture is always the God of a people, knowledge of Whom is secured, at least in part, in communal belonging. In the determination of those to whom God is also Father, the question of a ‘corporate’ remnant is moot. For whether Israel is constituted in blood or in belief (or both, as I have elsewhere maintained), either object of covenant promise is a peculiar people, a community that bears the stamp of collective understandings, related to one another by, among other connections, their relation to God,  whether by ‘origin’ (which is as much God’s design as election to belief is design) or by ‘will.’ The institution of the Church (yes, the Church is an institution, and not a mere congueries of anthropomorphic units of non-specific ‘belief’) is the prime mediator of this relation to one another in God[1]. To deny this is to deny that there is a single Gospel, and rather to say that there are many Gospels -that is, as many as there are believers.  In the sovereignty of God, neither of the two sources of community and covenant derives from accident. Thus the question of election is never one of biology versus belief, as both are determinate. It is for this reason that Christians are referred to as a chosen race. Thus 1 Peter 2:19,

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 

These concentric circles of identity (race, nation, priesthood) are what it means to be psychologically and sociologically human. Just as we do not cease to be “man” in our rebirth, we do not cease to be members of families, of tribes, or any natal collectivity. From the self-identified person, proceeding outward to the family, then to the nation (understood as a people), and finally to the Church. These are our several identities. The latter is the true and only unity of nations, exclusively by which they come into spiritual commerce with one another. To each of these spheres of existence, God as Father addresses his covenant. There are those who would oppose what is chosen to what is given by birth, but it is only in the decay and decline of social consciousness (those data we have only just spoken of) that such opposition of freedom and belonging can be posited.

The exclusively personal god, the god who is ‘my god,’ and yet who is not also ‘our God,’ is not the God of scripture. In both senses, that of the man as individual (that is, indivisible, in the sum of his being) and man qua man (a member of a people), our common Father is One who is a genuine father, and has by adoption a particular human progeny among whom is this vital commonality. The ‘genetic’ aspect of this spiritual pro-gen-y is by grace, but also by constitution. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit imparts to man a spiritual ‘gen’ or set of attributes originating in a progenitor, while man’s status as an image bearer assures the presence of the shadow, or outline of his spiritual Father. Thus it is man’s corporate constitution in God that undergirds Kinism’s insistence on regarding him as such. Man himself is corporate, defined by shared attributes which distinguish him from the remainder of nature. This corporate being of man as man, which swallows up without destroying his indivisible personhood, is the tupos by which his corollary identities must be understood. Man as a member of family, of tribe, of race. This unity-in-diversity, which man as image bearer reflects in his being from the Tri-unity of the Godhead, no subsequent “reform” can fully efface. 

1. This is the mediatorial error that befell the Roman church, by which it confused the roles of a mediator of the understanding of God among men (or certain men), and mediator of the relation between God and any man. The usurpation of latter mediatorial role supplants the salvational role of Christ himself, our actual mediator.

A Note On Commonality and Law

On 09/13/11, In Doctrine of Nations, by W.M. Godfrey, View and Post Comments

Absent the constraints of immemorial commonality, the binding force of social cohesion must be naked force, publicly rationalized by a plenary and messianic secular law. In our own time, the social and racial commonality of shared lineage has been aggressively supplanted by the idea of “American Values,” but a careful examination of these “values” shows them rather to be politically pragmatic than substantively moral or ethical. American Values are promulgated by the official organs of government and its partners in the totalitarian enterprise, applying the science of mass suggestion. One repeatedly hears sonorous terms proffered in what passes for discourse -terms such as ‘Justice’ and ‘Freedom’ deployed in the popular media. These are presumably the exemplars of American values. But absent some defining notions as to what actions and beliefs underlie these terms in the reality of practice, they are empty of moral significance.

What precisely IS justice? Economic justice is a term used grandiloquently in speeches by figures advancing the appealing idea of fairness. What, however, is economic justice in practice? When we have the temerity to ask, we are told that it involves the elimination of privilege. It is hoped that thusly, we may be led in a circle of self-referential terms, that when pronounced will fill us with the vague associations of goodness and decency, and being satisfied with such associations, we will conclude the search for meaning, having settled the matter by the sentimental impressions that such terms evoke in us. Such a state of suggestibility is referred to as “verbalism” by the perennialist philosopher René Guénon, who asserts in his monograph The Crisis of the Modern World that this is the basis of all modern democratic politics. It is, of course, easily seen that the elimination of so-called privilege is a technique of social equalization that proposes to eliminate social and economic inheritance, and further, to moot the effects of biological differentiation in those same spheres of action.

Certainly, when dealing with abstract the terms that are proffered by professional politicians and capitalists, the devil is in the details. When such terms come to be defined, the consensus that once appeared to resolve the tensions between identity groups begins to dissolve. It is very likely that the “consensus” required to hold together the modern pluralistic demos is manufactured. Beyond this illusory consensus around abstract terms (the stuff of so-called populism) only law, an invasive, plenary, salvational law can form the glue that welds together inherent antinomies. The scriptures tell us that Light has no commerce with darkness, but in a putative “democracy,” it must. The currency of democratic societies is a tense accommodation, a jagged and jarring compromise of values that is called “centrism,” but is really nothing more than the fencing-off of a hasty demilitarized zone between oppositional moral vectors.

Absent the structuring valences of immemorial cultural praxis and ethnic-racial resemblance - the rites, customs, and habituation in which ideas inhere and find daily expression- without these nexuses of assent, the overriding value of unity makes of the law an unsleeping despot. And no resigned despot, but one who takes up residence in every cottage, who quarters his dragoons in every barn, pasture, and square of every humble village, to prosecute war against the geometry of the hayricks.

Consanguinity, Shared Vision, and the Refractory Minority

On 05/20/11, In Doctrine of Nations, by W.M. Godfrey, View and Post Comments

It is impossible that, of the twin bases of civilization, the one and primary being a shared vision of moral order, and the secondary being the “like lineaments” of consanguinity[1] , that a unified society should arise or continue long in the absence of either unity that is in view by the presence of a significant minority of refraction, arising out of grievance or of instinctive natal distinction. The social tensions exerted by such grievance, ever-alive to the sentiments of the minority, cannot be thought contributory to the conditions necessary for the peace, stability, or longevity of the society in question, but rather mark the presence of a pre-revolutionary body within the greater body, that acts to redirect the cultural functions of the host to its own ends, whether of political or existential motive. Those who favor the continued presence of the aggrieved minority must answer, at some point, why the order and peace of the majority are values to be subordinated to this grievance, real or imagined, and why, the existential claims of this majority are to become secondary to those for whom the redress of self-determination is little-considered.

How is it, then, that the body of a society should, in perpetuity, be subject to autonomic hostility and dis-ease within all its functions, absent a clear articulation of the means of help, of redress that will end it? Either the majority or the minority will be forced to abandon their claims to, on the one hand peace, and on the other redress, which, when sufficiently developed, become greater than claims of the need for specific conditions, that is, existential claims that bear directly on the question of rights. Abandonment of these claims, it is easily seen, would lead ineluctably to the adoption of the epistemological perspective of either victor or vanquished, whereon, during some indeterminate period, one or the other will be forced to relinquish any and all distinctiveness, identity qua their former existence, and content themselves with complete absorption and abnegation, an experience amply evidenced wherever sectional identity is to be found. The cultivation of grievance can never be a tolerable component of the shared moral vision of a people, one of the pillars of a healthy society.

[1] St. Cyprian of Carthage, Treatise 10:15 “On Jealousy and Envy”

Alienists are Neo-Docetists Who Deny The Paliggenesia of Christ

On 04/13/11, In Hermeneutics, by W.M. Godfrey, View and Post Comments

Alienist critics of Kinism, such as the vocal pastor Brian Schwertly[1], being neo-Docetists, deny the Regeneration, or Paliggenesia, of Christ by their derogation of materiality, and further deny the orthodox biblical Doctrine of Nations, in their opposition to the ontological status of “families” of men, an error which also partakes of the logical fallacy of continuum.

When Paul writes of the creation “groaning together in the pains of childbirth”, this birth is not a birth of pure spirit, but a birth of the renewed creation in which is the entelechy of the perfect confluence and unity of spirit and flesh. Thus Paul relates in 2 Corinthians 5:4 that this renewal is not so that we might be “unclothed” (pure spirit) but that what is mortal (flesh) may be swallowed up in life (made imperishable, unlike cursed, mortal flesh)[2]. Flesh is particularistic, and this particularism is what Kinists celebrate. If flesh possesses no haecceity, then there is no necessity for each thing to have its own “tent,” as it were. The differentiation of the flesh corresponds to that of the spirit. We know that men are saved as differentiated spirits, since God has elected to save many men, and the “you” that God knew before the formation of your “tent” is also possesses a “this-ness”, a particularity, or the salvation of a plurality of men is wasted energy, imperfection, and is the equivalent of God denying his own divinity.

1. Schwertly is the pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church of Waupaca County, a member institution of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in America (WPCUS), a small denomination formed in 2006 in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, and, according to their website, based on objection to the spread of Federal Vision theology in their original denomination and what was perceived as latitudinarian departure from the regulative principle of worship (RPW). Pastor Schwertly has been a vocal and tireless (if not entirely ingenuous) critic of Kinism. Several of his sermons are available at SermonAudio.com
2. “For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.” 2 Corinthians 5:4