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Axe to the Root with Bojidar Marinov | Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Network
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In theory, all of us know our orthodoxy. We know about the Trinity, about our redemption. We can speak about our solas, and we know our TULIP. But then, when most of us go out in the world and meet reality, we still view it and assess it through pagan eyes. That’s because our modern theology has become abstract, limited to the world of our personal faith, and divorced from God’s reality. Bojidar Marinov’s Axe to the Root Podcast will help you turn your abstract theology into a relevant, applied theology, by thinking covenantally about every area of life, and about every practical issue in today’s world. This is a production of Recon Radio.
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Captain Marvel and the Madness of Power Religion
May 15, 201900:43:42Tap to summarizeWelcome to Episode 88 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will talk about movies. Specifically, Captain Marvel. (So, you are warned, there will be spoilers ahead.) Actually, not about the movie so much but about the reactions to it. And specifically, the reactions to it among some churchian celebrities and their followers. I usually stay away talking about movies and literature and art, except in a very general way, as to their place in the Dominion Covenant. You might want to check Episode 49 of the Axe to the Root Podcast, titled “Art in a Covenantal Frame.” Not that I have nothing particular to say about specific pieces of art and literature and movies; I think I do, and I like art and literature and movies and I like to decipher the ethical/judicial meaning of movies and books and pieces of art. My children and I have had many interesting conversations over the years. In fact, those are perhaps our most favorite conversations, given that family reading of fiction remained the most cherished family past time till their late teenage years, and right before the oldest ones went to college. Yes, believe it or not, I kept reading aloud stories and novels to my children long after they could read them on their own. With the youngest now, as she is still at home, we watch movies and sometimes we spent hours discussing their ethical/judicial value. So, there, it is not that I am indifferent to movies and fiction books and I have nothing to say; I just believe that there are others who are better qualified than me to say it in a much more exciting and insightful way. But this case is different. It’s not that the movie is anything special as artistic value. It is a fine movie, to be sure. Not really a masterpiece of the greatest kind, but not the worst out there. It fits nicely into the larger picture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it provides what it was meant to provide: an origin story. The story was consistent with the rest of the cinematic universe, and it was believable . . . well, believable within the context of that universe. I think it did not exploit all the possibilities for a dramatic effect at the point of the protagonist’s conversion; that scene in Maria Rambeau’s house where Carol Danvers learned that the Skrulls were not villains but refugees persecuted by the same empire that sent her to fight them, could have been a little longer, more dramatic, and more fraught with tension, soul-searching, and anger (suppressed or not) at the revelation that one had been lied to. I know that’s what I would do if I was faced with such challenge against the morality of all my beliefs and actions so far. But, then again, women are different from men; it is possible that a woman can make that transition faster than a man, I don’t know. We do see in the Bible women who are capable of making logical conclusions much quicker than men do. Either way, the movie in general was good. Do I want to watch it again? Yes, absolutely. It is enjoyable in many respects and as a whole. So, what did I like in the movie? Or, let’s be more comprehensive: what did I see in the movie? What was it that made it a good movie, and enjoyable at that, for a person like me who always tries to judge things based on a covenantal perspective? There were two ethical/judicial themes in the movie, one major and one minor, or, rather, auxiliary to the major one. The major theme was the individual moral conscience of man (and I use “man” in the Biblical, generic sense, including women in it) vs. the collectivist demands of a militaristic, expansionist empire. The movie starts with Vers: an extremely powerful woman whose body is modified to control and manipulate physical processes down to nuclear level. She can absorb energy in her body and the release it in the form of electromagnetic (photon) blasts. She can go “binary,” which means her body physics can transform into pure energy after which she can basically cut through anything, including space ships. She doesn’t know the source of that power, but what we learn is that that power itself is the source of some pride and self-confidence. However, that’s not the main ethical problem. A worse source of pride is that she is a member – the most powerful member, at that – of the most elite unit of the most elite military of the most powerful empire in the universe, the Kree Empire. Think about being a member of the most decorated special unit of the Navy Seals of the United States. Woohoo, by Jingo, we are the best and we kick you-know-what around the globe! Them ragheads, gooks, russkies, anyone, stand no chance. And, of course, we fight for freedom! I mean, I can’t figure out how my freedom ended up in the mountains of Afghanistan or the sands of Iraq, and I can’t figure out why the more I fight, the less freedom we have at home, but who cares, we really kick ass, man! Proud to be an elite soldier for the greatest empire there is. And the enemies she is fighting are really ragheads: ugly (compared to our heroes-warriors who are all handsome and tall and athletic and a delight to the eye), and their main weapon is taqqiah: able to disguise themselves so as to look entirely like members of our glorious free western civilization, and infiltrate it and build their Dearborns, Michigan in it. I mean, what’s not to make your proud: fighting for this glorious civilization (just look at all our technologies and buildings and how big we are, being the elite of the elite, beautiful beings compared to the enemy, fighting an enemy that is ugly and uses taqqiah . . . and we know what they do to their goats, right? (Or whatever passes for goats among the Skrulls.) The only dark spot in her ambition and pride are these recurring dreams – or memories? – that she can’t get rid of. They are certainly part of something deep in her, but since she has lost her memory in an accident several years before, she can’t put the pieces back together. But that’s OK. Her benevolent parental boss – the Deep State . . . I mean, the Supreme Intelligence of the empire – is there to help her get rid of those nightmares. Just ignore them. They only hinder your full potential. You just obey and comply, and you’ll be good. Think Jason Bourne: another story about an individual artificially enhanced in service of an empire, whose bosses are still powerless to destroy the moral conscience the image of God carries with it, despite all the enhancement, special training, and amnesia. Things go downhill, however, after she is tricked and captured by the enemy. To her surprise, she discovers that the enemy has not taken advantage of her incapacitation to kill her or torture her. They only want to revive her memories. Ironic, isn’t it. Her benevolent government bosses want her to suppress her conscience; the enemies – who should be expected to kill her – want to help her revive that conscience. The proud warrior is confused. To make matters worse, in the ensuing battle, she falls to earth, the original place of her memories (she doesn’t know it yet, but she feels it), and while fighting alone against a host of Skrulls (aided only by a few confused and helpless humans), she gradually comes to discover two things. First, that she had been fighting for an oppressive regime against a victimized people who have been nothing more than refugees from that regime. And, second, she discovers her true identity: Vers is really Carol Danvers, a test pilot for the US Air Force who supposedly died 6 years earlier in a test flight crash with her mentor and instructor Dr. Wendy Lawson – the woman of her dreams and nightmares – who was an engineer for the Air Force, but her true identity was Dr. Mar-Vell, a renegade Kree scientist who was helping Skrull refugees by designing a powerful engine for them to be able to escape the Kree attacks and find a world for themselves to settle in safety. Carol Danvers acquired her powers from absorbing the energy of the explosion from the engine she destroyed after the crash, following the orders of Mar-Vell. So in terms of the ethical conflict between her individual conscience and the collectivist demands of the Empire, the circle is now closed: Carol Danvers returned to take the place of her original mentor. Her discovery of her true identity brings to light the minor ethical/judicial theme. That theme was present in Vers’s nightmares from the very beginning of the movie, but given her memory loss, made no sense; it was multiple flashes of a girl or a young woman failing at different tasks, from playing in the playground to the ropes course at what seems to be a boot camp; and every time, she stands up and gets back to it again with a look of determination om her face. That minor theme turns out to be the old conflict between individual determination and ambition and the established and cherished social customs, stereotypes, and prejudices. Think of the movie Hidden Figures where the protagonists were looked down upon because they were black and female. Think of Facing the Giants, where the Eagles were considered the underdog by default. The ethical solution to this conflict should be obvious to everyone who has even an ounce of moral conscience: only dedication and hard work can overcome stereotypes and prejudice. After all, this is what modern Christians and conservatives in general tell those who are trapped in the vicious cycle of ghetto poverty: “hard work and dedication will surely help you get out of it, no matter how much prejudice and discrimination you face.” Right? Carol Danvers has lived through it: she has had to deal with every bit of prejudice and discrimination, through all the social stereotypes of what a woman can and can’t do. And she dealt with it through hard work and dedication. You would expect that all Christians and conservatives would cheer for her. (As we will see, tha...
Transcribe →The Reputation of a Salesman
Apr 17, 201900:38:31Tap to summarizeWelcome to Episode 87 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I want to pick up a topic again that we discussed about two years ago: namely, sales. If you remember, in our episode, “Sales from a Biblical Perspective,” I presented the thesis that sales are not only a legitimate part of the economy, they are actually one of the most important parts of the economy. Why is that? let’s look at a short answer before we continue with the important topic: the underlying issue is this: Is the economy driven by the objective needs of the consumers, or is it driven by the entrepreneurship, innovation, and productivity of the producers? If it is driven by the objective needs of the consumers, then there would be no need for salesmen: everyone knows what they need, they just go out and try to find it. The problem with this, however, is that it can’t explain why the economy grows. Why are people buying so many things they have no direct need for? People have survived without electricity for centuries; how come, all of a sudden, everyone “needs” it? How come everyone today “needs” a cell phone? After all, some of us older people didn’t even know we “needed” one for decades. If needs are objective, how is it that most of what we think we “need” today hasn’t been around for centuries, and everyone survived? The answer is, of course that our “needs” are not real objective needs. They are subjective desires the moment we learn what is possible out there. And then, in our hearts, we transform them into “needs.” When we learn that it is possible to have ceiling fans, we now “need” them. When we learn that it’s possible to have air-conditioning, we now “need” that one, too. When we learned that it was possible to have mobile phones, we started “needing” them, too. When it became possible for mobile phones to connect to the internet in every place, we started “needing” that internet connection, too. (I personally resisted that “need” for some time, but I also succumbed to it, eventually.) If you are around my age (48) or older, you have surely been asked by your children or grandchildren, “How did you all live without Internet, or without cell phones, or without computers, or without [you fill the blank]?” From our perspective, of course, life was normal, and we had no need for all these things. I mean, it is nice to have them around because they make our life easier, but they are certainly not indispensable. A “need,” therefore, is not objective reality; it is psychological conditioning. And that psychological conditioning doesn’t need any skillful psychological techniques. All it needs is break the news to the consumers about new stuff on the market. Next thing you know, the market develops a “need” for it. That’s where salesmen come in. They are the middle men who break that news. They are the ones who inform the buying public about the new possibilities offered by the producers. Von Mises pointed out that on the market, information is the most valuable commodity. The right information gives you the opportunity to make the right the decisions and thus become more efficient. Salesmen are the agent for spreading that information. In a sense, they are democratizing it, making it cheap and available to everyone. Or, if you want to use a Biblical word, think of salesmen as the “evangelists” of the business world. They bring some sort of “good news” to their customers: “There’s a way to make your life easier at a lower price.” I know, I know, we all hate salesmen, especially those that appear at our door, but hate them or not, the truth is, all of the improvements in our homes and lives that make them better and more comfortable than homes and lives 200 years ago have come to us because some salesman many years ago decided to overcome his fear of knocking on people’s doors, and brought the good news of this or that improvement, for the scanty probability of making a few bucks on a sale. So, hate them as much as you want, but respect their work. It’s hard work. Anyway, after having established the legitimacy – in fact, the necessity – of salesmen in a Biblical economy, I was asked the question: “How does a salesman establish and build his reputation?” It’s a question of enormous significance. After all, a salesman is not sitting in some office communicating primarily with his co-workers and his boss. A salesman is supposed to be out there communicating with those who make the decision to buy: the customers. As he is out there with the customers, he himself, his person, is the face of his company. His product may be the greatest product ever, it may be at the perfect price, and it might turn out to be the most profitable purchase his customers may make, but to all these factors, one more factor must be added before there is a purchase: the reputation of the salesman. Because, let’s be honest, all the other factors are only potentials for the future; they can’t be tested until the purchase is made and the customer is in a position to use the product. So the only real asset the producer has at the point of sale and negotiation is the personality of his salesman. Or, the reputation of his salesman. The question is great, and we know need to think of this: what makes the reputation of a salesman? And we need to think about it in a Biblical manner, from a Biblical worldview. We need to make sure that whatever presuppositions we place at the foundation of our view, need to be Biblical presuppositions. I am not saying that a salesman is supposed to go around reciting Biblical verses or singing psalms. (Although, as a curious fact, some time ago some pastor responded to one of my articles that what we need is not more people in the marketplace with a Biblical worldview, but more psalm-singers. Once we had all offices packed up with psalm-singers who sing the psalms every day, Christian business is going to flourish. You can’t make this stuff up, I tell ya.) But a salesman, especially a Christian salesman, is under obligation to understand the only worldview that can guarantee success, and apply that worldview to his job. And when he applies it, his reputation will grow. “Keep and do these commandments, because they are your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the nations” (Deut. 4:6). So, what is it that builds the reputation of a salesman from the perspective of the Biblical worldview? We need to start from the beginning, from the complete picture. Without knowing the whole picture, a salesman is lost, even if he is the most skillful salesman ever. So, first, he needs to have a comprehensive view of the world around him and of its economic needs in God’s plan. I know, I know, this sounds kinda of too excessive. A salesman surely doesn’t have to be a philosopher or a theologian? No, not any more than anyone else. But he still should understand the world in its bigger picture – like anyone else should. Without such understanding of the world, we are left without any guidance as to where our place is, and, in fact, without any standard whatsoever about a place, even. Many of the problems in our society today are due to the fact that the majority of Americans have been taught a fragmented view of reality. And I don’t mean just that they were taught such fragmented view of reality in their government schools. It is everywhere. They were taught such a view in their families, in their churches, on their FOX News or CNN or MSN TV channels (whichever was constantly on in their homes), in their cinema theaters, on their commercials, etc. Americans today go about their business informed by an eclectic mish-mash of ideas, and they are capable sometimes of saying things that are, in their logic, inconsistent with themselves, without even stopping for a second to consider how deeply self-contradicting they are. (Think about the modern “conservative” views on immigration, or the modern leftist views on police and gun-control laws.) A salesman, however, if he is to build a long-term reputation, can’t afford to have a fragmented view of reality; he has to demonstrate consistency in his understanding, especially in his understanding of how his work and his products relate to the society and the economy in general. And if he is a Christian, he has to demonstrate consistency with the Biblical worldview, and especially with the Dominion Covenant. This is easier to say theoretically, but what does it imply in practice? What would it mean to have a comprehensive worldview? It means this (listen carefully): A salesman is supposed to know what products he should sell, and what products he should avoid attaching his name to. Let me repeat it: A salesman is supposed to know what products he should sell, and what products he should avoid attaching his name to. It doesn’t look much on the surface; and many salesmen don’t stop to think much about it. But if you are a Christian and you are looking to have a long-term career in sales, you need to make sure you always understand that the nature of the product you are selling is not morally neutral. And not only if you are looking to have a long-term career in sales; but also if you are looking to start a business in the future. Or engage in activism. Or anything that would involve your personal reputation. There are products that a righteous salesman shouldn’t be selling in the first place, no matter how attractive the pay is. Now, when you hear that, your first thought is, “drugs.” That’s because your brain was conditioned by statist propaganda. If you are a Southern Baptist, your thought is, “tobacco and alcohol.” Or may be you are thinking, “guns.” Or...
Transcribe →Books and Missions
Mar 20, 201900:38:12Tap to summarizeWelcome to Episode 86 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will be talking about my favorite topic: foreign missions. Let me tell you a secret about myself: whatever else you thought I was, I am first and foremost a missionary at heart; I want to see foreign cultures evangelized for Christ, and I want to see true message and true challenge to all the cultures to submit to Christ. Now, contrary to what most Christians say today, I don’t think everyone should be a missionary – at least not in the traditional sense. Christendom needs more than just make everyone a missionary, and the more it grows, the more it will require a division of labor. It needs financial experts, entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, lawyers, writers, artists, etc. In a sense, of course, all these are part of the greater mission task of the church, because they all speak of the superiority of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; and we will have a future episode of Axe to the Root that will speak to the fact that evangelism is much more than simply preaching and trying to attract people’s attention with psychological methods. But even then, the task of bringing the truth of the Word to other cultures is still a very specific task, and there are people called to it, and they should be particularly trained to do it. Evangelist, after all, is a special ministry in the New Testament (Eph. 4:11), and I also believe that the ministry mentioned as “apostles,” is actually what we call today “missionaries.” The modern church has surrounded the word “apostle” with an almost mythical and magical meaning, to mean some superheroes of the early church who can’t be seen around today, but that is an ideology only adopted in the last century and a half. For most of its history, the church simply called its missionaries “apostles,” and no one saw any problem with it: Patrick, Apostle to Ireland, the Twelve Apostles to Ireland, Boniface, Apostle to the Germans, Cyril and Methodius, Apostles to the Slavs, John Eliot, Apostle to the Indians, John Knox, Prophet and Apostle of Scotland, etc. So, the biblical ministry of apostles is simply missionaries, and the word “missionary” was first used to replace “apostle” by Jesuits in the 16th century with the purpose to establish “apostle” as a very special post or office in the church which ceased in the 1st century. Modern Protestants and especially cessationists have just adopted the Jesuit use of the word. Either way, my purpose here is not to insist on the restoration of the Biblical word “apostle”; and, indeed, “apostle” and “missionary” mean the same thing anyway, one in Greek, the other in Latin. My point is that even in the Bible, a missionary still has to be a person with a special kind of ministry, someone who is first called before he is “sent” (which is the meaning of “missionary”). Anyway, for the practical purposes of our topic today, it doesn’t really matter whether you insist on the modern word “missionary” or want the original Biblical word in Greek, “apostle.” My point was that while every single Christian is a missionary of a sort, bringing the Kingdom of God to his area of work and social activity, still, there are people who have a special gift and call of being missionaries. Over the last three years, since I started this Axe to the Root podcast, I have used it to advertise the mission organization I started almost 20 years ago, Bulgarian Reformation Ministries. As a matter of fact, I have been on the mission field for much longer, 26 years, and BRM is simply an US-based non-profit representative of what we have been doing in Bulgaria for 26 years. Since I started advertizing BRM here, a number of listeners have been asking me questions about the nature of our mission. And since I have made claims that our mission is very different from what modern missions are, I have been asked the question, “How is it different?”, multiple times. Different reasons for asking the question: most people want to know what makes it different because they donate to missions and they want to make sure they understand what they need to be looking for in a mission; a few because they are called to go to the mission field and they want to know of successful models to mimic and implement – and our model has been quite successful. Believe it or not, there were a few individuals who wanted to understand my mission methods because they believed they could be replicated in either politics or business; and it may as well be the case, given that the same Biblical principles should apply to every area. So, this episode is a partial response to at least one of the questions I have been asked. Not to all of them, to be sure, because it will take more than just one episode to do it. Only one question, which has been asked many times: “Why books?” I have been quite insistent that a true mission must be more focused on books than on planting churches. Or even on “making disciples.” In fact, I even believe that putting books on the market is a better tool of making disciples than planting a church and having people gather once a week or even three times a week. (Actually, to be precise, I don’t believe in the hype of “discipleship” semantics as a special way of training people. But that I will leave to a future episode. For now, let’s focus on the question, “Why books?”) You know how modern missions work, for the most part. About 15 to 20 years ago, the International Mission Board did a survey on the amount of money the world’s churches donate to foreign missions every year. The total was about $2.8 billion. The lion’s share of it, as is to be expected, fell on the shoulders – and the purses – of US Christians: $2.5 billion. The other big supporters of foreign missions were the UK and South Korea. So, let’s acknowledge the truth: American Christians are not stingy when it comes to foreign missions: they contribute between 80% and 90% of all the support for them. Translated in gold at current prices, $2.5 billion is 60 tons of gold every year, for foreign missions. That’s probably as much as the whole church paid for missions between AD 30 and 1900. And we today pay as much every year. No matter how critical we can be of the American church, this is something worth celebrating and praising. There’s a “but,” though. And that “but” is in the fact that while American Christians are so generous when it comes to foreign missions, they are just as gullible as to how that money is spent. Suffice to say, there is next to zero control and accountability when it comes to missions. And the results are obvious: just look at the world today and tell me, how much impact have our missions had? Have we changed the world to the better? Where are the christianized nations as the result of our money that we have spent? Where are the cultures that converted from paganism to Christianity as the result of the money we have spent? Missionaries in the past went out and converted whole nations. Where is this today? Why are we spending that much money if there is no visible result? In an early episode of Axe to the Root titled, “Denethor Ministries,” I asked the same question about donating money to our domestic ministries: Why are we spending so much money on them if the results are negative? We could have spent the money on booze and have better results. And the same applies to the mission field. Every time I look at modern missions and the way they are done, I think of Waylon Jennings’s song, “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” No, I am not a big fan of country music, but I have a friend who deserves to be mentioned here, Joe Driscoll, who believes that Waylon is the greatest country singer ever. And since I trust Joe, I decided to hear some of Waylon’s songs. And Joe was right. So I am a Waylon’s fan now. But I digress. So you probably know the song: Lord it’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar Where do we take it from here? Rhinestone suits and new shiny cars It’s been the same way for years We need a change So, yeah, that’s how I feel about missions when I watch modern missionaries work on the mission field. Especially modern Presbyterian and Baptist missionaries, but many others as well. Charismatics, for the most part, are a bit better, but only by a bit. For the last 60 or 70 years, a certain model has been established for missions: large bureaucratic mission organizations associated with this or that large denomination in the US, dispensing endorsements for candidates for missionaries to go visit churches of those denominations, taking certain percentage of the donations, and then, after the missionary goes to the mission field, they are closely monitored and controlled to follow the policies – and the politics – of their mission organization. Of course, the endorsement is only given after the missionary has spent a good amount of money on seminary education, which is not cheap (getting a seminary education may be more expensive than getting an advanced engineering degree at an elite university). So the missionary is pretty much chained to obey the rules, otherwise, without an endorsement and the money that comes with it, he may have trouble paying his student debts. Which is OK, though, because if he follows the rules, the money is not small; and I have seen missions where dozens of missionaries “serve” in a country, living in mansions for $1,500 a month, while the local population survives on $150 a month. So I am looking at this gigantic scheme and I am thinking, “Are y’all sure Paul done it this way?” Do...
Transcribe →The Advance of Civilizations
Mar 6, 201900:45:10Tap to summarizeWelcome to Episode 85 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will take on the most ancient civilization on earth today. Most ancient not in the sense that it has been around before all the others – that wouldn’t be true, for it was a rather late comer in the early days. Most ancient only in the sense that of all today’s existing cultures, it can trace itself in time as an uninterrupted cultural legacy farther back than any other modern culture. There were cultures existing before it was formed, but none of them survived for such a long time. Or some modern cultures may look back and imagine that they have something to do with some culture two millennia ago, but in reality, they have nothing in common. (Think modern Egyptians and ancient Egypt, or modern French and the ancient Gauls, etc.) This culture has remained stable for so long that a modern representative of that culture can actually look at a literary artifact of three thousand years ago and read what is written with only a little trouble. How many people can you find in Ireland that can read the Ogham alphabet that was used only 1,400 years ago? Or how many Norwegians or Swedes can read their Runic alphabet that was in use at the time of the Reformation, 500 yeas ago? I don’t even want to mention Cyrillic, the alphabet of my native language, Bulgarian, which was created only about 1,200 years ago; and I even have trouble reading some of the texts written 400 years ago. And this culture we are going to be talking about has an uninterrupted literary tradition that is older that any name of any nation or any geographical toponym in Europe. Even Hellas, the native name of modern Greece, the oldest surviving name in Europe, is younger than than the literary tradition of that culture. So, while there is a dark side to that consistency over the ages – and we will shortly see what it is – it still commands a certain level of respect. It’s the Chinese culture. We have to hand it to the Chinese; they arethe oldest existing culture today. We can legitimately overlook their other boasting: scientific or technological discoveries, or philosophical systems, or systems of social and military organization, etc. I mean, those are great, if they were true, it’s just they were never developed into large-scale civilizational advances, so we can easily ignore them. (For example, the ancient Greeks invented a steam engine but they used it for religious special effects, not for any useful work. So we say that it was invented by James Watt and others in England in the 18thcentury. He put it to work right away.) But as far as culture is concerned – which means, the overall norms and habits and cultural expectations and especially ethical-judicial principles – a modern Chinese would feel much more at home with the Chinese of 2,000 years ago, than any modern Englishman would with the Angles of 2,000 years ago, or any modern Russian would feel with the Russians of 2,000 years ago. For one, he would be able to read the street signs, right? It surely is impressive, isn’t it? Now, whether it is something to be proud of is a completely different issue, and we will get to it in a few minutes. Anyway, that is the culture I am going to be talking about today; or rather, will be using as an example of an ethical-judicial principle about the advance of civilizations. It ain’t gonna be easy, though, and here I want to start with a disclaimer. I will be talking partly about the Chinese culture, and about some of its collective psychology. I know there are Chinese folks among our listeners, and there are some among then that grew up in that culture. They know it inside out: all its details, nuances, backgrounds, contexts, biases, prejudices internally and externally, all the things that I can’t know exhaustively simply because I have not grown in it. To be sure, I have always tried to be a sincere and unbiased student of Asia and its cultures and history ever since I got involved in Eastern martial arts and had interest in Eastern religions. (That before I became a Christian.) I even took a basic course in Chinese characters – not to learn them in depth, but to understand the principle behind them. But I am a European who is learning from other Europeans; and, unfortunately, most of the studies of East Asian cultures come from European observers. For some reason, there are very few Chinese, Japanese. Korean, or Vietnamese writers who undertake the task of explaining their cultures to Europeans. In psychological terms, East Asian cultures are rather shy and introvert, and opposed to the extrovertness of the European cultures, not to mention the sometimes crass self-promotion and bragging of the American culture. Thus, I plead guilty from the very beginning: you will certainly find fault with some of my analysis. But I also want you to understand: The truth of the conclusions in this episode is not affected by how detailed my knowledge of China is. I am only using China as an example; but I could use any other culture, and the conclusions will be the same. The reason China is a good example is because it has been the culture that, in the last century, has had a very keen interest in the question of how civilizations advance. But I am getting ahead of myself here. Three years ago, in March 2016, a Chinese chemist named Sun Weidong delivered a lecture to a diverse audience of professors, students, and just ordinary science enthusiasts at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, a large city (about 8 million population) in Eastern China. But he didn’t talk about chemistry. He talked about history. Not strange, by the way, given that much of his scientific career has been related to radiometric analysis of different historical artifacts. The strange part was the content of the lecture itself. Sun started his lecture with a passage from one of the most venerated historical texts in Chinese historiography, the Shi Ji, simply, The Historical Record, known to Western historians as Records of the Grand Historianby Si Ma Chien, a palace historian for the Han Dynasty in 2nd century BC. Si Ma was a very interesting and colorful personality himself, and we know a lot about his life, but I will resist the temptation to give details here. Suffice to say, he is considered the father of Chinese historiography, and his Record is considered the “foundational text of the Chinese civilization.” It is truly believed that through it, Si Ma really created the Chinese civilization as a civilization, by giving it intellectual cohesion that would make it survive as a culture for two more millennia, even in the midst of constant civil wars and foreign invasions, and even foreign rule for several centuries. In it, Si Ma put together, from earlier sources, the history of the Chinese civilization, starting from its early mythical origins in the Yellow Emperor (and even the three god-kings before him) before the 3rdmillennium BC, going through all the early dynasties before the Han dynasty, writing down a number of biographies of important historical figures compiled from a multitude of earlier sources, some of them lost to us today. The Record is written in more than half million Chinese characters (that’s separate words, folks), and is longer than the Old Testament, while, unlike the Old Testament, is written by one man only. If you want to delve into ancient Chinese history, the book is free online, in Chinese-English interlinear. The text that Sun Weidong quoted was from Si Ma’s history of the Xia Dynasty, the first Chinese dynasty that followed directly after the mythical period of the Three God-Kings and the Five Emperors. The Xia Dynasty itself is half-mythical, half-historical. You know how every culture on earth has its own myths and legends about the Great Flood; well, in Si Ma’s history, that flood happened during the Xia Dynasty; clearly wrong, but no doubt he simply recorded it faithfully from older records. The text in question here, however, is not the Great Flood but the geography and topography of the empire of that first Chinese dynasty, considered the mother dynasty of the Chinese nation. Here is the text in question: “Northwards, the stream is divided and become the Nine Rivers. Reunited, it forms the opposing river and flows into the Sea.” Sun then asked the question: “There is only one major river in the world that flows northwards. Which one is it?” A member of the audience replied, “The Nile.” Then Sun showed a map of the Nile River and its delta: truly, a stream that flows northward and is divided into nine tributaries, some of which “re-unite” into “opposing” (that is, “on the other side”) rivers. He then continued with his thesis: according to him, the roots of Chinese culture should be sought not in any natural cultural evolution of the local population, but were planted sometime in the mid-2nd millennium BC by migrants from Egypt. The Xia Dynasty, he believes, was in fact the Hyksos: a Semitic nation that ruled Egypt as “foreign rulers” in the 17ththrough the 16thcenturies BC, declined in power in the mid-16thcentury BC and was expelled by a popular uprising, after which the native rule over Egypt was restored. (Just to mention, he, of course, follows the modern accepted secular chronology of Egypt. I think that chronology is mistaken: the Hyksos’s rule was in the 15th– 13thcenturies BC, and the Hyksos were the Biblical Amalekites. But this discrepancy is not important to my thesis here.) The Hyksos were known to have had advanced bronze weapons before most other cultures, and they are also known to have developed superior seafaring technology. Sun argues that they might have sent expeditions as far as China, and also, that after the fall...
Transcribe →Theocracy and Libertarianism
Feb 20, 201900:48:08Tap to summarizeWelcome to Episode 84 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will work to bury an ideological fiction. In a sense, intellectually, I will be burying a corpse, given that that fiction has been dead for a long time – no one who believes in that ideology has been capable of producing a single piece of theological, philosophical, or logical (that is, presuppositional) evidence in favor of it. Every single line of support for it has been simply an instinctive irrational reaction, never a consistent logical conclusion. Over the years, I have asked many questions about that ideology, pointing to its inconsistency and lack of intellectual life in it. I have never gotten answers to my questions. I have pointed to Biblical examples and doctrines that refute it. I have pointed to books and articles by theologians who refute it, and give the Biblical presuppositions that refute it. The thing is dead and has never been alive. But it has its worshipers. So I will try to bury it with this episode. The ideological fiction I want to bury is this: Libertarianism is antithetical to theocracy. Or, to put it differently, that no Biblically consistent Christian can be a libertarian. Or, that if you follow the Bible to the tee, you can’t end up with a libertarian social order. Or, that a libertarian social order can’t be Christian. Or, that if we do not have a state that intervenes in people’s lives to prevent sin, we will eventually have chaos and destruction. Or, that in order for a society to prosper in righteousness and justice, we need a civil government empowered to tax and control and regulate its subjects for the higher purposes of God. Now, there are two sides to this ideology. One side is the secular libertarians who are committed to libertarianism – or so they say – but want to keep God and the Bible out of it. Von Mises was such, Murray Rothbard was such, Ayn Rand had some not so friendly things to say about Christianity (although, she agreed with it that liberty and capitalism can be only based on a system of ethics, which von Mises and Rothbard denied). Such secular libertarians have the concept that in order for a society to be free, it needs to be atheist, or, at the very least, any faith in God must remain at a personal level, while the society must be conceptually atheist or at least agnostic concerning any deities. Those are not my opponents in this episode. I have pointed out many times before that secularism and libertarianism can’t work together, and secular libertarianism inevitably has to end up in some form of mild statism, or some other form of institutional control of some men over others. See, for example, Lew Rockwell’s, Hermann Hoppe’s, and other secular libertarians’ belief in government control over immigration, which is nothing more than just another form of socialism. I have talked about it in my article, “Lew Rockwell and the Mild Statism of Secular Libertarianism” on the ChristendomRestored.com website. We will see a little bit later why all secularism or paganism inevitably has to produce some form of statism or power religion. My target in this episode is the other side of that ideology, those Christians who claim to be “conservative” and “Bible-believing” and “Reformed” and what-not, who claim to take all of their ideas from Scripture, and yet, they continue denouncing libertarianism, and continue supporting one or another form of statism with the claim that it is “according to the Bible.” And they continue declaring that libertarianism is antithetical to the Bible and ridicule everyone who proposes libertarian solutions to the problems of today’s world. Those same Christians who take the text of Romans 13 and defend modern political theories and practices whose origin is not Romans 13 but rather Revelation 13; but because they have adopted a religious faith in the right of the state to control people’s lives, they never stop to figure out the difference. To such professing Christians I want to present the evidence that Biblical theocracy is not antithetical to libertarianism, but, contrary to their assertions, libertarianism is the only logical political system that can be consistently based on a Biblical worldview; and also, that a Christian consistent with his Bible can arrive to only one possible political and social system: libertarianism. What we call today libertarianism is simply the political theory of the Bible. It is rooted in the Bible, and there is no other possible root for it. Granted, some secularists have taken the fruit and have abandoned the root, but that doesn’t mean we as Christians should be blind to the true origin of libertarianism as a political philosophy. After all, the same applies to science: some secularists have claimed that science must be separate from the Bible, but we don’t say that science is antithetical to the Bible, right? In the same way, a presuppositional analysis of the Biblical worldview and its application to political science and social theory leads us to the conclusion that the only righteous society that the Bible describes and prescribes is a libertarian society, free of any government control, and only subject to some very limited instances of human institutional judgment (not control but judgment). The rest of this episode will be such presuppositional analysis based on several fundamental points of the Biblical worldview, namely, the Biblical views of the nature of God and reality, of the nature of man and his purpose in God’s Covenant, and the meaning and nature of God’s law. In all of them, as we develop the antithesis between the Biblical and the pagan/secular worldviews, we will see that libertarianism as a political philosophy stems directly from the Biblical teachings about society; and we will also see that, as Rushdoony has pointed many times, paganism and secularism are inescapably statist in their views, and there is no chance of ever constructing a consistent secular or pagan society without having at least some degree of statism, that is, institutional control of some men by other men. Before we start, however, let me first lay the foundation with definitions for the two main terms we are using here: theocracy and libertarianism. Theocracy is, quite simply, a society under the rule of God. In a sense, every society is under the rule of God, of course, even those who oppose God and are under His judgment in history.(Being under God’s judgment is still being under His rule, right?) But the term here denotes a society that is self-consciously and deliberately submitted to God in everything it does: from its foundational premises and publicly accepted religious and intellectual principles, through the personal conduct of its members and its economic structure, all the way to its systems of justice and public trust and stewardship. A theocratic society is a society where, when its people are asked, “who is the ruler of your society?” or “what is the foundational principle of your society?, respond, “Jesus Christ and His Gospel.” It is important to understand that a theocratic society is not a society where church ministers rule (as is the commonly accepted mythology about the term). That would be a priestocracy, not a theocracy. It is not where the state controls and regulates people based on officially religious principles; that would be religious socialism. (Read the book The Socialist Phenomenon by Igor Shafarevich.) Theocracy is pure and simple, “God rules,” as the term signifies, and it has to do only with God’s direct rule over His creation and over mankind, not with men ruling over other men. Libertarianism, on the other hand, is a political philosophy that establishes the freedom of the individual to act as the highest value and the highest priority of all political and social endeavor. When we say “the individual,” we mean the individual vs. any sort of collective or any sort of power, whether family, church, or state. That means that in any single case where a decision must be made between the individual acting out of his own free will, and a collective or another sort of power forcing its will upon the individual under some threat of punishment or compulsion, libertarianism takes the side of the individual and denies the collective any moral authority to act or to force the individual to comply. Thus, libertarianism is about the liberty of the individual to act. Remember, libertarianism is just a political philosophy and its exclusive area of interest is the balance of power in the society between individuals and collectives. It is not a moral philosophy; it doesn’t declare declare what acts are moral and permissible by the individual. It still acknowledges that there are immoral acts committed by individuals that should be stopped, and some even recompensed and punished; but within the limits of acceptable personal behavior, libertarianism denies any collective or any government the moral ground to control or regulate the life of the individual. Whether it is what the individual will put in his body, where he will live, what arbitrary geographical border he will cross, who he will be hired by and who he will hire, what kind of business he will engage in, what prices he will attach to the product of his labor or to his property, what he will do with the money he earns and at what price, etc., all these should remain entirely within the sphere of self-government, and no other human government should be allowed to make any decisions for the individual himself. If there are any governments, their business should be to protect the individual against immoral acts by other individuals, not become immoral themselves. So, with these definitions, how do we proceed? How do we prove that libertarianism as a political philosophy follows from the Bib...
Transcribe →The Prophetic Ministry
Feb 5, 201900:45:51Tap to summarizeWelcome to Episode 83 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will practice some resurrection. That is, we will resurrect a topic that has long been dead in our churches, and especially in our Reformed churches. Namely, the topic about the Prophetic Ministry. Not just about prophecy, or just about the spiritual gifts. We want to talk about the Prophetic Ministry. What is it, Biblically, what is its purpose, what should it look like today, and, most important, why has this topic been silenced and forgotten by today’s churches – and especially, by the leaders and celebrities in today’s churches. And, perhaps, if we have the time, we may want to look into the issue, what we need to to do to restore it in the Church today. (I am sure we won’t have the time, for I need to make a very long introduction, but perhaps in a future episode.) I said we are going to be talking about the Prophetic Ministry, not about prophecy or the other gifts, but we need to start with prophecy and the other gifts – because we cannot resolve the issue of the Prophetic Ministry before we resolve the issue of the gifts of the Spirit and their validity and application today. So let me first shortly get this issue dealt with and out of the way before we move to the topic at hand. Those of you who have listened to previous episodes, specifically “Modern Presbyterianism: Under the Feet of Men” and “The Spiritual Gifts,” know that I am an unrepentant Charismatic. Not just a “continuationist,” which denotes a rather passive acceptance of the continuation of gifts, but a Charismatic. That is, I believe that the Bible specifically instructs us that the spiritual gifts as they are described in several chapters in the New Testament are central to the way the Holy Spirit works in the Church in the New Testament era, and they are also central to our knowledge of God, and specifically to His immanence. We are not just admonished to accept them as “continuing,” we are explicitly commanded to actively and earnestly desire all the gifts, and especially the gift of prophecy, because the more of the gifts we have, the more the Church grows in maturity. The only detailed description of a church service in the Bible (1 Cor. 14) is entirely predicated on the free practice of the gifts of the Spirit. Now, obviously, the Bible doesn’t say that a service that doesn’t have them is necessarily invalid, or that a church that doesn’t practice them every day is necessarily invalid. But what is clear – again, from Scripture – is that a church that deliberately forbids them or declares them “ceased” has a serious problem with trusting and believing Scripture, and therefore is not a Sola Scriptura church, no matter how vociferously it may claim the title. I know, I know, within the Reformed tradition, I rather stick out. (Perhaps not completely; a few Reformed theologians of the last 100 years have been continuationists.) And I have had my share of flak for voicing publicly my disagreement with the un-Biblical beliefs of the majority of those who pass for “Reformed” in this specific area of their theology. And, boy, have I heard all kinds of bizarre and laughable arguments why Scripture should not be taken at face value for what it says on the spiritual gifts. The most common of them, of course, is not Biblical (there are no Biblical arguments in favor of cessationism anyway) but sensational and experientialist: namely, “We don’t see today any prophets and healers, therefore the gifts must have ceased.” Because, you know, our temporary experience trumps the Bible; whatever the Bible says, we need to first see it, and if we don’t see it around us, it must have ceased, right? That’s what sola fide and sola scriptura means, right? Kinda ironic when it comes from folks who accuse Charismatics of “experientialism.” Then there is an attempt at Biblical argument from 1 Cor. 13:8-10, that when “the perfect” comes, the gifts will be done away; and “the perfect,” you know, is the completion of the canon. But what exactly in the text can make anyone believe that “the perfect” is the completion of the canon? Even Greg Bahnsen, himself an avowed cessationist, admitted that was not a good argument; and until the early 1900s, every single theologian commenting on that verse said that “the perfect” comes either at the end of history or with the earthly death of the individual. Calvin himself, commenting on that verse, calls it “stupid” to believe that “the perfect” comes in an intermediate time in history. But if this verse is not a good argument, there is no other verse that even mentions cessation of the gifts. Where is the Biblical evidence of those who beat themselves in the chest that they are “sola scriptura”? Then the turn comes for arguments that, for anyone unbiased, sound like they have come from a lunatic asylum. For example, that in Acts, the gifts are mentioned more in the beginning of the book but less or no mention of them is made at the end of the book. What kind of an argument is that? Paul told the Roman church in Rom. 1:11 that he longed to see them so that he could impart some spiritual gift to them. But he didn’t get to Rome until two years before his death. “Sorry guys, I promised to impart gifts to you, but it’s the end of the period, no spiritual gifts anymore.” Then comes the argument about “they were only for one purpose and it has expired.” Like, “only to witness to the Jews.” Or, “only to fill the gap until we have Scripture.” None of these “only reasons” are ever found in Scripture, but the mythology persists. Meanwhile, Scripture contains multiple real reasons and functions for the gifts: establishment, encouragement, edification, growth to maturity, power to witness, public worship, evidence for unbelievers, judgment, confirmation of elders, vision, purpose, protection, guidance . . . how many of these have expired in the first century? (On a side note, ever wondered why all the “Reformed” ministries we have today – including some of the best, like R.C. Sproul – have been preaching the same milk for 30+ years, and there has been no growth? Meanwhile, Charismatics are already busy building Kingdom institutions while our so-called “Reformed” are flocking to G3 conferences to hear the same stuff on substitutionary atonement and the grace of God that they have been hearing for decades.) Then comes the argument that if we have prophecy today, it must be as Scripture and therefore will rival Scripture – despite obvious Biblical verses that show that there have been prophets whose prophecies were not Scripture. Calvin says about this that prophecy is simply “the application of Scripture to present use.” Much like engineering is the application of science to present use. If engineering doesn’t compete with science, because they serve different functions, prophecy does not compete with Scripture, because they serve different functions. Paul told Timothy that “all Scripture is profitable,” and yet, Paul also twice told that same Timothy to remember the prophecies concerning him and his ministry and gift. Was Paul contradicting himself? Then semantics comes into play: They were “apostolic” gifts, you know. That is, they were only for the apostles. Well, sola scriptura doesn’t mention anything about “apostolic” gifts, but it surely calls them spiritual gifts, that is, they belong to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit has not expired in the first century, as far as I can tell. Or what about the argument that the tongues must be intelligible human languages? Paul explicitly says in 1 Cor. 14:2 that one speaks in tongues, “no one understands.” Etc., etc., etc., I am not going to try to cover all of that lunacy in every single detail. Sometimes I wonder, how deep a hole can a person dig for themselves just to avoid the clear obvious message of the Bible? When all these fail, of course, there comes a more “moderate” cessationism: for example, that God still does miracles today and He gives prophecies and stuff, but they are no more given as “gifts” to specific people, just scattered among many people. But the text in 1 Cor. 12:4-11 specifically says that the Holy Spirit gives them as gifts to specific people; and it is part of the whole concept of the church as a body with different parts. How do you hold to that position without logically destroying the whole concept of the Body as described in Scripture? What sola scriptura principle allows you to ditch a clear Biblical text in favor of your own imagination? But we will shortly see why the concept of the personal gifts is so repulsive to modern churchmen. To summarize: cessationism is one of the most un-Biblical doctrines to ever hit Christianity. While it came out of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, it has produced nothing more than irrational babbling by people who refuse to even read what the Bible c...
Transcribe →Paganism, Conservationism, and Fear of Competition
Jan 29, 201900:45:39Tap to summarizeWelcome to Episode 82 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will cover one of the greatest fears of our time, and the religious foundation of that fear. In previous episodes we saw that fear is the most powerful emotion people experience, and, judging from its prominence in the Bible, it is also the most important. We also saw that fear itself has a religious foundation and nature; and more than that, it is also a religion itself. (Ever been in a situation where you tell people paralyzed by fear that they shouldn’t be afraid, only to see them lash at you as if you were some sort of a heretic?) In 1798, an English pastor and scholar, Thomas Robert Malthus, published a book: An Essay on the Principle of Population. On the surface, it was just another scholarly thesis that came out of the Enlightenment. Of the right wing of the Enlightenment, to be precise, the one prevalent in England and Scotland and Prussia and Hanover, not the left wing, prevalent in France and Italy. The Enlightenment’s standards for all scholarship were that it was supposed to be as technical and mathematical as science, and, most importantly, free of any ethical values and considerations. Yes, even the right wing Enlightenment, the one that was driven by church ministers (as was Malthus himself) and used religious language and rhetoric as its justification. From this Enlightenment perspective, Malthus’s book was the perfect scholarly thesis. His topic was simple: the relationship between food production and population growth. It wasn’t anything new, to be sure, others before had tried that topic as well. It was a particularly common topic among the educated elite of revolutionary France – after all, that’s how the French Revolution started, with the people starving because of an alleged depletion of the resources for food production. A few revolutionary leaders argued that for France to remain full and content, about a quarter of the population should be exterminated to match the land available for food production. These ideas were, however, a little too extreme even for the French taste at the time; besides, most of their proponents – like Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton – were themselves guillotined. Similar ideas were floated in Prussia as well, although the Prussian monarchy, always in need of more soldiers, never took them seriously. So Malthus was not writing in a vacuum, the topic had already become “hot” among Enlightenment theorists on both right and left. He was, however, destined to become the father of a whole new trend with his theory. Why? Because he was much better educated than all previous writers, he was capable to write about in a perfectly technical, rather disinterested way (quite creepy, given the horrible bloodthirsty advice he was giving the political elite), and he was writing in a country that was politically stable and socially stratified, where scholars and church ministers like him had quite an audience and influence. He had the privilege of coming from a well-educated family, as well. His father, Daniel Malthus, was a non-Conformist (probably from an old Puritan family) and personal friend of men like David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Thomas took orders in the Church of England, contrary to his father’s religious views, probably to avoid the non-conformist disabilities and be able to take positions as a college professor. There was also another point where he disagreed with his father: unlike his father, who was a staunch optimist about the future, Thomas was a pessimist. And his book was the ultimate expression of his pessimistic views. In a very short sentence, the thesis of the Essay on the Principle of Population is that the prospects for humanity are bleak. Why? Because, as Malthus explained in mathematical terms, while the world’s population grows geometrically, the means for food production only grow arithmetically. That is the simplest and most popular way of presenting his thesis. In reality, however, his thesis was a little more complicated. He had to make it more complicated in order to add respectable Christina religious language to it, in order to conceal his true intentions. A fuller explanation of his thesis would be this: There is a certain number of population that matches the available resources for food production. However, when food production increases, mankind – and especially the lower classes of mankind – are not wise enough to maintain the same stable rate of human reproduction with the purpose of achieving higher standard of life. Instead, they are stupid enough to start reproducing more and more, exponentially. Eventually that exponential human reproduction catches up with and even overtakes food production, and people, even with the new and higher level of food production, are left much poorer and hungrier than before. That point where human reproduction catches up with food production has come to be called Malthusian catastrophe by sociologists, and the level at which the excess population stops growing due to shortage of food is called Malthusian trap. In short, all that Malthus’s analysis promised humanity was inevitable suffering in the future, marked by short periods of prosperity which, because of the very nature of humanity – especially of the poorer humanity – will inevitably lead to more and worse suffering. When he came to his policy proposals, he had to conceal the true nature of his religion under a lot of pious verbiage. He used long-winded phrases and metaphoric language for regular phrases (for example, “virtuous affection” instead of “marriage,” etc.) to satisfy the spirit of the time and especially the academic spirit of the time; but to make his proposals acceptable, he had to pretend that his motives were honest and virtuous. When asked why God would create a world of limited resources for a growing population, his answer was that this was so that God teaches us prudence in procreation. But under the verbose expression of love and concern for the poor and needy, he practically declared that the political elite must do everything they could to prevent the masses from achieving any sort of prosperity, even if that meant artificially created shortages. He was in favor of government taxes on food so high as to keep sufficiency of food beyond the reach of the average family; in his view, the masses of people needed to be kept at the brink of starvation even in years of abundant crops. In his pious language, it was better to be poor than foolish and use the abundance for more irresponsible procreation. He didn’t even shy of recommending violent death as a final measure; since natural famine and pestilence didn’t always do their job in regulating the population, he believed governments should finish the job by starting wars just for the sake of thinning out the population. In the final account, behind the seemingly dispassionate academic language, there was evil. His proposals, no matter how dressed they were in religious lingo, smacked of the ideology of the ancient pagan empires, especially the Biblical Assyria. The last time Europe had encountered such ideas and policies was in the last three decades of the 14th century when Tamerlane, a distant relative of Genghis Khan, tried to restore the Mongol Empire. Tamerlane was so systematic in exterminating whole populations that he beat even Genghis Khan himself. However, ever since the 14th century, no one in the known world ever used such policies nor advocated for them, not even the Ottoman Turks. (They had their share of atrocities but, in general, the Sultans viewed conquered populations as sheep to be bred and milked and sheared, not as vermin to be destroyed.) Malthus brought back to life ideas that everyone before him thought should have passed away with the passing of paganism. I will touch later on the influence of Malthus’s ideas in the last two centuries, and especially in our day. But before we do that, we need to first look into the religious origin of these ideas, and especially into the religious climate these ideas both require, and help create or recreate. Where did he get his ideas from? Is it possible that a Christian scholar come up with such ideology of cruelty? Is there really a Christian justification for Malthusianism, and Malthus claimed? Or could there be something else behind it, religiously? We all know that ideas have consequences. But I have argued before, in some of my articles, that ideas are themselves consequences of something deeper and greater than ideology – namely, faith. Ideology is always based on some religion, and even when we present our ideas in a seemingly rational and unbiased and academic form, they are still religious in their origin. There is still some deep moral commitment, some deep religious impulse that drives our ideology. I can bring in tons of quotes from Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen here to illustrate what I am talking about, but I prefer this short phrase by Dennis Peacocke which beautifully explains presuppositional epistemology in general and my argument here: “The mind only justifies what the heart has already chosen.” So, what was it that Malthus’s heart had chosen that his mind masterfully justified in that book? I have a name for the religion behind his thesis: Paganism of a Closed Universe. Or, a Closed-Universe Paganism, if you wish. Those who have studied physics know that I am borrowing a term from physics: Closed System. A closed system is a system that doesn’t allow the transfer of mass or energy in or out of the system. In the same way, a closed universe is a universe that does not allow any transfer of energy in or out of the universe. All that there is, is inside the uni...
Transcribe →How Christianity Invented the Future
Jan 9, 201900:40:50Tap to summarizeWelcome to Episode 81 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will talk about one of the most bizarre concepts the world has ever known. Namely, the future. OK, I know, I lost you right here, at the very beginning. The future is a bizarre concept??? How come? What do you mean, Bo? The future sounds to me as one of the most natural concepts a man can have. We are born thinking of the future, dreaming about the future, imagining what we are going to be in the future, planning for the future. No person has ever found difficult to think of the future and eagerly expect the future. Why would it be “bizarre,” if everyone is so familiar and so comfortable with the concept of the future? What are you talking about? Not so quick. Let’s start thinking here. I suggest that we have always accepted the concept of a the future as natural and normal without thinking why it should be natural and normal. Most of us never even thought what the future is, as a concept. When we dig into that concept, and into the way it is produced and perceived by our minds and hearts, we may discover that it is not as natural and normal as we may have first thought. May be it’s not even not normal, it may be a severe aberration, a mental monstrosity, if the “naturalness” of our minds is to be our standard for “normalcy.” Perhaps we need to stop and consider the possibility that “future” is simply an illusion which we have been poisoned with from an early age. Perhaps it is even a propaganda device meant to manipulate us and control us for certain purposes? Who knows what we can discover if we start thinking about the concept of the future instead of just accepting it on faith. Then again, we may discover that it is just a normal and natural concept, as we have always thought, right? But whatever we discover, it is still worth to start thinking about that concept of the future. It may help us learn things about ourselves and about how our minds operate. And if we learn things about ourselves, we may learn things about our Christian faith. And, as John Calvin said in the first book of his Institutes, once we learn more about ourselves, we end up learning about God. So, what is future? Specifically, what is it as a concept of thought, of philosophy, of psychology, of practical ideology? How do we define it, and where does it comes from? Is it part of our nature to think of the future as a separate category; do all people instinctively adopt it as part of their thought models? Or is it something that we learn from our parents because they learned it from others before them; and therefore, if we had parents from a different culture that didn’t have the concept of future, we wouldn’t even think about it as a valid reality? Reformed Christians, and especially presuppositionalists among my listeners may be fascinated to learn that despite the prevalence of that concept in our every day lives, and in our formal philosophical and ideological systems and endeavors, the concept of the future has been amazingly under-represented in philosophical and psychological studies. Not that there aren’t any studies on it, but the existing ones are way too few for such a common concept, and they are usually limited in scope. Even if you go to Wikipedia and read the article on “Future,” you will see that that article is quite short, with a few sketchy paragraphs on each of the disciplines of physics, philosophy, and religion, and half of the article devoted to side issues like art styles, and music and literary genres that have adopted the concept as foundational (like futurism and science fiction). It even lacks serious references for additional reading: no books, only a few references to marginal encyclopedias and newspaper articles. To compare, the article on “Mysticism,” for example, is about 8 times longer, very detailed and comprehensive, and has about 150 references, all to serious academic studies. And yet, how often is mysticism present as a topic in serious discussions as opposed to the future? The discrepancy is not only in Wikipedia; it is everywhere. Philosophers discuss a whole lot of other subjects, but they somehow always evade discussing the future as a philosophical concept, even though the future is one of the most common concepts the modern man deals with, every day. There were attempts, of course, few and far between. Roger Evered, a British engineer and educator who immigrated to the US in the 1960s, worked as aerospace engineer at McDonnell Douglas, and later taught at several universities and at the Postgraduate Naval College, did try to tackle future as a philosophical concept. His doctoral dissertation with the University of California in Los Angeles in 1973 was titled, “Conceptualizing the ‘Future’: Implications for Strategic Management in a Turbulent Environment.” He later went on to teach Strategic Management, and had to tackle the concept again. Most of his treatment of the concept of the future, however, remained limited to the area of strategic management. Not that there is any problem in such specific application of the concept; but it certainly tends to limit the scope, and Evered ended taking more things for granted than he analyzed and explained. After him, no one really tried to explain the concept from a philosophical perspective. The deepest studies ever tackled the concept in the context of consumer behavior; the 1980s and the 1990s were the culmination of studies on consumer behavior, and expectations of the future were central to any understanding of how the consumers would react to new products or commercials. Still, no scholar dared touch the concept from a more general, philosophical starting point. In that period, the term “philosophy of time” became popular. But despite its popularity, no one really sat down to even give a definition of the concept of the future, let alone study it as a concept. The philosophy of time studies focused mainly either on realism – the metaphysical relation between past, present, and future – or on nominalism – human perception of time and the theory of time preferences (the last one especially important for the study of political economy and entrepreneurship and investment). Again, nothing wrong with these studies, in fact, they are important both practically and theoretically, but . . . a definition of “future” was still not given, and neither was a study of the concept itself presented. The concept of the future was taken for granted, as if it has already been defined and studied, and only its relationship with other concepts was examined. Unique, huh? There is really no other such concept in philosophy that has been treated in such a lousy way. In fact, if anything, secular philosophers have often criticized Christians for not being able to define God (not that God is definable in human terms in the Christian worldview in the first place); and yet, here they are taking for granted a concept that they have never even tried to define. Now, there is a good reason why modern philosophy – especially modern secular philosophy – is incapable of even beginning to define the concept of the future. That reason is that modern philosophy has fallen victim to its foundational premise: that whatever definition or logical rule we use, it cannot refer us us back to anything supernatural, or to any other and higher reason or mind outside and above the human mind and human experience. Everything man uses to define himself and the world around himself must be based on “natural” assumptions, meaning naturalistic assumptions. All the foundations for our definitions must be grounded in man’s direct sensory experience. You know the regular atheist excuse for an argument: “If I can’t see your God, then He is either non-existent or irrelevant.” Philosophers know that such excuse is rather primitive and low-brow, and they seldom use it directly, it is still, as a philosophical presupposition, embedded deeply into the modern secular thought. So when it comes to definitions of things that require some open display of non-sensory faith, philosophers are rather timid to take up the challenge. And indeed, think about it. How can we define the future based on the modern secular thought that requires sensory experience before there is a definition? Why should we be even mindful about the future? Has anyone experienced it? Has anyone seen it? I used that argument with atheists many times: Do you believe there is future? Have you seen it? Can you describe it? Can you define it? The answers were always quite lame, logically. The complaints secularists raise about the Christian God apply to the concept of the future as well: it is only a figment of our imagination, only a conjecture, an extrapolation from misinterpreted evidence (and all of that evidence comes from another imaginary, the concept of the past, but I won’t go there in this episode), no one has seen it or experienced it, really. There is no natural reason for us to even believe there is future, or that it has any relevant significance to anything we do or say or think. The only possible answer to this is that even if we haven’t experienced the future so far, we will surely experience it tomorrow, when it comes . . . but so what? When it comes, it won’t be future anymore, it will be present. To base our definitions on mental expectations, not sensory experience, would be to resort to faith – and why would a secularist philosopher want to base his philosophy on faith? I mean, once you resort to faith for one thing, who knows in how many more definitions you will let faith dictate your perceptions and definitions, and then . . . what is the defense against Christianity and its faith-based philosophy? So, no wonder secularist philosophers avoid defining the future as a concept. They may talk about it, they may take it for ...
Transcribe →The Cult of Safety
Dec 19, 201800:47:17Tap to summarizeWelcome to Episode 80 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will examine a modern cult, so prevalent in our society that even professed Christians fall for it and worship at its altar. It is a cult that follows straight from the idolatry which I described in a previous episode of Axe to the Root, titled “Fear as a Motivator.” Fear is the religion of many Americans today, and of many church-goers; and it is a religion actively promoted by the government and from the pulpits. And this religion of fear leads to the cult I will describe below. And since I said in that aforementioned episode that we as Christians should reject the religion of fear, the conclusion is that we should reject the cult that follows from it as well. But I shouldn’t get ahead of my own topic. I was listening recently to a song by a punk rock group from Bosnia (a country on the Balkans), Dubioza Kolektiv. The title of the song is “The Anthem of Our Generation.” Now, since this is a punk rock group, you might not want to know the whole lyrics of the song (not everything in it is repeatable in a good company), but in general, the lyrics is an amazingly insightful characterization of the psychology of our generation today, and specifically of our inclination to worry about a number of irrelevant things. The conclusion of the song, expressed in the chorus, is this: “This is the anthem of our generation: We worry for a living.” Or, perhaps a better translation, “We live by worrying.” Either way, the meaning is clear: Our time is about the most secure time in history, a time of prosperity the world has never seen before, of the lowest crime rate and rapidly growing longevity, and a time when technology has made the life of billions of people so easy and comfortable that we can hardly find a single person in the West – and increasingly, in the whole world – who knows what it is to not have food, clothes, or shelter. And yet, we worry about everything: or, rather, we worry about things that to previous generations would seem ridiculously irrelevant: we worry about what kind of clothes we should wear in what situations, we worry about glaciers and the non-existent global warming, we worry about boogeymen like immigration and terrorism (when the chance of being killed by a terrorist is something like one in several million), etc. etc., etc. And because we worry so much about all these things, politicians and media have grasped that the best way to control us is to reiterate and exaggerate those petty worries we have to the level of gigantic threats, and then come and save us from them. And this, indeed, is the very tactics of modern politics: scare people into submission. To quote H.L. Mencken, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” But, of course, do not be quick to condemn the politicians for using fear to manipulate us. Remember that they only respond to what we have always adopted as our mode of operation; or, as Dubioza Kolektiv said it, as our mode of living. Namely, worry. When we as individuals are given over to constant worry, then don’t expect politicians to use anything else to control us but magnify those worries into full-scale fear campaigns. So, what do politicians offer to solve our problems, then? Safety. Obviously, for you to put them in power and keep them in power and close your eyes for their immorality and corruption and taxes and violations of your liberties, they need to promise you something to soothe your worries. What is that something? Safety from the hobgoblins that keep you worried at night. Once you are offered that safety, you would be willing to close your eyes for everything else, right? Thus, the cult of safety has become the largest and most cherished cult in our day; a cult that is deliberately supported by government action and by the media narratives. What is it that you want the most? Obviously, safety. What do you want the government to provide for you? Obviously, safety. What would you be willing to sacrifice for, including sacrifice your liberty? Obviously, safety. Safety is the main consideration, above all, especially safety from those imaginary hobgoblins that torment our hearts every day. Safety has become our obsession today . . . and no, don’t blame the millennials and their “safe spaces.” Everyone, including the older generation and specifically modern conservatives worship at the altar of safety. And we will see how. But let’s first go to the Bible and let’s see where in the Bible we see the cult of safety. Amazingly enough, the search leads us to the very beginning of the Bible, to the story of Cain and Able. Cain got jealous and killed his brother. When God confronted him for it, he remained unrepentant, so God had to declare a curse on him: “Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you cultivate the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you; you will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth” (Gen. 4:11, 12). Cain’s reply? He complained that his punishment was too great to bear. And he ended his reply with the following complaint: “. . . and whoever finds me will kill me.” Pay attention to what actually happened. The man had just murdered his own brother. He was just confronted by God Himself about it. Did God execute him right away as He should have done under His Law and promise? No, He gave him more life, even if that life was cursed. Cain’s eternal judgment was at stake. God just gave him more time to consider his sin and repent. And instead of showing gratitude and taking advantage of the opportunity, Cain complains that in that life on grace he is given, he doesn’t feel safe. (“Dude, seriously?”, as modern kids would say.) Justice and righteousness mean nothing to him. The man can’t see beyond his ego. Even in his disobedience to God, and even in being unrepentant for the most heinous sin a man can commit, he cares about his own comfort of feeling safe from the people around him. Here we see the first instance in the Bible of the cult of safety. It is such a clear example of the cult that we can derive the definition of that cult from it: the cult of safety is a commitment to being free of any real or imaginary danger, over and against a commitment to righteousness and justice. Let me repeat that last part, so that you don’t miss it: over and against a commitment to righteousness and justice. This is important to remember when we discuss the cult of safety of modern America. The cult of safety is not simply seeking safety through doing the right thing. It is a very specific and deliberate religious commitment to rejecting righteousness and justice in favor of man-made safety and security. That’s what Cain did. He had committed one of the worst possible crimes and sins ever; his eternal state was to be one of the worst ever. And yet, he didn’t care about righteousness and justice. He cared about feeling safe from other humans. God is full of grace, even to unrepentant sinners. (Although, His grace to them is rather heaping coals upon their heads.) So God granted Cain the safety he wanted. He put a sign on him (the same word as for a “sign of the covenant”) and warned the world that whoever kills him, will be avenged sevenfold. So Cain had the safety from other humans he wanted. He didn’t of course, have true safety, for his covenantal standing before God was still quite unfavorable. That “sign of the covenant” upon him was not forgiveness; he was only marked by God as his property, as in, “Leave him to Me, I want to have the personal pleasure of repaying him when the time comes.” So what did Cain do when he received such grace from God? You would think that out of simple gratitude, he would kneel before God with a contrite heart and offer his repentance for murdering his own brother. And then try to live life as close to God’s Law as humanly possible. No. He leaves the presence of God, he goes to another land, and the first thing he does is build a walled city. No repentance, no regard for justice, no regard for his covenantal standing before God or for his eternal state – and also, no faith in the promises of God. The man was promised immunity against vengeance, while in this life. He doesn’t trust it. He must make sure he builds his own protection against his perceived threats: his own walled city. That, my friends, is the best description of the life of a covenant-breaker. He rebels against God and commits a sin against God. Then he is confronted about it but remains unrepentant. Then he complains about the just judgment he receives. His first thought is not, “I am justly condemned.” His first thought is, “How do I get a safe space from the demons that haunt me?” God gives him temporary grace. The covenant-breaker, however, doesn’t trust it, leaves the presence of God and builds his own safe space, surrounded by walls, gates, and other immigration restrictions. Safety in his own devices, safety over justice and righteousness, safety at the expense of his covenantal standing before God. That’s the Safety Cult of the enemies of God. The same chapter in Genesis – chapter 4 – gives us also the solution of the covenant keepers. Now, granted, Adam and Eve did break God’s Covenant, but apparently, in their ju...
Transcribe →The Little Ice Age
Nov 20, 201800:44:28Tap to summarizeWelcome to Episode 79 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will go back in history to talk about a very significant event which, unfortunately, has never been covered by your history textbooks. It was certainly not covered by mine when I studied world history. My history textbooks, of course, were all written from a Marxist perspective, based on the Marxist view of history. Your history textbooks, most probably, were written from a Western secular perspective, based on the Western secular view of history . . . if there is such a thing in the first place, of course. All secular views of history are always forced to ignore certain significant historical facts, for a very simple reason: their view of history doesn’t allow for the existence of such facts. To be precise, their presuppositions about reality do not allow for such facts. All secular views of history are materialistic and naturalistic; that is, they presuppose that the only valid causes for historical trends and developments are those causes that are material and “natural.” Secular philosophy and historiology (historiology or historiography is the philosophy and method by which we study history), so, secular philosophy and historiology reject all interpretations of history that would involve any supernatural acts of God that would direct history. Of course, our listeners would know that, given the presuppositions of the secular thought. But there is another presupposition of secular thought that many Christians are not aware of: Secular historiology rejects not only all interpretations that presuppose a divine, supernatural agent, it also rejects all interpretations that presuppose any covenantal frame for history. And remember what “covenantal” means? It means “ethical/judicial,” that is conditioned upon and revolving around issues of good and evil. Thus, whatever happens in history can never be allowed to be the product of the self-conscious ethical and judicial decisions of men, based on some standard of ethics. Whatever ethics men have, and however consistently they apply it, has no bearing on the course of history. (As a side note, this view is not peculiar to secular historians; it is also shared by the majority of modern pastors and theologians. Yes, even your pastor in your church; odds are, if you examine him, you will find out he has the same philosophy of history as secular historians. But more about it in a different episode.) Such anti-covenantal view of history is so prevalent that with all the books on history we have today, we have almost none that employ a covenantal philosophy of interpreting history. I have been asked hundreds of times, “Do you have a good Christian book on the history of this or that historical event or period?” And I never have one that I can recommend; because, even Christian historians have fallen prey to the same secular interpretation of history where history is the product of impersonal, natural forces, and the ethics and the worldview of a culture have no bearing on the history of that culture. Marxists see the determining factor of history in economic forces (or, more precisely, in the developing tools of production), racists and nationalists see the determining factor of history in the genetics of men (and we will see in a future episode why modern secular libertarians like Lew Rockwell and Stephan Molineux also adopt racism as their frame of interpretation), modern liberals see the determining factors of history in the environment (climate, geography, etc.), and modern theologians just adopt any of these secular philosophies when they try to interpret history, if they ever do. It is for this reason I have always said that R.J. Rushdoony’s book, The Foundations of Social Order, is the most unique book ever written in the history of Christendom. If there has ever been a book that completely, unapologetically, and uncompromisingly interprets history covenantally, it is that book. It is not just a supernatural interpretation (“God moves history”), it is also a covenantal interpretation, namely, “God moves history through the worldview and the self-conscious action of men who were redeemed by His Gospel and influenced by His Word.” Of course, there are other books that touch somewhat on a covenantal approach to interpreting history: for example, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, or Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity, and a few others, but nothing has ever been close to Rushdoony’s consistency in applying it. Either way, to make a long story short, secular historians don’t like mentioning some important historical events exactly because these events, and the consequences of them in history, have no explanation in terms of secular historiology. And once we look into these historical facts, we may find out that they only fit a covenantal frame of interpretation of history. And the historical event we are going to cover this week is one of them. It was not something insignificant. It continued for 5 centuries. It had very abrupt, disastrous, and profound effect on the Christian civilization in Europe. It is well-documented; we have hundreds of thousands of historical documents that inform us about it. But it is seldom mentioned, except in marginal books and theses that don’t make it into the official textbooks and lesson plans. And there is a reason for it. That historical event is the Little Ice Age, a historical period of unusually cold climate that can be loosely dated from the early 14th century and continued until the last decades of the 19th century. But let’s start from some earlier dates, to have some context. Do you remember those ancient Greek paintings and engravings of several centuries before Christ, and the clothes worn by the men depicted in them? If you have seen them, you probably remember them, because they are all either naked or almost naked. I won’t go into the philosophy of nakedness here, but I will ask another relevant question: What climate did they have to have to be comfortable with such fashion? Modern Greece’s climate is Mediterranean, but it is certainly not tropical, and the winters can be quite cold. And yet, the Spartan society was known for the fact that their boys trained in military schools and were naked all year round. By the way, the girls, too. How did they survive the winters? Meanwhile, a number of Greek authors mention lions living in Europe at the time, not only in Greece but also as far north as Thrace (modern Bulgaria and Romania), Pannonia (modern Hungary) and Sarmatia (modern Ukraine). There is also evidence that other tropical and subtropical animal species – as well as plant species – lived in those areas as well. But how could they survive? I grew up on the Balkans and I can tell you, winters to the north of the Balkan Mountains can be quite harsh, and the climate is certainly not conducive for having lions, or antelopes, or anything that in modern times live south of the Mediterranean. The conclusion of all historians, therefore, is that the ancient world enjoyed a much warmer climate than we have today. Or, at best, its coldest period – between the 5th and the 4th centuries BC – was similar to our modern times. What is sure is that starting in the early 3rd century BC, the Mediterranean – and the whole world, in fact – experienced a period of unusually warm climate which lasted for about 7 centuries. Remember the Punic Wars and Hannibal’s crossing the Alps with his elephants in the late fall of 218 BC? The reason he could do it was because of the mild climate in that period. Every time you read the history of the Roman Empire, remember that all of the expansion of the Empire – as far north as Scotland – happened in a period of very warm weather. The growth of the population of the Mediterranean was all due to that warm weather: the Roman Empire is estimated to have had between 50 and 60 million population, an approximate one-third of the world’s population at the time. This warm period ended in AD 4th century when temperatures worldwide went down by a little, causing rivers in Europe to freeze in the winter (not recorded before AD 300), which made it easier for Germanic tribes to cross the borders of the Empire (the Rhein and the Danube rivers) and invade its richer provinces. The cooler period that started in the 4th century was most probably the reason for the great migration of the 4th through the 7th centuries, forcing many tribes out of their homelands in Northern Europe and Central and North Asia. (Think Goths, Slavs, Huns, Khazars, etc.) The same cooling off of the climate must have weakened the health of the population of the Mediterranean, for during that period, the Roman Empire experienced several outbreaks of different diseases, most of which were probably different strands of the flu. This weakened the Empire – in addition to its political and moral decay – and led to its ultimate demise in the West and retreat in the East. The Goths and the Germans who settled the west proved to be more resilient physically – and also, spiritually, after their conversion to Christianity. The cooler period continued for about 400 years. Warm weather came back in the early 800s, this time with a vengeance. The so-called “Medieval Warm Period” turned out to be the most productive period in the history of Europe and the Mediterranean. The population of Christian Europe – which would exclude Spain – reached 70-80 million, more than the Roman Empire was at the height of its glory. More notably, this growth happened mostly north of the Alps, unlike the Roman Empire where most of the growth was in w...
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