all kings all nations 1 very rough

 Christian nationalism

Outline/chapters

You are here: trans, gay, pedo, all kinds of perversions, ineffective cowardly church. Nihilism/atheism/anti Christianity in art, music, film, etc.

Darwinism, feminism, the enlightenment, the French revolution, secular humanism, nominalism, and Thomas Aquinas (francis schaeffer)

Theonomy: three types of law. Civil, ceremonial, moral. What is abolished? Fulfilled? What is required?

Kings and democracy and romans 13. What form of government is prescribed in scripture?

Postmillennialism and the kingdom of Heaven. Dispensationalism/amillennialism are soft gnosticism

Our history

Victory: the great commission as colonization and conquest

introduction

Journalist John Colapinto describes one of his interviews with David Reimer, an early subject of transgender methodology and sex reassignment.

I had come to Winnipeg to learn all I could about David Reimer, but my chief interest was in his childhood—a subject that, when I raised it, brought an immediate and dramatic change in him. Gone was the smile on his face and the bantering tone in his voice. Now his brows gather together above his small straight nose, his eyes began to blink with started rapidity, and he thrust his chin forward like someone who’d just been challenged to a fight. His voice—a deep, burred baritone—took on a new pitch and rhythm, an insistent, hammering rhythm, which for all its obvious aggrievement and anger also carried the pleading edge of someone desperate to communicate emotions that he feared other could never understand. How well even he understood these emotions was not immediately clear.[1]

After a horrifying circumcision accident, David’s parents believed they could give him a somewhat fuller life as a woman than as a man. Convinced by the congenial and charismatic Dr. John Money, an expert in gender theory, they handed their son over to Money to be the subjects of what was both an experiment and also a long male-to-female conditioning process, including the possibility of surgery on David to construct an artificial vagina. Instead of a happy young woman however, or even a damaged young man who bravely accepted and adjusted to a tragic disfigurement, David instead became a despairing, lonely, confused person struggling between two genders with a desire to please those he cared for and yet somehow find his own place. Graciously though, he also found an enormous amount of courage in this ordeal.

David’s parents, Ron Reimer and Janet Schultz, both descended from Mennonite families. The Mennonite denomination of Christianity follows a simple, unworldly life based directly on Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. In the late 1800s, the Canadian government, eager to populate their empty western regions, offered the Mennonites religious freedom, autonomous schools, and exemption from military service. During this time both Ron’s and Janet’s great grandparents settled in Manitoba.

Industrious and hard-working, Ron learned to cook and later operated his own coffee truck to support his family in Winnipeg. Hazel-eyed beauty Janet caught Ron’s attention when her roommate’s boyfriend brought a visitor by. As they dated in the early 1960s, they compared backgrounds, and the similarities in their respective stories amazed each other. They also discovered that they complemented each other nicely.

Janet could compensate for Ron’s sometimes passive reluctance to take decisive action; Ron, on the other hand, with his slow, considered approach to life, could rein Janet in from her more reckless enthusiasm and impulses. Together they made up a single entity stronger than either one of them.[2]

In Winnipeg, the pair spent much of their time together in Janet’s rooming house. There they conceived the twins, whom they eventually named Bruce and Brian. Janet had just turned eighteen and Ron would soon turn twenty.

Ron was nervous, but Janet refused to be anything but optimistic. “I was so excited,” she says, “because all my life I’d been dreaming, Oh wouldn’t it be wonderful to have twins?”[3]

Ron and Janet Reimer gave birth to identical twins Bruce and Brian Reimer in August of 1965. Sometime after the twins reached the age of seven months, they contracted phimosis, a common dysfunction where the foreskin becomes temporarily sealed at the tip and prevents proper urination. Their pediatrician recommended circumcision and Ron and Janet scheduled an appointment at their local hospital.

With the usual attending physician unavailable, the circumcision of the twins fell to general practitioner Dr. Jean-Marie Huot. Typically, the physician will stretch the foreskin of the infant over a bell-shaped metal shell for removal with a scalpel. Dr. Huot, however, decided to use a cauterizing machine to severe the foreskin. The instrument sends a current through a needle-like cutting tool that cauterizes the wound as the doctor makes the incision,

a dangerous consideration, since it would bring perilously close to the penis a current that could be conducted by the metal bell encasing the organ. If, at the same time, the current to the needle were to be turned up almost to the maximum, the results could be cataclysmic.[4]

Dr. Huot set the machine to minimum power and touched it to the infant’s foreskin, which failed. Increasing the setting, the second attempt also failed.  Increasing once more, the doctor touched the instrument to the foreskin.

“I heard a sound,” recalls Dr. Max Cham, the anesthesiologist, “just like steak being seared.” A wisp of smoke curled up from the baby’s groin. An aroma as of cooking meat filled the air.[5]

Dr. Huot had incinerated the infant’s penis.

Though a freakish historic blizzard had just hit Winnipeg, the hospital called Ron and Janet and summoned them. They visited their son and Janet asked the doctor, “Will it still grow, and he’ll just have a little penis?” The doctor said, “No. That’s not how it works.” The burnt penis eventually dried up and broke away, till nothing remained.

Bruce and Janet consulted multiple specialists but phallic reconstruction remained in its infancy in the 1960s. Plastic surgeon Dr. Desmond Kernahan explained to the Reimers that even if he constructed an artificial penis from the flesh of Bruce’s thigh or abdomen, such an organ would serve only as a conduit for urine and nothing more. Dr. G.L. Adamson, head of the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry at the Winnipeg Clinic, prognosticated that

[Bruce] will be unable to live a normal sexual life from the time of adolescence. He will be unable to consummate marriage or have normal heterosexual relations. He will have to recognize that he is incomplete, physically defective, and that he must live apart.[6]

Distraught, desperate, broken-hearted and furious—Ron dreamt of strangling Dr. Huot—the couple finally found hope in the person of Dr. John Money, a specialist in gender theory and transsexual surgery from Johns Hopkins University. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic mentioned a man in Baltimore who could help the couple raise Bruce as a girl. They had not considered the idea but upon witnessing the confident and charismatic Dr. Money on television, they had second thoughts. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired an episode of its current affairs program, This Hour Has Seven Days, on which Dr. Money introduced Mrs. Diane Baransky.

The camera cut from Dr. Money and his questioner to a blond woman who walked out onto the set. Dressed in a narrow skirt, high heels, and a matching close-fitting jacket, she took a seat in the chair across from the two men. A close-up shot revealed that her round, pretty face was expertly made up, in the style of the mid-1960s, with heavy eyeliner, mascara, and foundation, her mouth thickly painted with lipstick. Ron and Janet gaped at the TV screen. It was their first glimpse, ever, of a transexual.[7]

Experienced in the treatment of children with ambiguous genitalia, Dr. Money told the interviewer that he and his colleagues could make children into whichever sex seemed best, and that these children could be raised happily in that sex. Desperate for some hope for their son, Ron and Janet believed Dr. Money was the savior they didn’t realize they needed. Janet wrote to Dr. Money and he urged them to bring Bruce to his clinic in Baltimore immediately.

Born in New Zealand in 1921, John Money came to America at twenty-five years old, earned his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard, then joined John Hopkins. A mere fifteen years later, he was credited as the person to coin the term “gender identity” to describe one’s inner sense of sexuality. The international community held him as the undisputed authority on the psychological ramifications of ambiguous genitalia and he made headlines for establishing the John Hopkins clinic for transexual surgeries.

Yet for all his prestige as a prevailing authority, scientist, and researcher, Money had his own share of profound bias. Raised by an authoritarian father and strictly religious mother, he would later deride his upbringing as that of “tightly sealed, evangelical religious dogma.” He described his father as a brutal man who shot and killed the birds infesting his fruit garden. At four years of age, his father gave him an “abusive interrogation and whipping” over a broken window, which incident birthed in him a lifelong rejection of “the brutality of manhood.” At only eight years, after his father’s death, his mother and a cadre of spinster aunts raised him in an atmosphere not only exclusively female, but one so despicable of men that he later wrote,

I wondered if the world might really be a better place for women if not only farm animals but human males also were gelded at birth.[8]

Money rebelled against the repression of his religious upbringing, particularly regarding sexuality. The “pure realm of scientific inquiry” freed him from the shackles of sexual norms and traditional morality. In his book Sexual Signatures, he said, “There is plenty of evidence that bisexual group sex can be as personally satisfying as a paired partnership.” He also described his private life as “a give-and-take of sexual visitations and friendly companionships with compatible partners, some women, some men.” He published Lovemaps in 1986, a study of sadomasochism, coprophilia, amputation fetishes, and other “paraphilias” in an effort to destigmatize and decriminalize them. To Time magazine he said, “A childhood sexual experience, such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely.”[9] To this man the Weimers entrusted both of their sons, as Money often required Brian’s participation in his therapy sessions.

From studies and experimentation on hermaphrodite, or intersexed, children, Money formed his theory that the upbringing and not the biology of a child determines his or her sexual identity. Eventually he expanded his theory to include all children, not just those born intersexed.

Many years later, Money would describe how he arrived at some of his more radical theories about human sexual behavior. “I frequently find myself toying with concepts and working out potential hypotheses,” he mused. “It is like playing a game of science fiction.”[10]

In early 1967, Ron and Janet Reimer, ages twenty and twenty-one, visited Johns Hopkins at Doctor John Money’s Psychohormonal Research Unit. Money’s confident and professional manor made the Reimers believe they and their son were in the best possible hands. Janet said, “I looked up to him like a god. I believed whatever he said,” and Money said exactly what the desperate couple longed to hear. He promised them that he could give their son a perfectly functional vagina, “adequate for sexual intercourse and for sexual pleasure,” though obviously he would remain unable to bear children. He also promised that he would develop psychologically as a woman and eventually find himself attracted to men. At first hesitant, the couple inevitably gave in to what they perceived as the best chance for Bruce to enjoy a somewhat fulfilling life.

Ron could not even imagine the humiliations and frustrations that [Bruce’s sex life] would entail. As a girl and woman, though, Bruce wouldn’t face all that. If what Dr. Money told them was true, he could live a normal life, get married and be happy.

For the first step, a surgeon castrated young Bruce.[11] Soon after this, the Reimers began the process of socializing Bruce as a female. After the twins’ second birthday, Janet first put Bruce into a dress she had sewn herself with material from her wedding gown. “It was pretty and lacy,” Janet recalls. “She was ripping at it, trying to tear it off. I remember thinking, Oh my God, she knows she’s a boy and she doesn’t want girls’ clothing. She doesn’t want to be a girl.” Similar scenes repeated themselves all throughout this process.

When I say there was nothing feminine about Brenda, I mean there was nothing feminine. She walked like a guy. Sat with her legs apart. She talked about guy things, didn’t give a crap about cleaning house, getting married, wearing makeup. She’d get a skipping rope for a gift, and the only thing we’d use that for was to tie people up, whip people with it. She played with my toys: Tinkertoys, dump trucks. This toy sewing machine she got just sat.[12]

Other scenes effected enormous trauma on Bruce. At Bruce’s castration, Money told the Reimers that they should visit his clinic once a year for follow-up consultations. Money intended that these visits would “guard against the psychological hazards” associated with child sex reassignment, yet the Reimers believed these visits exacerbated more than alleviated the confusion and fear that Bruce suffered. Clinical notes affirmed their beliefs. Money’s private case files describe how Bruce reacted with terror on his first follow-up visit at age four. In these notes Money says, “There was something almost maniacal about her refusals [to be tested], and the way she hit, kicked, and otherwise attacked people.”

“You get the idea something happened to you,” David says, explaining the dread that engulfed him during those mysterious annual visits to the Psychohormonal Research Unit, “but you don’t know what—and you don’t want to know.”[13]

The consultations served to assist the Reimers in reinforcing the feminine socialization of Bruce, yet they ultimately served to reinforce Bruce’s instinct that he was not a girl and did not want to be a girl. When asked to draw a person, Bruce drew a stick figure of a boy. When asked to describe a “good dream,” he described a boy on a farm with a horse. Colapinto describes how family, teachers, clinic personnel and even Money’s interview transcripts all confirm that Bruce, though emasculated and engaged in this psychosexual reassignment, consistently presented as the more traditionally masculine of the twins.

Among the more grotesque methods of gender reassignment, Money introduced pornography to the twins. He believed that children must understand at an early age the differences between male and female sex organs. Bruce, who later assumed the name David, recalls that Money showed them pictures of adults engaged in sexual intercourse. “I want to show you pictures of things that moms and dads do,” he would say. Money also had the twins mimic sexual intercourse with each other, with David playing the female role. Brian remembers Money introducing these activities when the twins were six years old.

Money would make Brenda assume a position on all fours on his office sofa and make Brian come up behind her on his knees and place his crotch against her buttocks. Variations on the therapy included Brenda lying on her back with her legs spread and Brian lying on top of her. On at least one occasion, Dr. Money took a Polaroid photograph of them while they were engaged in this part of the therapy.[14]

Jane Fontane, who would later become David’s wife, describes the effect this had on him.

[We] had just watched a TV documentary on CIA torture involving electroshock to people’s genitals. He cried hysterically. He was crying about John Money. I’d never seen him like that. I tried to comfort him. David said Dr. Money made him go on all fours and made Brian go up behind his butt. They were being photographed. He mentioned that very act.[15]

At the same time that Money subjected the twins to these activities, Money also attempted to convince David to undergo surgery to create an artificial vagina. Money hoped this would further David’s female conversion, but David consistently resisted. David refused a genital exam, he refused to discuss the issue of vaginal surgery, and he refused to take his hormone pills. Even though David resisted visiting Money’s clinic in Baltimore, Ron and Janet bribed him by promising a side trip to New York, but it was the last time he agreed to such a visit.

During this visit, Money enlisted the assistance of a male-to-female transsexual to convince David of the benefits of vaginal construction surgery, yet David displayed the same negative emotions as usual—intense anxiety, anger, and depression, all reflected in his Sentence Completion Test.

Compared to most families, mine’s…a loser…I think most girls…aren’t very nice…I believe most women…aren’t very nice either…My feelings about married life are…rotten…To me the future looks…bad.[16]

This low roiling despair turned to “pure, deep-running panic” when Money introduced David to the transsexual. David instantly recognized the person as a male, pretending to be female, complete with heavy makeup, female clothing and hairstyle, and the artificially high-pitched feminine voice. The person described to David the wonderful life post-vaginal surgery.

He’s telling me about the surgery…how fantastic it was for him, and how his life turned out beautifully. I was thinking, “I’m going to end up like that?”[17]

Money made his last direct attempt to David to convince him to have the surgery, growing impatient as the discussion lingered and David’s resistance remained steadfast. At the end, David asked, “Are you finished?” and Money replied, “We’re finished,” with David hurrying and then running away, hiding from Money and the transsexual, convinced that they would force the surgery on him. He told his mother that if his parents ever forced him to see Dr. Money again, he would kill himself.

Later David met a counselor sympathetic to his struggle. Elderly, gray-haired, standing no taller than five feet one inch tall, Dr. Mary McKenty appeared to David as a grandmother who “looked like she’d be baking cookies for her grandchildren. She didn’t look like a typical psychiatrist.” While Ron and Janet warmed to McKenty, David could not immediately bring himself to trust her. After some period of testing, he accepted her as a confidant. As David approached his 14^th birthday in June of 1979, during a session with McKenty, she notes that David “did not want to play games,” and instead began to ask questions about his medical condition.

This marked the first time in Brenda’s ten-year standoff with the medical profession that she ever voluntarily raised the issue of her genitals and the fact that they did not resemble those of other girls. Brenda told McKenty how her father had explained that a doctor “did something that was a mistake.” McKenty asked Brenda what she thought had happened.[18]

David explained that he believed his mother had beaten him between his legs. For McKenty and her supervisor Dr. Keith Sigmundson, this revelation marked a possible turning point in David’s situation. In Freudian terms, David was expressing his “penis envy,” or some other bizarre subconscious incestual desires and/or hostility toward one or more of his parents. Sigmundson reasoned that this revelation signaled a universal fear shared by all females and that possibly they were “getting somewhere” with David’s transition to female. Sigmundson also considered that David’s comment revealed something far less abstract and subconscious, but a simple and logical explanation of his deformed genitalia and his mother’s guilt-ridden depression.

Brenda’s comment to McKenty could be interpreted not as her imminent acceptance of herself as a girl, but its opposite: her recognition that her earliest fears of maternal castration were incorrect and that now she wanted to know what had really happened to her; a sign, perhaps, that she was approaching the point at which she was ready to embrace the boy she had always instinctively know herself to be.[19]

Bruce, who later took the name David, expressed his acceptance of his parents’ role in the entire situation.

My parents feel very guilty, as if the whole thing was their fault. But it wasn’t like that. They did what they did out of kindness and love and desperation. When you’re desperate, you don’t necessarily do all the right things.

Why David Reimer? Why do we need to know his story? As believers, as Christians, as Americans, why does his story matter so much? The story of David Reimer represents the awful convergence of the lies of our age—of feminism, Darwinism, and self-determination. Feminism tells us that male and female are not only equal in value and dignity, a truth which scripture tells us, but that male and female are equal, period. Men and women are interchangeable and male and female are gender constructs created by society and not by God, so that we can transition between these constructs at will, with only a little makeup and clothing, or merely by declaring it and insisting everyone else agree. Darwinism teaches us that God has not created us in his image, but that some random, purposeless process has evolved us from lifeless matter into this complex, soulless, biological machine we call “man.” We are not special. We are not different from animals, with purpose as God’s special creation, created to love and serve him, to submit to his will and glorify him as created, but a meaningless empty shell with meaning and purpose determined by itself, or by some other meaningless empty shell.

Once Jefferson’s idea, “All men are created equal,” was wedded to President Wilson’s idea, that all peoples are entitled to “self-determination,” the fate of the Western empires was sealed. Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, saw it coming: “The phrase [self-determination] is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized…What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause![20]

Colapinto writes that in the early days of David’s transition, before some knew of the experiment’s dismal failure, the surrounding medical and psychological community sat amazed as John Money explained how he took a normal, healthy male child and transformed him into a normal, healthy female child.

John stood up at a conference and said, “I’ve got these two twins, and one of them is now a girl, and the other is a boy. [Money and his team] were saying they took this normal boy and changed him over to a girl. That’s powerful. That’s really powerful. I mean, what is your response to that? This case was used to reinforce the fact that you can really do anything.[21]

We can do anything. We can determine ourselves, not only to choose our destiny, but to uncreate God’s creation. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” said satanist Aleister Crowley. “You will be like God,” said Satan to Eve. We do not trust in God. We do not obey his word. This society, the West, believes in itself, in individualism, in secular humanism, in self-determination, not only that we are all equal to each other, but that we are equal to God. We do not need to worship him, to trust him to determine us and our future as we obey his word, but we can determine ourselves, and we have determined ourselves into madness.

We have the solution. We have the Law of God. We understand the form of government he expects. “You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world,” said Christ. We are the salt which preserves against this madness and corruption. We are the light that exposes this wickedness and guides men to Christ by the word of God and the power of his Spirit. We have the Great Commission, to bring the nations to heel as disciples of Christ, to baptize and teach them his word. we do not have to suffer any of this

We’ve seen the effects of these philosophies—the French Revolution, the death cult of communism, the perversion of science, and the destructive, perverse, and murderous tide of feminism, pornography, and abortion. These effects will never end; they will only increase. The wickedness of man has no limit. While his heart conceives sin upon sin upon sin, the perversions, the murder, the satanic rebellion of his works is only limited by his strength, his mortal life, and his technology. As he increases these, he increases his hatred of God and his destruction of himself, his children, and all God has created.

Sadly, even Christian apologists, men who claim to defend the faith against atheism and evolution and other nihilistic philosophies, all begin their defense with atheistic premises. “Let us pretend God does not exist and see what we can find with our sense and reason,” they say. C.S. Lewis did this. Norman Geisler resurrected the approach, in which he also borrowed from Thomas Aquinas, and all of Geisler’s apologist disciples do the same. If you assume God does not exist, you instantly destroy all credibility to your supposed position: God does exist. Why even bother? You’ve just declared that God is not to be believed and his word is not to be trusted, but instead only whatever rational arguments or scientific evidence you claim support his existence. Why should anyone trust anything you say if you talk from both sides of your mouth and do not even understand what it is you believe?

Author and philosopher Francis Schaeffer traces this descent into insanity back to 13^th century theologian Thomas Aquinas. Later during the 17^th century, we see it flourish and gain momentum during the Enlightenment, and then finally, it reaches its bottom in the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. We even see this subtly atheistic, anti-scripture, anti-doctrine in the writings of Christian philosopher and apologist C.S. Lewis. We no longer are souls, initially made in the image of God to serve and to worship God, but we are biological machines, morally no better and no worse than pond scum, superior in intelligence, utterly devoid of purpose, while at the same time possessing the infinite potential of a god to remake, recreate, and redefine everything contained in the word “man.”

Thomas Aquinas, the great philosopher and theologian. Thomas Aquinas, second only to Paul in spiritual insight, second only to Mary in virtue and innocence, bringing the irreplaceable wisdom of that pagan philosopher Aristotle to the Church of Christ! Who could ever have possibly guessed that we would find the roots of 21^st century secular humanism, this wicked, satanic civilization-destroying ideology, in this god among men? Francis Schaeffer, that’s who and some forty or so years ago.

Yes, Francis Schaeffer told us that Thomas Aquinas removed God from theology and gave us an atheistic framework for theology in his Summa Theologica. How do we know God? By faith. From whence cometh this faith? From God, and not from reason. But not according to Aquinas. Scripture tells us that God grants faith, that God reveals knowledge, that he is light, that his word is true and every man is a liar, and therefore every philosophy of men is nought but lies. But what does Aquinas tell us? That he has equaled God in dispensing revelation and this by the ever-amazing, ever-stupendous, all-powerful, uncorrupted and incorruptible, power of reason. All of the greatest Thomists of our age tell us this.

All that is of value, all that is enduring, all that is really preserving orthodoxy is due to uh classical theology and classical apologetics; but what is what is good and what is enduring um is due to Aquinas.[22]

Norman Geisler was a classical apologist who built a legacy of “defending the faith,” and he believed that if a man has statistical certainty of 95% or more in a proposition, or a truth claim, or an ideology, he could confidently place his trust in this proposition, or claim, or ideology. Geisler believed that statistical certainty equaled faith.

 [1] The following is adapted from As Nature Made Him, by John Colapinto, copyright 2000 by John Colapinto, published by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., New York, NY. Page xiii.

[2] Ibid, page 8.

[3] Ibid, page 9.

[4] Ibid, page 12.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid, page 16.

[7] Ibid, page 21.

[8] Ibid, page 26.

[9] Ibid, pages 28-29.

[10] Ibid, page 34.

[11] At this time, the Reimers and Money began to refer to the child as “Brenda.”

[12] Ibid, page 57.

[13] Ibid, page 80.

[14] Ibid, page 87

[15] Ibid, page 88.

[16] Ibid, 137.

[17] Pg 138.

[18] Pg. 158.

[19] Pg. 160.

[20] Buchanan, Pat. Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, © 2008 by Pat Buchanan, Three River Press, New York, pg. xv.

[21] Colapinto, pg. 76.

[22] “Norman Geisler: Where would evangelicalism be today without Aquinas?”, published July 29, 2022 by Bill Roach. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suA7Yt9q1AY

Goat Farmers: Introduction

  Introduction

I am not ashamed of the Gospel.[1]

The late Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias explains the motivation that led him to write his book, Can Man Live Without God?

I have heard [spiritual] questions that are deep and complex sometimes coming even from young teenagers, but the solutions I have heard most often offered to them are, quite frankly, superficial and simple. Many frustrated young people have expressed, “All I hear my parents or preachers saying is that the Bible says this is so and therefore it is so, and that is the only answer necessary to give. What they do not realize,” the young person passionately pleads, “is that when I begin my answer at school (or in the university) with ‘the Bible says,’ my answer is immediately dismissed as irrelevant, and in some instances I am torn to bits.”[2]

Noted former atheist turned Christian author, C.S. Lewis expressed a similar sort of veiled embarrassment at the notion that Christians rely solely on scripture in his book Mere Christianity.

I ended my last chapter with the idea that in the Moral Law somebody or something from beyond the material universe was actually getting at us. And I expect when I reached that point that some of you felt a certain annoyance. You may even have thought that I had played a trick on you—that I had been carefully wrapping up to look like philosophy what turns out to be one more ‘religious jaw.’ … This has not yet turned exactly into a ‘religious jaw.’ We have not yet got so far as the God of any actual religion, still less the God of that particular religion called Christianity…We are not taking anything from the Bible or the Churches; we are trying to see what we can find out about this Somebody on our own steam.[3]

Popular apologist Frank Turek travels to colleges and universities all over the country and explains how

We can deduce, without reference to the Bible, that there is a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, moral, personal, intelligent Creator who created all things and sustains all things to this very moment.[4]

In this so-called scientific, post-Darwin age of skepticism and doubt, Christian apologists attempt to save souls with the same tools that atheists and pagans use to tear down the Gospel of God. Ashamed of the Word of God and not believing in the power of God, they instead turn to the tools of science and philosophy to draw men to Christ. They do this because when they rely solely on the Word of God, men laugh at them, mock them, and dismiss them. Not fearing the God who saved them, rather they fear the derision of their fellow mortals. Full of pride and the need to impress men with their intelligence and their wisdom, rather than the humility and desire to glorify the God who gave them life, they appeal to men on behalf of Christ with their reason and their evidence.

The ministry of apologetics “attempts to show that the gospel message is true in what it affirms.”[5] Apologists try to defend the truth of the Gospel against claims that God does not exist, that Christ was not an actual person, that he is not God and did not rise from the dead, and that the Bible is not a historically reliable document, to name a few. While we should know and understand the facts surrounding our religion, many of these apologists pivot from merely explaining the history of the Gospel and the reliability of scripture, to contradicting plain scriptural teaching and believing that these facts and philosophical arguments somehow create faith in the unbeliever. For example, instead of agreeing with Paul, who said that all men know that God exists and still deny his existence and refuse to give him glory (Romans 1.18-20), they agree with the atheists who claim that they do not believe he exists. The apologists then try to convince men with facts and logic of something they already know but simply deny. They believe that logical argument and scientific facts will convince men of the truth of the Gospel when Christ says, “The Spirit gives life” (John 6.63), and Paul says that God gives faith and repentance (Ephesians 2.8; Philippians 1.29; 2 Timothy 2.25).

Should we use every means available to us to draw men to God? Absolutely not. We must use the means God has prescribed in the manner he has prescribed. Paul said

Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved. How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher? … So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.[6]

We do not appeal to men through reason and evidence because God does not save through reason and evidence but through his Word and through his preaching. God has not abandoned his Word because men mock us. God merely requires that we have greater courage and greater faith to boldly proclaim his Word that formerly met with far less contempt. God now requires greater humility so we withstand the mockery of the men of this modern age, not thinking of ourselves at all but of him and his glory. Apologists like Zacharias openly deride Scripture themselves when they describe scriptural solutions to spiritual questions as “superficial and simple.”

The Problem

Unfortunately for large swaths of the Church, apologetics, rather than scripture, has become the foundation for faith. Apologists teach that apologetics “strengthens the faith”[7] and that evidence and philosophy give men the necessary rationale for faith in Christ. The Bible does not teach this. Instead, scripture teaches that men must repent of their sin because they are condemned and eternal torment awaits them, but that Christ offers redemption. Scripture teaches that men already know that God exists, and that he will call them to account for the sins in their lives. Scripture teaches that men, dead in their sins, rebellious toward God, unwilling and unable to respond to the offer of salvation, require a miraculous work of the Holy Spirit in their hearts before they can believe. In spite of all this, modern apologists believe that men are not sinners, that they do not need any work of the Spirit in their hearts, and that they can absolutely respond to the offer of Christ without any transforming work of the Spirit. They only need the right amount of persuasive reason and evidence to convince them to believe in Christ. These apologists do not believe that they must preach of sin and the eternal condemnation that awaits men. Instead, they teach that men should believe in Christ because God does exist, Christ did rise from the dead, the Bible is reliable and true, and that ultimately Christianity is reasonable and scientific. They teach the bare basics of knowledge that even demons possess and they call it “the Gospel,” and when men agree to their rational propositions and accept their factual statements, they call it “salvation.” They teach that if a man merely agrees with logical propositions and statements of fact, then he has been saved from eternal damnation. Instead of the Word of God leading to the work of God, they lead men to mental decisions and temporary convictions. This is the message they proclaim in churches and colleges everywhere.

If you’re a skeptic, please keep in mind that you should believe or disbelieve what we say because of the evidence we present, not because we have a certain set of religious beliefs. We are both Christians, but we were not always Christians. We came to believe through evidence.[8]

The agency or method or means that confers authority only does so by a greater authority. The king bears his own heir. The people elect their government. Science determines truth by the witness of the senses. If reason and science determine the truth of scripture, then they are the new authority. If reason and science are the authority, then reason and science have replaced the Word of God. If reason and science determine the truth of the Gospel and Scripture, then reason and science replace the authority of God himself. If reason and science give men faith in God’s Word, then reason and science replace the power of the Holy Spirit.

Unfortunately [apologetics] isn't often spoken of in church and why isn't it spoken of in church? Because the seminaries are so far behind. The seminaries who teach the pastors are teaching pastors to preach to a generation that existed fifty years ago when you can open the Bible and people would go, “Oh the Bible! I guess I got to agree with the Bible.” Today it's completely against that so the seminaries are just now catching up to teach pastors that they've got to teach apologetics. That's what this is—evidence that it's true. So people who have questions can get them answered before they're going to believe what the Bible says.[9]

God does not use reason and evidence to change hearts and neither does he abandon his authority to reason and evidence. God himself changes hearts through the power of His Spirit in the preaching of His Word, and he tells us directly through his Word that his Word is true. He gives us his Spirit to confirm the truth of it. God is the authority. If he saves through his Spirit and His Word and not through the reason and evidence of men, then reason and evidence are not saving anyone, and all a man has if he believes himself saved by reason and evidence is a false redemption and a false faith.

The apologist believes that reason and evidence convinced him of the truth of Christ, and that he can assume his experience as truth rather than scripture. Since reason and evidence led him to Christ, reason and evidence can lead everyone to Christ. He ignores scripture which teaches that God himself opens blind eyes, gives life to dead hearts, and grants repentance and faith to rebellious sinners.

The Lord opens the eyes of the blind.

The Spirit gives life.

He is the one whom God exalted to His right hand as Prince and Savior, to grant repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins.

If perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth.

For to you it has been granted, not only to believe in Him, but to suffer for His sake.[10]

In straying from the simple truth of the Bible, these men have created a separate gospel. In abandoning the truths that men are sinners in the heart, completely unable to believe in Jesus, that they need a work of God before they believe, that they must hear from the truth of God’s word before God will work in their hearts, they lead men away from salvation and condemn not only the hearers of their false gospel, but themselves.

What is the creed of the apologist? Reason and evidence. Does that sound familiar? It should, for the atheist shares the same creed. Atheists believe in the things they see and the philosophy they understand. Atheists believe in reason and evidence.

Faith is trusting in what you have good reasons to believe is true. That's what it means to actually be a Christian who is following reason …[11]

Our faith rests on the solid foundation of sound reasoning and scientific evidence! Is anything more sure than the reason and science of men? Read what Christ says:

Everyone who hears these words of mine, and does not act upon them, will be like the foolish man, who build his house upon the sand. And the rain descended, and the floods came, and winds blew, and burst against that house, and it fell, and great was its fall.[12]

Christians found their faith on the Word of God, by the witness of the Holy Spirit, not on any philosophical argument or any fact discovered by scientific observation. Turek and other apologists believe that we must follow the dictates of reason and in turn, reason leads us to God and Christ. They believe that scientific evidence leads us to faith. If they merely present the unregenerate unbeliever with enough rational argument and scientific evidence, he will come to Christ. If he understands that the internal morality of men and the facts of the created universe speak to the existence of God, the claims of Christ and the truth of the resurrection, he will be saved. In this, they deny the corruption of sin and the witness of scripture. They deny that sin dwells in our hearts and ruins our relationship to God. They deny that sin corrupts the mind and the heart, including the thoughts, desires, and intentions of the heart. They deny that sin replaces reason. They deny that sin desires to rebel against God, to blaspheme his name, and deny his existence. Did Aristotle reason himself to Christ? Or Plato or Marcus Aurelius? Did a single Egyptian, who witnessed the miracles of the plagues, come to faith in Yahweh? Did the Pharisees, who witnessed the works of Christ, reason themselves to faith?

When these apologists proclaim a false gospel, they give men a message that does not save. Consequently, men and women who think themselves true believers inevitably fall away. Jesus said that even when we preach the Word of God, men often do not receive it with true faith.[13] How then can the unbeliever receive the Gospel with faith when these apologists proclaim the saving power of reason and evidence rather than the Word of God?

While some of these men claim to leave the fruit of their labors in the hands of God, they all attribute too much power to their reasoning, evidence, knowledge, and intelligence. For example, Lee Strobel, author of The Case for Christ, the bestselling apologetic book on Amazon, references his education and journalistic experience as some kind of validation of his investigation into Jesus Christ. He says,

In this quest for truth, I’ve used my experience as a legal affairs journalist to look at numerous categories for proof—eyewitness evidence, documentary evidence, corroborating evidence, rebuttal evidence, scientific evidence, psychological evidence, and yes, even fingerprint evidence. ... I applied the training I had received at Yale Law School as well as my experience as legal affairs editor of the Chicago Tribune.[14]

He likens his investigation to a murder trial, as if Christ is on trial and we are the jury who weighs the evidence for and against him. When he was an atheist, “there was far too much evidence that God was merely the product of wishful thinking,” and for him, “the case was closed.”[15] He says that his investigation into Jesus followed “the same classifications that you’d encounter in a courtroom.”[16] “If you were selected for a jury in a real trial,” he says, you would be required to “rigorously subject the evidence to your common sense and logic.”[17] Strobel also says that the Holy Spirit “nudged” him in the same direction that the “strong current of evidence” and the “torrent of facts was flowing.”[18] The Spirit of God needs a Yale-educated journalist to investigate the evidence and acquit Christ of the charge of fraud.

William Lane Craig, a Christian philosopher whose works attempt to reconcile Christianity with either evolution (science) or free will (philosophy), believes that the Church’s influence has waned due to a lack of intellectualism. We just aren’t logical enough. He quotes Charles Malik, who bemoans the absence of a prominent evangelical scholar whom “the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics world might quote … as a normative source.”[19] He continues to quote Malik who says that philosophy is “the most important domain for thought and intellect,” and that greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ requires a year studying the likes of “the Republic or the Sophist of Plato, or two years poring intensely over the Metaphysics or the Ethics of Aristotle.”[20] He quotes early twentieth-century scholar J. Gresham Machen who claimed that the “resistless force of logic” has reduced Christianity to nothing more than a “harmless delusion” and a “logical absurdity” in the eyes of many.[21]

While philosopher Douglas Groothuis believes that evangelism requires “the in-filling and direction of the Holy Spirit,”[22] and that “the results [of apologetics and evangelism must be] left to God’s sovereignty,”[23] he also believes that “conversion is necessarily intellectual and involves cognitive assent to propositions taken to be objectively true.”[24] He says that Christians must demonstrate the truth and rationality of Christianity using objective criteria, and without this, “there is no apologetic, but only preaching,”[25] as if preaching is somehow less effective and less desirable than apologetics. He maintains that Christians must use apologetics as “pre-evangelism,”[26] helping the ineffective Word of God along in its task of saving souls. Ultimately Groothuis believes that we evangelize by presenting Christianity as the most reasonable of the many religious options.

The best method for this holy endeavor [of missions] is to present Christianity as a hypothesis that passes rational testing better than rival worldviews.[27]

All of these self-proclaimed apologists believe this, to one degree or another.

The Solution

Our faith does indeed have evidence and it is indeed rational, but it is more than rational. It is spiritual. God is a spirit and he is beyond the rational and the material. Science and philosophy add nothing to our knowledge of God that scripture does not teach us. They are utterly redundant. The rational and the material do not support the spiritual. God does not stand upon the sand of reason and evidence, and neither does his Word or his salvation. Christ did not say we worship God in reason or through evidence.

God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth.[28]

We worship God, we know God, we understand and believe in God, through spiritual not natural means. Even when Christ mentions truth, he does not mean truth disseminated by rational or scientific means, but truth revealed by the Spirit of God. We are not atheists who trust only in what we see. We are not pagans who reason their own truth from their sinful hearts. We trust in Scripture as God reveals it.

These apologists detest the idea of “blind faith,” as if there is such a thing as “seeing faith.” This is a contradiction. Faith that sees its object, that understands it and tests it through science, observation, and rational and philosophical examination is not faith. We do not need faith if we understand something, if we see it and know how it works. We do not need faith in the sun when we see the sun and understand its effects on the world. We do not need faith in gravity when we drop an object and we see it fall to the ground. The apologists detest blind faith because the world detests it and they cannot bear the weight of the ignominy and humiliation of testifying to the truth of a God that no one can see or understand. They refuse to withstand the mockery of blind, ignorant, blasphemous men who despise their Creator and Savior, so they take whatever steps possible to minimize this mockery and use the same tools and wisdom as the men who hate God and curse his name.

But faith is absolutely blind. It is the opposite of seeing and understanding; it is the opposite of rigorous scientific observation and testing, of logical and philosophical examination. We do not trust in God because we see him, or because we understand what he does or who he is. We believe in God because he has chosen us, given us life, and created faith within us. None of this constitutes “sight.” One apologist has said, “I am a Christian because it is evidentially true,”[29] but this is patently false. God births each Christian. God is the cause of every believer, not reason, and not evidence. God opens the eyes of blind men. He gives life to dead men. He does not present himself to the rational or the scientifically minded and wait for them to believe in him, and neither do men save themselves when they encounter correct logical or factual evidence. One sinner does not encounter the Gospel and claim Christ by his rational mind when some other less rational sinner rejects Christ. Men learn of the world by reason and evidence but they do not reach any knowledge of the Most High through these. Men do their best to understand the universe through reason and evidence but they in no way understand the Creator of the universe through reason or evidence. No worm crawling around in a worm-farm reasons himself to understanding the human who rules his tiny worm-world. Men understand and evaluate the words of other men through reason and evidence, but in no way do they understand or evaluate the truth of God’s word through reason or evidence. God reveals himself to men and he does it through scripture by the power of his Spirit. Everything else reeks of atheism and paganism.

Faith is blind because our faith does not rest on evidence or philosophy but because it rests on God whom we cannot see and we do not completely understand. Yet our faith is not blind as faith in some fable or myth. Our religion is historical and rational and we do not believe in a fiction. As Peter said

For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty.[30]

But nothing that the apostles witnessed provides the foundation for our faith. No miracle has created faith in any believer nor has any rational argument manifested any work of the Holy Spirit in any believer. Many men and women witnessed the same Christ perform the same miracles and still did not believe. Many atheists and pagans have considered many rational arguments for Christianity over the centuries. Many have even diligently studied scripture, reading and trying to understand the primary source, yet have come away without faith. How do we explain this? Why do some believe without the evidence and many fail to believe even when seriously considering it? We believe because God wills it so.

When we search the Bible, we can either assume beforehand that we know and understand enough within ourselves to understand scripture, the world, and ourselves, and then attempt to unravel the mysteries of God, or we can assume that we know nothing at all, and admit that we need God to reveal to us who he is, what he does, and what he desires. If we assume that we already understand who God is, how the world works, and who we are, then what more is there for us to learn? But if we assume that we understand nothing, only then will God reveal to us the mysteries of his world, his desires, his nature, and ourselves.

To this one I will look, to him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who trembles at my word.[31]

God saves us, he teaches us, and he keeps us in him. He does none of this through apologetics. He does none of this through reason, evidence, knowledge, facts, science, or philosophy. He saves through his Word by the power of His Spirit. All is of Him and nothing is of us, or our science, or our philosophy, or our facts, etc. Reason, science, and philosophy do not validate his Word or his existence. They possess no greater authority than God or his Word. If we believe this, we ruin the Gospel, we preach lies, we do not lead any to Christ, and we create false believers. This kind of apologetics has become an abomination. Consider the words of Cornelius Van Til:

Christ must be the ultimate authority over our philosophy, our reasoning, and our argumentation—not just at the end, but at the beginning, of the apologetical endeavor…Our apologetical method, not merely our apologetical conclusions, should be controlled by the word of Jesus Christ…If the apologist treats the starting point of knowledge as something other than reverence for God, then unconditional submission to the unsurpassed greatness of God’s wisdom at the end of his argumentation does not make sense…The word of God would necessarily (logically, if not personally) remain subordinate to that autonomous, final standard.[32]

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[1] Romans 1.16

[2] Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God?, Word Publishing, 1994, page 13.

[3] C.S. Lewis, The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classic, HarperSanFrancisco, 2002, page 23.

[4] Cross Examined, “I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist LIVE from Louisiana Christian University - Part 2,” published March 29, 2022. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11k-VkNiIXc

[5] Clark Pinnock, quoted in Evidence that Demands a Verdict, © 2017 Josh McDowell Ministry, Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, page xxxii.

[6] Romans 10.13,14,17

[7] Cross Examined, “Why do we need arguments when we have the Scriptures?”, published August 24, 2020. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VxVw2d2uYI

[8] Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, I don’t have enough faith to be an Atheist, Copyright 2004 by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, published by Crossway Books, page 14.

[9] Cross Examined, “Why Don’t Churches Teach Evidence for Christianity?”, published October 24, 2018. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QahH6Tw-ejg

[10] Psalm 146.8; John 6.63; Acts 5.30,31; 2 Timothy 2.25; Philippians 1.29.

[11] A tweet by Frank Turek. https://twitter.com/DrFrankTurek/status/1504880356960477190. Incidentally he adds “following scripture” but more revealingly he adds it second in the list of what we are to follow: reason, then the scriptures, but only the scriptures because reason proves their truth.

[12] Matthew 7.26-27

[13] Matthew 13.1-23.

[14] Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ, © 2016 by Lee Strobel, published by Zondervan, pages 14-15.

[15] Ibid, 14.

[16] Ibid, 15.

[17] Ibid, 16.

[18] Ibid, 290.

[19] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, © 1984 Moody Press, page xii.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid, xiii.

[22] Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith, © 2011 Douglas Groothuis, published by InterVarsity Press, page 650.

[23] Ibid, 29.

[24] Ibid, 39.

[25] Ibid, 51.

[26] Ibid, 28.

[27] Ibid, 647.

[28] John 4.24.

[29] Melissa Dougherty, “When a Christian leaves the Faith: My Thoughts”, published June 1, 2020. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RluEHxI0Gv8.

[30] 2 Peter 1.16

[31] Isaiah 66.2

[32] Cornelius Van Til, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings & Analysis, edited by Greg L. Bahnsen, ©1998 by the Cornelius Van Til Committee, published by Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, pages 2-3.