Axe to the Root with Bojidar Marinov | Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Network: Recent Episodes
Reconstructionist Radio | Reformed Christian Podcast
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.
Every time someone says, “this is the real problem,” or “this is the real conflict,” it doesn’t say much about the problem or the conflict he is describing – that problem or conflict may be real, and it may not be real. But the truth is, it says a lot about the real worldview of the person saying it.
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.
Assigned Reading:
– Wisdom and Dominion, Gary North
Why do foreign missions need to start with books?
Assigned Reading:
– The Book That Made Your World, Vishal Mangalwadi
“Why the Chinese have it wrong.”
Assigned Reading:
– The Formation of Christendom, Judith Herrin
When R.J. Rushdoony said that theocracy is the closest thing to radical libertarianism that can be had, he was not speaking figuratively, nor was he speaking politically. He was speaking literally, based on a thorough analysis of Biblical Law and the social order it prescribed.
Assigned Reading:
– Law and Liberty, R.J. Rushdoony
– The Theme is Freedom, M. Stanton Evans
What is the Prophetic Ministry supposed to do, and why is it so hated by the modern church celebrities?
Assigned Reading:
– Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, Bruno Bettelheim
“The image of God in man laughs at Malthus’s closed-universe paganism. The end of history will not be economic. It will come not because we have run out of resources…The end will be covenantal: it will come because the church has fulfilled the Great Commission and has made the whole world submit to Christ, and has made all His enemies His footstool.
Assigned Reading:
– The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne Ehrlich
Jesus had a view of the future that scandalized both Gentiles and Jews.
Assigned Reading:
– Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview, Gary North
You have heard it said that the Biblical role of the civil government is to provide safety. But is this true?
Assigned Reading:
– Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law, Philip Howard
The worldview of a culture is revealed in the way it responds to calamity.
Assigned Reading:
– Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, Bruno Bettelheim
“What does the GDP growth of the last one quarter tell us about the economy, from a Biblical perspective?”
Assigned Reading:
– Regime Uncertainty, Robert Higgs (Published in The Independent Review, Volume 1, Number 4, of Spring 1997)
If you want to summarize the practical ideology of cultural pessimism, it is this: Every solution must be by default incomplete and temporary; the problems stay forever. And let me tell you, folks: There’s money in it. Huge money.
Assigned Reading:
– Restoring America, Joel McDurmon
That’s what the real covenantal meaning of collectivism is: an ideology which subjects individuals to the moral dictatorship of human collectives and/or elites, with the purpose of re-educating them into obedient pawns.
Assigned Reading:
– Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, Bruno Bettelheim
Assigned Watching:
– The Bourne Identity
“Tyrannies always demand enormous sacrifices for negligible returns.”
Assigned Reading:
– Russia in 1839, Astolphe de Custine
Modern voting is an act of war against an ever-encroaching state, trying to consume lives, liberty, and property. In such a war of protection of the home, there is no difference between men and women.
Assigned Reading:
– Freedom Conference Lectures, Bojidar Marinov
Within the context of the Dominion Covenant, there is no contradiction between conventional farming and organic farming.
Assigned Reading:
– Agricultural Revolution in England, Mark Overton
Patriarchy is not the antidote to sodomy. It is its mother.
Assigned Reading:
– The Pink Swastika, Scott Lively & Kevin Abrams
In the final account, our service to the lowest among us will determine the strength of our faith. That is where true Christianity is.
Assigned Reading:
– Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg
“He took on Himself all the guilt of the world.”
Assigned Reading:
– Redemption: Accomplished and Applied, John Murray
“A sodomite culture that has come to fruition has come to fruitlessness.”
Assigned Reading:
– Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg
“God doesn’t tolerate the injustice of closed borders for too long.”
Assigned Reading:
– Kaffir Boy, Mark Mathabane
In the same way, as patent legislation was proposed to lead to faster pace of scientific and technological growth, in the majority of cases, it only stifled growth, as inventors spend more time and resources running the race to get monopoly grants from bureaucrats to kill all competition, rather than develop their ideas in practice and making them available, serving as many people as possible, and making money in the process.
Assigned Reading:
– The Mythology of Science, R.J. Rushdoony
Does the Bible mention believers who are in service of a pagan, executive state, and does the Bible give specific commands to those believers?
Assigned Reading:
– The Best Years,1945-1950, Joseph Goulden
Given that ethical/judicial context of two-way responsibility between men and their institutions, then, what is the Biblical way for us to think about the tithe?
Assigned Reading:
– Tithing and Dominion, R.J. Rushdoony
In the interaction between a superior culture and an inferior culture, it is the inferior culture that loses, and eventually, gets assimilated.
Assigned Reading:
– Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg
“Biblical Slavery is always temporary, and has a redemptive purpose.”
Assigned Reading:
– Economic Commentary on Exodus 21-40, Gary North
“…for a nation, to be given the children of another nation for free, without even having to go to war, is one of the greatest blessings God would bestow.”
Assigned Reading:
– Strangers At Our Door, Zygmunt Bauman
“The division used by modern theologians – Moral, Civil, Ceremonial – is not found in the Bible.”
Assigned Reading:
– Leviticus: An Economic Commentary, Gary North
“Whatever Christians were not trained to do in the church, they won’t be able to do outside the church.”
Assigned Reading:
– The New England Pulpit and the American Revolution, Alice M Baldwin
“Ethically and judicially, making an authority of celebrities in the churches is not different than making an authority of celebrities in the political world.”
Assigned Reading:
– Moscow 1937, Karl Schlögel
But meanwhile, as Eusebius pointed out, the pagan world was learning spiritual principles from Moses, through the fame of Solomon. The pagans themselves knew very well where their civilization came from. Julius Caesar read the Septuagint and freed the Jews in his empire from any taxes. The temple in Jerusalem was a place where many Greeks and Romans and other nations came to worship. Wise men from the east came to worship the King of the Jews, and Titus specifically instructed his legions to spare the Temple of God. Proselytes – even from the house of Caesar – joined the Jewish communities and became part of the nation of Israel, later of the nation of the Church. When the covenantal status of ethnic Israel was removed, then the burden of defining and directing history through a confession of faith fell to the Church. But the Church didn’t act in a vacuum. It had material to work on: a civilization which in the course of centuries, slowly and painfully, was shaped and influenced by the Hebrew worldview to become more civilized, seeking God, and thus more open to accept His Gospel. In the final account, even the ancient world was driven by a profession of faith; and history was simply the perfection of that faith.
Assigned Reading:
– America BC, Barry Fell
The Modern Navel-Gazing Pseudo-Calvinism
Assigned Reading:
– You’ve Heard It Said, Gary DeMar
Abortion, therefore, won’t be ended by professional entertainers and institutional leaders building their own brand names and a host of spectators. . . . Abortion will be abolished only by the work of those leaders who, within three and a half years, recreate themselves in many others, through teaching them the vision, and entrusting them to the Holy Spirit.
Assigned Reading:
– The “Atheism” of the Early Church, R.J. Rushdoony
How did the most powerful nation in Christendom for several hundred years sink down to the level of such insignificance?
Assigned Reading:
–Covenant Enforced: John Calvin’s Sermons on Deuteronomy 27-28
If you are looking for a passive, docile, obedient woman, a woman that would be satisfied to be bossed around and “discipled” and told what to do and be patronized and taught and instructed…you are looking for the wrong kind of woman. Take those patriarchal ideas and throw them in the garbage can.
Assigned Reading:
– The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries, Rodney Stark
Those who call for the US government to “stimulate the economy” by regulating import and export are calling for and economic disaster. They are calling for the government to turn us all into frugal tramps – and keep us so for the purposes of a government policy.
Assigned Reading:
– Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg
Social visibility doesn’t influence culture. Only service does.
Assigned Reading:
– Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg
Art must take the world as interpreted by God and represent it in a form that emphasizes either beauty or ugliness, and re-interpret them ethically/judicially after God’s interpretation of them.
Assigned Reading:
– From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun
How Bad Have Our Hearts Become?
But in all this external progress, is there internal progress?
Are our hearts changed compared to the generations before us, or are
we the same moral degenerates, or even worse?
Assigned Listening:
– The Paralysis of Pessimism, Gary DeMar
There is a deeper reason for the aversion American men have to church, and until we discover this deeper reason and act on that discovery, we won’t solve the problem. And if we don’t solve the problem, the next extraordinary situation will be created not by our persecutors but by ourselves, by our own apathy and by our own stupidity.
The central point here is that any communion or community has to be based on a moral commitment to a creed or a faith. It can’t be metaphysical, based on some neutral characteristics like genetics, place of birth, economic status, IQ, or anything else. It has to be ethical/judicial;…There has to be a transcendent faith, and that faith has to have a transcendent moral law which would unite all the members of the communion into one body, without losing each one’s identity. Without such selective communion with people of the same faith and the same moral status, any community will end up being a communion with evil.
Assigned Reading:
– The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber
Assigned Reading:
– The Truly Covenantal and Reformed View of Prophecy (and of the Other Gifts), Bojidar Marinov (this article is not yet available through ChristendomRestored.com)
” . . . the attempt to produce relevance through solidifying institutional power and demanding submission to it will only produce more irrelevance.”
Assigned Reading:
– One Holy Local Church? The Ghettoization of Protestantism, Bojidar Marinov
A godly society is a sanctuary society.
Assigned Reading:
– “The Sanctuary Society and Its Enemies,” Gary North
– “Immigration Control: Federal Social Engineering,” Gary North
What changes did the Industrial Revolution bring to the Christian family? Did it weaken it or did it strengthen it? Did it help the Christian family fulfill its purpose in the Kingdom of God, or did it set it off its course in a direction which would eventually render it meaningless? Did it open up new horizons and new areas for growth and exploration, or did it shut the door to the future, laying the foundation for replacing the Christian family with something else? Was the Industrial Revolution a friend or a foe to the Christian family?
Assigned Reading:
– “Relationship vs. Purpose: How the Church Destroys the Christian Family,” Bojidar Marinov
– “Christian Culture vs. Clan Culture,” Bojidar Marinov
– “Individual Purpose and the Kingdom of God,” Bojidar Marinov
Fake news is more than just false reporting.
Assigned Reading:
– Inside the Soviet Alternate Universe: The Cold War’s End and the Soviet Union’s Fall Reappraised, Dick Combs
And when the state intervenes to control and regulate man and his economic choices, it can only destroy life and destroy growth. That’s the religious root of economic nationalism: the religion of death. The farther we stay from it, the faster we will grow our economy.
Assigned Reading:
– Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of Nazi Economy, Adam Tooze
To speak of “cultural Marxism” is just as legitimate as to speak of “materialistic Christianity,” that is, Christianity that arises from a materialistic understanding of reality.
Assigned Reading:
– The Betrayal of the Church, Edmund W. Robb, Julia Robb
To make it simple, when God says “Widows’ – or any other weaker persons’ – lives, liberty, property, etc. matters,” you don’t dare talk back at Him with “All lives, liberty, property, etc. matters.” Because you talk back at Him like that, you are in trouble.
Assigned Reading:
– The Anti-Chinese Movement in California, Elmer Sandmeyer
“God tied the hands of the powerful to protect the weak.”
Assigned Reading:
– Authority and Dominion, Volume 3, Chapter 31, “Servitude, Protection, and Marriage,” Gary North
– Authority and Dominion, Volume 3, Chapter 32, “Wives and Concubines,” Gary North
– Authority and Dominion, Volume 4, Chapter 48, “Oppression, Omniscience, and Judgment,” Gary North
For most – if not all – defenders of immigration restrictions and control, the immigration restrictions are some abstract reality out there, and if “we just obey the law,” there would be no problems, and everything will be alright. What is always missed is that behind these abstract immigration laws they want to see enforced, there is an institutional arrangement, and that institutional arrangement is just as destructive to America as are the government schools. And certainly more destructive to America than any threat open borders could involve.
Assigned Reading:
– Bojidar Marinov’s lectures on Biblical Immigration
So, what is your philosophy of missions? How is your view of missions different? How do you go about doing missions in Eastern Europe, and why is what you are doing better than what the American mission organizations have been doing so far?
Assigned Reading: – Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica: The Acculturation of the Slavs, Anthony-Emil Tachiaos
Christmas has to be defended…as something that is commanded as a principle in the Bible, and commanded in a way that gives us the liberty how and when and where to do it, as long as we do it. Because, if we don’t do it, we are in trouble. And Christmas is one way to do it.
“. . . this is exactly what the West did in its war against Islam: We worked hard, and we fought hard, and we spent tons of resources and human life, only to turn a secure historical victory into something that today nearly approaches the defeat of the West. Islam didn’t do it to us. We did it, the Christians in the West, it’s our fault, from beginning to end.“
A philosophy that self-consciously started with a departure from God as the objective transcendent standard, ended up creating a system of statist domination that the West hadn’t seen since the times of the late Roman Empire. As Rushdoony said in his Foundations of Social Order, all paganism inevitably leads to statism. Hegel’s neo-paganism was not an exception.
What is the most powerful motivator for man’s behavior, and the most powerful factor behind man’s actions, mentioned in the Bible? And what is the most commonly repeated commandment in Scripture?
What does the Bible say about the role of government? Are there any specific provisions in the Law of God about safety, security, and law-enforcement? What is the proper role of civil government in the law of God? Is it to provide safety and security? How should the laws be enforced in a Christian society?
The answers to these questions would take many more episodes, but we want to look at one particular aspect of them: social safety and security, and the role of civil government.
Recommended Reading:Joel McDurmon, 1 Samuel: In the Midst of Your Enemies (coming soon to the American Vision Library!)
Is our need for salvation the center of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
Recommended Reading:R.J. Rushdoony, A Word in Season
“So, if there are no prisons, how do we deal with these lesser crimes?”
Recommended Reading:Gary North, Tools of Dominion
Reconstructing Egyptian chronology, thus, leads us to see that secular historians have stretched ancient history beyond the historical evidence, inventing a gap of between 400 and 700 years at least. No wonder their history does not fit the Biblical narrative: they have made it up, from thin air.
Recommended Reading:“The Shadow of Christ in the Legal Revolutions in Greece and Rome“, Bojidar Marinov
Ages in Chaos, Immanuel Velikovsky
Trust and respect to the younger generation, therefore, is a sign of blessedness, and a sign of God’s favor on a society. Distrust, on the other hand, is a sign of God’s curse. And while it is often a temptation for the older generation to blame the younger generation for their real or imaginary faults, the reality is the sin and blame always lie with the older generation. The Luke 12:48 principle – to whom much is given, much shall be required of him – so well forgotten in our modern American culture, applies to parents and children as well: Parents carry the responsibility for any conflict of generations and any distrust.
Recommended Reading:Matthias Schwartz and Heike Winkel, editors, Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context
“. . . we need to go back to the real meaning of the Second Amendment. What was the historical context of the Amendment and of the Bill of Rights in general? What particular philosophical and ideological terms were at the foundation of the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights in general? Who were the people who were granted the rights? Who was the “antagonist,” the entity against which the rights were to be exercised?
All these questions are very important, and all these have been answered incorrectly by modern liberals in their gun-grabbing attempts. But the real problem is, conservatives have been just as bad in interpreting the Second Amendment – and it is their failure to read it for what it is is what led to our present loss of individual rights. Yes, folks, it is not the liberals, it is the conservatives’ failure that our rights have been taken away little by little. Had conservatives been consistent and faithful to the real meaning of the Amendment, we wouldn’t be here today.”
Book of the Week:
– August 1, 1946. The battle of Athens, Tennessee by C. Stephen Byrum
Every single practical covenant action follows these two principles: work and community.
Book of the Week:
– Bringing in the Sheaves: Transforming Poverty into Productivity by George Grant
We will attempt to apply to salesmanship a Biblical covenantal analysis, that is, find its place in the larger picture of the Covenant of God, find the ethical principles for doing sales, and then also, find the judicial limitations to the profession of a salesman.
Book of the Week:
– The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor
Keeping a steady focus on the past keeps the listeners from discerning between good and evil in the present, and prevents a focus on the future.
Book of the Week:
– Idols for Destruction, Chapter 1, “Idols of History” by Herbert Schlossberg
Leaving the details of history for another time, it is worth delving into the real reasons for the failure of the Moral Majority. After all, we in our time have seen the same failure, over and over again, of the religious right. We have also seen the failure of evangelical ministries – no matter how much money we poor into them – to change course of America’s moral downfall. With all these failures, seems like it’s time to start figuring out what led to them.
Book of the Week:
– Tactics of Christian Resistance by Gary North
Voting simply based on abstract principles divorced from the dynamics of the historical process and from the specific challenges of our times – God’s purpose to our generation – won’t be really Biblical voting. Like the men of Issachar, need to understand the times to know what Israel should do.
Book of the Week:
– The Biblical Philosophy of History by R.J. Rushdoony
It’s time for us to realize that the deep motivation behind America’s policies is fear. And rebel against it.
Book of the Week:
– The Dictators by Richard Overy
While the situation in our day is not perfectly similar to that in 17th century England, we have a number of Christians today who do not understand the law of God, do not care for the Law of God, and yet still advocate one or another action of the civil government. Most of their ideology of government is not Biblical – it comes from the modern popular theories, which are all children of the Enlightenment and its neopaganism.
Paganism in all its forms leads to tyranny. In the final account, our participation as Christians in the political arena without a clear understanding of the boundaries on civil government, will lead not to more righteousness, nor to more religious liberty. It will only lead to more tyranny. The Law of God must be at the foundation of our political involvement, and we must reject the temptation to expect the civil government to solve problems which are Biblically given to the family and the church. Like the Presbyterians of Cromwell’s time, we may find ourselves in alliance with the enemies of God, and eventually undermine our own efforts. In this, Cromwell should be a good example of a man who knew the limits of government. A man ahead of his time, but also a man underestimated in our own time, his views of government, and his actions in preventing tyranny may once again be a good school for us, in our own times of creeping tyranny.
Book of the Week:
– The Protector: A Vindication by Merle D’Aubigne
We need to be careful, therefore, when we read any of the Ten Commandments individually and isolated from the larger context, for we are running the risk of concocting a system of fake obedience to the Law which in itself is a violation of the Law. And the Fourth Commandment is no exception to this rule.
Book of the Week:
– Israel’s Calendar and the True Sabbath by Curtis Clair Ewing
And this more important theological question is this: Which order of grace – common or special – governs the world outside the church and the individual soul of man? Yes, we know that God sustains His elect through special grace, and He sustains the reprobates through His common grace. But what about the world? When God looks at the world outside the church and the souls of men, when He looks at the creation, or at the societies of man, or at the social institutions, or scientific endeavors, technological discoveries, at art and music and literature, at the total of our civilization today, does God look at it as something that just needs to be maintained and restrained (common grace), or does He look at it as something to be redeemed and saved (special grace)?
Book of the Week:
– Dominion and Common Grace by Gary North
Churchian leaders, therefore, who use Romans 13 to call for obedience to the police are no different than those who call for legalization of sodomite marriage. Such churchian leaders are idolaters, and they are contributing to the destruction of the social order of Christendom. The Biblical government is not a government of executive decree; an executive government is a counterfeit government. When our own churchian leaders legitimize a counterfeit government institution like the police, there is no reason to not legitimize counterfeit government money, counterfeit education like the public schools, a counterfeit family of two sodomites, etc. They are all parts of the same assault on the Christian social order. And for Christians to be able to restore the rule of God in every area of their society, all these must be opposed and abolished – yes, including professional police. As long as professional police remains in our society, no matter how much we strive politically to elect the right candidates, no matter how much we work for the moral restoration of the American society, Christian liberty and justice will be endangered and eventually lost.
Therefore, from a Biblical perspective, just like government schools, the Federal Reserve, all the government regulatory agencies, welfare and Social Security, etc., the standing army of police must be abolished. It is not a true government, and it has never been meant as a true government – it is simply an occupation army enforcing the will of a pagan, wicked government. Supporting it, and using Romans 13 to call for obedience to it is to commit the same sin as the people of Israel in 1 Samuel 8: They have rejected God from being their King.
Book of the Week:
– Are Cops Constitutional? by Roger Roots
There is no place like home. And when you are a 6-7-8-9-year-old kid, and your parents kick you out of their home to preserve their happiness, you are a homeless kid. It doesn’t matter if they send you to the nicest school system ever designed, with the most careful and qualified teachers, all with Master’s degrees – you are still a homeless kid, period. And when you are a homeless kid, in the minority among a population of adults who are all too happy of their selfish present, never really thinking of their future, then you grow up with the idea that you have no future, and no purpose. Yeah, for a short time, your bureaucratic well-paid surrogate mothers and fathers in school may be able to manipulate you to have a surrogate purpose and surrogate future. But eventually, it is fake, and it thins out, and you are left again like the little match girl in the Andersen’s story, in a cold world of selfish adults too busy celebrating their happiness.
Book of the Week:
– The Final Circle of Paradise by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
– The Second Invasion from Mars by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
When historians say that European dominance was caused by Europe’s superior technology, they are right. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. For behind that superior technology, there was a superior faith with a superior worldview, which made both the science, and the technology, and the economic infrastructure possible. Without this understanding, we can’t understand history.
Book of the Week:
– Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White, Jr.
When the only concept that defines the Biblical man was taken away from the pulpits and the minds and the hearts of the church, inevitably, the church lost the concept of Biblical manhood. And while the world – and Hollywood – were still in the inertia of an earlier Christian era, when man was defined by his purpose and therefore was a true man, the church pulpits were setting the stage for the loss of manhood and for the creation of the modern concept of a genderless society of no real men and no real women. The church had a 40-year head start on Hollywood.
The modern culture of perverts and effeminate men was born not in the studios of Hollywood or in the meetings of cultural Marxists but in the faculties of the modern Reformed seminaries, and in the pulpits of our own churches. Culture is religion externalized, and an effeminate religion will inevitably create an effeminate culture.
Book of the Week:
– The Calvinistic Concept of Culture by Henry Van Til
I don’t like to get involved in arguments about the sacraments. Not that I don’t believe the sacraments – or the ordinances – are not important. But the modern debate – on both sides, Presbyterian and Baptist – is irrelevant to the Biblical faith. It revolves around issues that are not even Biblical to start with. Its focus is far from the Biblical focus. It ignores God as the direct immediate reality behind the sacraments. It ignores the work of the Holy Spirit – far more important than the work of the individual or the church leadership. It ignores the ethical/judicial issues involved – especially the judgment part. And it ignores the victory of the Gospel in history.
Modern sacraments are the symbolic equivalent of crossing the Red Sea and settling in the desert on its eastern shore, feeding on manna forever. Actually, I take that back: the manna was sweet. The correct symbol would be feeding on rusk forever. Modern sacraments are a useless exercise, without any spiritual or judicial reality behind them. If some day I get back into that debate, it will be only when the Biblical focus is restored, and with it, the efficacy and the usefulness of the sacraments.
Book of the Week:
– The Sovereign Spirit by Martyn Lloyd-Jones
So, is Islam taking over Europe? Or the world?
The answer is, it isn’t. It is in retreat on all fronts. It has failed to create a civilization to challenge Christendom, or even the apostate humanist Western civilization that still carries a lot of its historical Christian cultural legacy. It has failed to produce individual purpose and personal maturity and productivity – and without purpose and maturity Islam can not produce the type of man needed to build a civilization. Islam needs Christianity to survive – and every time it rebels against Christianity it only sinks deeper and deeper in the drain of history, and loses more and more ground to that very Christianity it rebels against. Islam cannot produce any of the advances of the Western civilization – whether technological or social or political or psychological.
The reactions of some radical groups against Christianity are simply the agony of a dying animal; the more violent those reactions are, the more energy is lost, and the nearer its death is. A few terrorists are not a cultural threat; and when we fret about those few terrorists, we are only declaring our own weakness and fear. But in reality, there is no reason for fear. And there is no reason for statist solutions and government enforced security and endless wars in the Middle East. A period of peace and evangelism will bring about the death of Islam faster than any government programs or defenses. The future, as Paul said in 1 Cor. 3:21-22, belongs to Christianity.
Book of the Week:
– God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis by Philip Jenkins
Covenantal thinking always returns the Christian man to the fundamental unit of all government – the individual. As we have seen before, collectivism is not simply a social or political theory; it is a self-conscious war against God’s fundamental level of government, self-government. And racism in all its forms – ideological, practical, institutional, legislative – is collectivism. Its ultimate purpose is destruction, and eventually it destroys both sides in the conflict it creates.
Book of the Week:
– The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
If an economic theory says that economic growth is produced by consumption, or re-distribution – which is theft – or by magical manipulation of reality (inflation), it is an anti-Biblical economic theory. But if it says that economic growth is produced by sacrifice, work, and faith which lays the foundation for confidence and optimism of the future, it is close to the Biblical view of economics.
Book of the Week:
– Inherit the Earth: Biblical Principles for Economics, Gary North
Christians pour billions of dollars into men and ministries who believe in defeat, and thus subsidize their own defeat. Like Denethor, we are all, as a church, invested in defeat, billions of dollars every year. We have accepted the inevitability of defeat…no, worse than that, we have have accepted that defeat is so normative that we should even subsidize it.
Book of the Week: – Millennalism and Social Theory, Gary North
Today, Presbyterianism is not even a pale shadow of its former glory. If a person doesn’t know history, there is nothing in modern Presbyterianism that can tell him that just 100 years ago it was the central influence on the American culture. Nothing whatsoever. It is the perfect modern example of salt that has lost its savor, and was thrown out and is trampled under the feet of men. And here are the reasons for this decline.
Book of the Week:– Punic Wars & Culture Wars: Christian Essays on History and Teaching, Ben House
In the world after the Cross, God has planted a mechanism of self-destruction into every institution of authority, be it family, church, or state. And every institution of authority, when it trespasses God’s boundaries for it, triggers that mechanism, and it starts ticking. Whether it is Putin’s Russia, or the Islamic State, or Saudi Arabia, or the Obama administration, any political potentate who wants to get more power has to do it through acts that are ultimately suicidal for himself and for his plans. The greater the thirst for power, the greater the danger. And the more history progresses, the faster this mechanism ticks. Eventually, the wicked will find their plans thwarted even before they are put to action.
Far from losing hope, all we as Christians need to do is what the Psalmist says in Psalm 91: “You will only look with your eyes, and you will see the reward of the wicked.”
Book of the Week: – Dissent on Development: Studies and Debates in Development Economics, P.T. Bauer
Behind every case of injustice, there is a case of idolatry. And where there is systemic injustice in a system, this is only because there is systemic idolatry embedded in that system. And if the church is not speaking against injustice, then the church is not speaking against idolatry, and therefore the church is not preaching the Gospel.
Book of the Week:– Authority and Dominion – Volume 3, Gary North
– Authority and Dominion – Volume 4, Gary North
The original American rugged individualism didn’t come out of the blue. It was the product of 17 centuries of development of Christian doctrine and worldview, as well as the teachings of the Reformation and its view of the priestly status of the individual man under God. Our politicians and churchmen today hate it; they hate it because they hate the Christian doctrine and the Christian worldview that created that individualism. In order for the modern elites to thwart God’s Dominion Mandate to man, they need to replace it with the state’s power domination over man. But a self-governing man under God is not subject to power domination; and this made Christianity dangerous for the Roman Empire, and for the modern pagan tyrants as well. And we better keep it dangerous.
Bojidar’s Links:
– BulgarianReformation.com
– BojidarMarinov.com
– ChristendomRestored.com
Book of the Week: – Christianity and Classical Culture, Charles Norris Cochrane
Thus, spiritual manand mature man both describe a man who can judge both good and evil, in all things. It is righteous judgment that defines a spiritual, mature man. He is a man who knows the difference between good and evil, and has trained his senses to discern good vs. evil in everything that comes his way.
Axe to the Root will be a regular show produced by Reconstructionist Radio, hosted by Bojidar Marinov.