Axe to the Root with Bojidar Marinov | Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Network

Welcome to Episode 10 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about church sacraments, their meaning, their effectiveness, and their uselessness as well. Or, rather, their modern uselessness within the context of the theology of the modern church.

I want make this disclaimer at the very beginning: I generally stay away from arguments about sacraments. In fact, I don’t even like the word “sacraments,” and I prefer “ordinances,” for the obvious reason. Ordinances, because they are ordained, or commanded, by Christ. Sacrament in its modern meaning would presuppose some form of magic or liturgy behind it. Sacramentum is the Latin word for oath, and oath were considered a special form of magic in the pagan world. Now, of course, if we take the Christian meaning of “oath,” an ethical/judicial binding involving invoking God’s curse for breaking the oath, it would be better. The problem is, most, if not all, modern churches have abandoned the meaning of the sacraments as vows or judgment; even in the most anti-liturgical ones, the sacraments continue to be rather liturgical, even if no one calls them liturgy anymore. Also, modern Reformed churches have abandoned the belief in the spiritual reality behind judicial oaths. Yes, yes, I know, they pay lip service to the belief in the spiritual, but their “spiritual” is always rather abstract, happening somewhere in the background. And it better stay there in the background and in the shadows, while we have a theology that bans it from our churches and from our practice. No matter what their leaders claim from the pulpit, the real ideology of the majority of Reformed churches today is Enlightenment rationalism. God is just added to this ideology as a sort of an insurance company, making sure nothing extraordinary happens to our neat programs and pageants.

My personal preferences are generally on the Presbyterian side of the debate over the sacraments. I believe the children of believing parents are by default members of the Covenant and not little pagans living in a covenant home. I believe there is a corporate aspect to the Covenant of Grace which allows for representative inclusion in the Covenant of Grace; therefore, children of covenant parents should receive the sign of the Covenant. Nevertheless, I seldom participate in debates between Presbyterians and Baptists. Why? Because I can see that the majority of Presbyterians are absolutely clueless of the covenantal foundation of their argument. Thus, they argue in a fragmented way, not in a covenantal way. In the final account, all the arguments between Presbyterians and Baptists are on a level that is either rationalist or mysticist. And when I say “all the arguments,” I don’t mean only amateurish arguments on FB. I mean argumentation brought forth between theologians and writers and preachers. Yes, I must say, most of what comes out of our modern seminaries is pure childishness – including the theological arguments. The celebrities we have elevated for ourselves – on both sides, Presbyterian and Baptist – are quite simplistic and fragmented in their understanding of theology. Yes, yes, I know, you will tell me, but these guys write fat books and they preach so many sermons and write blogs and briefings, etc. I am not impressed. Quantity doesn’t make up for the lack of quality. The multitude of words can’t make up for the lack of covenantal thinking. So I generally stay away from those debates.

I differ with my Baptist friends on baptism, but keep in mind, on the Lord’s Supper, I find the position of the majority of my Presbyterian brethren fragmented and indefensible. Specifically, their rationalist view of the communion: that communion is a judgment of our intellectual capabilities of rationally conceptualizing the church as the body of Christ. And the belief following from it that children should be excluded from it. My children, again, are not little pagans living in my home – they are not pagans morally, and they are not pagans intellectually. They are members of the covenant judicially (contrary to my Baptist brethren), and they are members of the covenant intellectually and in deed (contrary to my Presbyterian brethren).

So, now that I have offended both groups, I should add, I know that there are nuances within each group, and some people wouldn’t agree with some specific terminology I have used so far. That’s OK. It doesn’t matter. I have a worse offense for you all, one that establishes an even worse divide between me and the two modern camps: I don’t believe the debate as it is today is even relevant to the Christian faith. Yes, you heard me well, and let me repeat it again: The debate over the sacraments is not even relevant to the Christian faith. Most of the debate today is predicated on presuppositions about the sacraments that are not even in the Bible; the Bible doesn’t seem to have such a focus on the significance and the details of symbols or efficacy of the sacraments. Such focus comes not from the early church – in fact, based on the writings of the early church fathers, there was a significant liberty in the early church concerning the methods and the beliefs about the sacraments. It’s not that the early church has specific evidence of subscribing to one or another doctrine of the meaning and the efficacy of the sacraments; it just has very scanty evidence and focus on these issues. True, the early church authors wrote on the issues of the sacraments – but judging from the volume and share of such writings, the early church seems to have relegated these issues to a place of secondary importance. They didn’t even include baptism and the Supper in most of their creeds! Whether they baptized children or not, and whether they allowed children to partake of the communion or not, or whether their mode of baptism was sprinkling or immersion, or whether the true meaning of baptism was a covenant sign or a confession of faith, or whether the Lord’s Supper was a symbol or real presence – these questions were discussed so rarely in the writings of the church fathers that we today have to glean bits and pieces from them in order to get the whole picture. There was no systematic theology of the sacraments in the early church. In fact, it wasn’t until the church started developing a special aristocracy of priests that it started developing different theories sifting out the gnats about rituals and symbols. And when such theories started developing, they ignored a number of camels that the church swallowed happily. And, I must say, continues to swallow today.

I know you are not used to hearing this about the sacraments; I know that the majority of Christians today have been conditioned to believe that the correct view of the details of the sacraments – liturgical and symbolic – is so important, that it deserves enormous attention. I will challenge this view here. I will show that Biblically, the sacraments have no meaning in themselves, and there is a higher reality behind them, and a deeper context which is specifically and self-consciously avoided by modern theologians. Avoided because they have invested in a truncated gospel limited to the church and the individual, a gospel of no victory in history, and, most of all, a gospel of a deist god who may have given his word to man some time in the past but is today silent and passive. Unless we send that truncated gospel to the garbage heap of history, we won’t understand the meaning of the sacraments, and we will have useless rituals – which they are today, in the vast majority of churches. Yes, I said it: the sacraments as the church preaches and practices them today are useless, and have no efficacy at all, no matter what your view of them is. And it is time to return to the Bible, and start reading what the Bible says about baptism and about the Lord’s Supper.

Let’s start with baptism. And let’s try for a moment to forget everything we have learned in sermons, books, and seminary lectures about baptism. Let’s be consistent with the most important clause our confessions of faith, and judge the opinions of authors, the decisions of councils, and private spirits by what Scripture says on the issue of baptism. And let’s try to visualize a realistic picture of those first baptisms performed by John the Baptist at the river Jordan.

We have John the Baptist who preaches repentance and redemption, which is not unusual in a nation that has been the guardian of the Scriptures of God for over a millennium. There was a multitude of preachers and teachers in Israel at the time, some legitimate, some not so legitimate. Very early in Jesus’s ministry, there were even religious activists who started imitating Him; see, for example, Luke 9:49-50, where the disciples met a man who cast out demons in Jesus’s name. While Athens was known for her babbling empty philosophizers, Israel was known for her preachers. They had a global fame; just a year after Jesus started preaching, Greeks from Athens came to hear Him. So John the Baptist’s preaching was not something unusual. The world at the time was used to listen to preachers of morality and redemption from Israel. After all, even Julius Caesar considered Israel so important that he freed the Jews of taxes every seventh year. Don’t forget the number of Roman soldiers described in the Gospels and Acts who either converted or at least acknowledged the truthfulness of Jesus’s claims. (Even Pilate himself did.)

But with that ordinary and normal activity – preaching repentance and redemption – John does something which has no analog in the OT: he baptizes for the remission of sins.

Where did he get that idea from?

The idea is not in the Old Testament. No one is baptized there. There is the concept of going through water, but it certainly is not of repentance for the remission of sins. When the people came to John to get baptized, in his preaching, he used terminology which pointed back to the Flood and the waters of the flood: “Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” But in the Flood, those who were saved, Noah’s family, were neither immersed nor sprinkled; it was the unbelieving world that was really baptized. In the same way, when Paul speaks about an OT baptism, Moses baptizing the Israelites in the sea, in 1 Cor. 10:2, the word applies to people who were neither immersed nor sprinkled; Exodus 14:22 specifically says that they “went through the sea on dry ground.” It was the Egyptian army that was properly baptized, if we take the literal meaning of the word. Obviously, the NT doctrine of baptism is not so awfully concerned about the literal meaning of the word baptizo, that is, immerse. To add insult to the injury, it’s not so concerned about the literal application of water either. Thus, at least part of the modern argument between immersion and sprinkling is irrelevant. We argue about the exact physical form of a symbol, when we have missed the real meaning behind that symbol. We have strained out a gnat, while we have swallowed a herd of camels.

Either way, there is no mention of baptism for the remission of sins in the OT. There is no mention of such a ceremony either. Remission of sins was through shedding of blood (Heb. 9:22: “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness”). So where did John take his idea from?

Even more important: how come his listeners, who for generations were trained to look to the Law and especially its ceremonies as their guide, all of a sudden accepted as valid a ceremony that was not in the Law? Even Pharisees and Saducees, those experts in the minutest details of the Law, came to be baptized (Matt. 3:7), without questioning the validity of the sacrament. Others who didn’t take John’s baptism still didn’t question its meaning, they only asked if John was the Messiah; they somehow knew that when He comes, Messiah will baptize. In John 1:25 they specifically asked him, “Why do you then baptize if you are not Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” But where did they get that idea from? Certainly not from the OT. How is it that John comes up with a totally new ceremony, changing the very central tenet of the old religion, remission of sins through shedding of blood, and no one questions its meaning?

So, there was no teaching on the meaning of baptism in the OT, except for a few highly symbolic references which didn’t even include immersion of the faithful but rather of the enemies of God. And John didn’t start a new school, developing a body of literature on the meaning of baptism. Not that he was illiterate; his father was a member of the priestly tribe, after all. John simply started preaching baptism on the remission of sins, out of the blue, in the wilderness, and people started coming to him, and he just baptized, without bothering to ask them if they understood the real meaning of baptism, and whether it pointed to regeneration or was simply a symbol, or a covenant sign, etc. remember, these people didn’t have centuries of teachings on the baptism; they had other teachings that were their tradition for over a millennium, and these teachings had nothing about baptism. Why wasn’t John concerned about creating a detailed body of knowledge and literature on the real meaning of baptism?

Compare this to our modern situation. After centuries of teachings on baptism, our seminaries and theologians and preachers and pastors produce tons of materials, going into all the obscure and arcane details of the ceremony, of the meaning of the ceremony, of the meaning of its detailed ceremonial parts, of the symbolism involved, of the necessary qualities of the ministers. . . . Teaching baptism, folks, can qualify as environmental disaster; who knows how many forests we have destroyed on fat volumes or lengthy chapters on baptism? We have special instructions for the people baptized, in some churches they are made to go through a special period of learning about the meaning of the ceremony. After they have been baptized, the teaching continues – lectures, conferences, sermons, seminars. How come, after 2,000 years of Christian teaching, we still need all this, and the people in John’s time knew it without all this? Could it be that they were smarter than us and didn’t need all this waste of energy of teaching them all these details?

Or could it be that in the worldview of the Biblical writers, baptism in itself didn’t have such a primary importance, and was only one part of a greater picture?

We have a good reason to believe that this is the case. And that reason is that in all four Gospels, when water baptism is introduced, it is always introduced in the context of a phrase that point to its secondary importance, compared to something of much greater importance.

Let’s look now at Matt. 3:11, the words of John the Baptist himself: “As for me, I baptize you with water for repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, and I am not fit to remove His sandals; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

I baptize you with water, but there’s a mightier and more worthy one than me, He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. How does that sound? Does that sound like water baptism has a central place, over and above any other baptism? Or does it sound like it is only a prelude to another, more powerful baptism?

Mark 1:7-8: “And he was preaching, and saying, ‘After me One is coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to stoop down and untie the thong of His sandals. I baptized you with water; but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’” Again, we see, water baptism is given only in the context of something much greater, and mightier, and worthier: baptism in the Holy Spirit.

Luke 3:16: “John answered and said to them all, ‘As for me, I baptize you with water; but One is coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.’” Here it is again.

John 1:25, the Pharisees asked him, “How come you are baptizing, if you are not Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” They knew that Messiah would baptize; they didn’t know – or didn’t acknowledge – that John was the Prophet, of course. John answered them about another one coming after him. And then, the next day, vv. 29-34, he continues his answer, and from his answer it is apparent that the whole point of his ministry is to identify the Messiah, who will baptize in the Holy Spirit!

Apparently, if we read our Bibles, water baptism was not enough; it was only an earlier step to something much mightier, more powerful, and greater than water baptism: baptism in the Spirit. In Luke 24:49 Jesus told them to wait in Jerusalem until they are clothed with power from on high. What was that clothing with power from on high that required that they just wait passively? These people were already baptized, they had already seen and believed the resurrection. They even had received the Holy Spirit; in John 20:22, Jesus breathed on them and told them to receive the Holy Spirit. Why did they have to wait? What was that power?

In Acts 1:4-5, the matter becomes clearer: “Gathering them together, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised, “Which,” He said, “you heard of from Me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” And even clearer a few verses later when he says, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.”

From these verses, it should be obvious that water baptism should lead to the greater baptism, that in the Spirit, and that without baptism in the Spirit there can’t be any effective testimony. If all four Gospels repeat the same thing about the ministry of John, if Jesus also confirms it after His resurrection, if He tells His disciples – already believers, already baptized in water, already witnesses of His resurrection and already received the Holy Spirit – to wait until they are baptized in the Spirit . . . there’s a good reason to believe that baptism in the Holy Spirit should be a very important doctrine for those who claim to be “sola scriptura,” right? And not only important, but our Reformed preachers and teachers should preach and teach it every time they preach and teach water baptism, and encourage their listeners to seek from the Lord baptism in the Spirit just as they sought from the church water baptism. Right?

Apparently, though, sola scriptura doesn’t seem to work in this case, not when modern Reformed ministries and churches are involved. To the flood of teaching about water baptism, the quantity of material on baptism in the Spirit is quite meager. I made the effort to run through the archives of a few major celebrity Reformed ministries to see what they have about baptism in the Holy Spirit. Very little. John MacArthur has a couple of sermons. Ligonier Ministries has 3 or 4 articles. The NT or systematic theology syllabi of several Reformed seminaries don’t even mention baptism in the Spirit. (They do have detailed courses on water baptism, though.) Reformed sermons on baptism in the Spirit are very few. Of those I have been able to find, most of the energy is spent on attacking modern Charismatics, and only small portions of them are devoted to attempts for Biblical exegesis of the concept.

The quantity is meager, but so is the quality, even from those ministries considered to be most reliable. The 3 or 4 articles on the Ligonier Ministry’s website contradict and refute each other. One warns against believing in a second, more perfect baptism – that is, baptism in the Spirit – and argues that this would create second class citizens in the Kingdom of God; even though several texts in the Gospels and Acts clearly speak of two different baptisms. Then another article, again on Ligonier’s website, says exactly the opposite: that we must clearly distinguish between conversion and baptism in the Spirit. John MacArthur is also self-contradictory. In one sermon he says that being filled with the Spirit is the same thing as being baptized in the Spirit. In another he insists that the two are different. Neither Ligonier, nor MacArthur, nor any other Reformed ministry I checked, really bother to address the connection between water baptism and baptism in the Spirit, emphasized by John the Baptist, ordained by Jesus, and described practically in Acts. No ministry bothers to make the connection between baptism in the Spirit and the supernatural manifestations of the Spirit described in Acts: speaking in tongues and prophesying. No ministry mentions baptism in the Spirit as the defining sign of Jesus’s greater ministry as over against John’s lesser ministry; nor do they comment on Jesus’s command to postpone their evangelism to after they had power from above.

And it doesn’t stop there. When one goes into the details of their teaching on baptism in the Spirit, the things get even more bizarre. Some teach that baptism in the Spirit means simply baptism in the church: once we are members of a church, we are automatically baptized in the Spirit, ignoring passages like Acts 19:1-7 where there were disciples who were not baptized in the Spirit. Others claim that the supernatural element of baptism in the Spirit has ceased and today it has nothing to do with supernatural power – without offering a single Scriptural verse to prove such discontinuity. Others explain that baptism in the Spirit is not an experiential event, because the baptized person doesn’t feel anything; therefore it must be just some natural occurrence or something; forgetting, obviously, that in the Biblical account it was the people around who certainly felt something and could testify that there was baptism in the Spirit. Etc., etc., etc. When it comes to baptism in the Spirit – as well as on many other topics – modern Reformed theology is a complete mess of contradictions and human inventions, having nothing to do with the Bible.

The question of course is, how do these guys get away with it? How come we have allowed our theologians and teachers and preachers and celebrities who are professedly sola scriptura ignore the plain teaching of Scripture on this issue. How is it that the baptism which the Bible clearly describes as the lesser ministry by the lesser man, is elevated to such prominent position, while we ignore the greater baptism by the greater man, which is made the mark of the New Covenant itself? How is it that we take water baptism isolated from the real meaning of the work of Christ: to give us the gift of the Holy Spirit? Why have allowed our celebrities to mislead us so badly, when the Bible speaks so clearly on this issue?

The answer to it may take another podcast; but here it is in short: Our modern Reformed theology – or what passes for “Reformed theology” – is rather Enlightenment rationalism, peppered with a few theologically correct propositions about God’s grace in personal salvation. In everything else, it is a self-conscious rejection of the direct, spiritual, supernatural involvement of God in history and in the life and work of His Church. Yes, yes, the supernatural work of the Spirit is somewhat paid lip service to; but it is always relegated to the realm of the abstract; never allowed to have direct manifestation in the life of the church or of the individual believer. I mean, imagine if everyone in the church is filled with the Holy Spirit and has that power from above as the believers in the church in Acts had; what will happen to the tradition and the programs and the liturgies of the modern Reformed churches? And how would the sessions maintain their authority? We can’t afford that, can we? We have our own theology that is designed to keep the Holy Spirit in His place. Yes, yes, sometimes we may allow Him to give some sort of some foreboding or illumination or dream; as long as He keeps them conveniently vague and abstract; and that’s about it. But the church needs to be run by men, and these men are serious, rational men; they have no time for supernatural shenanigans.

Again, we can continue talking about this Enlightenment rationalism in another place. Here, it is important to understand what it does to our view of baptism: it destroys the meaning of baptism. If water baptism is taken out of its proper Biblical context and interpreted in isolation from that context, we should expect that eventually, baptism would have no meaning whatsoever. And therefore, would have no efficacy. It doesn’t matter how many books we write on it, how many lectures we deliver on its efficacy, it doesn’t matter if we masterfully prove one or another of the popular views of it – covenant sign, confession, remission of sins, regeneration, or you name it – we won’t know what baptism is and what it means. If we don’t teach that it is only the beginning and it leads to a greater baptism by Jesus’s greater ministry, we have failed our listeners. Paul said in 1 Cor. 10:2 that Moses baptized his people in the cloud and in the sea. The baptism in the sea was not the end goal of it, and was not even the main baptism. They had to be lead by the cloud which was the Spirit of God; and at night it became a pillar of fire. It was the Spirit that led them into the Promised Land, not the water. Modern Reformed theology, with its excessive focus on water baptism and with its ignoring baptism in the Spirit – or misinterpreting it grievously, as it does – would have the Hebrews just stop on the other side of the Red Sea and live in the desert, center their culture around the narrative of their passage through the Red Sea, about the real nature of the water and of the passage, retell stories about the Pharaoh’s army and their death, and declare salvation to anyone who simply crosses the Red Sea and comes to live with them in the desert. Indeed, judging from the state of the Reformed churches today – Baptist or Presbyterian – the modern Reformed churches do indeed live in the desert, and there is no purpose nor intent of going all the way to the Promised Land and taking it. The cloud is still there, turning into a pillar of fire at night, waiting for us to follow it to victory, but we have a nice theology about why it shouldn’t be paid too much attention. We even re-interpret it to be anything else but what it is and what God says it is. We don’t even follow it to Sinai anymore; we have an abundance of theologies why even Sinai is not needed anymore. Our baptism has led us to the desert and has left us there.

And the result is obvious in the culture. Our churches are apathetic and dead, even where the people in the church were taught everything about the meaning of baptism – supposedly. There is no growth, no development. Within the last hundred years we lost the American culture. On the mission field, Presbyterian and Baptist missions are among the best funded of all; Presbyterian missions are rich compared to any other missionaries out there. And yet, the underfunded Pentecostal and Charismatic missions are eating their lunch in every nation where they compete. I have seen Presbyterian missions funded well enough to have all of their missionaries live American lifestyles in a third-world country and still spinning their wheels for 20 years without any impact in the culture. Meanwhile, Charismatic individual missionaries who use their personal savings to rent small apartments and live like the locals, plant a church within a year, and then several more within the next 5 years. True enough, neither has any cultural impact because neither has the theology for such impact, but the Charismatics are still showing a much better bang for the buck. We are still in the wilderness, as Presbyterians. And our botched view of baptism is one factor for this fiasco. It’s time to re-assess it, and it’s time to actually pay attention to the real meaning of water baptism and its proper place in the bigger picture of God’s Covenant. It’s time to let God be God, and let Him intervene in our neat but useless programs and pageants and ceremonies, and ask him to move us with His Holy Spirit. And if that means we start speaking in angelic tongues, so be it, sola scriptura. Whatever it is, we need baptism in the Holy Spirit more than we need to be sprinkled or dunked in water; for without it, we are salt that has lost its savor.

The situation is not any better with the Lord’s Supper.

A few years ago I was at a service in a Presbyterian church where the elders, before administering the Lord’s Supper, specifically instructed the congregation to examine themselves before taking the Supper, and if they believed they would be taking it in an unworthy manner, to refrain from taking. They also specifically didn’t allow children to take. Yes, I know, there is a long tradition behind these practices and warnings. After the service, in a rather casual conversation with one of the elders, I asked him if he could show me where in the Bible he could point me to an admonition of not taking the Supper if the person believed he was taking unworthily. The elder was pretty sure it was 1 Cor. 11, in the passage about the Lord’s Supper.

Again, I know very well, there is a long tradition behind this belief, and behind such a practice. That tradition is not Reformed, though, it dates several centuries before the Reformation, and it comes from times when the Roman church started going more and more ritualistic and occult in its sacraments. When we go to the Bible, 1 Cor. 11doesn’t advise anyone to refrain from participating in the Communion. There is no such thing as voluntary self-excommunication in the Bible. The text in 1 Cor. 11:27-28 says the following: “Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord. But a man must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup.” So the text doesn’t say, ‘Don’t take.” It says, “First examine yourself, and then take.”

I also asked the elder if he thought if that verse applied to children: that children could be “guilty of the body and the blood.” His reply was that probably not, but since they couldn’t discern the body, they were not qualified. To my question how he knew who could discern the body his reply was that they had to have intellectual understanding of the meaning of the body, and the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. In the final account, he said, “We as elders have the responsibility to guard the table from unworthy eating. And this is good for the people, because, as Paul said, they would be eating and drinking judgment to themselves.”

But in 1 Cor. 11 that judgment is expressed in visible, discernible events: people eating and drinking became sick and some died. And these events were not natural, for in an age when sickness and death were much more natural than they are today and happened at much earlier ages than today, such judgments were still quite obvious and supernatural for the people in the church in Corinth to notice them. And to also notice the connection between these cases of sickness and death and the Lord’s Supper. And even Paul, who wasn’t with them, knew about these cases from reports, and pointed to them as manifestations of judgment. Obviously, he didn’t expect anyone to say, “These were natural occurrences.” It was clear to everyone that these people got sick and died because of some unnatural – or supernatural – reason. Something like Ananias and Saphira.

Do we have such cases today in our churches, where people got sick and died because they ate unworthily? I can’t think of a single one. And I have never heard any report from anyone about such a case. I know many people who – in retrospect – were exposed as not even being believers, and yet, not a single one of them got sick and died because of partaking in the Communion. When it comes to children, I never heard of children who have taken of the Communion and got sick or died. (Actually, I know of children who were sick – even of terminal illnesses – and were healed after partaking.) Why is that? Is that judgment not applicable to our day anymore? Has it ceased, like some say other manifestations of the Holy Spirit have ceased? (Apparently, cessationism, to be consistent, must takes us to some really weird conclusions.) Or may be the judgment is not miraculous anymore, but stays only in the abstract and intellectual realm, just like the abstract “supernaturalness” of our modern theologians that is only somewhere in the background but never expressed in direct discernible intervention of God in the church? But what verses in the Bible could justify such radical cessationism?

The answer, I believe, is somewhere else. And it is in the fact that just as with water baptism, our modern theology has missed the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. It has presented the Lord’s Supper to us as a mixture between a magical ceremony and a seminary exam. The mood is always like at a funeral service – as if the death of Christ was the end of all, not the victory of a new covenant. People are excluded – or advised to self-exclude – based on standards that are not even in the Bible. Not to mention the practice in many churches to serve the Supper only once every several months – because, supposedly, its significance would be devalued if it was too often, like the first day of the week.

The Biblical view of the Lord’s Supper is covenantal, that is, ethical/judicial. The Supper is a judicial declaration, a court verdict. It is not a ritual of magical significance which can get polluted by the unclean participation of uninitiated people. It is not a university exam or diploma for those who can recite certain propositions of the faith and express intellectual agreement with them. It’s a court room, a place of separation where everyone must come, and will either be thrown out by the Lord Himself, or be accepted and healed.

Notice that the verses in 1 Cor. 11:30-32 do not say, “Do not eat.” There is not a single word in Paul’s admonition to suggest such a thing. Paul’s words are, “Eat only after you have examined, that is judged, yourself.” Because if you judge yourself rightly, you won’t be judged. But even if you are judged, listen to Paul’s words: “You are disciplined by the Lord so that you are not condemned with the world.”

What is Paul saying here? He is saying, “You better eat and be judged with the Lord, so that you are not judged with the world.” Don’t refrain from eating, or you are in a worse trouble than if you don’t eat. Just make sure you judge yourself before you stand before that Judge, just as Jesus said in Matthew 5:25.

That the Lord’s Supper is a judicial procedure is obvious from that whole passage. In different versions, the word “judge” appears in it seven times: But a man must judge himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself if he does not judge the body rightly. For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep. But if we judged ourselves rightly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged, we are disciplined by the Lord so that we will not be judged along with the world.

The idea that a man can escape judgment by not participating is not a Biblical idea. One is either judged in the Supper or judged outside it. And when in the Supper, he is judged not for his intellectual agreement but for his being able to recognize (or judge) the body for what it is, a body. The people judged there were not people who didn’t know their TULIP or have committed sins. These were people who used the Lord’s Supper to fill their own stomachs, because they didn’t recognize other Christians to be part of the same body. The context in the next chapter, 12, speaks clearly of the body and its unity. We are judged for our belonging to the body, not for our intellectual assent with theological propositions. Children belong to the body by default. They are not judged outside the body. They should participate.

Everyone is judged in the Supper, and those who belong to the body are judged not only not guilty, they are also declared victors and judges themselves. Thus, the Lord’s Supper is also a victory feast, not a funeral feast, and not a time of subdued silence for the people of God. Subdued silence is for the pagan temples where the gods must not be disturbed by human noise, or the rituals won’t work manipulating the gods to do man’s bidding. The modern Reformed too often overemphasize their own depravity, making up fancier and fancier terminology to demonstrate verbal humility: “I am such a wretched, miserable sinner, we are simply exiles here, we just mourn by the rivers of Babylon,,” etc., etc. Most of it, of course, is an attempt to drown in self-pity and fake humility their refusal to act and bring the redemption of the Kingdom of God to every area of life. This over-emphasis on depravity and this ignoring the power of redemption contributes to the wrong concept of the Lord’s Supper, making it a somber, almost occult experience of mental self-flagellation. The Supper is a declaration of victory, and it is supposed to be joyful and triumphant, not somber and self-pitying. Keep in mind, it is supposed to have enough food and wine for some people to get full and even drunk. If there is any symbol in it, it is that we have everything in abundance now, in Christ’s victory. And what do we have today? The servings of several average churches combined today couldn’t get one person full or drunk, let alone many persons. In what way exactly do we believe our modern communion follows the example of the early church?

This self-defeating, self-deprecating, individualist, rationalist, occult, ritualistic supper we have today in our churches is certainly not the Biblical supper. I am not saying the churches are not true churches, only that the churches do not have a supper rightly conceived and rightly constituted; a supper that is a court of judgment and also a victory feast. A supper that includes everyone who is a member of the body, not just the theologically and intellectually astute. No matter how much church leaders today strive to supposedly “guard the table,” the Holy Spirit is not involved in it. We won’t hear any soon that people have gotten sick or have died because of unworthy eating of the Supper. For all practical purposes, the modern communion in the churches is an empty ritual game.

To use the imagery of the Old Testament, our churches’ supper doesn’t point to any victory, and doesn’t point to any judgment on God’s enemies. But then, I guess, it’s only fitting, given that our baptism doesn’t point to following the cloud and the pillar of fire to the Promised Land. Spending our entire life in the desert doesn’t qualify as victory anyway.

As I said, 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.

The book I will recommend today is a short collection of sermons by Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Sovereign Spirit. That great Reformed teachers and pastor had something to say about baptism in the Spirit. Just pay attention to his arguments.

And help me continue the work in Bulgaria. Visit BulgarianReformation.com and prayerfully contribute to the work of building an intellectual foundation for the future Christian civilization in Bulgaria. We have tried to follow the cloud and the pillar of fire to the land. We need your help in the work of judging God’s enemies. God bless you.

Welcome to Episode 9 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about Islam, Europe, and the reality of the situation with Islam there. And keep in mind, here at Axe to the Root we are looking at everything through covenantal eyes; which means ethical/judicial eyes. We don’t care about political motivations; we are studying politics through the eyes of God’s Covenant. We don’t care about alleged facts and numbers; we know from our studies of presuppositional epistemology that facts and numbers in themselves don’t have any recognizable meaning; facts and numbers must be read within the context of a covenantal philosophy in order to make any sense. We know that any commentator who claims to just look at the facts and the numbers without first explaining his philosophy of life and the world is either clueless, or is trying to deceive us about his real philosophy and his real motives. And keep in mind, when it comes to Islam and Europe, the last 10-15 years such commentators have been on a roll everywhere on the mainstream media and in internet blogs and websites, speaking of supposed facts and numbers and making conclusions out of them, and then trying to convince us to make practical steps – especially in voting and political support – based on those conclusions. And many Christians and Christians leaders who have no understanding of the presuppositional nature of all thought – because they think and reason and speak as pagans – have bought into the rhetoric of these commentators, and have adopted their conclusions, and have called for the same practical actions and voting and support by Christians.

Thus, by the end of today’s podcast, I will be in trouble with many of you all; because the avalanche of news and analyses and commentaries is so overwhelming, telling us how Europe has been overtaken by Islam, we have accepted it as almost an article of faith. And no, I am not kidding; in quite a few discussions where I expressed doubt about the numbers and the scary projections about the Muslim takeover of Europe, I was declared “not a Christian,” and may be even an atheist. This is as close as humanly possible to similar experiences I have had back in the 1990s, when dispensationalists thought I was not a Christian because I didn’t buy into their proclamations that the Antichrist had already been born and would reveal himself to the world any moment now; in fact, to add insult to the injury I didn’t even believe any Antichrist was coming, but that the word signified a spirit present in the church in the first century and throughout the whole history of the church. The spirit of pessimism and fear hasn’t changed; it’s the same today, and it continues to thrive on all kinds of bombastic scares. Pessimism sells; and fear sells even better. In fact, as we will see in another episode, fear not only sells well, it is the main merchandise of governments who are trying to convince their people into subjection. Fear, as I argue in my article, “Terrorism: Biblical Analysis and Solutions,” is a form of idolatry, and like any other idolatry, leads to tyranny. Thus, statists and would-be tyrants will always sell fear. And an idolatrous people will always buy it, to their own destruction.

So I will be in trouble with many of you all, for the simple reason that I don’t buy the currently widespread fear and panic of Islam, and I look at the situation through Biblical eyes, and I don’t see such growth or expansion of Islam in Europe as many commentators see. When I say “through Biblical eyes,” it is not to say that I ignore the facts and the numbers; in fact, as we will see, real facts and numbers actually confirm what I see through Biblical eyes. I will give examples of how the alleged facts and numbers of the fear-mongers are not real, and they are either deliberately wrong, or their interpretations are twisted through their pessimistic expectations of the future. And then we will talk about the real situation with Islam, and with its battle with Christianity for the fate of Europe. Be prepared for some surprises.

So, what is the commonly accepted narrative about Islam in Europe? It is this: Europe is overrun by Muslims. Most of those Muslims are of the religiously active part of Islam, and their explicit goal and purpose is to conquer Europe. There is no such thing as a moderate Muslim, they are all devoted to spread their religion, and they all have an optimistic eschatology about the future, and in their future they all see a world dominance of Islam. Europe already has a large percentage of Muslims in Europe, and the European governments support that large and growing minority, and in many places the European cities have no go zones where Christians can’t go, because those zones are controlled entirely by Muslims and even the cops can’t go in them. The growth of the Muslim populations in Europe also has lead to increased rape stats, with many more women being raped, and that mainly by Muslim immigrants. Sweden is reported to have their rape stats up by over 1,000% by some agencies. For some countries, like Norway, all the registered rapes are done by Muslims, or at least, as some say, “men of Middle Eastern descent.” In the last one year, there has been an influx of Syrian refugees, which made the situation even less tenable. And these Muslims can’t be integrated in any possible way, because they simply refuse, and they can’t even be converted. In Britain and in Belgium, for example, the most common name for newborn boys is Mohammed, in all its different spellings and versions. Etc., etc., etc.

This is what the news and the pundits say.

There is only one problem here: Most of it is not true or is exaggerated. Where the numbers or the facts are correct, they are not given in the context of the total numbers, so that their significance is seen in the context of the whole. Many of the reports are based on alleged personal testimonies which can’t be traced back to any reliable source. And in fact, when one goes to reliable sources, the picture is quite different.

Right here, I know, I am already defined and declared non-Christian by many of our listeners. Or at least clueless about reality. Or ignorant about Islam. Before I continue, let me say this: I know what Islam is, and I know it in detail, unlike many alleged experts on Islam in America. I come from the nation in Europe with the third highest share of its population being Muslim: Bulgaria, 14% Muslims. (Only Bosnia and Albania have a higher percentage.) I grew up among Muslims, in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood. When I became a Christian, I shared the Gospel with Muslims, and some were converted to Christ. Later, when I started my mission work, part of it was in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods, and I have preached to former and current Muslims. I have a few articles on Islam and Shariah – for example, find my article on “Civilization and Self-Control,” and another one, “Putting the Claim that Theonomy Is Like Shariah to Presuppositional Rest.” I am not a stranger to Islam, I understand it, I have studied it, I have fought it on the mission field. And I know what a dangerous and disgusting religion it is, ethically and culturally. And exactly because I know it, I am saying the things I am saying. So don’t condemn me yet, stay with me, for we will not only learn the truth about Islam in Europe, we will also learn the covenantal lessons from that truth.

Where do we start from? Let’s start from Sweden, the nation that has become a proverb in the mouths of all those who warn about the Muslim takeover of Europe.

Sweden has 9.5 million population. At the most, 451,000 of them, close to 5% of the population, are Muslims. This number is the highest available estimate, but where does it come from? It comes from a report by the PEW Research Center, which provides no clear methodology for this number. Swedish independent—and free-market-oriented—sources criticize this estimate noting that the PEW’s estimate for Sweden includes “people with roots in Muslim countries.” This, of course, is not a very reliable indicator, given the fact that Christians are disproportionally more represented among the immigrants from Muslim countries. For example, Arabic Christians in the US are 63% of the total Arabic population of the US, compared to 5.5% in the Arab countries. In Sweden, the largest immigrant community with “roots in Muslim countries” are the immigrants from Iraq, a total of 130,000 which would be included in the PEW’s report. But of these, 120,000 (92%) are Assyrians who are traditionally Christian, not Muslim. Right there, folks, 25% of the PEW Research number is not even Muslim, but comes from a community that has been traditionally Christian for longer than England has been England! The second largest immigrant community in Sweden “with roots in Muslim countries” is the Iranian community—about 68,000 people—but it is comprised mostly of dissidents and opponents to the Islamic regime in Tehran, and most of them profess to be secular and agnostic/atheist in their views. There is another 15% of PEW’s numbers that are wrong. The most realistic assessment about the number of people of Muslim background in Sweden, then, would be no more than 200,000, and by the assessment of Muslim scholars in Sweden, only 100,000 are “religious,” of which only 25,000 are “devout Muslims,” that is, practice their religion according to its rules. Which means, for Sweden, 1% religious Muslims, ¼ % practicing Muslims. Which is about the same percentage as for Houston Metropolitan Area, with its 60,000 practicing Muslims out of a population of a little over 6 million.

And yet, the Internet in the last several years is full with reports of how the Muslim immigrants of Sweden are taking over the country. The Swedish police reportedly has given up on maintaining order in 55 “no-go” zones throughout the country, which correspond to the areas with highest percentage of Muslim immigrants. There is an “explosion of rape in Sweden” which most observers connect to the Muslim presence in the country; and the government doesn’t seem capable of dealing with it. Anti-Muslim attitudes are on the rise in Sweden, as they are in all the other countries in the European Union.

All this because of 1% of the population.

What about France, which has the second highest percentage in the European Union of Muslim population? (The highest is Bulgaria with 14%.) The estimates, of course, are still not definitive, they vary from 5 to 10% (the highest figure is by the US Department of State, the lowest by the French government). There again, since the government census agencies can’t legally ask about religious adherence, the estimates are based on country of origin. The question of whether the person practices their religion or not is allowed, and only one-third of the immigrants from Muslim countries declared to be practicing their religion. Which, if one takes 6 million as the number of immigrants from Muslim countries, gives a total of 2 million practicing Muslims in France, or around 3% of the total population.

What is less known to the general public is that while the immigrant communities in France are blamed for the spread of Islam in France, the truth is that these immigrant communities have a thriving Christian, church-centered culture that is outpacing Islam on all fronts. For example, Greater Paris (4 départements) has about 75 mosques and prayer centers, the largest of which can take about 1,000 people; the estimated Muslim population of Greater Paris is 1.6 million. This is a very low number of mosques compared to Houston which has over 40 mosques and prayer centers for only 60,000 Muslims. To take the comparison back to Paris, only one of the Greater Paris’s départements, Seine-Saint-Denis, has over 250 evangelical churches—and that in a nation that is traditionally Roman Catholic and secular agnostic. Let me repeat the difference: All 4 departements (districts) of Paris have a total of 75 mosques and prayer centers. Only one of those departements has 250 Evangelical churches. The list of those only who have decided to register for the online catalog of churches far outnumbers the list of all mosques in Paris. The majority of these evangelical churches serve the immigrant community, and they are much more influential in both evangelism and in forming the culture of the immigrant community than anything Islam can offer. On that list, there is even a Portuguese Assembly of God, a Laotian Evangelical Church, several Cambodian evangelical churches, several Gypsy churches, etc.

And yet, France has become a proverb in the mouth of many French and foreign observers as a nation that has almost surrendered to Islam. The riots of several years back were widely reported as almost another French Revolution—or Muslim Revolution, if you wish. Just like Sweden, France is now reported to have 150 “no-go zones” where no European can go into, and the police are helpless.

All this because of 3% of the population.

Right here we need to stop and consider this important fact: these numbers about the two countries alleged to have the worst impact of Muslim immigration should be enough to make us doubt the narrative of the panickers. Do we have some reliable data, then? Yes, we do. Official, real, proven data: Switzerland

Let’s look at Switzerland. Unlike Sweden and France, the government agencies of the Helvetic Confederation not only can, but by law they do ask about the religious adherence of the population. The reason is simple: while there is no state church in Switzerland, most cantons tax the population to support the religious establishments, and the amount of support is based on the number of adherents. So, unlike Sweden and France, we don’t have to “guestimate” the percentage of Muslims in Switzerland: It is officially declared to be 4.9%. If we take the maximum estimates about Sweden, it’s about the same percentage as Sweden. If we take the realistic estimates about Sweden, Switzerland has 5 times as many Muslims as Sweden, percentage-wise. And about the same percent and France. Which is to be expected, given that Switzerland has the highest percentage of immigrants of all European countries, and it has kept its borders open to immigration. Unlike Sweden and France, the Muslim minority in Switzerland doesn’t seem plagued by economic discrimination and unemployment; to the contrary, Muslims are fairly middle-class in Switzerland. Given that Switzerland is a small country, with this high percentage of Muslims, one would expect that it will have the same problems with its Muslim population as France and Sweden.

Guess what. It doesn’t. There are no “no-go” zones, no increased crime due to Muslim immigration, no isolated communities, no burned cars nor raped local women. In fact, when in 2009 the Swiss voted in a national referendum in favor of a ban on the construction of minarets, the Swiss Muslim minority took it very calmly. And that despite the urging by political and religious leaders of Muslim countries to protest the decision. More than 400,000 Swiss Muslims went about their business without uttering anything more than regret for the results of the referendum. Quite a different picture from we are fed by the mainstream media, isn’t it?

But isn’t it true, after all, that the most common name for newborn boys in Britain, for example, is Mohammed? And if it is true, isn’t it a proof that Muslims are breeding by an alarming rate in Europe, showing that they want to take over the continent?

Yes, technically, it is true that Mohammed is the most common name for new-born boys in the UK: In all its spelling variations, in 2014 it reached the number 7,200. To compare, the second most common name is Oliver: about 6,600 boys were named Oliver in 2014, which is about 8% less than Mohammed. Of course, taking all the versions of Oliver – for example, Ollie – as we did for Mohammed, Oliver goes to the top with about 7,600, about 6% over Mohammed. But this contest of numbers is still misleading, for it fails to present a picture in the context of the whole. Given that the United Kingdom has about 800,000 live births every year, the name Mohammed accounts for less than 2% of all those newborn boys. While it is popular among Muslims – predictably – there is no name of such singular popularity among Christians, or nominal Christians. In fact, in general, the name catalog in most European nations is much longer and much more diverse than the name catalogs of Arabic or Urdu names. That one name is so marginally popular still doesn’t show the full picture.

All that it indicates is that there is a higher birth rate among the small Muslim minority in the UK. Of course, then, the question is, “What stops Christians in the UK from having a high birth rate?”  But that’s a topic for another podcast.

But what about rape? Isn’t it true that rape is at historical highs in Europe, and all because of Muslim immigrants? Last year The New American Magazine reported – in all seriousness – that rape in Sweden has increased by 1,472% since 1975. But there is no statistics whatsoever to support such a number, and the number is completely fabricated. The real numbers are rather different. Sweden, indeed, has a rape rate much higher than the US – 5 times higher per capita – but then, this is the case in all of Europe, and this has been for a long time now, long before 1975. The reasons are obvious: gun control, not Muslims. In 1975 Swedish courts convicted 109 people of rape; Sweden then had about 8 million population. In 2014, with a population of 9 million (13 % increase), 195 people were convicted of the same crime. That is 79% increase in rape given 13% increase in population. That’s still a significant increase, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The whole story is that rape remained at the same levels until 2005 when Swedish legislation broadened the definition of rape – that is, more things are classified as rape now than before, and also, what before would have been recorded as one case of rape, is now broken in many different court cases. Within a couple of months, the rape stats jumped up to the current levels, and remained stagnant until this day. This, of course, is convictions. Reported rapes have also increased, but again, it is rather because of the changed legal definition of rape – changed to the point that if a wife lived with her husband for a year before he was accused of domestic abuse, that would be reported on the books as 365 different instances of rape for the whole year.

The reports are similarly false for countries like Denmark, Norway, and Britain.

Germany is another major example where rape is blamed on the Muslim immigrants. Some declared that Muslims immigrants bring a culture of rape to Germany. But most people outside Germany are unaware of a dirty secret that German women know and most of the world doesn’t: the culture of rape has always existed in Germany, with or without Muslim men – in fact, perpetrated mostly by German men. A reported 7-10,000 women are raped every year in Germany – a percentage much higher per capita than the US – and German courts have always been astonishingly soft on rapists: only 10% conviction rate historically, which has even declined in the last 20 years. International human rights organizations have been criticizing Germany for decades now, on this particular issue. A study of the last 10 years showed than 35% of the women in Germany have suffered some grave form of sexual abuse – a percentage too high to be blamed on the Muslims, and high enough to rival places like Iran or India. Muslims may have some marginal share in this, but the reality is, gun control and the laws for self-defense – which place a liability on the victim if she harms her attacker – as well as the reluctance of the courts to convict rapists, are the real factors for the rape culture. True, Islam is a disgusting religion, but blaming Muslims for an ethical and judicial flaw of the German apostate state and culture only makes us as bad as Muslims. Our job is to take the beam out of our own eyes first.

There are many more real facts that show that the current fear campaign about Europe being taken over by Islam is rather manipulative. Given the sources where it comes from – neo-conservative warmongers – the purpose of the manipulation is clear: to keep the Western public sufficiently scared of Islam to support any kinds of wars in the Middle East.

But, wait. Manipulation requires two – a manipulator and a manipulated. How is it that these multitudes in the West have bought into this panic ideology and have accepted as true claims that are false? It’s not like the facts are hidden. We live in the age of the Internet, after all, everyone can easily check the facts and discover that the scare campaign about Europe and the supposed rise of Islam to dominance is based on total fabrications. Why are so many people buying into it? And, even worse, why are so many Christians so gullible? And even worse, why are so many Christians, when presented with the facts, eager and willing to ignore them and even condemn those who present the facts?

The answer is: presuppositions. Most Christians today have a presuppositional commitment to defeatism and despair. Such is their theology of the Gospel: that the Gospel is powerless in changing cultures and achieving total victory in history. Such is their eschatology, that is, their view of the future in history: they believe that history will degenerate towards worse and worse, until the church and the Gospel are limited to small spiritual ghettos, and then the end will come. Within this presuppositional framework, any optimistic belief in the victory of the Gospel, and any sober analysis of the weaknesses of the enemy and his religions and ideologies, are considered a grave impiety and heresy: “How dare you even suggest that Christ can conquer history, contrary to our beliefs that history leads to nothing better than total apostasy?” You know, that scary “triumphalism” of the postmillennialists. Within this framework, piety and faith are expressed in more and more despair about the salvation of the world; even when these same people quote John 3:16-17, where the focus is clearly the salvation of the world, and the saved individual souls are only a means towards that greater goal and purpose. Optimism and faith in the comprehensive power of the Gospel are considered “worldly”: the spiritual thing is to believe that the fallen heart of man can overcome the work of the Holy Spirit – and yes, even among the majority of the so-called “Reformed.” (In fact, especially among them.) When the church has made an ethical and presuppositional commitment to defeat, every false claim about defeat looks true, and every doubt and rejection of such defeatism looks detestable. Thus, no matter how much you try to present the real facts to American Christians, they will reject them. Presuppositions.

The truth about Islam is that it is a toothless dog. It cannot build a civilization, and it cannot maintain a civilization, on its own. And it can’t be a threat to any existing civilization except to those who have already lost the will to live and prosper. It is true that Islam started quite strong and within a short period of time conquered a significant part of the world. But those victories were due not to Islam’s inner strength but to a legacy of civilizational memory inherited from Christianity and Judaism. In its beginning, not being epistemologically self-conscious and consistent, Islamic culture was a mixture of Islamic political power, built on the pillars of a basically Christian civilization. For the first 600 years of its existence, until the end of the Crusades, the majority of the subjects of the Islamic Caliphates were Christians; Christians were not subject to forced conversion, and neither were Jews. Jews and Christians comprised the majority of the learned elite of the Caliphate in Baghdad; when St. Cyril (the creator of the Cyrillic alphabet) went to Baghdad in the first half of the 9th century to discuss the Trinity with Muslim theologians, the capital of the Caliphate was still predominantly Christian. In fact, as Phillip Jenkins shows in his book, The Next Christendom, before the 12th century, the bulk of the Christian population in the world lived not in Europe, in Christian lands, but under Muslim rulers. If we are to run an average profile of a Christian family of that period, the sparsely inhabited Europe would be an outlier; the average Christian family before the 12th century tilled a piece of land along the Nile or in Mesopotamia, not in Europe. Christians also supplied the technological base and development of the Muslim world; when in 1187 Saladin took Jerusalem, he spared the Christian population of the city; not because of some tolerance or mercy, as some imagine; Christians were needed for his new empire as tradesmen and specialists in fields where Muslims didn’t bother to develop any knowledge or skill. (That Saladin wasn’t awfully merciful is known by the fact that in his career he saw no problem with slaughtering tens of thousands of Muslims in order to establish his own power; he saw Muslims as useless compared to Christians.) So dependent was the Muslim world on Christian technology – and also, Jewish social theory and organization, for most of the political and social and medical advisers of the Caliphs were Jewish – that the siege of Constantinople in 1453 was successful only because of the services of a Hungarian (Christian) engineer who built the enormous guns needed to breach the walls of the city. For a Muslim civilization or society to survive, it needs to feed off a Christian base and a Christian worldview. Muslims depend for their survival and their prosperity on a thriving Christian civilization. Even a civilization that is apostate from Christianity and still carries the cultural influence of Christianity is much better than anything the Muslim world can muster; and Muslims depend on it. They cannot challenge the European culture in any possible way.

Since its early days, Islam has become epistemologically more conscious – just as Christianity has become so as well. Thus, if in its early stages Islam had the cultural inertia to adopt many Christian values in its culture, over the last century, especially, the committed adherents to the Muslim religion have become more and more self-conscious of the purity of their faith. Saudi Arabia’s Wahabbism and ISIS and other radical movements are a rather novel development in the Muslim world; they are simply a sign of the epistemological consistency that is growing among Muslims. But as it is with all anti-Christian religions, intellectual consistency is deadly and suicidal; only orthodox, Trinitarian, covenantal, potmillennial, theonomic Christianity can afford to stay consistent with its presuppositions without borrowing from other religions or ideologies. As Cornelius Van Til taught us, any non-Trinitarian religion has to borrow presuppositions from Christianity in order to stand on its feet. Any non-Christian religion, therefore, faces a grave dichotomy: become intellectually consistent with itself and die; or, continue lingering by adopting more and more of Christianity’s presuppositions. But adopting Christianity’s presuppositions only prolongs the agony; it doesn’t prevent death. Every religion or ideology lives with the life of its believers. Eventually, those believers see its schizophrenic character and begin abandoning it.

And contrary to the claims about some civilizational strength of Islam which threatens Christianity, the reports from the mission fields both in Europe and in Muslim lands are quite positive. Muslims are converting to Christianity in great numbers. Churches in Germany and Britain report of an increased number of newly baptized former Muslims among the refugees from Syria. Concerning France, Muslim sources themselves admit that 15,000 Muslims a year defect to Christianity, especially in its Protestant and Evangelical varieties. Spain has a community of Pentecostal and Baptist churches of Moroccan immigrants. On the Balkans – where the traditional bulk of European Muslims live, Evangelical missions are especially active in places like Albania, Bosnia (both traditionally Muslim), and in Bulgaria (and I had the personal privilege to take part in that activity). In the Middle East, Christianity is in decline only where the US has invaded – in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Syria – and especially among the Kurds and other populations, Christian missions report astounding successes. In fact, the atrocities of the Islamic State were the main reason for certain formerly Muslim groups to turn to Christianity. The same situation is reported in Indonesia – the most populous Muslim country in the world – and in all of Northern and Western Africa. Islam is far from advancing; if anything, it’s losing ground everywhere, and the only culture threatened by it is that humanistic apostate culture in Western Europe which has lost the will to live anyway. Why would Muslims have a higher birth rate than European atheists and nominal Christians? Isn’t it because Europeans have lost their optimism for the future?

And, contrary to many claims and fake photos on the Internet, Islam doesn’t have any optimism for the future and doesn’t have any plans to conquer the world. Islamist eschatology is not even close to Christian postmillennialism; it is in fact an almost exact copy of historic premillennialism. It believes in general apostasy from Islam in the last days, it believes in the rise of a political figure, the False Messiah, the counterpart of the premillennial Antichrist. The Beast, and Gog and Magog will also appear. It believes in a final physical battle between the Redeemer and the False Messiah. There are 66 signs that will point to the end, and all of them are pessimistic and apocalyptic – apostasy, sin, pestilences, disasters, etc. Islam’s eschatology is premillennialism on steroids, and there is nothing optimistic about history in it. Muslims do not expect Islam to conquer the world; to the contrary, they expect its influence to wane.

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.

The book I will assign for reading today is God’s Continent by Philip Jenkins. Jenkins is a well known myth-buster, and in this book, he busts the myth of Europe taken over by Islam. To the contrary, he carefully documents numbers and facts, and he shows that if there’s a religion thriving and expanding in Europe, it is Biblical Christianity. Not the dead religion of the traditional Romish and state churches in Europe, but the living, vibrant, optimistic, expanding Christianity of the new movements, very often below the radar in many countries, but real and active, especially among the immigrant communities. What about Islam? Not so much. It’s growth has stagnated, and even where Islam doesn’t lose against Christianity, Muslim children surrender to the secular humanistic culture. It’s a toothless dog.

I have seen it myself. And I have preached among Muslims, and I have seen many converts from the Muslim religion, and we continue working among Muslims in Bulgaria. So, as always, I will ask you all to visit BulgarianReformation.com and prayerfully consider supporting our work in Bulgaria. There’s a fertile field, and a little seed can produce abundantly. And no, we don’t expect defeat. We are planning for victory.

Welcome to Episode 8 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes we will be talking about racism. I know, racism is a politically charged word in the US today, and even the very mentioning of the word already produces certain reactions in people; and that even before they know what it’s all about. Liberals, of course, are wont to call “racism” everything that disagrees with their current emotions. When talking about the past, they call segregation racism. Today leftist students of some racial minorities want their segregated spaces, because now integration is racism. Although, to be honest, I find this completely consistent, because even in the past, segregation was enforced by liberals, not by conservatives; after all, it was the Democrat Party who voted against de-segregation many times. But, keep in mind, my point here is more than just unloading on a particular political party. Conservatives are not blameless either; they have developed an automatic shutdown response everytime someone points out that some of their reactions may be driven by latent racism. “Oh, yeah, you must be a liberal, if you speak of racism.” And they stop listening. Between these two emotional and mindless reactions devoid of any moral sense and commitment to real justice is the Biblical, covenantal view, which always looks at individuals as independent moral entities, which need to be judged based on their own individual covenantal standing before God. Such covenantal thinking is never afraid to address an issue from the position of justice, it refuses to treat people as animal units in a herd, and it always considers any charge of racism not from the position of political stereotypes but from the position of ethical/judicial principles. It always asks: are the Biblical principles of righteousness (ethical) and justice (judicial) violated because of our stereotyping of an individual because he belongs to a genetic group? Or because of our ascribing moral qualities on a group because of a few individuals we have met – or statistics we have been served?

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.

It is, though, quite attractive as a mentality, especially when the other side can be accused of similar racism. We just love to put people in collectivist boxes, and then justify it by pointing that other people put us in their collectivist boxes. Because Hispanic students made their own Hispanic students club, white students find it justified to make their own white students club. Or because blacks are wont to speak disparagingly of each other, that somehow justifies others of speaking disparagingly of them. Etc., etc. There are always good reasons, y’know, to ignore the Biblical view of the individual and of self-control and speak as a collectivist, and put people in collectivist boxes, and then ascribe cultural and ethical characteristics, and covenantal standing to individuals based on their box. Now, if you ask me, I agree with R.J. Rushdoony’s opinion that the Christian answer to all the racial and economic and metaphysical divisions – that is, class and caste – is the communion of the saints. (We will talk in a future episode about the Christian view of class and caste, and how Rushdoony’s words on it have been taken out of context and he has been accused of believing in something he has actually criticized many times.) So I don’t care if everyone in the world makes their own little stupid clubs by skin color, or by economic status, or by place of birth, or by how long their nose is, or with which foot they touch the floor every morning, and I don’t care if I am excluded from their stupid little clubs; my only real club of any significance will be the communion of the saints, that is, those who believe in Lord Jesus Christ and profess Him according to the testimony of the Bible. And in it, there are no differences that deserve mentioning. Neither are there differences deserving mentioning out of it.

But racism is a real issue, and we need to talk about it. It’s a real issue theologically and ideologically; it is a heresy, and it should be denounced and excommunicated by the church. It is also a real issue ethically, for it creates conditions for complacency and self-righteousness. And, as we will see, it is a judicial issue, for it creates the atmosphere needed by tyrannical governments to enforce their agendas on the population.

We need to understand, first, that there are two kinds of racism.

One kind is the more primitive, more visible, direct, and brutal racism: the racism that declares that different human genetic stocks define human groups which are different in everything, including culture and morality. And, if they pretend to be Christian, even covenantal standing before God. These are groups that speak about “miscegenation” – that is, marriage between different races – as sin or at least undesirable, and call for government regulation of such marriages. Mixing of people of different genetics they consider “multiculturalism,” because genetics determine and define culture, for such ideologues. Man is entirely or at least partially defined by his genetics, declares such racism, and therefore there is an ethical and cultural part of man that he can’t change by his choice; a white man will always remain a white man and make cultural and ethical choices as a white man (whatever that means), and a black man’s cultural and ethical choices will always be a black man’s cultural and ethical choices (whatever that means). In a conversation some time ago with one such racist (who pretends to be a Reformed Christian) who has a Scottish last name (nobody knows if he has Scottish genes, though, he hasn’t done a genetic analysis of himself), I asked him what culture he would build if he was given to Russian parents and raised as a Russian, and had absolutely no knowledge of his genetic origin. His immediate answer was, “I would be building a Scottish culture and I would be acting as a Scotsman.” It makes sense, doesn’t it, after all, that’s how we pick our dogs: different breeds have different characters, and we can tell their internal character by their external looks. Our dog is a blonde retriever, I mean, a golden retriever although she is rather Scottish, I mean, gingerish, and that determines her character. Our neighbor’s dog is darker, with flat nose and curly hair, and he has a character that fits his race. We do that for dogs, and natural law tells us we can do the same for humans. We just need to keep different breeds of humans separated so that the moral characters and the cultures don’t get mixed. We don’t want multiculturalism, after all.

I said this is a primitive kind of racism only because of its rather primitive doctrine that equates humans to animals. In terms of historical existence, this specific type of racism has been around in Christendom only for about 2 or 300 years. A fully developed belief in the cultural significance of genetics has been at the foundation of India’s caste system for several centuries, and probably for a millennium. In its more animistic and occult form the belief was present among primitive tribes in the Americas, Australia and Polynesia; the concept of a tribe originating from some animal, and defining the culture based on that origin was just a more spiritualized version of the modern, allegedly “scientific” racial theories of culture. Similar pagan racism is still at the official mythology of the origin of Japan; and in fact, the history of Japan is a history of racism made into an imperial policy: from the extermination of the Ainu people (the original inhabitants of the islands) to the atrocities committed by the Japanese military during WWII. Racial views of culture existed in ancient Greece although they died out due to Hebrew influence. (Yes, Greek philosophy had Hebrew roots, but we will talk about it in another episode.)

The Old Testament itself acknowledged no cultural transmission through physical heredity, and indeed, a recurring theme in it is the apostasy of the children from the religion and culture of the fathers. In fact, the Old Testament doesn’t even acknowledge the modern symbolic connection between blood and heredity; as in when people say, “the blood of his fathers flows in his veins.” Such symbolism is purely pagan; the Bible is in agreement with reality on this issue: blood doesn’t transmit heredity. With the growth of the popularity of the Law and the religion of Moses in the ancient world, racist theories gradually disappeared in the ancient world. Early Christianity dealt the final blow on the ancient, pagan racism.

Ironically, while the Gentile world was being freed from its remaining racist beliefs by the victorious march of Christianity, racism as an ideology was revived in the writings of Talmudist rabbis in the Middle East. The theory of the “curse of Ham” came from the Babylonian Talmud in the 3rd century. This theory said that the descendants of Ham, Noah’s son, were cursed with black skin, innate immorality, and passive acquiescence with tyranny and enslavement. The use of the Biblical curse on Canaan (not on Ham), of course, is arbitrary, for the Bible doesn’t mention anything about black skin, and the descendants of Canaan were quite white. The reasons for this resurgence of a thoroughly pagan and anti-Biblical theory in Judaism are not very clear, but it is not a surprise either. Gary North has explained in his book, Judeo-Christian Tradition, that contrary to the beliefs of many modern Christians, modern Judaism is not a Biblical religion but a self-conscious attempt by the rabbis to steer away from the Law of God, and adopt pagan views while baptizing them to look good. Whatever the reasons were, Muslim scholars – influenced by Aristotle – eagerly adopted the concept of the curse of Ham; after all, it helped them justify the growing slave trade in black Africans from Sub-Saharan Africa. The Quran doesn’t distinguish between races, so the Muslim rulers needed a theological excuse for their raids and slave trade. The Babylonian Talmud provided the excuse.

During that same period Christian Europe had no trace of racism or of racial consciousness based on skin color or other genetic features. The concept of the communion of saints was the only concept of ethical and cultural division; the world was divided between Christians and non-Christians, and divisions of skin color had no identifiable meaning. In the Byzantine Empire, converting to Christianity made one a full-fledged citizen, even eligible for the highest civil post, that of the emperor. Several emperors were of Armenian descent, one was a Khazar. Ethnic origin had no meaning in the Byzantine thought. In Rome, the Jewish quarter – all converted Jews – gave several popes to the medieval Roman Church. “Nation” as an ethnic term didn’t exist in medieval Europe; the “natus” meaning of “nation” (that is, born) was related to judicial allegiance of the place of birth, not to family connections. Thus, cousins of the same family could be of different nations if they were born across the border between two judicial polities. The Russian poet Pushkin was the great-grandson of Abram Gannibal, a black slave from Cameroon presented as a gift to Peter the Great. Gannibal was freed by Peter, then given an extensive military and engineering training and education. As part of this training he fought in the armies of several European nations, as a Russian. Another Russian poet, Lermontov, was of Scottish descent himself, but he never thought of himself as anything else but Russian. During the medieval period, the legend of Prester John was very popular both among the population and among the learned elite; a mythical Christian ruler of a great empire somewhere on the earth. He was often depicted as a black African by many painters. The Ethiopian delegates to the Council of Florence in 1441 were received with a pompous ceremony, for the European church believed them to be ambassadors of that Prester John. Even the early slave trade was racially motivated but religiously motivated; there was no idea of racial superiority or inferiority in Europe at the time. At the same time Portuguese traders were loading Black pagan slaves from the coast of West Africa; Cristovao da Gama, Vasco da Gama’s younger son, was fighting for the black Christian queen of Ethiopia against superior Muslim forces.

Racial theories of culture re-entered Europe only in the early 16th century, through the Muslim and Judaist influence in Spain. It was the Spanish monarchy in the 16th century which encouraged the spread of the “blue blood” theory of the European nobility, in order to maintain the elaborate social stratification in Spain, as well as the brutal treatment of the Native populations in America. And it was in the Spanish colonies in the New World where the first openly racial slavery laws were introduced.

The Enlightenment gave a new impetus to the ideology of racism. The covenant was abandoned as a sociological foundation for culture. In order to reject God, the Enlightenment philosophes resorted to looking for materialistic and metaphysical definitions of culture. They didn’t directly attack the concept of God; they attacked the concept that culture had anything to do with religion. (Voltaire, for example, had exactly the same views of Christianity as the modern “Reformed” seminaries: he believed in God, he believed that the Christian faith produced good personal morality, but in his most important novel, Candide, he rejected both Christian optimism of history and the idea that there can be such a thing as Christian culture. Keep this in mind: your “Reformed” pastor is most probably educated in a seminary by professors whose views are not awfully different than those of Voltaire.) The Enlightenment philosophes fell in love with the racial view of culture; so much that a theory became popular in France that the French nobility originated from Nordic Germanic warriors who conquered the genetically inferior Celtic and Latin peasants. Ironically, under the same love for racial theories. German nobility was trying to find a Latin racial origin for itself, as coming from the Roman conquerors. In Poland, the nobility tried to trace their genetic origin to Sarmatian nomadic warriors. Etc., etc. Modern genetics was known at the time, so different materialistic explanations for the origins of races were brought forth, specifically the concept that climate affects the human seed and thus produces both different physical characteristics and different cultures. The theory was clearly refuted when black Africans brought to Europe continued producing black African children in the European climate, but the ideology of the Enlightenment had no place for inconvenient facts.

But the real modern ideology of racism started developing only at the end of the 18th century when Christian Europe couldn’t afford to ignore the growing slave trade and slavery in the Americas; and neither could it afford to ignore the blatant contradiction with the Biblical standards. German philosophers and natural scientists like Christoph Meiners and Samuel Thomas von Sommering spoke of the “beautiful white race” and the “ugly black race,” and tried to prove the inferiority of the non-European races.

In the 1780s and the 1790s, one of the most meticulous and conscientious anthropologist of the 18th century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, published his studies on human skulls, and divided the human species into five races according to comparative skull measurements: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, Malayan, and American. Blumenbach specifically warned that his studies were only about physiology, and he criticized the theories of those who were trying to find signs of superiority or inferiority between the different races. He also pointed out that culturally, some regions in Europe were quite backward compared to regions in Africa or in Asia, so there was no base for the racial theories of culture. Even before the discovery of modern genetics, Blumenbach opposed the theory of the different and parallel genetic origin of the races, and held to the Biblical narrative that all races were simply different varieties of degeneration from one original race. (A theory that is today confirmed and proven by modern genetics, but rejected in his time by most scientists.) Despite Blumenbach’s views, though, his study became popular in the American colonies exactly as a confirmation for the inferiority of the Negro race. It wasn’t, of course, but together with the revived Talmudist mythology of the curse of Ham, it gave a nice excuse for the continuation of slavery and the slave trade. So popular, in fact, that even as late as the 1950s, racial theorists in the US still used – or rather misused – Blumenbach’s study of cranial (that is, skull) features as a proof for the moral and intellectual inferiority of the Negro race.

The revival of paganism by the Enlightenment led to a revival of racism, and racists of all kinds tried to attach themselves to different popular theories. Evolution – even if the theory is not innately racist – became a favorite excuse for racism. I already mentioned the theory of the climate determinism. With the rise of the theories of Freudism, behaviorism, and the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, different racist authors adopted the rather artificial IQ tests as their proof of inferiority. Racists have also tried to attache themselves to different Christian groups in their attempt to gain legitimacy.

The anti-covenantal nature of this type of racism should be obvious: It is, in its very foundation, materialistic determinism. It declares that genes – or blood, or flesh, or whatever other material racists can think of – produce culture. It declares that man is ultimately – or may be just partially – a product of his flesh, and that his spirit is shaped and defined and controlled by his flesh. Marxism is the other popular form of materialistic determinism in the 19th and the 20th centuries, except that the material factor in Marx’s analysis was the economic conditions of man. Different economic classes, Marx held, having different economic power and living in different economic conditions, will build different cultures and will have different systems of morality. But Marx himself was not a stranger to the racial argument either; he himself held strong racist views, and he praised the French racial ideologue Gobineau. He also highly praised Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and again for the same reason. Materialistic determinism was at the foundation of most new theories in the 19th century. After all, they were all following Hegel, and in Hegel’s view, even God defined Himself and evolved His own being through the material power of the state.

The church, of course, must reject such racism as heretical. The Biblical view of culture is that it is covenantally defined: the dominant ideology in a society is what determines the dominant culture of that society. In the same society, sometimes, several different cultures emerge, based on the different religious views in that society. Henry Van Til gave the Biblical definition of culture in his book, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture: “Culture is religion externalized.” That is, what we see in the culture around us, is only a visible manifestation of the religious and ethical choices of men. Not of their genes, and not of their economic conditions. Men of different skin color and of different economic means will have the same culture if they are all gathered in the only Biblically valid Christian gathering: the communion of the saints. On the other end of the spectrum, brothers in the same family will fight against each other, culturally, if they have chosen to follow two opposing religions. Man’s flesh doesn’t command man’s spirit; his ethical commitment and choices are what define man as a man under God. Thus, the church must from among itself those who promote such materialistic determinism, even if – and especially if – they are trying to use the name of Christ in its support.

Then there is another kind of racism, not so heretical but just as collectivist. We are all prone to it – myself included in this number – for we are all prone to stereotype people and put them in boxes. Especially when putting them in boxes helps us in our self-righteousness. We ascribe cultural characteristics to individuals based on their skin color – not because we consider genetics determinative, not because we consider them inferior, but because we have been served certain statistics which tell us that specific individuals must behave in a specific way because they belong to a group.

Some time ago a friend of mine and I were talking to a non-American Christian, and he asked us, very seriously, “How do you guys deal with all the Hispanics down in Texas?” We were a little confused. “Deal . . . about what?” “Well,” he said, “isn’t it dangerous to have such a large share of the population loyal to Mexico?” We laughed, of course, “Why would they be loyal to Mexico? What is there in Mexico to be loyal to, that is superior to Texas culture? The corrupt political establishment? The exorbitant taxes and bureaucratic regulations? The brutal and corrupt police and military? The drug cartels?” “Well, their culture is the same.” Well, it is true that on the surface, their culture is the same, but our friend made a logical leap from the external similarity of cultural trappings to the ethical/judicial choices of all Hispanics in Texas. It came as a deep surprise to him that a significant and rising percentage of Hispanics – especially among the young – has converted to Protestantism, and many have conservative political views. In his view, if he saw a Hispanic, he would automatically assume that the person is Roman Catholic, and probably a Democrat voter. Well, yes, stats do seem to lead in that direction, but stats speak of aggregates. Making assumptions about individual Hispanics based on these stats would be just as wrong as making assumptions about individual whites.

In another example, earlier this year, a radio preacher popular among certain evangelical fundamentalist audience ranted about a black kid he saw, who flipped off a police car and then threw away his plastic bottle without disposing it in a container. The preacher was offended by the actions of the kid – which is normal – but then he continued his rant by projecting the future life of that kid based not on the stats for people who flip off police cars and litter. His projections were based on the official statistics for black males: 70% chance to be a deadbeat dad, 60% this, 65% that, all projections and predictions of how the life of that kids is going to go, because he belongs to a specific skin color group. He didn’t make any projections that would include in the stats white kids who flip off police cars or litter: the numbers wouldn’t be so radically against the kid, then, would they? He didn’t mention that his stats include black males who never flipped off a police car – that may have led to some inconvenient conclusions. He also gave as example of moral uprightness his own generation and his own group – which should be white suburbanites, I suppose, as opposed to the black males group his stats is about – who never flipped off a police car and if they littered, they felt guilty.

Technically, in terms of fundamental theology, this is not racism: it doesn’t involve an ideological belief in the inferiority or superiority of a certain genetic class. This is what makes many people object when this is called “racism,” because they do not see any ideological commitment to racial supremacy in it. But then again, these same people are eager to call many actions or agendas of modern civil governments with the name “Marxism,” even though these actions and agendas are based on ideologies that are technically and ideologically unrelated to or opposite to Marxism. Why? Because they perceive that even if Marxism is not the official ideology behind modern taxation, monetary policies, climate policies, it is still true that the motives and the goals are the same. So, when we take the examples of collectivist thinking I mentioned, why should it be wrong to call it racism, if the motives and the agenda, and the ethical/judicial consequences are the same as if there was a full-fledged racist ideology behind them?

And the ethical/judicial consequences are certainly the same as they are of full-fledged racism.

One ethical consequence, of course, is the impact such racism has on the targeted minority – impact that we as Christians are under obligation to always take in account, according to Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 9:22, “I became all things to all man.” We as Christians, I said, but especially those of us who are considered ministers of the Gospel and therefore men of authority. Impact mainly on the individuals within that minority, and especially on the younger generation in it. Paul also says in Eph. 4:29 that no rotten word should come out of our mouth; it is generally assumed that he is talking about cussing, but the truth is, it includes much more than just cussing – any non-redemptive talk, especially by men in authority, is forbidden. Fathers are not allowed to provoke their children so that they don’t get discouraged (Col. 3:21; Eph. 6:4). Speaking in hopeless terms to a young person, especially by a men of authority, certainly qualifies as provocation and as rotten words. When a whole generation of young men are spoken in terms of hopelessness because of their belonging to a certain genetic group, and if this is everything they hear every day in the news, and by their neighbors, and by the official statistics, eventually they tend to live with the idea that there is little hope for them.

If you don’t believe me, try it on your children. Start telling them from an early age that, as children of white suburban parents, there is 95% chance that they would grow obese and morally and culturally apathetic, and will get to care for nothing more than just their paycheck and the next football game. Tell that to them every day, show them movies where white suburban kids like them grow to be morally apathetic and selfish, show them studies that explain the reasons for such inevitable trend, tell them that this is because they have grown in a family of two white parents, that it is the suburban culture that has left its imprint on them, and that there is little chance for them to change it. Continue doing that for 18-20 years. What do you think will come out of your kids, if not selfish, self-absorbed, apathetic brats who care for nothing much but their own comfort? Well, this is what we do to black kids in the inner cities when we continue the same racist rants of statistics and projections – racist not because we officially believe in genetic inferiority, but racist because the final result is the same. And a black kid has not much chance – especially if he doesn’t have a father. After all, if the father has left, what is the kid to do, except hear day after day the same statistics how there is little hope for a kid like him who hasn’t had the chance to grow under a loving father in his home? Aren’t we as Christians to lift those that are fallen? Why are we instead trampling on their minds and hopes? And when the target is a racial minority, how is that not racist? Would we do it to our own kids?

Another ethical consequence is what such attitude does to our own conscience. We are so good because we never flip off a police car. (We, I mean, generically. I have flipped police cars and cops, to be honest.) So what advantage is it to us as a group, that we should give ourselves as an example? White suburbanites of our generation who have not flipped off a police car in their lives and never gotten in any greater trouble than a speeding ticket, are also the most morally and culturally apathetic generation in the history of the US. After all, it is on our watch that abortion has been legalized, and it is still on our watch that politicians play games with the slaughter of the unborn, and we continue voting and then go about our own business. And we have been the dominant political group for the last 50 years and longer. Our focus on the speck in the eyes of one minority group prevents us from seeing the huge beam in ours. Yes, yes, we would issue a formal confession that we are all sinners, but then practically, we would proudly give ourselves as example to those other groups, as if their sin is so bad and ours is only an insignificant issue.

And to be honest, the more I study the issue, the more I wish white suburbanites start flipping off not only police cars but all other levels of the crime syndicate that parades as “civil government” in our country. There is something we can learn from those black kids in the inner cities, and that is the distrust of power structures who have long ceased to be legitimate civil government, and have filled the cup of their iniquity. It took our forefathers in 1775 much less to flip off a whole empire; that we have not started yet is a clear testimony to our moral decay.

And finally, there is a judicial issue with this kind of racism. Because we are so superior to them – culturally, of course, not racially – we are unwilling to address the issues of government injustice against minorities. When a black man is killed by cops, our first reaction is always in favor of the cops: he must have deserved it. Michael Brown was killed, we took the side of the white cop, even though we all knew that shooting after retreating unarmed person without a court warrant is illegal under all circumstances, as per two decisions of the Supreme Court. If only we could have a video, but since we didn’t have it, the cop is innocent by default. Then we had a clear video of the murder of Eric Garner, and then it was insufficient; sure there must be more to that story. Even those who admitted, half-mouth, that it was murder, remained silent when the Grand Jury exonerated the murderous cop. Then Freddie Gray was arrested for just owning a pocket knife, and then killed, we said nothing. Why would a black man want to have a pocket knife? We all talk about the Second Amendment, then we freak out when the Black Panthers want to have their communities armed to defend themselves against police brutality. Yes, I agree, the Black Panthers are Communist in their ideology, but should we disarm black neighborhoods because of that? Should we remain silent when they are indeed assaulted by cops, and when those cops have our tacit approval in the fact that we never protest against police brutality in black neighborhoods? And no, there is no supremacist ideology behind this silence, but there is still racism – because we have accepted that the inferior culture in the black neighborhoods deserves police brutality, and therefore we are not going to stand for justice in these cases. In the final account, we are just as passive and apathetic concerning the legitimate complaints of the black community as we are about everything else. And while we don’t ourselves harbor any racist thoughts, with our silence, we are complicit in the institutional racism of our civil government; that same civil government that we should have started flipping off long ago – and worse than just flipping off – if we had only a tenth of the spirit of our forefathers.

This sort of attitude – automatically ascribing the statistical categories of group to its individual members, is what Joel McDurmon in his book on logic calls “fallacies of composition.” As we said before, such collectivising of individuals is not Biblical; it is a war against self-government, and it eventually destroys both those who practice it and those who are their targets. it’s about time we stop thinking of people as members of groups, and only allow one division between people: a covenantal division between the communion of the saints and the world of the lost. And treat every lost person as a potential convert.

The book I will assign this week is a book written by a black female liberal. When you read the book, ignore the ideological bias – what’s important in the book is the historical facts of the transformation of racism into its modern form – more subtle, more politically correct, but just as brutal and unjust and profitable for the elites as its previous version. The book is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. There I much we can learn from our ideological enemies – because, as many of us know, very often our worst enemy is ourselves.

And don’t forget to visit BulgarianReformation.com and prayerfully donate to our mission. America is an important battlefield of the Kingdom of God; but the war is going to be won in many battles in many places in the world. And Bulgaria has been a very favorable battlefield for the Kingdom; a field where a little effort produces serious outcome. Help me continue the work there, and God bless you.