“God doesn’t tolerate the injustice of closed borders for too long.”

Assigned Reading:

– Kaffir Boy, Mark Mathabane

Assigned Reading:

– Abundance, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler

In the same way, as patent legislation was proposed to lead to faster pace of scientific and technological growth, in the majority of cases, it only stifled growth, as inventors spend more time and resources running the race to get monopoly grants from bureaucrats to kill all competition, rather than develop their ideas in practice and making them available, serving as many people as possible, and making money in the process.

Assigned Reading:

– The Mythology of Science, R.J. Rushdoony

Host

Bojidar Marinov

Description

In the same way, as patent legislation was proposed to lead to faster pace of scientific and technological growth, in the majority of cases, it only stifled growth, as inventors spend more time and resources running the race to get monopoly grants from bureaucrats to kill all competition, rather than develop their ideas in practice and making them available, serving as many people as possible, and making money in the process.

Assigned reading: R.J. Rushdoony, The Mythology of Science

Listen

Transcript

"Why patents", you will ask, I am sure. You have never heard a sermon on patents in your church, right? If you open Sermon Audio and search for 'patents,' you will get 'No matching sermon title found.' Just like something we talked about before, the Right and Duty of Private Judgment. Well, the real scandal is about the Right and Duty of Private Judgment, of course, because it was a fundamental doctrine of the Reformation, so not finding anything on that topic shows the sorry state of what passes today for 'evangelical' or 'Reformed' or 'Protestant' churches in the US. It's more natural to not find anything on patents, though, for patents . . . do they actually have any covenantal significance. Does the Bible speak of them at all?

And if you are rather confused why we should talk about patents in a podcast that is focused on covenantal, that is, ethical/judicial commentary on our modern world, it is because your 'pastors' or 'leaders' or 'elders' or whatever other self-designation they have, have never really made the effort to rise to the demands of their position and actually apply the Word of God to all of life. Patents are an important covenantal topic in our world today. They span over several areas of application of the Law of God, from the nature and purpose of scientific and technological development, through the nature of man as the agent of the Dominion Covenant, all the way to issues of property rights and theft, and also government interference, and specifically the executive state versus the Biblical, judiciary civil government. Studying patent law, and trying to discern good from evil in the modern patents laws, will give us a great deal of insight in many topics of Christian Reconstruction, and in expanding the Kingdom of God.

Patents, to be honest, have not been covered much by Christian Reconstructionist authors either. It is not because Christian Reconstruction, as a theological and intellectual movement, believes that patents are ethically or judicially neutral. To the contrary, we see every single part of human life and society as inherently religious, and therefore subject to the same spiritual laws and principles described in the Bible. (And 'spiritual,' if you remember the first episode of Axe to the Root, means 'ethical/judicial.') So the reason is not that we don't see the area of patents and patent law as spiritual. It is rather that among the vast quantity of topics we are trying to cover, the topic of scientific and technological development has not been developed well enough, yet. We do have a general epistemological understanding that science and technology are only possible in the context of a Biblical worldview. We do have a philosophy of history that connects the prevalence of the Biblical worldview to the growth in inspiration...

Assigned Reading:

 – Paul and Gender, by Cynthia Long Westfall

Axe to the Root Podcast Episode #65 

 Host: Bojidar Marinov

Recommended Reading: Paul and Gender, by Cynthia Long Westfall

 

Transcript:

Head-Covering: Freedom and Justice vs. Liturgy and Power-Play  

Welcome to Episode 65 of Axe to the Root Podcast, part of the War Room Productions, I am Bo Marinov, and for the next 30 minutes I will try to fix a gap in my teaching for the last 20 years. That gap is the interpretation of 1 Cor. 11:2-16: Paul’s injunction about women’s head-covering in the church. When I say gap, I don’t mean that I had taught a fallacious interpretation of the passage. As a matter of fact, I had no interpretation at all. I had been asked many times about my interpretation, especially by women, and especially by women who are sensitive about abuse of power in the church. But I always replied that I hadn’t gotten to that passage yet. I had nothing to say. I knew all the official interpretations – especially the so-called “Reformed” ones, by respected Reformed preachers. I couldn’t buy into any of them, though. All of them seemed quite out of character for Paul in his other epistles, and even in that same epistle of 1 Corinthians. All of them seemed to interpret the text quite out of the context: these several chapters of 1 Corinthians treat the topic of the church as one body, with everyone in it, male or female, equal in honor and dignity, and all these interpretations – even by the most respectable Reformed theologians and preachers, seemed to take this passage out of context and interpret it as if half of the church – the women, had lower honor and dignity. In addition, there was nothing ethical or judicial in the interpretations I was hearing: they were all focused on the liturgical trappings of head-covering as if they were the real thing; and I knew from both Biblical common sense and from experience that women can outwardly cover their heads and yet despise their husbands, and other women could never put on any covering and yet were pious and orderly in their conduct. Thus, head-covering certainly doesn’t correspond to the reality these preachers and theologians wanted to ascribe to it. And as far as I am concerned, when you interpret a passage for me, you better give me the ethical/judicial reality behind it that I can apply today, or I don’t buy into your interpretation. An interpretation that confuses liturgical symbols with ethical/judicial reality is not my cup of tea, thank you very much. I am a Reconstructionist; I need to know what covenantal issues are behind the passage. Symbolism is fine and nice, but symbolism is not real theology. Tell me what the passage says to justice and righteousness, and tell it in ways that account for both the historical context and the clear and precise grammatical meaning. 

Speaking of historical context and grammatical meaning, we have all adopted the claim that the historical-grammatical method is the best “conservative” method for interpreting the Bible. That is, the method that looks at the grammatical structure of the text and its direct and plain meaning, and then at the historical context and what the text would have meant for its contemporary readers. And then, of course, the interpreter, after he has discovered the grammatical meaning and the historical meaning in context, may try to discover what ethical/judicial application there is in that text for us today, of if there is such modern application at all. This is where I have my doubts about the historical-grammatical method: While the concept is good, it has been used by modern Reformed churchmen not to really interpret texts but to interpret covenant applications away. I have listened to tons of lectures and sermon where the preacher, claiming to be “sola scriptura,” conservative, Reformed, expository, and whatnot, takes a Biblical passage and builds a long, boring,

Does the Bible mention believers who are in service of a pagan, executive state, and does the Bible give specific commands to those believers?

Assigned Reading:

– The Best Years,1945-1950, Joseph Goulden

Host: Bojidar Marinov

Summary:

Axe to the Root will be a regular show produced by Reconstructionist Radio, hosted by Bojidar Marinov.

Book of the Week:

Unconditional Surrender, Garth North

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Given that ethical/judicial context of two-way responsibility between men and their institutions, then, what is the Biblical way for us to think about the tithe?

Assigned Reading:

– Tithing and Dominion, R.J. Rushdoony

In the interaction between a superior culture and an inferior culture, it is the inferior culture that loses, and eventually, gets assimilated.

Assigned Reading:

– Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg