Ronnie W. Rogers, “Taking every thought captive…”

Hitler’s animosity and inhumane atrocities against the Jews are well known.  His venom against them and his plan to use his own oratorical abilities to exploit them in order to resurrect Germany is a theme running though Mein Kampf.  However, one should never forget how effective his devilish, albeit intellectually doltish, scheme was.  Moreover, there are more than a few today who seek to eradicate from the globe the Jews, Christians, and other groups they deem to be corrupting influences. 

The following quote reminds us of how one can use a group in order to accomplish a dastardly political end.

“My object is to guide first-rate revolutionary upheavals, regardless of what methods or means I have to use in the process. Earlier revolutions were against the peasants, or nobility, or the clergy or against dynasties and their network of vassals, but in no case has revolution succeeded without the presence of a lightening rod that could conduct and channel the odium of the general masses . . . [W]eighing every imaginable factor, I came to the conclusion that a campaign against the Jews would be as popular as it would be successful . . . Disproportionately to their small number they account for an immense share of the German national wealth, which can be just as easily put to profitable use for the state and the general public as could the holdings of monasteries, bishops and nobility. Once the hatred and the battle against the Jews has been really stirred up, their resistance will necessarily crumble in the shortest possible time. They are totally defenseless, and no one will stand up to protect them.”¹

Even though Hitler died, there are still several “Hitlers” on the political landscape who will use whatever means possible to ruthlessly conquer the weak maugre all political agreements and niceties.

1. Josef Hell, Aufzeichnung, 1922, Z.S. 640, p. 6, Institut für Zeitgeschicthe in Frankfurt. Quoted in Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 28-29. Cited in Philip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 160-161. [↩]

Intentionalists believe that the Constitution should be understood in the way it was understood by the Founders.  Consequently, it is a fixed document with static meaning; therefore, it means today what it meant then.  The only way one can properly interpret it is by studying the authorial intent of the signatories. 

In contrast, progressives believe that the Constitution is to be understood as a living document, which not only allows but requires that each generation interpret the Constitution in light of current needs and changes.  They argue that the meaning must be ever changing in order to keep the Constitution relevant and adaptable to the issues of the day. Therefore, the interpretations and adjudications of the Supreme Court, which are not explicitly sanctioned by the Constitution, are not only appropriate, but essential.

Thus, the question of which approach is the correct one?  Well, if the latter was the desire of the Founders, then I would ask, why did they include an explicit process for amending the Constitution?  For the amendment process seems glaringly superfluous if the Founders intended for the Supreme Court to change, add to, or reinterpret the Constitution according to their modern opinions regarding the need to change. 

Moreover, one may even go so far as to suggest that both of the legislative houses are, if not extraneous, at least marginalized in significance since legislators were/are actually the nation’s lawmakers.

Jefferson said, “To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”¹

1. Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:277, http://www.landmarkcases.org/marbury/jefferson.html [↩]

We like to consider ourselves a “civilized” and “humane” society, and I think that is true in many ways.  However, the legalization and normalization of abortion reminds us of the darker side of our humanity.  For in abortion, the strong summarily dismiss the lives of the preborn through methods that betray a narcissistic primal barbarism.   I suspect that if an actual abortion was performed on television for all to see in cinematic detail, it would rival the cruelest and most heart wrenching of horror movies. 

Recently, Landon Norton’s Round Table presentation succinctly reminded us of the inhumane process of an abortion.  Please do not allow his admirable brevity to cause you to forget the heroic struggle of each little one caught in this human web of brutish and savage selfishness.  (more…)

“Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.” Proverbs 13:24).

 “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. If you strike him with the rod, you will save his soul from Sheol.” (Proverbs 23:13-14).

Spanking is viewed by secularists and Christian secularists¹ as anachronistic at best and labeled by many as abuse.

However, the Bible is clear that spanking is actually an act of love.

To equate biblical spanking with abuse is to misrepresent spanking for emotive conditioning, and denotes the change of a culture’s view of child rearing to a non-biblical approach.  Those who present spanking as abusive do so by comparing the event to someone beating or hitting another person or some such nonsensical comparison.  However, equating the two is like equating muggers and football players because they both make physical contact with another human being; or comparing a police officer shooting an assassin with a thief killing his mark because in both instances a gun was used.

Similarities do not make two events morally the same if there are essential dissimilarities, e.g. suicide and martyrdom.  To devalue spanking because someone takes it too far and thereby transforms it into abuse is as misguided as devaluing the automobile because of a hit and run driver.  The problem is not the automobile but the abuse of it, and in like manner the problem is not spanking but the abuse of it either by flippantly labeling it abuse or calling genuine abuse spanking.

What sets biblical spanking apart is that it is commanded by God as a form of discipline for children, which God would never do if it were abuse.  It is commanded in the book of Proverbs, which is a book devoted in large part to a father—parents—instructing their children and rearing them out of a devoted love and concern for the child’s well-being, which is the very antithesis of the motivation for abuse.

Particularly when children are young, they need to be taught right from wrong through feeling discomfort to their behind because pain is a part of the built-in warning system that humans have.  Small children are not able to understand rational discourse well enough to protect them from harm; for example, a child needs to learn to associate NO from the parent with pain on their behind so that they will not injure themselves by touching hot stoves, running in front of cars, etc., because they will be able to immediately associate a parent’s NO with pain.  Moreover, when the parent tells them that a certain behavior will hurt them so they should not do it, they have an immediate understanding of hurt, which they do not have if you merely give them a paper on the subject or interact with them through some democratic lecture.

As Christians, we do not believe that spanking is the only form of discipline, or even the best in every situation, but it is a loving part of child rearing when done in the loving spirit of the whole book of Proverbs.  Opponents who extricate the teaching on spanking from its full biblical context expose themselves as shamefully unfamiliar with what they are talking about or so repulsively dishonest for political gain that their ramblings should be summarily dismissed.  Spanking is from a loving parent for the benefit of the child’s full development and well-being, whereas abuse is a hurtful dispensing of adult anger or frustration upon a child for the narcissistic benefit of the parent.

My two daughters were spanked on a number many occasions.  I suspect that at the time, they would have voted to outlaw spankings, and deemed them tantamount to being made to lay on a bed of nails while riding a camel in a rocky desert; however, today as grown women, they would extol the loving benefit of it and have every intention of carrying on the great tradition with my grandchildren.  Why?  Because they know we love them, they are better for it, and they want to love their children in a godly way. 

My challenge to every secularist is simply this.  I defy any one of them to find any, no matter how minute, damage to one of my daughters because of spanking them when they were little or to detect even the slightest lack of love between us because of such discipline.  I would even say that those who think spanking is abusive or passé should meet my daughters and think again. 

To wit, I have no regrets about spanking my daughters and if I had it to do all over again, I would not “spare the rod” because I love what both of my daughters have become.

1. by which I mean a person who claims to be a Christian, but thinks like a secularist thereby disregarding the clear teaching of Scripture [↩]

The present rhetorical climate labels humans as “consumers”, which is true to a degree, but we are much more than just consumers.  The value in such a label being used as the most apt for humans merely furthers the environmentalist’s agenda and miscasting of humans as intruders into an otherwise pristine universe.

The formula goes like this; the environment is damaged when there is an increase in population, affluence, and technology.  The damage is caused from depleted resources and the emission of pollution.  This formula was espoused by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, which predicted in no uncertain terms that population would grow at such an enormous rate that hundreds of millions of people would die from famine.  Although this did not happen, his formula¹ is still relied upon by those who seek to stifle capitalism and eliminate human beings through the barbarism of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia.

His equation, like that of other environmental alarmists and catastrophists, ignores the human component of being a producer as well as a consumer.  For example, “While the population grew [in the United States] by 19% from 1976 to 1994, the index of air pollution fell by 53 percent. During the same time, affluence tripled, and technology also increased dramatically, with more and more computerization and automation not only in industry and commerce but even in private homes.”²

They fail to consider man’s enormous contribution to life by his use of the natural resources.  They see only a consumer and miss that man is created in the image of God.  Beware when you are referred to as merely a consumer and be quick to remind yourself and others that you should be most readily known as a producer.

1. A repetition of the Malthusian Catastrophe argument [↩]
2. Environmental Stewardship in the Judeo-Christian Tradition, (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Acton Institute, 2007), p82 [↩]

Once a citadel of truth and training for Christian ministers, Harvard is today an enemy of the gospel and truth.  Speaking at the 2002 fall convocation, Harvard President Lawrence Summers admitted that “things divine [had] been central neither to my professional nor to my personal life.” He then wondered out loud, “In what ways should Christianity be privileged, and not be privileged, recognizing the [Divinity] School’s traditions, strengths, and need for focus, and also taking into account growing religious pluralism?”¹  Of course the commitment of his life and the decline of Harvard from the once bastion of orthodoxy gives us the answer to his question, none of significance.

The founders would have been astonished. They had put Christ’s name on the first seal and published this 1642 account of the school’s history, rationale, and order:²

After God had carried us safe to new England, and wee had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our liveli-hood, rear’d convenient places for Gods worship, and settled the Civill Government: One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust³ . . . Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Iesus Christ which is eternall life, Joh. 17.3. and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.⁴

Yale was founded in 1701 primarily because Harvard (founded in 1636) was seen to be too far away and becoming more and more liberal, a shift that was highlighted by a rift between the president of Harvard, Increase Mather, and the rest of the Harvard clergy, whom Mather viewed as increasingly liberal.  Mather ultimately became very supportive of Yale in hopes that it would champion Puritan Orthodoxy and not travel the path to liberalism that Harvard had.

Harvard continued its descent into the abyss of liberalism when in 1805, the school appointed Henry Ware, a Unitarian minister, as Hollis Professor of Divinity.  President Charles Eliot worked arduously to spread his Unitarian and Emersonian ideas throughout the university.

Concerning the biblical account of the Garden of Eden, Eliot said, “The conduct attributed to God in that story would be wholly unworthy of any man whose standards of conduct accorded with the average sentiments about right and wrong of civilized people today.”⁵ About Harvard’s doctrinal roots, he said, “No thinking person believes any longer in total human depravity. Everybody perceives that human society could not exist, and never could have existed unless the vast majority of mankind had been well disposed, affectionate, and trustworthy . . .”⁶

“Eliot embraced the anti-Christian Ralph Waldo Emerson and appointed such non-believers to the faculty as jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, philosophical pragmatist Charles Saunders Peirce, and evolutionist Chauncey Wright.”⁷

This descent into apostasy has been replicated thousands of times in schools and churches in the western world….It reveals once again the parasitic nature of liberalism, which seldom founds a country, school, mission, church…but soon finds its way in and then in leadership.  This when the Biblicist forgets that eternal vigilance is the price of doctrinal fidelity!

1. Lawrence Summers, “Convocation of the Divinity School of Harvard University 2002,” Harvard University: Office of the President Website, September 8, 2002, http://president.harvard.edu/speeches/2002/convocation.html (accessed December 27, 2004). [↩]
2. Entitled New England’s First Fruits. [↩]
3. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 432. [↩]
4. Ibid., 434. [↩]
5. Henry Saunderson, Charles W. Eliot, Puritan Liberal (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), 174. [↩]
6. Ibid., 211. [↩]
7. Kairos Journal [↩]