Conservatives and Free Speech

Whoever first said "be careful what you wish for," it applies to conservatives and the embrace of so-called "freedom of speech" in relationship to Charlie Hebdo  and the terrorist murders in France. Conservatives don't get equal time for their views on campus.  They can't get jobs in Hollywood.   Their books don't make the Pulitzer list.  And calling terrorism Islamic has been hate speech. Creation can't be taught anywhere.  If you deny global warming, you won't be allowed to take that position in any official capacity.  I was at a jam packed town hall meeting here about social security years ago and someone from our church, who linked a shortage of social security tax to abortion, was booed and hissed and mocked into silence.

Is it worth it for conservatives to use Charlie Hebdo for hypocrisy as a tool to shame liberals into allowing them to speak?  Liberals haven't been shouted down at a state university until they opposed Islam, mainly out of their atheism.  They can't be credible in opposition to hate speech against Islam and support for Charlie Hebdo.  I know this is why conservatives link to liberals making anti Islam diatribe.

I heard Salman Rushdie say that he knows you don't believe in free speech if you say, "I believe in free speech, but."  He says there are no "buts" in free speech.  There have been "buts" in free speech, but they've all been conservative.

Free speech has become a political apparatus, like the term "racist."  Liberals say almost any objectionable or outlandish epithet under their notion of free speech, and it continues.  They have opposed speech against Islam, that is, Charlie Hebdo speech.

When I say, be careful what you wish for, I mean, be careful wishing for more Islam bashing, because for every profanity of Mohammed, you'll start hearing ten for Jesus -- no more tamping down blasphemy against God.  Since you can insult the Koran, you can say whatever you want against Christianity and pull the Charlie Hebdo card.

But then, is the liberal free speech position a conservative position?  Even further, should Charlie Hebdo and its profane and puerile cartoons constitute free speech, even in liberal France?  Adopted during the French Revolution in 1789, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in Article 11 state that

The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.

Certain speech can be denied in the United States.  The Federal Communications Commission does not allow certain language over the airwaves.  It is illegal based upon obscenity laws.  Some books are prohibited even by the public school.  No one is allowed to say just whatever he wants.   That has always been a conservative position on speech.

With the loss of an absolute standard for right and wrong, the total takeover of moral relativism, you can't judge offensive speech.  In the absence of a final, controlling authority, you allow whatever people want to say.  Everything must be legal, every form of God bashing included.  It reflects a lawless society.  Be careful what you wish for.

Hannah W. Smith, Spiritualism, Universalism, and the Rise of Keswick: part 7 of 21 in Hannah W. Smith: Keswick Founder, Higher Life Preacher, Quaker Quietist and Universalist Heretic

This entire 21-part study appears on the FaithSaves.net website in a study entitled “Hannah Whitall Smith: Higher Life Writer, Speaker on Sanctification, Developer of the Keswick Theology, Quaker Quietist and Universalist Heretic.” Click here to read the entire study.

 

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“As already noted, Mrs. Smith declared that her universalist heresy and other heresies were key to her work as a Higher Life preacher and Keswick founder.”

 

to read the section that was in the blog post below.

The Fundamentalist Repulsion of Christian Worldview

Only a righteous man, a regenerated child of God, understands the world, its history, present, and future.  Man's thinking was corrupted by the fall and without salvation, he doesn't grasp God's intended purpose and plan.   After creation, God mandated raising a family and earning a living through the words "be fruitful," "multiply," "replenish the earth," "subdue" and "have dominion."  He never rescinded that mandate after the curse, only that those two responsibilities would occur with sorrow.  Sin would make it harder, but both still had to be done according to God's command.

Since sin made God's cultural mandate impossible without redemption, He built into the curse the promise of redemption.  The seed of the woman would bruise the head of the serpent.  The image of God in man, common grace, and the providence of God do allow men to accomplish deeds in line with God's directive, but they fail at the root objective of glorifying Him.

Christians are redeemed to fulfill God's mandate.  Only true believers know or even can know what that is.  God alone is the source of the universe, of His created order, the origin of the laws of physical nature, which we study in the natural sciences, the source of the laws of human nature, as well the principles of morality, justice, aesthetics, and logic.  We are the ones who have something to say about and to contribute to life on earth.

The need for redemption brought an evangelistic purpose to the mandate.  God loves the world.  But God continues to fulfill His pre-fall, pre-curse purpose through that redemption.  Redemption is a means to an end.  God is to be glorified.  He will be glorified, because He will redeem a people to Himself who will glorify Him.  The mandate must be fulfilled still.

To fulfill the mandate, Christians cannot divide the sacred from the secular and forsake every institution on earth but the church.  The church is pivotal in this age.  God's will gets accomplished through the church, but in the world, believers are there still fulfilling the mandate God gave them. The lives of believers should revolve around the church, but they are lived out in the world.  Since this is God's world, believers know best what it's all about and should stay engaged in informing of and transforming in God's position.

This post is about fundamentalism, but fundamentalism has been better overall than evangelicalism in fulfilling the mandate.  That's a very big subject that would take too long in this post, but I'll say what is wrong with evangelicalism.  Evangelicalism has morphed to the world system, in so many ways mimicking the world as a strategy.  I was reminded of this today when I saw an online clip of Tim Tebow reading a nasty tweet about him on the Jimmy Kimmel show.  Rather than revealing the mandate to the world as God intended it, the evangelicals adapted it as a plan of infiltration.

Fundamentalism was an era of my life from 1974 to about 1995.  I think that I understand it very well, now looking from the outside.  Fundamentalists started their own schools and colleges and separated everyone from the world.  The work in the world became meaningless.  All that had meaning was the church.  They so separated themselves from everyone that they left everything in the world, every institution to the godless.  This was not the story of early American Christianity. Christians had their influence everywhere.  They were the historians and the teachers and the philosophers.

Fundamentalism forsook the public square, when only Christianity understands this world.  The reason nobody gets it is because nobody is there to get it.  As time went on, sadly fundamentalism has begun to take on more of the world and taken on the evangelical strategy.

You can't think of hardly a fundamentalist thinker, writer, author, artist, or composer that matters.  Fundamentalists completely forsook God's mandate through an extreme and unbiblical type of separation.  Even if Christians have lost the impact God desires, they can still have an impact.  I think it's too late for the country, but it doesn't mean that it isn't something that Christians should still be doing, that is, revealing to the world God's truth, goodness, and beauty about everything.

David Brooks of the New York Times on Fundamentalism and Religion

David Brooks, one of the moderates on the op-ed page of the New York Times, wrote on January 8 within the context of the murders of the French satirists this last week:

Moreover, provocateurs and ridiculers expose the stupidity of the fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are people who take everything literally. They are incapable of multiple viewpoints. They are incapable of seeing that while their religion may be worthy of the deepest reverence, it is also true that most religions are kind of weird. Satirists expose those who are incapable of laughing at themselves and teach the rest of us that we probably should.

So this is fundamentalism:  "fundamentalists are people who take everything literally" and "are incapable of multiple viewpoints."  You can't take Brooks literally to understand what he says, so maybe I'm not a fundamentalist, because he really means, fundamentalists take everything their sacred book says literally.  And yes, folks like me take everything in the Bible literally, that is, grammatically and historically, or in other words, we understand scripture according to its plain sense.

A man like Brooks doesn't understand the Bible or literal interpretation (yet he's a "conservative").  I suspect he's someone who questions parts of the dietary restrictions or the talking snake or the man swallowed by the big fish, which also means he doesn't understand history (as told by God in the Bible).

One, to take the Bible literally, you believe the supernatural parts, which are almost everything in it. If you don't want to believe the supernatural stuff, you have to allegorize it all, that is, make it mean what you want it to mean (otherwise known as rewriting it).  You run into trouble on the first sentence, especially "God created."  Once you've accepted the greatest, all the lesser, everything else in the Bible, is easy. Believing in God is to believe the supernatural.  God is the point of the book.

Brooks though has got to have the Bible be an all natural book with an all natural interpretation.  That takes God out of the equation. Have a good time with that.

Two, if you take God out of the Bible, you're then left with multiple viewpoints.  There's a ratio even to this. The less God there is in the Bible, the more multiple viewpoints, the ones made-up by people rewriting the Bible according to their own imaginations.

Without God, multiple viewpoints are valid, so the Bible doesn't matter much any more.  The Bible already doesn't matter to Brooks, so he shouldn't lecture people, who believe the Bible, to take multiple viewpoints, which includes lecturing God, Who won't be lectured by him.

You've heard people say it takes more faith to believe in evolution than in creation.  I think it is good enough to say that it takes faith to believe in evolution.   With over one hundred twenty necessities to support human life, before he even considers the existence of the human body, he's believing in his own kind of supernaturalism:  perhaps the god of coincidence.

Three, on scripture, Brooks has fallen off the back of the turnip truck -- figuratively -- because we understand that some of scripture uses figures of speech and symbolism.  But that's lost on the shallow and unsubstantial.  Give him a warm beverage and point him toward a beautiful view -- figuratively.

Four, the discontinuity of scripture proceeds from God's sovereign love.  God condescends to man to save him at various times and in diverse, non-contradictory manners.   The annals of a nation Israel arose as a monumental portion of God's historical arch.  Through the seed of Abraham would all the nations of the earth be blessed.

Five, the apex of stupidity is losing your own soul, even for the whole world, let alone a commentary gig on PBS and a slot on the New York Times op ed page.  When Brooks wrote, "stupidity of the fundamentalists," and "most religions are kind of weird,"  he took the role of provocateur and ridiculer for a moment.  Most fundamentalists are stupid, just on average less stupid than most others, and most religions are kind of weird, all of them but one.  Intellectual suicide, which Brooks commits, is both stupid and weird.

When you believe in one God, who is the Author of scripture, you have to believe one interpretation of scripture.  The founding fathers only meant one thing when they wrote the constitution and they were quite fallible human beings.  Since God wrote scripture, you're stupid and weird to take the self-contradicting position of several truths, like Brooks does with his embrace of "multiple viewpoints." He compares to a fifth grader looking for another interpretation for "clean your room."

Multiple viewpoints arise out of necessity from a relativistic society, which don't represent the Bible or even a legitimate God, let alone the one and true God, the God of the Bible.  Brooks, gazing over the side of El Capitan at Yosemite, doesn't take several viewpoints on gravity.  If he sees writing in the sand, he isn't okay with "the wave or the wind caused that."  He's just not that stupid or weird.

Hannah W. Smith, Universalism, and an Unholy and Unhappy Life: part 6 of 21 in Hannah W. Smith: Keswick Founder, Higher Life Preacher, Quaker Quietist and Universalist Heretic

This entire 21-part study appears on the FaithSaves.net website in a study entitled “Hannah Whitall Smith: Higher Life Writer, Speaker on Sanctification, Developer of the Keswick Theology, Quaker Quietist and Universalist Heretic.” Click here to read the entire study.

 

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“Judging by her unhappy and un-Christian marriage and the fact that none of her children who survived to adulthood were born again or honored the Lord, Mrs. Smith neither had the true “secret” of a happy Christian life nor the spiritual power to affect others for Christ.”

 

to read the section that was in the blog post below.

Is There Any Spiritual Authority Outside of a Church and Other than the Lord Jesus Christ?

Once upon a time, some people outside of First Baptist of Hammond warned about Jack Hyles. Hyles had worked his situation to insulate against outside interference.  He had established a strong grip of pastoral authority, even when it was obvious to anyone that he was long disqualified from the office.

When some attempted intervention with Hyles, they were dismissed as undermining church authority. Since then, in my lifetime, I have seen this play out again and again in numbers of different places with the same claims of individual church authority being sacrosanct.  Is it true that another church does not have authority over another church?  Does the chain of authority end at a single church?

Here Presbyterians might pipe up.  They offer presbyteries, synods, general assembly, and confessions.  They would claim some biblical basis for this system and tout the quality control it offers.  The church council has authority over individual churches according to this arrangement. Truly, if that is a biblical structure, we should follow it.  I don't think so, but I digress.

A church with which I was very close, at which I was a one time member, began a rot at the head. Then I heard the idea that if someone warned the members, he was stepping someplace without authority.  He was doing the worse thing.  The rotting of the church was bad, but he made the warning worse.  The dilapidation of the church was better than messing with church authority.  You might call this laying down the church authority card.

About every week, I visit other church's members and try to pry them from their churches.  Is this wrong?  Is that messing with church authority?  Is it dividing a church?  At what point, is it permissible to do anything about what's going wrong with another church?  Our church says, my priest says, my pastor says, is a primary basis for not listening.  They don't need scripture; they've got their leader.

Some might say, you can do something.  You can pray.  You can talk to the pastor of that church, try to change his mind, make a difference that way.  I agree with pray.  I also think that faith without works is dead.  While I'm praying, the Bible tells me to do something about someone who disobeys. Prayer in that sense is faithless.  I agree with confront the pastor.  And he shuts it down.  You're done, and when you say one more thing, you're what?  You are messing with the authority of that church. You've got your own church, so, really, mind your own business.

So you've now talked to the pastor and he's doubled down.  He has battened down the hatches and circled the wagons and closed ranks in numbers of ways.  You either don't understand church authority, you disrespect it, or you're arrogant.  You can't tell him, them, what to do.  You are operating outside of your realm of authority.

Enter my local only church doctrine.  I'm local only.  Local only guys really respect the authority of each church.  When someone works around the pastor or operates on another church not his own, he's proven that he's not a local only guy.  That's sort of universal church happening in practice.  Is this right?

Jesus is over all the churches and Jesus wrote the Bible.  The use of the generic noun, "church," says there is only one church, His church.  There are not a variety of churches.  There is only His church, His.  Church.  When another church disobeys the Bible, at what point are you defying church authority?  Again, Jesus is the Head of the church.  He walks in the midst of His churches.  He's a body part -- the Head of the body, of each body.  He's also the body.  The body, over which He is the Head, is His body.

Jesus said, "I will build my church."  He has only one church.  And each of those churches are to have the same mind. What is that mind?  What is the source of that unity?  It is the truth.  The truth is authority outside of every church and other than the Lord Jesus Christ.  How does Jesus Head the church?  Through His Words.  He rules through His Words.  Each church is ultimately under the authority of scripture, so each church doesn't have the authority to disobey scripture.  Disobedience to scripture is the worst abuse of authority.

In a sense, Jesus is the Truth, so the truth is still Jesus.  But you know what I mean.  People outside of a church can judge another church according to the truth.  And they can intervene with the truth.  It's true that they can only say something.  They don't have a vote.

Once a whole church stops listening, you can't do anything anymore, just like you can't do anything with a person you evangelize who won't listen.  You dust your feet of that church, just like you would that individual.  At what point do you let it go?  Can only a church judge church authority?

We have an example of churches intervening in each other's matters in Acts 15.  There were two churches, one in Antioch and one in Jerusalem, on the outs with each other, and the leadership met to stay in fellowship.  The fellowship between two churches was important.  Would each church just say, "It's none of your business," or, "You're just getting your nose in another church's matter?"  Not if they cared about each other, and not if they loved the church and Jesus and the truth.

In the end, is church authority more important than the truth or is church authority a means to an end, which is the Truth?  We are sanctified by the Truth, not church authority.  Church authority is a truth, but not a truth to abuse truth.

The church authority card could be used in an abusive way.  I think it was in the Hyles situation, the one I had several years ago with a church with which we were a member.  That church rallied other churches to its side, saying that its authority was being undermined and attacked.

I can't do anything with authority in another church except tell its members the truth.  I'm not there to see events like its members can see, but I can judge doctrine, perhaps even better than the church people themselves.  There is some practice I can judge.  If I get on youtube and see false worship, I'm seeing it.  I can read a doctrinal statement.  I can interview, ask questions, and hear it or see it myself.  We can know things about a church from the outside.  The Acts 15 churches were judging those types of beliefs and practices themselves, when they judged each other.  And then they did something about it.

Many of the decisions about what do do with a particular person or pastor or church are each judgment calls.  You act in wisdom, relying on biblical principle.  Any men should be willing to have their teaching and practice exposed to reasonable, biblical criticism.  Every church should be willing to defend their practice.  I know I want to do that.  I want to explain why we believe and practice like we do.  If what I believe and practice is good and the truth, then I should want to and be able to defend it in front of more than just my own church people.

The Bible itself is authority outside of a church.  No church has authority outside of scripture.  When you lay down what God says, that still rules over a church, whether it comes from the outside or from within.

30, 60, 100: Can We Conclude That More Fruit Was Caused by the One Receiving the Seed?

You might hear something so many times that you think it is the truth, but sometimes it is the truth and sometimes not.  In the classroom teaching for over 25 years, I will ask students a question, and after the first one responds, others will take their answer down the same path, even though it is wrong.  It is human nature.  I'm asking you reader if the same thing is done with one vital aspect of the parable of the soils (sower) in Matthew 13 and Mark 4.  Here is what I'm talking about in Matthew 13:

But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

I'm especially referring to the last part, "some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty."

Does the text itself connect the differences in fruit bearing to something done by the person who received the seed?  I've never myself heard a presentation that would imply a "no" answer to that question.  I remember hearing a number of factors that differentiate between the results someone sees in his sowing of seed -- more power with God and more fruit, more dedication to God and more fruit, or more sowing and more fruit -- those types of reasons.  I've never heard someone teach a theological randomness, ambiguity, or dubiousness.

What I'm saying is that Jesus wasn't communicating cause of the greater fruitfulness.  He was only telling us that the amounts might be different.  We can't conclude anything from the greater results.  What we do know is that they'll be varied.  Fruit will be there, but it will be varied.

Men have taught that one could conclude something about the quality of this believer, the one who received the seed, by the nature of his 100, versus the 60 or 30 of the others.  30 is an average Christian, 60 a good one, and 100, par excellence.  This has fueled a desire to be the 100.  And so how do you get 100?  Well, here's how.  And then comes the almost sheer pragmatism.  The bigger church claims superior spirituality based upon its size, and they often uses these verses as a basis for that.  The smaller church must be doing something wrong, and it needs some kind of reeducation to be a 60 or 100 church, if it's only a 30.  Even if someone doesn't teach this as true, it is most often what it seems that churches believe.

The Matthew 13 and Mark 4 passages are used as a proof text.  But do those passages prove this? Look at them.

We can conclude that a believer will be fruitful, but the passage doesn't say that the more fruitful he is, the greater believer he is.   Some bring a hundred, some sixty, and some thirty, but with no stated reason.  Certain Christians will bear more fruit than others.

Matthew 13 itself makes the point that the fruitfulness doesn't result from the seed sowing, but from the condition of the soil.  Many other passages confirm this theological view.  1 Corinthians 3:7 says, "neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase."  The ones who plant and water, all Christians, are irrelevant as to reproduction.  God gives the increase.  In the Matthew 13 text, Jesus refers back to Isaiah 6 and God's revelation that Isaiah would not see fruit from his endeavor.  1 Corinthians 15:58 says that if your labor is in the Lord, it is not vain.

The passage isn't about the sower bearing fruit.  It's about the condition of the soil having an impact on the result of the seed sown.  You'll know someone is good ground because he receives the seed and brings forth fruit of whatever amount that might be.  Hundred, sixty, and then thirty are about the soil where the seed is planted, not about the sower.

A lot of wacky strategies, techniques, and deeds have come from seeking the 100, like some sort of lost city of gold.  Seminars explain how to get the greater fruit.  Certain programs offer a guarantee. They will work.

True conversion won't happen just anywhere.  The hearts must be good ground.  The recipients must strive to enter the narrow gate.

Will some churches get bigger because they are more obedient, more faithful to the Great Commission?  I believe so.  If one church sows to one million people and another one to one thousand, the one who sows to more people might see more fruit.  On the other hand, you can sow one million seeds on concrete and one thousand on good ground and the one sowing on better ground will get better results.  You can't judge anything as to the spiritual condition of the sower from the result.

Some churches that are disobedient and unfaithful will get bigger, because they have used worldly means of accomplishing the growth.  When someone does everything right, he can still see very little tangible results, doing more and better than someone with larger visible consequences.  Scripture doesn't emphasize how big your church will become. It teaches faithfulness and purity and love for God and his neighbor.

You could argue that the church with thirty has the smaller production, because it doesn't sow enough seed, but you can't tell that by the number.  You would have to be able to see the faithfulness, the obedience with the gospel, firsthand.  Some churches get much bigger, but their ministry is actually far smaller.  We cannot conclude that more fruit was caused by the one receiving the seed.

Hannah W. Smith, Inner Light and Biblical Misinterpretation; part 5 of 21 in Hannah W. Smith: Keswick Founder, Higher Life Preacher, Quaker Quietist and Universalist Heretic

This entire 21-part study appears on the FaithSaves.net website in a study entitled “Hannah Whitall Smith: Higher Life Writer, Speaker on Sanctification, Developer of the Keswick Theology, Quaker Quietist and Universalist Heretic.” Click here to read the entire study.

 

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“Hannah, as a natural concomitant of her continuationism and Quakerism, believed in the Inner Light heresy and was consequently an opponent of the sole authority of Scripture.”

 

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