Category: Theology

The Reformation of Philosophy: Ordering Philosophical Questions in the Light of God’s Eternal Decree. A Christian Individualist’s Reformation Day Meditation, Dogmatically Expressed.

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God has worked all things according to the counsel of His will.[1]

How do you like them apples, O Man?

Every breathtaking sunset, every animal-immolating forest fire.

Beethoven’s Fifth. Auschwitz’s gas chambers.

The regeneration of every healthy cell, the proliferation of every tumor.

Every orgasm, every rape.

Five hundred eight years ago today, Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic monk of the Augustinian order, proposed to debate in public certain theological propositions, 95 in all. He famously listed them on paper affixed (probably not nailed) to Castle Wittenburg’s door, the German farming town’s bulletin board.

Thus began the “Protestant Reformation,” without which there would be no Christian Individualism. The latter is downstream from the Reformers’ (partial but significant) work of recovering Biblical truth.

As a Christian Individualist, I do not subscribe to any Reformed ecclesiology,[2] yet I happily adopt the motto of Reformer Jodocus Van Lodenstein (1620-1677), semper reformanda.[3]

The object of continuing reformation, however, is not the society we call a “church,” but the individuals whom the Holy Spirit is progressively conforming to Christ through their obedience to His Word. Continue reading “The Reformation of Philosophy: Ordering Philosophical Questions in the Light of God’s Eternal Decree. A Christian Individualist’s Reformation Day Meditation, Dogmatically Expressed.”

Christian Individualism: A Substack for the book

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1902). 1921, the year he attended Moody Bible College (not Institute).

It’s a work in progress. It won’t replace this site but instead will anticipate next year’s publication (God willing) of Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers. The goal is to address questions that arose since I finished the 106,000+-word draft that finally found its way to the publisher. (It’s in the proofreading stage.)

I’ll discuss the book here on the way to its 2026 launch, but not in the detail you’ll find there; nor will I go into the finer points of Christian apologetics and “church history” as I might here.

So, please let me know what you think of that site’s very first “publication,” dated today: Christian Individualism: A way of life and, next year, a book and consider subscribing and spreading the word. Thank you!

Marking seven years, clarifying this site’s future course

This site was launched on October 3, 2018, seven years ago this month. In the future, I will focus on next year’s (God willing) publication of Christian Individualism and dedicate its posts to developing my understanding of Christian Individualism.

That understanding is not necessarily shared by anyone else, not even those who, like me, agree with the Biblical ecclesiology and eschatology of Otis Q. Sellers and the Word of Truth Ministry he founded in 1936. (Search his name on this site.)  Sellers didn’t found, lead, or belong to a “denomination,” and neither do I. I’m a sinner saved by grace. Period.

Overall, I’m pleased with this site’s more than 300 mini-essays, many being ancestors of book chapters. Now, however, in the time left to me, I will more sharply define the course of this site. It won’t be devoid of politics, history, and philosophy, but I will interpret all things, including those topics, through the lens of Scripture. I will ask those who disagree what their lenses are.

There will be more apologetics, that is, the defense of the Gospel. That will require making clear what I mean by that term as well as what it means to defend the hope that’s in me (1 Peter 3:15) and the peace that comes with being justified by faith and believing the Gospel (Romans 5:1). My intellectual world is centered on, revolves around, that.

I will give Christ the pre-eminence He’s always been due. Not C. L. R. James. Not Herbert Aptheker. Not Susanne Langer. Been there; done that. I will box up my books on, say, the history of communism and crack open more on the history of Christians living in the Dispensation of Grace, a.k.a. “church history.”

The logline of this site has been, “Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days (2 Tim. 3; Eph. 3:2). I will do a better job of living up to that implicit promise.

“. . . for the young man shall die a hundred years old.”

Yes, but because of the eonian (“eternal”) life flowing from the King—from Him Who is Life itself—to His subjects . . . not by organ transplants!

No more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days, for the young man shall die a hundred years old, and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed. Isaiah 65:20 (ESV)

The fiend in the Kremlin—the KGB alum who, we’re told, was “caught” the other day in a “hot mic” moment—fantasized to his equally fiendish Beijing host that “human organs can be continuously transplanted” and “the longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.”

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.” Genesis 3:4 (ESV)

In the future manifest Kingdom of God, the divine dispensation that will follow the present dispensation of grace (Ephesians 3:2; KJV), death will no longer be an enemy that eventually catches up with you, no matter what you eat, how much you exercise, or how many organs are transplanted from someone else’s body into yours. No infant will die prematurely, and centenarians will be considered boys and girls. If you die, it will be because something you do earns God’s wrath, as Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11), who lived in the “ear stage of the Kingdom” (Mark 4:26-29), earned that wrath by lying to the Holy Spirit. The present dispensation is a “parenthesis,” a regnum interruptum, if you will, between that stage and the “full grain in the ear stage,” the manifest Kingdom of God. Disease and death are outworkings of the curse of the Fall of man, not particular judgments. When God acts today, He acts only in grace.

Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers will, God willing, be published in 2026. In the meantime, searching <Otis Q. Sellers> on this site will provide answers to many of the questions that my dogmatic assertions above may have occasioned. But you can always ask one below.

Whence “revolutionary” moral outrage? An attempt at a biblical answer.

That’s the question underlying my current project. Answering it might explain why I was drawn to revolutionary Marxism (of interest at least to me, if not to you).  Youngsters can be at once hypercritical and credulous. Revolutionary rejecters of the existing order, they fall for one or another “explanation” hook, line, and sinker.

Rummaging through the lives of Marxist intellectuals is no mere romantic, antiquarian interest of mine (although it is partly that). I will draw upon but not add to the biographies already written. I’m trying to understand, to the extent it is intelligible, the demonic madness we see on college campuses, draped in the language of moral outrage. (“F—  finals! Free Palestine!,” announced one savage disrupting  Columbia University students who were trying to use the main library to prepare for final exams, to cite only one example. I find the categories of intelligibility in Christian theology, specifically anthropology.

Created in God’s image and living in His world as (we all are), the miscreants have a sense of moral outrage (however misinformed), but they have nothing in which to ground it. On Monday, they’ll affirm that it’s wrong to starve children; on Tuesday, that an unborn child’s natural protector has the right to procure the services of an abortionist to destroy that child chemically, or cut him or her to pieces, or leave him or her to expire on a metal table. Most of them, if pressed, will say that, strictly speaking, we don’t know that we have more moral dignity than that of “evolved,” i.e., rearranged, pond scum. They merely dogmatize that we do.

I’m stepping back from the news and noise of the day to reflect on more civilized specimens of humanity, however much their careers betrayed the civilizing impulse. I want to explore why they thought Marxist revolution adequately addressed the moral outrage of interracial subjugation, cruelty, and savagery, evils that energized them? That it was such an answer is the conclusion at which my three very different intellectuals arrived.  It all starts with outrage at one or another fact in one man’s experience: colonialism, imperialism, slavery, peonage, Jim Crow.

I will also ask whether these men, if they were alive today, would embrace today’s savages. I fear they would have, as counterintuitive as such a conclusion might strike some. Continue reading “Whence “revolutionary” moral outrage? An attempt at a biblical answer.”

Christ Crucified, the death penalty, and the abolition of death

“Saint Dismas the Good Thief.” Icônes arabes : art chrétien du Levant, France: Institut du monde arabe (Public domain)

One of the criminals alongside whom Jesus was crucified said that while He had done nothing to deserve capital punishment, they had. That malefactor said they had received it justly (δικαίως, dikaiōs) and prayed He would remember him when He comes into His kingdom, implying that He is a King.

Jesus then spent what little energy He had left to promise the penitent one life in that Kingdom—but not to correct his penology (Luke 23:39-43). He had no reason to. As God (אֱלֹהִ֔ים, Elohim) warned Noah, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Genesis 9:6).

This imperative is honored in many places in the Law of Moses, which He came to fulfill. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish (καταλῦσαι, katalysai) them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). His dying, however, would abolish (καταργήσαντος, katargēsantos) death itself (2 Timothy 1:10).

This week especially, those of us who by His grace identify with the penitent malefactor embrace that truth.

 

On dogma and dogmatism

William F. Vallicella,Ph.D.

Bill Vallicella, a friend and philosophical sparring partner of two decades, recently discussed another thinker’s argument from design to God.[1] Since my interest lies in biblical rather than “classical” theism, I will not engage with the argument itself or his discussion of it. Instead, I want to examine the presuppositions of philosophical theology general and a thesis of Bill’s in particular.

The presupposition of philosophical theology is that it is licit for a human being to suspend his knowledge of יהוה (Yahweh)—the God of the Bible—in order to explore the limits of philosophical inquiry with respect to God’s existence. From time to time, Bill revisits his thesis that there are no rationally compelling (“knock-down”) arguments for or against any metaphysical position. He did so again in his recent post, providing an opportunity for me to restate my position.

I was reminded of an essay I reposted in 2023, which first appeared on my old site twenty years earlier. In it, I critique “Dogmatic Uncertainty” by the British libertarian classicist and novelist Sean Gabb.[2] Both Gabb and Bill implicitly rely on the contrast between δόξα (doxa) and ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē)—that is, between “mere” opinion and certain knowledge. I presume that Bill, an expert in argumentation, has not ruled out the possibility that we are within our rights to claim ἐπιστήμη about God without supporting argumentation. But if I make that claim, am I being necessarily “dogmatic” in the pejorative sense? Continue reading “On dogma and dogmatism”

Trump’s dream: A merit-based and color-blind society

His courage and oratory are almost enough to explain how he came to lead the Civil Rights Movement (CRM). We must not, however, overlook his profession: he was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, an academically trained preacher in the Baptist tradition. Such titles bestow an odor of sanctity. They didn’t deflect the assassin’s bullet—ultimately set into motion by whom, we may never know[1]—but they shouldn’t inhibit us from questioning his message.

Unfortunately, the latter was the Social(ist) Gospel (SG), not the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the wolf of socialism in sheep’s clothing of biblical passages. King’s education was downstream to the theology of SG’s American fountainhead, Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), who at Rochester Theological Seminary had studied under the orthodox Reformed Baptist theologian Augustus Hopkins Strong (1836–1921).[2]

The Rev. Howard Thurman

More immediately, King came under the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) and Howard Thurman (1899-1981).[3] Neither man held Jesus’ view of Scripture. The Bible may be profound, insightful, inspiring, they thought, even “inspired,” but not breathed-out by God, the status which it claims for itself, and all that follows from that status.[4] Through reading Thurman the young King discovered the maverick Hindu Mohandas Gandhi.[5]

“So what?,” you may ask. Here’s what: King denied Jesus’ divinity[6] and resurrection[7]. The Bible was not, for King, the inerrant word of God. Such an opinion is nonsense, the product of a naïve, bygone era. For him, it was quite errant. Continue reading “Trump’s dream: A merit-based and color-blind society”

Jimmy and Joe: Progressive bookends of a (soon-to-be-bygone?) era

When the truth is being obscured, one may make an exception to the nil nisi bonum rule.

Joe Biden sold his soul to the Progressives, but Jimmy Carter began his public life as one. The peanut farmer’s folksy demeanor masked his support for the Left’s agenda, arguably more scandalous than “Scranton Joe’s” scam because of Carter’s Christian credentials. Continue reading “Jimmy and Joe: Progressive bookends of a (soon-to-be-bygone?) era”