Postmortem 22: Calvinism, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

1:09 Unveiling Calvinism's Purpose to Shatter Modern Values Welcome to Ichabod of Kings cast. This is your host, Cal for the Dead cast, the non host of the non existing podcast that you're listening to. And this is another smaller episode. A lot of the themes in this have been covered in different parts, but I want to just give a brief explanation of the utility of Calvinism or the concept of Calvinism. 1:31 What, what do I mean when I defend Calvinism or would describe myself as a Calvinist and what do I not mean? And there is a lot of problems with quote UN quote Calvinism. But the, the, the utility in it as, as I'll describe is to shatter the kind of framework that is often used as a wet blanket to presume and assume all kinds of pre-existing value judgments and moral judgments that people make. 1:58 Exposing the Pervasive Human Rights Religion in Society So obviously one of the most clear ones is the current destruction of Palestine and Gaza by by Netanyahu and by the Israeli government and the nation state of Israel. And whatever exact position you take on this and why, right, you have a popular outcry generally on the left that is about the the tragedy and inhumanity to Palestinians, how horrible, horrible, horrible this is. 2:28 And so pictures of kids getting run over with tanks and getting shot and murdered and blown up. And of course, right, you know, on the Israeli side, they put out their own propaganda about like, look at all like the poor Jews getting blown up or murdered by Hamas and these other terrorist organizations. 2:46 Now, in both of these cases, whether it's the poor Jews or the Arab Palestinians being mowed down, there are these assumptions about value judgments that go on, right? We have this sense of human rights and the human dignity to self actualize that every single person, no matter who or what they are and what conditions they're born in into whatever family they are born to have the privilege to self actualize. 3:15 And everyone else must respect that self actualization. You cannot infringe upon this, though of course, some countries still practice the death penalty that believe in this sort of thing. But that's why the death penalty is getting abolished. 3:31 And so Catholicism has been molded by this in the general form, right? Of course, there are still trads that float around that are in rebellion to the kind of direction, the spirit of the current Vatican. This is the basic attitude and atmosphere of every single major state Protestant church in Europe, all the mainline Protestant churches in America, and even a significant number of evangelical churches. 3:59 This is the basic idea in Judaism, which looks a lot more like, I mean, like you have like the crazy already, you know, Conservative, Orthodox Judaism. But for most Jews, what does it mean to be a Jew? It's practicing the human rights religion and even even maybe identifying the human rights religion as uniquely Jewish, right. 4:19 This is our unique contribution to the world. So whether it is a left wing Jewish magazine talking about tikkun olam, right, repairing the world. And that's like that's what Judaism is about. It's this very this earth, this worldly attempts to build world harmony and World Peace and human rights. 4:38 And by extension that would require democracy and maybe being anti fascist or if not being socialistic. And then you have people like Jordan Peterson breaking down in front of a crowd crying about how the Jews are the best of us. 4:55 The Jews are the great last to hope for the West. And what is the West for Jordan Peterson? It is a regime of human rights and protecting the rights of men and women, right? Gay and straight, you know, as long as the straight stuff doesn't get totally supplanted by the gay stuff, let alone the trans stuff. 5:14 But he's OK with all of that. I mean, Jordan Peterson became famous not because he was opposed to using preferred pronouns, but he didn't like the school requiring him to use the pronouns. So he would out of decency use somebody's preferred pronouns, but he didn't want to be made to use them as this. 5:34 I mean, I guess sufficiently and it's time this was kind of worth celebrating. But this is the essence of Peterson. This is, you know, it's no surprise that Christianity is just this kind of Jungian matrix of symbols that talk about the quest of a man. And this is any man, any woman to self actualize the hero's journey. 5:53 So whatever this is from actual young and how this kind of is filtered through Joseph Campbell, right? The the quintessential human story in every society is the quest to become who you're supposed to be, whatever that means, right? 6:09 And this is the essence of the human rights religion and this is the essence of Judaism. And then so whatever right, you call this judeo-christian ethics or values, but it is really human rights. This is the universal that can absorb the odd particularities of Catholics or Protestants of whatever variety, or Jews or right. 6:31 And by extension, this is reaching out to Hinduism in the form of Gandhi and Gandhi worship and valorization. Hinduism is the religion of peace and then even Islam, right? And this isn't like some kind of sneaky, a way of sliding in Islam is that Islam is really just this hollow thing. 6:51 Yes, you have some interesting mystical traditions that come from and work through Islam and you have some interesting metaphysical speculations. And to whatever extent this is just using Islam as a cloak to hide A commitment to Aristotle or Plato or something else. But the core of Islam and whether it's the Quran and you know, with the Hadid added on, it is this kind of hollow legalistic shell and it can be filled with whatever. 7:15 So Muslims who come to the unless they live in ghettos, they acculturate and they become basically insufferable liberals or leftists. And this is, this is quite common, right? There's nothing contradictory about someone like Rasheeda Talib or Ilhan Omar being Muslims and being, you know, social justice Democrats. 7:37 OK, This is totally compatible. So this is this kind of overarching thing that is like, infected everything. 7:42 Contrasting Islam's Anthropology with Christian Original Sin And this is just the general way that ethics are done in today's world. And this is just civilization and being civilized about things. Of course, they're also the fringe ideas that still hang around in the world, whether it is the brutality of enforcing A Hindu caste system that is technically illegal but it's still in function, or it's Islamic terrorists connected to Salafism trying to rebuild Dar al Islam, rebuilding the Islamic world and a caliphate or something like that. 8:15 You know, there is this sort of understanding that violence is used in as necessary and of course, right, People who participate in the human rights religion also find violence acceptable to a certain extent. You have to remove the enemies of a tolerant society or whatever. 8:32 So violence is always in play, but violence against fascists, violence against bigots is necessary as sort of a reluctant thing. But it's because they deny the humanity of others that they must be removed. And you would say, well, of course Islam doesn't really do that, right? 8:51 Like, of course, like the Hindu caste system doesn't do that. The caste system, you can make a kind of argument about Hinduism, about a kind of hierarchy of being or something of that effect. But with Islam, you do have this bizarre combination of extreme violence and repression based on what a Christian may call a Pelagian anthropology, the idea that man is born capable of just doing whatever he wants. 9:17 So as Muslims will tell you, everyone is born a Muslim. The way I've heard it described is that everyone is born on the highway to heaven, but people make turns to get off of the highway. And of course within the Islamic world there is a fatalism. 9:34 Maybe they wouldn't call it that, but there's an arbitrariness of of what Allah wills. And so some people end up in torture, some people end up in paradise. But this all presumes upon the original innocence of man, original in the sense of every single man that is born currently. 9:53 So Islam is derivative from Christian cosmology. They take a very different turn and twist with the role of Adam and Paradise. You can clearly see the influence of Jewish fables in the relationship between Satan and Adam and how Satan falls. 10:11 But this is very different from how Christians understood things, particularly in the cortex of the Apostle Paul, and understanding the role of sin in the fall from sin in the way that this was understood by figures like Augustine. 10:26 And this isn't to try to get exactly into hammering out what original sin is or what what exactly it means or doesn't mean or how Christians have divided over this, that not every Christian who believes in something like original sin believes in original guilt, that the the progeny of Adam were not guilty of Adam's sin, even if they're guilty of the consequences. 10:47 So sometimes some Eastern Orthodox people have tried to claim that they don't believe in what Augustine taught in terms of original guilt, They believe in ancestral sin. And so this can be absurdly demonstrated by somebody like John Romanides, who's kind of a fringe Orthodox figure that was sort of popular among some Anglophone Orthodox, this Greek Orthodox priest in America that taught that basically sin is related to some kind of fluid in your spine. 11:14 And so when you practice hezechasm, you're reducing like the physiological manifestation of sin. So Orthodoxy is like a medical therapeutic practice. It's not psychological or something which he accuses the West of being obsessed with guilt in the state of guilt and being ashamed of yourself in this sort of stuff. 11:35 But whatever the truth of all of that is this really this is this really has nothing to do with the main point that Islam does not accept really at all as far as I can tell. Maybe there are some sects that believe in something like this, some idea of an original sin or a sin nature as evangelicals were calling. 11:53 And traditionalists will cry about how that is a misuse of the term nature and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I don't want touch that either. That should be kind of obvious. How to parse that. 12:04 Calvinism's Core: Man's Innate Evil and God's Covenant So this is a very different kind of cosmology of what I want to lay out is sort of this basic Calvinism that people were born evil. Now you can qualify that to say that man is obscured in his original goodness, that man was created to be good, but man everywhere is born evil, with a tendency to do evil and to act evil and to be evil, and therefore this concept of human rights does not exist. 12:30 Man stands in a position of judgment before the throne of God, that no man is guiltless by nature and dint of his birth in the race of Adam, and that salvation can only come through baptism into the name of Jesus Christ. 12:46 And I'm not going to touch exactly where. What does that mean in terms of the relationship between the sacrament and the state of salvation and personal faith, or whether this is applicable to adults only or to children and adults or children of believing adults or our this is cashed out. 13:04 So I think the Calvinist way of doing this, and this is on the side before I take off in sort of the negative direction, I think the Calvinist construction of this, and this would include the Church of England as well, but this emphasis on the covenant and the emphasis on these ways of belonging that make these rituals meaningful. 13:23 This is a much more effective way of explaining the New Testament because very easily people start to think of sacraments, or by extension these lesser rights sacramentals. It's basically a form of white magic. So the Eucharist has this white magic power to counteract black magic. 13:41 So you put your you, you know, you have peasant superstitions from the Middle Ages where you like, don't eat the host, you keep it in your pocket or you put it in a necklace and something and it will, it will deflect evil forces. And this is part of the Gothic fascination with Catholicism and it's materiality in an age where there is this emphasis on scientific rigor and material circumstances in on the continent and in the British Empire and in America. 14:09 But this fascination with Catholic materiality kind of dovetails well with this adaptation to a superstitious view of these things. So in Bram Stoker's Dracula, right, the German professor Van Helsing, even though he's not a particularly good Catholic or a believing Catholic, and none of the other characters, as far as I can recall, are Catholic. 14:34 They believe even the power of Catholic works and Catholic relics and, and the power of the host to reflect the forces of evil. So this is basically a form of magic. And so that there is always that tendency and then you have the hostile rejection of that. 14:49 And then you basically Chuck out all sacraments and they don't really mean anything because what all that matters is your inward disposition. And this is the tendency towards Quakerism. And and you can understand why that would be a seesaw back and forth where people who are flooded with all of this superstitious trash just say throw it all out, right? 15:11 I'm going to smash this icon in half and God doesn't do anything because he actually doesn't care about this garbage and you're blaspheming him, right? Read the second commandment. So you have this kind of Batil Sturm that the destruction of the statues in the Netherlands and things like that. Is this whiplash? 15:27 And then you see, you know, traditionalists freak out so they got their icono pop corners. It gets to the point of being garish. But this is this emphasis on materiality and this emphasis on the body even to like grotesquely modern levels of like, we should be more comfortable with our physicality and our sexuality and stuff like that. 15:47 You saw from Catholic family planning manuals and stuff from from the John Paul 2 era. And so you have this emphasis on materiality, whichever way it goes, even to the point of it becoming basically a form of magic that this has this warding power and, and the covenantal way of understanding all of this, which is a unique contribution from Calvinist. 16:12 That doesn't mean every single Calvinist in history, you know, including John Calvin was, was highly thoughtful about the role the covenant played, the new covenant and structuring the relationship of Christians to one another, to Christians and non Christians, how family structures operate, how political structures operate. 16:30 And, and, and you know, ultimately, you know, the world these rituals have in the life of the church and the the Puritans did a good job with kind of understanding this and how they formed their New England colonies. But you could also see this in Old England and even in the established Church of England among people who remain. 16:50 So you can you have a very strong sense of covenantal belonging in somebody like John Tillotson who becomes Archbishop of Canterbury during the Glorious Revolution. But you also can see this in non jury Mystics like William Law who spends a lot of time talking about the covenant and how the covenant brings you to the Spirit of God that works through you and transforms your heart. 17:14 And this then kind of has this cascading effect somewhat to Methodism, but this is just strictly the English version of this. You can see similar stuff in German theology and Dutch theology and French Huguenot theology, whatever it might be. 17:30 And eventually this kind of bleeds over. So later Lutheran's will adopt covenantal terms and emphasis on understanding the Heil's Gesichte, the sacred history, the unfolding of the covenant through time. And there's Reform theologians will first pioneer this idea of redemptive history and looking at the covenant and how all this stuff works. 17:51 And it gives a meaning to history and a meaning to time as this unfolds without making it a slave to time. So it's the historicity of Christian dogma and the continued relation between God and man through the Bible, right? The Bible isn't just beamed into one prophets mind, the whole thing like the Koran with Mohammed. 18:12 But the eternal Word of God comes to the people of God in the times that God designates, and you have the eternal take the form of temporality. And this is basically, I mean, I've said this before, but this is basically what Plato recognized in the role of the myth. You have to tell a story. 18:27 And in this case, it is the historical unfolding, right? Even if it seems mythical in some parts, it's the historical unfolding of God's Word, the God's people through the ages. And this continues past the closing of the Canon. The Canon is to interpret the times. 18:44 It is the highest authority in the Calvinist emphasis on Scripture and even judging Hellenic influence and holding it up to the light of Scripture. That Roman and Greek ideas, philosophical or otherwise, can be judged. 19:00 Roman and Greek law can be judged. Roman and Greek myth and Boise can be judged. All of these things stand in light of Scripture, which is the temporally bounded eternal window into the mind of God. And so this emphasis on covenant, I think is very, very important and, and especially the high place of Scripture for Calvinists. 19:21 Romans 9: Shattering Human Rights with Divine Sovereignty But of course, what does this all amount to right? The the punch line of this cast is that Calvinism with however you want to define it exactly. Calvinism is the axe to wield against human rights religion. It is the way to cut out the cancer of human rights religion within many Christian churches that no, your life doesn't have any meaning intrinsically. 19:46 No ones lives have any intrinsic meaning. This is entirely bestowed by God. It can be given, it can be taken away, and that's the power in text like Romans 9. And this is a favorite text for many Reformed people and Calvinist people. 20:01 And yes, it is about the nations, but it has a kind of fractal application that individuals reflect nations and nations reflect individuals. And this is all throughout the Bible that Jacob is a reference to the nation of Israel, or, you know, calling him just by his name, Israel. 20:17 And the nation of Israel is can be reflected in a single person like Jesus Christ. So starting at verse 9 of Romans 9. For this is the word of promise. At this time will I come, and Sarah shall have a son. And not only this, but when Rebecca also had conceived by 1. 20:34 Even by her father Isaac. For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand not of works, but of Him that calleth, It was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger, as it is written. 20:54 Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated. What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? And this is where someone might want to step in if they can actually understand the punch of this text and say, yeah, there is unrighteousness with God because that's not fair. 21:09 He's judging them before they did good works. He's doing this strictly to make a point about his election. So this is an arbitrary It's explicitly that God chose the younger one to make it clear that God is not a slave to the order in which he establishes that the will of God works through what can easily just become the natural order. 21:30 And it becomes chains, it becomes a law, It becomes effectively a form of sorcery, which is how the Jews end up turning the Torah. Even God's revealed word given to Moses on Sinai can become a form of magic where you hold it against God. 21:47 And so there's a famous Talmud story of God getting out lawyered by a couple of rabbis and then God's like a tear welling up in his eye. I guess like my children have beaten me for the first time. I'm so proud of them. But this is a kind of very disgusting thing, right? This this says that the creator can be subverted by the creation fundamentally. 22:05 And so Paul arguing against this is the anti Talmud. For God is not bound to any particular order he establishes if it contradicts the fundamental principles and the order to which he established the world in the 1st place. So when it's asked is there unrighteousness with God, Paul says God forbid for he set the Moses. 22:26 I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy. For the Scriptures saith unto Pharaoh, even for this same purpose, if I raised thee up, that I might show my power in thee, and that My name might be declared throughout all the earth. 22:48 Therefore having mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth that will say then unto me, why does he yet find fault for who have resisted his will? So here we go, right? This is it's all fate, it's all determined, it doesn't really matter. 23:04 So how can God judge anybody? But Paul goes on, Nay, but, O man, who art thou that replies against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it? Why hast thou made me thus? Have not the Potter power over the clay of the same lump, to make one vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor? 23:23 What if God, willing to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction, and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy which He had afore prepared to glory even unto us, whom He have called not only of Jews only, but also of the Gentiles? 23:44 Intrinsic Human Value: A Flawed Modern Concept So this passage is hopefully familiar to most listeners. But this is a punch in the nose to the human rights religion. You don't have human rights. There are no human rights. God alone has the right to discern what can be done. He's the one who creates covenants, and He's the one who fulfills these covenants according to the purpose in which He gave them in the first place. 24:05 They can't be jury rigged against Him. Where God's getting out lawyer to and tricked by very cunning rabbis, right? This is, you know, again, making God into like the ultimate rabbi that God is a Jew fundamentally and not that the Jews are supposed to be his people. 24:22 So it's a completely inversion of the relationship, but that is exactly what Paul is trying to destroy and that is exactly what human rights religion is trying to obfuscate, that God is a man. And this is, you see this all over the place. This is all the post Holocaust kind of theology that's done so in light of the fact that all of these Jews perished in these work camps during World War 2. 24:46 And this was combined with official anti Semite policy of restrictions on Jews based on blood quanta and removing them from German society. And so you have this. What do you make of it? So it can't be that they're under judgment. It can't reflect the sovereign will of God in raising up Hitler and ultimately destroying the Third Reich and all, you know, whatever happens after that, whatever the meaning of all of this is, but no, it can't have any meaning because that would then mean that this suffering was unleashed by God. 25:18 That would mean God is the devil. We don't want to believe that because again, liberal theology thought this had all been turned behind, right? World War One was the great shattering point in World War 2, only deep in this. And so we can't say that God actually did anything. So God's actually just like us. 25:34 God's a man, right? And so incarnational theology becomes warped and mutated to make this point that God is a fellow sufferer. God was as Bart sort of believed. And this is a debate among Bharati. And So what exactly he meant by this right, in God choosing to be a Trinity. 25:52 So there's this sort of volunteeristic aspect of God being three persons and one substance, whatever exactly that means, right? He he chooses this through his will, but it's ultimately to become Jesus Christ that and to suffer in this way and to suffer with his creation. 26:08 And why does he do this? Because in some ways, in some kind of reflective, eternal way, God is more fundamentally a man than even other human beings. And what Bart means by this, it's like, again, it could just be slippery language. He loves these absurd paradoxes. 26:24 And people hammer him like, what does that mean? What does that mean? But this, this is attractive. In the 1960s, you know, combined with Bonhoeffer about this death of God theology, God died in the camps. And so when Elie Wiesel writes at night, which is a novel that's designed for Catholics, basically writes it in French for French Catholics, right? 26:44 There's this very sappy scene, right? You get caught up in the narrative. And so it makes you want to maybe shed a tear or something. But there's this very sappy scene, totally contrived, but this Jewish youth gets caught by guards in the camp, and he's punished with death and he's hung. 27:00 And so he's strangling to death. And all these guys in the camp are like, upset and frustrated, you know, the youth of the nation being killed. And so one of the Jews says to another, like, where is God in all of this? And the responses? He's on the gallows. And so you can interpret that a couple different ways. 27:16 But if you're a sappy human rights religion Catholic, then you're like, yeah, you know, God is the chief sufferer. God became a man so that he can suffer with us. What does this have to do with sovereignty and governing? The world can't talk about this now. We can't really understand this. 27:32 We have to understand that whatever power or whatever kind of sovereignty can only be exercised by suffering with the people. And so this is, this is very appealing to a certain kind of democratic ethos that your rulers and your leaders, your your members of parliament, your chancellors, your prime ministers, your presidents, they should be the kinds of people rolling in the filth with the rest of us. 27:56 They're no different than the rest of us. They're not heroes. They're they don't have a destiny. They don't have a great vision. And and This is why, I mean, this is an aside. I absolutely hate the 1970s and I really, really hate Jimmy Carter. I I sympathize with him because he was like a man alone at one point. 28:12 His own party kind of hates them and tries to get rid of him. But this kind of sappy, phony Christianity that Jimmy Carter expresses and this idea that and what he represented and what some liberals today wish had succeeded is, you know, I'm just a common guy. 28:27 I'm just a regular guy. I don't really have a plan. I don't really know what's going on, just like the rest of you. But I'm going to try my best to work for you, the people and all this stuff. There's no majesty, there's no glory, there's no radiance. I mean, and not like the fake kind that you get from theatrics and ceremonies and aesthetics, but real power, real grandeur, what was called piety in in in ancient Rome, that you have gravity, that your presence, your virtue speaks of itself, that people, you know, you're a man of destiny striding across the world. 29:03 And this sort of thing has been recognized, but it was blanketed after the war and it was celebrated through this kind of horrible garbage theology. And again, it's in service to the commonality and basic aspects of human life. And this was enshrined through a French Catholic movement called personalism that then eventually dominates the Vatican through Vatican 2. 29:26 But then John Paul 2 is a big personalist. And so every life is a world unto itself, and every life is intrinsically precious. And there's no reason to believe this from the Bible, and there's no reason to believe this from empirical experience. 29:42 And there's no reason to believe this from the course of human history where governments were designed to recognize that some people are better than other people, and it might be through a manifestation of talent. And so you have a somewhat open aristocracy in the form of a Republic, and it might be in the form of monarchy where you breed people to succeed one another in in a royal dynasty. 30:07 And of course, right, this can be criticized and attacked. It has been criticized and attacked that heredity doesn't necessarily prove virtue. But Even so, even if you have a Republic or even some kind of limited democratic government, or even something like Periclean Athens, which was very clearly understood to be a kind of aristocratic democracy, where great families and great individuals like Pericles had to move and direct the masses who vote because otherwise they would be headless and confused. 30:37 But all of these recognize the the value of some lives over others, that some lives are intrinsically more valuable than others. And of course, in light of what, who decides that? Who determines that? Instead, we turn to this kind of sappy idea of, well, you know, intrinsically every life is worth something. 30:55 But there's no reason to believe that based on what? Who gives this evaluation? 31:00 Human Rights: Kantian Fiction and Solemn Providence It's not nature. It's not anywhere you'd have to assume this. And so this is where you know, some kind of Kantian or neo Kantian kind of political metaphysics comes in. We just have to believe this. We can't prove God. We can't prove the immortality of the soul. 31:17 We can't prove the freedom of the will. All this stuff can can appear to be sort of sketchy at best, if not totally incredible. And so human rights is also one of these Kantian fictions. We just have to assume it and work from the basis that it's true, regardless of what the world may say, regardless of our own experiences. 31:36 It just has to be true. And so Calvinism is a great tool to just say, no, it's not. It's not true at all. By the power of the gospel, by the recorded revelations in the Bible that are infallible and canonical. It's not true and no Christian should believe it. 31:54 And you can attack non Christians. Therefore, with this, you believe in fairy tales like human rights. Now, of course you could come up with a different view of this Communists, you know, recognize the basically the malleability and the, you know, lack of utility of certain human life. 32:09 So you crack eggs to make omelets and that sort of thing. And of course, you know, evo psych types or you know, secular national Socialist type. So you can kind of come up with a different conception of this sort of thing, a hierarchy of races. So there's that horrible meme about it's a very Jewish thing to talk about the supremacy of man at the top of a pyramid. 32:30 But it's, it's a very Aryan based Nazi swastika thing to recognize the equality of all life. So I mean that you could cut it in either direction. And so you have neo Nazis that basically adopt A kind of Hindu idea. 32:46 And you see this sometimes where no, like that. Look at the no nobility of this cow. No, human beings are not worth the same as this cow. Or at least some human beings are not worth the same as this cow, right? There's this, there's this kind of natural equality among all life, But obviously there's a hierarchy to life. 33:04 And again, it comes down to a question of what the value of a life is and how and to what extent life has any meaning. And this isn't to say that the Bible doesn't have a unified sense of anthropology, that there is one race of man that subdivides into many different races and many different nations, and there's nothing intrinsically equalizing about that. 33:26 But that there is this unity, and that because man bears the image of God, because that is what man is or should be. Therefore, the death penalty is to be exercised against those who violate that by murdering A fellow man, right? 33:42 Whatever race or or nation or ethnicity, there's this unified sense of humanity. And yet nevertheless, this can be obscured, denied and perverted to horrible dimensions where basically dumping buckets and buckets and buckets of paint and filth and trash on a portrait makes it almost impossible to believe that it ever was a portrait, that it ever did bear this image. 34:08 And because man has this role and man unlike any other creature can fail to enter into his nature. And this becoming the crisis of history, because that can happen, you really do see people who are failed images of God that it's, it's almost like the image of the devil has taken its place. 34:26 And yet Even so, all of this is under the Providence of God. And that's why Paul can say this, whether you think he's talking about individuals or nations or individuals representing nations. And there's this fractal relationship, but however you want to cut it, Paul says, what if God made some for honor, some for dishonor? 34:45 What if some are fitted to be made in in to experience his mercy, and some are being fitted to be made to experience wrath and destruction? And that is what Calvinism unlocks. You can throw all of this stuff out. You can dump it in the trash. All the saccharine stuff about human rights violations prove it. 35:04 You know you. This is one of the big problems. You have no standard. You just claim this stuff. It's all fairy tale fiction. It's because you think it would be true. You think it would be obviously nice because most people believe it. I have the comfort of the herd telling you, you know, that's ridiculous. How could you reject that? 35:19 Obviously it's true. It's not. You can't prove it in anything, anywhere, by any standard, unless it's revealed. You have to have some divine vision, a divine law that could give some structuring to the order of the universe. And that doesn't mean that you can't ascertain some of this stuff by looking out on nature. 35:36 But This is why Calvin describes the Scriptures as a pair of spectacles. They're glasses. They help you see and understand and read the book of creation or the book of nature, whatever you want to call it. And so knowing that this gives you an incredible amount of power to basically just Chuck out all of this trash. 35:54 And this can be done on the left or on the right or in the center. And all these people who believe in this fairy tale can be rejected. You can you can have the smiling Calvin image, right? And all you get are accusations and adomonyms, right? You're a monster. I can't believe you believe that, but you are recognizing above the gods, above human beings, above historical forces, above luck, above destiny, which is blind and uncaring, just rumbles on forward. 36:24 Above all of that, there is a sovereign hand on the wheel driving things forward, directing the course of events, that even when you mean something for evil because you're a vicious and nasty brute, God can use it for good. But all events that take place are under the hand of Providence, and it's not always a pleasant Providence. 36:45 God's Terrifying Judgment and His Law-Word I like the phrase that Nick Land has used. I don't know if he coined it, but using the phrase solemn Providence, it is solemn. It doesn't end well for everybody. Some are the pots that get ruined. Some nations exist to be the pots that are going to be destroyed. And that should be terrifying. 37:01 That's why in the letter to the Hebrews, which I like to think Saint Paul wrote that too, but to the letter to the Hebrews, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. It's not pleasant. And so This is why you have psalms like Psalm 39, like, please stop the withering gaze of God. 37:18 Please stop looking at me. Let me just die because judgement is too hard to bear. It doesn't end well for everybody. And so the kind of sappy memorializing stuff about how life is so great, you just got to enjoy life, right? 37:33 We're all going to make it. It's not true. You might not make it. You have to throw yourself on the mercies of God. And again, what marks out Christianity different than say, like the fatalism of Islam is there is a path forward. I think a lot of people work themselves up into a tizzy studying theology when something simple like Romans 10/9 that if you shall confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and you shall believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 38:00 Or the simple children's hymn, Jesus loves me. This I know for the Bible tells me so, right? That is enough to establish the basis. You don't have to soul search and you there are levels to this, right? There are foundational levels beyond this. 38:16 But the importance of this is anchoring your soul in a world that is entirely scary. Otherwise be right, because the human rights religion and the human rights myth is a way to anchor, you know, the value of everybody. We're all God's children or we're all humans, one race, the human race. 38:32 And that's simply not the case. Humans can be denatured, basically, right? It's God's will that that doesn't take place. But when God can judge a king, a great glorious emperor like Nebuchadnezzar, and make him a cow that eats grass in the field like a wild beast, your nature is something that's in the hands of God. 38:51 It's not inviolable. It's not God contradicting Himself that He, if he intervenes in things, performs wonders and miracles and signs. These are not going back on a previous decision. It is God's self understanding his will and intellect together to bring about the purposes for which he did anything at all. 39:10 And these are ultimately revealed through the course of the Bible. That even angels would like to look into these events, that they didn't see how it was going to unfold. Nobody could have predicted the fullness of God's will, the fullness of the covenant unfolding in the way that it did. And yet now you can know it and you can know the mind of God and you can see this. 39:28 And while none of this is unique to Calvinism in general, whatever that might mean, Calvinists generally only ones that preserve this in any kind of sense or capacity. Unfortunately, though, as I promised a long time ago that I was going to get into the negative aspects of all of this, is that what are Calvinists like? 39:46 They're stuck up. They're stodgy. They're generally some of the most obnoxious people to interact with. The scholastic domes are insufferable. And the people who Hock them or even more insufferable. I'm not a theology nerd. In fact, these guys rate their beards need to be shaved and they need to be banned from drinking alcohol or smoking pipes or cigars or whatever. 40:07 There's a unique patheticness and pathological aspect that's uniquely millennial in the quote UN quote new. Calvinist, I guess it's also Gen. X phenomenon. They got tattoos, they like MMA, they like cussing, they like to read their theology books. 40:22 Really sophisticated hard stuff like John Piper. No, I'm picking on some, but but there is this great love of Logo Maki and the love of systematics theology. And some of the worst people, worst instincts on basically everything are Calvinist that I've met. 40:39 You know, they think they're really tough about really thinking about the hard answers and the hard questions, but they are broken by the world spirit. They're basically feminists. So this is like the amazing thing, I guess. This is like the Jews in Jesus day. They have this treasure and they won't open it, they won't use it. 40:57 They won't use the things that they've been given. Instead, they hoard them away and they use them in a really stupid, pathetic way. So the, the, the purpose of thinking about God's election is just psychological comfort that God still cares about you or something. When you think, no, this, this gives you Vista on all of world history and somehow all you can do with it is recapitulate what everybody already believes. 41:20 And a lot of these people end up falling for the human rights stuff too. So there's no right one major take away. One thing to think about is that no idea intrinsically leads you anywhere ideas or tools. And so you have this incredibly sharp and powerful sword or the cut through a lot of the garbage and they keep it in the sheath and they want it to rust because this, the purpose of this is so they can debate about super lapsarianism or infralapsarianism. 41:45 Horrible, horrible. How many wings of the covenant are there? Oh, you know, you denied the covenant of works. Oh, you're a heretic. I don't, I don't want to argue about the Westminster Confession of faith. I don't dislike the Westminster Confession of Faith. There's not a lot I disagree with in the Westminster Confession of Faith. 42:02 But I don't live in the 17th and 18th centuries. I don't care. So that's, I mean, that's always like the thing that eats me is I, it might sound funny, right, coming from me and everything I've talked about up to this point, especially because you'll have Michael Horton and he'll talk about how Romans 9 broke him and he was like dragged kicking and screaming in the Calvinism and this kind of stuff. 42:25 But and that attitude itself is maybe reflected kicking and screaming. Wouldn't you want to rejoice in the reality that's been unlocked? No. So it might be funny saying all this about Calvinism, how useful is how powerful it is. But all these people are are absolutely horrible. 42:41 Most Reformed churches are horrible and not just because of the beard bro stuff. And you get like some of these guys who will be online, you'll be like, yeah, where they're like, I'm like based Reformed guy, based Calvin. Look, he's burning Servidis because he's giga Chad. And this is trashy aesthetics. This is trashy memes. 42:57 This doesn't get to the root of of basically overthrowing these paradigms, right? That's what it's for. It's being able to just smile when someone is like, well, you, you must be a horrible person. You, you don't accept human rights. Calvinism just rejoices and people being destroyed. 43:14 God is such a moral monster. And you say, yeah, that's exactly right. You have to unleash the monstrous capacities. It's like a nuclear bomb. You have to use it when you need it. And this is a monster that needs to be destroyed. It's not Calvinism that's the monster. It's this lie and this myth that traps the entire world and informs all of these completely incoherent policies, foreign and domestic, for most Western first world nations in the world today. 43:42 Modern Calvinists: Failing to Unleash Powerful Theology So this is not a tilt towards barbarism and this is not open call for like murders freeze because nothing means anything. Nihilism. No, it's finding the root in the councils of God, the roots of justice, the roots of law and order. 43:58 This is all in the counsels of God in the word of God that shapes and forms things or what Rushdoony like to call the law word of God right emphasizing that the word of God is always an ordering and structuring power and phenomenon is the ought that is constantly forming and reforming the is of our world in which we participate, in which we become instruments of God in which we are the sword in his hand cleaving off the wicked and saving and redeeming this world. 44:24 Right in as much as Jesus Christ is the word of God made flesh. You become a little word you become an image of an image of an image reflecting all the great Saints and heroes, both canonical in the Bible and non canonical outside of the Bible. And so this then opens up your eyes that you know understanding what is actually meaningful and valuable. 44:43 And so when you have a human rights religion hijacking churches, evangelicals in America at least still defend the death penalty. But the Catholic Church, you know, teaches against the death penalty. All the mainline state Protestant churches, they teach against the death penalty. It's inhuman. 44:58 You can't take on life. That's just as bad as the original criminal who killed wrong, wrong, absolutely wrong. And it's not just because I want to kill people or I have my own idiosyncratic view, right. This is, this is ingrained in a rich web of interconnected symbols, thoughts and ideas that span the entirety of human history that the word of God endures forever. 45:21 So again, this might sound strange, the power in this, right, You know, why are you attacking reformed theology? Why are you attacking this stuff? Because these people make a mockery of it. There's so much power and greatness. I mean, This is why I would almost prefer to call myself Augustinian, because Augustine understood this entirely. 45:39 But that loses the punch because people think Calvinists are these horrible, horrible monsters, right? So you can't believe that God genocided the Canaanites, the women and the children. I can't believe it. That's horrible. You don't have a place to stand. You don't even, you can't even tell me. 45:55 So you know when this is like the Daily Wire stuff about what is a woman? But it's a really good point, right? The insanity of today is not only superficial, the absurd stuff like people choking up on it trying to answer a question, what's a man and what's a woman? What's the difference between a man and a woman? 46:10 But you can't even tell me why. Why do human lives have any value whatsoever? You just say God. That's not true. The Bible doesn't teach that. And so if you go looking and sniffing for that somewhere else it ends up in this kind of sappy self self referencing tautological philosophy. 46:27 Well, humans have value because humans are valuable, therefore they have value. This means nothing, right? And so when the Bible prescribes the death penalty, or God judges people and kills them and submits them to the sword, that's God's prerogative. Why the death penalty exists is not because of human rights and that every human being is valuable intrinsically. 46:45 But when you murder lawlessly and you attack a man and murder him, you're attacking God's order. There's a death penalty for that. And there's death penalties for all kinds of aberrations in the order of God, that you're destroying God's image as it's supposed to come to fruition in the perfection of man. 47:03 So sodomy gets the death penalty. Children grow, you know, grown children who attack their parents violently and reject their authority violently, they're put to death. There's all sorts of things. The violation of the 10 commandments beat, each of them basically receives a death penalty. 47:20 So there is a reason for this, but it doesn't have anything to do with human rights. And yet what do Calvinists do? What do Reform people do? They just guzzled their IPA's and they smoke their cigars and they're like, oh, look about the Puritans. Look at all the, you know, look at all this cool theology and it's not really unleashed in any meaningful way. 47:39 And it doesn't apply to anything. And you know, the sad thing is it's like, well, what's the history of Reformed theology in the 20th century? Rushdoony being exiled from like good proper reformed company. Greg Bonson being like banished from the OPC. 47:54 These people attack all of their best lights. They attack all the people who get at the fundamental world ordering aspect because what they really want is just some like whitewashed walls Sunday Chapel where then they can go back to their normal life. Like I'm good. Like, I hope all these reformed churches are wiped off the face of the earth because they are taking the gifts that they have and and burying them. 48:14 They're taking the talents they have and are burying them, so they should get nothing. They should be wiped out. Who would want to be around these people, the frozen chosen, the basically Walking Dead who have no spirit, but they have all this capacity to understand things in such a bright and luminous kind of way. 48:31 So no, right. I don't really care about all this, like other goofy stuff. I want to get into a fight about exactly understanding the nature of sacraments. I don't want to participate in like, trying to hunt people down, you know, reform. They're famous for all the really awful heresy huntings they do on things like the theonomy or, or federal vision. 48:52 Oh, it's too Catholic. It sounds too Catholic. They're they're destroying the relationship between faith and works. I hate it. I really hate this stuff. And maybe something, you know, I'm not trying to be obnoxious to some people who might not really like federal vision or be critical of theonomy. But what I hate is this attitude of destroying the applications, the most valued and treasured applications that you could bring out of this. 49:14 To destroy the 20th century's worst aspect, to destroy the 21st centuries worst aspects, To return to something on a stable basis, To RIP up the false world order by its roots and throw it in the fire. And instead, all these people care about is winning arcane debates over totally useless things. 49:33 I mean, and that's unfortunately what's happening with Stephen Wolf and Christian nationalism. And probably what will end up happening. I'm not, I don't have any great hope that it's going to thrive, but maybe it will. But they'll they'll form these committees in in different reformed churches and they will basically just come up with some phony heresy to explain why they should reject it, even though this is incredibly timid stuff by all lights, right? 49:56 I mean, all of these guys end up in the same boat, right? No matter where they're coming from, whether it's Wolf with Christian nationalism or the federal vision people before him or the theonymous before that. And it's always like, well, look, I'm just quoting the fathers of our church. I'll look at the Westminster Confession on this point. 50:12 Look at this theologian and that theologian and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And whether they're right or wrong, right, dude. So it doesn't matter. Like just get out. I don't care, right? It sounds racist, sounds sexist. It sounds extreme. It sounds authoritarian. You got it's got to go. 50:29 And so it goes. And so then these churches just will implode, right? You know, really great. You have feminists, basically pastors, female pastors, but they believe in super lapsarianism. So it's very, very, very cool. Traditional orthodox based, very rad trad garbage. 50:48 It's I just throw all this. I mean, see, it's sometimes it's even worse than like traditionalist Catholics and Orthodox, but it's really awful stuff. And these people are just committed to being zombies. That's all they want to live for. And so their theology becomes a way of doing this. 51:03 And you just find like, horrible, obnoxious people who are every stripe of Reformed or Calvinist. You have the like, actually staid, doctrinaire Reformed confessionalist types. And then you'll find these New Calvinists, most of them are basically just Baptists who have tattoos and they like to drink. 51:21 And, you know, and there you think that's very cool to talk about. Well, God could just do anything. And that's not even true either, right? Emphasizing, right, the power of God to the point of being arbitrary also destroys all of this. And so it's no surprise that these people burn out and become imbeciles because they're already imbeciles. 51:39 And so right, you know, even using the label Calvinism, if it's like, if it takes away from the power of the punch of the moral monster aspect of this, then it's useless. You know, these are people call usually hyper Calvinist. They're they're fatalist, they're determinist and they rebel in this. 51:56 But the point is to be able to accept the ethics of the Bible and reject human rights religion. And that's, that's the power of the smiling Calvin image. That's the power of just identifying with Calvinism. That even people who are super, super anti Christian and basically every way like David Bentley Hart, even though he's like was the sort of adjacent radical orthodox guy, all the radical orthodox people end up becoming like a gay human writes version of Hinduism. 52:22 But even David Bentley Hart recognizes that, you know, the Calvinists because they're like horrible, terrible, evil people who believe horrible, terrible, evil things. None of my criticisms are going to really work on them because they can just point to the Bible because they're ignorant fundamentalists. 52:38 And and then they can, you know, have their way And I fight with them and say that's not really what the Bible teaches because you have to read Greco Roman speculative philosophy to really understand it. But you know, he even makes room for them. Even the haters make room for them. When you're dealing with a new atheist, you talk about how God is not good, God is not great, right? 52:59 A lot of this is just moral pandering based on 20th century human rights religion, even, you know, supposedly cutting edge thinkers and cutting edge, you know, he's got a cigarette. Christopher Hitchens, you got you got Hitch slapped. These people, you know, start crying crocodile tears about N Koreans being enslaved by Kim Jong Un and, you know, starving African babies and stuff. 53:21 And Calvinism shatters this. No, every horror and every good thing that happens happens under the watchful eye of solemn Providence. And you have to find comfort and shudder in this, right? It's it's both. It's recognizing that whatever happens is in the hand of God. 53:38 And it's also right, either even the really scary or bad stuff is in the hands of God. The God is not some kind of sappy, you know, grandpa figure, this avuncular figure just waiting around. Oh, I wish my kids would get it together. Oh, you know, I'm suffering. I feel really bad for them, you know, Oh, it's so sad. 53:55 Don't look at the massacres. Oh, this is not how the Bible paints this picture. So it's trying to shatter this. You have to break this so that you get people to say, well then I'm not a Christian, I don't like the Bible. Good, it's mine. Stay away. Don't bring your slappy happy clappy garbage human rights trash into my world. 54:15 Stay in your own world with your own fake religion and your own fairy tales. But it has nothing to do with historic Christianity, has nothing to do with the edge of the Bible. And that's what Calvinism in theory can unlock. But no right. Reform idiots would rather debate worthless garbage and try to be a rearguard defender, using the Westminster Confession to justify gay rights and feminism and race communism and all the other kinds of things, right? 54:41 That's all they care about because they just want to be acceptable, regular, normal people that have some quirky beliefs. That's how a lot of people, that's how a lot of traditionalists are. They're, whoa, I go to a quirky, weird religious service, but I'm basically like everybody else. And it's rejecting that. 54:57 And you have to have principal reasons to reject that. Otherwise it's just eccentric. And usually you're bent by some kind of social pressure. I guess the way of keeping yourself from being bent is that you form social groups that teach what you believe. But this is just rearguard reactive and defensive. 55:14 You want to conquer the whole mindscape, and this is what this allows you to do. It's a way of just avoiding this stuff. And there was a whole bunch of literature that was like, no, actually the Canaanite stuff wasn't really like a mass extermination of people. There's only a couple people and the women, children weren't even there. 55:31 Doesn't say any of that stuff. And it makes you look weak. And it's all special pleading. You have to lean into this stuff. This is what it says and this is what it teaches. And this is the world of judgment where men are not born with intrinsic human rights and they're not born with some intrinsic human value where they're supposed to self actualize it. 55:51 Yeah, maybe yourself actualization is being destroyed, being a symbol of wrath. You're like Pharaoh, you're risen up to be cast down. And that at a national level and at an individual level where who knows? 56:04 Calvin's Core Idea: Unlocking a New World And this is something that's not just to throw at other people, but to reflect on yourself, right? What is going to be the role of America? Is it going to be obliterated? I don't know, right? But this is in God's hands. And this is not predetermined fate where the will of no personal entities is is involved. 56:22 It's not just luck and contingency. It's not the iron laws of history grinding on. It is the council's the perfect councils of the everliving God. And so again, just to say this once more, it may sound funny that I'm doing this cast on this and I've argued, you know, defense of covenant theology and different aspects of Reform theology, but I really have nothing in common with most of these people who would identify as such. 56:48 And being around them is why I really dislike to Reform theology and Calvinism. And reading kind of the generic things, you know, the systematics textbooks and what the seminaries put out is all really disgusting and disturbing, right? I'd rather just read fiction. I really have no interest in systematic theology. 57:05 And again, that might come off as kind of obnoxious and obtuse, but I'm not really interested in reading textbooks about this stuff. It's using this to explain a better world, right? When Rushdoony writes the Institutes of Biblical Law, that's way more powerful than one more systematics textbook, right? 57:21 It's bringing this in an applied sense of God's law word. So yeah, either if I were around most Calvinists, I would never want to be a Calvinist. And I don't like them and I don't read their stuff and I'm not really interested in any of this. I don't really like John Piper. I didn't like any of the New Calvinists mega church stuff. 57:37 I'm not interested in reading Reform systematics. I don't, I don't care about this stuff. But it's the power of this basic, simple idea identified with John Calvin that can unlock basically a whole new world for you and how to argue and debate this stuff. 57:52 You don't have to be trapped. The ever living God is your ally, and he is your shield and he is your sword, and he's before you and behind you and above you and below you, and wherever you go you can overcome. The gates of hell cannot resist. 58:08 So this is the Ichabod of King's cast. Hopefully this was helpful. It's just a brief sketch of things. May God bless you always, and God guide you with His wisdom.