23 January 2023

Revisiting Revisiting Constantine

https://proto-protestantism.blogspot.com/2015/03/constantine-defended-and-revisited.html

Recently, I decide to re-read this book and the article I wrote about it in 2015. The book I'm referring to is "Constantine Revisited: Leithart, Yoder, and the Constantinian Debate" edited by John Roth (Wipf and Stock 2013). This book was written in response to Peter Leithart's "Defending Constantine" (IVP Academic 2010).

As I wrote in 2015, the book made many good points against the Leithart thesis, but most of the contributors missed the mark and some don't even belong within its pages.

11 January 2023

The Frankfurt Declaration: Its Disordered Assumptions, Deceit, and Dangers (II)

Providence lobbed the American Church a softball when it came to Covid. Did it rise to the occasion? No, the episode exposed a metastatic spiritual cancer, a real ugliness, and it revealed a reigning ethical system antithetical to the New Testament. The rotten harvest of a generation of Right-wing Dominionism came to bear in the selfishness and avarice we witnessed. The survival of the fittest ethic of capitalism and the sociopathic mercenary ethics of Libertarianism contributed to the deaths of over 1 million people – just in the US. These false social systems and ideologies have been deeply established in the minds and hearts of American Evangelicals due to an aggressive programme of false teaching that has been in place now for more than a generation. Covid exposed the rotten heart of the larger Evangelical movement – of American Christianity in all its mammon-loving repugnant splendour. Many Church leaders (including the supposed and farcical tyranny-resisters of The Frankfurt Declaration) have blood on their hands.

The Frankfurt Declaration: Its Disordered Assumptions, Deceit, and Dangers (I)

https://frankfurtdeclaration.com

This last summer a new doctrinal declaration appeared that for all its bluster has received surprisingly little attention.  From what I can tell the forces behind it represent an informal effort or loose alliance that would include the likes of John MacArthur, and people associated with James White and G3 ministries.