Altlutheraner

Recently, a group of people describing themselves as “confessionally Reformed believers from a broad range of churches” has come together seeking to “resist a rising tide of reactionary thinking emerging on the fringes of our own circles.” The reason for this “resistance” is given plainly. It is because young men throughout Christendom are coming to reject what has been termed the “Post-war Consensus.” Although the authors later reject the idea that they are defending the Post-war Consensus in their work, it is clear that this was only done pro forma.

In order to achieve this “resistance,” a “Declaration” has been published by Joseph Boot, Jeff Durbin, Andrew Sandlin, James White, Douglas Wilson, and Tobias Riemenschneider, that it may function as “a statement on racial ideologies threatening the Church.” And they retain such inflammatory language throughout, saying that those who have refused to imbibe the poison of equalism “introduce anti-gospel racial categories into the church,” and many other similarly foolish things. Because, among other things, the argumentation of the “Declaration” is so weak that to quote it is to refute it, I merely re-present the affirmations and denials contained therein, presented as theses.

1. The Kingdom purposes of Christ and requirements of His Word cannot be equated with the seating positions of political actors during the French Revolution, and the modern antithesis between right and left is not equivalent to the antithesis that God established in the Garden of Eden between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, the kingdom of darkness and kingdom of light.
2. The modern neo-pagan secular project is bankrupt and desperately trying to hold the social order together by means of a fraudulent narrative and anti-Christian worldview. As a result, the lies of secular elites in all spheres have necessarily grown increasingly evident and outrageous.
3. As a consequence, some young men in the West have become jaded and cynical, with an element among them now rejecting or doubting the received account of virtually anything. The great danger is that now, instead of acting on the basis of revealed truth in Christ, they are in the unhappy position of reacting by choosing between opposing sets of lies.
4. Disillusionment and resentment over the lies one has been told is an inadequate preparation for standing in the truth and resisting a new set of lies.
5. Disillusionment and resentment make a person vulnerable to deception and frequently prepare the ground for accepting new falsehoods, setting the stage for further disillusionment.
6. Neo-pagan secularism with its utopian religious motive did not arise as a consensus after World War II. Rather, it manifests itself as the political outworking of the so-called Enlightenment during the French Revolution and gradually won the hearts and minds of Western nations, being well expressed in the political philosophies dominating Europe prior to the outbreak of the two great global conflagrations.
7. The aftermath of World War II served as a cultural tipping point for the secular narrative and its myth of religious neutrality which has functioned as a centerpiece for these lies. It has promoted this deception with triumphal hubris throughout all Western institutions, insisting on both an idolatrous religious pluralism and a mandatory globalist cosmopolitanism.
8. A contradictory and pervasive thread of self-doubt and self-loathing has also formed an essential part of this secular narrative following the horrors of World War II. Thus, when the reactionary right challenges the “post-war narrative” they are not necessarily breaking free of it — this is a reflex that the post-war narrative itself has nurtured. The narrative thrives on an unstable mix of white imperiousness and white guilt.
9. No particular view of the Allied leaders, their strategies, or tactics during World War II should be a test of Christian orthodoxy.
10. This civic adiaphora may not be expanded to cover malice, vain glory, race-baiting, antisemitism, treachery, bitterness, or hatred. These issues are entirely distinct.
11. It is impossible to harmonize the racial and antisemitic theories of Adolf Hitler and neo-pagan doctrines of the Nazi cult with the gospel of Christ and the teachings of scripture.
12. If the superabundant, diverse forms and veritable glut of evidence — detailed in diaries, documented records, firsthand testimonies of eyewitnesses, extensive photography and videography all provided within living memory — for the deliberate mass destruction of millions of Jews by the Nazis does not amount to historical certitude for what specialists call the Holocaust, then the science of history itself is called into question.
13. There is a vital biblical difference between the self-loathing of men in the grip of disillusionment over a failed idol, and the true repentance of the Christian man.
14. It is impossible to recover an ethic that honors our fathers and their momentous sacrifices while actively and openly dishonoring them.
15. As the secular liberal edifice crumbles, many will refuse to turn to Christ. As the “strong gods” inevitably return, godless influential figures will arise the same way Theudas did (Acts 5:34–39). The temptation for some Christian leaders will be to ape such methods for the sake of clicks, followers and the ephemeral notion of “influence.”
16. It is impossible to be a faithful Christian shepherd without identifying, naming and fighting the wolves which prey on the flock. As such, pastors have a duty to confront and rebuke wickedness in all its forms within their congregations.
17. In deeply unsettled times there is a carnal desire in fallen man to seek out a scapegoat for sin and social corruption. This sadistic urge seeks to expiate guilt by laying the blame and punishment for all cultural ills on an identifiable group(s). The victimized group(s) is offered up to the masses as providing ostensible ‘explanatory power’ for cultural decay, which all conspiracy theories must provide if they are to gain any traction. The Jews have often been the easiest target for this kind of sinful and decrepit thinking.
18. Scapegoating is not a legitimate practice for Christians to participate in because God has already provided the final and perfect scapegoat in Christ Jesus who alone is the true sin-bearer.
19. Our rejection of antisemitism does not require us to ignore or minimize the destructive impact that various God-hating individual Jews have had in human history, just as our rejection of the hatred of Europeans and Anglo-Saxons does not require us to ignore the cultural devastation that many God-hating individual Gentiles have produced. Every ethnic people have members to be ashamed of, and every ethnic people have members to be grateful for.
20. Jews are not in any way uniquely malevolent or sinful, Judaism in its multifarious expressions is not objectively more dangerous than other false religions, and it does not represent an exceptional threat to Christianity and Christian peoples. By nature, the Jews are objects of wrath just like the rest of us, which is condemnation enough (Ps. 14:2–3), and are equally recipients of God’s grace (Rom. 11:11–32).
21. World affairs are not governed by conspiring Jews, and there is not a global Jewish conspiracy to corrupt and destroy Western society.
22. Jews are as all other men — alienated from God and in need of the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ. As a people they have nevertheless remained an object of God’s providential care.
23. As the Puritans of old taught, in God’s good time, multitudes of Jews will come to faith in Christ and be added to the true commonwealth of Israel, inheriting the same blessings as Gentile believers. Hence, the cancerous and counterproductive sin of antisemitism has no place among God’s people.
24. There is not more than one message or way of salvation. Salvation is through Christ alone, by faith alone, and by grace alone for both Jew and Gentile, out of whom God has made one new people, removing the dividing wall of hostility (Eph. 2:11–21).
25. God has ordained the existence of peoples and nations (Acts 17:26–28) and as such our cultural heritage is something to be grateful for so that, in view of God’s good gifts to our people, national pride, along with a healthy patriotism, are appropriate for Christians. At the same time, it is important to reject every form of identity politics, whether of the left or right — or whether the form it takes is malicious or vainglorious.
26. The church of Jesus Christ in its particular locale does not have any compulsory quotas or assigned ratios for ethnic mix. The make-up of any local church community will be dependent on many socio-cultural, lingual and regional factors, and there is no requirement that any given congregation “look like the new Jerusalem.”
27. But a Christian congregation does not have right to arbitrarily exclude any person based on prejudice, malice or bigotry toward their ethnic group.
28. The ultimate bond or good for temporal human life is not grounded in absolute loyalty to blood and soil, family or nation, but in the totalizing bond of the Kingdom of God through the Covenant of Grace (Matt. 3:9; 6:10; 8:11; 12:46–50; Luke 14:26; Eph. 2:11–21; Rev. 7:9–10).
29. In all things, including the treatment of our fellow human beings, the model man and example is not the life and teaching of Aristotle, nor any other merely historical personage, but the Lord Jesus Christ himself, Son of Man and eternal Son of God.