Knowing Scripture
Written by R.C. Sproul |
Friday, June 30, 2023
Though the Bible is not like any other book in that it carries with it the authority of divine inspiration, nevertheless, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit over a written text does not turn verbs into nouns or nouns into verbs. No special, secret, arcane, esoteric meaning is poured into a text simply because it’s divinely inspired. Nor is there any such mystical ability we call “Holy Ghost Greek.” No, the Bible is to be interpreted according to the ordinary rules of language.
It has often been charged that the Bible can’t be trusted because people can make it say anything they want it to say. This charge would be true if the Bible were not the objective Word of God, if it were simply a wax nose, able to be shaped, twisted, and distorted to teach one’s own precepts. The charge would be true if it were not an offense to God the Holy Spirit to read into sacred Scripture what is not there. However, the idea that the Bible can teach anything we want it to is not true if we approach the Scriptures humbly, trying to hear what the Bible says for itself.
Sometimes systematic theology is rejected because it is seen as an unwarranted imposition of a philosophical system on the Scriptures. It is seen as a preconceived system, a Procrustean bed into which the Scriptures must be forced by hacking off limbs and appendages to make it fit. However, the appropriate approach to systematic theology recognizes that the Bible itself contains a system of truth, and it is the task of the theologian not to impose a system upon the Bible, but to build a theology by understanding the system that the Bible teaches.
At the time of the Reformation, to stop unbridled, speculative, and fanciful interpretations of Scripture, the Reformers set forth the fundamental axiom that should govern all biblical interpretation. It is called the analogy of faith, which basically means that Holy Scripture is its own interpreter. In other words, we are to interpret Scripture according to Scripture. That is, the supreme arbiter in interpreting the meaning of a particular verse in Scripture is the overall teaching of the Bible.
Behind the principle of the analogy of faith is the prior confidence that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. If it is the Word of God, it must therefore be consistent and coherent. Cynics, however, say that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. If that were true, then we would have to say that the smallest mind of all is the mind of God. But there is nothing inherently small or weak to be found in consistency. If it is the Word of God, one may justly expect the entire Bible to be coherent, intelligible, and unified. Our assumption is that God, because of His omniscience, would never be guilty of contradicting Himself.
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17 Reasons Why it is Irrational to Trust the Medical Community Regarding the Covid Vaccines
The medical establishment simply cast aside all evidentiary standards (in favor of a particular political agenda); this means that the medical establishment’s culture is against objectivity in science, and lacks the necessary mechanisms or guardrails critical to conducting objective scientific inquiry. The bottom line is that none of the “experts” and none of the “local doctors” who are telling people the vaccines are safe and effective have any idea of the actual technical underlying science. This means that they cannot possibly provide any scientific insight, credibility, or authority regarding the vaccines.
One of the most intractable impediments to convincing people of straightforward facts relating to the covid vaccines is their instinctive and unshakeable trust of the mainstream medical community, and especially their personal doctor/s.
To that end, here a series of arguments or reasons why it is not just imprudent but irrational to have faith in the mainstream medical community and everyone who relies on them as a primary source of covid vaccine information.
Another objective is to empower people to articulate their clear and reliable intuition that the medical community lacks institutional credibility and objectivity rather than doubt their own intellectual ability.
It is necessary to preface that when I refer to the medical community or establishment, I am not referring to any of the heroic doctors and other professionals who do think and act independently of the mainstream medical community. In fact, you can pretty much apply to them the inverse of all the arguments enumerated below.
Another critical point to keep in mind is that even though most of the arguments below only directly apply to part – or even a select few individuals – of the mainstream medical community, they are nevertheless an indictment of the entire medical community. It is a tightly interwoven, interconnected and insular group that shares information widely through a variety of channels and feedback mechanisms. Information deriving from a corrupted source anywhere in the medical community thus infects the entire medical community. Its insular nature regarding what they consider to be acceptable sources for scientific or medical information means that they largely lack a mechanism for allowing correction of faulty information from an external source.
For the most part, I restricted the arguments presented to those that can be made from premises that are objectively true regardless of where one falls regarding the covid vaccines.
One final point is that the contention that it is irrational to trust the medical community regarding the vaccines is derived from the totality of the evidence. In other words, when there are a dozen major red flags, it is prudent to assume that there is something systematically rotten about the whole system; in this case it that means it would be irrational to regard them as a reliable source of information for anything to do with the covid vaccines.
For the following reasons, the medical establishment is unequivocally untrustworthy regarding the vaccines:The mother of all biases: The medical community bet every ounce of credibility and authority they had on the vaccines being safe and effective, so they cannot afford to ever admit they were wrong should the vaccines ultimately turn out to have real safety issues
The politicization of the medical community
The insistence on a “One Size Fits All” contrary to fundamental medical practice
The lack of consistent evidentiary standards
Few medical professionals including those involved in making policy or opining on the vaccines have any idea how the vaccines work
They got pretty much everything about covid wrong before the vaccines
The failure to treat covid
The lack of critical or independent thinking by anyone in the mainstream medical community
The medical community failed to convey basic risk stratification
Public health officials used wrong information and spurious data to construct pandemic policies
The medical community never admitted that they made serious mistakes
The denial of natural immunity
Censorship and Fraud
They don’t denounce useless and harmful practices derived from their policies and statements
The medical establishment is riddled with massive financial conflicts of interest
Every specific claim made regarding the vaccines so far has ultimately proven to be false
A significant % of the medical community are genuinely evil people1. The mother of all biases: The medical community bet every ounce of credibility and authority they had on the vaccines being safe and effective, so they cannot afford to ever admit they were wrong should the vaccines ultimately turn out to have real safety issues
Never in recent memory has there been such a powerful bias afflicting the medical community or public health officials. They have loudly and daily proclaimed in the most definitive ways imaginable that the covid vaccines are absolutely safe and effective, to the point of advocating that people be compelled by various means to get vaccinated. Billions of people followed their advice, and billions more succumbed to their pressure.
If the truth is that these vaccines are not quite as safe as they say, that would mean that potentially millions people died, and perhaps tens or even hundreds of millions suffered all sorts of horrible injuries because of them, or contracted covid despite vaccination because they were lulled into a false sense of security that the vaccines are essentially impervious and subsequently contracted severe covid disease or even died.
Their credibility would be absolutely blown to pieces. After all, they were as definitive as possible. And they attacked with unrestrained zealotry anyone who dared to even voice a little skepticism. They have publicly humiliated, attacked, defamed, castigated, chastised, mocked and scorned those who refused to accept their proclamations of functionally impervious vaccine safety.
The inherent human impulse to preserve one’s sense of integrity, morality, and righteousness is severely threatened by the prospect of conning the world into a hastily rushed intervention that proved to be the deadliest therapeutic ever released and foisted upon the public.
Another powerful innate human impulse is to preserve oneself from facing accountability for enormously consequential rank negligence – if the vaccines are anywhere near as dangerous and lethal as a growing mountain of data and studies now indicate, “rank negligence” doesn’t even begin to describe the depth of culpability here.
And let’s not forget that not only is their expertise is on the line, but so is the essence of their professional identity. If the medical community got this wrong and people figure it out, the medical community will become a pejorative to many if not most people, an institution completely denuded of credibility and thought of as a modern cult.
This is true as much for the small community doctors as it is for Fauci, for they too are complicit in convincing people that the vaccines were “safe and effective”, albeit on a smaller scale.
In Short: It is not rational to expect that the medical community can be remotely objective about the issues pertaining to the covid vaccines, let alone be willing to admit that the vaccines are not safe, when they are so heavily and intractably invested in the vaccines being as safe as they promised they would be. This is especially true now that they took a significant hit on the efficacy claims as Omicron publicly humiliated them when it shredded any notion that the vaccines could stop transmission, a critical and prominent early claim of vaccine proponents.
2. Politicization of the Medical Community
The medical community has become extremely politicized. Consider the following:JAMA sacked their President because he had the temerity to defend doctors as not intrinsically racist
the AMA declared that racism is a not only a public health crisis, but is the #1 PH crisis (!)
the inclusion of race in itself as a “risk factor” used for triaging scarce covid treatments
the sudden and radical switch from “a 10-person outdoor funeral was too unsafe to allow” to “27 million people mass protesting George Floyd was somehow not only safe but necessary to address the aforementioned “public health crisis” of systemic racism”
The CDC’s prior advocacy for gun control, calling gun ownership a public health crisisThese are but a few of the numerous and ubiquitous instances of clear political entanglement with what are supposed to be non-partisan medical institutions, showing that political considerations clearly supersede scientific considerations in the most high-profile and impactful sorts of decisions and policies.
And this corruption of scientific standards extends into published literature. Consider the study Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research, where we are duly informed in the abstract:Just what the devil are “human-ice interactions”?? This sounds more like pseudo-religious mysticism than anything remotely scientific.
And their conclusion opens with the following declaration:
“Ice is not just ice. The dominant way Western societies understand it through the science of glaciology is not a neutral representation of nature.”
Scientifically, ice is indeed just ice. Apparently, however, scientists understanding a topic solely via the scientific method is “not a neutral representation of nature”.
This used to be my cardinal example of politics conquering the scientific journals, but that was before I came across the study On Having Whiteness:Ask yourself: just how rotten does the culture in academia have to be for an actual journal to publish the rabid deranged rantings of an unhinged lunatic? (Just imagine if someone tried to publish this sort of vile screed about “Jewishness” or “Blackness”…)
And lest you think that this paper is somehow a one-off exception, here are many more.
To cap it off, here is an example specifically related to the covid pandemic response: Approaching the COVID-19 Pandemic Response With a Health Equity Lens: A Framework for Academic Health Systems. Title says it all.
In Short: The medical establishment is openly and blatantly political, and has a history of acting against science for political reasons; this means that they are willing to put politics over science.
3. The insistence on a “One Size Fits All” contrary to fundamental medical practice that patients are unique individuals with unique health profiles
One of the cardinal rules of medicine is that every patient is a unique individual with unique medical characteristics that therefore requires individualized treatment. There is certainly no such thing as a treatment that is magically the optimal choice for every one of the hundreds of millions of people in the country.
As the few intrepid inquisitive people who bother to actually read granular scientific literature about the vaccines know, there is considerable variation between types of individuals regarding the vaccine and how best to administer it.
It is axiomatic that different people have different risks from different medical interventions. Or at least it used to be. The myopically focused hyper-aggressive campaign that quite literally every adult and child, man and woman, get vaccinated is contraindicated by all of medical history, and suggests that the medical community literally sees the vaccine as some sort of magical unicorn, something that would be seen in a cult but out of place in the practice of medicine.
The manic obsession to vaccinate even those with so-called “natural immunity” – ie immunity from having been infected with the covid virus – stands as ironclad proof of the morally unhinged and the firmly anti-science character of the medical community’s agenda to vaccinate every living human on the planet.
In Short: The aggressive, unrelenting insistence on the biggest one-size-fits-all in history that everyone get vaccinated is contrary to all prior medical standards and practice; this means that they are at minimum acting and thinking more like cult members than doctors. This also means that they are not treating patients as unique individuals in the same way they used to.
4. The lack of consistent evidentiary standards
It goes without saying that objective, unchanging standards for evaluating evidence is the very definition of scientific research and inquiry.
The utter lack of any standards used for anything Covid related stands as a starkly visible sign of the decidedly unscientific character of the medical community throughout Covid.
Lockdowns were implemented on the basis of a fringe lunatic’s crackpot model. I say “fringe lunatic” because he has a long history of delusional epidemiological predictions of viruses becoming mass-casualty pandemics where the magnitude that he was off by was itself considerably larger than the total actual deaths from the prognosticated pandemic super-killer:
[Imperial College epidemiologist Neil] Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. (Sheep genocide!!) He also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die. There were fewer than 200 deaths.
In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. In the U.K., there were only 177 deaths from BSE.
In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. (And then he said maybe 200,000,000!) In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
In 2009, a government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a “reasonable worst-case scenario” was that the swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths. In the end, swine flu killed 457 people in the U.K.
And Ferguson is still going strong:
Mask usage and mandates were adopted suddenly and unexpectedly without any sort of scientific rationale whatsoever, at least that was documented in any scientific literature.
Remdesivir was given its EUA on the basis of one trial conducted by its manufacturer, and whose primary endpoint was changed midway (which is something that typically constitutes scientific fraud) when the preselected primary endpoint failed to show that Remdesivir had any efficacy, namely that there was no reduction in mortality or hospitalization. The same story repeated itself for every pharma drug granted approval for a covid indication.
On the other hand, HCQ was demonized despite having hundreds of trials showing very convincingly that it was effective as a prophylaxis and early treatment.
Ivermectin was similarly demonized despite having dozens of RCT’s showing a clear and consistent benefit in all stages of covid.
The same goes for most of the other drugs/treatments used by thousands of doctors worldwide, such as those found in the FLCCC’s protocols – numerous studies showing a clear and consistent significant benefit, and all ignored by the medical establishment and government agencies.
The vaccine trials that provided the “robust” data for the FDA’s approval were a colossal joke. This article is long enough so I’ll avoid going through the details here, but suffice it to say that the Pfizer kids trial simply lied about paralyzing one of the kids in the trial – Maddie de Garay (along with an inhuman ordeal of excruciating agony and mental/emotional trauma). All of the treatment options on the FLCCC protocols have far more robust evidence than any of the vaccines hurriedly rushed out on the skimpiest data imaginable.
In Short: The medical establishment simply cast aside all evidentiary standards (in favor of a particular political agenda); this means that the medical establishment’s culture is against objectivity in science, and lacks the necessary mechanisms or guardrails critical to conducting objective scientific inquiry.
5. Few medical professionals including those involved in making policy or opining on the vaccines have any idea how the vaccines work
Doctors, surgeons, GP’s, infectious disease specialists, OBGYN’s, etc, etc, etc haven’t the foggiest idea of how the covid vaccines work. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and ask your local [fill in the blank] specialist/doctor to explain codon optimization, the proline swaps in the vaccine’s spike protein, self-assembling lipids, the chemical alterations to switch the positive charge of cationic lipids to neutral in a neutral PH, spike biodistribution, lipid biodistribution, and so on.
And it’s not only the vaccines themselves that are ridiculously intricate and complicated. The immune system itself is massive, twisted maze of different types of cells, molecules, pathways, and chemistry that involves the entire human anatomy. Even an experienced immunologist could not possibly predict in advance how the different and truly novel vaccine products would interact with the various human anatomical biomes.
Expert opinion is considered the lowest form of “evidence,” because when it comes to predictions, experts are almost always wrong. Were scientists’ inability to conceive of a plausible mechanism for speculative harms a viable standard to adjudicate safety concerns, the FDA could be largely retired, what with little need for the robust testing regiment all novel therapies and biological agents are subjected to in the face of staunch expert claims of lack of plausibility for unexpected adverse effects to occur. Regrettably, experts seldom recognize the limits of their expertise, and vis-à-vis covid seem unaware that any exist altogether.
In Short: The bottom line is that none of the “experts” and none of the ‘local doctors’ who are telling people the vaccines are safe and effective have any idea of the actual technical underlying science. This means that they cannot possibly provide any scientific insight, credibility, or authority regarding the vaccines.
6. They got pretty much everything about covid wrong before the vaccines
If a particular methodology consistently yields wrong answers, than it can be reasonably assumed that it will continue to do so. It is irrational to trust the same people who got masks, lockdowns, distancing, asymptomatic spread, risk stratification, seasonality, children’s risks from and spreading covid, testing, case data, hospitalization data, mortality rate, etc., etc., etc. dead wrong to suddenly know what they’re talking about when it comes to the vaccines.
And as we will get to later, pretty much every specific statement made about the vaccine that we can test against real-world results has been proven to be dead wrong.
In Short: They were wrong about everything else before the vaccines, and there is no compelling reason to think that they will do better regarding the vaccines.
7. The failure to treat covid
The failure to treat what was allegedly the worst plague in modern times is possibly the greatest medical failure of modern times. This is without considering the war they waged on effective cheap repurposed FDA-approved drugs – simply their failure to ever really treat covid is itself astounding. Quite literally the whole point of doctors is to treat medical maladies and diseases. Never in human history have doctors systematically decided not to even try and treat something, never mind the most pressing existential medical crisis in a century.
Contrast the failure of the medical establishment to treat covid with the amazing success of the thousands of heroic doctors and nurses around the world in treating covid. All that this small minority of doctors did was to simply practice the art of medicine using the tools available to them. In the words of Dr. Brian Tyson, one of the most prolific doctors who treats covid:
If you see inflammation, use anti-inflammatoriesIf you see blood clots, treat blood clotsIf you see pneumonia, treat pneumoniaIf you see hypoxemia, treat hypoxemiaIf you know it’s viral, use antiviralsIf you do nothing, quit practicing!!!
This isn’t complicated. The failure to treat covid is a failure to treat covid.
In Short: The medical community has failed – by choice – to treat covid, allegedly the worst plague in a hundred years; this means that something has replaced their Hippocratic culture and healer mindset as their guiding principle/s.
8. The lack of critical or independent thinking by anyone in the mainstream medical community
Consulting an expert is only meaningful if the expert will apply his or her expertise and judgement to analyze the issue presented. On the flip side, experts who uncritically go along with whatever those atop the medical community’s hierarchy promulgate not only cannot be considered as “expert opinion”, but also indicate that the free-flowing debate that is the lifeblood of scientific inquiry has clotted as though it was invaded by hordes of marauding spike proteins.
One of the more glaringly obvious characteristics of the pandemic is the shocking, Borg-like unanimity among the medical establishment. Pretty much every mainstream doctor on the establishment side is in 100% agreement with 100% of what the establishment says or does 100% of the time.
Exhibit A: Covid treatment. After two years of covid, how many prestigious hospital systems or universities have developed their own covid treatment protocol? Outpatient treatment? Prophylaxis regiment? The answer – again quite shockingly – is ZERO. Every major hospital and academic center has simply just went along with the NIH panel’s recommendations.
And no, that isn’t because they tried and just couldn’t come up with anything. How many medical conferences have been held where frontline doctors got together to share notes and compare clinical experiences, or where the world’s preeminent researchers and protocol designers swapped theoretical possibilities to study? Zero. Is there even an official online platform or portal in either the government or in academia where doctors and clinicians can network in the aforementioned manner? Nope.
So they never bothered to even take the most basic and rudimentary steps to try and develop any treatment protocols for covid.
We’ll get to the censorship and crusading against any dissenters later, but let’s state for now that the medical community literally censoring dissent within their own ranks is also indicative of a lack of independent or critical thinking by the establishment medical community.
In Short: The medical establishment’s members do not think critically or independently of the medical organizations and government agencies; this means that firstly the doctors/medical professionals not in positions of significant authority are not exercising any personal judgement, and second, that the few people in charge of the medical community are not engaging in the sort of rigorous debate that is the basic diligence for scientific analysis as they simply never face any dissenting views when making decisions.
9. The medical community failed to convey basic risk stratification
One of the most basic if not the most foundational axioms in Public Health is to figure out who, and to what degree, is at risk.
So first off, the med community failed to notice the severe age and comorbidity stratification of covid risk. This was obvious immediately as covid set in from the earliest analysis of covid deaths in Italy and from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, to pick 2 prominent examples.
They subsequently compounded this indefensible negligence by failing to communicate this to the public when the medical literature, and more importantly worldwide clinical experience, decisively proved this to be the case.
In order for an individual to make personal health decisions regarding covid, they obviously need to know what the risks and benefits are for them specifically from covid.
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The West Didn’t Steal Its Way to Wealth
To know the actual economic history of enrichment and civilization, you have to know the numbers. Most people don’t. People got rich and civilized by liberty, not by coercion.
Let’s be clear ethically. Imperialism, as in South Asia, was very bad. Enslaving people, as in West Africa, was too. So was shooting striking workers, as in Kentucky. There are no excuses for the Opium Wars or King Leopold II in the Congo or the U.S. seizure of the Philippines or Ford’s goons beating up workers at the Battle of the Overpass. Stealing, coercion, murder are evil.
Wealth and its civilization, though, did not depend on the evil. The Left channels Vladimir Lenin in claiming that the West got rich by robbing the poor. And the Right channels Theodore Roosevelt in claiming that the world got civilized by conquering the poor. Both sides are wrong. People got rich and civilized by liberty, not by coercion.
To know the actual economic history of enrichment and civilization, you have to know the numbers. Most people don’t. The surpassingly wise Swedish professor of public health Hans Rosling reported that even well-informed people score worse than a chimp would throwing darts at the numbers. People think that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. They think that economic growth is perpetually threatened by new headwinds requiring urgent tacking by the ship of state. They think that things are worse than ever. They think that The End Is Near. And in reaction to such horror movies, they think that perhaps a bit of tyranny from left or right would be a Good Thing.
No. Nearly forever, from the caves until about two centuries ago, the average human, except for a few lords and priests, dragged along in today’s prices on less than $2 a day. Try living on $2 a day. Some people still do: South Sudan. Then, from 1800 (or 1900 or 1960) to the present, a Great Enrichment, dwarfing the mere doubling in the so-called Industrial Revolution of 1750 to 1850, made the average human 25 times richer. The number nowadays in the same prices is about $50 a day. Think China, Brazil, and Botswana. And Finland, Ireland, and Iceland, once miserable and colonized, stand well above $100 a day. At $50 or $100 a day, people get food instead of famine, long lives instead of parasites, Ph.D.s instead of illiteracy, high-rises instead of hovels.
Every nasty jerk in history has stolen, and usually gotten away with it. As Gibbon said in 1776, “history is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” So stealing by imperialism and enslavement caused the Great Enrichment, yes?
No. Do the numbers. If you seized your neighbor’s house and her stuff and enslaved her husband, you might get 20 percent richer. Maybe 50. Call it 100. Great for you. “Foreigners shall rebuild your walls,” said the Lord to Jerusalem through His prophet Isaiah, “and their kings shall be your servants…Your gates shall be open continuously…that through them may be brought the wealth of nations and their kings under escort.” Good for Jerusalem. In the zero-sum world before 1800, stealing and enslaving got the jerks 10, 50, even 100 percent richer. Hallelujah.
But the Great Enrichment has been two-and-a-half thousand percent. By fourth-grade arithmetic, the present $50 minus the miserable base in 1800 of $2 is $48, which divided by the base is about a factor of 25, or about that 2,500 percent. Blimey. Stealing can’t come remotely close to accounting for it. Stealing from the wretched of the earth doesn’t even sound like a good criminal plan. And anyway, stealing from Peter to pay Paul can’t enrich both, and certainly not by 2,500 percent.
Consider, for example, British imperialism. Half of the Royal Navy, which was paid for by Britons at home, was assigned to protect the sea routes to India. Glorious. Yet India itself yielded no stolen benefit to the average Briton. Not a shilling. India traded with Britain, sure. But trade is not stealing, and the trade would have happened regardless of whether the Raj was Britain or France or the domestic rajas.
Straightforward stealing from India happened only once. A window opened after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 through which some bold thieves entered. Robert Clive of India and Warren Hastings and some other nabobs made fortunes by stealing. Clive remarked that in view of his opportunities, “by God,…I stand astonished at my own moderation.” Then the stealing stopped and the paying for the glory began, as did a little peaceful trade of Sri Lankan tea and Indian jute for Lancashire dhotis and Yorkshire railway locomotives. And as rich as Clive and his fellow nabobs briefly became, their enrichment was trivial in national terms. Clive’s wealth at his death was half of one-tenth of 1 percent of Britain’s. Nice to have, you say, roughly $200 million nowadays. But it’s not average-enrichment-making, then or now. It’s a fly on the scale.
Something therefore is deeply screwy about blaming the West’s undoubted stealing and enslaving and other malfeasance for the poverty that remains. While the malfeasance was taking place, humans for the first time went from misery to sufficiency, and they can now look forward in a few more generations to universal enrichment. As late as 1960, 4 billion out of the 5 billion souls on the planet earned the old $2 a day. Now it’s 1 billion out of nearly 8 billion, and truly rich places that were once shockingly poor, such as the Italian South or South Korea or South Tyrol, multiply.
Stealing does not a Great Enrichment make. Our friends on the left claim that rich people stealing from the English working class around 1800 resulted in…uh…everyone getting richer by a factor of 25. Huh? You break into your neighbor’s house and, like the assassin in the 2002 Tom Hanks gangster movie Road to Perdition, you brutally murder Hanks’s wife and one of his sons. Then you make off with his stuff. Out of this, says the Left, the real incomes of everyone—you, Hanks, his other son, the gangster boss, everyone—rise by 2,500 percent.
It’s Monty Python loony. In 1930 the spoof of English history 1066 and All That put it this way: “Many remarkable discoveries and inventions were made [about the year 1800]. Most remarkable among these was the discovery (made by all the rich men in England at once) that women and children could work for 25 hours a day…without many of them dying or becoming excessively deformed. This was known as the Industrial Revelation.”
After all, the historical problem with the hypothesis of stealing for enrichment is that stealing is historically commonplace, yet it never resulted in a Great Enrichment. Until it did. Whoops. What kind of a historical explanation is that?
And the economic problem is that the Enrichment after 1800 was so very Great that it can’t possibly be explained by routine projects, whether financed by evil stealing or by virtuous abstention from consumption. Canals, for example. Projects such as the Swedish state’s stealing of the conscripted labor of 58,000 soldiers to dig the Göta Canal from Söderköping to Gothenburg between 1810 and 1832 face sharply diminishing returns. Normal capital accumulation does. That’s besides being economically idiotic in this case, and in the case of most of the canals that were financed as nice-sounding “internal improvements” in the United States during the 1830s. Compare stealing tax money to build a high-speed railway between L.A. and San Francisco. Just sayin’.
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Deep State? What About Deep Church?
One example can be seen in larger bodies where both teaching and lay elders once governed the church; they’re called “ruling” elders. Today, some churches reduce the role of ruling elders to merely shepherding and have established a smaller group of men, including possibly non-ordained staff members, to govern and exercise authority over the church. One of these unbiblical innovations is called a “Governance Commission.”
The term “deep state” is ubiquitous in today’s parlance and used by many to signify political control and power in the United States. While driving my car just a while ago listening to the program, Issues, Etc., on the Lutheran Missouri Synod radio station KFUO, reference to the “deep state” occurred several times. It was explained as the bureaucratic control and secret manipulation of government policy behind the scenes by certain influential members of government agencies. When I finally heard a clear definition of what it is, I couldn’t help wondering if something similar is taking place in some churches and denominations throughout Christendom? In other words, is there a “deep church” in the body of Christ?
Many would probably recognize or perceive its existence especially in the hierarchal churches or denominations. But what about Protestant, Evangelical, or Reformed Faith churches? The more I thought about it, the more I recognized its increasing presence, even in Reformed Faith churches. However, it’s important to first attempt to recognize the source, that is, is it biblical or something else? The early Church led by the apostles did not represent bureaucracy or hierarchy as so many churches do today. The apostles did not represent highly educated men who were paid based on their levels of education or their degrees attained. Some of the early leaders continued to support themselves by their trades. Others were modestly supported by other believers, as they traveled evangelizing wherever they went. Requests for donations appeared to focus not on support for leaders or an institution, but for the poor and persecuted believers.
The Western Church—whether hierarchal, Evangelical, or Reformed—today does not closely resemble that early church. In many respects, today’s churches, denominations, and branches are a far cry from the early Church. In fact, most forms seem to be distanced from the biblical image and norms given to us. With the increasing bureaucracies in most church bodies, is it possible that the world’s ways and means have invaded Christ’s Bride, surreptitiously?
Unfortunately, as a Reformed Faith Christian, I admit I can’t ignore that something close to the “deep state” in politics is evident in Reformed Faith churches. I am reluctant to admit this, but truth requires that we acknowledge facts, history, and reality. Below are just a few indications that some Reformed Faith churches have acquiesced and embraced the world in polity and practices.
One example can be seen in larger bodies where both teaching and lay elders once governed the church; they’re called “ruling” elders. Today, some churches reduce the role of ruling elders to merely shepherding and have established a smaller group of men, including possibly non-ordained staff members, to govern and exercise authority over the church. One of these unbiblical innovations is called a “Governance Commission.” Placing so much power over a particular church in the hands of a few select individuals is always questionable and risky. Smaller groups can become elitist and political, exercising unchecked power and possibly abuse or manipulate their authority that would not happen with the larger group of ruling elders or overseers.
As organizations receiving charitable and voluntary contributions, year-end in-depth financial statements of income and expenditures were once provided to all members. This transparency included staff salaries, additional perks, and individual expenditures or overhead expenses that were easily understood. Some churches no longer provide such detailed statements to their memberships. Today, financial transparency is essentially absent to the congregation. Of all institutions and organizations, Christian churches and organizations should be the most transparent.
In bygone days, pastors were paid for the work they did for the church–as most pastors carried the same burdens and duties regardless of level of education. Today in many churches, pastoral salaries relate to level of education and degrees received. Pastors with more degrees are paid more than pastors with a seminary only degree. In other words, remuneration appears to be based on what has been received rather than what is given, and many pastors’ seminary expenses were either supported or paid for by their churches. It must be recognized some are simply more privileged than others. Even in the world, remuneration based on work performed, rather than privilege received, is more just and fair.
Churches previously relied heavily on voluntarism to perform many duties in the church, as opposed to a large paid staff. Many of our contemporary Evangelical churches have large paid staffs and even pay people for services that were once volunteered freely as service unto God. Both natural and spiritual gifts voluntarily bolstered churches ministries; however, today many of those services are monetarily remunerated. Paying staff for work that could be voluntarily performed by the laity consumes limited funds that could be directed to proclamation of the Gospel or needed charity.
It’s doubtful early Christian pastors or priests received housing allowances that were tax-exempt. Today, pastors expect to receive salaries plus housing allowances. This practice appears based upon indirect government assistance. Allegedly, one pastor requested a reduction in salary with an equivalent raise in housing allowance in order to pay less taxes. This practice appears to be manipulative.
In the past, congregations nominated candidates for office in Reformed Faith churches. This too appears to be diminishing, where committees of a few elites are authorized to select candidates for church office. This “central planning” or “deep state” model creates situations whereby candidates can be selected who are more controllable, rather than based upon their qualifications, character and experience to direct activities on behalf of the church. In some instances, the pastor has final authority to approve or disapprove candidates, without giving explanation to the ordained lay overseers. Selecting officers or committee members without congregational responsibility gives inordinate power to the staff, and over time, and will lead to diminished participation of the congregants in the life of the church.
The above discussion shows, unfortunately, that the world and worldly practices as—opposed to biblical practices and principles—have entered the Church, and there appears to be a “deep church” as well as a “deep state.” Are we willing to acknowledge and recognize how much the world has been allowed into the Church? Are we even willing to address the issues biblically? In the Reformed Faith, the laity once had the responsibility for oversight, which appears to be decreasing in many churches.
Isn’t it time for both leadership and laity to take control of their churches and denominations to ensure genuine transparency, doctrinal integrity, and biblical practices and principles? God’s Word and Church History demand it. “Deep church,” as “deep state,” is unhealthy and merits addressing.
This is written by a former missionary. Missionaries in general make great sacrifices to serve Christ, to proclaim the Gospel, and to disciple others out of great love for the Lord. Remuneration is generally a pittance of what could be earned in other fields. This writer has also served her church in many areas using both natural and spiritual gifts with no expectation of remuneration. Today, she writes this monograph seeking no remuneration because serving God is a joy and a privilege.
Helen Louise Herndon is a member of Central Presbyterian Church (EPC) in St. Louis, Missouri. She is freelance writer and served as a missionary to the Arab/Muslim world in France and North Africa; this article originally appeared in October 1991 in her church newsletter.
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