Beginning in Eden, the Scriptures tell the story of God’s unconquerable purpose to advance His saving reign on the earth. And this purpose is one that all creaturely agents, whether human or demonic, are powerless to oppose. God will reign. He will have His people. He will have His kingdom. And every enemy, including death itself, will come under His dominion or else be destroyed.

Make your vows to the LORD your God and perform them; let all around him bring gifts to him who is to be feared, who cuts off the spirit of princes, who is to be feared by the kings of the earth. (Psalm 76:11–12)
It has never gone well for the kings of the earth when they have attempted to oppose the God of heaven. Whether we are thinking of the ancient king of Ai, whose last moments were spent strung up in a tree (Josh. 8:29); or the thirty other kings of Canaan who soon followed suit (12:7–24); or Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, who was driven out of his mind until he was willing to admit that “the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will” (Dan. 4:32); or that old weasel Herod who was eaten by worms for failing to give glory to God (Acts 12:23) — whatever example we select, there is always one conclusion to be drawn: and that is that the only proper recourse for the kings of the earth is to bow to the Christ who is the Ruler of kings (Rev. 1:5). As the psalm so forcefully puts it, “[…] let all around him bring gifts to him who is to be feared, who cuts off the spirit of princes, who is to be feared by the kings of the earth” (vv. 11–12).
To put this another way, the Bible’s political theology is, minimally, one of indomitable triumph.
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Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Thursday, August 22, 2024
The problem with progressivism is not simply an ephemeral set of policies. The problem is that progressivism is a worldview with a set of metaphysical assumptions. And while I would never go so far as to equate Christianity with conservatism proper, there is no metaphysical comparison between progressivism and conservatism. They possess an organizing logic of total contrasts. Conservatism champions a constrained idea of the universe, one of moral givenness and order. For this reason, it builds within the confines of limits and hands down this moral inheritance through successive generations. 

Do you ever wonder why everything progressivism touches eventually rots? While some may question the exact correlation-causation link I am making, the rearview mirror of history seems to tell us a very plain truth: The preponderance of progressive ideas and influence in society corresponds to statist and authoritarian government, decadent and perverse morality (especially sexual morality), family decline, cultural despair, crime-ridden streets, and, yes, even ugly architecture. Cultural decline and social pathologies result from the progressive vision for humanity and government.
This is not, chiefly, a reality that stems from politics alone. It stems from theological realities that spill into the political. Our political order traffics in deeply theological and moral realities that deceive us into believing that political arrangements are surface-level conflicts over tax policies. Behind every political arrangement is an organizing logic that will lead either to truth and flourishing or error and destruction. My settled conviction is that the organizing logic of progressivism leads to decay, degeneracy, and destruction.
The problem with progressivism is not simply an ephemeral set of policies. The problem is that progressivism is a worldview with a set of metaphysical assumptions. And while I would never go so far as to equate Christianity with conservatism proper, there is no metaphysical comparison between progressivism and conservatism. They possess an organizing logic of total contrasts. Conservatism champions a constrained idea of the universe, one of moral givenness and order.
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Written by Jeffrey A. Tucker |
Friday, September 16, 2022
Today we live amidst new creations that we know from experience turned very different from how they are envisioned: lockdowns, closures, masks, distancing, capacity limits, vaccines, vaccine mandates, and a host of other preposterous things and practices (plexiglass anyone?) that came to mark our time, all promoted as the approved science by major media. 

Two years before lockdowns, the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein, about which a wonderful movie was released on the author’s life and thought. At the same time, there was a book and an exhibit at the Morgan Library, and growing controversies about the personal and political ethos that a generation of radicals meant to their times and bequeathed to ours.
This is the book that never stops giving, but there is more going on. The anniversary two years ago seems now like a foreshadowing of what happens when science goes wrong. She knew it back then: the grave dangers of intellectual pretense (thus anticipating F.A. Hayek) and the unanticipated social consequences of what Thomas Sowell would later call the unconstrained vision.
The monster created in the fictional laboratory — readers are always surprised that he is a sympathetic character, only lacking in all moral sense, like perhaps many we know too well now — anticipates the unfolding of politico-technological history as it developed from the late 19th century through the 20th. This came to be perfected in 2020 when the innovations we rely on – social media, Big Data, personal tracking, wide availability of medical services, even vaccines – came back to destroy other features of life we value, like liberty, privacy, property, and even faith.
The long fascination with Shelley’s work is related to her intellectual pedigree. She was, after all, the daughter of one of two of the mightiest minds of the 18th century, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, thinkers who took the Enlightenment project into new frontiers of human liberation. Mary herself ran off with and eventually married the troubled but erudite Percy Shelley, found herself embroiled in an awkward relationship with Lord Byron, and experienced the terrible tragedy of losing three children while experiencing both cruel shunning and great acclaim.
Her thinking and her life were the product of late Enlightenment thought, infused by both its best (Humean) aspects and its worst (Rousseauian) excesses. Her lasting contribution was as a corrective, affirming the freedom to create as the driving force of progress, while warning against the wrong means and the wrong motivations that could turn that freedom to despotism. Indeed, some scholars observe that her politics late in life were more Burkean than Godwinian.
Her enduring contribution is her 1818 book, which created two enduring archetypes, the mad scientist and the monster he creates, and still taps into cultural anxiety concerning the intentions vs. the reality of scientific creation. There is a good reason for this anxiety, as our times show us.
She wrote during a period — it was a glorious one — when the intellectual class had a justified expectation that dramatic changes were coming to civilization. Medical science was improving. Disease would be controlled. Populations were on the move from the country to the city. The steamship was vastly increasing the pace of travel and making international trade more resource-efficient.
She was surrounded by the early evidence of invention. The beautiful movie about her life recreates the ethos, the confidence in the future of freedom, the sense that something marvelous was coming. She attends a kind of magic show with Percy at which a showman and scientist uses electricity to cause a dead frog to move its legs, which suggests to her the possibility of giving life to the dead.
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