This false gospel [Cultural Marxism], as we have seen, has a doctrine of sin, and that is the very existence of people like me. My only hope under this new religious regime is to become woke to my status as an oppressor and learn to hate my very existence. If I refuse, or at very least fail to begin signaling some woke virtue, I will face the scrutiny of its pseudo-ministers in the church and perhaps even the wrath of its inquisitors without.

Every false religion needs inquisitors because they are false religions. There is no light in them and lies do not draw people.
The original Marxists employed snitches to find and punish dissenters. During the Bolshevik revolution, dissenters were actually killed; but the Neo-Marxists rarely draw blood. They are just as content to drain the bank accounts of oppressors.
The previously mentioned, Social Justice Warriors are one kind of inquisitor, and they are always listening for infractions to Cultural Marxist orthodoxy. When they hear one, they scream (actually, they usually just send out a tweet with a sufficiently virtue-signaling hashtag attached). This how Cultural Marxism is being advanced and enforced inside the church: Social Justice Warriors in both pulpit and pew who snitch on the un-woke.
When it comes to enforcing Neo-Marxism outside the church, we have: ANTIFA. This “Anti-Fascist” movement is a nationwide network of Cultural Marxists who are mysteriously able to mobilize on a moment’s notice and who, upon arrival, begin to breaking things, burning things, throwing bricks and bodily fluids, etc.
One of their more subtle methods of punishing oppressors is a dirty little thing called “doxing.” This involves spying upon right-wing events, discovering the identity of those who attended, contacting their employer, and getting them fired for being “haters” of some kind. This tactic is actually very old, but it has become increasingly easy due to cell phones, facial recognition technology, and social media.
Such risks serve as a good reminder that persecution indeed comes in many forms, but it will always come to those who are faithful to the gospel: “Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (2 Timothy 3:12).
Are you ready to suffer persecution? You must be, because a false religion has been established in our land. It has a prophet and his name is Karl Marx. It has a god and it incarnates in revolution. It has apostles, like the violent Vladimir Lenin and the non-violent elites of the Frankfort School. It holds forth the empty promise of egalitarianism (i.e., absolute equality of opportunity and outcome).
This false gospel, as we have seen, has a doctrine of sin, and that is the very existence of people like me. My only hope under this new religious regime is to become woke to my status as an oppressor and learn to hate my very existence. If I refuse, or at very least fail to begin signaling some woke virtue, I will face the scrutiny of its pseudo-ministers in the church and perhaps even the wrath of its inquisitors without.
What, then shall we do? I am honestly not sure there is anything we can do, other than to affirm what Scripture says, “If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:9). A more colloquial rendering of that final phrase would be: To hell with them.
Christian McShaffrey is a Minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and is Pastor of Five Solas Church (OPC) in Reedsburg, Wis.

The churches that seem to be the strongest often have many members who have worked through earlier deceptions about their conversion to arrive at a solid assurance with God. The probing was occasioned by learning that spiritual life in the individual produces noticeable change. The exploration into whether or not they actually have spiritual life altered everything.

In the early 1700s, between 75 and 80 percent of American people attended church meetings regularly. Yet huge numbers among them were unconverted. It was among these people that Awakening doctrines had their greatest effects. In other words, wherever people gathered, within or outside the colonial church buildings, the principle leaders were addressing church members who needed Christ.
What truth, among the many emphasized, had the greatest influence on unconverted church members in The Great Awakening? And who are the unconverted church members in our context who may also need this truth?
The Great Awakening’s Emphasis on Regeneration
When George Whitefield was asked why he so often preached, “Ye must be born again,” he replied, “Because ye must be born again!”
Regeneration, or the new birth, was the prevalent issue of the Great Awakening of the 1740s. As Joseph Tracey said:
This doctrine of the “new birth,” as an ascertainable change, was not generally prevalent in any communion when the revival commenced; it was urged as of fundamental importance, by the leading promoters of the revival; it took strong hold of those whom the revival affected; it naturally led to such questions as the revival brought up and caused to be discussed; its perversions naturally grew into, or associated with, such errors as the revival promoted; it was adapted to provoke such opposition, and in such quarters, as the revival provoked; and its caricatures would furnish such pictures of the revival, as oppressors drew. This was evidently the right key; for it fitted all the wards of the complicated lock.[1]
This doctrine has repeatedly been at the heart of awakenings.
By “regeneration,” we mean the giving of life to dead souls as a sovereign work of the Holy Spirit. Berkhof says it is “that act of God by which the principle of the new life is implanted in man, and the governing disposition of the soul is made holy…and the first holy exercise of this new disposition is secured.”[2] The Lord lived and died for his own, and as King, gifts our dead souls with new life resulting in sight, belief, repentance, and holiness.
J.C. Ryle said in so many words that the awakening preachers of that time believed in an indivisible union between authentic faith and holiness. He writes, “They never allowed for a moment that any church membership or religious profession was the least proof of a man being a Christian if he lived an ungodly life.”[3]
The attention to this truth, fed by their earlier Puritan theology, brought great conviction and massive numbers of conversions when preached and taught with the unction of the Spirit in times of revival. Where it did not bring conviction, it brought anger. Whitefield, who himself was written against in over 240 tracts of various types,[4] said that when you heard middle colonies’ preacher Gilbert Tennent (and his brothers) you were either converted or enraged. According to Gillies’ quoting of Prince in Historical Collections of Accounts of Revival, Tennent is said to have preached in this way:
Such were the convictions wrought in many hundreds in this town by Mr. Tennent’s searching ministry; and such was the case of those many scores of several other congregations as well as mine, who came to me and others for direction under them. And indeed, by all their converse I found, it was not so much the terror as the searching nature of his ministry that was the principal means of their conviction. It was not merely, nor so much, his laying open the terrors of the law and wrath of God, or damnation of hell (for this they could pretty well bear, as long as they hoped these belonged not to them, or they could easily avoid them), as his laying open their many vain and secret shifts and refuges, counterfeit resemblance’s of grace, delusive and damning hopes, their utter impotence, and impending danger of destruction; whereby they found all their hopes and refuges of lies to fail them, and themselves exposed to eternal ruin, unable to help themselves, and in a lost condition. This searching preaching was both the suitable and principal means of their conviction.[5]
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
We are to be what we are: mere Christians redeemed and sanctified by grace alone, through faith alone, and seeking to live according to God’s moral law, in union with Christ, out of gratitude for God’s free favor in Christ—not in order to be justified and saved but because we have been justified and saved.

Some years ago, while explaining Heidelberg Catechism 114, on the moral law, I wrote, “Paul was not a Gnostic, a Valentinian, an Anabaptist, a Familist, nor an Antinomian. He was a sinner saved and justified freely through faith alone, a Christian living in union and communion with Christ, seeking to bring his life into conformity to all of God’s holy moral law.”
A reader wrote to ask what this paragraph means. It is a loaded with historical references that would take some time to explain but each of these represents some kind of over-realized eschatology. By that I mean someone who thinks that he has or can have heaven on earth right now. In order to have it each of these groups changed the rules of the game. In one way or another they got rid of God’s moral law, God’s grace, or God’s church.
The Gnostics (including the Valentinians) did by getting rid of God himself and by making themselves into gods. This is probably the dominant theology of our age. The Anabaptists certainly had an over-realized eschatology. They were not content to be mere Christians. They wanted to make themselves into apostles and fancied that they were super-spiritual—perhaps they were the Super Apostles of the sixteenth century?—who both mastered the law and were free from it. They did not need justification and salvation by grace alone, through faith alone and the basis of the imputed righteousness of Christ alone—the first generation of the Anabaptists rejected the Reformation solas. They fancied that they had the apostolic gifts and powers including tongues, being slain in the Spirit, and continuing revelation. They were the true precursors of American evangelicalism from 1800 to today. The Familists was a movement founded in the 1540s, in Emden. They were precursors to the early Pietist movement of Jakob Boehme (1575–1624). They were radical subjectivists who rejected the sacraments. Their views were adopted by the Quakers. Again, this is a manifestation of an over-realized eschatology.
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