Paul's Passing Thoughts

Blogger Matt Walsh is bummed. He posted the following on Facebook recently: “Let me tell you what’s on my mind right now. I probably shouldn’t, but I’ve never been one to keep my thoughts to myself. I am feeling extremely frustrated and disheartened. Maybe you picked up on that if you watched my video today. Over the last month, as I have waded into the debate about young Earth creationism and expressed my view that the Earth is older than 6,000 years, I have seen a side of Christianity that I’d never experienced before.” Walsh continues: “Many Christians have responded viciously. Even worse than the viciousness is the close-mindedness. I don’t mean close-minded because they disagree with me. There is nothing close-minded about disagreement. I mean close-minded because they are absolutely unwilling to listen to what I have to say.”

I investigated the video and the responses. Indeed, Walsh presents formidable arguments in the video, and indeed, thank God for American separation of church and state jurisprudence or Walsh would be suffering more than bad feelings. And thank God for a well functioning capitalistic economy because in countries like Kenya, burning people alive in a ditch with brush may be illegal, but the economy is in the tank and law enforcement doesn’t have the resources to do anything about it. Here, I could go off on a rabbit trail concerning the stupidity of socialism, but I will show restraint.

Moreover, he dared speaketh against the high priest of young creationism, Ken Ham, who I have had serious problems with for a long time. Ham is not a good person, nor is he the sharpest knife in the drawer, but hey, I can say that because this is not how I make my living. And beside that, people who read my stuff are independent thinkers who are not afraid of ideas and trust me, that’s not a big number.

Walsh, apparently, doesn’t know what hit him, but I do: two things; authority as truth, and the Protestant red herring. First, authority as truth. Walsh, like most Churchians, is confused about church. He actually thinks the churches (Catholic and Protestant) support independent thinking. This is cognitive dissonance of the highest order. Church orthodoxy is based on a hierarchy of spiritual authority and always has been. Regardless of the church’s overt behavior which constantly contradicts the plain sense of Scripture, the church continues to thrive while raking in millions  from the working poor. Bottom line: it sells salvation, and part of the price is agreeing with orthodoxy; heterodoxy doesn’t get you into heaven. “Secondary issues” are the sandbox that church despots allow the parishioners to play in while momma church watches from the kitchen window.

But Walsh stepped into something that he thought was a secondary issue because he didn’t get the memo. Ham, a darling of Catholics and Protestants alike, and also the undisputed Cardinal of biblical creation science, so called, has been stating for some time that a rebuttal of a six day creation is akin to denying the gospel. Other high priests of Protestant evangelicalism like John MacArthur Jr. have been aping the same thing. The reaction is the result of a perception that Walsh is denying the gospel. Never mind Walsh’s argument, which I believe has merit, he has spoken against authority as truth. Ok, so I usually don’t play the Nazi card to make a point, but we must ask ourselves why an educated society followed the likes of Adolf Hitler. Same reason.  The idea that true social justice is defined by unity for unity’s sake is nothing new and by the way, unity sanctifies the “truth.”

Ken Ham’s creation museum itself is the prime example of church cognitive dissonance. If one reads the Bible carefully, the ark was little more than a huge floating box. “Ark,” is actually a Hebrew word that means, “box.” But boxes don’t sell. You can’t raise millions to build a big box at the head of a holler in Kentucky; it has to be an elaborate boat. That’s Protestantism’s authority as truth: you look right at a big boat and call it a box; brilliant. However, the boat is a box because Ken Ham says so. Get with the program Matt. A literal observation of the Bible’s description of the ark is nothing like what Ham built, but that’s ok. However, thou darest take liberties with a literal interpretation of six days? Remember Rob Bell? He dared question the traditional understanding of hell, and the papal bull came down from John Piper in a tweet: “Bye, bye, Rob Bell.” And so it was written, and so it was done; Bell was finished.

I always ask, “why?” Why such a strong pushback to Walsh’s thesis? I stated one reason, but there is another. If you don’t believe in the literal six solar days of creation (though it is referred to in that way by Ham and others, Walsh explains why they couldn’t be “solar”), you are advocating for Evolution. Well, considering the Protestant doctrine of total depravity, it would be a shame to think we came from apes. So, what do we have so far?

A box is a boat, there are days that are solar before there was a solar system, and we object to the idea that we came from monkeys or apes, who are not totally depraved, which apparently denies our total depravity. Go to church if you will, but I wouldn’t brag about it.

At least church has enough shame left to create lots of red herrings in regard to its paramount item of cognitive dissonance: the Protestant gospel of justification by faith. That’s what the penchant for debate among Churchians is really about. If they stop arguing about “secondary issues” for any length of time, someone might start asking questions about the elementary glaring errors concerning its gospel. Catholics are far less guilty of red herrings than Protestants because they are honest about papal authority while the latter invests in steroidal propaganda concerning freedom of conscience. Walsh thought he was stepping into a Protestant “secondary issue.” NOT.

Catholics have a problem with the Protestant gospel. They deem it, “legal fiction.” The first thing that church leaders fear as a result of the great unwashed not being distracted by red herrings is a discussion about what really sparked the Protestant Reformation. During that time, the Bible was not the primary authority for truth, philosophy was. Saint Augustine was very clear on this; without Plato, there is no real understanding of the Bible. That’s what he said. That’s church history. The church, like all pagan religions before it, believed in a separation of the evil material world and the invisible spiritual world. One is mutable, and the other immutable, and mutually exclusive in all ways. This has always called for additional mediators to guide the great unwashed in the reality of evil apart from any knowledge of good. In essence, man cannot know anything about reality.

In the 13th century, the Catholic Church began to move more towards the idea that man can know reality, and began questioning the strict dichotomy between the material evil and the spiritual good. The Platonist wing of the Catholic Church was not happy about it. If man has any good in him at all, that means he needs less authority from those outside of him who guide the great unwashed through the darkness of the material world with orthodoxy. Yes, those who know that we cannot know must guide those who are affixed to their earthiness; those who are guided by shadows.

Hence, more cognitive dissonance, but this time in regard to the gospel itself. While the Bible declares that believers ARE righteous with a righteousness APART from the law, Protestantism claims that the righteousness that saves is a “legal declaration.” How is something apart from the law a legal declaration? Gee, I don’t know, how is a box a boat? How is a solar day non-solar? Why is it better to be totally depraved than of monkey origin?

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that objective truth can be drawn from the Bible through reason and logic. I also believe that this will only be accomplished through the collective effort of God’s people, primarily the laity. I believe that Christians in our day know very little about the Bible because fixed orthodoxy has greatly limited our knowledge. The few have dictated “truth” to the many for thousands of years; so, here we are.

If man is completely unable, and completely disconnected from spiritual reality, it only makes sense that anyone who is saved is somehow preselected. Obviously, if anyone is going to be saved, the active spiritual realm must act upon the passive material realm. The election debate is also grounded in world philosophy, but how is it tossed about among Churchians? Right, as a “secondary” biblical issue. None of these debates have anything to do with the Bible, but rather philosophical presuppositions concerning mankind.

The whole notion that these debates are biblical is a red herring in and of itself; ALL of these arguments are predicated on metaphysical presuppositions. While accusing Walsh of pandering to the wisdom of man, that’s what church has always been founded on. There is no biblically based statement of philosophy because the church fathers hijacked that possibility as early as the 2nd century. It is a vast work that remains unfinished, and it could be argued that the work has not even been started.

If people like Walsh, who is a formidable thinker, ignores the pushback and joins a collective effort to crawl out of the church cave into the real light, he will need the right diagnosis and the right prescription: a cure for authority as truth and red herrings.

paul