Recent Twitter Files reveal widespread and coordinated censorship there. Where vile language acceptable, those speaking truth have lost their jobs. Long before, state institutions censored the most important truths in human history without recrimination.
Before you continue, I offer you a guide. This post will move outside of most people’s box. I ask you not to delve into the establishment clause of the first amendment of the United States Constitution. Before you jump to practical ramifications, consider the truth of the post.
The Truth, the Logos
When you read Genesis 1 in the Bible, you are reading the account of the beginning of all time, space, and matter. Everything originates with God out of nothing. That is the explanation for everything. It does not even exist without Him, but He also sustains it.
The Bible record is truth as well as is the truth. Scripture presents itself as the truth. Jesus, God the Son, said to His Father God in John 17:17, “Thy Word is truth.” It might make you feel good and help your life, but that is just a byproduct of its truth. It works because it is the truth. The truth is one, because God is one. Nothing in this record contradicts any other part. God does not deny Himself.
God created man in His image and with His likeness. He intended man to reflect Him in his nature. Men should treat and look at the world in every aspect like God would. They should follow what God says, the truth, for and about everything. God expects men to view the world, see it, like He does.
Modernists speculate a fully naturalistic origination and continuation of all things. They opine this as progress from the superstition of ignorance. In fact, the premoderns had it right. It never was a natural world. The Greeks were right in their concept of cosmos, which they called logos, an intelligence that permeated all space and matter and in contrast to random and chaotic naturalism.
People in John’s day understood his Logos in John 1:1, who He said was Jesus Christ, was the source for this cohesion, intelligence, and order. Paul wrote that in Christ were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3) and that by all things consisted (1:17). That was the Logos.
No Bifurcation of Truth
Paul was also emphatic in the truth of Christ’s bodily resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). Jesus showed Thomas the wounds in His hands. He was one, whole Person. A physical body was the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Both body and spirit glorified God. This contradicted a pagan dualism, that separated truth into separate spheres of the spiritual and physical.
This New Testament presentation matches the Old Testament concept of truth, “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). Every aspect of knowledge falls under the purveyance of God’s truth. Even though someone may divide the truth into various fields such as government, economics, math, and biology, it still is one cohesive, orderly truth proceeding from the one mind of one God.
Whatever field or region under the sovereignty of one truth splinters from the one, or whenever it does, it becomes distorted, superficial, meaningless, and subjective. The greatest advancements today in philosophy and science come in what Stephen Meyer calls “the return to the God hypothesis.” The universe is fine tuned. A cell is irreducibly complex. In philosophy, only God explains the existence of everything that exists. It’s impossible for something that exists not to have a reason for its existence.
Separating the truth from government, art, music, and economics, leaves any one in chaos and moral relativism. The gospel does not stand apart from all the truth of the Bible. And the gospel itself cannot and should not be divided into separate components of different degrees of subjective value. For instance, it is good for social reasons and perhaps psychological ones but not to reconcile to God and appease His holy wrath.
Religion the Truth, Equal with Facts
The state is good with religion as long it isn’t the truth. If it becomes the truth, it is equal with facts, science, math, and engineering. True religion cannot just stop with the true definitions of a man and of a woman. Next it says you go to Hell if you reject Jesus Christ. Even worse it limits your marijuana use.
Much of the philosophical conversation today revolves around what I here write. One faction, even considered conservative now, bemoans the loss of Western Civilization and its advantages. It is the water in which we swim, even if no longer Judeo-Christian ethics.
Classically liberal intellectuals warn readers and listeners. They won’t like the disappearance of Christianity, hearkening Nietzche’s prophecy about the death of God in the 19th century. However, if you remove the resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Christ, the consummation of all things in the future literal, physical reign of Jesus Christ, you eradicate all of Christianity. It is a whole that cannot be separated into disjunctive parts.
Total Truth
For a long time Christians self-censored by backing away from total truth (the title of Nancy Pearcey’s book). They stopped bringing the truth to all the subjects and every institution, all ordained by God. The dismissal of one is the dismissal of all.
A moral statement is either true or false. True moral statements come from the Word of God. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, nothing else the Bible says is true. Paul says this in 1 Corinthians 15. You cannot chop the Bible up like that. The moral values become meaningless without the truth of the history and the scientific declarations.
The table of nations in Genesis 10 is the truth. The prophecies of Daniel 11 are the truth. What scripture says all over about men and women is the truth. These are not subjective and relativistic. They are objective. They are true. All these writings should be taught everywhere as truth, not in religion class as an alternative along side the lies of other religions.
The separation of church and state, which is not in the United States Constitution, necessitates censorship. Anything church related is only church related and stays in the church. Only state stuff belongs in the state, which as many of you know, includes everything in the world, including biblical issues like marriage and parenting practices. Then the state labels all of theirs science and facts and outside of the state, unless cooperating with the state, subjective, private, and even conspiracy. If it is truth, it is your truth, subjective truth, which is fine as long as you keep it outside of institutions.
Take Moses into the Supreme Court Building
For awhile the state has been fine with a sculpture of Moses with the two tablets on the Supreme Court building. It is a decoration. It is a ritual. Maybe it’s even an archetype into which you read whatever you want. They cannot use it as grounds for decision making, even if its self-evident truths form the basis for logic, argument, and morality.
Perhaps a government and big business or oligarchical complex now joins in widespread censorship. Let’s just say that complex does censor the citizenry of the United States and other Western countries. Christians already censored themselves by segregating themselves away from God’s world and keeping the truth away from its institutions, whose very existence arises from that truth.
God requires more than talking about the truth at church. He requires adherence to the truth in every institution. This is the teaching of all nations. True discipleship requires national adherence. Churches at least should adhere, but their goals are further than that. They want the knowledge and dominion of His truth everywhere.
Thank you, brother Brandenburg for writing. When the nation was founded, it was presupposed by the majority that God was both real and true. Satan these years since has been busy inverting that notion, and therefore making our way of government in its original form, increasingly more troubled and unstable. I still believe our American Republicanism is the best form of Government ever conceived outside of Moses’s Theocratic Judgeship. Considering we will never have that again, and one day Christ will rule from David’s Throne at Jerusalem for a literal 1000 years in perfect righteousness, and that no mandate for Theocratic Government exists in the New Testament until that time, we need Christ to rule us from our hearts. It bares mentioning, and I know you’re not suggesting this, but it’s becoming increasingly popular now to identify as a “Christian Nationalist,” I have observed even some Baptists falling into this error. They seek a Christian Theocracy in my opinion, and I believe they’re a subversive Catholic anti-reformation information operation, capitalizing on the reactionary sentiments of American Conservatives to woke culture. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on this, or how to restore an American society that presupposes God to be true first in all things, without crossing the line into Christian Nationalism, or some other Christian Theocratic government.
Benjamin,
It’s a big discussion to be had. I’m introducing the discussion. Believers should want every nation to be a Christian nation. How do we do that though with people also having liberty, freedom of conscience, all that? The founding fathers didn’t do enough in my opinion to incorporate the truth of the Bible into the fabric of the nation. They essentially dipped their toe in with the documents. They were so afraid of the state religion of Europe and a loss of rights, that they were not clear. It’s controversial, I know, but I think we should be able to talk about it, ironically, that is, not be censored from discussing it, my first sentence.
Amen, and I agree. It may be possible to form a government based on a corrected American Republicanism, where God is made center in all public affairs, but it would require some kind of balancing to prevent an unscriptural theocracy, or Catholic takeover. A new Constitution that carefully and precisely defines the Kingdom of God, The Church, and the State as three distinct (yet related) institutions, with the latter two having clear liberty for the Church, and Authority for the State, may work. The Constitution of the United States is still very strong to this day, despite it all, we can engage in public evangelism with the protection of the Law. Crafting something of the same caliber, but with a greater focus on God, His attributes, and nature is an interesting mental exercise. One other thought, the Constitution derives its authority from the People, perhaps a corrected constitution should derive its authority from God (with a careful scriptural definition of God), that then delegates authority to qualified People (i.e. men of virtuous households, similar to the qualifications of a Deacon, and have vested interest in the success of the nation), and not all People regardless of station, carte blanche. I know the original US Constitution had some language like this, but has since been watered down into the egalitarian mess we have now. I understand if you don’t agree with anything I have said here, they’re just some thoughts I had on the same subject.
I wrote a column and ultimately deleted it for particular reasons awhile back, where I said that there is a state church already, and if you do have one, it matters which one you have. I have long supported the free exercise and establishment clauses, but they have not provided enough IMO. You don’t have free exercise when a state religion of naturalism reigns. How this all is to be done? Like I said, we won’t know unless believers will bring the truth to every region or domain of their lives. Churches themselves have bifurcated theological truth from cultural truth like we see today with someone who says he is a fiscal conservative and a social liberal.