Thema

A Manifesto on What Matters

Douglas Wilson

ur culture is haunted by epistemological despair, a despair which cannot be buried, shouted down, turned aside, or simply ignored. It is always there, even though we prefer to deny it. We have no idea why we are here, where we are supposed to go, and how we are to conduct ourselves on the way. But in the meantime, our government schools solemnly teach third-graders how to use condoms. Countless fathers desert their wives and children. Pastors dishonor their calling through their rampant adulteries. Thieving representatives of a thieving people plunder the widow. The drunkards of Ephraim puke on the table. For those who have eyes, the approaching night is clearly the kind which cannot be danced away.

Why?

This has happened because, over the last century, the Christian church has allowed herself to be corrupted by the various forms of unbelieving -isms which surround her -- egalitarianism, feminism, socialism, environmentalism, you-name-it-ism. The church consequently has no answers for those questioning, no light for those in darkness, no life for those who live in death. The church, which God ordained as the pillar and ground of the truth, now finds herself echoing (although somewhat plaintively) that ancient relativistic aside of Pilate -- Quod veritas? What is truth?

In a world of pagan despair, the epistemological corruptions and compromises of the Christian church have blurred and distorted the clarity of the biblical message. And the silent presence of the bystanding, impotent church has merely added to the weight and burden of our cultural despair.

Non-Biblical Solutions

To the extent that the symptoms of our disease are undeniable, the world does offer some suggestions. A common method solves the problem by admitting that it exists,but it is not that serious. As soon as the false prophets and liars see that God's people are on the verge of a deep and real repentance, they will not be long in coming forward. And when they come forward they will heal the wound of the people lightly; they will speak peace when there is no peace. They will do nothing more than take a damp washcloth and dab around the edges of our gangrenous wound. But there will be no peace. Until we see that God is true, though every man be a liar, we will not have peace.

The Biblical Solution

Christians must obediently and humbly return to the triune God of Scripture. We must return to a fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of all true wisdom. This must be our epistemology, our apologetic, our hermeneutic -- thorough-going obedience to the grace of God through Christ in the fear of God. This, and only this, will enable us to become like the men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do. Therefore, the Lord, not man, must control the transformation of culture.

By the grace of the Lord, we must resolve to be faithful to every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. From Genesis to Revelation, we must not be embarrassed by any passage of Scripture, and once we have submissively ascertained its meaning through careful and patient grammatical and historical study, we must seek to put it into practice the day before yesterday.

The reformation of culture begins with individuals. It will be as individuals that we will appear before the bar of God to be gathered with the sheep, or scattered with the goats. Individuals will give an account for all their idle words, lustful and covetous thoughts, squandered talents, and now vain excuses. Individuals will enter into the blessed rest or be banished to the outer darkness.

All who name the name of Christ must therefore depart from all forms of wickedness, especially the secret sin which has been hidden from every eye but God's. Individual Christians must repent of the sin of autonomous individualism, the belief that our lives and thoughts are our own property, and that our relationships with others are simply a matter of our own voluntary arrangements. As the Lord lives, they are not. We have been bought with a price; we are not our own. Having been redeemed by Christ, we have been placed by God under various governments to obey Him through faithful service according to the law He has established for the governance of these institutions.

The family is the first such institution which must be reformed according to the Word of God. All Christians must recognize the importance of structuring the family according to the Scriptures and not according to the smoke of this world. The husband is established by God as the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church. This position is not to be abused through petty tyrannies; husbands must diligently imitate the self-sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. Christian husbands must repent of their countless attempts to ignore this truth, their abdications, their compromises with the lies and liars of feminism, their lack of spiritual leadership, and their adulteries.

Godly wives are to delight in their husbands and in their children. There is no shame in managing a household well, and a great deal of shame in deserting it. Children are to honor their parents in the Lord; it is the right thing to do.

In a godly culture, grace's center of gravity is found in the family. Our culture is so rebellious that we have institutionalized our rebellion, and cannot even conceive of how a genuine obedience would appear. We must nevertheless begin; Christians must insist on the abolition of the government school system, our nursing home system, our government welfare system, and countless other agencies and bureaucracies designed by the godless to replace the family. The family, and only the family, is the ministry of health, education, and welfare.

Christians must hasten the destruction of this godless system of salvation by works through separating themselves from it. Christians must take their children out of government schools and day-care centers, their parents out of rest homes, and food stamps out of the budget.

The second institution in need of God-given reformation is the church. The first duty of all Christian churches is to proclaim clearly the gospel of Christ as Scripture has revealed it to us. Our preachers must therefore repent of their ignorance, slothfulness, timidity, and prideful "wiser than God" assumptions, and return to a bold proclamation of the truth of the gospel. We need have no fear in preaching this message, for it abases man and exalts Christ. We need to tremble for having neglected it.

This message is that man by nature is a deserving object of God's wrath, utterly without hope of saving himself. Dead in his filthiness, he is without God and without hope in the world. But before all worlds, God the Father selected by name a people to be called by His name, the number of whom cannot be increased, diminished, or counted. When the appointed time for their redemption came, God the Son took on human flesh, and was born of a woman. According to the predetermined plan of God, the eternal Word of God died on a tree as a perfect and efficacious substitute for His people, those whom the Father had given Him. As the message of this gospel progresses throughout the world, God the Spirit comes upon the men and women selected for salvation and in a wonderful and effectual way, regenerates them; those who God has ordained to eternal life believe. This being the case, what shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? No true child of God will ever fall from the everlasting arms.

The message of the gospel is clear in Scripture. We must confess that our sinful neglect of it has blurred it to us. As the church returns to a clear understanding of the gospel message, other important doctrinal reformations will follow.

The state is the third institution in shambles. At the very beginning of the coming cultural reformation, our civil magistrates must repent of their blasphemous delusion that the civil government is in any way competent to be a savior for man. This blasphemy is ours, for our magistrates represent us to God in the civil realm. Through them, we have sinned in rejecting the biblical doctrine of God's predestination. Not surprisingly, unbelieving man seeks to fill the void of what he calls chance with his own form of total and absolute control -- bureaucratic predestination by man. The result is an all-encompassing totalitarian state at war with the living God. But our God is a God of battles and such teapot rebellions never last very long; the Lord in heaven laughs.

God requires the magistrate simply to be a deacon of justice, to punish the wrongdoer with the sword. The duty of the magistrate is to make it possible to walk across town safely in the middle of the night. This is the extent of their responsibility. But because they have attempted to usurp the position and prerogatives of the sovereign God in salvation, they have been too overwhelmed and distracted to do the one thing God requires of them.

All Christians must repent of this, for we have been content to have them represent us by such blasphemous folly. The taxes we currently pay and the persecutions we currently experience are a just chastisement for our disobedience. As unbelieving civil magistrates preen themselves on their omnicompetence, our response must not be rebellion or anger. We live under a government which is better than we deserve. Our response must be patience in our suffering; we are responsible for what we receive. If the rod is for the back of fools, we must not complain when God administers the beating. We may confess with patience because we know that when the chastisement is done, God will rise up and use His purified church to scatter His enemies.

The Task Before Us

The Christian faith calls us to nothing short of world conquest. In order to be faithful to our Lord's great command, we need to take seriously the task of world evangelization. The need is great. But before we send missionaries across land and sea, we must take care that we send out the gospel and not our sin and folly.

Our first great need is therefore a second reformation. We must recover the teaching of Scripture and know it to be the teaching of Scripture. The second need is revival. Without the power of the Spirit anointing it, all the doctrinal knowledge in the world will simply be words and more words. The third great need is the evangelization of the world, undertaken by a purified and empowered Church. The Lord God has promised that day, and we must pray that He hastens it.

While a lost world has been wandering blindly in the arrogance of sin, we have taken our ease in Zion, seeking our own pleasure and comfort, rather than seeking first the kingdom of God. And those Christians who have been "activists" have sought to do the work of God in the world according to the words and wisdom of men. Our failure has been as great as our folly. We must confess our impotence.

We must study the Scriptures and reform our doctrines and beliefs according to the Scriptures. We must then pray, seeking reformation and revival from the sovereign Lord Who alone can bestow it. When the household of God has been cleansed, according to His Word, we will be qualified to preach the triumph of the Lord Christ to the nations of the world.

And there were loud voices in heaven, saying, "The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever!" (Rev. 11:15)