Anvil - Volume 13, Issue 6

Back Issues

One Little Word Shall Fell Him

Douglas Wilson

In these troubled times, it is crucial for every Christian to recognize that the Holy Trinity is not the god mentioned on the coins which you have in your purses and pockets. Neither is He the god mentioned in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Looking from the other side, the god of American civil religion is the kind of generic unspecified god necessary to the formation of every kind of pagan empire. Christians must take great care, and hold tightly to their faith. The apostle John warned us expressly to keep ourselves from idols.

Their god has no name. He has no son. He has no attributes. He has no distinction of persons. He has not revealed himself on a mountain, in a cloud, or in the sea. He has not given any scriptures to men so that we might know him and worship him in truth. He did not send a son to die on a cross, or to come back from the dead. He resembles nothing so much as a vast ocean of ethereal rice pudding. And because of this, he is a faceless, nameless abstraction, an idol manufactured in the brains of power-hungry men. And this is why the masters of empire can stretch and manipulate this word god as they will, and it always comes out, luckily enough, that this god heartily approves of whatever it is they want to do.

Their stage-prop god never once sent a desert prophet into the court of any king to rebuke anybody for anything—quite the reverse. The emissaries of this pathetic god always come from the court—to rebuke true Christians for being unpatriotic in their failure to worship the idol.

But we do not worship him; we defy him. This god bless America? He is an impotent nullity, and cannot even get his blessings down from countless reader boards to the street. No, we reject him; we challenge him. But we do pray, and earnestly, that the Lord Jesus Christ might show forgiveness and kindness, and on His terms alone. May the Lord Jesus Christ bless America, and soon.

As Christians we are (in patience) to possess our souls. Worship as Christians every Lord's Day. Worship the triune God alone, and come to the Father through Jesus Christ our Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit. But in order to worship Him alone, it is necessary for those Christians who are called upon to say the pledge of allegiance—a religious oath if ever there was one—to abandon the received text.

If all this seems a little extreme, try to imagine what would happen if we altered the Pledge the next time we say it. All that is necessary is the dropping of one word—indivisible, and the insertion of two others—the triune. The result is something a faithful Christian could say.

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under the triune God, with liberty and justice for all."

Elastic Literalism

By Douglas Jones

Anyone who has glanced at "last-days dispensationalism" over the past several decades knows how the prophetic interpretations have quietly shifted as the world changed. For example, in the seventies names like Kissinger, Sadat, Amin, and others were certainly key players in final events. And, of course, the Soviet Union was at the very center of it all because it had all the muscle (now it's just a Namibia with a long ballet tradition). The Ten-nation European common market fulfilled the ten toes of Nebuchadnezzar's dream-statue (Dan. 2:41ff.), and some got uneasy in the early eighties when an eleventh nation was going to be added. Now, of course, the EU has fifteen nations.

The September 11 attacks certainly never fit into any of the pundits' projections in prior decades, but now, surprise-surprise, new prophecy books are coming out showing how it was there all the time.

Apart from the fact that none of these pundits has ever shown an ounce of adult shame over their end-times gerrymandering, we have to remember that their much hallowed literalism was introduced to save us from all that nasty liberal squishiness. Liberals were bad because they wiggled out of clear biblical texts. Dispensational literalism was the savior sent to set all the rest of orthodox Protestantism back on track. No longer would anyone be able to ooze between passages. Literalism would plant sturdy hermeneutical walls which would decisively show us not only that the Virgin birth was true but also that the end times were laid out as clearly and distinctly as a geometry problem. Ten nations means ten nations, not fifteen.

End-times devotees need to look in the mirror. Theological liberals could never get away with all the spreading and looping and stretching that these folks get away with. Both liberals and dispies are addicted to the latest fad of crisis. The call to literalism appears to have been just a front for propheteers to do what ever they wanted.

But how can their own people forget so easily? To be frank, most people don't stay in those churches more than five years. The memory slate keeps getting wiped clean. Literalism now means: new meat; new interpretation.