Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Fire

After the PCA adopted the Ad Interim Committee’s report on the Federal Vision, I remember reading this post, “Of Wolves, Wildfires, and Combat: What Members Can Do To Encourage Their Ministers,” by Dr. R. Scott Clark on The Heidelblog:

Members, in the Federal Vision our congregations face wolves and wildfires. The FV spreads like a wildfire. It is blown by the wind and devours all it touches.

This witness is true. As I write a pack of CREC wolves meets here in Moscow for their third Triennial Church Council of the Most Holy Confederate Presbytery of Saint Anselm. Or something like that. And as I write wild fires rage out of control in Southern California, burning everything to the ground in their paths. The blazes are so huge and propelled by such fierce winds that firemen look like children holding garden hoses as the put their lives on the line to extinguish the flames.

Think of your home, with all of your possessions that you collected over a lifetime — including those items dear to your children — and tell yourself you have less than an hour to get out. What would you grab? How would you pack it? Why this article and not that one? Then tell yourself that in three hours the fire will reduce your home to ashes and you will have to find new living arrangements when the day is over: first temporary living, then permanent. Hopefully you have insurance. But insurance or not, you have lost everything in minutes, and there’s nothing anyone could do except run. Now magnify your loss by thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. How do you quantify tragedy of this magnitude?

Natural disasters are terrifying events, and in Southern Cal this is the “shake and bake” season. But at least one of these fires is manmade — i.e., arson. Someone deliberately set a fire, in the Santa Ana winds, intending it to destroy something (we don’t know if the arsonist had entire neighborhoods in mind), which brings us back to the Federal Vision.

The Federal Visionists are bad men with bad intentions. They are theological arsonists. When they see a church animated by lively faith, they want to hijack it to the Federal Vision and ultimately to the CREC. If it opposes, they will try to split it. When they see an upright minister of the gospel, they want to corrupt him with perverse doctrine. And if he opposes them, they put fire to his reputation with innuendo or abusive ad hominems.

These are lawless men who know no authority but their own, which they centralized in one man. Confessions, creeds, and constitutions are documents without meaning to them. They have no concept of submission, unless you submit to them. They ransack decency and order to impose FV on peace and purity. They have defied the courts (or “councils” to use their parlance) of seven Reformed denominations, because they are the men and wisdom will die with them. They are self-willed reprobates who revel in chaos and they are determined to wreak havoc in the Church of God. These men don’t even possess the virtue of honor among thieves, if there is such a thing. Don’t forget what Wilson did to Sandlin’s church and how the CREC covenant breakers sanctioned his wicked, subversive conduct.

So, now that the Federal Visionists have refused correction and hardened themselves against the truth, what should the Church do with them? Now that we know they intend to pillage the household of God, if not burn it down, what is the next step?

Reject them. Put them out. Isolate them. Drive them into the Federal Vision’s natural habitat — the CREC — and let it continue in its cultic agenda. But fence the Church from them and warn the flock against them. Protect the house of faith from these arsonists; let them not come near. Indeed, leave them alone and let them prepare themselves for eternity, for God has prepared a special place for them — He calls it the Lake of Fire.

Finally, pray for the poor souls burnt by Federal Vision and the homeless souls in California. These are awful tragedies.

4 comments:

DaFedSez said...

Dear Mark,

While I am impressed at your attempts at attaining to true smugnanity and your impressive photoshopping skilz, you still appear to badly misunderstand the FV. I know this for certain because you do not yet appear to agree with us, and when it comes to the FV the rule is "agree that you might understand." I would invite you once again to join us, and have been authorized to tell you that if you do so, I can offer you some of the benefits that come with the FV anointing:

1. The ability to actively tinker with core doctrines of the Christian faith that have been accepted for centuries, and reshape them at will. No prior experience or even formal theological education is necessary. We also have an assortment of adulatory blurbs already drawn up that you can sprinkle like sugar on the back of your first book as well as at least 4 conference appearances in 2008 alone! I regret to inform you that the Trinity and Justification and the Sacraments have already received the silly putty treatment at length, but a friend assures me that there are several other doctrine thingees to tamper with. I suggest you get on board soon though before the good ones get snapped up.

2. Your own sacerdotal garment and minister's uniform designer. No aspiring visialogue is complete without a dog collar and an extensive wardrobe of polyester robes, sashes, and what we affectionately call the pointy hat. These garments have the magical power to add gravitas and divert attention away from even the worst goatee or otherwise total lack of physique. They also instantly transform tedious self-contradictory revisionist goobledegook into liturgical masterpieces. Nothing says "I'm #1 around here and you aren't" like FV couture (TM).

3. A set of fill-in-the-blanks letters that will give you the power to excise and intimidate members of the church without recourse to any irritating sort of "book-of-so-called-church-order." Also included is a copy of our new "Praying Through the Imprecatories" devotional.

I can also give you one of the secret keys to understanding the CREC (Catholics Reclaiming Evangelical Churches) movement. Our great hero of the reformation is actually King Henry the Eighth. You see he recognized that the only thing really wrong with the Roman Catholic church was that the Pope had all the power (that continuing problem still keeps many of us away from our true Alma Mater.) You see what we need today is that good old medieval Romanism but with an individualized system of congregational papacies. Join us and you too can be a miniaturized version of Leo the Tenth! (Oh, and I checked about the ceiling thing but I was told Michelangelo is dead, bummerisimus eh?)

Mark T. said...

Actually, I lifted the Booth photo from another site, so the Photoshop compliment belongs to someone else.

BlackNTanInTheAM said...

I don't get it, who is DaFed?

Mark T. said...

Travis,

I gave him his own category on my sidebar. Read it and it’ll speak for itself.