Theologians of the Beast and Ivory Tower Takes on Empire

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/empires-foreign-and-domestic/id1677193347?i=100063749953

Since the American Reformer keeps popping up on Reformed websites like The Aquila Report, I have (out of curiosity) been listening to some of the podcasts. They have proven as disappointing as the writings.

This episode in particular struck me – I actually shut it off about three-quarters of the way through. I'd had enough. It took me back to seminary days, recalling conversations that were going on among Dominion-minded folks and Theonomists in particular. They would engage in these grand theoretical discussions which they mistakenly believed to be rooted in Biblical thought.

Listening to this episode on the American Empire – which basically defending the notion, I was repeatedly reminded of how callous these people are. They have no regard for nor understanding of human life and the costs such empires incur. They think they are moral and yet I repeatedly kept thinking about the amoral geopolitical machinations of men like Henry Kissinger. The difference is Kissinger was a secular Jew in service to an empire. These men profess to be Christians and yet their morality is more base than what one would find in a toilet.

Offhand comments endorse and bless actions that resulted in millions of deaths and whole societies turned into wastelands. 'Moral rule' is used as a fig-leaf for what is little more than rapacious thievery and mass murder. It was really vile to listen to it.

I remember being rather annoyed while listening to such musings in the context of a Reformed seminary. Maybe it's because I'm much older with grown kids and a lot more life under my belt, but I found this to be simply offensive.

It's a case of Ivory Tower absurdity – but these men don't even deserve to be reckoned 'Ivory Tower' – their ignorance was too overwhelming, their understanding of history and politics too pedestrian and shallow.

But such talk is all the rage – how pleased they would have been had their podcast existed back in 2003-2004 when such 'imperial' talk was in vogue. The seminary conversations I remember back in the 1990's were a little more tame though no less immoral.

The overwhelming ethos is that of amorality and consequentialism. And of course the terrible blasphemous assumptions of sacralism which continue to dominate and poison the Reformed- Magisterial Protestant mind and yet also continue to permutate as the context shifts.

Few advocate the ecclesio-political models of the sixteenth century or even the later confessional era, but these men are their progeny to be sure. They may run their thinking through the filters of liberalism and exist in a state of dissonance and contradiction but they are the offspring of not just the sacralists of the Reformation era but a long line of error reaching back into late antiquity when the shadow of Rome still hung over the Earth.

When you think the Kingdom of God is built through avarice and conquest – and that you have a right and duty to engage in these activities on a macro and geopolitical scale, then all I can say is – go back and start over. You've misunderstood. You've misread the Bible. Your reading has been hijacked by philosophical commitments and you've lost your way. You are not theologians of Zion but the Beast and its apostate collaborator known as Mystery Babylon – your mistress is not the Bride of Christ but the Whore that rides the Beast.