K:JNWTS 30/3 (December 2015): 44-45
Jefferson White, The Political Theory of Christ and its Creation of Our World. 371pp. Paper. ISBN: 978-1512277951. $19.95.
This is a book which will not be much noticed; but it deserves to be much noticed. It is a penetrating exposition of the paganization of the modern (especially American) world--a paganization which has also infected the church with its Pelagian tentacles and its god-in-our-image postmodernism. Liberalism--religious/theological and political--is ever pagan, ever totalitarian, ever tyrannical, as genuine (not faux) Christians are beginning to realize. Even so-called conservative and libertarian Christians are infected with the disease because so many of them are aspiring tyrants, control freaks, authoritarians and even liberty-ans of the almighty independent self.
White has crafted the narrative of this nascent and emerging paganism in America from its birth in post-Civil War legal theory, to its canonization in the infamous New Deal of FDR and its application in the Alinsky radicals of the contemporary scene. Each of these deviants from the divine order of true separation of powers (God and Caesar, Mt. 22:21) is a God-hater and thus a hater of the people of God (as is all paganism). Our author traces the story from OT and NT revelation which sets God over against pagan state-religion oneness (a truly radical antithesis)--i.e., separation of church and state as the distinction of Creator and creature. He moves to the story of the Christian church standing courageously athwart the omnipotent tyrannical state, especially as that narrative flows out of the Protestant Reformation. But then, the downgrade, as the scions of elitism in the Enlightened West twisted every aspect of Christian culture into a post-Christian wax-nose (all the while claiming that they were the REAL 'Christians'--of course!!) to fulfill their depraved lust for power!, power!, absolute power!! over every soul in the universe.
Once upon a time politically, the U.S. Constitution was a bastion against this bare faced tyranny. No more; the Constitution has been reimaged in the likeness of the (pagan) lawyers, judges and legal theorists who control and deconstruct that historic document with their own agendas (and do they ever have agendas, as we are learning daily). Once upon a time religiously, the Word of God was a bastion against this same bare faced tyranny. No more; the Bible is increasingly an unknown book (just try to get people to study it seriously--not pop fluff narcissism which has passed for 'bible study'for fifty plus coffee-klatch years) in a culture which ridicules it and destroys any who attempt to believe it or abide by its tenets. "No Tolerance for (Real) Christianity" is the new religion of the 21st century liberal and every pagan soul is a soldier in that battle to destroy that which holds up the mirror to his or her depraved and brutal heart. White is particularly good here in tracing the extremism of the Left in the interest of destroying the truth of the Word of God--notably since the dawn of the Age of Aquarius and the sexual revolution with its tawdry, ugly and un-natural absolutization of the genital. James Davison Hunter, David Horowitz and others have revealed this mega-shift. Add Jefferson White to that number with particular thanks for the meticulous work his footnotes display in the judicial and legal arena.
At the end of this well-written volume, we cry, "Lord have mercy!", as we pray, "even so Lord Jesus, come quickly!"
--James T. Dennison, Jr.