Why be Evangelical?

As the first tenet of Abolitionist ideology, we understand the importance of preaching the Kingdom of Heaven at hand, hoping to persuade men unto repentance and faith so that they may partake in the congregations of the Lord.

To be evANGELical is to be God’s “messenger, envoy, one who is sent, an angel, a messenger from God”. The Great Commission, though mostly ignored and twisted by professing Christians today, is a perfect example of what it means to be evangelical.

“And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” (Matthew 28:18-20)

Any consistent approach to liberty will be one that honors God’s order of creation and pays homage to the truths with which he has blessed us. In discussing the civil bondage that man makes for himself and his neighbor can only be regarded through a lens of sin and repentance and how they relate to judgment and faith. The lofty discussions about human civil government, political action, taxation, non-aggression principles, and any other bulwark against liberty must be from a Biblical worldview and a Christian perspective. This is because human civil government is a sin issue and the road to liberty is a repentance issue, characterized by obedience to God.

This is not to say that humanists and secularists are unable recognize the wickedness of being mastered by their fellow man. Surely God making upright, those made in his image still gives those who reject him the ability to recognize common sense truth, but the fact is that they cannot account for that truth and have no ideological framework on which to interpret it. This is also why it is the rejection of God which leads men to recognize the truths of liberty but wholly reject them in order to form the bonds of human civil government. When men no longer desire to be ruled by God, He gives them up to a debased mind. When they have a debased mind, they will fail to keep his commands. When they fail to keep his commands, they soon disregard social virtues, fail in keeping the Sabbath, dishonor their fathers and mothers, and eventually chase after other gods for provision and protection, which will enslave them into the Egyptian bondage that we all find ourselves in today.

It has exclusively been on behalf of God’s nature and desires for his creation that famous men in the Bible have liberated their neighbors from bondage or warned them against the dangers of rejecting God from their worldviews. Abraham rescued civil citizens from the yokes of Ur and Haran. Moses liberated the Israelites from the covenants they made with Egypt. Gideon refuses the voice of the people to have him rule over them. Samuel refuses to give the people a king, then warns them of the consequences for their sin. Nehemiah makes friends of the unrighteous mammon, then secures the freedom of the Israelites and moves them away from human rulers. John the Baptist condemned the political bondage of the Pharisees to Herod and Caesar while overseeing the conversion of many into a kingdom of freemen. Jesus Christ himself refused to subject that kingdom to the Pax Romana and established a nation for freefolk who keep his perfect law of liberty.

Even though the subjects of bondage and liberty can be over-complicated and muddied from secular points of view by economists, political affiliates, and humanistic presuppositions, they ultimately and firmly rest on two theological propositions:

1. The imago Dei gives man a certain nobility that, when maintained, prevents him from being ruled over by other men. When God gave to Mankind the Dominion Mandate, establishing his prerogative to subdue the earth, fellow image bearers of God were not included in that subjugation.
2. The God-man himself, stepped down into the darkness of human civil society to establish a kingdom in order to liberate man from the dominion of man, including the sins that lead them into that bondage. Jesus Christ, the king of Judea, became like us in all things, humbling his sovereignty in order to provide an example for his disciples to follow while having a name for which they can make appeal in order to live as free souls under God. Read more about this here.

The reason why worldviews in competition with Christianity cannot consistently provide a framework for a free society is because they invariably presuppose the validity of the principles that necessitate a free society while simultaneously rejecting the very foundation for those principles. The worldview of the humanists, “atheists,” nihilists, and postmodernists contain the tenets of subjective morality, exclusive materialism or naturalism, and the idea that all beliefs must rely on observational evidence in order to be valid. The reasons for all of these tenets are intrinsically related, and that is because they each conveniently rule out the possibility of the existence of the God of the Bible in a childish pretense of forcing their debate opponents to intellectually disarm themselves in a sort of philosophical socialism. They attempt to penalize Christians for the natural advantage that their worldview affords them in contrast to the slothful and covetous worldview of those who reject the existence of God. This is only one reason why (we will use a general term) “modern atheism” is directly related to socialism. It insists upon professing Christians disqualifying their own worldview in order to operate on an even playing field with the pseudo-worldview of professing atheists.

Professing atheists tend to claim that the reason that morality is subjective (while also ejaculating that “the God of the Bible is immoral“) is because, they might say “nothing has value apart from a subject to value it, all value judgments are subjective.” However, the real motivation behind this tenet is more along the lines that, if there were a source of objective morality that established right from wrong for all mankind, then they would necessarily have to deal with the conviction and shame of rebelling against that standard. Pretending that morality is subjective (even while hypocritically declaring liberty to be an objectively good notion) is the integrous equivalent of a petulant child pretending to not hear his mother’s scolding over his deliberate misbehavior. The tenet is nothing more than the practice of putting their fingers in their ears and their head in the sand. However, there is one sense in that morality is subjective: Either it is subjected to the arbiter of the objective standards for morality (a just and righteous God), or it is subjected to the debased mind that a just and righteous God gives men over to when they refuse to be ruled by Him. In the case of the latter subjugation, those men invariably eventually are themselves subjected to the false gods of human civil government who promise to reflect the “subjective morality” of the majority of the people through democracy, but always just tend to reflect the end results of such a worldview: corrupted, tyrannical, covetous, violent, and oppressive. Man cannot be good without God. Those who try, raise up men to be gods over them. The beliefs of professing atheists contradict their worldview, more often than not. They will habitually and incessantly make claims about morality. Some right. Most wrong. They may express condemnation over a pedophile or a rapist, citing that “consent” should be the standard for sexual acts. And while they are mostly correct in that assertion (they would also wrongly assert that voluntary intercourse in the exclusive context of matrimony between two polarized genders is not the standard) they cannot account for that standard without appealing to some ultimately arbitrary presupposition. They know right from wrong, often lie about that knowledge, and do not know why they have that knowledge.

Professing atheists also tend to claim that the reason why naturalism is the superior worldview is because it automatically discounts “magical skydaddies who grant wishes and perform miracles and demand your blind belief” and asserts that “only natural and physical processes such as evolutionism operate in the universe and account for all of existence” or something to that effect. The actual reason why professing atheists must reduce themselves to a materialistic worldview is because the existence an immaterial Creator who is not contingent to the Universe would require their acknowledgment and a complete overhaul of their lifestyles to conform to His majesty and power. It is much more convenient to dismiss this reality in order to commit to their selfish lifestyles and self-will. The irony of the kind of debased mind that asserts that the world is naturalistic and that God does not exist is that it also presupposes and takes for granted concepts that it cannot account for. In order to elevate the scientific method, professing atheists presuppose truth while rejecting the idea that absolute truth exists. This is because the material world is always changing or “evolving” and if truth is materialistic then it must also be subject to change. This does not prevent them from ever making truth claims in their hypocrisy, however, even though they cannot account for truth in a materialistic worldview where entropy is the dominating force. Professing atheists do tend to imagine themselves to be logical, but do not assert that logic is universal to all men, but, like morality, is relative. This necessarily means that they must consistently believe that contradictions in logic are acceptable, or that logic can change, or that it is made of matter, but you will be hard-pressed to find one that will admit it. Because that would mean they could never rely on logic in any meaningful way and that their entire worldview is simultaneously logical and illogical from moment to moment and from person to person because then reality would have to be subjective and they would have no reason not to imagine themselves to be lost in an absurd twilight of confusion with no substantial meaning or conceivable purpose. All the same, they refuse to admit that logic is universal, unchanging, and immaterial because they would have to try to account for these factors without appealing to a universal, unchanging and immaterial God which is impossible and self-refuting. No doubt, most of them are more willing to admit that they could be programs in the Matrix, nothing more than a disembodied brain in a vat running simulations, or a floating port-a-potty in space dreaming of their everyday lives, than they are willing to repent, come to their senses and admit that God must exist and that they are just more comfortable pretending that He doesn’t so they can think and act how they desire.

Lastly, professing atheists assert that the reason why only observational evidence is an acceptable standard for truth claims is that Christians believe in the “god of the gaps.” The more scientific study that occurs, the fewer gaps there are, the less reason one has to put their blind faith in the existence of God. “I only believe in something if the evidence supports it.” Naturally, the real reason should be obvious. If God is immaterial because he is spirit, then resorting to a tenet of exclusively observational evidence of physical criteria would conveniently rule out God’s existence by narrowly defining it to exclude him. In essence, “God does not exist because he does not fit into the arbitrary rules I have made to examine the universe because I do not want him to exist.” So, while on the surface the ideas that: all beliefs must be supported by observational evidence, and that beliefs that contradict observational evidence cannot be tolerated, appear to be rational and logical, they are anything but. Professing atheists must have ultimate standards for determining the validity of evidence for their beliefs, and no doubt they would appeal to whether the evidences have been falsified by other observers, but ultimately they must appeal to their own reasoning to determine whether those conclusions are valid. And what do they appeal to in order to determine that their reasoning is valid to make that determination? Their own reasoning, of course. A worldview contingent upon entirely observational evidence is necessarily tautological and absurd for the same reason subjective reasoning is both the crux and the condemnation of a godless worldview. When the reason why you know something is true is because you trust your own powers of reasoning, then you are ultimately only ever supporting yourself with yourself. What you believe is valid because you say so because you say so because you say so… The irony is that everybody intrinsically knows that God exists.

The professing Christian, equipped with the integrity to assert that an immaterial, unchanging, and universal God who is not contingent upon the physical universe (which has a point of origin that cannot be observationally evident, by definition) exists, has a starting point to consistently recognize truth, and morality, and logic, and reason. That necessarily includes recognizing that only the truth claims found in the Bible are consistent and ultimate. Not just with itself in a logical framework to understand various physical sciences, from cosmology, to archeology, to molecular biology, to history, but also to understand political science and why men go under the civil authority of ruling men, how to get them out again, and just what makes mankind special enough to be eligible for that kind of redemption.

A materialistic worldview cannot account for these things without being entirely arbitrary and literally whimsical. Only a Christian worldview has the ability and integrity not to just consistently prescribe a righteous and free society, or condemn an unrighteous and enslaved society, or actively liberate man from the dominion of man, but it also expresses the reason why those who reject God as their authority, find themselves under the dominion of Benefactors who exercise authority.

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold [suppress] the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature [man-made institutions] more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.” (Romans 1:18-25)

All of scripture either describes and warns against the way to bondage and death or prescribes and instructs the way to liberty and life. These are not just hyperspiritual concepts that have little to no impact in this life. The jurisdiction of Heaven is not just a place awaiting dead men or some second coming of Christ. Hell is not just a punitive reality for unrepentant, deceased sinners. These paths are taken while you are alive and their destinations are likewise experienced by the living; their choices  in this life determining their ultimate fate after determining their present jurisdiction.

And this is why the topics of bondage and liberty are concerned with the Gospel of God, which must be preached, not out of man’s wisdom which so often perverts the truth and makes victims out of sinners, but from the perspective of God who desires that every man repent before he be redeemed unto liberty and new life.

“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ; And having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled.” (2 Corinthians 10:3-6)