Axe to the Root with Bojidar Marinov | Reconstructionist Radio Reformed Network

Every time someone says, “this is the real problem,” or “this is the real conflict,” it doesn’t say much about the problem or the conflict he is describing – that problem or conflict may be real, and it may not be real. But the truth is, it says a lot about the real worldview of the person saying it.

The only real asset the producer has at the point of sale and negotiation is the personality of his salesman. Or, the reputation of his salesman. Assigned Reading: – Wisdom and Dominion, Gary North

Why do foreign missions need to start with books? Assigned Reading: – The Book That Made Your World, Vishal Mangalwadi

“Why the Chinese have it wrong.” Assigned Reading: – The Formation of Christendom, Judith Herrin

When R.J. Rushdoony said that theocracy is the closest thing to radical libertarianism that can be had, he was not speaking figuratively, nor was he speaking politically. He was speaking literally, based on a thorough analysis of Biblical Law and the social order it prescribed. Assigned Reading: – Law and Liberty, R.J. Rushdoony – The Theme is Freedom, M. Stanton Evans

What is the Prophetic Ministry supposed to do, and why is it so hated by the modern church celebrities? Assigned Reading: – Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, Bruno Bettelheim

“The image of God in man laughs at Malthus’s closed-universe paganism. The end of history will not be economic. It will come not because we have run out of resources…The end will be covenantal: it will come because the church has fulfilled the Great Commission and has made the whole world submit to Christ, and has made all His enemies His footstool. Assigned Reading: – The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne Ehrlich

Jesus had a view of the future that scandalized both Gentiles and Jews. Assigned Reading: – Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview, Gary North

You have heard it said that the Biblical role of the civil government is to provide safety. But is this true? Assigned Reading: – Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law, Philip Howard

The worldview of a culture is revealed in the way it responds to calamity. Assigned Reading: – Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, Bruno Bettelheim

“What does the GDP growth of the last one quarter tell us about the economy, from a Biblical perspective?” Assigned Reading: – Regime Uncertainty, Robert Higgs (Published in The Independent Review, Volume 1, Number 4, of Spring 1997)

If you want to summarize the practical ideology of cultural pessimism, it is this: Every solution must be by default incomplete and temporary; the problems stay forever. And let me tell you, folks: There’s money in it. Huge money. Assigned Reading: – Restoring America, Joel McDurmon

That’s what the real covenantal meaning of collectivism is: an ideology which subjects individuals to the moral dictatorship of human collectives and/or elites, with the purpose of re-educating them into obedient pawns. Assigned Reading: – Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, Bruno Bettelheim Assigned Watching: – The Bourne Identity

“Tyrannies always demand enormous sacrifices for negligible returns.” Assigned Reading: – Russia in 1839, Astolphe de Custine

Modern voting is an act of war against an ever-encroaching state, trying to consume lives, liberty, and property. In such a war of protection of the home, there is no difference between men and women. Assigned Reading: – Freedom Conference Lectures, Bojidar Marinov

Within the context of the Dominion Covenant, there is no contradiction between conventional farming and organic farming. Assigned Reading: – Agricultural Revolution in England, Mark Overton

Patriarchy is not the antidote to sodomy. It is its mother. Assigned Reading: – The Pink Swastika, Scott Lively & Kevin Abrams

In the final account, our service to the lowest among us will determine the strength of our faith. That is where true Christianity is. Assigned Reading: – Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg

“He took on Himself all the guilt of the world.” Assigned Reading: – Redemption: Accomplished and Applied, John Murray

“A sodomite culture that has come to fruition has come to fruitlessness.” Assigned Reading: – Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg

“God doesn’t tolerate the injustice of closed borders for too long.” Assigned Reading: – Kaffir Boy, Mark Mathabane

Assigned Reading: – Abundance, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler

In the same way, as patent legislation was proposed to lead to faster pace of scientific and technological growth, in the majority of cases, it only stifled growth, as inventors spend more time and resources running the race to get monopoly grants from bureaucrats to kill all competition, rather than develop their ideas in practice and making them available, serving as many people as possible, and making money in the process. Assigned Reading: – The Mythology of Science, R.J. Rushdoony

Assigned Reading:  – Paul and Gender, by Cynthia Long Westfall

Does the Bible mention believers who are in service of a pagan, executive state, and does the Bible give specific commands to those believers? Assigned Reading: – The Best Years,1945-1950, Joseph Goulden

Given that ethical/judicial context of two-way responsibility between men and their institutions, then, what is the Biblical way for us to think about the tithe? Assigned Reading: – Tithing and Dominion, R.J. Rushdoony

In the interaction between a superior culture and an inferior culture, it is the inferior culture that loses, and eventually, gets assimilated. Assigned Reading: – Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg

“Biblical Slavery is always temporary, and has a redemptive purpose.” Assigned Reading: – Economic Commentary on Exodus 21-40, Gary North

“…for a nation, to be given the children of another nation for free, without even having to go to war, is one of the greatest blessings God would bestow.” Assigned Reading: – Strangers At Our Door, Zygmunt Bauman

“The division used by modern theologians – Moral, Civil, Ceremonial – is not found in the Bible.” Assigned Reading: – Leviticus: An Economic Commentary, Gary North

“Whatever Christians were not trained to do in the church, they won’t be able to do outside the church.” Assigned Reading: – The New England Pulpit and the American Revolution, Alice M Baldwin

“Ethically and judicially, making an authority of celebrities in the churches is not different than making an authority of celebrities in the political world.” Assigned Reading: – Moscow 1937, Karl Schlögel

But meanwhile, as Eusebius pointed out, the pagan world was learning spiritual principles from Moses, through the fame of Solomon. The pagans themselves knew very well where their civilization came from. Julius Caesar read the Septuagint and freed the Jews in his empire from any taxes. The temple in Jerusalem was a place where many Greeks and Romans and other nations came to worship. Wise men from the east came to worship the King of the Jews, and Titus specifically instructed his legions to spare the Temple of God. Proselytes – even from the house of Caesar – joined the Jewish communities and became part of the nation of Israel, later of the nation of the Church. When the covenantal status of ethnic Israel was removed, then the burden of defining and directing history through a confession of faith fell to the Church. But the Church didn’t act in a vacuum. It had material to work on: a civilization which in the course of centuries, slowly and painfully, was shaped and influenced by the Hebrew worldview to become more civilized, seeking God, and thus more open to accept His Gospel. In the final account, even the ancient world was driven by a profession of faith; and history was simply the perfection of that faith. Assigned Reading: – America BC, Barry Fell

The Modern Navel-Gazing Pseudo-Calvinism Assigned Reading: – You’ve Heard It Said, Gary DeMar

Abortion, therefore, won’t be ended by professional entertainers and institutional leaders building their own brand names and a host of spectators. . . . Abortion will be abolished only by the work of those leaders who, within three and a half years, recreate themselves in many others, through teaching them the vision, and entrusting them to the Holy Spirit. Assigned Reading: – The “Atheism” of the Early Church, R.J. Rushdoony

How did the most powerful nation in Christendom for several hundred years sink down to the level of such insignificance? Assigned Reading: – Covenant Enforced: John Calvin’s Sermons on Deuteronomy 27-28

If you are looking for a passive, docile, obedient woman, a woman that would be satisfied to be bossed around and “discipled” and told what to do and be patronized and taught and instructed…you are looking for the wrong kind of woman. Take those patriarchal ideas and throw them in the garbage can. Assigned Reading: – The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries, Rodney Stark

Those who call for the US government to “stimulate the economy” by regulating import and export are calling for and economic disaster. They are calling for the government to turn us all into frugal tramps – and keep us so for the purposes of a government policy. Assigned Reading: – Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg

Social visibility doesn’t influence culture. Only service does. Assigned Reading: – Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg

Art must take the world as interpreted by God and represent it in a form that emphasizes either beauty or ugliness, and re-interpret them ethically/judicially after God’s interpretation of them. Assigned Reading: – From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun

How Bad Have Our Hearts Become? But in all this external progress, is there internal progress? Are our hearts changed compared to the generations before us, or are we the same moral degenerates, or even worse? Assigned Listening: – The Paralysis of Pessimism, Gary DeMar

There is a deeper reason for the aversion American men have to church, and until we discover this deeper reason and act on that discovery, we won’t solve the problem. And if we don’t solve the problem, the next extraordinary situation will be created not by our persecutors but by ourselves, by our own apathy and by our own stupidity.

The central point here is that any communion or community has to be based on a moral commitment to a creed or a faith. It can’t be metaphysical, based on some neutral characteristics like genetics, place of birth, economic status, IQ, or anything else. It has to be ethical/judicial;…There has to be a transcendent faith, and that faith has to have a transcendent moral law which would unite all the members of the communion into one body, without losing each one’s identity. Without such selective communion with people of the same faith and the same moral status, any community will end up being a communion with evil. Assigned Reading: – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber

Assigned Reading: – The Truly Covenantal and Reformed View of Prophecy (and of the Other Gifts), Bojidar Marinov (this article is not yet available through ChristendomRestored.com)

Special Talk at the AATX Conference

” . . . the attempt to produce relevance through solidifying institutional power and demanding submission to it will only produce more irrelevance.” Assigned Reading: – One Holy Local Church? The Ghettoization of Protestantism, Bojidar Marinov

A godly society is a sanctuary society. Assigned Reading: – “The Sanctuary Society and Its Enemies,” Gary North – “Immigration Control: Federal Social Engineering,” Gary North

What changes did the Industrial Revolution bring to the Christian family? Did it weaken it or did it strengthen it? Did it help the Christian family fulfill its purpose in the Kingdom of God, or did it set it off its course in a direction which would eventually render it meaningless? Did it open up new horizons and new areas for growth and exploration, or did it shut the door to the future, laying the foundation for replacing the Christian family with something else? Was the Industrial Revolution a friend or a foe to the Christian family? Assigned Reading: – “Relationship vs. Purpose: How the Church Destroys the Christian Family,” Bojidar Marinov – “Christian Culture vs. Clan Culture,” Bojidar Marinov – “Individual Purpose and the Kingdom of God,” Bojidar Marinov

Fake news is more than just false reporting. Assigned Reading: – Inside the Soviet Alternate Universe: The Cold War’s End and the Soviet Union’s Fall Reappraised, Dick Combs

And when the state intervenes to control and regulate man and his economic choices, it can only destroy life and destroy growth. That’s the religious root of economic nationalism: the religion of death. The farther we stay from it, the faster we will grow our economy. Assigned Reading: – Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of Nazi Economy, Adam Tooze