The Kingdom of God

The Director's new article on "The Kingdom of God" is now available on the Director's personal blog site: Parekbasis

Here is an excerpt:

"To speak of the Kingdom of God is to speak of a divine political order that stands in contrast to the politics of man. Christians throughout the world are not merely members of the various nations who worship the same God in their personal devotions. They constitute a nation in their own right, a distinctive people, called out and separated from the kingdoms of the world, and born from above through faith in Christ into another kingdom with its own political order.

"The form of this political order is absolute monarchy. Regardless of the particular forms of administration under which the Monarch’s sovereignty is delegated to his ministers in the different spheres of life (i.e. family, Church, State), the Christian nation is governed by an absolute Monarch whose law is unchangeable, whose jurisdiction is unlimited, and whose will is final. His ministers, or vicegerents, who govern under his law in the various institutional aspects of the life of the nation, may or may not be chosen by means of elections, depending on the nature of the institution (e.g. elections may be used in choosing elders—Ex. 18:25; Dt. 1:13–15; Acts 14: 23 cf. 6:3–6, but such elections have no place in the family). Nevertheless, those chosen by whatever means are bound absolutely to govern these institutions under the will of God as revealed in his law. This applies not only in the government of the Church but in the family and the State also. No Christian politician, chosen by whatever means, or belonging to any particular political party, has any dispensation to serve any other Lord. In his work as a politician he owes an absolute and unswerving loyalty and obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ. 

"Rome recognised the inevitable conflict between Christ and Caesar that this fact created. So did the early Church. It is the modern Church’s failure to recognise the inevitable and exhaustive nature of this antithesis that has in large measure rendered the Church so irrelevant and powerless in the modern world. We can put this another way by saying that the modern Church has failed to recognise that all political thought and action is inevitably religious, and that since Christianity is a religion it must of necessity have a distinctive view of political order. Had the early Christians been prepared to do what the modern Church on the whole seems prepared to do, namely to restrict their worship of Christ to a personal salvation cult, which is what the various permitted mystery cults were, there would have been no conflict with Rome. But they were not prepared to do this."

Atheism and Atonality

The Director's new article on "Atheism and Atonality" is now available on the Director's personal blog site: Parekbasis.

Here is an excerpt:

". . .  if there is no God and everything exists as a result of blind evolutionary processes—chance—then nothing has any meaning and we cannot say anything intelligible about anything in the universe. As we have already seen, atheists cannot live consistently in terms of such a philosophy, so they smuggle the world God made back into their world-view dressed up as something else. They presuppose the concepts of order, meaning and rationality but insist that these things come from some aspect of the cosmos itself, not from the creative will of God, who is not part of the cosmos . . . The non-believer therefore lives intellectually and spiritually on borrowed capital that he puts to bad use . . .

". . . Interestingly, this principle of non-belief does sometimes work itself out more consistently in art. In the world of art we often see more clearly where atheism leads, the kind of ultimate conclusions that are involved in the denial of God. The denial of God ultimately implies the denial of all meaning. And whereas in their everyday lives men find it difficult to live in terms of this principle, in art sometimes this principle is worked out more consistently, though usually unselfconsciously. If one looks at much of modern art there is bewildering meaninglessness to it. This can be seen in the visual arts where paintings seem to have no logic. One part of the painting might have absolutely no relation to another part; indeed the whole painting might seem utterly meaningless, a conglomeration of colours and shapes that appear to have no purpose. The world represented by such art is radically shattered, broken, disjointed, dysfunctional, meaningless. The various parts of the pictures may seem to have no meaningful relationship to each other in the way that items on a rubbish tip have no meaningful relationship to each other. And indeed the casual lay observer may well describe such pictures as rubbish, a description that is often not unreasonable given this lack of meaningful integration in the overall scheme of the work because it is precisely the lack of meaningful relationships between individual things that defines a rubbish tip. It is often said that such art is not meant to be representational and therefore that such criticism is not valid, but I doubt this is a valid argument. Such art is not representational in the sense that we normally use the term “representational” in reference to the visual arts. But in another sense such art is representational, only what it represents is the utter meaninglessness and randomness of a world without God, a world without order, reason, meaning or purpose."

Film Making Course, September 2013, Devon, England

Download information leaflet

The exciting developments in the Christian Film Making industry in the US are making the Gospel message, and also, just plain information or encouragement, more readily distributable. You-tube and other websites are being increasingly used for this purpose. Christians turned their backs on the opportunities which Hollywood afforded for shaping society righteously and much ground has been lost. Now is the time to find out how we can help recover that ground. 

Ken Lawrence is a homeschooling Pastor who has been running annual film camps at his farm in Colorado. A couple of years ago he and his daughter stayed in England en-route to India on a mission-trip. We got talking about films and I was quite excited by the possibility of introducing the home-schoolers in the UK to the concept.  Ken is only too please to share the benefit of his hard-won-experience (so you don't need to repeat the same mistakes!) and offer insights into how he has solved technical challenges in all aspects of film making. 

The thing I love about film-making is that it involves very many different skills, and therefore individuals. Think about the credits which roll by on a film you have watched. There is much scope for creativity and learning through things going wrong and therefore offers a unique character-building opportunity: team-work and camaraderie are going to be some of the most valuable aspects of the project.

If you book for one member of your family, that family member will be actively involved in the project during the week, as well as being clued-up on the theory having studied the course. For the rest, the usual camping fee (£110 per family) will be payable (Tracy van den Broek will be taking the bookings: email tracyvdb@gmail.com). If an individual on the training programme is not coming to the camp with a family, he/she will need a tent etc. and I will cook for him/her—the cost will be £30. If more than one family member wishes to be enrolled and active during the week there will be a slight reduction in price but please bear in mind that, with the best will in the world, the airfares must still be paid. Numbers of active participants (i.e. those getting their hands on the equipment and ordering folks about!) are limited to 15. Those who are enrolled will be referred to as the A group.  It might be possible (once the airfares are paid!) for there to be a B group who might be official assistants.

The individuals enrolling must be aged 15 or over. A certificate of completion will be issued to each member of the A group at the end of the week.

All the rest of us might be useful as extras at some point or other—and otherwise we will be arranging things such as Shakespeare reading, music, dancing, walks etc. Ken has kindly agreed to offer us some expert film-critiquing insights. We hope to designate some films ahead of time for families to watch and for Ken and Zack to point out natty little film-making techniques which you'd have missed otherwise and—more importantly—giving us a pair of Christian-worldview-spectacles through which to view films productively.

http://www.christianfilmmakerscamp.com/uk2013

If you know of anyone who is already involved in Christian film-making and from whom it might be possible to hire lighting and other bulky equipment, please forward me the details. There is a great deal of practical stuff to sort out for this week if we are to get the very best out of it

So, go ahead and copy/paste the link and find out more about it.

Blessings on you and yours from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, our Powerful Saviour.

Tracy van den Broek

For more information email: tracyvdb@gmail.com

Discipling the Nation, conference July 2013

The Kuyper Foundation will be running a conference on Discipling the Nation on Friday 26 and Saturday 27 July 2013 in Taunton, England. See the Conference page for more details.

New Book Available from the Kuyper Foundation

The Christian Passover: Agape Feast or Ritual Abuse?, a new book by the Director, Stephen Perks, is available from the books page. The book deals with the nature of Christian worship and the central ritual of the Church gathering, i.e. the Eucharist/Agape Feast, it's early practice, dismemberment, and abolition by the clergy in the first half of the first millennium (under the influence of a pagan religious worldview that still paralyses the modern Church, namely dualistic pietism), and its need for restoration if the Church is to accomplish the Great Commission. Don't be fooled into thinking that the Eucharists and communions or Lord's Suppers that are regularly celebrated in the Church today are the real thing. They are not. The post-apostolic Church took the form of the pagan religious rites of Rome and poured Christian content into them. The result, however, was that the Christian content got badly distored in the process.