Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

Christopher,

I didn’t say you were a Kinist. I said you regularly check in to Kinist websites like the rabidly ugly Spirit/Blood/Water. You provided further information in your comment below that I think condemns you.

You say they have “some good points” and “interesting information.” This is a site that Photoshops hook noses onto pictures of Jewish people, discusses at length their supposed depravity, calls for denying equality — civil, social, and ecclesiastical — to Blacks and Hispanics, and not by referring to them as “Blacks” and “Hispanics,” trust me, and refers to homosexuals in the most inflammatory terms possible while extolling the virtues of the most racist, hateful “Christian” theologians of the last century. It calls the “preservation of the white race” a Christian imperative, and doesn’t even bother to dress up its racism with pained, strained, euphemisms. Spirit/Blood/Water is irredeemingly polluted, unfit for the Church of Jesus Christ.

And so I think that any Christian offering even the most muted praise — frankly, any believer who offers anything short of scathing rebuke — is at least as dangerous as the Kinists themselves. I worry less about the Kinists’ effect on Church and society; I worry instead about the influence of those who would even make room for them in Christ’s Body.

As for calling you “vile,” please understand that I take zero pleasure in leveling such a rebuke. But you have behaved not just “intolerantly,” or “dishonestly” (the pseudonym thing), or even “maliciously.” You’ve shown yourself to be what my thesaurus adds as possible synonyms characteristics like “obscene, vulgar, disgusting and contemptible.” I think I’ve labeled you, by the display of fruit you’ve demonstrated, quite correctly. That’s nothing I find amusing or affirming.

This is all not without heartache. See, Christopher, while I genuinely appreciate your appeal to our “brotherhood/sisterhood” in Christ — and I truly thank you for extending that to me — I despair that I’m not sure we are. Not because I think you’ve fallen short, or aren’t good enough, or that I’m somehow too virtuous to be linked with you.

No. Hear this, and take it to heart: Apart from Christ, I am a “sister” only to liars, murderers, thieves, thugs, and temple prostitutes. I am part of the Body of Christ ONLY (completely, ineffably, unalterably) by his grace. I fall short distressingly often. You needn’t — and you don’t — trouble yourself ever wondering if I think you’re somehow measuring up.

Here’s, then, what leads me to tears when I pray for you. I don’t see fruit consistent with repentance in what you demonstrate. Granted, you don’t see it in me, I suppose, which makes your assertion of our brotherhood all the more meaningful to me. But what I see from you, Chris, is not love. I don’t hear humility. I don’t sense compassion for the lost. And, since I can’t follow you around 24 hours a day, I have to treat you based on what I see, and what I see makes me truly, humbly, in trembling and great sadness, wonder if you really do know Jesus. To paraphrase your closing remark about Kennedy, “let’s see the fruit, and tremble.”

You make me angry, yes. You offend me deeply, personally — not because you talk about me, but because you talk so contemptuously of the poor and the lost. But you also make me very, very sad. I choose to love you; I hate no one, and I have compassion for you. I long to be your true sister in Christ; I hope I am. Still, I pray earnestly for your soul . . . just in case, at this point, we’re not. And it’s not like you’re the weak link here. If you doubted my salvation, I hope you’d pray for me.

I’m not likely to post lengthy comments or respond with more than brief acknowledgment, but you are welcome to email me privately at the email every Vision 2020 reader knows is mine: kjajmix1@msn.com.

Until then, may we both go in grace.

First, his comment, in its (very long) entirety. Then my much shorter response, in a separate post immediately following.

And then, I’d the host of this blog, I’d like very much to get to my other guests and not spend so much time on this one. I’m sure he understands.

(Copied from “Comments,” received Sept. 1, 2009, from Christopher Witmer):

Christopher Witmer has left a new comment on your post “The Context Here Is “HATE””:

“I may be vile, but I’m still your brother. In case anyone might be confused, I would like to point out that my posting at a Kinist site does not mean I agree with them any more than I agree with you when I post here. SWB has a lot of very useful information and good things to say, and also no small amount of error. I reject some of the most basic tenets of Kinism, such as I am able to get my head around them (they have yet to be systematically well formulated, in my opinion), and I have publicly voiced very sharp disagreements with them in the past. I will probably do so again in the future, at a time of God’s choosing. On top of that, I am often chagrined by what seems to me to be a mode of presentation of their opinions that is unnecessarily in-your-face and deliberately offensive for the wrong reasons. (As Christians we should let our offense be the offense of the gospel — and may those who are offended by that be mightily offended by it! But beyond that we should strive to be all things to all people in order that as many as possible might be won for Christ.) Thirdly, I am often dismayed and saddened by their attacks on ministers of the gospel who I consider to be godly people — men such as Doug Wilson, Doug Phillips, John Piper, and R. C. Sproul, Jr. Which is not to suggest that these men are perfect (far from it) or beyond reproach in all things at all times. I am well aware that they have said, written and done things that are worthy of criticism. But to be fair, criticisms of ministers of the gospel always need to be balanced and to take their entire visible life into account, and in that regard the things said about those ministers by the Kinists have not been fair, but rather have been a false witness. And in that regard they have much in common with you, Mrs. Mix. If anything, your violations of the Ninth Commandment, especially regarding Doug Wilson, have been even worse than theirs. At least they have not sought to make an online career out of Wilson bashing. Be that as it may, I still consider the folks at SWB, as I also consider you, to be among my brethren in Christ.

If I am to be reviled for my statements concerning Ted Kennedy, so be it. I have spoken ill of him, but I have not maligned him, because everything that I said was the truth. By their fruits you shall know them. Final judgment belongs to God, and just as one of the criminals on the cross next to Jesus repented and received salvation at the end of his life, so we must admit the theoretical possibility that Ted Kennedy is now in Heaven with Jesus. If he is, hallelujah! But we have every right to evaluate his visible works, and based on those works we must conclude that he is certainly worthy of eternal damnation, many millions of times over. As a career politician, he committed the most egregious of sins in the most public way possible — by codifying evil into law. If, as you suggest, Kennedy developed a deep and life-transforming commitment to his Catholic faith, he should have manifested his repentance and transformation in a way that was every bit as public as his manifold sins were. However, we have absolutely nothing like that to point to. When he said he believed in the Resurrection, he said something that any demon could confess as well.

I don’t doubt that Kennedy was ridden by lots of unresolved guilt — that would go a long way to explain why he apparently sought to redeem himself through “good works” (to use the term in the loosest possible sense) via other people’s confiscated money. For socialists, not just the wealth, but also the guilt, must be redistributed. In that sense, Kennedy was a socialist on steroids.

As for me, I want to remember Kennedy in the most appropriate way possible, and I am inclined to agree with the notion that “Obama Care” should be renamed in Kennedy’s honor. So let’s do it: from this day forth, let it forever be known as “Kopechne Care.”

If Kennedy claimed to be a Christian, we can take him at his word; his condemnation is therefore all the greater. Let us see his end and tremble.”

(End of comment. See subsequent post for my response).

OK. I still don’t know how to coordinate posts that I’ve written but saved for a couple of days (usually until my temper settles down) so that they appear as the most recent of the posts you see, dated on the date I hit “publish,” not on the original date of composition. If I write and save it on Sunday, mull it over on Monday, and then decide to go with it on Tuesday, it appears as though it was written on Sunday, lodging it behind anything else I might have written on Monday.

What this means is that right before “Good Books Come In Threes” is a look at the puerile political punditry of an unusually rabid Kirker — and I wouldn’t want you to miss it. Or, actually, I wish you could; I wish people didn’t spew such venom in the name of Christ when a prominent liberal icon dies. But they do, and I wrote about it, and if you scroll down past “Good Books,” you’ll find “The Context Here Is ‘Hate’.”