We just finished a fantastic tour of Edinburgh with NSA’s Pelican Club. Many thanks to George Grant for leading. The picture is from right after our church service at Barnbougle Castle, with the Firth of Forth in the background. Scotland is pretty lovely this time of year.

I asked for a question to be added to our alumni survey this year regarding home ownership. I just got the results and was surprised to learn that over 95% of NSA grads who graduated 15 years ago own their homes. And 65% of NSA grads who graduated five years ago own their homes. I don’t know the national averages for these age brackets, but a suspect that these rates are significantly higher.

I don’t normally engage with the comments section much. But I notice that the majority of guys down there seem to think that in my earlier post somehow I wasn’t aware of the Septuagint, which is kind of funny. So, let’s walk through this. If you reread my post again you will see that I am addressing the Protestant church, or more specifically the Reformed. On Scripture, Westminster 1.8 reads “The Old Testament in Hebrew (which was the native language of the people of God of old), and the New Testament in Greek (which at the time of the writing of it was most generally known to the nations), being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as in all controversies of religion the Church is finally to appeal unto them.” You can’t hold this and insist on an Old Testament from the LXX at the same time. The cry of the Reformation was ad fontes, back to the sources. The source of the Old Testament is the Hebrew text. And the Protestant church has been built on that assumption that we are going back to the source. I don’t think most of the guys commenting below have thought very hard about the implications of abandoning the Hebrew text. They are trying to get away from the Jews so hard, but what they don’t see is that it will cost them their Protestantism. Now, yes, you can get a Bible with an Old Testament that is a translation of from the Septuagint. But you will gradually cease to be a Protestant, and you will instantly cease to be confessionally Reformed. So, by all means, if you have such an allergic reaction to the rabbis, please go Eastern Orthodox. Our churches will be better off. But what you can’t do is continue using your ESV, or your NKJV, or your KJV, or whatever modern translation you use, while pretending that you are not relying on post-70 AD rabbis for your Bible. Also, one quick note about Jerome and the Vulgate. No, the Vulgate is not translated from the Septuagint. Jerome had started with a translation from the Septuagint, but he became convinced that the Septuagint had been corrupted by anti-Christian sentiments by the rabbis. So, he went back to what he termed the Hebraica veritas, the Hebrew truth and translated his Vulgate Old Testament from there.

Without post-70 AD, rabbinic Judaism, the Protestant church does not have a Bible. First, the manuscript tradition that all of our modern translations are based on is the Masoretic text. The Masoretes were the rabbis that followed after the Tannaim and the Amoraim. They worked from the 7th to the 10thcentury AD and their main focus was the preserving of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and developing the vowel and accent system that we use today when we read the Hebrew text. Delete the work of the Masoretes and you delete the text that we use for our Old Testament. No rabbis, no Bible. Second, the Protestant recovery of the ability to read the Old Testament in the original Hebrew language was made possible by relying on the work of late medieval rabbis, primarily the grammarians, along with the assistance of 16thcentury Jews who either were willing to teach Hebrew to their Christian neighbors or who actually converted to the Christian faith themselves and brought their rabbinic knowledge of the Hebrew text with them. For instance, in the early thirteenth century, David Kimhi composed the Miklohl, a basic grammar of the Hebrew language, and the Hashorashim, a Hebrew dictionary. When sixteenth century Christians began returning to the Hebrew language, these texts provided their entrance into Hebrew fluency. Additionally, the grammarians produced a series of commentaries on the text of the Old Testament, commentaries which developed something very similar to what we now refer to as the historical-grammatical method. These commentaries served as tutors to early protestant exegetes, trying to make their way through the Hebrew text for the first time. For instance, from 1517-1519, the Christian publisher Daniel Bomberg, working in Venice, published what we now refer to as the Bomberg Rabbinic Bible. It contained the Masoretic text of the Old Testament, surrounded by the corresponding Targum (Aramaic translation/interpretation of the Hebrew text), and commentaries by grammarians such as Rashi, Kimhi, Ibn Ezra, etc. Bomberg’s Rabbinic Bible became an essential tool in the libraries of Reformed exegetes. If you have spent any time in Bucer’s commentary on the Psalms, you know how heavily he relied on Bomberg’s sources for his own understanding of the text. What is harder to notice, but which is equally true, is how much weight Calvin himself gave to these sources. At one point Calvin singles out Kimhi as the best of the Jewish exegetes. This reliance on the assistance of the grammarians permeates the works of sixteenth and seventeenth century, Protestant exegesis. Delete the Rabbis, and you delete the Protestant ability to read and translate the Hebrew text. This reliance on Jewish sources was not without its pitfalls. The anti-trinitarian controversies that plagued the Reformed church in the 16th century were largely a result of Protestant reliance on Jewish commentaries. For instance, Kimhi’s commentary on the Psalms included critiques of the Christian reading of the messianic Psalms. Some young exegetes were not ready to go up against Kimhi’s work and found themselves succumbing to heterodox views on the deity of Christ, etc. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the Reformed church figured out how to make good use of Jewish sources without losing their minds. For instance, it is not a coincidence that many of the contributors to the formation of the Reformed political tradition, men like Franciscus Junius and John Selden, were also great Hebraists, steeped deeply in the works of medieval rabbis. They drew from that tradition for much of their work. There were movements to burn all the Jewish sources that rose up at various moments, but these movements were primarily driven by the Papists, not the Reformed, who generally opposed this mania. To repeat my opening claim - without post-70 AD, rabbinic Judaism, the Protestant church does not have a Bible. The Jews were still wrong about Jesus. But without them, you don’t have Bible.

Regarding some of the recent posting about pastors and their levels of fitness, a few comments. First, if you think that these posts are actually about fitness, you are missing the actual game. This conversation is motivated by something else entirely. Second, to the extent that young men are being discipled into this mentality, they are being shepherded into spiritual retardation. Proverbs teaches that the glory of young men is their strength and of old men, their grey hair (Prov. 20:29). Over the course of life, you move from strength to wisdom. And like the wine in Jesus’ wineskin parable, no one having tasted the older prefers the younger. By making fitness into a pastor’s goal, you swap out the end and replace it with the beginning. That is what I mean by spiritual retardation. You are putting infancy in the place of maturity. And that is no knock on pursuing fitness. By all means, young men pursue strength. That is where you start. But the end is wisdom. And I prefer a mature pastor over an infant pastor. Lastly, I’ve seen the argument that this is about stewardship, about healthy practices that will give you a long life. That is a great end to seek. But scripture gives us clear teaching on how to pursue that end. “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you,” (Ex. 20:12). If you want to live long in the land, obey the fifth commandment. If you pursue fitness while disrespecting your elders, best of luck on your wellness journey, but don’t expect God to bless it.

We need to think larger than the institutions that employ us. Building thick Christian communities with multi-generational impact means leaning into and supporting other strategic Christian institutions in your town. One thing that would be easy to do and would have a significant impact if we all did it, would be to find your closest ACCS school and sign up to give $100 per month to them. You don’t need to have kids there to know that this will produce long term fruit in your community. classicalchristian.org/find-…

NSA’s Blues beat U of I. Well done men.

Here are several helpful hints on how to be unhelpful while giving career advice to young men. benmerkle.substack.com/p/how…

So first, of all, NSA was rated as Idaho’s top national liberal arts college and that’s pretty cool. But you really ought to read this breakdown on EdNews of how Idaho’s colleges performed. The author seems incapable of mentioning NSA without adding his ideological content warnings. This cracks me up. idahoednews.org/news/a-natio…

The NSA rugby team had a great start to their season this past weekend at a tournament in Boise. Lost to BSU (10-24) and then beat Idaho State (31-5). Well done to the Blues.

Becoming Immune to Being Called a Nazi If you are a young conservative, Christian man, you will be called a nazi. It doesn’t matter how much you protest or how much you can show that the slur can’t possibly be accurate, you will be called a nazi. You will be called a racist. You will be called antisemitic. And, given their inevitability, you need to know how to be unfazed by these accusations. There are two basic approaches to growing an immunity to these slurs. One is to make the slurs small and one is to make God big. This first approach is the approach that is being advocated by too many men on the right. It is an approach that makes fleshly sense. But in the end will warp and shrivel your soul. The second approach is the way that Jesus teaches. It will immunize you against the slanders, while strengthening your soul. The first way looks like this – they are going to call you a nazi? Fine. Make that accusation small. Make it not a big deal to be called a nazi. Get yourself comfortable with that branding. Were the nazis really all that bad in the first place? Maybe Hitler had some good things to say? Immunize yourself to the slur by trying the slur on yourself until it becomes no big deal. Tell jokes about niggers and jews. You grow comfortable with the accusation so that when they hurl it at you they are just throwing brer rabbit into the briar patch. This approach is appealing because it has a fleshly sophistication to it. It is a sort of rhetorical jujitsu, whereby you roll with their attack and remove all of its sting. It is also kind of fun because you get to laugh all the way through it. Brer Rabbit laughs the hardest when he is sitting in his briar patch. But, in the end, this approach is deeply unhealthy. It makes you take something that is actually sinful and disgusting and you are willingly smearing it all over yourself in what you think is an act of defiance. And while you feel like you have the upper hand in the argument, you have actually given your opponent control over you because you are allowing him to call the shots for you. For instance, let’s say you are determined to always do the opposite of what I tell you to do. Then you might think that you are independent of me because you are defying me. But in reality every decision you make is now contingent on what I say. You do nothing independent of me. You have to wait until I speak to know what to do. In reality, I have become your master. So you can try to make the sin small or you can try to make God big. Now when I say try to make God big, of course God’s infinitude is independent of anything we do. What I mean is, you make him big in your mind. You make his concerns, his judgments, his determinations all the largest concerns in your mind. This is a strategy for making your heart obedient. You make other things small by holding them in comparison to him. Jesus taught, “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple,” (Luke 14:26). This is that ordo amoris that our Vice President got into trouble for referencing. Our loves, our loyalties are all meant to be properly ordered. And at the top of that chain of well-ordered loves is God himself, to whom all of our love and loyalty is owed. And once you have that straight in your head, you are better equipped to deal with the taunts of an enemy. “Therefore do not fear them. For there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known,” (Mat 10:26). You realize that one day you will stand before the triune God of the Bible. And when you see, with the eye of faith, that day of judgment coming, it makes the condemnations of others seem trivial. “He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life,” (John 12:25). This was the confidence that Paul steeled himself with as he went to face great opposition. “Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ,” (Phi. 3:8). When you do this, when make your main concern the judgment of God, then you give control over your judgments, not to your enemy, but rather to God himself. They call you a racist and you don’t care. Not because you have embraced racism in a twisted attempt to defang the accusation. But rather because you legitimately don’t care what that guy calls you. You continue to reject racism, not because you our cowering before the accusations of the left, but rather because you don’t want that filth on your hands when you stand before the triune God at the final judgment. Make the accusations small by making God big.

The Erick Erickson article that is making the rounds points to a phenomenon that is on the right and is worth opposing. However, what he does is sloppy and does more harm than good. The neo-nazi, antisemitic, white nationalists do exist. But they are mostly all in their parents’ basements watching porn and other feral corners of the internet. To the extent that they make any contribution to the broader public it is in the comments section of someone else’s social media feed. Erickson points at a real subculture but then he goes on to name organizations and men that have nothing to do with that world. For instance, I know Nick Solheim and American Moment. He is not a white-nationalist fantasizer, but rather an insanely productive American patriot. He is none of the things that Erickson alleges in that article. Multiple NSA grads have left the college and gone on to work under him at American Moment, grads that I remain proud of for their hard work to serve our nation. Other men in that list, like Scott Yenor and Timon Cline, are men that we have had on the stage at NSA and that I would be proud to have back. Casually throwing the Nazi slur at men like this only further deafens the hearing of the young men that we are trying to reach and makes them more vulnerable to the actually unhelpful voices that are calling to them, not to DC, but back into their parents’ basements.

wng.org/sift/new-saint-andre… A good write up on our case against the city.