{"id":1679,"date":"2026-05-03T18:07:57","date_gmt":"2026-05-03T17:07:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/?page_id=1679"},"modified":"2026-05-04T18:03:47","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T17:03:47","slug":"precursors","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/dominion-theology-recovering-our-social-and-political-responsibility\/precursors\/","title":{"rendered":"The Precursors of Dominion Theology"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

The Precursors of Dominion Theology<\/h2>\n

Introduction<\/h3>\n

The argument I am making in this chapter is that by thoroughly analyzing the changes, tensions, and contradictions within the metanarratives of the Western culture over the last two centuries, it becomes inevitable that a Christian counterculture of dominion theology\u00a0would emerge. I was emphatic in the introduction regarding the importance of a cross-disciplinary approach to properly understanding the context and emergence of dominion theology. Consequently, this chapter is more like a mountain climb than the trail-walking of the previous chapters, but it should be a rewarding climb if you persevere. It is probably the most difficult chapter in the book and the most technical one and, as such, is probably not suited to every reader, so feel free to skip forward as required or even omit it altogether if your interest is more specifically with dominion theology.<\/p>\n

Theology, Philosophy, and Culture<\/h3>\n

The first point to make is that it is a frequent fallacy of evangelical\u00a0theologians to pay insufficient attention to the zeitgeist<\/em> of their situation in time and to give an ahistorical account of the church in time, sometimes ingeniously described as \u201cprophetically energized interpretation of historical facts.\u201d[1]<\/a> Divine providence becomes a means by which one sidesteps their culture, whereas I have previously argued theology is strongly associated, <\/a>influenced, and influences the intellectual and cultural milieu.[2]<\/a> It is also an error of the late modern period, with its mythological evolutionary scientism, to desire to reinterpret the entire past in terms of the present with nothing but the \u201cautonomous mind of man.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

We will comment more on this at the end of the chapter, but for now, the point we are making is that both modernism\u00a0and postmodernism, modernity and postmodernity, collided in this era, and it is for this reason that this chapter undertakes a philosophical overview of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to properly provide the historical context and intellectual diagnosis of the era.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

The Rise and Fall of Science<\/h3>\n

The early decades of the twentieth century in the Western academy were marked, perhaps defined, by the analytic philosophy of Moore and Russell, which argued for a rigorously empiricist theory of knowledge and was forcefully dismissive of any \u201chigher way of knowing\u201d by religious experience.[5]<\/a> Russell went on to be a key personality within the Vienna Circle\u00a0during the 1930s and in the development of the anti-metaphysical tenor of its logical positivism, which downgraded religious experience as non-cognitive nonsense.[6]<\/a> The Circle had issued a manifesto entitled (when translated into English) \u201cThe Scientific View of the World.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n

Science was to be elevated to scientism<\/em>, and it was the application of the principles of logical positivism, the<\/em> (not \u201ca\u201d) scientific view of the world, which would solve all<\/em> the problems of humanity by liberating it from its bondage caused by the metaphysical pollution of culture.[8]<\/a> So, Russell\u00a0was to assert in his apologetic that questions of fact can only be decided by the empirical methods of science\u00a0. . . questions that can be decided without appeal to experience are either mathematical or linguistic.[9]<\/a><\/p>\n

This was a form of what became known as the \u201cverification principle\u201d that a proposition in any sphere of culture (not just religion and science) was meaningful if<\/em> and only if<\/em> it was capable of empirical<\/em> testing. This was a cathartic, intoxicating, and radical principle that, from the mid-1930s for the next two decades, exerted a huge influence across the humanities and the sciences; any proposition or theory that failed this test was jettisoned as \u201cnon-sense.\u201d Any talk of theological and spiritual matters obviously failed this criterion, an empirical test for God or for God\u2019s action in the world was precluded by the very concept of God, and the positivist summary of religious thought was it makes \u201cnon-sense\u201d to talk about a being called God or of God acting in the world. However, the principle also caught the theories of the softer social sciences and the speculative or mathematical sciences, who struggled to find empirical ways of understanding their disciplines that they might be on the side of \u201csense.\u201d The purge was on, and it was real, but that was the price to pay to enter the New Age, where science was to reign.<\/p>\n

Yet, its thousand-year reign was abridged to but twenty years with the forceful demonstration of Quine, one of the movement\u2019s own philosophers, that the principle itself was self-defeating.<\/em> It had exempted the principle itself<\/em> from the criteria asserted by the principle\u2014we cannot go into nature <\/a>and find a \u201cverification principle,\u201d so on that basis, it makes no sense<\/em> to talk about a verification principle<\/em>.[10]<\/a> In fact, and this became a general realization amongst many of the critics, any<\/em> rational principle was problematic on the verificationist basis, and attempts to relax or reformulate the principle to admit the common idioms of analytic thought and scientific practice were seen to either exclude too much or were too rigid, voiding its efficacy as a methodological basis for distinguishing science\u00a0from \u201cnon-science\u201d and \u201cnon-sense.\u201d In other words, logical positivism\u00a0itself<\/em> was exposed as a \u201cthorough going metaphysics [denying] all metaphysics.\u201d[11]<\/a><\/p>\n

It must be emphasized that Quine had, from within<\/em> empiricism, offered this comprehensive rebuttal of logical positivism. He had demonstrated that the verification principle\u00a0required working outside of the empiricist framework; it was a brutal self-contradiction, a metaphysical dogma.[12]<\/a> Quine\u2019s essay really marked the end of the movement and the \u201ctyranny of empiricism\u201d; even though Quine himself remained a sophisticated empiricist, he argued that no theory could reach the level of sufficient attestation that it could be considered \u201ctrue\u201d in an objective sense, but as long as it was useful<\/em> in solving problems or explaining the world, the theory might be maintained.[13]<\/a> Quine\u2019s influence was itself enormous in the postpositivist era, with his development of scientific naturalism and epistemological\u00a0holism, where he asserted that we always \u201csee the world\u201d in terms of a theory of nature. Furthermore, there are many possible<\/em> theories of nature that have equivalent claims as adequate explanations of phenomena; as the \u201cdata\u201d of phenomena builds up, some theories may no longer be adequate<\/a> and can be dispensed with. This was a radical departure from the mythology surrounding a science\u00a0as the sole source of truth.<\/p>\n

In short, there was a plurality of possible theories of nature: each might be considered \u201cempirically adequate\u201d in describing phenomena; none could be asserted ahead of time as being the \u201ctrue\u201d account. Equally importantly, other philosophers of science contemporary to Quine, such as Kuhn, further undermined the claim that only<\/em> the scientific<\/em> was synonymous with the rational<\/em>. Kuhn had argued persuasively that science operated within a specific cultural context, was non-linear, and had unavoidable subjective dimensions; it was not the<\/em> truth but merely represented milestones on the way to a better understanding of the world.[14]<\/a><\/p>\n

That is, something of the \u201ctyranny<\/em> of science\u201d[15]<\/a> was arrested during this era, with many of the softer sciences and the humanities liberating themselves from the physicalism of positivism\u00a0and the scientific naturalism that was replacing it. The argument had been reframed to a far more restrained and measured discourse regarding philosophical and <\/a>\u201cscientific\u201d naturalism, arguing that any concept of God is unnecessary and irrelevant in understanding or describing the natural operation of the universe in the latter half of the twentieth century; science\u00a0was in fact \u201cneutral\u201d on metaphysical questions\u2014it was beyond the competency<\/em> of science to answer those questions.[16]<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet, those questions were still asked elsewhere in the academy and one of the dominant critiques of religious thought originated immediately after the positivist era in the non-positivistic analytic atheism in the philosophy of Flew and Mackie.[17]<\/a> Flew and Mackie were not so much \u201cscientific\u201d in their critique but were evidentialist and rational<\/em> in their intellectual approach, arguing that the beliefs of theists and Christians, specifically, were irrational. <\/em>Both had argued this on the basis of the argument from evil, that the existence of a good, omnipotent God was logically incompatible with the presence of evil in the world, a position first argued by Epicurus around 300 BC and emphatically restated by E in his Natural Religion.<\/em>[18]<\/a><\/p>\n

Their work was immediately attractive to the subsequent philosophical<\/em> naturalism, so that even if scientific<\/em> naturalism could<\/em> be neutral, it was seldom true in practice by virtue of the prejudices of the practitioners, and they quickly began incorporating these critiques as part of the continuing assault on the plausibility of the God hypothesis. As religious groups began asserting their rights to be heard in the public square during the 1970s and <\/a>1980s, culture generally never tired of pitting the enlightened practice of \u201cscience\u201d against the bigotry of the religious fundamentalist.[19]<\/a> It was not long before the duel with philosophical and scientific naturalism was given crude expression in \u201cNew Atheism\u201d[20]<\/a>\u2014a \u201cstrong scientism,\u201d the belief that science provides the \u201conly<\/em> . . . source of knowledge of the world, or alternatively, that the only <\/em>questions worth<\/em> asking were those that science could<\/em> answer.\u201d[21]<\/a> For all intents and purposes, the academy and its apologists had reverted to the working premise of logical positivism\u00a0that the concept of God was irrational and incoherent.<\/p>\n

However, such dogmatism struggled for credibility in the postmodern world; few, now, find such scientism\u00a0persuasive or compelling and New Atheism\u00a0is already considered a historical movement, barely making it a decade in the public consciousness.[22]<\/a> Most philosophers now admit sources of knowledge outside of the constraints of scientific naturalism. Indeed, Plantinga demonstrated forcefully that the premises of philosophical <\/em>naturalism do not even support theoretically<\/em> a comprehensive science\u00a0but mitigate against it. Plantinga, in his critique, made much of \u201cDarwin\u2019s doubt\u201d; we might paraphrase it thus: If our reasoning, hence our science, is but a natural process, why should I believe the conclusions of my reasoning any more than that of the reasonings of a monkey? Or put another way, the boundaries of nature ensure we can never get outside of nature to establish an abstract science explaining<\/em> nature.[23]<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>Instead, epistemological\u00a0pluralism and holism now stand in stark contrast to the crudeness of New Atheism. Most philosophers are far more cautious regarding the scope of our problems, which science\u00a0might<\/em> have the competence to solve, and for the purposes of our argument here, it was certainly no longer \u201cunscientific\u201d or \u201cirrational\u201d to hold to the Christian worldview.[24]<\/a> Modern naturalistic science destroys itself as a system or purveyor of knowledge and reduces to logical nonsense. It is of little surprise that cultural confidence in science had collapsed to a large degree by the middle of the 1990s.[25]<\/a><\/p>\n

The Collapse of the Liberal World Order<\/h3>\n

Disillusionment following the Balkan wars of 1912\/13 and then World War I in 1914 in Europe precipitated the collapse of classical liberal optimism and utopianism, being replaced by the Nietzschean \u201cwill to power\u201d as the replacement metanarrative in the cultural powerhouse of Europe, the German republic.[26]<\/a> Even though Germany had been defeated in WWI and the settlement after had deliberately disadvantaged Germany, it only succeeded in radicalizing its intelligentsia and enabling the rise of the National Socialists, who then dramatically rebuilt the nation, economically and politically. It is a paradoxical fact that though the Allies went to war again with Germany, Lord Keynes agreed with the Nazi critique of Western economics and adopted it as fundamental to his economic thought postwar.[27]<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n

The core belief was that totalitarianism was a natural and efficient means of delivering a new humanist world order free of bourgeois sentimentalism.[28]<\/a> The universalizing ideologies of Nazism and Communism came together in a pact during the 1930s, precipitating the Holocaust as rite of passage. Their central modern premise was a complete belief in the power of reason\u00a0to \u201ccreate an ordered world in which the unpredictability and chaos of [irrationality] would give way to paradise.\u201d[29]<\/a><\/p>\n

The New Humanist World Order<\/h3>\n

In this context, it is not accidental that Roosevelt\u2019s willingness to cede Eastern Europe to a friendly Soviet Union indicated the strength of his implicit support of its humanism.[30]<\/a> An uncomfortable, barely remembered fact is that Soviet dissidents post-Second World War experienced mass deportations from the West to Russia after the Yalta agreement, regardless of their personal wishes, and more Russians died at the hands of Stalin because<\/em> of this agreement<\/em> than were ever killed by the Nazis<\/em>.[31]<\/a><\/p>\n

With such a common unity of purpose to create a New World Order, it is no longer a bare economic fact that American loans to the Eastern bloc <\/a>communist regimes during the Cold War are evidence for many dissidents that \u201cAmerica was the greatest ally to the Soviet Union.<\/em>\u201d[32]<\/a> Rushdoony\u00a0was able to describe at book length why \u201cWashington is as humanistic as Moscow.<\/em>\u201d[33]<\/a> Western capitalism had lost its Christian humanitarian roots of creating and sustaining wealthy cultures, and by 1947 it became simply a means of generating as much profit as possible; the Western dream became one of unprincipled and unbridled materialism.[34]<\/a> A militant secular humanism\u00a0had become entrenched in both the Western and communist blocs, and it was inevitable that a reaction within Christian thought was to emerge.<\/p>\n

Late Modern Christian Thought<\/h3>\n

Theology was in a state of flux as it wrestled with theological liberalism during the nineteenth century. The rise of an alleged scientific \u201crationalism\u201d and the metanarrative of Darwinism in the West during this period had precipitated the crumbling of past religious certainties.[35]<\/a> The choice was clear: embrace the new scientific world order or retreat into allegorizing Scripture\u00a0and existentialism in an attempt to hold onto faith despite the \u201coverwhelming\u201d scientific evidence against it.[36]<\/a><\/p>\n

Barthianism resembled the latter; fundamentalism\u00a0was the \u201cscientific\u201d response of conservative Christianity.[37]<\/a> Fundamentalism, once it had moved beyond its anti-intellectual populist beginning period, was characterized by one commentator as \u201cmodernists swimming against the tide.\u201d[38]<\/a> It was rigorously methodical and rational with, in Warfield, a ring-fenced<\/a> doctrine of inspiration that was beyond refutation, being based on an impeccable modern logical position bereft of any substantive appeal to religious experience.[39]<\/a> It was about doctrinal purity and demanded, like the political movements, rigorous and uncompromising commitment to the normative creed.<\/p>\n

However, ultimately, the effort was unsuccessful as modernism\u00a0collapsed into totalitarianism and the Fundamentals <\/em>of 1917 became the final statement of conservative academic theology within the mainstream universities before leaving the harlot Babylon to her inevitable judgment.[40]<\/a> There followed cultural ghettoization and intellectual withdrawal of the dispensationalist fundamentalist\u00a0movement proper from social and intellectual action for approximately the period of 1920\u20131970.[41]<\/a> The Reformed\u00a0seminaries did not fare much better with the split of Machen from Princeton over its embrace of theological liberalism and then the subsequent splits from Machen over even finer points of doctrine, leading to a fragmentation of Presbyterianism in the US; and it was again to be the 1970s before Rushdoony\u00a0was to offer his reformer\u2019s vision.<\/p>\n

Politically and culturally, secular humanism\u00a0and its stepsister, the \u201csocial gospel\u201d movement, were having it mostly their own way, and if there was an evangelical\u00a0vision for culture \u201cas a whole,\u201d it was simply to facilitate the preaching of the gospel by any means necessary before the imminent return of the Lord. Rushdoony\u00a0describes this place of Christian history thus:<\/p>\n

Scripture is stripped of its total message and reduced to a soulsaving manual. Matters of law respecting crime, the use of the land, money, weights, property, diet, civil government, and all things else are set aside to concentrate on soul-saving only. If now Christian schools are started by some of these groups, too often their essential purpose is to further soul-saving.[42]<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The Rise and Collapse of Postmodernism<\/h3>\n

So, in summary we see that within the political culture generally, the story of the early twentieth century for the West was an emphatic rejection of the religious metanarrative and a radical embrace of humanism\u00a0and modernism\u00a0in various forms as the century progressed. Yet, such positions were sustained only by what can be described as an irrational<\/em> confidence in the absolute rationality of reason, and it was soon to be challenged:<\/p>\n

But what if reason or rationality itself rests on belief? Then it would be the case that the opposition between reason and belief was a false one, and that every situation of contest should be recharacterized as a quarrel between two sets of belief with no possibility of recourse to a mode of deliberation that was not itself an extension of belief.[43]<\/a><\/p>\n

The \u201cpost-modernists\u201d who first began to appear in the 1960s recognized this implicit circularity of an unqualified confidence in reason\u00a0and balked at this as epistemological\u00a0totalitarianism.[44]<\/a><\/p>\n

So, who and what were the postmodernists? \u201cPostmodernism,\u201d especially philosophical postmodernism, is sometimes considered as a post-WWII movement, but it had been used first in schools of art, which Lyotard, the philosopher of the later movement, claimed went all the way back to Duchamp in 1912. Duchamp posited that a painter<\/em> need not make a painting<\/em> to be an artist.<\/em> Similarly, if the location of an object was in an art gallery, the institution of the gallery bequeathed upon it the status of \u201cart\u201d; it could indeed just be a pile of bricks or an empty room where the light switches on and off.[45]<\/a> In other words, in common parlance, talk of \u201cmodern art\u201d often refers to postmodern<\/em> art.<\/p>\n

However, philosophical postmodernism\u00a0began finding its philosophical feet during the 1970s and was brought into focus and mainstream Anglo-American academia (it was already well-established in the \u201cContinental\u201d <\/a>academies) with the 1984 publication of the English translation of Lyotard\u2019s La condition<\/em> (Fr. 1979). At around the same time as Lyotard published in French, American Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty\u2019s Mirror<\/em> (1979) was published as a repudiation of modern philosophy; he became one of postmodernism\u2019s most colorful, forceful, and iconoclastic advocates.<\/p>\n

It was no surprise that the intellectual rebellion of the postmodernists came to the fore in the postwar period. It had just been preceded with the carnage of Nazism and Communism, and it was clear that modernism\u00a0was<\/em> having its own crisis by pursuing its own secularizing and universalizing presuppositions to their inevitable and logical conclusion in the Holocaust. The radical intellectual flight from reason\u00a0in reaction to these failed promises of modernism gave special impetus to postmodernism\u00a0in the postwar period. It first manifested in the rebellion and optimistic cultural spontaneity of the economic boom of the 1960s but rapidly descended into a sharp cynicism that was distinctive of the recession that followed in the West during the 1970s. Lyotard, considered the seminal thinker of philosophical postmodernism, would have surrendered all hope of certainty on principle<\/em> (if he thought there were any principles to be had) but wanted us to stay hopeful nevertheless: \u201cIt must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.\u201d[46]<\/a><\/p>\n

Lyotard\u2019s cryptic and uncommitted aphorism is perhaps representative; postmodern discourse became exemplified in finding a way to use a lot of words to not really say anything formally, but that was<\/em> the point.[47]<\/a> It was the organic process of philosophizing that the conceivable might appear.<\/em> Derrida\u2019s lectures became known for their long, rambling nature\u2014if you were looking for a \u201cpoint\u201d to the lecture, you were already missing<\/em> the point. As Lyotard makes clear, the rambles are still allusions<\/em> to that which cannot be presented; paralogism was endorsed as philosophical method.[48]<\/a> By design, we are supremely subjective and eschew even the possibility of objectivity as bourgeois false consciousness.[49]<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>Thus, this can readily be catastrophic to scholarship, with its implicit vagueness and renunciation of analytic clarity, perhaps demonstrated well by the \u201cSokal hoaxes,\u201d where fake papers advancing bizarre \u201cpostmodern\u201d theses were<\/em> accepted for publication in leading postmodern journals. \u201cSokal squared\u201d was a similar recently repeated exercise concentrating on the nascent gender and CRT disciplines. Despite the ridiculousness and lack of critical peer assessment exposed by the fakery (it would indeed be difficult to understand what the process of peer review might mean for the postmodernist journal other than censoring works with a cogent argument as bourgeois), the academics were unrepentant, labeling it \u201can attack of the Right.\u201d[50]<\/a><\/p>\n

In what might be seen as the desire to avoid such excesses, Rorty took a different track than the abstraction of the Continental postmodernists and was the focus of an \u201cAmericanization\u201d of the postmodern movement by combining it with Deweyan pragmatism. Rorty also demonstrated a strong desire to generate some kind of ethical<\/em> program despite initially becoming and remaining famous as at the vanguard of the crusade against truth.[51]<\/a> Lyotard was said to be unhappy with this turn but with Rorty, pragmatism, pluralism, and relativism entered the cultural mainstream and the denial of the possibility of objective truth became the working hypothesis of the academy. Rorty, I would argue, was the patron saint of postmodern philosophers <\/em>(whereas Nietzsche might be considered the patron saint of postmodernism\u00a0in general[52]<\/a>). Liked and loathed in equal measures, he was the most-cited philosopher by the early 1990s, becoming known for his rejection of \u201ctruth\u201d and a disdain of his own discipline. He migrated into a new field combining literary criticism and philosophy but remained the favorite philosopher of the Left up until his death (2007).[53]<\/a><\/p>\n

Though Rorty tried to mitigate the Continental postmodern deconstructionism so influential in literary criticism by moving postmodernism\u00a0in the direction of pragmatism, Rorty himself had described the human <\/a>condition as one of \u201cirony.\u201d[54]<\/a> However, for those less sophisticated in thought than Rorty, this \u201cirony\u201d all too readily decayed into a despairing negativity that life just happens, and we are powerless in any real sense to understand and shape the world. Of course, the supreme<\/em> irony for the postmodernist is that implicit within their view is the reciprocal form of the very same truth fallacy from which they were seeking to escape: to deny any concept of truth is stated as an absolute truth<\/em>.[55]<\/a> This then functions as an effective axiom of their postmodernist framework.[56]<\/a><\/p>\n

With all this paralogism celebrated and on full display, Lyotard prophetically foresaw that despite this effervescence of postmodernism\u00a0during this period, there was a desire for the terror of the modern illusion of analysis, certainty, and objectivity to return, and the counterreaction of modernism, as postmodernists prophesied of its demise, was swift.[57]<\/a> It was a particular totalizing and caustic counterreaction of modernism to its alleged demise, borrowing from postmodernism the dispensing of the nicety of reasoned discourse, to be replaced with, as we have previously seen, a relentless polemic and mockery of one\u2019s opponents. This was exemplified by the New Atheist polemic against any<\/em> and all<\/em> religion. Yet, now, there were the additional dimensions of cultural Marxism: deplatforming and censorship. Postmodernists were also identified with a refusal to challenge critically, with those opinions deemed unacceptable on unargued but \u201cdeeply held\u201d a priori<\/em> criteria. Indeed, with subjectivity as central to our understandings of ourselves, your position was valid because it was your<\/em> position and any attempt to argue from principle against you was equated with a refusal to permit your fundamental right to psychic calm and was therefore \u201cviolence.\u201d The point being that if my belief was \u201cdeeply held,\u201d you have no right to challenge it, and it was \u201cviolence\u201d to attempt to do so.<\/p>\n

In other words, as postmodernism\u00a0decayed into this crude cultural form, it manifested in identity politics and dispensed with the need to argue and justify your position. For the Marxist, verbal \u201cviolence\u201d could be met with physical violence as a form of self-defense. Mixed with this kind of cultural Marxism, the most demanding of modernisms, this quickly degenerated into the simple division of \u201coppressed\u201d and \u201coppressor\u201d and the \u201cothering\u201d of those with whom you disagree. The postmodern component is <\/a>the belief that you are so \u201cothered\u201d from me that we can have no argument because our language and worldviews are incommensurate.[58]<\/a> The Marxist component is that this \u201cothering\u201d is your way of keeping me in a state of perpetual oppression and I must resort to revolutionary action to overthrow that, and we certainly do not have to have a debate about it.<\/p>\n

This provided a lens through which to view all interpersonal and international relations, and the oppressed could use any means necessary, including violence, to liberate themselves. Thus, far from being a tool of hope and pluralism, freeing thought from modernist tyranny, postmodernism\u00a0had paradoxically become an instrument of neo-Marxist apologetics that obviated the imperative to have an argued position and, instead, divided people on the basis of their immutable and incommensurate characteristics.<\/p>\n

Put another way, the problem for the postmodernist is rather like the problem Wittgenstein\u00a0(who is often viewed as helpful to the postmodernist cause in other respects) posited at the end of the Tractatus<\/em>, that we have used this ladder to climb up to this place but then have to pull the ladder up after us because we realize that if<\/em> what we have concluded is true, then<\/em> it is illegitimate to have climbed up using the ladder that we did. This point was not lost on some postmodernists, who readily subscribe to a paralogical<\/em> conception of reality, because starting from \u201clogical\u201d presuppositions, as Wittgenstein did, nevertheless terminated in self-contradiction. Life (and philosophy) is clearly more than logic, and I will architect it myself.<\/p>\n

In summary, then, as a positive, postmodernism\u00a0has some valuable insights that serve to reign in the totalizing modernisms of the twentieth century (such as \u00a0fascism and communism). In its most holistic mode, work in the humanities and, to a significant degree, the sciences can be usefully assessed for its sensitivity to postmodernity and postmodernism; in such a mode, its influence is now much more measured, and it serves now to help us to recognize \u201cthe limitations of our modern premises.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, as an overwhelming negative, postmodernism, when combined with cultural Marxism, as it often naturally has been, being a movement predominantly of the Left, has paradoxically exerted a coercive<\/em> rather than a liberating influence on scholarship. It is woefully inadequate and poorly defined as a system of thought in itself<\/em> as it denigrates \u201csystems<\/em> of thought.\u201d Rorty\u2019s attempted combination of postmodernism with American pragmatism provides something of a way forward for <\/a>postmodern thought beyond the abstract, intellectual Continental deconstructionism. Yet, few in the movement have the erudition or intellectual nuance of Rorty, who, in later years, was content to be described as a \u201cbourgeois\u201d thinker and presumably an enemy of the movement he nurtured to adulthood. Rorty was an embodiment of the postmodern dilemma; it is rather like trying to argue that breathing is illegitimate, though all that time you are breathing whilst you delegitimize breathing through breathed words. So, in Docherty, for example, he describes postmodernism as a \u201cmood, not a period,\u201d and woe to us if we are swayed too easily by moods![59]<\/a> There is still plenty of postmodernism in culture at large, but it is philosophically incoherent (with some postmodernists \u201creveling\u201d in this very feature), its limitations now well exegeted, especially by those whose disciplines it criticized so severely.[60]<\/a><\/p>\n

Thus, if the choice before us is one of logic, or perhaps better, logos<\/em> versus postmodern paralogism, then we, as Christians, must surely choose logos<\/em>, and this is freely admitted as a metaphysical commitment\u2014 my faith informs my reason\u00a0at this point.[61]<\/a> Similarly, as an analytic philosopher, I argue you need to understand how to live according to the design plan correctly<\/em>\u2014yes, I believe in objectivity\u2014to live a long life; you understand the rules of the game and play it according to those rules.[62]<\/a> As a Christian, I view those \u201crules\u201d as the law of God, and following those, you will succeed. This is part of the case we build in the subsequent chapters<\/a> and is fundamental to the philosophical and theological underpinnings of dominion theology.[63]<\/a><\/p>\n

Concluding Summary<\/h3>\n

This has been the most demanding and complicated chapter of the book so far, as we have been very ambitious in trying to decode the philosophical and cultural milieu of the last two hundred years. There will be plenty with the chronology and inferences that we have made that some will readily object to, but far fewer will argue with what we conclude here as we gather our thoughts. The state of human civilization as the new millennium approached was characterized by \u201cautophagic capitalism\u201d and the bloody Marxist wreckage of the \u201crotting offal of modernity.\u201d[64]<\/a><\/p>\n

This absolute descent of secular civilization into two world wars, multiple further conflicts along ideological lines, the Cold War, the bankruptcy of academia, the rootlessness of postmodernity, and the correlative pessimistic and cynical turn of evangelical\u00a0Christian eschatological thought demanded a response. The emergence of Rushdoony\u2019s Reconstructionism\u00a0in this period was the movement in which intellectual and social discontent turned to action. It is to his role in the Reconstructionist movement and its formative nature for dominion theology that is the subject of the next chapter.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Emergence of Modern\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> C. Peter Wagner, \u201cForeword,\u201d in Hamon, Eternal Church<\/em>, 12. Though this book has much to commend it, it has a single sentence on Reconstructionism\u2014hardly an adequate assessment of a major realignment in theology of the church.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Macneil, \u201cScripture\u00a0and Post-Darwinian Controversy.\u201d<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Rushdoony, Mythology of Science<\/em>, 1\u20134; Rushdoony, Limits of Reason<\/em>, loc. 88.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> \u201cModernity\u201d and \u201cmodernism\u201d are readily separated as distinct categories\u2014modernity refers to the technologies of the era, those sociological aspects that result from the innovations of the era; modernism refers to the set of ideas and philosophy. With \u201cpostmodernity\u201d and \u201cpostmodernism,\u201d this separation has not been maintained; most writers use the terms indiscriminately. See Lyon, Postmodernity<\/em>, 6\u20137.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Russell\u2019s basic philosophical text that served as a primer for a generation of philosophy students is The Problems of Philosophy<\/em>. Moore was famous for his rigorous analytic method and his Defense of Common Sense<\/em>. He had an entire issue of the Philosophy<\/em> journal published in his honor at his death; it was his rigorous method<\/em> rather than his conclusions that had generated such admiration. See also Russell, Western Philosophy<\/em>, 789.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> It is important to distinguish logical<\/em> positivism\u00a0from the \u201cpaleopositivism\u201d of Auguste Comte a century earlier, but both forms of positivism emphatically rejected metaphysics and elevated science\u00a0to scientism\u00a0(\u201cthe only questions that are legitimate and are worth asking are those that science can answer\u201d); Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic<\/em>, 56\u201358.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Carnap et al., Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung<\/em>, 75\u2013116. This is the English translation of the original by Stadler and Uebel.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> This supreme confidence of the logical positivists that they were right and the last<\/em> word in philosophy (Wittgenstein\u00a0had famously retired from philosophy after \u201csolving\u201d all of its problems in his Tractatus<\/em>) is captured in Ayer\u2019s foreword to the 2nd edition of his Language, Truth and Logic<\/em> (1946). He had introduced logical positivism\u00a0to the English-speaking world in 1936 after he had attended meetings of the Vienna Circle, who themselves had developed the ideas of Wittgenstein\u2019s Tractatus<\/em> and Russell\u2019s logicism.<\/em> He admits to being overzealous in the first edition and still later was to retreat from the veracity of most of what he had written therein but maintained it had served a \u201cvaluable cathartic purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Russell, \u201cLogical Positivism,\u201d 367.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Quine, \u201cTwo Dogmas.\u201d This is generally considered to be one of the most influential papers published in the twentieth century and is still mandatory reading for philosophy of science\u00a0students and, in my experience, those of many other disciplines.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Rushdoony, Limits of Reason<\/em>, loc. 111.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Quine was mentored by and collaborated with Rudolf Carnap, one of the most influential of the logical positivists. See Macneil, Foundations<\/em>, where there is substantial attention given to Quine.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Though a point more suited for the philosophical discussions of my Foundations<\/em>, Quine was arguing for something distinct from pragmatism, though you might argue the practical<\/em> implications of his position would be similar. He was rather making a rational proposition: he was arguing that no one need ever<\/em> relinquish their theory; they could always \u201creinterpret\u201d any fact or new data to fit in with the framework of their theory or modify their theory in some way to accommodate anomalies and new facts. This absolutely destroys any claim that scientific theories give you objective<\/em> accounts or truths about nature, or that one theory is implicitly better than another on a purely rational<\/em> basis; the theory is always tested against the world.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> By \u201cnon-linear,\u201d it is meant that many traditional accounts of science\u00a0had (and still do) present scientists as building on one another\u2019s work, e.g., Einstein built on Newton, who himself had said, \u201cIf I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants\u201d (letter to Robert Hooke on Feb. 5, 1675, in the archive of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania). What was so radical in Kuhn was that he had asserted that Einsteinian physics had usurped<\/em> Newtonian physics, and Copernicus had usurped<\/em> Ptolemy, replacing the previous theory with an entirely new paradigm<\/em>, frequently contradictory and unrelated<\/em> to what went before it\u2014it was a revolution<\/em> of thought, not an evolution<\/em>. Kuhn fully expected Einsteinian physics to be usurped by another revolution<\/em> within the scientific community.<\/p>\n

Kuhn\u2019s Scientific Revolutions<\/em> is another example of required reading for the philosopher of science, and its basic thesis has been adopted by many outside of the discipline of science to \u201cprotect\u201d their discipline from the tyrannizing instincts of the academic scientists. It is somewhat ironic that Kuhn\u2019s lasting legacy has been felt outside of science in the humanities, as subsequent philosophers of science highlighted the ambiguity, the implicit relativism, and the imprecision of his language in the Revolutions<\/em>. However, it was cogent and persuasive enough to have been seen as broadly applicable to the other disciplines in defending them against the charges of irrationality in their rejection of the primacy of a \u201cscientific\u201d methodology for the grounding of their discipline. See my Foundations<\/em> for a broader discussion of Kuhn.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> A term most immediately associated with another highly influential and controversial philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend. It was a theme he returned to repeatedly during his colorful career, stated first in his Against Method<\/em> and in his last publication (a composite of a lecture series) the Tyranny of Science<\/em>, before dying prematurely of a brain tumor. Few assaulted the elevated mythology of science in our culture so directly and described the dangers of unfettered scientism\u00a0as Feyerabend, and he, too, is required reading for philosophers of science.<\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> Plantinga, Science, Religion and Naturalism<\/em>, ix.<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> Flew\u2019s Theology and Falsification<\/em> is generally thought (and in his own words in the retrospective, There Is a God<\/em>, ixv\u2013xv) to mark the rebirth of analytic atheism and, paradoxically, analytic theism by pioneering a post-positivist manner of speaking about God. See also Mackie, \u201cEvil and Omnipotence,\u201d 200\u2013212. This was considered a rebuttal of the staple \u201cfree will defense\u201d of the theist for the existence of evil; the issue that remains part of the atheist critique of Christian thought especially, though most philosophers would consider now Mackie\u2019s rebuttal itself successfully rebutted by Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga in his God, Freedom, and Evil<\/em>. See also Macneil, Augustine and Plantinga.<\/em><\/p>\n

[18]<\/a> Epicurus\u2019s dilemma is stated thus: \u201cIf God is good, he would want a world free of evil and if he is omnipotent, he would use his power to remove it. The fact there is evil in the world, indicates either that God is impotent, or that he is unwilling, and therefore not good.\u201d Many a Calvinist\u00a0would resolve the dilemma by adding in an additional premise to resolve the paradox, arguing if there is evil in the world, it is because it serves the purposes of God and God permits it. The how<\/em> or why<\/em> evil is permitted in that way remains hidden in the purposes of God, that is the extremely psychologically uncomfortable terminus (particularly from the perspective of those who witness or have endured severe abuse or hardship), which would also seem to be the central message of the magisterial book of Job.<\/p>\n

[19]<\/a> Professor James Barr\u00a0published his Fundamentalism<\/em>\u00a0in 1977, with a substantive revision in 1982. This was perhaps the defining critique of the era, being freely quoted in many subsequent publications critical of \u201cconservative evangelicalism\u201d both academic and popular. Despite his substantial reputation, his analysis in this work was flawed in important places, and he failed to distinguish fundamentalists from other conservative evangelicals (considering the terms synonymous) as we were careful to do at the beginning of our discussion in this book. See also: Macneil, Fundamentals and Fundamentalism.<\/em><\/p>\n

[20]<\/a> Taylor, \u201cNew Atheists.\u201d<\/p>\n

[21]<\/a> Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens were affectionately known as the \u201cFour Horsemen of the [atheist] apocalypse.\u201d New atheism was known for its supreme confidence in its views and its derisive dismissal of all who disagreed with them, even if their opponents, too, were arguing on an atheological basis about different models of evolutionary theory. See Macneil, Foundations<\/em>, \u00a73.3.5, 68.<\/p>\n

[22]<\/a> It is even more noteworthy that Dawkins now describes himself as a \u201ccultural Christian,\u201d in preference to the alternative of radical Islam.<\/p>\n

[23]<\/a> For a much fuller discussion of these philosophical issues surrounding science, see Macneil, Foundations<\/em>, \u00a73.3.7.<\/p>\n

[24]<\/a> However, much more would need to be said as to why the Christian worldview\u00a0is the only<\/em> fully rational worldview rather than just a competitor in the postmodern marketplace. This argument was the subject of my doctoral studies and is developed in my Foundations<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[25]<\/a> In the era of television advertising, certain domestic appliance advertisements removed the \u201cscientists\u201d with their white laboratory coats because of the public suspicion over science. The COVID pandemic was also another example of what happens when science gets tyrannical and out of control; see Macneil, \u201cGreat COVID Caper.\u201d<\/p>\n

[26]<\/a> Nietzsche, Wille zur Macht.<\/em> Elisabeth F\u00f6rster-Nietzsche bridged the divide between Nietzsche and Nazism by assembling this work from fragments of Nietzsche\u2019s unpublished work. It should be noted than many Nietzschean scholars object to this association of Nietzsche with Nazism, citing his sister\u2019s \u201cNazification\u201d of his work, but is undeniable that Nietzsche had a willing audience amongst the Nazis and the fascist movements, including Hitler and Mussolini. Kuyper\u00a0was to write after the close of WWI, \u201cThe rising sun to the up-and-coming generation of Germany\u00a0. . . today everything revolves around Nietzsche\u201d (Kuyper, Blurring of the Boundaries<\/em>, 366).<\/p>\n

[27]<\/a> Quoted in Rushdoony, \u201cMoney, Inflation, and Morality.\u201d<\/p>\n

[28]<\/a> The pervasive influence of Darwinism here should not be underestimated, both biologically (in the eugenics movement, that still had strong, open support in the 1960s as a foundational ideology to the family planning movement), in historicism (in Marxism), and here, sociopolitically. Some, indeed, saw the working out of evolutionary processes with almost a metaphysical or religious pretheoretical commitment to Darwin, with one of the greatest evolutionists of the modern era, Stephen Gould, writing in his Punctuated Equilibrium<\/em>, \u201cIt is a metaphysical commitment we make\u201d (145).<\/p>\n

This means that the evidence for evolution is that there is no evidence (Gould, Punctuated Equilibrium<\/em>, 116).This was in response to the embarrassment, he describes, that the fossil record with all its large gaps does not<\/em> support a view of a gradual<\/em> change of species. He used the Marxist concept of \u201crevolution,\u201d that the jumps in the record were periods of rapid change, followed by quiet periods of no change\u2014hence the gaps in the fossil record. As I noted in my Foundations<\/em>, \u00a73.3.5, this is a master class in sophistry being beyond both proof and refutation, and the bitter feud between Dawkins, Gould, and their disciples continues to this day, despite Gould passing in 2002. Thus, my conclusion expressed there is that evolutionism is a metaphysical dogma in its entirety<\/em>, despite its cosmetic dressing in scientific clothes.<\/p>\n

[29]<\/a> McGrath, Passion for Truth<\/em>, 182\u201383.<\/p>\n

[30]<\/a> Dallek, \u201cRoosevelt\u2019s Relationship [sic] Stalin,\u201d para. 1.<\/p>\n

[31]<\/a> Bethell, Last Secret<\/em>. Nicholas Bethell is better known as Baron Lord Bethell and was a hereditary pier in the British House of Lords until his death in 2007. See also, Rushdoony, \u201cChristian Reconstruction 1 and 2.\u201d<\/p>\n

[32]<\/a> Rushdoony, \u201cHumanist Order.\u201d<\/p>\n

[33]<\/a> Rushdoony, Christianity and the State<\/em>, loc. 1430.<\/p>\n

[34]<\/a> Cope, \u201cBusiness and Economics.\u201d<\/p>\n

[35]<\/a> Bahnsen, \u201cCalvin\u00a0and Postmillennialism,\u201d para. 1\u20135.<\/p>\n

[36]<\/a> Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology<\/em>, 35\u201344.<\/p>\n

[37]<\/a> It is perhaps more accurate to argue that academic Protestantism\u00a0generated a scholarly response to theological liberalism in what became the 4-volume set edited by Torrey (1917) but had been published in various journals previously. This was eponymously named \u201cThe Fundamentals,\u201d but this does not<\/em> seem to be the origin of the term \u201cfundamentalist,\u201d which was rather coined by newspaper columnists around the same time and referred to a particular style of populist, non-academic evangelist. Many of the first generation of \u201cfundamentalists\u201d were anti-intellectual and vocally opposed to the academy as an expression of the harlot Babylon, which provides good evidence that the academy was not the origin of the term. I examine the issue of fundamentalism\u00a0in my \u201cScripture\u00a0and the Post-Darwinian Controversy.\u201d<\/p>\n

[38]<\/a> Lawrence, Defenders of God<\/em>, 27.<\/p>\n

[39]<\/a> It should be noted that Warfield (contra Barr) was not<\/em> a fundamentalist\u00a0himself but an orthodox, conservative Presbyterian of Princeton Theological Seminary. However, his defense of the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture\u00a0became formative for the fundamentalist position. Additionally, the commonsense realism, so influential in the Princeton epistemology, meant it was very sensitive to the imperative of having a scientific respectability for the apologetic; see Macneil, Foundations<\/em>, \u00a73.5.4\u20133.5.6. See also Warfield, \u201cInspiration,\u201d in Writings<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[40]<\/a> Torrey and Dixon, Fundamentals<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[41]<\/a> Lloyd-Jones, What Is an Evangelical?<\/em>, 49; Stott, Involvement<\/em>, 13.<\/p>\n

[42]<\/a> Rushdoony, God\u2019s Plan for Victory<\/em>, loc. 185.<\/p>\n

[43]<\/a> Fish, Free Speech<\/em>, 135.<\/p>\n

[44]<\/a> For an excellent primer on postmodernism\u00a0by someone observing it somewhat critically rather than being part of the movement, see Butler, Postmodernism.<\/em> He echoes Docherty, whom we quote later as saying postmodernism is a \u201cmood\u201d rather than a movement, but brings out the link with Marxism concisely and well as \u201cthe Marxist presupposition that we are all in any case the victims of a \u2018false consciousness\u2019 brought about by \u2018bourgeois\u2019 discourse\u201d (111).<\/p>\n

[45]<\/a> Both of these are famous examples of \u201cpostmodern art\u201d exhibits that won prestigious prizes. See Butler, Postmodernism<\/em>, 1\u20134.<\/p>\n

[46]<\/a> Lyotard, Postmodern Condition<\/em>, 81.<\/p>\n

[47]<\/a> A fine exemplar of dense, postmodern prose is also found in the essay accompanying the English translation of Lyotard listed in the bibliography.<\/p>\n

[48]<\/a> As a further point of philosophical criticism, if they are \u201callusions,\u201d it suggests there is still something presentable<\/em> awaiting a suitable, analytic, alternative narrative. It is difficult to find coherence in Lyotard\u2019s assertion here.<\/p>\n

[49]<\/a> Butler, Postmodernism<\/em>, 2. Butler makes the point that the movement is a movement of the political left; hence, most of what is produced has a political message and that, perhaps, is its point.<\/em><\/p>\n

[50]<\/a> I give the details on the Sokal hoaxes and explore the issue of peer review more fully in Macneil, \u201cFake (but Peer-Reviewed).\u201d<\/p>\n

[51]<\/a> Rorty, Ethics for Today<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[52]<\/a> A case argued effectively by Blackburn in Truth<\/em>, \u00a74: \u201cNietzsche, the Arch Debunker.\u201d<\/p>\n

[53]<\/a> The movement was sometimes characterized as philosophers writing poor literary criticism, and literary critics writing equally poor philosophy.<\/p>\n

[54]<\/a> Rushdoony, Limits of Reason<\/em>, loc. 91; McGrath, Passion for Truth<\/em>, 163\u2013200.<\/p>\n

[55]<\/a> Rushdoony, Limits of Reason<\/em>, loc. 1005\u201350; Fish, Free Speech<\/em>, 135\u201336.<\/p>\n

[56]<\/a> Rhodes, \u201cAbsolute Truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

[57]<\/a> Lyotard, Postmodern Condition<\/em>, 81\u201382.<\/p>\n

[58]<\/a> Lyotard codified this in his work The Differend<\/em> (1983). He considered this his most important work, but it did not find its way into English until 1990.<\/p>\n

[59]<\/a> Docherty, \u201cPostmodernist Theory,\u201d 479.<\/p>\n

[60]<\/a> For examples, see Thiselton, Hermeneutics<\/em>, 327\u201348; Blackburn, Ruling Passions<\/em>, 279\u2013310. Blackburn\u2019s Truth<\/em> (2006) contains perhaps one of the most far-reaching critiques of the postmodern view, his critique even reaching as far as a footnote in Rorty\u2019s own work.<\/p>\n

[61]<\/a> As many Christians will know, Jesus is described as the \u201cLogos\u201d (\u201cWord\u201d) in the original Greek of John 1:1. It has an obvious relation to the word \u201clogic,\u201d sharing the same root but is rather stronger. It refers to an overall rational principle of the universe, first appearing as a similar concept in the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 500 BC). The personification in Jesus of the concept is in line with what is stated in Col 2:3, 9 (NET): \u201cIn whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. . . . For in him all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form.\u201d You might also say \u201cessence\u201d\u2014what it is about God that makes him God dwells in Christ.<\/p>\n

[62]<\/a> Macneil, Foundations<\/em>, 222. Here, I discuss the relation of the Plantingian term \u201cdesign plan,\u201d which connects our knowledge of the world with the faculty of reason. The basic idea is that for cognitive functions (including our reason) that are working correctly in a suitable environment according to the way God intended, they could be relied on to give you knowledge about the world.<\/p>\n

[63]<\/a> Revisiting this section a decade later after it was first written allowed me to reorganize, tidy up, and update what is an extremely compressed account of postmodernism, but even in this updated form, it might raise more questions than it answers for the philosophy student. However, in my defense, a critique of postmodernism was not the subject of this<\/em> book, I am only seeking to draw out specific themes relevant to dominion theology, which could be investigated further by the reader if desired and are argued more fully elsewhere. In that respect, a great primer on postmodernism and<\/em> its relation to faith, the interest of this book, is found in Thiselton, Hermeneutics<\/em>, 327\u2013348. For issues of Christian philosophy specifically, I would be amiss not to recommend my Foundations <\/em>based on my doctoral studies.<\/em><\/p>\n

[64]<\/a> McVicar, Christian Reconstruction<\/em>, 230.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
Last Days<\/a><\/div>\n
Dominion Theology<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Precursors of Dominion Theology Introduction The argument I am making in this chapter is that by thoroughly analyzing the changes, tensions, and contradictions within the metanarratives of the Western culture over the last two centuries, it becomes inevitable that a Christian counterculture of dominion theology\u00a0would emerge. I was emphatic in the introduction regarding the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1624,"parent":1636,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1679","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1679"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1734,"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1679\/revisions\/1734"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1636"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetmacneil.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}