Kiln of the Soul parish is a covenant community. The Covenant of Christ is everything, and we assert that you cannot fully grasp the Covenant without embracing a Hebraic mental approach. It’s not enough to simply be aware of Christ’s Hebrew background; you must absorb it. The message of Jesus Christ came within that frame of reference, and it results in a radically different outlook from what is common in the West in general, and America in particular. You cannot keep the Covenant of Christ without committing yourself to the task of changing how you think.
The gospel is not a body of ideas; it is not data. You cannot process it intellectually. It is a Person. You must make Him Lord and exercise your faith from your heart, not from your head. Jesus was a Hebrew mystic; serving Him requires a mystical approach. You measure all things by your ongoing personal relationship with Him. He speaks to you through the moral consciousness of your heart, not through your head.
So, when someone asks me a question about Vox Day, the response is not based on intellectual evaluation. Human intellect is invariably seduced by self-serving motivations, consciously or not. Vox is a prime example of that. It’s not a question of his intellectual talent, but that everything he uses that talent for is self-serving. He does not serve Christ.
I made it a point to warn him about this way back when he allowed comments on his blog. Some of his readers understood and agreed with it, but Vox never bothered to respond. He continues to this day building an algorithm of life that rests entirely on intellectual talent, a talent that never ceases to serve his fleshly nature. His religion does not stand on the kind of faith that takes up the Cross, but on pure logic.
People of faith do not exhibit the bitter hatred Vox does. It’s one thing to relay to the world a public denunciation of sin; that has always come with a call to repentance and an offer to work for rehabilitation. The prophet’s mission is not a drive-by shooting of condemnation alone. Jesus has always welcomed sinners home, and said quite bluntly that this is how we are supposed to operate in His name.
It’s not that Vox can’t understand; he refuses to walk by the heart and spirit. He consistently turns away from the gospel message of redemption, and the bulk of his effort is condemnation. That’s how Satan does business.
I’ll give an example: His Socio-sexual hierarchy is not biblical at all, but an artifact of western culture. You can try to force it to fit into non-western cultures, but it misses the whole point. Our Lord does not make people that way; they get that way from being exposed to the pagan western culture. Vox ginned up the notion of the Sigma Male for himself as an excuse to avoid doing things the way Christ taught us. It is the ultimate excuse to avoid carrying the Cross. Christ calls us to get directly involved.
The ideal man of God is a shepherd. Vox’s system insists that only Alphas can do that, which is utterly false. God’s Word says every man must find a path to the shepherd role using whatever talents God has granted him. One does not seek the role of shepherd; it is thrust upon you when God decides it is your time. You prepare for that faithfully through the process of pursuing His Word and seeking a direct conscious connection to Him. How can I please You, Lord?
But because of his moral vacuity, Vox refuses to take responsibility when God places him in that role. He is in that position, but refuses to embrace the moral demands that come with it. Instead, he plunders it for his personal gain. This is precisely the sin of Satan and his allies on the Divine Council. He does not take upon himself the burden Christ assumed when people crowded around Him.
I don’t read Vox these days; his intellectual brilliance serves no valid moral purpose. There is no hope of glory in his words. His acid spite for inconvenient people is cancerous and can easily lead you astray from Christ’s ways. He does not invest his talents back into the covenant, the community of faith. He has no spiritual covering, and I pray he repents before destruction falls on him.
In case you are wondering, I have no particular interest in having him join our parish. That’s not what this is about. He should build his own fellowship that testifies to the world of the power and grace of our Lord, not his fleshly interests.
Completely agree with this assessment. I don’t normally write long comments online but this is an important topic. Please forgive the wall of words. VD has a huge following and is widely and erroneously regarded as a modern-day prophet by those who are seduced by his worldly way of thinking. This is a false view of him and should be condemned widely. His Christian followers are being led up the garden path, and worse.
VD is an avid student of military history and economics and a fantasy fiction writer who is adept at cultural pattern recognition and weaving a story around what he ‘sees’, based on what he has studied or that can be inferred or interpreted in a particular and stylized way. His followers may not initially see those stylized patterns for themselves, which allows him to fashion them into predictions for the West for the near-to-mid-term future, which he does using various pet theories, antipathies and insecurities to emphasize whichever aspects appeal to him and advance his personal interests.
The obvious problem with this is that for every 100 things he’s ‘predicted’ another 100 of them never happened and never will. He ignores his failed predictions and emphasizes those that are accurate. That’s what gamblers do. Perennial predictions of ‘X’ or ‘Y’ are going to be right at least some of the time. Being more adept at pattern recognition than many of his readers, he has a slight edge over the house like a card counter at a blackjack table. Like every gambler, he emphasizes the wins and buries the losses, except in his case selecting the choicest ones that can be developed, adapted or embellished into whatever advances his commercial interests. Like every high grifter on the long con, he hides his game quite well, but every now and then something slips out that gives the game away.
The second problem is that his Dark Lord persona is a means to shield himself from the consequences of failing to do good for others. After all, if you call yourself a ‘dark lord’ of an ‘evil legion of evil’, then in a morally contorted double irony you can absolve yourself of responsibility when evil is done because of something you’ve said or written. Needless to say, saying ‘I told you I was evil’ does not absolve one of responsibility for doing evil. The truth of that should not be missed. Satan’s greatest trick is to convince people he doesn’t exist. To be fair, VD is being honest to some degree as he does not walk in the light of Christ and it may be that he knows this. He walks in the limelight of his own making. He’s basically a snake-oil salesman, creating and selling xenophobic fantasies that appeal to those who feel lost, disappointed, disgruntled or disenfranchised in a multi-racial world and see him as a knighted champion in a feudal fantasy where everyone who doesn’t think like them, feel like them, look like them, behave like them and is with them, is worthy of condemnation.
Read VD for a while and it becomes clear that he’s a broken man like everyone else who has created this fantasy world around himself to avoid the harsh reality of his own brokenness. He calls himself a ‘Sigma’ but anyone who has read his blog for a while knows that he more closely resembles what he calls a ‘Gamma.’ Sigma is what he wants to be, but Gamma is what he is. Gamma is a euphemism for ‘broken men’ – i.e. all men. He needs the gospel just as we all do. VD tries to hide this fact but the truth always betrays him, and he hates it like a man who is constantly running away from the truth. He projects that hatred onto anyone whose slightest stumble triggers him back into reality who he then condemns as if Christ was never crucified. This is Satan’s work, for sure.
The third major problem with VD is that he puts himself in charge. Disloyalty to him and his ideas is taken as disloyalty to God and His Word. He makes his own rules for the world that everyone must follow or be considered intellectually, genetically or psychosexually inferior. He patrols the boundaries to attack every transgression yet deflects and obfuscates his own transgressions – if he acknowledges his own transgressions at all, which is rarely. He creates dramas and poses as the One Who Knows Best to make ever more rules to maintain his fantasy. There is never any acknowledgement of the sovereignty of God our Heavenly Father.
The last problem I’ll mention here is perhaps the most revealing: VD wallpapers his fantasy world with Christianity, addressing biblical topics and quoting the Bible (often out of context) and espousing weak theology whenever it suits him (which includes rejecting the whole idea of theology itself when it doesn’t support his theories and antipathies). He does this while acting in ways that are contrary to a coherent profession of Christian faith. There is a clear absence of spiritual fruit in his words and actions with others.
Conclusion: VD is not a prophet but a self-serving propheteer like Simon the Sorcerer who acknowledged the Holy Spirit but desired it for his own purposes. Simon the Sorcerer had no part in the Lord’s work.
Excellent analysis; I’m impressed Jack, and blessed by your support. VD’s approach assumes there is no God, no Holy Spirit that empowers humans to serve a divine purpose. Everything in VD’s world is secular and man-centered. Thank you.
The socio sexual hierarchy is a very basic template to men’s behaviour. No one has to think its true if you don’t wish to. However i notice amongst the men around me there is a rough approximation – give or take the individual personalities. So there is probably something there to the theory – but i find the endless naval gazing about it at the Sigma game blog tedious & once I understood the concept it didn’t hold furthet interest.
It is a mistake in your argument however, to think the only “good” man or Shepherd as you write is the top dog alpha class. This mistake tells me you haven’t understood the theory well enough.
Any man in whatever section of the hierarchy he belongs can choose to be a shepherd, though the men in the bottom 2 levels would find it more challenging. The man in either of those 2 bottom caregories is there because certain behaviors are affecting his personality & competence. But the effort to cultivate qualities of a shepherd would improve the man to where he would move to another position on the hierarchy – because his behaviour, competence & personality would improve.
What is interesting though is that I have noticed though how much offence the concept of a possible hierarchy even existing provokes amongst other bloggers. Particularly certain men – who probably are being defensive without realizing it – & possibly are displaying gamma traits – unknowingly – if we are to take the hierarchy at face value. Such men usually vehemently deny the hierarchy with way too much emotional vitriol than is needed for a topic they supposedly have no interest in.
Apart from that, i think reading anyone’s heart & state of their soul is an unknowable project. The internet persona is not the real person really. The trigger for your concern /dislike seems to have started because he ignored your initial advice. I read Vox’s blog reguarly enough to know his internet opinions, am skeptical of many of his predictions & i don’t look to him to shepherd my soul. I do appreciate his contributions to the world via his beautiful book collections out of Castelia House & how he helped Owen Benjamin successfully fight the cancellation attempt by Patreon. These are tangible successes which exist separate to whateverever else he does or doesn’t do. .
You misread; I was saying that every man must embrace the shepherd image regardless of his talents and abilities. It is the Voxites who say only the Alpha can be a shepherd. That conversation took place in a forum elsewhere where several guys were defending Vox. I have no objection to a social hierarchy; I teach biblical feudalism on this blog. His hierarchy is an observation that ignores the spiritual, and his advice to men on various blogs is generally devoid of moral guidance. I would not dream of reading his soul, only offering a prophetic warning that his persona is rancid compared to the Covenant.
Christians who defend the SSH, I commend you to the Great Reversal brought about by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. That sermon turned typical assumptions about who is blessed by God upside down. While worldly wisdom views the rich, the powerful, the happy, the self-confident as blessed, or in the case of the SSH, the more appealing categories, Jesus declares the poor, the mournful, the self-abasing and the meek as blessed. The Great Reversal turns people away from viewing others according to their worldly traits and towards a view of people as God sees them: feeble yet precious lambs in need of the Good Shepherd.
Human beings are often susceptible and sometimes feel the unkindness of the world and its unloving gradations acutely. We fret over it. A lot. But the Lord our Shepherd has a tender heart and any weakness at once melts him. If he sees a lamb, he stops. If he hears our sigh or groan, or marks our ignorance or our feebleness, the very tenderness of his heart, even if there were nothing else, would cause him to look upon us.
One could argue that the SSH theory is attempting to do the same in a worldly way, but compare that character to the cold and clinical influence of the SSH. The theory may be broadly and basically accurate in a worldly sense but it promotes socially and culturally based notions of manhood as necessarily definitive of what masculinity should look like. It essentially declares, if not intentionally but certainly effectively, that those who don’t fall into the more appealing categories are somehow defective or lacking. It essentially re-reverses the Great Reversal and declares them unblessed. Christian witness to, and embodiment of the gospel is thus compromised. The SSH can act as a millstone around the necks of God’s precious children and should be rejected on that basis.
Again, Jack: Well said. We don’t need worldly ways dragged under the label “Christian”.