Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Nebraska Has A Lutheran Pastor, Dan Delzell, Who Doesn't Know The Catechism

A Lutheran pastor should know better than to ask, as Rev. Delzell does for The Christian Post, here:

"Is it up to us to hand out the punishment to lawbreakers....and the free gift of eternal life to sinners who repent and believe the good news? All of this is beyond us, and outside of our human understanding."

Well yes, it is up to you. And no, it is not beyond us.

I guess they don't teach The Office Of The Keys anymore in the Lutheran Church, number five of the six chief parts of the small catechism, knowledge of which was normally assumed in pastors, and also expected of confirmands . . . already at the age of 13.

It is based on these texts:

And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

-- Matthew 16:19

Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. ... Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.

-- Matthew 18:18, 21f.

Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; [and] whose soever [sins] ye retain, they are retained.

-- John 20:23

Clearly in Matthew the emphasis is on the side of overflowing mercy, but you rarely find that from Christians these days, who are very quick to condemn.

Things are evidently worse in Lutheranism than I thought.

"Long lay the world in sin and error pining", but no more?

The irony of those lines penned by John Sullivan Dwight in 1855 is the horrible, bloody history of the world which soon followed in their wake, mocking them more loudly with every passing decade, from the American War Between The States through the murderous World Wars right on to the present-day, but purposely-ignored, inhumanities of man in Africa, China and the United States.

Yes, in the United States, where over 50 million unborn have been slaughtered in the last 40 years while we go about our business, often go to church and generally think we enjoy ourselves, and Francis Fukuyama tells us with a straight face that thankfully we no longer engage as a species in montrous projects of social transformation.

People who say, as this one does, a Roman Catholic named Howard Kainz, that the world is no longer "in the condition it had been in for most of human history" because in "the Church" God "provided a firm basis for Christian life" do not have their eyes open to the sorry facts of the world. Religious denial of reality is no less pernicious than the ideological sort, say, of Marxism, which may have something to do with the fact that the former often prepares the way for the latter.

If we are not still in sin and error pining I don't know who ever was, or why or how they were ever redeemed from it. If "the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom," it is not self-evident that we have it.

The Protestants, at least, helped begin the process of recovering the reality of man's sorry state, beginning with Luther's open hostility to the denial of reality implicit in the Catholic tradition, most famously that in the purchase of absolution a spiritual difference was made between the one who bought it and the one who didn't. If the Catholics are still afraid of this all these years later, as Kainz is, they are right to be, because Protestantism actually means death to all such ideology, if but for the fact that it has succumbed to it itself. Carried through to its logical conclusion, Protestantism would finally detect in Christianity's own origin the denial of reality which is the seed of its own destruction, but by and large this has not happened except among some academics, starting with Albert Schweitzer, whose long but thin line of followers bears witness to the recalcitrant inelasticity of human nature. 

If we were to be honest brokers of the essential message of Jesus, we would admit that it is followed by next to no one claiming the name Christian because it cannot be, at least for very long, not without being possessed of the fundamental conviction that God is about to bring the world to final judgment: 

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

Christians today run away from that message and all the texts in the Gospels which support it, not in the least because Jesus was tragically mistaken about the future, as disappointed true believers perennially discover. To have anything to do with it is to associate error with deity, and this cannot be allowed, for the obvious reason. But Christians also run away from true repentance because if it were followed, they would not be able to utter all this nonsense about leading "the Christian life" while holding down jobs, paying off mortgages, entering into marriages, raising families, enjoying relative ease and saving for a "safe" retirement.


"So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple."


To repent would mean turning one's back on all this, on one's former way of life, with a desperate urgency which does not exist.

"But God said unto him, [Thou] fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?"

Accordingly the urgency has been transformed in the wake of the failure, spiritualized, internalized and specialized, as in the special calling to monasticism practiced by the few, but even that is now nearly forgotten, its last bastion the priest's call to celibacy. Luther himself was close to the original understanding, though he did not follow it himself and thus contributed to the continuation of its "spiritualization":


"And take they our life, goods, fame, child and wife, Let these all be gone, they yet have nothing won; The kingdom ours remaineth."


Faint echoes of this message have been heard in living memory, for example in the popular 1965 film "The Sound of Music" where we see a young woman torn between her feelings of love for a man and her desire to renounce the world, not for an imminently coming kingdom and judgment, but for a life closer to God in the convent.

In 1933 Oswald Spengler reflected correctly on this residuum of the original teaching, now divorced from its apocalyptic setting in the modern "spiritualized" consensus, that 

Christian morality is, like every morality, renunciation and nothing else. Those who do not feel it to be so are materialists. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread" means: do not regard this hard meaning of life as misery and seek to circumvent it by party politics.

But if the Marxists try to circumvent the "hard meaning of life" by party politics, the Christians try to circumvent it with their notions of the realized kingdom of God in the Church and its sacraments, where the vagaries of existence are spiritualized away into a denial of reality no less mendacious than the failed achievements of Soviet five year plans.

We are no closer to becoming 2 Peter's "partakers of the divine nature" than we are to Trotsky's "superman" who "will become incomparably stronger, wiser, more subtle."

The way forward for people of faith is to stop denying reality, and to begin by saying, "God be merciful to me, a poor, sinful being."

"The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise."

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Saturday, December 22, 2012

in hoc signo vinces

 "εν τούτῳ νίκα" 

Friday, December 21, 2012

The World Ends . . . For Moe

Give me that world, Herring, or I'll marinate ya.




See him say it, here, in "I'll Never Heil Again" (1941).
You nitwit! You shattered my world!

Lesbian Minister Wonders Why Only 3 In 10 In Her Pews Are Men

Ah . . . how would she know they are men?

Dumbest story of the year, from, where else?, Canada.


Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Yoda Sings The 23rd From The Bay Psalm Book


Aww! Restore my soul doth he! Yes.
The Lord to me a shepherd is,
Want therefore shall not I.
He in the folds of tender grass,
Doth cause me down to lie:

To waters calm me gently leads
Restore my soul doth he:
He doth in paths of righteousness
for his name's sake lead me.


Story here.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Jesus' Warning Against Libertarianism's Apocalyptic Role

"Increased lawlessness will cause a chilling effect on compassion for the many."







You recognize the line better, perhaps, from the King James Version, which doesn't translate it as an objective genitive:

"And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold."

-- Matthew 24:12

Who else in our time but the libertarians combine both concepts, demanding to practice every sort of vice as a consequence of being free, while disdaining the managerial state by "going Galt"?

I am not an apocalypticist, but contemporary libertarians who claim they can also be Christians don't know what they are talking about. Children, of course, don't like to be told "No", and often take the ball and go home. That such infantilism should become elevated to a philosophy is not surprising in an age when self-absorbed baby boomers have produced legions of individuals who have failed to launch.

"I I Me Me Mine" sang The Beatles. 

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Not even the Mayans believe it's the end of the world.

Mayans themselves reject any notion that the world will end. Pedro Celestino Yac Noj, a Mayan sage, burned seeds and fruits to mark the end of the old calender at a ceremony in Cuba. He said: "The 21st is for giving thanks and gratitude and the 22nd welcomes the new cycle, a new dawn."

More here.

Friday, December 7, 2012

"I Don't Believe In The End Of The World . . ."


Speaking in a live interview to five television channels on Friday, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev seized on a chance reference to the Mayan prediction to express his scepticism. "I don't believe in the end of the world," he said, before adding mysteriously: "At least, not this year."

More, here.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

The American Economy Is Sick Because The People Are Sick

"Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither [can] a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire."

-- Matthew 7:16ff.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

If The World Ends On December 21st . . .

. . . the drinks are on me.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Are We To Be Equal To The Angels, Or Over Them?


"Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?"

-- 1 Corinthians 6:3


"But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: Neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection."

-- Luke 20:35f