The fox tells the ape that the life without toil is freest "uncontrolled of any"

For without gold now nothing will be got,

Therefore (if please you) this shall be our plot:

We will not be of any occupation;

Let such vile vassals, born to base vocation,

Drudge in the world, and for their living droil,

Which have no wit to live withouten toil;

But we will walk about the world with pleasure

Like two free men, and make our ease our treasure.

Free men some beggars call, but they be free,

And they which call them so more beggars be;

For they do swink and sweat to feed th' other,

Who live like Lords of that which they do gather,

And yet do never thank them for the same,

But as their due by Nature do it claim.

Such will we fashion both our selves to be,

Lords of the world; and so will wander free

Where so us listeth, uncontroll'd of any:

Hard is our hap, if we (amongst so many)

Light not on some that may our state amend:

Seldom but some good cometh ere the end.

-- Edmund Spenser (1553-1599), Prosopopoia: Or Mother Hubberds Tale

A religious man's zeal is an enlightened man's fanaticism

For zeal's a dreadful termagant,

That teaches saints to tear and rant.

-- Samuel Butler (1613-1680), Hudibras

Ignorance is bliss

 

I had been happy

So I had nothing known.

Oh now, for ever

Farewel the tranquil mind! Farewel content!

-- William Shakespeare, Othello, Act III, Scene 3

If the earth were eternal . . .

If the world were eternal, by the continual fall and wearing of waters, all the protuberances of the earth would infinite ages since have been leveled, and the superficies of the earth rendered plain.

-- probably Dr. Stephen Hales (1677-1761), inventor of the ventilator

On the children of the wicked

The son, bred in sloth, becomes a spendthrift, a profligate, and goes out of the world a beggar.

-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down to the grave.

-- Job 21:13

Righteous Job was a father to the poor

Because I delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and him that had none to help him. The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me: and I caused the widow's heart to sing for joy. I put on righteousness, and it clothed me: my judgment was as a robe and a diadem. I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame. I was a father to the poor: and the cause which I knew not I searched out. And I brake the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the spoil out of his teeth.

-- Job 29:12ff.

Paul's chutzpah: Chief of sinners says "I am pure from the blood of all men"

Wherefore I take you to record this day, that I am pure from the blood of all men.

-- Acts 20:26

And Saul was consenting unto his death. 

-- Acts 8:1

And when the blood of thy martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing by, and consenting unto his death, and kept the raiment of them that slew him.

-- Acts 22:20

Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.

-- 1 Timothy 1:15

'Murican poetry, from the inimitable W. A. Criswell, pastor, Southern Baptist Convention

Criswell in November 1978

Once I was a tadpole beginning to begin,

Then I was a frog with my tail tucked in,

Then I was a monkey in a banyan tree,

And now I’m a professor with a PhD.

Quelle surprise: Rob Bell speaks up for a version of progressive revelation

Quoted here:

'See? It completely contradicts itself.' And it does, unless you read it as an unfolding story and you realize that these two different passages were written at two different times, and they reflect a growing sophistication in thinking. Now we have something very interesting. We see that people were growing and evolving in their thinking about the divine. That’s a story that we are much more likely to find ourselves in. 

Well, why shouldn't Rob Bell go for progressive revelation?

After all, it's a convenient justification for jettisoning things in the Bible he objects to . . . like hell. To Rob Bell, hell isn't an example of our current state of evolved, sophisticated thinking, so the interpretive principle permits him to relegate it to an earlier, now obsolete stage of God's revelation to man.

But progressive revelation is also basic to the dispensational theology of Bell's former Evangelical faith.

You can take the man out of the Evangelicalism, but you can't take the Evangelicalism out of the man.

The modernist prejudice behind the theory of progressive revelation here is obvious, if little noticed by its critics, implying that the Biblical ancients weren't as enlightened as we are.

This is the sort of dismissive attitude toward the past which makes it impossible to understand them on their own terms, meaning there is a predisposition to misunderstand them.

But Evangelicals, former or otherwise, are particulary vulnerable to this lurch because of the degree to which their own heritage struggled with and assimilated modernism.

Rob Bell is only late heir of an age which long before us was already digesting modernism from the Christian point of view, for example in Thomas Dehany Bernard's The Progress of Doctrine in the New Testament, the Bampton Lecture from 1864.

More specifically, however, progressive revelation was the essential modernist presupposition of J. N. Darby's dispensationalist theology, without which we wouldn't have Evangelicalism in the first place, with its easy compartmentalization of features of God's revelation which are an effront to post-Enlightenment reason: food laws, animal sacrifice, capital punishment, just war, etc.

Apart from the obvious, that there is a development of ideas in the Bible which can be demonstrated historically, the very idea of progress itself remains, however, an unquestioned value of our time which we've inherited from modernity, which overthrew the ancient world's agriculturally inspired ideas of cyclicality, birth and death, and eternal return.

And Christians and secularists alike share it . . . in droves.

But it must be asked: Is it really progress in divine thinking to travel from the age of faith under the Patriarchs, to the slaughter of animals under Moses, to the human sacrifice of the Son of God under Paul, to the mass murdering of tens of millions of the age of the Enlightenment?

The more I look at the ceaseless ages run the more the pattern looks like degeneracy to me.

Over 7 billion people inhabit the planet today. But by 1 AD over 40 billion were already dead. What do we know that they did not? Only that Princess Leia is dead, too.

The prophets of the Old Testament, whose heirs John the Baptist and Jesus were, dreamed by contrast with our Christian world of the interminable Sacrifice of the Mass of a world finally founded by God eternally upon justice, without violence, without tears and without death, however mediated that must be through judgment. Appropriately, they were tortured and killed.

I fancy that we have been fooled into thinking that we have made progress at all by the times in which we have been living, that is, by the Holocene, which began approximately 11,700 years ago.

We don't grasp that we bask in the glow of a dying interglacial, and cannot bear that The Ice Man returneth.

The next round is on me!

John and Paul do not agree on the identity of "the son of perdition"

To Paul the son of perdition is an AntiChrist figure who appears at the end of the world:

Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day [of Christ] shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;

-- 2 Thessalonians 2:3

To John's Jesus the son of perdition is Judas, one of the Twelve, already come, and already lost, and completely uneschatological:

While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.

-- John 17:12

He hangeth the earth upon nothing

 

 

 

 

He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

-- Job 26:7

Creeping liberalism in Southern Baptist Convention accompanied by declining membership

Back to back stories at Real Clear Religion today report on a membership decline in the SBC in 2016 coincidental with the introduction last fall of a new gender-inclusive translation of the Bible:

Southern Baptists Embrace Gender-Inclusive Language in the Bible:  America's largest Protestant denomination has produced a revised translation that incorporates many features it had long condemned

Hundreds of New Churches Not Enough to Satisfy Southern Baptists:  Baptisms are at a 70-year low, while Sunday worshipers are at a 20-year low

The second headline avoids telling the truth up front: Membership is down 1 million since the 2003 peak, and 78,000 in 2016, according to the story, with total giving down 1% in the last year.

The first story might in part explain why:

The CSB [Christian Standard Bible] translates the term adelphoi, a Greek word for “brother” in a gender-neutral form 106 times, often adding “sister.” “Brotherly love” is translated “love as brothers and sisters.” The gender-neutralizing pattern is also present in its translation of the Old Testament. ...

In the CSB, there are hundreds of verses that fall within the “gender-neutral” category condemned in Southern Baptists’ own resolutions. Together, they provide an illustrative survey of the kinds of quietly progressive changes that have been inserted into this conservative denomination’s Bible translation. 

That breeze you're catchin' is W. A. Criswell, spinning in his grave.

The vanity of study

Robert Graves c. 1941

 

 

 

Yet vainly most their age in study spend;

No end of writing books, and to no end.

-- John Denham

CNN gives Reza Aslan the left foot of fellowship

I'm not gloating, really I'm not

From the story here:

CNN has parted ways with controversial host Reza Aslan one week after Aslan called President Trump "a piece of s---" and "an embarrassment to mankind" on Twitter.

"CNN has decided to not move forward with production on the acquired series "Believer with Reza Aslan,'" the network said in a statement. “We wish Reza and his production team all the best."

The Iranian-born Aslan is the host of CNN's "Believer," which aired weekly on Sunday nights. The 45-year-old author and religious scholar also called the president a "man baby" in a subsequent tweet.

The splendour of God's creation

 

How could this noble fabrick be design'd,

And fashion'd, by a maker brute and blind;

Could it of art such miracles invent?

And raise a beauteous world of such extent;

-- Richard Blackmore (1654-1729)

This corporeal clod

The spirit of man,

Which God inspir'd,

cannot together perish

with this corporeal clod.

-- John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)

Lament of the Day: Rod Dreher calls Homer's Odyssey a "novel"

Here, also not realizing the epic poem was sung:

[Bob Dylan:]

Specific books that have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school – I want to tell you about three of them: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.

[Rod Dreher:]

He goes on to discuss those three novels, and how they affected his understanding of the world, and in turn, his music. One of the greatest popular musicians of the 20th century, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, got his start in what we now call classical education — one that gives the student “a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by.”

Here’s part of his description of The Odyssey. He makes it sound like a folk song. He makes it sound like real life . . ..

Dreher also seems blissfully unaware that after Paul's Damascus Road conversion he eventually disappeared for about 10 years, no doubt reassessing his new found faith in Christ against his native tradition in Pharisaism:

Isn’t this what all serious religious pilgrims and truth seekers do? After their epiphany, they submit to tradition — not just the more recent tradition, but big-T Tradition. 

The blindness of total depravity

 

 

Nor can we call it choice, when what we chuse,

Folly and blindness only could refuse.

-- John Denham (1615-1669)

The absence of "church", "saints" and "early catholicism"

You will search in vain for church and saints [ἐκκλησία and ἁγίων] in the gospels, save for Matthew 16:18, Matthew 18:17 and Matthew 27:52 (and what "saints" meant in the latter isn't exactly the same idea which we find after the gospels, but let's not open that can of worms right now).

The gospels dubiously tell us Jesus predicted his future death and resurrection on the third day, but the future church and its many members? not so much, which only underscores the dubiosity of the third-day rising predictions. (For fun, I resurrect the word "dubiosity", which had fallen into disuse already by the time of Samuel Johnson).

You would think that a guy who knew he was going to rise from the dead and found a church would have said much more about it. After all, predicting the future church is small potatoes compared with predicting your own crucifixion and resurrection on the third day. Jesus' imagination was clearly focused on something less pedestrian than the now interminable church age and the salvation of its billions of goyim.

And you would also think the church would have made him talk much more about it.

Talk of the "church" only in a little corner of Matthew is probably "early catholicism" at work, or at least something like it. It looks suspiciously similar to the insertion of the third-day-rising predictions themselves. It too is propaganda, but on a much smaller scale.

This tells us something very important.

The absence of "church" from the gospel tradition, even from John, testifies to, if not the sway of a smoldering conception of the eschatological future imagined by Jesus, at least to the enduring cognitive dissonance the memory of that still produced. The problem still being wrestled with in the gospels is the death of Jesus and the failure of the end of the world to materialize, not something else. This dissonance probably had everything to do with the production of the written gospels in the first place. The emphasis on, and the similarity of, the passion narratives in the gospels both make that plain.

The absence of "church" as a category, however, points to an earlier stage in this process of self-reflection than we find in the epistles. We are not yet at the later self-referential stage of the church found in Paul and elsewhere in the New Testament after the gospels where "church" and "saints" are most definitely used as routine categories. This means the material in the gospels, if not the gospels themselves, dates much earlier than is generally appreciated. The absence of "church" in the gospels is thus similar in significance for their dating to the gospels' failure to mention the destruction of the Jewish temple. Together they point to a date for the gospels before 70, perhaps well before.

It is difficult to believe that when the rest of the New Testament after the Fourth Gospel is loaded with uses of "church" and "saints" that the gospels could possibly come from that era.

The hypothesis of an intrusion of "early catholicism" has not been without its problems, however, for example for the composition of Luke-Acts. It is almost inconceivable that the repeated use of "church" in Acts, for example, comes from the very same hand as gave us the Gospel of Luke, or at least that Acts comes from the same time period of composition as the gospel, a point which perhaps speaks against the two-volume history hypothesis of Luke-Acts. But it is more inconceivable that on the original conception in New Testament scholarship of "early catholicism" at work all over the place in Luke's Gospel that it could be an exponent of that without once mentioning the church. To make matters worse for the theory as originally conceived, the third gospel's unique witness to some of Jesus' most pointed eschatological assertions hardly fits the relatively more mundane future ecclesiastical setting from which it is supposed to have sprung.

What this means is that as a phenomenon "early catholicism" remains a useful hypothetical category whose content has to be rethought and scaled back. The gospels' solution to the eschatological dilemma which occasioned their composition in the first place supplies that content. Early catholicism is thus at the same time a lot earlier than originally conceived and dedicated to a different object.

It seems best to view the gospels as earlier than 70, at least in spirit, and as attempts to rewrite the narrative of the failed eschatological message of Jesus.

Reza Aslan doth protest too much: Even saying he responded "in a derogatory fashion" vainly tries to put a shine on the vulgar turds he tweets

Here . . . but also here where you'll find he has quite the habit of unleashing a veritable shitstorm of vulgarity.

Well, he did convert back to Islam from Christianity.

He did steal the idea of his so-called PhD thesis from S.G.F. Brandon.

And he did eat human brains.

Reza Aslan. Profane. Aggressive. Confrontational. Disingenuous. Kleptomaniacal. Mendacious. MUSLIM.

For CNN, he's perfect.

The Devil's Dictionary definition of "infidel"

Infidel

n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does. 

The flight of the hyperbole

Hyperboles, so daring and so bold,

Disdaining bounds, are yet by rules control'd;

Above the clouds, but yet within our sight,

They mount with truth, and make a tow'ring flight.

-- George Granville (1666-1735)

The difference between Muslim extremism and Christian extremism

Muslim extremism produces all in the same profane person expert cheating, lying and murder of unbelievers.

Christian extremism produces all in the same person serial monogamy, moonshining and snake handling which gets only themselves and sometimes their followers killed.

Tacitus criticized the Christians for their hatred of humankind, but he obviously never met a Muslim.

"Bible Answer Man" Hank Hanegraaff diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma

This comes hot on the heels of the controversy surrounding his recent conversion to Orthodoxy. The 66 year old father of twelve has been a long time defender of the Christian faith and critic of heretical and cultic movements.

From the story here:

On May 5, he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called mantle cell lymphoma.

Since then, he has started an aggressive regimen that includes chemotherapy sessions, a bone marrow transplant and blood transfusions.

Hanegraaff admitted to some scary moments, like on the day he got his (PET) scan results over the phone while riding in a cab in New York City:

“The doctor said ‘you have tumors in your neck, you have tumors in your chest, you have tumors in the lungs, arms, stomach, pelvis.’ ”

Rod Dreher gets a DNA test but gets completely distracted from the fact that his family "turned" German

Here:

I’m 99.3 percent European. About 67 percent of that ancestry is Anglo-Irish, with 9 percent “French and German” (they can’t yet distinguish between French and German ancestry, so my ancestors came from that region; it’s got to be German, because the first Dreher to come to the US came from Germany; Dreher is a German name meaning “turner”), and 4 percent Scandinavian. The rest is “broadly Northwestern European”. But here’s the surprising part: 0.6 percent of my ancestry — the thin red slice — is West African. The genetics timeline indicates that five to eight generations ago (the test can’t be more specific), I had an ancestor who was 100 percent West African. That ancestor was likely born between 1700 and 1820.

Well, isn't that instructive?

So far in life Rod Dreher has "turned" personally from Methodism, to Roman Catholicism, to Orthodoxy of some sort or other. How long will it take for him to understand how in keeping this is with his own name, his own character?

Obviously his family got this name "Dreher" because it turned from what it was to German, and the family accepted it. Now Rod Dreher is turning still, which is why he submitted his DNA for analysis in the first place (there's some innate doubt there), only to find out he's got a little "black" in him somewhere along the way, which turns him some more . . . from the main point.

The money on the test was obviously well spent.

In otherwise godless Sweden "religious" = murderous cheating liar

Must be a Lutheran, right?

From the story here:

While the suspect calls himself a “genius in cheating” in school and says he is religious and does not use drugs, he lied when asked whether or not his parents are alive. “In the next life,” he reportedly answered, while only one of them passed away. While he calls himself “170% healthy” the coroner recommends an extensive investigation to find out if the 21-year-old is not mentally ill.

The true God needs no bloody sacrifices, not of bulls upon the hills, not of birds of the air, not of his "only begotten son", and not of the "mass"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats out of thy folds. For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High: And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.

-- Psalm 50:9ff.