Whatever be your birth . . .

Be just in all you say and all you do;

Whatever be your birth, you're sure to be

A peer of the first magnitude to me.

-- John Dryden

You've gotta walk that lonesome valley, nobody else gonna walk it for you

The Reverend Mr. Black, covered by Johnny Cash in 1981, here.

Critic of the alt-right Matthew Rose is mistaken: Race was a category to the historical Jesus

Matthew Rose, here in First Things:

The alt-right seeks an account of what we are meant to be and serve as a people, invoking race as an emergency replacement for our fraying civic bonds. It is not alone; identity politics on the left is a response to the same erosion of belonging. But race is a modern category, and lacks theological roots. Nation, however, is biblical. In the Book of Acts, St. Paul tells his Gentile listeners, “God has made all the nations [ethnos].” The Bible speaks often of God’s creation, judgment, and redemption of the nations. In Christ there is no Gentile or Jew, yet God calls us into his life not only as individuals but as members of communities for which we are responsible. ... Young men . . . need an account of nationhood that teaches them about their past, without making them fear the future; an account of civic life that opens them to transcendence, rather than closing them to their neighbors.

It was the Pauline synthesis which made the risen Christ the proponent of a universal religion, one which goes into all the world making disciples. The historical Jesus, however, viewed those outside the house of Israel as dogs, and himself as sent only to the lost among his own kind. To imply that that made Jesus somehow closed to transcendence certainly ought to give his worshippers pause, but it shows just how thoroughgoing has been the victory of Paul over Jesus that the horizontal is so matter-of-factly valued as if it were the vertical. This is, in fact, a kind of idolatry.

The alt-right's opposition to Christianity is really opposition to this Paulinist revolution, without which Christianity would no doubt have ceased to exist. But the alt-right understands it as little as Christians understand that they are children of this lesser god.

Meanwhile, the failure of Jesus' coming Kingdom of God is a cautionary tale of humanity's inate capacity for self-deception which could instruct his followers and opponents alike but, because it hasn't so far, probably never will.

North America will be glaciated again, or worse, before that ever happens.

    

Billy Graham, deceased at 99, followed the path first cut by George Whitefield, preacher of the new birth

Thomas Kidd, here:

George Whitefield, born on Dec. 16, 1714, was a Church of England minister who led the Great Awakening, a series of Christian revivals that swept through Britain and America in the mid-1700s. Whitefield drew enormous audiences wherever he went on both sides of the Atlantic, and his publications alone doubled the output of the American colonial presses between 1739 and 1742. If there is a modem figure comparable to Whitefield, it is Billy Graham. But even Mr. Graham has followed a path first cut by Whitefield. ...

“As you have made a pretty considerable progress in the mysteries of electricity,” Whitefield [once] wrote to [Benjamin] Franklin in 1752, “I would now humbly recommend to your diligent unprejudiced pursuit and study the mystery of the new-birth.”

An alt-right Jesus, but for Jews only: The rest of us are dogs, whites included

Contra Connor Grubaugh, assistant editor of First Things, here:

Christianity in its original and most animating form is fundamentally incompatible with the Faustian ethic and race-based mythos of the alt-right, just as it is incompatible with the equivocations of liberalism. Orthodoxy is its own mythos—a true one.

These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

-- Matthew 10:5f.

I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. ... It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs.

-- Matthew 15:24, 26

The vignette in Acts 10 and 11 proves that the earliest church had assumed on the basis of this original message of Jesus that repentance unto life had not been granted "also to the Gentiles" (Acts 11:18).

Moreover Jesus himself had criticized the missionary zeal of the Pharisees in the outside world:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.

-- Matthew 23:15

Rather than speak of the impossibility of "alt-right Christianity", it seems more like an absolute necessity, however much that makes the faith an anachronism which has precious little to say to our time. The original message of Jesus is thoroughly "race-based", for Jews only.

Or is all this "scripture" to be relegated to the junk heap of history as nothing more than the evil work of Paul's opponents, the Circumcision, tampering with the Word of God?

No fence against a flail

ON STEPHEN DUCK,
The Thresher and Favourite Poet.
A quibbling Epigram.


The thresher Duck could o'er the queen prevail,
The proverb says "no fence against a flail",
From threshing corn he turns to thresh his brains;
For which her majesty allows him grains*:
Though 'tis confess'd that those who ever saw
His poems think them all not worth a straw!
Thrice happy Duck, employ'd in threshing stubble,
Thy toil is lessen'd and thy profits double.

-- Jonathan Swift, 1730


*"allowing him a Salary of Thirty Pounds per Annum, and a small House at Richmond in Surrey"

When is a Lutheran not a Lutheran?

There once was a woman named Beeson,

a Reverend who discovered a reason,

that it was more cozy

to go by "Peter", not "Rosie",

That's Lutheranism this Lenten season.

Offending our self-obsessed chaos of individualists in twenty words or less

"I do not get to decide who I am and how I may behave".

-- Carl R. Trueman, here

There's wearing your faith on your sleeve, and then there's . . .

Of Bishop Berkeley's immaterialism

My neck may be an idea to you, but it is a reality to me.

-- James Beattie (1735-1803)

Like ISIS, Obamas' gay portrait artist is really cutting edge

Be not blindly guided by the throng

Be not blindly guided by the throng;

The multitude is always in the wrong.

-- Wentworth Dillon

Useless rain

So have I seen the lost clouds pour

Into the sea an useless show'r;

And the vext sailors curse the rain

For which poor shepherds pray'd in vain.

-- Edmund Waller (1606-1687)

Isn't "postliberal theology" oxymoronic?

Think about it.

The post-liberals rejected the preeminent role played by reason in the formulation of the modernist interpretation of Christianity, which in its turn had really been a rejection of the pre-modern rationalism of the church in favor of the so-called modern type. 

The post-liberals granted that there was an internal logic to these two interpretations, something liberal theology had been loathe to grant, but rejected the existence of a superintending logic over them all, to which they bare witness.

When one goes this route, one is separating the "logy" from the "theo" in theo-logy and jettisoning it. As a consequence, one can't really speak of a postliberal theology. In rejecting logos one is really rejecting speech and argument itself. One is left with a God about whom nothing can be said.

Had postliberalism been true to itself, however, it never would have come to exist in the first place because it would have understood this imperative to shut up.

The thing post-liberalism claimed was true of others they never quite applied to themselves, namely that the limitations of language and culture made their own truth claims impossible. In seeking to relativize the dogma of others, their own movement became a dogma, but not one successful enough that you can actually look one up in the Yellow Pages under "post-modernist churches" and attend a Sunday, or preferably some other day, service.

What post-liberalism actually does is attract certain personalities from the pre-modern or the modern camps who are susceptible of rejecting reason, Americans caught up in radical individualism being noteworthy examples. This mission field has been white unto harvest, riddled as it is with self-imposed isolation and separation from "community". Some of them doubtless call themselves "nones", and their creed, if they have one, is "Here's to the truth as perceived by you!".

The topic is recently and usefully discussed here at The Blog of Veith.

A God like this makes theology (rational talk about God) impossible

The LORD killeth, and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up. The LORD maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low, and lifteth up.

-- I Samuel 2:6f.