The Fourth Gospel is conveniently self-authenticating and self-insulating about the reliability of the church's recollection of the teaching of Jesus

 But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

 

-- John 14:26

 

I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.  Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. 

 

-- John 16:12f. 

 

This reflects the essential "my truth" enthusiasm at the heart of early Christianity without which there would be no St. Paul with his Christ mysticism.

 

This is the true origin of individualism and subjectivism in the West. It is ultimately self-defeating because it leads logically to relativism.

Ryan Burge discovers what Larry Norman always knew: Church is middle class, a hospital for the healthy

 The group that is the most likely to attend services are not the poor, nor the wealthy. Instead, it’s people who smack in the middle of the income distribution. This analysis points to the following conclusion: the people who are the most likely to attend services this weekend are those with college degrees making $60K-$100K. In other words, middle class professionals. ...

Increasingly religion has become the enclave for those who have lived a “proper” life. College degree, middle class income, married with children. If you check all those boxes, the likelihood of you regularly attending church is about double the rate of folks who don’t.

Data here.

I'm sure those of The Circumcision are just thrilled with Donald Trump's latest promise, you know, like Javanka

Trump: I'll Sign Law Banning Child Sexual Mutilation In All 50 States'

The climate apocalypse predicted by high school dropout Greta Thunberg has failed, just like the religious apocalypse predicted by the Gospels

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  For his part Jesus at least stuck to his guns to the bitter end, though even he kept adjusting the timeline incrementally forward. It was his followers who did most of the covering up for him. In deleting her tweet prediction back in March of this year, Greta resembles them.

The deletion of the prediction, and of ~54 other such predictions, is the subject of some well-deserved derision here and here.

The merriment aside, it is safe to say that faith in the ever-coming, ever-delayed climate apocalypse will continue despite all being lost, now that we have reached the five-year-point of no return.

More and more the climate hysterics look like the already/not yet Kingdom of God enthusiasts among the world's Christians. The latter have their cake and eat it too as their answer to the problem of Jesus' expected in-breaking of the kingdom before the end of the mission of The Twelve in Matthew 10. As no Christian will concede that Jesus was mistaken about this, no climate fanatic will concede that their predictions have been false.

Like Christians in every age since, climate ideologues in academe, in organizations, and in the press routinely conflate instances of extreme weather with climate as signs of the predicted imminent catastrophe. The steady drumbeat of boy crying wolf is meant to whip up expectation and devotion, and above all money, which give the movement coherence and hope as the coming end is delayed again and again and again. You might even say that the Christian apocalyptic delusion, embedded into the very thinking of the West over the long centuries, prepared the way for the victory of the Climate delusion.

It is a useful meditation in how the original "apocalyptic" message of Jesus really wasn't apocalyptic at all, predicting signs and wonders in the heavens above and in the earth below. It only became so in the hands of the Gospel authors after its failure. As Vincent Taylor matter-of-factly pointed out decades ago, the Gospels were primarily composed in response to the delay of the parousia. The Gospels make Jesus predict a second coming, but its delay too was no less of problem than the failure of the first coming.

Jesus' original message was truly, dare we say merely, thorough-goingly eschatological, as Albert Schweitzer had said over 100 years ago. It was not apocalyptic.

Jesus said there would be no sign of the coming of the Son of Man (Mark 8:12). He would come quickly, like a thief in the night, leading the reaper angels who would pluck out from the world everything which offendeth. Two would be in a field, one would be taken and the other left. Two in a bed, one taken, one left. The taken would be bundled up together and burned. The kingdom of God would descend from heaven above. Its heavenly temple would descend and crush its earthly counterpart. The Twelve would rule over the Twelve Tribes of Israel as God made his will done on earth as it is in heaven. Everything in Jesus' generation would continue briefly just as it is, as in the days of Noah, people buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, and then Bam!

All would be calm and normal before the great and terrible day of the Lord.

This message is still embedded in the Gospel data, but its timeline and details were all recast in specifically apocalyptic terms of a second coming, the delay of which the Gospels are meant to address as a cope. Apocalyptic and eschatology have been hopelessly conflated ever since, with Christians forever preoccupied with the signs of the times.

People who marvel at how Christianity ever achieved its status as a universal religion which has endured through the ages and commanded the assent of billions over two millennia despite the on-going delay of the parousia rarely reflect on the power fanaticism has to delude thoroughly, and on a grand scale.

They have the climate hysteria now before their very eyes. They are actually living it. And yet they cannot see it.

The climate delusion has reached astounding proportions since its laughable prophet Al Gore, divinity school dropout (what a coincidence, right?), first began his climate ministry in 1993. The whole world is feeling its grip, banking on so-called green electricity when its capacity to generate enough of it to replace fossil fuel and nuclear sources is nothing but a pipe-dream.

And to think America almost made him president.

Nothing good has come out of Carthage, Tennessee.

Of intractable human nature

 Why should our clay

Over our spirits so much sway?

-- John Donne

Non-denominational Protestant Christianity will be the big winner in the future in the United States and already is at 29 million strong

 Ryan Burge, here:

There is absolutely no way to gather data on that tradition, but it’s clear that it’s growing incredibly fast. ... Denominational Christianity used to be an incredibly important cultural force in American life. Leaders in these traditions use to hold sway over millions. Today, they are a shell of their former selves. ... The big winner? That new non-denominational church down the road that has no institutional baggage.     

And here:

What may be an even bigger threat to the SBC is the dramatic rise in nondenominational churches. When looking at the size of every major Protestant tradition over the last 14 years, the common thread is decline. Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians are all a smaller share of the population now than they were in 2008. The only exception is nondenominational Christians. They were 7.1 percent of the total population in 2008, but that number has risen to 8.6 percent in 2022.

One advantage of nondenominational churches is that they don’t have institutional baggage like many denominations, including the SBC. While people are skeptical of putting money in the offering plate and having some of it go to a head office hundreds of miles away, in nondenominational churches those leadership decisions are handled by people sitting in the pews each weekend. In a time of declining trust in institutions, nondenominationals are well-positioned, and are reaping the benefits through rising attendance and giving.

Young people are falling for the disproven science of astrology in record numbers, think birthdates and celestial objects determinative of their lives

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The astrology business has boomed by 482% since 2018, now valued at $12.8 billion and rising:

. . . more Americans know their zodiac sign than their blood type, and likewise, as many as 70 million Americans check their horoscopes daily.

More.

The numbers rival American Catholicism.

The reason?

Today's young are the most unchurched yet. Having given up on one superstition, they have simply fallen for another:

 In terms of identity, Generation Z is the least religious generation yet. More than one-third (34 percent) of Generation Z are religiously unaffiliated, a significantly larger proportion than among millennials (29 percent) and Generation X (25 percent). Fewer than one in five (18 percent) baby boomers and only 9 percent of the silent generation are religiously unaffiliated. ... Less than half of millennials (45 percent) and Gen Zers (40 percent) say they attended church weekly [during childhood].

Queer Jesus has gone "mainstream" because 13.7 million sane people have already left the formerly mainstream churches

Queer Jesus Goes Mainstream at Churches, Divinity Schools

John Murawski, RCI

 

United Church of Christ membership is down 64% to 0.8 million from 2.2 million. The queer-affirming church performs nuptials for polyamorists where multiple partners marry each other.

United Methodist Church membership is down 47% to 5.7 million from 10.7 million. The church aims to be the first to ordain a drag queen.

Presbyterian Church USA membership is down 74% to 1.1 million from 4.25 million. In Iowa they worship the god of trans being, the great they/them.

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America membership is down 42% to 3 million from 5.2 million. It elected a transgender bishop two years ago.

The Episcopal Church in the United States is down 53% to 1.7 million from 3.6 million. It has a priest who maintains that promiscuous people are simply being hospitable. The real sinner at Sodom was Lot, who refused the hospitality of the rapists trying to break down his door.

There's nothing mainstream about the 12 million still left in these churches.

Millions of Americans have fled into non-denominational Protestantism. And there are at least 30 million Baptists of one kind or another, while Roman Catholics number 70 million.

The USA has 210 million nominally Christian people. But Africa has 685 million. Latin America about 601 million. Europe 571 million.

America is fast on the road to becoming a Christian backwater. The main show is elsewhere.

Joseph Henry Thayer's chief example of anthropos "without distinction of sex" isn't

A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.

ἡ γυνὴ ὅταν τίκτῃ λύπην ἔχει ὅτι ἦλθεν ἡ ὥρα αὐτῆς· ὅταν δὲ γεννήσῃ τὸ παιδίον οὐκ ἔτι μνημονεύει τῆς θλίψεως διὰ τὴν χαρὰν ὅτι ἐγεννήθη ἄνθρωπος εἰς τὸν κόσμον.

 

-- John 16:21

John obviously had to hand τὸ παιδίον to express human being without distinction of sex if he had meant that again, but he uses ἄνθρωπος instead. The birth of a man-child was a default value of Jewish women.

Thayer was infamous in his own time for denying the "unerring verbal accuracy" of the New Testament, claiming that the Lutherans didn't make the Bible the "standard" in the same way as his fellow American Congregational Calvinists had done.

 

Thayer, lauded for his devotion to the truth by his contemporaries in the scholarly community, believed in a myth.

 

Thayer got his information second hand, not from personal knowledge of the history of Lutheranism, relying instead on Philip Schaff, who himself was notably ignorant of much about Luther, especially about the enthusiasm for the Formula of Concord in his own time, which states in the opening:

We believe, teach, and confess that the sole rule and standard according to which all dogmas together with [all] teachers should be estimated and judged are the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures of the Old and of the New Testament alone . . ..

Thayer obviously never got the Lutheran memo, either, to let John interpret John. Circumcision was for an ἄνθρωπος after all (John 7:23).

Back in those days, apparently, you could in fact tell a Harvard man quite a lot . . . of hooey.

 

Appartions, and visions, and legends, oh my!

 

  Apparitions, visions, and intercourses of all kinds between the dead and the living, are the frequent and familiar embellishments of the legends of the Romish church.

-- Bishop Francis Atterbury