The early 1970s Shiloh Fellowship in East Lansing, MI, was literally a multi-level marketing scheme which preyed on the many to enrich the few

Derek Prince, one of the Ft. Lauderdale Five

 

Jesus inveighed against mammon, and Luther against indulgences, but human nature never changes.

 

My Three Years in a Christian Cult: On leaving the Shiloh Fellowship 

Peter Schwendener

... The message, which came straight from Christian Growth Ministries in Ft. Lauderdale, was this: the “Jesus movement” most of us belonged to was a good thing that had run its course. It was now time to start building the Kingdom of God. The Body of Christ, meaning the church, was more important than the individual Christian. ...

In 1975, the New York Times published an article entitled “Growing Charismatic Movement is Facing Internal Discord Over a Teaching Known as ‘Discipling.’” That was us, and I had by that year moved into the house on Brookfield Drive with three other “brothers.” Discipling and shepherding were the same thing. According to this teaching, the true church was not the usual setup of pastor and congregation but rather a vast network of relationships between sheep, who could be men, women, or children, and shepherds, who could only be men. You weren’t a real Christian unless you were personally “accountable” or “submitted” to a local shepherd who watched over all parts of your life. You also paid tithes directly to this person, who in turn tithed to the shepherd above him in a pyramid whose summit was in—you guessed it—Ft. Lauderdale. ...

I soon had my own shepherd, a Jewish convert named Kim Levinson who answered directly to Erik, who answered to Derek Prince, one of the Five. In Charismatic circles, Derek was a genuine celebrity whose books and cassette tapes circulated widely. His calling card was exorcism, a subject that, like shepherding, divided the Charismatic movement. ...

We were growing as a group, and almost everyone worked and tithed. I worked night shifts full-time at a twenty-four-hour restaurant. A sizable portion of our money went straight to Ft. Lauderdale, but we still had enough to buy the church building from our Lutheran landlords, who moved elsewhere. There was also enough to buy Erik and his wife a house near the church. A key tenet of the movement was “service” to those in authority, and I eagerly volunteered to help Erik with chores around his new house. ...

The group soon had seven or eight full-time shepherds who followed Erik’s lead by using money from tithes to buy houses near the church. Though mostly in their early twenties, they became known as “the elders” and assumed increasing importance at meetings and elsewhere as Erik began traveling, often for weeks at a time, with his mentor Derek [Prince]. The two men (Erik and Derek, as we called them) frequently went overseas to spread the movement’s teachings to London, Paris, Amsterdam, Jerusalem, and elsewhere. It was on our dime, of course, and some of us found it troubling while others attributed all doubts about it to you-know-who. ...

I went up to Erik and told him I had decided to leave the group. “I respect what you’re saying,” he said. “Let’s talk about it.” I was still working the night shift at the restaurant and met him there for breakfast a few days later. After admitting the Fellowship had lately experienced a few problems, he said we were back on track and tried to persuade me to stay. If I did, I would be “discipled” by him personally and would learn exorcism, have access to the group’s money, and maybe meet one of the sisters as a prelude to getting married. ...

Tom Holland, author of DOMINION, observes that Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism, just as Oswald Spengler had maintained

Inescapable Influence, ‘How the Christian Revolution Remade the World’:

“That’s fine,” I seem to hear a skeptical reader saying. “This may work in the case of the Enlightenment, but you are not going to say that Marxism or Communism, for example, also had Christian roots, are you?” That’s precisely one of the subtler points Holland is making in Dominion. In the foundational texts of Christianity there are places where a fundamental solidarity with the poor and the hungry, the powerless and downtrodden, is formulated.  Jesus himself called these people “brothers,” and identified with them unreservedly (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”), whereas for those at the other end of the power spectrum, he had a different message (“Woe to you who are rich!”). And the first generations of Christians understood quite well what Christ had meant: “We have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world,” writes Paul (1 Corinthians 4:13). Importantly, such a social vision is not just a peripheral feature of Christianity, or something added later by charitable souls, but stems from the central doctrine of Christianity: the Incarnation. As Holland puts it, “by making himself nothing, by taking on the very nature of a slave,” Christ had “plumbed the depths to which only the lowest, the poorest, the most persecuted and abused of mortals were confined.” In early Christian communities, all were “brothers” and “sisters,” everything was held in common, and power was deliberately shunned—a radical response to the radicalism of Christ’s own message. Various forms of what would later be called “socialism” or “communism,” recurrent throughout Christian history (from the Taborites to the Münster Anabaptists to countless other fringe groups) took those early communities as a good model to follow.

By the time Karl Marx entered the scene, then, Christianity already had a long and colorful history of toying with the communist idea. Coming from a solid rabbinical environment as he did, Marx didn’t fail to recognize a great Jewish teacher when he saw one, even when that teacher had ended up inspiring another religion altogether. Even the terminology used by Marx “to construct his model of class struggle—‘exploitation,’ ‘enslavement,’ ‘avarice’—owed less to the chill formulations of economists than to something far older: the claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets.” Marx’s famous formulation “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” looks to Holland like a cheeky act of plagiarism from the Acts of the Apostles: “Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to everyone as he had needed.” 

The only certain provenance of some of the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament is a garbage dump in Egypt

Grenfell and Hunt in Egypt circa 1896

So important were these manuscripts to their owners that they were pitched.

Many important secular manuscripts also have been found in the dump, some hitherto unknown to scholarship.

It's a sobering commentary on human nature, well known to any good text critic, but as little appreciated now as the books themselves happened to be then. 

How We Got the Good Book:

[T]he provenance of many important collections is murky at best. ... In contrast to the Beatty and Bodmer collections, whose origins are archaeologically uncertified, the manuscripts deriving from Oxyrhynchus come from a genuine archaeological exploration, led by the redoubtable British scholars Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, who in 1896 struck gold while digging in a town dump in Egypt. So vast is the number of manuscripts they found—perhaps half a million, spanning centuries and languages, only a small portion of them Christian—that their publication, begun in 1898, had reached seventy-seven volumes by 2011. [Brent] Nongbri provides a helpful catalogue of all the Christian writings identified [there] to date [in God’s Library: The Archeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts].

A Catholic joins Pope Francis in misunderstanding "ideology" as single issue voting

One Paul Moses, here in Commonweal:

[Bishop Murphy] thus subordinated many other concerns of Catholic social teaching—and signaled to Catholic voters in the two suburban counties on Long Island to do the same. (Murphy was not available for comment in a phone call to his residence.) It was no small matter, given that Catholics are a majority within the diocese’s borders, that polling shows nearly nine in ten of them say religion is “very important” in their lives, and that many are the sort of moderate suburban voters who swing close elections in New York state.

In his apostolic exhortation Rejoice and be glad, Pope Francis warns against elevating any single social issue, including abortion, above all others. He includes this in a passage that assails two “ideologies striking at the heart of the Gospel.” The first is seen in those who elevate the quest for social justice over faith, over openness to grace. The second is found in those who see social engagement as “superficial, worldly, secular, materialist, communist or populist,” he wrote. “Or they relativize it, as if there are other more important matters, or the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause that they themselves defend.”

Single issue voting is hardly the same thing as "ideology". That is quite simply a terrible simplification of ideology.

What marks out ideological thinking from mere single issue voting is the overarching, undergirding character of an ideology's flight from reality, indeed, its denial of reality, over against those who accept the features of reality which happen to be the impediments to the ideology's realization.

In the case of abortion, the denial of reality is all on the side of its advocates, not its opponents. Its advocates say that the unborn child isn't a child, merely a fetus. And therefore when one terminates a pregnancy one isn't committing murder. To which the opponents reply, If it isn't really alive why do you have to kill it? The hoops one must jump through to deny the evidence plainly in view are self-evident. It's the abortion advocates who are the ideologues, not the advocates for life.

The case is similar with illegal immigration, the real subject of Paul Moses' advocacy. The ideologues deny the reality and legitimacy of nation states, their borders and the rule of law, and redefine the transgressors of same as "migrants" or "strangers" instead of what they really are, "illegals".

One suspects that this attack on single issue voting as ideology is not just another example of the penchant for projection characteristic of human nature when caught in a fault, but of contemporary liberalism generally. Frustrated with an ever intractable reality, the representatives of reality must be marginalized, maligned and disarmed if the liberal agenda is to have any hope of advancement.

Catholics used to be smarter than to fall for this sort of thing.    

David Bentley Hart admits that "on the whole, the Gospel is probably not a very good formula for protecting public safety"

Ya think?

Here in Commonweal:

The Sermon on the Mount’s prohibitions of retaliation are absolutely binding on Christians, in both the private and the public spheres, for on the cross Christ at once perfected the refusal of violence and exhausted the Law’s wrath.

This simply begs the question, not only of present injustice, but of final judgment, which Christianity nevertheless teaches. The wrath of God has been hardly exhausted and will be meted out, according to the clear Christian teaching. This makes no sense if the Law's wrath has been "exhausted". The only conclusion to be drawn from that, if it is true, is that there will be no final judgment. This, of course, is where universalism comes from. And the doctrine of purgatory is its halfway house.

The ordinance not to retaliate, like all of the teaching, for example on poverty, is part of the wider message that the world is soon coming to an end. Take that end away, and the teaching becomes utterly obscurantist. It is only intelligible as an explicitly interim ethic in an eschatological time. But even at that, as Schweitzer correctly pointed out, it really represents the negation of ethics and is no ethic at all because all traditional human relationships under it have come to an end ("For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother").

That is why Tacitus correctly called the Christians haters of humanity.

 

It's also why Christians themselves at length gave it up.

People will not persist in an interminable state of poverty and undergo injustice in very large numbers or for a very long period. The history of the church tells us so. It is the history of the compromise and defeat of the original eschatological message. It is a history of degeneration.

Early in the essay Hart deflects the charge of sentimentality saying that he thinks there are very few opponents of capital punishment who do not realize the heinousness of many crimes. But in its place Hart advocates for his own sunny form of unrealism:

[I]f Newman was right—and believing Catholics had better hope he was, for the sake of the intelligibility of their faith—it is not only doctrine but also the church’s understanding of its teachings that is clarified over time by the Spirit. There may be slight missteps, of course, but the general view of development tacitly taken by the magisterium is that there are no violent retreats from clearly stated new discoveries; there is only a relentless narrowing and intensification of focus. This suggests, among other things, that the teachings of the magisterium under the current pontificate are probably more trustworthy than those under the pontificate of, say, Leo X.

I expect Mary to be declared part of the godhead any day now.