There is safety in solitude

School of the Vestals, a painting by Hector Leroux, 1880

 How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

 

-- Alexander Pope 

A priest eschews AI confession for disembodying the Gospel, but misses how priests and sacraments started it all

 

The historical Jesus made forgiveness of sins a horizontal matter in a social relation of equals, and a predicate for divine forgiveness before the imminent end of the world foreclosed the opportunity.

The Christ of faith and early Catholicism turned forgiveness of sins into a vertical matter enclosed in a sacrament requiring elite intermediaries to administer it. 

But with a sacrament of confession to a priest the person actually wronged is simply bypassed and forgotten. Is there a better example of disembodying the Gospel? People who look for the origins of gnosticism and individualism should look here! 

The historical Jesus did not teach to confess one's sin to a priest, but to the person who was actually sinned against! Jesus' teaching everywhere stresses horizontal reconciliation without which there can be no vertical reconciliation.

Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.

 -- Matthew 5:23f. 

... And forgive us [ἄφες] our debts, as we forgive [ἀφίεμεν] our debtors. ... For if ye forgive [ἀφῆτε] men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you [ἀφήσει]: But if ye forgive [ἀφῆτε] not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive [ἀφήσει] your trespasses.

-- Matthew 6:12, 14f.

So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive [ἀφῆτε] not every one his brother their trespasses.

 -- Matthew 18:35

And when ye stand praying, forgive [ἀφίετε], if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive [ἀφῇ] you your trespasses. But if ye do not forgive [ἀφίετε], neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive [ἀφησεὶ] your trespasses.

 -- Mark 11:25f.

Confess your faults one to another . . ..

 -- James 5:16 

Forgiveness [ἄφεσις] is the social imperative of eschatological time, of the fullness of time proclaimed by Jesus the eschatological prophet when the kingdom of God was "at hand".

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance [ἄφεσιν] to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty [ἐν ἀφέσει] them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

-- Luke 4:18f.  

This forgiveness is offered unconditionally, without the "ifs" and conditions for forgiveness of later tradition. And Jesus himself models that meaning of unconditional forgiveness even to the bitter end of his life.

Father forgive [ἄφες] them, for they know not what they do.

-- Luke 23:34

This is why the disciple compelled to walk one mile walks two (Matthew 5:41). This is why the disciple struck on the one cheek offers the other also (Matthew 5:39). This is why the disciple robbed of his coat gives up also his cloke (Matthew 5:40).   

But retaining sins, withholding of forgiveness, would have simply been anathema to the historical Jesus. That just represents the intrusion of business as usual, the mere continuation of profane time, whose time was up. 

  

A Disembodied Gospel

Jim Morin, The Lamp

 

... For Catholics, the ordinary way to receive forgiveness of sins is by individual sacramental confession to a priest. We believe that Christ instituted this sacrament when he said to his apostles, “whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” [John 20:23] But what is the reason which stands behind Christ’s decision to make forgiveness dependent on a direct interaction with a priest? One can give psychological motivations: confessing sins to another person promotes self-examination and sharpens awareness of sin; hearing spoken words of mercy gives experiential knowledge of forgiveness. One can also give ecclesiological reasons: reconciliation with God is simultaneously reconciliation with the Church, and besides, confessors are theologically trained to judge repentance, to resolve moral doubts, to answer spiritual questions, and so on. ...        

The irony of the essay is that this priest really does seem to grasp in his conclusion that "we need real human communion rooted in the love of the Incarnate Word". It just never occurs to him that he might be standing in the way of it, just like AI.

Thomas Paine doubted the historicity of The Slaughter of the Innocents because John the Baptist survived it without fleeing to escape it

 

 ... This writer [Matthew] tell us, that Jesus escaped this slaughter, because Joseph and Mary were warned by an angel to flee with him into Egypt; but he forgot to make provision for John [the Baptist], who was then under two years of age. John, however, who staid behind, fared as well as Jesus, who fled; and therefore the story circumstantially belies itself. ...

-- Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason 

So you missed The Rapture, again

 The general root of superstition is, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.

 

--  Francis Bacon

Pope Francis is gone, but not forgotten

 

How the mackerels got there in the first place lol

  

 Sooner shall cats disport in water clear,

And speckled mackrels graze the meadows fair,

Than I forget my shepherd's wonted love.

-- John Gay (1685-1732)

Gene Veith surprisingly misses what early radio preachers like Walter A. Maier of The Lutheran Hour were really up to in helping to reverse "America's Religious Depression"

 

At one point in his excellent review of Ministers of a New Medium: Broadcasting Theology in the Radio Ministries of Fulton J. Sheen and Walter A. Maier, Gene Veith makes passing reference to their opposition to the atomic bombings of Japan, which for the time seems like a pretty conventional position for churchmen to take who were already grappling with the profoundly demoralizing effects of the atrocities of the World Wars.

Veith, however, might have better considered this larger theme of American demoralization and how preachers such as these rose to address it. In a word, they did it first, by reasserting the primacy of God's law, calling a spade a spade. The two broadcasting luminaries were, as he says, "robustly orthodox", and frequently "began with a searing condemnation of sin, often occasioned by a current issue or event".

Veith, a Lutheran, oddly misses that the phenomenal recovery of the churches in the post-war from the malaise of the period 1930-1950, "America's Religious Depression", stems precisely from preaching what Lutherans call Law and Gospel. First, they called the wars' sins actual sin, something most men and women who lived that hell needed and wanted to hear, something which made sense of the senseless maelstrom into which the whole world had been plunged, not once but twice. Second, they proclaimed the gospel's antidote to that sin in the form of Christ's gracious act of redemptive death on the cross. We had blood on our hands, but Christ's blood washed it away.

People forget how amazingly popular The Decalogue, The Ten Commandments, became during the 1950s. Preachers preached it, film makers dramatized it, President Eisenhower himself promoted it, monuments to it went up everywhere. It was what war weary souls most needed to hear. Love for God's law reoriented the entire country.

We were a victorious nation, but a nation literally sick of the immorality of war and desperate for forgiveness. The Law, and then the Gospel, together answered this situation. The churches boomed, the population boomed, the economy boomed.

 

LOL Pastor Doug Wilson thinks Democrats forgot to rig 2016 and the world will end if Trump wins in 2024

Trump won in 2016, as I noted, because the opposition didn’t have their “just in case” machinery in place. They were caught flatfooted. If the legal persecution of Trump causes any kind of major sympathy swing toward Trump in unusual places (e.g. among blacks, let’s say), it is possible that the left could be caught flatfooted again, only in localities that they had assumed to be safe. Because they assumed them to be safe, taking them for granted, they did not have their machinery in place.

If the American people are maneuvered into the position of thinking that there is only one way to vote ourselves out of clown world, and that is to vote like it is time to be Transgressive, then that would be a Trump vote. But even if such a thing were to happen, it would fall more in the category of bringing everything to a head, and not in the category of fixing anything. It would be kind of like the moment when Samson pulled down the Temple of Dagon.

Here.

OK Doug.

Forget the Christian nationalism, Christian globalism is where it's at, Jack

Mark Tooley, here:

But disdaining Emmett Till’s murder, and the civil rights revolution it helped unleash, as part of the wider ongoing, 2000-year-old Christian revolution of equality and dignity for all, is helpfully clarifying.

And don't you forget it™you Christian soldiers you, marching as to war.

The proud but more modest aims of the American nation died in 1865.

 

Forget stereotyping and paradox, Scripture affirms the immortality of . . . Zeus, whose children we are, and in whom we live and move and have our being

Even one of their own men, a prophet from Crete, has said about them, “The people of Crete are all liars, cruel animals, and lazy gluttons.”

 This is true.

-- Titus 1:12f.

They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one, The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies! But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever, For in thee we live and move and have our being.

-- Epimenides, Cretica

 

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.   

 

-- Acts 17:28  

Pick your poison.

The wise man doesn't just die like the fool, he is also forgotten like the fool

 

For the wise, like the fool, will not be long remembered; the days have already come when both have been forgotten. Like the fool, the wise too must die! 

-- Ecclesiastes 2:16

Which is the good way?

Thus says the LORD: Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk in it.

-- Jeremiah 6:16 

 

 

 

But my people have forgotten me, they burn incense to false gods; they have stumbled in their ways, in the ancient roads, and have gone into bypaths, not the highway ...

-- Jeremiah 18:15

Why Lutherans are particularly susceptible to white guilt

Lutherans are particularly susceptible to "white guilt" because guilt has been a way of life for them as Protestants. The whole idea of "systemic racism" in America wouldn't be flourishing without it.

Every Sunday Lutherans stand, confess and agree that they "are by nature sinful and unclean". "Confession", remember, literally means agreement, "saying the same thing". The gospel which they believe, preach, and teach, week in and week out, tells them that their individual sins put Jesus on the cross 2,000 years ago. Yours did too, they say. It isn't a big leap from accepting guilt for Jesus' death to accepting guilt for what white slavers and white supremacists did ages ago, even though they had nothing to do with it.

Lutherans have been repeating this guilt and stewing in this guilt mentality for over 500 years, and have infected all of Protestantism with it, perhaps no more successfully than among the Baptists in America, who flourished in the slave states. With their "come to Jesus moment" the Baptists gave America a uniquely personalized religion whose key experience is like nothing so much as a Maoist struggle session in which the accused breaks down in front of a crowd in emotional crisis and agrees to his crimes in his testimony of faith. The Baptist dramatically confesses the Lord Jesus with his mouth and is baptized, and so is saved.

It needs hardly be said that the groundwork for the success of this individualistic Baptist faith in America, forged in the Protestant Reformation, had already been laid for it by other influences resulting in the development of American "rugged" individualism.

And you might want to just leave it at that, and not appreciate other antecedents deep in our history beyond the relatively recent theological, philosophical and psychological ones which are germane to this moment in our history. For example in Roman Catholicism itself, before the Reformation, with its aggressively hierarchical system of religious specialists on top getting their living from the offerings coerced of the sinners below in exchange for the absolution of the guilt they successfully convinced them of.

Or in Paul's transformation of an eschatological cult centered on The Temple, which called no man "rabbi" and no man "father", into a more successful form of Pharisaism with its "synagogues" everywhere actually run by the equivalent of rabbis, and eventually fathers, and assembling at which and financially supporting became the central part of religious obligation. "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes" has to happen somewhere.

Or in Judaism more anciently. The exploitation of guilt, after all, goes all the way back at the very least to one tribe's control over eleven others in ancient Israel. This arrangement also came to a head in a kind of "reformation" moment when the northern kingdom rejected the manipulation by the southern, which controlled the Temple cult, over the issue of taxation and set up its rival cult at Bethel. The Deuteronomic code, well spring of imagination at the American founding, was written by the Temple cult winners of that duel.

Guilt, specifically religious guilt, has been key to manipulating people in the West from its beginnings, and it comes as no surprise that some white people in America today, secularized and demoralized, should still so easily fall victim to such gaslighting, now by black race hustlers. They've been gaslighted for centuries after all, so what's a little more?

The guilt habit of mind has become endemic, whether religious or not, and it's a threat to the liberal order given that perhaps 15 million Americans have recently protested in the streets in its favor, some violently. You might conclude more cynically that this is happening because there's a sucker born every minute, or more charitably because it's a natural consequence of natural human inequality. In either case, the good society may be measured by the degree to which that good society protects such people from being manipulated, and still others from being hurt by the manipulated, and since it's not, the liberal order has failed, or is failing. The whole affair is a cautionary tale. People who think it preposterous that America might one day descend into the barbarism of 7th century Islamism, or into Adrian Vermeule's vision of Catholic integralism governing the Western hemisphere from Quebec to Buenos Ares should think again. Instead another reformation is needed, one which rejects "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me".

The tell of it all is that even as the very strength of the enslaved peoples of America has long been acknowledged by themselves to be this same Christian gospel, some of their descendants, too, have now finally learned how to leverage all the same tricks of guilt and manipulation it teaches.

The objective, let it not ever be forgotten, is your stuff.

First fruits. Tithes. Offerings. Taxes. Reparations. Pay-back. Redistribution. Same as it ever was. Figure out a way to manipulate people to get their stuff for free, or at least at little cost, to make a handsome living without having to really work for it (think priests, Levites, pastors, academics, bureaucrats, teachers, politicians, activists, tub-thumpers, and other assorted pests).

Working for it is what whitey does. That's the racist part of the current hysteria. The Marxist part of Black Lives Matter is the old religious system denuded of The Deity and Society elevated to the level of Magic Cash Register, at which everyone is equal. That's the utopian theory anyway, the hope, but not the hope of glory.

What happens in reality is that communism wherever it has been tried ends always the same way, in brutal dictatorship, brutal totalitarianism or both, with an elite in charge, hoarding all the benefits for itself at the expense of the many as they mouth the words everyone knows to be false at the point of a gun but must sing in order to survive:

"In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic"...

"By...the abolition of private property...then the liberation of each single individual will be accomplished..."

It's a red letter Sunday when you read that Rod Dreher, author of the "most important religious book of the decade", agrees that the Eucharist is pagan cannibalism

He forgets it's also idolatry, but hey, take what you can get, right?

Pachamama call your office.

There are the sin forgivers, and then there are the sin retainers, like evangelical Pete Wehner

You've got to wonder if Pete Wehner ever seriously considered that evangelicals who give Trump a pass are instead practicing forgiveness.

What would forgiveness look like, Pete? Did Jesus ever once turn a blind eye to moral transgression?

But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. 

 

-- Matthew 6:15

Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots. 

 

-- Luke 23:34

Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more. 

 

-- John 8:11

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

 

-- John 20:23

Pete's clearly still a sin retainer, after all these years, just as many evangelicals have been in the past, for example in regard to Bill Clinton.

Kind of runs in the human family, but for a brief, shining moment.

The Deepening Crisis in Evangelical Christianity:

The enthusiastic, uncritical embrace of President Trump by white evangelicals is among the most mind-blowing developments of the Trump era. How can a group that for decades—and especially during the Bill Clinton presidency—insisted that character counts and that personal integrity is an essential component of presidential leadership not only turn a blind eye to the ethical and moral transgressions of Donald Trump, but also constantly defend him? Why are those who have been on the vanguard of “family values” so eager to give a man with a sordid personal and sexual history a mulligan? ...

[T]here is ... the undeniable hypocrisy of people who once made moral character, and especially sexual fidelity, central to their political calculus and who are now embracing a man of boundless corruptions. Don’t forget: Trump was essentially named an unindicted co-conspirator (“Individual 1”) in a scheme to make hush-money payments to a porn star who alleged she’d had an affair with him while he was married to his third wife, who had just given birth to their son.

What is more comical, Michel Houellebecq's misplaced faith in the competence of theologians or his ignorance of Catholicism's responsibility for schism?

Restoration: An Exchange of Views on Religion Between Michel Houellebecq and Geoffroy Lejeune

"Can the Catholic Church regain her former splendor? Yes, perhaps, I don’t know. It would be good if she moved away definitively from Protestantism and drew closer to Orthodoxy. Unity would be the best solution, but it would not be easy. The question of the Filioque could easily be resolved by competent theologians. ... Basically, it amounts to this: The Catholic Church, in the course of its history, has granted much too much importance to reason (aggravated over the centuries, probably, under the influence of Protestantism). Man is a being of reason: That’s true, from time to time. But he is above all a being of flesh, and of emotion. It would be good not to forget that."

Scott Redd simply assumes that Jesus loved the immigrant, refusing to mine the uncomfortable evidence to the contrary

Immigration and the Kingdom of God:

 

[W]e do best when we remember how Jesus loved the poor, the needy, the immigrant, while never forgetting that His work always pointed us further to another goal: a world without borders, where every tear is wiped away (Revelation 21:5). That’s where we are going too, but we are not there yet.

Matthew 2:6 knows no such world without borders, only a Christ who shall rule over Israel:

And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel. 

 

^{Matthew 10:5ff. has Jesus explicitly telling his disciples not to evangelize the Gentiles but to go only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel:}

^{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. And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. ... But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come.}

^{Matthew 15:24ff. tells us Jesus called the Gentiles dogs, to whom he was not sent and who should not be preferred over the children of Israel:}

^{But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Then came she [a woman of Canaan] and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me. But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs.}

 

^{Matthew 19:28 conceives of the kingdom to come as the kingdom of the twelve tribes of Israel, not as some new, all-inclusive redefined Israel with the Gentiles grafted in:}

^{And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.}

Forget the church militant, Birmingham ditches LGBT acceptance over intimidation from jihadis

Our new country's going to be just great!

Peter Hitchens: Protestant England as I knew it has almost entirely disappeared

From his splendidly temperate and richly informative essay, LATIMER AND RIDLEY ARE FORGOTTEN: A PROTESTANT UNDERSTANDING OF ENGLAND’S MARTYRS, here:

 

 

 

 

 

 

For More and Fisher have, more or less, won. The Elizabethan settlement long ago broke down. The Anglican Church, once forged to a gleaming hardness by the fires of Bloody Mary, has rusted away. Its Catholics now brandish thuribles and don chasubles, bowed down by embroidered copes at elaborate High Masses. Even its archbishops of Canterbury now array themselves in garish vestments that would have appalled their grandfathers. Its Protestants have wandered off into a land of guitars and modern language, full of the sort of enthusiasm Anglicanism once feared and despised, its Calvinism quite undiluted by godly order, sobriety, and reverence. The Elizabethan Prayer Book, which Catholics were once forced to endure, has almost disappeared from use in its own churches, except in cathedrals, or in a few services for very old people, held early in the morning or at sunset, until the Grim Reaper takes a hand, attendance dwindles, and they stop forever. The Prayer Book’s penitential, stern theology is too rich a mixture for a land that has grown comfortable with divorce and abortion. The English Bible, that great cause for which William Tyndale was strangled, is neglected and unread, its thrilling trumpet-blasts of seventeenth-century poetry unknown even to the officially well-educated, and almost never used in church. By another paradox, Roman Catholics have their own vernacular Bible and prayers, dreadfully inferior in beauty and euphony to those of the Church of England, though few know, because they have never heard or seen anything better. The Roman Catholics have even introduced Communion in both kinds, taken to singing hymns, and brought in married priests through the back door by ordaining married Anglo-Catholic defectors to the Ordinariate. Protestant England as I knew it has almost entirely disappeared, and its once-universal opinions are now regarded as odd, eccentric, and intolerant. Only in Northern Ireland and a few corners of Scotland will you find any remnant of the once-dominant worldview that saw popery as the ally of poverty, of “brass money and wooden shoes,” and of despotism.

Bioarchaeologist blames mass child sacrifice by Chimú "civilization" in Peru in AD 1468 on the weather

And don't forget boys and girls, the real villain in the new world was the European, beginning with Christopher Columbus not three decades later, according to the author of your kid's high school history book, Howard Zinn:

How certain are we that what was destroyed was inferior? Who were these people who came out on the beach and swam to bring presents to Columbus and his crew, who watched Cortes and Pizarro ride through their countryside? What did people in Spain get out of all that death and brutality visited on the Indians of the Americas? 

From the story here in National Geographic:

The layer of mud found during excavations may provide a clue, say the researchers, who suggest it was the result of severe rain and flooding on the generally arid coastline, and probably associated with a climate event related to El-Niño. ...

Haagen Klaus, a professor of anthropology at George Mason University, has excavated some of the earliest evidence for child sacrifice in the region, at the 10th- to 12th-century site of Cerro Cerillos in the Lambayeque Valley, north of Huanchaco. The bioarchaeologist, who is not a member of the Las Llamas project, suggests that societies along the northern Peruvian coast may have turned to the sacrifice of children when the sacrifice of adults wasn't enough to fend off the repeated disruptions wrought by El Niño.

"People sacrifice that which is of most and greatest value to them," he explains. "They may have seen that [adult sacrifice] was ineffective. The rains kept coming. Maybe there was a need for a new type of sacrificial victim." 


Meanwhile, "ancient" ain't what it used to be (anything before 476 AD, the fall of the Western Roman Empire), perhaps because the arc of human barbarism keeps interfering with that other one bending toward justice somebody recently immortalized.