When the free are slaves

 

 We are industrious to preserve our bodies from slavery,

but we make nothing of suffering our souls to be slaves to our lusts.

 

-- John Ray (1627-1705) 

LOL, Calvinist John Piper says you are free to obey The Emperor and get vaccinated

And you thought "freedom is slavery" was an Orwellian idea. The inspiration is thoroughly Christian, and "The question is", said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master, that's all".

 

The apostle Peter said,

This is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as slaves of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor. (1 Peter 2:15–17)

“Live as people who are free.”

Peter had just said, “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether to the emperor as supreme, or to governors” (1 Peter 2:13). So how can you “be subject” and “be free” at the same time?

Peter’s answer is that Christians are “slaves of God.” In other words, when you submit to a “human institution” (1 Peter 2:13), you don’t do it as the slave of that institution. You do it in freedom, because you are slaves of God, not man. God owns his people — by creation and redemption. ...

When we submit, we do so for the Lord’s sake. Because he said to. God’s ownership of his people strips every decisive entitlement from human authority. It turns every act of human compliance into worship. When we submit, we do so for the glory of our one Owner and Master. Life is radically Godward.

More.

 

Every act of compliance is worship, eh?

In the 3rd century many Christians found one act of compliance utterly beyond the pale. They refused to comply with an edict of Decius requiring everyone to perform a sacrifice to the gods in the presence of a Roman magistrate, which was deemed sufficient to demonstrate one's loyalty to the empire.

Some Christians at the time thought such sacrifices to be idolatrous. Many were killed for refusing to offer them.

Many people today, and not just Christians, think that the vaccines can cause harm, to their children and/or to themselves, and refuse to take them or allow them. Some people are losing their jobs as a result.

Many wonder what happened to the ideas we grew up with, that in America health decisions are between the individual and her doctor and are no one else's business, especially not the government's business. Many today wonder what happened to the "first, do no harm" line in the Hippocratic oath.

Circumstances likewise changed a great deal between the composition of I Peter and the 3rd century. There was no formal empire-wide persecution of Christians before the Decian edict of 250 AD. In the absence of official edicts requiring apostasy, obeying the law was not at issue and was promoted in the interests of evangelism and comity, especially in the 1st century.

Similarly Paul in I Corinthians 8 knew that eating meat offered to idols was nothing because no other gods actually exist, but that weak minds found it offensive, for which reason he said that one should not eat meat offered to idols to protect their feelings.

This advice had unintended consequences. The weak minds proliferated, to the point that by the 3rd century the Christians were literally a people living apart from the wider Roman society, attracting suspicion and ultimately the ire of the authorities for failing to behave like Romans. Rod Dreher fans should take note. His prescription in The Benedict Option might be more cause than effect of the troubles he believes are coming, and may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Today vaccine compliance earns you a proof of vaccination card. With it you can go about the normal business of living, including going to work. In the 3rd century, sacrifice earned you a libellus, a proof of sacrifice card. With it you could escape execution.

You would expect that in a liberal society, a free society such as that bequeathed to us by the Protestant founders of America who inherited the ideas of Paulinism, the, if you will, weak-minded anti-vaxxers among us would be cut the same slack Paul cut those who were superstitious about idol meat.

But we don't live in that world any longer. We live in an absurd world where the vaccinated, the protected, promote fear of the unvaccinated, which is superstition. It's getting to be more and more like the 3rd century world of suspicion and compulsion.

John Piper has as little to say to the one as to the other. But the 3rd century speaks volumes.

 

 

Freedom who loves, must first be wise and good

Freedom who loves, must first be wise and good;

But from that mark how far they rove we see,

For all this waste of wealth, and loss of blood.

-- John Milton

On the American Protestant origins of liberalism as freedom from Catholicism and the authority of the pope

From a very useful essay by James M. Patterson, "The Dogmatic Rivalry at the Heart of America":

These Protestant outbursts coalesced into a prominent mid-nineteenth century faction called “Nativists,” who found a home in the Whig Party. Nativists tended to come from the artisan classes who were negatively affected by the arrival of Irish working in factories whose cheaper products displaced artisanal work and, hence, added to the animus for the Irish as minions of “popish plots.” In his recent book Liberal Suppression, [Philip] Hamburger charts how Nativists began to use the term “liberal” during this period to refer not merely to a kind of political gregariousness [among rival Protestants] but to an independent from “foreign influence.” To be “liberal,” then was the opposite of being Catholic. Because Americans loved liberty, they had to be Protestant, since Protestants rejected the impositions of foreign princes in favor of native liberty of conscience. Hence, Nativists identified themselves as the “American Party” and their political program as “Americanism.”

The early Nativists were animated by their Protestant enthusiasm, but over time, they moved from religious convictions to political ones. ... Indeed, one of the most shocking conclusions of Hamburger’s work is the direct link between the ideology of the KKK and today’s “humanist” associations. ...

It is no coincidence that the three critics of liberalism considered here are Catholic. Both because of crises in the Catholic Church and because of the rapid social change of the past two decades, Catholic intellectuals have had to improvise an explanation and have found it to be liberalism. It is not so much wrong as incomplete, but it does explain how American Catholics and Protestants have diverged in their evaluation of liberalism. In the recent dustup between Sohrab Ahmari and David French, one saw this tension reach the surface. The Catholic Ahmari, in keeping with the American Catholic tradition, held liberalism in contempt for its failure to defend the common good, but for the Protestant French, liberalism was instrumental to forming a coalition for religious freedom against the external authority of the secular state. French seems not to understand that for much of American history, Protestants used the same argument against Catholics.

Bethel Redding's Beni and Jenn Johnson declare "cancer free zone" in April 2017, Beni comes down with it in March 2018

You can't make this stuff up.

Do you see a man who is hasty in his words? There is more hope for a fool than for him.

 

-- Proverbs 29:20

Beni Johnson is the wife of Bill Johnson, a so-called miracle worker and faith healer.

From the story here:

Beni Johnson, co-pastor of Bethel Church in Redding, California, is being treated for a cancer diagnosis that "shocked" her. "When this all began in March and I walked out of the doctor's office shocked." ...

Just over a year ago in April 2017, Beni's daughter-in-law, Jenn Johnson, urged members to pray for a "cancer free zone" at Bethel during a during a worship session while singing "By the Blood." During that service, Beni Johnson revealed she had a heavenly encounter with Jesus in the spirit and gained access to healing power over cancer. "All through worship whenever I start to sing this song and I close my eyes I just actually step into Heaven. And I was looking around Heaven but I noticed that my brother-in-law Jim, and my father-in-law Bill's dad are standing on the edge of Heaven and they are looking down," she said. "And both of them died from cancer. And I said, Holy Spirit, Jesus, why are they standing out to me? Why are they standing and looking down and then Jenn said 'we declare healing over cancer,'" Beni Johnson said as the audience applauded. ...

As people were encouraged to pray for those with cancer, Johnson stated, "Don't pray; declare. This is a time, this is an open Heaven right here and we're calling down the healing power of Jesus over cancer." 

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

After eating human brains, what's next, Reza Aslan arguing practitioners of ritual cannibalism should be free to practice their religion in the US?

Take, eat, this is my brain . . .

Story here.

Don't read the story if you're eating lunch right now, I'm about to lose mine.

The hubbub isn't about what it should be about, the cannibalism, but about the purported caricature of Hinduism implied by Aslan's documentary.

The guy should be arrested and put away for participating, but hey, he's inviolable because he's a Muslim.

Give that man the Duranty Award: Rod "Benedict Option" Dreher is so insular he can't find his own ass with both hands let alone the unfree world in 2016

Guess he never heard of China, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela for starters, then there's all the Muslim tyrannies, and then the tens of millions of aborted in Europe and the United States who never made the light of day because we think we're so free.

What's the unfree world in 2016? One in five people in the world still live under communism . . . at a minimum.

Apparently Rod Dreher is enjoying too much grilled octopus in Manhattan these days to be awake to the rest of the world.

Perfect freedom eludes us

From Carol Zaleski on Samuel Johnson, here, who with fine turns of phrase has captured the humanity and wisdom of the man who navigated the divide between pre-modern and modern man more heroically than any English writer before or since:

'No writer has more convincingly described the failure to “scheme life,” the near futility of hygienic self-improvement. Not piety alone, but piety weathered by illness, disfigurement, financial worries, marital difficulties, overwork, and hereditary melancholy (to the point that he feared madness), as well as his bungled attempts at self-discipline, made Johnson skeptical of the Enlightenment ideal of autonomy. He was a kind and courageous man (notwithstanding his well-known combativeness in debate), full of charity, whose setbacks inoculated him against spiritual pride.'