Pope Leo XIV's encyclical is sadly political not theological, apologizing for slavery without mentioning Pope Leo X's role in the transatlantic slave trade

 

Not all the Leos were lions, I guess.

On the problem of Just War, the author comes close to concluding that this pope is guilty of immanentizing the eschaton, which is about right. 

The more I watch this new pope the more I sense that he's not filling the big shoes any more than the previous guy did.

The story of our times. 

 

Contra Pope Leo in “Magnifica Humanitas,” Just War Theory Is Not Outdated

... Fully aside from its length—245 paragraphs and 42,300 words—one is justified in questioning the overall coherence of the document. ... he injects other topics that appear unrelated. Among these are ... the Church’s past complicity in slavery and slave trade (no. 176).

In a footnote, Leo identifies four papal bulls from the years 1435, 1442, 1452 and 1455 that are said to have expressly “relativized” the “problematic incompatibility of slavery with the Christian conscience” (n. 174). Not included in this list is one of his earlier namesakes, Pope Leo X, who in 1514 renewed the authority of earlier papal bulls that had granted Portuguese authorities the right to subjugate non-Christians and reduce them to slaves. This, in turn, would help lay the foundation for the transatlantic slave trade.

As it concerns the Church’s formal complicity regarding slavery, in the encyclical Leo confesses, “I sincerely ask for pardon” (no. 176). But if such confession, repentance, and need for pardon were a true and heavy burden that the Vatican actually carries, it would then seem appropriate that, at minimum, an entire encyclical in fact be devoted solely to the excruciating problem of the Church’s complicity in such evil. Perhaps such will be forthcoming. ...

 

How do you cleanse the land of the blood of the innocent Jesus when it is God himself who defiled it?

 

So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.

-- Numbers 35:33

 

New Testament "theology" is pretty clear that it is the Jewish god who is ultimately responsible for shedding Jesus' blood:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son ...

-- John 3:16

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all ...

-- Romans 8:32 

God sent his Son to be our sin offering ...

-- I John 4:10

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

-- Romans 5:8. 

The penalty for Jesus' murder is death according to the Law of Moses, but who could possibly kill God, the murderer, except God himself?

 

The Christian atheist Thomas J. J. Altizer, who died in 2018 at the age of 91, wrote in 1966 that the transcendent God of the Bible had truly died when he immanentized himself and entered human history through the Incarnation and was crucified. As a leading representative of The God Is Dead movement, the highly animated Altizer instantly became a pariah in America, which at the time literally wanted to kill him over it, as his obituary remembered:

 He even went on the “Merv Griffin Show,” a popular television talk program, though the event, held before a live audience in a Broadway theater, was a debacle. He was given two minutes to speak. “The response was a violent one,” he wrote later, “forcing the director to close the curtains and order the band to play forcefully, and after this event a crowd greeted me at the stage door, demanding my death.”

But logically one should really go a step farther than Altizer and say that the Jewish god actually committed suicide according to this God Is Dead "theology" because God did all this on purpose.

After all, Jesus allowed himself to be crucified according to the wide evidence of the gospels and the New Testament, which insists that Jesus went to the slaughter like a sheep and opened not his mouth (Acts 8:32). This is exactly what one should have expected of a truly Divine Man bent on death.

This problem again illustrates the limits of "theology", Aquinas' queen of the sciences.

Her rational talk about God goes only so far, which Tertullian recognized when he said that the resurrection is certain because it is impossible (certum est, quia impossibile).

There are more things than the resurrection which are impossible.

 

 

Neocon speech writer for George W. Bush, Evangelical Michael Gerson is very angry with his brothers for not being angry, too

Trump should fill Christians with rage. How come he doesn’t?

The Trump movement is

inconsistent with Christianity by any orthodox measure. Yet the discontent, prejudices and delusions of religious conservatives helped swell the populist wave that lapped up on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. During that assault, Christian banners mixed with the iconography of white supremacy, in a manner that should have choked Christian participants with rage. But it didn’t.    

Is that disqualifying?

Like many of his fellow Christians, Gerson rejects the historical Jesus as eschatological prophet of the end of the world and instead believes in an unfolding, immanentized eschaton which realizes the universal rule of God through the church:

In the present age, [Jesus] insisted, the Kingdom of God would not be the product of Jewish nationalism. It would not arrive through militancy and violence, tactics that would contribute only to a cycle of suffering. Instead, God’s kingdom would grow silently, soul by soul, “among you” and “within you,” across every barrier of nation or race — in acts of justice, peacemaking, love, inclusion, meekness, humility and gentleness.       

Gerson's Trump critique is useful to the political objectives of Washington Post liberalism, but that liberalism all the same knows that his version of Christianity is nothing but a paper tiger, having co-opted its values long ago.

Maybe down deep Gerson knows this also.

He is a life-long sufferer of mental illness:

 

If Gnostic ideas are "essentially apostate" and "heretical", the question of their necessary and actual origin in Paul, for example, is simply being begged

The Gnostic heresy’s political successors :

First, they are all essentially apostate projects, enterprises that have arisen in the midst of Christian civilization with the aim of supplanting it.  And they could have arisen only within the Christian context, because, second, these projects are all heretical in the broad sense of that term.  That is to say, they are all founded on some idea inherited from Christianity (the dignity of the individual, human equality, a law-governed universe, a final consummation, etc.) but removed from the theological framework that originally gave it meaning, and radically distorted in the process. ... the key marks of the Gnostic mindset – the positing of unseen malign forces, the hermeneutics of suspicion and “dream world” theorizing, Manicheanism and shrill intolerance of all dissenters, even something like an immanentized eschaton (“The Storm”). 

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. -- Ephesians 6:12

Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. -- I Corinthians 2:6ff. 

Be not ye therefore partakers with them. For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light: ... And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them. ... Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.  -- Ephesians 5:7f.,11,14

Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light: Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:  -- Colossians 1:12f.

Martin Luther King Jr. was not a conservative, but someone who thought Christians could in some sense immanentize the eschaton

King, quoted here in WaPo:

“My friends,” Dr. King said in his Detroit sermon, “all I’m trying to say is that if we are to go forward today, we’ve got to go back and rediscover some mighty precious values that we’ve left behind. That’s the only way that we would be able to make of our world a better world, and to make of this world what God wants it to be. . . .”

The sermon is noteworthy for King's utopian inveighing against hate as if it were not ineradicable:

It’s wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong! It’s wrong in America, it’s wrong in Germany, it’s wrong in Russia, it’s wrong in China! It was wrong in two thousand B.c., and it’s wrong in nineteen fifty-four A.D.! It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong! 

Russell Moore embraces the immanentized eschatology of Martin Luther King Jr., Harry Jaffa and Abraham Lincoln

Quoted here:

[I]magine a 1960s civil rights movement led not by Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, but by Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright. King did not simply speak to the passions of his followers but to the consciences of his detractors and to the consciences of those on the sidelines, overhearing it all. Behind that was a coherent set of ideas, grounded in the Bible and the Declaration of Independence.

How Evangelicals trivialize the resurrection as present day love, consolation and social action

Zack Hunt, here:

[W]e can begin to see [the resurrection's] transforming power in how we respond to the tragedies in our own lives, how we love and console one another, how we work together to keep evil from ruling tomorrow, and how we come together to alleviate the daily suffering that is all around us.

Apart from its orientation, this is really little different than the historic catholic approach, in which the supposed "already" of the kingdom of God is manifest sacramentally, primarily through the Eucharist. It makes little difference, however, how the divine is immanentized. Either way it is immanentized by human agency through temporal means.

Neither conceptualization pays the proper respect due to the singular character of the resurrection as an idea, as a metaphysical phenomenon, if that oxymoron be allowed. The born again Christian protests that Jesus changed his life even though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary available to outsiders looking in, while the sacramentalist protests that he literally eats the body and blood of the Lord, purchased though it may be from a church supply house. The cemeteries are no respecters of these persons, and are as full of such people as of any other.

The thinking person must reject these expressions of human enthusiasm, for that is what they are, pale reflections of the "real" thing. The real thing was not under human control, was not susceptible of human interference and manipulation. To insist otherwise is to misunderstand the claim made by the resurrection.

If God ever transformed us, there wouldn't be any doubt about it. In truth that remains "not yet" for the Christian. Only the resurrection of Jesus can seem to lay claim to express such an "already" about which there is no doubt.

And yet there is doubt, as there is belief.

The problem of the resurrection of Jesus is not just a problem for the history of apocalyptic, with which the resurrection represents a radical break. The question also remains whether God really acted in human history in such a way, or did human hope once again overstep its bounds, as it is perennially wont to do, in claiming the apotheosis of a man? If we in our own day can insist on our own participation in the divinity to some extent on the very thinnest of evidence, the likelihood of the early Christians having committed this ancient sin is high.

The latter question is not new by any means. Jews, but also Muslims, have asked it, or rather charged it, for centuries. The great success of the West has much to do with the fact, from their point of view, that Christianity is a form of human hubris, a blasphemy. It is hard to imagine the world as it is today without it, or that it would have become the way it is without it, and the prospect of actually losing what we have achieved in the West by abandoning this plastic way we look at human nature to some extent stands in the way of our thinking about this important question on a Tuesday.

A lousy Tuesday.

Ted Cruz is a Christian ideologue who wants to immanentize the eschaton through what might as well be Sharia Law

From John Fea, here:

According to his father and Huch, Ted Cruz is anointed by God to help Christians in their effort to “go to the marketplace and occupy the land … and take dominion” over it.  This “end-time transfer of wealth” will relieve Christians of all financial woes, allowing true believers to ascend to a position of political and cultural power in which they can build a Christian civilization. When this Christian nation is in place (or back in place), Jesus will return.

... Cruz’s approach to politics is inseparable from this theology. His goal is to lead a Christian occupation of the culture and then wait for the Second Coming of Christ.

Like much else, Islam got "irja" from Pauline Christianity

From a recent discussion, here, about how ISIS seeks to immanentize the eschaton:

'Unless you have some knowledge of medieval Islamic theology you probably have no idea what irja means. The word translates literally as “postponing.” It was a theological principle put forward by some Muslim scholars during the very first century of Islam. At the time, the Muslim world was going through a major civil war, as proto-Sunnis and proto-Shiites fought for power, and a third group called Khawarij (dissenters) were excommunicating and slaughtering both sides. In the face of this bloody chaos, the proponents of irja said that the burning question of who is a true Muslim should be “postponed” until the afterlife. Even a Muslim who abandoned all religious practice and committed many sins, they reasoned, could not be denounced as an “apostate.” Faith was a matter of the heart, something only God — not other human beings — could evaluate.

'The scholars who put this forward became known as “murjia,” the upholders of irja, or, simply, “postponers.” The theology that they outlined could have been the basis for a tolerant, noncoercive, pluralistic Islam — an Islamic liberalism. Unfortunately, they did not have enough influence on the Muslim world. The school of thought disappeared quickly, only to go down in Sunni orthodoxy’s memory as one of the early “heretical sects.” ...

'In fact, there are hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world who are also engaged in irja, even if they are unfamiliar with the term. Some of them are focused on the Quran, instead of the medieval Shariah, and hold on to the famous Quranic verse that says, “There is no compulsion in religion.”' 

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Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then every man will receive his commendation from God.

-- 1 Corinthians 4:5

Each one must do as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

-- 2 Corinthians 9:7

Progressive taxation is a Christian heresy

Progressive taxation is a Christian heresy based on a loose interpretation of Luke 12.48b, as if it justified charging one rich man 33%, another 35% and still another 39.6%, while charging one poor man 10%, another 15% and a third 25%:

Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required;

Literally ripped from its context and mangled, the passage is made to teach something completely at odds with the apocalyptic setting of the chapter (which mirrors Matthew 10), its coming Son of Man figure (vss. 8, 10, 40), its urgency about the end of the world and the judgment which comes with it (vss. 20, 28, 40, 46, 49f., 56) and especially its call to repentance.

The latter consists of liquidation of assets, distribution of same to the poor (vs. 33), and utter dependence on God (vss. 24, 27, 29-32). It doesn't matter whether one has much or little when answering the call to come and follow. The price is always the same: everything you've got. That is the sense in which those with much have much required of them, but it is also the sense in which those who have little have little required of them. Nevertheless it is all required, whether much or little. 

Accordingly it is complete nonsense to suggest that such a Jesus has anything to say to us about taxation. He doesn't imagine the world will even last long enough to develop the immanentized utopia of liberal dreams. But even if he had, who would fund it? Certainly not his disciples, who would have no jobs to tax, having left all to follow him. If Christianity is anything, it is renunciation of the world, not this uneasy truce we see living out its years everywhere. 

What's almost worse than this perversion of history is progressive taxation's theocratic hypocrisy. The liberals who advocate progressive taxation often seem to find nothing wrong with scaling the wall separating church and state to pluck this bon mot for their cause while at the same time decrying every conservative who does the same in support of traditional morality, for example. The reason liberals do it surely is sinister, trusting to the simple God-fearing folk of the country who wouldn't dare to raise any objection to the teaching of their master, nevermind it isn't his teaching. 

The real error of progressive taxation is its unequal treatment of people under the law, which makes the law an ass. Time to end it.

The price of American citizenship should be the same for everyone.

Catholic Columnist Notices Libertarianism Was The Target Of Pope Francis' Exhortation

Michael Sean Winters, here:

The most interesting criticisms of Pope Francis's apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, have come from libertarians who are closest to the economic views the pope denounced. ... John Carr, who now heads the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University, thinks both parties are now essentially defined by their commitment to economic or lifestyle libertarianism. "These libertarian tendencies are reinforced by large campaign contributors and powerful interest groups on the left and right (e.g., Emily's List and the Koch Brothers, Planned Parenthood and the Club for Growth). Who died and left Arianna Huffington and Grover Norquist in charge? Is there any room left for compassionate conservatives and pro-life Democrats?" The ideological incoherence of both parties, adopting libertarian ideas on some issues and communitarian ideas on other issues, is unstable.

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I don't mind saying I beat him to it, here:

The pope's message, after all is said and done, is really quite simple, as all ideologies are, the difference being that his is a heavenly one, not a terrestrial. He's obviously uncomfortable with American Catholics of the conservative persuasion who have been allying themselves with what is commonly called libertarian ideology, the devotees of which Russell Kirk famously named the "chirping sectarians" of the conservative movement, Rep. Paul Ryan being a prominent contemporary example thereof. For Kirk, it was their ideological habit of mind which marked them out as outsiders of the movement because they could not abide the persistent lack of conformity to principle which is endemic to fallen, human nature in need of salvation, and substituted for it a bastardized, immanentized eschaton of infinite freedom . . ..