Tell how learning shoots

 Tell like a tall old oak how learning shoots

To heav'n her branches, to hell her roots.

 

-- John Denham 

Few want to consider that the impulse to genocide has deep roots in human nature, and even in Jewish religion itself

 

Mandy Patinkin on Gaza: "How Could It Be Done To Your Ancestors, And Then You Turn Around And Do It To Someone Else?"

But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.

-- Deuteronomy 20:16

 

They did not destroy the nations, concerning whom the LORD commanded them: But were mingled among the heathen, and learned their works.

 

 -- Psalm 106:34

 

 

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. ...

Pope Francis clearly believes in a little bit of depravity in each person, just not in total human depravity lol

 

Norah O'Donnell: When you look at the world what gives you hope?

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams, women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead. And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good. 

More.

 

Your average American Catholic, however, has faith in a caricature of Jesus of their own making, as gooey and sentimental as any Protestant's, as Samantha Stephenson demonstrates here. Their common Jesus never called anyone to repent, never said few would be saved, never warned of impending wrath.

Between the errors of total depravity and fundamental human goodness lies the correct view, mixed human nature. Like the scholastics of a by-gone era, however, the pope splits hairs in the wrong direction from this, landing on the side of human nature being more of a good mixture than the not totally bad mixture emphasized by Paul:

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin.  I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

-- Romans 7:14ff.

For his part Martin Luther, against the Reformed proponents of total depravity, affirmed that the Christian is simul justus et peccator, at the same time just and sinner, because of Christ.

The view was also Shakespeare's:

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues.

The urge to cancel others is natural, a feature of mingled human nature, good and ill together

 Begone, or else let me. 'Tis bane to draw

The same air with thee.

 

-- Ben Jonson

The mingled paint of living, good and ill together

 

 

'Tis in life as 'tis in painting,

Much may be right, yet much be wanting.

-- Matthew Prior

Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia praises pope's anti-fanaticism and Athanasius all in the same breath

Charles Chaput, here.

It's always amusing to listen to fanatics have their cake and eat it too.

The pope can travel to Egypt and "speak eloquently against religious fanaticism" while these priests never consider that their own vows of celibacy just might be a sign of an extreme obsession of their own. Muslims who kill in the name of their religion are fanatics, they say, but Christian clergy who won't be fruitful, multiply and contribute new lives like normal people do somehow get a pass. There is active killing, but apparently not passive. Mortal and venial anyone?

Anyway, to the mind of Chaput the pope visiting Egypt suggests Athanasius, 4th century bishop of Alexandria, whom Chaput without the slightest whiff of embarrassment holds up as someone who zealously lived his faith, believed deeply, and courageously stood against the whole blasted heretical world. His name became attached to a creed which anathematized Arians, etc., condemning them to "everlasting fire". Wow. Nothing to see in the way of fanatical there, no sir. Move along. 

Religious founders are by definition fanatics. They have to be in order to be successful at founding something. That's why we remember them and follow them. Some are worse than others (I'm talking about you, Muhammad), which is to say some are better than others (your choices are any, except Muhammad). The also-rans in the competition don't found whole new world religions. Typically they become "saints" or their equivalents. Like the rest of us, they have mixed human natures, with some admirable qualities and frankly, some not so admirable, either in their own lives or because the law of unintended consequences yielded something awful from what they taught or from an understandable misunderstanding of what they taught. You know, like jihad, or pacifism, communism or apocalypticism.

Generally speaking, the more fundamental they are, the more kinda mental they are.

So a Paul of Tarsus tamed the wild beast who was Jesus, and a Martin Luther tamed the wild beast that was Paul. And now the Western world, at least, is a sort of circus of tamers.

But there's no one yet to tame Muhammad.

"Methodist": Another Way To Spell "Pest"

I'll never forget the reaction of an earnest Methodist when I began what was to be but a brief sojourn among the Methodists some years ago: "You mean you like us?"

In the end I didn't, but not because of the history of Methodism's political advocacy per se, with which I was already intimately familiar. What I found wanting was the theological basis for it: grace so predominating as a doctrinal force that it excludes almost all talk of sin and judgment, a monstrous form of Christianity similar to others in America which end up emphasizing just one feature of themselves in an exaggerated fashion. The latest version of this phenomenon abandons the concept of hell. As we used to say in Greek class, orthodoxy is my doxy. Heterodoxy is another man's doxy.

If theocracies are wrong because in the end they conclude that human beings are essentially evil and need to be ruled, liberal democracies are wrong because they believe that people are essentially good and can be trusted to their own devices. The basis for American style limited government, by contrast, is a moral conclusion derived from long experience on English soil which believes that men are first and foremost always at war in themselves.

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues."

-- William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, 4.3.84

From William Murchison, here:

From the Methodist standpoint, as it evolved in the late 20th century, the Lord was calling his people to adopt pretty much the social and political programs of the Democratic Party. ...

A poll at the church’s 1996 General Conference found that 60 percent of clergy delegates took the liberal side on social and political questions. The laity lagged only slightly behind, with 51 percent making the same affirmation. ...

Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians - that is how it goes in the old mainline denominations. Leaders tug leftward; the path to the right leads often enough straight out the church door - to bodies with conservative commitments, or just to religious inertia. ...

Americans saw readily enough, as the dark night of Prohibition descended, that the Methodists and their allies had quit preaching and gone to meddling. Something deeper was wanted - an engagement with the high and serious purposes of God, first in creating man and woman, then in saving them.