I don't think this is going to go over too well with the true-believing Christians, coming as it does from Bibi

 Netanyahu: The West Must Be Strong To Survive, "Jesus Christ Has No Advantage Over Genghis Khan"

... You know, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century—someone that I admire a lot—was the historian Will Durant. Now, he wrote many volumes. I read most of them. He also wrote The Lessons of History, a very brief, 100-page book, in which he said, well, history proves that, unfortunately and unhappily, Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan.

Because if you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough—evil will overcome good. Aggression will overcome moderation. ...

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Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

-- Romans 12:21

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Update:

No Offense Meant by Jesus Genghis Khan Comparison, Netanyahu Says

ToI

 

Ross Douthat doesn't consider that the testimony of the eyes failed Mary Magdalene before it succeeded

 

 

 

 

 

 

. . . you have to go into the Gospels with a skeptical framework already to come away from them feeling that the core narrative isn’t deeply rooted in eyewitness testimony, in things that either the authors or their immediate sources really experienced and saw.

 More.

Was eyewitness testimony ever more unreliable than in the case of Mary, who we are told really did experience and see, according to the Fourth Gospel?

And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.

 -- John 20:14ff.

The idea that only prejudiced skeptics read the Gospels and come away doubting "eyewitness" testimony is quite the cope. Many former true believers have come to doubt what they once firmly believed to be true, their carefully constructed apologetic frameworks dismantled piece by piece until at length the whole structure imploded.

But Mary wasn't such a one. She did not believe in the resurrection promise in the first place, and her eyes utterly failed her when there it was, staring her in the face.

It's as if Jesus had never preached resurrection at all, so that "the apostle to the apostles" was from the beginning to the end as ignorant as they. 

George Scialabba isn't convinced by John Gray's attack on The Enlightenment, but still finds his new book worthwhile

The true believer dies hard.

From Scialabba's review in The New Republic here:

As Carl Becker argued 85 years ago in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (still “the best book on the Enlightenment,” in Gray’s opinion), the philosophes “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.” Gray’s verdict is even harsher: “Racism and anti-Semitism are not incidental defects in Enlightenment thinking. They flow from some of the Enlightenment’s central beliefs.” ... [A]gain and again, Gray finds, ... a mode of thought overthrows religion, only to imitate some of its characteristic intellectual moves. ... In fact, some of the resemblances Gray claims to see between Christianity and various types of atheism are less than compelling. In a devastating critique of Becker’s Heavenly City, Peter Gay coined the phrase “the fallacy of spurious persistence” to name a tendency to claim false or exaggerated continuities. ... Of course we should keep Gray’s cautions well in mind. The catastrophic revolutionary ideologies of the past were ersatz religions. Scientific utopias and promises to transform the human condition deserve the deepest suspicion. Moral and political progress are always subject to reversal. Humans are animals; human nature is riven with conflicts; reason is a frail reed. 

Too bad Trump did not touch or kiss a man, then he would be celebrated for his courage in coming out of the closet

Seen here in the comments to "Donald Trump Denounced by Liberty University Students".

Once again the communists succeed by getting the true believers to live up to their own book of rules while they break all of them.

Calvinism kills as surely as apocalyptic, or Mao.

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.

A Methodist imagines a more demanding form of discipleship would look like the church of the post-war

You know, when families were bigger, more people went to church, more came weekly, more prayed, perhaps at least at every meal because families ate together then, more attended Bible study or Sunday School, and more tithed of their time if not of their treasure.

Now all that looks like an impossibly lost ideal.

Seen here:

"Discipleship has some built-in defining characteristics that are much more demanding than occasionally showing up. People who haven’t shared in public worship for two years should not be called disciples. Those too busy to pray, who have no time to meet with other Christians for accountability and spiritual practice, who neglect a sacrificial commitment of time or money should not be called disciples. Those who do meet to debate carpet colors, criticize the pastoral leadership, snipe over music styles, and decide who isn’t welcome are not disciples. Those who only pay attention to the parts they like and that make them feel comfortable and lovable are not disciples. Come on! Why would anyone want to be a disciple if the key qualification is breathing?"

There's that dying vision of discipleship, at least in America, and then there's discipleship, the kind Jesus taught which the church has from the beginning safely stored away in a box reserved only for its true believers, its fanatics.

"So you cannot become my disciple without giving up everything you own." -- Luke 14:33

When you drop this first demand, all the other dominoes fall . . . eventually. 

Never believe the polling data: true believers tend to over-report

As with American Christians who lie about how often they go to church, Muslims don't tell the truth about praying five times a day.

From the story here:

[T]he research comes to us via Phillip Brenner. He's a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He's conducted several studies that explore this contrast between what people say about themselves and their actual behavior.

One technique he uses is to track what people tell their diaries. ...

What he finds ... is that people tend to be reporting that they pray more than they actually do. And this finding is very similar to the finding that Brenner made a couple of years ago when it comes to church attendance in the United States. And people in the United States say they go to church but large numbers actually don't.

And what's interesting is in both places the people who are over-reporting their religious behavior have something in common. Here's Brenner[:]

The similarity between these two places is that it is the people who think that religion is important, it's important in their daily lives. Those are the people who are over-reporting. And those are the people who are over-reporting church attendance in the U.S. and those are the people who are over-reporting prayer in Turkey, Palestine and Pakistan.

The Magical Thinking of the True Believers, Right and Left

Frank Bruni for The New York Times, here:

[T]here’s magical thinking in secular life . . . it springs from a similar yearning for easy, all-encompassing answers[.] ...

Faith-based is right. We all have our religions, all of which exert a special pull — and draw special fervor — when apprehension runs high and confusion deep, as they do now. And if yours isn’t a balanced-budget amendment and a government as lean as Christian Bale in one of his extreme-acting roles, it might well be a big fat binge of Keynesian stimulus spending. Liberals think magically, too, becoming so attached to a certain approach that they wind up advocating it less as option than as panacea.

Crystal Cathedral Declares Bankruptcy

But the true believers forge ahead positively nonetheless from their pile of (clear) rocks:

"Our announcement today to file for the protection of Chapter 11 is just one more chapter in the book that he is continuing to write -- and we know that God's plans are good -- we have no doubt his chapter will be good!"

CNN.com has the full story here.

My Scylla and Charybdis

I have met a few serious Christians of the sacramental persuasion who maintain that the Lord's Supper has been transformative for them in some sense, but not many. And judging by the behavior of most of my fellow Lutherans over the years, I can firmly state without fear of contradiction that communion hasn't done much for them in the life-changing sense. Nor has Bible study done much to renew their minds, at least when it comes to important issues of the day involving morality. The visible church and the invisible one are definitely not of equal size.

As a boy, I endured two years of weekly catechetical instruction, including public examinations on the sacraments, the Office of the Keys, the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, and The Lord's Prayer. The expectation which was built up in me for the grand day of confirmation and first communion was considerable indeed, but the denouement was hardly climactic. In no small way the failure to experience anything significant played an important role in my subsequent efforts to seek out authentic spiritual experience, and drove me into the scriptures which I read cover to cover many times by the time I had graduated from high school. With a heady mix of sacred scripts and hormones, I ventured off to college to begin the long trek toward seminary. Instead, some wise soul should have handed me a copy of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer and sent me packing to the Marine Corps. No such luck.

In time I began to appreciate just how much Lutheranism is a kind of mixture of Catholicism and Protestantism where sacraments and scripture represent "the means of grace," through which Christians hear the gospel, believe, and obtain forgiveness of sins and eternal life. But the trinity of Lutheran beliefs clearly shows that the sacraments are secondary to scripture: grace unaccompanied by anything else, faith unaccompanied by anything else, scripture unaccompanied by anything else. The young Luther, once upon a time hiding from the authorities and unable to go to mass, says that he can take communion spiritually but no less actually simply by reading and believing the words instituting the Lord's Supper in scripture.

Nevertheless, baptism and the Lord's Supper are means of grace to be offered by the church because scripture shows that these sacraments were instituted by Christ to that end: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved;" "This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." The more expansive list of sacraments in Catholicism was rejected because scripture did not say they were instituted by Christ. For Luther the priority of scripture is clear in the face of the traditions of the church, accumulated over centuries, which obscure it, and reformers contemporary with and subsequent to him ran with this, and in a distinctly non-sacramental direction which emphasized scripture's singular role.

Historical forces long in the making were at work here. The recovery of knowledge of the classical Greek and Roman worlds during the Renaissance through the intensive study of manuscript evidence inevitably led to a cultural change among churchmen in the age of Reformation with respect to the study of sacred texts. Everything depended on how one esteemed them, and on what questions were asked of them. Luther's discovery of Paul's gospel in his letters helped Luther solve his own personal spiritual problems. And his respect for Paul grew so great that he could be suspicious of the canonicity of a New Testament text like James which seemed to contradict Paul. One only wonders to what lengths Luther might have gone had he come to the texts with different questions, different assumptions.

If it had been true that "any classical text, in an age when all powerful knowledge was stored in books, had the character of a bomb that had fallen from a great height and could explode at any time" (A.T. Grafton, "The Renaissance," in The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal, Oxford, 1992), subsequent history, especially in the age of Enlightenment, would prove that the same was true of the Bible. Luther had settled on two sacraments, not seven, and on the Bible, not tradition, but in so doing the principle had also been established that an individual could plausibly make such decisions. He had lit a fuse.

(Originally posted 5/29/09)