Interrupted retreat

Clamours our privacies uneasy make,

Birds leave their nests disturb'd,

and beasts their haunts forsake.

-- John Dryden

The true God needs no bloody sacrifices, not of bulls upon the hills, not of birds of the air, not of his "only begotten son", and not of the "mass"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats out of thy folds. For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High: And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.

-- Psalm 50:9ff.

For ye have the homeless always with you: Aren't they already just like Jesus?

Mel Trotter Ministries: Trying to end homelessness in greater Grand Rapids for over 115 years.

And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

-- Matthew 8:20

Bart Ehrman Is Mistaken To Think Jesus Thought The Son Of Man Was Someone Other Than Himself

Here is Bart Ehrman most recently on this subject:

And [Jesus] talked about someone else, rather than himself, as the coming Son of Man. ... His message is about the coming kingdom to be brought by the Son of Man. He always keeps himself out of it. ... I have already argued that he did not consider himself to be the Son of Man, and so he did not consider himself to be the heavenly angelic being who would be the judge of the earth. 

Against this Mark 2:10f is plain enough:

But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (he saith to the sick of the palsy,) I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house.

Of course, Ehrman evidently discounts the authenticity of this and similar sayings on the grounds of their character as miracle stories, but as Albert Schweitzer taught us long ago, the thorough-going eschatological interpretation means that we can accept the presentations of both Matthew and Mark pretty much as they are without doing serious violence to them.

 

Of course, there are other self-referential examples which are not miracle stories.

 

And it came to pass, that, as they went in the way, a certain man said unto him, Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head. 

 

-- Luke 9:57f.

To be clear, Ehrman is right to stress that it was God who would initiate the events of the heavenly appearance of the Son of Man to execute judgment on the world, not Jesus. Indeed, Jesus is completely passive in this regard throughout the Gospels (which incidentally completely nullifies the zealot hypothesis), and even right up to the bitter end, only giving up it seems on the cross: "My God, My God, Why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46/Mark 15:34). The problem of how Jesus still imagined himself in this role of Son of Man even as he tells the high priest at his trial that the high priest would see the Son of Man coming on the clouds remains nearly insoluble, not to mention that the subsequent Johannine interpretation and the presentation of the exalted Jesus in Acts performing the comparatively most trivial, even superstitious, divine interventions completely reject it. But the value of Schweitzer's original conceptualization is that Jesus thought this way at several points during his ministry but remained undeterred by events which showed him that he was mistaken, especially early on in Matthew 10 when he thought the end would come before the disciples had finished going throughout Israel on their mission trip (an expectation by the way which is completely incompatible with a suffering servant of the later passion narrative and for that reason absolutely remarkable for its survival as witness to Jesus' original self-conception). And then it seems Jesus expected it again on his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, only to be disappointed again, and then in the Garden of Gethsemane when he boasts that he could call down the heavenly legions, and then finally at his trial. But in all instances Jesus holds himself back as it were, dare we say it, the way only a crazed fanatic does when faced with the immediate improbability of his own false expectation.

There is more than a hint of mental illness in all of this, which many people suffering from bipolar disorder will instantly recognize. And we can see Jesus' progeny in the many end-time enthusiasts of our own time, whose message often attracts a certain sort of personality.

It is not meant as an insult to someone worshipped as a god, nor to his worshippers.

Desperate times produce extremes of their own, for which we should above all show compassionate understanding. 

Foxes Have Holes And Nadia Bolz-Weber Has A Duvet

Here, in The Washington Post:

“I never experience God in camping or trees or nature. I hate nature,” she told the Austin crowd as she paced the stage. “God invented takeout and duvets for a reason.”

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Honesty. It's a start.

And it came to pass, that, as they went in the way, a certain man said unto him, Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest. And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

-- Luke 9:57f.

The Orthodox Are Insane To Assert That "All War Is Evil"

The supper of God is our flesh, not his.

 

As here in the comments section:

Orthodoxy continues to uphold the ancient Christian teaching that all war is evil.

If it were true that all war is evil, the Orthodox would have to stop worshiping Jesus, who believed in war with all his heart and preached it, a final war in which the Son of Man would imminently descend from heaven leading the armies of God to judge the world in righteousness, saving the few but consigning the many to the flames of Gehenna. The vision of it which animates Jesus' entire ministry commanded people to flee from its coming not just for their own good but as a sign of their repentance, abandoning their very lives with all its encumbrances, including "goods, fame, child and wife".

It matters that Jesus did not think that human beings would or should take this war into their own hands, but the failure of that war to materialize means that Jesus' statements about pacifism in the face of that war are as historically conditioned as his failed predictions of that war.

 

Christianity is absurd without the coming of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven. 

So the vision of Him as warrior, with armies of his own to bring wrath on the human race and prepare a feast of dead flesh for the buzzards, died hard:

Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. ... And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, followed him on white horses. From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. ... Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly in midheaven, "Come, gather for the great supper of God, to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great." And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth with their armies gathered to make war against him who sits upon the horse and against his army.

-- Revelation 19:11, 14f., 17ff.

Food for buzzards, that's what we are. That's the supper of God, not the communion.

The Kingdom Is Coming So Quickly There Isn't Even 24 Hours To Bury The Dead

 

 And a certain scribe came, and said unto Him, "Master, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest." And Jesus saith unto him, "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head." And another of his disciples said unto Him, "Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father." But Jesus said unto him, "Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead."

-- Matthew 8:19ff.

As they were going along the road, someone said to Him, "I will follow You wherever You go." And Jesus said to him, "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head." And He said to another, "Follow Me." But he said, "Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father." But He said to him, "Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God." Another also said, "I will follow You, Lord; but first permit me to say good-bye to those at home." But Jesus said to him, "No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God."

-- Luke 9:57ff.

Thanksgiving For Protestantism

The Protestant work ethic, that industry and frugality eventually lead to riches, was not by any means fully formed in the minds of the grateful at the first Thanksgiving. It took the struggles and failures of communalism and the specter of want in the years immediately following to cause a reassessment and reformulation of the Pilgrim economy.

The following article originally appeared here.

November 25, 2009

The Mayflower's Pilgrim Capitalists

By Steven Malanga

Reading Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower, an account of the voyage of the Pilgrims and the settling of Plymouth Colony, what strikes me most is not simply the extraordinary suffering of those who made the crossing, or how close to failure the entire venture teetered for years, or even the author's recounting of the first celebration we've since dubbed Thanksgiving.

What leaps out from the pages of the history, probably because it's so little a part of the common narrative of the Pilgrims, is a crucial decision by the colony's governor, William Bradford, to change the fundamental organization of Plymouth's economy, a move which secured the colony's future. As Philbrick describes it, after three years in America the Pilgrims "stumbled on the power of capitalism" and in the process ensured the colony's survival.

Of course, for many people, the particulars of an economic system hardly seem like the stuff out of which national myths are made. Instead, the popular retelling of the Pilgrims' tale this time of year typically focuses on their role as separatists who fled England seeking religious freedom, came to thrive in the Dutch city of Leiden but worried that their children would lose their English identity and language, and so determined instead to found a colony in America where they could practice their religion but otherwise govern themselves as Englishmen and women.

The Pilgrims got more than they bargained for in the journey. After a brutal 66-day voyage, the Mayflower reached Cape Cod in mid-November of 1620, too late to build a suitable settlement before the winter set in. Living largely aboard the ship while they built the first structures, the settlers were ravaged by disease that winter, and by early spring, only half of the original voyagers remained alive.

Through the spring and the summer the Pilgrims nursed each other back to health, built their settlement, made friends with local Indians, and planted both native English crops and American seeds provided them by the local natives. That fall, as Plymouth Harbor attracted hordes of migratory birds, the Pilgrims went hunting, accumulating enough meat for a big celebration. When a hundred or so Pokanokets Indians showed up with freshly killed deer to add to the plenty, what started as a traditional European harvest festival became a feast of mythic significance, especially after Bradford and Edward Winslow ended their account of the Pilgrim's first year at Plymouth with the story of that Thanksgiving..

But mythic celebrations aside, the Pilgrims would struggle at Plymouth for two more years, never quite securing their freedom from worry and want until Bradford reorganized their tiny economy. For three years Plymouth had operated like other English colonies such as Jamestown, on a communal system where everyone worked the land and shared the fruits of labor. Now instead, in 1623, Bradford decided that each family should have its own plot of land to cultivate and would get to keep what it produced. By rights, this shouldn't have mattered much to the God-fearing Pilgrims. After all, they were engaged in a heroic endeavor to create a new life for themselves in America and all of them were presumably working as hard as possible to achieve that.

Still, as Philbrick writes, under Bradford's new regime, "the change in attitude was stunning." While previously men had tended the fields while women cared for the children, Bradford wrote that now women and children took to the fields, too, and the colony's output increased sharply. "The inhabitants never again starved," Philbrick relates, and eventually Winslow described Plymouth as a place where "religion and profit jump together."

Despite their devout nature, the Pilgrims weren't abhorred by such comparisons because the nature of religion was changing, too. The Protestant reformer John Calvin had placed work and the pursuit of one's occupation in a new religious context. Whereas under the Catholic Church for more than a thousand years work was something one did to subsist, Calvin argued that work was what God willed the faithful to do, and the worldly success that one achieved through hard work was a sign that one was, perhaps, a member of the elect. So thoroughly did many Protestant sects adapt this ethic that more than 100 years after the founding of Plymouth the minister John Wesley, architect of Methodism in England, would observe that "religion cannot but produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches."

The Pilgrims were followed to New England by waves of Puritans who believed as the Pilgrims did that a man's occupation was his calling in life and that success in one's calling was not to be renounced. It was a very different view of work and prosperity which became, not surprisingly, the ethic that defined the new country where, as Alexis de Tocqueville would later observe, all "honest callings are honorable" and where "the notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary, natural, and honest condition of human existence."

Not your typical Thanksgiving sentiment, but words nonetheless to contemplate this time of year.

Steven Malanga is an editor for RealClearMarkets and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute