Peter Thiel rationalizing the post-war as the Age of Antichrist is the flip side of Christians rationalizing the church age as the kingdom of God

... Douthat: ... I’m just interested in how you get to a world willing to submit to permanent authoritarian rule.

 

Thiel: Well, there are these different gradations of this we can describe. But is what I’ve just told you so preposterous, as a broad account of the stagnation, that the entire world has submitted for 50 years to peace and safetyism? This is I Thessalonians 5:3 — the slogan of the Antichrist is “peace and safety.” And we’ve submitted to the F.D.A. — it regulates not just drugs in the U.S. but de facto in the whole world, because the rest of the world defers to the F.D.A. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission effectively regulates nuclear power plants all over the world. You can’t design a modular nuclear reactor and just build it in Argentina. They won’t trust the Argentinian regulators. They’re going to defer to the U.S. And so it is at least a question about why we’ve had 50 years of stagnation. And one answer is we ran out of ideas. The other answer is that something happened culturally where it wasn’t allowed. And the cultural answer can be sort of a bottom-up answer, that it was just some transformation of humanity into this more docile kind of a species. Or it can be at least partially top-down, that there is this machinery of government that got changed into this stagnationist thing. Nuclear power was supposed to be the power of the 21st century. And it somehow has gotten off-ramped all over the world, on a worldwide basis.

Douthat: So in a sense, we’re already living under a moderate rule of the Antichrist, in that telling. ...

 

Here in The New York Times. 

 

It's truly precious to see a gay man's warnings about cultural decadence, and Christianity, taken seriously by a purportedly Christian interlocutor for a purportedly serious newspaper. 

 

As Rod Dreher likes to say . . . 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Decadence 101

 Taught, half by reason, half by mere decay,

To welcome death, and calmly pass away.

 

-- Alexander Pope 

The superstition around baptism remains strong in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix

Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of the Diocese

Thousands of baptisms over 20 years were declared "invalid" and "nullified" in St. Gregory parish because the priest in question routinely said "We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," instead of "I baptize you . . .", an "incorrect formula" which failed to indicate that it is Christ who baptizes in the sacrament since it is the ordained priest who is uniquely invested with the spiritual power and presence of Christ:

"The issue with using 'We' is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes."

More.

This is pure magical thinking, an example of decadence, the degeneration of the original conception of baptism, from sign of repentance, renunciation of the world, and attachment to the new community of the elect to mysterious, wonder-working ritual imparting divine grace and forgiveness of sins.

The evidence of the Synoptics shows that Jesus himself did not baptize anyone like John the Baptist did. Only the Fourth Gospel says that Jesus so baptized, in John 3, but that is deliberately corrected in John 4 to state that Jesus himself did not baptize, and that only his disciples did.

Well, set aside the contradiction and ask, what formula did they use?

Did the disciples of Jesus use the formula "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost"? 

The idea is preposterous.

So did that make those baptisms "invalid" and therefore null?

Totally kooky.

Magic is for a world continuing on into the indefinite future, with billions of possible customers. The baptism of repentance was for salvation from a world soon coming to an abrupt end. The failure of the latter paved the way for the former.

Peter Leithart wrings his hands over the divisions caused by the Reformation, uttering complete rubbish

Here in First Things:

The catastrophic effects of these divisions rippled out into European culture, society, and politics. They’re rippling still. Worse, the fragmentation of the Church undermined the evangelical aims of the Reformers. By its sibling feuds, the Reformation quenched the very Spirit it had unleashed.

Protestants were not solely responsible for the division of the Church. Catholic intransigence and treachery silenced prophetic voices and delayed and prevented the deep self-examination the Church needed. Yet Protestants were responsible, especially for the divisions within the Reformation’s own ranks.

Quenched the Spirit, eh? Which spirit? Peter Leithart, like most Christians of the contemporary period, doesn't grasp the essentially divisive nature of the coming of the Spirit, as if the prophets were put to death for preaching the unity of the faith in the bond of peace. The prophets critiqued the household of God, calling it to repentance and revealing its sins, often at the cost of their lives.

It is a fetish of our utopian age to exclude this point of view in favor of a preoccupation with unity. But it's still disturbing that churchmen seem caught up in it, even at this late hour in the ridiculous history of ecumenism. They'll do anything it seems not to face the fact that in the Bible the idea is a development of its later literature, emphasized in the Fourth Gospel (especially John 10 and 17) and the Pauline Ephesian letter (chapter 4), neither of which can be reconciled with the Synoptic tradition nor the early genuine letters of Paul without doing a little violence to reason. Even the Passion narratives have been reworked from this point of view of the later "church", which is the first concrete expression of Christianity's decadence. Robust preoccupation with "the Other" from the original period of the Spirit gave way to the crabbed self-reflection and identity "politics" of Christian, Jew, church, synagogue, Greek, barbarian, male, female, slave, free, and Roman citizen.  

Jesus the eschatological prophet, on the other hand, never imagined a "church", let alone this long, drawn out history betwixt heaven and hell. He did not imagine "identities". Those who do the will of God are my mother, sisters and brothers, he said. Many are called. Few are chosen. Narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life. Few are they who find it. Repent while you still can. The reign of God is nigh. Come follow me.

What a polarizing fellow.

"All his ways are judgment" (Deut. 32:4).

 

Protestants shouldn't apologize for it.

Rod Dreher, Sanctimonious Scold, Turns His War For Seriousness on Herman Cain

Recently it was people in the church whom Dreher labeled unserious because they adopted a realistic view of the visible church where moral failure occurs. In Dreher's view, such people couldn't possibly appreciate how that might turn someone into an unbeliever.

Dreher has moved on to politicians like Herman Cain, whom he labels an unserious amateur, because he sang at the National Press Club, here:

When Herman Cain sang at the National Press Club the other day, I thought it was absurd. There he goes again, the clown. ... You wouldn’t trust an amateur to spay your cat or to give you sound investment advice for your 401(K) — yet there are millions of Republians who think an avuncular amateur like Herman Cain would do a great job as president of the United States, or at least a better job than Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, or anybody else on offer who has actually worked in politics. I’m not thrilled with these choices either, but come on, what is wrong with us?

Dreher is entitled to his opinion.

And mine is that under that dismissal of Cain lurks a disdainful view of Cain's Baptist religion, which isn't as elite as Dreher's Eastern Orthodoxy but which Cain wears far more effortlessly, cheerfully and convincingly than what most religious people put on.

If you want to believe that people who believe what Cain believes couldn't possibly be deep thinkers about anything, go right ahead. But to my way of thinking, I don't want a president constantly having an existential crisis about his faith like Dreher seems to have on a regular basis. He's gone from Methodist to Catholic to Eastern Orthodox to who knows what next.

Herman Cain knows where he wants to take the country, and his moral compass to get us there is set. If you don't want a population which exercises more self-restraint, self-control, savings, investment and personal responsibility for its own success, by all means, avoid Herman Cain. 

But if you want more of the same old same old handwringing about insoluble problems, any of the others will do.

(updated from November 2011)

The Sickness at the Highest Levels of United Methodism

The sickness at the highest levels of United Methodism is most lately demonstrated by this statement from an emeritus professor of theology at Perkins School of Theology:

The church should be concerned with being biblical in the deepest sense. What might that look like? The ranking of a few statements by Paul above all the persuasive and powerful texts related to God’s radical love through Jesus Christ can hardly qualify as serious biblical inquiry and authority. Paul and his generation had no knowledge or awareness of long-term consensual same-gender loving relationships so prevalent today.

At this late date in the study of the New Testament one would think that there would be other matters over which to argue when it comes to the differences between Jesus and Paul than the categories of their moral universe.

It is only a measure of contemporary decadence that a person who should know better would seek to divide them over an issue which would have been non-existent at the time, not just for Paul but for Jesus himself. No one can say with a straight face that Jesus and his generation knew of "long-term consensual same-gender loving relationships." The reason for this is that in Judaism they were stoned to death when they were found out, not unlike other malefactors.

Like the Christians, for example. Just ask Saul. He stood by holding the coats while Stephen was dispatched to the next world. I suppose it won't be long before some enterprising New Testament scholar tries to make a name for himself by claiming homosexuality was a chief tenet of Stephen's Hellenistic circle in Jerusalem. We already have one claiming there was advocacy for suicide in early Christianity, so why not Greek homosexuality, too?

No, the law of God is wise because it demands that evil be stamped out when it is discovered before the people can become inured to it. But, of course, inuring the people is the modus operandi of Fabian socialism.

The problem with the preachers of the radical love of Jesus is that to them, radical is measured on a meter whose needle only goes into the red zone when fellow Christians are outraged, not the world. What they intend is anarchism, not radicalism. It drinks from the same well as the revolution of the 1960s. A new order is not its object, merely overthrow of the existing order. These would give us license, not liberation.

These people don't know the first thing about radicalism, otherwise they'd be out of a job. The sorry truth about the church since the dawn of the twentieth century is the way it has made peace with the liberal Jesus of the nineteenth. Jesus is nothing more than a moralist who taught forgiveness and love, reigning interminably in heaven while ceaseless ages here below roll on and on and on, to be improved year upon year by the presence of God's holy people. This Jesus was a sitting duck for the Progressive Movement, the Social Gospel, liberation theology, the civil rights movement, and all the other forms of Marxism which now plague the world, and the United Methodist Church now in particular. Rick Santorum was more right than he knows.

If the church were "biblical in the deepest sense," the church as we know it wouldn't exist. The cost of discipleship rules that out, but, of course, recovering what that means is almost impossible for the church because it has been trimming and compromising Jesus since the beginning. Jesus asked his followers to turn their backs on their jobs, their money, and their wives and children because the form of this world was passing away in an instant. So urgent was his message of the kingdom and the coming judgment that there was no time even to bury the dead. The judgment would come even before the disciples had finished preaching in Israel.

Yes, judgment. And Jesus' vision of it is horrific. Many are called, but few are chosen. Homosexuals will make up only a small few of us who don't make it.

Radical.