A priest eschews AI confession for disembodying the Gospel, but misses how priests and sacraments started it all

 

The historical Jesus made forgiveness of sins a horizontal matter in a social relation of equals, and a predicate for divine forgiveness before the imminent end of the world foreclosed the opportunity.

The Christ of faith and early Catholicism turned forgiveness of sins into a vertical matter enclosed in a sacrament requiring elite intermediaries to administer it. 

But with a sacrament of confession to a priest the person actually wronged is simply bypassed and forgotten. Is there a better example of disembodying the Gospel? People who look for the origins of gnosticism and individualism should look here! 

The historical Jesus did not teach to confess one's sin to a priest, but to the person who was actually sinned against! Jesus' teaching everywhere stresses horizontal reconciliation without which there can be no vertical reconciliation.

Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.

 -- Matthew 5:23f. 

... And forgive us [ἄφες] our debts, as we forgive [ἀφίεμεν] our debtors. ... For if ye forgive [ἀφῆτε] men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you [ἀφήσει]: But if ye forgive [ἀφῆτε] not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive [ἀφήσει] your trespasses.

-- Matthew 6:12, 14f.

So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive [ἀφῆτε] not every one his brother their trespasses.

 -- Matthew 18:35

And when ye stand praying, forgive [ἀφίετε], if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive [ἀφῇ] you your trespasses. But if ye do not forgive [ἀφίετε], neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive [ἀφησεὶ] your trespasses.

 -- Mark 11:25f.

Confess your faults one to another . . ..

 -- James 5:16 

Forgiveness [ἄφεσις] is the social imperative of eschatological time, of the fullness of time proclaimed by Jesus the eschatological prophet when the kingdom of God was "at hand".

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance [ἄφεσιν] to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty [ἐν ἀφέσει] them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

-- Luke 4:18f.  

This forgiveness is offered unconditionally, without the "ifs" and conditions for forgiveness of later tradition. And Jesus himself models that meaning of unconditional forgiveness even to the bitter end of his life.

Father forgive [ἄφες] them, for they know not what they do.

-- Luke 23:34

This is why the disciple compelled to walk one mile walks two (Matthew 5:41). This is why the disciple struck on the one cheek offers the other also (Matthew 5:39). This is why the disciple robbed of his coat gives up also his cloke (Matthew 5:40).   

But retaining sins, withholding of forgiveness, would have simply been anathema to the historical Jesus. That just represents the intrusion of business as usual, the mere continuation of profane time, whose time was up. 

  

A Disembodied Gospel

Jim Morin, The Lamp

 

... For Catholics, the ordinary way to receive forgiveness of sins is by individual sacramental confession to a priest. We believe that Christ instituted this sacrament when he said to his apostles, “whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” [John 20:23] But what is the reason which stands behind Christ’s decision to make forgiveness dependent on a direct interaction with a priest? One can give psychological motivations: confessing sins to another person promotes self-examination and sharpens awareness of sin; hearing spoken words of mercy gives experiential knowledge of forgiveness. One can also give ecclesiological reasons: reconciliation with God is simultaneously reconciliation with the Church, and besides, confessors are theologically trained to judge repentance, to resolve moral doubts, to answer spiritual questions, and so on. ...        

The irony of the essay is that this priest really does seem to grasp in his conclusion that "we need real human communion rooted in the love of the Incarnate Word". It just never occurs to him that he might be standing in the way of it, just like AI.

All kidding aside, it's stunning that a believing Catholic like Ross Douthat thinks morality is a secondary aspect of religion

 Here:

But the challenge does run a little deeper if the only parts of church that Dad believes in are the secondary goods of religion (community and morality and solidarity and choral music), while the primary good — communion with God and the integration of human life with divine purposes — is assumed to probably be so much wishful thinking even before the specific dogmatic questions get involved.

 

 

Stunning because Douthat elsewhere recognized, in 2011, that the unique human characteristic of passing moral judgment is demonstrative of the way human beings strangely stand outside nature, just like God:

Second, the idea that human beings are fashioned, in some way, in the image of the universe’s creator explained why your own relationship to the world was particularly strange. Your fourth- or 14th-century self was obviously part of nature, an embodied creature with an animal form, and yet your consciousness also seemed to stand outside it, with a peculiar sense of immaterial objectivity, an almost God’s-eye view — constantly analyzing, tinkering, appreciating, passing moral judgment.

God desires mercy, not sacrifice (Matthew 9:13; 12:7):

Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me:  Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee? And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due unto him. So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.  

-- Matthew 18:32ff.

Douthat, like much of Christianity and the West, suffers from too much vertically-oriented individualism, at least this year, for which we'll just have to forgive him.

The Fourth Gospel is conveniently self-authenticating and self-insulating about the reliability of the church's recollection of the teaching of Jesus

 But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

 

-- John 14:26

 

I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.  Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. 

 

-- John 16:12f. 

 

This reflects the essential "my truth" enthusiasm at the heart of early Christianity without which there would be no St. Paul with his Christ mysticism.

 

This is the true origin of individualism and subjectivism in the West. It is ultimately self-defeating because it leads logically to relativism.

Catholic Bishop cannot remember his Aristotle, says Aristotle good, Plato bad

I'm guessing he probably never read either one.

Bishop:

"The guardians, Plato’s philosopher-kings, can utterly control the lives of those in his charge, even to the point of censoring music and poetry, regulating pregnancy and childbirth, eliminating private property, and annulling the individual family. Aristotle departed from this conception of the good society and took as his point of departure the aspiration and freedom of the individual."

Aristotle, Politics, 1.1253a: 

"The city-state is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually...the state is prior by nature to the individual...a man incapable of entering into partnership...must be either a lower animal or a god."

Critics of Plato on this subject routinely omit that the idealistic elements of his utopian state apply only to the few, the guardian class, not to the general population, and that the guardians will be comprised only of the best sort. One may criticize Plato for making naive assumptions about human nature, but he does not deserve to be read any less carefully than does Aristotle, who is anything but a libertarian individualist.

Why Lutherans are particularly susceptible to white guilt

Lutherans are particularly susceptible to "white guilt" because guilt has been a way of life for them as Protestants. The whole idea of "systemic racism" in America wouldn't be flourishing without it.

Every Sunday Lutherans stand, confess and agree that they "are by nature sinful and unclean". "Confession", remember, literally means agreement, "saying the same thing". The gospel which they believe, preach, and teach, week in and week out, tells them that their individual sins put Jesus on the cross 2,000 years ago. Yours did too, they say. It isn't a big leap from accepting guilt for Jesus' death to accepting guilt for what white slavers and white supremacists did ages ago, even though they had nothing to do with it.

Lutherans have been repeating this guilt and stewing in this guilt mentality for over 500 years, and have infected all of Protestantism with it, perhaps no more successfully than among the Baptists in America, who flourished in the slave states. With their "come to Jesus moment" the Baptists gave America a uniquely personalized religion whose key experience is like nothing so much as a Maoist struggle session in which the accused breaks down in front of a crowd in emotional crisis and agrees to his crimes in his testimony of faith. The Baptist dramatically confesses the Lord Jesus with his mouth and is baptized, and so is saved.

It needs hardly be said that the groundwork for the success of this individualistic Baptist faith in America, forged in the Protestant Reformation, had already been laid for it by other influences resulting in the development of American "rugged" individualism.

And you might want to just leave it at that, and not appreciate other antecedents deep in our history beyond the relatively recent theological, philosophical and psychological ones which are germane to this moment in our history. For example in Roman Catholicism itself, before the Reformation, with its aggressively hierarchical system of religious specialists on top getting their living from the offerings coerced of the sinners below in exchange for the absolution of the guilt they successfully convinced them of.

Or in Paul's transformation of an eschatological cult centered on The Temple, which called no man "rabbi" and no man "father", into a more successful form of Pharisaism with its "synagogues" everywhere actually run by the equivalent of rabbis, and eventually fathers, and assembling at which and financially supporting became the central part of religious obligation. "For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes" has to happen somewhere.

Or in Judaism more anciently. The exploitation of guilt, after all, goes all the way back at the very least to one tribe's control over eleven others in ancient Israel. This arrangement also came to a head in a kind of "reformation" moment when the northern kingdom rejected the manipulation by the southern, which controlled the Temple cult, over the issue of taxation and set up its rival cult at Bethel. The Deuteronomic code, well spring of imagination at the American founding, was written by the Temple cult winners of that duel.

Guilt, specifically religious guilt, has been key to manipulating people in the West from its beginnings, and it comes as no surprise that some white people in America today, secularized and demoralized, should still so easily fall victim to such gaslighting, now by black race hustlers. They've been gaslighted for centuries after all, so what's a little more?

The guilt habit of mind has become endemic, whether religious or not, and it's a threat to the liberal order given that perhaps 15 million Americans have recently protested in the streets in its favor, some violently. You might conclude more cynically that this is happening because there's a sucker born every minute, or more charitably because it's a natural consequence of natural human inequality. In either case, the good society may be measured by the degree to which that good society protects such people from being manipulated, and still others from being hurt by the manipulated, and since it's not, the liberal order has failed, or is failing. The whole affair is a cautionary tale. People who think it preposterous that America might one day descend into the barbarism of 7th century Islamism, or into Adrian Vermeule's vision of Catholic integralism governing the Western hemisphere from Quebec to Buenos Ares should think again. Instead another reformation is needed, one which rejects "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me".

The tell of it all is that even as the very strength of the enslaved peoples of America has long been acknowledged by themselves to be this same Christian gospel, some of their descendants, too, have now finally learned how to leverage all the same tricks of guilt and manipulation it teaches.

The objective, let it not ever be forgotten, is your stuff.

First fruits. Tithes. Offerings. Taxes. Reparations. Pay-back. Redistribution. Same as it ever was. Figure out a way to manipulate people to get their stuff for free, or at least at little cost, to make a handsome living without having to really work for it (think priests, Levites, pastors, academics, bureaucrats, teachers, politicians, activists, tub-thumpers, and other assorted pests).

Working for it is what whitey does. That's the racist part of the current hysteria. The Marxist part of Black Lives Matter is the old religious system denuded of The Deity and Society elevated to the level of Magic Cash Register, at which everyone is equal. That's the utopian theory anyway, the hope, but not the hope of glory.

What happens in reality is that communism wherever it has been tried ends always the same way, in brutal dictatorship, brutal totalitarianism or both, with an elite in charge, hoarding all the benefits for itself at the expense of the many as they mouth the words everyone knows to be false at the point of a gun but must sing in order to survive:

"In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic"...

"By...the abolition of private property...then the liberation of each single individual will be accomplished..."

Paul's other gospel

 

And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. 

 

--  1 Corinthians 15:17

This statement would have come as quite a shock to the many people whose sins Jesus actively forgave in his own lifetime according to the Synoptic tradition, who never once heard Jesus conditioning God's forgiveness of them on Jesus' own future death and resurrection. They might have been forgiven for thinking Paul's casuistry made him one of the Pharisees.

The Passion Narrative shows strong evidence of having been reworked from the later standpoint of this theology of the cross, but elsewhere hardly so thoroughly as that. 

On the contrary, the Synoptic tradition preserves a Jesus who conditioned God's forgiveness not on some once for all sacrifice whose efficacy was to be proven by resurrection, but rather on faith and its reciprocal human action which demonstrated the sincerity and efficacy of the individual's repentance. Faith is not yet a system of dogma, but a description of the right relation and interaction between God and men and men with each other in relation to God.

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. 

 

-- Matthew 6:14f. 

 

Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.

 

 -- Matthew 10:8

Both things can't be true. Either forgiveness of sins is a fundamentally social matter or it is not. 

The reasoning of Paul sometimes makes a mockery of the life and teaching of Jesus, whose many pronouncements of forgiveness and salvation during his public ministry become not simply relativized by Paul, but of no real effect. They become pointless episodes in a pointless life finally given meaning only by death. Paul even boasts of not knowing that Jesus, the Jesus of the flesh.

It is sick when you really think about it, but it explains much about the conflicted mind of Paul, who is possessed of a morbid fascination with death and who also owns a history of lashing out born of unresolved inner hostilities, both before and after his conversion.

We would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. 

 

-- 2 Corinthians 5:8 

 

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If it is to be life in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. 

 

-- Philippians 1:21ff. 

 

But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed. 

 

-- Galatians 1:8ff. 

 

If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema! Maranatha! 

 

-- 1 Corinthians 16:22 

 

For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh. 

 

-- Romans 9:3 

 

For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews' religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it. 

 

-- Galatians 1:13

Being "in your sins" seems to have been a topic of debate in early Christianity after the death of Jesus. Apparently forgiving one another was no longer thought to be a sound basis for right relation with God and with each other. While Paul sought to make forgiveness of sins contingent on an "historical" datum, the resurrection, the Fourth Gospel made it contingent on simple belief in the Good Shepherd, the Light of the World, etc. 

I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins. ... Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. 

 

-- John 8:24ff.

This is an otherwise unremarkable passage, fully in keeping with The Fourth Gospel's focus on the Divine Logos who descends from heaven in the Incarnation and ascends back up to heaven in the Resurrection. Forgiveness of sins depends entirely on belief in this person who did this. It is an entirely vertical conception. There is no social dimension to it. Gone is the "sell that ye have and give to the poor" basis of the call to discipleship found in the Synoptics (Matthew 19:21; Mark 10:21; Luke 12:33).

Except this must have caused offense at this point in John's narrative to some of the scribes, knowing the Synoptic tradition as they might have. Accordingly it is remarkable that some of them inserted before this section of John 8 the famous Pericope Adulterae, where Jesus forgives the woman caught in adultery. Nowhere else in John do we encounter this Jesus who goes about forgiving the sins of the people like we do in the Synoptics, demonstrating the horizontal faith relation which is ubiquitous there.

But even at that Jesus does not go out looking to do this in John. The woman, caught in the act of adultery, is brought to him as he's teaching in the Temple, early in the morning. And the social aspect is wholly negative compared to the positive, other-directed examples found in the Synoptics. In John the accusers simply melt away under the withering challenge of Jesus, so that no one is left. It is just the woman and Jesus alone.

Is there a more vivid image of the new gospel of the solitary individual in relation to his god?

Think of it as one of the unintended consequences of Jesus' impact.

And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, "Teacher, we know that you are true, and teach the way of God truthfully, and care for no man; for you do not regard the position of men."

 

 -- Matthew 22:16

The one who gives up praying to God is faithless and is already "from evil"

 

No English translation of Luke 18:1 adequately captures the sense of μὴ ἐγκακεῖν, "don't be from evil".

Some examples:

"And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint;" (KJV)

"Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up." (NIV)

"And he told them a parable, to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart." (RSV)

"Now He was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart," (NASB)

"Then Jesus told them a parable to show them they should always pray and not lose heart." (NET).

These failures of translation are not surprising given the thoroughgoing effort to suppress the failed eschatological message of Jesus and reinterpret it from the beginning. As usual, however, Luke remains its rare honest reporter.

The translations suffer from reading into Luke's usage of the term, the only one in the gospels, the usage from Paul, which has already become patently psychological and introspective (e.g. 2 Cor.4:16). Luke's use, however, is plainly eschatological in its context (Luke 17:20ff. through Luke 18:8) and knows nothing of this later "introspective conscience of the West". It focuses on the behavior which springs from the inner man, not on the inner man itself. Yes, Scripture ought to interpret Scripture as the Lutherans insist, but it is Luke who ought to interpret Luke. 

The one who gives up praying to God in Luke is representative of the many faithless at the end of the world, who are literally "from evil" (ἐκ κακός) because they have given up believing in the very idea of justice in the first place. The many are all jaded and don't even bother asking for justice anymore. In fact, to them the seat of justice itself is so unhinged the effort would be doomed from the start. The representatives of justice have become such thoroughgoing individualists and laws unto themselves who do not see themselves as beings in relation to God or even to other men that it would be impossible even to make a case to them. So why even try?

The few who will be saved, however, are like the persistent widow of this narrative. She alone among all her peers has not given up on the idea of a justice which is outside herself and represents the ground of being. No one else but she even bothers to try anymore. No one else but she even believes that a decent case can be made for it. She is ridiculously outnumbered. The capriciousness of unjust justice she faces at the fullness of time, at the end of the world, is shown in that it is moved no longer by principles of God or man but only by its own exhaustion with this harpy. This lone defender of Absolutes wins because she is stronger and more enduring because of the Absolutes, not because of her faith in the Absolutes. She simply knows the strength of her case, and refuses to give it up. She knows it can't be beaten, and that it will win. That Jesus must admonish even his own closest disciples to be like her and not join the many in their backsliding behavior is very telling. His promises of the imminent consummation were beginning to ring hollow even in their ears.

It calls to mind Jesus' instruction to his disciples elsewhere about the paradigmatic discipleship of a widow, who put into the treasury (ὅλον τὸν βίον αὐτῆς) "her whole life" (Mark 12:44/Luke 21:4), perhaps the most important two cents in the history of the West. For whatever else might be said about the failure of the kingdom of God to appear, Christendom yet stands for that same transcendent, unshakeable moral order for which a widow sacrificed everything that she had.

The human capacity for and ubiquity of evil were taken for granted by Jesus. What remains remarkable is that he believed some could repent, and no longer "be bad".

Offending our self-obsessed chaos of individualists in twenty words or less

"I do not get to decide who I am and how I may behave".

-- Carl R. Trueman, here

Isn't "postliberal theology" oxymoronic?

Think about it.

The post-liberals rejected the preeminent role played by reason in the formulation of the modernist interpretation of Christianity, which in its turn had really been a rejection of the pre-modern rationalism of the church in favor of the so-called modern type. 

The post-liberals granted that there was an internal logic to these two interpretations, something liberal theology had been loathe to grant, but rejected the existence of a superintending logic over them all, to which they bare witness.

When one goes this route, one is separating the "logy" from the "theo" in theo-logy and jettisoning it. As a consequence, one can't really speak of a postliberal theology. In rejecting logos one is really rejecting speech and argument itself. One is left with a God about whom nothing can be said.

Had postliberalism been true to itself, however, it never would have come to exist in the first place because it would have understood this imperative to shut up.

The thing post-liberalism claimed was true of others they never quite applied to themselves, namely that the limitations of language and culture made their own truth claims impossible. In seeking to relativize the dogma of others, their own movement became a dogma, but not one successful enough that you can actually look one up in the Yellow Pages under "post-modernist churches" and attend a Sunday, or preferably some other day, service.

What post-liberalism actually does is attract certain personalities from the pre-modern or the modern camps who are susceptible of rejecting reason, Americans caught up in radical individualism being noteworthy examples. This mission field has been white unto harvest, riddled as it is with self-imposed isolation and separation from "community". Some of them doubtless call themselves "nones", and their creed, if they have one, is "Here's to the truth as perceived by you!".

The topic is recently and usefully discussed here at The Blog of Veith.

A chaos of individualism

'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none

Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

-- Alexander Pope

In the Marburg Colloquy the Lutherans and the Reformed forever parted company over the meaning of the presence of Christ

Present everywhere, huh?

You can read a transcript of the Marburg Colloquy of 1529 online here.

About it Gene Veith here points to "the different approaches not just to the Sacrament but to the Bible and, above all, to Christology."

This is most certainly true, but it is the different approach to the Bible I think which is paramount, for it is from the Bible that Luther derives his Christology and all his doctrine. Its articles of faith dominate independently and are not to be put at war with one another:

"Every article of faith is a principle in itself and does not require proof from another one."

Luther defends his understanding of the Holy Supper on the basis of the plain meaning of the words of institution from the Synoptic testimony, whereas the rationalistic reformers venture far and wide over the ancient fathers and the text of Scripture in their debate with Luther, but end up appealing especially to John's Gospel to argue against Luther's understanding of that Synoptic testimony.

For example, Oecolampadius of Basel opened the meeting with a salvo which takes Christ's presence at the right hand of God in heaven so narrowly and literally that for him Christ couldn't possibly be present bodily also in the Holy Supper at the same time. But for Luther, "this is my body" means both things can be true at the same time because Scripture says so, even though we cannot understand it.

In this Luther refused to make Scripture the enemy of Scripture (of course, his problems with James for example show that if he thought there were differences which couldn't be reconciled, well, then the offending Scripture must not be Scripture). 

If anyone ever doubted Luther's devotion to the authority of the text of Scripture to the exclusion of all else, one need only meditate on this excerpt from near the conclusion of the meeting:

"The important thing, as Augustine says, is that the words of the fathers must be understood in relation to Scripture. If they seem to run counter to the Scriptures, one must clarify them by interpretation, or reject them." 

Martin Luther, sovereign theologian, sovereign individual.

Chris Lehmann blames gnosticism for American Christians' development of a sanctified money cult

From an interesting review here by a progressive, which entirely misses the materialism inherent in both the American conservative and progressive interpretations of the meaning of the Christian faith, making gnosticism kind of beside the point because it's adapted for materialist ends, which in a real gnostic would be a contradiction in terms.

Americans, it seems, specialize in perverting not just the orthodoxy, but also the heterodoxy:

At the root of this depressing defeat for a prophetic and socially-conscious Christian faith, in Lehmann’s reading, is what amounts to a strong and ever-present current of Gnosticism: the belief that I can rise above all obstacles and can transform myself and succeed against all odds with God’s help; that I can even transcend basic human limitations—suffering, illness, and death—and become God-like in my personal triumph. It’s always about me and “my” God; it’s never about transforming the social conditions that cause so much unnecessary suffering for so many.

Lehmann demonstrates how during times of the most acute public suffering, like the depressions of 1837, 1857, 1893, etc., almost all Protestant thought leaders served up new formulas for individual self-improvement rather than challenging the presumption and arrogance of wealth. Hence his title, “The Money Cult”: in what many are pleased to regard as a Christian nation, the functional faith of most believers has usually boiled down to a sanctified form of acquisitive individualism.

Calling J. Gresham Machen a forgotten libertarian is as unhelpful as calling Jesus a socialist

In a short essay entitled "Rendering Unto Caesar: Was Jesus a Socialist?" which the author rather embarrassingly calls "epic", Lawrence W. Reed never quite gets it that the idea of socialism is a phenomenon of the modern age which didn't present itself to the minds of pre-modern men and that those like Gorbachev who paste the term on figures of the past are doing more to obscure their thoughts than to elucidate them. Regrettably Reed goes on to commit the same error himself.

Socialism is an intellectual category which only lately in history arose in reaction to the appearance of industrial capitalism in the Enlightenment West. To paint Jesus with the hues of this corner of time completely ignores his own time and its conditions in which as a prophet he preached the imminent coming of the kingdom of God in unique historical circumstances. But it will hardly do to also make Jesus a defender of capitalism, which couldn't be more anachronistic. A good student of Jesus' teaching would not miss, as Reed does, that personal poverty and distribution of assets to the poor was a condition of discipleship according to the Synoptic tradition. Jesus believed this precisely because it represented repentance to him, without which one would not survive the end of the world and God's judgment which were fast and certainly approaching.

Of course this underscores a major difference with St. Paul, whose thought was a preoccupation of the New Testament scholar John Gresham Machen, the subject of the recent essay by Reed entitled "God’s Forgotten Libertarian". If repentance required various acts of renunciation of the world to Jesus, to Paul it above all required belief in the lordship of Christ, whom Paul believed was still soon to return in judgment.

The irony of Reed's title is that like socialism, libertarianism is also a late product of the modern age, precisely from the clutches of which Machen sought his whole life to rescue thinking about Paul, especially in The Origins of Paul's Religion (1921).

It's difficult to imagine a better way to misrepresent Machen.

And Paul.

Libertarian Christianity would have been an utter contradiction in terms to the apostle to the Gentiles for the simple reason that there could never be any notion of personal autonomy in Christianity, as if one could give oneself one's own law to live by apart from the law of Christ, or could live in blissful isolation without being a member of the body of Christ or without a duty to the rest of humankind, or could actually own oneself. These are all core notions of libertarian individualism which are at war with basic Pauline ideas:

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.

 

-- 1 Corinthians 6:19f.

Likewise he who was free when called is a slave of Christ. You were bought with a price . . ..

 

-- 1 Corinthians 7:22f.

Let no man seek his own, but every man another's wealth.

 

-- 1 Corinthians 10:24

Even as I please all men in all things, not seeking mine own profit, but the profit of many, that they may be saved.

 

-- 1 Corinthians 10:33

[Charity] . . . seeketh not her own . . ..

 

--1 Corinthians 13:5

Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?

 

-- 2 Corinthians 13:5

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

 

-- Galatians 2:20

Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

 

-- Galatians 6:2

So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.

 

-- Romans 12:5

Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.

 

-- Philippians 2:4

Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.

 

-- Philippians 4:11f.

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves . . ..

 

-- 2 Timothy 3:1ff.


Christianity may have become many things, but what it most certainly is not in its origins is a materialist philosophy. Those who say otherwise like Reed unfortunately know not whereof they speak. 

Liberal exceptionalism: The post-war liberal West is suddenly suffused with self-doubt, but the rest of us are fine

Steven Erlanger reporting from London in The New York Times here, conflating post-war liberal values with Judeo-Christian ones:

"THE West is suddenly suffused with self-doubt. ... Are Western values, essentially Judeo-Christian ones, truly universal?

"The history of the last decade is a bracing antidote to such easy thinking. The rise of authoritarian capitalism has been a blow to assumptions, made popular by Francis Fukuyama, that liberal democracy has proved to be the most reliable and lasting political system. ... The fight over values is not limited to democracy . . . with radical disagreements over the proper place of women and the rights of homosexuals. In its rejection of Western liberal values of sexual equality and choice, conservative Russia finds common cause with many in Africa and with the religious teachings of Islam, the Vatican, fundamentalist Protestants and Orthodox Jews."

It's as if liberalism were a frightened little child, running to hide behind her mother's skirt after having gone too far with some opponent, maybe the dog. Judeo-Christian values, the last refuge of the liberal scoundrel.

Historically speaking, Judeo-Christian values produced what was a relatively quiescent American republican mercantilism until the dawn of the 20th century, not the worldwide crusade for democracy and unfettered capitalism we have come to see thereafter, but sixty years of lousy public education has a way of making people forget such things.

Amnesia also exists about traditional values, which gave us their easy imprimatur for social relations organized around the family and children, with a long and storied history until recent times. The pipe dream has been egalitarian individualism and its various licenses for perversion, which are still fringe arrangements for most people, even for those who purchased them. Regret is everywhere. Such things are the specialties of liberalism, which does indeed look like it's coming undone, but the truly universal things like religion and the family and the arrangements they inspire continue to suggest themselves by nature to billions.

Only a liberal could fail to see them everywhere, as if they were the exception, not he.