Pete Hegseth's pastor thinks Pete is just what we need to replace the current crop of degenerates running the US military

 

 Up until just a few years ago, Pete could hardly be described as the God fearing Christian man we most need now to run the US Department of Defense. His history since his first marriage in 2004 is a lurid tale of infidelities, inseminations, and inebriation up until at least 2017.

Not only is his Christianity of very recent vintage, so is his church, founded in 2021, which Hegseth eventually became associated with after he moved to Tennessee, evidently in May 2022.

Promising to quit drinking if confirmed to the position has to be the most absurd statement lately to come out of the mouth of a God fearing Christian man.

Degenerates may run the Defense Department, but the DOD is not the only thing which has degenerated in this country.

 

Why Pete Hegseth nomination is a milestone for the rightwing Christian movement he follows

... Throughout this nomination process and the ensuing controversy, Pilgrim Hill founding pastor Brooks Potteiger and pastoral intern Joshua Haymes, who jointly manage a small-scale media operation and podcast, have been among Hegseth’s most enthusiastic supporters.

“Replacing degenerates with God fearing Christian men,” Haymes said in a Nov. 13 social media post about Hegseth’s nomination. “Trump’s White House will be staffed by (at least some) faithful, God-fearing Christians who will be advising president Trump and wielding political power.” ...

Hegseth's involvement with this Reformed evangelical camp arose not from any personal relationship with Wilson, but the recent expansion of CREC churches. Wilson doesn’t personally know Hegseth but called the nomination “a wonderful pick,” Wilson said in a Nov. 25 blog post. “He is an advocate of classical Christian education, an opponent of women in combat roles, and to top it all off he is a member of one of our CREC churches.”

Hegseth’s church, Pilgrim Hill, is among 50 the denomination added between 2020-2024, a 41% growth in U.S. congregations now totaling 120, according to an analysis of the CREC’s church directory.

This 41% spike is credited by denomination leaders in a September 2023 report as the fruits of conservative disenfranchisement with mainstream evangelical groups, starting with COVID-19 and CREC pastors like Wilson resisting public health guidelines. Potteiger, who founded Pilgrim Hill in 2021, said on a Feb. 10 podcast interview another driver was the Black Lives Matter protests and evangelical leaders’ alleged acquiescence to the movement’s demands, which Potteiger characterized as “a huge satanic tactic to corrupt the gospel.”

It would be odd for Jesus' opponents to say he wasn't yet fifty if he were actually only about thirty

 Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? 

-- John 8:57

Now when all the people were baptized, it came to pass, that Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened, And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased. And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli . . .. 

-- Luke 3:21ff.

LOL, Presbyterian David French is completely unfamiliar with the far-right road show in revolutionary America which repeatedly called the people to arms from Protestant pulpits

He's shocked, I tell you, shocked:

 If you think it’s remotely unusual that a truly extremist event (which included more than one person who’d called for hanging his political opponents) was held at a church, then you’re not familiar with far-right road shows that are stoking extremism in church after church at event after event. ... We know that fanatical religious subcultures can do an immense amount of damage to the body politic. ... what we face is an Christian subculture that is full of terrible religious purpose. The seeds of renewed political violence are being sown in churches across our land.

 More.

In 1776 the David French of 2022 would almost certainly have been a Loyalist, and the sworn enemy of the Presbyterian Rebellion condemned by George III.

Unlike today's fire-breathing right-wing lunatics, French is a proud proponent of "elite Evangelicalism" and "elite American culture" for whom "Christian nationalism" is an oxymoron. Those crazy Pentecostal patriots supporting Donald Trump come from the other side of the tracks, in case you needed reminding. David French is above all that, and stands for everything good, proper, and reasonable, you see. Like the Pharisees did. He is not like other men.

But his idea that a "new insurrection is being organized, in a sanctuary near you" is just as crazy as his idea that January 6th actually was one.

How a now de-Christianized America is suddenly going to embrace a bunch of religious fanatics with their hair on fire is not explained, but the "apocalyptic message" of "national doom" comes for us all, including for David French.

Is there a public Christian today who is more out of touch with the deeply political nature of the history of Protestant experience in America than he?

Glenn A. Moots ably defends Luther and Calvin from the charge of being radical revolutionaries, but too readily accepts their recent Catholic opponents' definition of "revolutionary"

Glenn A. Moots ably defends Luther and Calvin from the charge of being radical revolutionaries in "Was the Protestant Reformation a Radical Revolution?", but he could have done better by framing them as restorationists who returned the Christian religion to its rightful origins as revealed in Holy Scripture. That is most certainly how they saw themselves.

 

And this was not coincidentally how American Protestant revolutionaries also saw themselves:

 

Magisterial Protestants rejected the proliferation of radical sects and dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic and were, by liberal standards, quite severe with their opponents (e.g., Anabaptists or Quakers). According to Sidney Ahlstrom, three-quarters of eighteenth-century Americans were magisterial Protestants.

To revolt derives from revolve, to roll back or around. In Biblical terms this is the meaning of repentance, a turning away from present evil and going back to the original, right way.

This old meaning of "revolution" still dominated at the time of Alexander Hamilton and the American founders, and is inextricably bound up with the development of English Protestantism, which of course derived from Luther and Calvin.

What Is Conservatism? :

First, there were those who admired the English constitution that they had inherited and studied. Believing they had been deprived of their rights under the English constitution, their aim was to regain these rights. Identifying themselves with the tradition of Coke and Selden, they hoped to achieve a victory against royal absolutism comparable to what their English forefathers had achieved in the Petition of Right and Bill of Rights. To individuals of this type, the word revolution still had its older meaning, invoking something that “revolves” and would, through their efforts, return to its rightful place—in effect, a restoration. Alexander Hamilton was probably the best-known exponent of this kind of conservative politics, telling the assembled delegates to the constitutional convention of 1787, for example, that “I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced.” Or, as John Dickinson told the convention: “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us. It was not reason that discovered the singular and admirable mechanism of the English constitution…. Accidents probably produced these discoveries, and experience has given a sanction to them.” And it is evident that they were quietly supported behind the scenes by other adherents of this view, among them the president of the convention, General George Washington. ...

Anyone comparing the Constitution that emerged with the earlier Articles of Confederation immediately recognizes that what took place at this convention was a reprise of the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Despite being adapted to the American context, the document that the convention produced proposed a restoration of the fundamental forms of the English constitution . . .. Even the American Bill of Rights of 1789 is modeled upon the Petition of Right and the English Bill of Rights, largely elaborating the same rights that had been described by Coke and Selden and their followers, and breathing not a word anywhere about universal reason or universal rights.

Donna Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, opts for Athenian ostracism (and maybe worse): Lincoln and Douglas debates = good, Socrates' debates = bad

The unemployed classics PhD (Princeton) lives in Silicon Valley with her husband and two children, and runs a much fancier online presence than yours truly. She remains discomfited that America is more Rome than Athens.

The problems with online ‘debate me’ culture:

As the editor of an online publication that runs articles about the intersections of classical antiquity and the modern world, often from a feminist and progressive perspective, I’ve gotten my fair share of “debate me” challenges. Many of these have come after I began writing about far-right interest in ancient Greece and Rome in 2016. Blocking some of my would-be adversaries on Twitter seemed to just energize them — and convince them I was afraid to engage.

A call to debate may seem intellectual, even civilized. In theory, well-structured and respectful debates are an ideal opportunity to reach an audience that isn’t fixed in its views. In reality, however, most “debate me” types seem to view them mainly as a chance to attack their opponent’s credibility. Their model is not Lincoln and Douglas, but rather Socrates: By needling their interlocutors with rapid-fire questions, they aim to reveal, as they see it, their opponents’ ignorance and stupidity, and their own superior intelligence and logic. ...

These modest men also identify with Socrates, the original “debate me” troll. The Platonic texts show Socrates pulling any number of Athenians into debates, and although some are eager to argue with him, others can hardly wait to escape him by the end of the dialogue. Plato’s “Euthyphro” concludes with Euthyphro insisting that he has to leave, while Socrates calls after him, complaining that they haven’t yet figured out the nature of piety. Many of the dialogues end when the interlocutor has been bludgeoned into submission and seems to find it easier to agree with Socrates than continue further — every “debate me” man’s dream. ...

As Laurie Penny noted last year with respect to Milo Yiannopoulos, deplatforming white supremacists is a much more successful way to shut them down than insisting that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and allowing them to air their hateful views in a structured debate setting. 

A Catholic joins Pope Francis in misunderstanding "ideology" as single issue voting

One Paul Moses, here in Commonweal:

[Bishop Murphy] thus subordinated many other concerns of Catholic social teaching—and signaled to Catholic voters in the two suburban counties on Long Island to do the same. (Murphy was not available for comment in a phone call to his residence.) It was no small matter, given that Catholics are a majority within the diocese’s borders, that polling shows nearly nine in ten of them say religion is “very important” in their lives, and that many are the sort of moderate suburban voters who swing close elections in New York state.

In his apostolic exhortation Rejoice and be glad, Pope Francis warns against elevating any single social issue, including abortion, above all others. He includes this in a passage that assails two “ideologies striking at the heart of the Gospel.” The first is seen in those who elevate the quest for social justice over faith, over openness to grace. The second is found in those who see social engagement as “superficial, worldly, secular, materialist, communist or populist,” he wrote. “Or they relativize it, as if there are other more important matters, or the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause that they themselves defend.”

Single issue voting is hardly the same thing as "ideology". That is quite simply a terrible simplification of ideology.

What marks out ideological thinking from mere single issue voting is the overarching, undergirding character of an ideology's flight from reality, indeed, its denial of reality, over against those who accept the features of reality which happen to be the impediments to the ideology's realization.

In the case of abortion, the denial of reality is all on the side of its advocates, not its opponents. Its advocates say that the unborn child isn't a child, merely a fetus. And therefore when one terminates a pregnancy one isn't committing murder. To which the opponents reply, If it isn't really alive why do you have to kill it? The hoops one must jump through to deny the evidence plainly in view are self-evident. It's the abortion advocates who are the ideologues, not the advocates for life.

The case is similar with illegal immigration, the real subject of Paul Moses' advocacy. The ideologues deny the reality and legitimacy of nation states, their borders and the rule of law, and redefine the transgressors of same as "migrants" or "strangers" instead of what they really are, "illegals".

One suspects that this attack on single issue voting as ideology is not just another example of the penchant for projection characteristic of human nature when caught in a fault, but of contemporary liberalism generally. Frustrated with an ever intractable reality, the representatives of reality must be marginalized, maligned and disarmed if the liberal agenda is to have any hope of advancement.

Catholics used to be smarter than to fall for this sort of thing.    

The harebrained Peter Leithart writes that "we fill up what is lacking in Christ’s suffering" at First Things

Here.

It's a textbook example of ignorant exegesis, in this case of Colossians 1:24.

Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body's sake, which is the church

Νῦν χαίρω ἐν τοῖς παθήμασιν μου ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν καὶ ἀνταναπληρῶ τὰ ὑστερήματα τῶν θλίψεων τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου ὑπὲρ τοῦ σώματος αὐτοῦ ὅ ἐστιν ἡ ἐκκλησία

Paul isn't saying there's anything insufficient or lacking in Christ's afflictions. He's saying he himself is lacking in them, which is why he says to begin with that he rejoices in his sufferings.

Those sufferings fill up what he asserts to be a deficit of them in his experience, "in my flesh" (ἐν τῇ σαρκί μου), which might seem surprising given his statements elsewhere about their ubiquity in his missionary activity. So Paul is clearly speaking a little hyperbolically about himself here. Or perhaps ironically. In comparison with most every one of his contemporaries, he has already suffered much. The point Paul wishes to make is that his service to the church as Apostle to the Gentiles is validated when he experiences suffering and affliction, and so he welcomes those things. The more he suffers for the sake of the gospel, the more the church should know the validity of his calling. "When I am weak, then am I strong", etc.   

This is an entirely autobiographical statement by Paul as an apostle, an example of the defense of himself he is wont to make against his opponents, rather than a recommendation for or illustration of the normal Christian life (compare his counsel elsewhere to ordinary folk to live peaceably with all men, live quietly, work with your hands, etc.).

To suggest otherwise is ignorant and needlessly feverish.

Critic of the alt-right Matthew Rose is mistaken: Race was a category to the historical Jesus

Matthew Rose, here in First Things:

The alt-right seeks an account of what we are meant to be and serve as a people, invoking race as an emergency replacement for our fraying civic bonds. It is not alone; identity politics on the left is a response to the same erosion of belonging. But race is a modern category, and lacks theological roots. Nation, however, is biblical. In the Book of Acts, St. Paul tells his Gentile listeners, “God has made all the nations [ethnos].” The Bible speaks often of God’s creation, judgment, and redemption of the nations. In Christ there is no Gentile or Jew, yet God calls us into his life not only as individuals but as members of communities for which we are responsible. ... Young men . . . need an account of nationhood that teaches them about their past, without making them fear the future; an account of civic life that opens them to transcendence, rather than closing them to their neighbors.

It was the Pauline synthesis which made the risen Christ the proponent of a universal religion, one which goes into all the world making disciples. The historical Jesus, however, viewed those outside the house of Israel as dogs, and himself as sent only to the lost among his own kind. To imply that that made Jesus somehow closed to transcendence certainly ought to give his worshippers pause, but it shows just how thoroughgoing has been the victory of Paul over Jesus that the horizontal is so matter-of-factly valued as if it were the vertical. This is, in fact, a kind of idolatry.

The alt-right's opposition to Christianity is really opposition to this Paulinist revolution, without which Christianity would no doubt have ceased to exist. But the alt-right understands it as little as Christians understand that they are children of this lesser god.

Meanwhile, the failure of Jesus' coming Kingdom of God is a cautionary tale of humanity's inate capacity for self-deception which could instruct his followers and opponents alike but, because it hasn't so far, probably never will.

North America will be glaciated again, or worse, before that ever happens.

    

An alt-right Jesus, but for Jews only: The rest of us are dogs, whites included

Contra Connor Grubaugh, assistant editor of First Things, here:

Christianity in its original and most animating form is fundamentally incompatible with the Faustian ethic and race-based mythos of the alt-right, just as it is incompatible with the equivocations of liberalism. Orthodoxy is its own mythos—a true one.

These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

-- Matthew 10:5f.

I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. ... It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs.

-- Matthew 15:24, 26

The vignette in Acts 10 and 11 proves that the earliest church had assumed on the basis of this original message of Jesus that repentance unto life had not been granted "also to the Gentiles" (Acts 11:18).

Moreover Jesus himself had criticized the missionary zeal of the Pharisees in the outside world:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.

-- Matthew 23:15

Rather than speak of the impossibility of "alt-right Christianity", it seems more like an absolute necessity, however much that makes the faith an anachronism which has precious little to say to our time. The original message of Jesus is thoroughly "race-based", for Jews only.

Or is all this "scripture" to be relegated to the junk heap of history as nothing more than the evil work of Paul's opponents, the Circumcision, tampering with the Word of God?

David Bentley Hart admits that "on the whole, the Gospel is probably not a very good formula for protecting public safety"

Ya think?

Here in Commonweal:

The Sermon on the Mount’s prohibitions of retaliation are absolutely binding on Christians, in both the private and the public spheres, for on the cross Christ at once perfected the refusal of violence and exhausted the Law’s wrath.

This simply begs the question, not only of present injustice, but of final judgment, which Christianity nevertheless teaches. The wrath of God has been hardly exhausted and will be meted out, according to the clear Christian teaching. This makes no sense if the Law's wrath has been "exhausted". The only conclusion to be drawn from that, if it is true, is that there will be no final judgment. This, of course, is where universalism comes from. And the doctrine of purgatory is its halfway house.

The ordinance not to retaliate, like all of the teaching, for example on poverty, is part of the wider message that the world is soon coming to an end. Take that end away, and the teaching becomes utterly obscurantist. It is only intelligible as an explicitly interim ethic in an eschatological time. But even at that, as Schweitzer correctly pointed out, it really represents the negation of ethics and is no ethic at all because all traditional human relationships under it have come to an end ("For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother").

That is why Tacitus correctly called the Christians haters of humanity.

 

It's also why Christians themselves at length gave it up.

People will not persist in an interminable state of poverty and undergo injustice in very large numbers or for a very long period. The history of the church tells us so. It is the history of the compromise and defeat of the original eschatological message. It is a history of degeneration.

Early in the essay Hart deflects the charge of sentimentality saying that he thinks there are very few opponents of capital punishment who do not realize the heinousness of many crimes. But in its place Hart advocates for his own sunny form of unrealism:

[I]f Newman was right—and believing Catholics had better hope he was, for the sake of the intelligibility of their faith—it is not only doctrine but also the church’s understanding of its teachings that is clarified over time by the Spirit. There may be slight missteps, of course, but the general view of development tacitly taken by the magisterium is that there are no violent retreats from clearly stated new discoveries; there is only a relentless narrowing and intensification of focus. This suggests, among other things, that the teachings of the magisterium under the current pontificate are probably more trustworthy than those under the pontificate of, say, Leo X.

I expect Mary to be declared part of the godhead any day now.

Paul clearly had opponents from east to west, in Galatia, Corinth, Rome and possibly Ephesus, who accused him of lying

Roman Galatia in the early second century

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now the things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie not.

 

-- Galatians 1:20

The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is blessed for evermore, knoweth that I lie not.

 

-- 2 Corinthians 11:31

I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost,

 

-- Romans 9:1

Whereunto I am ordained a preacher, and an apostle, (I speak the truth in Christ, and lie not;) a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and verity.

 

-- 1 Timothy 2:7

Bill Johnson of Bethel Redding erects his whole theory of signs and wonders on a Christological lie

From When Heaven Invades Earth (2013), p. 29, where Bill Johnson attempts to drive a wedge between the two natures in Christ in the manner of an Arian, an Adoptionist, or a Nestorian:

'Jesus could not heal the sick. Neither could He deliver the tormented from demons or raise the dead. To believe otherwise is to ignore what He said about Himself, and more importantly, to miss the purpose of His self-imposed restriction to live as a man. Jesus Christ said of Himself, "The Son can do nothing" (John 5:19). ... He had no supernatural capabilities whatsoever! While He is 100 percent God, He chose to live with the same limitations that man would face once he was redeemed. ... He performed miracles, wonders, and signs as a man in right relationship to God. . . not as God.'

But it's Johnson who does the ignoring about what Jesus said about himself, and he does so utterly dishonestly.

Not only does Johnson rip John 5:19 from its broader narrative (where Jesus is defending a Sabbath miracle by actually appealing to his intimacy with the Almighty as the divine Son), Johnson deliberately shortens it into a fragment, representing that as if it were the whole:

Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.

 

-- John 5:19

Johnson ignores "but what he seeth the Father do". Jesus is not emphasizing his limitations as a man in this statement, but his glory as the one who is so close to God that he cannot but do what God himself does, because it would be contrary to his nature to do anything else. "No man hath seen God at any time" the Evangelist has said earlier (John 1:18), but here the Son clearly has, and does. Accordingly he cannot do anything but what he sees his Father do. Whereas John is out to show Jesus' divinity in this way in the narrative, Johnson is out to show Jesus' mere humanity.

But Jesus' Jewish opponents in John are not out to kill him for claiming to be a mere man, but for claiming equality with God!

Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.

 

-- John 5:18

Bill Johnson specializes in nothing so much as a violence of his own . . . to the text and to those who follow it.

 

If there were a jail for heresy, Bill Johnson should be celebrating his tenth year in it.

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.

Rebellion To Tyrants Is Obedience To God

"I don't understand how people can call themselves Christians today who are not at the same time enraged opponents of this regime. A truly devoted Christian must be a devoted opponent!"

-- Henning von Tresckow to his wife in April 1943, quoted in Bodo Scheurig, Henning Von Tresckow: Ein Preusse Gegen Hitler (Gerhard Stalling Verlag, 1973), 147

"The whole world will vilify us now, but I am still totally convinced that we did the right thing. Hitler is the archenemy not only of Germany but of the world. When, in few hours' time, I go before God to account for what I have done and left undone, I know I will be able to justify what I did in the struggle against Hitler. God promised Abraham that He would not destroy Sodom if only ten righteous men could be found in the city, and so I hope for our sake God will not destroy Germany. No one among us can complain about dying, for whoever joined our ranks put on the shirt of Nessus. A man's moral worth is established only at the point where he is ready to give his life in defense of his convictions."

-- Henning von Tresckow before his suicide, after the failure of the July 20th plot, 1944, quoted in Joachim Fest, Plotting Hitler's Death (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1996), 289–290

Is Missionary Self-Defense Taught By Jesus?

Is missionary self-defense taught by Jesus? The short answer is, No.

But Robert Gundry seems to think so, here, in criticism of the Zealot hypothesis revived by Reza Aslan:

Though Jesus wasn't "a violent revolutionary bent on armed rebellion," he "instructs his disciples immediately after the Passover meal" to go sell their cloaks and each buy a sword, as for a violent revolution. So says Aslan, but he fails to mention the context of an evangelistic mission requiring not only a sword for self-protection but also a purse, bag, and sandals for travel, just as he fails to mention that Jesus' bringing a sword has to do, figuratively and contextually, with division in families over whether to follow Jesus, not with revolution against Rome (compare Jesus' saying in the different context of violence that "all who take the sword will perish by the sword"). Undoubtedly Jesus was crucified as "The King of the Jews"—i.e., as a messianic rebel—but Aslan has to doubt or deny that the Sanhedrin shifted from the religious charge of blasphemy, under which they condemned Jesus, to a false political charge of sedition when arraigning him before Pilate [emphasis added].

The key evidence is in Luke 22.33-38:

And he said unto him, Lord, I am ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death. And he said, I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me. And he said unto them, When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, lacked ye any thing? And they said, Nothing. Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. For I say unto you, that this that is written must yet be accomplished in me, And he was reckoned among the transgressors: for the things concerning me have an end. And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough.

The first thing to be said about this is that if Reza Aslan has to doubt or deny a shift in charges by the Sanhedrin, Gundry has to believe and assert a shift in context to the evangelistic in this passage which is plainly absent.

To be sure, Luke here makes Jesus allude to Luke 9.3:

And he said unto them, Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece.

But now Luke makes Jesus reverse this command in the new context, and what's new about it is that Jesus plainly anticipates there will be a threat to the safety of the disciples, who like Peter will deny him and run away. Jesus isn't anticipating some new missionary activity for the disciples. He's imagining their scattering, and so their vulnerability, sheep without their shepherd.

If I were going to be mean, I'd call Jesus a situation ethicist on Gundry's reading. But Gundry's idea of new missionary activity is clearly by analogy from the previous instruction, not in evidence in the new instruction itself. At least on Luke's presentation of Jesus' words, the new situation might logically require carrying weapons, but to imagine a missionary reference at this point in the narrative looks strained, to say the least. And why weren't weapons needed before? Won't God continue to protect his own now without them? Faith as the grain of a mustard seed.

The problem is that Luke's overall presentation of the arrest of Jesus looks fanciful and muddled, quite apart from this reversal in the mouth of Jesus. It's almost as if Luke is trying to harmonize the unharmonizable. And this passage about swords seems to be representative of that.

For example, in 22:24 the whole question of who would be the greatest among the disciples intrudes unnaturally in the narrative, after Jesus' prediction of his betrayal by one of his very followers at the Passover meal, as if to suggest the disciples are a bunch of narcissists at the hour of Jesus' greatest need. And hadn't Luke brought up this argument going on amongst the disciples way back in chapter 9 already? Why bring it up again? Matthew by contrast knows nothing of this controversy popping up at the Lord's Supper.

Then in 22:43 an angel appears to Jesus to strengthen him at the Mount of Olives, but since the disciples are all asleep as this occurs, who is there to observe this, that Luke might know of it, hm?  Did a little birdie tell him? Matthew does not know of it, even though he claims to know about many appearances of angels otherwise, including to Jesus' father, Joseph.

Additionally, what sense does it make that one of the disciples took off an opponent's ear with a sword and didn't get arrested for it on the spot with Jesus, if Jesus is perceived by his opponents to be an insurrectionist King of the Jews on the Zealot hypothesis? Arrest the ring leader, along with his armed followers, right? In Matthew at least, where there is no new talk of acquiring weapons for such a situation, Jesus rebukes the resort to weapons forthrightly, and the offending disciples escape, as they do also in John but not without a second divine sign in addition to the healing the ear that was cut off.

And, of course, in the past missionary activity the disciples have had to eschew self-defense instruments such as staves according to Luke's own account, but now suddenly they already are seen to be in possession of swords! "Oh look, here's two", they say now, like Jesus didn't know they've had them all along.

Is that narrative to be believed while at the same time Jesus expresses indignation at his opponents for coming for him by night with weapons? Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black on Luke's reading? Neither Matthew, Mark nor John (!) make Jesus look quite so foolish, allowing weapons for us, but not for you.

There's something funny going on in the tradition about all of this, which may be illuminated by examining all the passages in the gospels mentioning swords and staves, where you will find not the slightest hint of approval for carrying weapons of any kind, except perhaps in two places.

In Matthew 10:34 we have this:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

Yet the explanation following this makes it clear, as Gundry points out, that this is a metaphorical sword, one meant to explain repentance in the most radical terms as that which divides the follower of Jesus even from normal human relationships, as the case may require, just as a real sword would:

And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

That leaves us with Mark 6:8 only, which isn't even about a sword, but only about a staff, truly more of a defensive weapon than is a sword, which is an offensive one:

And commanded them that they should take nothing for their journey, save a staff only; no scrip, no bread, no money in their purse.

Mark, unfortunately, is not supported in this reading by Matthew nor by Luke, who both correct Mark and say Jesus commanded them to take not even that. Interestingly, when Luke's Jesus refers to this in chapter 22 (cited above), however, he merely summarizes what he had made explicit in chapter 9, glossing over the staves entirely, which he had earlier specifically prohibited. Luke is making Jesus look rather fast and loose with the facts here.

Was that intentional on Luke's part? I think so. Luke is writing from a later period, coping with the new reality of the kingdom's coming having been already long delayed. He is at pains to rationalize the Christian's continued existence in an increasingly dangerous world, and finds the earliest tradition about the imminently coming kingdom and its ethic of no possessions, not even weapons, difficult to reconcile with reality. The remarkable thing about that is how he knows that tradition and records it in the starkest possible terms (14:33), which no one else does (So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple). It's almost like it bothers him. And, of course, Mark's unique saying about keeping a defensive weapon would be in keeping with Luke's point of view because, like Luke, Mark is associated with the later, Pauline perspective, which has already rationalized to some extent the failure of the parousia.

It is fashionable to ridicule Luke the historian as anything but an historian for reasons such as this. On the contrary I would say that his realism about the on-going perils of human existence in the face of a delayed parousia mark him as a reliable recorder of the transition from failed apocalyptic faith to the phoenix of catholic faith.

But it will not do for us to sweep aside the Jesus who thoroughly disavowed the role of human agency in ushering in the reign of God and who believed to the bitter end that God himself would bring it to save the faithful few who repented and were waiting for it. Nor can we sweep aside Jesus' expectation of this imminently coming kingdom for one rationalized as delayed indefinitely in order to save the many who would be able also to repent and believe.

Both views trim the sorry evidence.

Jeffrey Goldberg Thinks Mormonism's Bad Rap Is Due To Its Proximity To Our Own Times

For Bloomberg.com, here:

In talking to my Mormon friends (some of my best friends are Mormons), the answer is clear. The practices and origin stories of most religions, when viewed by outsiders, all seem fairly strange. But Mormonism seems just a bit stranger than the rest. The great fear is not that Americans will see a Mormon politician as too sinister to lead the country (the way that some Baptist leaders once saw the Catholic John F. Kennedy) but that Americans will see a Mormon as too bizarre to be president.

They point to the issue of “sacred underwear,” the derisive term for undergarments worn by some Mormons to remind themselves of their religious responsibilities. Many find the concept odd, but should they? Is Mormonism really that much stranger than other religions?

I vividly remember learning from a Catholic friend that, each Sunday, his family would attend church to drink the blood of Jesus and eat his body. Freaky. But is it any freakier than the sight of a bunch of Jews gathering around an 8-day-old boy to watch a man with a beard snip off the tip of the baby’s penis, and then to eat blintzes afterward? Religious Jews, of course, also wear a variation of “sacred underwear” -- zizit and tallitot, traditional garments that date back thousands of years, to the ancient Middle East.

The Mormon tradition dates back less than 200 years, to Palmyra, New York. What Mormons suffer from more than any other major religion is proximity. The foundation stories of Mormonism took place in the age of skeptical journalism, and they took place in the U.S.

This seems right to me, except that the lineage factor is missing from the analysis and what significance that has for the progenitors, which cannot be understood apart from an appreciation of doctrinal matters. 

Jews find Christians especially strange because Christianity is an heretical sect of Judaism which crossed the line and made a god of a man.

Christians find Islam strange because it is an heretical sect derived from an heretical sect of Christianity which crossed the line and made a man of a god.

Mormonism is an heretical sect of American Christianity which American Christians historically found objectionable more on moral grounds than theological, so much so that they quite literally drove the Mormons out west to Utah.

In point of fact, the Supreme Court of the United States itself ruled against statehood for Utah until Mormons officially abandoned polygamy because the practise was considered by the Court to be destructive of public (Christian) morals. No state in the union was going to be allowed to be a polygamist enclave.

Imagine such a ruling today, say about same sex relations.

Theologically Mormonism's problem for Christian America is its divinization of not just one man but of all men. But as far as I can tell, the Mormon in the race for president is probably the last Mormon I'll have to worry will push his ideas on anyone.

I'm not convinced he has any.

Compared with the ideas of his opponent, however, I can live with that. 

William McGurn Must Be A Shill For The Homosexual Lobby

To William McGurn for The Wall Street Journal, Christian evangelical objections to the heretical theology of Mitt Romney's Mormonism are equivalent to incidents of homosexual intimidation and violence against Mormonism, except McGurn never mentions the words "homosexual" or "gay" when referencing these attacks, all of which were committed against Mormons by queers, and queer lovers, not Christians, here:

[F]ar more alarming for Mormons are the attacks on Mormon property and Mormon livelihoods just three years ago that registered barely a peep among the same media now so obsessed with Mr. Jeffress. These attacks happened during the 2008 campaign in California over Proposition 8, a state referendum to ban same-sex marriage. When opponents of the measure found that Mormons had contributed heavily to its passage, ugly attacks followed.

LDS temples in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City received envelopes filled with white powder, provoking an anthrax scare. A Book of Mormon was burned outside an LDS chapel in Denver. Other Mormon chapels were vandalized.

Individuals fared even worse. The head of the Los Angeles Film Festival was forced to resign after his contribution was made public. Ditto for a fellow Mormon who ran the California Musical Theater. A former gold medalist who served as U.S. chef de mission for the 2012 Olympic Games in London likewise stepped down. A 67-year-old woman who had donated just $100 stopped working at the restaurant her mother owned to spare it further protest.

If William McGurn had any integrity, he'd admit that Republicans are giving Mormon candidates more than a fair hearing, while Christians welcome Mormon support against the real enemies of America, like homosexuals, but stake their claim against Mormon candidates on the political issues and especially on their propensity to flip-flop on them, which looks like a feature of their religion, as was the case historically both with respect to polygamy and to the status of black people.

What leaves readers wondering is why William McGurn works so hard to hide the homosexuals' attacks on Mormonism, and conflate those attacks with the First Amendment speech of evangelical Christians and Republicans.

We notice there is no Mormon running for president in the Democrat Party. But there might be a Muslim secular humanist.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

It is common among the Lutherans to insist on letting Scripture interpret Scripture. This is all well and good until you find out this means that Paul gets to interpret Mark, for example, despite the fact that it is easily argued that Paul had no knowledge of the teaching of Jesus as found in the Gospels.

The principle doesn't mean that a text should be allowed to speak for itself. Instead, the principle presupposes the notion of the unity of the Bible, which simply insulates its books within a cocoon of canonicity, impenetrable by anything from without and the individual books within incapable of disagreeing with each other, the latter being what troubled Luther about James.

Sunday's sermon in a Lutheran church was based on the story from Mark 10 about the godly rich man who asked Jesus what he yet needed to do to inherit eternal life. It pointedly illustrated the special pleading so characteristic of the Lutheran manner of interpreting the Bible. The preacher actually wanted us to believe that Jesus did not give the rich man a straight answer at all, even though Jesus said in all candor that the rich man needed to "sell whatsoever thou hast and give to the poor . . . and come, take up the cross (a theological embellishment absent from Matthew and Luke), and follow me." No, a deeper theological (!) point was being made by Jesus, we were told, to the effect that we cannot save ourselves by our own actions. Only God can save. So Jesus demanded an "impossible" thing of the man to underscore that point.

In other words, Mark is not allowed to speak for himself. Ephesians must be imported to interpret the text: "for by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." Indeed, almost every line of Scripture must be brought under the sway of Paulinism as understood by Lutherans.

The problem with this line of thinking is that the text of Mark shows that the disciples themselves had successfully obeyed the difficult call to discipleship given to them and "said goodbye to everything that they owned" (Luke 14:33). The Synoptic accounts are all in agreement on this, and indicate that Jesus recognized their obedience and promised them rewards "in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting" as a consequence. That is the simple meaning of the text, however much one would rather it sounded like St. Paul.

It is true that the disciples were surprised by the severity of the demands Jesus placed on the rich man. No doubt they compared their experiences and concluded "no one could be saved" if such extreme conditions were required as the cost of discipleship, conditions with which they themselves had not yet had to comply. Obviously we are confronted here with varying costs of discipleship, the simple meaning of the text. The disciples had not sold everything and given away the proceeds to the poor. They obviously had nothing to sell. All they had were menial jobs to walk away from, and wives and children, and the humble dwellings where their poor families remained behind. The rich man doubtless had all these things as well, but much more in great abundance, and money in the bank.

So how can two levels of cost be justified? How can that be fair? Have not all "sinned and fallen short of the glory of God?" Is it not the case that "there is none righteous, no not one?"

The Synoptics are unanimous in reporting the sycophantic ruse of Jesus' opponents who came to him saying "we know that thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou regardest not the person of men" (Mark 12:44; Matthew 22:16). Indeed, they must have heard that Jesus was as likely to criticize the upstanding figures of the day as a "brood of vipers" as he was his own followers as "ye of little faith." If Jesus' invectives against scribes, pharisees, the rich and the powerful, and hypocrites in general cause one to think he simply favored the poor, the meek, the downtrodden and such like, that is a mistake. He addresses his willing hearers as "you who are evil." He is routinely found employing the language of reversal and rebuke: the first shall be last and the last first, the truly great must be the servant of all, Satan is as quickly personified in the person of Peter as the voice of the heavenly Father, etc. No, Jesus is at pains to level the playing field, as it were.

If we were to let Mark and the other Gospels speak for themselves, a different answer comes to hand for the question of the cost of discipleship: "Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required." Because human beings are not equal in their earthly condition, they must become so when they answer the call to discipleship. All people, rich and poor alike, must unite in the abolition of the antonyms which divide them. They must repent and see themselves as God sees them, as the mere ants we appear to be from thirty thousand feet. The spirit at work in Jesus is the same spirit at work in Isaiah, who called Jacob, the Israel of God, a "worm."

From the richest ruler with great possessions to the poorest widow with only two mites, all must say goodbye to the old world with its old distinctions, honors, achievements and rewards, and yes its shames, calumnies, failures and injustices, and follow as equals into the kingdom of God. Those who have little to leave behind must leave it as surely as the rich must leave behind plenty. It is only from the human point of view that the one leaves little and the other more. From God's perspective, it is the renunciation of whatever one is which shows the true repentance. "Whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it."

There can be no question of renouncing someone else's life, someone else's experience, only of what falls within one's own sphere. Wealth is a snare, however, more likely to weigh down the would be follower, too cumbersome for the demands of the narrow way that leads to life. It is not surprising that a preacher in a wealthy American town in 2009 should do whatever he can to explain away the severity of Jesus' demands on the rich.

 

But it is still sad.