Late stage civilization

 

Odysseus gets Polyphemus drunk, mosaic, Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Italy

 

 Prosperity begins to mellow,

And drops into the rotten mouth of death.

-- William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 4, Scene 4

76% of American Christians are now the very antithesis of disciples of Jesus

Relevant Magazine, August 23, 2023, here:

76 percent of Christians now believe God wants them to prosper financially. That number rises among younger generations, with 81 percent of churchgoers between the ages of 18 to 34 and 85 percent of churchgoers 35-49 holding onto that belief.

Luke 14:33 :

So you cannot become my disciple without giving up everything you own. 

      

Tara Isabella Burton traces the origin of this prosperity gospel heresy to a new England faith healer named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby who influenced Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.   

Dubbed "the mind cure" and "New Thought" historically, it mushroomed into a diverse number of iterations over time both religious and secular beyond this humble beginning, not the least of which was in Norman Vincent Peale. Today it broadly goes by the term "manifesting, the art and quasi-spiritual science of willing things into existence".

The latter succinctly encapsulates what faith-healing, prosperity Pentecostalists like Kenneth Hagin and Ken Copeland styled "calling those things which be not as though they were" (Romans 4:17). They believe the Christian's tongue has the power to create something out of nothing, just like God.

Burton aptly describes it as

  the instinct to conflate spiritual forces, political and economic outcomes and our own personal desires.

Here, for The New York Times.

Prosperity is depressing

 

Prosperity corrupts

 Their manners wax more and more corrupt, in proportion as their blessings abound.

-- Francis Atterbury

David Bentley Hart translated the New Testament recently, but neglects its Jesus and his belief in hell

How predictable: See, I'm a translator. I know what it really says.

David Bentley Hart is this season's Rob Bell. Everybody who wants to be $omebody in Christianity lately tries to make it off of hell, faggotry, the prosperity gospel or intentional Christian "community".

If the guy were honest, he'd reject the Jesus of the gospels instead of posing as one of his theologians. Some would say he already has, he just doesn't know it yet.

One thing's for sure: There's a place for him . . . somewhere, preferably that airport in the US Upper Midwest with Fox on, not CNN, for all eternity.

Trump hasn't lied 5,000 times, he's just channeling Norman Vincent Peale's power of positive thinking and the prosperity gospel's power of positive confession

Too bad more people don't understand this.

This guy certainly doesn't. 

Meet Daniel Dale, the man with the Herculean job of keeping track of Trump’s lies:

Usually, the lying is Trump ad-libbing — it’s him deviating from his text. In that [campaign] case, immigration lies in particular were being written into his rally speeches.

In many cases, I think it is unstrategic. I think it’s just Trump being Trump. I don’t know if it’s his natural state, or if it’s a learned behavior, after lying successfully as a real estate guy and lying successfully as a playboy celebrity to get his name in the tabloids. ...

I do use the word lie, but for my database, I call it a database of false claims, because I think while a significant percentage are lies, I'm not sure about all of them.

As we know with this president, he’s often confused or ignorant of policy specifics. And so I don’t know that he intentionally attempted to deceive with all 4,900-plus. So many of those are lies, but I can’t say that for all of them.

This guy, on the other hand, does.

Commentary: Prosperty gospel may be United States' new civil religion:

In terms of religion, this inauguration exhibits the confluence of two major currents of indigenous American spirituality.

One stream is represented by Norman Vincent Peale's longtime bestseller "The Power of Positive Thinking" (1952). The famous Manhattan pastor is Trump's tenuous connection to Christianity, having heard the preacher frequently in his youth. For Peale and his protege, the late Robert Schuller of Crystal Cathedral fame, the gospel of Christ's death for human sin and resurrection for justification and everlasting life was transformed into a "feel-good" therapy. Self-esteem was the true salvation.

Another stream is represented by the most famous TV preachers, especially those associated with the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). Kenneth Copeland, Joyce Meyer, Benny Hinn, T.D. Jakes, Joel Osteen and Paula White are the stars of this movement, known as Word of Faith. ...

Besides throwing out doctrines like the Trinity and confusing ourselves with God, the movement teaches that Jesus went to the cross not to bring forgiveness of our sins but to get us out of financial debt, not to reconcile us to God but to give us the power to claim our prosperity, not to remove the curse of death, injustice and bondage to ourselves but to give us our best life now. White says emphatically that Jesus is "not the only begotten Son of God," just the first. We're all divine and have the power to speak worlds into existence. ...

Some representatives, like Osteen, offer an easy-listening version that seems as harmless as a fortune cookie. It's when he tries to interpret the Bible that he gets into trouble, as in his latest book, "The Power of I Am." "Romans 4 says to 'call the things that are not as though they were,' " he says, but the biblical passage is actually referring to God.

But it's not really about God. In fact, one gets the impression that God isn't necessary at all in the system. God set up these spiritual laws and if you know the secrets, you're in charge of your destiny. You "release wealth," as they often put it, by commanding it to come to you.

"Anyone who tells you to deny yourself is from Satan," White told a TBN audience in 2007. Oops. It was Jesus who said "anyone who would come after me" must "deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Matthew 16:24).

Most evangelical pastors I know would shake their heads at all of this.

Prosperity gospel grifters have their own watchdog, Texas' Trinity Foundation

The preachers getting rich from poor Americans:

 

Ole, who always had a have-a-go approach to problem-solving, felt an urge to step in. First, he tried approaching the ministries on behalf of the penniless donors, thinking he could explain the circumstances and get the money refunded. However, like Larry, he found no-one willing to talk.So he took it to a Christian broadcasting association - but it didn't want to get involved. Then he approached local district attorneys, who explained that many preachers were protected by the First Amendment (guaranteeing freedom of religion and free speech), so there was nothing they could do. So he turned back to the media, this time major networks and publications, which said investigations would be too time-consuming.Ole was faced with a multibillion-dollar industry built, as he saw it, on exploiting the poor - and it was completely untouchable.And this is how a community church became an investigations office. The Trinity Foundation felt compelled to tackle the prosperity preachers because no-one else would.

 

The first schismatics are the Roman Catholics themselves, and then the Greek Orthodox, and they are divided to this day

Spare me the critique of "schismatic" Protestantism beginning with Luther in 1517.

You Catholics and Orthodox were at it over 400 years before us, and still are.

Meanwhile Protestants laid the groundwork for the most free, enlightened and prosperous populations which have ever existed in human history while you sit there arguing about who runs this rathole and that rathole as both are being overrun by Muslims.

In 1053, the first step was taken in the process which led to formal schism: the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Michael I Cerularius ordered the closure of all Latin churches in Constantinople, in response to the Greek churches in southern Italy having been forced either to close or to conform to Latin practices. According to the historian J. B. Bury, Cerularius' purpose in closing the Latin churches was "to cut short any attempt at conciliation". ... Several attempts at reconciliation did not bear fruit. In 1965, Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Athenagoras I nullified the anathemas of 1054, although this nullification of measures taken against a few individuals was essentially a goodwill gesture and did not constitute any sort of reunion. Contacts between the two sides continue: every year a delegation from each joins in the other's celebration of its patronal feast, Saints Peter and Paul (29 June) for Rome and Saint Andrew (30 November) for Constantinople, and there have been a number of visits by the head of each to the other. The efforts of the Ecumenical Patriarchs towards reconciliation with the Catholic Church have often been the target of sharp criticism from some fellow Orthodox.

Like others WaPo calls Paula White, picked by Trump for an inauguration prayer, controversial

White and new husband Jonathan Cain of Journey fame both on marriage #3 

In "Paula White, prosperity preacher once investigated by Senate, is a controversial pick for inauguration" :

When White’s role in the swearing-in ceremony was reported Wednesday, the Daily Beast said in a headline, “Shady Pastor to Pray With Trump at Inauguration.” Erick Erickson, an influential Christian writer who strongly opposed Trump during his campaign, fumed on his website: “An Actual Trinity-Denying Heretic Will Pray at Trump’s Inauguration.”

By their fruitcakes ye shall know them: Hotty pastorette close to Donald Trump is a prosperity gospel heretic says Russell Moore

Here:

“Paula White is a charlatan and recognized as a heretic by every orthodox Christian, of whatever tribe,” read a recent tweet from Russell Moore, a prominent Southern Baptist leader and vocal Trump critic, who wasn’t available for an interview.

Moore stated his objection to what White represents clearly already last October, here:

Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, is disputing conventional wisdom that Trump is hugely popular with born again Christians, insisting those actually in his camp follow the “dangerous false teaching of the prosperity gospel.” 

Matthew Harrison, LCMS President, accurately diagnoses what ails the church abroad

The only problem is his own synod generally and leadership in particular in the United States are variously infected with the theological pathologies he cites.

Quoted here:

Realizing the highest growth potential is abroad, the synod is in fellowship with more than 30 church bodies worldwide, particularly in Latin American and Africa. Harrison says Lutheranism “sputters and fails” anywhere clergy don’t have extensive seminary training. For that reason, he said, church leaders in Ethiopia and other areas have asked the Missouri synod for theological support.

“They know they need pastors against glory theology, against prosperity theology and against all kinds of charismatic nonsense going on in Africa,” Harrison said at the conference. “If we are going to stand tall against the culture, if we are going to be intense about reaching out, church planting among cultures of immigrants, nonwhites, etc., we cannot shirk seminary education. It is our crown jewel because it teaches our men what they need to know and give for the gospel.”

The poor in spirit according to Joseph Benson

From the English Methodist minister Joseph Benson, 1749-1821, here:

But it seems much more probable that the truly humble are intended, or those who are sensible of their spiritual poverty, of their ignorance and sinfulness, their guilt, depravity, and weakness, their frailty and mortality; and who, therefore, whatever their outward situation in life may be, however affluent and exalted, think meanly of themselves, and neither desire the praise of men, nor covet high things in the world, but are content with the lot God assigns them, however low and poor. These are happy, because their humility renders them teachable, submissive, resigned, patient, contented, and cheerful in all estates; and it enables them to receive prosperity or adversity, health or sickness, ease or pain, life or death, with an equal mind. Whatever is allotted them short of those everlasting burnings which they see they have merited, they consider as a grace or favour. They are happy, because theirs is the kingdom of heaven — The present, inward kingdom, righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost, as well as the eternal kingdom, if they endure to the end. The knowledge which they have of themselves, and their humiliation of soul before God, prepare them for the reception of Christ, to dwell and reign in their hearts, and all the other blessings of the gospel; the blessings both of grace and glory. For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy, I dwell in the high and holy place: with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones. Isaiah 57:15; Isaiah 66:2. And those in whom God dwells here shall dwell with him hereafter.

A scholar of the prosperity gospel pinpoints the false message of libertarianism at the heart of it

Here:

The prosperity gospel has taken a religion based on the contemplation of a dying man and stripped it of its call to surrender all. Perhaps worse, it has replaced Christian faith with the most painful forms of certainty. The movement has perfected a rarefied form of America’s addiction to self-rule, which denies much of our humanity: our fragile bodies, our finitude, our need to stare down our deaths (at least once in a while) and be filled with dread and wonder. At some point, we must say to ourselves, I’m going to need to let go.

At Least Two Thirds Of American Christianity Is Counterfeit

στενὴ ἡ πύλη καὶ τεθλιμμένη ἡ ὁδὸς 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because two thirds of American Christians are convinced God wants them to be economically prosperous, as discussed here:

As the size and number of their congregations, TV ministries, and bestselling books confirm, the contemporary footprint of the American Prosperity Gospel is large, indeed. This buttresses Bowler's larger argument that the Prosperity movement is no religious sideshow. Citing studies, Bowler shows that 17 percent of all American Christians openly identify with the movement; that every Sunday, over a million people attend Prosperity-oriented megachurches—43 percent of which boast multiethnic or multicultural congregations; and that two-thirds of all Christian believers are convinced that God, ultimately, wants them to prosper. In effect, she argues that if a substantial number of people identify with the Prosperity Gospel and accept its common teachings, then it must be closer to the mainstream than one might imagine.

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Jesus said to him, "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions. And Jesus said to his disciples, "Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." -- Matthew 19:21ff.

George Washington, My Kind Of Protestant

From George Will, here:

George Washington famously would not kneel to pray. And when his pastor rebuked him for setting a bad example by leaving services before communion, Washington mended his ways in his characteristically austere manner: He stayed away from church on communion Sundays. He acknowledged Christianity's "benign influence" on society, but no ministers were present and no prayers were said when he died a stoic's death. This, even though Washington had proclaimed in his famous Farewell Address (which to this day is read aloud in Congress every year on his birthday) that "religion and morality are indispensable supports" for "political prosperity." He said, "Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion." He warned that "reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

Thanksgiving For Protestantism

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

The following article originally appeared here.

November 25, 2009

The Mayflower's Pilgrim Capitalists

By Steven Malanga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Them Most Scorning are Most Bad of All"

“Of Mockers and Scorners, and false Accusers”

O HEARTLESS fools, haste here to our doctrine,

Leave off the ways of your enormity,

Enforce you to my precepts to incline,

For here shall I show you good and verity:

Incline, and ye find shall great prosperity,

Ensuing the doctrine of our fathers old,

And godly laws in valor worth great gold.

Who that will follow the graces manifold

Which are in virtue, shall find advancement:

Wherefore ye fools that in your sin are bold,

Ensue ye wisdom, and leave your lewd intent,

Wisdom is the way of men most excellent:

Therefore have done, and shortly speed your pace,

To acquaint your self and company with grace.

Learn what is virtue, therein is great solace,

Learn what is truth, sadness and prudence,

Let murmuring be gone, and gravity purchase,

Forsake your folly and inconvenience,

Cease to be fools, and ay to sue offence,

Follow ye virtue, chief root of godliness,

For it and wisdom is ground of cleanliness.

Wisdom and virtue two things are doubtless,

Which man endues with honor special,

But such hearts as sleep in foolishness

Know nothing, and will nothing know at all:

But in this little barge in principal

All foolish mockers I purpose to reprove,

Claw he his back that feels itch or grief.

Mockers and scorners that are hard of belief,

With a rough comb here will I claw and grate,

To prove if they will from their vice remove,

And leave their folly, which causes great debate:

Such captives spare neither poor man nor estate,

And where their self are most worthy derision,

Other men to scorn is all their most condition.

Yet are more fools of this corruption,

Which of wise men despise the doctrine,

With grimaces, mocks, scorn, and collusion,

Rewarding rebukes for their good discipline:

Show to such wisdom, yet shall they not incline

Unto the same, but set nothing thereby,

But mock they doctrine, still or openly.

So in the world it appears commonly,

That who that will a fool rebuke or blame,

A mock or grimace shall he have by and by:

Thus in derision have fools their special game.

Correct a wise man that would eschew ill name,

And gladly would learn, and his lewd life amend,

And to thy words he gladly shall intend.

If by misfortune a rightwise man offend,

He gladly suffers a just correction,

And him that him teaches takes for his friend,

Him self putting meekly unto subjection,

Following his precepts and good direction:

But if that one a fool rebuke or blame,

He shall his teacher hate, slander and defame.

Howbeit his words oft turn to his own shame,

And his own darts return to him again,

And so is he sore wounded with the same,

And in woe ends, great misery and pain.

It also proved full often is certain,

That they that on mockers alway their minds cast,

Shall of all other be mocked at the last.…

But who that of sin is clean in deed and thought,

May him well scorn whose living is stark nought.

The scorns of Nabal full dear should have been bought,

If Abigail his wife discrete and sage,

Had not by kindness right crafty means sought,

The wrath of David to temper and assuage.

Hath not two bears in their fury and rage

Two and forty children rent and torn,

For they the prophet Elisha did scorn.

So might they curse the time that they were born,

For their mocking of this prophet divine:

So many other of this sort often mourn

For their lewd mocks, and fall into ruin.

Thus is it folly for wise men to incline,

To this lewd flock of fools, for see thou shall

Them most scorning that are most bad of all.…

From SHIP OF FOOLES, by Alexander Barclay, circa 1550, edited and adapted