Pope Francis clearly believes in a little bit of depravity in each person, just not in total human depravity lol

 

Norah O'Donnell: When you look at the world what gives you hope?

Pope Francis (In Spanish/English translation): Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams, women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead. And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good. 

More.

 

Your average American Catholic, however, has faith in a caricature of Jesus of their own making, as gooey and sentimental as any Protestant's, as Samantha Stephenson demonstrates here. Their common Jesus never called anyone to repent, never said few would be saved, never warned of impending wrath.

Between the errors of total depravity and fundamental human goodness lies the correct view, mixed human nature. Like the scholastics of a by-gone era, however, the pope splits hairs in the wrong direction from this, landing on the side of human nature being more of a good mixture than the not totally bad mixture emphasized by Paul:

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin.  I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

-- Romans 7:14ff.

For his part Martin Luther, against the Reformed proponents of total depravity, affirmed that the Christian is simul justus et peccator, at the same time just and sinner, because of Christ.

The view was also Shakespeare's:

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues.

At least Rome tried to stop the barbarian invasions from the north, the LCMS' Matt Harrison has welcomed the hordes from the global south for a decade

 Here.

You will be replaced by better Christians, he says. It is God's will, he says.

Except you won't be. You aren't being. The future is oblivion for the LCMS, not replacement.

This has only been the LCMS' latest gimmick in a long line of gimmicks to stem the tide of decline.

The first, minor dip in the numbers for the LCMS was from 1974. Seminex. It amounted only to a pruning of the tree. The second, steeper dip from the late 1990s was purely demographic, and cut to the root. Peak Baby Boom in 1957 reached age 40 in 1997, after which it is difficult for a woman to have children.

It was already then too late.

The LCMS was always an improbable enterprise to begin with, suffering from multiple personality disorder, just like the religion itself. Simul justus et peccator. The members were at once disloyal to the homeland as immigrants to America, yet here they were, still strangely German proud. It worked for quite a long while out in farm country, where animal husbandry kept the prime directive always in mind, but the forces of anti-German discrimination started to take their toll during the Great War, and finished off the German-lovers in the Second.

My grandfather, a graduate of Springfield who had been a missionary and church planter in places such as Oregon and Wisconsin, introduced English services once a month during The War To End All Wars. The anger over that expressed by church members caused him a massive heart attack which killed him suddenly in 1919 the day after an ugly voters meeting. He was only 52. His last of nine children ended up volunteering to fight Hitler in 1943, to the quiet consternation of the extended family, some of whom had retreated to the safety of the Wisconsin Synod. The LCMS continued to grow only because its loyal sons like my father survived the war and continued to have relatively big families of four.  I happily grew up taking German from the 7th Grade onward in the public school. In college I read Faust and the Lutherbibel.

But we were too few.

Some of the people running the show then weren't stupid. They knew what was coming if they didn't DO SOMETHING. And so there were desperate attempts pushing evangelization programs on the youth in the 1970s, many of them non-Lutheran in inspiration.  There was the Ongoing Ambassadors for Christ. The group would descend on a town for a weekend and cold-call at front doors, doing a survey, presenting the Gospel, inviting them to church. There was the Jesus Movement, then the Charismatic Renewal, The Purpose Driven Life, and the Church Growth gimmickry.

They all came to nothing, except to infect the LCMS' church life and worship with the same laxity infecting the wider culture. Die, Der, und Das was too hard! back then, but now we must learn over 100 gender identities. 

What they should have done is make babies. That is how one honors father and mother.

And so it is not well with the LCMS. And it will not live long on the earth.

The soul of the LCMS was required of it a long time ago. The only question now is whose things shall these be which remain?

Down he points.

 

The Absence of the Presence

If the experience of the divine presence can be as underwhelming in charismatic circles as it has been in sacramental Christianity, it is at least as equally elusive in what we may unhappily call "mystical" Christianity where a "personal relationship" with Christ is the emphasis.

Hard and fast borderlines between these forms do not exist universally, of course, and some mixture of these may be observed, depending on peculiar historical developments dominant in the experience of the individual congregation, especially since the 1970's when a great deal of interpenetration of ideas has occurred. For those sitting in the place of the unlearned, the sacramental churches may be represented as the far right of the spectrum, its mystical side is on the left but perhaps more to the center with the tongue talkers way out in left field. These last speak of being filled with the Holy Spirit in something called the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and so emphasize a direct and personal experience with the Godhead, and of a dramatic sort. Those to the center often claim to have a profound experience of conversion, but without the dramatic signs. Altar calls, emotional personal testimonies, and public dunkings are more their style. The most bizarre of the pentecostal types include those, I kid you not, who now even claim that God has actually restored missing teeth, in gold no less, and will do the same for you. Snake handling is oh so yesterday, while there is no question of the blind seeing and the deaf hearing. Hope springs eternal for the one who so believes: "the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father" (John 14:12).

The stodgy right wingers of the sacramental ilk or their rationalist brothers will sometimes glory in the fact of having no religious experience at all, and feel no regret about it either, which is why the authority and inspiration of Scripture is so important to them, for without that there would be nothing else. Among Lutherans of this type the old theological insight, simul justus et peccator, sums up human experience in Christ in formal, legal terms from God's perspective. The best analogy is the courtroom where the verdict of the jury and the sentence of the judge do not transform the essence of the person on trial. The person who goes free and the one who goes to jail differ in no wise from one another, except that the one knows this while the other does not. Technically freed from the consequences of sin, until the flesh is transformed in the resurrection the former is stuck with its baneful influences as much as is the latter. So he makes the best of it until then. It's schizophrenia only in the formal sense. Justification is forensic, but its temporal application requires other work outs first. Any kind of Christianity other than that, they will tell you, is madness in fact. That way lies manic depression at worst, fanaticism at best. No good can come of it. Mother Teresa, for all we know, now that her true feelings have seen the light of day, went to her grave in anguish over the absence of the divine presence in her experience. In public, she kept up appearances, as they say.

Mystical Christianity is all about human transformation, and it is no coincidence that its contemporary forms are heavily influenced by concerns, conceptions and terminology derived from the so-called science of psychology more than they are from the historic Christian faith. Ours is, after all, an age of enormous narcissism, a(n inevitable?) by-product of the success of the West. It is primarily a phenomenon of the twentieth century which has co-opted the first, and it comes as quite a surprise to its simpler devotees to learn that their hero, Saul of Tarsus, was an unwilling convert to Christianity who did not wring his hands in anguish over his sins when he "accepted" Christ on the road to Damascus. The Emperor Constantine was not brought to Christ in a fit of existential anguish about his failed life, substance abuse, and hurt feelings in his family but by a vision of the cross on the battlefield of war, if the sources are to be believed.

The stories of our converts are sniveling by comparison, and effeminate. We are constantly regaled with stories of slavery to drugs, alcohol, political power, sex and tobacco, none of which they were capable of overcoming without the help of Christ. When this was still a sane society, people told you to stop doing bad things because they thought God had so equipped human beings to stand on their own two feet. Not any more. The citizens of this country give the impression that they couldn't stop drinking for twenty-four hours let alone declare their independence from inside the confines of a paper bag, quite apart from the King of England.

It is not fair to single out the Christians for their bad behavior as if the same in non-believers is not also bad. It's just that their pretensions to transformation simply do not stand the tests of investigation. When no one else is awake early on Sunday mornings, they are out there on the highways in their freshly washed cars, as many of them speeding to church as the general population to work on a Monday morning. A Christian couldn't possibly pad a bill, especially if he's also your relative. We can't really treat you like one for whom Christ died unless you join our church. In fact, we don't really want to know you unless you do.

From where I sit, Christian or not, whether it's got tits or testicles, it's going to cause you trouble.