Laser-focused middle class Christianity Today finds the speck in a brother's eye, doesn't like it when the poors complain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is there no minimum wage? Is there no welfare? Do we not pay taxes?

 

The prophet Ezekiel opposed the spiritual determinism of the Torah, favoring instead the personal responsibility of the individual

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. 

-- Ezekiel 18:20 

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; 

-- Exodus 20:5

And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.  

-- Exodus 34:6f.

The LORD is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.

-- Numbers 14:18

Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me,

-- Deuteronomy 5:9

'You show lovingkindness to thousands, and repay the iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children after them—the Great, the Mighty God, whose name is the LORD of hosts.'

-- Jeremiah 32:18

 

The Fourth Gospel notably makes the issue a burning one during the ministry of Jesus, but makes Jesus not exactly a Solomon for his take on it, which is reminiscent of his answer whether to pay taxes to Caesar or not:

And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. 

-- John 9:2f.

Luke, however, presents a Jesus who takes no prisoners.

He clearly places Jesus against the view of Ezekiel. Jesus explicitly makes his own generation responsible, and liable, for the murder of ALL past prophets, all the way back to ABEL (Can't you just hear his defenders shouting, But this is clearly hyperbole!?):

That the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation. 

-- Luke 11:50f.

And Matthew's gospel does the same:

That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation.

-- Matthew 23:35f. 

 

The truth is the Torah is also divided on the issue.

A proponent of the view of Ezekiel somehow sneaked it into the code and it won enough acceptance to become a touchstone:

The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. 

-- Deuteronomy 24:16

But the children of the murderers he slew not: according unto that which is written in the book of the law of Moses, wherein the LORD commanded, saying, The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, nor the children be put to death for the fathers; but every man shall be put to death for his own sin. 

-- II Kings 14:6

But he slew not their children, but did as it is written in the law in the book of Moses, where the LORD commanded, saying, The fathers shall not die for the children, neither shall the children die for the fathers, but every man shall die for his own sin.

-- II Chronicles 25:4

 

The perennial problems of good and evil, justice and mercy, the community and the individual, are mightily wrestled with by religion, but hardly resolved by it.

It could hardly be otherwise.

 

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..."

Religion is not the cornerstone of the American Republic

Religion is not the cornerstone of the American Republic, but know-nothings keep repeating that it is, such as "the Framers first listed religious liberty for a reason".

No, they did not.

The original First Amendment to the US Constitution involved representation, not religion. The original Second Amendment in its turn addressed representation's remuneration, not religion. Not until the original Third Amendment did religious liberty come up, and guns in turn in the Fourth, and so on through what is now our Tenth Amendment. The original First and Second Amendments were the first two of twelve, but failed of ratification.

The supposed primacy of religion because it was a subject of the First Amendment is a myth, recently repeated again here by one Josh Hammer:

Religious liberty, defined perhaps as the ability of the religious to freely and unobtrusively practice their faiths and worship and obey the Almighty in accordance with the idiosyncratic dictates of one’s own conscience, is the cornerstone of the American republic. Numerically, the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment are the first enumerated provisions of the very first ratified constitutional amendment. That is no mere coincident — the Framers first listed religious liberty for a reason.

This is nonsense. The original First Amendment, Article the First below, was about a formula for regularizing representation. That was the matter of first importance at the founding of the country. It is first in all the bills of rights which passed the Congress in 1789. Because it and its companion amendment were not ratifed at the founding, however, the Third Amendment became the First only by accident. While Article the First should have been ratified in view of what the Congress later did because the article wasn't ratified, as we'll see below, Article the Second was at least eventually ratified in the 27th Amendment ... in 1992.

Ratification of Article the First remains the great unfinished task from the Revolutionary era. If Article the Second could live on and be ratified in 1992, so can Article the First still be ratified today, or something close to it.

If the Revolution was sparked by a central animating outrage, it was taxation without representation. More than anything else it drove the first Americans to revolt against their English countrymen, with whom they otherwise shared the most intimate bonds of religious feeling, language, law, history, blood and custom. But religion or no, a distant parliament across the sea thought it could pick their fellow countrymen's pockets without their input or consent.

Americans today face a similar situation with the US Congress, even if they can't quite put it into words. The US president today may be greatly disapproved, but even he routinely far outscores the 535 men and women of an insular Congress in far away Washington, DC, who do not and cannot represent the 329 million people sprawled across this continent. The members of Congress go on and on wildly spending money which they no longer even collect sufficient taxes to cover but instead just borrow, in the people's name. This has been the default position of both parties in the wake of tax reform since the 1980s: "If you won't let us tax you to pay for it, we'll just borrow it instead", they seem to say. There is no brake on the spending, and in truth many don't want there to be.

We've seen this default behavior before.

Never too terribly bright in the first place, it finally dawned on the Congress back in the 1920s that it could fix the number in the US House at 435 because the founding generation had never settled the issue in Article the First.  With the Senate becoming a "super House" by virtue of the change to popular election, the House found it expedient to protect its own power by stopping itself from growing. Every new member, after all, dilutes the power of those already there and adds a vote for or against something current membership is already for or against. At the same time burgeoning immigration meant there were many new Germans, Irish and Italians in America which a WASPy Congress would rather not sit next to in the Capitol. The time was ripe to end the growth of representation.

The people, no longer reliably connected to the well springs of the founding, were none the wiser. They still aren't. Yet that act was the biggest power grab in the history of the Republic, second only to Abraham Lincoln's violation of the sovereign rights of the States. Each member of Congress since that time has accrued more and more power as a simple consequence of the country growing in population. Each one wields authority over ever larger legions of nameless faces in congressional districts now bloated to an average of 756,000 souls each in 2019. This subversion of the growth of representation with population was as sure a violation of the original intent of the constitution as was the Executive's War On the States. From the point of view of self-government, the one was as much an expression of tyranny as the other.

The results haven't been pretty. We now have a Congress the election of whose members routinely costs $10 million for a representative on average, $20 million for a Senator, none of whom know your name or care what you think. They pay more attention to the 11,586 registered lobbyists in 2018 than they do to us. There are nearly 27 lobbyists per member of the US House, and nearly one lobbyist for every 30,000 Americans, which ironically is the ratio for initial representation which Article the First originally had in mind. We have the best government which special interest money can buy. But just imagine: The founding generation fought bitterly over representation ratios of 1:30,000 vs. 1:50,000 and couldn't agree about them, but we sit idly by and let grifters domineer over ever growing hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans. The founding generation would not recognize us as a free people.

As a consequence of this concentration of more and more power in fewer and fewer hands in the US House and Senate, the leaders of Congress such as Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell also loom much larger in importance than they ever should have, as have the political parties they represent. Minority voices get no hearing and gain no traction. A stultifying degeneration to the lowest common denominator prevails, purple in hue, mostly. Mediocrity spreads everywhere. Millions feel disaffected, to the extent that ex-patriation has become a thing in the last refuge for freedom on earth.

A US House today of 6,580 under Article the First, on the other hand, would indeed be more cumbersome and inefficient than the Speaker of the House having to whip just 218 votes to spend us blind, but that's kind of THE WHOLE IDEA. It's much harder to rack up a national debt of $22.829 trillion when you have to herd 3,291 cats to do it instead of 218, but that's exactly what passing the Reapportionment Act of 1929 was designed to forestall. The 1920s was about nothing if not about revolutionizing America in the interests of power concentrated in a large, professional and centralized government controlled by specialists, answering only to an elite of 535 zeroes which has gone on to bequeath to us a debt of $23 with twelve zeroes after it. 

Meanwhile religious people today still have their choice of roughly 345,000 congregations in the US where 151 million worship as they please, and the rest don't. We are not suffering under the dim pall of an Established Religion of Rome, Wittenberg, Jerusalem or Mecca. Yet somehow all this religious activity has done absolutely nothing to prevent all this profligacy and debt slavery. Some would even go so far as to say that religion has more than contributed to this sorry state of affairs. 

The inescapable truth is that WE ALL are indeed in servitude. WE ALL are on the hook for those trillions upon trillions of dollars, with no end in sight. Not individually perhaps, but when countries can no longer pay their bills, they tend not to last too long, and the innocent end up paying the same price as the spendthrifts, usually involuntarily through social decay, disease, famine and war.

We really ought to fix this while we still can. Representation is the cornerstone of the Republic, not religion, and it's high time we had some of the former again.     

Article the First:

"After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons."

Article the Second:

"No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened."

When God is dead to others, the good in you which comes from God is dead to them too

As an atheist himself says, here:

Social life is a theater. Behind the curtains, beasts reign. Fear is the primary check on the underlying self-assertion. Just as justice, at bottom, is usually no more than a desire to inflict pain, so the law and the state itself are possible only at gunpoint. The main reason people pay taxes, resist from harming one another (when they do), and obey the law is not that they are good moral agents, but that they are deterred by the prospect of painful consequences. ...

To a significant extent, civilization is nothing but a rationalist illusion. Conflict is the natural state of all animals, and man is the only cruel animal only because other animals are not thus advanced. Intrinsically competitive, the world is forever torn by incompatible interests. If we had knowledge of our collective motives and intentions, we’d see that human life is not meant to be peaceful and orderly. No wonder we all live in and by conflict, with ourselves, with family, with friends, with colleagues and co-workers, and on and on.

United Methodist Church got $7.6 million in the last 3 years from our taxes to settle illegals in the US

Hey, just doing the work American communists won't do.

Reported here:

[Minerva] Carcano heads the California-Pacific Conference of the United Methodist Church, which supports comprehensive immigration reform. The church’s Board of Child Care has received at least $7.6 million in federal grants in the last three years to provide shelter services for unaccompanied alien children who are apprehended crossing into the U.S. illegally.

“We are working to welcome everyone,” Carcano told [Rep.] Goodlatte in response to his question about welcoming illegal aliens.

“That is very concerning to me,” the Republican replied, adding that the United Methodist Church (UMC) was “essentially aiding and abetting” illegal aliens. ...

“Immigrants want to stay home,” she said. “They’re not able to stay home because we’ve undermined their economies. We have raped their lands.”

Caiaphas continued as high priest until deposed by Vitellius, Roman governor of Syria, in 36

Kayafa ossuary

And Jesus said, "I am; and you will see the Son of man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven."

-- Mark 14:62

Vitellius was there [at Jerusalem] magnificently received, and released the inhabitants of Jerusalem from all the taxes upon the fruits that were bought and sold, and gave them leave to have the care of the high priest’s vestments, with all their ornaments, and to have them under the custody of the priests in the temple, which power they used to have formerly, although at this time they were laid up in the tower of Antonia, the citadel so called ... Vitellius put those garments into our own power, as in the days of our forefathers, and ordered the captain of the guard not to trouble himself to inquire where they were laid, or when they were to be used; and this he did as an act of kindness, to oblige the nation to him. Besides which, he also deprived Joseph, who was also called Caiaphas, of the high priesthood, and appointed Jonathan, the son of Ananus, the former high priest, to succeed him.

-- Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, XVIII.

Queerdom is coming for Christendom's cash: Felix Salmon wants some evangelists to be more equal than others

Felix Salmon, here, who seems more interested in retribution against the church than in the money:

'[N]ow that the US government formally recognizes marriage equality as a fundamental right, it really shouldn’t skew the tax code so as to give millions of dollars in tax breaks to groups which remain steadfastly bigoted on the subject. ... [T]he US government subsidizes churches to the tune of many billions of dollars per year by giving them tax-exempt status. One conservative estimate put the sum at $71 billion, but the fact is that no one really knows what the number is. ... We’ll let you practice your bigotry, at least within the confines of your own church. But we’re not about to reward you for doing so.'

Funny he says nothing about de-privileging other nonprofits, of which religious organizations are just a subset. He appears not to like religion very much: His source for the $71 billion figure is secularhumanism.org, run by the Center for Inquiry, a nonprofit dedicated to a secular society and abolishing the tax privileges of religion.

In Felix Salmon's ideal world, some evangelists are to be more equal than others.

Estimated Revenue Lost To US Churches' Property Tax Exemption Is Next To Nothing

It has been estimated as recently as 2011 that the value of property owned by churches in the US could be as high as $500 billion. Think of all that as a large city with 2.5 million single family homes each valued at $200,000.

Assuming a taxable value of $250 billion and a tax rate of $3000 per $100,000 of taxable value, the revenue lost to local taxing authorities would come to just $7.5 billion.

Local government revenues in the US in 2011 came to $1.2 trillion, so the revenue lost to churches' property tax exemption comes to a measly 0.6% of that.

Big whoop.

Stephen Colbert Gets Off Four Shots To Finish

"There once was a man named Barack,

Whose re-election came as a shock. 

He raised the taxes I pay,

And then turned marriage gay. 

And now he's coming after your glock."

-- Stephen Colbert

The Ethics of the End of the World

Sunday upon Sunday can stack up after a while into something which amounts to not much of a muchness, and one must try to put all that out of one's mind for a moment, lay everything aside and re-read an entire Gospel at a sitting to regain one's sense of interpretive proportion. Usually when I do this I end up shaking my head over the stark contrast a Gospel represents just in its urgent tone of voice compared with the satisfied demeanor evident in the denizens of any given church. Whatever may be said of our religion of forty years ago, let alone twenty centuries, its moral tone was more distinct, its own sense of urgency more palpable. Was it because we were not as rich then? And did not live as long? Or was our connection to the sources of Jesus' inspiration somehow more substantial? Did we actually preach Law and Gospel in those days, instead of about Law and Gospel?

The conviction of the imminence of the end of the world has its basis in Jesus' moral vision of God's coming judgment. A studious peasant on the periphery of society, he brings to bear the powers of a gifted critic whose observations are steeped in the language of the Law and the Prophets but whose experience is that of the outsider looking in. His contemporaries are repeatedly said to be astonished at this mere carpenter's son who suddenly appears on the scene filled with an urgency to tell all who will listen to repent and follow him. Jesus is at pains to urge radical change in attitudes and behavior, to invest life with a moral sense it has come to lack, because he is convinced God is about to intervene decisively and justly in human history, in contrast to contemporaries who were content to acquiesce in the status quo, or who more widely thought we should enjoy it while it lasts because human life simply represented a fleeting point in time. For Jesus "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die" must give place to "take up your cross and follow me" because God surely is coming. Apart from this constellation of presuppositions, the character and force of the teaching of Jesus itself becomes distorted and misunderstood.

The earthly Son of Man of this early tradition, who has no place to lay his head, looks besieged by hangers-on though supremely in command in comparison with the ascended Jesus of the later tradition, who sits at the right hand of God's power in heaven, from where he seems oddly unable to find the kind of competent help he is looking for, even among The Twelve. The latter he had commanded "Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not." Suddenly all that is changed, and he at length hits upon a young fanatic, one Saul of Tarsus, to whom he complains from heaven of being persecuted and whom he subsequently directs in his travels, first here and not there, to spread the message beyond the Jewish confines where it had produced what must be considered an anticlimactic result. But after a good beginning even this Paul disappears for upwards of a decade before he reappears and produces the history with which we are now familiar from the New Testament.

Since God's decisive judgment of men had failed to materialize in the conclusion of Jesus' earthly career, it is not surprising that the re-interpretation of it should find new expression in such formulations as "it is appointed unto men once to die, and then comes judgment," which amounts to an attenuation of the original eschatological expectation of Jesus. And unlike Jesus' missionaries of Matthew 10 (The Twelve) who went out provisionless with the promise and expectation that they "shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come," Paul takes no support from anyone but funds his own missionary activity by practicing his trade, going among the Gentiles, planting churches and visiting them, retracing some of his steps multiple times, being closer to the end of all things only by a day, each and every day that passes.

Under the pressures of such developments, it is still somewhat surprising that the memory of the early tradition survived. At this long remove it is easy to fail to imagine the impact that it must have made. Much of it must have seemed as unintelligible as it was offensive.

We are informed that the individuals Jesus called who became The Twelve left everything behind, including co-workers and jobs, wives and family, and, depending on the chronology you accept, wandered around following their teacher for about three years, turning most of them into what today we should call beggars and dead-beat dads, socially irresponsible men of the meanest sort. While it may be argued that some of these had nothing to lose by doing so except long hot days in the boat, at least one may have abandoned a more lucrative skimming operation collecting taxes.

But most were far more reluctant to come along. The command to cut off hands and feet or pluck out eyes if they cause one to sin can't have helped. The rich young ruler sorrowfully declined because he couldn't bear to part with his many possessions, which Jesus told him to liquidate for the benefit of the poor as the final one thing lacking. Others protested their need to bury their dead before they answered the call to follow, for which social obligation Jesus had no patience whatsoever. The man at the plow must keep looking to the future and not look back or he will plow a crooked line and miss the kingdom's sudden appearance ahead of him.

The rich in particular have difficulty inheriting the kingdom of God because wealth's many cares distract them from the impending catastrophe and the narrow way of escape. The foolish rich man is more concerned with building new barns to store his gains than with the prospect of a final reckoning overtaking him as a thief in his nightly leisure. Riches represent a wide load on their backs which makes passage through the narrow doorway to the kingdom impossible. "Narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and few there be who find it."

Ostentatious dumping of wealth at the last second to get in won't do either, and would represent as conspicuous a sin as the lifelong propensity to accumulate wealth and ignore the needs of the poor. The improper divestiture of wealth at once exposes the insincerity of the would be follower of Jesus. It is noteworthy how often this is overlooked by our contemporaries both in the church and out of it who want to be recognized for their charitable giving. "Take heed," begins Matthew 6, "that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly."

A person who has less to give away more easily escapes detection than one who has much, and faces a task therefore much less onerous. But still he must do it, and God will see it. This is the meaning of Jesus' statement that the widow he saw from the street, who almost escaped notice when she put into the treasury two small coins, "cast more in than all they . . . even her whole life," because it was all that she had, in contrast to the Pharisees who openly and grandly deposited great sums out of their abundance. In what Jesus had observed in the woman, God had observed as one of the truest of followers.

What is remarkable about the Gospels is how they preserve the memory of this world renouncing ethic in the face of the imminent eschaton despite the trend already at work within them, especially in the little apocalypses in Matthew 24 and Mark 13, to re-interpret the urgent expectation of the end in the light of the crucifixion. Consider, for example, Luke's account of the trial of Jesus. There Jesus no longer predicts his imminent coming as the Son of Man with the clouds as in Mark, but only that he will in future sit at the right hand of the power of God (23:69). Yet in 14:33 Luke uniquely preserves in the sternest possible terms the conditions of discipleship: "So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." The latter shows against the hyperbolists that Jesus expected all his followers, not just the rich, to turn their backs on everything they owned. To the hardness of which even members of the Twelve had protested their compliance, wondering to what end.

To what end, indeed. Despite the sacred halo painted over the early community in Jerusalem in Luke's Acts of the Apostles, it was Paul who intervened to rescue them from the economic difficulties they got themselves into, and who made of The Way the Weltreligion that it became. It was his expansive missionary ambition which brought Jesus' moral vision of reality in a new form to new soils which did not have the benefit of the Law and the Prophets. Without Paul the civilization of the West is almost unimaginable, the way forward, full of danger. If ours is a post-Christian age, if we no longer know what to make of this inheritance, if we no longer care, perhaps the swine are ready to turn, trample and rend.