Opposition to Russell Moore among Southern Baptists is reaching a crescendo

For a summary of important essays by Southern Baptists who oppose Moore's liberalism, see here.

Francis Chan's radical discipleship isn't so radical that he can't own two restaurants, a marina and a hotel

Here, in the opening after the prayer, by his own admission.

He's not exactly the utterly penniless itinerant prophet like Jesus, nor even the itinerant self-supporting apostle and laborer like Paul. He's what is called a rentier. He uses the income to support his family, which lives frugally, and his work, which is noteworthy.

But who knows? Maybe some day he'll actually trust God and go all the way. For now Francis Chan still does not grasp that repentance according to Jesus means, "No man can be my disciple who does not say goodbye to everything that he owns."

What do really religious people and leftists have in common?

Both were standing in the same different line from the one where God was, handing out the ordinary sense of humor.

They received this one instead, the one where you happily smile while marching in memory of homicide victims:

Rev. Jackson and Father Pfleger march in Chicago Dec. 31, 2016 

The Religion Laugh of the Day: Rob Bell becomes a Muslim . . .

. . . so he'll have a whole new set of beliefs to deny one day.

Here, in The Babylon Bee.

In Matthew the useless servant is cut off, in Luke to be such is almost a badge of honor

And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. -- Matthew 25:30

So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do. -- Luke 17:10

Why Family Christian Stores is bankrupt for good: Pledged in 2012 to give 100% of profits to charity

That's no way to run a business, but it is a way to bankrupt it.

It took less than five years. And now over 3,000 employees who had jobs don't.

Good job, idiots!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Family Christian's own story here on November 29, 2012:

Family Christian, the nation's largest Christian retail chain with 280 stores in 36 states, announced today that its management team has partnered with a group of Atlanta-based Christian businessmen to acquire the company from its private equity owners. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Under the new ownership, Family Christian's pledge is to contribute 100% of its profits to Christian causes and, specifically, ministries serving widows and orphans both in the U.S. and abroad. Family Christian has always been committed to providing resources for the Christian community, but the new ownership structure will allow the organization to not only equip Christians in their daily walk, but to increase the organization's impact by providing substantial financial support to faith-based causes.

Fast forward to now. Dateline Grand Rapids, Michigan, February 23, 2017 here:

GRAND RAPIDS, MI - Family Christian Stores, the nation's largest chain of Christian book and merchandise stores, announced it will close its doors after 85 years in business.

The announcement on Thursday, Feb. 23, did not specify a timetable for the liquidation, which will affect more than 3,000 employees at more than 240 stores in 36 states.

In 2015, Family Christian shed about $127 million worth of debt to its suppliers, creditors and consignment vendors when it went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was sold for about $55 million.

"We had two very difficult years post-bankruptcy," said company president Chuck Bengochea in a news release, that blamed changing consumer habits and declining sales for the decision.

Giving profits away to charity is simply destruction of capital, which was needed to plow back into the company to keep it profitable under the very difficult retail circumstances of the online age after a terrible recession.

Too bad the ownership didn't think of its obligation to its employees and customers first. That they didn't indicates the ownership deserved this, but the lives now wrecked because of their blindness most certainly did not deserve it.

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

Present everywhere, huh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Luther, sovereign theologian, sovereign individual.

Big thinker Michael Novak, 83, has passed away after a battle with cancer

Michael Novak was an important Roman Catholic advocate for not just the compatibility of free market capitalism with Christianity, but for the idea that free market capitalism actually advanced the aims of Christianity, particularly the alleviation of poverty.

This made Novak an odd duck more among Catholics than among Protestants because Catholics had more generally posed as prophets like Jesus, ridiculing wealth, hoping they could inspire voluntary redistribution of it, whereas Protestants thought human beings should prove God's blessing by becoming, if not wealthy, at least self-sustaining members of society. Their shared error from the point of view of Jesus, however, is their mutual belief in human action.

I remember hearing Novak speak at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the days surrounding the release of his 1982 book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, his most influential work. Already then it seemed to me he misunderstood the aims of Jesus, if not the aims of Jesus' heirs. As recently as 2014 he misunderstood them still, not appreciating that the Carpenter's Son turned his back on small business capitalism by giving up his job, which was in keeping with his requirement that his followers do the same, in the belief that God was about to intervene decisively in Jewish history. Jewish history, not world history.

Like many contemporary self-styled conservatives, Novak had formerly been a leftist. I maintain that his interpretation of Jesus shows that he remained a leftist, the essence of which is to introduce utopia through human action. The phenomenon is not uniquely left, however, but human, a form of rebellion. Christians, like the Pharisees before them, made the same mistake, believing that they could extend the kingdom of God among men by acting as God's agents through the democratization of holiness through the universal availability of his Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ.

Both misunderstood the liminal setting for the ideas of Jesus, who above all else eschewed human action, whether by the Tea Party of his time, the Zealots, or by the liberals of his time, the Pharisees, who sought to extend the particular holiness of the Temple's priestly class to all the people through the synagogue system. Through the genius of the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus, Christianity ended up making Pharisaism safe for the whole world, minus the food restrictions and the mutilation.

As the eschatological prophet of promise, however, Jesus did not believe that the eternal verities would or could come by such human action, but only by divine action, divine intervention. This implied judgment, the two sides of which were impending salvation and imminent doom. Jesus was fundamentally a pessimistic thinker from the human point of view who did not believe that most of his contemporaries would be "saved" in this advent of judgment.

There was only one way to escape, and that involved radical repentance, of which few were capable.

No man, he said, can be my disciple who does not say goodbye to everything that he owns.

In the final analysis, every individual says goodbye to everything that he owns, as Michael Novak has just done. The tragedy of human life is that most of us simply spend our lives imagining that we won't have to.

"Likewise as it was in the days of Lot--they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built . . .."

In "A Mighty Fortress is our God" Luther plainly hymned the divisive cost of discipleship

And take they our life,

Goods, fame, child and wife,

Let these all be gone,

They yet have nothing won;

The Kingdom ours remaineth.

-- Martin Luther, 1529

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. 

 

-- Luke 14:33 

Who will give a stone to a son who asks for bread?

Allah, apparently.

Peter Leithart wrings his hands over the divisions caused by the Reformation, uttering complete rubbish

Here in First Things:

The catastrophic effects of these divisions rippled out into European culture, society, and politics. They’re rippling still. Worse, the fragmentation of the Church undermined the evangelical aims of the Reformers. By its sibling feuds, the Reformation quenched the very Spirit it had unleashed.

Protestants were not solely responsible for the division of the Church. Catholic intransigence and treachery silenced prophetic voices and delayed and prevented the deep self-examination the Church needed. Yet Protestants were responsible, especially for the divisions within the Reformation’s own ranks.

Quenched the Spirit, eh? Which spirit? Peter Leithart, like most Christians of the contemporary period, doesn't grasp the essentially divisive nature of the coming of the Spirit, as if the prophets were put to death for preaching the unity of the faith in the bond of peace. The prophets critiqued the household of God, calling it to repentance and revealing its sins, often at the cost of their lives.

It is a fetish of our utopian age to exclude this point of view in favor of a preoccupation with unity. But it's still disturbing that churchmen seem caught up in it, even at this late hour in the ridiculous history of ecumenism. They'll do anything it seems not to face the fact that in the Bible the idea is a development of its later literature, emphasized in the Fourth Gospel (especially John 10 and 17) and the Pauline Ephesian letter (chapter 4), neither of which can be reconciled with the Synoptic tradition nor the early genuine letters of Paul without doing a little violence to reason. Even the Passion narratives have been reworked from this point of view of the later "church", which is the first concrete expression of Christianity's decadence. Robust preoccupation with "the Other" from the original period of the Spirit gave way to the crabbed self-reflection and identity "politics" of Christian, Jew, church, synagogue, Greek, barbarian, male, female, slave, free, and Roman citizen.  

Jesus the eschatological prophet, on the other hand, never imagined a "church", let alone this long, drawn out history betwixt heaven and hell. He did not imagine "identities". Those who do the will of God are my mother, sisters and brothers, he said. Many are called. Few are chosen. Narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life. Few are they who find it. Repent while you still can. The reign of God is nigh. Come follow me.

What a polarizing fellow.

"All his ways are judgment" (Deut. 32:4).

 

Protestants shouldn't apologize for it.

Obscure blogger reveals how he shrugs off Pope Francis

I'm not on tranquilizers either.

Authenticity, as the Devil's Dictionary might have it

Authenticity

n. 100% pure synthetic, formerly never used of persons for reasons no longer obvious, a vestige of  dead Romanticism cut from its corpse and cherished and venerated like a talisman in the pursuit of episodes of emotional excess.

Not coincidentally it is a disease particularly afflicting the young, who have little experience of being reliable, dependable and trustworthy but account for half of the 20 million new diagnoses of sexually transmitted disease every year. And more generally the world's fish population.

Supremes decline to hear case, polygamy remains a crime in Utah

Here is the lede:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear arguments from the husband and four wives who star in the television show "Sister Wives," letting stand a lower court ruling that kept polygamy a crime in Utah. 

The story indicates the Supremes let stand a Denver appeals court ruling that "The Browns" had no standing to sue in the first place under the Utah statute.

Viewership of their Sister Wives show struggles around the 2 million mark.

Duck Dynasty by contrast, a show about a large successful colorful but traditional family, averaged 8.7 million viewers in 2013. 

The poor refugees

Poor refugees, at first they purchase here;

And soon as denizen'd, they domineer.

-- John Dryden

Suddenly what the Bible says about refugees matters, but about gays . . .

. . . or marriage, or divorce, or abortion, or the vow of poverty et cetera et cetera et cetera, not so much.

Purported Catholic Christopher Jolly Hale thinks walls are anti-Christian, but obviously hasn't visited the Vatican

Here.

Is the pope's wall anti-Christian?

Hale used to be a director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which was exposed by Wikileaks as an organization working for a progressive revolution in the Catholic Church.

In other words, he's a commie.

Aquí Me Coloco: President of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod adopts the euphemism "undocumented immigrant" for "illegal alien"

Here:

The LCMS, he writes, “is doing everything possible within its capacities to assist you in compassionate action” toward immigrants. “We have and will continue to stand with Jesus’ mandate to ‘love your neighbor’ in the case of immigrants, documented or not, even as we provide assistance within the bounds of the law.”

Well, without Hispanics, the LCMS in North America is probably dead, so it's understandable.

And yeah, he's the leader of the conservatives. Think what the liberals want.

The Pecksniffian New York Times defends accepting Syrian refugees at a ratio of 1% Christian to 99% Muslim as representative

Ignoring the Obama administration's own declaration of a genocide against religious minorities on March 17, 2016, which Trump's policy seeks to address.

Here:

While only about one percent of the refugees from Syria resettled in the United States last year were Christian, the population of that country is 93 percent Muslim and only five percent Christian, according to Pew. And leaders of several refugee resettlement organizations said during interviews that it takes 18 months to three years for most refugees to go through the vetting process to get into the United States. Many Syrian Christians got into the pipeline more recently.

"Many Syrian Christians got into the pipeline more recently".

Yeah. They mean the ones who survived.

The rest were tortured, crucified or had their heads cut off before there even was a pipeline. An untold number of Christians has died in an officially declared genocide at the hands of ISIS since it took over parts of Syria and Iraq beginning in 2014. Perhaps over 1000 before that. 

Trump presidency to prioritize Christian refugees persecuted by Muslim fanatics, restoring balance

From the story here:

[A]bout 99 percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the U.S. were Muslim, while less than 1 percent were Christian.

The difference between Christianity Today's Ed Stetzer and a Lutheran

Ed Stetzer in Christianity Today here makes Kellyanne Conway own "alternative facts" like a Democrat would, or a fundamentalist, whereas a Lutheran would "put the best construction on everything", cut her some slack for the oxymoron, and grant that competing crowd estimates are just that, estimates, not facts (every reasonable person knows that's what Conway meant, but Ed's not being very reasonable, he's being a literalist):

Yet the Trump Administration is starting with a new version of facts—called “alternative facts” by Trump’s spokeswoman. That’s not helpful. This is a bad start and a problem for the Trump administration. 

The Eighth Commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

What does this mean?--Answer: We should fear and love God that we may not deceitfully belie, betray, slander, or defame our neighbor, but defend him, [think and] speak well of him, and put the best construction on everything.

Donald Trump takes the oath of office on his boyhood Bible today

I've got one just like it from my boyhood, but slightly more used.

The triple tradition says that Jesus broke the prime directive to pieces

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

-- Genesis 1:27f.

For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.

-- Matthew 22:30

For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.

-- Mark 12:25

And Jesus answering said unto them, The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: Neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.

-- Luke 20:34ff.

Martin Luther King Jr. was not a conservative, but someone who thought Christians could in some sense immanentize the eschaton

King, quoted here in WaPo:

“My friends,” Dr. King said in his Detroit sermon, “all I’m trying to say is that if we are to go forward today, we’ve got to go back and rediscover some mighty precious values that we’ve left behind. That’s the only way that we would be able to make of our world a better world, and to make of this world what God wants it to be. . . .”

The sermon is noteworthy for King's utopian inveighing against hate as if it were not ineradicable:

It’s wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong! It’s wrong in America, it’s wrong in Germany, it’s wrong in Russia, it’s wrong in China! It was wrong in two thousand B.c., and it’s wrong in nineteen fifty-four A.D.! It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong! 

Yes, it's in there: "Money is the answer for everything"

Ecclesiastes 10:19

Truth comes like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome

Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome. We all pay an involuntary homage to antiquity. ... To the great majority of mortal eyes, Time sanctifies everything that he does not destroy. 

-- Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, Volume 1 (London: 1841), p. 314. 

The 12-year old Jew who ate a salami sandwich on his front porch on Yom Kippur 1937 has died

Nat Hentoff, uncompromising defender of freedom of speech, reported here.

Stupidest story of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation: "Das Ende" on Playmobil Luther Bible is anti-Semitic

My KJV page at the end of the Old Testament: The End of the Prophets

Only a fool or a malcontent would fail to recognize the heretofore customary and universal editorial use of "the end". In this case, it's a malcontent, but it's fools who take his lies seriously.

Here:

Why was the word “END” written so prominently, Brumlik asked. “Theologically, there can be no other reason than that the ‘Old Testament’ and its validity should be seen as ended and superseded,” he wrote in the Berlin newspaper tageszeitung [sic]. 

My KJV page at the end of the New Testament: The End

WaPo runs op-ed by Michael Horton of Westminster Seminary in California, explaining the heterodoxy surrounding Donald Trump

Here. Not everyone in California is crazy.

Triumph through defeat: New Yorker music critic observes that Bach's understanding of the Lutheran theology of the cross may have been ahead of its time

Here:

You need not have seen the words Passio secundum Johannem at the head of the score to feel that this is the scene at Golgotha: an emaciated body raised on the Cross, nails being driven in one by one, blood trickling down, a murmuring crowd below. It goes on for nine or ten minutes, in an irresistible sombre rhythm, a dance of death that all must join.

What went through the minds of the congregation at the Nikolaikirche, in Leipzig, on Good Friday, 1724, when the St. John Passion had its first performance? A year earlier, Johann Sebastian Bach, aged thirty-nine, had taken up posts as the cantor of the St. Thomas School and the director of music for Leipzig’s Lutheran churches. He had already acquired a reputation for being difficult, for using “curious variations” and “strange tones.” More than a few of his works begin with gestures that inspire awe and fear. Several pieces from his years as an organ virtuoso practice a kind of sonic terrorism. The Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor feasts on dissonance with almost diabolical glee, perpetrating one of the most violent harmonies of the pre-Wagnerian era: a chord in which a D clashes with both a C-sharp and an E-flat, resulting in a full-throated acoustical scream.

In the St. John Passion, Bach’s art of holy dread assumes unprecedented dimensions. The almost outlandish thing about “Herr, unser Herrscher” is that it does not simply take the point of view of the mourners and the mockers. It also adopts the perspective of the man on the Cross, gazing up and down. Aspects of the music that seem catastrophic acquire a triumphant tinge. ...

If the good people of Leipzig understood that they were in the presence of the most stupendous talent in musical history, they gave no sign. Indeed, Bach removed “Herr, unser Herrscher” from the score when he revived the St. John the following year—a hint that his listeners may have gone away unhappy.

Two gather for the 5:15 PM Sunday service at St. Luke's Episcopal Cathedral, Portland, ME, and one of them was the priest

A female priest, and the male reporter, who was feeling "adrift".

From his story here:

The wide, empty nave was dark except for the light coming in through the stained-glass windows. My footsteps had never sounded louder as I walked toward the little octagonal chapel at the back, where the Rev. Anne Fowler sat alone by the altar.

“Oh,” she said. “I guess it’ll just be us tonight.”

I was the only one who’d shown up for the 5:15 service.

Too bad Eleanor Rigby wasn't there.

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.”

The tradition of the apostles supplanted the tradition of the elders and was both oral and written

On the other hand, our old ways were once new, weren't they?

Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread.

-- Matthew 15:2

Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.

-- 2 Thessalonians 2:15

A stupid delusion I heard over the holiday, attributed by the person to the movie Schindler's List

The delusion: While the Nazis attacked Jews on Kristallnacht the German Christians were in their churches singing Christmas carols, so they couldn't have been genuinely Christian. 

The fact: Kristallnacht occurred in the middle of the night on November 9-10, 1938 while most people were asleep in their beds, and weeks before the beginning of Advent that year. No one was in church singing anything, let alone Christmas carols. The enraged events of that night occurred just hours after the elaborate commemoration in Munich of the 15th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, and after the news of the death of a German diplomat shot in Paris had reached Hitler.  

The unpleasant truth: Christians in the United States, traditional or otherwise, continue to go about their own merry lives and have since 1973 while tens of millions of the American unborn have been slaughtered in the womb and continue to be until this very day right under their very own noses, but they do nothing about it.

Yet somehow it's the German Christians who are the hypocrites.

The Virgin Birth kerfuffle erupts among the Baptists, WaPo artfully avoids Roman Catholic Mariolatry and its Holy Quaternity

WaPo ends the story with this whopper, as if Roman Catholicism's thinking about Mary were less of a spectacle than that of the rubes in flyover country:

The Catholic Church teaches that the Virgin Mary was also conceived without sin to carry Jesus (the “Immaculate Conception” applies to hers, not his) and that she was “assumed” into heaven at the end of her life. Catholics name Mary as “blessed among women” and venerate her as a saint for her miraculous life.

Well not just "as a saint". She is the Queen of Heaven who reigns over the entire world and is to be worshipped, according to Pius XII in 1954:

From the earliest ages of the catholic church a Christian people, whether in time of triumph or more especially in time of crisis, has addressed prayers of petition and hymns of praise and veneration to the Queen of Heaven. And never has that hope wavered which they placed in the Mother of the Divine King, Jesus Christ; nor has that faith ever failed by which we are taught that Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, reigns with a mother's solicitude over the entire world, just as she is crowned in heavenly blessedness with the glory of a Queen. ...

It is gratifying to recall that We ourselves, on the first day of November of the Holy Year 1950, before a huge multitude of Cardinals, Bishops, priests, and of the faithful who had assembled from every part of the world, defined the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven where she is present in soul and body reigning, together with her only Son, amid the heavenly choirs of angels and Saints. Moreover, since almost a century has passed since Our predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, proclaimed and defined the dogma that the great Mother of God had been conceived without any stain of original sin, We instituted the current Marian Year And now it is a great consolation to Us to see great multitudes here in Rome - and especially in the Liberian Basilica - giving testimony in a striking way to their faith and ardent love for their heavenly Mother. In all parts of the world We learn that devotion to the Virgin Mother of God is flourishing more and more, and that the principal shrines of Mary have been visited and are still being visited by many throngs of Catholic pilgrims gathered in prayer. ...

In order to understand better this sublime dignity of the Mother of God over all creatures let us recall that the holy Mother of God was, at the very moment of her Immaculate Conception, so filled with grace as to surpass the grace of all the Saints. Wherefore, as Our Predecessor of happy memory, Pius IX wrote, God "showered her with heavenly gifts and graces from the treasury of His divinity so far beyond what He gave to all the angels and saints that she was ever free from the least stain of sin; she is so beautiful and perfect, and possesses such fullness of innocence and holiness, that under God a greater could not be dreamed, and only God can comprehend the marvel." ...

"With a heart that is truly a mother's," to quote again Our Predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, "does she approach the problem of our salvation, and is solicitous for the whole human race; made Queen of heaven and earth by the Lord, exalted above all choirs of angels and saints, and standing at the right hand of her only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, she intercedes powerfully for us with a mother's prayers, obtains what she seeks, and cannot be refused." On this point another of Our Predecessors of happy memory, Leo XIII, has said that an "almost immeasurable" power has been given Mary in the distribution of graces; St. Pius X adds that she fills this office "as by the right of a mother."

Let all Christians, therefore, glory in being subjects of the Virgin Mother of God, who, while wielding royal power, is on fire with a mother's love. ...

[M]ay Christians gather, in small numbers and large, to sing her praises in churches, in homes, in hospitals, in prisons. May Mary's name be held in highest reverence, a name sweeter than honey and more precious than jewels; may none utter blasphemous words, the sign of a defiled soul, against that name graced with such dignity and revered for its motherly goodness; let no one be so bold as to speak a syllable which lacks the respect due to her name. ...

By this Encyclical Letter We are instituting a feast so that all may recognize more clearly and venerate more devoutly the merciful and maternal sway of the Mother of God. 

-- AD CAELI REGINAM

ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XII ON PROCLAIMING THE QUEENSHIP OF MARY TO THE VENERABLE BRETHREN, THE PATRIARCHS, PRIMATES, ARCHBISHOPS, BISHIOPS, AND OTHER LOCAL ORDINARIES IN PEACE AND COMMUNION WITH THE HOLY SEE

Megan McArdle discusses the failure of communism beyond the small scale . . .

. . . but misses that its origin is in the most intimate unit of small scale experience of all, the nuclear family. Once you extrapolate much beyond that level ("Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother." -- Mark 3:34f.) it's not going to last long.

Megan McArdle, here:

[C]ommunism has never successfully worked above the level of a small group; it’s trying to manage transactions with strangers on the logic of small-group reciprocal altruism. Those small groups have a lot of social mechanisms, from shaming to threat of exile, to prevent people from cheating. When you try to scale it up to millions of strangers, it collapses into destitution or bloody tyranny. 

And all that believed were together, and had all things common. ... And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. ... And one of them named Ag'abus stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world; and this took place* in the days of Claudius. And the disciples determined, every one according to his ability, to send relief to the brethren who lived in Judea; and they did so, sending it to the elders by the hand of Barnabas and Saul. 

-- Acts 2:44; 4:32; 11:28ff.

*probably sometime between AD 44 and 48

How to shorten your lifespan in three easy steps

1. Smoke cigs. 7 years.

2. Drink too much. 10 years.

3. Love the love which dare not speak its name. 24 years.

As if "Cigarettes, Whiskey and Wild Wild Women" weren't enough.

N. T. Wrong strikes again, denies the Synoptic Jesus who teaches a revolution in the creation, not a reaffirmation of it

It makes you wonder if N. T. Wright, here, would consign the whole triple tradition to "incipient gnosticism", which would be quite the leap:

Second, John's prologue by its structure reaffirms the order of Creation at the point where it is being challenged today. John consciously echoes the first chapter of Genesis: "In the beginning God made heaven and earth; in the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1). When the Word becomes flesh, heaven and earth are joined together at last, as God always intended.

But the Creation story, which begins with the duality of heaven and earth, reaches its climax in the duality of male and female. When heaven and earth are joined together in Jesus Christ, the glorious intention for the whole of Creation is unveiled, reaffirming the creation of male and female in God's image. There is something about the enfleshment of the Word in John 1 that stands parallel to Genesis 1 and speaks of Creation fulfilled. We see what's going on: Jesus Christ has come as the Bridegroom, the one for whom the Bride has been waiting.

Not for nothing is Jesus's first sign to transform a wedding from disaster to triumph. Not for nothing do we find a man and a woman at the foot of the Cross. The same incipient gnosticism which says that true religion is about "discovering who we really are" is all too ready to say that who we really are may have nothing to do with being physically created as male or female. But the Christmas message is about the redemption of God's good world, his wonderful Creation, so that it can be the glorious thing it was made to be. This word is strange, even incomprehensible, in today's culture. But if you have ears to hear, then hear it.

Au contraire:

For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.

-- Matthew 22:30

For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.

-- Mark 12:25

And Jesus answering said unto them, The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: Neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.

-- Luke 20:34ff.

Pagan church, pagan people with their eyes upon the Lord

Pagan, from Latin paganus, a country boy.

I know, I know, that's completely politically incorrect.

Larry Norman, here.

The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them . . . but I am among you as he that serveth

And there was also a strife among them, which of them should be accounted the greatest. And he said unto them, The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve. For whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth? is not he that sitteth at meat? but I am among you as he that serveth.

-- Luke 22:24ff.

To Jesus the prophet, God is the Great King and Jerusalem is his city

But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God's throne: Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King.

-- Matthew 5:34f.

Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King. God is known in her palaces for a refuge.

-- Psalm 48:2f.

Kingship in Israel represented the decay of the post-Mosaic order

Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah, And said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations. But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the LORD. And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.

-- 1 Samuel 8:4ff.

You just have to take your little life, and walk it out

I’m doing all I can for now, with what I have. Sometimes that’s all you can do. You just have to take your little life, and walk it out.

-- Janet Foy, from the dead zone here

Nevertheless I must walk to day, and to morrow, and the day following . . .

-- Luke 13:33

Shall the dead arise and praise thee?

Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? shall the dead arise and praise thee? Selah.

-- Psalm 88:10

Some say it's better to smoke here than hereafter . . .

. . . and some believe he's smoking more than ever.

This Lutheran and his Jewish wife and daughter could not escape, and gassed themselves in late 1942

Renate Stein, Jochen Klepper and wife Johanna Stein

Sometime in November 1942 the well known poet Jochen Klepper had received orders to report once again for military service, from which he had previously been dismissed because of his mixed marriage. Then on December 10, 1942 Adolf Eichmann personally denied Renate, aged 20, an exit visa from Germany, exposing her to the requirement to obey a previous deportation order to the camps. The next day they were all found dead on the floor in the kitchen.

Rod Dreher isn't orthodox about prayer anymore than anyone else is

Instead of praying in secret according to the teaching of Jesus, Rod Dreher broadcasts the news about his praying, makes a show of his praying even before it happens, and uses his praying almost like a weapon, a cudgel, with which to threaten, nay promise, confrontation with the enemy, solidarity with the like-minded, and "witness" generally against the godless West, as if there were no godless East. But if the witness is contrary to the basic soul of the faith, what good is it?

Dreher fancies himself a refugee from the religious right, but what follows below just proves once again that you can take the man out of the politicized religion, but you can't take the politicizing out of the religious man. The reason, of course, is that man is a political animal by nature, as Aristotle taught us long ago, and Paul accepted and taught in his peculiarly Christian way.

If the true faith of Jesus were practised anywhere, however, you would be hard-pressed to know much about it, by definition. What is "the widespread practice of the faith" when we are to pray in secret, give in secret, fast in secret? The public face of the church is not known by these things. The true orthodox are invisible in these matters or they are not orthodox. When they pray, you do not know it. They pray like David to be hidden, not revealed:

Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings, From the wicked that oppress me, from my deadly enemies, who compass me about.

 

-- Psalm 17:8f.

Here is Dreher, featured this day at Real Clear Religion:

As most readers know, I am an Orthodox Christian. My deep concern over the relationship between Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church is not that the ROC will exercise undue influence over the Russian state, but that the ROC will become Russian nationalism at prayer. I am extremely sympathetic to the ROC critique of the West, and see things like the opening of the new Russian Orthodox cathedral in Paris to be a blessing. On my next trip to Paris, after I make my pilgrimage to pray before the relics of St. Genevieve, the city’s patron, I will make a visit to this Russian cathedral, pray there, and give thanks to God for its witness in that magnificent Christian (or once-Christian) city. It is my prayer — really, it is — that the Russian cathedral will in some real sense bring believing Eastern and Western Christians closer together, and strengthen our common witness against the post-Christian West — such that one day, Europe may return to the widespread practice of the faith. 

Sometimes I wonder if Rod Dreher thinks more highly of himself than he ought to think.

Rod Dreher imagining he's Karl Barth

Karl Barth imagining what's for dinner