The impossibility of extremity: The worst is not

Who is't can say I'm at the worst?

I'm worse than e'er I was,

And worse I may be yet: The worst is not,

So long as I can say, this is the worst.

-- William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 4, Scene 1

The peevish are wasps, easily offended and soon angry

Lay the rough paths of peevish nature ev'n,

And open in each heart a little heav'n.

-- Matthew Prior

He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding:

but he that is hasty of spirit exalteth folly.

-- Proverbs 14:29 

The golden mean of equanimity

He laughs at all the vulgar cares and fears,

At their vain triumphs, and their vainer tears;

An equal temper in his mind he found,

When fortune flatter'd him, and when she frown'd.

-- John Dryden

Paula White and Beni Johnson: The dominionist lunatics behind Trump and the January 6 Capitol fiasco

Peggy Wehmeyer in The Dallas Morning News:

If evangelical Christians are called to live in truth, why do so many believe political conspiracies? :

In the middle of the Capitol siege on Jan. 6, I received a text message from a close friend in Colorado who’s been skeptical of my evangelical faith for years. He wanted me to see the picture on his TV screen: a giant Jesus 2020 flag waving beside protesters storming the nation’s capital. “I guess Jesus supports this mob!” he wrote. “Good to know.” Moments later, my daughter, alarmed, texted me a Facebook post from a friend calling on everyone to repent, for Jesus has come to the rescue. ...

When Trump became president, a rapidly growing faith movement began stirring political uprising in the evangelical church.

Largely unnoticed by any of the media, and rooted in charismatic and Pentecostal traditions, this informal network of mega churches counts its members in the tens of millions, many of them in their 20 and 30s.

Unlike other evangelicals, they believe their leaders are modern-day apostles and prophets who get their orders directly from God. Their mission is to usher in the Kingdom of God on Earth now, by, as they put it, “taking dominion” over politics, business and culture.

Trump caught on to the size and power of the movement quickly. When he lost the election in November, his spiritual adviser, Florida-based prophet Paula White, called for a “bold spiritual army” to restore him to power.

From California to Colorado to Texas, networks of apostolic prophets insisted that Trump won the election and was chosen by God to restore Christian values to America. Disagree with the prophets, according to this thinking, and you’re opposing God. If I didn’t know better, I’d ask them: If God is speaking through you and tells a lie, which one of you is the huckster?

One of the most influential churches in this movement is the Bethel Church in Redding, Calif., where spiritual leaders Bill and Beni Johnson oversee an 11,000-member ministry compound, including the popular Bethel Music label and the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry. Thousands of students enroll at schools like this to learn how to miraculously heal the sick, prophesy, and cast out demons.

Following the attack on the Capitol, Beni Johnson tweeted, “Pick up your sword and stand. Where’s your faith friends, is it in what God said or in a man? Find those seasoned prophets who are still standing and saying God has this!” Twitter quickly suspended Johnson’s account.

The food of fools

'Tis an old maxim in the schools,

That vanity's the food of fools;

Yet now and then your men of wit

Will condescend to take a bit.

-- Jonathan Swift

Freedom who loves, must first be wise and good

Freedom who loves, must first be wise and good;

But from that mark how far they rove we see,

For all this waste of wealth, and loss of blood.

-- John Milton

If Gnostic ideas are "essentially apostate" and "heretical", the question of their necessary and actual origin in Paul, for example, is simply being begged

The Gnostic heresy’s political successors :

First, they are all essentially apostate projects, enterprises that have arisen in the midst of Christian civilization with the aim of supplanting it.  And they could have arisen only within the Christian context, because, second, these projects are all heretical in the broad sense of that term.  That is to say, they are all founded on some idea inherited from Christianity (the dignity of the individual, human equality, a law-governed universe, a final consummation, etc.) but removed from the theological framework that originally gave it meaning, and radically distorted in the process. ... the key marks of the Gnostic mindset – the positing of unseen malign forces, the hermeneutics of suspicion and “dream world” theorizing, Manicheanism and shrill intolerance of all dissenters, even something like an immanentized eschaton (“The Storm”). 

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. -- Ephesians 6:12

Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. -- I Corinthians 2:6ff. 

Be not ye therefore partakers with them. For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light: ... And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them. ... Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.  -- Ephesians 5:7f.,11,14

Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light: Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son:  -- Colossians 1:12f.

Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth

 

 

When pronouncing sentence, seem not glad;

such spectacles, though they are just, are sad.

-- John Denham

Woe unto you, lawyers!

The busy, subtile serpents of the law

Did first my mind from true obedience draw;

While I did limits to the king prescribe,

And took for oracles that canting tribe.

-- Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon

Catholic apologist for the faith Dave Armstrong tries to wriggle out of renunciation as the essence of discipleship

  Who Must Renounce All Possessions to Follow Jesus?:

To start with, it’s very important to consider to whom Jesus’ words apply in this instance. I deny that it is required of every Christian to leave their families, or to be single and celibate. That is the higher calling of what Catholics call the “evangelical counsels.” Some are called to that; most of us are not. St. Paul makes these distinctions very clear in 1 Corinthians 7.

I contend that what is being referred to in the passages above is the “above and beyond” discipleship of those who are apostles: a select group of individuals that were present and required only during the period of the very early Church. Not all disciples are apostles. In fact, 99.99% are not. The Bible repeatedly refers to the initial group of the disciples of Jesus, as “the twelve.”

Armstrong of course avoids Luke 14:33 altogether, which is part of the discourse addressed to the "great multitudes" beginning in vs. 25 (which includes "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple"):

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

There is no idea of a "higher calling" here. The Twelve already exist, yet the "great multitudes" are called just as they were. There is only one standard of discipleship, and it applies to all equally, from high to low, from the rich young ruler to the lowly fisherman and every one in between.

Armstrong's other arguments tend to fall in the "is is ought" category of fallacy. Just because the disciples fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane despite Jesus' request that they watch and pray with him doesn't make it right! The disciples', not to mention Paul's, many instances of bad behavior making them bad disciples isn't proof that Jesus' retreated from his conceptions. How silly.

The guy argues like a proof-texter with nary a hint of subtlety.

Perhaps he was a former fundamentalist. The idea that certain things "were present and required only during the period of the very early Church" sounds like he had been a Baptist dispensationalist before he became a Catholic.

On a final note, apocalyptic eschatology, which is the sine qua non for understanding this and all of the New Testament, is, well, you guessed it, not in view.

"Pure liberal" who refuses to vote is not a man but rather Aristotle's god or beast, either way an anti-social being not part of the human community

Michael Malice, here, because when it comes down to it in the end, he simply wants to be alone:

"I simply pray to be left alone."

Aristotle, Politics 1, 1253:

A man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it inasmuch as he is solitary ... the clanless, lawless, hearthless man reviled by Homer, for one by nature unsocial is also a lover of war. ...

The city-state is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually. ...

When the whole body is destroyed, foot or hand will not exist except in an equivocal sense. ...

If each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole state as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god. ...

Radicalism is pulling up something by the roots before the time

The radical cannot abide the co-existence of opposites.

So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares?  He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest . . ..

-- Matthew 13:27ff.

Swear no oaths to others or to yourself, on New Year's Day or on any other day

When I have most need to employ a friend, 

Deep, hollow, treacherous, and full of guile, 

Be he to me! This do I beg of heav'n, 

When I am cold in zeal to you or yours.

-- Buckingham in William Shakespeare's Richard III (as known to Samuel Johnson)

OK, so not everyone's a liar

 Even if everyone else is a liar, God is true.

-- Romans 3:4

Jesus saw Nathan'a-el coming to him, and said of him, "Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!" 

-- John 1:47

Limners of another kind

Poets are limners of another kind,

To copy out ideas in the mind;

Words are the paint by which their thoughts are shown,

And nature is their object to be drawn.

-- George Granville

The lighted fool

 

 

The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. ...

Richard Bentley's "Big Crunch"

"There might arise some vertiginous motions or whirlpools in the matter of the chaos, whereby the atoms must be thrust and crowded to the middle of those whirlpools, and there constipate one another into great solid bodies."

-- Richard Bentley (1662-1742)

Scrutinous, like The Ancient of Days

 

  Age is froward, uneasy, scrutinous,
Hard to be pleas'd, and parsimonious.

-- John Denham

A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him . . . the judgment was set, and the books were opened.

-- Daniel 7:10

When you hand the religion beat to the libertarians

 

This stormy night

 Let them sleep, let them sleep on,

'Till this stormy night be gone,

And th' eternal morrow dawn;

Then the curtains will be drawn;

And they waken with that light,

Whose day shall never sleep in night.

-- Richard Crashaw

Paul in Romans 3: Let God be found true, though every man be found a liar

 This whole thing is priceless, but this is perhaps the most telling part:

Stephens-Davidowitz analyzed data from the General Society Survey which is one of the authoritative sources for information on the behavior of Americans. Extrapolating data from that survey, men said they use 1.6 billion condoms every year while women claimed to use 1.1 billion. If 2.7 billion condoms every year sounds like a big number that’s because it is. Unfortunately, the actual number of condoms sold is just 600 million per year.

The upshot is that people exaggerate a lot, and in large numbers ("Man, I have a lot of sex! Look at all these condoms I use! Yeah, I practice safe sex!"), which may help explain why the presidential race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is as close as it is.

The polls clearly demonstrated exaggerated support for Joe Biden and exaggerated distaste for Donald Trump, except for a couple of firms' product which showed a tight race in the final days of the campaign.

Rasmussen Reports, for example, in its daily poll conducted only in the last week before the election, found either Trump or Biden ahead nationally, flip-flopping from day to day but only to +1 or +2. The final Rasmussen poll had Biden +1, whereas the final national average of polls calculated by Real Clear Politics had Biden +7.2. 

The provisional outcome Biden +2.9 is more consistent with the narrower polling spread from the final week than with the final "lying" national average of Biden +7.2: Biden/Harris 50.6% (253 Electoral College) vs. Trump/Pence 47.7% (214 EC).

On the other hand, Biden's average predicted support of 51.2% was nearly dead on, overshooting by only 0.6 points. But Trump's predicted support of 44% undershot by 3.7 points (47.7%).

Exaggerated support for Biden was the lie which dominated the predicted polling spread, and exaggerated lack of support for Trump was the lie which dominated the predicted share of the vote.

So there were two "lies".

For whatever reasons it was more fashionable to express support for Biden than for Trump. That so-called "shy Trump supporter" phenomenon much talked about in the final days of the campaign appears to be confirmed and on display. More people appear to have lied when they said they supported Biden than when they said they supported Trump. A fair number of Americans who actually supported Trump may have lied and said they supported Biden.

Or . . . 

maybe it wasn't exactly a lie and they just changed their minds.

Or maybe they just didn't vote. I mean, c'mon, in Michigan there was a huge turnout but nearly 2 million people who still could have voted didn't. What about that? Could be a lot of Biden supporters not voting in the end, right?

Or maybe the pollsters tampered with the polling and lied about it to promote Biden! A lot of these polls are in fact overweighted AWFL anyway (affluent, white, female, liberal), so arguably some of them overstate support for Biden. 

Or maybe someone is tampering with the voting results and the results saying Biden won by +2.9 are a lie! Maybe Biden really did win by more.

Or maybe he actually lost! What about that?! Software glitches. Ballots in ditches. Military ballots in dumpsters. Antifa faggots beating up Trumpsters.

How will we ever know for certain?!

I don't think we will. Somebody's lying about something, and only God knows who, what, when, where and why.

At least I hope so. And I do mean that. I honestly do.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Because the Bible tells me so.

If they say the moon is blue . . .

O church men are wily foxes 

More crafty than jugglers' boxes . . .

If they say the moon is blue 

We must believe that it is true 

Admitting their interpretation. 

-- William Roy, Jerome Barlow, Rede Me and be Nott Wrothe, for I Saye No Thinge But Trothe, 1528

It's so typical of Christian enthusiasts to focus on John and accept it at the expense of the Synoptics

This writer is clearly an enthusiast who gets messages from God, and is especially enthusiastic for the "eternal life" idea as found in John 3: 

'... in the New Testament, eternal life is THE dominant concept and central to the “earthly” ministry and divinity of Jesus Christ'.

In John, eternal life is a matter of belief in Jesus (John 3:15f.).

In the Synoptics, however, about which the writer says nothing, eternal life is a matter of keeping the commandments, divestiture of possessions with distribution to the poor, and following Jesus (Matthew 19:16ff; Mark 10:17ff; Luke 18:18ff; also Luke 10:25ff. where showing mercy to a mugged foreigner is showcased. Luke is, after all, a gospel in transition from Jewish gospel to universal gospel).

Obviously the Synoptic teaching presupposes discipleship in the eschatological setting of the historical Jesus with all its urgency, which by the time of John has all but disappeared. It attracted few, because it was so hard.

The way of belief was easier, and came to attract many.

Which version is "central to the 'earthly' ministry"?

I think that's obvious, but not to an enthusiast. 

LOL, Redding California's Bethel Supernatural School of Ministry experienced a shortfall in enrollments of ~1,000 due to Wuhan virus pandemic restrictions

 "Virus restrictions reduced our school by about a thousand students", said Chris Vallotton in a video attached to the story, here, about Beni Johnson calling face masks "freaking stupid".

Yeah, it was the restrictions, not the virus.

That's the ticket.

 

"Since early September, 274 coronavirus cases have been confirmed at the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry."

Gee, no supernatural healers were available with enough skills at Ground Zero for Christian supernaturalism to stop the virus dead in its tracks.

What. A. Shock.

Anti-Christian Pope Francis rebuked by fellow Catholics for his same sex civil unions recommendations recently made public

Catholic leaders condemn Pope Francis’ endorsement of same-sex unions   :

Cardinal Raymond Burke, a frequent critic of Francis, said the pope’s comments should be “rightly interpreted as simple private opinions of the person who made them.” “Such declarations generate great bewilderment and cause confusion and error among Catholic faithful,” Burke, a member of the Vatican’s highest court, said in a statement Thursday on his website. He added that Francis’ views were contrary to Catholic teachings.

Bishop Thomas Tobin, of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, also agreed with Burke that the pope’s statement “clearly contradicts what has been the long-standing teaching of the Church about same-sex unions.” “The Church cannot support the acceptance of objectively immoral relationships,” Tobin said in a statement. “Individuals with same-sex attraction are beloved children of God and must have their personal human rights and civil rights recognized and protected by law. However, the legalization of their civil unions, which seek to simulate holy matrimony, is not admissible.”

Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, went even further, calling the pope’s gay support “confusing and very dangerous,” according to the National Catholic Reporter.

If you're looking for happiness from politics, you're looking in the wrong place

How small, of all that human hearts endure,

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,

Our own felicity we make or find:

With secret course, which no loud storms annoy,

Glides the smooth current of domestic joy.

The poetry is Oliver Goldsmith's, but Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) wrote it.

Rod Dreher, author of Live Not By Lies, thanks Van Halen for the memories

 

Fortune has an inclination to be ill to the ill

Then let the greedy merchant fear 

For his ill-gotten gain;

And pray to gods that will not hear,

While the debating winds and billows bear

His wealth into the main.

-- John Dryden, The Twenty-ninth Ode of the Third Book of Horace, Englished

Care not for any man

It is folly to seek the approbation of any being, besides the supreme; because no other being can make a right judgment of us, and because we can procure no considerable advantage from the approbation of any other being.

-- Joseph Addison

Yes, the New Testament is full of ideas torn from their eschatological milieu and misused by utopians, communists and other ideologues

But academically rigorous this is not.

Wisconsin priest says Catholics can't be Democrats, rips into Father James Martin SJ, says 60m aborted stand at gates of heaven barring their entry

Father James Altman, here:

“Here is a memo to clueless baptized Catholics out there: You cannot be Catholic and be a Democrat. Period,” Altman said in the video posted Aug. 30. “The party platform absolutely is against everything the Catholic Church teaches, so just quit pretending that you’re Catholic and vote Democrat. Repent of your support of that party and its platform or face the fires of hell.”

A million dollars won't make any difference to your $1 Labor Day hamburger, except that it might buy you new teeth with which to eat a $10 steak instead

 

 

 

 

Suffice it then, thou money god, quoth he

That all thine idle offers I refuse;

All that I need I have: what needeth me

To covet more than I have cause to use?

-- Edmund Spenser

Though diseased, yet shall you live

Though every human constitution is morbid, yet are there diseases consistent with the common functions of life.

-- John Arbuthnot (1667-1735)

What is a communist?

What is a communist?

One who hath yearnings

For equal division of unequal earnings.

Be he idler or bungler or both, he is willing

To fork out his sixpence and pocket your shilling.

-- Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849) 

Church is middle-class

On the inevitability of income and wealth inequality

Experience teaches it, to be sure, and it's an old enough piece of common sense wisdom that it got enshrined by the Torah. Subsequently it was gifted to us by Christianity, in Pharisaical form, as crystallized by the tyranny of the Pauline consensus contaminating the gospels.

For the poor shall never cease out of the land . . ..

-- Deuteronomy 15:11a

For ye have the poor always with you . . ..

-- Matthew 26:11a 

For ye have the poor with you always . . ..

-- Mark 14:7a

For the poor always ye have with you . . ..

-- John 12:8a

For Paul, "poor" is what it has always been, an explicit category which is "other", and is not the essential element and mark of Christian self-definition, let alone Jewish:

only they would have us remember the poor, which very thing I was eager to do.

-- Galatians 2:10

Except Luke will have none of it.

He alone avoids the saying because it destroys the binary. Luke knows that voluntary poverty is the mark of true repentance qualifying one to be the disciple of Jesus, to be one of the few who will escape the imminently coming judgment. Luke's Jesus does not imagine a "church" which will feed and clothe the poor, let alone one which has enough substance to feed and clothe itself and "therewith be content". The choice is only binary, God or mammon.

Hence the unique Lukan witness, which takes the place occupied by "you have the poor always with you" in the other gospels:

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

-- Luke 14:33

Not very commonsensical, not very Jewish, either. Moses Maimonides did not approve. And Christians today avoid talking about it like . . . well . . . the plague.

An infinite number is absurd

∞

How clear soever this idea of the infinity of number be, there is nothing more evident than the absurdity of the actual idea of an infinite number.

-- John Locke

Stone cold Stoic

In lazy apathy let Stoicks boast

Their virtue fix'd; 'tis fixed as in frost,

Contracted all, retiring to the breast;

But strength of mind is exercise, not rest.

-- Alexander Pope

Somehow we will pay

The Gospel of Luke's unique use of "pestilences" (loimoi) turns Jewish apocalyptic into Greek

And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven. (King James Version)

(σεισμοί τε μεγάλοι κατὰ τόπους καὶ λιμοὶ καὶ λοιμοὶ ἔσονται φόβητρά τε καὶ σημεῖα ἀπ᾽ οὐρανοῦ μεγάλα ἔσται) (Textus Receptus)

-- Luke 21:11

The parallel use of loimoi in Matthew 24:7, found in the KJV and NKJV (footnoted), is weakly attested in the manuscripts and is therefore omitted by the NIV, ESV, RSV, ASV, NET and NASB.

Luke alone in the New Testament uses the otherwise relatively rare "loimos" (see in Bruzzone, below, p. 890), and in but one other place, Acts 24:5. There Luke puts the word in the mouth of a trained orator employed by the Jews to accuse St. Paul of being a "pest", which is quite funny actually (cf. Demosthenes 25.80). It must have been the mention of "famines", "limoi", in the tradition received by Luke which probably triggered his addition of "pestilences". 

This is likely because "limoi" and "loimoi", "famines" and "pestilences", are part of a classic literary constellation of calamities, those two especially and frequently in combination with "polemos", "war" (which Luke also has in 21:9f., kicking off the list of troubles). These terms in combination reach deep into Greek memory, back to such eminences as Homer (Iliad 1.61), Hesiod (Erga 243), Aeschylus (Suppliants 659), the historian Herodotus (7.171.2; 8.115.2f.), Plato (Laws 709A), Pindar, Sophocles, and particularly to the historian Thucydides (1.23; 2.47; 2.54), whose account of the famine and plague at Athens opens his History of the Peloponnesian War. The pairing of famine and plague in particular had become a topos taught in the schools already by the time of the Attic orator Aeschines (3.135), so thoroughly ingrained in the imagination had it become by then (see now Rachel Bruzzone, "Polemos, Pathemata, and Plague: Thucydides' Narrative and the Tradition of Upheaval", Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 57 (2017) 882-909, esp. 888ff., here).

As an obviously educated writer, Luke probably had learned the topos as a boy. 

Once this is appreciated, one can also observe and better appreciate Luke's (double) introduction of the felicitous "te...kai" construction, also in imitation of good style found in Herodotus and Thucydides in similar contexts, and how Luke uses it to pair "great earthquakes" with this topos "famines and plagues" in the first half of the sentence on the one hand, and in the second half of the sentence, the "signs from heaven" with a description of them as "both fearsome and great" on the other.

The only translation I know of which even attempts to capture this, at least in the first half of the sentence, surprisingly, is that of J. N. Darby:

there shall be both great earthquakes in different places, and famines and pestilences; and there shall be fearful sights and great signs from heaven.

Luke's is a morbidly beautiful sentence in its way, if not pulled off entirely successfully, attempting as it does to express how more or less two things of all too familiar and essentially terrestrial terror will be doubly echoed in the heavenly realm by signs at once spectacular and disturbing, confirming the gods' displeasure with men:

There shall be both great signs in place after place, as well as famines and pestilences, and signs from heaven both fearsome and great.

These "te...kai" and topos niceties are wholly lacking in Matthew 24:7 and Mark 13:8, which are artless and probably closer to the original form of the saying, omitting "pestilences" and "both...and". Hence the confusion in the manuscripts with the word order in Luke 21:11 itself, producing many variant readings, because the introduction of the terminology by Luke fought with the received elements.

It's all Luke's fault.

Smart people are frequently misunderstood.

But if one can keep from getting bogged down in all that for one moment, it points to the effort made by Luke to make the apocalyptic teaching of the Christians intelligible to Greek minds. He's trying to make it sound even more familiar to them than it already was. And this begs the question of the origin of Christian apocalyptic in the first place. Just how Hellenized was all this to begin with? It looks more plausible to me after reading Bruzzone, who, by the way, says narry a word about it. The success of the Christian movement is at least partly explained by the resonance of its message with the actual hopes and the fears shared by its hosts.

Bruzzone makes a good case that the Greek tradition is immemorially rich with suspicions of divine involvement in human ills of civil strife, war, natural calamities, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, as well as wonders and portents in the skies, and on the earth below famine, plague, and mass death (loigos). All of these things are associated, if not always in every detail, with the gospels' memory of Jesus' apocalyptic teaching . . . and with Thucydides.

Oh my God, not Thucydides.

This unique case in Luke's Gospel involving pestilence might lead some quickly to say and too quickly to say, "See, Luke was a physician, preoccupied with 'medical' terminology. That's all this is." Well, that hardly makes Luke a physician than it makes one of Thucydides.

But maybe it makes Luke an historian, and a very Greek one at that, at least in his own imagination.

"I came not to judge the world", or "Woe unto the world"?

This is another one of the few places in which Matthew preserves a memory of the historical Jesus' "Jew only" gospel. There are "woes" on Jews, too, of course. Many in Israel are called, but few even of them are chosen. There is no thought of calling Gentiles and Samaritans, only the lost sheep of the house of Israel. οὐαὶ τῷ κόσμῳ.

John is part of the post-crucifixion consensus whose hand thoroughly contaminates and dominates the record with Christianity as universal religion, open to all.

Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!

-- Matthew 18:7

And if any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.

-- John 12:47

The Messianic hope is a fool's errand, a presumption based on a prophecy of Moses which failed in its own time

The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken; 

-- Deuteronomy 18:15

And the LORD said unto me, They have well spoken that which they have spoken. I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. 

-- Deuteronomy 18:17f.

When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him. 

-- Deuteronomy 18:22

And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face ...

-- Deuteronomy 34:10 

The descending and ascending Divine Logos of John 1 is but one iota and yet a whole world away from Divine Loigos (mass death)

λοιγός

 

And let no murderous havoc come upon the realm to ravage it.
(μηδέ τις ἀνδροκμὴς λοιγὸς ἐπελθέτω τάνδε πόλιν δαΐζων)

 

 -- Aeschylus, Suppliant Women, 678-679 (from the chorus' prayer for Argos)

While both Aeschylus and Sophocles also additionally specifically attribute such ruination to Ares, god of war, the New Testament doesn't know the actual term.

 

But Luke especially has the idea of mass death come out of Jesus' own mouth.

that the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechari'ah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it shall be required of this generation.
(... ναί λέγω ὑμῖν ἐκζητηθήσεται ἀπὸ τῆς γενεᾶς ταύτης)

 

 -- Luke 11:50f.

I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.
(οὐχί λέγω ὑμῖν ἀλλ᾽ ἐὰν μὴ μετανοῆτε πάντες ὁμοίως ἀπολεῖσθε)

 

 -- Luke 13:3

I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.
(οὐχί λέγω ὑμῖν ἀλλ᾽ ἐὰν μὴ μετανοῆτε πάντες ὡσαύτως ἀπολεῖσθε)

 

 -- Luke 13:5

And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all.
(... καὶ ἦλθεν ὁ κατακλυσμὸς καὶ ἀπώλεσεν ἅπαντας)

 

-- Luke 17:26f.

The common grave of all

For sepulchres themselves must crumbling fall

In time's abyss, the common grave of all.

-- John Dryden

Don't overlook the crannies

The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects thro' small crannies or holes, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.

-- Francis Bacon

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..."

On the American Protestant origins of liberalism as freedom from Catholicism and the authority of the pope

From a very useful essay by James M. Patterson, "The Dogmatic Rivalry at the Heart of America":

These Protestant outbursts coalesced into a prominent mid-nineteenth century faction called “Nativists,” who found a home in the Whig Party. Nativists tended to come from the artisan classes who were negatively affected by the arrival of Irish working in factories whose cheaper products displaced artisanal work and, hence, added to the animus for the Irish as minions of “popish plots.” In his recent book Liberal Suppression, [Philip] Hamburger charts how Nativists began to use the term “liberal” during this period to refer not merely to a kind of political gregariousness [among rival Protestants] but to an independent from “foreign influence.” To be “liberal,” then was the opposite of being Catholic. Because Americans loved liberty, they had to be Protestant, since Protestants rejected the impositions of foreign princes in favor of native liberty of conscience. Hence, Nativists identified themselves as the “American Party” and their political program as “Americanism.”

The early Nativists were animated by their Protestant enthusiasm, but over time, they moved from religious convictions to political ones. ... Indeed, one of the most shocking conclusions of Hamburger’s work is the direct link between the ideology of the KKK and today’s “humanist” associations. ...

It is no coincidence that the three critics of liberalism considered here are Catholic. Both because of crises in the Catholic Church and because of the rapid social change of the past two decades, Catholic intellectuals have had to improvise an explanation and have found it to be liberalism. It is not so much wrong as incomplete, but it does explain how American Catholics and Protestants have diverged in their evaluation of liberalism. In the recent dustup between Sohrab Ahmari and David French, one saw this tension reach the surface. The Catholic Ahmari, in keeping with the American Catholic tradition, held liberalism in contempt for its failure to defend the common good, but for the Protestant French, liberalism was instrumental to forming a coalition for religious freedom against the external authority of the secular state. French seems not to understand that for much of American history, Protestants used the same argument against Catholics.

The soft captivity of love

When love's well tim'd, 'tis not a fault to love;

The strong, the brave, the virtuous, and the wise,

Sink in the soft captivity together.

-- Joseph Addison

America's religious grifters, but I repeat myself, asked for bailouts ... and boy did they get 'em

Televangelists, Dallas megachurch that hosted Pence approved for millions in pandemic aid:

"the First Baptist Church of Dallas ...

"It was among the tens of thousands of religious organizations that received a total of $7.3 billion in pandemic aid from the Small Business Administration.

"The list of religious organizations approved for about 88,400 small business loans also included Joyce Meyer Ministries Inc, a Missouri church which in 2007-2011 was investigated by the Senate over its finances. That church was approved for $5 million to $10 million - the largest sum an individual entity could apply for. ...

"Oklahoma-based Life.Church Operations LLC ...

"the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Bernardino, California ...

"Willow Creek Community Church Inc. in Illinois ..."

Of course, there's gotta be a verse for that, right?

And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal habitations. 

-- Luke 16:9

Love is master

Love never fails to master what he finds;

the fool enlightens, and the wise he blinds.

-- John Dryden