Rod Dreher, so-called most important Christian thinker of our age, differs little from the superstitious fear-peddlers of any previous age

 On this day twenty years ago, a shocking sign appeared in New York. ... I remember standing there at the edge of Ground Zero, looking at my watch, waiting for the minute when, one year earlier, the first plane struck the north tower. That was also to be the signal for the start of the memorial service at Ground Zero. At that moment -- at that precise moment -- a ferocious wind blew in from the same direction that the plane had taken. It was uncanny. There was a hurricane far offshore, and this was its outermost fringe. Still, the timing was eerie. ... When I emerged out onto the street a few minutes later, the wind had stopped. I don't know what time it ceased to blow, but I would bet it was when the last name was read. ...

 

 The phone rang. It was my journalist friend, slightly freaking out. "Come over," she said. I took off. At her apartment, she led me into her home office, and pointed to something hanging on a wall. It was a small American flag, almost paper-thin, and very old. Judging from the number of stars on its field, I would say from the Revolutionary War era. It was mounted and framed under glass.  ... On this day, however, when she returned from Ground Zero, she noticed that it had been torn right down the middle. ... Both of us were, and are, Christian. The significance of this sign was not lost on us. ... I immediately interpreted the torn flag as a sign that God had withdrawn his protection from America, in judgment.

 

The whole thing is here.

There shall no sign be given unto this generation. 

 

-- Mark 8:12

 

Somebody has to pay for those French oysters, and his son's college education.

 

Might as well be you.

The true king does much with little

 This small inheritance 

Contenteth me, and's worth a monarchy.

Sufficeth that I have maintains my state
And sends the poor well pleased from my gate.

-- William Shakespeare, Henry VI, part 2, Act 4, Scene 10

. . . and the two fishes divided he among them all. 

 

-- Mark 6:41

Snoring upon the flint

Weariness can snore upon the flint,

when resty sloth finds the down pillow hard.
 

-- William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Act 3, Scene VI

Weary Jacob made stones for his pillows at Bethel

Progressive Walter Brueggemann offers not one text in the Bible which offers "a counter-position" friendly to homosexuality, let alone to bestiality, incest, or transgenderism

Because there aren't any.

 

 

 

 

The reason the Bible seems to speak “in one voice” concerning matters that pertain to LGBTQ persons is that the loud voices most often cite only one set of texts, to the determined disregard of the texts that offer a counter-position. ... The Bible contains all sorts of voices that are inimical to the good news of God’s love, mercy and justice. ... And where the Bible contradicts that news, as in the texts of rigor, these texts are to be seen as “beyond the pale” of gospel attentiveness.

More.

For Brueggemann all the following simply have to go, along with Romans 1:23ff. itself, because they are the enemy of the easy, welcoming gospel (which would strike St. Paul as quite the odious lie), even though there isn't any evidence that early Christianity reversed its antipathy for any of these perversions.

Make no mistake. There is no reason why the prohibitions against bestiality, incest, and transgenderism should stay when those against homosexuality must go.

Brueggemann should be made to answer that: 

 

Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.

-- Exodus 22:19

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. 

-- Leviticus 18:22

And the man that lieth with his father's wife hath uncovered his father's nakedness: both of them shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

-- Leviticus 20:11

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

-- Leviticus 20:13

And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast.

-- Leviticus 20:15

And if a woman approach unto any beast, and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman, and the beast: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. 

-- Leviticus 20:16 

The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.

-- Deuteronomy 22:5

Cursed be he that lieth with his father's wife; because he uncovereth his father's skirt. And all the people shall say, Amen.

-- Deuteronomy 27:20

Cursed be he that lieth with any manner of beast. And all the people shall say, Amen.

-- Deuteronomy 27:21

Cursed be he that lieth with his sister, the daughter of his father, or the daughter of his mother. And all the people shall say, Amen.

-- Deuteronomy 27:22

Cursed be he that lieth with his mother in law. And all the people shall say, Amen.

-- Deuteronomy 27:23

 

Brueggemann ignores a bunch of texts himself which contradict his cherished catch-all counter-idea that "The Gospel, unlike the Bible, is unambiguous about God’s deep love for all peoples."

For Brueggemann it couldn't possibly be that Jesus was an eschatological prophet to Israel only (Matthew 10, 15), bringing good news to its lost sheep who were impoverished by the rich who have their reward (Luke 7), who preached impending divine judgment of his generation (Luke 11) and never imagined a future church but rather the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God out of heaven wherein The Twelve would sit on twelve thrones judging the new Israel (Matthew 19, Luke 22).

There's plenty of contradictory evidence against Brueggemann's easy gospel of "welcome", he just ignores it.

Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few. 

 

-- Matthew 7:13f.

Brueggemann ignores all the evidence because he has a different agenda, about a kingdom that is "never fully here" but is only becoming.

Perhaps the most succinct example of that ignorance is summed up in his twisted claim that "The burden of discipleship to Jesus is easy". The burden of Jesus is in fact quite specifically light because the disciple has no possessions weighing him down, impeding his escape through the narrow gate, and no social obligations of work and family either, all of which were renounced because they hold one back. 

No man can be my disciple who does not say goodbye to everything that is his.

-- Luke 14:33

No one knows this Jesus anymore, not Paul himself, not today's church, and especially not Walter Brueggemann. 

Neocon speech writer for George W. Bush, Evangelical Michael Gerson is very angry with his brothers for not being angry, too

Trump should fill Christians with rage. How come he doesn’t?

The Trump movement is

inconsistent with Christianity by any orthodox measure. Yet the discontent, prejudices and delusions of religious conservatives helped swell the populist wave that lapped up on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. During that assault, Christian banners mixed with the iconography of white supremacy, in a manner that should have choked Christian participants with rage. But it didn’t.    

Is that disqualifying?

Like many of his fellow Christians, Gerson rejects the historical Jesus as eschatological prophet of the end of the world and instead believes in an unfolding, immanentized eschaton which realizes the universal rule of God through the church:

In the present age, [Jesus] insisted, the Kingdom of God would not be the product of Jewish nationalism. It would not arrive through militancy and violence, tactics that would contribute only to a cycle of suffering. Instead, God’s kingdom would grow silently, soul by soul, “among you” and “within you,” across every barrier of nation or race — in acts of justice, peacemaking, love, inclusion, meekness, humility and gentleness.       

Gerson's Trump critique is useful to the political objectives of Washington Post liberalism, but that liberalism all the same knows that his version of Christianity is nothing but a paper tiger, having co-opted its values long ago.

Maybe down deep Gerson knows this also.

He is a life-long sufferer of mental illness:

 

It would be odd for Jesus' opponents to say he wasn't yet fifty if he were actually only about thirty

 Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? 

-- John 8:57

Now when all the people were baptized, it came to pass, that Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened, And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased. And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli . . .. 

-- Luke 3:21ff.

The Mediterranean diet . . . of slaves

And the mixt multitude that was among them fell a lusting: and the children of Israel also wept again, and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat? We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick: But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.      

-- Numbers 11:4ff.

Labour tempereth greed

 As a man had a right to all he could employ his labour upon, so he had no temptation to labour for more than he could make use of.

-- John Locke

Former Milwaukee Catholic Archbishop Rembert Weakland (1977-2002), a prime architect of the national cover-up of sex abuse by priests, has died at 95

 Rembert Weakland was a bad man, and not just because he spent $450,000 of the faithful's tithes (which he paid back later) to pay off a male theology student with whom he had had an affair. Weakland, a lion of liberal American Catholics, came out as gay in 2009. ...

Weakland was Milwaukee's archbishop for a very long time, during most of the child sex abuse allegations against priests. The local church had to pay $30 million to settle the cases, eventually seeking bankruptcy protection. ...

For those who engaged in these cover-ups, the most important thing of all was the clergy, not the children who were molested, and their family members. That is the real legacy of Rembert Weakland, a godfather of the lavender mafia.  

Nobody knows this beat like Rod Dreher, here.

It passes strange that Fred Sanders reviews a book by the not orthodox Roger Olson which critiques liberal Christianity as not orthodox, without even mentioning it

 Olson . . . : “I have come to the same conclusion Machen did, and I think any orthodox Christian, however progressive they might be, must agree that liberal Christianity is not authentically Christian.” ... Olson repeatedly argues that liberal theology has “cut the cord of continuity” with its Christian past . . ..

Here.

Roger Olson is outside the catholic faith, denying that God is et unus immensus.

Pot calls kettle black, but you wouldn't know it from the review.

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.     

-- Psalm 90:2

American United Methodists scramble to exit the denomination over same sex marriage by the December 2023 deadline

The United Methodist Church—America’s third-largest religious body, with over 6.2 million members—is in the thick of its own [schism] over its teachings on sexuality. Hundreds of congregations have voted to leave the denomination, which had 13 million members world-wide as of 2020, and thousands more likely will. On Aug. 7, United Methodism’s second- and seventh-largest churches by attendance, both in the Houston area, voted to quit the denomination. 

What brought United Methodism to this divide was its decision-making body’s 2019 “Traditional Plan”—a document that affirmed its ban on same-sex marriage and mandated that all clergy be celibate if single and monogamous if married. That sets the church apart from nearly every other mainline Protestant denomination. The traditionalists won thanks to votes from conservative African delegates, whose churches have grown by millions even as the U.S. has declined by nearly the same magnitude.

... United Methodism has lost five million members in the U.S. since 1968 and will lose millions more. Mainline Protestantism has been sidelined—and it will take years for United Methodism’s schism to resolve.

More.

The inspiration for letting your light so shine before men is in Isaiah's condemnation of the phony, self-absorbed ritual fasts of the house of Jacob

 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. 

-- Matthew 5:16

Feed the hungry,
and help those in trouble.
Then your light will shine out from the darkness,
and the darkness around you will be as bright as noon.

-- Isaiah 58:10

Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 

-- Matthew 6:16

Grand Rapids, Michigan, where you're not much unless you're a rich Calvinist, once put beggars in jail 211 times between 2008 and 2011

 The ACLU said Grand Rapids enforced the state law 399 times between Jan. 1, 2008, and May 24, 2011. James Speet and Ernest Sims were among those arrested. They filed the original lawsuit. Speet held a sign, while Sims asked for spare change. ... 

The appeals court said that striking down the law was “appropriate because the risk exists, that, if left on the books, the statute would chill a substantial amount of activity protected by the First Amendment.” It noted that Grand Rapids police produced 409 incident reports related to begging. Thirty-eight percent of those stopped by police were holding signs, requesting help, with messages such as “Homeless and Hungry: Need Work.” The others involved verbal solicitations. In 43 percent of those cases, police immediately arrested beggars. In 211 cases, those convicted were sentenced directly to jail time. 

More.

Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. 

-- Luke 6:30

The Lutheran Reformation saved the Papacy

The greatest danger of all--secularization--the danger which came from within, from the Popes themselves and their 'nipoti', was adjourned for centuries by the German Reformation. ... This alone had made the expedition against Rome (1527) possible and successful, [and] so did it compel the Papacy to become once more the expression of a world-wide spiritual power, to raise itself from the soulless debasement in which it lay, and to place itself at the head of all the enemies of this reformation. ... In the face of the defection of half Europe, was a new, regenerated hierarchy, which avoided all the great and dangerous scandals of former times, particularly nepotism ... It only existed and is only intelligible in opposition to the seceders. In this sense it can be said with perfect truth that the moral salvation of the Papacy is due to its mortal enemies. ... Without the Reformation ... the whole ecclesiastical State would long ago have passed into secular hands.

-- Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1945), 79.

What shall it profit India's Warren Buffett if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own life?

 Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, ‘India’s Warren Buffet’, dies at 62

 

The foolish blather of the extemporaneous prayer

 The extemporizing faculty is never more out of its element than in the pulpit; though even here, it is much more excusable in a sermon than in a prayer.

-- Robert South

Change is bad

 

 

 

 

 

My son, fear thou the LORD and the king: and meddle not with them that are given to change.

-- Proverbs 24:21

For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.  

-- Malachi 3:6

Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.  

-- Hebrews 13:8

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. 

-- James 1:17

Don't drink the hemlock of today's Shakespeare scholars

 

[Shakespeare] scholars ... are participants in a “long-term project to discredit altogether the culture” of the West. Insofar as they succeed at shaping the minds and hearts of future generations, their project threatens us with civilizational suicide. Rescuing the Western soul from a tragic demise requires us to see their medicine for the hemlock it is. ...

Relentless as they are, the waves of Shakespeare abuse cannot help breaking upon the rock of the man and his achievements. Due to the Bard’s “unique combination of imaginative intelligence, skill, and creative genius,” he continues to be “cherished,” studied, and performed throughout the world. To encounter his works is to encounter a powerful reaffirmation of the complex, paradoxical, and liberating tradition of which he is the “principal poet.”

More.

The Jesuit headline that would never be: Abortion Ban in Indiana a Wake-Up Call for Pro-Choice Movement

 

Abortion Win in Kansas a Wake-Up Call for Pro-Life Movement

 

Indiana Is First State To Approve Near-Total Abortion Ban Post Roe

John Nelson Darby, famous religious innovator of The Rapture, was the youngest of six sons, another example in support of Frank Sulloway's thesis

 

J.N. Darby 1800-1882

1996

Sulloway is important for challenging the crisis theory of scientific revolutions propounded by Thomas Kuhn, showing how many revolutionary personalities, who tend to be later or last borns, rebelled against well established consensus views which though long in the tooth were in no danger of going away.

Darby's innovations, interestingly enough, came to him after experiencing serious injuries when he fell from a horse when he was still 26.  

The small, relational Christian community of just shut up

 For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.

 Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.

And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.

-- I Corinthians 14:33ff.

Reason 4,109 to avoid a church today

 For the land is full of adulterers; because of the curse the land mourns, and the pastures of the wilderness are dried up. Their course is evil, and their might is not right. Both prophet and priest are ungodly; even in my house I have found their wickedness, says the LORD.

-- Jeremiah 23:10f.

The creepy connubial Christ talk of the New Testament gets some of its inspiration from OT prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah

 For thy Maker is thine husband; the LORD of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; The God of the whole earth shall he be called.

-- Isaiah 54:5

Surely as a wife treacherously departeth from her husband, so have ye dealt treacherously with me, O house of Israel, saith the LORD.

-- Jeremiah 3:20

Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD:

-- Jeremiah 31:21

The young hope for a new tomorrow, the old have only yesterday

Forget stereotyping and paradox, Scripture affirms the immortality of . . . Zeus, whose children we are, and in whom we live and move and have our being

Even one of their own men, a prophet from Crete, has said about them, “The people of Crete are all liars, cruel animals, and lazy gluttons.”

 This is true.

-- Titus 1:12f.

They fashioned a tomb for thee, O holy and high one, The Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies! But thou art not dead: thou livest and abidest forever, For in thee we live and move and have our being.

-- Epimenides, Cretica

 

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.   

 

-- Acts 17:28  

Pick your poison.

Nothing belongs to Caesar: The idea that Jesus believed anything else is preposterous

Tiberius

The earth is the Lord's.

-- Exodus 9:29

For all the earth is mine.

-- Exodus 19:5

Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the LORD'S thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is.

-- Deuteronomy 10:14

The earth is the LORD'S, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.

-- Psalm 24:1

For the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof.

-- I Corinthians 10:26, 28

For all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine.

-- I Chronicles 29:11

The day is thine, the night also is thine.

-- Psalm 74:16 

The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine. 

-- Psalm 89:11

Thus saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the place of my rest?

-- Isaiah 66:1

Hihowareya

 

How

 

Why all this poetry?

 Poetry is not merely important to Christianity. It is an essential, inextricable, and necessary aspect of religious faith and practice. The fact that most Christians would consider that assertion absurd does not invalidate it. Their disagreement only demonstrates how remote the contemporary Church has become from its own origins. It also suggests that sacred poetry is so interwoven into the fabric of Scripture and worship as to become invisible. At the risk of offending most believers, it is necessary to state a simple but ­unacknowledged truth: It is impossible to understand the full glory of Christianity without understanding its poetry. ...

No believer can ignore the curious fact that one-third of the Bible is written in verse. ... These ancient Hebrew and Aramaic poems remain vividly present in English—and not only for Christians—because the King James Bible had the good fortune to be translated in the age of Shakespeare. ...

What are the Beatitudes but a poem carefully shaped in the tradition of prophetic verse?... The Incarnation requires an ode, not an email. ... Sacred poetry is a human universal. Every culture has felt the need to invoke and describe the divine in the most potent language possible. Poetry itself seems to have originated in sacred ritual. Only gradually did the art expand into secular uses. Since the development of poetry as an art predates the invention of writing, the genealogy of sacred verse is lost in prehistory. It is always hard to assign an exact date or occasion to surviving ancient texts. Even the dating of the Old Testament is difficult to establish; the books were composed and compiled across a millennium.

Much more, here.

The inner light torments us

 Not sharp revenge, nor hell itself, can find

A fiercer torment than a guilty mind,

Which day and night doth dreadfully accuse,

Condemns the wretch, and still the charge renews.

-- John Dryden

Overall, only 10% of those diagnosed with breast cancer do not survive 5 years, and faith healer Beni Johnson of Redding, CA was among them

 Redding-based Bethel Church co-senior pastor Beni Johnson dies after battle with cancer

  

Breast Cancer Survival Rates

There must be sects among you, that the approved may become manifest

 As fire breaks out of flint by percussion, so wisdom and truth issueth out by the agitation of argument.

-- James Howell (c. 1594 -1666)

You will tire of living life to the full

  

 Satiety from all things else doth come,

Then life must to itself grow wearisome.

-- John Denham

The learners suffer, the ignorant rest

 The soul preferreth rest in ignorance before wearisome labour to know.

-- Richard Hooker

Self-annulling charity

Poor refugees, at first they purchase here;

And soon as denizen'd, they domineer.

 

-- John Dryden

Pope Francis makes an utter mockery of the Catholic faith, gives Nancy Pelosi communion in the Vatican though barred from it in the US

 

Friendship with the world is enmity with God

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unfaithful creatures! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 

-- James 4:4

And remember, my sentimental friend that a heart is not judged by how much you love but by how much you are loved by others.

-- Wizard of Oz to the Tin Man, 1939

Nancy Pelosi in shock as Supreme Court overturns liberal sacrament of abortion

 PELOSI: WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE? 

https://www.mediaite.com/uncategorized/what-is-happening-here-emotional-pelosi-slashes-at-trump-and-the-republicans-over-cruel-roe-v-wade-decision/

There is no such thing as "double belonging", unless you're a "former", or a Jesuit

 Knitter, a former Catholic priest and a major influence on many Catholics who subscribe to Buddhist ideology, insists the two faiths are not in conflict.

-- Buddhist/Catholic, Priests/Theologians Practice 'Double Belonging'  

Schutz, RNS

 

 

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.  

 

-- Matthew 6:24

Democracy in action

 As when in tumults rise th' ignoble crowd,

Mad are their motions, and their tongues are loud.

-- John Dryden

The flighty life of the enthusiast

 He is drawn, by a sort of ignis fatuus, into bogs and mire almost every day of his life.

-- Isaac Watts

Christian Reformed Church of America 2022 Synod affirms that "polyamory, pornography and homosexual sex ... violate the seventh commandment"

 Among other things, as reported here:

The vote to “affirm that unchastity in the Heidelberg Catechism encompasses adultery, premarital sex, extra-marital sex, polyamory, pornography and homosexual sex, all of which violate the seventh commandment,” passed 123 to 53, with two voting to abstain.

The tree of loving grows on the bank of the river of suffering

 

John Dryden was no Athenian

 A multitude of scribblers, who daily pester the world with their insufferable stuff, should be discouraged from writing anymore.

-- John Dryden

For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.

-- Acts 17:21

Impiety begets impiety

Shall then the Son of Saturn be undone,
Like Saturn, by an impious Son!
Justly th' impartial Fates conspire,
Dooming that Son to be the Sire
Of such another Son.

-- George Granville

Calvinist Grand Rapids publisher "Eerdmans is proud to publish many books ... that have stood the test of time", and a bunch that never will

 

Books to Read for Pride Month

The tweet was deleted, but the blog post, and the books, remain.

When pride cometh . . .

 When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom.

-- Proverbs 11:2