Russell Kirk: I abhor Christ's doctrines

Quoted here:

Additionally, Kirk noted in the summer of 1942, the only Christian body that seems to approach the truth and rigors demanded of Christianity is the Catholic Church. “The closer it comes,” he continued, “the further I draw away from it.” He admired Christ as a person, he continued, but “I abhor his doctrines. Christianity is truly a religion for the expropriated.” When pushed to the quick, Kirk turned to the humanism of Harvard scholar Irving Babbitt. Babbitt’s philosophy offered more rigor and discipline than Christianity, as it contained “a ruinous moral laxity, a sort of indiscriminate sentimentalism.” Christ and Christianity simply could not live up to the highest standards of the good life. In this, Kirk sounds much like the Romans who were appalled that Christians admired King David and, thus, believed it a lesser religion.

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Reading this in the summer of 2014 brings to mind the Russell Kirk of 1985. That summer while reading Paul Elmer More with him in Boulder, Colorado, he asked me what I thought of More. I remember telling him I thought More's ideas repulsive, as More would doubtlessly think mine. Kirk just smiled that wide-eyed grin of his.

Love is a corpse . . .

From Larry Norman's 1973 So Long Ago The Garden, his prescient "Nightmare Number 71" (1971 was the last year the total fertility rate in the US exceeded the replacement rate, except for 2006 and 2007):

Last night i had that same old dream it rocked me in my sleep

And left me the impression that the sandman plays for keeps


I dreamed i was in concert in the middle of the clouds


John wayne and billy graham were giving breath mints to the crowds

I fell through a hole in heaven i left the stage for good


And when i landed on the earth i was back in hollywood



The california earthquake it tore the land in half

While san andreas cleared her throat i heard tsunami laugh

The ground began to tremble the land began to sway

And people in the other states they were glad they'd moved away


But suddenly california just floated in the breeze

While every state that wasn't sank down into the seas

And soon i saw atlantis rumble and rise high

And the great egg of euphrates came down out of the sky


And out stepped shirley temple with guy kippee who was dead


And that communist bill robinson whom shirley called black red


They have a marionette of harpo marx they said it was an inside joke

But when i honked his horn he came alive and these were the words he spoke



With the continents adrift and the sun about to shift

Will the ice caps drown us all or will we burn


We've polluted what we own will we reap what we have sown?


Are we headed for the end or can we turn?

We've paved the forests killed the streams

Burned the bridges to our dreams

The earth is bursting at the seams


And in pain of childbirth screams


As it gives life to what seems

To either be an age that gleams


Or simply lays there dying


If this goes on will life survive how can it


Out of the grave oh who will save our planet?

I said i'm pleased to meet you i always thought you were a scream

He said have you ever thought of having helen keller in your dreams

I said errol flynn dropped by but he tried to steal my girl


Then she ran off with ronald colman said something about a new world

Now i'm stuck with my own cooking hey i'm lonely can't you see


Well he grabbed my leg and said exactly eighty nine words to me

Count them

: let the proud but dying nation kiss the last generation


It's the year of the pill, age of the gland

We have landed on the moon but we'll clutter that up soon


Our sense of freedom's gotten out of hand


We kill our children swap our wives


We've learned to greet a man with knives


We swallow pills in fours and fives

Our cities look like crumbling hives

Man does not live he just survives

We sleep till he arrives


Love is a corpse we sit and watch it harden


We left it oh so long ago the garden

The strings snapped briskly then went slack the marionette lay dead

While hoover played with the motorcade the body slumped and bled

The man who held the camera disappeared into the crowd


I said the hope of youth, fictitious truth, lays covered in a shroud


Then up walked elmo lincoln and he said i beg your pardon


But we left it oh so long ago, the garden

Jesus predicted an imminently coming kingdom which brings catastrophic death, not N. T. Wright's Christendom

gathering tares to be burned

N. T. Wright, here:

Here is the central element: the point about God’s authority is that the whole Bible is about God establishing his kingdom on earth as in heaven, completing (in other words) the project begun but aborted in Genesis 1–3. This is the big story that we must learn how to tell. It isn’t just about how to get saved, with some cosmology bolted onto the side. This is an organic story about God and the world.  God’s authority is exercised not to give his people lots of true information, not even true information about how they get saved (though that comes en route). God’s authority, vested in Jesus the Messiah, is about God reclaiming his proper lordship over all creation. And the way God planned to rule over his creation from the start was through obedient humanity. The Bible’s witness to Jesus declares that he, the obedient Man, has done this. But the Bible is then the God-given equipment through which the followers of Jesus are themselves equipped to be obedient stewards, the royal priesthood, bringing that saving rule of God in Christ to the world.

Jesus in Luke 13.1ff.:

There were some present at that very time who told him of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen upon whom the tower in Silo'am fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish."

The hyperbolists, of course, must insist that "perish" means something more and something less than "die violent death", and that "you" must refer to more than those then "present", and that "likewise" doesn't really mean "in the same way", and that "repent" doesn't really mean "turn your back on your former life". Jesus couldn't have possibly meant what he said literally, because then he would have been mistaken, and a mistaken Jesus is unthinkable because then he is unworshipable.

And that would be crazy!

NT Wright's Kingdom of God is still basically a kingdom designed for and of this world, and that's the problem with it

It is not the apocalyptic kingdom of the gospel documents which he otherwise claims to be rescuing.

Here:

[A]t a particular time God called a particular pair for a particular task: to look after his creation and make it flourish in a whole new way. ...

The point is that if you start, not with Adam and a “moral test,” but with Adam and Eve and a vocation (see Psalm 8), then a lot of things in Paul look significantly different. There is more to Paul—and to Genesis—than you might have thought. It all works, it’s all good, it’s all about God’s grace—and it’s about a justification through which humans are “put right” in order to get the original project back on track, so that we might be “putting-right” people for the world.

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

-- Matthew 22:30

"[T]he harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels."

-- Matthew 13:39

Where's the love, man? Daily Beast article suggests Dave Ramsey follows only half of Romans 13:8.

His critics, many of whom are the ex-employees who have been "raptured" out of the company, mock him as Dave Ramses or Dave Ramses II and suggest he's big on the "owing no man anything" part while pretty short on the "loving one another" part of Romans 13:8, saying he subjects his employees and ex-employees to a culture of fear, intimidation and spying. Here in The Daily Beast:

“As a boss, Dave Ramsey was a bully,” said one former employee, who was a member of a secret Facebook group of about 100 former Lampo employees that Ramsey managed to infiltrate without their knowledge last year. “Most of us left Lampo years ago and yet he still haunts us, lurking over our shoulders like he’s the damn Godfather. And many of us are scared of him, unsure of how far he’d go to silence us.”

NT Wright settles for remnant theology to resolve the conflict between kingdom and cross

Here, imagining that God's kingdom is really present in a new form because of the cross even though the concept of final judgment and a transformed world, so prominent in the mouth of the Jesus of the Gospels whom he seeks to recover, rescue and defend, makes narry an appearance. You will find neither the term "judgment" nor the concept once in the essay.

"Kingdom and cross are woven tightly together in some of the very texts which the gospel writers themselves highlight in their interpretation of the story of Jesus. There are of course many, many more, all of which point to the following conclusion. When we see the story of Jesus as the climax of the story of Israel, we should not be surprised to discover that the suffering of Israel, and of Israel's supreme representative, is to be understood in terms of the longer and larger purposes of Israel's God - in other words, the establishment of his worldwide healing sovereignty. Conversely, we should not be surprised to discover that when this God finally claims the nations as his own possession, rescuing them from their evil ways, the means by which he does it is through the suffering of his people - or, as in the story the gospels themselves are telling, the suffering of his people's official, divinely appointed representative."

If that's the best he's got, the greatest living New Testament scholar is nothing but a tired trimmer for whom passages such as "many are called but few are chosen" must be roughly resolved into the single personality of the Messiah who suffers the judgment in the stead of everyone else, an allegorical interpretation designed to escape the difficulty of the plain meaning of the many warning sayings and calls to repentance of the Gospels, not a serious attempt at interpretation. I heard it in preparation for Lutheran seminary already in the early 1970s. 

NT Wright remains NT Wrong, a creature of orthodoxy first and foremost.

How the followers of Mao and the followers of Jesus are similar

John Gray reviewing some academics' essays about Mao's Little Red Book, here:

For Wang, the book “represented a scriptural authority and emanated a sacred aura”. During the Cultural Revolution study sessions were an unavoidable part of everyday life for people in China. Involving “ritualistic confessions of one’s errant thoughts and nightly diary-writing aimed at self-criticism”, these sessions, he writes, “may be seen as a form of text-based indoctrination that resembles religious hermeneutics and catechism” – a “quasi-religious practice of canonical texts”.

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The instinct to take a text as authoritative and sacred, put it at the center of living, and then to study it, confess one's falling short of it, and even journaling about it, a popular evangelical habit in America by the way, all of it in a decidedly secular, atheistic, and political historical context evinces something telling about human nature, not about the divine. Human beings have a proclivity for ideology and fanaticism which can be exploited through the cult of personality. You may think Maoism is over in comparison to Christianity, but Gray recognizes that it has a Nachleben, and it is no coincidence that that afterlife is mostly in the West.

"Collegial" as The Devil's Dictionary might define it

When members of a faculty commit to work together to enforce conformity of opinion, and can be trusted to silence contrary voices and advance the mediocrities who agree with them even though they fail to uphold the high standards they otherwise use to weed out their enemies. Especially required of junior colleagues without tenure and graduate students, in the opinion of the department chair. Characteristic of divinity programs and the secular departments which envy them. 

Forget the public and the pontifex maximus: Pastor Timothy Tutt goes against Jesus' belief in the devil

Timothy Tutt tut-tuts here:

I’m just the pastor of local church in a small-ish denomination, so it may be folly to go against the majority of a polled public and a popular pontiff. (The pope has the prestige of an international pulpit, the history of the Roman Catholicism, and a cadre of theologians to support his views.) But it’s time to be clear: the devil does not exist.

Jesus (in Matthew 13:37ff):

He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man; The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

What if Jesus' view of the law was only aspirational, like his belief in the imminently coming Kingdom?

"Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished."

-- Matthew 5:17f.

"The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel."

-- Mark 1:15

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Then neither is the time fulfilled, the kingdom here, nor everything accomplished. Heaven and earth remain, and therefore so does the law.

Black Baptists in Detroit say advocates of homosexuality in the church are God's enemies and theirs

If these Detroit Baptists were white they'd be public enemy number one right now for the clarity of their moral vision, right along side the Westboro Baptists:

"If you are against God you are against me!"

The story and video are here at The Detroit Free Press.

Donald Sterling plays Hosea, loves a slut and revives Hebrew prophecy, telling the truth about Magic Johnson's sordid past

From a different point of view about the matter, here:

Johnson was brought into the story initially when Sterling told his girlfriend [the slut] to delete photos of herself with him [Johnson] from her Instagram account.

“What has he done?” Sterling said of Johnson (via CNN’s transcript). “Can you tell me? Big Magic Johnson, what has he done? He’s got AIDS. Did he do any business? Did he help anybody in South LA?”

Cooper corrected him on Johnson’s health status and eventually the interview, a textbook example of how not to do damage control, meandered back to Magic.

“What kind of guy goes to every city, has sex with every girl, then he goes and catches HIV,” he said. “Is that someone we want to respect and tell our kids about? I think he should be ashamed of himself. I think he should go into the background. And what does he do for black people? He hasn’t done anything."

“Here’s a man I don’t know if I should say this, he acts so holy. He made love with every girl in every city in America, and he had AIDS, and when he had those AIDS, I went to my synagogue and I prayed for him. I hoped he could live and be well. I didn’t criticize him. I could have. Is he an example for children? You know, because he has money, he’s able to treat himself. ..."

I was obviously mistaken about Pope Francis: Diabolus est Jesuita, communisticus. Ita!

The devil is a Jesuit, and a communist one at that.













h/t Chris

Liberalism remains what's the matter with Kansas: plans to build a really big pile of rocks

Methodist Adam Hamilton can't stand the apocalyptic Jesus

Methodist Adam Hamilton has to edit out of the Bible the apocalyptic Jesus, and much else, here:

The violence attributed to God in the Bible is a serious issue that Christians must address. It is inconsistent with the character of God described in many places in the Old Testament, and certainly inconsistent with the Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ who calls his followers to love their enemies.

John the Baptist begged to differ:

I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

-- Matthew 3:11f.

Walpurgisnacht: Witches and devils and spectres oh my!

 

 

 Now to the Brocken the witches ride;

The stubble is gold and the corn is green;

There is the carnival crew to be seen,

And Squire Urianus will come to preside.

So over the valleys our company floats,

With witches a-farting on stinking old goats.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

The Feud With "The Jews" of the Fourth Gospel Was With "The Judeans" Not "The Jews"

As I have observed before, the Fourth Gospel's use of "the Jews" is so stark that on occasion it makes it look like Jesus and his disciples are outsiders and not Jews. And Paul the Jew oddly seems to blame "The Jews" for Jesus' death even though Paul in Romans thought that the gospel was for the Jew first.

An interesting story here suggests the solution is to translate differently:

One example from the New King James Version (NKJV) is instructive: “Then after this, [Jesus] said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again. The disciples said to him, ‘Rabbi, the ioudaioi [Jews] sought to stone you and are you going there again?’” (John 11:7-8) Translating “ioudaioi” above as “Jews” presents an immediate problem. It implies that Jesus – even while called “rabbi” – was not Jewish, but an outsider, along with his disciples. This would include John, despite his insider knowledge of the people and places, customs and nuances of early first-century Israel.

It obscures the fact that John is describing a family dispute – albeit a bitter one – among some of his fellow Jews on whether Jesus was Israel’s deliverer. It implies that the Jews as a people were Christ’s monolithic foe, and perhaps even collectively culpable for his mistreatment and death.

In other words, rendering “ioudaioi” as “Jews” suggests the writer drew an impassable line between Jesus and his earliest followers and “the Jews.”

Clearly he did not. The problem rests with the translation. Ioudaioi here means “Judeans,” not “Jews.”

That the solution is plausible is accepted by the translators of the New King James Version, as the article itself notes, but is not carried through in John for some reason:

Don’t translators see the problem? Actually, the New King James Version (NKJV) translators did. In I Thessalonians 2:14-16, a portion from one of Paul’s letters, they rightly rendered ioudaioi “Judeans.” With this one simple change, they transformed a passage wielded infamously for centuries against the entire people of Israel into one that criticizes a miniscule clique of individuals – likely Caiaphas and his allies – within first-century Judea.

Why no similar corrections for John’s Gospel? Why indeed.

Mollie Hemingway cries sacrilege at Sarah Palin but forgets Luther's view that baptism kills

Mollie Hemingway gets her undies in a twist (here) because she thinks Sarah Palin's baptism joke at the NRA meeting was a sacrilege against the life-giving sacrament:

Sarah Palin gave a speech to members of the National Rifle Association, gathered in Indianapolis this weekend. She said something that struck me as sacrilegious ... [:] "Well, if I were in charge, [prisoners] would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.” ... Does [waterboarding] deliver those who are subjected to it from the devil, as Christian baptism does? Does it give them eternal life, as Christian baptism does? Is it voluntary, as Christian baptism is? It is none of these things. Joking about baptism in the context of this aggressive action suggests that we don’t think baptism is as life-giving or important as it is.

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Except that the Lutheran understanding of baptism, as Mollie ought to know, also includes meting out death, and on a daily basis:

Fourthly.

What does such baptizing with water signify?--Answer.

It signifies that the old Adam in us should, by daily contrition and repentance, be drowned and die with all sins and evil lusts, and, again, a new man daily come forth and arise; who shall live before God in righteousness and purity forever.

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Since waterboarding is never meant to kill but is a painful experience designed to get the truth out of someone, you might even say it bears a strong resemblence to the intent of baptism as Luther understood part of its purpose.

Sarah Palin may be many things, but in this case no one but a special pleading Lutheran grandstander looking for something to say would look at Sarah Palin's remarks and conclude she meant anything specifically religious by them. Her remarks might have been in bad taste, but it wasn't sacrilege.

After all, Sarah Palin knows an awful lot about bad taste.

The Wise Sayings Of The Imam

The Wise Sayings Of The Imam:

 

"God's sovereignty is the is-is-ought fallacy elevated to a theological dogma. See The Mandate of Heaven." 

 

"Dispensationalism is the rationalism of the schoolmen but in evangelical dress."

"If there were only two choices, I'd rather be a bigot than a small it. You're it."

"Mormonism is a religion with one too many 'm's' in its name."

"Whether it's got tits or testicles, it's going to cause you trouble."

"Only a teachers' union would find nothing wrong with making a retired teacher with braces on her teeth the pronouncer at a spelling bee."

"Run for your lives! Even the Christians drive like crap."

"All things considered, I prefer the Old World Disorder to the New World Order."

"The light beer of Lutheranism has five fewer sacraments than our regular beer."

"Forget the Antichrist. Obama is the AntiPaul. He has become all things to all men, that he might by all means enslave some."

"What happens to a doomsday cult when the world doesn't end? It becomes Christianity, then Islam, then Puritanism, then Mormonism."

"Daughters turn their fathers into social conservatives, but sons turn them into foreign policy liberals."

"Respect for our elders is enjoined by our religion not because they often deserve it, but because they often don't."

"America does better when she specializes in marksmen, not Marxmen."

"The first thing to go when a civilization begins to descend into despotism is proportionality. Suddenly all infractions become equal and equally intolerable without exception. The child who innocently draws a picture of a gun becomes the same as the one who brings a real one to school."

"Direct democracy means majoritarian mobs vote to extract money directly from your wallet and transfer it directly into theirs."

"Church and school: two places where the credulous ever go, believing it will improve them. A third is the voting booth."

"In a civilized country they say 'You can't make a purse out of a sow's ear,' in a barbarized one 'You can't polish a turd.' Guess which one we're in."

"The Norwegian Labour Party teaches its young to hate Israel and seeks to make that official government policy, and then they are surprised by the Utoya massacre?"

"If it costs somebody else money, it's not a right."

"Tyranny cannot endure because the tyrant is overcome by his own passions, which rule him."

"Democrats enslave the people to the big government store, Republicans to the discount store."

"The new American dream is four million Muslims headed back to Arabia with a liberal under each arm."

"Rush Limbaugh protests so much against the Republican establishment because the half of his brain tied behind his back is his suffering liberal self which keeps telling him he's one of them."

"Wise men know that human nature is neither all good nor all evil, but a mixture of the two. The problem is that, more often than not, it turns out to be a bad mixture."

"Who isn't a child of his time, except the one living in it?"

"Burial is your last act of recycling."

"Poverty is good because, like a severe illness, it can make you more alive to the world."

"Like vultures, corporate raiders perform a needed function in nature, but they are seldom popular as pets."

"People who will do anything for a job are dangerous because they will do anything."

"I'd be working class, if only I were working."

"Anger moves the evil to get even, the good to get justice, and true believers to expunge it, resulting in neither."

"America no longer declares wars because then it would have to win them."

"My passwords are so secure even I don't know them."

"Many people read and speak a foreign language, but few know and understand the truth even in their own."

"A people whose primary response to everything is emotional is an unpredictable people, which makes them unreliable to the global community."

"America is entirely a phenomenon of Protestantism. It is as unimaginable to conceive of it being birthed from Roman Catholic 'conservatism' as is blood from a turnip. You can't say 'No' to a king without a king saying 'No' to a pope, without a monk saying 'No' to Johann Tetzel."

"If sorrowful toil is the curse of all mankind, why are so many people clamoring for jobs?"

"The times demand self-application, self-restraint and self-mastery when all about us is servitude to backgammon, bawds and the bottle."

"Socialism is not a unique form of evil which has only lately made its appearance, at the end of 'history' as it were. It is simply the clothing worn by tyranny in our time."

"I'm so discombobulated today that I'm spelling it 'discomjimulated'".

"Keynesianism and Christianity are similar because each always has an answer for why it's not wrong."

"If you use less pants, there's fewer work washing them."

"True Protestantism protests Luther on behalf of Paul, Paul on behalf of Jesus, Jesus on behalf of The Prophets, and finally The Prophets on behalf of The Law of Moses."

"I'm usually firing on all cylinders, just not always in the right order."

"The politician becomes a statesman by losing for the sake of a principle."

"If you want to see human transformation, go to a graveyard, pal."

"Jesus is at his best as a critic of his own religion."

"The least presentable member of the body of Christ, in a word, stinketh. If not allowed to do its job, which is generally the case in Christendom, the church is rightly said to be 'Full of it'."

"There comes a winter in life after which there is no spring."

"One reason why heaven is such a pleasant place is that it is not densely populated."

"If man is the measure of all things, our contemporaries come up short."

"American National Socialism pacifies the people it robs with the welfare state."

"Patriotism is now the last refuge of the bugger."

"Predestination is a theological conception not unlike fate which is suggested by the inescapability of death and projected onto divinity by the human mind."

"In order to be a good steward of God's gifts, do the opposite of whatever Jim Cramer says to do."

"When you're too tired to cook, just make sure you don't mistake the catfood for the meatloaf."

Civilizational collapse: Neither Baby Boomers nor Millennials have been fruitful and multiplied

Near the peak of the Baby Boom births per 1000 hit 25.0 in 1955, and over the next 22 years collapsed to 15.1 per 1000 women by 1977, a traditional demarcation year for the beginning of the Millennials. No cohort since 1993 has hit or surpassed the 15.1 level, and Millennials since turning 22 in 1999 haven't done any better. Births to Millennials since 2007 have fallen 12% from 14.3 per 1000 to just 12.6 per 1000, the lowest level in the post-war period. Even during the abortion mania between 1973 and 1976 births per 1000 remained higher than they are under the Millennials.

In shouting No! to reproduction is to be found all our other shouts of No!: to economic growth, to educational advancement, to national greatness, to civility and to religion. In the great cultural handoff after the Second World War, we have fumbled the ball and wandered off the field.

If we believed in the future, we would be creating it.

Next stop, oblivion.