The future of God I will briefly discuss is that of Christianity and its place in the future of Western Civilization. Christianity was obviously foundational in the rise of the West by uniting the European tribes under Christendom, but the Enlightenment and development of forensic science in archeology, natural history, linguistics, and philology have led to Christianity becoming attenuated today and something of an endangered species as the cult underlying our culture.
There are many millions of sincere believers in the risen Jesus of Nazareth in the West but none command the kind of respect among our intelligentsia and bien-pensant as theologians, clerics, prelates, popes did in ages past. At best, the pope today may not even be accorded the amount of respect as the current Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of a very small and obscure Buddhist sect.
Among most leaders and leading thinkers of the traditional Right, Christianity is not always regarded highly or as helpful. While they acknowledge a debt to Christendom and its leading role in the rise of our civilization and defense against Islam; it is important to also acknowledge that Christianity is the real engine of science and intellectual inquiry into the nature of Man, God, and the Universe.
To put it as simply and brusquely as possible (I’m able to offer a longer defense of my propositions if engaged) here are four things a rational and faith filled Christian can or need no longer believe:
1) God writes books. (‘Inspired’ being an undefined circumlocution.)
2) God organizes people into religions.
3) God chooses a people to be special to Him.
4) God assigns missions to prophets and individuals.
Here are things that God does do:
1) God reveals himself directly to people as one of three People or manifests Himself in less obvious ways through grace, apparition, or miracle.
2) God guides the prayerful to knowledge and wisdom. Only the Truth can impart truth.
3) God works through Creation in any manner he chooses with a purpose.
Stripped of unnecessary man-made appurtenances, accretions, aggregations, and strained pieties, Christianity may once again fully inspire and undergird the West if Christianity can reform its theology and jettison claims that no longer persuade rational men.
Christianity is in need of conversion, a change of heart, if it is to survive as the only viable explanation of the meaning of life (and death) that sustains, drives, and inheres for human life to thrive and prosper as moral beings with supernatural being and destiny.
When Christians embrace this simpler, truer, and reborn faith, then they will stand and defend that faith tooth and nail (as they once did against Islam and paganism), rejecting the depravities and corruption of materialism, hedonism, secularism, Marxism, and false religions, especially Islam.
Of course, most people, ruling elites and the masses, will be nominal in their practice of Christianity as they always have been, but the formation of belief, inculcating children with proper morals and mechanics of belief, the possibility of genuine spiritual relief and guidance, will animate civilization and give it backbone, certainty, optimism, and energy. It will renew the arts and sciences.
The defense of the West cannot succeed without a revival of faith, but that old time religion will never suffice against the irrefutable criticism that has accrued over the last few hundred years as science and scholarship eviscerate so many doctrines and assumptions. Studies in historicity of the Old and New Testaments have demonstrated enormous fictions in the Old (Solomon never was, Jericho never fell to Joshua, Sennacherib’s army wasn’t destroyed by plague, etc), and textual problems for the New making attribution to eyewitnesses problematic when a Medieval scribe puts words in Jesus’ mouth.
Human beings can never leave well enough alone. The Resurrection wasn’t enough as the simple basis of faith, i.e. death is not death, love is greater than death, God cares and saves.
Humans had to make salvation more, and explain it with elaborate metaphors and analogies, attaching further supernatural claims, and injecting pious romantic notions onto creeds. They took a simple Cross and remade it into an enormously contrived work of filigree, enamel, jewels, precious metals, icons, saints, canons, webs of theology, and centralized power.
God is the ultimate in simplicity. He is Truth, Love, Beauty, Goodness. What’s simpler than that? Hydrogen is the simplest element, but it leads to a vast complexity of matter and energy. Water is simple, and leads to a stunning variety of life as do four simple nucleic acids. In the Church, people become enamored of elaborate theology and doctrines, pure trivia, rather than submitting to the simple and living God. Men prefer to talk, write, argue, concern themselves with legalisms, create elaborate canons, or build systems than pray their way to communion with the actual living God, distracting themselves with contrived miscellany.
The Church, even the Protestant evangelical ones, is overwhelmed with atavisms, mutations, and corruptions that present sensible men, who sincerely desire salvation and wisdom, with insurmountable burdens in many cases, or imposes on intelligent adherents suspension of reason upon a great many essentially meaningless matters rather than simply following the risen God who has revealed Himself to them. Thus making smart believers into unconvincing apologists having to defend the indefensible, refute the irrefutable, and assert the nonfactual.
Is Darwinism false? Yes, but not because the Bible says so, but because scientifically, natural selection can never account for the development and variety of life. Other mechanisms must be at work, and are gradually being discovered, but rational men must acknowledge that life cannot come from non-life.
It took me around ten years from my conversion to Christianity to carve away all the unessential elements of faith. The first great departure came when I was trying to explain to a friend why Mary needed to be a virgin according to Church teachings and pious ruminations. He wondered what difference it would make and why would God necessarily have to operate differently in the making of Jesus than people being created otherwise. God can create a Jesus, virgin mother or not. It wouldn’t matter to God. He doesn’t complicate things, He simplifies them. He doesn’t do two absurd things when one will do. He is the ultimate Occam’s Razor.
The second major awakening occurred when I was reading an interview with Raymond Brown, the Catholic scholar, who simply stated when asked about how the Bible came to be written, “God doesn’t write books. People write books.”
As an author familiar with every kind of writing and sense of writing, I was struck to the core. Knowing God as I did, I understood that God does not condescend in such a manner as to dictate or ‘inspire’ by some sort of whispering susurrus of feeling and approval.
Writing the Truth is a matter of knowing the Truth and finding a way of expressing it that makes sense, is effective, and beautiful. That is why Islam and Mormonism (Joseph Smith based it on Islam, that is, as a fiction he might pull off like Mohammed did, and gull a bunch of people into following him and fulfilling his sexually incontinent desires and will to power) are so obviously phony and evil. They have no beauty and do not correspond to wisdom and sense. Whereas Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, even pagan philosophies have a great deal of wisdom, and beauty but fail to make sense entirely.
Christianity only makes sense, of course, if Jesus is risen and is God, but the primal beauty of this absurdity is that it can be tested. Not through Pascal’s Wager, although that probably works, but in the simple expedient of asking (and you shall receive). If anyone wants to know if Jesus is alive, available, and divine, he only need ask Jesus to reveal himself to him in a way that’s convincing. The catch being a man must be sincere, willing to wait for the response, and serious about following Him once he sees the Truth, since any other response would be folly. If a man asks for the most direct path to the grocery store, and then drives off in every direction but towards the store, who would waste his time advising the man once he knew that about him? God is responsive on His terms. If that’s unacceptable to a man, he gets no response because he is worth none.
Anyway, for the traditional man on the Right, he knows that for the West to survive it must have a cultus, a common mythos of belief in order to survive and prevail. He knows that no kind of paganism will satisfy his soul since Christianity effectively destroyed paganism with its accessible Trinity, the personal triune God. But it is one thing to submit to Jesus, another to have to submit to a host of other enormous and supernatural claims that don’t really have anything to do with salvation. A man wants to know if Jesus really does exist, not if his mother was this or that or if the pope is infallible or if the Bible is perfect. He wants God unfiltered and unfettered. That is why Christianity must grow up and put away the childish things, and become a faith every man can, if not embrace and believe, tip his hat to in respect. In effect, that Christ could be the answer to the question he’s not ready to ask because it’s not as ridiculous as in former times.
A risen dead guy? Yeah, that’s crazy, but if that’s all I have to ponder, think about, ask, and submit myself to, I might do it someday if desperate enough or all out of other answers.
AA is a twelve-step conversion process (very much like the Church’s initiation process) and has its Big Book, but what people are told is to “take what you need and leave the rest.” That’s exactly what most Christians do as they go along. They use what helps them and ignore what they don’t like. I propose that the West, in order to be saved must look at Christianity and take what it needs (the mythos/truth of Christ risen) and leave the rest of what attached itself to Him and hinders Western man from synchronous psychological unity with his fellows and a fruitful life. 
Postscript:
There are a number of aspects of Christianity or faith in Christ that will always remain complex in their explication, such as Natural Law. Even as the reformed faith sets aside many doctrines, moral issues remain that the Church was able to previously defend by arguing from authority and tradition such as birth control. Apologetics will often require a shift in the future from proof texting and praxis to different, perhaps less convincing arguments.
For example, the injunction against female priests, bishops, pastors and such is scriptural and traditional. How to justify it further when scripture and tradition carry much less weight? Natural Law, human experience, and the ever-present reality of patriarchy combined with scripture, tradition, and the way of prayer that always leads to conformity in knowledge of God’s will help to stem the perverse spirit of many who always seek their own way regardless of their affronting Wisdom.
Many women, children, the spoiled, or resentful will always claim some rule is unfair and must be altered to suit them or they will huff and puff and scream bloody murder. They must be shown the door as they were in the past. Overweening selfishness is corrupting and should never be countenanced.
Have you read much CS Lewis? There are even doodles on YouTube. (Search for Man or Rabbit as it goes directly to your point).
The weight accorded to Scripture and (Capital-T) Tradition ought to be to the extent they are true, and in what sense they are true. If they carry less or more weight for any other reason then it is an error, one simultaneously grave and simple.
How can a traditional right even exist without weight to tradition?
And I’m more sceptical of the modern Critics – we have very early copies of the NT texts and the changes were (sometimes literally) marginal. And the archeologists said the Hittites never existed – until they were found, so I’m skeptical of that too, while I don’t take everything literally, I am careful not to dismiss the possibility.
Last Century produced G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis. And even Bishop Sheen was a TV favorite.
They were very traditional and very Christian. If we were to return to a Traditional Christian culture, I think both would be icons of what we are trying to recover. Their faith was quite simple, but it flowed from there into every thought and aspect of life. Because eternity is greater than the temporary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJu0oYvi-cY&index=5&list=PL9boiLqIabFgjeaTcx_LLsXrguKfeqLmn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9fR1vSxNEQ
Why should a woman not in this [priestly] sense represent God?… Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to ‘Our Mother which art in Heaven’ as to ‘Our Father’. Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All this, as it seems to me, is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does…. …Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say… that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin… And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument not in favour of Christian priestesses but against Christianity…. It is also surely based on a shallow view of imagery…. …One of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of God. One of the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the Church.
Today we have Peter Kreeft – who quoted the above in http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/sexual-symbolism.htm
The “Patriarchy” can only have authority to the extent it is given by God, that is, to the extent it and its actions are true and good. It is not so much a privilege, but a duty, a responsibility, and often a thankless and unwanted one. The feminists may complain, but then fail to run things properly, or even when they do, they complain of the toll it takes – the 40 year old at the top of her career who will never have a child is not uncommon. But it is no less wearying for men.
The subtlest heresies are those wherein we create Jesus in the image we want him to be instead of what he really is.
In the other areas of the Christian Manopsphere they point out that this https://societyofphineas.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/jesus-bad-ass-40762844869.jpeg?w=294&h=450 is the feminist christian woman’s idea.
I’ve often pointed out in other venues that Jesus could have written a book if he wanted to, and we would not have the Gospels and have to think and engage them, but we would have all the answers clearly. However I would point out that you simply have to go through the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew, chapters 5 through 7 and you realize you can’t even begin to live out what he said. I don’t think he could make things clearer. We only know of Jesus through scripture (unless you have had a personal direct revelation, but that has more problems). So when you say you believe in Jesus, unless it is a meaningless answer to a trivia question, the immediate reaction ought to be how can I serve him? How can I make myself right, or conform. Scripture has some of the answers, but some are buried deep and not all are good miners, some accept pyrite for gold.
He did not write a book, so how are we to approach him? The second alternative is he founded a church, with the Apostle Peter as his Prime Minister (since at Caesera Phillipi, Jesus used the words in Isaiah 22 about the keys to the kingdom to that effect). Worse for feminists, it was patriarchal. Yet here is how I understand it – His authority is mediated by the Church, and we must submit to it in roughly the same way wives ought to submit to their husbands. Husbands are fallen men, as are those in the Church. But either grace will overcome it (often with forgiveness on all sides), or Jesus may as well be a myth – the gates of hell will prevail.
Even if you don’t join me in that, Aslan is not a tame lion, Jesus isn’t some kind of quiet ghost who won’t interfere. But the soft Jesus, the “Good Buddy” Jesus, and others tend to be what the imagination gravitates to. Not some kind of spiritual drill instructors that upon some failure will demand “drop and give me 50 pater nosters!”, and often for our pleading, prayers, profession, and praise, shout “I can’t hear you!”. Drill instructors are merciful, because the enemy will take your life and the hardness is necessary to make you into the man you need to be. Jesus is worried about your soul and a real Jesus will just as severely merciful.
And make no mistake. The post does not mention the Devil. Yet he is our greatest enemy. Without Jesus, he should be feared as there is no real defense. But even with Jesus, the Devil is often ignored as if he isn’t working actively today, undermining, corrupting, seducing us into relaxing, putting down our weapons or letting them rust, or even joining his side and thinking it is part of God’s plan.
We can talk about which Generation of War, the strategy and tactics for some future conflict, but the utter foolishness is not to realize we are already in a war far more serious than any in the 20th century. Divorce ripping apart “the one flesh”. Abortion turning us into the Aztecs. And the Devil scarcely gets a mention as a threat. Four planes crashed killing 3000 over a decade ago and we still remember and want more revenge and to destroy a remote enemy, 4500 are slaughtered daily and we worry about sports or movies. Oh yes, we are at war, one with eternal stakes, yet we are not fighting that battle, except on the margins. The devil is not in the details, he has invaded and is occupying your home.
Where does Jesus come in once you realize that you have an eternally mortal enemy actively trying to kill both the flesh and soul?
(Badboy Jesus image from https://societyofphineas.wordpress.com/)
Also recommended: The Screwtape Letters
Doodle versions of 1 and 7:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3MWVMKKY3A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp98AlCHLaQ
“A risen dead guy? Yeah, that’s crazy, but if that’s all I have to ponder, think about, ask, and submit myself to, I might do it someday if desperate enough or all out of other answers.”
Before I try to engage the author more deeply, I would ask the author to clarify his claims concerning the authenticity of Christian miracles. E.g. #1: Padre Pio. E.g. #2: Joan of Arc.
Thanks
“But if you do not believe [Moses’] writings, how will you believe My words?” (John 5:47)
As a recovering atheist I was surprised to see that the apostles spoke so negatively about myths or fables. This reinforced the sense I had that their claims were reliable.
– “For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty.” (2Pet 1:16)
– “As I urged you when I went into Macedonia–remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is in faith.” (1Tim 1:3-4)
– “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.” (2Tim 4:3-4)
– “This testimony is true. Therefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, not giving heed to Jewish fables and commandments of men who turn from the truth.” (Titus 1:13-14)
At the same time they denounced myths and fables, they constantly referred to the earliest events recorded in the book of Genesis. Luke even records the genealogy of Christ, man by man, right back to Adam.
References to Adam and Eve (Matt 19:5, Mark 10:6, Luke 3:38, Rom 5:14, 1Cor 6:16, 1Cor 15:22, 1Cor 15:45, 2Cor 11:3, Eph 5:31, 1Tim 2:13, 1Tim 2:14, Jude 1:14)
The Serpent (2Cor 11:3, Rev 12:9, Rev 20:2)
Cain and Abel (Matt 23:35, Luke 11:51, Heb 11:4, 1John 3:12, Jude 1:11)
Enoch (Luke 3:37, Heb 11:5, Jude 1:14)
Noah (Matt 24:37, Matt 24:38, Luke 3:36, Luke 17:26, Luke 17:27, Heb 11:7, 1Pet 3:20, 2Pet 2:5, 2Pet 2:5)
The apostle Peter even warned about men who “willfully forget” the events recorded in Genesis.
“For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water.” (2Pet 3:5-6)
The apostles saw myths or fables as deceptive and contrary to sound doctrine. They also constantly referred to Genesis in defense of their doctrine. This would be a glaring inconsistency if the apostles believed the book of Genesis was myth or fable.
To give an example of the war:
https://www.traditionalright.com/a-time-for-wolves/
http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/brotherhood.jpg
Consider the equivalent pictures of Chesterton or Lewis, or anyone else you would like to name who is wise or spiritual.
Oh, “the wolves” are exciting. They represent the Pagan ideal, and Paganism had its virtues.
And they don’t make many demands as far as obeying commandments, much beyond the tribe itself.
Yet can anyone say they would rather be a Lewis or Chesterton instead of one of these wolves?
Perhaps, but that delineates the war including its nature. Having turned Christendom into a ruin and/or parody of its former self, the enemy presents partial truths which cure the symptom but not the disease. Effeminacy is to be cured by pagan masculinity, not by spiritual mastery and traditional virtues like fortitude. Instead of rebuilding the church, they burn fake boats.
Broad is the road that leads to destruction, and it doesn’t matter if you enter hell on the right or left side.
Back when there was a forum, I noted the organizers of this pagan gathering were into “black metal” music. The Satanism might not be truly believed in (See Screwtape Letters about “have the patient picture someone in red tights”) but tends to be explicit. The post is about Jesus, but this other one is about the Norse pantheon – Thor, Odin, Balder, etc., yet both appear here.
I don’t exactly want to quote “Choose this day whom you will follow” from the book of Joshua, but it is hard not to.
And that is the choice of those who wish to restore “Tradition”. – if it doesn’t begin with Jesus Christ, it won’t end in restoring Christendom. The wolves are going somewhere else.
You want Scripture to be your final authority on many matters, but as I pointed out, Scripture no longer holds as much water as it once did. It was all written by men. God does not write books.
The book, Misquoting Jesus, offers unrefuted evidence of how much the New Testament is unreliable, to an extent we cannot determine. I disagree with the author’s conclusions about faith (he’s an apostate), but his facts and scholarship have yet to be challenged as wrong. He has been vigorously attacked for his views, but his demonstrations have never been shown to be false.
The Old Testament is riddled with so many falsehoods and historical errors that have been well illustrated that serious men who value truth, evidence, logic, and reason cannot begin to accept it. Adam and Eve? Never happened from what we know of natural history. Sin and death existed long before Man entered the picture. You don’t really believe that Ezekiel flew to heaven on a chariot of fire, do you? Or many other things like it.
How does God actually operate in both individual lives and in that of a nation or people? There is Providence, but not like the OT would have you believe.
People believed in Jesus, experienced his resurrection and banded together before there was ever any scriptures to guide them. They relied on God and the Holy Spirit. Scripture is helpful, but not essential when you have access to Truth himself.
The best book on New Testament accuracy of its texts is Misquoting Jesus. I mention more about it below. It’s the case of an atheist being right and thorough in his scholarship, but shallow in his conclusion about Christ.
We know about Troy, the Hittites and many other things that many once thought fabulous, but we also know that death did not enter this world through human agency. This world was made with sin (morality – right and wrong – embued in advanced mammals and with an ability to recognize it) and death existed before any mammals such as Man appeared.
If our Cult is to thrive, we have to discard much that hinders men from considering its basis, the risen Jesus. And if you have Jesus (and the Trinity), what else do you need essentially?
For example, if humans never were responsible for the Fall, what need we of a sacrifice of blood to atone for our condition? Obviously none, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need to be saved from ourselves (because no one can save himself), put on the true path, and made aware that death is not death.
I’ll read more below, but the atheist had his axe to grind, and if that is the best, I’ll stick with tradition and orthodoxy. http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/new_testament_corruption.html http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0830828079
This is not a small point. The resurrection itself is one of those fabulous inventions according to the same atheists. The resurrection is what hinders nonbelievers. The trinity is also considered by many an invention. Is the Nicean or even the Apostles creed just another unreliable document?
Aquinas and his contemporaries said animals killed and died, but if Man is a different KIND of being, death too would not necessarily follow other than as a result of sin. Animals – the brutes – do not have the same kind of soul, they don’t understand good and evil, so can’t sin. To sin, you have to know you are disobeying.
There is also a simple question. How do YOU know you have Jesus? Cultural Marxists claim they do (Liberation Theology) and make similar arguments about Man and Scripture going wrong. And what is this “risen Jesus” – does he request or demand anything? Does he teach or do miracles? And if you can give any answer, can you make the case using reason and evidence? And we haven’t got to the trinity – is Jesus God, or something less? Why do we need both a risen Jesus and the Trinity?
I agree we need to discard what hinders evangelizing, but the greatest issue is our failure to present an image of Jesus personally that others see through our deeds. And we are told the Holy Spirit is the one to change hearts.
If someone WILL not believe, it isn’t any fact or flaw in logic hindering belief, but an ill will. And unbelief itself is a sin. They are not reasons but rationalizations hindering belief.
Christianity only offers truth. To deny any part of truth is to deny Christianity itself. A minimized gospel won’t lead to the fullness in Christ Jesus. We are not seeking members for a cult but saving souls from hell.
Being Roman Catholic, Truth about such matters is Scripture and (Capital-T) Tradition and the Magisterium (the Bishops, collectively and the successor of Peter).
Jesus spent three years teaching by word and deed – of which a tiny amount made it into scripture (see the end of John’s gospel). Jesus didn’t just pop up at the last supper. They relied on the lessons they were personally taught and shown. They had all the words of the gospels and more, directly, they experienced it.
Having had the direct light of Jesus, they didn’t need the shadow of Scripture.
CS Lewis on the issue of Adam, briefly (from The Problem of Pain) http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thepangeablog/2010/05/02/c-s-lewis-on-creation-fall-evolution-quote-to-ponder-51508/
And somewhat more at length: http://biologos.org/blog/surprised-by-jack-part-3-mere-depravity
In this case he generally allows “Adam” to be from some poetry instead of history, but there is the point that we fell.
Just as there is the point that Jesus suffered, died, and was buried; and on the third day he rose again (as the Creeds say, “according the the scriptures”).
The fruit and tree and serpent can just be “window dressing” just as the stone, the shroud, the angels, the women seeing him, the apostles discovering the empty tomb and who entered first. Or even meeting him unknown on the road to Emmaus. But at some point the plot depends on aspects which aren’t mere window dressing. Atheists also claim, well, he was a yogi so didn’t really die, just woke from a trance a few days later, or that the apostles stole the dead body, etc. and the risen Christ becomes ordinary. If you play too much with “Adam and Eve”, you get something other than God creating Man (as something other than an animal), and Man rejecting God and falling. That is the fine line you must navigate.
Much has been confused by ultra-literalist fundamentalism (I feel closer to fundamentalists than moderates though). Scripture isn’t literal, scientific, history, though passages can and do contain all three. One reason for having Tradition and a Magisterium is they can authentically teach Scripture at the deeper levels. I have giants on whose shoulders I can stand on. If you take scripture alone, you are left with trying to figure out for yourself what parts are literal or not and what they mean. On a basic level this is no problem (You can’t get around the evil of murder, theft, fraud, and adultery, what Jesus claimed in his own words, and Paul’s philosophical treatises – which are often preferred to the commands printed in red ink). But when you try to probe deeper or ask it to do what it was not provided to us for, you can get into lots of trouble and it generally ends in confusion and quarreling.
That’s one of my main points — no one is barred from the direct light of Jesus. He is as accessible today as he was yesterday. People generally need guidance, though, and that’s the role of the church, certainly, but they add so much more besides over time and make it hide bound and irrelevant.
We are asking intelligent, sincere, and interested people to believe in extra claims we have no business claiming.
Without a real Adam and Eve, there is no Fall because there is no explanation sufficient to demand ascent. There must be different reason or reasons why Mankind is deficient in regard to atonement. Mortality (and all it’s random ills) was built into life because that’s the only way to make souls, in essence, that will eventually come to yearn for salvation and wholeness (and holiness).
The church (or a church) has got to eventually face the facts of life and faith or remain stuck as a weird cult with odd and many absurd claims (it can never prove) and as nonsensical as Scientology; becoming a backwater that saves some as the expense of their ability to reason honestly.
My ability to evangelize is very simple. If somebody wants to know why I believe in Jesus, I can tell them it’s because I’ve met him, and they can do the same if they desire to know the Truth of it. They just have to ask. They don’t have to accept the Tradition, the Magisterium, the Bible, the saints, miracles, the Creed. They just have to meet him Him, and take it from there.
Things will sort themselves out. They always do, but the church can’t survive as a viable institution that undergirds the West if it doesn’t cast or burn off all the jetsam that’s washed up into it for 2000 years.
Our faith is one of revelation, and all revelation is personal. Discernment is always necessary but neither tradition or scriptures can assure wisdom, prudence, and truth.
Do you also want children to stop singing, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so?” Human authorship vs divine inspiration is a false choice. People are complex and God can handle complexity. Bart Ehrman’s radically skeptic standard would disqualify all ancient literature. Watch him debate James White. It’s not even close. The Bible has thousands of times more evidence than any other work of its time. For Ehrman, if there is a typo in one of multiple manuscript lines then maybe the sky is not actually blue. He is not to be taken seriously on the subject.
Henry Ford noted what has been well understood for a long time now by conservative Christians, “The flaccid condition of the Church, so much deplored by spokesmen who had regard for her inner life, was brought about not by “science,” not by “scholarship,” not by the “increase of light and learning”– for none of these things are antagonistic even to incomplete statements of truth — but by Jewish-German Higher Criticism. The defenders of the faith have fought long and valiantly against the inroads made by the so-called Higher Criticism, but were sadly incapacitated in their defense, because they did not see that its origin and purpose were Jewish. It was not Christian; it was not German; it was Jewish.”
Jewish or not, the point is that if pragmatism is your standard then to traditional/biblical views we should go. Look at conservative groups like the Mennonites and Amish. The groups that take the Bible most seriously have retained the most tradition. The women still wear dresses and veils, the men work hard, the families are huge. The whole reason I ended up valuing tradition rather than cultural Marxism is that I believed the gospel of Christ and therefore the Bible.
I certainly believe in Adam and Eve. If you descended from monkeys, that is your personal problem. But what is harder to believe, Elijah in a chariot of fire, or God sacrificing His Son for rebellious mankind? Clearly the latter. The Bible makes very serious claims, but two billion people are convinced. And again, the chief apostles knew Christ in person and took the scripture seriously:
“Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” (2Pet 1:20-21)
“And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.” (2Tim 3:15-17)
People are not complex. We are very simple creatures. Our selfishness, defensiveness, and fearfulness manifest themselves in ways that appear myriad and multitudinous, but only because of the confusion they create. God is Love, and that is a simple thing. If we follow God we become equally simple.
Anyone who has ever met the Father (pure loving kindness) knows that he would never order anyone to murder every man, woman, child, and animal (beloved creatures all) of any race or nation of people as the OT claims the Hebrews were ordered to destroy the Amalikites.
If the Bible is wrong in one important instance, and not in a trivial way of a simple misspelling or typo, it acts to falsify a great many other aspects. It doesn’t do any good to say, well, the Bible is mostly true and mostly accurate and that proves . . . It needs to be absolutely true or it discredits itself.
And it’s marvelous you point to Jewish-German Higher Criticism as the vile culprit of Biblical debunking when it’s the same Jews with a propaganda objective who wrote the Old Testament to glorify themselves and their race as superior to the rest of humanity. Scheming rotten Jews sought to discredit Christianity by discrediting the Bible that loving, universal minded, wonderful Jews created along with messianic Jews for Jesus like Mark, Matthew, John, Peter, James, and Paul.
Go ahead and try to explain to a molecular biologist how Adam and Eve just appeared and ruined everything for Mankind until Jesus atoned for their rebelliousness.
I am not descended from monkeys. I am descended from the first single celled life form that appeared on Earth by what I assume to be a miracle since life cannot come from non-life as far as I know.
Because a billion or more people believe in various claims about the Bible means what exactly? Masses believe in Mohammed, in Buddha, in Hinduism, too. Billions believe in astrology. The assertion you make is ridiculous.
If you don’t personally know Jesus, it doesn’t matter about the Bible. If you don’t know how to pray, and follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit, you’ll never get anywhere. Without direct experience and revelation, the Bible is nearly meaningless. It offers some wisdom and useful rules, but it cannot save anyone from himself.
As I’ve been trying to point out, whether one is considered a “weird cult” or the claims are “absurd” is totally irrelevant.
Are the claims true or false.
We both appear to claim to be personally enlightened by Jesus.
My Jesus is that of the Gospels, and except that some things are edited or paraphrased, the words in red have the essence of the words he spoke (in Aramaic, e.g. Cepheus for peter/petros/petra).
You appear to claim some backsliding atheist’s book whose claims are debatable is gospel truth and that the four Gospels are the equivalent of fiction. Feel free to clarify if this doesn’t state your view accurately.
If what you claim the Church has added is true, it depends on whether Jesus is the Truth, the source of truth, and that the Devil is the father of lies, and was a liar and murderer from the beginning.
Put differently, the Church either brings an unfocused, fuzzy image of Jesus into clear focus, or is adding obscuring decorations to a Jesus who is already clear.
The problem with the latter claim is that you haven’t posed an alternative. You haven’t said what your Jesus has said about anything relating to morality, civil government. Criticizing the church is one thing, but pointing out a new and perfect resolution to a paradox is different – it would be a miracle. And it would be evidence your Jesus is the right one and is leading to truth. If your Jesus says exactly what the Church says (and the Trinity is a church construct), then on what basis do you condemn the church – and/or scripture? If your Jesus is saying something fundamentally and specifically different, you should elaborate. Is Adultery, Gay Marriage, Abortion, and such now good and not evil?
I’m really not trying to belittle you, but am trying to understand. Discarding the Church, Scripture, and Tradition is one thing, condemning them, calling them evil, lies, etc. requires something more if it is not mere libel.
The Bible is just a book without knowing Jesus. It is supposed to lead you to the Author.
The Church is just another corrupt human institution without Jesus, it is supposed to lead you to him and support the faith.
Tradition is just another set of nonsense rules and practices without Jesus, it is supposed to be the song he wrote for us to sing.
But you seem to say, The Bible is corrupt, wrong, useless, regardless of Jesus. The Church is wrong and has nothing to do with Jesus. Tradition is irrelevant, just follow Jesus and do as you please within the bounds. This might be a bit raw, but is it wrong, or have I mistaken your position?
The Amalikites were before Christ and thus possibly beyond redemption as such. This is like saying, in an era before chemotherapy or antibiotics, no doctor would suggest amputation of a cancerous or gangrenous limb. Or, equally, if someone evil came to kill your wife and children, that even if the only way to stop him was to kill him first, you would not be permitted.
(Was it wrong to exorcise demons before asking the person if their possession was voluntary – see Acts with the slave girl that could fortell the future, or Simon Magus).
Molecular Biologists have already “found” Adam and Eve – through the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA respectively. But I quoted CS Lewis on the subject.
The last thing the OT does it to glorify Jews. It shows them to be selfish, corrupt, adulterous, disobedient, rebellious, and unrepentant. Even “after God’s own heart” David committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband murdered. Solomon with his concubines. Did you ever read Kings or Chronicles or the Prophets?
You might say you know Jesus so you know how to get to heaven, and you may say you know how to get to Topeka. Yet I would prefer having a compass, map, and GPS to get me to Topeka, or at least to insure you are keeping to the right road and going the right way. All of the spiritual equivalents of things that show direction you have discarded.
You have already said the Bible is meaningless – and in such a way that whether you know Jesus or have the Holy Spirit makes no difference. The Bible has to be no more spiritually meaningful than the local telephone directory.
St. Jerome (who translated the Vulgate) noted “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ”. You disagree in the strongest terms.
2000 years ago, Jesus walked Palestine. Do you have his address and phone number – you say “he is as accessible today”, but I don’t find his location on Google (I’m not counting the tabernacle in Catholic Churches or in the monstrance in adoration chapels). He was physically present, and was visible, and audibly spoke to the disciples and crowds “yesterday”. Where is that happening today? I would normally point to Paul on the Damascus Road as advocating your position, but you say Scripture is fiction.
I won’t contest “the direct light of Jesus”, especially since I think some who don’t claim Christ are managing to act better than those who claim to be in the light, though this is extraordinary grace. Light might exist outside the church, but it is like fireflies in the forest v.s. a well lighted stadium.
The “extra” claims are either true or false. If they are false, then those claiming are corrupt and ought not be listened to. If they are true, then they should be listened to, and carefully.
If you think that God, the Father, did not love every Amalikite as much as he loves you, then you are very mistaken. If you think He ordered their deaths, you are more than doubly mistaken, and have never known the Father or His will towards his children, all of them. As foes in battle they can be fought with, but not murdered man, woman, child, and kine.
Adam and Eve, who disobeyed God and brought about the fall of Man and caused sin and death to come upon Earth, have never been found because they never existed. Death and Moral Sense existed before Man.
Yes, the argument that since parts of the Bible are unflattering to Jews (David) or Christians (Peter) it makes it all that more plausible is a logical fallacy. The Iliad makes Agamemnon and Achilles both look like dicks, and we know Troy existed and Mycenae so therefore Homer got everything right and told everything honestly, and it proves that everything in the Iliad is true, has to be true because it’s now more plausible.
I have read all of the Bible, yes. The OT a few times entirely and some parts frequently, and the NT too many times to count.
You accept that Tobit, Jonah, Genesis is mostly fable and fiction, yet think Samuel and Chronicles can’t be because they mean to persuade you they are reports and not tales? Do you really believe Samson slew multitudes with the jawbone of an ass, lost his strength by having his hair cut, and pulled down a temple when it grew back? And that’s not some sort of tall tale, legend, cautionary tale, or fable?
Yet, Samson is presented as historical fact just as Saul, David, and Solomon are.
Still, this is all beside the point of my article. Explain if you will how Christianity can be revived so that it dominates our culture as northern Europeans again, and animates our lives, arts, sciences, etc.
What keeps a man on the straight and narrow path, the right way, is prayer. If you don’t learn how to pray (all the time and everywhere), it doesn’t matter how good your map, compass it, or guidebook is — you’ve missed the boat entirely. The Bible won’t get you to heaven, only God will or can. You must renounce everything, including your cherished notions about religion and its trappings.
Remember where Paul wrote “there is freedom in Christ”? He wasn’t just referring to not having to eat kosher and be circumcised, he referred to all extraneous things that are distractions from the one essential fact of Christ the risen.
Religious people form a lot of opinions that can be helpful for a time, but eventually lose value or efficacy and have to be reconsidered. Most of what everyone believes are just a collection of provisional ideas supported formally or informally. Doctrine can be useful as a raft to cross the river, but once on the other side, you don’t need to pick it up and carry it along with you.
Prayer is the golden road in our Faith. All the rest is window dressing after awhile, and it gets you nowhere.
God the Father (actually the Trinity) loved every Amalikite. He also loves everyone in Hell. Sometimes it requires a sever mercy to prevent those from the former category from entering the latter.
Death existed before Man. Moral sense existed with the origin of the Angels. If Adam and Eve didn’t exist, at least in the sense CS Lewis accepts, then there could have been no fall and no need of redemption.
Either you believe in the fall or not. Yet without Adam and Eve, either we were created pre-fallen, or didn’t fall. In the former case we don’t need redemption because it is God himself who is responsible for our state having imposed it. If the latter we don’t need redemption since we aren’t fallen.
“You accept that Tobit, Jonah, Genesis is mostly fable and fiction” I accept no such thing. Each verse must be taken on its own merit. Raphael exists and stands before God and is one of the three honored on the feast day of the Holy Angels.
Something I do not take as perfectly historical and/or literal does not then mean I take it as pure fiction or even mythology. I believe Jonah existed, fled his task, was abducted by God in “a fish” though I don’t speculate much further, ended up in Nineveh, preached, they repented and were spared.
Genesis, before Noah is an echo of an echo, so I don’t take much literally, but post Noah, I am more careful.
If you actually read Judges, Samson lost his strength because the spirit of God left him, and regained it as a direct result of repentance (he broke his Nazirite vow). I don’t doubt he slaughtered a large number with a bone, and it was likely the jaw that was described. If you don’t believe in miracles, the minutiae cannot matter. If you do, then the minutiae are merely part of the story. Our Lady of Guadaloupe ended the Aztec sacrifice. Would that she end Abortion. Her image on a Tilma made of cactus fiber still is there.
The explanation (which I have given in other posts) of how Christianity can be revived is even simpler. Submit to Christ. That involves a third Great Awakening or revival. It has happened, and yes, through prayer, but the one prayer that you say comes from a tainted source:
Thy Kingdom Come.
Thy Will Be Done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.
Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
Do not put us to the test.
Deliver us from evil.
While I agree completely that prayer is “the only thing”, it must be an honest prayer. If the result of prayer is to read scripture (as true) and you just keep praying past it, the prayer has no effect.
There is the old joke. A man is on the roof of his house beset by rising flood waters. A boat comes by and offers to take him to safety. He responds “I’m trusting in God” A second boat gets a second response. Then a helicopter is met with the same. The waters rise and the man is drowned. He appears before God and asks “Why didn’t you help”. God replies, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter”.
We are given Holy Tradition, the Church, and Holy Scripture. In extraordinary circumstances God can work outside these things, but they are exceptional miracles. You can pray all you want, but if you are specifically praying disobedience after you are shown these are true, God may become silent (but you may still hear the voice which encouraged disobedience), but that won’t mean you are on the right road. If you are in New York, you must go west to go to Topeka, at least the most direct route. If you decide to go south, and pray very hard to get to Topeka, you will still not get there even with an extraordinary effort, crossing the south, then north poles as well as the equator. But you will never reach Topeka since it does not lie along a meridian.
Prayer will tell you where to go, but how to get there has been revealed through far more ordinary means. And you will travel via ordinary means. It is a very rare miracle where someone is teleported.
To put it into context, I’m a pacifist, perhaps even more so than you.
The modern, post Christ-is-risen problem today is Islam.
The current governments approve of the slaughter of innocents (drone strikes) and other grave sins (torture) in “the war on terror”.
But we have an Abortion Holocaust in our midst. Not 10,000 miles away.
My standard is simple. Whatever you call the violence against evil begins at home, so as soon as you do whatever it is you plan to do to ISIS or AlQueda to the local clinic or abortion doctor in your suburb, then you’ve proven the justification and righteousness of your position and I won’t argue against it.
If you will commit every monstrous grave sin with full knowledge and consent of the will – but only “over there” against “towel heads” and condemn the identical act “over here” against “those nice but misinformed doctors”, then you are a hypocrite or worse.
There are fewer doctors willing to perform Abortions than members of ISIS or Al Queda (perhaps for today I should add something about Gay Marriage). The Amalikites might belong to a category that for practical purposes makes them unredeemable. But then we ought to insist that we determine if ISIS, Al Queda, or NARAL are within or outside that category. And Justice requires us to act appropriately. If you demand a life for a life, begin locally. If you are a pacifist, then condemn the remote slaughter.
For the moment, I fall into the latter, and I do condemn all shedding of innocent blood, and equally condemn all violence (Scott Roeder) used to attempt to stop it.
I’m sorry to see that we are at a complete impasse regarding Faith. If is a sad and tragic word. Everyone won’t submit to God. They never have or will and they will suffer for it now or later. America will fall, and in the long run, as the man said, we’re all dead; but I care about my progeny and what will become of my people and faith. Morality doesn’t change even when the many call evil good, but religions do change unless you reject every Christian who is in a church that rejects any one thing you insist upon.
Prayer, when done properly, is an on going form of revelation that both heals and enlightens.
But that is the exact point. The term for someone who rejects the truth is “Heretic”, not as an epithet, but as a correct label. I don’t doubt that some who I would not identify as Christian will end up in hell, and many who say they are Christian won’t make heaven. But something else Lewis pointed out is that “Christian” has a specific meaning – “Gentleman” originally meant someone who owned property, not someone who was polite. “Christian” means someone who holds to the truth about Jesus.
Do you “reject every Christian who” doesn’t accept that “Morality doesn’t change”? Isn’t that “one thing you insist upon”?
I only insist upon the truth. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, so I am also insisting on Jesus, but the true Jesus and his commandments, not any random Jesus that each person imagines Jesus to be. Scripture and the writings of the Church Fathers and the saints give a clear picture of Jesus and they reinforce each other. The Mystics like St Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross explain how to pray. The church says how to pray. But they all say that if you pray, and are being told something very different, then you misdialed and got connected to the wrong thing. We have had 2000 years to accumulate truth. Doctrine develops. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35110 That is how religions “change”, they progress building on the existing store of truth.
Prayer is part of Tradition, but so is Scripture and the Church, and both are “true”. If you reject truth and Tradition, prayer cannot be of aid because the first thing revealed in prayer should be that you are like the prodigal son and you need to go back home.
It is not healing if the pain and symptoms go away but not the underlying disease, nor is it enlightenment to deny truth even if you get really good rationalizations.
One reason I returned to Catholicism was the same problems you have with Scripture, but I didn’t go to the other pole – from perfect as written by the hand of God to being just the random words of men. It is divinely inspired, but man written, so the light is soft instead of hard. (Personally, I think) the Catholics have the best resolutions of literal v.s. allegorical, and the apparent contradictions and errors, but Christians start with the Bible’s divine inspiration. Jesus didn’t write a book, but he founded a church that collected a divine anthology. You must engage reason and faith to approach it properly. And in faith, the words of scripture will be even more amazing and powerful than if it were the verbatim dictation of God since there are no limits on inspiration. Jesus speaks to us through scripture.
And that is what Tradition says.
I would not mind being C. S. Lewis, though I trained as a swordfighter and admire the lions – not the wolves. And the choice is not as simple as wolves and shmoos…
‘O see ye not yon narrow road,
So thick beset wi’ thorns and briers?
That is the Path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.
‘And see ye not yon braid, braid road, 45
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the Path of Wickedness,
Though some call it the Road to Heaven.
‘And see ye not yon bonny road
That winds about the fernie brae? 50
That is the Road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.
The most common reason people object to the Bible today is that they dislike the severity of God. This is obviously in part a result of cultural Marxism. They want a God who says “make love not war.” They don’t want a God who seems so Fascist or Authoritarian. While there is certainly room for different views within the ethnic nationalism that naturally results from a consistent application of Christianity, there is no room whatsoever in viable Christian nationalism for this My Little Pony theology that stumbles at the fact of God having authority over life and death. To man up must be one of Christendom’s top priorities at this time. Bleeding hearts must get over themselves. God kills people. Even the innocent are sometimes casualties. Christianity 101 includes the future resurrection of the dead. God will make things right in the end.
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