Posted on 02/22/2009 11:49:57 AM PST by pharmamom
Christians are entering a time of tribulation. The past almost two thousand years have been years of safety and security for us in the West. Christianity has been the modus vivendi, and while internecine battles have at times made disagreement dangerous, we haven’t faced an enemy from without. That has been changing for the past few decades, with the secularization of Europe and forces here in America insistent upon banishing religion (well, Christianity) from the public square. I believe that the Islamization of the West, a process our politicians are not only not opposing, but facilitating, will push Christianity further into what I would call a season of trial. I called it winter in the title, but a powerful and necessary winter that we can welcome as a prelude to resurrection.
Christianity in the West has been the most profound force for individual freedom the world has ever seen. While Christians have participated in social structures that force inequality, the fundamentally radical idea that we are all equal in Christ has led us inexorably to social equality, and the Christian insistence on free will and imago dei has brought us through the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason into the brilliant flowering of human discovery in science and technology. None of us can miss the irony that the fruit of our free will has been to drive its source out of public discourse, while poor substitutes for faith in God (such as faith in government) lead us into subservience once again.
Christians have participated in this diminishment of the role of faith in our social and political life. With the rise of materialism, we have stopped talking about spiritual equality and focused only on material equality. When the goods one possesses becomes the only measure of worth and happiness, political ideologies that seek to impose material equality and thus reduce individual liberty are inevitable. The State is the new church, preaching a gospel of salvation through submission to government. Since all that matters is the state of the body in this life, can we be astonished that the majority of people look to the state to provide for what they perceive to be their only need—physical satisfaction? And since humans live in a state of depravity, we should not be surprised that those who can will satisfy their sinful needs for power and control by stripping us of our freedom and responsibility in order to impose their ideas of proper social order and equality.
Christianity is not properly an individual faith. Christians are meant by God to live in community, making up the body of Christ on earth. But this community is meant to be a liturgical community with its life defined by the Incarnation and its vigor derived from the Holy Spirit. Christians in community practice caritas voluntarily, caring for one another out of love, not at the point of a gun. To the extent that a Christian in community surrenders his liberty, it is in free emulation of Christ’s sacrifice for us, not from ann exterior force imposing its will upon him. In return, all in the community submit to the standards of the gospel, striving to live a life of becoming god—not a life of depravity and sin where others are forced not only to accept any type of behavior but also to care for the needs to those who refuse responsibility. This is the grating flaw in the arguments of those like Obama who would coopt the idea of charity from the gospel while ignoring the duty and perogative of the community to hold its members to the standards of the life of faith. Obama’s insistence on forced sharing is the epitome of cheap grace for those who benefit from the work of others.
In a statist West, being a Christian will once again be the radical and subversive act it was just after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When I affirm that I am a Christian, I am asserting that my life is more than the material existence this government insists it is. I am asserting that my salvation has been secured not by the acts of corrupt and power-hungry men who seek to enslave me by forcing my physical dependence upon their political strictures, but by the death and resurrection of a man who was also God. I am telling the powers and principalities of this current government that I am beyond their control, because I belong to God. They may strip me of my liberty at the point of their guns, but I am free in Christ; and that ultimate freedom empowers me to speak the truth of the gospel no matter what efforts they make to silence me. I am free because I know that what happens to my body in this lifetime is not of ultimate importance. This stands in radical apposition to the Marxist myopia which sees only our material existence—a myopia that has shaped the past 150 years of political, philosophical and scientific thought.
We don’t have to look far back in our history to see the power of our freedom in Christ. We can point to the martyrs of the early Church, but stories of saints being stoned, crucified, blinded and flayed seem far from our current experience. No, we only have to look to the experience of the ancestors of black Americans who now clamor for government enslavement. The slaves who suffered at the hands of sometimes Christian whites themselves proclaimed a radical truth: their bodies may have belonged to another human, but their souls belonged to Christ. Every time they prayed, every time they worshipped, every time they strove to live into the image of God, they affirmed their ultimate freedom, the freedom God gives us to become god ourselves. Being a Christian in a time of tremendous physical suffering is not just to hope for a pie-in-the-sky heaven after death; being a Christian in the midst of suffering is to become God while you are alive. (This is what the Orthodox call theosification.) I don’t have to endure suffering while I’m alive only in the hope of paradise after death—I can exult in the process God is working in me while I live, healing me from sin and making me a new person in Christ.
So we are entering a Christian winter, a time of being pruned back, of having to strengthen inwardly, like a tree turns in upon itself in preparation for flowering later. Those who have grown in rocky soil, whose faith is shallow, who hope for easy salvation and will find it in an increasingly authoritarian state, will fall away. Those who want others to care for them or who wish to find an easy Utopia will turn to a government that increasingly insists it has the power of god to provide and to save. Those whose hearts are not set on Christ will be seduced by a political ideology that has all the trappings of authority and power; they will worship the state. If one opens one’s eyes to our shifting demographics, one may see that we will eventually be subsumed by the theocratic demands of the increasing Muslim population in our country. Then there will be many who are beguiled by the fatalistic prescriptions of a religion that denies not only personal liberty but even the idea of free will. In the face of these forces—an increasingly fascist government that believes it can establish utopia and an authoritarian theocratic faith that inherently limits liberty—being a Christian will be a revolutionary act. We will insist to the state that man cannot make heaven on earth, that humans are sinful and limited and in need of Christ to heal them. And we will refuse to convert to a faith that denies free will, salvation through faith and the transformation of the soul through submission to Christ alone.
I am very afraid of what will happen to our country not only in the next few years, but also in the decades to come. I am afraid because I am selfish and because I am weak. I do not want my children to suffer and be enslaved, however subtle that enslavement may be. I do not want either the technological nightmares developed by a humanity unfettered by humility or the return to the Dark Ages offered and made inevitable by a religion that eschews the freedom of the human mind. I am very weak. I live in fear and trembling, hoping against hope for a renewal of the Christian West because I do not want to have to be strong. But I believe with St. Paul that our suffering will bear holy fruit—our suffering will produce endurance, and our endurance will produce hope, and hope will not disappoint us because God in Christ has already accomplished our salvation. The victory has been won since a man named Jesus hung on a cross on Calvary. Our life in God is assured; our sacred obligation is to proclaim that victory no matter what the cost. Every minute of every day, if we open ourselves to grace, we are becoming like Christ. We then must be Christ to a world that denies its need of Him, knowing that soon—in the blink of an eye—we will be celebrating the Paschal feast once and for all.
“The past almost two thousand years have been years of safety and security for us in the West”
Have you noticed all the semi-brown persons in Southern Europe? Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France?
They would be evidence of the massive rapes & invasion of the mohammedans in the 700s-800s
The dark ages were pretty bad. And then don’t forget all the mass killings by the ...um... established church.
no, it’s been a roller coaster.
yep, and we are about to witness Communism for the first time first hand. The liberals have been working on this for a long time.
Thursday, January 10, 1963
Mr. HERLONG. Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Patricia Nordman of De Land, Fla., is an ardent and articulate opponent of communism, and until recently published the De Land Courier, which she dedicated to the purpose of alerting the public to the dangers of communism in America.
At Mrs. Nordman’s request, I include in the RECORD, under unanimous consent, the following “Current Communist Goals,” which she identifies as an excerpt from “The Naked Communist,” by Cleon Skousen:
[From “The Naked Communist,” by Cleon Skousen]
CURRENT COMMUNIST GOALS
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture—education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use [”]united force[”] to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction] over nations and individuals alike.
Almost there.
I guess the author doesn’t know about the Turks being at the gates of Vienna (1683)? If you look at things from a southern or central european stanpoint, things were pretty threatening. Just ask the Serbs, Greeks and other Balkan Christians about “external threats”.
Absolutely. See the way the media whipped people up against the Serbs? Intrinsically, the Russian/slav people should be on our side. It’s all just divide & conquer.
there has been no “regime change” in russia, that’s the thing. they just needed to remove the “communism” focal point.
You are right; I did not take that into account. Nonetheless, I think my point stands—even with the Moors attacking, Christianity was the status quo. Being Christian was not subversive. Within the Christian community, holding non-sanctioned views may have been dangerous (I acknowledged that in the opening paragraph), but even then, the nature of Christianity is to be a trajectory toward increasing openness and acceptance. To wit, we no longer burn heretics or force non-conformers to leave. The nature of Western Christianity is to allow open discourse and dissension, even when it costs the church its position and power.
BFL
yea we are.
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