Article by Christian Leithart.
From the conclusion:
The way to keep our senses sharp, says Hauerwas, is to constantly remind ourselves of danger through telling true stories. For the church, these true stories are about suffering, death, and resurrection. This is the good news with which we transform culture and bring life to the cities of men. A Christian—or a rabbit—can never be complacent. As the agents of God in the world, we too are called to take up the cross.
And not on “power”, as the postmodernists insist. Speech on Youtube here.
Article by
The Rev Dr Alan Clifford
LENT – (along with the religion which inspired it) should be given up ‘for Lent’ and forever!
An Oxford organisation known as the ‘Oxford Minority People Gathering’ have complained to BBC Oxford that while Divali, the Chinese New Year, and Ramadan are reported, Lent is not.
I fully understand OMPA’s complaint. This is but a further example of the creeping deletion of Christianity from our culture.
However, a more urgent question is what kind of Christianity do we wish to preserve and promote?
Getting upset about BBC Oxford’s omission of Lent raises a more profound question: why Lent at all? As I argue, there is a strong case for abolishing it.
It is astonishing in this secular age that superstitious observances like Lent still survive.
There’s no denying that in our obesity-ridden society, diet-reduction would be good for the health of all of us. But to turn it into a religious ritual is no part of authentic biblical Christianity.
Lent is of pagan origin, adapted as a 6th-century Papal innovation. It is quite alien to the teaching of the New Testament. While Roman Catholics, Anglicans and others persist in its observance, the Apostle Paul rejects the validity of special holy days and superstitious abstinence (see Galations 4:10-11; Colossians 2:16-23).
Christian teaching does have a lot to say to us on the subject of over-indulgence. However, our Saviour’s teaching on ‘self-denial’ (see Mark 8:34-8) covers every kind of self-gratification, and not just for forty days but every day! Also, arguments against Lent do not call into question properly-understood and correctly-motivated periods of fasting and prayer.
More faithful interpreters of the Bible are represented by the great Genevan reformer John Calvin (1509-64) and the great English Puritan Richard Baxter (1615-91):
Christ did not abstain from food and drink to give an example of temperance, but to gain Him more authority in being set apart from the common lot of men, that He might progress as a messenger from heaven, not as a man of the earth.
It is really quite foolish to institute the so-called forty-day fast in imitation of Christ. For there is no more reason today why we should follow the example of Christ, than ever there was for the holy Prophets and the other Fathers under the Law to imitate the Fast of Moses. In fact we know that no-one ever had such a thought.
They pretend to be imitators of Christ, when they fast every day of the forty, but really they so stuff their bellies at breakfast that they can easily go through dinner-time without food. What resemblance have they to the Son of God?
Neither Christ nor Moses held a solemn fast every year, but both held one only, in all their lives.
For [Lent observers] to persuade themselves that it is a work of merit, a part of religious devotion and the worship of God – this is the ultimate superstition.
Commentary on Matthew’s Gospel, John Calvin
The imitation of Christ in His forty days’ fasting is not to be attempted or pretended to; because his miraculous works were not done for our imitation.
The pretending of a fast when men do but change their diet, flesh for fish, fruit, sweetmeats, etc, is but hypocritical and ridiculous.
As for the commanding such an abstinence, as in Lent, not in imitation, but bare commemoration of Christ’s forty days’ fast, I would not command it if it were in my power…
A Christian Directory (1673), Richard Baxter
So give up Lent and take up the true Christian life! Link up with a faithful and consistent Bible-believing church, and embrace for life-long discipleship our Saviour’s life-transforming saving grace.
Dr Alan C. Clifford
Norwich Reformed Church
In this article, I find the following paragraphs:
The 1970s and 1980s were the point at which the long arc of traditional liberalism gave place to an avowedly illiberal, mechanical ‘control system’ (managerial technocracy) that today fraudulently poses as liberal democracy.
Emmanuel Todd, the French anthropological historian, examines the longer dynamics to events unfolding in the present: The prime agent of change leading to the Decline of the West (La Défaite de l’Occident), he argues, was the implosion of ‘Anglo’ Protestantism in the U.S. (and England), with its entailed habits of work, individualism and industry – a creed whose qualities were held then to reflect God’s grace through material success, and, above all, to confirm membership of the divine ‘Elect’.
Whereas traditional liberalism had its mores, the decline of traditional values triggered the slide towards managerial technocracy, and to nihilism. Religion lingers on in the West, though in a ‘zombie’ state, Todd avers. Such societies, he argues, flounder – absent some guiding metaphysical sphere that provides people with non-material sustenance.
It’s a bit strange: The author (Alastair Crooke) points to Todd’s hypothesis of “‘Anglo’ Protestantism” being the “prime agent of the Decline of the West”, but in the following paragraph mentions “the decline of traditional values”. It’s not clear from the article whether the latter statement is Crooke’s or Todd’s.
In any case, I would contend that Protestantism (not ‘Anglo’, but ‘Calvinistic’, e.g. Puritanism) indeed “entailed habits of work, individualism and industry – a creed whose qualities were held then to reflect God’s grace through material success”, this actually being good things. It led to the Industrial Revolution and so to the blessing of drastically reduced infant mortality and better quality of life for nearly everyone.
The other part of that sentence, namely “above all, to confirm membership of the divine ‘Elect’” indeed points to something more problematic. It’s true and will have led, due to human fallibility, to “elitist” attitudes. However, in a healthy Christian environment such attitudes would have been tempered by the commandment to “love thy neighbour as yourself”.
The loss of the faith in God led to the loss of the power of this commandment within society and therefore to “the decline of traditional values”.
So, it’s not “Protestantism” – of any flavour – that led to the “Decline of the West”, but the loss of faith.
What was retained was the belief in the ability to be somehow part of an “elect” group who are somehow “better” than most other people and therefor have a right to lord it over them – uninhibited by divine commandments.
That attitude led to fiat money, the welfare state, state schooling, both World Wars and the subsequent “Decline of the West”.
Article in Breitbart.com
In 1988, Dr. Gary North gave a speech on Karl Marx and Marxism. The portion relevant here starts at this point and extends to the end about 12 minutes later.
Here’s what he says: In 1660, when Charles II acceded the English throne, it was clear the Puritan revolution had failed. From then on, the language, but not the system, of political tracts was secularised. For example, prior to 1660 there was regularly talk of the three ages of man being the age of the Father, the age of the Son and the age of the Holy Spirit. After that date, especially in the 19th century, there was often talk of the age of religion, the age of metaphysics and the age of reason.
This fed into the Marxian belief in an atheist millennium that was about to be ushered in, in fact that it was assumed to be “inevitable”.
However, the professional revolutionaries hit a brick wall in 1965, North says. And that was the undeniability of the failure of a socialist revolution in Indonesia. In a strong counter-revolution, 100.000 ethnic Chinese were killed by “racial anti-communists”. These, I assume, were Muslims (North doesn’t say).
North goes on to say that from then on, communists realised they couldn’t take over a country with deep religious roots. They would have to restructure their ideology and pitch and re-write their pamphlets.
They realised that they have to have a religious and theological foundation if they wanted to capture the minds of the people.
Out of these thoughts was born the “liberation theology”, which was, or is, particularly active in Latin America.
North finishes by saying that recruitment for revolutionary movements is based on a vision of world transformation and whose side you need to get on to drive progress toward a “new world order”.
My interpretation of North’s words here: From 1965, “Stalinist” communists implicitly agreed with the early “cultural Marxist” Antonio Gramsci, whom they had up until then treated as a heretic. The Italian Gramsci had in the 1920s written essentially that in Europe a Bolshevik revolution would not succeed because of the “cultural hegemony” of the Catholic church. It was these writings that inspired the Frankfurt School a generation later to their – largely successful – cultural revolution which has totally marginalised the church, where it has not been co-opted.
Writes Charles Hugh Smith in an article with that title on the blog “Of Two Minds”.
Quote:
The single-minded pursuit of greed does not magically organize the economy or society to serve everyone’s interests equally. As Adam Smith explained, capitalism and the social order both require a moral foundation, which in a free society takes the form of civic virtue: it is the responsibility of every citizen who is able to contribute to the social capital that serves us all to do so not in response to an oppressive state but of their own free will.
Here’s the problem though: What if the citizen opts to use his free will to not contribute to the social capital? What if, instead, he opts to use his free will to exploit the social capital without giving anything back, ever? Who’s to stop him, and how and why?
This is where the force of religion comes in. Wherever we use the word “responsibility” we need to examine this: “To whom are we responsible”? In a society where we can assume the vast majority of members believe in a God to whom they feel “responsible”, we can assume that they will behave largely along the lines of the commandments handed down from on high.
This can no longer be taken for granted in erstwhile Christian societies. This general presupposition began to be eroded to a large extent during the (pre-French Revolution) Enlightenment (with precursors of this trend beginning in the Renaissance). The French Revolution massively strengthened and accelerated this trend. The logical end points of this trend were the concentration and death camps of the 20th century.
We have since taken one (!) step back from that abyss. But we haven’t “turned around” yet and walked away from it.
This is a 12-minute clip from a podcast episode with Paul Kengor. In it, he and Dr. Peterson discuss the poetry of Karl Marx that is seldom seen in academia and explore the implications it likely had on his more prominent works.
9-minute excerpt of an interview with Hugh Ross.
This is why only a “properly applied” religion (specifically: Christianity) can thwart the advance of socialism.
Article by Wanjiru Njoya.
By the same author, see “A Socialist Road to Destruction Amid So-Called Good Intentions“.