An Active, Living Force

Christianity the Cornerstone of Democratic Values


By Kevin Donnelly
The Australian
April 18, 2015

[This piece was written a few years ago.  It's relevance is timeless, however. Ed.]

In his Easter message, David Cameron stated that Britain was a Christian country and that “the church is not just a collection of beautiful old buildings. It is a living, active force across our country.”

The British Prime Minister went on to argue that all schools must teach what it means to be British, which is not surprising given last year’s “Trojan Horse” ­affair, where some Muslim schools in Birmingham were considered in danger of advocating extreme ­Islamic values.

Cameron described British values as “freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility and respect for British institutions. Those are the sorts of things I would hope would be inculcated into the curriculum in any school in Britain.”

The argument that Christianity is central to British culture, especially its political and legal systems, is also argued by 22 Christian leaders in a document titled Values: The Characteristics of Our ­British National Identity.

Like Cameron, the Values document highlights the importance of liberal democratic values such as the rule of law, the sanctity of human life, a commitment to the common good and “freedom of speech, debate, conscience and ­religion”. The argument is also put that such values are “derived from our Judaeo-Christian foundations” and are “fundamental to the health of our national life”.

Cameron, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, is on record as warning that multiculturalism has failed as a government policy and that the alternative must be “muscular liberalism”.

If Islamic youth are not taught clear and firm values about what it means to be British and why such a way of life is worth defending, then, Cameron argues, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if they are attracted to “extremist ideology”. Neither should it surprise anyone that in Australia — a former British colony, with the same political and legal systems — liberal, democratic values and Christianity are central to our way of life, too.

The Orcs Are Returning to Modor

Infanticide Is The Historical Hallmark Of A Pagan Culture

Judeo-Christian principles helped to form our culture, and Christianity is deeply pro-life. Until now, restraining evil as Christianity defines it bound Americans together with a common creed.

By Georgi Boorman

The Federalist

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who just made deeply troubling comments on abortion, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who just signed the country’s most radical abortion law, have been the subject of intense ire in recent days. The outrage is coming not just coming from “radical” pro-lifers, but people from across the political spectrum.

Why? Because virtually no one but the far left believes it is morally acceptable to allow infants to be murdered seconds before birth, or to be left to die after delivery at the behest of the mother. Yet the nation has been shocked by the radical left’s boldness in their mission to define preborn human beings as disposable non-persons. Where is this evil coming from, and how do we stop it?

The Slaughter of the Young and the Elderly

Abortion and infanticide have historically been common practices. In the first century AD, infanticide was a common and culturally accepted practice across the world. The murder of infants was a regular occurrence in Europe into the Middle Ages and beyond, despite being condemned by both church and state.

The practice was not confined to the desperate, illiterate, impoverished masses, as if “enlightened” thinkers knew better. The Twelve Tables of Roman Law, admired by Cicero, contains the command that, “A dreadfully deformed child shall be quickly killed.”

Likewise, the wealthy first century Roman philosopher Seneca once wrote, “We doom scabby sheep to the knife, lest they should infect our flocks. We destroy monstrous births, and we also drown our children if they are born weakly or unnaturally formed; to separate what is useless from what is sound is an act, not of anger, but of reason.”

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow, Idaho

The Fragility of Civil Order

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

“I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Tim. 2:1–2).

Whenever men have enjoyed any privilege for any length of time, it becomes part of the framework of their minds. They take it for granted, and assume that this particular privilege, whatever it is, will rise in the east tomorrow, right after the sun does. That privilege might be clean water, which you can get by turning a tap, or it might be a comfortable standard of living, which is evidenced by the fact that you are reading this on your phone, or it might be the peaceful transfer of political power. It might be the fact that when you go to the polling places to cast your vote, you do not have to walk past riot police.

Some of you might recall that after the last presidential election, I registered my opposition to the criminal prosecution of Hillary Clinton for anything.

A Golden Age

What Christianised England "Looked" Like

We live in a secularist society.  It is atheistic, humanistic, statist . . . the adjectives go on.  Consequently, it is difficult for us to imagine a society which is (or was) thoroughly Christian.  We do not imply by that adjective that it is or was completely Christian.  Rather we mean that society was influenced and steered by the Christian faith.  In other words, we refer to a place and time where the Christian faith dominated individual, family and public life.

Has ever such a time existed in the past?  Yes.  It has.  Historian Robert Tombs describes England in the seventeenth century.  In particular, he describes parish life.  Prepare to enter an alien world--that is, a world profoundly different from our own.

The truly serious issue, as it had been for a century, was religion, now the focus of cultural, social, personal and political life to an unparalleled extent.  In the wake of the Reformation and the impact of the English Bible, most people felt more intensely about religion than all but the most fervent minority today.  [Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2015), p.214. Emphasis, ours.]

We acknowledge that being fervent Christians (that is, true believers) we indeed are a small minority in our own countries today.  This is pretty much consistent throughout the West.  But we would make a grave error if we believed that it has always been this way.

Soros Versus God

Boundless and Bare

In the Progressive world view, novelty is a prized achievement.  The past is an impediment to progress.  The new, the fresh, is immediately attractive.  To be avant-garde is to command respect.  Life and human progress is an unending new season fashion show.  To be alive is to keep up with cutting edge couture.  The Progressive ideology insists upon progress as its lifeblood.

In the Christian world view the past is all determinative.  This contrast alone sets the Christian faith to be against Progressivism.  It sets the Christian faith against modern Western culture.  The God of all creation is a promise maker and a promise keeper.  Every person, society, and nation is subject to God's promise making and promise keeping.  These promises were all made in the past.  We are shaped and conditioned, for example, by the promises and vows God made to the patriarch, Noah (Genesis 9).

Another way of expressing this is to say that God is a covenant making and a covenant keeping God.  God takes oaths and vows.  Moreover, he keeps his oaths and vows.  His oath keeping shapes our entire existence.  Ironically, this does not mean that things do not develop and change.  On the contrary, God's vows include oaths taken to bring the creation to a glorious climax, when every tear will be wiped away and every caviller will be silenced.

These two radically contrary perspectives--Progressivism vs Christianity--necessarily involve very different views of human society and its progress.

The Second Christendom

Returning From Babylon: Rebuilding Jerusalem

We have completed a second reading of Anthony Esolen's Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture [Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017].  Doubtless we will end up perusing it again.  

It is somewhat distracting that the title a pre-occupation with American culture and its reconstruction.  Most of the discussion in the book arises from recent cultural history in the US, as well as commentary upon the present discontent.  Yet we venture to say that most Christians scattered throughout the West--the UK, Europe, Australia and NZ--will immediately identify with the deeper context.  The focus and intent is to recover and rebuild Christendom--or be engaged in building the Second Christendom.

For that reason we wish Out of the Ashes would enjoy a broad, sustained international readership.  In the hope that we will help stimulate an even wider group of readers, we endeavour to entice folk by pointing them to a couple of paragraphs towards the end of the book.

Re-Building Christendom--No Time to Lose

The Three-Fold Cord

The State's control over education in New Zealand has been with us since the 1880's.  At the time state funding and control was first put forward few realized that it was a very early manifestation of a doctrine that would come to dominate the country--and well nigh bring us to ruin.  Some have called this ideology"Socialism Without Doctrines".  

Migrants to New Zealand (mainly from the UK) in the late nineteenth century and on into the twentieth came from a civilization that had a long pedigree.  It also had well established institutions, such as hospitals and schools.  Migrants naturally wanted to see these things established in New Zealand--and the quickest way was to fund them out of the public purse.  So New Zealand became a socialist country by practice, rather than by dogma.

Churches were largely complicit in this development.  They were comfortable with supporting state schools, rather than establishing their own parochial schools.  After all, the state had the money (extracted through taxation) and churches did not.  It took a century for this model to fail badly. It has turned out that socialism in the education sector--with or without doctrines--would be no more successful than it has proved to be producing not fit-for-purpose, useless widgets.

The Benedict Option, Part II

Avoiding the Hard Thinking Required

Further to yesterday's post on Rod Dreher and the Benedict Option, we reproduce a recent post by Dreher at The American Conservative to give a sample of his advocacy of the Benedict Option.

The Last Evangelical Citadel

Rod Dreher
The American Conservative

To defend the citadel, soldiers need new strategies — ones that are actually quite old (Alexlukin/Shutterstock)

David Goodwin, head of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, writes that Evangelicals (of which he is one) regard the Bible as their “citadel,” but now find themselves struggling to defend it in post-Christianity. The problem, it seems to me, is fideism. Excerpts:

Daily Meditation

Unity Via Increased Charity

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD, sj: On the evil of Christian disunity; and on prayer and cooperation in works of charity as the means of reunion.

6 May 1963

Dear Padre,

You ask me in effect why I am not a Roman Catholic. If it comes to that, why am I not—and why are you not—a Presbyterian, a Quaker, a Mohammedan, a Hindu, or a Confucianist? After how prolonged and sympathetic study and on what grounds have we rejected these religions? I think those who press a man to desert the religion in which he has been bred and in which he believes he has found the means of Grace ought to produce positive reasons for the change—not demand from him reasons against all other religions. It would have to be all, wouldn’t it?

Our Lord prayed that we all might be one ‘as He and His Father are one’ [John 17:21]. But He and His Father are not one in virtue of both accepting a (third) monarchical sovereign.

That unity of rule, or even of credenda [things to be believed], does not necessarily produce unity of charity is apparent from the history of every Church, every religious order, and every parish.

Schism is a very great evil. But if reunion is ever to come, it will in my opinion come from increasing charity. And this, under pressure from the increasing strength and hostility of unbelief, is perhaps beginning: we no longer, thank God, speak of one another as we did over 100 years ago. A single act of even such limited co-operation as is now possible does more towards ultimate reunion than any amount of discussion.

The historical causes of the ‘Reformation’ that actually occurred were (1.) The cruelties and commercialism of the Papacy (2.) The lust and greed of Henry VIII. (3.) The exploitation of both by politicians. (4.) The fatal insouciance of the mere rabble on both sides. The spiritual drive behind the Reformation that ought to have occurred was a deep re-experience of the Pauline experience.

Memo: a great many of my closest friends are your co- religionists, some of them priests. If I am to embark on a disputation—which could not be a short one, I would much sooner do it with them than by correspondence.

We can do much more to heal the schism by our prayers than by a controversy. It is a daily subject of mine.

From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III
Compiled in Yours, Jack The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis. Copyright © 2008 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Least Important Election in Our Lifetime

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

INTRODUCTION

Important elections are those in which you are deciding whether to go north by northeast or south by southwest. Important elections are the ones in which you decide whether to go thissaway or thattaway. Important elections are held on Mount Carmel, with the candidates being Jehovah and Baal.

Important elections are not elections in which millions of people are deciding how to pick up the only available turd, and their dispute is over which end is the cleaner end. Ours is the kind of election that only occurs when all the crucial decisions have been made decades before.vote-for-pedro

Important elections, in other words, are elections in which decisions are actually made. This election is nothing more than a slow motion manifestation of the decisions we have already made, decisions we began making many decades ago. Trying to come up with a “responsible choice” at this stage in our cultural devolution is trying to choreograph a judgment, trying to turn a full-blown riot into West Side Story.

So in one sense, this is the least important election in our lifetime. When it comes to elections, we have already made our decisions. In another sense, this is a crucial time in the life of our nation.

MAWS WHAT HE SAWS

As the Scots Bible puts it i the Buik, God is not mocked.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

21 Principles for the Christian Citizen

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

Because the teaching of the apostle Paul on civil authority is widely misunderstood and misrepresented, we need to review some basic principles. As we do, we need to remember something that Abraham Kuyper once said: “In any successful attack on freedom the state can only be an accomplice. The chief culprit is the citizen who forgets his duty, wastes away his strength in the sleep of sin and sensual pleasure, and so loses the power of his own initiative.”


Political Principles

So here are 21 principles concerning civil government that the Christian must understand.

“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God” (Rom. 13:1).

1. Civil government and rule is a blessing from God, and not a necessary evil. “The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God. And he shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain” (2 Sam. 23:3-4).  We are not anarchists.

2. God establishes a righteous throne with majesty.

State of the Union

The State of Christian Faith Among Youth In the US

The Good News Behind Why Teens Don’t Need a Bible for Christmas

Most practicing Protestant youth already own one—and they’re reading it, according to researchers.

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra
Christianity Today

Virtually all Americans ages 13 to 17 who identify as Protestant, attend a religious service at least once a month, and say their faith is very And most of them are reading it, according to a new survey from the American Bible Society and Barna Group. Almost three-quarters read their Bible weekly or more: 16 percent read every day, 37 percent read several times a week, and 21 percent read once a week.

Another 13 percent read once a month, 5 percent read three or four times a year, and 8 percent read less than that. When you add in the 91 percent that hear the Bible read aloud at church once a week or more, it adds up to about 95 percent of practicing Protestant teens (79% of whom are non-mainline) hearing or reading the Bible at least weekly.

A Different Time, A Different World

Roddie Edmonds, late WWII U.S. veteran, is 1st soldier honored for saving Jews

Washington Times

By Aron Heller - Associated Press - Wednesday, December 2, 2015

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Nazi soldiers made their orders very clear: Jewish American prisoners of war were to be separated from their fellow brothers in arms and sent to an uncertain fate.  But Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds would have none of that. As the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer held in the German POW camp, he ordered more than 1,000 Americans captives to step forward with him and brazenly pronounced: “We are all Jews here.”

He would not waver, even with a pistol to his head, and his captors eventually backed down.
Seventy years later, the Knoxville, Tennessee, native is being posthumously recognized with Israel’s highest honor for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II. He’s the first American serviceman to earn the honor.

“Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds seemed like an ordinary American soldier, but he had an extraordinary sense of responsibility and dedication to his fellow human beings,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and memorial. “The choices and actions of Master Sgt. Edmonds set an example for his fellow American soldiers as they stood united against the barbaric evil of the Nazis.”

It’s a story that remained untold for decades and one that his son, the Rev. Chris Edmonds, only discovered long after his father’s death in 1985. 

Edmonds was captured with thousands of others in the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944 and spent 100 days in captivity.

Making Room for Other Gods

Walking in the Ways of Unfaithful Fathers

In the last half of the nineteenth century, secularism had not just gained a foothold in the West. It was making rapid strides to the fore.  The causes and signs of this overthrow of the First Christendom were numerous.  As is always the case, hindsight shows them up more clearly.

Many of the causes lay with the Church, God's people.  They became unfaithful in numerous ways.  They forgot what their forefathers had taught them.  They forgot that the Kingdom of Christ was and remains a totalitarian kingdom--embracing the totality of all reality throughout the entire created universe.  They accepted a dichotomy between the realms of the sacred and the secular (courtesy of Immanuel Kant) and conceded that in the secular realm, the sacred had little claim and no authority.  God had His "sphere"--invisible, secret, beyond time and history--and the material or secular world had its sphere of autonomy--independent of God, operating under its own rules, truths and authority.  Thus began the long retreat, which cast children out of formerly Christian homes, seduced Christian parents away from Christ and His Church, and gradually turned Christian loyalties more and more toward the secular god--the State.

A generation which conceives of just one sub-atomic particle operating independently of the all encompassing command of the living, infinite, eternal, and unchanging God will be followed by generations which deny God in everything.  And so it has come to pass.  The surrender began in the Church as it tried to make room for the gods of this world.

One form of the capitulation was to elevate the State to a quasi-divine position of  being the means of bringing God's Kingdom upon the earth.

Vestiges of the First Christendom

A Great Hour to Live

Christendom has passed into history.  Christian Europe was the first Christendom.  We await the development and rise of the second, third, fourth . . . Christendoms.  In the meantime, so pagan has Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world now become it is difficult to imagine a time where so many people--a majority in fact--once took the existence of God and Christian teaching for granted.  But such indeed was the case.

By the time of the Second World War, Western Christendom was in its final stages of dissipation, soon to be replaced by a militant, secular, atheistic, materialistic humanism.  Whilst on the cusp of this new violent and decadent world, glimpses of the former heights could still be seen from time to time.

Letter From America (About "Nuts!")

Cultural Conservatives Have Barely Begun to Fight

A response to Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option”

By David French

National Review Online

An atmosphere of gloom and despair pervades some cultural-conservative circles, and, at first glance, it’s easy to understand why. There’s no question that hysterical public assaults on Christians or others who dissent from leftist sexual orthodoxy are increasing in volume and frequency. It seems as if every day there’s a new story of an attempt to silence, intimidate, or publicly shame social conservatives.

It’s not enough to express disagreement with cultural conservatives — they must lose their jobs, lose their businesses, and close their schools, unless they bend the knee to the sexual revolution. Bonds of friendship and loyalty are meaningless if the cultural conservative holds the wrong view on same-sex marriage, and Christian clubs are vile discriminators if they simply want to be led by Christian leaders. In the “blue” sectors of America, particularly the academy, some Christians feel that they have to live under deep cover to protect their careers.

All of this is true. All of this is daunting. And none of it is cause for cultural retreat. Yet that is exactly what one of America’s more influential cultural conservatives is proposing. Rod Dreher, formerly at National Review and now at The American Conservative, advocates what he calls the “Benedict Option” in the face of the cultural onslaught:

The Importance of the Seminary

Tactical Priorities To Extend the Kingdom

In his commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, John Stott writes:

. . . let us copy Paul's strategy.  He was profoundly disturbed by the prevalence of false teaching in the churches.  He refers to it in all his letters.  The Pastorals are full of allusions to deceivers, deviationists, empty talkers, speculators, divisive controversialists and hypocritical liars.  The question is this: how did Paul react to this distressing situation?  What was his strategy in the face of spreading error?

All the church's future pastors and teachers pass through a seminary. It is there that they are either made or marred, either equipped and inspired or ruined.

He refused to give in to it in a feeble spirit of defeat.  he did not remain idle or silent on the ground that everybody has a right to his or her own opinion.  He did not secede from the church in the belief that it was irredeemable.  No, Paul was neither a defeatist, nor a pluralist, nor a secessionist.  So what was his strategy in fighting the good fight of the faith?  It was this: when false teachers increase, we must multiply the number of true teachers. . . .

This is why the key institution in the church is the seminary or theological college.  In every country the church is a reflection of its seminaries.  All the church's future pastors and teachers pass through a seminary.  It is there that they are either made or marred, either equipped and inspired or ruined.  Therefore we should set ourselves to capture the seminaries of the world for evangelical faith, academic excellence, and personal godliness.  There is no better strategy for the reform and renewal of the church.  [John Stott, The Message of I Timothy and Titus: The Life of the Local Church (Nottingham: Intervarsity Press, 1966), p.183f.]

Hold Fast to the Traditions and Institutions of Liberty

In Defence of Juries

Why juries?  They appear to be a peculiar anglo-saxon institution, at least in terms of their origin.  Every so often a talking-head stands up to suggest there has to be a "better way".  The assessment of evidence and the determination of guilt would surely be better served by those trained to evaluate evidence and reason to a sound conclusion.

Juries necessarily reflect the general state of society at large.  That is offered as one of the great benefits of juries: it is a trial of one's peers.  That is one of their perceived benefits.  Juries are not made up of elites who control just about everything else.  But that also means that if education standards in society generally fall and folk are unable to reason clearly, let alone articulate, juries risk falling into a situation where they are little more than corporate expressions of brute prejudice, self-righteous sanctimony, and general ignorance.  We have served on juries and have "insider" knowledge, so to speak.

Persecution Helps Confirm the Christian Faith

 You Either Serve God or the Alternative

Amongst the many supporting evidences for the verisimilitude of Christian faith is the repeated persecution of Christians.  This phenomenon has been repeated throughout the AD aeon.  It has been universal.  This is all the more singular insofar as Christian doctrine proclaims a Gospel of peace and goodwill towards all men.  The historical praxis of Christians has been largely consistent with this doctrine.

Tacitus records that in 64-5AD, Nero persecuted thousands of Christians, putting them to death under the worst forms of public torture, on the grounds that they were "haters of the human race", which, of course, justified the rest of the human race hating Christians in turn.  But things moved on.  The correspondence between Pliny the Younger and Emperor Trajan fifty odd years later in 109AD about how to deal with Christians focused upon their implicit sedition because they would not honour the Roman state gods.  Different reasons, same outcome.

It is reported that 80 percent of religious persecution in the world today is focused upon Christians.

God's Truth Abideth Still

The Leftist's Chief Rival

The West has become "anti-God".  But what God are they opposed to.  Not the god of Islam--Allah--although the West does not particularly like the things which Islamists do.  Rather, the West offers a number of apologies for such behaviour.  We are told that the Islamists are not really believers in Islam, but heretics.  They do not represent what is truly Islamic.  The West cannot bring itself to speak out against a deity called Allah.

The Deity which the West opposes is the Christian's God.  The West is threatened by Him who is "infinite, eternal, and unchangeable".  It is disturbed by people--Christians in this instance--living within its respective national borders who are not only prepared, but willing to say, "No" to the relentless drive towards a secular utopia.  But, once again, the question is begged as to why Western secularists are intimidated.  After all, by any measure, the beliefs of the secularists control just about every important node of power and influence in our cultures.  Secularism controls the schools, the law courts, the legislative arms of government, political discourse in general, and the market place.

There are two reasons why secular humanism is intimidated by God and Christians.