The Fed continues blithely to ignore the destructive inflationary impact of excessively expanding the money supply.
The light of God’s truth has been snuffed out in Europe, now the least Christian and the most secularized and socialized part of the western world.
This week, Black Rock Congregational Church is focusing on worldwide missionary programs and the 20-plus missionaries that the church supports. In that connection, rather than a traditional sermon, we at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut) heard a report by Dr. Ted Noble, one of those missionaries. His subject was the appalling decline of Christianity throughout Europe.
Fewer than one percent of Europeans are Christian believers. Elsewhere, especially in Africa and Asia, the percentage is much higher and growing. Europe has become a spiritual wasteland in which people look to the political state for their salvation.
In the 19th century, Africa, the Dark Continent, was looked upon as the great field of activity for Christian missionaries. Conditions are the reverse today. American Episcopalians, for example, who seek a return to the Bible and a turning away from the secularized social gospel that has overtaken their church, now look to African bishoprics for support.
Dr. Nobel talked mostly about the opportunities and the needs for missionary work in Europe. But it’s important also to ask why Europe is in spiritual decline.
This is an impelling question, since Christianity’s greatest, lasting impact was in western Europe. After the final fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, Christianity was left as the only civilizing force in western Europe. Without the Catholic Church in Rome, libraries and education itself would not have survived. Concepts of civilized law and order, based upon the Roman Empire’s codex, were preserved in Christian canonical law.
The Eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople (later Byzantium, today Istanbul), survived the onslaught of Islam for another thousand years until 1453. But Constantinople was not able to exercise much direct influence upon western Europe after the fall of Rome. Christian city states all around the eastern Mediterranean and into Russia, parts of the Eastern Orthodox Church, were continually subjected to Islamic jihad after the 7th century.
Europeans, before the evolution of strong nation states in the 16th century, thought of themselves as inhabitants of Christendom. It is thus accurate to assert that everything that we know as western civilization is an exclusive product of Christianity emanating from the church at Rome.
What went wrong?
The short answer is the French Revolution of 1789.
That cataclysmic event destroyed Christian civilization and instituted the religion of socialism, first in France, then throughout Europe.
In the simplest terms, French philosophers of the ill-named Continental European Enlightenment (the 18th century) decapitated Western civilization. The human soul and conscience, moral codes, and the relationship of each individual human to the universe and his fellow humans were tossed into the trash heap. The Western world was figuratively reduced to a headless body that reacted blindly to external, physical stimulae.
The secular, atheistic religion of socialism (in the United States, liberal-progressivism) ignores peoples’ spiritual needs. It asserts, instead, that only material needs for water, food, clothing shelter, and sex count in political society. In socialist religious theory, all of these things can be administered by the secular political state in ways that permit state planners to manipulate and control every aspect of human social behavior.
No one can logically accept that liberal-socialist doctrine and simultaneously support the metaphysical, natural-law principles that were the basis of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, Jefferson’s inalienable human rights flowing from our Creator God.
Philosophical materialism implies that the human soul is a myth; there is only the physical tangle of nerves, muscle, and bones constituting the physical human body. Non-material qualities like personal responsibility, piety, patriotism, and morality are dismissed as value judgments, lost in the morass of moral relativism. Karl Marx, for example, sneered at religion as the opium of the masses, calling it a fiction created by the ruling class to stupefy and subjugate the workers.
Dismissing the Mind of God and the natural law that flowed from it, intellectuals of the French Revolution believed themselves capable of manipulating humans, in the mass, as if they were puppets. They expected their secular religion of socialism to bring harmony and perfection to human life.
Instead, they took the Western world back to the lawless days of the hordes of Genghis Khan, when the sword was the only source of order and right. The millions of dead and maimed in two World Wars and the murders of tens of millions by the French Revolutionary councils, Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, and Castro are the legacy of French socialistic materialism and secularity.
Europe, once the driving force in world culture, has become a hollow shell that the inflow of Muslim immigrants will crack and overwhelm in coming decades, unless Christian missionaries succeed in bringing Europeans back to Jesus Christ.
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Reactions of some nominal Christians to the message of Pope Benedict XVI are nothing more than liberal-progressive-socialistic “toleration.”
In his April 18th column for the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne, Jr. expresses the misgivings of liberal-progressives who enjoy the ritual of religion, but don’t want to be bothered with following the teachings of Jesus.
Mr. Dionne writes:
The most jarring word that Pope Benedict XVI is using during his visit to the United States is “countercultural.” The American sense of that term is shaped by the 1960s: free love, drugs, hippies, rock music and rebellion. Needless to say, that’s not what Benedict is preaching.
That word is the key to understanding how Benedict’s message runs crosswise to conventional liberalism and conservatism. Benedict came to the United States as a quiet but forceful critic of “an increasingly secular and materialistic culture,” as he put it during yesterday’s Mass. Almost any American who paid attention to his sermon had to be uncomfortable because all of us are shaped by the very forces he was criticizing.
Benedict directly challenged an assumption so many Americans make about religion: that it is a matter of private devotion with few public implications.
The truth is that too many of us like to think of ourselves as saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ. We think that it’s enough to give lip service to the Gospels on Sunday, while keeping our lives in a separate compartment for the remainder of the week.
This is what German pastor Dietrich Bonnhoeffer called cheap grace. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who openly defied the materialistic, liberal-progressive socialism of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) and paid for it with his life.
In The Cost of Discipleship, pastor Bonhoeffer wrote:
Instead of following Christ, let the Christian enjoy the consolations of his grace! That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
Jesus, two thousand years ago, put his finger on the same phenomenon.
No one was more versed than the pharisees in the texts of the Hebraic Bible and more learned about the requirements of the law emanating from Moses’s original covenant with God. But, Jesus told them, true religion is based on the two greatest of God’s commandments: have no other god than God Himself, and love your neighbor as thyself.
Ritualistically following the law alone was not sufficient. There had to be a softening of the heart that led to obedience to God’s commandments, to genuine concern for serving others and aiding the needy.
So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with ‘unclean’ hands?”
He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: ?” ‘These people honor me with their lips,
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For the latest installment of George Shadroui’s chronicle of William F. Buckley, Jr’s battles with the liberal-progressive wing, this time with Norman Mailer, read Crossing Swords: Norman Mailer and the Culture Wars on The Intellectual Conservative website.
Thomas Segel projects more light onto the loony land of liberalism. Being a liberal requires extreme superficiality, readiness to accept any idea that at first glance, from afar, sounds good. Liberal superficiality requires that no one look beyond the initial impact of any welfare-state spending measure or paganism such as environmentalism to discern the further damaging effects that create far worse conditions than the initial distress.
A Gallon of Milk, A Gallon of Gas and the Ethanol Hoax
By Thomas D. Segel
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Harlingen, Texas, April 24, 2008: When I read the newspaper or view the nightly television news shows I can
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The shibboleth of liberal-progressive-socialism is tolerance, which in practice means the near absence of standards. Anything other than the morality of Judeo-Christianity is acceptable.
What then to do when actions by a certifiable liberal-progressive offend other liberal-progressives? Without the rejected standards of God-given moral principle, liberal-progressives are left floundering.
ScrappleFace writes that former President Carter, who specializes in embracing dictators, will broker a peace agreement between the two Democratic-Socialist Party aspirants to collectivized tyranny.
