The View From 1776

Verse 18 above ("The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth...") contrasts with verse 17 (For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.")

In his continuing exposition of the foundational Christian doctrine in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, Pastor Dan Gardner (Assembly of God Church, Cohocton, New York) used the term “natural man” to describe secularists who steadfastly deny our Creator God. 

The natural man looks into the mirror and sees his god: himself, the egotist for whom there is no higher power than his own mind.  The natural man is he who, like Protagoras (quoted in Plato’s Theaetetus), declared, “Man is the measure of all things,” meaning that there are no independent, transcendent standards of right and wrong, that every person is free to make his own rules.

Natural man found great comfort in the 1920s and afterwards in the mind manipulation hypotheses of Sigmund Freud.  In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud wrote that the problems of western civilization arose from conflict between morality and deep-seated sexual desires.  The result was debilitating guilt; the solution was to junk morality and come to terms with one’s sexual drives.  By implication, the purpose of humanity was no longer aspiration toward the highest of ideals, but surrender to sexual drives.  The future of humanity was not upward, but downward toward the sewer of moral relativism.  The human soul was thrown out and replaced by worship of our genitalia.  We see the results today in our juvenile adulation of hedonistic sensual gratification in movies, TV, and the print media.

As Paul makes clear, however, even the dullest of intellects can perceive order in the immensity of space surrounding our planet, in the vast panorama of the sun and stars and our moon, which move in regular patterns, from day to day and over periods of many years. Suppressing the truth of such obvious evidence of design in the cosmos is to turn one’s back on God and to invite His wrath. 

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

A current example of large scale suppression of the truth is our climategate scandal.  Secularists who fancy themselves capable of controlling the weather of the entire planet and brook no challenge from God’s Truth go to criminal lengths to manipulate and to fabricate data, as well as to prevent publication of contradictory evidence.  Without regard for the attendant, immense setbacks in standards of living, particularly in poorer countries, secularists are intent upon imposing their unsupportable hypothesis of man-made global warming upon all of humanity.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. (Romans 1:21-32)

Exalting himself over God and His Creation, natural man commits sins of omission: he neither honors God nor gives thanks to God for his blessings, fancying that all is the product of his own genius.

Natural man, in the same vein, indulges in sins of commission: he makes futile speculations (e.g., socialist bureaucrats’ attempts to control the entire economy, and corrupt global-warming scientists’ endeavors to arrogate to themselves control of the world’s energy resources). 

Natural man professes his own wisdom as the final answer to all questions.  The fool says in his heart, “There is no God. (Psalms 14:1)

And natural man forsakes God for man-made images: money, power, prestige, and self-importance. 

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:  "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.  (1 Corinthians 1:18-19)

The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.  (1 Corinthians 2:14)

Whatever one may think of homosexuality, the bible condemns it as an unnatural practice. 

In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire. (Jude 1:7)

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion." (Romans 1:26-27)

Our modern-day culture not only tolerates depravity, but both encourages it and teaches it to our young students.

Those defending homosexuality say that it is an inborn tendency.  But alcoholism is a similar, inborn vulnerability, yet hardly anyone opposes programs to reprogram alcoholics’ destructive urges.
   

   
“Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” (Romans 1:32)

David Malpass assesses the problem.

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Every month Congress adds more federal powers and debt, voting as if its allegiance were to Washington, city of cranes, instead of to the voters and taxpayers. The financial services reform bill does little to reopen lending to small businesses but adds huge new federal powers, including the imposition of corporate taxes, to create a giant new bailout fund (think Son of Tarp)...

Delaying the day of reckoning, the Fed has committed its institutional credibility to monetary supercharging, as it did in 2003. By arbitrarily pegging the interest rate near zero for big banks and the Treasury, we’re living in a surreal framework in which the more federal debt, the better for GDP. Except that there are three huge losers: savers earning 0%, small businesses not hooked into zero-rate loans and future taxpayers saddled with the debt when interest rates zoom…

Longer term, the critical question is what the interest rate will be to finance the new mountain of federal debt. Will the $20 trillion in national debt be financed at today’s 4% rate or will it require 7%? It matters a lot to the budget and financial markets.
In the near term the financing rate depends on the Fed (though it denies that it controls bond yields). Over the next few years, however, the financing rate will depend on the market’s perception of the U.S.’ ability to pay all the debt on time and with dollars that still have value…

There is every reason to suspect that the charges against Goldman Sachs are little more than a political ploy by the administration to shift attention away from its own financial improvidence and to add impetus to its proposed regulatory strangulation of the banking business..  Right or wrong, however, the SEC’s action questions Goldman Sachs’s reputation for probity.

In many respects the frothy nature of Wall Street securities dealings leading to the current crisis are reminiscent of the mid-19th century marketing of canal-building and railroad-building securities that financed the nation’s rapid industrial and agricultural growth from the 1820s until the 1880s.

During that period, far too many speculative financial deals were marketed by Wall Street banks, deals in which securities buyers often lost their money.  It was a time when bank notes issued as currency by banks all over the nation were equally varying in soundness. 

In the 1880s, two bankers imposed a higher standard of fiduciary responsibility.  Jacob Schiff at Kuhn Loeb and J. P. Morgan at his eponymous firm endeavored never to market securities or to finance deals that had not been subjected to their judgment of financial soundness. 

Schiff, for example, would not handle a purely speculative financing.  He insisted upon traveling along the route for the proposed railroad to determine that sufficient population and economic development already existed to provide freight revenues sufficient to support debt service on the contemplated security issue.  By the time of the First World War, Kuhn Loeb’s reputation for responsible judgment placed the firm in the front ranks heading sale of Treasury bonds to finance our entry into the conflict.

Morgan, from his earliest banking days had exhibited superb business judgment.  Finding that they could trust both his honesty and business acumen, European banks, particularly in London, then the financial capital of the world, made J. P. Morgan and Co. their principal agent for dealings in the United States.

Ironically, Goldman Sachs has carefully cultivated the same ethic and has enjoyed a superior reputation for sound judgment and honesty. 

Political structural safeguards against arbitrariness were essential aspects of our Constitution.  Increasingly since the 1930s New Deal, under socialist Franklin Roosevelt, those safeguards have been destroyed. Ever more power has been taken from states and local governments and usurped by the Federal government.

That process has reached new depths of degradation in the Obama administration.  Treatment of bondholders in Chrysler and GM was of the same order as arbitrary seizures of money and property by monarchs, from King John to James II.  The proposed effective take-over of Wall Street by Federal bureaucrats is more of the same.

Read Michael Barone’s Gangster Government Becomes a Long-Running Series.

Pastor Dan Gardner (Assembly of God Church, Cohocton, New York) opened a series of sermons exploring the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome.  The epistle was written approximately 27 years after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, while elements of Jesus’s life and teaching were still fresh in the minds of those who lived around him and were eye witnesses to his ministry on earth.

Pastor Gardner’s text was Romans 1:1-17:

1 Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God— 2 the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures 3 regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, 4 and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. 5 Through him and for his name’s sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith. 6 And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.

7 To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

8 First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being reported all over the world. 9 God, whom I serve with my whole heart in preaching the gospel of his Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you 10 in my prayers at all times; and I pray that now at last by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you.

11 I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong— 12 that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. 13 I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that I planned many times to come to you (but have been prevented from doing so until now) in order that I might have a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles.

14 I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. 15 That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are at Rome.

16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith."

In this opening portion of his epistle, Paul begins his witness to the power and righteousness of God and the good news, the gospel, of Jesus that salvation is open to all people, Jews and Gentiles, through faith leading toward a lifelong path of sanctification.

Pastor Gardner emphasized the many doctrinal precepts tightly summarized in verses 1 through 6.  Paul begins by identifying himself as an apostle, a term that, in its Greek root, means messenger.  Paul was both the principal messenger of the gospel outside Judea and, in that role, the founder of all the original churches in the Gentile world.

Paul notes that he was called by the spirit of God to be an apostle.  Although less dramatically than Paul’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, we all are called to salvation through the Holy Spirit.

Paul was “set apart for the Gospel of God.” This congers up sanctification, holiness, and separation from the darkness of sin.  Setting apart and justification are by the Grace of God, through Jesus Christ.

Verses 2 through 5 state the most fundamental doctrine of Christianity: Jesus is both divine and human, descended as foretold in the Scriptures from David, to witness through his Resurrection the power of God and the way to salvation for believers.

31 “The time is coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.

32 It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD.

33 “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.

34 No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the LORD.  “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

The theme of Paul’s salutation to the church in Rome can be stated as live by faith and unashamedly preach the Gospel:

3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.  (1 Corinthians 15:3-4)

Bill Greene reports: Chomsky Turns To The Right !!!: Chomsky Joins Fox News and Sarah Palin to Fight Obama and the Evil Bankers

Professor Chomsky was a prominent critic of our involvement in the VietNam war and one of the most prominent opponents of our counter-measures against Al Queda terrorism in the wake of 9/11.

In the past, if he had anything complimentary to say about the United States, it was not widely reported.  For example, in America’s Dumbest Intellectual, by Stefan Kanfer in CITY JOURNAL, Summer 2002 | Vol. 12, No. 3:

The goal of America, Chomsky charges, “is a society in which the basic unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it’s not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that’s not your problem either.” Prisons and inner-city schools, Chomsky maintains, “target a kind of superfluous population that there’s no point in educating because there’s nothing for them to do. Because we’re a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.” Another example: “When you come back from the Third World to the West—the U.S. in particular—you are struck by the narrowing of thought and understanding, the limited nature of legitimate discussion, the separation of people from each other.”

Another example: The New Criterion, May 2003,The hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky, by Keith Windschuttle.

Noam Chomsky was the most conspicuous American intellectual to rationalize the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The death toll, he argued, was minor compared to the list of Third World victims of the “far more extreme terrorism” of United States foreign policy.

Does Reason Know What It Is Missing?

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In his earlier work, Habermas believed, as many did, that the ambition of religion to provide a foundation of social cohesion and normative guidance could now, in the Modern Age, be fulfilled by the full development of human rational capacities harnessed to a “discourse ethics” that admitted into the conversation only propositions vying for the status of “better reasons,” with “better” being determined by a free and open process rather than by presupposed ideological or religious commitments: “…the authority of the holy,” he once declared, “is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus.”

In recent years, however, Habermas’s stance toward religion has changed. First, he now believes that religion is not going away and that it will continue to play a large and indispensable part in many societies and social movements. And second, he believes that in a post-secular age — an age that recognizes the inability of the secular to go it alone — some form of interaction with religion is necessary: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”

Judeo-Christian spiritual religion, the substance of Western civilization, does considerably more than provide a “foundation of social cohesion and normative guidance.” It is the bulwark to preserve individual political liberty and to forestall secularity’s unavoidable tendency toward political dictatorship.

The initial stages of tyranny, as Habermas implicitly acknowledges, come with secular intellectuals’ destruction, in the name of the rational human mind, of society’s devotion to, and awareness of transcendent power and moral authority of Divine Being.  In the free-for-all that follows, as in Weimar Germany of the 1920s or the United States today, social, economic, and political bonds disintegrate, leaving a demoralized citizenry, who welcome the emergence of a Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao - any strong man who promises to restore order.  Without a higher law, a timeless set of moral principles which a society accepts as divinely ordained, such secular rulers have no limits upon their ruthless, tyrannical exercise of arbitrary power. 

For a more extensive treatment of the assertion that morality and the rule of law cannot exist unless resting upon the foundation of revealed, Divinely inspired religion, see Can You be Moral and Ethical without being Religious?