May 12, 2013
Paradise Lost: Notes from the Post-Christian Front
5-13-13
“To sacrifice what you are, and to live without belief: that is a fate more terrible than dying.” So declared Joan of Arc. “One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it.” Joan was a martyr, but she was also a revolutionary. No less a hero of the faith was Martin Luther a few centuries later. Offered a pardon from excommunication, torture, and death if he merely recanted his written opinions, he declined and said to his accusers words that have thundered through the ages: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”
Heresies nibbled around the edges of the early Church two thousand years ago. Often they were persuasive enough to some believers that creeds were codified in order to resist error. “What do we believe? Let us keep things fresh in our minds, and write these principles down, that we might meditate on them, and bequeath them, properly, to our children.”
Today most churches have forgotten the creeds. Protestant churches often ignore them. Many churches no longer recite the Lord’s Prayer. There is no vacuum, however: their places have been filled by rituals like Exchanging the Peace. “Peace be with you.” A holy kiss. A three-pat hug. We care, as Christ commended. Programs exist to facilitate, and prove, that caring impulse, for all the world to see.
The impulses that Jesus admonished us to adopt, as His followers – charity, for instance – frequently have been co-opted by governments. It would be wrong to say that the Modern State has been a pickpocket or a thief of our prerogatives and rights and inclinations, however. Contemporary Christians largely have surrendered the traditional tenets of their faith, willingly ceding the role of the church to the state. No “separation” there.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” So declared Satan in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Book I, 254-255. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” (263).
The Bible predicts that in the End Times, people will call evil good, and good evil. Even the saints – devout churchgoers – will be deceived. Even believers will have “itching ears” ready to listen to perversions of the Truth and excuses for immorality.
In recent days the trial of a Philadelphia abortionist accused by his employees of killing babies after live births, and causing the deaths of some mothers, has trickled through the filters of news media that do not think such atrocities are newsworthy… or blameworthy. He was found guilty, and Planned Parenthood hoped the killing would continue… but in facilities “cleaner” than Philadelphia’s angel of death. A Cleveland man is accused of imprisoning three girls as sex slaves for a decade, inducing abortions by physical abuse. Elsewhere, judges who prevent 15-year-old girls from having aspirin pills or cigarettes in school, ruled that girls of that age, and younger – no age restrictions – can buy “abortion pills” over the counter, with no doctors’ approvals nor parental notifications.
We have been taught that ancient cultures practiced infant sacrifice to appease their gods, and we have been taught to regard those societies as triangulated somewhere in the middle of barbaric, primitive, and deluded. Just so. But what is it about our own culture – Our GDP and economy? wide-screen TVs? iPods? college degrees? sports cars? – that makes us any different?
We sacrifice children, even babies, to the gods of Convenience, of Lust, of Selfishness, of Political Correctness. The older cultures burned babies on flaming pyres, or threw them into volcanoes. We sever babies’ necks and toss them into dumpsters, or let them sift between the culture’s cracks into basement dungeons or for sale to “trafficking” networks.
This, in Christian America. Or what has become – let us be honest, no longer “threatening” to become – Post-Christian America.
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How many of us long to return to simpler times? Do we need to be in the shadow of Solomon’s Temple? Is there no substitute for the fire of the First-Century Church? Should we burn with the fervor of biblical reform, as did Martin Luther? Must we sit under “hard preaching,” as Puritans under Jonathan Edwards? Maybe. But some of us would just like to live in a world, again, where a simple “mother’s faith” nurtured us, protected us, guided us. And these scenes were sacred, not ridiculed.
Click: My Mother’s Faith
So true Rick…EVERYTHING today is about money including church and 98% of anything Christian. I wonder how many pastors and Christian workers we would have left in the west if there was no salaries paid. A huge number of people are going to get one serious shock when they find out that it is our motives that God will hold to account more than our actions. It is time for the Christian church to stop treating God as if he is stupid and can’t see our hearts..!
Very succinctly stated. The spirit of the antichrist is afoot in post-Christian America. God, have mercy on us!
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[…] Today most churches have forgotten the creeds. Protestant churches often ignore them. Many churches no longer recite the Lord’s Prayer. There is no vacuum, however: their places have been filled by rituals like Exchanging the Peace. “Peace be with you.” A holy kiss. A three-pat hug. We care, as Christ commended. Programs exist to facilitate, and prove, that caring impulse, for all the world to see…. Read this in full at http://www.mondayministry.com/blog/2013/05/12/paradise-lost-notes-from-the-post-christian-front/ […]
We were never a “Christian” nation. Neither are we a “Caucasian” nation or an “Anglo” nation. Although most of the Founding Fathers considered themselves to be religious (some were Christians, others were deists), they also realized the folly of the government attempting to impose a particular religion and its ideology onto the populace.
Spirituality comes in many forms. Whether or not an individual regards themselves as a Christian says nothing about the person’s character or value as a human being, nor does it speak to their loyalty and patriotism toward our nation.
The notion that one group of religions is more righteous or more American than any other is contrary to the tenets established by our founding fathers when they endorsed the “separation of church and state” as a fundamental concept in the US Constitution.
Grammar aside, I am troubled by the facts that you miss my points; you answer questions I am not asking; and your knowledge of American history is flawed.
Of course the United States was a Christian nation. By demographics and statistics. Even by a Supreme Court ruling 120 years ago. But never to exclusion or repression of other faiths. The First Amendment was not adopted to avoid the “folly” of imposing a particular religion and what you call “its ideology.” It was precisely to avoid the injustice of a state-sponsored denomination, with the resultant coercive policies of taxation, favoritism, social exclusions, and so forth.
Of course spirituality comes in many forms, and I will agree that even atheists can be loyal citizens or good soldiers. Your point must be a leftover from another blog post.
You would do yourself a favor by avoid skating on thin ice by referring incorrectly to the “wall of separation.” It is NOT in the Constitution. “Founding Fathers” did NOT endorse it: many more quotations from the Founders can be found confirming their belief that without God, “Providence,” the Bible, Christian instruction and morals, a Republic of free people would be doomed to fail. Check Washington, Adams, Franklin, Madison… even the “deists” who are trotted out by our agenda-driven contemporaries. Jefferson alone coined the phrase… many years after leaving the presidency… in a private letter to the Danbury Baptists… stating in an opinion, his view of the wisdom of one denomination not being favored over others by the government. BEFORE the Constitution, his Virginia Statutes of Religious Freedom likewise affirmed that religious expression must be free of the state’s coercion. That the state should honor and preserve religious freedom.
All these views — the ethos of our culture before what I call this era of “Post-Christianity” (in the West, generally, not just the US) — can be paraphrased as “Freedom of religion.” Today it has morphed to “Freedom FROM religion,” which the Founders would regard as a cancerous perversion of the American concept of liberty and a recipe for (or result of) society’s dissolution.
Today we have weekly, daily, examples of governmental hostility toward religion.
My points that elude you have nothing to do with folly or even righteousness, but the essence of liberty and the historical facts of the American experience.