The intolerance of tolerance

“Our Western Nations have both forgotten God and forgotten where they have come from.
Now they are attempting to complete the process of severing the roots of Western civilization,
destroying its root system poisoning its soil and ruining its entire spiritual,
moral and social ecology”
Os Guinness

Only a renewal of Biblical Christianity will save Western civilization…
otherwise, we are doomed to go the way of the great Roman and Greek civilizations.
David Robertson

(gulls enjoying a morning looking for fish / Rosemary Beach, Fl /Julie Cook / 2019)

It seems that our favorite cleric from down under…
you know the one…the one who use to be from merely across the pond
but who is perhaps technically now under the pond rather than across it,
has recently offered some wonderful insight into our latest cultural woe…
that being Cultural Marxism.

We’ve talked about this before.

And we’ll just keep on talking about it because it is a real and present evil..
one that is currently burrowing its way into our lives…and please note
that is a fact and not merely right-winged hysteria.

You may recall that the Rev. David Roberston resigned his post as head pastor
at St Peter’s Free Chruch (reformed Presbyterian) in Dundee, Scotland after
27 years in order to move to Sydney Australia.
He continues to write, preach and blog away just as he continues to be
what I like to call a modern-day Christian soldier…

The post that I’m referencing today is actually a post that is based on the notes used
for a recent talk, David gave at the New South Wales Parliament Round Table Forum.

He opens the post with a small disclaimer to his readers…

David states that he is a white, middle-aged male who hails from a historically
imperialistic nation.
He notes that he also has, and most likely still, considers himself a socialist
as well as a Christian.
He also extols that he went to school not to merely get a degree in hopes of
procuring a job, but rather that he went to school in order to learn.

“I think education is in and of itself a good thing and should not be about
social engineering in some kind of Brave New World dystopia.”

So I will state my own disclaimer.

I am a white, late middle-aged, woman who hails from a leading
world power, democratic nation.
I am a Christian.
I am college-educated.
And I am from the South of this said democratic nation.

I think folks like to call where I hail from the Bible belt of the Nation.
But I don’t know if that is still applicable as no one seems to be a local
anymore but rather imports.
Imports who don’t give two hoots about Bibles or belts.

I am not a socialist but rather a moralistic conservative.
I don’t know if that’s a thing or not, but it pretty much sums me up in a nutshell.
Moralistic.
Conservative.
Oh, and don’t forget, a woman.
All that girl power out there should give me points where the
moralistic and conservative aspect take points away…
or so say the current culture gods.

David pulls heavily from a couple of books for his notes.
One of the books is actually a book I’ve alo pulled heavily from as well,
Melvin Tinker’s book The Hideous Strength

I learned of this little book actually from David and his posted review of
the book some time back.
It was written in 2018 and is based on the fictional a work of C.S.Lewis of
the same title, That Hideous Strength.

The other book David pulled from is Rob Smith’s book Concocted Conspiracy or Revolutionary Reality
A book I am not familiar with.

And so yes, before we begin, we all know that I’ve written about the ills of Marxism
before just as has David…
however, David is offering us a bit of an updated timely reminder as he also throws in
the recent dangerous push of identity politics.

David notes that
“Marxist theory leads to three aims –
the abolition of private property, the abolition of the family
and the abolition of the Church.”

I think most of us over the age of 50 will agree,
all but maybe Bernie Sanders, that Marxism is a scourge.

However a scourge it may be, sadly our youthful progressive liberal culture seems
hell-bent on implementing it and won’t rest until it does—

This misguided and out of touch with reality post-Christian, progressive
youthful culture is equally supported by many of our own Democratic hopefuls
running for President of the United States, along with their fellow House
Democratic members who seem equally hell-bent on the Marxism quest.

Why am I now thinking that the word pandering must be somewhere behind all of this??

Think the Fab 4…but again, we digress.

Marxism, as history has so blatantly demonstrated, does not work– end of sentence.
Nor will it ever work in a conventionally democratic nation.
Again, end of sentence.

And once again, as previously stated, history emphatically teaches us this.

And yet we are apparently such slow learners, as well as products of amnesia,
that it appears we’ve all but forgotten our own history lessons.

Think the Soviet Union and Karl Marx.

Think 1987 as President Reagan tells the current sitting leader of
the Soviet Union, ” Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”….

It took from about 1917 until 1987 but that wall did indeed come tumbling down.
However, I fear most of our youthful progressives wouldn’t be able to
actually name said wall of which we speak, and as to why we even speak about it…
but I digress.

Oh and I forgot… we might just be able to thank our heavily angst-ridden liberal colleges
and the equally liberal professors for this lapse in history teaching as they have been
busily rewriting that very history…one event at a time.

But David explains what this lastest Marxist and totalitarian scourge will eventually
do to life as we know it if we as a society continue on this same trajectory.

Things that were once embraced will be rejected and that which was once accepted as
normal behavior will be forbidden.
Look at what the PC culture is doing, has done, to Christianity and morality
along with your right to hold on to such as sacred and true.

“Another tool is the totalitarian (as opposed to the Christian) view of tolerance.
Things which are perceived as preventing freedom or happiness cannot be tolerated.
“certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed,
certain policies cannot be exposed, certain behaviour cannot be permitted without making
tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude”.

Political correctness is driven by two things,
group identity and the discounting of truth as valuable.
Some groups are beyond criticism.
Some truths cannot be said.

And it appears that Christianity, the Judaeo / Christian tradition,
the traditional family, traditional Western Civilization, differing opinions,
white males, morality, truth, conservativism, etcetera…
have all fallen into that category of that which may no longer be uttered…

All the while, abortion, gender fluidity, transgenderism, fake news, liberalism, safe rooms,
LBGTQ_____ (fill in the blanks with any letter that pleases you), atheism, racism, fascism,
‘isms’ of every shape, size, and description… are all the rage as are those
who embrace such…
Embrace anything other than the aforementioned and then you my friend will be ridiculed,
sued, attacked, heckled, disgraced, run out of business, run out of town and gleefully obliterated.

Yet David offers one last piece of closing wisdom in which we all must reach…

“You cannot have the fruits of Christianity if you do not have the root of Christ.”

Cultural Marxism in Modern Society…

Is our post modern cultural Marxism rooted in a sexual revolution that was disguised as a women’s movement?

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good-bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks, the one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry,
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.
Lyrics by Graham Nash
Teach your Children

What do Critical Theory, Marxism, Socialism, cultural liberalism, women’s equality,
homosexuality, transgenderism, and the sexual revolution all have in common?
They are the underlying lynchpins to our current day’s ills…

And they all seem to have begotten the other in some perverse orgy of thought, action and protest.

I wrote a post last week referencing a recent letter penned by Pope Emeritus Benedict
in which he states that the ills of the Chruch today can actually be traced right back
to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s.

“Pope Benedict XVI has broken his silence in a rare essay on the sex abuse crisis
in the Catholic Church, claiming that it was caused in part by the sexual revolution of the 1960s
and the liberalization of the church’s moral teaching.

“Since I myself had served in a position of responsibility as shepherd of the Church
at the time of the public outbreak of the crisis, and during the run-up to it,
I had to ask myself — even though, as emeritus,
I am no longer directly responsible —
what I could contribute to a new beginning,”
Benedict wrote, in explaining why he is speaking out now.

But his comments on the sex abuse crisis seem certain to inflame tensions between
conservative Catholics, who largely blame homosexuality and lax sexual ethics for the scandal,
and liberals, who say there is no known connection between homosexuality and pedophilia.

In the essay, Benedict asserts that the changes in traditional moral standards
on sexuality both in society and within the Catholic Church laid the groundwork
for the sex abuse crisis.

“Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ’68,” he writes,
“was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.”

Bishop Gavin Ashenden actually expanded on this notion albeit as a separate thought than that
of the former Pope’s, all of which I shared in that same previous post.

https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2019/04/12/silent-no-more-the-absence-of-god/

Contrary to what many critics now argue, I don’t see the former Pope’s letter as some
sort of feeble excuse for the scope of predation and the decades of lies and cover-ups,
but rather I see that Benedict is identifying a marker…
A key and crucial marker, marking much of our current ills and woes.

But before we proceed, you might need to read over another previous post.
It’s a post which might refresh your memory about Critical Theory,
The Frankfurt School and Marxism—all of which have been identified and brought to our
attention by Melvin Tinker in his book
That Hideous Strength:
How The West Was Lost
The Cancer of Cultural Marxism in The Chruch,
The World And The Gospel of Change

Here is a link to one of the previous teaching posts regarding Mr. Tinker’s book:
https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2019/01/30/new-left-not-so-new-raison-detre/

In a nutshell, however, “according to Tinker–
“In 1923 a week-long symposium was organized by Felix Weil in Frankfurt,
Germany in which they laid out a vision for a Marxist think-tank and
research centre.
The original name for the centre was the Institue for Marxism (Institut fur Marxismus),
but a more innocent sounding title was subsequently given,
The Institute for Social Research (Institut fur Sozialforschung).
Since that time the ISR has usually been known simply as the Frankfurt School.”

In the early 1940s, many of these German philosophers made a mad dash to the US once
the Nazis had shuttered their Institute—bringing with them not merely an academic philosophy
but rather a desire for a “new world order” of Marxism—
bringing it directly to the forefront of America’s academic schools of thought.

Their “school” of philosophy (a cultural Marxism) was readily accepted and absorbed into
America’s academic elite thinkers and schools.
New, refreshing and cutting edge, or so it seemed.

Fast forward to today…

As we now stand bewildered and nearly helpless while looking at the nation we thought we once knew,
I believe a key and crucial breadcrumb will be found if we look back to those heady days of 60s.

Those days of protests, revolutionary movements and a summer of love.

While we painfully scan the horizon, looking for reasons as to why we are currently in
a terrible mess, I believe we need to not only re-explore but we need to understand…
we need to understand that what appeared to be a movement by and for women vying for
equality in the mid-1960s was far more serious and far more sinister than equal
pay for equal work.
So much so that most of the women protesting had
no idea how their “movement” was to morph into a damning Sexual revolution.

Vietnam, Civil Rights, Women rights, peace, and love…
what a churning boiling toxic kettle of foreboding ills.

A movement shattering certain social norms set the stage for our
current culture’s spiraling demise.

And sex was going to be a key factor, if not the pivotal factor.

According to Max Horkheimer (one of the German philosophers) and his fellow scholars,
bourgeois society is inherently sexually repressed,
which is a major factor in neurosis and other forms of mental illness.
‘They believed,’ as Breshears makes clear, ‘that a revolutionary,
post-capitalist and post-Christian society could liberate humanity
from this repression, so sexual liberation from the restrictions of a patriarchal society
was a major theme in their ideology.’

Both Eric Fromm and Wilhelm Reich (more of the German philosophers) re-worked
Freudianism into the neo-Marxist ideology.
Fromm argued that sexual orientation is merely a social construct,
that there are no innate differences between men and
women, and furthermore that sexuality and gender roles are socially determined.
It was Reich who coined the term
‘the sexual revolution’ (the title of his 1936 book) and contended that the
innate sexual impulse should be liberated
from artificial and man-made moral restrictions.

But perhaps more than any other member of the Frankfurt School it was
Herbert Marcuse who was to have the most far-reaching influence in this aspect of
the neo-Marxist ideology.
In Eros and Civilization he
sought to bring together neo-Marxism with a version of neo-Freudianism in order
to turn the power of the throwing off of all traditional values and sexual restraints
in favour of ‘polymorphous perversity.’ The very idea of marital love and
fidelity was considered by Marcuse to be counter-revolutionary.
Although cultural change was the ultimate goal, Marcuse understood the tactical appeal
if the pleasure principle. For we are often reminded, ‘sex sells,’
and it sells politics too, what better way
to recruit revolutionaries than to convince them that sexual promiscuity
is a sure way to bring
about the revolution?
Dinesh D’Souza notes in ‘What’s so great about Christianity?’
the centrality of this tactic by quoting neo-Marxist,
‘Against the power of religion, we employ an equal if not greater power—
the power of hormones.’/em>

These are names that are mostly foreign to those of us today who are looking for answers,
yet they are names of men who were to play pivotal roles in ushering in the mess
you and I are currently living in today…

Yet as there is much more to write, share and say…I’m off to Atlanta.
So this is part I….Part II and possibly Part III will be forthcoming…

But the Mayor is calling.

It seems her chief aides are going on a little date night prior to the arrival of their new addition
and of course, the Mayor needed a babysitter.
Plus I’ll be on baby watch this weekend standing in while my son is out of town for a wedding.
His overtly pregnant wife is in no condition to trek a couple of hours away from home
this late in the ballgame…

Stay tuned…

Oh, by the way… Percy is still at the Vets…
the surgery seems to have been successful as long as he stays
in a cage, unable to jump…sigh

Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil,
for the devil has been sinning from the beginning.
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.
1 John 3:8

it’s all making sense…or maybe not

“God will judge us not according to how much we endured,
but how much we could love”
Richard Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ

Well, I sat down late Easter afternoon…worn out, exhausted and thankfully thought I might be
starting to actually be feeling a tad bit better…but I
certainly didn’t want to say that out loud.

I wanted to shift my thoughts to something from what I had just finished reading.
It’s a book about a story…the story includes my own yet fully compiled story
oddly intertwined within…
so any talk about all of that is going to have to wait…

Therefore I opted to pick back up a book that you may remember that I had been reading…
reading until things went a bit skewed.

That Hideous Strength: How The West Was Lost
The Cancer of Cultural Marxism in the Chruch, The World and The Gospel of Change
by Melvin Tinker

And I had every intention of offering another tidbit today that really struck me as to
how Mr. Tinker, and in turn, C.S.Lewis, foresaw what was to be the catalyst for
so much of our cultural troubles today….but, something else caught my attention.
Something that required me to put that thought on hold a day or two longer.

I’ve written about Christian Persecution before.
I’ve actually written about it a great deal.

But the trouble is…the persecution keeps escalating.
Not lessening, not keeping an even keel but growing

Now it’s not that I would ever think that my tiny little words could make
much of any sort of difference, it’s just that I feel it important to
speak out—just like I do about abortion.

These things don’t get any better, so I just keep trying to shine a little
light in the darkness.

Since Sunday, nearly 300 people have died from the terrorist bombings which took place in Sri Lanka
during Easter services.
8 bombings total rocked the country with 3 churches full of worshipers, along with three upscale
hotels, being purposely targeted.

The attackers were Islamic extremists.

Western leadership outrage hit the twitter waves…

Hillary Clinton offered condolences
“On this holy weekend for many faiths,
we must stand united against hatred and violence.
I’m praying for everyone affected by today’s horrific attacks on Easter worshippers
and travelers in Sri Lanka.”

Barack Obama offered condolences for Easter worshipers….
“The attacks on tourists and Easter worshippers in Sri Lanka are an attack on humanity.
On a day devoted to love, redemption, and renewal,
we pray for the victims and stand with the people of Sri Lanka.”

But wait…

What exactly is an ‘Easter worshiper’?

Christians go to Chruch on Easter in order to worship…so might they be what the former president
was painfully trying to acknowledge?

Yet last I checked, no one worshiped Easter.

Christians worship, on Easter, the Risen Christ…The Redeemer.

So I think we’re seeing one piece to this puzzling problem…
American leadership never likes to use the “C” word….that being the word, Christian.

But I’ve written about that before.
I’d actually written about President Obama having a very difficult time voicing the fact
that there is actually real persecution against Christians.

And for all his grandiose rhetoric and eloquence of speech when speaking or addressing
a crowd, he could never call a terrorist attack what it actually was…
an attack by Islamic Extremists.

According to a story offered on Fox News back in Janurary,
“An international Christian organization is warning that the persecution of Christians
worldwide is set to rise in 2019 — and it’s calling on the United States to do more to help.

Release International, a U.K.-based charity that helps supports persecuted Christians
around the world and a partner organization of Voice of the Martyrs,
warns that this year, particularly in China, India, and Nigeria, persecution
against Christians is rising.

The story continued…
“These are countries that have long been on the list but we’re seeing
an upwards curve, an alarming rise in persecution,”
Andrew Boyd, Release International spokesman, told Fox News.

“Release has been doing this work for 50 years,” Boyd added.
“I have no doubt that persecution is increasing and it is alarming
and the contexts are different. You have militant Islam in Nigeria;
China, which is communism; India, which is militant Hinduism;
North Korea which is a weird blend of communism and Emporer worship.
There is an increasing intolerance and it’s being played out in violence and
we know it because of the reports that are coming from our partners on the ground.”

https://www.foxnews.com/world/christian-group-warns-of-sharply-rising-persecution-in-these-countries-in-2019

And yet our leaders continue to turn a blind eye while refusing to use the “C” word
or the ‘I E” words…

It was way back in 2014 when I first started writing about Christian persecution.
A year later it was to be a post about Islamic Extremists.

https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/ostriches-and-ducks/

Tomorrow I hope to tie in what I was reading regarding the catalyst that has lead
our culture into its current abyss and rising attacks on Christianity…

Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted,
2 Timothy 3:12

new left, not so new-raison d’etre

“But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence,
where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said,
certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed,
certain behaviour cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument
for the continuation of servitude.”
Herbert Marcuse

As we revisit our friend Melvin Tinker and his book
“That Hideous Strength: How The West Was Lost
The Cancer of Cultural Marxism in the Church, the World and The Gospel of Change”,
we pick up where we last left off…reviewing some of the writings of the likes of individuals
such as Herbert Marcuse.

Who was Herbert Marcuse you ask?

He was a German-born American philosopher, sociologist, and Political Theorist.

Marcuse was a key figure in the Frankfurt Shcool of Critical thinking.

According to Tinker–
“In 1923 a week-long symposium was organized by Felix Weil in Frankfurt,
Germany in which they laid out a vision for a Marxist think-tank and
research centre.
The original name for the centre was the Institue for Marxism (Institut fur Marxismus),
but a more innocent sounding title was subsequently given,
The Institute for Social Research (Institut fur Sozialforschung).
Since that time the ISR has usually been known simply as the Frankfurt School.”

Besides his time spent in the Frankfurt School, Marcuse also spent time working for the
US government in the Office of Strategic Services which was a precursor to the CIA.

But what is actually more relevant and crucial to us today regarding Marcuse,
as we witness a sinister surge in this new cultural Marxism grabbing hold of
our Western Civilization, is that Marcuse is known as the ‘father of the New Left’.

The New Left…??

Perhaps The New Left is an oxymoron—not new at all.

Have we not been inundated with all things of the New Left ever since the midterms?
Does the new darling of that New Left Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ring a bell?
So perhaps we’re actually discerning that this “new” left isn’t so new after all…

Tinker responds to Marcuse’s opening quote —
“Notice all those ‘cannots’?
Who do you think they are applied to?
Mainly people like Christians.
This is a new totalitarian-tolerance while all the time masquerading as a new freedom.
As such the new tolerance must extinguish the old tolerance and those people and
institutions which traditionally expouse it such as the church.
Furthermore, for neo-Marxism to have a raison d’etre
there must be repressed groups which need liberating,
People are required to see themselves as victims of the liberal society of which they are a part.

PC or not PC? That is the question
It is cultural Marxism which lies behind the all-pervading political correctness of our age.
Those of both the political right and left acknowledge this.
Pat Buchanan of the right wrote, ‘Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, a regime to punish dissent
and to stigmatize social heresy as the Inquisition, punished religious heresy. Its trademark is intolerance.’

Similarly from the more liberal publication Newsweek:
PC is, strictly speaking, a totalitarian philosophy …
Politically, PC is Marxist in origin…There are…
some who recognize the tyranny of PC but see it only as a transitional phase,
which will no longer be necessary once the virtues of tolerance are internalized.
Does that sound familiar? Its the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In 1930 Max Horkheimer became the director of the ISR which is when neo-Marxism was
launched in earnest.
Horkheimer was convinced that the major obstacle to the spread of Marxism was traditional
Western culture with its Judeo-Christian heritage.
Here there developed a revisionist neo-Marxist interpretation of Western culture under the rubric,
Critical Theory, the goal of which according to William S. Lind ‘was not truth but praxis,
or revolutionary action: bringing the current society and culture down through unremitting,
destructive criticism.’
Truth, according to this view, was locked into its own particular point in history and so was
historically relative (of course that would apply to Critical Theory itself
a fact which was conveniently overlooked).

“unremitting destructive criticism…” along with ‘facts that are conveniently overlooked‘.
With the New Left’s biggest obstacle being Western Culture and its Judeo-Christian heritage…??

If you think that none of this is relevant or affects you, your life, your routines, your beliefs…
you best think again.

No, this New Left is really not so new at all—
yet it continues on relentlessly, with a growing fevered pitch,
to desperately turn your world upside down.
To de-establish the established.
To neuter the bedrock of Western Civilization…that being
her Judeo-Christian foundation.

And there is no one who is more giddy about this revved-up assault
then that of our old ancient foe.

Split
Divide
Eliminate
Conquer

You and I will soon have two choices, that is if those two choices aren’t already standing before us…
Stand firm in our faith…
or…
appease and apologize…
and in turn, lose our souls.

First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and
following their own evil desires.
They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised?
Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.”
But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was
formed out of water and by water.
By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.
By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire,
being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.
But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years,
and a thousand years are like a day.
The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness.
He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief.
The heavens will disappear with a roar;
the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.
Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be?
You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.
That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat.
But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth,
the home of righteousness.
So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this,
make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.
Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation,
just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him.
He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters.
His letters contain some things that are hard to understand,
which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
Therefore, dear friends, since you already know this,
be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of lawless men and fall from
your secure position.
But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
To him be glory both now and forever!
Amen.
2 Peter 3:3-18:1

death of your own culture, right under your own eyes…

“What we have in the Tower of Babel episode is in effect a rival cosmology to that of God’s;
it is an unmaking and a remaking of the world, a blasphemous human “let us’
over and against the Holy ‘let us’ of the Triune God.”
Melvin Tinker

(Le Mont-Saint-Michel / Julie Cook/ 2018)

I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday–
so as I sat in the waiting room along with all those others who were also waiting,
I was actually hard at work.

I learned a long time ago to make the most of any and all “empty” moments.
Call it multitasking or simply the survival skill of having been a working mother…
I was sitting in a corner, book open in my lap while my yellow highlighter was going to town.
I was almost disappointed when the nurse came out and called me back.

I was in the midst of the slow continuation of working my way through the marvelous,
albeit short, book by Melvin Tinker
That Hideous Strength: How The West Was Lost
The Cancer of Cultural Marxism in the Chruch, the World and The Gospel of Change

Below I want to offer you the two page’s worth of enlightenment that I managed to read
and highlight before the nurse came to get me—

It is so much on the money that I had to contain myself from shouting out
a big ‘AMEN” as I read.
Had I done so, the folks waiting around me might have thought I was out of my
meds….meds for things like sudden and unexpected outbursts—
appropriate and not…
but little did they know I was reading words of an alarming truth that is sinisterly
consuming our very lives.

“We saw how for Lewis, the ideology of his day, which he sought to expose and debunk,
was naturalistic materialism.
One of the main ideologies of our day is a variant of this, namely, neo-Marxism,
sometimes called cultural Marxism or libertarian Marxism.

A philosophy of human liberation.
It seeks to overcome human alienation, to emancipate man from repressive social institutions,
especially economic institutions that frustrate his true nature, and to bring him into harmony
with himself, his fellow men, and the world around him so that he can overcome his estrangements
and express his true essence through creative freedom.

But the liberty which the cultural Marxists have in mind is not the liberty
of classical liberalism– equality under the law or even equality of opportunity.
Unlike the classical Marxist whose main focus was economic inequality,
theirs is an equality cutting across the whole of human experience.
It was Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School who argued that traditional societies promote what
he called a ‘repressive tolerance” because they do not deal with the latent inequalities of humans;
the fact that some are cleverer, wiser or harder working than others,
who are then to be considered to be oppressed because of their perceived deficiency.

As Andrew Sandlin writes:
Libertarian Marxism is all about liberating humanity from the social institutions and conditions
(like the family and church and business and traditional views and habits and authorities)
that prevent the individual from realizing his true self,
his true desires and aspirations, from being anything he wants to be–full autonomy…
Libertarian Marxism is the Marxism of our culture and time.

Peter Berger calls the ‘plausibility structures’ of a society,
that is those background assumptions, beliefs and ways of thinking and acting which are taken as given.
It is the presumption which declares “Of course, everyone now days knows that…’
The aim is to get people to think and feel for themselves that certain values and practices,
such as same-sex marriage, are common sense, fair or even natural.

Over the last 60 years or so in the West there has effectively occurred the death of on culture,
rooted in the Judeo-Christian world view, and the rise of another more secular one.
Philip Rieff observes that,
“The death of a culture begins with its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways
that remain inwardly compelling.’ Once the ideology of neo-Marxism, you talk instead about ‘equality,’
‘liberation’ and ‘tolerance’–the things of which the Chruch of England speaks endlessly)
the revolution is more or less complete.
The upshot of this is that if these beliefs and practices are considered plausible,
Christian beliefs and practices become implausible more less by default,
in which case it will not do simply to argue for the cogency of the Chrisitan faith for
most people will think that there is nothing to argue about.
Many of us don’t spend that much time thinking how we might argue against flat-earthists—
we simply assume they are mistaken, out of touch and an irrelevance;
so it is with many people’s view of Christianity.

Changing the view of Christianity, one Marxist at a time…
we’ve been warned….

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether
I come and see you or am absent,
I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit,
with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel,
Philippians 1:27

Two ways, one choice

“There are two ways, one of life and one of death,
and there is a great difference between these two ways”
The Two Ways

(bookcover)

The kind folks at Plough Publishing have once again shared a few new books with me for my review.
Sometimes I have time to read them, sometimes, I don’t.
Sometimes I have to settle for a bit of berry picking…pursing for those tastiest little
nuggets…nuggets that not only need to be shared but such nuggets are necessary when it comes to sharing.

I received a couple of books with today’s offering bieng from one of those books.

The Two Ways
The Early Christian Vision of Discipleship from
The Didache and The Shepherd of Hermas

With an introduction by Rowan Williams

The Didache, also known as The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, an anonymous work composed in the late
first century AD, was lost for centuries before being rediscovered in 1873.
The Shepherd of Hermas was written by a Roman Christian named Hermas in the second century AD
or possibly even earlier.
A tale in which the “angel of repentance” appears to Hermas, a Christian living in Rome in the form of a shepherd.
Both works were included in early lists of canonical books.

There was, in the eyes of Rome, a deadly difficulty in the claim made by the early Christians
and that of their loyalty, or lack thereof, to the state.
As it appeared that their loyalty was no longer found in the authority of Rome and of the state
but rather in a man who Rome considered dead and gone.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, in his introduction to the book
examines the life of Christians during the infancy time-period of the new ‘religion’
as seen from the eyes of the political and governing body of Rome.

Williams notes that “any Chrisitan in this period knew that, even if things were relatively peaceful,
it was always possible that a suspicious government would crackdown.
(Sound familiar 21st century Christians?)

The suspicions were well-founded in one sense.
If you look at the eyewitness accounts of martyrdom in these early centuries—
documents like the wonderful record of the martyrs of Scilli in North Africa in AD 180–
you can see what the real issue was.
These Christians, most of them probably domestic slaves, had to explain to the magistrate that they
were quite happy to pray for the imperial state,
and even to pay taxes, but that they could not grant the state their absolute allegiance.
They had another loyalty—which did not mean that they wished to overthrow the administration,
but that they would not comply with the states’ demands in certain respects.
They would not worship the emperor, and, as we know from some texts, refused to serve
in the Roman army.

They asked from the state what had been very reluctantly conceded to the Jews as an ethnic group—
exemption from the religious requirements of the empire.
What made their demand new and shocking was that it was not made on the basis of ethnic identity,
but on the bare fact of conviction and conscience.
For the first time in human history, individuals claimed the liberty to define the
limits of their political loyalty,
and to test that loyalty by spiritual and ethical standards.

That is why the early Christian movement was so threatening–and so simply baffling—
to the Roman authorities.
It was not revolutionary in the sense that it was trying to change the government.
Its challenge was more serious:
it was the claim to hold any and every government to account,
to test its integrity, and to give and withhold compliance accordingly.

The Early Christians believed that if Jesus of Nazareth was “Lord,”
no one else could be lord over him, and therefore no one could overrule his authority.

We use the word “Lord” these days mostly in a rather unthinking religious context,
as a sort of devotional flourish: for a Roman, it meant the person who made the decisions you had to abide by,
from the master of a slave in the household to the emperor himself.

To speak of Jesus as “King of Kings and Lord of Lords” was to say that his decisions
could not be overridden by anyone.
You might have to disobey a “lord” in our society in order to obey the one true Master of all—
the one who used no violence in enforcing his decisions but was all the more unanswerable
an authority because of that.
He alone needed no reinforcement, no temporal power,
to overcome external threats of rivals.

The theology of the early centuries thus comes very directly out of this one great central
conviction about political authority: if Jesus is Lord, no one else ultimately is,
and so those who belong with Jesus, who shares his life through the common life of the worshiping community,
have a solidarity and a loyalty that goes beyond the chance identity of national or political life.

The first claim on their loyalty is to live out the life of Jesus which is also the life of God–
a life that needs no defense and so has no place for violence and coercion,

God, says Clement of Alexandria in the late second century, shows his love supremely in the fact that
he loves people who have no “natural” claim on him,
‘Humans love largely because of fellow-feeling, but God’s love is such that it never depends
on having something in common.
The creator has in one sense nothing in common with his creation—how could he?
But he is completely free to exercise his essential being, which is love, wherever he wills,
And this teaches us that we too must learn to love beyond the boundaries of common interest and
natural sympathy and, like God, love those who don’t see to have anything in common with us.

So many good nuggets here to taste, savor and finally digest…
And that’s just from the introduction!!!

From the notion of how we currently use the word “Lord” when referring to Jesus…
With it being more of a case of mere verbiage rather than a true sense of one who actually is in sole
authority over us.
As in one of true Lordship.

For in the word “Lord” one finds deep humility, yielding to and the deferring of self to that of another…
all of which is actually found in the use of what most consider to be a simple single word.
All of which are concepts so foreign to the 21st-century self-sufficient mind.

And so here’s the thing…
we have a new year.

The gift of a new year.

Yet for so many reasons, we needed to throw out this past year a long time ago.
It was caustic, volatile, vitriolic, hate-filled and divisive.

We have watched a nation, and an entire civilization, turn her back on her
Omnipotent Creator.

We have seen sinfulness legalized and legitimized while those who cry foul are victimized, scorned
and are actually now deemed criminal.
Criminal for holding, claiming, speaking and standing firm in the Faith of the One True God.
While sadly the majority who claim that belief stand idly by saying nothing.

Our friend the Wee Flea, Pastor David Robertson, has been offering his own review of a book with
a somewhat familiar title.
That Hideous Strength: How the West Was Lost
The Cancer of Cultural Marxism in the Chruch,
The World And The Gospel Of Change
by Melvin Tinker

The book’s title is a nod to a novel of the same title by C.S Lewis
(That Hideous Strength–the last in a space trilogy from 1945),
Tinker takes Lewis’ work and runs with it…making a novel applicable to our current times
as we watch a Post Christian world teetering on the brink of irreversible destructive harm.

Our dear friend, the rouge Anglican cleric Bishop Gavin Ashenden, states that “if this book manages to wake
the Chruch to the danger it faces it will have done a great service to the Kingdom of heaven today”.

In his reflection of Mr. Tinker’s work, John Steven, FIEC, contends that
“The last sixty years have witnessed the death in the West of the Judeo-Christian worldview and its
replacement by an increasingly totalitarian secularism. Melvin Tinker deftly explains how this
revolution happened, and exposed the tactics that enabled Cultural Marxism to triumph
amongst our institutions and elites. We are deceiving ourselves if we think that this new ideology
is simply about achieving equality.
Rather it seeks the abolition of the family as the basis for society.
Having identified the challenge he helpfully shows how Christians should respond.
Following in the footsteps of William Wilberforce we must proclaim the gospel of God and
vigorously refute the ideas and values of the present day.
He calls for bold and courageous evangelical leadership, which is often sadly lacking
in the contemporary church.
Although a challenging read, this book provides invaluable help in understanding our
contemporary context.
It will make you grieve, pray, and deepen your confidence in the gospel fo the Lord Jesus,
which is alone able to free lost men and women from their bondage to sin and Satan.”

And we have grieved have we not?

I have felt much palpable grief this past year, living in the obvious descent into this
post-Christian world.
It has been a slow yet painful, none the less, descent.

But this year, this new year there are faithful voices crying out into the wilderness for us all to
take heart, to repent, to put on our armor and to be bold.

Be silent no more we are told.
But rather proclaim…and do so vigorously.

Be bold and courageous…for it will take boldness and courage to take on the cultural ideology
while showing our loyalty…loyalty not to the current state but rather to the one true Lord.

Get ready…the clarion call has sounded.

“Let the nations be roused;
let them advance into the Valley of Jehoshaphat,
for there I will sit
to judge all the nations on every side.
13 Swing the sickle,
for the harvest is ripe.
Come, trample the grapes,
for the winepress is full
and the vats overflow—
so great is their wickedness!”
14 Multitudes, multitudes
in the valley of decision!
For the day of the Lord is near
in the valley of decision.
15 The sun and moon will be darkened,
and the stars no longer shine.
16 The Lord will roar from Zion
and thunder from Jerusalem;
the earth and the heavens will tremble.
But the Lord will be a refuge for his people,
a stronghold for the people of Israel.
Joel 3:12-16