The Dark Side of Political Philosophy, and How it Led to the Growth and Development of Today’s “Political Left” Movement

(Updated August 30, 2020): On the topic of why I think that the Roman Catholic Church is a problem with respect to the “wokism” situation we see today, it is not simply that I think things like “the Mass”, the priesthood, the saints, had anything (or much) to do with it. Roman Catholicism is NOT just its religious trappings. It is not just its history. It is not just “the evils that it has done in history”. It is also a thought system of its own. It has adopted “philosophies” over time. It is in fact a collection of these things. More, as well, it was a “cause” against certain “effects” reacted. Today we see some “effects” in the form of the so-called “academic subject” called “intersectionalism” that reacts against “White European Males”. There is so much more.

In this article, originally dated February 2019, I began to make the philosophical connection.

I’ve been asked many times, “why do you think it’s the intellectuals who convert to Roman Catholicism, while many of those who don’t approach the topic from a so-called intellectual viewpoint tend in large measure to convert the other way, from Roman Catholicism to evangelicalism?”

It seems to me that the “intellectuals” (or those who would think of themselves in that way) are more philosophically savvy, and they tend toward logical and ordered systems such as Aristotelianism (and derivatively, Thomism). That is a definite draw.

However, I think that is wrong-headed in several important ways. To take just one example, in his “Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction”, Edward Feser outlines Kant’s “naturalist” assumptions and decides simply to ignore all of Kant (and what followed). He says (and I’ve added paragraph breaks to enhance readability):

I See the Need for a Clearly Articulated Christian Worldview

Jason Engwer and I have been having some discussions in the comment threads from some of my recent blog posts about an idea, a hypothesis that I have been proposing, which involves a link between what the Roman Catholic Church of the past, and what “wokism” is and is doing in the present. He believes that it is not a good idea, not a good hypothesis, and I know that I have not provided a complete argument for it.

As I mentioned in the comments, I had been hoping to get some feedback with the intention that I would be able to work out my thoughts more fully. Jason would prefer that I not use Triablogue for that particular kind of thing, and of course I will defer to his wishes.

But I am interested in having a discussion.

As someone who is a conservative, Reformed, evangelical Christian, I am alarmed by recent trends in politics and culture, and I imagine that some of you are as well. Francis Schaeffer’s excellent question comes to mind: “how then should we live?” What role should Christians play in all of this? I have frequently in my life been a keen observer of politics. Other times, not so much, depending on what’s going on in my own life. I would imagine that’s true for most of you as well. I seem to be watching more closely these days.

As a writer, I am hugely aware that “words have meanings”. It should be evident to all that definitions are fluctuating almost by the day. Words and concepts such as “racism”, “anti-racism”, “justice”, “social justice”, even “liberal” and “conservative” get thrown about, and often, people today are using the same words, but using different definitions in their minds, and consequently while it looks as if they are having a conversation, in real life, they are talking at cross-purposes, and not having a genuine conversation at all.

The pure speed of conversation, through “social media” such as Twitter and Facebook enable us to see events, form opinions, and to dive into “discussions”, without even knowing the full details of a thing.

These are times, I believe, when people’s thoughts and concepts are in flux, and as a result, people are changing their ways of thinking. Some popular examples include someone like the former comedian Dave Rubin, who is a “gay” “married” “classical liberal” “atheist”, who recently has, through various discussions, found himself to be more apt to “believe there is a God” and to have a generally more conservative outlook in life.

The independent YouTube journalist Tim Pool, too, whom I watch, cut his teeth, so to speak, by “live streaming” news reports from the “Occupy Wall Street” protests from some years ago. Now he is watching closely as rioting is pretty much a constant thing in some Democrat-run cities, and though he considers himself a “social liberal”, in his commentaries, he currently despises the Democrats for allowing things, and he has placed himself firmly in the Trump column for this upcoming election.

Given that this is a time of flux, I believe that the times are ripe for, and needful of, a clearly articulated Christian worldview to make its way onto the public stage.


We can all see what the phenomenon that I am calling “wokism” is and is doing. It is having a profound effect on the national discussions, including everything from the rioting in cities, the role of police and police departments, the role of individuals (generally, a conservative viewpoint) vs the role of “aggrieved groups” (generally, a leftist viewpoint).

One reason for this may be found in academia. It is said (and many of you will be aware of this narrative) that anti-war protesters of the political left went into academia because of the draft deferrals that could be gained by following that path. They found movement there to be kind of “free and easy”, and over a few decades, new “fields of study” emerged, some legitimate, some not (in a parasitic kind of way) – “race studies”, “women’s studies”, “gender studies” – and concepts such as “intersectionality” and “anti-racism” have emerged. New methods, too, emerged. In the meanwhile, those in charge of some of these “studies” have found the concept of “Tenure” to be their ally, in the effort to spread these new lines of thought. Whole new moralities, and in fact, moralities pursued with religious fervor, seem to have taken root and bloomed to fruition before our eyes.

(For anyone who is interested, Roger Kimball is a constant and excellent observer of such things, and has documented the process in his work, “Tenured Radicals”.)

The subject matter is confused and confusing. Even the church is being caught up in things. When George Floyd was killed, I became involved in discussions with church members, and my pastor became involved. My church is located in a city area, where there are multiple college campuses, and inner-city churches nearby. The concept of “anti-racism” came to the forefront. The concept basically says, “if you’re not an anti-racist, you are a racist”. This of course involves definitions that have been changed, without us having been involved in the effort to change those definitions.

I found myself on the opposite side of the discussion from some church members who wanted to support the #BlackLivesMatter” movement. Of course as we have seen, that organization is owned and run and funded and staffed by self-described Marxists, and I just can’t see myself supporting anything that is Marxist.

That’s all for now. More later, Lord willing. Let me know if you have any comments or questions.

The Political Papacy and its related Cancel Culture

The papacy has a long history of political illegitimacy, based on forgeries.

In the eighth century, Constantine was known primarily through the account of him in the legend of Pope Sylvester. In this he was incorrectly portrayed as an emperor who had persecuted Christianity until struck down with leprosy. On rejecting the suggestion of his pagan priests that he bathe in the blood of sacrificed babies, he had a vision of Saints Peter and Paul telling him to find Bishop Sylvester, who cured, healed and baptized him. Onto this core narrative was grafted the [false] claim that when Constantine subsequently decided to leave for the East, out of gratitude he entrusted Pope Sylvester with a set of imperial regalia, including a crown, and with the authority for himself and his successors to appoint an emperor in the West should circumstances ever require it. (Collins, Roger. Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy (p. 148). Basic Books. Kindle Edition).

The “Donation of Constantine”, cited above, and an ancillary “Constitution of Constantine” of course were forgeries, a fact that was not known until the late 1400s, but the documents were “probably not written until the ninth century” and “the ideas behind it were older and may have developed in the papal court”. “Their widespread acceptance enabled Leo to make Charles [Charlemagne] emperor on papal authority” (Collins, p. 150).

The nexus of politics and “the Church” was never so great as it was during the medieval years. According to Collins, “virtually every other Western emperor before the sixteenth century wanted papal coronation to legitimize his authority” (Collins, p. 150).

Many of you will have heard of the document Unam Sanctam , promulgated inn 1302, which concludes with the famous statement, “we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff”.

This is not a religious sentiment. It is a statement written to a King of France, and the reasoning is political:

For with truth as our witness, it belongs to spiritual power to establish the terrestrial power and to pass judgement if it has not been good. Thus is accomplished the prophecy of Jeremias concerning the Church and the ecclesiastical power: ‘Behold to-day I have placed you over nations, and over kingdoms’ and the rest. Therefore, if the terrestrial power err, it will be judged by the spiritual power; but if a minor spiritual power err, it will be judged by a superior spiritual power; but if the highest power of all err, it can be judged only by God, and not by man, according to the testimony of the Apostle: ‘The spiritual man judgeth of all things and he himself is judged by no man’ [1 Cor 2:15]. This authority, however, (though it has been given to man and is exercised by man), is not human but rather divine, granted to Peter by a divine word and reaffirmed to him (Peter) and his successors by the One Whom Peter confessed, the Lord saying to Peter himself, ‘Whatsoever you shall bind on earth, shall be bound also in Heaven’ etc., [Mt 16:19].

This form of political papacy had its own “cancel culture”. It is outlined by William of Ockham in his “A Short Discourse on the Tyrannical Government”. The longer title is known as:

William of Ockham

A Short Discourse on the Tyrannical Government
Over Things Divine and Human,
But Especially Over the Empire
And Those Subject to the Empire
Usurped by Some Who are
Called Highest Pontiff

In a prologue, he affirms that he is aware of “the faith handed down by Christ and the Apostles” (p. 4). Further:

If I do unwittingly say anything contrary to it, I am ready to be corrected by anyone at all who can show me the truth; an as well I will by my own inquiry and by asking others at the appropriate time and place, with careful attention seek the truth (p. 4).

So Ockham, a Franciscan, an honest man, was committed to his idea of “Church” and Christian doctrine.

But he rejects the view that the papacy has secular authority. In Book 1, Chapter 1, sets out an argument that he disbelieves, and works to disprove, but one that is extant throughout “the Church”, that one may dare not question the pope’s political power.

Since I am about to investigate many matters concerning the power of the pope, I have decided, because of the error of some who fear papal power more than God’s, to inquire first whether thorough examination of the nature and extent of the pope’s power is permissible and without danger of just accusation. There are some – too ready to please men, by whose will they can now be raised, now lowered – who dare assert that no one is permitted to inquire about the pope’s power by disputation (p. 5).

Yes, there have been worldly leaders who have been more than happy to kill or imprison individuals who spoke out against themselves and their governments.

But this is, in what we know as “Christendom”, the original “Cancel Culture”.

They rely on this, that according to the canon and civil laws no one is permitted “to dispute about the ruler’s jurisdiction”; therefore, a fortiori, it is not permissible to dispute about the power of the supreme pontiff, lest one commit the crime of sacrilege.

This is the very same phenomenon that is seen with the Twitter mobs and the Leftist mobs – “we have decided upon what is political orthodoxy – whether it be speech about race or gender or the environment or whatever”.

Ockham was excommunicated (which excludes him from the sacraments and therefore from salvation) and exiled. He died “unreconciled”.

“You are not even permitted to inquire about our standard orthodoxy on this”.

Comments, questions?

Medievalism as “Source”

Just by way of clarification, I wanted to illustrate what I was thinking when I said that “Roman Catholicism is the source of damage in our culture today”. I did not intend to say that it was the Roman Catholic religion that is causing all of the problems.

My intention was to talk about the “history of ideas”, and in that sense, in the illustration nearby, you can see that in the flow and history of ideas, especially in talking about western Europe, that there was a very long time when Roman Catholicism was the only game in town.

On 4 September 476, one hundred years after the Goths crossed the Danube, the last Roman emperor in the west, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed, and it was the descendants of those Gothic refugees who provided the military core of one of the main successor states to the Empire: the Visigothic kingdom. … (Heather, Peter. The Fall of the Roman Empire (p. xi). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.)

The papacy after that point held to a “two-swords” theory of power and authority. In 494 AD, not long after the city of Rome was sacked, “Pope Gelasius” wrote to the then-emperor Anastasius “on the superiority of the spiritual over temporal power”:

There are two powers, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely, the sacred authority of the priests and the royal power. Of these that of the priests is the more weighty, since they have to render an account for even the kings of men in the divine judgment.

You are also aware, dear son, that while you are permitted honorably to rule over human kind, yet in things divine you bow your head humbly before the leaders of the clergy and await from their hands the means of your salvation.

In the reception and proper disposition of the heavenly mysteries you recognize that you should be subordinate rather than superior to the religious order, and that in these matters you depend on their judgment rather than wish to force them to follow your will.

This pronouncement set the tone for political order in western Europe for the next 1000 years.
And so, when I say that Roman Catholicism was THE source for all of our cultural and political difficulties today, it is this event that I had in mind.

* * *
Just to give you a brief outline of the political history of Europe from that point, the pope, “Pope Leo”, crowned Charlemagne as emperor of the Holy Roman empire in 800 AD. By 1054, the eastern and western churches officially split (after much bickering prior), effectively severing the western from the eastern empire as well. The “high middle ages” represent almost a total “reconstruction” of the old Roman empire. Peter Heather cites a letter of Peter Damian, who was one of the Cardinals in the inner circle of the Roman hierarchy in the eleventh century:

Now the Roman Church, the see of the apostles, should imitate the ancient court of the Romans. Just as of old the earthly Senate strove to subdue the whole multitude of the peoples to the Roman Empire, so now the ministers of the apostolic see, the spiritual senators of the Church Universal, should make it their sole business by their laws to subdue the human race to God, the true emperor. (Heather, Peter. The Restoration of Rome (p. 388). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.)

This was a period of period of great accomplishment. Local church and monastic “schools” came together over time, eventually leading to the founding of the great universities of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford. New religious orders such as the Dominicans (teachers) and Franciscans (“friars minor”) formed and also developed “schools of thought”. Writers such as Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and others worked greatly to synthesize what was known of Christian doctrine.

That period also offered many troubles. Thomas Aquinas wrote a long work, “Error of the Greeks”, which gave reasons that the eastern churches should submit to the papacy – it had to be retracted later, because its arguments were found to be heavily reliant on forged documents that were rampant during the prior centuries.

The “great schism” also developed during that time, when political infighting led to a time when there were two and even three “popes” in place. English kings realized that their land-owning allies would not necessarily fight every war without having some say-so, leading to the development of a bi-cameral parliament.

William of Ockham dared to write about “papal tyranny”. Marsellius of Padua wrote a treatise that led to the idea that government involvement of the citizenry that would provide for the best political systems.

* * *
During that 1000 year period, however, there was really only the one source of political power, and its “source” was the papacy. All political and religious thought was either an affirmation of or rejection of the thinking and institutions that were in place at the time.

With this kind of history in mind, it is hard for me to imagine that I “overreact” to Roman Catholicism, by the way. There is such a thing as specialization. Nobody ever said that Stephen Hawking (for example) spent too much of his life studying physics.

It seems to me that most people don’t pay enough attention to it, and in that way, they are missing a lot. The damage is not a surface kind of damage. It lies deeper, in the underlying thinking of things.

That kind of phenomenon is still in place today, although to a much lesser degree. It is the kind of thing I have in mind as I write this.

So, back to First Things. THEY SAY: “Culture is the root of politics, and religion is the root of culture.” For a 1000 year period of time, the papacy was at the root of religion AND politics. Perhaps there is some of that they would want you to stop thinking about. At the time of the Reformation, John Calvin was absolutely right to say that the papacy was the institution through which “satan has polluted every good thing that God has appointed for our salvation.” I did not think it would be controversial on a Reformed blog to repeat such a thing.

The historical papacy has polluted much else, too, and the effects are still with us today, either in the form of affirmations of, or rejections of, papal thinking and teaching.

I say all of this as background for some of the things I hope to discuss going forward. Perhaps I should have outlined it better before I got started. As I said in an earlier comment, I do appreciate your feedback and even your objections. If I’m going to be writing about this topic moving forward (as I hope to do), it is true that “iron sharpens iron”, and you all are helping me to better focus my thoughts.

White European Males

Someone in the comments of my previous article, “Roman Catholicism is the source of damage in our culture today”, suggested that I was “sounding like the Westboro kooks who think they're the only 20 people who are pure enough to be saved”.

I assure you that I am not intending to sound this way. I’m not going to be like Martin Luther, throwing ink wells at the devil in his room, and nor am I going to go into screeds about “know nothings”.

Instead I am taking seriously some of the things that the Roman Catholic Church officially says, the way they have positioned themselves “in the world”. I’m looking at their history, and political philosophy and I am trying to understand how this country, a mere 30 years after the fall of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, can have so many agitators working to implement socialism today.

It’s “white European males” who find themselves at the bottom of all the “intersectionality” charts these days – It is “white European males” who are said by those on “the left” to be responsible for most of the evils in the world. I look at Roman Catholicism, which undoubtedly, for hundreds of years, was the primary intellectual environment for “white European males”, and I’m saying to myself, “I wonder if there’s a connection”.

With all of this in mind, I am an enthusiastic Trump voter who believes that the left/right divide has aligned itself on the person of Donald Trump, precisely because Trump is not an ideological person. He calls himself a “counter-puncher”, and it is purely an act of Providence, I am sure, that the United States finds itself today with a “political left” that is almost wholly united in its zeal against Trump.

So the “conservativism” that we see in Trump is almost purely a response by him to “counter-punch” against “the political left”, which at a political level includes virtually all Democrats, some “NeverTrump” Republicans, and some high-minded Christians who will never vote for someone who is less pure in his personal life than, say, John Piper. And which, at a cultural level, includes the news media, most colleges and universities, lots and lots of younger people who are just caught up in “the spirit of the age” (which is largely embodied by “wokism”).

In 2016, I had many conversations with fellow Triablogue writers, to the effect that Trump wasn’t conservative, that he would show his liberal side. And he has done so with his recent pronouncement that he is the most “gay-friendly” president in history – a thing that makes me cringe, but I try to understand it in context.

With that said, I still think voting for Trump is the best way to address the most immediate problems that we face today, particularly in the US. While it’s a big world, and there are many “enemies” (including Islam, Communist China, biological warfare, nefarious former KGB agents, and even mere apathy) I think “wokism” (which I am using as a catch-all phrase to include its intellectual parent, Marxism, and its like-minded relatives that we know as “Critical theory”, “Cultural Marxism”, Critical Race Theory”, “intersectionality”, “anti-Racism” “cancel culture”, and things like that), is the greatest threat to our country today.

And again I say this from the perspective of a Christian, “in the world but not of the world”, looking at what I can do, in the Romans 13 sense, “Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities”, in a land in which “we the people” are tasked with something like “self-government” through institutions that have been set up to function in a realm where concepts of “Republic” and “democracy” are in the forefront.

I’m not going to claim I have all the answers here. I have a lot of questions. I’ve haven’t written much lately, but I’ve been reading a lot, and I want to share what I’m learning.

We live in a culture where “white European males” are the ones who have come out at the bottom of the intersectionality charts. They and their paternalism are seen to be the greatest evils that the world is facing today.

There’s a saying, I don’t know if it’s true, that “a definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again, and expecting different results”. If that’s the case, it doesn’t seem to me that we want to move back in the direction of Roman Catholicism, and in fact, while we want to look for Christian solutions, we certainly don’t want, moving forward, to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Roman Catholicism is the source of damage in our culture today

I have spent a lot of time watching our culture. Sometimes it seems as if Roman Catholics, such as Robert George of Princeton (in our day) or Michael Novak (from days gone by) have been our allies in “culture wars”. 

While some of their thinking may be sound, their underlying view of reality is damaged by their Roman Catholicism. Their Roman Catholicism is the very problem, not part of the solution. 

Go to the First Things website and the header on their pop-up request for donations says:

“Culture is the root of politics, and religion is the root of culture.” – Richard John Neuhaus

Our culture has been tearing itself apart, led philosophically by a form of Kantianism that enables human beings to “construct” their own realities, and at a more visceral level by the concept of Marxism as it manifests itself in what is essentially “a new religion”: “Wokism”. 

 “Wokism” (or simply “leftism”) brings with it a raft of new “moralities”, including “Cultural Marxism”, “Critical Theory”, “Critical Race Theory”, “anti-racism”, “Intersectionality”, the search for “equality”, whatever you want to call them. 

They are all names for “things you gotta do if you want to be saved” in the eyes of this world. It is a religion as much as any other set of beliefs is a religion.

If it’s true that “religion is the root of culture” (and I believe it is), then we need to take the idea that Roman Catholicism is the source of the damages a step further. 

John Calvin said in Institutes 4.1.1 the papacy was the institution through which “satan has polluted every good thing that God has appointed for our salvation.” 

Looking around at our world today, no truer statement has ever been uttered. Neuhaus was, and First Things is, a channel of satan into our culture, because it supports the papacy, and by extension, Roman Catholicism

We must never forget this, and Christianity must from this moment forward work to eliminate the concept of papacy as “a good thing”. 

Roman Catholicism likes to use Genesis 3:15 as some sort of proof or prophecy for its Marian dogmas:

The Lord God said to the serpent ... He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.”

But rather, what an apt metaphor it is for the way that “the papacy” has hobbled Christianity since its “development” in the fourth and fifth centuries. 

It is said that slaves were “hobbled” by cutting the Achilles tendon, and preventing them from running away. 

It is the concept of “the papacy” that has hobbled Christianity, and its ability to affect “culture” in a Godly way, since the days before it "historically developed" (Klaus Schatz, "Papal Primacy", p. 36). 

Think about it. Your comments? 

John Frame on Steve Hays

Posted on Behalf of Dr John Frame

I think I met Steve in the early 90s. When you teach theology, people come out of the blue and ask you questions. And that's what happened, in a way, with Steve. Typically, such correspondents want to ask about predestination or the millennium— the conventional topics of the day. But Steve's question was very different.

He asked something like "can a Reformed Christian be a Malebrancheian Occasionalist?"

When people try to understand causality, they think in terms of David Hume, and determinism, and freedom.

Malebranche was a philosophical predecessor to David Hume. Steve had been reading a history of philosophy, and Malebranche was kind of like a theistic Humean, except that he lived prior to Hume. His Occasionalism held that God is the only causal agent, and that creatures provide the "occasion" for divine action.

Steve's question threw me for a loop. I had never considered this question. I tried to persuade Steve that God did create the world with a real causal structure. That God causes things in such a way that the world does produce genuine causes.

According to my very fallible memory, after our brief correspondence, Steve joined us at WSCal as a student. He took some classes for about a year, and then he went back north.

Maybe a year later, I got a note from a former student and WSCal alumnus in the Northwest. He had become a pastor.

He wrote to me, "is it possible that there's such a thing as a theological prodigy?" He wrote about this fellow he knew, and, given the details, I knew it had to be Steve Hays.

Steve came back to WSCal in the late 1990s, and he took most of my classes. We became good friends.

On one occasion, my wife had Steve to dinner, and he seemed to trail me around the house, asking question after question, and writing my answers in a notebook.

Unfortunately, that was the time when things became sticky for me at WSCal. What had been a wonderful, congenial and collegial faculty in the eighties had become faction-ridden, and it seemed that everybody was at each other's throats. Steve was an encouragement to me, but he didn't take sides in the controversies. Looking back on the experience, Steve later described himself as neither confessional enough, nor Klinean enough, for the culture there. "I'd prefer to stay closer to the Scriptures," he said.

In 1999 I got my family together and moved to Orlando, Florida. Teaching at RTS [Reformed Theological Seminary] was the greatest 17 years of my life.

Around that same time, Steve and his mother decided to move east, to Charleston SC. Steve was close to his parents, and his father had died in 1999. [Steve's memoir notes "My father had died a month shy of my fortieth birthday".]

RTS also had a campus in Charlotte, NC, and Steve became associated there.

Together we became involved in producing a distance education program. I taught a number of courses, in theology, philosophy, ethics, and apologetics. Steve worked as my teaching assistant, as well as having worked on his own project.

Unfortunately, Steve became disassociated with RTS. I think he was in an online discussion that became a little too heated. I'm not sure what it was, but something happened, and he began blogging at Triablogue.

I've followed Steve over the years. In fact, Triablogue is the only blog that I've read consistently. When I went to my office each morning and turned on the computer, Triablogue was part of my regular routine.

Over the years, Steve has been helpful to me in a number of ways, such as in discussions with some of the neo-Thomists in recent years. For a while, it looked as if the whole Reformed world was about to go neo-Thomist. Paul Helm, Richard Muller, and many other Reformed thinkers joined the movement.

I recognized, and still do, that there are many good things in the work of Thomas Aquinas. But Thomas mixed up his good biblical theology with a lot of pagan philosophy from Plato, and especially Aristotle. I am a student of Cornelius Van Til, and like Van Til I have always been critical of Thomas's compromises with Greek Philosophy.

I wrote some brief essays such as "Two Models of Divine Transcendence: Pure Being vs. Divine Lordship," to indicate my view of things.

I realize that Thomas was trying to reconcile some Christian theologies with ideas from some of the great philosophies. It would be unthinkable for a Christian thinker living in his time not to do that. But "pure being" is not in the Bible. The biblical God is not Aristotle's "prime mover", although some try very hard to make that identification. God is YHWH, who makes covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Some time over the course of those early years, Steve became a very sophisticated philosopher. I've been at some of the leading seminaries and universities in the country, and I was amazed at how much philosophical reading Steve did. He was aware of philosophical conversations that I'd never heard of.

He had personal correspondence with many philosophers, as well as theologians, and he learned quickly how these professional thinkers discussed issues. Steve avoided stereotyped lists of talking points (alas, the common content of evangelical theology) and instead developed careful, cogent chains of argument, nuanced and qualified.

He tended to develop his arguments as I also do, with numbered lists of points. He'd develop one point, then another, indicating that he wanted to focus on this issue, rather than that. Whatever it was that Steve wrote, you always could tell that he knew what he was talking about.

I was interested that in our numbered-list approach, and in our way of approaching problems, Steve and I were very similar. I think he learned from me, but the reverse was also true.

In sum, I regarded Steve as a kindred spirit. He wasn't always on my side, but he was a Godly man, devoted to his family, seeking to think God's thoughts after Him.

He wasn't afraid to step outside of boundaries. So while he was always thoroughly Reformed in his thinking, he didn't use buzz words. He didn't always make conventional arguments. He wasn't afraid to delve into unpopular topics.

Look at the issue of cessationism. With me, the sufficiency of Scripture was always most important. Yes, natural revelation is helpful, and we learn that from Romans 1. We also know that God has spoken to people through dreams and visions. But Scripture is a sufficient source for doctrine.

So some Reformed thinkers have argued that at the death of the last apostle, God absolutely stopped speaking authoritatively to human beings. To many Reformed thinkers, the Charismatic tradition is entirely anathema.

My position was that yes, the canon of inspired Scripture is closed. That is to say, Scripture alone is God's "covenant document" (Kline) to rule his church. But Scripture never says that God's revelation will stop with the death of the last apostle. God communicates any way he chooses.

Natural revelation, for example, continues. We may legitimately make various distinctions within the concept of revelation, but in ordinary life we need not only to hear Scripture, but also to work in a godly way to APPLY Scripture to other forms of experience in which God makes himself known. So there is a bit of looseness here that we cannot avoid, a looseness hard for many Reformed thinkers to tolerate.

Steve, though a highly principled Calvinist, was willing to embrace that looseness. He did not feel bound by Reformed tradition to avoid anything that sounded Charismatic. Indeed, he maintained an independence from tradition that seemed to me to express sola Scriptura in the best possible sense.

Other Triabloggers write about paranormal phenomena, such as the Enfield poltergeist. [JB note: Steve has often told me that "naturalism" is the greatest enemy that we face.] I think God can work in unusual ways.

So over the years, even after our collaboration at RTS was over, Steve and I continued to be good friends. We were also part of a group that began at Westminster back in the 1990s. Philip Marshall, Greg Welty, later James Anderson, and I all stayed in touch, and every once in a while Steve would write to the whole group about philosophical and theological ideas that he was in touch with. We'd all get together by email and go over the issues.

I thought the world of Steve, and I will miss him very much. I look forward to resuming our conversations in glory (with so many more resources at our disposal!) Until then, I will still be reading Triablogue, where Steve's influence lives on, and where a number of godly thinkers remain to take up his torch.

A Long Obedience In the Same Direction

I wrote this about Steve Hays last Saturday, as soon as I knew he had died:

It is fair to say that I have learned more from Steve Hays in my life, than from any other human being. Christian doctrine, philosophy, “how to think clearly”. Steve was first of all a profound Christian thinker, and a prolific blogger at Triablogue, which I started reading in 2006, and where I became a co-blogger at his request, in 2010. He died peacefully this morning.

Looking back, it was actually 2011 when I became a Triablogger.

I am now and always have been a nobody. I never wanted to be anybody. Back when I was young and running for my health, Joe Henderson, a former editor of Runner’s World magazine and, according to Wikipedia, “recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on running”, said something to the effect that “while many are running up mountains, to try to get to the top, some of us just want to run laps around the base.”

To put that idea more Scripturally, it might be stated, “But we urge you, brothers, … to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, …” (1 Thess 4:11).

That has generally been my philosophy of life, with a few exceptions. Those exceptions typically revolve around me looking at a thing and saying “now that ain’t right”.

One of those exceptions turned out to be Roman Catholicism.

* * *

I grew up in a devoutly Roman Catholic family, hearing very frequently that the Catholic Church was the Church that Christ founded, the one true Church. “Thou art Peter, and on This Rock I will build my Catholic Church”.

Later as a teen, I heard the Protestant Gospel (the Biblical Gospel). I read the New Testament, I found the Gospel there, but I didn’t find the Roman Catholic Church. Matthew 16:18 was always thin gruel for me. As an aspiring wordsmith, I soon learned that it didn’t say what they told me it said. And so that contradiction sent me on a journey of explanation. To find out precisely why “that ain’t right”.

I was in and out of Catholicism a couple of times. I left in 1979 for what I considered to be the right reasons. Later someone persuaded me “it wasn’t too bad”, and following up with those folks, I was persuaded that I should try to go into the priesthood. After a few years of that, I ended up getting married, and having lots of kids, but some things about the Roman Catholic Church still didn’t sit right with me.

A friend handed me the 1994 issue of “First Things” with the first “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” statement. That too didn’t seem right.

I wrote a long letter to my parish priest at the time, telling him all my reasons that I did not believe that I could remain Catholic. I never heard from him after that. That was August of 1997.

The Internet was coming online at the time, and I found some of the early Protestant writers who were writing about Catholicism: James White, Eric Svendsen, David King, and several others. James White’s “The Roman Catholic Controversy” had a profound influence on my thinking about Rome in those days.

I joined the NTRMin discussion board, and got to be one of the “adelphoi”, the insiders. (I honestly didn’t understand James White’s “channel”. Never got the hang of the culture there. Not that I didn’t like it, but I didn’t understand how it worked!)

NTRMin helped to shape my thinking theologically. When you leave a thing that’s important to you, as Roman Catholicism was to me, there’s a void. And it’s very important that that void gets filled properly.

After a lot of exploration, I found and attended an OPC church in 2002 and 2003, but it was destroyed in a fire, and Reformed churches in the area were few and far between. I began following several blogs and participating in comments and discussions, especially surrounding political and religious issues.

That’s the first time I had heard of Triablogue. NTRMin (where I had met Jason Engwer) kind of went out of business in 2004 or 2005. Then in 2006, one of my other NTRMin friends said she had started reading Steve Hays and Triablogue. I had seen Steve’s name in a few discussions at NTRMin, so I tuned in over at Triablogue.

Around that same time, I first came across Peter Lampe’s work, “From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries”. That ground-breaking work had been written in 1987, in German, so it was not widely known.

But apparently the Vatican knew about it. They promptly did two studies into the papacy, one historical (1989) and another theological a few years later That was surprising because Rome never does anything promptly. It is said that they think in terms of centuries. But the quick work here well could have been because Lampe’s work shook them up.

John Paul II issued his “Ut Unum Sint” encyclical in 1995, famous for its request that even Protestants help him look for “a new situation” for the papacy.

Lampe’s work was published in English in 2003, and I found it in 2006. Reading that work was a life changing experience for me, for it showed me the first genuine look at what the ancient church in the city of Rome was like, in a way that was based on historical, archaeological, and other physical evidence.

In 2007 I went to a local Michael Horton conference, in which he talked about “Two Kingdoms” theology. Not ironically, a key verse for him was “But we urge you, brothers, … to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, …” (1 Thess 4:11).

I became interested in that, and by 2008, I had landed on Jason Stellman’s blog about Two Kingdoms theology (the now defunct “De Regnis Duobus” blog). I was looking into a subject that might be termed “political theology” or “political philosophy”.

But Stellman was going through his own “transformation”. In those days, the group of Roman Catholic converts who were later to start the blog “Called to Communion” were showing up in Stellman’s comments, and it seemed as if that blog had totally moved off of “Two Kingdoms” and into discussions of Roman Catholicism.

So in June 2009, I started a blog to discuss issues separately from both the Stellman site and the new “Called to Communion” site. By that time, I already had a huge sense that “that ain’t right” – a WSCal-trained pastor was converting to Roman Catholicism.

It was during those discussions that I began to have a fairly robust email conversation with Steve. My earliest emails with him go back to that period. Later, James Swan asked me to blog at his blog, Beggars All. A year later, after I told Steve that James and I had had a bit of a disagreement, Steve asked me to write at Triablogue.

My response was to say, “It would be the dream of a lifetime”.

* * *

I wasn’t one of the insiders who knew of Steve’s health conditions beforehand. I just assumed he’d keep writing. But I do have the ability to do the kind of snooping around that most readers don’t have access to.

As I write, there are 23,546 published blog posts on Triablogue. I personally have written 1,344 of them. Jason Engwer is tagged in 1549 of them. Patrick Chan in 1299. Peter Pike is tagged in 301. Interestingly, Hawk does not tag his posts as Hawk, but he’s been writing a quite a bit lately. There are several others who have written for this blog over the years, but the vast majority of these 23,000 blog posts were written by Steve Hays.

Checking the archives (in the right hand column), the earliest blog post here was “Posted by Unknown” on Friday, April 16, 2004. That one reads:

This is an experimental blog with two who’ve never blogged but should and one who just started blogging but struggles to find the time. I’m hoping this will give a public outlet to all of the wisdom and provocative thoughts of my two as of yet blogless friends. Gentleman, after you...

Steve was one of those guys, and since that date, it seems, he genuinely took 1 Thess 4:11 to heart. And he did it in a profoundly appropriate way.

There’s a book title that impressed me a great deal, some time ago. It was “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction”. Those of us who read this blog got to see that concept play out right before our eyes.

On the Origins of the African Slave Trade

I posted this article in August of 2019, but it seems more than helpful in today's context.

With all the talk of “intersectionality” “privilege” and “oppression” and “reparations” and “racism” coming from the left, I’ve felt inclined, again, to look to the beginnings of what people are talking about.

I’ve located three excellent historical sources on the African slave trade – I’m open to reviewing more, but these are three that I’ve found:

Inhuman Bondage—David Bryon Davis, 2006. New York, NY and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800—John Thornton, Second Edition, 1998 (Twelfth printing, 2006). New York, NY and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870—Hugh Thomas, 1997. New York, NY: Touchstone (Simon & Schuster).

These are (generally) long books, but here are a few relevant points:

Slavery is not simply the problem of one race, it’s a human problem. The Israelites were enslaved by the Egyptians, “Romans established the status of a slave by law and distinguished him from a serf” (Thomas, p. 26).

A white slave trade existed in Europe before the west coast of Africa was ever explored by the Portuguese. “In the early 1400s this white slave trade from the Black Sea foreshadowed almost every aspect of the African slave trade, which was about to begin, including complex organization, permanent posts or forts for trade, and long-distance shipment by sea to multinational markets” (Davis, p. 82).

The term “Slavs” – from Slovak to Yugoslavia – is derived from the word “slaves”. I’ve already written to the effect that my own ancestors were likely slaves at some point.

“African Americans” should be at least as incensed with “African Africans” about the on-going capture and sale of fellow Africans, as they are with anyone else. “Virtually all of the enslavement of Africans was carried out by other Africans” (Davis, p. 13). On the other hand, Europeans did not conquer the Africans, nor could they. “Not only did African naval power make raiding difficult, it also allowed Africans to conduct trade with the Europeans on their own terms, collecting customs and other duties as they liked” (Thornton, p. 38).

A series of popes – all prior to the Reformation – authorized the entire African slave trade enterprise, prior to Columbus’s voyage to the Americas. Popes “Eugenius IV” (Illius Qui, 1442), “Nicholas V” (Dum Diversas, 1452 and Romanus Pontifex, 1454), and “Callixtus III” (Inter Caetera, 1456), (Thomas, pp. 64–66) ostensibly felt a “need to act forcefully against Islam, seen, after the fall of Constantinople, as now menacing Italy itself” (66). But it was the fall of Constantinople in 1453 which left the pope “the uncontested first prince of Christendom” (65). The slave trade was, in its beginnings, purely a Roman Catholic enterprise.

Fewer than “5-6%” of all Africans who came to the New World came to North America. “By 1820, nearly 10.1 million slaves had departed from Africa for the New World” (Davis, p. 80). “Yet the region that became the United States … received less than 4 percent of the slaves shipped to the New World” (Davis, p. 61). But conditions were such that these thrived to the degree that “by 1850 over 30 percent of the African New World diaspora” lived here.

This is not to say that there wasn’t “inhuman” treatment of some – even of many slaves. But inhuman treatment was rampant everywhere, at all times prior to the 20th century. Ancient Rome first captured its empire and then protected its borders by brutal, even savage means (though couched in “honor”, as it was at the time). This empire fell through invasions of external peoples who attacked, raped, pillaged, and enslaved those they conquered every bit as brutally.

That is just human-on-human treatment, and it’s not to take into consideration at all treatment by nature through “climate”, famine, disease, wild animals, and other ravages of nature. By those standards, no human being faces “oppression” today. You might say we are all (even the most “intersectional” among us) “living the dream”.

“White Privilege” and “Dum Diversas” – the Papal Bull that Authorized the African Slave Trade

I posted this article more than a year ago, but with race violence fairly prevalent right now, this seems like a useful bit of information that can help us get our bearings with respect to race issues in the western world.

The left-wing popular culture wants to attribute racism and slavery to “white European males”, and in fact there is now a whole derogatory category called “white privilege” that exists and that seeks to castigate every white person for the evils of racism and slavery by positing an ongoing “systemic racism” that still exists today, sort of like a headwind to “people of color” but a tail wind to those of white European descent.

But they ignore the fact that human slavery is as old as the human race itself, and that the Black African slave trade within that continent long pre-dated the arrival of “white European males”. It was, in fact, a concerted effort by more than a few “white European males” (for the most part, Protestant Christians) that ended the slave trade and eventually abolished slavery in the Western world (but not in the Muslim world). A little discernment will go a long way toward modifying and even dismantling the left’s narrative on this topic.

At this point, I don’t believe that too much qualification or explanation is needed to define “the political left” in the US. There is a stark and quite evident divide on the political spectrum. One qualification that is needed is to distinguish what I’ll call “classical liberalism” from “the political left”. “The political left” seems to have very little concern for “classical liberal” ideals such as “advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press [and speech], and international peace based on free trade.” If anyone has any questions about this, I’ll be happy to comment further on it.

I myself am for the most part a second-generation American. My parents were born in the US, but three of my four grandparents were born in eastern Europe and migrated to the US prior to World War I. My maternal grandmother, who was born in the US, was the third child of grandparents who had their first child in Slovakia. More, this part of the world knew nothing of enslaving people, but it knew all about being enslaved, primarily by Muslim invaders of the Ottoman empire, who historically had made a number of incursions into that part of Europe.

My hope here is to try to provide some broader context for some of those fires that continue to rage on in our day.

A Brief History of the African Slave Trade

Ted Cruz asks some pointed questions

Y'all know who Ted Cruz is. And it's true, he admits at the end that there are more important things than asking these questions (such as making sure that we check the spread of the coronavirus), but these are questions that need to be asked, and answered, sooner rather than later.

Spreading fear, intentionally or unintentionally

Is there really a plague upon us all?

Sometimes, even the best-intentioned sources can give off the wrong messages. Look at this map from the Johns Hopkins site that is tracking “Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases”.

From the look of it, it appears as if there is “a plague upon us all”. Certainly uncontrolled outbreaks of novel (new) viruses can get that way, and they have, historically, in real life, been incredibly damaging, and incredibly frightening.

But some charts and maps (like this one) aren’t helping us really to understand what’s going on, and where we are in real life.I think that the way the graphics are set up, they are more inclined to spread fear, than to explain things accurately.

It’s true that we don’t yet have all the best numbers, because not everyone’s testing is either accurate or adequate. I trust that’s a situation that is correcting itself as things move forward. In some cases, such as South Korea, we do have that kind of numbers. In other places, maybe not.

But as better information becomes distributed, we can expect that we’ll be able to see more clearly those locations where the curve is flattening, and where it is not, and the things they are doing to help things along. The video here, though it’s a few weeks old, will give you an idea of what to look for.

Exponential charts can’t work in real life.

Here’s a video that shows why that’s so, and when and how to expect and understand when things begin “flattening”.



How Exponential Growth Charts Work

Many curves are flattening (2020-03-24 -- UPDATED)

Update -- apparently there were far more new cases around than just the 2411 initially reported here. The site that I've linked to is a new site intends to keep a running total of the new cases and deaths in each state. It relies on official sources (seems like state departments of health), but unfortunately, these do not always update in the most timely way, and nor does this site update in an automated way. So the numbers are somewhat behind. From what I can tell, there were actually 13000 new cases in the last day or so, not the 2411 that were named in the original post (which I got from a source that I trust). Sorry for the confusion. Comments are closed at this point.

From this morning on Facebook: 2355 of the 2411 new Coronavirus cases Monday [in the US] were in New York. 26 of the 29 new deaths were in NY. Most states didn’t record a single new case.

HT: P. Andrew Sandlin

Source: Worldometers (scroll down for actual numbers and granular sources).

How God Operates

I’m not an expert in Old Testament. But I want to relate some thoughts from the Prophet of Isaiah, as I understand them from our Sunday School teacher, who is a Cambridge guy and head of the Old Testament department at Grove City (PCA) College here in western Pennsylvania.

The commentator Alec Motyer calls the first 2/3 (chapters 1-37) of Isaiah “The Book of the King”. My Sunday School teacher suggests it can be related as “a tale of two kings”: Ahaz and Hezekiah, who were successive kings of Judah, the Southern kingdom. Ahaz was king of Judah (the Southern Kingdom) from 735 BC to 715 BC; Hezekiah, his son, was king from 715 BC to 686 BC.

These individuals and events are confirmed by sources outside of Scripture, by the way. As Kenneth Kitchen relates in his masterful “On the Reliability of the Old Testament”:

Nature of the Sources: The sources themselves show clear affinities in the kind of records used. Ancient kingdoms (large and small) did maintain running records (daybooks, etc.), exactly as were the annals (or daybooks) of Israel and Judah that are regularly cited as references by Kings and Chronicles. … What has survived in the rest of the ancient Near East, as in Kings and Chronicles, is a series of special interest works that have drawn upon the running records… (and he lists them, pg 63, emphasis in original).

During those days, the middle east was a cauldron of anxiety, as kingdoms made war on other kingdoms, and kings made alliances based on who they thought was going to be “the winner” in the various struggles over time. Of course, all of these changed over time, and the records of these kings and their emissaries is long and complicated.

The message of Isaiah to these kings of Judah was, “who are you going to trust? Are you going to trust in foreign kings and alliances? Or are you going to trust me?”

Here is how Ahaz handled things:

Coronavirus is a stupid virus. The bet is that we’re not stupid people.

It started (we think) in filthy conditions, in a marketplace in Wuhan, China, where non-domesticated animals are caged live in squalid conditions and sold for food. It seems to have initially spread in those conditions.

So the virus itself is not the only factor affecting the spread of the virus. We’ve seen similar instances.

The Bubonic Plague bacteria was spread by fleas, which infected rats. Getting rid of the Plague included getting rid of rats and fleas.

Similarly, Polio was spread through contact with feces or when an infected person sneezed or coughed. Yes, we developed a vaccine for it, but around that same time, modern plumbing and sewage treatment helped with basic sanitation, and Polio has fallen off the grid as a serious concern.

In the same way, Coronavirus is spread by “non-viral” conditions. People with the virus cough and spread it. But Coronavirus is not a super-bug. It is a stupid bug. It has certain properties (which we know) can be significantly reduced and even eliminated in any environment by washing (hands, faces, things in your home) with simple soapy water, or simply by staying away from it and letting it die.

Sometimes this isn’t always possible. But doing so is a goal. And we now are in the midst of a major effort to remind people again to stay away from people who may have a spreadable form of the disease, and to wash their hands, wash surfaces that have been exposed to the virus.

Yes, “draconian” measures enabled places like China and South Korea to significantly interrupt the spread of the virus. But simpler measures such as these will likely be effective as well.

President Trump is betting that the Coronavirus is a stupid virus, and that 15 days-worth of attention to “social separation” and better hygiene will greatly facilitate the “flattening of the curve”.

That’s not the only response, however. The response we’re seeing is both massive and multi-faceted.

Trump as CEO is clearly in “git ‘er done” mode. For example, he has also called in Navy hospital ships to New York City and Los Angeles to ease burdens on medical facilities there. There are other (multi-faceted) military responses as well.

There is also an effort to enlist private enterprise as a counter measure to existing government (bureaucratic) ineptitude. The much-publicized failure in “testing” is a result of the fact that no one in the government has had the foresight to just go off and create and stockpile millions of this specific variety of test. Or N95 masks. Or respirators.

Trump as CEO probably had the issue of testing brought up, and he at first listened to his designated advisors on that, the CDC. “Yes, Mr. President, we can take care of that”, they would have said. The problem was, they weren’t prepared to do it. That process took some (valuable) time.

So Trump’s response has been to bring in a massive and muti-faceted corporate / public “partnership”, which included people who CAN do that. Large and small organizations alike have been enlisted to try to produce massive numbers of tests. Organizations that can enable quick and “drive-thru” testing at a retail level (Walmart, Target, CVS, etc.). And quick analysis and results through commercial testing labs like Roche and LabCorp. Along with a central source for compiling testing results.

Masks and respirators are now being mass-produced by major corporations like 3M and distributed by ThermoFisher, which is a large scientific catalog/distribution company. They have the ability to move to a “war-time” footing, in a way that is similar to the US’s production of bombers and bombs, tanks, ships, and other weaponry during World War II.

He’s also given the states license (by removing FDA regulations, which maybe involved congress) to turn States into “50 laboratories” of experimentation to create their own responses to their own individual needs. Each state can find its own version of Walmart and 3M and Thermofisher to facilitate their own testing and other responses to the spread of the virus.

Trump has mobilized huge numbers of different people and organizations to do lots of different things. At a federal level, he has removed obstacles such as FDA regulations, to enable the testing and public trials of existing drugs to treat the disease.

At a public level, we are asked to observe “social separation”, not to hoard, but to observe sound hygiene principles everywhere.

Out of this, some will be more successful than others. But we will learn what works and what doesn’t. Trump has been saying, he wants this process to be repeatable and scalable going forward. So if anything like this happens again, we as a country will have a ready pattern for mobilization.

We know the terms: “scalable”; “repeatable”.

And none of this is even beginning to speak to the financial responses.

Trump is in every way showing his trust in “the American people”. He is betting his presidency on the fact that Americans will catch on to the right ways to respond to a stupid virus. He is betting that Americans, by and large, won’t be stupid people. As more and more people recover (even those who are asymptomatic), more and more people will have immunity to the spread of the virus.

Hawk below has already cited a medical expert suggesting that we might find the fatality rate is “much lower than we have been fearing”.

And President Trump is predicting that, if that’s the case, things will get back to normal sooner rather than later.

Artemis, Diana (4Th Century Pagan Goddesses), Pachamama, and Mary

Everett Ferguson writes,

In the Latin west and in the Greek east the church won only by detouring the traditional piety [pagan] to other objects. The martyrs and the saints received the homage once given to the heroes and nature and household spirits. The similarity between the cult of heroes and spirits in ancient Greece and Rome and the cult of the saints in medieval Christendom (Roman and Greek) has often been observed.

…. When Christianity replaced paganism, the saints took over the functions of the specialized local deities. The situation may be described as “the old firm doing the same business at the same place under a new name and a new management”. This perhaps says too much. It was not the ancient religion itself that survived but the mentality that was part of it. (Ferguson, “Backgrounds of Early Christianity”, pg 182.)

Every emperor, every municipality, every household, in fact, had its own “gods”, its own statues. The people of the ancient Roman empire didn’t wish each other “good luck”. They wished each other, instead, the good will of the “gods”.

The conservative and traditionalist Roman Catholics who are all up in arms about the Pachamama statue ought to keep this mind, and they ought to stand back and watch as the current hierarchy of the Roman Church invokes a process of “development” that will bring the Pachamama into its pantheon of “saints” in just the same way that such “development” brought the Greek goddess Artemis (Roman Diana) into that same pantheon as “the Virgin Mary” in the fourth century.

There’s an “Our Lady” of Just About Anything. Why Not “Our Lady of the Amazon”, Pachamama?

Pachamama, Our Lady of the Amazon

Traditionalist and conservative Roman Catholics (see here and here, for example) are going apoplectic over the notion that Pope Bergoglio brought Pachamama statues into the Vatican. “It’s a pagan idol” they say.

That should be beside the point. There’s a legal pope endorsing it, there’s a group of Italian bishops who wrote a prayer to Pachamama. Call it #developmentofdoctrine.

There’s an “Our Lady” of just about anything you can think of. “Our Lady of the Amazon” (Pachamama) certainly can fit into this calendar.

What follows below is from the “Marian calendar” published by a website called “Roman Catholic Saints & Heroes!” – Interesting that “Heroes” is added.

The site is owned by a layman, James Fitzhenry, “Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary”, who prays “that the example of their lives may inspire all Catholic children to imitate their virtues, and serve as well to remind men of our age of the great things that can be accomplished through dedication to purpose and the grace of God.”

There’s just about one for every day of the year:

How “Pope Francis” is Dealing with the “Leaving Home” Network

The “Leaving Home” network (leaving Roman Catholicism) is much larger than the “Coming Home” network. And this seems to be one of the key things that’s driving the Bergoglio papacy.

There is a very good reason why we see lots of “Coming Home” stories of conversion to Roman Catholicism, but not many the other way. When one person “comes home”, that really is all they can point to. Just one conversion is a big thing. They can’t point to huge numbers traveling in their direction.

A Roman Catholic may make the claim about the Good Shepherd going to find one lost sheep. But that presupposes that there are another 99 already “home”. In this case, the 99 are flooding away in droves.

The other side of that “home to Rome” coin is that there are simply too many conversion stories that are going the other way. Too many to report. Too many people are leaving.

When someone becomes Roman Catholic, it is just a big event for them. When a Roman Catholic leaves and becomes Protestant, well, that sort of thing happens all the time. Pew Research has recently reported that among US Roman Catholics:

See “The Blacksmith who Made the Nails” at your church!

This one-man drama – not the Old Testament prophet Obadiah, but a wholly fictitious character – will take you (via your imagination) to first-century Palestine, where you’ll see and hear and feel what it was like to know Jesus personally, through the eyes of the local blacksmith who made the nails that held Jesus to the cross.

Obadiah was created and is performed by one of my best friends in the world, Dale Crum. He currently has availabilities in his schedule, and if you’d like to consider having Obadiah performed at your church or event, contact Dale at 901-552-8213, or contact him via email, “obadiahdrama” at “gmail.com”.

John Henry Cardinal Alfred E Newman

First published September 4, 2011; republished in honor of Newman’s canonization as a Roman Catholic saint.

Alister McGrath’s Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, Third Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ©2005), doesn’t end at the Reformation. He continues to review developments in the various doctrines of justification as they proceeded through the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican schools of thought.

McGrath writes about the “seriously and irredeemably inaccurate” historical and theological analyses that John Henry Cardinal Newman did of Luther’s doctrine of Justification. That assessment — “seriously and irredeemably inaccurate” — is based on his review of Newman’s 1837 Lectures on Justification.

Newman, now a Roman Catholic saint, is a hero to many of today’s generation of militant Roman Catholics. Newman’s theory of “the development of doctrine” provides the underpinning for the modern (Vatican II) version of Roman Catholic doctrine. Of course, Roman Catholics expect that Newman was right, or substantially right, about most of the things he said.

But on the contrary, Newman’s Lectures were “seriously and irredeemably inaccurate” in many respects, and McGrath documents this thoroughly.

McGrath says of Newman: