Pastor Peters Asks: When Was This Written?

Truth is truth, regardless of year of publication...

Pastor Peters--ya'll really should check him out--shares along these cogent words, which could have been written this week, but in actuality date from the early 1940's, by Episcopal Bishop Bernard Iddings Bell.

When one examines the blueprints of a post-war Paradise offered for our encouragement or enticement by the spokesmen of the contending nations, one perceives a common denominator in their various plans: a unanimous assumption that the new order is to be an affair of this world only; a taking it for granted that all that men need for security and happiness and peace is an industrial and political setup well conceived; a postulation that man, when he regards himself as an end to be served, is morally competent, of sufficient natural good-will to make his system—whatever it may be—minister to something more satisfactory than a frequently renewed fratricidal conflict.

Against this common assumption which characterizes all the popular post-war hopes—British, American, Russian, German, Japanese, Italian—the teaching of Jesus Christ stands in unqualified opposition; nor can the Christian Church compromise in respect to that opposition without ceasing to be Christian. In that simple fact is the essence of the Church's problem.

Bell is just getting warmed up with these opening paragraphs--

If man, as envisioned by democrats and totalitarians alike, is for himself a determining end; if he may safely do as he pleases, in such fashion as may from time to time seem to him expedient; if he is able to handle his affairs without redemption from an ingrained folly; if in his own power he can rise above self-seeking and live in a voluntary sociality; if he is able to get along quite nicely without contact with any power not of himself which makes for righteousness—then Christianity is irrelevant to life. In that case the Church is at worst an incubus which ought to be destroyed and from which innocent children should be protected, at best an ivory tower in which peculiar and incompetent people may from time to time be permitted to take refuge from reality—an institution insignificant but relatively harmless.


But wait! There's more!! But you'll need to read for yourself.

One immediate observation: Is there an Episcopal bishop living in the US who would think or dare to write such words? OS has met and known a few of these types, and they are, as Bell predicted 'peculiar and incompetent people', definitely taking refuge from reality. Hey! The music is wonderful, the buildings are old and pretty, the atmosphere is quiet and calm, and the guy (or lady) in the pulpit won't dare say a word that might ruffle your feathers, much less make you quake in your boots. 

God is a good idea, Jesus was a nice moral teacher, If we'll be nice to one another and vote the Democrat ticket, all will be well with the world, Please do remember to give generously, There is sherry available in the meeting hall following the service, We'll see you next week. 

It is clear, from reading now, that the US and UK assumed they would win the war in the 1940's, and the GreatAndGood were hard at work thinking through what they wished the world to look like in the aftermath of the conflagration. This was before Dresden, Hiroshima, and the freeing of the Nazi and Japanese concentration camps, the Nuremburg trials. The full extent and wickedness of the evil had not yet been revealed, nor the dangers that lay ahead. 

Still, unfazed, on they went, forming a new order as described above, adhering to it faithfully, oblivious to its consequences. William Buckley, as a young man, described its institutionalization at Yale University in his classic slim volume God and Man at Yale.
(The link takes you to the Amazon listing--a few bucks well spent.) As OS read it a few months ago, it dawned upon him: 'Damn, the culture was screwed to the wall by 1950! The GreatAndGood set about to disassemble our lives, our homes, our mores, our economy, our churches and synagogues, our faith itself. And we paid them to do it!'

It's well worth reading--Buckley shines as a writer, never a wasted word. 

Another good, pithy, short read: Solzhenitsyn's Address At Harvard Yard, in which he traveled the journey from cultural icon to non-person in the space of about one hour. It was a record at the time, back in 1978. Any mention of the man's name now is met with a blank stare (Who?), or blocking by moderators in most comment threads. Read his words, and it won't be hard to understand why.  

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

For those of OS's vast legion of readers (myriads of readers!!) who are in shock about Donald Trump, bear this in mind: He never got the memo from Yale, and he spends every day pushing back against those GreatAndGoods who have so systematically and coldly savaged this country. He's a flawed messenger, to be sure, but he's the guy with the resources and will to lead the push-back. And push back he does, in ways great and small, some unexpected--like the whole NFL player/National Anthem dustup. But he seems to have an instinct for the push-back, and his followers sense it as they push back with him. He's a boxer--he punches back, and sometimes punches first. Thus the drop in NFL viewership, and certainly Major League Baseball owners are holding their breaths this post season. It will only take one wing-nut player at a World Series game to cause America's TV screens to go dark, and sports bars to empty early. 

Other push-backs are going on more quietly, especially the one that sees ISIS being driven from the battlefield, with apparently few prisoners taken. Not much publicity, mind you, just a lot of pushback of the lethal variety. And it seems there are fewer car-bombs going off in the markets of Baghdad, Damascus, Tripoli, Beirut, Amman, and Jerusalem.  Dead men can't build bombs, it turns out. Push-back works, at least some of the time. 

So, back to the original question--Bell penned these words in 1942, when a bishop could still write them, and Atlantic Magazine would deign to publish them. 

We are living now in the world created then, and hopefully we will find the courage to continue to push back.

The Very Worst Sermon Ever...Presiding Bishop Schori Blathers In Venezuela

Just when you think you've seen/heard it all, along comes Presiding Bishop Schori, the captain at the helm of the sinking Episcopal Church here in the US.

Art Buchwald, the great satirist of an earlier day, would despair of his daily task at writing something funnier than what the great-and-good of Washington political life would daily peddle as serious pronouncements. Ron Nessen, Nixon's press secretary, particularly irked him.

Malcolm Muggeridge, as editor of Punch, faced the same problem. He once described the Archbishop of Canterbury attending a performance of Jesus Christ, Superstar. The old fool stood up at the end of the show and exclaimed 'Long live God!'. Muggeridge struggled, clever as he was, to write material funnier than what he observed in real time.

The clergy are a particularly rich source of humor. They don robes, climb into pulpits, and declare the most asinine things, ideas that can't possibly pass the smell or laugh test.

Presiding Bishop Schori, however, does win this year's grand prize with this excerpt:

We live with the continuing tension between holier impulses that encourage us to see the image of God in all human beings and the reality that some of us choose not to see that glimpse of the divine, and instead use other people as means to an end.  We’re seeing something similar right now in the changing attitudes and laws about same-sex relationships, as many people come to recognize that different is not the same thing as wrong.  For many people, it can be difficult to see God at work in the world around us, particularly if God is doing something unexpected.

There are some remarkable examples of that kind of blindness in the readings we heard this morning, and slavery is wrapped up in a lot of it.  Paul is annoyed at the slave girl who keeps pursuing him, telling the world that he and his companions are slaves of God.  She is quite right.  She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves.[1]  But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness.  Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it.  It gets him thrown in prison.  That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does – maybe more so!  The amazing thing is that during that long night in jail he remembers that he might find God there – so he and his cellmates spend the night praying and singing hymns.

An earthquake opens the doors and sets them free, and now Paul and his friends most definitely discern the presence of God.  The jailer doesn’t – he thinks his end is at hand.  This time, Paul remembers who he is and that all his neighbors are reflections of God, and he reaches out to his frightened captor.  This time Paul acts with compassion rather than annoyance, and as a result the company of Jesus’ friends expands to include a whole new household.  It makes me wonder what would have happened to that slave girl if Paul had seen the spirit of God in her.

On the one hand, the account seems innocent and well-meaning, until we remember the real story: The slave girl was, well, a slave girl, owned by pimps. She was at the very least severely mentally ill, in today's terminology, and St. Paul invoked Christ to free her from her bondage. She was liberated from her hell. The pimps, seeing a profit center vaporize in front of them, had Paul and Silas jailed. They stayed up the night, singing hymns in the dark, when the earthquake occurred. The terrified jailer, seeing all the cell doors open, was about to take his own life--in order to spare himself the tortures of Roman 'justice'. Paul intervened, and assured him that there had not been a jailbreak. The jailer asked the crucial question 'What must I do to be saved?'--the question a sane man asks when encountering the transcendent presence of the risen Christ.

And, what of that slave girl? The good bishop would have left her in her hell, the property of her pimps, with her claim that that mental disturbance was 'the presence of God in her'. 

Who let this woman out of seminary, much less handed her a bishopric? 

The entire sermon is here. The responses are rich...