Category: Uncategorized

We live within a covenant within a covenant. The covenant of Western liberalism arose, and could only have arisen, within the covenant that is Christianity. We have lived within the political and moral culture that is the product of Christianity for two or more centuries. We have got used it. So used to it that we have forgotten that there is a world outside it. For a long time it has been inconceivable to modern liberal thought that this liberalism might weaken, and have to fight for its life, and even come to an end and be replaced by other political cultures that are not liberal. It found it even harder to imagine that other cultures could see it but not wish to join it and become absorbed by it, that they could be repulsed by it, and fight it with the venom of someone fighting for his life, and that they could win and succeed in destroying this liberal political culture, and that they could do so quite easily because it was already quite hollow. For a long time, inside the tent of modern political culture, all has been temperate. No one now living has fought for his life, and no one wonders if he would fight and could fight if some fiercer culture suddenly appeared to make him do so.
Continue reading “Inside the tent of modern liberal political culture”

There are two ways of life, two competing ways. There is the way of the blessed. And there is the way of the resentful and miserable. Bliss is the old English word for happiness. Bliss and bless are related, indeed one comes from the other. We are blessed, and so made happy, by God. You are happy if you have been given life and the good things that belong to it. You are happy if you know that you have received some of these good things, and may expect more. You are happy if you realise that these are indeed good things and if you are able to look forward to more. Thankfulness makes for happiness. You are happy if you can say ‘I am content, I have enough’. And you are happier still if you meet other people who make the same acknowledgement, express the same gratitude and gladness. You can share your happiness with one another. We are the people who turn everything to good. We may turn terror and disaster into a challenge that we can overcome or at least come through, with tears, through gritted teeth, sometimes through horror and numbness. And afterwards, we may give thanks and find that happiness has returned.

The strange thing is that both the happy and the unhappy want to share their experience. Just as the happy want to share their happiness, those who are in misery want to make us feel as they do. They want to make their misery ours. Sometimes, if they have never pushed back against it, their misery becomes so strong that they want to frighten, hurt and break everything up, no longer caring whether what they do is good or bad. Evil grows, when we don’t push back against it. In their misery some want to bring the world down. They believe that if they are not going to survive, no one else should be allowed to either. They do not wish the world to continue on without them. They enter a tail spin. Their rage shrivels them, and attempting to take the place of God they destroy and become destroyers and are burned up by their own fury. We see this fury aimed against the West by those excluded from happiness by their own evil, particularly when this evil is given ideological justification by their primitive cult.

But why should we talk about the Unhappy? We should talk about the Unhappy only in order to be able to identify them and avoid the signs of contagion. We walk through them, and they hammer away at us. It is only important that we do not turn aside, try to split the difference with them and so get drawn in to them. No identifying with our persecutors, no Stockholm syndrome for us. Every week we come up to the altar in order to confess, to retch and cough up all the bile in the air which we have breathed in during the week. We do not confess our own sin only but all the sin around us. As we confess it, its hold is broken, we are released from it and then we are in our right mind again, and may give thanks and be glad.

‘Behold the wood of the cross,’ we say on Good Friday. ‘Touch wood,’ we say on any day of the year, reaching out for the nearest piece of wood as an extension of the wood of the cross. When we cross our fingers it is a sign of the cross we are making.

The cross is a tree. This tree represents the union of God and man in Christ, and the history that creates this union, and the gospel that reveals this history.

The cross is a representation of the figure of a man with his arms extended upwards. Moses held up his arms until the battle against the Amalekites was won and Israel was saved (Exodus 17.11.-12) in battle. ‘He opened wide his arms for us on the cross.’ His arms are up in welcome and to give us his protection. The Lord extends his arms out in order to save us and give us his shelter. He extends his covenant to include us, so we are covered and protected. He holds out his arms as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and as the Holy Spirit gives us his protection, portrayed in our West window as the dove with outstretched wings.

The Lord opens wide his arms for us also on occasions when his arms are not mentioned. In the Transfiguration on the mountain the disciples see the Lord radiant with glory, with Elijah on one side and Moses on the other. Peter wants to recognise their dignity by setting up awnings to give them some shade. By his reply the Lord indicates that it is he who gives Peter and the Disciples shelter. The Lord is our covering (kippur), the covenant and the atonement that keep us safe. He raises his arms so that we can all come in under his coat. Moses and Elijah, the prophets and the law, are two wings of this shelter. Elijah stands on one side of Jesus, Moses on the other, so that the three of them form a triptych, in which Elijah and Moses reflect different aspects of Christ, so that we can see better who Christ is because we can see these two aspects of his identity in these two other figures.  The elements are no threat to the Lord, for they are simply his obedient servants. But the Lord gives us our shelter not so much from the elements, but from some of the worst consequences of the disorder in creation that result from our failure to rule it well. The Lord gives us shelter. He gives us a place to be. That place is with him. He is that place. 

More…

The clergy have created over these last decades a ‘gospel’ which is unattractive and inaudible. The British people long since decided that the clergy are saying nothing of any consequence. And they are right. For the clergy are saying nothing that is in any way different from the offering of the media, corporations and governments, with their long determination to remove decisions from us. The corporations know how to delight and entertain, while the government knows how to buy loyalty with jobs and incomes. Only the Church knows that humans must not sell themselves or give up responsibility for themselves and their neighbours. The clergy have not challenged any of the abandonment of responsibility through centralisation or the growth of regulation, or challenged the distractions and compensations offered for them. The have given into to the temptation to commit our all health, education and welfare to the all-centralising powers, and been part of the prejudice against actual people making decisions in their own towns and villages. The clergy themselves are centralisers. They are here to take decisions away from us. They seem ready to amalgamate parishes into oblivion, replace the wide-spectrum gifts and ministries of congregations, parcelling up the various aspects of Christian witness into jobs and careers reserved for a few in a central office. Lucky for them, we are here to oppose them. We insist that all life and wellbeing begins at the altar in the worship of God, and that our refreshment and restoration depends on our manning our station at the altar at every parish church in every place, small as well as large. Only the prayer of Christians can prevent man from surrendering himself to, and being swallowed up by, the overweening Leviathan.

Our worship alternates between private prayer and public prayer. When we pray in public it becomes clear that we intercede not only with God but also with our fellow men. We pray to God, who is always the first and final hearer of our prayers. We are the voice of God appealing to our neighbours and neighbourhood and to the whole nation. We are the voice of God to them, so God help us and God help them. We are the mediator between man and man, and we are the mediator between God and man, and this is so because this is what the Lord makes us; he determines that we – we are his embodiment her and now, to these people.

The Church comes out of church, and travels along our streets, taking the worship service with it, taking that service into the marketplace in the centre of town. So we shuttle between church and marketplace, between closed building and open space. The Church goes from church to marketplace and back to church again. It oscillates and alternates because being ‘in church’, inside its own building, behind walls and therefore invisible and unnoticed, to appearing in public, and singing and kneeling and standing there, regularly and unhurriedly on vigil, in peak footfall in the day and late evenings, holding the ground, claiming the territory against all who ravage across it in the hours of darkness.

We carry these tableaux with us into our town centre and public spaces. We carry the cross, and our voices carry our songs into the middle of the Saturday morning busyness of our shopaholic neighbours, and to the place where our unemployed and listless are waiting for something to happen. Because we carry this cross, we are recognisable as Christians, even at a distance. Even when they are just passing in the car and turning off the roundabout, people will catch a glimpse of us and some of them will realise what we are doing. Our identity is clear because we are alternately standing and singing, and kneeling and praying, around a large and very visible cross. Some of those standing on each side of the cross are robed in vestments. We can carry an ark depicting the Lord – as a carnival float, and those in vestments stand on either side of this scene and by framing it, make it visible to those further away. We do not use amplification. We use only the harmony of our own coordinated voices, singing either in unison or antiphony, which is alternately, one group responding to the next. As far is as possible we sing and pray what we know off by heart. Our corporate unity and our identity as the Body of Christ displays and amplifies the gospel proclaimed in our worship

In preparation for Easter, Christians undergo a process of public self-examination and repentance, for ourselves and for our nation. We will hold a vigil. Its theme will be repentance, first our own, then the churches, then repentance on behalf of our nation. We have adapted prayers from Common Worship and the Book of Common Prayer, and added our own, and hope that our prayers will improve through use.
We will be giving thanks for the blessing of God for this nation over many centuries, which has created our law, freedom of conscience, civil liberty and our open and generous society. We will say that it is ongoing Christian witness that sustains our confident liberal political culture; when that witness is not given, this liberal culture is replaced by ideology and coercion. We will repent that we have not succeeded in passing the gospel on and so have left our young people exposed, vulnerable and without hope.
Over the last couple of years it has been revealed that in many British towns young women have been under attack. There have been assaults, drugging, rape, kidnapping, prostitution, repeatedly and sometimes over many years. Public services knew these crimes were taking place, covered them up, and threatened those who tried to make them known. Their actions may have involved perverting the course of justice or misconduct in office.
We will pray for all our public servants. We will affirm that the law of this nation is sovereign and that our police have full authority to uphold it. No section of the community is above the law, or may impose another law in this country. Whoever fears one community, and gives them immunity from the law, is committing an injustice against every individual and against the whole nation. We will mention the towns in which the rapes of women and girls were long known about but covered up – Rochdale, Rotherham, Stoke, Derby, Telford, Oxford, Aylesbury, Luton and many others.
We pray for all ministers and public servants, in local authority, police, courts, probation and social workers. We will remind our public servants of their high calling, and of the source of their authority. We will give thanks to God for all public servants and officers of the law.
We believe that the Lord Jesus Christ draws us into his own priestly and intercessory ministry, making us the body of which he is the head. We are to give voice to the prayers and laments of our people, to express for them what they cannot articulate for themselves. We do so with the words of the gospel and worship handed down to us. As we follow the passion and crucifixion of our Lord, so we may learn to see the people of our country, despised and rejected, polluted and wretched. Following our Lord and using the psalms, we may express their grief and give thanks for the salvation open to us in Jesus Christ.

In John 2, in Lent Three, Jesus drives the traders out of the temple. In other readings this Lent and throughout the Gospel of Mark in Year B of the Lectionary, the Lord drives demons and alien spirits out of Israel. Access to Christ is free, not for sale. The whole creation is God’s free gift to all; no one should reduce access or charge for access to it. The Lord cuts down all the middle men who have inveigled themselves in and make a living charging the people of Israel for what the Lord makes available of them for free.
How is our own national temple? How is the mechanism of our nation’s economy? How successful is it at allowing formal economic participation and giving hope of prosperity to those at the bottom? How much economic freedom and consequent social mobility does it allow? Who are our intermediaries, and what sort of job are they doing?
First, we need to say something about clergy.
Clergy were those who could read, and were appointed so that the rest of us, who had no bible or could not read, could hear what was written. They would read it, we would learn it, and attempt to learn it off by heart. We preserve our memory of scripture by singing or chanting passages of it. Of these priests not all reserved themselves for the liturgy. Some taught and became teachers and did so in schools and universities. Some dedicated themselves to the care of the sick and so to medicine and became doctors and scientists. Some studied church law, and worked its principles out into secular law and political jurisdiction. They became lawyers who worked in courts of justice and as they oversaw the preservation and transfer of property, they moved into in commerce as contract lawyers. All the members of these professions were once referred to as clergy, the class of the literate, made powerful by the records they studied and added to. All these are our modern secular clergy. We call them public servants or civil servants or accountants, analysists, administrators, managers, financiers and IT people. As they identify new areas of responsibility these professions create sub-divisions, proliferating a thousand career paths. They are all agents and intermediaries. Our forebears used the word ‘priest’ for all such intermediaries. These professionals are the priestly hierarchies of our age. They divide and re-divide resources so that they may be shared as widely as possible. As they offer us this service, each takes their own share just before they pass us our share. They offer us a service, but sometimes the cost is more than the total economy can support. Then when a population has suffered many years of immiseration as a result of these professions and a bloated public sector, it undergoes a spasm in which many of them are thrown off, and the burden on the lowest classes is temporarily lightened enough for them to recover confidence and enter the formal economy again.
The Public Sector and Professions are the clergy of our age, and church clergy are just a small sub group indistinguishable from the rest of the public sector. What is always needed, now as then, is a Reformation, in which all the self-appointed agents, intermediaries and their hierarchies are warned, have the opportunity to make redress, or if not, are cut out from the body of the Church and nation

What is the purpose of Slave Club? The purpose of Slave Club is to prevent anyone escaping Slave Club. The power of Slave Club is the fervour of its slaves. It is every slave’s job to keep everyone else enslaved. Slave loyalty means that no one can be allowed to leave. They all live in fear that someone will escape. If anyone does, it will show that escape is possible, and the power of Slave Club will be broken. But they don’t believe that there is any life for them outside Slave Club. They make their threats in public and in daylight. Six times daily they get into line and murmur ‘Death to those not in the line’. Each demands this demonstration of loyalty from his neighbours just so he can feel sure of the power of Slave Club. If anyone escapes the rest will not know what to do. They fear that they will not even know who they are. If anyone ever did escape Slave Club it would prove the truth that the club is not compulsory. It would show that there is life outside the club. The fear sends them wild. What motivates Slave Club? Fear! What fear is this? Fear of Freedom!
If you are outside Slave Club, you are free. If you are free you are an offence and an enemy of Slave Club. You are proof of the falsity of Slave Club. You are an existential threat to those who impose Slave Club on each other. You show that the power of compulsion that they believe that they are under, is false. Your freedom shows that Slave Club is fear without reason. That’s why you are the one they hate. Obey and conform, they bellow. Your independence of mind must be such a burden to you, they say. Lay it down. Only do as we do, and all will be good. How they hate it when their fear doesn’t work on you. You show that they don’t have to do or to be what Slave Club says. You show that Slave Club is nothing beyond a state of mind, the product of the weak. Your laughter alone can save them

Christianity or Islam: which is the real “religion of peace”?…. Is Christianity’s history really as bloodstained as Islam’s? In Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t, New York Times bestselling author Robert Spencer not only refutes such charges, but also explains why Americans and Europeans must regain an appreciation of our Christian heritage if we ever hope to defeat Islamic supremacism. In this eye opening work, Spencer reveals:

* The fundamental differences between Islamic and Christian teachings about warfare against other religions: “Love your enemies” vs. “Be ruthless to the unbelievers”
* The myth of Western immorality and Islamic puritanism and why the Islamic world is less moral than the West
* Why the Islamic world has never developed the distinction between religious and secular law that is inherent in Christianity
* Why Christianity has always embraced reason–and Islam has always rejected it
* Why the most determined enemies of Western civilization may not be the jihadists at all, but the leftists who fear their churchgoing neighbors more than Islamic terrorists
* Why Jews, Christians, and peoples of other faiths (or no faith) are equally at risk from militant Islam

Spencer writes not to proselytize, but to state a fact: Christianity is a true “religion of peace,” and on it Western civilization stands. If we are not to perish under Islam’s religion of the sword – with its more than 100 million active jihadists seeking to impose sharia law–we had better defend our own civilization.
Religion of Peace: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isnt

John Derbyshire reviews Spencer’s book

If what he has told us is true — and so far as the present state if Islam is concerned, I think it is — then the West should proscribe Islam, and the sooner the better. We should not allow Muslims into our countries, other than for necessary diplomatic or scholarly purposes. We should revoke the visas and permits of resident aliens who are Muslims, and ensure their departure. We should offer to purchase the citizenship of Muslim citizens, and bribe them to leave. Those who will not leave should be carefully watched by the police, and subjected to social disabilities — they should not, for example, be admitted to the armed forces, or allowed to proselytize in prisons. (Take a religion addled with violence and infused with a hatred of our society, and teach it in prisons to the most violent and antisocial of our people? Have we gone stark raving mad? ) Mosques and madrassahs should be closed, or at the least punitively taxed.

http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Reviews/Religion/religionofpeace.html

Where are you going to die? When the moment of your death arrives, are you going to be sitting in front of your television screen? Or are you going to be kneeling before the altar that has a cross on it? Are you going to be in church, absorbed in the worship of God in the presence of all generations of his saints? Are you going to be sedated and speechless before the shrilling puppet show of the media? Which is for you, the true liturgy of God by which all creation is remade and redeemed, or the counterfeit liturgy within which all life is faked? Which liturgy is yours? Which liturgy do you belong to?

As long as we turn on the television and watch this media output we offer our homage to the founders our media empires. As long as we sit before the screen, and let this torrent run over us, they are happy. We are sedated and rendered harmless. We inhabit the world they have constructed for us so we share in the great hallucination. We live on the reservation created by media and entertainment industries, in the cage they have erected around us, made happy by confinement within the park assigned to our age-group.

We might as well erect a little bust of these media moguls and put them in the place of honour above the television. To watch the output of the their media empire is to adore all the products of their imagination, and so to honour them as head of our household. Of course each television and each screen displays the images and idols that show us what we want to be, while the voices tell us what we want to hear. Just as the Romans kept figurines of generic ancestors in alcoves and cabinets, so we enjoy figurines that flicker and move across the screen which each of us keeps before us, or behind which each of us hides. There we are content to live an ersatz life, lived through the perpetual of human types, each Punch-and-Judy show keeping us fixated and secure. We might as well offer our media masters a pinch of incense and venerate them as our own ancestors and, as the authors of all possible outcomes conceivable for us, as the Fates. Unless you pray to the God who made you and gives you a voice, that is.