MATHETΩN

There are more than 450,000 churches in America, according to a recent tourism census.

Tomorrow, 450,000 men shall mount to a strange elevation and tell 450,000 audiences 450,000 hours-worth of lies.

Principle rather than principality.

During an appearance on Hannity & Colmes, pastor Rick Warren agreed that the United States should assassinate Iran’s head of government, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad. He explained that this would be the biblical course of action for a Christian America “because Paul in Romans says God put government on earth to punish evildoers”.

If Christians were simply to say, We may do whatever we wish, I would not be outraged at them. If they were to say, George Washington or Martin Luther tells us to do what we do, I would not be indignant. But when they misuse the words of my Lord and his Envoys and even turn them right backward, as this man did, then I must be wroth with them for His sake, from love of Him.

For by doing so they may seem to perform a selfish coy trick, but in truth by doing so they obscure the Logos from others and (were it possible) purge Him from humankind’s memory.

“Are you expecting me to accept some tacit meaning in the scripture-fragment you have quoted, sir? I will be quite frank: Why should I care what that fragment means when Bible-gangsters who wield it do not care: they merely point it as a dagger toward the women they wish to menace with it?

“But I will say a handful of things about its meaning; only because Paul the Envoy is dear to me and the verities he wrote dear.

“Then: ( Ist ) Where else in the Scriptures do we read someone ought to keep home? Against the heathen king Habakkuk railed: ‘He is a proud man, neither keepeth at home’ (Hab ii.5). And yet no Southern Baptist Convention resolution I’ve read suggests the President mind the linen. To insist Paul remanded wives to housekeeping because some syllables between it and his phrase are homonymous makes as much sense as to insist books be printed with fruit of the vine because ‘winepress’ can be found in Deuteronomy.

“( IInd ) Obedience to one’s own husband (not―qu’elle idée!―to any other men) is here taught by the same envoy who asserted that there is no difference between men and women (Gal iii.28) and commanded a husband to submit to his wife (Eph v.21). This too is the envoy who taught slaves to obey their masters while at the same time commanding masters to obey their slaves (Eph vi.5ff) and pleading for the freedom of a slave to his master (read the affective ‘Letter to Philemon’).

“And these are not the end of his paradoces. ‘We would know therefore what these things mean’? Much can be explained by considering the next thing I will say, the

“( IIIrd ) ‘That the word of God be not blasphemed’ is the reason Paul counsels young women to obey their husbands. ‘That the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed’ is the reason he teaches slaves to obey their masters (I Tim vi.1). But who would say anything blasphemous about the evangelion if he saw a wife spending on something extra or a slave seeking to escape to Gaul? Peter the Envoy tells his readers who: pagan sinners, ‘foolish men’ that in ignorance assumed that liberty was good only for ‘lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries’. (Read his first letter, particularly the mid part.)

“You see, in Paul’s day the laws of the Roman Empire required slaves to obey masters and wives to obey husbands: a master or a husband who was a Roman citizen even could execute his slave or his wife. Similar laws persisted in Europe until rather recently; the first legal freedoms for women were legislated in England not long before 1800; in Russia women were not emancipated until nearly 1900!

“And so a woman who had believed in Jesus, or a slave who had, would rightly think that she had been saved to liberty (Isa lxi.1; Mat xvii.26; Joh viii.32, 36; Rom viii.2; I Cor xii.13; II Cor iii.17; Gal iii.28, v.1; Col iii.11; et al.). But Paul and Peter hastened to limn for their readers a result: a pagan sinner, observing the laws governing women and slaves unenforced among them, would blaspheme the evangelion, crying: ‘This Way is nothing but a way to evade the mores, to tweak Caesar!’

“( IVth ) And now I beg you, in deep sincerity, to think what acts of ours (be we men) toward women or others might, in our world in our times, give an unbeliever excuse to cry:

“ ‘This religion is only a pretext, a stubborn excuse to do what is unethical!’ ”

“Those who claim to know everything and to settle everything end up killing everything. The day comes when they have no other rule but murder, no other science than the poor scholastic arguments which occasionally serve to justify murder.”

My soul exalts the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God

my saver,

… his name is Holy,

and his mercy is for generations and generations,

for those who fear him.

He has taken power into his arm,

and scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He has pulled down the dynasts from their thrones,

and raised up the humble;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

He has reached out his hand …

“Red hair originated in Poland and Norway in 8500 B.C.!” said the man on the train to a woman. “Curly hair originated in Massachusetts in 4500 B.C.!” said he to another woman. He could look around him so gleefully because he felt so powerful. This is the potency of Scientism — it renders all so small that even the small can master all. At long last all can hold a religion of undoubt because merely the factoid is its sacrament.

“If the poster really meant to state that ‘individual justice’ [his term for any justice without overwhelming force] would be unjust, then he must believe that societal justice must be unjust any way it is configured — for what is society but individuals by the dozens or millions? Adding one million unjust things is to have injustice — this is simple arithmetic.

“However, I think that what he meant to state is that ‘your justice, or his justice’ would be unjust. While ‘hizzoner’s justice, or the reverend’s justice, or that very smart man over there’s justice’ is indeed just and society can and must rely on it.

“Every argument for archism ends up this way: that there are humans, who are unreliable, despicable, and even risible, and then there are ueber-humans — transformed by the magic of expertism, institutionalism, divine right, and so on — who only can look out for the common good, and if we know what’s good for us we’ll give them silent obeisance.

“The Christ-follower, however, knows that there is only one justice, Christ’s, in any human who will hear Him in the heart …”

What cunning fellows were the Church in their heyday! They wooed a new and brutish lord, the Sword of State, and for the most part they won him.

Then came Democracy and rebuked the Church with every other archy. Yet they retained some tokens of their old allegiance: Holy Matrimony was still handled by the greasy palms of lawyers; Christ’s Mass and Easter turned gaudy tricks upon the government calendar still.

But Democracy pressed on, turning the world upside-down. Is marriage a law? Then it must be implemented as the State deems equal. Are Christmas and Easter government holidays? Then they may not be religious ones.

He whom they pretend to imitate prophesied: “They that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” And yet the Church had not yet perished by the Sword of State: still, they wept petulantly at the ceremonial scratch and were the jest of bystanders.

Are the Church lessoned at last? Will they return repentant to their first lord? Lo! they strain, a million arms outstretched, toward the Sword of State! Their greed for it has never been so acute. They organize and sue and fight, they pule and pant and rage.

They will not be sated until the very gilt of angels is the grime on Caesar’s feet.