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  • “Why Did He Lose Six Million Jews?”

    Back in my prog days, one of my favourite groups was Emerson Lake and Palmer. For my Anglican/Episcopal readers, this was the group that, while Episcopal churches fought over the prayer book and the organ committee was in gridlock over the blasphemous suggestion that the church buy an Allen, introduced a new generation to the hymn “Jerusalem” in this way:

    But there were unfavourite moments from this group, especially this one from their album Tarkus, where the following made it into the lyrics:

    Can you believe God makes you breathe,
    why did he lose six million Jews?

    At the time and now my answer was simple: where were we when the Holocaust was in preparation? And by “we” I was thinking about the soon to be Allies, who piddled in the 1930’s while Hitler, whose intentions for the Jews was clear from Mein Kampf, was making preparation for another world war. (Some of that I discuss in my Book Review: Jean-Baptiste Duroselle’s France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939.) Beyond that I couldn’t and can’t see blaming God for something that humans could have done something about, especially when “humanism” was being taunted as the replacement for theism. I’m not the only one: I quote Giles Fraser in my post Wonder Where Evil Comes From? Try the Mirror:

    But this much is obviously true: evil and suffering have outlived the loss of faith. Once we had God to blame. But now that God has gone (… other explanations are available …) we have no one left to blame but ourselves. Not for earthquakes, but certainly for the horror of war. Humanists now own the problem of evil. So why don’t humanists more often experience some sort of loss of faith in humanity? Where is their existential crisis? I may be wrong, but it seems to me like it’s a dog that doesn’t often bark.

    I’ll come back to the “why” shortly but today the sentiment “lose six (and more) million Jews!” has become fashionable. The genocide of worldwide Jewry is written into Hamas’ DNA and is now shouted in the streets by people, many of whom are not Muslims or even close to it. What we have now is genocide with purported divine sanction. I really don’t think that such people have the right to complain about “war crimes;” what we are back to is personal, Middle Eastern brutality which was around long before international law, Islam or Christianity.

    To put it mildly this is a game changer, one which has taken many by surprise while others don’t even recognise it’s happened. While international law certainly antedates the Nuremberg trials, those trials did more to advance the idea of war crimes and crimes against humanity than any other single event. And the chief crime (certainly not the only one) they were prosecuting was the Holocaust, the extermination of those six million Jews that ELP lamented but is now celebrated in the streets.

    The question on many peoples’ minds is simply “where did all of this new found antisemitism come from?” I think the basic problem is that it never really went away, it just went into hiding until it could be made fashionable again. The basic problem is that, on the whole, Jews are overachievers, and the rest of humanity, while reaping the benefits of their genius (represented in the outsized number of Nobel prizes they have won) have resented their success. (Or, as one Algerian friend told me, “Jews are smart.”) Hitler constructed the “final solution” because the existence of the Jews put the lie to his idea of the Aryan Germans as the “master race,” and that existence has shown that many other pretentious groups don’t deserve that moniker either.

    It’s true that, outside of the State of Israel, the United States has been the most welcoming place for Jews on the planet, but that silver lining hasn’t been without a cloud. Things really began to sour around World War I, when the old WASP alumni of the Ivy Leagues took fright at the number of Jews passing through these storied institutions and redesigned the admissions process to de-emphasise sheer academic achievement and look for the “well-rounded person.” It was also the time when Jew and Gentile really separated (especially at the top,) which led to some of the conditions I grew up with. There was always an antisemitic undertow, one shoved to the back by the horrors of the Holocaust, but it was there, waiting to re-emerge.

    On my first trip to the then Soviet Union, my brother and I were sitting in the eating hall of our Intourist hotel. On the other side of the hall was a wedding reception. Two of the attendees were fuelled by vodka, and one of them shouted to the other, “I thought you were my friend!” Fisticuffs ensued. Today the Jews find themselves in the same position. People who they had benefited have suddenly turned on them. Many Jews thought they had a good handle on their enemies and their friends, but they’re waking up to the fact that they were wrong.

    Really, though, it’s time for all of us to decide who are our real friends are and stick with them. This whole fiasco has upended many of our liberal (and some conservative) platitudes about each other. We need to prioritise opposing people who are trying to kill us because, as Martin Niemoller observed, when they come for us, there may be no one else left.

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  • The Democratic oligarchs funding pro-Hamas nonprofits

    Last Wednesday, several dozen pro-Palestinian activists, their faces obscured by keffiyehs and Covid masks, attempted to block the entrance to the …

    The Democratic oligarchs funding pro-Hamas nonprofits

  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Why I am now a Christian–Unherd

    She’s crossed the line of eternity:

    That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

    I’m seeing those on social media who don’t think this is a legitimate conversion. To that I have a couple of observations.

    I’ve mentioned from time to time my Iranian friends who were baptised and became Christians. They point to people who didn’t seem to me to be overtly Christian and yet they influenced their decision which, as she points out, is major. But obviously a Muslim notices things about us that we don’t, which is why we should take care about the way we act. Christianity makes differences in a culture that even Christians don’t always see, especially in places like East Tennessee where its rootedness is still so obvious.

    The second is that I’m sure there are those who have had doubts (my family certainly did, hoping the seriousness wasn’t true) about my own commitment to Christ. There were years when it wasn’t as obvious as it was later. In some ways that was a good thing: vicious South Florida had a way of singling people out. Our crossing from death to life is the beginning of a journey, one that doesn’t end until we stand before our Saviour.

    There’s something else she said that I’d like to comment on:

    But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

    The one thing that kept me loyal to this country during the Cold War was the simple fact that they were atheists and we, for the most part, were not, or at least we didn’t have to be. (That distinction could get humorous, as it did here.) If that were not the case, I would have run off with a Symbionese Liberation Army or a Bader-Meinhof Gang. Belief in God does make a difference.

    God bless her in her journey to a great eternity.

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  • How America can stop Iran — Unherd

    A recent edition of The Tehran Times carried a warning: “If the Zionist regime’s war crimes and genocidal attacks against civilians in Gaza do not come to an end, the region will move towards making a big and decisive decision…”

    How America can stop Iran — Unherd

  • The Reign of Wickedness and Unbelief

    From Bossuet’s Elevations on the Mysteries:

    O God! unbelief reigns on the earth. We are no longer wicked out of weakness; it is by design; we are by principle, by our sayings. Send us some John the Baptist who confounds error, who shows that unbelievers are senseless. Bring them back to real prudence, these unbelievers and professional libertines. Real prudence is not to believe yourself, and to practice what the Sage says: Do not trust your prudence. But, Lord, confound also the recklessness of those who say that they believe, even though they do nothing of their belief. Therefore bring back unbelievers of all kinds to the prudence of the righteous. 

    More so now than in Bossuet’s day, although the clouds were certainly gathering…

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  • About Those Altar Calls…

    Matt Broomfield’s sad piece about British Charismatic preacher Mike Pilavachi has many issues which need to be unpacked. I won’t get to them all, but let’s start with this: Anglicans don’t need to be smug about this for the following reasons:

    • Pilavachi is in fact an Anglican minister; Broomfield notes this and addresses him as the “Rev. Canon.” When the Charismatic Renewal hit more than fifty years ago, many classical Pentecostals had serious reservations about these inhabitants of “nominal” churches. Some were doctrinal, but many were cultural (different socio-economic levels and secular cultures) and some were based on the fact that the Charismatics has received the gifts without going through the legalism that Pentecostals considered de rigeur. In this case Pilavachi and many like him had ignored the pastoral lessons classical Pentecostals had learned in the previous half century. Additionally, had the Church of England enforced the “three strikes and you’re out” approach to worshipping according to the BCP, they could have put a stop to Pilavachi’s activities early.
    • Pilavachi isn’t unique in his being drawn to kinky sex practices; the Anglican Evangelicals have had their woes with John Smyth, Jonathan Fletcher and the Iwerne Camp fiasco. What is wrong with these people?

    I’d like to spend most of this post on one topic which Broomfield spends a lot of time on: the altar call. I think I can claim some special consideration because I actually wrote the book on this subject (for the Church of God, at least.) The altar call as it is currently practiced has its origins in the early nineteenth century with people like Charles Finney. It’s interesting to see how Broomfield equates this with Paul’s “Road to Damascus experience” because, for many, the altar’s only purpose is salvation, or another major spiritual experience. For many churches this is it, as they (explicitly or implicitly) believe in unconditional perseverance, irrespective of whether they accept the rest of TULIP or not. Most notorious of these are the Southern Baptists; Billy Graham was one of them, his altar calls were centered on salvation. But that was his ministry.

    In Pentecostal churches altar calls are a much more varied business. In addition to “saved/sanctified/baptised in the Holy Ghost” we pray for healing, finance matters, and many other life issues. To do that effectively requires altar workers who have some training and Scriptural knowledge they can share, and the purpose of Ministering at the Altar was to train (mostly lay) people in how to do that. That in turn implies that trips to the altar can be multiple, and that is certainly the case. An altar experience can be a major experience or an incremental one. I’m not sure if the mistake of thnking otherwise is Pilavachi’s or Broomfield’s, but it’s definitely a serious one.

    As far as Broomfield’s loss of faith through all of this, all I can say is this: I worked for our denomination for 13 1/2 years, saw and experienced many things, some good, some bad. Losing my faith? Forget about it, what I have from God came from God, not from one of these preachers. That simple fact helped me to avoid turning my experience during the Catholic Charismatic Renewal into a covenant disaster and many other life rescues.

    Today I get to remind my church of where it came from and hope to continue that influence in the Advent Series I’m working on. There is life in God beyond people like Mike Pilavachi, you just have to be willing to find it.

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  • Don’t blame Israel for the sins of America — Unherd

    The Nagorno-Karabakh region, between Azerbaijan and Armenia, has been the source of repeated, bitter fighting since the Nineties. A few weeks ago, following nine months of Azeri blockade of the majority-Armenian civilian population, Azerbaijan launched an offensive against the region. Some 100,000 Armenian refugees fled for Armenia. It was, in effect, an ethnic cleansing of…

    Don’t blame Israel for the sins of America

    An excellent piece which brings out an interesting point: the U.S.’s support for Israel didn’t originate in the Evangelical community but in the large Jewish community, many of whom immigrated before the First World War. That was obvious to anyone who has lived in an area with a large Jewish population, as I did in South Florida (Join the Club. Maybe Not! A Strange Tale of Two Worlds in Palm Beach.) For many Evangelicals, especially those who live in the South (and that’s most of them) Jews are an abstraction they read about in the Bible. For much of our Gentile elite class of yore, that certainly wasn’t the case, and they started pushing back with things like choking off admissions to Ivy League schools.

    Given the general incompetence of our current elite and our inability to eject them from the seats of power, as the U.S.’s footprint recedes Israel would do well to “spread its bets” on new allies. The Jewish state, inhabited by overachievers, is in a position to do this. If I were them I wouldn’t do anything rash but I wouldn’t waste any time either.

  • Stephen King, America’s Mao Dun

    He’s gone woke to cover his past sins:

    The critical consensus in certain corners is that this is the result of King having gone woke — perhaps in an attempt to stave off cancellation for work that hasn’t aged well. There may be something to this — King’s pre-Y2K oeuvre makes heavy use of the Magical Negro trope, not to mention the n-word, which white authors are no longer allowed to put in the mouths of their characters. And some of his more recent books do carry a whiff of attempted atonement for past political incorrectness. Sleeping Beauties, co-written with son Owen, is an enjoyable thriller that nevertheless also reads like a 700-page plea for membership in the Good Male Feminist club (as do many of King’s tweets). Billy Summers, published in 2021, features a protagonist whose inner monologue is deeply disdainful of Donald Trump, and King himself has said that The Institute is intended as an allegory for the Trump administration’s border policies.

    Early on in the WordPress era of this site, I ran a post about Mao Dun, the pen name of Shen Yanbing, the author of the novel Midnight. I quoted a passage from John Fraser’s book on the subject of China in the late 1970’s and early 1980 as follows:

    Mao Dun turned out to be an aging mockery of what I had built him up to be. I caught him in the midst of what was clearly a difficult assignment for his somewhat confused state of mind: the assimilation of the new Party line on literature. He droned on and on about “the Party’s correct policies” and the “havoc wreacked by the Gang of Four.” Every question on contradictions facing Chinese writers were either ignored out of hand or sidestepped. I was present with a sad old man who had survived a horrible disgrace to rise again another day. He was certainly not going to be disposed of again if he could help it. Except for few moments, which I actually managed to get him to digress on his beloved daughter who died during the civil war, he declined to show his human face. Instead he lectured me on how Chinese writers now had the freedom to explore and speak out on any issue whatsoever–”except if they oppose socialism or seek to spread bourgeois ideas.” He delineated again the old Communist theories of “revolutionary romanticism and revolutionary realism” to prove that under Communism there really was true freedom of expression.

    As I listened to him, noting his air of loyal confidence in the regime that had once relegated him to the dust heap of “revisionist irrelevancy,” he seemed transformed into a Chinese version of Vicar Thwackum in Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones: “When I speak of religion, Sir, I mean the Christian religion, and not just the Christian religion but the Church of England.” Mao Dun says much the same thing when he defines how a young Chinese writer should use the freedom of expression the Party has allowed him: “He [the writer] should be an optimist and put that optimism into his writing. In describing events and developing his characters, it would be be natural to look for this quality. With this optimism a writer should be able to see into the future, and by the future, of course, we mean Communism…” (John Fraser, The Chinese: Portrait of a People. New York: Summit Books, 1980 pp. 127-128.

    Up until now we have had this conceit that somehow our artists and writers are better than this. They are not when enough pressure is applied. We need to see the totalitarian nature of our society and how it can turn on even its favourite people when given the opportunity.

  • Objective Reality is Rather Important

    I haven’t engaged Bobby Grow in a long time (for good reason) but he, in his encapsulation of Karl Barth, Thomas Torrence, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham et.al., makes the following statement:

    At a purely superficial level, does the reader see how what Barth and Torrance are doing sound a lot like the characteristics present in the thought of both Scotus and Ockham, respectively? Do you see how theologians like Barth and Torrance might be read as modern-day adherents of what also became known as Nominalism (i.e., what we see, loosely, in the thought-life of both Scotus and Ockham, respectively)? Indeed, some would attempt to argue that Immanuel Kant himself, and the dualism he proposed, was very much so akin to the nominalism developed by someone like Ockham. Without getting into the nitty-gritty of all of that, let it simply be noted that while someone like Barth was indeed conditioned by the impact of Kant on the modern Germanic ideational landscape, what Barth was doing, by way of the analogy of the incarnation (and thus faith), was to flip any sort of Kantian or Nominalistic dualism on its head by bringing the heavenlies into the earthlies as that obtained and concretized in the incarnate Son of God, the Man from Nazareth, the Theanthropos, Jesus Christ.

    What he and many others overlook is the fact that large swaths of Christian thought–and this is especially true the closer we get to our own day–don’t make a particularly good case that a) they are objectively real or b) have a meaningful relationship to the creation in general. It was this lacuna (among other things) that drove me out of the Episcopal Church and to Roman Catholicism and Thomism. The fact that the latter church couldn’t bring itself to have a pastoral system to match its theology was something I could not anticipate going in. I don’t see how anyone with scientific training can avoid this issue. For someone who came out of a very secularised background, it was likewise unavoidable.

    But such it is…I also think it’s a pity that he’s decided to pass up a PhD for another Master’s degree. There’s probably a dissertation in his blog (assuming he could find an institution and academics to go along with his idea) and his erudition and ability to handle the jargon would certainly keep him in good stead. But it is his decision…although I should point out that he is from Oregon…

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  • Disregarding the False Dichotomy of Calvinism and Arminianism [Commentary on Browne: Article XVII]

    In keeping with his earlier treatment of Article X and Article XVI, Browne holds that Article XVII is neither Calvinist nor Arminian, although, as mentioned previously, he suggests the Article allows for both positions: “It seems worthy of consideration, whether the Article was not designedly drawn up in guarded and general terms, on purpose to…

    Disregarding the False Dichotomy of Calvinism and Arminianism [Commentary on Browne: Article XVII]

    Much of what is here buttresses my points–especially on the Book of Common Prayer–in my post Kicking Final/Unconditional Perseverance Out of Anglicanism. One thing he does bring up is the business of “ecclesiastical election.” This may seem to be a clumsy piece of theology, but the role of the church was an integral part in Augustine’s view of predestination (along with about everything else.) That becomes evident when you look at a true Augustinian such as Bossuet. Calvin eliminated the role of the church, which gives his theology the raw, fatalistic feel that it has.

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