RE: Gordon Runyan, “Congress is Full of Crooks Because Our Pulpits are Full of Cowards” lastresistance/3049/congress-is-full-of-crooks-because-our-pulpits-are-filled-with-cowards/ My first reaction to Mr. Runyan’s article was to say “Amen.” But then I got to thinking. While Mr. Runayan’s article may be true to a point, the situation is actually much worse—at least in my church: Roman Catholic. We have too many pastors who have adopted the “social gospel” and believe—and occasionally even preach—that using government as an instrument of armed robbery is perfectly O.K. and even virtuous when it is done for a “progressive” purpose. The vision that immediately pops into my mind and, probably one of the most egregious cases, is retired Detroit auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton. My friend Joseph Ficht and I have observed that Vatican II was basically a bunch of socialist authoritarians taking control of the church from monarchist authoritarians who had been dominant since the time of Constantine. Under Constantine the church ceased to be an underground organization thanks to Constantine legalizing Christianity. Perhaps the price of legalization was the adoption and preaching of a certain subtle form of idolatrous emperor-worship. Thus, for example, the frequent failure of the church for nearly two millennia to speak out against thoroughly unjustifiable wars for the personal aggrandizement of kings and other political leaders and against the destructive taxes to support the destructive and unjustifiable wars. I think it was too high a price. Indeed, church officials sometimes encouraged them. Think of the Archbishop of Canterbury goading Henry V into war with France in Shakespeare’s play, “Henry V.” The Archbishop thinking the church might gain some material preferment out of the war. The main goal of such a war being little more than the personal aggrandizement of the king. Even the king hesitated at first: “Therefore take heed how you impawn our person, How you awake the sleeping dogs of war: We charge you in the name of God take heed, For never two such kingdoms did contend, Without much fall of blood, whose guiltless drops Are every one a woe, a sore complaint ‘Gainst him whose wrongs give edge unto swords That make waste in brief mortality” --“Henry V,” Act I, Scene II But still the church through all those centuries to its credit did try to instill some sense of noblesse oblige in such leaders and remind them that he who would be first should put himself last and make himself the servant of all as the Gospel admonishes. That kingly titles are but temporal trifles compared to the immortal soul of one sinner—whether he be peasant or prince. And that the king is as bound by law and morality as the lowest vilein. But when church leaders adopt the idea it is possible through political and economic means to create heaven on earth by taking all wealth and putting it into the hands of a supposed philosopher king, then all moral constraint flies out the window. Mass murder, mass thievery, brutal repression, total destruction of liberty and ordinary morality are perfectly O.K. as long as they are done for a “progressive” purpose. We are making the perfect world, after all. Some of the hymns used in my church are so awful, I wonder why we don’t just sing “The International” and be done with it. Mr. Runyan’s article also makes the important point that obsession with the Second Coming by some Christians creates a problem where they abandon all effort to improve the world where each person and all of us together is required to work out his salvation. A problem St. Paul had to wrestle with at the very beginning of Christianity. There is always the temptation to abandon the world to its destruction. But we all know that centuries of predictions of the end of the world have all failed. To take the attitude, “I am one of the elect who is saved and, therefore, need not sully myself with affairs of the world. Indeed my duty is to escape them and the coming denouement.” As John Milton pointed out forcefully in “Aeropagitica or On the Freedom of Printing,” this makes for a very vapid and irrelevant Christianity. Far better a Christianity that engages and confronts evil. But just as importantly remembers that salvation comes from God and his truth, NOT laws, politics, and coercion.. “ I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.” --John Milton, “Areopagitica or on the Freedom of Printing,” 1644.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 18:56:49 +0000
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