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tinyshe · 4 years ago

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Classical Catholic Education

Please note: I am copy-n-paste/sharing for personal use. I am not endorsing nor have I explored this site in its entirety but have it here as a point of interest (so don’t yell at me if you don’t like it but if their is something heretical then please let me know exactly where/what. Thanks! Please read their preface near the bottom of the post.

Understanding Classical Catholic Education

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Preface (below)

Introduction As we begin our study of the classical liberal arts, we will first consider the philosophy behind this ancient system of learning. We will see that modern educational philosophies are not alternatives to the ancient system but errors leading men away from sound philosophy and ultimately, true happiness.

The Arts in Ancient Israel In this second lesson we will connect two important points in the history of the classical liberal arts curriculum. We will consider the development of the arts after Moses up to the time of the development of the famous Greek schools.

The Arts in Ancient Greece In this third lesson we will consider the liberal arts curriculum as it continues to develop among the Greeks, demonstrating that the wisdom of the Greeks was in their honoring the ancient wisdom of Egypt and Israel. We must begin by recalling the testimony of Scripture that Solomon’s wisdom filled the nations. We will see that, while many modern scholars admire the Greeks yet despise the ancient religious traditions, the Greeks were themselves eager to preserve and practice the wisdom of the ancients.

The Arts in Ancient Rome In this fourth lesson we will consider the liberal arts curriculum as it continues to develop among the Romans, demonstrating that the Romans added the language of the curriculum and the art of Rhetoric. Once again, the essence of the liberal arts curriculum (the goal of which is true Wisdom) is not changed, but the beauty of the program is enhanced and the systematizing of yet another part is completed.

The Arts in the Hellenistic World In this fifth lesson, we consider the inter-testamental history so as to rightly understand the relationship between classical liberal arts education and Jewish society around the time of the life of Our Lord.

The Arts in the First Century In this lesson, we continue to follow the development of the classical liberal arts in the early Christian Church, and see the foundation of classical Catholic education.

The Arts in the Early Middle Ages In this lesson we will consider the next important page in the history of the classical liberal arts: education in the medieval world.

The Arts in the High Middle Ages Between the 5th and 9th centuries, Boethius, Cassiodorus, Alcuin and others gathered and preserved the wisdom of the Patristic age, but also sowed the seeds that would give birth to the age to come. The developments of this era were caused not so much by the conscious effort of the period’s scholars to bring in something new, but were forced upon them by the new challenges of the spread of Christianity through Europe. Most importantly, they highlighted the centrality of Dialectic in Christian education and set the stage for the flowering of Scholasticism.

The Renaissance & Reformation In this lesson, we will jump ahead to the first great assault made on classical Catholic education. This assault took place over a period of time, from the 14th through the 17th centuries and is contained within two events identified by historians as the Renaissance and the Reformation.

The Scientific Revolution In this lesson, we will look at the Scientific Revolution, which like the Protestant Reformation, is another manifestation of the dark side of the Renaissance. In this lesson we will get at the core principles of the Scientific Revolution, which have caused great confusion in the Church, have provided for several embarrassing moments in Church history and continue to cripple Christian people today.

American Public Education After the establishment of a federal government in the United States, the ability to collect taxes gave educators and lawmakers a means of ramping up this mission. In Europe, the increase in secular power that followed the Reformation inspired rulers to create public school systems for the indoctrination of children in the interest of social obedience.

The Dawn of Modern Education In this lesson we will look deeper into the philosophical and historical context of the American public school system to understand how it evolved from a Protestant endeavor to create an anti-Catholic American citizenry into a secular machine for cultural change.

Catholic Schools in America The history of Catholic schools in America is only understood when we consider the schools in light of the history and experiences of the Church in America.

The Classical Liberal Arts Academy In this course, we have covered the history of education from the ancient Egyptians through to the Catholic schools of the 20th century. In this lesson we will look at the misguided efforts some have made to “repair the ruins” and the founding of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy.

The Goal of Classical Catholic Education What you should realize at this point is that our challenge in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy is not one of discovery or invention, but a challenge of restoring what was lost. Nevertheless, we must begin with a careful examination of the goal of the classical liberal arts curriculum.

The Means to True Happiness We learned that this true happiness is available to all human beings, but is available in heaven, not necessarily on earth. On earth, we have four objectives to focus on that will enable us to enjoy God forever in heaven.

Order a printed copy of this book($10)

Download a PDF copy of this book (free)

Preface

We live at an amazing moment in history. Society is violently divided and bring driven further apart by political controversies. Technology is making schooling and publishing obsolete. Catholic schools are closing, parishes are being consolidated, religious communities are selling their empty facilities, families are failing to raise children who remain in the Church. Yet, in the midst of this decline, the restoration of classical Catholic education has begun in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy.

I was an ex-Catholic teenager who felt the distress of being left to the world. I knew that the teachers and religious leaders around me were not sincerely interested in my happiness, and that I needed to find answers for myself. I had a girl I wanted to marry, but I had no idea how to do anything as a Christian adult.

Christian churches, schools and families, are not supposed to produce lost teenagers like me, and Christian children cannot afford to learn the way I did—most of them never will. The problem modern Christian teenagers face is not a joke, or “just the way it is”. It is a systemic failure of Christian society.

My long and expensive search for answers led me to classical Catholic education. I’ve been working on this research, all day, every day, for over 25 years. In this book, I’m sharing lessons I wrote for a course for Christian parents in 2009—and I am sharing this book with Christian parents who want to save their children’s souls.

Classical Catholic Education

The greatest challenge Christian parents face today is that they have no access to the history that I share in this book. This ignorance has left them vulnerable to false teaching by a “classical education” movement that is a living example of sophistry—pretending to be wise to get money. We have to see through this and move forward with real, classical Catholic education.

We can fix these problems. We don’t need to become experts or earn degrees to to give our children the education they need. Parents don’t need to become teachers because the teachers have already given us what we need. We need to work together, as parents, to help our own children learn the truth, which their souls will recognize. Let’s get that work started—there’s no time to lose.

God bless,

William C. Michael Classical Liberal Arts Academy www.classicalliberalarts.com

#catholic #classical education

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johnchiarello · 5 years ago

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Acts 6

ACTS 6 https://youtu.be/Vqgm3E4k95A Acts 6 https://ccoutreach87.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/3-23-17-acts-6.zip Acts 6:2 Then the twelve called the multitude of the disciples unto them, and said, It is not reason that we should leave the word of God, and serve tables. Acts 6:3 Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business. Acts 6:4 But we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word. ON VIDEO- .Cookie parable . ‘Wandering aimlessly’- who said this? . ‘Another world’- ‘Not in the Bluff’- mouth of 2 witnesses .Flour Bluff Park .Prayer altars .Church as community .Feeding the poor .Greek speaking Jews .Alexander the Great .Why Greek and not Latin? .First Deacons .Timon[s] .Hahn .Going to court .Trump [yes- more ‘wire tapping’ stuff] .NBC NEW ‘Fake news’ again PAST POSTS- [Past teaching I did that relates to today’s post- ‘Acts 6’] https://ccoutreach87.com/james-2015/ https://ccoutreach87.com/house-of-prayer-or-den-of-thieves/ https://ccoutreach87.com/overview-of-philosophy/ https://ccoutreach87.com/galatians-links/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/01/18/acts-1/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/01/26/acts-2/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/02/02/acts-3/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/02/09/acts-4/ https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/03/23/acts-5/ (739) ACTS 6- There arises the first controversy in the Jerusalem church. The fact that they were doing this daily massive food distribution led to an area of prejudice. The ‘Grecians’ [Greek speaking Jews] were being neglected. They were seen as a little lower on the scale of racial purity. They were speaking a language less pure than the Hebrew tongue. So the Apostles heard of the problem and said ‘pick out 7 men of good report, who have favor and wisdom and put them in charge of ‘this business’. In essence these were the first Deacons. The business was simply speaking of the duty of serving the food. Up until now the Apostles were involved with the distribution. But they said ‘we will devote ourselves to prayer and the Word’. This chapter is important, many well meaning church communions trace their practices of church government to this time. Are Deacons positions who ‘do the business of the 501 c 3’? Not really. Well, not at all! Are there ‘Pastors’ here in the modern idea of the office of a person who is over the flock and is the weekly speaker whom the people see every ‘Sunday’. No. Are these practices all wicked and from the devil? Of course not! But it does help to see what is actually going on. This early community saw the need for the leaders to devote time to the word and prayer. Fulltime ministry? Really more of a community adjustment allowing those with greater insight to propagate the gospel. Paul will later show us this doesn’t mean each separate community had ‘full time ministers’ who were forbidden to work secular jobs. He will continue to make tents thru out his life. But he will also teach that it is all right to meet the material needs of those who are ministering spiritual food. We also see the Apostles lay their hands on these first deacons. Is this some type of official ordination [recognition, licensing] from a seminary? Of course not. Is it wicked to attend seminary and have an ordination? Of course not. The principle of the ‘school of the prophets’ in Elijah’s day shows the possibility of God working thru these universities. It’s just we need to be careful we are not reading ideas into the story that are not faithful to the text. My reading of this chapter shows an organic community of people who were ‘the church’. They did have leadership and sought God for direction and weren’t imprisoned by any specific form of ‘church’. The main ingredient was a group of people sharing the life of Christ and living this life out as a community. All church communions have a tendency to read there own story into ‘Gods story’. That is we find isolated verses of scripture and say ‘see, this is why our church government does it this way’. It’s OK to a degree, but then when you see ‘our church government’ as the only true church government, that’s where problems arise. I think we should avoid looking for prescriptive patterns of ‘church government’ from the book of Acts. We should read the story as a community of people who are experiencing God and learning to walk out this experience as the Body of Christ. The great mystery is that God is ‘no longer dwelling in Temples made with hands’ but in a vibrant Body of people! [p.s. Stephen will quote this prophetic scripture in the next chapter as he does one of the most masterful jobs of an Old Testament survey to be found in the New Testament].

[parts] [parts] Alexander sought to implement the ideals of his teacher- he wanted to unify the known world under one people/culture- a belief that Aristotle held- a sort of ‘unified theory’ [Einstein] that would seek to bring all learning/knowledge together under one supreme [Divine] principle.

Alexander’s experiment was called Hellenization- which was the Greek worlds attempt to impose Greek culture/language on all their conquered enemies- and at the same time allow them to hold on to the their own culture too. Alexander did amazingly well at this experiment- at the young age of around 24 he had accomplished most of his mission. The cities were a sort of composite of Greek culture mixed in with their own culture- this is where we get the modern term Cosmopolitan.

Alexander died young and his kingdom was divided between 4 generals- one of them- Ptolemy- would himself make it into the history books because of his keen intellect.

The system of cosmology developed under him would last [and work!] until some 17-18 hundred years later when it was overthrown by the Copernican revolution during the time of Copernicus and Galileo.

Alexander’s generals would do their best to carry on the system of Hellenization- and other nation’s generals would keep the system going even after Greece fell. One of them- Octavian [Roman general] makes it into the history books by another famous name- Julius Caesar.

Alexander established a great library in the Egyptian city of Alexandria [named after him] and many of the great writings were preserved during this time.

The writings of Aristotle would be discovered again during the time of Thomas Aquinas [13th century Catholic genius/scholar] and this would lead to Scholasticism [a peculiar school of thought developed/revived under Aquinas] and give rise to the Renaissance.

Okay- before the birth of Christ- the Jewish people resisted the imposing of Greek culture upon them- you had the very famous resistance under the Jewish Maccabean revolt- where the Jews rose up and fought the wicked ruler Antiochus Epiphanies- and till this day the Jewish people celebrate this victory at Hanukah.

Eventually Rome would conquer the Greek kingdom and the Jewish people were allowed to keep their culture and temple- yet they were still a people oppressed. Hassidism [getting back to the beginning] developed during this attempt to not lose their Jewish roots- the Pharisees of Jesus day came from this movement.

Alexander was pretty successful in his attempt to unify language- even though the bible [New Testament] was written by Jewish writers- living under Roman rule- yet the original bible is written in the Greek language.

Bible scholars till this day study the Greek language to find the truest meaning of the actual words in the bible [I have a Greek Lexicon sitting right in front of me].

It would take a few centuries before a Latin version appeared on the scene [the great church father- Jerome- would produce the Latin Vulgate].

Yet it would be the re- discovery and learning of the Greek texts [under men like Erasmus- and the Protestant Reformers] that would lead to the Reformation [16th century] and other movements in church history.

The Jews had various responses to the empires that ruled over them during various times. Alexander the Great instituted Hellenization- a sort of cultural compromise over the people he conquered. They could keep their religious/cultural roots- but would be subservient to Alexander and Greek rule. Some Jewish people rejected any compromise- we call them the Essenes- they moved out of town- so to speak, and lived in what we refer to as the Qumran community. This was a few centuries before the time of Christ- and this was where the Dead Seas Scrolls were found in the 20th century. A Bedouin boy was looking for his goats- threw a rock in a cave right off the Dead Sea- and that’s how we found the scrolls. The scrolls might have been hidden there by the Essenes- Now- when my friends asked me about them- I told them that it’s been a while since I read up on any of this- but to the best of my memory the thing that made them significant was the fact that they were very old manuscripts- from the bible- and they backed up what we had had all along.

[parts]

VERSES- Acts 6:1 And in those days, when the number of the disciples was multiplied, there arose a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration. Acts 6:2 Then the twelve called the multitude of the disciples unto them, and said, It is not reason that we should leave the word of God, and serve tables. Acts 6:3 Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business. Acts 6:4 But we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word. Acts 6:5 And the saying pleased the whole multitude: and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolas a proselyte of Antioch: Acts 6:6 Whom they set before the apostles: and when they had prayed, they laid their hands on them. Acts 6:7 And the word of God increased; and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly; and a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith. Acts 6:8 And Stephen, full of faith and power, did great wonders and miracles among the people. Acts 6:9 Then there arose certain of the synagogue, which is called the synagogue of the Libertines, and Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and of them of Cilicia and of Asia, disputing with Stephen. Acts 6:10 And they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit by which he spake. Acts 6:11 Then they suborned men, which said, We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses, and against God. Acts 6:12 And they stirred up the people, and the elders, and the scribes, and came upon him, and caught him, and brought him to the council, Acts 6:13 And set up false witnesses, which said, This man ceaseth not to speak blasphemous words against this holy place, and the law: Acts 6:14 For we have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered us. Acts 6:15 And all that sat in the council, looking stedfastly on him, saw his face as it had been the face of an angel.

James 2:5 Hearken, my beloved brethren, Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him? Matthew 26:61 And said, This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days. In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations Mark 14:58 We heard him say, I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands. In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations John 2:19 Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy thistemple, and in three days I will raise it up. In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations

http://www.corpuschristioutreachministries.blogspot.com https://www.facebook.com/john.chiarello.5?ref=bookmarks https://ccoutreach87.wordpress.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ4GsqTEVWRm0HxQTLsifvg

https://plus.google.com/108013627259688810902/posts https://vimeo.com/user37400385 john chiarelloFollow On https://www.linkedin.com/home?trk=hb_logo http://johnchiarello.tumblr.com/ http://ccoutreach.over-blog.com/ Note- Please do me a favor, those who read/like the posts- re-post them on other sites as well as the site you read them on- Thanks- John.#

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Acts 3

Acts 4

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#God #Jesus #Bible #Religion #ccoutreach87

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newsnigeria · 7 years ago

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Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/east-west/

How the East can save the West

This column was written for the Unz Review]

Europe: My honor is solidarity!

“That tells you all you need to know about the difference between modern Britain and the government of Vladimir Putin. They make Novichok, we make light sabers. One a hideous weapon that is specifically intended for assassination. The other an implausible theatrical prop with a mysterious buzz. But which of those two weapons is really more effective in the world of today?”.

(Boris Johnson)

Let’s begin this discussion with a few, basic questions.

Question one: does anybody sincerely believe that “Putin” (the collective name for the Russian Mordor) really attempted to kill a man which “Putin” himself had released in the past, who presented no interest for Russia whatsoever who, like Berezovsky, wanted to return back to Russia, and that to do the deed “Putin” used a binary nerve agent?

Question two: does anybody sincerely believe that the British have presented their “allies” (I will be polite here and use that euphemism) with incontrovertible or, at least, very strong evidence that “Putin” indeed did such a thing?

Question three: does anybody sincerely believe that the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats will somehow make Russia more compliant to western demands (for our purposes, it does not matter what demands we are talking about)?

Question four: does anybody sincerely believe that after this latest episode, the tensions will somehow abate or even diminish and that things will get better?

Question five: does anybody sincerely believe that the current sharp rise in tensions between the AngloZionist Empire (aka the “West”) does not place the Empire and Russia on collision course which could result in war, probably/possibly nuclear war, maybe not deliberately, but as the result of an escalation of incidents?

If in the zombified world of the ideological drones who actually remain in the dull trance induced by the corporate media there are most definitely those who answer “yes” to some or even all of the questions above, I submit that not a single major western decision maker sincerely believes any of that nonsense. In reality, everybody who matters knows that the Russians had nothing to do with the Skripal incident, that the Brits have shown no evidence, that the expulsion of Russian diplomats will only harden the Russian resolve, that all this anti-Russian hysteria will only get worse and that this all puts at least Europe and the USA, if not the entire planet, in great danger.

And yet what just happened is absolutely amazing: instead of using fundamental principles of western law (innocent until proven guilty by at least a preponderance of evidence or even beyond reasonable doubt), basic rules of civilized behavior (do not attack somebody you know is innocent), universally accepted ethical norms (the truth of the matter is more important than political expediency) or even primordial self-preservation instincts (I don’t want to die for your cause), the vast majority of western leaders chose a new decision-making paradigm which can be summarized in two words:

“highly likely”

“solidarity”

This is truly absolutely crucial and marks a fundamental change in the way the AngloZionist Empire will act from now on. Let’s look at the assumptions and implications of these two concepts.

First, “highly likely”. While “highly likely” does sound like a simplified version of “preponderance of evidence” what it really means is something very different and circular: “Putin” is bad, poisoning is bad, therefore it is “highly likely” that “Putin” did it. How do we know that the premise “Putin is bad” is true? Well – he does poison people, does he not?

You think I am joking?

Check out this wonderful chart presented to the public by “Her Majesty’s government” entitled “A long pattern of Russian malign activity”:

In the 12 events listed as evidence of a “pattern of Russian malign activity” one is demonstratively false (2008 invasion of Georgia), one conflates two different accusations (occupation of Crimea and destabilization of the Ukraine), one is circular (assassination of Skripal) and all others are completely unproven accusations. All that is missing here is the mass rape of baby penguins by drunken Russian sailors in the south pole or the use of a secret “weather weapon” to send hurricanes towards the USA. You don’t need a law degree to see that, all you need is an IQ above room temperature and a basic understanding of logic. For all my contempt for western leaders, even I wouldn’t make the claim that they all lack these. So here is where “solidarity” kicks-in:

“Solidarity” in this context is simply a “conceptual placeholder” for Stephen Decatur‘s famous “my country, right or wrong” applied to the entire Empire. The precedent of Meine Ehre heißt Treue just slightly rephrased into Meine Ehre heißt Solidarität also comes to mind.

Solidarity simply means that the comprador ruling elites of the West will say and do whatever the hell the AngloZionist tell them to. If tomorrow the UK or US leaders proclaim that Putin eats babies for breakfast or that the West needs to send a strong message to “Putin” that a Russian invasion of Vanuatu shall not be tolerated, then so be it: the entire AngloZionist nomenklatura will sing the song in full unison and to hell with facts, logic or even decency!

Solemnly proclaiming lies is hardly something new in politics, there is nothing new here. What is new are two far more recent developments: first, now everybody knows that these are lies and, second, nobody challenges or debunks them. Welcome to the AngloZionist New World Order indeed!

The Empire: by way of deception thou shalt do war

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it.

(John 8:44)

Over the past weeks I have observed something which I find quite interesting: both on Russian TV channels and in the English speaking media there is a specific type of anti-Putin individual who actually takes a great deal of pride in the fact that the Empire has embarked on a truly unprecedented campaign of lies against Russia. These people view lies as just another tool in a type of “political toolkit” which can be used like any other political technique. As I have mentioned in the past, the western indifference to the truth is something very ancient coming, as it does, from the Middle-Ages: roughly when the spiritual successors of the Franks in Rome decided that their own, original, brand of “Christianity” had no use for 1000 years of Consensus Patrum. Scholasticism and an insatiable thrust for worldly, secular, power produced both moral relativism and colonialism (with the Pope’s imprimatur in the form of the Treaty of Tordesillas). The Reformation (with its very pronounced Judaic influence) produced the bases of modern capitalism which, as Lenin correctly diagnosed, has imperialism as its highest stage. Now that the West is losing its grip on the planet (imagine that, some SOB nations dare resist!), all of the ideological justifications have been tossed away and we are left with the true, honest, barebones impulses of the leaders of the Empire: messianic hubris (essentially self-worship), violence and, above all, a massive reliance on deception and lies on every single level of society, from the commercial advertisements targeted at children to Colin Powell shaking some laundry detergent at the UNSC to justify yet another war of aggression.

Self-worship and a total reliance on brute force and falsehoods – these are the real “Western values” today. Not the rule of law, not the scientific method, not critical thought, not pluralism and most definitely not freedom. We are back, full circle, to the kind of illiterate thuggery the Franks so perfectly embodied and which made them so infamous in the (then) civilized world (the south and eastern Mediterranean). The agenda, by the way, is also the same one as the Franks had 1000 years ago: either submit to us and accept our dominion, or die, and the way to accept our dominion is to let us plunder all your riches. Again, not much difference here between the sack of the First Rome in 410, the sack of the Second Rome in 1204 and the sack of the Third Rome in 1991. As psychologists well know, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Interestingly, the Chinese saw straight through this strategic psyop and they are now sounding the alarm in their very official Global Times: (emphasis added)

The accusations that Western countries have hurled at Russia are based on ulterior motives, similar to how the Chinese use the expression “perhaps it’s true” to seize upon the desired opportunity. From a third-person perspective, the principles and diplomatic logic behind such drastic efforts are flawed, not to mention that expelling Russian diplomats almost simultaneously is a crude form of behavior. Such actions make little impact other than increasing hostility and hatred between Russia and their Western counterparts (…) The fact that major Western powers can gang up and “sentence” a foreign country without following the same procedures other countries abide by and according to the basic tenets of international law is chilling. During the Cold War, not one Western nation would have dared to make such a provocation and yet today it is carried out with unrestrained ease. Such actions are nothing more than a form of Western bullying that threatens global peace and justice. (…) It is beyond outrageous how the US and Europe have treated Russia. Their actions represent a frivolity and recklessness that has grown to characterize Western hegemony that only knows how to contaminate international relations. Right now is the perfect time for non-Western nations to strengthen unity and collaborative efforts among one another. These nations need to establish a level of independence outside the reach of Western influence while breaking the chains of monopolization declarations, predetermined adjudications and come to value their own judgment abilities. (…) The West is only a small fraction of the world and is nowhere near the global representative it once thought it was. The silenced minorities within the international community need to realize this and prove just how deep their understanding is of such a realization by proving it to the world through action.

As the French say “à bon entendeur, salut!”: the Chinese position is crystal clear, as is the warning. I would summarize it as so: if the West is an AngloZionist doormat, then the East is most definitely not.

[Sidebar: I know that there are some countries in Europe who have, so far, shown the courage to resist the AngloZionist Diktat. Good for them. I will wait to see how long they can resist the pressure before giving them a standing ovation]

The modern Ahnenerbe Generalplan Ost

The decision, therefore, lies here in the East; here must the Russian enemy, this people numbering two hundred million Russians, be destroyed on the battlefield and person by person, and made to bleed to death

(Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler)

Still, none of that explain why the leaders of the Empire have decided to engage in a desperate game of “nuclear chicken” to try to, yet again, force Russia to comply with its demands to “go away and shut up”. This is counter-intuitive and I get several emails each week telling me that there is absolutely no way the leaders of the AngloZionist Empire would want a war with Russia, especially not a nuclear-armed one. The truth is that while western leaders are most definitely psychopaths, they are neither stupid nor suicidal, but neither were Napoleon or Hitler! And, yes, they probably don’t really want a full-scale war with Russia. The problem is that these rulers are also desperate, and for good cause.

Let’s look at the situation just a few months ago. The US was defeated in Syria, ridiculed in the DPRK, Trump was hated in Europe, the Russians and the Germans were working on North Stream, the British leaders forced to at least pretend to work on Brexit, the entire “Ukrainian” project had faceplanted, the sanctions against Russia had failed, Putin was more popular than ever and the hysterical anti-Trump campaign was still in full swing inside the USA. The next move by the AngloZionist elites was nothing short of brilliant: by organizing a really crude false flag in the UK the Empire achieved the following results:

The Europeans have been forced right back into the Anglosphere’s fold (“solidarity”, remember?)

The Brexiting Brits are now something like the (im-)moral leaders of Europe again.

The Russians are now demonized to such a degree that any accusation, no matter how stupid, will stick.

In the Middle-East, the US and Israel now have free reign to start any war they want because the (purely theoretical) European capability to object to anything the Anglos want has now evaporated, especially now that the Russians have become “known chemical-criminals” from Ghouta to Salisbury

At the very least, the World Cup in Russia will be sabotaged by a massive anti-Russian campaign. If that campaign is really successful, there is still the hope that the Germans will finally cave in and, if maybe not outright cancel, then vat least ery much delay North Stream thereby forcing the Europeans to accept, what else, US gas.

This is an ambitious plan and, barring an unexpected development, it sure looks like it might work. The problem with this strategy is that it falls short of getting Russia to truly “go away and shut up”. Neocons are particularly fond of humiliating their enemies (look at how they are still gunning for Trump even though by now the poor man has become their most subservient servant) and there is a lot of prestige at stake here. Russia, therefore, must be humiliated, trulyhumiliated, not just by sabotaging her participation in Olympic games or by expelling Russian diplomats, but by something far more tangible like, say, an attack on the very small and vulnerable Russian task force in Syria. Herein lies the biggest risk.

The Russian task force in Syria is tiny, at least compared to the immense capabilities of CENTCOM+NATO. The Russians have warned that if they are attacked, they will shoot down not only the attacking missiles but also their launchers. Since the Americans are not dumb enough to expose their aircraft to Russian air defenses, they will use air power only outside the range of Russian air defenses and they will use only cruise missiles to strike targets inside the “protection cone” of the Russians air defenses. The truth is that I doubt that the Russians will have the opportunity to shoot down many US aircraft, at least not with their long-range S-300/S-400 SAMs. Their ubiquitous and formidable combined short to medium range surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery weapon system, the Pantsir, might have a better chance simply because it’s location is impossible to predict. But the real question is this: will the Russians shoot back at the USN ships if they launch cruise missiles at Syria?

My strictly personal guess is that they won’t unless Khmeimim, Tartus or another large Russian objective (official Russian compounds in Damascus) are hit. Striking a USN ship would be tantamount to an act of war and that is just not something the Russians will do if they can avoid it. The problem with that is this restraint will, yet again, be interpreted as a sign of weakness, not civilization, by the “modern Franks” (visualize a Neanderthal with a nuclear club in his fist). Should the Russians decide to act à la American and use violence to “send a message”, the Empire will immediately perceive that as a loss of face and a reason to immediately escalate further to reestablish the “appropriate” hierarchy between the “indispensable nation” and the “gas station masquerading as a country”. So here is the dynamic at work

Russia limits herself to words of protests ==>> the Empire sees that as a sign of weakness and escalates Russia responds in kind with real actions ==>> The Empire feels humiliated and escalates

Now look at this from a Russian point of view for a second and ask yourself what you would do in this situation?

The answer, I think, is obvious: you try to win as much time as possible and you prepare for war. The Russians have been doing exactly that since at least early 2015.

For Russia this is really nothing new: been there, done that, and remember it very, very well, by the way. The “western project” for Russia has always been the same since the Middle-Ages, the only difference today is the consequences of war. With each passing century the human cost of the various western crusades against Russia got worse and worse and now we are not only looking at the very real possibility of another Borodino or Kursk, and not even at another Hiroshima, but at something which we can’t even really imagine: hundreds of millions of people die in the course of just a few hours.

How do we stop that?

Is the West even capable of acting in a different way?

I very much doubt it.

The one actor who can stop the upcoming war: China

There is one actor which might, maybe, stop the current skidding towards Armageddon: China. Right now, the Chinese have officially declared that they have what they call a “comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation” later shortened to “strategic partnership”. This is a very apt expression as it does not speak of an “alliance”: two countries of the size of Russia and China cannot have an alliance in the traditional sense – they are too big and different for that. They are, however, in a symbiotic relationship, that both sides understand perfectly (see this White Paper for details). What this means in very simple terms is this: the Chinese cannot let Russia be defeated by the Empire because once Russia is gone, they will be left one on one with a united, triumphal and infinitely arrogant West (likewise I would argue that Russia cannot afford to have Iran defeated by the Empire for exactly the same reasons, and neither can Iran let the Israelis destroy Hezbollah). Of course, in terms of military power, China is a dwarf compared to Russia, but in terms of economic power Russia is the dwarf when compared to China in this “strategic community of interests”. Thus, China cannot assist Russia militarily. But remember that Russia does not need this if only because military assistance is what you need to win a war. Russia does not want to win a war, Russia desperately needs to avoid a war! And here is where China can make a huge difference: psychologically.

Yes, the Empire is currently taking on both Russia and China, but everybody, from its leaders to its zombified population, seems to think that these are two, different and separate foes. [We can use this opportunity to most sincerely thank Donald Trump for so “perfectly” timing his trade war with China.] They are not: not only are Russia and China symbionts who share the same vision of a prosperous and peaceful Eurasia united by a common future centered around the OBOR and, crucially, free from the US dollar or, for that matter, from any type of major US role, but Russia and China also stand for exactly the same notion of a post-hegemonic world order: a multi-polar world of different and truly sovereign nations living together under the rules of international law. If the AngloZionists have their way, this will never happen. Instead, we will have the New World Order promised by Bush, dominated by the Anglosphere countries (basically the ECHELON members, aka the “Five Eyes”) and, on top of that pyramid, the global Zionist overlord. This is something China cannot, and will not allow. Neither can China allow a US-Russian war, especially not a nuclear one because China, like Russia, also needs peace.

Conclusion

I don’t see what Russia could do to convince the Empire to change its current course: the US leaders are delusional and the Europeans are their silent, submissive servants. As shown above, whatever Russia does it always invites further escalation from the Empire. Of course, Russia can turn the West into a pile of smoldering radioactive ashes. This is hardly a solution since, in the inevitable exchange, Russia herself will also be turned into a similar pile of smoldering radioactive ashes by the Empire. In spite of that, the Russian people have most clearly indicated by their recent vote that they have absolutely no intention of caving in to the latest western crusade against them. As for the Empire, it will never accept the fact that Russia refuses to submit. It therefore seems to me that the only thing which can stop Armageddon would be for the Chinese to ceaselessly continue to repeat to the rulers of the Empire and the people of the West what the wrote in the article quoted above: that “The West is only a small fraction of the world and is nowhere near the global representative it once thought it was” and “the silenced minorities within the international community need to realize this and prove just how deep their understanding is of such a realization by proving it to the world through action.”

History teaches us that the West only strikes against those opponents it sees as defenseless or, at least, weaker. The fact that the Popes, Napoleon or Hitler were wrong in their evaluation of the strength of Russia does not change this truism. In fact, the Neocons today are making exactly the same mistake. So telling them about the fact that Russia is much stronger than what the western propaganda says and which, apparently, many western rulers believe (you always end up believing your own propaganda), does not help. Russian “reminders of reality” will do no good simply because the West is out of touch with reality and lacks the ability to understand its own limitations and weaknesses. But if China stepped in and conveyed that crucial message “The West is only a small fraction of the world” and that the rest of the world will prove this “through action” then other countries will step in and a war can be averted because even the current delusion-based “solidarity” will collapse in the face of a united Eurasia.

Russia alone cannot continue to carry the burden of stopping the messianic psychopaths ruling the Empire.

The rest of the world, led by China, now needs to step in to avert the war.

The Saker

#E.U #russia #Syria #u.k #U.S.A #Ukraine

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pwitness · 7 years ago

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Catholicism and Modernity, by Gabriel Daly, OSA

In the hundred years before the Second Vatican Council there were three such major attempts: the first in the 1860s (Reform Catholicism), the last in the 1940s (Nouvelle theologie). Between these two there occurred the attempt which was named and condemned by Rome under the term “Modernism.” The Vatican creating the myth of a modernizing movement which was allegedly threatening the very existence of the church. It has been suggested that the decision to attack the Modernists stemmed from Rome’s general hostility to post-Enlihtenmnet developments outside the Catholic Church. The sociologist, Lester R Kurtz, argues that the Modernists were an asset to the Vatican in that they “served as the negative model for the church’s stance towards the modern world.” In short, Rome, which found itself powerless against the modern world could bring all its might to bear successfully on its own dissidents, thereby revitalizing the Catholic will to resist modernity and--far more significantly--to do so on Rome’s terms. Loisy, in The Gospel and the Church, had opposed some central tenets of liberal Protestantism, but his description of The Gospel and the Church as “a very Catholic book” was both plausible and disingenuous. John Kent applies much the same sort of argument to the church of both Pius IX and Pius X, which, he claims, “was being ruled by a counter-revolution which constantly presented itself as the victim.”

In 1863 the German Catholic historian Ignaz von Dollinger, while professing loyalty to papal authority, made a vigorous attack on the scholasticism of his age, accusing it of sacrificing historical scholarship to sterile speculation. He went on to contrast the brilliance of German thought with the decadence of theological thought in the Latin countries. Pius IX replied in a letter, Tuas libenter, to the archbishop of Munich-Freising which not only proclaimed the authority of the Roman Pontifical Congregations but condemned the existence in Germany of a movement against the “Old School” and its doctors, who have served the church so well down the ages. Tuas libenter laid down the pattern of things to come. The Syllabus of Errors (1864) reinforced what was contained in Tuas libenter.

This raises the question of how Modernism is to be related to liberal Catholicism, especially the liberal Catholicism (or, “Reform Catholicism”) of the 1860s. Terrell used the terms “liberal Catholic” and “Modernist” interchangeably, once the latter term had become current and saw the ultramontane ecclesiology of Tuas libenter as the direct antecedent of Pius X’s church. Edmund Bishop, the leading Catholic liturgical scholar in Britain, who was happy to describe himself in private as a Modernist, believed that the Munich Brief (Tuas lib enter) was the decisive event in Rome’s stand against modernity. All that followed was, in Bishop’s opinion, simply the application of its principles: clericalism, papal pretence to unrestrained control over all scholarship, and affirmation of scholasticism as the language of that control. In 1909 Bishop wrote to von Hugel that Pascendi was “a conclusive act, giving out to the world the whole force and meaning of the Munich Brief of 1863.”

“In the second half of the nineteenth century a militant and successful neoscholasticism brought energy and formal clarity to Catholic theology; it also brought limitations, controversy, and intolerance.” T.F. O’Meara’s judgment is a useful reminder of the dual character of Rome’s campaign against modernity. The growth of papal power in the church found ideological support in a refurbished scholasticism. Each fed the other in a remarkable example of institutional symbiosis. Scholastic essentialism provided the Vatican with a language well suited to the articulation of its immobilist position on doctrine, while the Vatican in turn sued its authority to make neo-scholasticism the exclusive language of its conception of orthodoxy. It is no coincidence that Tuas libenter not merely commended the “old theology” over the new but also employed the term “ordinary magisterium” for the first time in an official Roman document.

The link between the 1860s and the Modernist period is mainly an ecclesiological one. Edmund Bishop’s view of Pascendi as an application of Tuas libenter oversimplifies matters somewhat and ignores the topics of agnosticism and immanentism, neither of which was at issue in 1863. Nevertheless, as Tyrrell was to argue, there is a close theological connection between the absence of an immanent dimension in the concept of God and an ecclesiology which is patriarchical and authoritarian: a distant God needs to delegate power to human representatives.

It was Leo XIII who gave final focus to the anti-modern movement which proclaimed and defended the exclusivity of the “old school.” In 1879 Leo published his encyclical letter, Aeterni Patris, which made Thomism, as a philosophico-theological system, mandatory for the whole church. It is important to note that it was Thomism, and not simply scholasticism, which the pope imposed. In an unprecedented act--Rome normally kept out of disputes between the schools--Leo wrote to the General of the Franciscans informing him that the Order was not free to follow St. Bonaventure and Scotus, if it meant departing from the mind of St. Thomas.

To return finally to the problem of definition, in the context of Aeterni Patris Catholic Modernism may be defined as follows. “Modernism” was the term employed by Pius X and his curial advisors in their attempt to describe and condemn certain liberal, anti-scholastic, and historico-critical forms of thought occurring in the Roman Catholic Church between c. 1890 and 1914. I am therefore contending that, although Catholic Modernism was a belated attempt to respond to the challenge of modernity, it cannot be defined merely in terms of its responsiveness to modernity but must be related to the scholastic lineaments of Rome’s understanding of orthodoxy. On the basis of this contention one can reasonably take Maurice Blondel’s L’Action as the point of departure of Catholic philosophico-theological Modernism.

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cabiba · 8 years ago

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People who read these reflections may wonder how I arrived at the understanding that socialism has failed. I am describing the whole experience in another book, but here a brief glance at the intellectual road I traveled may be helpful. It has not been so winding a road as some may think.

I stated the aim of my political activities in two articles in the Masses in 1916: not to reform men, or even primarily reform the world, but to “make all men as free to live and realize the world as it is possible for them to be.” In this, the years have brought no change.

In those same articles I dismissed Marx’s philosophic system, his idea that socialism is historically necessary, as “a rationalization of his wish,” and declared: “We must alter and remodel what he wrote, and make of it and of what else our recent science offers, a doctrine that shall clearly have the nature of hypothesis.”

The hypothesis, as I conceived it, was that by intensifying the working class struggle, and pursuing it to victory either at the polls or in a revolution, we could “socialize the means of production,” and thus extend democracy from politics into economics. That, I thought, would give every man a chance to build a life in his own chosen way. It would “liberate the proletariat and therewith all society,” to use a Marxian formula that I liked to quote.

To me, in short, socialism was not a philosophy of history, or of life—much less a religion—but a large-scale social-scientific experiment. I came to it by a process of thought rather than feeling. I had no personal envies or resentments; I was happily circumstanced and wisely brought up; I thought of myself as free. I wanted to extend that freedom to all men; I wanted to see a society without distinctions of caste, class, race, money-power—without exploitation, without the “wage system.” I knew this could not be brought about by preaching; I had observed the effects of preaching. I was captivated by the idea that it might be brought about by a self-interested struggle on the part of those most deprived under the present system. Thus the class struggle as a method was the very center of my socialist belief. The articles quoted above were titled “Towards Liberty, The Method of Progress,” and they were meant to be the first chapters of a book.

It was juvenile of me to imagine that humanity as a whole, especially by splitting itself into two halves, could turn a whole period of history into a scientific experiment. Science requires a scientist, or at least an engineer, and the engineer, in this case, would have to have dictatorial power. But that thought, if it entered my mind, I managed to elude. I worked out a socialism of my own which enabled me to take an independent position on many concrete questions: feminism, population control, peace, and war. Both the doctrine of class morals and the propaganda of class hate I rejected. I could think freely on such questions because my socialism was not a mystical cure-all, but merely a plan which I considered practical for solving the one specific problem of making freedom more general and democracy more democratic.

Although I was a member of the Socialist Party, the magazines I edited from 1912 to 1922, the Masses and the Liberator, were arrantly independent, and I was pretty regularly flayed alive by the party officials for some heresy or other. It was usually a revolutionary heresy. I was decidedly at the red end of the party spectrum. Still, it wasn’t always the reformists as against the revolutionists that I attacked. As often it was the dogmatism of both. Naturally, in my attempt to make Marxism over into an experimental science, I waged a continual war on the bigotry, the cant, the know-it-allism, of the party priesthood. This I think distinguished the policy of the old Masses and the Liberator as much as their militant insistence on the class struggle. I was always close friends with the I.W.W., and on good terms even with the anarchists, although I lectured them on their childish innocence of the concept of method. I was not afraid, either, of the word liberal with a small l, although I had my own definition of it. “A liberal mind,” I wrote in the Masses for September 1917, “is a mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything. It is the only mind that is capable of judging beliefs, or that can hold strongly without bigotry to a belief of its own.”

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in October 1917, shocking the whole world of progressive and even moderate socialist opinion, I backed them to the limit in the Liberator. I raised the money to send John Reed to Russia and published his articles that grew into the famous book, Ten Days That Shook the World. I was about the only “red” still out of jail in those violent days, and my magazine was for a time the sole source of unbewildered information about what was happening in Russia. Its circulation reached a peak of sixty thousand.

When Lenin’s pamphlet, called in English “The Soviets at Work,” was published—the same that won Whittaker Chambers to communism—I was enraptured. The monumental practicality, the resolute factualness, of Lenin’s mind, combined as almost never before with a glowing regard for poor and oppressed people, anxiety over their freedom, devotion to the idea of their entrance into power, swept me off my feet. I still think it one of the noblest—and now saddest—of political documents. It convinced me that Lenin’s mind was experimental. In every line he seemed to realize my ideal of a scientific revolutionist. I greeted him in two articles in the Liberator as “a Statesman of a New Order,” and dedicated myself with no doctrinal reservations to the defense of his principles of action and his Soviet regime.

Attacking those who accused him of dogmatism, I exclaimed: “I have never seen a sign in any speech or writing of Lenin that he regarded the Marxian theory as anything more than a scientific hypothesis in process of verification.”

There were few translations from Russian in those days. I had to go to Russia and learn the language before I found out that Lenin was a true believer in the Marxian mystique. He was, to be sure, more high-handed with its postulates than any other believer—much more so than Trotsky. He had the trick, as Karl Radek once remarked to me, of “deciding a question on the basis of the facts and then fixing it up with the theory afterward.” He also had Hegel’s notion of “dialectic logic” to help him with this trick. I did not know enough then to distinguish between the limited freedom dispensed to the faithful by this ingenious notion, and the complete freedom of a mind dealing only with facts, purposes, and plans of action. I gave my heart to Lenin more completely than I have to any other leader and fought for the Bolsheviks on the battlefield of American opinion with all the influence my voice and magazine possessed. From the October revolution until Baron Wrangel was swept out of the Crimea, I was engaged in a civil war, and my socialist convictions grew hard and firm. It took a long time after that, a steady and merciless bombardment of hostile and unanswerable facts, to unsettle them.

Going to Russia

Still, I was far enough from fanatical when I sailed for Russia in 1922 to remark to my friends that I was “going over to find out whether what I have been saying is true.” I arrived in September, in time to learn a little Russian before I attended the fourth congress of the Third International. I was not a delegate and had no official status, but the Liberator was well enough known so that I was hospitably received as a guest. Later on, Trotsky, who consented to cooperate with me on a biographical portrait, gave me a portentous document bearing his signature and the seal of the Red Army, asking everybody in Russia to receive me cordially and attend to my needs. I traveled wherever I wanted to with that document, and saw whatever I asked to see.

I traveled at the height of the swift recovery that followed the adoption of the New Economic Policy, and I experienced Soviet life at its best. Although surprised and shocked by some features of the experiment, I found ground for great hope also. Only one thing seemed to me calamitously bad. That was the bigotry and Byzantine scholasticism which had grown up around the sacred scriptures of Marxism. Hegel, Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin—these men’s books contained for the Bolsheviks the last word of human knowledge. They were not science, they were revelation. Nothing remained for living thinkers to do but apply them, gloss them, dispute about them, expatiate on them, find in them the germs of every new thought or thing that came into the world.

Instead of liberating the mind of man, the Bolshevik Revolution locked it into a state’s prison tighter than ever before. No flight of thought was conceivable, no poetic promenade even, no sneak through the doors or peep out of a window in this pre-Darwinian dungeon called Dialectic Materialism. No one in the western world has any idea of the degree to which Soviet minds are closed and sealed tight against any idea but the premises and conclusions of this antique system of wishful thinking. So far as concerns the advance of human understanding, the Soviet Union is a gigantic roadblock, armed, fortified, and defended by indoctrinated automatons made out of flesh, blood, and brains in the robot factories they call schools.

I felt this barbarous thing more keenly than any other disappointment in the land of my dreams. I was sure it contained the seeds of priest rule and police rule. Any state religion, as all the great liberals have pointed out, is death to human freedom. The separation of church and state is one of the main measures of protection against tyranny. But the Marxian religion makes this separation impossible, for its creed is politics; its church is the state. There is no hope within its dogmas of any evolution toward the free society it promises.

For these reasons, instead of writing the travel stories expected of me about “Life under the Soviets,” I went into the reading room of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow and got down to work on my old unfinished partial torso of a book, Towards Liberty, the Method of Progress. Although not deceived that anybody would pay prompt attention to me, I thought it my duty to the revolution to attack this roadblock, this prodigy of obtuseness parading as ultimate wisdom, in the only way it could be attacked, by an unanswerable demonstration of the conflict between Marxism and the scientific method.

I stayed a year and nine months in Russia, and put in a major part of my time learning Russian and reading, mostly in that language, the essential literature on which the actions of the Bolsheviks were based. Leaving Russia in June 1924, I spent the next three years in western Europe, where I finished a book on the subject and named it Marx and Lenin, the Science of Revolution. It was published in London in 1926. The Anglo-Saxon world had so little interest then in Marxian theory that I had to advance the money for its publication. But Albert and Charles Boni bought sheets and published it a year later in New York. La Nouvelle Revue Française published a French translation the following year. My money investment was well repaid. But my success in undermining the roadblock in Russia was not conspicuous.

The copy I sent to the Marx-Engels Institute was returned by the Post Office marked: “Denied admission by the Department of Publications.” The only murmur to come out of Russia was from the great scientist, Ivan Pavlov, who surprised me with a letter in his own hand sent fearlessly through the mail: “I endorse completely your criticism of the philosophical foundation of Marxism.” And he added this contribution to my painfully slow recovery from socialism: “There isn’t any science of revolution, and there won’t be for a long time. There is only a groping of the life force, partly guided empirically, of those who have a much-embracing and strong common sense. Our Bolshevik Revolution, with its details so disastrous to our intellectual and moral development, I consider an anachronism which (of this I am convinced) will repeat itself in this form never and nowhere in the civilized world. Such is my deepest understanding of these matters.”

Holding on to Leninism

In that book, I wrote as a believer in the Soviet system, and I still imputed to Lenin a stride forward, however unconscious, toward the attitude of experimental science, calling him by contrast with his more orthodox opponents an “engineer of revolution.” There was a great deal of truth in this, but I still managed to elude its implications. I thought it was a wonderful and hopeful thing that Lenin had succeeded, by basing himself on the Marxian analysis of class forces, in throwing a net over the whole of Russian society, and gathering the power into his hands and that of a party dedicated to building socialism.

This theoretic conception stood firm in my mind, even though I had seen before leaving Russia what I now believe to be its direct and normal consequence: the usurpation of power by a tyrant having no honest instinct for the liberties of men. I had not only seen but very carefully studied the plot by which Stalin made himself master after Lenin’s death. Besides studying his maneuvers, I attended the party congress of May 1924, at which his open attack was launched and Trotsky’s prestige in the party destroyed. Behind the scenes at that congress, Trotsky told me in whispers the drift and essential details of the suppressed document called Lenin’s Testament. I was leaving Russia in a few days, and I spent those days gathering, with his encouragement, what further documents I needed to expose the plot and explain it. To do this I laid aside my work on Marxism and wrote the little book called Since Lenin Died, which remains, I think, an authentic source for the history of the conflict about leadership which followed Lenin’s death.

In the evolution of my socialist opinions that book marked a rather modest step. My conclusion was only a caution to revolutionists in other countries against accepting in the name of Leninism “the international authority of a group against whom Lenin’s dying words were a warning, and who have preserved that authority by suppressing the essential texts of Lenin.” Fourteen years would pass before I was able to see in that group, not only an enemy of Lenin’s plans, but a result of the revolution as conceived and engineered by him.

I had said enough in my two books, however, to ostracize me completely from the official communist movement. When I came home from Europe in 1927 most of my old political friends refused to speak to me on the street. I was a traitor, a renegade, a pariah, a veritable untouchable, so far as the communists were concerned. And as the bitterness mounted, this mood spread to the radical, and even in some degree to the liberal, intelligentsia as a whole. To get rid of my facts, I was of course promptly and indelibly labeled “Trotskyist,” although I neither agreed with Trotsky’s Marxism nor ever shared the delusion that he might become the successful leader of a party. That the policies of Lenin and the original aims of the Bolsheviks were defended by Trotsky was made unmistakably clear in my little book, and will be unmistakably clear in history, I believe, if honest history survives. But my loyalty was not to any leader or group. My loyalty was still to the working class, to the idea of progress through class struggle. In principle, I was merely supplying the international working class and its leaders with information essential to the intelligent conduct of the struggle.

With the same purpose I translated and published in 1928 the suppressed program and documents of the exiled Left Opposition of the Russian Communist party, calling the book The Real Situation in Russia. As the text was theirs rather than mine, I gave the royalties to a small branch of the Trotskyist Opposition which had by that time been formed in America. This added to a growing impression that I was a personal follower of Trotsky, although my private thoughts about his failure to outmaneuver Stalin were anything but those of a follower. It was always Lenin’s policies, and the truth about what was happening in Russia, that I was defending. My translation of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution was made with admiration but not endorsement. To me that book is the supreme and most compelling application of the Marxian metaphysics to history, far outdoing the similar efforts of Marx himself. But I think it will be the last. No giant will ever again drive facts into those forms at such an expense of intellectual power.

A book which marks a longer step in my own development, emotional if not intellectual, was my Artists in Uniform, written in 1932–33, and published in 1934. There I described the hideous dictatorship in literature and the fine arts set up under Stalin’s knout, and the obsequious infantilism of Americans like Mike Gold, Joe Freeman, Bob Minor, Hugo Geliert, Maurice Becker, William Gropper, my ex-colleagues on the Liberator, who of their own free will kneeled down to it. No one who had believed in the socialist revolution as a liberation of spirit, as we all in those days so loudly did, could with intellectual honor pretend that this was it or any step in the direction of it. I did not pull any punches in that book, but I still spoke as a revolutionary socialist, a non-party old Bolshevik. I said in my introduction:

“I am on the side of the Soviets and the proletarian class struggle. But I think that critical truth-speaking is an element of that struggle essential to its success . . . The efforts toward socialist construction in the Soviet Union must inevitably serve the world movement in some sense as a guide. These efforts should not be followed, however, as a seamstress follows a pattern, but as a scientist repeats an experiment, progressively correcting the errors and perfecting the successful strokes.”

Those were, I think, my last published words as a defender of the Soviet Union.

Losing Faith

It is not easy to set dates in such a matter. “Who can determine when it is that the scales in the balance of opinion begin to turn, and what was a greater probability in behalf of a belief becomes a positive doubt against it?” Cardinal Newman asks the question in his Apologia, and I must say that with all the documents I have in hand, I can not be exact as to the moment when I abandoned my attitude of “loyal to the Soviet Union but opposed to the Stalin leadership,” and decided that thanks to that leadership the hope of socialism in Russia was dead. I only know that during the year 1933 those positive doubts grew so strong that I abandoned my pro-Soviet lectures, and remained silent for about two years. In the spring of 1936, I wrote an essay, “The End of Socialism in Russia,” which was published in Harper’s Magazine, January 1937, and afterward by Little, Brown & Company as a book. “To my mind, there is not a hope left for the classless society in present-day Russia,” I said in that book. But I still regarded Stalin’s totalitarian dictatorship as an enemy, rather than a result, of the policies of Lenin.

It took me another two years to arrive at the knowledge that Lenin’s methods—or in other words bolshevik Marxism—were to blame. This further slow step in my enlightenment was recorded in another book, published in 1940, and called Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism.

“I now think,” I wrote in that book, “that this brilliant device for engineering a seizure of power, invented by Lenin with a super-democratic purpose, has shown itself to be in fatal conflict with the purpose. I think that an armed seizure of power by a highly organized minority party, whether in the name of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Glory of Rome, the Supremacy of the Nordics, or any other slogan that may be invented, and no matter how ingeniously integrated with the masses of the population, will normally lead to the totalitarian state. ‘Totalitarian state’ is merely the modern name for tyranny. It is tyranny with up-to-date technique. And the essence of that technique is a reverse use of the very thing upon whose forward action Lenin ultimately relied, the machinery of public education.”

This change of opinion invalidated much that I had said in the second part of my book, Marx and Lenin, the Science of Revolution. Moreover, I had learned a great deal more about Marxism since that book was published in 1926. Its demonstration of the unscientific, and indeed superstitious, character of Marx’s whole mode of thought seemed more and more important as the battle between the Soviets and western civilization developed. It was my main contribution to the battle, and I wrote it over again as maturely and carefully as I know how. With the title Marxism: Is It Science, it was published in the autumn of that same year, 1940.

Even then, although rejecting Lenin’s system of party control, I had not decided that “the socialist hypothesis” was disproven. That decision, or the inner force to confront that fact, arrived in the following year. And in this case, I do remember the precise moment. At a cocktail party given by Freda Utley—I think for her friend Bertrand Russell—during a conversation about some last and most significantly dreadful news that had come out of Russia, she suddenly asked me:

“Aside from these Russian developments, do you still believe in the socialist idea?”

I said, “No.”

No More Socialism

Although I had never said this to myself, the answer came from the depths of my heart and mind. It seemed perfectly clear, once the question was boldly put, that if the socialist hypothesis were valid in general, some tiny shred of the benefits promised by it would have appeared when the Russian capitalists were expropriated and production taken over by the state, no matter how untoward the circumstances.

By that time everything in Russia was worse from the standpoint of socialist ideals than it had been under the regime of the Tsar. I did not need any additional experiments such as that in Nazi Germany, or in England, or the obvious drift in other countries, to convince me. I was sure that the whole idea of extending freedom, or justice, or equality, or any other civilized value, to the lower classes through common ownership of the means of production was a delusive dream, a bubble that had taken over a century to burst.

I have never had any hesitations or regrets about the decision—only about the unconscionably long time it took me to reach it. When I am denounced as a turncoat by the true believers it does indeed bring a blush to my cheek, but only because it took me so long to turn my coat. I sadly regret the precious twenty years I spent muddling and messing around with this idea, which with enough mental clarity and moral force I might have seen through when I went to Russia in 1922.

This present book contains my principal conclusions, or the principal things I have learned politically, since making that decision. I imagine some of its readers will echo the remark of Upton Sinclair in a recent letter, that I have merely “gone from one extreme to the other.” I think, on the contrary, that the step is shorter from hard-headed class-struggle socialism to a firm defense of the free-market economy than to the old wishful notion of a high-minded slide into utopia. It is a straighter step to take. The struggle is still for freedom; the main facts are still economic; the arch-enemy is still the soft-headed idealist who refuses to face facts.

An excerpt from Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955).

#Max Forrester Eastman #socialism #fee.org #communism #max eastman #leninism #marxist leninist

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afishtrap · 8 years ago

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In 1590 Jose de Acosta's Historia Natural y Moral de Las Indias was published in Sevilla, Spain. This work typifies the conflict between sixteenth-century Jesuit cosmology and the existence of the American continent. As Acosta came to terms with this conflict, he made several important observations in the fields of biogeography and climatology. Historia Natural y Moral de Las Indias probably represents the first documentation of the phenomenon of altitude sickness. Acosta explains this sickness in naturalistic terms, marking the growth of secular explanations among sixteenth-century evangelistic organizations such as the Jesuits. Historia Natural y Moral de Las Indias is also significant because it shows a transfer away from the authority of the traditional scientific texts and toward the use of direct experience. Acosta, as an individual, possessed a strong interest in nature and things scientific, a quality considered by some to be non-existent in post-Reconquista Spain.

Thayne R. Ford. "Stranger in a Foreign Land: Jose de Acosta's Scientific Realizations in Sixteenth-Century Peru." The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 19-33.

The source for Acosta's intellectual and scientific approach is found in his academic background. In the Spanish Universidades, Jesuit trainees were tutored extensively in the literature of the Greeks and Romans. Particular attention was paid to classical philosophy and rhetoric.1l This long-standing shift towards the classical language and scholarship spread Aristotle far and wide in Spain.Aristotle became the authority on how to analyze and understand the world at large. The Society of Jesus' acceptance of Aristotle was unusual since the rest of Europe was largely becoming disaffected with the Greek scholar. Many humanists felt that Scholasticism, under the direction of Aquinas and others, had failed in its attempt to tailor Aristotle's concepts of deity, spirit, and matter to Catholic theology. So, who then became the authority for sixteenth-century European humanists? Plato. Crane Brinton argues in his Ideas and Men that intellectuals such as Erasmus,Thomas More, and Pico delta Mirandola "welcomed Plato as a relief from Aristotle, as a philosopher closer to the purified but still sacramental Christianity they really wanted."12 This favoritism shown towards Plato, however, was strongly contrasted by the Society of Jesus' strain of humanism, which preferred Aristotle. Elements of the then popular humanism existed in late-Renaissance Jesuit ideology, yet in this case under a different philosophical umbrella, namely Aristotle's. Edmundo O'Gorman explains in Ctiatro Historiadores de Indias: "The Jesuits of the generation of Acosta, in other words those of the last third of the sixteenth century, embodied this movement of Aristotelian liberation.... " Acosta and other Jesuits had strong interests in classical writings, natural sciences, and ethnography. These interests are perhaps both the cause for and a reflection of the training in Aristotelianism.

[...]

Despite the training in Aristotle, Jose de Acosta's scientific method was still much different from the science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Acosta's mind, science was not a conclusion derived from test tubes, abstract computations, or precise instruments. Historia certainly does not exemplify the meticulous nature of modern science or, for that matter, the exactitude of Copernicus or Brahe, both contemporaries of the Spanish priest. In Historia's pages is a deadening paucity of mathematical equations, calculations, and theorems. In fact, in only one instance does Acosta work with numerical calculations.19 For Acosta the scientific method meant, as he states in the prologue to the book, the use of "inquiry" and "experience" in very broad terms.20

While Aristotle was popular in the educational institutions, dogma and authority still played important roles in the sixteenth-century Jesuit worldview. For the Society of Jesus, authority and hierarchy were indubitable elements of the divine architecture of the world. Aristotelian methodology never produced results that conflicted with official doctrine, but only results that buttressed and supplemented the opinions of the church. Aristotle was used to "fill in the gaps" where the church and scriptures were silent. Although Acosta's exposure to Aristotle played a crucial role in cultivating his intellectual perspective, other religious forces structured his outlook as well.

[...]

In sixteenth-century Spain, Catholic exegetical trends are largely a carryover from the Scholasticism of the late Middle Ages. Of course, one major difference was that the clergy began reading the biblical text in its original languages. By 1522, Spanish scholars at the University of Alcala had completed the Complutensian Polygot Bible which included the original Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew texts printed in columns beside the Vulgate translation.24 Other than this change, Catholic hermeneutics remained relatively static until the early seventeenth century.

The inclination to favor Antiochene hermeneutics was further heightened by the psychological impact of the Lutheran Reformation.25 The period of the Reformation was characterized by Protestant leaders brandishing the Christian Bible as justification for their various theological ideas. In response to this "heresy," Rome endorsed the Society of Jesus as one of its foremost weapons in the Counter-Reformation. The Counter-Reformation, directed principally by the Jesuits, followed suit when scriptural justifications became the primary ammunition employed by the Protestants to criticize the church. On both sides, theologians attacked the other using proof texts as evidence that their heretical opponents were in error. Theologians in both camps, especially among mid-to-late-century Protestants, espoused the principle of biblical infallibility, otherwise known as biblicism.26 Prior to the Lutheran Reformation, ecclesiastical authority played a crucial role in the interpretation of the biblical canon. During the Counter-Reformation the focus on authority shifted away from the church and toward the text of the Bible itself. For the Jesuits the Bible was not only a tool to explore the will of God or to learn moral lessons, but also a defense for the bureaucratical tradition. Biblical proof texts were used to justify the church's own theological premises. Until Protestant theologians asserted the independent authority of the Bible, the use of such tactics was quite irregular.

[...]

Most influential on Acosta's scientific ideas was his literal interpretation of the biblical narrative of the patriarch Noah.30 The example of Noah in particular permeated Acosta's notions of the natural world and the origins of animal life, including life found in America. In Acosta's mind, if the Bible chronicled historical occurrences, then Noah not only lived, but he survived a historical flood and afterwards docked his ark on Mount Ararat.31 Thus for Acosta, modern Armenia was the center for all subsequent human and animal life. This scenario posed a problem for the Spanish priest, however.According to the book of Genesis, the Deluge covered the entire earth, consequently eliminating animals such as those found in South America.32 Concerning these new varieties of species never seen before in the Old World,Acosta wondered how it was possible that certain species of animals, such as the alpaca and guanaco, two Andean species related to the llama, traveled to the New World while no remnant of their species remained behind in the Old World. He also asked why these animals in their migrations from Northern Mesopotamia chose only the South American Andes to colonize.

#peru #south america #early modern #anthropology #medicine #research #jstor

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finegameofnilworld · 8 years ago

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The Anglican Church, both evangelical and Catholic. Anglicans debate constantly their identity, is the Church reformed, is it Lutheran, is it Catholic, should it be estbalished or disestablished? There are different identities in the Anglican Church, some based on Evangelicalism and others along Catholicity or liberalism. The question is how these identities and questions are addressed and is a sort of malaise where different identities are held together by compromise suffcient? I don't think so. To address these questions we must remember that above all the Church of England is the Body of Christ- expressing a full Catholicity in its faithfulness to the Gospel of God. The Church of England appeals to scripture for its authority and identity, because Christ is the head of the Church. Scripture centres on Christ Himself, and the Church of England grasps this fact with the support of the whole structure and tradition of the Church. The Church of England sees in the tradition of the Church a participation in the 'One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church' (Nicene Creed), and has retained many aspects of that polity, namely the Episcopate and a sacramental ecclesiology. To expound further on how the Church of England sees itself as both informed and inspired by the exposition of the Gospel of God through Scripture, a sort of evangelical imperative, and continues the Catholicity of the Church, I would like to share a reflection written by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey in his book, The Gospel and the Catholic Church: 'Prominent in the old structure which the Anglicans retained was the Episcopate. The reasons given for this ministry varied; for the stress and strain of controversy were intense, and the Anglican position had to be defended, often self-consciously, against Rome or the Puritans without and the pressure of the more extreme Reformers within. Hence the English Church did not always perceive the meaning of its own order in its deepest relation to the Gospel and the universal Church. For some Churchmen, Episcopacy was of divine law found in scripture; for others, it was the best way of imitating antiquity; for others, it was well suited as a buttress to the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings; for others it happened to be the national church, and it was thought legitimate for other Reformed churches to use other orders. But what matters most is not the opinions of English divines about Episcopacy, but the fact of its existence in the English Church, just as what mattered in the first century was not the Corinthians' language nor even St.Paul's language about his Apostleship, but the fact that, under God, it existed. For its existence declared the truth that the Church in England was not a new foundation nor a local realisation of the invisible Church, but the expression on English soil of the one historical and continuous visible Church of God. It meant that, in spite of the pressure of Erastianism and even the frequent acceptance of Erastianism by the church's leaders, the English Church was reminded by its own shape and structure that it was not merely an English institution but the utterance in England of the universal Church. The fact about the Anglican church coloured the thought of the Caroline divines. Their theology was anti-papal, but was opposed also to the new scholasticisms of the Reformers. It appealed to the Bible as the test of doctrine and also to the Fathers and to the continuous tradition of Church life, semper et ubique et ab omnibus, both in West and East alike. The study of Greek theology gave to the Churchmanship of these seventeenth-century divines a breadth that reached beyond the West and its controversies; and their idea of the Church is summed up by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes when, in his preces privatae, he prays: for the whole Church Catholic, Eastern, Western, our own. This sense of the English Church as the representative of the Church universal was checked by the puritan supremecy under Cromwell; it was revived at the restoration in a narrower and more self-conscious form, when order was stressed but the sense of the universal meaning of order was largely lost. It was obscured throughout most of the Church's life of the eighteenth century, and it was revived by the Tractarians early in the nineteenth. The issue before the Tractarians (the Oxford movement) was, what essentially is the Church of England? Very widely it was held to be simply a State department; to contemporary English liberalism it was an English society formed by the confluence of various schools of English religious thought, but to the Tractarians it was the expression in English of the one historic and universal Church. 'I saw,' said Newman, 'that Reformation principles were powerless to save her. I kept ever before me that was something greater than the Established Church, and that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic set up from the beginning, of which she was the local presence and organ. She was nothing unless she was this.' Hence the Tractarian emphasis upon the Apostolic succession. Printed in large type in the first number of the Tracts of the Times were the words, 'OUR APOSTOLIC DESCENT'; and these words did not express merely a doctrine about the status of the clergy, a revived clericalism, but a belief that the rites of the English churches are not only acts wrought between Christ and Englishmen, but acts of Christ in His one universal Church in which Englishmen share through its representatives on English soil. This aspect of the English Church-its historic order, its sacramental life, its kinship with the pre-Reformation Church and with the Catholic elements still existing in Rome- has always appealed specially to one part of the English clergy and laity. Others have been more concerned with the Church's kinship with the Reformers, with preaching of the Gospel, with the conversion of the individual, and have been indifferent to Church order or have regarded it as something valuable only because it is ancient and because it is useful. Both these schools of though have existed side by side in the English Church; both have had their times of poverty and their times of wealth and revival; and it has become customary to rejoice in the Church's comprehensiveness and to stress the need for balance and for the due recognition of these two elements, besides the element that has kept alive the humanism of the Renaissance and has been known as the Broad or Liberal. But, if our reading of the New Testament and especially the Pauline Epistles is correct, these two truths- the Evangelical and the Catholic- are utterly one. To understand the Catholic Church and its life and order is to see it as the utterance of the Gospel of God; to understand the Gospel of God is to share with all the saints in the building up of the one Body of Christ. Hence these two aspects of Anglicanism cannot really be separated. It possesses a full Catholicity, only if it is faithful to the Gospel of God; and it is fully Evangelical insofar as it upholds the Church order wherein an important aspect of the Gospel is set forth. To belittle the witness of the Reformers and the English Church's debt to the Reformers is to miss something of the meaning of the Church of God. To belittle the Church order and regard it as indifferent is to fail in Evangelical insight since Church order is of the Gospel. Hence 'Catholicism' and 'Evangelicalism' are not two separate things that the Church of England must hold together by a great feat of compromise. Rightly understood, they are both facts that lie behind the Church of England, and, as the New Testament shows, they are one fact. A church's witness to the one Church of the ages is a part of its witness to the Gospel of God. Varities of thought and of apprehension of course exist. There are always those to whom certain aspects of truth appeal more than others. There may always be those who dwell cheifly upon the One Body, the Church, as the pillar and ground of truth; and there may always be those whose minds are more filled with the thought of Christ and the individual. 'He loved me and gave himself for me'. But there is a true and a false way of thinking of the comprehensiveness of the Anglican Church. It can never be rightly expressed in terms of Victorian Latitudinarism or broad-mindedness, or by saying 'here are two very different conceptions and theologies, but with a broad common-sense humanism we can combine them both.' Rather can the meaning of the Church of England be stated thus: 'Here is the one Gospel of God; inevitably it includes the scriptures, and salvation of the individual; as inevitably the order and the sacramental life of the Body of Christ, and the freedom of thought wherewith Christ has made men free.' Translated into practice this means that the parish priest has a heavy responsibility, he must preach the Gospel and expound the scriptures, and he must also proclaim the corporate life of the Church and the spiritual meaning of its order. In every parish the Prayer Book entitles the laity to hear the Gospel preached, and the Scripture expounded, and also to receive the full sacramental teaching of the historic Church including the ministry of Confession and Absolution for those who desire it. For the Anglican Church is committed not to vague position wherein the Evangelical and the Catholic views are alternatives, but to the scriptural faith wherein both elements are of one. It is her duty to train all her clergy in both these elements. Her Bishops are called to be not the judicious holders of a balance between two or three schools, but without any consciousness of party, to be the servants of the Gospel of God and the universal Church.' -Michael Ramsey. The Gospel and the Catholic Church.

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johnchiarello · 8 years ago

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Acts 6

ACTS 6

https://youtu.be/Vqgm3E4k95A Acts 6

https://ccoutreach87.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/3-23-17-acts-6.zip

Acts 6:2 Then the twelve called the multitude of the disciples unto them, and said, It is not reason that we should leave the word of God, and serve tables.

Acts 6:3 Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business.

Acts 6:4 But we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word.

ON VIDEO-

.Cookie parable

. ‘Wandering aimlessly’- who said this?

. ‘Another world’- ‘Not in the Bluff’- mouth of 2 witnesses

.Flour Bluff Park

.Prayer altars

.Church as community

.Feeding the poor

.Greek speaking Jews

.Alexander the Great

.Why Greek and not Latin?

.First Deacons

.Timon[s]

.Hahn

.Going to court

.Trump [yes- more ‘wire tapping’ stuff]

.NBC NEW ‘Fake news’ again

PAST POSTS- [Past teaching I did that relates to today’s post- ‘Acts 6’]

https://ccoutreach87.com/james-2015/

https://ccoutreach87.com/house-of-prayer-or-den-of-thieves/

https://ccoutreach87.com/overview-of-philosophy/

https://ccoutreach87.com/galatians-links/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/01/18/acts-1/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/01/26/acts-2/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/02/02/acts-3/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/02/09/acts-4/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/03/23/acts-5/

(739) ACTS 6- There arises the first controversy in the Jerusalem church. The fact that they were doing this daily massive food distribution led to an area of prejudice. The ‘Grecians’ [Greek speaking Jews] were being neglected. They were seen as a little lower on the scale of racial purity. They were speaking a language less pure than the Hebrew tongue. So the Apostles heard of the problem and said ‘pick out 7 men of good report, who have favor and wisdom and put them in charge of ‘this business’. In essence these were the first Deacons. The business was simply speaking of the duty of serving the food. Up until now the Apostles were involved with the distribution. But they said ‘we will devote ourselves to prayer and the Word’. This chapter is important, many well meaning church communions trace their practices of church government to this time. Are Deacons positions who ‘do the business of the 501 c 3’? Not really. Well, not at all! Are there ‘Pastors’ here in the modern idea of the office of a person who is over the flock and is the weekly speaker whom the people see every ‘Sunday’. No. Are these practices all wicked and from the devil? Of course not! But it does help to see what is actually going on. This early community saw the need for the leaders to devote time to the word and prayer. Fulltime ministry? Really more of a community adjustment allowing those with greater insight to propagate the gospel. Paul will later show us this doesn’t mean each separate community had ‘full time ministers’ who were forbidden to work secular jobs. He will continue to make tents thru out his life. But he will also teach that it is all right to meet the material needs of those who are ministering spiritual food. We also see the Apostles lay their hands on these first deacons. Is this some type of official ordination [recognition, licensing] from a seminary? Of course not. Is it wicked to attend seminary and have an ordination? Of course not. The principle of the ‘school of the prophets’ in Elijah’s day shows the possibility of God working thru these universities. It’s just we need to be careful we are not reading ideas into the story that are not faithful to the text. My reading of this chapter shows an organic community of people who were ‘the church’. They did have leadership and sought God for direction and weren’t imprisoned by any specific form of ‘church’. The main ingredient was a group of people sharing the life of Christ and living this life out as a community. All church communions have a tendency to read there own story into ‘Gods story’. That is we find isolated verses of scripture and say ‘see, this is why our church government does it this way’. It’s OK to a degree, but then when you see ‘our church government’ as the only true church government, that’s where problems arise. I think we should avoid looking for prescriptive patterns of ‘church government’ from the book of Acts. We should read the story as a community of people who are experiencing God and learning to walk out this experience as the Body of Christ. The great mystery is that God is ‘no longer dwelling in Temples made with hands’ but in a vibrant Body of people! [p.s. Stephen will quote this prophetic scripture in the next chapter as he does one of the most masterful jobs of an Old Testament survey to be found in the New Testament].

[parts]

Alexander sought to implement the ideals of his teacher- he wanted to unify the known world under one people/culture- a belief that Aristotle held- a sort of ‘unified theory’ [Einstein] that would seek to bring all learning/knowledge together under one supreme [Divine] principle.

Alexander died young and his kingdom was divided between 4 generals- one of them- Ptolemy- would himself make it into the history books because of his keen intellect.

The system of cosmology developed under him would last [and work!] until some 17-18 hundred years later when it was overthrown by the Copernican revolution during the time of Copernicus and Galileo.

Alexander established a great library in the Egyptian city of Alexandria [named after him] and many of the great writings were preserved during this time.

Bible scholars till this day study the Greek language to find the truest meaning of the actual words in the bible [I have a Greek Lexicon sitting right in front of me].

It would take a few centuries before a Latin version appeared on the scene [the great church father- Jerome- would produce the Latin Vulgate].

The Jews had various responses to the empires that ruled over them during various times.

Alexander the Great instituted Hellenization- a sort of cultural compromise over the people he conquered.

They could keep their religious/cultural roots- but would be subservient to Alexander and Greek rule.

Some Jewish people rejected any compromise- we call them the Essenes- they moved out of town- so to speak, and lived in what we refer to as the Qumran community.

This was a few centuries before the time of Christ- and this was where the Dead Seas Scrolls were found in the 20th century.

A Bedouin boy was looking for his goats- threw a rock in a cave right off the Dead Sea- and that’s how we found the scrolls.

The scrolls might have been hidden there by the Essenes-

Now- when my friends asked me about them- I told them that it’s been a while since I read up on any of this- but to the best of my memory the thing that made them significant was the fact that they were very old manuscripts- from the bible- and they backed up what we had had all along.

[parts]

VERSES-

Acts 6:1 And in those days, when the number of the disciples was multiplied, there arose a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration.

Acts 6:2 Then the twelve called the multitude of the disciples unto them, and said, It is not reason that we should leave the word of God, and serve tables.

Acts 6:3 Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business.

Acts 6:4 But we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word.

Acts 6:5 And the saying pleased the whole multitude: and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolas a proselyte of Antioch:

Acts 6:6 Whom they set before the apostles: and when they had prayed, they laid their hands on them.

Acts 6:7 And the word of God increased; and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly; and a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith.

Acts 6:8 And Stephen, full of faith and power, did great wonders and miracles among the people.

Acts 6:9 Then there arose certain of the synagogue, which is called the synagogue of the Libertines, and Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and of them of Cilicia and of Asia, disputing with Stephen.

Acts 6:10 And they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit by which he spake.

Acts 6:11 Then they suborned men, which said, We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses, and against God.

Acts 6:12 And they stirred up the people, and the elders, and the scribes, and came upon him, and caught him, and brought him to the council,

Acts 6:13 And set up false witnesses, which said, This man ceaseth not to speak blasphemous words against this holy place, and the law:

Acts 6:14 For we have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered us.

Acts 6:15 And all that sat in the council, looking stedfastly on him, saw his face as it had been the face of an angel.

James 2:5

Hearken, my beloved brethren, Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him?

Matthew 26:61

And said, This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days.

In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations

Mark 14:58

We heard him say, I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands.

In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations

John 2:19

Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy thistemple, and in three days I will raise it up.

In Context | Full Chapter | Other Translations

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Note- Please do me a favor, those who read/like the posts- re-post them on other sites as well as the site you read them on- Thanks- John.#

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