My Christian faith is so strong that I’ll never waiver from it. But since my commitment to God in May 1993, I’ve never been a pushover. I can’t count the times I’ve been ridiculed, criticised and had the phrase “call yourself a Christian” thrown at me. The ridicule I can easily cope with, but the “call yourself a Christian” which is usually from a woke Christian is the one that gripes me the most. So a Christian is supposed to be a weak little person who sees what’s going off in the cathedrals and high churches now as being ok because we are meant to be meek and mild. That’s not what God wants. He wants us to speak out about the pathetic archbishop’s and their wishy washy views that keep them popular with the wishy washy Christian’s that we aren’t called to be. That’s easy. True Christianity isn’t easy. It’s being in a C of E church and listening to a vicar who you really liked talking about how evil the “racist EDL” are, at a time when I knew very little about the EDL but gathered from his comments that we aren’t supposed to defend our country. Its listening to the nice little elderly ladies after the sermon saying how awful those Jews are for how they behave towards Palestinians, knowing that they like to come to church every Sunday to have their ears tickled but receive no teaching on main world events that God needs us to hear. It’s hard putting “nice” vicars who you really like and who like you, and sweet little old ladies who you have respect for and have respect for you on what you know to be the right path when you haven’t been to Bible college yourself! It’s hard having people think differently of you and starting to be standoffish because of your views but refusing to budge from what you know is right. I had to many a time speak the truth though my voice was trembling and my knees shaking, and knowing they weren’t going to like me as much anymore.
Jesus wasn’t a walkover. The meek and mild Jesus stormed into the temple overturning tables and calling it a den of vipers for less than what’s happening in His churches now.
I reckon I should sign up at the local gym and get some muscle power to overturn a few tables myself. I may start at York Minster!
Great reply Syl. Keep speaking the truth to those people, and hopefully at least one of them will eventually wake up. But even if they don’t, the truth matters. 😀xx
Muscular Christianity. What would we give for dollops of that right now? As a Christian without a church, of an Anglican bent and deeply in love with the KJ Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, I'd probably be a member of the C of E. Were it not for the C of E... Welby the final straw, when during Covid, he publicly stigmatized those of us smart enough to say no to the jab.
Daniel - signed up to your Substack as a result of your book on evil incarnate, Billy Boy Gates. Thoroughly enjoy your pieces, AND the unalloyed anger that pours of the page. Knocking on 73, I'm as angry as ever I have been about what has been done to us, and is coming down the pipeline. 73 is no age for the barricades, but when there is no other choice...
Thanks very much Jeremy. I’m a mere 50, but I feel 73 😉 great to hear you’ve read the book on Gates, and I’m glad you’re enjoying the Substack as well. We should feel anger at what’s being done. As Johnny Rotten says, anger is an energy. 😀
I've been severely angry since March 2020; very action I took was fuelled by it. I'm also into my 73rd year.
The anger now sits as an ember smoldering away in my soul.
The other way I think Christianity has been hijacked by the left is they use it to justify socialism, as in the spirit of Robin Hood (robbing hoodlum).
Daniel - most of the time I feel 50 - think it may be down to my wife and I going carnivore four years back. Seems to fix a lot of stuff and rejuvenate you - of course, Homo sapiens was carnivore for however long we have been around - c250k years? (ignoring our precursors as well) until around 6k years back with the advent of agriculture. But hell, yes, I am ANGRY!
Christianity is the theological construct that was designed to provide an interpretation of Jesus which would make itself suitable to Caesar. Never mind Jesus said give to Caesar what is Caesar's and give to God what is God's. Christianity is the perversion of the teachings of Jesus that made them suitable for ultimately becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity gives what is God's to Caesar. We need to clearly distinguish Christianity, which was the creation of Peter and Paul and the rest of the apostles (who were clearly told by Jesus there was much they would not understand till later, but never mind, they turned it around and started telling Jesus what it was he said), and the emperor Constantine brought that process to a close by forcing the bishops at the point of sword to agree on a suitable (to him) definition of what Christianity was.
Another way of putting it is that Christianity made a dualistic religion our of a non-dualistic teaching, which is a process that is very common in all religions: the original inspiration is subverted and turned into something that is useful to the world. Never mind Jesus said his Kingdom was NOT of this world. That statement was conveniently ignored by most of Christianity.
only shelves full. I could keep you busy for a lifetime. Modestly, I will point you to my own book "Closing the Circle: Pursah's Gospel of Thomas and A Course In Miracles." That explores one particular dimension, namely how the original Jesus spoke, before he was heavily edited by Paul. The Jefferson Bible, is another angle, for Jefferson sensed on his stocking feet that the Bible twisted Jesus around, and he excerpted the actual saying, and dismissed the ones he could not make sense of. I might not always agree with his choices, but the direction was right - trying to get back to what Jesus actually sounded like without the later theologizing. Some of the easy books on early Christianity include Bart Ehrman´s. He had the keen sense that there was cognitive dissonance between Jesus and Paul & friends. Then there is always the book Constantine's Sword, which is a marvellous reflection of how the Emperor Constantine forced a single concept of what was Christian and what was not. There are endless histories of how the NT canon was selected, explaining why Matthew and Luke were placed first for theological reasons, even though Mark is older, and in a lot of ways cleaner. The Thomas was rediscovered, and it is even older than Mark. There are whole entire libraries on early Christianity. One good source is The Other Bible by Willis Barnstone, containing a good dose of relevant apocryphal literature. As Ehrman puts it somewhere, before Nicea (325), there were 25,000 "Christianities," and today we are back to those sorts of numbers. Some concepts seem to have died out altogether, but you can find traces in the older literature. Endless fun. My early education was from reading my NT in Greek and carefully sorting out some anachronisms which put later theology in Jesus' mouth. That alone is revealing. Then I intensely studied Mark, with one commentary in particular (in Dutch, sorry), where the author comes to the conclusion that the baptism in the River Jordan was the moment of the Resurrection, so that the Resurrection was thought to come before the crucifixion, and Jesus was no longer of this world well before they crucified his body. Note also in the Acts of John, how several of the Apostles experienced him, but looking very differently.
Sorry for my late response to your generous listing of resources. Which TBH I'll not get to half of them, as I'm not inclined to make full-time study of it. I delved into A Course in Miracles, a decade ago. Then I read Bart Erhman's How Jesus Became God, which made every bit of sense to me. Then I questioned whether Jesus had actually existed, but couldn't chew on the dense writings of Carrier and Price. But I keep coming back to the idea of "not throwing the baby out with the bath water" when it comes to Christianity. Because where/how else are we to draw that line in the sand between moral rectitude, and grotesque debauchery?
I have ended up firmly with A Course in Miracles, that is the closest thing to how I understand Jesus, and with a lot of details that I was missing earlier.
Thank you for a fascinating contribution to the discussion and for those listed resources, which I also think sound very useful. I've not studied the life of the early Christians closely enough to comment except in the broader historical sense I do in my article, so all detailed knowledge is appreciated.
Yes, it helps to put yourself in the position of the man in the moon looking down on all this, and how in the old days of early Christianity, every community had their own version of Christianity, and there were lively arguments about if the resurrection was before or after the crucifixion, and then the Emperor Constantine forces the bishops at the point of sword to come up with a consensus definition of what Christianity is (325 Nicea), and Bishop Athanasius defines the canonical New Testament (367 AD), and for a moment it appears as if Christianity was one thing, as per the Nicene creed. It was an illusion of consensus, just as much as in our day politicians manufacture an illusion of consensus about viruses, vaccines, or climate change. It seems to make no sense that the dialogue about the meaning of Jesus should collapse into one for one brief moment and all the thousands of communities really agreed. That seems like an absurd notion, and yet, history is written by the winners, and that was pretty much the Roman church, which however had its own battles with dissension in the ranks, and the first big evidence was the splitting off of the Eastern orthodox church, but there were many others, like the Thomasine communities in India, who practiced very differently based on what they were taught by the apostle Thomas, who ended up in Kerala. The story is hilarious of the Portuguese who came ( ca 15th century) and initially thought they were meeting Christian brothers and embraced them, but once they figured out how different were the practices and various details of the faith, they began to prosecute them as heretics.
I read your article, and would have commented there but am not able to unless as a paid subscriber. But I too from an early age was a seeker for a more resonant truth than what I found in church. I became a meditator in my teens; here's an excerpt from my book:
"Maharishi told us that human suffering is due to a narrowed consciousness of the full reality of life--that happiness and fulfillment are our natural state. In those days, such ideas were extraordinary. But it all made sense to me--this concept of a supreme intelligence at the source of all and everything. It affirmed my Christian belief in a fundamental goodness and purpose to life. It was also my first introduction to the idea of enlightenment, which I intuited to be harmonious with the concept of Christ consciousness."
Yes, thanks. Once you intuit even a little bit that by definition spirit is what we are, and is the only reality, you cannot unsee it, and it does not matter how our journeys go, we cannot end up anywhere else, but in truth, for the simple reason that only truth is true and everything else is a lie. In other words, everything outside of truth is Maya, by definition. so you can try all the flavors, and it will take you a long time, but in the end still only truth is true, ant that is really Truth with a capital T, not the relative truth of the world, where one thing is truer than another.
The conception of The Church of England is a conspicuous case in point. Still, I’d rather have a government “endorsing” the Faith, however cynically, than one that seeks to plow it under.
Not even a century old! I think the 1960s were when the rot became visible and celebrated, when it became OK to be "different" in ways that people had mostly never thought of or, if they had, had kept them to themselves. There have always be those who followed their own perversions throughout history - mostly people who could afford to - but the 1960s brought so much of it into the mainstream and it's been downhill ever since.
The 1960s is indeed when the rot really set in. But it had been building really from the same point that Comunism built from, and there was a crisis of faith in the late 19th century. WWI and WWII also had huge effects on it all.
As I see it, “the collapse of belief” has occurred in two stages — the first associated with Darwinism at around the time of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” The second was post-1950’s. Just as Kamala Harris and her ilk have prattled on about “reimagining the police,” so my generation started reimagining Christian worship. Ross Douthat’s book “Bad Religion” is very good on this subject. Cultural self-loathing followed hard upon. Is there a “fix”? All I know how to do is vote for Trump, which is weird, to be sure.
Love this thought provoking, but also a very thoughtful piece. You scratched and scraped around in the fog, the deceptive disinformation, rhetoric, and misleading bull 💩, and found that beautiful jewel ... the heart and soul of Christianity.
"Woke" is just the latest in a long line of attempts to subvert the truth of God's Word. This is what the devil does. When it finally fades it will be replaced with another form of insidious nonsense. But hey, God wins in the end.
Broadly speaking - as 20th century technological wizardry rolled out over the old verities of Christendom - the Universal Love moral imperative came to be re-imagined as Social Justice. This shares many characteristics with the old religion. A big part of the pull of the Social Justice religion (as with all the Abrahamic religions) is the salvation it promises. No you don’t get to go to Heaven but you do get to feel very virtuous. And so much more so than your ‘uncaring’ redneck peers. Thus has it become (for everyone other than intellectual contrarians) a 21st c. article of faith; existing on a rarefied plane beyond the scope of political/philosophical interrogation. Disrespecting it is blasphemy...as in “So you don’t care about injustice then?!” And [in this essay] I am about to disrespect it and argue that it is a flimsy kind of religion. A moral and philosophical flimsiness spread out on a global canvas.... and a heavenly kingdom with bureaucracy hard-wired into it...... https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/love-of-the-people
My Christian faith is so strong that I’ll never waiver from it. But since my commitment to God in May 1993, I’ve never been a pushover. I can’t count the times I’ve been ridiculed, criticised and had the phrase “call yourself a Christian” thrown at me. The ridicule I can easily cope with, but the “call yourself a Christian” which is usually from a woke Christian is the one that gripes me the most. So a Christian is supposed to be a weak little person who sees what’s going off in the cathedrals and high churches now as being ok because we are meant to be meek and mild. That’s not what God wants. He wants us to speak out about the pathetic archbishop’s and their wishy washy views that keep them popular with the wishy washy Christian’s that we aren’t called to be. That’s easy. True Christianity isn’t easy. It’s being in a C of E church and listening to a vicar who you really liked talking about how evil the “racist EDL” are, at a time when I knew very little about the EDL but gathered from his comments that we aren’t supposed to defend our country. Its listening to the nice little elderly ladies after the sermon saying how awful those Jews are for how they behave towards Palestinians, knowing that they like to come to church every Sunday to have their ears tickled but receive no teaching on main world events that God needs us to hear. It’s hard putting “nice” vicars who you really like and who like you, and sweet little old ladies who you have respect for and have respect for you on what you know to be the right path when you haven’t been to Bible college yourself! It’s hard having people think differently of you and starting to be standoffish because of your views but refusing to budge from what you know is right. I had to many a time speak the truth though my voice was trembling and my knees shaking, and knowing they weren’t going to like me as much anymore.
Jesus wasn’t a walkover. The meek and mild Jesus stormed into the temple overturning tables and calling it a den of vipers for less than what’s happening in His churches now.
I reckon I should sign up at the local gym and get some muscle power to overturn a few tables myself. I may start at York Minster!
Great reply Syl. Keep speaking the truth to those people, and hopefully at least one of them will eventually wake up. But even if they don’t, the truth matters. 😀xx
Muscular Christianity. What would we give for dollops of that right now? As a Christian without a church, of an Anglican bent and deeply in love with the KJ Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, I'd probably be a member of the C of E. Were it not for the C of E... Welby the final straw, when during Covid, he publicly stigmatized those of us smart enough to say no to the jab.
Daniel - signed up to your Substack as a result of your book on evil incarnate, Billy Boy Gates. Thoroughly enjoy your pieces, AND the unalloyed anger that pours of the page. Knocking on 73, I'm as angry as ever I have been about what has been done to us, and is coming down the pipeline. 73 is no age for the barricades, but when there is no other choice...
Keep up the good work!
Thanks very much Jeremy. I’m a mere 50, but I feel 73 😉 great to hear you’ve read the book on Gates, and I’m glad you’re enjoying the Substack as well. We should feel anger at what’s being done. As Johnny Rotten says, anger is an energy. 😀
I've been severely angry since March 2020; very action I took was fuelled by it. I'm also into my 73rd year.
The anger now sits as an ember smoldering away in my soul.
The other way I think Christianity has been hijacked by the left is they use it to justify socialism, as in the spirit of Robin Hood (robbing hoodlum).
Daniel - most of the time I feel 50 - think it may be down to my wife and I going carnivore four years back. Seems to fix a lot of stuff and rejuvenate you - of course, Homo sapiens was carnivore for however long we have been around - c250k years? (ignoring our precursors as well) until around 6k years back with the advent of agriculture. But hell, yes, I am ANGRY!
Christianity is the theological construct that was designed to provide an interpretation of Jesus which would make itself suitable to Caesar. Never mind Jesus said give to Caesar what is Caesar's and give to God what is God's. Christianity is the perversion of the teachings of Jesus that made them suitable for ultimately becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity gives what is God's to Caesar. We need to clearly distinguish Christianity, which was the creation of Peter and Paul and the rest of the apostles (who were clearly told by Jesus there was much they would not understand till later, but never mind, they turned it around and started telling Jesus what it was he said), and the emperor Constantine brought that process to a close by forcing the bishops at the point of sword to agree on a suitable (to him) definition of what Christianity was.
Another way of putting it is that Christianity made a dualistic religion our of a non-dualistic teaching, which is a process that is very common in all religions: the original inspiration is subverted and turned into something that is useful to the world. Never mind Jesus said his Kingdom was NOT of this world. That statement was conveniently ignored by most of Christianity.
I find this intriguing. Do you know of any particular books or other writings that explain this more fully?
only shelves full. I could keep you busy for a lifetime. Modestly, I will point you to my own book "Closing the Circle: Pursah's Gospel of Thomas and A Course In Miracles." That explores one particular dimension, namely how the original Jesus spoke, before he was heavily edited by Paul. The Jefferson Bible, is another angle, for Jefferson sensed on his stocking feet that the Bible twisted Jesus around, and he excerpted the actual saying, and dismissed the ones he could not make sense of. I might not always agree with his choices, but the direction was right - trying to get back to what Jesus actually sounded like without the later theologizing. Some of the easy books on early Christianity include Bart Ehrman´s. He had the keen sense that there was cognitive dissonance between Jesus and Paul & friends. Then there is always the book Constantine's Sword, which is a marvellous reflection of how the Emperor Constantine forced a single concept of what was Christian and what was not. There are endless histories of how the NT canon was selected, explaining why Matthew and Luke were placed first for theological reasons, even though Mark is older, and in a lot of ways cleaner. The Thomas was rediscovered, and it is even older than Mark. There are whole entire libraries on early Christianity. One good source is The Other Bible by Willis Barnstone, containing a good dose of relevant apocryphal literature. As Ehrman puts it somewhere, before Nicea (325), there were 25,000 "Christianities," and today we are back to those sorts of numbers. Some concepts seem to have died out altogether, but you can find traces in the older literature. Endless fun. My early education was from reading my NT in Greek and carefully sorting out some anachronisms which put later theology in Jesus' mouth. That alone is revealing. Then I intensely studied Mark, with one commentary in particular (in Dutch, sorry), where the author comes to the conclusion that the baptism in the River Jordan was the moment of the Resurrection, so that the Resurrection was thought to come before the crucifixion, and Jesus was no longer of this world well before they crucified his body. Note also in the Acts of John, how several of the Apostles experienced him, but looking very differently.
Sorry for my late response to your generous listing of resources. Which TBH I'll not get to half of them, as I'm not inclined to make full-time study of it. I delved into A Course in Miracles, a decade ago. Then I read Bart Erhman's How Jesus Became God, which made every bit of sense to me. Then I questioned whether Jesus had actually existed, but couldn't chew on the dense writings of Carrier and Price. But I keep coming back to the idea of "not throwing the baby out with the bath water" when it comes to Christianity. Because where/how else are we to draw that line in the sand between moral rectitude, and grotesque debauchery?
I have ended up firmly with A Course in Miracles, that is the closest thing to how I understand Jesus, and with a lot of details that I was missing earlier.
https://rogiervanvlissingen.substack.com/p/jesus-in-the-course-and-the-bible?r=8tut8
Thank you for a fascinating contribution to the discussion and for those listed resources, which I also think sound very useful. I've not studied the life of the early Christians closely enough to comment except in the broader historical sense I do in my article, so all detailed knowledge is appreciated.
Yes, it helps to put yourself in the position of the man in the moon looking down on all this, and how in the old days of early Christianity, every community had their own version of Christianity, and there were lively arguments about if the resurrection was before or after the crucifixion, and then the Emperor Constantine forces the bishops at the point of sword to come up with a consensus definition of what Christianity is (325 Nicea), and Bishop Athanasius defines the canonical New Testament (367 AD), and for a moment it appears as if Christianity was one thing, as per the Nicene creed. It was an illusion of consensus, just as much as in our day politicians manufacture an illusion of consensus about viruses, vaccines, or climate change. It seems to make no sense that the dialogue about the meaning of Jesus should collapse into one for one brief moment and all the thousands of communities really agreed. That seems like an absurd notion, and yet, history is written by the winners, and that was pretty much the Roman church, which however had its own battles with dissension in the ranks, and the first big evidence was the splitting off of the Eastern orthodox church, but there were many others, like the Thomasine communities in India, who practiced very differently based on what they were taught by the apostle Thomas, who ended up in Kerala. The story is hilarious of the Portuguese who came ( ca 15th century) and initially thought they were meeting Christian brothers and embraced them, but once they figured out how different were the practices and various details of the faith, they began to prosecute them as heretics.
I read your article, and would have commented there but am not able to unless as a paid subscriber. But I too from an early age was a seeker for a more resonant truth than what I found in church. I became a meditator in my teens; here's an excerpt from my book:
"Maharishi told us that human suffering is due to a narrowed consciousness of the full reality of life--that happiness and fulfillment are our natural state. In those days, such ideas were extraordinary. But it all made sense to me--this concept of a supreme intelligence at the source of all and everything. It affirmed my Christian belief in a fundamental goodness and purpose to life. It was also my first introduction to the idea of enlightenment, which I intuited to be harmonious with the concept of Christ consciousness."
Yes, thanks. Once you intuit even a little bit that by definition spirit is what we are, and is the only reality, you cannot unsee it, and it does not matter how our journeys go, we cannot end up anywhere else, but in truth, for the simple reason that only truth is true and everything else is a lie. In other words, everything outside of truth is Maya, by definition. so you can try all the flavors, and it will take you a long time, but in the end still only truth is true, ant that is really Truth with a capital T, not the relative truth of the world, where one thing is truer than another.
The conception of The Church of England is a conspicuous case in point. Still, I’d rather have a government “endorsing” the Faith, however cynically, than one that seeks to plow it under.
Looks like the "plowing under" may have begun. I've time-stamped this video to start with the main point: https://youtu.be/Zcmls0r58y0?si=mdbPR6qPdnurymVd
Not even a century old! I think the 1960s were when the rot became visible and celebrated, when it became OK to be "different" in ways that people had mostly never thought of or, if they had, had kept them to themselves. There have always be those who followed their own perversions throughout history - mostly people who could afford to - but the 1960s brought so much of it into the mainstream and it's been downhill ever since.
The 1960s is indeed when the rot really set in. But it had been building really from the same point that Comunism built from, and there was a crisis of faith in the late 19th century. WWI and WWII also had huge effects on it all.
As I see it, “the collapse of belief” has occurred in two stages — the first associated with Darwinism at around the time of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” The second was post-1950’s. Just as Kamala Harris and her ilk have prattled on about “reimagining the police,” so my generation started reimagining Christian worship. Ross Douthat’s book “Bad Religion” is very good on this subject. Cultural self-loathing followed hard upon. Is there a “fix”? All I know how to do is vote for Trump, which is weird, to be sure.
Christianity has been around a long time. Woke happened only recently, and in a time when Christianity is being swept under the table.
Love this thought provoking, but also a very thoughtful piece. You scratched and scraped around in the fog, the deceptive disinformation, rhetoric, and misleading bull 💩, and found that beautiful jewel ... the heart and soul of Christianity.
Thank you.
"Woke" is just the latest in a long line of attempts to subvert the truth of God's Word. This is what the devil does. When it finally fades it will be replaced with another form of insidious nonsense. But hey, God wins in the end.
Broadly speaking - as 20th century technological wizardry rolled out over the old verities of Christendom - the Universal Love moral imperative came to be re-imagined as Social Justice. This shares many characteristics with the old religion. A big part of the pull of the Social Justice religion (as with all the Abrahamic religions) is the salvation it promises. No you don’t get to go to Heaven but you do get to feel very virtuous. And so much more so than your ‘uncaring’ redneck peers. Thus has it become (for everyone other than intellectual contrarians) a 21st c. article of faith; existing on a rarefied plane beyond the scope of political/philosophical interrogation. Disrespecting it is blasphemy...as in “So you don’t care about injustice then?!” And [in this essay] I am about to disrespect it and argue that it is a flimsy kind of religion. A moral and philosophical flimsiness spread out on a global canvas.... and a heavenly kingdom with bureaucracy hard-wired into it...... https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/love-of-the-people