Posted on 04/02/2019 7:15:18 PM PDT by Rennes Templar
Are you sure of that?
Don’t give her any ideas. All she has to do is say one sentence in Arabic, and it’s done.
“When America headed up its constitution with We The People, it threw the dice on its future.”
It was eventually going to collapse into rubble. (Almost did in the 1850’s and 60’s). Or turn into Sodom and Gommorah and then collapse into rubble, if it turned out to be wildly successful. (As it did, wildly).
I just wish that the collapse had not happened while I lived. Not so lucky on that score.
“Identity politics over leadership. That’s the current commie party.”
Oh, their platform is one thing only...take out the white people. And that’s what their policy would achieve. It’s their only point of policy. It’s where we are heading.
An epic summary of our current circumstances.
Anyhow, those who still believe in Christ know that America is between a rock and a hard place. Either we have a widespread revival here making a semblance of the original constitutional vision viable again, or else we melt into barbarianism with its cold, and sporadically hot, wars.
I am not so sanguine on generic “conservatism” being able to win in and of itself in a secular sphere. De Tocqueville spoke of a country with the soul of a church. But that soul didn’t get here by means of laws ordering it to do so. It got here by people choosing to be part of it, choosing to say yes to God’s universal invitation.
I would say, a come to Jesus moment on a greatly multiplied personal level. I'm one of those old fashioned believers who asserts that Jesus is real, not figurative allegory for some hazy benevolent impulse inherent to us by which man must bring about his own salvation. We're sinners, and salvation must come from outside. Otherwise that "hazy benevolent impulse" will turn into something looking like Marxism where humans try to establish their own salvation without calling dependently on the Savior.
Even Donald Trump has been pressing the point of Christianity heavily. No fool he, Donald understands that his vision won't stand without that kind of spiritual basis. He might be the least Christian in the world himself for all we know (although God will forgive him abundantly) but at least he understands something about what Christendom ought to be doing and teaching.
It certainly is a system very vulnerable to such a fate.
God has put us in the time and place where we are for a reason. However painful our journey, God is not stupid or vacuous.
Israel was a divinely established nation that served as a display of what would happen under the old covenant as the nation obeyed and disobeyed in turn.
America is not specifically cited in the bible, but it is serving as a display of what happens to Christendom as it obeys or disobeys in turn.
I thought that even Islam wasn’t okay with flaming gayhood, though it has loopholes. They’d gladly overlook it for the sake of working more Islam into the West.
Not all that different than their grandparents who voted out of fear of losing medicare or social security.
And certainly no different than their grandparents who STILL won't stand up out of fear of being called the R word or for the good feels they get being "inclusive".
Fear is an emotion.
One could hope and pray. God uses the governments of the world as He wishes. To get rid of some of the Chicago Way in order to get a Gay Way in its place... not sure how good an overall bargain that is. But at least a Gay Way can be challenged in a different manner.
Fear is there in order to warn us to seek safety. The problem is bogus things pretending to offer safety. The safest thing is the thing that we can never see directly — that is, a saving God. God can use the things on earth to afford provision, but they never will be the ultimate source of that provision.
Great!
What part of Africa is she from?
If you’re polygamous, lesbo wives are a plus. You can have a threesome.
As a Protestant, I can accept that for a Protestant salvation is an individual enterprise. The implications of this observation are enormous. One can hardly explain the American Revolution without reference to the extraordinary revival that coursed through the colonies prior to the revolution. Literally thousands of colonials would gather in open fields to hear itinerants such as Wakefield preach to the masses. It was a phenomenon that swept the country which was to be repeated in many ways during the Civil War, especially in the South.
But a caveat is in order, the reason the faithful gathered in the fields to hear a preacher on top of a wagon was because the established church, especially in New England, excluded these preachers from their facilities. So we see the origins of the Chautauqua tradition in America. In this exclusion in which these preachers were barred from existing churches and forced to operate in the open, we see echoes of the practices in 17th century New England in which banishment occurred, Catholics were driven from Massachusetts to Rhode Island, nonconformity was emphatically discouraged with stocks and other punishments, and in extreme cases lapses into paranoia and witch trials.
The caveat should also include knowledge that the Mayflower Compact was essentially a socialist document and the attempts to settle in the Massachusetts Bay colony in the early 17th century were originally utopian or socialist experiments. They failed for the reasons that socialism universally fails but nevertheless the impulse was unmistakably there.
Having stated and illustrated the caveat, I nevertheless contend that Protestant faith postulates an essentially individual salvation. I have often written in this forum that Christian salvation is essentially retail event, it is, at least for the Protestant, an expression of a relationship between two people (emphasis intentionally put on "people"), the penitent and Jesus.
The implications of this individualistic salvation are enormous. It is the bedrock for the Declaration of Independence. It is impossible to imagine Thomas Jefferson writing, "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," without the idea that man is an individual, one who is created, recognized, and ultimately justified by God. It is impossible to consider the denial of the divine right of kings apart from the revolutionary idea of the sovereignty of the individual. So the legitimacy runs not from God to King to Subject but from God to man and then on loan to government. This syllogism is essential for the republican impulse that sparked the American Revolution.
This is of more than mere historical interest.
It is of immediate application to our present day elections and to the kind of government we will have, the kind of culture that government will permit, and the kind of religion, whether Catholic, Protestant or otherwise, which will be permitted to flourish or, rather, marginalized. Barack Obama makes no apologies for his belief that "salvation" (presumably meant by him in the secular sense but it is perhaps revealing that he resorts to the word) is strictly a group phenomenon. He says time and again that he came to recognize that his salvation can occur only in the context of salvation for the whole country.
The implication? Get with the program or you will frustrate "salvation." Consider what animates the left and not coincidentally makes the left so intolerant. The utopian impulse, or the impulse of the statist, to organize society in order to create an earthly heaven is an impulse which has been with us throughout history. We have noted that it infected the pilgrims and the result was not pretty. They nearly starved, they became intolerant, they became radicalized -a description which well describes every leftist movement history presents for study.
Yup
I'm not so sure.
The Bible contains a few of examples of top-down revival.
I would want to flee before the weather systems blew the sulfurous fumes toward my town!
Rahm was just not far enough left to satisfy the extreme left. Amazing.
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