Protestantism, Modernism, Atheism

Crisis Magazine ^ | November 28, 2017 | Julia Meloni

[ebb tide]

“The reality of the apostasy of faith in our time rightly and profoundly frightens us,” said Cardinal Burke in honor of Fatima’s centenary.

In 1903, Pope St. Pius X declared himself “terrified” by humanity’s self-destructive apostasy from God: “For behold they that go far from Thee shall perish” (Ps. 72:27). How much more “daunting,” said Cardinal Burke, is today’s “widespread apostasy.”

In 1910, St. Pius X condemned the movement for a “One-World Church” without dogmas, hierarchy, or “curb for the passions”—a church which, “under the pretext of freedom,” would impose “legalized cunning and force.” How much more, said Cardinal Burke, do today’s “movements for a single government of the world” and “certain movements with the Church herself” disregard sin and salvation?

In Pascendi, St. Pius X named the trajectory toward the “annihilation of all religion”: “The first step … was taken by Protestantism; the second … by [the heresy of] Modernism; the next will plunge headlong into atheism.”

So let us, said Cardinal Burke, heed Fatima’s call for prayer, penance, and reparation. Let us be “agents” of the triumph of Mary’s Immaculate Heart.

A few weeks after that speech, the Vatican announced its shining tribute to the Protestant revolution: a golden stamp with Luther and Melanchthon at the foot of the cross, triumphantly supplanting the Blessed Virgin and St. John.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider has asked how the Vatican can call Luther a “witness to the gospel” when he “called the Mass … a blasphemy” and “the papacy an invention of Satan.” The signatories of the filial correction have expressed “wonderment and sorrow” at a statue of Luther in the Vatican—and documented the “affinity” between “Luther’s ideas on law, justification, and marriage” and Pope Francis’s statements.

At a 2016 joint “commemoration” of the Protestant revolution, Pope Francis expressed “joy” for its myriad “gifts.” He and pro-abortion Lutherans with female clergy jointly declared that “what unites us is greater than what divides us.” Together they “raise[d]” their “voices” against “violence.”   They prayed for the conversion of those who exploit the earth. They declared the “goal” of receiving the Eucharist “at one table” to express their “full unity.”

In Martin Luther: An Ecumenical Perspective, Cardinal Kasper confirms that the excommunicated, apostate monk is now a “common church father,” a new St. Francis of Assisi. This prophet of the “new evangelization” was “forced” into calling the pope the Antichrist after his “call for repentance was not heard.” But Kasper finds ecumenical hope in Luther’s “statement that he would…kiss the feet of a pope who allows and acknowledges his gospel.”

Kasper says Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium, “without mentioning him by name,” makes Luther’s concerns “stand in the center.”

So it’s Luther’s “gospel of grace and mercy” behind, apparently, the high disdain for “self-absorbed promethean neopelagianis[ts]” plagued by a “soundness of doctrine” that’s “narcissistic and authoritarian” (EG 94).

So it’s Luther—the bizarre protagonist of “ecumenical unity”—behind the demand for a “conversion of the papacy” that gives “genuine doctrinal authority” to episcopal conferences (EG 32). Sandro Magister says the pope is already creating a “federation of national Churches endowed with extensive autonomy” through liturgical decentralization.

So it’s Luther behind the demand to “accept the unruly freedom of the word, which accomplishes what it wills in ways that surpass our…ways of thinking” (EG 22). Kasper says Luther’s faith in the “self-implementation of the word of God” gave him a heroic “openness to the future.”

Ultimately, Kasper’s Luther—a prophet of “openness” to futurity, a “Catholic reformer” waiting for a sympathetic pope—emerges as a symbolic father for Modernism’s struggle to change the Church from within. Modernism falsely claims that God evolves with history—making truth utterly mutable. So Kasper the Modernist says dogmas can be “stupid” and Church structures can spring from “ideology” and denying the Eucharist to adulterers because of “one phrase” from Christ is “ideological,” too.

Kasper baldly calls the “changeless” God an “offense to man”:

One must deny him for man’s sake, because he claims for himself the dignity and honor that belong by right to man….

We must resist this God … also for God’s sake. He is not the true God at all, but rather a wretched idol. For a God … who is not himself history is a finite God. If we call such a being God, then for the sake of the Absolute we must become absolute atheists. Such a God springs from a rigid worldview; he is the guarantor of the status quo and the enemy of the new.

A shocking ultimatum from the man hailed as “the pope’s theologian”: either embrace a mutable God who’s not an “enemy of the new”—or profess “absolute,” unflinching, hardcore atheism.

Kasper says the Church must be led by a “spirit” that “is not primarily the third divine person.” That ominous “spirit,” says Thomas Stark, is apparently some Hegelian agent of creation’s self-perfection. Pope Francis, against all the “sourpusses” (EG 85), describes our “final cause” as “the utopian future” (EG 222). Because God wants us to be “happy” in this world, it’s “no longer possible to claim that religion … exists only to prepare souls for heaven” (EG 182).

But Christ said, “In the world you shall have distress” (Jn. 16:33). The 1907 dystopian novel The Lord of the World hauntingly imagines the travails of history’s last days, when humanity has heeded Kasper’s call to “resist” God with absolute atheism if necessary. By this point, “Protestantism is dead,” for men “recognize at last that a supernatural religion involves an absolute authority.” Those with “any supernatural belief left” are Catholic—persecuted by a world professing “no God but man, no priest but the politician.”

More and more clergy apostatize. Man “has learned his own divinity.” Yet Fr. Percy Franklin still adores the Eucharistic Lord, still believes that “the reconciling of a soul to God” is greater than the reconciling of nations. He secretly hears a dying woman’s confession before the “real priests”—the euthanizers—come.

Her daughter-in-law, Mabel, scoffs that the new atheism has perfected Catholicism:

Do you not understand that all which Jesus Christ promised has come true, though in another way? The reign of God has really begun; but we know now who God is. You said just now you wanted the forgiveness of Sins; well, you have that; we all have it, because there is no such thing as sin. There is only Crime.

And then Communion. You used to believe that that made you a partaker of God; well, we are all partakers of God, because we are all human beings.

Mabel and the rapt multitudes ritually worship Man. God was a “hideous nightmare.” Their spirits swoon before a politician promising “the universal brotherhood of man.”

That “savior of the world” is the Antichrist. All must deny God or die.

For history, like the novel itself, ends not with rapturous utopia but with tribulation, apostasy, martyrdoms, and “God’s triumph over the revolt of evil [in] the form of the Last Judgment” (CCC 677). In the throes of his own tribulation, Fr. Franklin calls us to cling to the faith and those refuges of old:

The mass, prayer, the rosary. These first and last. The world denies their power: it is on their power that Christians must throw all their weight.

[grey_whiskers]

I think you're conflating two different disagreements here.

"Less Filling!" "Leggo My Eggo!"

[boatbums]

Sure. But if one rationalizes the observance of the commandments and observes them based only on that reasoning, such an approach lacks the essential element of binding to G-d’s will and the person will be at increased risk of rationalizing an actual transgression.

Do you mean like the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law?

[grey_whiskers]

You are *so* misunderstanding / misapplying what I am saying, dude.

The Grace comes from God ("God's unmerited favor").

Our forgiveness of sins, and our justification, is solely through the Cross and the Resurrection.

But I think God can and does use all kinds of instruments / methods / tools (and yes, sometimes, gasp, even people, and even Saints...and sometimes even Miracles and Signs and inanimate objects) to attract our attention or soften our hearts or call us. Or even just because He's generous.

(See the story of people being healed when Peter's *shadow* passed over them. See the story of the man whose body was thrown into a tomb and touched the body of Elisha in 2 Kings 13, and the guy got up and ran away. Speaking of Elisha, look at the story of the man whose borrowed iron axe-head fell into the river in 2 Kings 6. There was no essential doctrinal significance to that story at the time.)

[grey_whiskers]

Finally getting back to your post.

Before I reply, I couldn't figure out specifically what that acronym PTCBIH means. Can you write out out explicitly?

[aMorePerfectUnion]

“Huh. Hebrews 12 kinda implies that they’re at least watching (and presumably, rooting for us).”

Commonly believed but not true. Chapter 11, the hall of faith, details amazing stories of people who trusted God, despite circumstances.

Chapter 12 starts with the connector word, “Therefore.” It links chapter 11 and chapter 12.

The cloud of witnesses are those who witness to faith through their lives in chapter 11.

There is no cheering, watching or awareness of us in the text.

The “great cloud of witnesses are those the author just detailed.

[grey_whiskers]

Read the rest of the chapter.

Verses 22-24 say

22Instead, you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to myriads of angels 23in joyful assembly, to the congregation of the firstborn, enrolled in heaven. You have come to God the judge of all men, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, 24to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

Note, the *heavenly* Jerusalem....and angels, ...the firstborn, enrolled in heaven, ...the spirits of righteous made perfect.

It doesn't say "when you die you are going to come to" but it says "you *have* come to".

[ealgeone]

“Counting” the posts took about four seconds, with “find.” I wasn’t neurotically hunched over the computer for hours.

But you took the time to do the search. It's neurotic no matter how you slice it.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

Gw ,

12:14–29 Is a new section contains the 5th warning in Hebrews: The Danger of Unresponsiveness

It is not about saints or angels watching and cheering.

[Elsie]

No one can read my mind.

I'd bet yer sweetie can!

[Elsie]

I find ‘em...
I post ‘em...

[Elsie]

I made no error on this at all.

Hey Vlad!

443 awaits your comments.

[Elsie]

When wanting a picture of dwarf,
Don’t settle for one of ol’ Worf.
That grumpy old Klingon,
No hymns be he singin’.
And his food? It’ll make y’all barf!

[Elsie]

Did you miss the scene when Saul had the prophet summoned by the medium/witch of Endor?

No.

---

1 Samuel 28:3-25  English Standard Version (ESV)

³ Now Samuel had died, and all Israel had mourned for him and buried him in Ramah, his own city. And Saul had put the mediums and the necromancers out of the land. ⁴ The Philistines assembled and came and encamped at Shunem. And Saul gathered all Israel, and they encamped at Gilboa. ⁵ When Saul saw the army of the Philistines, he was afraid, and his heart trembled greatly. ⁶ And when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord did not answer him, either by dreams, or by Urim, or by prophets. ⁷ Then Saul said to his servants, “Seek out for me a woman who is a medium, that I may go to her and inquire of her.” And his servants said to him, “Behold, there is a medium at En-dor.”

⁸ So Saul disguised himself and put on other garments and went, he and two men with him. And they came to the woman by night. And he said, “Divine for me by a spirit and bring up for me whomever I shall name to you.” ⁹ The woman said to him, “Surely you know what Saul has done, how he has cut off the mediums and the necromancers from the land. Why then are you laying a trap for my life to bring about my death?” ¹⁰ But Saul swore to her by the Lord, “As the Lord lives, no punishment shall come upon you for this thing.” ¹¹ Then the woman said, “Whom shall I bring up for you?” He said, “Bring up Samuel for me.” ¹² When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out with a loud voice. And the woman said to Saul, “Why have you deceived me? You are Saul.” ¹³ The king said to her, “Do not be afraid. What do you see?” And the woman said to Saul, “I see a god coming up out of the earth.” ¹⁴ He said to her, “What is his appearance?” And she said, “An old man is coming up, and he is wrapped in a robe.” And Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground and paid homage.

¹⁵ Then Samuel said to Saul, “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” Saul answered, “I am in great distress, for the Philistines are warring against me, and God has turned away from me and answers me no more, either by prophets or by dreams. Therefore I have summoned you to tell me what I shall do.” ¹⁶ And Samuel said, “Why then do you ask me, since the Lord has turned from you and become your enemy? ¹⁷ The Lord has done to you as he spoke by me, for the Lord has torn the kingdom out of your hand and given it to your neighbor, David. ¹⁸ Because you did not obey the voice of the Lord and did not carry out his fierce wrath against Amalek, therefore the Lord has done this thing to you this day. ¹⁹ Moreover, the Lord will give Israel also with you into the hand of the Philistines, and tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me. The Lord will give the army of Israel also into the hand of the Philistines.”

²⁰ Then Saul fell at once full length on the ground, filled with fear because of the words of Samuel. And there was no strength in him, for he had eaten nothing all day and all night. ²¹ And the woman came to Saul, and when she saw that he was terrified, she said to him, “Behold, your servant has obeyed you. I have taken my life in my hand and have listened to what you have said to me. ²² Now therefore, you also obey your servant. Let me set a morsel of bread before you; and eat, that you may have strength when you go on your way.” ²³ He refused and said, “I will not eat.” But his servants, together with the woman, urged him, and he listened to their words. So he arose from the earth and sat on the bed. ²⁴ Now the woman had a fattened calf in the house, and she quickly killed it, and she took flour and kneaded it and baked unleavened bread of it, ²⁵ and she put it before Saul and his servants, and they ate. Then they rose and went away that night.

[Elsie]

You might even note Stephen in Acts, while being stoned, prayed, "Do not hold this sin against them." That was mediating.

Hold up justa goldarned minute there, Partner...

Mediation

Mediation is the attempt to help parties in a disagreement to hear one another,

to minimise the harm that can come from disagreement (e.g. hostility or ‘demonising’ of the other parties)

to maximize any area of agreement, and to find a way of preventing the areas of disagreement from interfering

with the process of seeking a compromise or mutually agreed outcome.

[Elsie]

As far as I can tell from reading the thread, the idea of Sola Scriptura seems to be to act as a safeguard against certain errors or license, or idolatry: but the problem in practice, is that there seems to be a large share of Sola proponents, who automatically assume that any practice not in scripture, automatically gets mapped onto a list of probable sins or errors, and condemned.

Not quite.

1. They are superfluous
2. The folks who claim extra-biblical stuff INSIST that much of it is NEEDED and VITAL to salvation and pleasing GOD.

[Hrvatski Noahid]

> Do you mean like the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law?

There are actions for which the individual or the society is liable to be punished, since such behavior is not appropriate for the human race, even though it is beyond the scope of the Seven Commandments. But Gentiles are obligated to fulfill the Seven Noahide Commandments because they are the eternal command of G-d.

[Elsie]

Though 1 in 5 lack any humor,
Has a test confirmed this sad rumor?
With somber sad tones,
a crushed spirit dries up the bones.
May as well be Chuck Schumer.

[Elsie]

Incidentally, if your remark were true, then Moses and Elijah would not have been able to discuss with Jesus concerning His Death and Resurrection, during the Transfiguration.

Oh?

Matthew 17:1-8 ¹After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. ²There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. ³Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus. ⁴Peter said to Jesus, "LORD, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters-one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah." ⁵While he was still speaking, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!" ⁶When the disciples heard this, they fell facedown to the ground, terrified. ⁷But Jesus came and touched them. "Get up," he said. "Don't be afraid." ⁸When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.

Mark 9:2-8 ²After six days Jesus took Peter, James and John with him and led them up a high mountain, where they were all alone. There he was transfigured before them. ³His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. ⁴And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus. ⁵Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters-one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah." ⁶(He did not know what to say, they were so frightened.) ⁷Then a cloud appeared and covered them, and a voice came from the cloud: "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!" ⁸Suddenly, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus.

Luke 9:28-36 ²⁸About eight days after Jesus said this, he took Peter, John and James with him and went up onto a mountain to pray. ²⁹As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. ³⁰Two men, Moses and Elijah, appeared in glorious splendor, talking with Jesus. ³¹They spoke about his departure, which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem. ³²Peter and his companions were very sleepy, but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him. ³³As the men were leaving Jesus, Peter said to him, "Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters-one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah." (He did not know what he was saying.) ³⁴While he was speaking, a cloud appeared and covered them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. ³⁵A voice came from the cloud, saying, "This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him." ³⁶When the voice had spoken, they found that Jesus was alone. The disciples kept this to themselves and did not tell anyone at that time what they had seen.

2 Peter 1:16-18 ¹⁶For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our LORD Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. ¹⁷He received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased." ¹⁸We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.

 

 

HMMMmmm...

...it seems that your topic of discussion is not found in the Scriptures.

[Elsie]

Or someone’s homepage...