Anticipating persecution

Russell Moore approvingly retweets this:

Well. Since Russell Moore is the head of the Southern Baptist’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and led the rush to deny that a Trump supporter could be a r-e-e-e-a-l evangelical, one wonders what memorable thing Moore had to say — No?

It seems he so impressed Mr. Cunningham when leading a group of seminarians to the prison in which, according to tradition, Paul was kept before his execution. (Nobody actually knows where Paul was imprisoned.)

The hole lead straight down into a tiny dungeon cell that was dark, damp, and cold. A cell where Paul probably penned his last letter to his disciple Timothy, just moments before his death.

And here we were, some 2,000 years later, gathered around Dr. Moore as he began to read some of those words Paul wrote to Timothy all those years ago.

He read (2 Timothy 2:9),

“for which I am suffering, bound with chains as a criminal. But the word of God is not bound!”

In that moment those words came alive like never before.

Because the Roman Empire has collapsed, but people still read Paul, et cetera, et cetera.

How can you not laugh? After all …

• 2 Timothy is almost universally thought by Biblical scholars to be a forgery and not written by Paul.

  Most modern critical scholars argue that 2 Timothy was not written by Paul but by an anonymous follower, after Paul’s death in the First Century.[1][2]

  The language and ideas of this epistle are notably different from the other two Pastoral letters yet similar to the later Pauline letters, especially the ones he wrote in captivity. This has led some scholars to conclude that the author of 2 Timothy is a different person from 1 Timothy and Titus.

• This is precisely the same thought offered by Shelley, in Ozymandias.

  And on the pedestal these words appear:
  `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
  Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
  The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

  There is nothing very original going on here.

• And, of course, since Christianity rests upon a well-documented raft of nonsense, that is the empire which is collapsing.

Nor is our earnest scholar done.

Today, we face a similar age that screams in our ears the same devilish lie that we are losing right now, and will lose in the end. But take a lesson from that prison cell in Rome, things are not always as the appear right now.

Yes, it may be true that in days ahead we may also find ourselves behind bars for the gospel we preach. But if we are, those bars will no more contain our message than they did Paul’s.

These people live in an enclosed, self-sustaining fantasy world; there is no hope of reasoning with them, or drawing them into the communion of goodwill that has enabled the survival of humanity in spite of their degrading metaphysics and appalling superstitions. They must be defeated.