Civil Commotion

‘Christology’ is that branch of theology concerned with the nature of the man Jesus, a subject of dispute since the very first century anno domini. Don’t bother mentioning to these evangelical intellectuals that there is a solid basis for questioning whether or not the man Jesus ever even existed; they won’t hear it.

Here is an annotated version of the statement which Albert the Pious urges all godly, right-minded people to affirm:

We confess the mystery and wonder
  of God made flesh
  and rejoice in our great salvation
  For we are all born no damn good, and deserve to burn in hell forever
  through Jesus Christ our Lord.

With the Father and the Holy Spirit,
  the Son created all things,
  sustains all things,
  and makes all things new.
  We believe these things without a scintilla of evidence
  Truly God,
  He became truly man,
  two natures in one person.
  According to the Compromise of Nicaea

He was born of the Virgin Mary
  This was not known to the first generation of Christians
  and lived among us.
  Crucified, dead, and buried,
  He rose on the third day,
  ascended to heaven,
  You’d think there’d be a contemporaneous record of an event like this
  and will come again  
  This was supposed to happen within His generation, but … WHOOPS!
  in glory and judgement.

For us,
  He kept the Law,
  atoned for sin,
  and satisfied God’s wrath.
  For we are no damn good
  He took our filthy rags
  It is touching us which soils our clothing
  and gave us
  His righteous robe.

He is our Prophet, Priest, and King,
  building His church,
  interceding for us,
  Interceding with Himself, mind you
  and reigning over all things.
  His reign has no responsibility for misfortune, however

Jesus Christ is Lord;
  we praise His holy Name forever.

Amen.

Bah. These people are idiots, and so are those who can’t see that.

My party has gone batshit crazy.

Lindsay Graham

Pop a Tums and go read the article it links to.

The mainline churches are just as plagued as the Bible Belt by people who think they are Christians when they are not.

I [John Piper] live in Minnesota and to be Minnesotan is almost to be Lutheran or Catholic. And those churches just as much as any Baptist church in the Bible Belt are shot through with people who think they are Christians when they are not.

To ‘get’ the punch-line, you need to understand that Piper is a Calvinist who is very big on bovine submission, death-wish theology, the you’re-no-damn-good schtick; what he is complaining about, the people he is condemning as misguided, are the people his decadent cult has failed to totally crush.

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
Sinclair Lewis (attr)

There is yet another round of explanations of Trump’s popularity among Republicans, especially evangelicals.

Before discussing them, I should concede that my confidence that Trump would flame-out quickly was mistaken. It has been obvious for a long time, to anybody with two eyeballs connected to a working mind, that the Republican Party is a dysfunctional mess. Even so, I believed the party still had a sane backbone which would dismiss him quickly.

Sorry. My bad. The sane have left. It’s like when a gathering is over and the adults have all gone home, but a handful of hangers-on remain behind to revel in their nihilism and drink till their eyeballs fall out — they are the modern GOP.

But Ellis Washington has an entirely different theory of it; he believes Americans are charmed by a real-life instance of John Galt, the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Unlike Trump, who is a real American icon of flesh and blood, Rand’s Galt protagonist in Atlas Shrugged, was originally conceived as a symbolic figure of free market capitalism rather than a “two-dimensional” or realistic person. In an earlier essay I liken Trump to the legendary Olympian god, Prometheus, a comparison that Galt has been equated to, as well as to other iconic figures from literature and history. “More icon than character” was how writer Mimi Reisel Gladstein defined Galt as being portrayed. Ayn Rand’s own notes specified that she anticipated that the Galt character would possess “[n]o progression” and “no inner conflict” because he was “integrated (indivisible) and perfect.”

Trump and Galt follow a very nonconformist, iconoclastic worldview the diametrical opposite of Collectivist, Socialist, and Marxist economic organization portrayed in the novel, in which society controlled by legions of tyrannical apparatchiks and incompetent bureaucrats create a corrupt culture that fosters mediocrity in the name of egalitarianism not equality (e.g., equality of out comes over equality of access), which the novel understands as the inevitable consequence of socialist idealism.

Washington overlooks that John Galt (and Hank Rearden, and Francisco d’Anconia, the other heroes of Rand’s novel) are ethical businessmen who actually produce stuff. Trump has gone bankrupt four times, leaving the people who accepted his valueless promises empty-handed.

But that’s not how Sarah Posner sees it. No. She thinks evangelicals are flocking to Trump because he is a political version of Joel Osteen, that Trump is, basically, a prosperity gospel televangelist.

But Trump, whose Bible has seemed like more of prop than a campaign-animating principle, understands other impulses of evangelical voters. This intuition also enabled him to best Cruz, 30 to 13 percent, among non-evangelical voters in South Carolina.

That impulse, which is Trumpism in a nutshell, is the magical thinking of how Americans get rich, whether it’s by surviving a reality television show, getting lucky with an investment, winning the lottery or being blessed by God.

I’ll grant there is a lot of magical thinking going on, but that’s the only thing Posner gets right. Trump’s crude insults of — everybody, actually — should have undone him a long time ago, but they haven’t; that’s because they are what his admirers want. Trump isn’t running on promises of easy riches (though he has promised that, too), but on the envy and malice of those left behind by change. He is a perverse maestro of class warfare.

Friedrich Nietzsche had Trump’s number a long time ago.

The aristocratic outlook was undermined from the deepest underworld through the lie of the equality of souls; and if faith in the “prerogative of the majority” makes and will make revolutions — it is Christianity, beyond a doubt, it is Christian value judgments, that every revolution simply translates into blood and crime. Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the “lowly” lowers …

The Antichrist, §43

I don’t think that the country writ large is as sick as the Republicans, but I sure wish the Democrats had stronger candidates.