Category: Progressive Christianity

03May

An Old Easter Message is Resurrected, to the Chagrin of Anglican Centre Director

On the heels of the previous article, another case of “resurrection denial” has come to my attention. In January of this year, the former Dean of Perth in Australia, the Very Reverend Dr. John Shepherd, was appointed interim director of the Anglican Centre in Rome, only to face a sudden firestorm of criticism stemming from an Easter message he posted online in 2008. One cheekily worded headline (Eternity News) observed, “Church Leader Finds Internet Never Forgets”.

In the message that was “resurrected” (pardon the pun), Dr Shepherd states:

The Resurrection of Jesus ought not to be seen in physical terms, but as a new spiritual reality. It is important for Christians to be set free from the idea that the Resurrection was an extraordinary physical event which restored to life Jesus’ original earthly body.
…
Jesus’ early followers felt His presence after His death as strongly as if it were a physical presence and incorporated this sense of a resurrection experience into their gospel accounts. But they’re not historical records as we understand them. They are symbolic images of the breaking through of the resurrection spirit into human lives.
…
Jesus lived … as a transformed spiritual reality.

Apparently, this was old news to other Anglicans in his region. A group identifying itself as “Sydney Anglicans” noted way back in 2003:

Dr Shepherd wrote that it was not necessary to believe the Gospel accounts of Jesus appearing to his disciples, that Jesus was physically and literally raised to heaven, or that he will come again ‘in the form in which he has already been present on earth’.
He also said that there is no need to believe “there will be a final judgment where the righteous will be accepted into a so-called heaven, and sinners condemned to everlasting damnation.”

Perhaps the senior cleric has changed his mind. To his critics, Dr. Shepherd says, “I have never denied the reality of the empty tomb”. His efforts to distance himself from his earlier comments appear to have been successful. Calls for him to be removed from his position have gone unheeded, and the controversy seems to have evaporated.

For further reading:

David Ould, Jan 10, 2029. “NEW HEAD OF ANGLICAN CENTRE IN ROME IS DENIER OF JESUS’ RESURRECTION.” Online at https://davidould.net/new-head-of-anglican-centre-in-rome-is-denier-of-jesus-resurrection/

“Dean of Perth commits heresy in broad daylight”, April 28, 2003. Sydney Anglicans. Online at https://sydneyanglicans.net/news/730a

“Interim Director of the Anglican Centre in Rome rebuffs “resurrection” criticism”. Jan 15, 2019. Anglican Communion News Service, online at https://www.anglicannews.org/news/2019/01/interim-director-of-the-anglican-centre-in-rome-rebuffs-resurrection-criticism.aspx

03May

Deniers!

I recall the term “denier” originally being applied pejoratively to those who minimize or outright disbelieve the horrors of the Holocaust—the genocide of Jews in Europe under the Nazi regime during World War II. Holocaust denial is associated with racist ideologies, and expressing such denial generally pushes one to the fringes of society. Deniers face (and rightly so) anger, public shame, and ostracism, and depending on the locale, may also find themselves in violation of law. French historian Robert Faurisson was prosecuted, and fined under the Gayssot Act in 1991, and subsequently was removed from his academic post. (He is not totally devoid of public support—In 2012 he was awarded for his “courage” by Iranian president Ahmedinejad, himself a “denier”).

The “denier” label, with emotional power borrowed from Holocaust denial, has been used more recently against skeptics of the current scientific consensus on “global warming” (or “climate change”). The top few “hits” from a search engine will pull such titles as “The Depravity of Climate-change Denial” (The New York Times), “What Deniers of Climate Change and Racism Share” (The Atlantic). As this is a political issue of much controversy, I’ll merely note this as a phenomenon and move on.

(As an aside, I think that there exists a lot of denial about the atrocities of global Communism, and that would be a worthy target of activism. Unfortunately, those controlling the organs of culture right now are more often ideologically aligned with Communism than opposed to it).

Every Easter, another kind of denial rears its ugly head among those who claim to be followers of Christ. A recent New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof has me thinking about this issue again with respect to the bodily resurrection of Jesus, celebrated by Christians around the globe during Easter. No less a personage than the president of New York’s famed Union Theological Seminary, Dr. Serene Jones, was pressed about her views on the subject. She made it clear that she is in fact on the correct side of climate change, but about the physical resurrection of Jesus, she is a “denier”:

When you look in the Gospels, the stories are all over the place. There’s no resurrection story in Mark, just an empty tomb. Those who claim to know whether or not it happened are kidding themselves. But that empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed.

She expressed doubt regarding other miracles, called the virgin birth “bizarre”, and questioned whether there is an afterlife (“I don’t know! There may be something; there may be nothing.”). Regarding the God of the Bible, she opines,

God is beyond our knowing, not a being or an essence or an object. But I don’t worship an all-powerful, all-controlling omnipotent, omniscient being. That is a fabrication of Roman juridical theory and Greek mythology. That’s not the God of Easter. The God of Easter is vulnerable and is connected to the world in profound ways that don’t involve manipulating the world but constantly inviting us into love, justice, mercy.

In a critique, Dr. Albert Mohler, president of another famous Protestant seminary, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, takes Dr. Jones to task. “Let’s be clear. She is teaching a religion here – but that religion is not Christianity.”

Many of our leaders and academics are quite squeamish about the idea of an actual resurrection. They are somehow able to affirm the words of the old creeds in their churches on Sunday, “I believe in the resurrection of the dead,” with two fingers crossed behind their backs.

Perhaps Christianity could borrow the secular world’s approach, and address its own problem with progressives and skeptics, who have ravaged churches and seminaries from within. One significant fracture point would be the resurrection of Jesus. We could name names, and create lists of “Resurrection deniers.”

Applying the term “denial” would even be biblical. The apostle Paul warned Timothy in his second letter that the “last days” will bring to ascendance all manner of wicked and unsavory people, “having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.” (2 Timothy 3:5)

I don’t foresee an organized effort by traditionalists to recapture the faith from tepid nonbelieving leaders. They may not even need to bother. As vibrant orthodox Christianity grows ever stronger, this other milquetoast and eviscerated version of religion is simply evaporating. Once glorious Protestant churches are in a demographic death spiral, as they somehow fail to be energized by the progressive theologians’ message that “love in our lives can’t be crucified” (but of course death is the end of you).

Still, I think many in the pews would welcome the return of orthodox Christianity back into the historic houses of worship. I would.

Sources:

Kristof, Nicholas, April 20, 2019. “Opinion: Reverend, You Say the Virgin Birth Is ‘a Bizarre Claim’?”, New York Times, available online at https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/opinion/sunday/christian-easter-serene-jones.amp.html

Albert Mohler, April 22, 2019, “A Tale of Two Religions: Liberal Theology Without Illusions”. Online at https://albertmohler.com/2019/04/22/a-tale-of-two-religions-liberal-theology-without-illusions

15Oct

Varieties of Christian Thought on Creation

Coincident to reviewing the old story of Jacob’s Ladder, I am teaching a small group that is taking on the opening chapters of Genesis. This surely ranks among the most contentious areas of Scripture. We don’t advocate a particular view here, but offer the following information as a helpful resource.

Michelangelo (1465-1564), “The Creation of Adam”

Varieties of Christian thought on Creation, with Sources of Further Information

I. Young Earth Creationism:

—Teaches that the Universe is young, being created by God in six literal days.
—Clearly an orthodox Christian position, and the view dominant until the advent of Darwin and modern geology’s clues that the earth may be very old. Currently, it is held by about 30% of Americans. Recent proponents include:
—Ken Ham, “Answers in Genesis”: https://answersingenesis.org
—Dr. Henry M Morris, Institute for Creation Research: http://www.icr.org/homepage/

II. Old Earth Creationism

Gap Creationism:

—Teaches six literal 24-hour days, but there was a gap of time between two distinct creations in the first and the second verses of Genesis, which the theory states explains many scientific observations, including the age of the Earth.
—Thomas Chalmers, a divinity professor at the University of Edinburgh, popularized the Gap theory. He first lectured on it in 1814.
—Popular in late 1800s to 1940s, associated with the Scofield Study Bible which took this position.
—Arthur C. Custance, a Canadian physiologist and anthropologist, wrote a privately published book, Without Form and Void (1970), arguing for the gap theory. This book is considered the strongest and most able defense of the gap theory available.
—The most thorough refutations of the gap theory come from rival creationists. They point out the absurdity of supposing that billions of years exist between the crack, as it were, of the first two verses of Genesis (https://ncse.com/cej/8/3/formless-void-gap-theory-creationism)

Day-Age Creationism:

—Holds that the six days referred to in the Genesis account of creation are not ordinary 24-hour days, but are much longer periods (from thousands to billions of years). The sequence and duration of the creation “days” may be paralleled to the scientific consensus for the age of the earth and the universe.
—Dates as far back as St Augustine, who argued that the days of creation can’t be literal since the sun wasn’t made until day 4.
—Hugh Ross, Canadian astrophysicist, is a proponent, and founded “Reasons to Believe”: https://www.reasons.org

Progressive Creation:

—In this view creation occurred in rapid bursts in which all “kinds” of plants and animals appear in stages lasting millions of years. The bursts are followed by periods of stasis or equilibrium to accommodate new arrivals. These bursts represent instances of God creating new types of organisms by divine intervention.
—Accepts “microevolution” but rejects “macroevolution”.
—proponents include Dr. Robert Newman, astrophysicist and theologian. He writes a nice overview of some of the implications of the different views of origins,
https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1995/PSCF9-95Newman.html

IV. Evolutionary Creation / Theistic evolution

—Fully embraces evolutionary theory, but believes that there is a mind behind it all, namely God
—Dr. Francis Collins, head of Human Genome Project and subsequently named director of the NIH. Founded BioLogos: https://biologos.org
—Howard J. Van Till, Professor emeritus of Physics and Astronomy, Calvin College, author of The Fourth Day.

V. The Framework Hypothesis:

—It starts from Biblical interpretation, and is compatible with many of the above views of creation or evolution. In this view, the “days” in Genesis have nothing to do with historical time; they are literary devices, employed by God in order to communicate the story of the creation in terms that we can understand.
—The activities of the six days of creation are arranged into a “framework” of two triads (days 1-3 and days 4—6), with parallel types of activities in each triad.
—Dr. Arie Noordzij of the University of Utrecht was the first proponent of the Framework Hypothesis in 1924. Nicolaas Ridderbos (not to be confused with his more well-known brother, Herman Nicolaas Ridderbos) popularized the view in the late 1950s. It has gained acceptance in modern times through the work of such theologians and scholars as Meredith G. Kline, Henri Blocher, and Bruce Waltke (Wikipedia)
—The framework view has been successful in the modern era because it resolves the traditional conflict between the Genesis creation narrative and science.

Intelligent Design: Not explicitly Christian, But it is consistent with Creation

—Proponents claim that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”
—ID presents two main arguments against evolutionary explanations: “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity”. Complexity is an argument for design.
—ID aims to be a scientific theory (and is, on the face of it), but arose initially out of a textbook controversy, and is seen as being closely associated with Christians and Creationists.
—Dr. Steven C Meyer, biologist who then earned PhD in history and philosophy of science; founder of “Discovery Institute”: https://www.discovery.org
—Dr Robert J Marks, (b. 1950), Baylor University, “has emerged as the public face of intelligent design.” (“20 Most Influential Christian Scholars”) His colleague William Dembski at Baylor is a mathematician who wrote The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities and No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence.

Other interesting links:

The American Scientific Affiliation is an organization of Christian scientists and engineers (Note that it is NOT specifically aimed at creation/evolution issues and includes people with all of the above perspectives): https://network.asa3.org

29Jun

100 Years of Communism: Secret Police Infiltration of the World Council of Churches

The World Council of Churches has long been under attack, and many may remember a scathing 1993 article by Joseph Harriss published in Readers Digest, “The Gospel According to Marx”, which alleged that the WCC was under the thrall of the KGB. Though dismissed at the time as a “rehashing of old issues”, subsequent data shows that he was correct. The WCC has been recently exposed as being heavily penetrated by the KGB during the 1970s and 80s, according to a book based on now public Bulgarian secret police archives. In 2009 historian Momchil Metodiev detailed the relationship between Bulgaria’s communist government and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. His work has been summarized in a review by the Bulgarian Institute for the Study of Recent Past.

Relying upon now declassified archives from the Bulgarian secret police, his book Between Faith and Compromise” details decades-long efforts to destroy and control the Church as a force in Bulgarian society. Of interest to me is the cynical manipulation of the World Council of Churches by this and other atheist Communust governments that sought to infiltrate and control ecumenical councils. Depressingly, they appear to have succeeded.

Participation of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in ecumenical organisations (the World Council of Churches, Christian Peace Conference and Conference of European Churches) was initiated, implemented and guided by the communist state, mainly by State Security.
…participation of the Bulgarian church in ecumenical organisations was not inspired by the idea of interdenominational dialogue and co-operation. Rather it was inspired by the communist state, which wanted to infiltrate the World Council of Churches and push it into the ranks of international organisations that could be used for communist propaganda, especially in the so-called Third World.
Churches from the socialist countries (with the exception of Roman Catholic churches) joined the World Council of Churches in 1961. In the late 1950s, the WCC already had become an “object for penetration” of the Bulgarian State Security services. They also selected the first Bulgarian participants to attend ecumenical training courses in the early 1960s.

This led to an “alternative power center” within the church in Bulgaria. A lay leadership emerged that was in sync with the Bulgarian (Communist) secret police.

The loyalties of this group were also well-known in the World Council of Churches. Despite this, the WCC, manipulated by the representatives of the socialist countries, regularly criticised the policies of the US and Western European countries regarding the Third World countries. Only once, at the Assembly in Nairobi in 1975, was there an unsuccessful attempt to criticise the violation of religious freedoms in the Soviet Union.

Much can be said about these organizations, but I’ll leave it at this. As Mark Tooley, director of the anti-communist Institute on Religion and Democracy writes: “Books like Metodiev’s, based on research in communist archives, increasingly are confirming that the WCC and other religious groups did follow the KGB’s script during much of the Cold War.  The question is, as the WCC continues his far-left advocacy, whose script does it follow now?” (FrontPageMag.com).

17Jun

Communist Infiltration of Protestant Churches

“Dr Harry F Ward, for many years, has been the chief architect for Communist infiltration and subversion in the religious field.” (Former communist Manning Johnson, 1953, Testimony before House Un-American Activities Committee).

In a year that marks both the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, and 100 years of Communism, we will examine a nexus between these two mighty movements. In the early 1900s, a large number of clergy had Marxist leanings and were easy targets for manipulation by communists, despite the atheism of the latter. Dr. Paul Kengor, author of Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century is quoted as saying:

When I started researching this book, I asked Herb Romerstein, the veteran investigator of the communist movement, and himself a former communist, which group of Americans were most manipulated. He unhesitatingly answered “liberal Protestant pastors.” He called them “the biggest suckers of them all.”

Harry F Ward

One of the more prominent of these early communist sympathizers was the Methodist Harry F. Ward. He trained at Northwestern University (BA 1897) and Harvard (MS Philosophy 1898). Returning to the Midwest he became a pastor of a Methodist church in the slums of Chicago, where contact with stockyard workers increasingly radicalized him. He joined a fledgling labor union in solidarity with his parishioners. He began preaching sermons that emphasized political and economic themes. In 1905 he took a sabbatical during which time he read the works of Karl Marx. The following year he founded the Methodist Federation for Social Service, joining with like-minded Methodist pastors to promote social change. He taught at Boston University in 1916, and later became a professor of ethics at New York’s Union Theological Seminary (from 1918 to 1941), where he was instrumental in distributing communist literature, according to Comintern archives. He influenced a generation of pastors.

Of Ward’s Union years, an interesting glimpse is provided in a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous theologian and martyr under the Nazi regime, who had trained at Union. Ward was depicted as “decidedly more ideological than any of his Union colleagues”:

Ward and Niebuhr would take dramatically different turns in the decade ahead: Niebuhr abandoning pacifism for Christian realism, and eventually becoming a Cold War anticommunist Democrat; Ward, meanwhile, hunkering down, as he saw things, in the trenches with Jesus and Marx, a defender of the “Soviet spirit” against all its enemies. . . . In the classroom, Bonhoeffer listened closely as Ward enunciated his singular version of Pascal’s wager: Christians had the world to gain from living “as if” there existed an ethical God weighing every human action in the balance. This meant, at least for Ward, a socialist revolution. (Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Vintage, 2015, p 124)

From 1920 to 1940 he was the national chairman of the ACLU, the role for which he is best remembered today. He is also one of the fathers of the ecumenical movement. Along with prominent socialist theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, Ward was instrumental in founding the Federal Council of Churches in 1908, which was a precursor to the current National Council of Churches.

Kengor, who based his work on declassified communist archives, writes of Ward in the Catholic World Report:

One of the more eye-opening early documents now declassified from the Comintern Archives on Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is a four-page December 1920 letter that lists liberal college professors targeted by the Soviet Comintern and American Communist Party. On the list is not only Ward, listed with Union Theological Seminary, but other professors from seminaries or religious colleges, from Mount Holyoke to Trinity College. The liberals are listed by Comintern officials as sources to get their materials on the shelves at seminary and college libraries.

Ward made several pilgrimages to the USSR, where he was given the full Potemkin-village treatment. The progressive pastor was smitten, returning to write more than one book on the marvels of the Motherland. In 1935, he published The Soviet Spirit, a valentine to Lenin and Stalin, which the “Daily Worker” and “New Masses” promoted loudly. The “Daily Worker” did a full-page profile of Ward’s book, along with a glowing feature on the good reverend. The hardcore atheists were enamored of the Methodist minister. As for New Masses, it offered a free give-away of The Soviet Spirit as a complimentary gift for buying a one-year subscription.

In the 1950’s Ward’s name came up in connection with the infamous McCarthy hearings. Former American Communist leader turned defector, Manning Johnson, gave the testimony noted above. He was asked if Ward was a communist. Johnson answered in the affirmative.

“I would say that he is the Red dean of the Communist Party in the religious field.”

Johnson named an organization headed by Ward as a Communist front, namely the “American League Against War and Fascism”. This organization was created by the Communist Party central committee and per Johnson was involved in activities including sabotage, fomenting resentment against law enforcement, conducting espionage for the Soviet Union, and infiltrating and subverting churches, seminaries, and youth organizations. All sensitive information conveyed to this and other front organizations were reported to the Communists in Russia. The end goal of using front organizations was to attempt to radicalize millions of people in support of Communist ends.

Harry F. Ward was selected to head the American League Against War and Fascism. The party conclusion was that because he was a minister, he would be able to draw in churches, and secondly, that he would be able to draw in labor because of his imposing record as a clergyman of some standing and note.

In other words, they considered him the ideal head for the organization. It was proven a good decision because the American League Against War and Fascism was able, through exploiting the antiwar and anti-Fascist sentiments among the clergymen and among church people generally to involve millions of people in supporting the program of the American League Against War and Fascism.

… The majority of the ministers in the American League Against War and Fascism were involved by Harry F. Ward, and the organization which he was connected with, known as the Methodist Federation for Social Action; also the People’s Institute of Applied Religion, and other Communist-front organizations operating in the religious world. The Methodist Federation for Social Service later became the Methodist Federation for Social Action.

The Methodist Federation for Social Change

The secretary of the Methodist Federation, Ms. Winnifred Chappell, was also named as a Communist, and wrote an article in June 1934, that called for workers to refuse to make goods for their governments, and to join in “a joyful international Soviet to supply their own and each other’s needs.” Another prominent member of the Methodist Federation was Jack McMichael, former head of a major Communist front organization known as The American Youth Congress. He was himself later called before the HUAC committee where he vehemently denied being a Communist.

Johnson’s testimony about the Methodist Federation continued:

The Methodist Federation for Social Service or the Methodist Federation for Social Action, headed by Rev. Harry F. Ward, whom I have already identified as a party member, was invaluable to the Communist Party in its united-front organizations and campaigns. It was invaluable because through it the party was able to get contact with thousands of ministers all over the country.

… They had the contact, a wealth of
contact, established and built up over the years with ministers in every section of the country who were easily and quickly involved in various united-front activities, consequently giving these Communist-front movements an aura of respectability the like of which they could not get except for the tremendous amount of faith people have in religion and the church.

Mr. Manning’s full testimony is available at the Internet Archive.

The influence of The Methodist Federation for Social Change is well attested: MFSA attained the height of its growth just following World War II under the leadership of Jack McMichael. By 1950, the MFSA was highly influential in the Methodist Church. While the MFSA had only 5,800 members compared to 9 million in the entire Methodist Church, this membership included half of the church’s 16 bishops, as well as having representatives in all the major seminaries at the time.(Wikipedia). The Methodist Church would be scandalized enough by the MFSA to formally cut ties, though it has persisted as an independent organization and remains a force within Methodism, proclaiming today its mission: “to mobilize, lead and sustain a progressive United Methodist movement, energizing people to be agents of God’s justice, peace, and reconciliation” (MFSA website, accessed 2/28/2018).

Testifying about the MFSA in 1953, Communist Party founder Benjamin Gitlow revealed that its objective “was to transform the Methodist Church and Christianity into an instrument for the achievement of Socialism.” (HUAC transcript is available at Archive.org).

The National and World Council of Churches

As noted earlier, Harry Ward was instrumental in founding the Federal Council of Churches, a precursor to the National Council of Churches, and by extension the World Council of Churches. For decades, the latter organizations were led by Ward’s pupil and fellow member of the MFSS, Bishop Bromley Oxnam (1891-1963).

Oxnam studied under Ward at Boston University (also assisting him in grading papers, and babysitting his children). Oxnam became a socialist–though apparently never a Communist–calling the industrialized capitalistic world “unchristian, unethical, and anti-social”. (As an aside, he apparently also was not one for theological disputes, hilariously referring to them as “one monkey with a mirror flashing it in the eyes of another”). (See Brookhiser, “The Earnest Methodist” in First Things, 1992). Oxnam became president of DePauw University in 1928. Oxnard rose rapidly through Methodist ranks, eventually becoming Bishop of Washington, DC.

The National Council of Churches became the subject of scrutiny in the 1950s. The Air Force Reserve had raised concern, and Secretary of the Air Force Dudley C. Sharp defended his allegations:

…in view of the Secretary’s repudiation of the information conveyed respecting the National Council of Churches of Christ in America, the chairman issued a statement to the effect that the leadership of the [N.C.C.] had hundreds or at least over a hundred affiliations with Communist fronts and causes. Since then we have made careful, but yet incomplete checks, and it is a complete understatement. Thus far of the leadership of the National Council of Churches of Christ in America, we have found over 100 persons leadership capacity with either Communist-front records or records of service to Communists causes. The aggregate affiliations of the leadership, instead of being in the hundreds as the [H.C.U.A.] chairman first indicated, is now, according to our latest count, into the thousands, and we have yet to complete our check.

As an aside, I can remember growing up in small town America and hearing people grumble about the NCC’s left wing agenda. I know of people who left their churches because they “didn’t want to send any tithes to the National Council of Churches.”

In 1990, after the Romanian Communist regime fell, the World Council of Churches issued a tepid apology for its silence on the human rights abuses suffered by Christians under Communist regimes. Rev. Emilio Castro, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, said: “I think we didn’t speak strongly enough, that is clear. That is the price we thought we needed to pay in order to help the human rights situation inside Romania.” (L.A. Times).

Conclusion

As early as the turn of the 20th century, Harry Ward and other zealots for the “Social Gospel” articulated by theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch were turning their attentions toward the abolishment of capitalism and eventual establishment of a world socialist government. They were easy marks for Communists who used them to infiltrate and subvert Protestant Christianity. Their efforts had enormous impact upon the “mainline denominations” such as the Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Episcopalians. These groups have continued to drift leftward ever since, and have paid a price, losing as much as 50% of their membership (see this piece from The Gospel Coalition).

In fairness, I must state that not all socialists were Communists, and not all persons identified as Communists, even under oath, necessarily were such. Ward wrote once, “As for myself, I belong to no social or economic faction. In answer to that question I usually say, I am neither Communist, nor Socialist; I am something worse than that–I am a Christian.”

Some leftists, while sympathetic to socialism and progressive political positions, nonetheless opposed Communists within their organizations. Many people who were Communists in the 1920s later changed their minds.

Probably most of the “red churchmen” listed above were merely “fellow travelers” with communism. They were sympathizers, rather than card carrying members of the party of Lenin. Many ministers were largely unaware of the extent to which sinister and calculating Communist agents were using and manipulating them behind the scenes.

28Mar

A Study Challenges the Secularization Hypothesis

An article by Glenn Stanton in the Federalist cites new research calling into question the near dogma that Christianity in America is dying amid a relentless tide of secularization–That the gates of science and progressive politics are doing what the gates of Hell could not, namely prevailing against the Church. It turns out that this is only partly right; It is progressive politics from within the churches, not outside it, that has taken down many of the once great Protestant denominations.

Yes, these churches are hemorrhaging members in startling numbers, but many of those folks are not leaving Christianity. They are simply going elsewhere. Because of this shifting, other very different kinds of churches are holding strong in crowds and have been for as long as such data has been collected. In some ways, they are even growing.

The Stanton article points out growth in nondenominational churches that are Evangelical in outlook, and states that these groups gain five new congregants exiled from the liberal churches for every one they lose for any reason. “They also do a better job of retaining believers from childhood to adulthood than do mainline churches.”

Over time, even as the “nones” increase their share of the population, at the expense of weakly affiliated religious people, the “strongly affiliated” have not only held steady but even grown slightly, and currently number about 40% of U.S. adults. One third of American adults pray multiple times a day, and believe that The Bible is God’s actual word. Stanton points out that church attendance today is higher than at the time of the founding of our nation.

The 2017 study in question is “The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research “ by Landon Schnabel of Indiana University, and Sean Bock of Harvard (Sociological Science, 4, 686-700).

26Feb

100 Years of Communism: Infiltration of African-American Churches

Manning Johnson (1908-1959) was an African American who was introduced to Communism by way of a front organization called the American Negro Labor Congress, and saw in Communism a possible redress to ills suffered by his people. An ambitious member of the Communist Party in America in the 1930s, he rose to the highest ranks, gaining a seat on the National Committee, and becoming a candidate for the ultra-elite Politburo. He ran for the U.S. Congress in New York as a Communist in 1935.

He became disillusioned with things when he realized that minorities were being exploited and controlled by white leaders of the party:

“These white communists wielded more power than the nominal Negro heads of the Commission. In a word, they are like white overseers. Every Negro member was aware of the fact that these white overseers constituted the eyes, the ears and the voice of the Kremlin.”

He apparently also felt some remorse about the ruthless tactics employed by the party, including espionage, subversion of well intended “dupes”, and even assassinations:

“Thus, as a participant on the highest level of the communist conspiracy in America, I observed the cold, calculating, ruthless nature of red power politics and political warfare, stripped of all its illusory propaganda and idealistic cover. “

In his autobiography, Color, Communism, and Common Sense, he described shocking inside information about how Communists targeted the African American churches because of their centrality to community life. Moscow-based agents instructed the American Communists to cease denouncing the churches, which had so far failed, and to try to infiltrate them instead. Deception was to be the new policy: “The honeyed phrase replaced harsh words. The smile replaced the smirk. The velvet glove covered the mailed fist.” He stated that from 1934 on, the policy achieved successes:

White ministers acting as missionaries, using the race angle as bait, aided in the cultivation of Negro ministers for work in the Red solar system of organizations. Bribery through gifts, paid lectures, flattery through long applause at staged rallies, favorable mention in the red controlled press were not the only methods employed to corrupt the Negro ministers. The use of sex and perversion as a means of political blackmail was an accepted red tactic.

At the same time that all this was going on at the top, the comrades were building cells below in the church “to guarantee that decisions made at the top would be brought down to the congregation.”

Manning cited documents alleging that some youth organizations and a number of Alabama churches were under Communist control, and could therefore also be used as cover for illegal activities.

The irony is profound. While at the same time they were going about destroying churches and rooting out Christians in Soviet territories, the Kremlin pushed the following message in its efforts to woo American black churchgoers:

The new line went like this: Jesus, the carpenter, was a worker like the Communists. He was against the “money changers,” the “capitalists,” the “exploiters” of that day. That is why he drove them from the temple. The Communists are the modern day
fighters against the capitalists or moneychangers. If Jesus were living today, he would be persecuted like the Communists who seek to do good for the common people.

The end game was to “stir up race and class conflict”. The goal would be either to control a block of people who could be incorporated into a future communist regime or else, at the very least, to destabilize and harass the existing government.

Manning’s book, Color, Communism, and Common Sense, is available at the Internet Archive.

Later sources, such as the Venona files and KGB archives, have corroborated much of Johnson’s testimony about the inner workings of the CPUSA and the concerted efforts at subterfuge and espionage conducted against the US by the Soviet Union in the 1940s-1970s. We are fortunate that there was little chance of success for a full blown Communist revolution in our country. In the subsequent decades the communists would become never more than a dwindling fringe. Yet it is also a marvel what an enormous influence this tiny fringe had in energizing and galvanizing workers, intellectuals, pastors, academics, journalists, and other “fellow travelers.” They planted seeds that we are still reaping. They helped fill the sails of our ship of state and culture with a leftward breeze that is still blowing hard.

01Nov

The Church is Divided Mostly Between Conservatives and Liberals

So opines an article by Ed Kilgore in New York Magazine on the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. On a variety of issues, the two camps have moved closer together theologically (see, for example, our article “Protestants and Catholics Celebrate Agreement on Justification”). Protestants have warmed toward some of the church’s historic liturgies and practices (such as the increasing popularity of observing Lent). The Roman Catholics have had their own internal reformations both in response to Luther in the 1600’s, and more recently with the reforms instituted by the Vatican II council.

Catholics have by and large embraced what might have previously been considered distinctly Protestant practices, like the use of vernacular languages in worship, personal Bible study (again, in the language of the reader rather than Latin), congregational singing of hymns, etc; and they have shed some of the more egregious practices that rankled Protestants (and also internal critics), such as the selling of indulgences. And as the article points out, “Moreover, virtually all Christians have abandoned some of the more unsavory habits of thought and deed they once shared, from aggressive anti-Semitism to active state-sanctioned persecution of “heretics.”

Today, the real divide is within denominations more than between them. “The difference among Christians these days tend to break along a left-right rather than a Catholic-Protestant spectrum,” says Kilgore.

The NY magazine article quotes Atlantic writer Emma Green, who observes the same shifts in an essay entitled “Why Can’t Christians Get Along, 500 Years After the Reformation?“.

Historian Mark Noll of Notre Dame notes that Catholics and Protestants have come closer together. “In my lifetime, there has been a sea change in Protestant-Catholic relations, opening up an unimaginable array of cooperation.”

Yet these denominations are beginning to fracture over LGBTQ issues and more fundamental disagreements between traditional Christians, especially in places like Africa, and the intellectual elites in the west who embrace a more worldly and progressive stance. In reaction,

A growing number of Christians are organizing themselves based on ideological convictions, rather than a shared confessional tradition. “As a lot of denominational traditions are experiencing pressure and even fracture,” said Noll, “so also [is] interdenominational cooperation amongst like-minded people growing in leaps and bounds.”

03Aug

Boomers and the Church

I came across an interesting essay regarding the powerful impact that a single generation has had on Christian life in the U.S. The author of “The Six Commandments of the Boomers” is Reverend Todd Wilken, a blogger, speaker, and pastor within the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod.

Wilken, himself a member of the “Baby Boom” generation (those with birth dates between 1946 and 1964), begins his piece with a sweeping critique of his cohorts as being generally narcissistic and self absorbed. They are now 28 percent of the U.S. population, and all of our societal institutions and power centers are firmly in their control.

Their influence on the churches of our land has been no less sweeping than it has been on other aspects of life.

Boomers seek to recreate the institution in their own Boomer image. The Boomers have brought this imperative of the individual to bear upon the Church. The Church is here to provide whatever the Boomers want or think they need… The Church has undertaken more innovations in the last generation than in all the previous generations combined, mostly at the insistence of the Boomers.

One area has been music:

And in the Church of the Boomers music is THE issue. Music was the Boomers’ voice. In large part, their music was what defined them as “hip.” Suckled at the breast of what began as tinpan alley and quickly became the music industry, the Boomers can’t wean themselves. Their kind of music is hip and that imperative of hip extends even to the Church. Again, Veith observes:

“Certainly Baby Boomers often do demand their kind of music in church. This is another of their traits —to be demanding and self-absorbed and intolerant of other styles. The World War II generation never demanded worship styles with Big Band music.”

I have been fond of saying that we seem to be stuck in a dichotomy: Boomer theology and traditional music (your average mainline denominational church), versus boomer music and traditional theology (a typical evangelical church). I now realize that I underappreciated even the sinister influence that the “Boomer worldview” has had on theology that is otherwise outwardly orthodox:

In the Church of the Boomers this rebellion against authority manifests itself as a skeptical approach to the Church’s doctrinal standards, pastoral authority, and polity.

However, the bigger problem is that in the Church there is an unquestioned authority: the authority of the Bible. The Church of the Boomers rejects this authority in one of two ways; they either deny the authority of the Bible outright, as in liberal Churches, or they relativize the authority of the Bible, as in much of Protestant Evangelicalism. The first kind of rebellion against Scripture’s authority is obvious. The second is much more subtle, and therefore more dangerous.

The relativizing of the Scripture allows the Boomers to affirm Scripture’s authority in theory while denying it in practice. They can say that they are Bible believing, that the Bible is inerrant and infallible, and even authoritative. The problem isn’t in what the Boomers say about the Bible, the problem is in how they use the Bible.

When studying the Bible there is a big difference between asking, “what does it mean?” and asking, “what does it mean to me?” The former seeks objective truth, the latter seeks subjective, relative truth. The former affirms Scripture’s authority, the latter denies it. Bible study in the Church of the Boomers is mostly the latter. If the meaning of the Bible is determined by each individual’s private interpretation, then the issue of the Bible’s objective authority is rendered moot.

Read it all at the link above.