Recently, we
looked at some of the bad consequences that flow out from the Roman Catholic
teachings on Christ’s descent into Hades.
Now we must
look at the other main faction of the post-Orthodox West, Protestantism, and
some of the tares it has sown. More
specifically, how has the West gone from writing Christian allegories like Pilgrim’s
Progress in the wake of the Protestant Reformation to atheistic/Marxist Woke
babbling that seeks to destroy anything remotely Christian? It is because they exist on the same line of
continuum; they have the same root.
Mr Paul
Krause helps illustrate this. At the end
of his essay on Pilgrim’s Progress, he writes,
Let us return to this theology of calling which
Bunyan takes from Sacred Scripture and rewrites for us in the similitude of a
dream. Bunyan, as we know, was a radical nonconformist. He was also a devout
Calvinist. Christian’s call out of the City of Destruction is Bunyan’s esoteric
message for “Christians” inside the Restoration Church of England to come out
of the city fitted for destruction. The Restoration Church of England is
Formalist, Hypocritical, and Ignorant of the true faith which Bunyan has
expounded for us in his allegorical pilgrimage.
Bunyan is warning his fellow readers that to remain
in the formalist, ignorant, talkative Restoration Church is to consign oneself
to condemnation. Like Christian, who is imprisoned in Vanity-Fair, Bunyan was
imprisoned during the Restoration. The life of Christian mirrors the life of
Bunyan. Bunyan was originally an idealist, a man who fought in the revolution
and favored an initial cleansing of the Church of England. But is this what God
called his People to do in the Bible? Sure, there is the Commission to preach
and baptize and teach—but the weight of Scriptural theology is a calling out.
As mentioned, Abraham is called out of Ur of the
Chaldees. Lot is called out of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Israelites are called
out of Egypt. St. Paul teaches that the hope of Christians is to be called out
of the earthly Jerusalem and ascend to the heavenly Jerusalem. The Church Fathers,
most notably St. Augustine and St. Gregory Nazianzus, also write of this call
of the Church out of the world as it pilgrims in this world to the next.
“The Pilgrim’s Progress, then, is a
nonconformist text in the wildest sense, as well as in the highly specific
context of Restoration Nonconformity.” Indeed it is. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress may not be as aesthetically magisterial as Milton’s Paradise
Lost. But it is, as I hope we can now see, a Protestant’s book. It contains
in its pages the great seismic shift away from institutional idealism and
toward a separationist theology which revived the Theology of Calling found in
Scripture and the Church Fathers. It is, above all, perhaps the finest work of
English nonconformist literature since John Milton and remains unsurpassed more
than three centuries later. There is a lot of John Bunyan in The
Pilgrim’s Progress, and perhaps that is why it is quintessentially
Protestant and timeless.
--https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2021/04/pilgrims-calling-john-bunyan-pilgrims-progress-paul-krause.html
What is
noteworthy here is that this description is very much akin to the ancient heresy
of Gnosticism - It is radically dualistic, subjective/individualistic, and
involves a special divine revelation or calling to a select few to receive
‘salvation’. (For more on those and on
the other marks of Gnosticism, visit https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2021/01/31/the-gnostic-heresys-political-successors/--Via Rod Dreher’s blog at
The American Conservative.)
The dualism
is so pronounced in Misters Bunyan and Krause that even the visible Church is
irredeemably tainted by evil. But those
solitary individuals whom God has called out are able to see clearly and find
the path to the City of God.
Hence we see
the first outlines of our modern Elite, who likewise believe they are ‘chosen’,
having access to a secret, exalted knowledge with which they can escape the
futility of the present corrupt world and gain entry to Paradise (or in the
modern sense, create it themselves).
Hence we
have the Tom Walton’s of the world (the grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton),
the corporate Titans, with their efforts to make a utopia where transgender
people have all the same ‘rights’ as everyone else:
“We are
alarmed by the string of policy targeting LGBTQ people in Arkansas. This trend
is harmful and sends the wrong message to those willing to invest in or visit
our state. We support Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s recent veto of discriminatory
policy and implore government, business and community leaders to consider the
impact of existing and future policy that limits basic freedoms and does not
promote inclusiveness in our communities and economy.
Our
nation was built on inalienable rights and strengthened by individual differences.
Arkansas has been called the land of opportunity because it is a place where
anyone can think big and achieve the extraordinary. Any policy that limits
individual opportunity also limits our state’s potential.”
--Heath Higgs, https://www.fox16.com/news/politics/walton-family-foundation-issues-statement-on-arkansas-anti-trans-legislation/, via https://www.ozarksfirst.com/local-news/arkansas-general-assembly-votes-to-override-veto-on-transgender-youth-treatment-ban/
In simpler
terms, then, the modern Woke Elite are simply the old Protestant Reformers who
have shed the Christian elements that masked the latter’s Gnostic belief
system.
But
Christianity (i.e., the Orthodox Church) is not simply a gathering of
like-minded individuals seeking escape from a hopelessly evil world. It is a real union with the deified flesh of
Jesus Christ and with one another, Whose Grace ripples out into the world
through His Body’s members, sanctifying it, little by little, that all the cosmos
may share in the Life of the All-Holy Trinity.
The individual Christian does not disappear in this union, and yet his
subjective judgment of the Church and her creed/doctrines is not the final
authority, either: There is a priestly
hierarchy, consecrated by God, to which he must be obedient. St John of Kronstadt (+1908) offers this
beautiful description of the Orthodox Church:
The holy Church is God's most supreme, most
holy, most good, most wise and necessary establishment upon the earth. She
is "the true tabernacle'' of God, " which the Lord pitched, and
not man" (Heb. viii. 2)—not Luther, not Calvin, and not Mohammed, nor
Buddha, nor Confucius, nor any other suchlike sinful, passionate person. The
Church is a union of people established by God, united among themselves by the
Faith, Doctrine, Hierarchy, and Mysteries. She is Christ's spiritual army,
equipped with spiritual weaponry against the numberless armed hordes of the
devil: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against
spiritual wickedness in high places" (Eph. vi. 12). She is a spiritual
hospital where mankind, enfeebled by the open wound of sin, is cured by
grace-filled treatments given by God—by repentance and communion in the Holy
Mysteries of Christ, in Christ's Body and Blood, and by the word of God, by the
instructions and counsels and consolations of the shepherds of Christ's
rational flock. She is a common laver of purification, rebirth, and
sanctification; she is God’s sanctuary in which all are sanctified by the Holy
Spirit through Baptism, Chrismation, and the other Mysteries, and the Divine
Service. She is the spiritual sun of the world, enlightening and giving 1ife to
all who sit in the darkness and shadow of death an who are dead through sin.
--http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/krons_church.aspx
But in
reality, the Protestants are only following the path cleared for them by the
Roman Catholic Pope, who long ago set the ensample for all in the West to
follow vis-à-vis rebellion against the Orthodox Church of the Holy Apostles,
the only true Christian mother of the West:
The most harmful thing in Christianity, in
this God-revealed, heavenly religion, is the leadership of one man in the
Church—for instance, the pope, and his supposed infallibility. It is precisely
in the dogma of his infallibility that the greatest mistake is contained, for
the pope is a sinful man, and O the disaster if he fancies himself to be
infallible! How many great errors, destructive of the souls o men, has the
Catholic, papal church thought up—in dogmas, in rites, in canonical rules, in
the Divine Services, in the deadly and malicious relations of the Catholics
with the Orthodox, in blasphemies and slanders against the Orthodox Church, in
revilings directed against the Orthodox Christians! And of all this the
professedly infallible pope is guilty, with his and the Jesuits' teaching,
their spirit of falsehood, duplicity, and every sort of unrighteous means ad
maiorem Dei gloriam (for the—alleged—greater glory of God).
--Ibid.
May the West
return swiftly to the Orthodox Faith, through the prayers of the holy
God-pleaser, Father John of Kronstadt!
A hatred of Orthodoxy, fanaticism against
and persecution of the Orthodox, even killings, run like a crimson thread
through all the ages of Catholicism's existence. By their fruits ye shall know
them. Was such a spirit commanded to us by Christ? If to anyone, it is always
possible to say to Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed: "Ye know not what
manner of spirit ye are of" (Luke ix, 55).
. .
.
"Receiving the end of your faith, even
the salvation of your souls" (I Peter i. 9). Behold the end and goal of
the Orthodox Christian faith—the salvation of the soul of every believer. How
invaluable is our faith; how holy, true, God-pleasing, powerful, saving! How
necessary it is to love Her, worthily to esteem Her, constantly to utilize Her
for one's own salvation and that of others. O Lord, save the race of Orthodox
Christians, and convert all the non-orthodox to Orthodoxy, as to the one faith
which saves, established by Thee, glorified by Thee, and to be eternally glorified
by Thee! Thou art holy and righteous—and Thy faith is holy and righteous.
--Ibid.
The holy
image of St John is via https://orthodoxwiki.org/John_of_Kronstadt .
--
Holy Ælfred
the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to
the Union!
