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.
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-Ã -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 .
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
