THEOLOGY: Folk vs. Academia or Why I have resentments against Systemic & Systematic Intellectual Elitism

A very interesting conversation at "Grail Country" on YouTube. Here's my own comment on the video, in regards to Christianity dying out:

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"Christianity may die out, but that would be the most Christian thing for Christianity to do!"

Nate is a very wise man for saying this, and Christianity does seem to contain the seeds of it's own self-immolation, especially in regards to the doctrine of the antichrist.

When you read the Bible in a synthetic fashion, it's difficult to come away with any feeling other than Christianity, as it's currently practiced, will ultimately fail in it's objective to save the world. There are many reasons for this, but ultimately the issue seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding of the transaction that God has made with us mere mortals, even though it's quite explicit in the Bible itself. That transaction is thus: "I've given up my LIFE for you. Now, to follow ME, you must give up your own life, even unto death, just like I did." That transaction makes sense when you factor in the resurrection, and the idea that none of us really die, it's more of a transition to a new realm of existence. But you actually have to BELIEVE all that, and probably a majority of Christians just don't. They'll pay lip service to following Jesus, but their own agenda and goals will always be supreme, not God's. And they do this cute little self-deception despite multiple, repeated warnings of an eternity in hell from Jesus himself if you depart from God's will. He ain't messin' around.

When you read the Bible closely, it's not really "unbelievers" who are going to be sent to hell, it will be believers who failed to take the message seriously. In other words, the most severe judgment will be for those who knew better. That's why Jesus told the pharisees that tax collectors and prostitutes will be entering the kingdom of heaven before they ever did. The most severe judgment will be for God's own servants.

Another clear example of this is the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. The rich man is sent to eternal damnation because he failed to do exactly what he knew from the law and prophets to do: take care of those less fortunate than him. That's why Abraham refuses his request to have Lazarus goes visit the rich man's brothers, because Abraham said they have the law and the prophets to instruct them, if they don't listen, the fault will be theirs, not God's. Oh how awful it will be to have to deal with the consequences of your own actions, or in the case of the parable, inactions!

Right now, in the very times we are living in, we are seeing how Christianity is mostly failing in Western Civilization, as everyone chases after the gadgets and gizmos of modernism, even those who know better. Mathematically, when you seen something like this occur, it's only a matter of time before the rate of decline increases steadily, and total collapse of the system becomes certain. We are already witnessing this in real time across most of western Europe.

It seems that the one place on earth where the Christian message still has some life to it is in Africa. TGrog's point about the charismatic movement has a lot to do with the growth and popularity of Christianity amongst Africans. It seems to be the only form of Christianity left that has any real life left in it.

So will God allow Christianity (as we know it) to self-destruct in the West? Yes, yes he will. But maybe that's for the best, as the old forms are just old wineskins that are not capable of handling the new wine he wants to pour out. Ultimately God wins, and his WILL will be on EARTH as it is in HEAVEN. You can take that to the bank.

Just don't get too attached to your own personal form of Christianity as you know it, as it might become obsolete sooner than you realize.

Date video posted to YouTube: February 15, 2024
Length: 1 hour, 25 minutes, 15 seconds

- Pseudo Boethius

THEOLOGY: The Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age: An Interview with Rosaria Butterfield

One of the most interesting women in Christianity is Rosaria Butterfield. Worth listening too.

Date posted to YouTube: February 5, 2024
Length: 1 hours, 2 minutes, 21 seconds

- Pseudo Boethius

THEOLOGY: Now Faith is Being Sure of What We Hope For (Hebrews 11:1-2)

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for” ( Hebrews 11:1-2 )

"In the natural realm, faith doesn’t make sense. Because faith cannot be seen, understood or explained when situations beyond human control require its use. And yet faith is absolutely necessary for the believer. In fact, faith is the first and only thing required of us when we come to God (Ephesians 2:8-9). Later on in this chapter the writer draws attention to the fact that without faith we cannot please God, which means it is absolutely necessary (Hebrews 11:6).

"Paul told the believers in Corinth, “We live by faith, not by sight” (II Corinthians 5:7). If this is the case, it is important to know what faith is, so that we can regulate and conduct ourselves in faith, not by what we see, taste, touch, hear or feel."

Read the rest here:  Now Faith is Being Sure of What We Hope For (Hebrews 11:1-2)

2019-01-03  [P-B]

THEOLOGY: Ugandan Pastor SHOCKED he would not enter Heaven unless...

Pastor John Mulinde talks about an encounter he had with God, and the message God gave him about his own life.  There's a warning here for all of us. 

2019-01-02  [P-B]

BOOKS: "The Experience of God"

Simon Kidd reviews the book "The Experience of God" by David Bentley Hart:

"The Experience of God is divided into three main parts, with a preceding ten-page ‘Introduction’ detailing David Bentley Hart’s motive for writing it. He explains that recent heated debates about the existence of God indicate a fundamental confusion about the subject. In some ways the book is a challenge to atheists to be clear about what it is that they don’t believe, a task DBH has undertaken at greater length in his 2009 Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, also published by Yale.

"This is a book of philosophy, rather than theology, and at its core is the tradition of ‘classical theism’. Stemming from Plato and Aristotle, this tradition was developed in the early Christian centuries by the ‘Fathers of the Church’ as well as pagans like Plotinus, reaching its apogee in the writings of the medieval philosopher-theologians of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Apart from the ‘Religions of the Book’, DBH says that the definition of God that he is offering is one that can be found in ‘Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, various late antique paganisms [and] even applies in many respects to various Mahayana formulations of, say, the Buddha Consciousness or the Buddha Nature, or even to the earliest Buddhist conception of the Unconditioned, or to certain aspects of the Tao’ (4). This universalism is also captured in the book’s subtitle, since ‘being, consciousness, bliss’ are translations of the Sanskrit ‘sat, chit, ananda’, which are usually combined into the portmanteau ‘Satchitananda’ (with variant spellings), a term referring to the ultimate reality, Brahman (see Wikipedia: ‘Satchitananda’). The Sanskrit terms are used explicitly in Part Two.

Read the entire review of The Experience of God

THEOLOGY: JUDGED and SENT TO HELL

Often times it's the greatest sinners who have the greatest wisdom.  This young lady was a blatant, intentional sinner by her own admission, if it was wrong, she did it.  Until one day she realized she was on a path of destruction, and called out to Jesus. 

2018-12-23  [P-B]

THEOLOGY: Mary K Baxter Describes Horrors of Hell

Mary K Baxter, a prophet, has seen a vision of hell.  We often forget that Jesus preached as much on hell as he did heaven.  (But she has seen heaven too!).

2018-12-23  [P-B]

RELIGION: David Bentley Hart - Can many religions all be true?

Can ALL religions be true?  Possibly....David Bentley Hart shares about what he's learned about religion over the years, and how there is a surprising amount of commonality between them.

2018-12-09  [P-B]

ARTICLE: INEVITABLE SCHOLASTICISM: A REVIEW OF "INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY"

Friday, July 13, 2018

Excellent book review on the importance of Scholasticism from First Things:

Leinsle shows that many truisms that animate the standard narratives of Catholic theology are false. For example, he refutes the notion that Scholastic methods were introduced into theology as an alternative to scriptural reading and biblical commentary. On the contrary, from the sixth century onward, collections of theological sentences were gathered within glosses on Scripture precisely to help readers interpret the sacred text. Patristic citations were assembled by monastic communities in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in order to facilitate understanding of the discrete senses of Scripture (the literal sense, the typological, the moral, and the analogical). The first concordances of terms and Bible verses were created by twelfth-century Scholastics in order to compare terms and analyze the meaning of Scripture as a coherent whole. 

More decisively, Leinsle shows that our presumption that Scholasticism encourages an insular and isolated mentality is exactly the opposite of the truth. The theology of the high Middle Ages was focused on a central question: In light of the discovery of Aristotelian philosophy, what is the scientific status of Christian theology? In other words, in what sense is Christian theology the queen of the sciences, the most complete view of the world available to human beings? How does it relate then to philosophical or scientific knowledge that derives from natural experience as such—in a respectful and critical way? These are not easy questions to contend with. But they are also unavoidable for an intellectually serious Christian culture.

Read the full article here:  INEVITABLE SCHOLASTICISM: A REVIEW OF INTRODUCTION TO SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY

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