Evangelicals Need to Read Richard Hooker

Yes, they do.  So do some Anglicans.

Stunning Warning: (Civil) War Coming to Europe

I linked this article in the post immediately below.

OK, yeah, I know it is "World Nut Daily", but don't be so quick to dismiss the article, because the people quoted in it are eminently credible.

Besides, all of us -- even the Neo-Anglicans among us who would naturally tend to reject such arguments out of hand -- know in their heart of hearts that what these commentators say is likely true. See this video too.

Author, WND columnist and anti-Shariah campaigner Pamela Geller thinks it is already too late. Asked if she thought it would come to civil war in Europe, Geller told WND, “Yes, I do.”

She’s not alone.

“If the European political establishment maintains its stranglehold on power, it seems unavoidable that Islam will continue to build a political presence that will ultimately lead to Muslim uprisings and a European reaction outside of accepted political channels,” said G.M. Davis.

Davis, a Stanford Ph.D. and the author of “House of War: Islam’s Jihad Against the World,” believes the only way the problem could be solved peacefully is through “an effective anti-Islamic political movement” taking shape in Europe “within a generation.”

The situation in Europe already seems to be spiraling out of control. Austrians are stocking up on weapons, and intelligence analysts warn of an imminent terrorist attack in the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile, European governments are cracking down on their own populations, even as tens of thousands of Muslim men are marching through the countryside like an invading army.

Davis argues if mainstream political forces are not able to quell the continuous influx of Muslim migrants into Europe, “grassroots organizations” will take up the “defense of Europe.

He told WND: “They would be acting in defiance of their respective governments, which could spark wholesale abandonment of those governments by their populations. We saw this in Communist Eastern Europe in 1989-91 with the key difference being that violence would be very much widespread [this time].”

As the article notes, analyst Diana West is skeptical that Europeans will muster the courage to rise to the occasion.  A few years ago, West published an article entitled "Connecting the Dots on Islam", in which she stated,

Whether most Muslims wouldn't hurt a fly is an increasingly irrelevant footnote to the hostile aggression of other Muslims who, in a very short time, have actually transformed civilization as we used to know it.

If the will to resist allows us to manage the threat of violence, the will to connect the dots would compel us to eliminate it. How? By carefully examining and, I would hope, reconsidering and reversing, through foreign, domestic and immigration initiatives, what should now be seen, gimlet-eyed, as the Islamization of the non-Islamic world. Such an assessment, however, is all too vulnerable to catcall-attacks of "bigotry," even "Nazism" -- a deceptively inverted assault given the doctrinal bigotry and similarities to Nazism historically promulgated by the Islamic creed.

West now seems skeptical of Europe's "will to resist", but if recent news is any indication it seems that huge blocks of "grassroots organizations" all over Europe, but especially in Eastern Europe, are springing up to meet the challenge.  I tend to think they will resist, violently if necessary, for what other option do they have?  And will Russia, North American Anglosphere states, Australia and New Zealand stand idly by while Western Europe becomes Islamic?  I hardly think so.  But in order for the latter three to develop the necessary resolve to oppose the Islamification of Europe, the regnant liberal-leftism there, as here in North America, will also have to be moved aside.  Ponder the implications of that. 

My dear Anglican Bishops, you know that what has been written here is true.  Your move.  My dear fellow Anglicans, let us accordingly be deeply in prayer for our bishops.

Peter Hitchens on Anglicanism and Traditionalist Conservatism

Peter Hitchens, who in my estimation is one of the best paleoconservative political writers on the scene (as judged by both the content of what he writes and the élan with which he writes it), is a convert from atheism and Trotskyism to a very traditional style of Anglicanism.  One of the things that drives me around the bend about so many purportedly conservative Christians, including a goodly number of Anglican bishops and priests, is that when one assesses what they say about political and cultural matters, they are spouting views that would have been thought of as reckless radicalism by previous generations of Anglican thinkers.  This statement from a recent article about Hitchens caused me to break forth in a few "Huzzahs!":

A conservative position flows directly and inevitably from a theist position. I'm not saying you can't be a conservative without being a theist - it seems much more difficult, I'm not certain I can work out why you would want to be.

But here's the rub: if you want to know what Hitchens means by "conservatism", read his articles.  He is no friend either of neoconservatism, multiculturalism, or any of the "isms" deemed within the pale of conservative theological and political thought by multitudes of Neo-Anglicans.  What's more, if all the generations of Anglicans up to the time of, say, C.S. Lewis could be brought back from the dead to opine on Mr. Hitchens, I'm confident that they would see in him someone who really understands the cultural and political ramifications of traditional Anglican faith, unlike so many of our Neo-Anglicans and a few deluded trad Anglicans.

It would be one thing if this debate were simply an abstract one that is largely unrelated, or not related at all, to our existential condition here in the West, but it is not.  It is now, literally, a life-or-death sort of debate, with reference to both our collective and individual existence, and it is now beyond the ability of conventional politics to fix it.  A growing chorus of notable voices is warning that civil war may be at hand, and our bishops need to recover the steely traditionalist conservative Anglican resolve to admit that this is so, and consequently to both radically alter their narrative and to prepare the flock for the task ahead.  The task will involve the proclamation of the Gospel, yes, but it will equally entail a call to steel for a fight.

"Ideas have consequences" said the famed traditionalist philosopher Richard Weaver.  Too many people both on the right and the left seem oblivious to the potential or real consequences of their "ideas", theologies or worldviews.  Modern Anglicans haven't escaped that malady, but the day is coming, and now is, when Anglicans will need to fully come to grips with the traditionalist implications of the old English faith. 

        

New to the Blogroll

Tales of Chivalry.

"The Hate is Back."

'The hate is back' say German media as migrant crisis sparks the country's worst spate of political violence since the Nazi era

You know, you've got to smile at the liberal-left's increasingly futile attempt to control the Official Narrative. The insane immigration policies (etc.) of European liberal states, which have led there to a resurgence of the right, means that "hate is back" doncha know.

It's all so laughable when you consider that the lefties have shown themselves to be as just as hateful if not more so than the right, and that the history of leftist vs. rightist states shows that the left's hatred is far more intense, if gauged by the number of people they have murdered compared to that the right (especially when you factor in abortion).

In Europe right now, it's all a sure sign of their desperation and ultimate doom. They are unfit to govern, and an increasing number of Europeans know it.

In 2011, when the demented Anders Brevik went on a killing spree over what he perceived to be the Norweigan sellout to Islam, European traditionalists scrambled to distance themselves from his actions.  However bad things may be, you don't just go out and murder a bunch of benighted politicians and kids, they rightly argued.  But there is a point to be addressed here they said, and one "Shrewsbury", commenting on the traditionalist Lawrence Auster's blog,  made that point eloquently:

Shrewsbury is giving no thought to the political fall-out from the Breivik atrocity, for three reasons, in ascending order of importance:

3. If the liberals want to turn a hundred horrible murders into just more grist for the mill of their squalid politics, he is willing to let them have it.

2. He does not give a rat’s hindquarters what liberals (that is, neo-Leninists) think or say or do about anything. At this point in the dialectic, no dialogue is possible with them. They live in their own universe of lies and depravity.

1. The deeper meaning of this event goes far beyond giving the haircuts on the television news a new rhetorical weapon. It means multiculturalism and mass immigration are now pushing some white people into the same nihilistic psychological space as Muslims, left with nothing but an overwhelming urge to destroy. If the liberals had the wit to understand this, they would be profoundly alarmed. The difference of course is that the Muslim culture is the source of its own despair, while for the European the cause of despair is the forcible ruin and elimination of his culture by others—the left, the Muslims. This means that the European urge to destroy can be slaked by allowing the European to be European, while the Muslim’s urge to destroy can never be slaked, because, to achieve any peace, he must become something other than Muslim.

But at the moment this makes no difference—you have two urges to destroy, with the utterly rotten edifice of liberalism in the middle. And this is what matters, not what Rachel Maddow is babbling tomorrow. We may even find that the liberals’ expressions of hate toward the right become actually less intemperate after this, as they begin to sense the stirrings of the monster which they have done so much to awake, and, having cried wolf a thousand times, now find themselves confronted by a dragon; and begin to realize that all their silly ranting about how awful the Right is will be of no use if they are to be confronted by a Right which really is awful.

This didn’t have to happen, the left didn’t have work so long and so frenziedly to try to destroy us, and everything we are, and everything we have, but they did, so it will happen. It is sickening and it is tragic.

I would highlight Shrewsbury's point that "(a)t this point in the dialectic, no dialogue is possible with (the European liberal-leftists). They live in their own universe of lies and depravity."

Which means that their states no longer enjoy political legitimacy.  Certain things follow from this.

For us Anglicans, I would argue that the time has come to put away this kind of nonsense, and embrace the realism we will all need to avoid civil war in Europe and perhaps here in the Anglosphere.

Lastly, regarding "'hate",  I will conclude with this observation of G.K. Chesterton:

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

What is behind us is Christian civilization.  As Bill Bennett once put it, we defend that civilization "because it is good, and it is ours."

The Irrationality and Unmanliness of Christian Pacifism

On display here.  I gave up after posting references to Catholic teaching, to the work of C.S. Lewis and Richard Niebuhr, and highlighting the illogic of their exegesis.  Their blinders are apparently on for good.

Three Articles for the "Church v. Academy" Category

Advice to Young Scholars, Robert P. George

Jesus and the Professional Theologians, Peter J. Leithart

Doctors of the Law and the Spirit of Trent, Fr. Ray Blake

The Church and Men

"Men are Miracle-Gro for a church. Put men in a church and it will grow. The men don't even have to be that committed. Mainline churches in postwar America scooped up religiously adrift me--and grew like mad as a result. But during the 1970s, the mainline turned its back on men (and all things masculine). Almost immediately mainline churches began deflating like leaky balloons--losing members and influence." - Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow, p 134

The Left's Unholy Alliance with Islam

Great piece from an Aussie on the symbiotic relationship between the Left and Islam.  As the map below indicates, Christianity's greatest threats have been from Islam and Leftism, here shown in red (communism).  Other less virulent forms of leftism vex the Church today, but as James Kalb correctly observes there are increasing indications that things will get worse under them in Europe and the Anglosphere.  The spread of Christianity on the map is shown in white, but we do not see this threat depicted here.

My own belief is that, on the spiritual level, Leftism is a virulent form of Antichristianity that hates Christ and His Church so much that it has happily joined ranks with Islam, even if this means the destruction of its liberal states down the road.  That is, it's hatred is so intense that it will gladly commit suicide in order to effect a homicide of the object of its hate.  It is nihilistic to the core. 

Don't neglect to read this important article.

The Spread of the Gospel from Western Conservatory on Vimeo.

The Feminization of the Church is Largely a Result of the Feminization of Western Culture

Update 10/6: More men speaking in girls' 'dialect', study shows

Yesterday I posted a link to Leon Podles' book The Church Impotent:  The Feminization of Christianity.  Podles devotes a substantial part of his work showing the causes of feminization within the Church (e.g., medieval "bridal mysticism"), but is sure the case as well that the Church has been feminized from without.   As feminism is a corollary of Western liberal-leftism, and as that ideology has permeated Western culture since the late 18th century, we have all been caught up in its zeitgeist all our lives.  Consequently, I think we Westerners have unconsciously adopted beliefs and attitudes deemed "normal" by our culture that are anything but normal when viewed in light of the Christians doctrines of creation and redemption.  We've brought these beliefs and attitudes, with their corresponding pathologies, into the Church.   Just to cite one example, but a key one, I think Western egalitarianism accounts for why otherwise traditional churches capitulated so quickly and thoroughly on the issue of women's ordination.

The zeitgeist proceeds from bad to worse, and in so doing provides the Church with the rationale to do an entire rethink of Western liberalism.   This morning a Facebook friend posted his experience at a high school football game:

I worked an High School Football game this weekend and watched two great teams of boys play with passion and developing skills of teamwork, camaraderie and leadership. I was down on the field standing next to a play when a Ref unexpectedly threw a flag at the end of the play. This took me by surprise since I was standing right there and I didn’t see any kind of a foul. The Ref marched out to the center of the field and indicated the foul – no one, not even the Public Announcer knew what the Ref had just indicated. The 5-yard penalty was paced off and the game continued. I asked one of the coaches what the heck had been called – Answer: The Ref felt that the winning team was being “too aggressive” and penalized them for it. The wussification of the American male will not help America survive. I’m sure the Ref would have been “booed” by both sides, if anyone knew what the call really meant.

Later this morning I stumbled upon this article:

Students warned: Bulging biceps, big guns advance unhealthy masculinity

The Vanderbilt week kicked off with a lecture by the first man to minor in women’s studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Jackson Katz. (His alma mater now offers a bachelor’s in women, gender and sexuality studies.)

The self-described “anti-sexist activist” and filmmaker said that sexual violence and domestic abuse are men’s issues and that men would “benefit tremendously from having this conversation.”

Katz founded a consulting firm that “provides gender violence prevention and leadership training to institutions in the public and private sectors” and has pioneered the use of bystander training in the U.S. military, according to his website. . . .

Athletes and fraternity members are a risk to themselves and others because of the pressure put on them to act masculine, according to other events from the week.

One event featured a screening of the limited-release documentary The Mask You Live In, which blames “America’s narrow definition of masculinity” for the deteriorating mental health of boys and men.

“The three most destructive words that every man receives when he’s a boy is when he’s told to ‘be a man,’” former NFL player Joe Ehrmann says in the film. Now a minister, Ehrmann spoke on an all-male panel in 2013 titled “Breaking the Male Code,” which was organized by Vagina Monologues writer Eve Ensler.

“Whether it’s homicidal violence or suicidal violence, people resort to such desperate behavior only when they are feeling shamed and humiliated, or feel that they would be if they didn’t prove they were real men,” psychiatrist James Gilligan, a professor at New York University, says in the The Mask You Live In. . . .

This is the second consecutive year Vanderbilt has hosted a discussion about masculinity. The Center for Medicine, Health, and Society hosted “The Politics of Masculinity” last year.

Rory Dicker, the director of the Women’s Center, told The College Fix by email that it hosted the week to “further the conversations” in response to Katz’s “provocative ideas” about masculinity.

But this year’s masculinity series was roundly mocked in national news outlets in the week leading up to the observance, including by a panel of four women and one man on the Fox News show Outnumbered.

Host Andrea Tantaros claimed the organizers were trying to “demasculinize men” and turn them into “thumb-sucking little beta males in skinny jeans.”

Asked about the Fox News pundits’ criticisms, Vanderbilt’s Dicker said they “missed the fact that … there are many ways to be masculine, but American society pressures boys and men to adopt” the version that prioritizes “being competitive, stoic and aggressive, for example.”

Boys and men should also be taught that “emotional vulnerability, cooperation, and sensitivity are valuable human traits,” Dicker said.

Ick.  Just, ick. It's time for us to exercise the Benedict Option in earnest in order to escape this and other pernicious mentalities of Western unbelief.   There's nothing wrong about boys and men being "emotionally intelligent", but feminism is interested in much more than making them so.  They want to make unmanly, and we simply will have none of it.  Our boys need to be taught both the military and gentlemanly virtues of chivalry.  They need to learn about Christian monks and warriors.  They need to master the outdoors.  They need to learn to use tools and weaponry.  They need to taugh how to relate to women in a virtuous, but steadfastly male way.  In his essay The Necessity of Chivalry, C.S. Lewis touted that medieval code as the best way to make Christian men:

The medieval knight brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate toward one another.  It brought them together for that very reason.  It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson.  It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. . . .

If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections - those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be "meek in hall", and those who are "meek in hall" but useless in battle - for the third class, who are both brutal in peace and cowardly in war, need not here be discussed.  When this dissociation of the two halves of Launcelot occurs, history becomes a horribly simple affair. . . .  The man who combines both characters - the knight - is not a work of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.

In the world today there is a "liberal" or "enlightened" tradition which regards the combative side of man's nature as a pure, atavistic evil, and scouts the chivalrous sentiment as part of the "false glamour" of war.  And there is also a neo-heroic tradition which scouts the chivalrous sentiment as a weak sentimentality, which would raise from its grave (its shallow and unquiet grave!) the pre-Christian ferocity of Achilles by a "modern invocation". . . .

(However), there is still life in the tradition which the Middle Ages inaugurated.  But the maintenance of that life depends, in part, on knowing that the knightly character is art not nature - something that needs to be achieved, not something that can be relied upon to happen.  And this knowledge is specially necessary as we grow more democratic.  In previous centuries the vestiges of chivalry were kept alive by a specialized class, from whom they spread to other classes partly by imitation and partly by coercion.  Now, it seems, the people must either be chivalrous on its own resources, or else choose between the two remaining alternatives of brutality and softness. . . . The ideal embodied in Launcelot is "escapism" is a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word; it offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable. . . .

We simply can't turn our boys over to men who major in women's studies.  Come out from among them, and be ye separate.

Lessons in Manliness: The Hobbit

From The Art of Manliness blog.

The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity

Leon Podles' important work is now available for free as an e-book.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Migrant crisis: Are these happy young men really timid souls fleeing war and persecution?

Moorman on the Puritans and the Caroline Divines

“(The Puritans), less well informed than the Anglicans, . . . could not understand what these scholarly men were trying to do. Because the High Churchmen stood out for episcopacy as essential to catholic order they accused them of wanting to restore the papacy; and because they fought for the beauty and order in worship, for loyalty to the Prayer Book, for the offering of a liturgy worthy of a great Church, the Puritans thought they wanted to bring back the Roman Mass. The Caroline Divines, therefore, found themselves out of sympathy with the Puritan party which was rising to power, and many of them suffered during the troubled years. But by their sound scholarship, their courage, the purity and sanctity of their lives, they saved the Church of England from destruction and laid the foundations upon which later generations could build.” John Moorman, "History of the Church in England"

Two Recommended Articles on Anglican Catholicity

The Anglican Mind in Caroline and Tractarian Thought, Canon Arthur Middleton

WhyThe Parish?,  Fr. Lee Nelson

ACNA, the Russian Orthodox Church and Romans 13

Let's hope that the warm relations recently struck between the ACNA, and OCA and the ROC don't chill in the wake of the ROC's pronouncement that Russia's war against ISIS is "holy."  Already, over at the ACNA Facebook page, the pacifists and the theologically challenged are having a hissy-fit over the ROC's statement.  I was sort of hoping that the new ecumenical bonhomie between the ROC and ACNA might disabuse the view of certain ACNA clergy that "violence is never the answer."  We shall see.

Muscular Christianity

Russian Orthodox Church declares war on ISIS a ‘holy battle’.

Now we're talkin'.

Christian Resistance Theory: The Catholic Second Amendment

Another must read by Second Amendment scholar David Kopel.

Scholars of the American Revolution and of the Second Amendment are used to looking at the closest intellectual ancestors of the Founders—especially at John Locke and Algernon Sidney, and also at the many other English authors from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who articulated a right to armed revolution in order to vindicate the natural right of self-defense. Although King George III reportedly denounced the American War of Independence as “a Presbyterian rebellion,” it seems that American principle of justified revolution has very strong Catholic roots. When Pope Gregory launched the Papal Revolution, he had no idea that there was an American continent, let alone that he was unleashing ideas which, after centuries of development, would mature into an American Revolution. One of the values of understanding the debt that the Declaration of Independence and the Second Amendment owe to the Summa Theologica, to Policraticus, and to the other great works of Catholic resistance theory is that we can better understand that the American principles of revolution and the right to arms are not novelties that spontaneously arose in 18th-century America or in 17th-century Great Britain. Rather, they are the natural results of an intellectual tradition that was in many ways far older and broader—and much more Catholic—than the American Founders may have realized.

Christian Resistance Theory: John of Salisbury

Lex iniusta non est lex - St. Augustine

A few days ago I promised some further comments on Christian resistance theorists from the Middle Ages.  Oftentimes when I make comments such as the one I made in the previous post, I get blank stares and embarrassed silence, especially from fellow clergy.  The assumption seems to be that since Jesus promised us tribulation in this world, a passive, pacifist response is what is required from all Christians who suffer persecution.  No Christian, and certainly no clergyman according to this view, should ever defend the argument for the propriety of armed resistance against tyranny.  As Archbishop Foley Beach recently put it in a comment designed to honor Martin Luther King, "Violence is not the answer. Violence only leads to more violence. It is non-violence which brings lasting social change".

As you can see in the linked blog article, my answer to that was, "Archbishop Beach's comment is flat wrong when viewed in a biblical and Christian-historical contexts.  Plus, it's just flat wrong empirically.  The Orthodox Serbs and Greeks will tell you that their violent resistance against the Ottoman Turks brought lasting social change to their lands." I'm sure Archbishop Beach would also agree with the proposition that violence was indeed the right answer to Adolf Hitler.  (I choose to give His Grace the benefit of the doubt and speculate that his words represented a "throw-away" comment designed to say something politic about MLK on his national day of celebration.)

Moreover, the Christian resistance theory that was developed by certain theologians in the West, and more or less embraced in the East, was developed by clergy, mainly bishops.  One such bishop was the Anglo-Saxon John of Salisbury, Secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop of Chartres, and author of an important political treatise, Policraticus, in which the bishop, echoing the political thought of Manegold of Lautenbach and foreshadowing that of Thomas Aquinas, argued for the right to revolution against tyranny, a proposition that stands at the center of American political theory.

My good friend David Kopel, with whom during my gun rights activism days I co-authored a law review article on the right to keep and bear arms, penned this article about John of Salisbury.  I highly recommend it to all my Christian friends, especially my fellow clergy who think that Christian theology justifies the proposition, "Violence is never the answer."

Consider St. Augustine

Who, following St. Paul in his doctrines of grace, was just as Protestant as Luther and Calvin, but in his mysticism, ecclesiology and sacramentology was just as Catholic as those who preceded the Reformers.

That should be our aim as Anglicans.  We are not Presbyterians with prayer books.