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How true is the following article? Is Eastern Christianity braced well for any of this? How goes it?
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Spineless Shepherds: The Scandal of Christian Heresy
By Chuck (a private soldier in the Culture War)


For in the last days the false prophets and the corrupters shall be multiplied, and the sheep shall be turned into wolves, and love shall change to hate.
-The Didache, XVI.3

Presbyterians can't decide if faith in Jesus is their sole means of salvation. Episcopalians ordain non-celibate homosexuals. A Congregational church drops the Lord's prayer from its Sunday service. Brazilian Anglicans send missionaries to England to preach the gospel. Inclusive language bibles emasculate G-d the Father. Lutherans wonder if preaching the gospel is still necessary. Churches evict Boy Scouts on trumped up charges of discrimination against homosexuals. Unitarians, preoccupied with aborting themselves out of existence, barely notice. In these disordered houses of the Lord, up is down, right is wrong, love is hate, and good is evil, and liberal Christians no longer preach the gospel. What is going on here? How dare we flippantly pervert 3000 years of Judeo-Christian moral teaching, the very foundation upon which Western civilization was built?

The church is under relentless attack from the atheistic state, and the collectivist coalition of bad actors (liberal media, feminists, homosexuals, race baiters, animal rights lunatics, and greenies) that make common cause in their hatred for G-d who created the natural order and the hierarchies of the cosmos which they can neither dispose of nor control. G-d alone rules His Creation. They hate Him because He mocks their puny, self-aggrandizing scheming for atheistic humanism.

Even religious conservatives, hypnotized by the PC mantra of “tolerance,” and intimidated into inaction by the implied threat of bombastic attack from the religious left, are often reluctant to call this phenomenon by its proper name: heresy; and even more unwilling to reprove its perpetrators: the liberal clergy. Instead, they are reduced to incessant gibbering about challenges posed to the church in a post-Christian era, sometimes even girding their loins enough to repulse a solitary liberal attack at the parish council meeting. Rubbish. This is fighting a strategic war on a tactical level, a surefire strategy for losing. The strategic target in this fight is the liberal clergy. Most laypeople have no formal religious education and only weak indoctrination into their own faith. They are continuously bombarded with collectivist propaganda from the media and the government, so it is hardly a surprise that many otherwise upright people have been led astray by these doctrines of demons. Religious confessions of every stripe are infested with political agitators more interested in advancing a humanistic political agenda than with worshipping G-d. That's just the unfortunate lay of the land.

The liberal clergyman, on the other hand, cannot feign ignorance. It is impossible to study sacred scripture and theology, even in a Marxist theological institution, without comprehending the underlying Truth of the Word of G-d. The Word is too quick and powerful to be so simply obscured. No, he is guilty of malfeasance. Trained to be a good shepherd of his people, he is a mighty failure, committing treason and leading millions of souls astray by his moral cowardice. The liberal pastor prefers the security and false serenity of preaching heresy to the dirty, oft-bruising conflict of the spiritual arena.

Despite its apparent complexity, malaise in the church is quite simple to cure. All Christians must fearlessly preach the gospel, following the Apostle Paul's example. This includes moral encouragement of brothers and sisters, and the righteous reproof of sin and heresy. Can anyone read the Pauline epistles without recognizing Paul's purpose for writing them? It is the pastor's sacred responsibility to know the difference between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and to reprove, instruct, and correct his sheep properly according to the Word of God. If they will not be corrected, they must be expelled from the flock. Ultimately, it is the pastor's responsibility to identify and root out heresy at the local level. If the pastor, himself, is intimidated by liberal elements within his church he is a weakling, the equivalent of a shepherd afraid of his own sheep, and without moral claim to his position.

So, brothers and sisters of liberal confessions, now is time to hold your liberal pastors and bishops personally accountable for teaching the false doctrines of heresy that lead the souls of the faithful astray. Stiffen their spines without equivocation, pray for their moral courage unceasingly, and demand that they fulfill their God-ordained duty to lead the flock righteously and fearlessly. Would the Apostle Paul, or indeed Jesus Himself, fear to be politically incorrect if he walked into your church in the flesh today?

The greatest threat to America's national security comes not from hostile foreign powers, but from internal dissolution and moral decay caused by collectivist ideology in various forms. Chaoskampf (conflict-against-chaos), a literary motif of the ancient Near East, refers to the heroic struggle of the gods against hostile monsters of chaos threatening the cosmos. The ancient battle still rages; primordial chaos still endangers God's creation, today manisfesting itself as political correctness, crypto-Marxism, globalism, atheism, moral decline, forced deconstruction of Western culture, and religious persecution of Christians and Jews.

[ 01-04-2002: Message edited by: Edwin ]

Edwin,

Excellent! In the running for inclusion on my site, as is Brendan's article today on Orthodox civilization and Orthodox-bashing by the West during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

A realistic assessment of the Eastern Churches in America based on this?

The threat to the Byzantine Catholics comes from Amchurch, who like John Ireland of yore threaten to steamroller their less numerous Byzantine brethren if only through social pressure. I've seen this with my own eyes, happening to the third generation. Ireland posthumously gets his wish.

The threat to the Orthodox, especially cradles ( "ethnics' ) comes not from a bigger Church to which they are yoked but from the larger American culture, which indirectly means from Protestantism. Going along to get along, and to preserve one's hard-earned acceptance in American society as "America's fourth faith'. What I call ethnic Protestantism: seeing one's faith as just an ethnic flavor of Christianity like Lutheranism, Presbyterianism, etc. — "šizko jedno', "it's all the same'. Hence the deafening indifference to abortion and the sellout on contraception.

In the Eastern European homelands the threat is similar, as the legacy of decades of Communism combines with the worst of Western secularism and materialism (you now can buy stuff like Hustler in Poland — woo hoo). The Church itself will hold fast but the people are indifferent to it. Plus there is some competition from well-bankrolled Western sectarian missionaries.

http://oldworldrus.com

[ 01-04-2002: Message edited by: Serge ]

Another writing by the same author from above ...


"Throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, the Establishment elite worked tirelessly to dismantle and uproot the venerable institutions and noble virtues upon which this nation was founded. Pursuing a gradualist agenda, this well-organized cohort of Marxist progressives savaged the family, the Church, the law, the public schools, the armed forces, the Constitution, the notion of personal responsibility, the work ethic…indeed the whole of western culture. An extraordinary alliance gauchiste of feminists, sodomites, multiculturalists, globalists, race baiters, greenies, and liberals of every conceivable stripe conspired to attack any institution or idea promoting the now quaint notion that there is something greater and more noble than a man's own base appetites. Now is the time to reap their harvest of death.

Poisoned by a toxic diet of PC propaganda dripped into them by the IV of the public schools, the entertainment media, and the federal government, American youth are systematically stripped of their moral basis and their ability to think inferentially; then, they are indoctrinated with the disordered newspeak slogans of the Left. They are taught to hate God, but to love perversity; to hate America, but to love the UN; to despise their parents, but to love their “village;” to denounce western culture, but to revel in the barbarous tribalism of the Third World, ...

Robbed of a well-developed illative sense, most of our youth manage, nonetheless, to detect the deep deception inherent in all Marxist doctrine, and this revelation makes them despondent. Deprived of the warmth of familial love, the affection of true friends, the moral teaching of the church, and a secure place in the community-the underpinnings of civilized society-our youth are transformed en mass into weary, cynical existentialists hopelessly casting about for meaning in a meaningless world. Lacking empathy, devoid of kindness, their moral compasses disabled by the state, they feel only the pain and cold of their own emptiness ..."

[ 01-04-2002: Message edited by: Edwin ]

Interesting reading. Is this posted from a website? Where is it at?

Thanks!

Dave Ignatius DTBrown@aol.com

I love it. Even reading it a second time (I had seen it previously in Pat Robertson's publication) it still has all the zazz and juices I remember. Gimme more, gimme more, gimme more.

This is absolutely stupid. Protestant Fundementalism has no place in the Catholic Church. These are the same ding-dongs who blamed the World Trade Center diaster on America.

I am a life-long Catholic and am just aghast that people think we need these people and their trouble making in our Church.

If I wanted to be a Bible-thumper, I would go downthe street to the holy roller church of mindless nonsense.

Olga Nimchek

You have to remember that many Protestant Clery trace their philosphy back to the God is Dead Movement. I worked with a seminary graduate that belonged to that school and they the church as merely a spiritual advisor and the Social Mission as the important thing. We shared and office and he thought there was no God. I believed in God but the ministers he knew did not believe. To them Jesus was a socail cause.

<Antonio Banderas impression, with bad "Espanish' accent>

Ah, fundamentalism! It is the, how you say? Ahhh yessss... "f-word' of religious dialogue...

</Antonio Banderas>

Oh, come on!

You reap what you sow. America spits at God with abortion, etc., plus (here Robertson and I part ways) props up Israel and takes sides against Palestine, so it's not surprising someone hit back. (Even though in the statist neocon "Amerika �ber alles' mind, Third World people aren't supposed to hit back.) God doesn't cause evil like 5,000 people dying in one day, but if a nation turns away from Him it faces the consequences, just like a person. Surely you don't believe "my country, right or wrong' is Christian?

http://oldworldrus.com

[ 01-05-2002: Message edited by: Serge ]

Offensive post removed.

[ 01-15-2002: Message edited by: Administrator ]

(Post deleted.)

http://oldworldrus.com

[ 01-05-2002: Message edited by: Serge ]

There is so much I would love to say in response to this ********, but will restrain myself. However, I will let St. Augustine say a few words in my place: "Is there any affliction or endured by mankind that was not endured by our fathers before us? What sufferings of ours even bear comparison with what we know of their sufferings? And yet you hear people complaining about this present day and age because things were so much better in former times. I wonder what would happen if they could be taken back to the days of their ancestors--would we not still hear them complaining? You may think past ages were good, but it is only because you are not living in them. It amazes me that you who have been freed from the curse, who have believed in the Son of God, who have been instructed in the Holy Scriptures---that you can think the days of Adam were good. And your ancestors bore the curse of Adam, of that Adam to whom the words were addressed: 'With sweat on yout brow you shall eat your bread; you shall till the earth from which you were taken, and it will yield you thorns and thistles.' This is what he deserved and what he had to suffer; this is the punishment meted out to him by God. How then can you think that past ages were better than your own? From the time of that first Adam to the time of his descendants today, man's lot has been labor and sweat, thorns and thistles. Have you forgotten the flood and the calamitous times of famine and war whose history has been recorded precisely in order to keep us from complaining to God on account of our own times? Just think about what those past ages were like! Is there one among us who does not shudder to hear or read of them? Far from justifying complaints about our own time, they teach us how much we have to be thankful for." From the second reading of the Office of Readings for Wednesday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time, page 134 in vol. 4 of the Liturgy of the Hours. (From Augustine's Sermio Caillau-Saint Yves 2, 92: PLS 2, 441-552)

There is so much I would love to say in response to this ********, but will restrain myself. However, I will let St. Augustine say a few words in my place: "Is there any affliction or endured by mankind that was not endured by our fathers before us? What sufferings of ours even bear comparison with what we know of their sufferings? And yet you hear people complaining about this present day and age because things were so much better in former times. I wonder what would happen if they could be taken back to the days of their ancestors--would we not still hear them complaining? You may think past ages were good, but it is only because you are not living in them. It amazes me that you who have been freed from the curse, who have believed in the Son of God, who have been instructed in the Holy Scriptures---that you can think the days of Adam were good. And your ancestors bore the curse of Adam, of that Adam to whom the words were addressed: 'With sweat on yout brow you shall eat your bread; you shall till the earth from which you were taken, and it will yield you thorns and thistles.' This is what he deserved and what he had to suffer; this is the punishment meted out to him by God. How then can you think that past ages were better than your own? From the time of that first Adam to the time of his descendants today, man's lot has been labor and sweat, thorns and thistles. Have you forgotten the flood and the calamitous times of famine and war whose history has been recorded precisely in order to keep us from complaining to God on account of our own times? Just think about what those past ages were like! Is there one among us who does not shudder to hear or read of them? Far from justifying complaints about our own time, they teach us how much we have to be thankful for." From the second reading of the Office of Readings for Wednesday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time, page 134 in vol. 4 of the Liturgy of the Hours. (From Augustine's Sermio Caillau-Saint Yves 2, 92: PLS 2, 441-552)

I think that this socio-political stuff is exactly the kind of posturing that the Lord warned us against when He said that we should eschew the world and all its wiles. There's all kind of "loony-ism", whether Marxism, fundamental Christianity, Islamity, or PC-ism that diverts us from the Lord's command: Love God; love your neighbor as yourself.

AS I get older, I have learned one lesson to be the foundation: I have a soul and it is MY obligation (not some group's) to bring myself to God. That means following the basic tenet/commandment of the Gospel: Love God; love my neighbor as myself.

What other people do is their own business. There can be all sorts of labels (and God knows, people are ALWAYS ready to stick one on anybody or everybody), but the labels are nothing more than prideful judgement.

We baptized faithful KNOW what we have to do. We must just DO IT, and evangelize by our living witness. The rest of it,... I don't give a damn about the labels. "By their WORKS shall you know them." If one isn't loving and kind, then I'll smile, wish the best and move on. The Lord will judge me and them in His own good time. As a Christian, I have enough on my plate to keep me more than occupied unto eternity. And I can't be distracted from my goals by the "liberal", "conservative", "heterodox", "orthodox", "evangelical", "fundamentalist" lunacy.

In Your mercy, Lord. Keep my eyes fixed upon YOU alone and Your promises.

Blessings!

St. Augustine, Don, Dr. John,

AMEN!