There’s a lot of noise about defending Western Civilization as Christian. It’s not Christian, of course, but Western Civ has provided the platform for hijacking the label “Christian.” None of these scholars defending Western Civ wants to explain how a Hebrew man defending ancient Hebrew mysticism is the founder of what passes for rationalist Christianity in the West. Somehow the doctrine of Christ was wholly replaced by Platonic-Aristotelian logic filtered through heathen Germanic mythology. As I’ve often tried to show, seizing the words of the New Testament and filling them with that wild mixture of nonsense was pretty much the same as the Jews gutting their Hebrew Scripture of its deep mystical traditions and filling it with Hellenized rationalism.
Without apology I assert that Western Civilization has done more damage to the gospel message than any other identifiable force in human history. It has so dirtied the name “Christian” that I hesitate to use it in some settings. But we aren’t hostile in the sense of trying to destroy Western Civ. That job has already been done; Western Civ has always borne the seeds of its own destruction. Those seeds have germinated, grown, and the crop is about ready to harvest. The West is almost dead and gone.
What follows it will probably be worse. It remains for another generation of heart-led mystical believers to discern the flaws of that, but good riddance to the West. It will be painful and destructive on Western folks because the West has been so painful and destructive to everyone else. When Jesus talked about worshiping Mammon, He was characterizing the influence of Hellenism on Hebrew religion, and it’s the same rationalist materialism that characterizes the West. I will not be shamed for my prophetic warning that this is going to hurt, and justly so.
Meanwhile, precious few are those who hear and repent. There’s no arrogance or pride in that. We are filled with sorrow that no one listens, but no has listened over the centuries since Jesus warned His own people not to go down that Hellenized path to Hell. We watch has billions of souls pass by every opportunity to seize their own divine inheritances. Paul says the Creation itself mourns that very thing, so we cannot avoid joining in the dirge.
Lord, please allow us to rescue a few.
What you are saying is probably as close to the truth as anyone is likely to get, but I’m inclined to wonder if Constantine and the Bishops of Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria didn’t have that in mind when they were deciding what the New Testament was going to say and what texts should be included, which rejected. That was certainly the event that fixed the direction Christianity was going to take for the next couple of thousand years. Seems Christianity came to have more to do with the mental workings of Saul of Tarsus than those four books about a man called Jesus they canonized, and the one they rejected.
The statement, “Without apology I assert that Western Civilization has done more damage to the gospel message than any other identifiable force in human history” seems to me to ignore the fact the first Council at Nicaea did a per-emptive strike to assure it was never going to ge anything other than what it became.
I think I can answer both of these together. I take the position Paul wasn’t so cerebral as trying to answer a cerebral drift, using the terminology that came with it. But I agree that Constantine and his hired bishops set the path because the Early Church Fathers had already drifted far enough to be led in the wrong direction. So far as I can discern with my feeble understanding, John’s Apocalypse was the last sanely mystical writing of it’s kind. And I find evidence that the canon was pretty well established by common practice by the time John passed, so that there wasn’t much to discuss in 300 AD except as to how it should be interpreted and what political use it could be. They hedged it in with a very stalwart mythology as to what men should make of it. I’m not much troubled by the resulting collection as long as we ensure we view them in light of the Old Testament. But I agree that the tale of how things were chosen is pretty murky, and it pays to be humble about your choices.