make a summarized distillation of the history of Christianity
- somewhat like NAG Here, but for Christians
- need to start the timeline somewhere where things broke, maybe ~200 or maybe ~70?
PULL FROM the-west
- the Catholic Church institutionalized Christianity, removed the priesthood mindset
- the Reformation tried to claw it back, removed at least some of the traditions
- the founding of America, with all its goodness, was also VERY much built on mutual benefit (and nothing communal or loyal)
- the Progressive Movement shifted the focus from the Church’s job managing the moral state of man to the physical state
- social gospel, among other things
- beyond being poorly equipped for this (due to the soul-changing and not-as-political nature of the Christian faith) this was simply too many battles to fight
- the decay comes as the Church has given up its moral responsibility to the world’s institutions
- the answer comes through the Church revisiting its authority to have its own institutions, NOT in partnering with the world
- this may not happen, though, and the world will probably keep taking over more control
- if the Church ever DID do this, it would lead to [persecution], meaning most Church institutions are too [afraid] to damage the good thing they’ve got going
We have outsourced
the Church has been outsourced
pstychologists replce ministers
the govt replaced parents for esucation and moral guidance
bureaus replace the Church community
2025-05-04 speech
Lev 10:1-2 Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu took their censers, put fire in them and added incense; and they offered unauthorized (strange) fire before the Lord, contrary to his command. So fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.
We don’t know what that strange fire was (alcohol could have been involved), but it was not according to specification.
- it wasn’t within the boundaries of what God had established
- v. 6: their sin was so great that Aaron wasn’t even allowed to grieve their deaths
We offer strange fire to God when we declare something holy that really isn’t.
2 modern quotes:
- But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will — not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord.
- In the bible you read, in Mark 9:23, “if thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.” Dr. Norman Vincent Peale said, “this is one of the greatest laws in the universe. Fervently do I wish I had discovered it as a very young man. It dawned upon me much later in life and I found it to
be one of the greatest, if not my greatest discovery, outside of my relationship to God. And the great law briefly and simply stated is that if you think in negative terms, you’ll get negative results. If you’ll think in positive terms, you will achieve positive results. That is the simple fact which is at the basis of an astonishing law of prosperity and success. In three words, ‘believe and succeed’.”
A. Nuremburg, 1938, a key Hitler speech on art
B. 1959 sales training recording by Earl Nightingale
In God’s eyes, both of these are equally blasphemous because they dovetail holy and unholy
consider my present life a cautionary tale of this:
- I believed a synthesis of the world’s and God’s wisdom, which led me eventually to sin against my wife and kids
- I haven’t seen my wife or kids since September because of what I did
- That situation created a legal butterfly effect that took my job away from me
- On paper, I am cursed against every job I look for
- Soon, I will lose more from this through prolonged unemployment
- However, I and my family deserve nothing short of death for what I’ve done, so I have nothing left to complain about
Protestant Post-Reformation PTSD
the Post-Reformation PTSD
Mary Bible studies for females are sparse compared to Deborah or Rahab
Ornamentation is sparse
Rituals are often taboo
The attention of the saints on this world is taboo
condemnation of the Apocrypha
the end of it all
the domain of what will happen is going to get pretty bad
the absence of a king has demonstrated awful human behavior with all the free speech
we’ve decided that 2 young people are better at judging character than their 4 parents (arranged marriage)
tradition is out, now that technology is in
Jesus will come back when there are no souls left to harvest