Tag: faith

TBT^4: Go to Church

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At present, it feels like the United States is experiencing a major Christian religious revival just below the surface.  It seems like being a professing Christian has become—dare I say it?—cool.  The desire for genuine connection with Christ and a body of likeminded believers ripples throughout the nation, potentially bucking the long, depressing trend of declining faith.

While Boomers seemed to embrace the excuse to stay home from The Age of The Virus—they left churches and never returned—at least some young people are realizing the benefits of church attendance.  It feels like something is changing, that the Holy Spirit Is Moving in mighty ways.

Let’s hope that feeling is correct!  Regardless, in good times and bad (especially bad), we should be going to church, engaging in the our Christian walk with fellow believers.  The Easter season is the perfect time to get back into the habit.

With that, here is 25 April 2024’s “TBT^2: Go to Church“:

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TBT^256: Nehemiah and National Renewal

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Ah, yes, another timeless TPP classic—my highly politicized commentary on Nehemiah.  It’s a powerful story of God’s people working together and placing their faith and trust in Him, overcoming formidable odds in the process.  It’s a great “But God” story—rebuilding this wall would have been impossible but for God.

From an historical standpoint, the story is also an important reminder that the life cycle of nations is often cyclical.  Perhaps no people understood that better than the Hebrews, who were often the cause of their own misery, thanks to their tendency to forget about God as soon as things got comfortable.  That sin is not unique to the Hebrews, ancient or modern; it is an affliction all peoples in all times have struggled to resist.

We’re in a moment of national renewal in the United States.  Let us remember, when the times are good again, that it was Divine Providence—God—that allowed us this reprieve, this second chance.

With that, here is 14 March 2024’s “TBT^16: Nehemiah and National Renewal“:

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Rooting Out Heresy: The Cathars

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Years ago I picked up a book with the titillating title The History of Witchcraft and Demonology by Montague Summers, an alleged Catholic priest who professed a belief in the reality of witches, vampires, and werewolves, among other supernatural critters that go bump in the night.  On the point of witches, at least, they are all too real.

I’ve never quite managed to finish the book—it’s a slog, given the scholarly writing style of the early twentieth century—but the first few chapters take a deep dive into Gnosticism and related religious movements, like Manichaeism.  As I recall, Summers traces much of European witchcraft to various Gnostic heresies.

For the unfamiliar, Gnosticism essentially argues that everything in this world is wicked, and that God is, in fact, evil.  The argument is that all physical matter is the creation of an evil god, the demiurge, and that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was, in fact, good, as he sought to bring enlightenment and understanding to humanity.  Only the spiritual is good, and the rejection of material existence is, therefore, good.  Obtaining to that spiritual good is the result of gaining knowledge, which is why the serpent’s act in Genesis is not a moment of man’s fall, but of his awakening.  Gnostic faiths are also inherently dualistic, which can be particularly enticing to Christians, who often fall into a dualistic worldview of the earthly against the spiritual.

At least, that’s one quick version of Gnosticism.  The details vary, but the broad strokes are the same.  Regardless, we can easily see that Gnosticism and its offspring are inherently anti-Christian in nature.  They reject God’s Holiness, and elevate Satan to the role of a “good” god.  Like all forms of heresy—and sin!—Satan inverts and perverts the Truth.

And what is witchcraft, then, but an attempt to manipulate the spiritual world to do the bidding of humans in this world?  The Bible makes it very clear that witchcraft is not good.  We all know Exodus 22:18, a verse that has graced the opening title cards of many a bad horror film:  “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”  1 Samuel 28:3-25 tells the story of King Saul consulting the Witch at Endor, seeking to speak with the ghost of the prophet Samuel.  For this violation of God’s Law—and its implicit lack of trust in God’s Providence—Saul lost his throne for himself and his heirs.

I’m not advocating we go around staking overweight YouTube lesbians who claim to be witches (although I love Brian Neimeier‘s non-violent and cheeky “Witch Test“), but we need to be mindful of how easy it is to fall into heresy.  Christianity is a difficult faith at times, even though in some ways, it is the easiest:  Christ Offers us the free Gift of His Grace; Salvation is available to us, if only we will receive it.  But there are certainly difficult passages, and reconciling the God of the Old Testament with the Christ of the New Testament has presented a perennial struggle for some Christians.

Of course, even that dichotomy is false—and potential form of heresy!  The God of the Old Testament is the God of the New—and the God of today and forever!  God Does Not Change.

Nevertheless, some groups have failed to make the reconciliation; coupled with the Gnostic influences from Persia (via Manichaeism), the Middle Ages saw the rise of a fascinating, complex heresy, one that was rooted out—brutally but, I would argue, necessarily—by the Catholic Church:  the Cathars.

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TBT^2: Go to Church

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Church can be a beautiful thing.  Indeed, it should be—it’s the Body of Christ!  But many Christians are quitting church for various reasons.  The Age of The Virus gave everyone a taste of how the heathens live; unfortunately, too many Christians enjoyed it and dropped out of church almost entirely.

Perhaps the worst thing churches—and schools, and governments, and hospitals, and businesses, etc., etc., etc.—did during The Age of The Virus was to shutter their doors.  Churches should have been the last places to close down; during a pandemic, people needed access to their churches more than ever before, but the churches followed the world.  They’re suffering as a result now.

Granted, church attendance was on the decline In the Before Times, in The Long, Long Ago, before The Age of The Virus brought its authoritarian terrors.  The Plandemic was just the excuse to stop attending—“for safety!”—and it seems that many folks were not eager to return.  That’s a shame.  A church community provides so much, and while we can and should study Scripture on our own, we are part of a body.  An ear that hears but has no brain to process it or arms to react to the hearing is pretty useless.

So—go to church!

With that, here is 27 April 2023’s “TBT: Go to Church“:

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TBT^16: Nehemiah and National Renewal

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Ah, yes—Nehemiah.  One of my favorite books of the Bible.  What’s not to like?  A group of scrappy underdogs work together against the machinations of their enemies to build a wall.  They do it by trusting God.

When I first wrote this post way back in 2019, my most religious readers were quick to point out that, while I focused on Nehemiah building the wall, I skimped out on discussing God’s Role.  It was a fair, if slightly self-righteous, criticism.  Without God, there would have been no rebuilding of the wall.

That’s an important point:  without God, any “national renewal” would be fleeting, if it were possible at all.  Thank you to my slightly self-righteous readers for reminding me of that fact.

With that, here is 30 March 2023’s “TBT^4: Nehemiah and National Renewal“:

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Chapel Lesson: Exploring God’s Creation

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My school’s chaplain—a truly amazing man of God—is struggling in the hospital as I write these words.  Please lift Father Jason Hamshaw up in your prayers, dear readers.  I do not know the nature of his affliction, but the last I heard, he was in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), which never bodes well.  He is a relatively young man, and a loving husband and father.  One of his sons is a student here at my school.  Pray, and pray hard.

Because he is in the hospital, I was asked to deliver the chapel lesson/devotional/homily the morning of Thursday, 26 October 2023.  Here is the devotional I wrote, with a huge debt of gratitude to The Daily Encouraging Word, which I substantially adapted and modified for this lesson:

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You Can’t Cuck the Tuck IV: They Cucked the Tuck!

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It’s been nearly three years since I last wrote an installment of You Can’t Cuck the Tuck, but not because I grew disinterested in Tucker Carlson’s insightful commentary.  Quite the opposite:  his powerful, succinct analysis of our current ills has only deepened my respect for him and his worldview even more.  That he delivers his critiques with mirth, laughter, and good humor only strengthens them.

Sadly, Fox News—an organization that hasn’t done anything particularly interesting since Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld—has embraced cuckery and kicked The Tuck to the curb.  The last vestige of FNC as a truly conservative option in the space of mainstream cable news is now gone.

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TBT^4: Nehemiah and National Renewal

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A quick blurb before today’s post:  I’ve released my second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  It’s a collection of travel essays I’ve accumulated over the last four years, and it’s available now on Amazon.

Here’s where you can pick it up:

Pick up a copy today!  Even sharing the above links is a huge help.

Thank you for your support!

—TPP

***

I first wrote this (admittedly) political interpretation of Nehemiah 1:1-11 back in 2019.

2019.  What a different world.  That was in The Before Times, in The Long, Long Ago, before The Age of The Virus.  I suppose we’re living in the After Times now, a strange new world that is indelibly different after two years of masked ‘n’ vaxxed hysteria.  Doesn’t it seem like we’ve woken up, groggy and confused, from a two-year nightmare?  Everyone is living in a haze of uncertainty and regret—“maybe we shouldn’t have shut down restaurants and harassed people for not wearing a mask in their cars.”

It’s also interesting how that whole ridiculous, absurd ordeal now seems like some vague afterthought, almost like we only just barely remember what we endured a scant year or two ago.

Perhaps waking up from the nightmare and recognizing it as such is some form of national renewal.  I’m not so optimistic.  I think our society has goldfish memory, and we’ll act independent and defiant until the next cadre of experts delivers the next set of restrictions that we all must adopt, otherwise we’ll be Very, Very Bad People.

Why can’t we get national leaders like Nehemiah?  He stood up to attacks, schemes, plots, and slander, and managed to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem—and his people in the process.

With that, here is 24 March 2022’s “TBT^2: Nehemiah and National Renewal“:

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Gnostic Mysteries

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There is something appealing about possessing some bit of secret knowledge or trivia that is unknown to everyone, save a select few “initiates” fortunate enough to partake in the mysteries.  The seductive allure of secret knowledge—or of just being “in-the-know” about some microniche subculture—seems to be a part of human nature.

We’d like to think in our modern age that we’re not superstitious sorts, but we are haunted everywhere.  Scientists have elevated themselves to the level of priests in a cult of scientism, worshipping the emptiness of nihilistic materialism just as the pagans worshipped lifeless idols.  Both are made of stuff—hard, material, unfeeling, insensate stuff—and both are equally empty.

But we here on the Right can fall prey to Gnostic fantasies as well.  The Libertarian dreams of a utopia in which everyone engages in frictionless free exchanges and all uncomfortable disputes are settled with cash and self-interest.  He’s as materialist and deluded as the mask-wearing mandatory vaxxer preaching loudly from the Church of Scientism.  The hyper-nationalist dreams of some impossible ethnostate that never really existed in the first place.  And so on.

Still, it’s seductive, the idea that we can possess the knowledge of good and evil, of true Reality.  After all, that’s the original sin, isn’t, it?  Eve, then Adam, could not resist the allure of being—so they were told, dishonestly—like God.  But even—perhaps, especially–Christians can fall into this trap.

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