The Finkelsteinery

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dies Unexpectedly: No Foul Play Suspected? REALLY??

2016-02-14T18:39:00.000-08:00

What Really May Have Happened?

Americans ought to view with skeptical incredulity the sudden death of a prominent Supreme Court Justice, who was not only a key intellectual in the Constitutional movement, but a formidable opponent of and barrier to the efforts of New World Order Marxists which have been aggressively employed to test and rupture the foundations of our Republic, of fundamental human rights and of individual liberty – especially when, from the start, reports of his death were accompanied by unprompted denials of foul play, followed by a quick decision to forego an autopsy or any kind of investigation. A vitally important political figure dies unexpectedly (arguably among the most influential political and juridical figures of the Twentieth Century), first reports of which declare emphatically “No, he wasn't murdered; no, really, he wasn't!” – and no one finds that suspicious, especially given the fact that in most populated areas of our country, one could probably throw a stone in any direction and stand a good chance of hitting someone with a motive to kill the man? No one wants to even check, via autopsy, whether there might be suspicious marks on his body or something suspiciously wrong with his blood chemistry? REALLY?? Something is rotten in Denmark, and I can smell it all the way over here in Wisconsin...

This video mentions Dr. Carroll Quigley, who was Chair of the Political Science department at Georgetown University in the 1960s. Read his book, which reveals more about clandestine efforts involving Western governments and global business interests, free online in .pdf form, at Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. It is also available from Amazon, here.

Then, to illuminate Quigley's work and the impact of what it reveals, also read W. Cleon Skousen's, The Naked Capitalist: a Review and Commentary on Dr. Carroll Quigley's Book Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time.

Support Impeachment of President Barack Hussein Obama!

2016-01-12T07:58:00.002-08:00

I was sent an email last night, by an Anonymous sender, regarding the Articles of Impeachment against President Barack Hussein Obama, that will be considered by the Republican National Committee (RNC) on January 13, 2016. The email encouraged its recipients to spread the news of these Articles as widely as possible, and urged them to also notify their local RNC delegates and legislators of their support for his Impeachment. I have done, and am doing, these things.

I agree with and support an effort to impeach President Obama, for the reasons stated in the Anonymous letter, and more. Yes, even though it is only months before the end of President Obama’s second term and the Constitutional end of his Presidency, and even though the effort to impeach him, if successful in the House will most likely fail to result in conviction in the Senate, and even though the impact will likely be no more than symbolic and serve to generate alot of negative press, we are, in fact, duty-bound to pursue this course of action. President Obama is not just guilty of forty-eight infractions against the U.S. Constitution, as if they were single acts committed in a point of time somewhere in the past, but, being guilty of these infractions, he remains in continuous violation of the U.S. Constitution. What’s more, these violations, if they are not undone by the President or the People, will carry into the next administration. That is, the violations will continue, unless we act. Moreover, every single one of the forty-eight infractions is, itself, an impeachable act. If we do not act to impeach President Obama, we are defaulting on our obligations as citizens of the United States, and will lose our Republic.

The email that I was sent included two links. One link was to an interview of Stephen Pidgeon, who is a primary contributor to the drafting of the Articles of Impeachment against President Obama. The second link was to the Articles themselves. I have included both the video and the Articles, below. I have also included a copy of the letter I was Anonymously sent. Please note the tone of urgency in that letter. It was written by an evidently intelligent person, who, on the basis of President Obama’s ongoing violations of the Constitution, is afraid to reveal his identity.

May God Bless America ...even though we don’t deserve it.

Interview with Stephen Pidgeon of the
North American Law Center

Click Here to Read the Articles of Impeachment of Barack Hussein Obama

An ANONYMOUS LETTER Urgently Encouraging Support for
The Impeachment of President Obama
Dear Friend and Fellow Sovereign Citizen,

This is a serious message. Though I (the sender) know you personally, or am at least acquainted with you, please pardon my use of Anonymous email -- just as Publius wrote anonymously just prior to the American Revolution, so do I for my own protection, as I no longer have confidence that our political establishment is any more inclined to protect the People by vigorously acting against government infractions of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, than they are by acting against ongoing rampant infractions of the Second, Fourth and Tenth Amendments. I am sending this note to you, as I have to about a thousand others, in hopes that you can help draw public attention to what is clearly now our Civic Duty: the Impeachment of President Obama.

As you may well know, with the assistance of the North American Law Center (http://www.northamericanlawcenter.org/), Articles of Impeachment against President Obama have been recently drafted, and are scheduled for consideration by the Republican National Committee (RNC) at their meeting this week, on January 13, 2016. Despite support for his impeachment among average Americans (who have for years been calling for it), the leadership of the RNC, along with prominent career politicians, are far from enthusiastic about the idea. A link to the Articles is provided below. In addition, a link to an interview with a key contributor to those Articles is also provided. The links are listed in the open, so that you can see they are legitimate. Please visit those links (you may have to copy and paste the links into your browser) and give strong consideration to their content. After viewing/reading those links, I ask you to please contact your local RNC delegate, and your legislators, to urge support for the Impeachment of President Obama. Please also forward this email to everyone you know, or post it on your Blog or Facebook page, encouraging them to do the same.

Please understand the urgency behind this. President Obama, as an open enemy of our Republic, and of the very ideals of Liberty (which for centuries since the Renaissance and Enlightenment have everywhere served to equip the common man with education, given him promise, endowed him with purpose, lifted him out of poverty and beknighted him with dignity), has been in continuous violation of the Constitution -- the world's sole bearer of those ideals -- in at least forty-eight instances according to the Articles of Impeachment that have been drafted against him; he has used these violations to commit fraud against the People of the United States, to abuse the Power of the Executive Office, and to aid and abet our Nation's enemies, making us vulnerable to those who hate us; thus he has, in the final words of the Articles of Impeachment, "acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States."

We, the People, must act swiftly. President Obama has deliberately acted to weaken and demoralize our Nation, and appears now to be poised to unleash bloody mayhem across our Country, and, in coordination with other world leaders, throughout Europe as well, in order to justify a declaration of Martial Law -- ushering in the establishment of a dictatorship to restore and maintain order, and affecting the permanent collapse of Western Civilization. A classic recipe for coup d'etat, it has been prepared to serve the West in its entirety. If the People will not act to stop him now, it is likely that we will not make it to the elections in November. We have simply run out of time. We must act, NOW!

But even if this were not the case, even if this were mere "conspiracy theory" -- as President Obama has been forced to publicly refer to it in defense of his recent attacks against the Second Amendment -- even if he has not deliberately invited civil unrest and swung open the doors of our nation to wanton terrorists and criminals that they may generate fear and ignite violence in our country... consider this: it is now public knowledge that President Obama -- winner of the Nobel Peace Prize -- is intent upon leading the world as U.N. Secretary General, the spectre of which has our only friend and trusted ally in the Middle East, Israel, quivering with fear. President Obama, a narcissistic prima donna, has ambitions of being President of the World. President Bill Clinton entertained the same notions, but the public indictment of the People against him -- his Impeachment by the House of Representatives in 1998 -- made that politically impossible. If we have any concern for the people of the world, we must act to Impeach President Obama, we must act to preserve them from the kind of disaster wrought by him in our own Country.

Again, after giving strong consideration to the content in the links below, please contact your local RNC delegate, and your legislators, to urge support for the Impeachment of President Obama. Please also forward this email to everyone you know, or post it on your Blog or Facebook page, encouraging them to do the same.

Time is short. Don't hesitate to act. Your country, and the future of the free world, depend on you.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

(You may need to copy and paste the links listed below)

Interview with Contributor to Impeachment Articles: Obama is Establishing a Dictatorship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1yVXkwcZ4A

The Articles of Impeachment -- enumerating 48 violations of the U.S. Constitution committed by President Obama
http://www.northamericanlawcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Articles-of-Impeachment-of-Barack-Hussein-Obama-3.2-41.pdf

NSA Bluffdale facility to store over 5 zetabytes of surveilance data on sovereign American citizens

2012-12-04T21:39:00.000-08:00

Back in the 1990's, patriotic citizens already knew that Americans were the most surveiled and dossiered people in the history of the world – more so than citizens under the Fascist or Communist regimes of Hitler or Stalin. Of great concern at that time was the liberty destroying implications of RICO, FINCEN, "Know Your Customer" and other similar interdiction philosophies, legislation and law enforcement policies and programs. The philosophy of the most former of these, RICO, threatened to invert one of the fundamentals of American liberty – the presumption of innocence until proof of guilt has been unanimously ratified by a jury of one's peers – by designating everyone as a potential suspect of criminal activity except those who could be positively ruled out as such. This philosophy represented a complete reversal of investigation policies which, prior to RICO, respected the presumption of innocence (and the Eighth Commandment) by requiring evidence of a crime having actually been committed BEFORE investigation could justifiably begin, and by limiting potential suspects to those who could be positively connected to the alleged crime. Instead, RICO legitimized the legal philosophy that everyone is a potential criminal and justified the indiscriminate, unwarranted and perpetual collection of data on all persons in a search for activity fitting various criminal profiles. FINCEN and "Know Your Customer" were two such data collection programs.

Sovereign citizens of the united States, concerned that such philosophies, policies and programs represented a threat to fundamental human rights that are enumerated in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, were assured that FINCEN was only regional and targeted only interbank transactions already under reasonable suspicion of illegal activity, while "Know Your Customer" bank procedures were only the recommendations of the World Bank and were thus voluntary and not required. Most concerned citizens outside of the East Coast ignored FINCEN, while throughout the Nation, "Know Your Customer" was vigorously opposed by customers who urged their banks to decline participation in this program. By the close of the 1990's, "Know Your Customer" had been defeated in the marketplace, as banks which were known to implement it suffered a measurable loss of patronage as a result. Then came September 11, 2001, and soon after came the Patriot Act, an essentially unreviewed and significantly under-debated piece of legislation which nationalized FINCEN-types of data collection on all persons, mandated "Know Your Customer," and expanded the indiscriminate collection of data on all sovereign citizens, regardless of any fundamental human rights enumerated in the Constitution. Today, all non-cash transactions are tracked and recorded along with all banking activity. All online activity is recorded – all websites accessed, all emails sent. Everything.

These are violations of fundamental and necessary human rights, violations which rise to the vaulting heights of malicious aggression against sovereign citizens of the united States. Those who ignore or dismiss such violations and the dire consequences which necessarily descend from them are blathering fools. "I'm not doing anything wrong, so what do I care," is their first response. These are intellectual incompetents, who, like nothing more than animals, merely exist from one impulse to the next, with little capacity for contemplating the meaning of their own existence much less considering the benefit of others. Narrow, thoughtless "in-the-moment" pragmatists, they concern themselves only with filling their own bellies. Today. Only with securing their own comfort. Today. Only with the swiftest course of relieving themselves the pain of thinking and working. Today. They do not have the capacity or foresight to see, understand or appreciate that, once they abdicate their obligations in a system of self-government, what is "right" or what is "wrong" is entirely outside their control – is determined solely by an independent central authority who owes no person an explanation for what criteria constitutes right or wrong or suspicious activity, why or when those criteria change, or whether any of it really matters once political interests presume to interfere. The second response of these incompetents is to suggest that, "We need to make certain sacrifices to enjoy peace and security." And here is more evidence of the same, and so I repeat: Narrow, thoughtless "in-the-moment" pragmatists, they concern themselves only with filling their own bellies. Today. Only with securing their own comfort. Today. Only with the swiftest course of relieving themselves of the pain of thinking and of working. Today. No sovereign citizen, nor collection of such citizens, has the authority or can assume the prerogative to suspend the fundamental and enumerated human rights of any other sovereign citizen for any reason. Period. That is what it means to be a Sovereign. And that is what it means to be an American citizen: not a follower of so-called "leaders" in government (a Sovereign has no leaders in government), not a subordinate to the arbitrary rule of greater men (a collection of Sovereigns recognize no one "greater" among themselves), but a a Sovereign who voluntarily submits along with his fellow Sovereigns to the Rule of Law, which they collaboratively establish in the halls of representative government. Fools can voluntarily suspend their own rights, and abdicate their sovereignty for the supposed benefits their stupidity justifies, but they cannot suspend the fundamental enumerated human rights of others or force them from the privilege of sovereignty into serfdom. And what benefit could they derive from it anyway? Benjamin Franklin suggests, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Those lacking the personal capacity and grit for the intellectual and physical struggle to acquire and maintain liberty, even at the cost of temporary safety, get exactly what they deserve. When liberty is turned over to the State, it is never peacefully returned; such fools would trade liberty for safety, and embrace slavery in return – would gladly trade everyone's liberty for the promise of their own temporary safety, and consign the whole of society to a fearfully wretched state of servitude under the tyranny of arbitrary and ruthless State power.

In the wake of the Generals Allen and Petraeus scandals, William Binney, whistleblower and former NSA crypto-mathematician who served in the agency for decades, very simply and straightforwardly describes the magnitude of the government's data collection program. It started in the 1990's, accelerated swiftly under Bush following the Patriot Act, has continued to see considerable growth under Obama, and today, as Binney reports, the NSA is constructing a data center in Bluffdale, UT, capable of storing and managing over five zetabytes of data collected on sovereign American citizens.

Given that all data is simply stored, regardless of whether such activity is legal or even suspicious today, the reader should ask himself if the variety of data he accesses, uses and shares over a given period of time could be construed to suggest the profile of a criminal, or of someone harboring criminal sentiments? What kind of eBooks does he access, download and read, and what do they suggest regarding his psychological profile? What about twenty years from now? Is it possible that "hate speech" laws may be expanded by then to include the expression of religious conviction or the exercise or advocacy of Christian church practice – as it has already in Canada with respect to sexual orientation or in certain European countries fearful of fallout from criticism of Islam? Is it possible that certain political or economic philosophies, like democracy or capitalism, may be regarded as seditious in the near future and be punishable by imprisonment or execution – as in the former Soviet Union, China, Cuba and many other countries across the world through most of the 20^th Century? In these or any other circumstances, is it possible that the data one accesses, uses or shares today could be construed in the future as evidence of a psychological profile characteristic of what is thought to be a criminal, or a political enemy? The answer is most assuredly and emphatically, Yes!.

The proper response to impending and tragic loss of individual sovereignty and liberty in this Nation, is not that of Lutheran Quietism, is not the political action taken by the passive citizen of fascist Germany who may have had his opinion but remained demonstrably impotent as Hitler engaged in wanton and maniacal policies of the Final Solution. The answer is not that of the witless, careless and lazy leach who floats through life singing, "Que Sira Sira, I have my faith, I know I'm going to heaven, everything is in God's hands, nothing else matters, Que Sira Sira." These are not the answers of a Sovereign who bears not only the right but the authority and obligation to make himself heard, especially in matters pertaining to his liberty as a Sovereign and thus also his ability to freely carry out his rights and responsibilities as such. Shame on the American citizen, and especially the Christian, who would take no notice of nor have any care over the dissipation of fundamental enumerated human rights, who would rather submit to unwarranted and continuous surveillance and psychological profiling by the governing authorities than trouble himself to be concerned, and who would gladly force his countrymen to do the same.

Good citizenship requires that one stay informed, remain concerned, and be active. And the best way to be active is to remember Congressman Larry McDonald and the Four Boxes of Liberty:

first to discuss such issues amongst ourselves, to utilize our freedom of speech to persuasively urge our neighbors and countrymen to abandon trust in the despotic machinations of freedom’s enemies and in those who work their engines;
to then exercise our right as citizen-sovereigns to remove those from political office who misunderstand their limited roles, who disrespect the autonomy of citizen-sovereigns, and who work either deliberately or from profound ignorance and carelessness to deprive those whom they represent of their liberty, and to replace them with representatives who will not;
to then exercise our obligation as citizen-sovereigns to challenge unjust laws in the courts, even if we must first suffer the indignity and expense of suffering unjustly for disobeying such laws in order that material cause and legal standing can be established before the court;
to then exercise our right as citizen-sovereigns, in our capacity as jurors who determine fact from evidence presented in the courts, and in agreement with fellow jurors, to nullify unjust laws when fellow citizen-sovereigns stand to suffer as victims of those laws (this is called jury-nullification);
and finally, when all else fails, we are obligated, as our Declaration of Independence clearly and directly states, to dismantle a government which cannot or will not be reformed, by force if necessary, and build a new one in its place, as is the right of all sovereigns who stand to be deprived of their sovereignty by others. From the Declaration:
It is in the defense of the individual citizen-sovereign’s liberty, as a sovereign, that alteration or abolishment of a government which is “destructive of the unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is justified.

Four Boxes of Liberty

THE FOUR BOXES OF LIBERTY

The Soap Box
The Ballot Box
The Jury Box
The Ammo Box

William Binney, in his idealistic struggle for the cause of liberty, has taken his civic obligations as a citizen-sovereign all the way to McDonald's THIRD BOX of Liberty. He is a true example of personal sacrifice and dedication to protect against violations of the fundamental enumerated rights that are necessary to the character and continuation of our Nation. For more information, follow developments in the struggle to defend liberty in a digital world on the pages of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Victim of Hungarian Socialism airs Political ad against rising tide of Socialism in the USA

2012-11-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

The blog Intrepid Lutherans recently ran a series originally posted on The Finkelsteinery in 2009. That Intrepid Lutherans series was entitled, C.F.W Walther and the Two Kingdoms in Action: "No reasonable man, much less a Christian, can or should take part in the efforts of Communists and Socialists".

This same thorough, and thoroughly Biblical, historical and Christian refutation of the claims of Communism and Socialism, can be found on The Finkelsteinery in the following series of posts:

"America's Martin Luther" Lectures on Communism and Socialism - INTRODUCTION

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (Contents and Prefaces)

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE ONE)

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE TWO)

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE THREE)

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE FOUR)

Also to be found on The Finkelsteinery are two politically oriented Fourth of July postings, one addressing political Liberty in our Democratic Republic as a form of “confessional unity” in the Political Estate which makes a positive appeal to the reality of Divine Providence to justify its existence, and the second addressing the certain threat our Democratic Republic now faces of Communist overthrow.

We are the Sons of Liberty

The Communist Revolution in America: Thoughts & Warnings on the Eve of July 4, 2012

Finally, to see how, in 2009, the creation of a worldwide Socialist government was very narrowly averted at Copenhagen, thanks in part to Wikileaks, see the following series of articles also published on The Finkelsteinery:

Natural Law, Moral Imperative, and Public Policy: Copenhagen Looms Near

An “Inconvenient Truth:” Climate Change and Scientific Fraud

EU President: 2009 to be First Year of Global Governance

Nopenhagen: Fata Morgana fades in Truth's Brilliant Light

In coming days, another series of posts will be featured on The Finkelsteinery from the writings of a conservative mid-19^th Century Frenchman who wrote in years leading up to the Third French Revolution (1848) (to which C.F.W. Walther refers, along with the Second Revolution of 1796, in his SECOND LECTURE) until his death in 1850 – writings which he submitted to his countrymen in favor of true economic and social Liberty, in order to combat the rising tide of Revolutionary Communist and Socialist sentiment. Though this writer failed to avert the Revolution instigated by Communist and Socialist agitation, and failed to avert the institution of Socialism as the form of government in France, the work which I intend to feature is one which is recognized as a continuation of the economic theory of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, and as foundational to later celebrated economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and which, very interestingly and helpfully, sets limits on the very concept of Law itself, as employed by the State, by appeal to Natural Law and Divine Providence.

Stay Tuned!

Obama Supporters Become Romney Supporters -or- Youth Turn Against Obama...

2012-09-25T12:17:00.001-07:00

This has been my experience with recent high-school/college graduates, as well (that's right, there is no distinction in my mind anymore). This is the result of what American society has spent twelve to sixteen, even twenty years, preparing for the leadership of the next generation. When I am 70+ years old, and have largely turned over the course of politics and religion to the next generation, I am confident that this is all that I will have to depend upon. That being the case, I expect that I will labour for my own survival until the day I die. The prospect of suffering under the failures of my own wit and health is far less frightening than suffering under the wisdom of today's youth.

As for Romney, yeah, he'll get the youth vote. He's better looking than his opponent.

The Communist Revolution in America: Thoughts & Warnings on the Eve of July 4, 2012

2012-07-03T18:45:00.000-07:00

Given the state of affairs in the United States, while others are celebrating liberty, I thought it more appropriate to lament the withering assault liberty has suffered in the United States in the past 150 years, beginning with a short video recently released by Lt. Gen. Ret. W.G. Jerry Boykin, an original member of the U.S. Army’s Delta Force, ultimately commanding the elite team in combat operations, who later led the Army’s Green Berets as well as the Special Warfare Center and School, and in the final four years of his 36 year career in the Army, served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence:

Lieutenant General (Ret.) W. G. Jerry Boykin,
decorated former Delta Force commander and U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence,
discusses the infiltration of Marxism in American politics and culture.

I was an undergraduate when the Iron Curtain fell. The year was 1989. I was too immature at the time to appreciate the gravity of the event, other than having a naïve feeling of relief that America and the West would soon be rid of the threat of thermonuclear war. The immediate impact was the rush of Eastern Europeans to the West, many of them excited to discover what they had only heard stories of: freedom and opportunity. Many Westerners were glad to receive them socially, and to create opportunities for them economically. For example, at that time, a close family member of mine, with contacts in State government, had swiftly developed business contacts in Russia, and as a result sponsored two families for an extended visit in America, so that they could learn our language, customs and business practices, and carrying this knowledge back to Russia with them, use it to broker relationships between local small businesses in America and Russia.

I was fortunate to spend a lot of time with the leaders of these families. Though these men had never seen a microwave oven before, they were nevertheless well-educated, refined and articulate. Both of them denied membership in the Communist Party, both served in the Soviet War in Afghanistan as non-commissioned officers (sergeants), both served in Soviet special forces. They were both excited to be in America, and both appreciated the opportunity to learn about us and share their experiences and perspectives. As they grew more familiar with America, however, their excitement waned, turning to caution and concern. They recognized the language of Communism in regular use in our society, and saw the prominent role of the Federal Government in the regulation of local matters as a hallmark of “bloodless revolution.”

This type of experience replayed itself over and over, as opportunities in the West resulted in a flood of Eastern European university students. After becoming politically aware, I began to seek these people out, to learn from them. As a result, I befriended a young man from the Czech Republic (who later naturalized and is still living in America) who came from a family of vintners. I apparently roused him out of a mild depression with some intelligent political discourse – I happened to know the name of his President and could pronounce his name properly. It was a little thing that made him very happy. Over several years in college, we had many good conversations. One I recall was his love for America and his desire to be a citizen – which he accomplished without having to get married to an American (he said, “I’m not about to trade one form of freedom for another...”). Another conversation I will never forget, was one in which he expressed vile hatred for Communism and the Soviets:

hate

millions

In another conversation, he confessed:

love

everyone

This was the time of the unelected co-president Hillary Clinton’s village-building-through-socialized-medicine escapade, which positioned a monolithic “national” government directly in relation to the “mass of individuals.” Rather than respecting the limited role of the Federal government, which positions it in relation to the governments of the States of our union, and in relation to the governments of foreign nations, “socialized medicine” placed the Federal government in direct relation to the individual, disrupting and interfering with the governing authority of the State, County and local governments whose functions include individual concerns (unlike that of the Federal Government).

I could go on... There were the Hungarian and Polish students, who seemed to get along with each other fairly well, but who were so full of national pride that it was nearly impossible to have a productive discussion with them... Then there was the Russian physics student – an admitted Party member – who was a lot of fun to argue the merits of Capitalism with. There were the Slovakians, the Estonians, Latvians and even a few Bulgarians. All expressed similar sentiments regarding their former years under Communism (“I remember those days in black and white, there are no color images in my memory... everything was so uncertain, there was no hope,” one acquaintance reminisced) and their concern for the future of America as they recognized the encroachment of the same political ideas they thought they had left behind in Eastern Europe.

The Communist Manifesto and the Ten Planks of Communism
Their outlook on America and the dangers of Communism left an impression on me. I read the Communist Manifesto and other historical sources, and came to understand

that the common sentiment, “From each according his ability, to each according to his need,” is the mantra of Communist collectivism;
that the worker solidarity movements of the late 19^th Century were organized by Marxist agitators seeking a foothold in America;
that 19^th Century Industrialists, in response to the rise of Communism in Europe and its presence among the labor unions in America, sought to exploit labour solidarity for the purposes of their bourgeois Utopian ideals by financing John Dewey’s Education Revolution in America, proliferating his pragmatic ideologies of education (i.e. “Progressivism”), to create, not educated people (artes liberalis), but trained people (artes servilis), and even sponsoring Dewey’s residency in Russia shortly after the Bolshevic Revolution, to consult with the Soviets as they developed their system of education;
that Marxism, while being both a political and an economic theory, is also a social theory which relies upon the assumption that the world’s economy is a “closed system,” and that social groups must therefore compete for economic resources which are, in principle, limited
- that the reason why the solidarity movements in America went no further politically than the creation of labour unions was that immigrants were predisposed to giving up their identity as unique social groups, rather than clinging to them, and that they endeavored instead to assimilate with the culture of their new home (the “melting pot”),
- and, thus, that the following eighty year period was devoted to the legislative creation of such groups, in order to pit them against one another in American society and force them to clamor before the Federal government for limited economic resources (the “salad bowl”), and in this way create the condition of social conflict that Marxist social theory was invented to solve – such groups include
that all of these developments, and more, were quite consistent with the Ten Planks of Communism clearly laid out by Marx and Engels toward the end of Chapter II of the Communist Manifesto, which reads:

The Communist Rules for Revolution
It is interesting, and rather alarming, to compare the comments of Lt. General Boykin from the video, above, and the Ten Planks of Communism found in the Communist Manifesto, with a Communist document that is said to have been captured in Dusseldorf, DE, in 1919, by Allied Forces: the Communist Rules for Revolution. Though there is some question as to the authenticity of the claim that it originated in Germany, or that it was even written anytime before the 1930’s, it is said to have been published in a local Oklahoma newspaper in 1919 (the “Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise”), it is known to have been published in a magazine in 1946 (“Moral Re-Armament”), and was endorsed as authentic by Florida state attorney George Brautigam in 1954. Since then, it has been entered into the Congressional Record no less than three times.

COMMUNIST RULES FOR REVOLUTION

Corrupt the young, get them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial, destroy their ruggedness.
Get control of all means of publicity and thereby:
Get people's minds off their government by focusing their attention on athletics, sexy books and plays and other trivialities.
Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial matters of no importance.
Destroy the people's faith in their natural leaders by holding the latter up to contempt, ridicule and obloquy.
Always preach true democracy but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.
By encouraging government extravagance, destroy its credit, produce fear of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.
Foment unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders, and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of government toward such disorders.
By specious argument cause the breakdown of the old moral virtues: Honesty, Sobriety, Continence, faith in the pledged word, ruggedness.
Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext, with a view to confiscating them and leaving the population helpless.

Congressman Larry McDonald and the Four Boxes of Liberty
One of those entering the Communist Rules for Revolution into the Congressional Record was none other than Congressman Larry McDonald. A cousin of General George S. Patton, he was a conservative Democrat during the 1970’s, an ardent foe of Communism, and president of the John Birch Society. He was aboard Korean Air Lines Flight 007 when it was shot down by the Soviets in 1983. He was known to be considering a run for the Office of United States President at the time.

Congressman Larry McDonald defended the authenticity of the Communist Rules for Revolution, which were suspected of spurious origin at the time he submitted them to the Record for publication, in a 1975 editorial he published in the Rome News-Tribune, as follows:

a letter dated January, 1962, revealed that the Library of Congress had indeed been sent this information and its source

Given such evidences, the questions for us center on how we ought to respond. In a Free Society, where each citizen is sovereign (defined by his right to ownership of property), not the government, and where the government is servant to its sovereigns, not the citizen servant to his government, how does a conscientious citizen deal with growing threats against his liberty? How does he deal with encroaching tyranny? If a Free Society is also a Civilized Society, we citizen-sovereigns are obligated

first to discuss such issues amongst ourselves, to utilize our freedom of speech to persuasively urge our neighbors and countrymen to abandon trust in the despotic machinations of freedom’s enemies and in those who work their engines;
to then exercise our right as citizen-sovereigns to remove those from political office who misunderstand their limited roles, who disrespect the autonomy of citizen-sovereigns, and who work either deliberately or from profound ignorance and carelessness to deprive those whom they represent of their liberty, and to replace them with representatives who will not;
to then exercise our obligation as citizen-sovereigns to challenge unjust laws in the courts, even if we must first suffer the indignity and expense of suffering unjustly for disobeying such laws in order that material cause and legal standing can be established before the court;
to then exercise our right as citizen-sovereigns, in our capacity as jurors who determine fact from evidence presented in the courts, and in agreement with fellow jurors, to nullify unjust laws when fellow citizen-sovereigns stand to suffer as victims of those laws (this is called jury-nullification);
and finally, when all else fails, we are obligated, as our Declaration of Independence clearly and directly states, to dismantle a government which cannot or will not be reformed, by force if necessary, and build a new one in its place, as is the right of all sovereigns who stand to be deprived of their sovereignty by others. From the Declaration:
It is in the defense of the individual citizen-sovereign’s liberty, as a sovereign, that alteration or abolishment of a government which is “destructive of the unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is justified.

Congressman Larry McDonald is the one who is most often credited with a meme which capsulizes these four steps to preserving liberty. It is called the Four Boxes of Liberty, and it is a fitting place to end this post:

THE FOUR BOXES OF LIBERTY

The Soap Box
The Ballot Box
The Jury Box
The Ammo Box

Wishing what few and infrequent readers I have an introspective Fourth of July, 2012.

Freddy Finkelstein

P.S.: For a thorough, and thoroughly Biblical, historical and Christian refutation of the claims of Communism and Socialism, see this series of Lectures published on The Finkelsteinery in 2009, by 19^th Century Lutheran theologian Dr. C.F.W. Walther:

"America's Martin Luther" Lectures on Communism and Socialism - INTRODUCTION

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (Contents and Prefaces)

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE ONE)

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE TWO)

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE THREE)

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE FOUR)

Also, to see how, in 2009, the creation of a worldwide Socialist government was very narrowly averted at Copenhagen, thanks in part to Wikileaks, see the following series of articles also published on The Finkelsteinery:

Natural Law, Moral Imperative, and Public Policy: Copenhagen Looms Near

An “Inconvenient Truth:” Climate Change and Scientific Fraud

EU President: 2009 to be First Year of Global Governance

Nopenhagen: Fata Morgana fades in Truth's Brilliant Light

Newt Gingrich controls debate on energy policy

2012-03-18T16:41:00.007-07:00

Even though he is currently running third in the Republican Primaries, with approximately only half of the delegates won so far by Rick Santorum, who is running second, and one-third the delegates of the current leader in the Primaries, Mitt Romney, it is the ideas proposed by Newt Gingrich, not Mitt Romney, and not Rick Santorum, which are drawing fire from the current Democrat-controlled White House. Neither Romney nor Santorum have revealed a platform that is compelling enough to draw commentary from our current President, Barack Obama; but Newt Gingrich's energy proposals, being simple to communicate and easy to defend given the abundance of facts supporting them, clearly represent an early threat to the President's re-election, so much so that he is already actively campaigning against those ideas. Neither Romney nor Santorum can boast the honor of having such compelling and broadly appealing ideas that the President has singled out those ideas for rebuttal.

Even the analogies used by Newt Gingrich, being powerfully descriptive and meaningful to Americans, are being absconded and repeated by the President as his own.

Newt Gingrich: It's kind of strange to have an American president who favors Saudi oil over American oil. Saudi jobs over American jobs. I frankly want an energy policy so no president ever again bows to a Saudi King...

Brian Kilmeade: Mr. Speaker, you are clearly on the President's mind. The $2.50 [per gallon]... and he used your example that you've been using, because you wanted talk about space exploration, you said, "they would have said that about Christopher Columbus" -- he's even using your phrases.

Newt Gingrich: Well, imitation is a high form of flattery... It is the President who is refusing to recognize the modern world. In the modern world, the amount of oil we have in North Dakota because of new drilling technology has jumped from 150 million barrels to 24 billion barrels in the last decade. We have more oil in North Dakota than we ever dreamed possible, and some poeple think that with another generation of new technology, we'll have 500 billion barrels in North Dakota. It's the President who is sort of a -- he used the term "flat-earth society" [in reference to Newt's energy proposals], I would say that he belongs to the "Sierra Club Flat-Earth Society," he can't believe anything new that would improve energy because then it takes away his desire for government to control our lives... Look, I'm for biological research, I'm for developing algea over time, but with the current algea technologies you'd have to have over $850 per barrel oil to make them economically competitive. The President just lives in this fantasy land where he goes around -- it's like Solyndra -- he imagines these things up. It's like shovel-ready jobs. Remember he finally admitted two years later that there were no shovel-ready jobs in his shovel-ready jobs program? Well, we're back to the same fantasy life. The American people deserve inexpensive oil and gas, if it's possible, they deserve it from American sources, to keep the money in America to create American jobs. The President is doing just the opposite. He's asking the Saudi's to bail us out, which means that he'll have to bow even more deeply the next time he sees a Saudi King. I'm deeply opposed to that kind of foreign policy.

Notice how throughout his conversation, Newt effortlessly weaves the health of the American economy with foreign policy and national security. It's all connected, and this connectedness is easy to manage in the course of discussion for someone like Newt, who has command of the ideas and the facts. His main competitors, on the other hand, compartmentalize topics and limit themselves to pragmatics that spin well as marketing slogans and commercials. Romney and Santorum come off as traveling salesmen, selling themselves for President. Newt, on the other hand, is an intellectual with ideas, who's task is earning the Presidency through informed and persuasive argument.

We Conservatives got snookered by a "traveling salesman" in 2000, and held our nose in 2004 when we knew what we were voting for. But we couldn't do it in 2008. I'm not sure I can force myself do it in 2012, either. As I stated in February, the more I listen and watch, the more I am convinced that Newt is the only candidate on the field today with the experience and the intellectual horsepower to lead our nation back to its founding principles in the Great Ideas of Western Civilization, having a clear view of our nation’s unique position in the Arc of History and our vital importance to the continuation of Liberty and Human Rights in the World. With these Great Ideas as foundation, I am further convinced that Newt's leadership will be essential to returning America to a position of economic and political respect and dominance in the World.

Newt Gingrich 2012

Who is Newt Gingrich?

2012-03-12T15:03:00.009-07:00

"I'm running for President because I think we are in enormous danger of losing America as a country that is exceptional. I think we are in enormous danger of losing our economic vitality, losing our national security, and ultimately losing our freedom. And I think we need a leader who understands what has made America great, and who is prepared to unleash the American people to go back to rebuilding the country that we love."

I think Newt is correct. As I stated in my previous post, not only is America is great peril, not only is liberty and our economy at risk, but, in my opinion, the trajectory of Western Civilization hinges on the 2012 Presidential election. The Great Ideas of Western Civilization coalesced in the Declaration of Independance and the Constitution of the united States; in this Great Experiment, the torch of Liberty was passed to us to carry forward. While it flickered out nearly everywhere else, America had remained a shining beacon, the last best hope of Liberty for the common man -- if he could only get here, he could shed the burden of tyranny which oppressed him and freely apply his God-given faculties to the opportunites that his own land, labour and capital presented him with. Today, that torch appears to be spent and nearly extinguished, as the Ideas which fuel it disappear through ignorance and/or wanton disregard.

Newt Gingrich 2012

Dissecting the deliberately misleading discourse of a committed Liberal, requires intelligence and thorough articulation.

2012-02-26T21:00:00.005-08:00

Newt Gingrich Responds to President Obama’s Energy Speech
in a speech before the California GOP in San Fransisco, February 2012

The Candidate for the Republican Nomination for President of the United States who has, in my mind, emerged with the strongest platform for righting our listing ship of State, is Newt Gingrich. I'll admit, I've always liked Newt as a Conservative political leader and intellectual, and remember with fondness his leadership in the House during the 1990's. Though troubled by his ignominious departure from politics, and the content of media reports regarding the way he handled his second disintegrating marriage, after watching him through the debates, I am convinced that Newt is the only candidate on the field today with the experience and the intellectual horsepower to lead our nation back to its founding principles in the Great Ideas of Western Civilization, having a clear view of our nation’s unique position in the Arc of History and our vital importance to the continuation of Liberty and Human Rights in the World.

The challenges hurled at us by Socialists and post-Structuralists on the left, and by narrow-minded pragmatists and vulture-capitalists on the right, are destructively dismissive of what it is that we ought to be conserving in our Nation, and in the West; as I listen to Newt and compare him with his fellow contenders, I have become convinced that Newt has a clear understanding of how to meet those challenges in a way that not only preserves but propels our American values and way of life into the future. The other Candidates for the Republican Nomination today, however, give no indication that they see these matters as clearly as Newt Gingrich or understand them as deeply, nor do they seem to be able to articulate sound solutions to the dire and very complex circumstances we now face in ways which effectively marshal the fundamental ideologies of America's founding and which are necessary to the perpetuation of the West. Newt can, and he demonstrates this every time he is given an opportunity to speak. The fact is, two of his opponents in the race for Republican Nomination are sputtering pragmatists who, following the old worn-out formula for political campaigns, are running on issues, not on principles which reach to the foundations of America's social and political institutions, and not on ideas which will propel our Nation through the next generation. His third opponent is an unrepentant ideologue with no realistic plan of action whatsoever. We don’t need another narrow Republican issues-pragmatist for President. Not fully understanding or appreciating the root of our problems, they have a sad history of advocating quick fixes, rather than structural changes, that are easy to communicate and politically expedient, rather than necessarily complex and requiring the focused participation and dialogue of all representatives in the Legislature. In this way they are ruining our nation with their short-sightedness, their alienation of opposing parties, and their shallow understanding of and seemingly limited regard for America’s greatness and importance in the history, and to the future, of Human Rights and Liberty. In my opinion, the trajectory of Western Civilization hinges on the 2012 Presidential election.

In the clip above, Newt demonstrates exactly what will be necessary not only to defeat Barack Obama in the next election, but to contend with adversaries throughout a Presidency which has as its purpose the implementation of structural changes in the way government runs: careful, point-by-point dissection of his adversaries – even though it results in longer and more complex speeches. Newt here demonstrates that he is intelligent and articulate enough to make his case, and to hold the attention of his audience even though it requires lengthy explanation. And this is what we need. We need an intellectual in office for a change, not a pragmatist, not a person who stammers at the limits of his knowledge every time he's called upon to defend his proposals from both fact and principle.

Newt Gingrich 2012

In case you haven't heard other of his speeches, here are a couple of the more compelling speeches he has given during this Primary season:

Newt Gingrich's Speech at CPAC 2012

"A Better Approach to Deficit Reduction"
A public policy speach delivered by Newt Gingrich
at the Heritage Foundation, August 2011

Shall we Recognize the Rights of Parents?

2011-11-28T23:34:00.000-08:00

Those of us who are Home Educators know very well the threats against parenthood and parental rights -- they have loomed over our heads like a darkening shadow since at least the early 1990's. Our nation's disastrous flirtation at that time with "Outcome Based Education" (OBE) was intended to produce "International Children." There were open battles against this form of education in many states, like Tennessee, where relatives of mine had involved themselves in the fight directly. In the interest of producing "international children," it was proposed that the implementation of OBE would include batteries of psychiatric examinations for children entering Kindergarten, and periodically throughout their educational careers, to determine whether bias was being picked up in the home or from some other environment that would militate against the educational objectives of the government. If such bias was detected, so the plan proposed, children would be removed from the home and subjected to deprogramming before being permitted to return to school.

I was a young man at that time, but through the experience of my relatives, who lived in Tennessee and were active in the fight against these proposals, which were eventually defeated by active parents and Home Educators there, I became sensitized to the evil of an overreaching government, particularly as it invades the sanctity of home and family. The true face of government was revealed to me then, and as I have remained alert to it over the years, I have observed the threat to have only grown worse.

The video above was produced by ParentalRights.org, in conjunction with the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), in an attempt to raise support for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would recognize the rights of parents. I heartily support such an amendment.

"Fair Use" for non-commercial purposes "broadened" by Federal Judge

2011-06-22T08:33:00.000-07:00

For those who have not noticed, there has been strong advocacy, lately, for a loosening or elimination of US intellectual property laws. These laws impact conditions -- like who, how, when and why -- under which copyrighted materials, like music, art, literature, etc., and patented processes and goods can be obtained, used, sold and/or distributed. While some sort of protection for the individual creator of such products, processes, and published works seems to be fair in my opinion, the real question is whether current laws exist more to protect the artist/author/engineer or to grant long-term quasi-monopoly to the publisher/manufacturer. Copyright laws, for example, which hold for 90 years (far outside the lifespan of the average creator of a given copyrighted work), do nothing but grant monopoly to the publisher and limit access to relevant art and knowledge. This latter result is exacerbated by the practice of ceasing publication of works on which publishers claim copyright, for profit considerations. If publication of a work is not economically viable, then whose financial interest is served by continuing to retain copyright to it? None, in my opinion. Under these conditions, copyright laws succeed far more at impeding the important exchange of knowledge that procede in society as a matter of course -- without reference to profit motive, but which result from a perpetual exchange of ideas which must pervade in a living culture.

Thus, such laws impact not only the interests of copyright/patent holders and their patrons, but also the free and open dissemination of knowledge in society. And this idea -- the idea that knowledge ought to be freely available to the members of society -- is at the core of very important movements within technology (the chief disseminator of knowledge in our era), such as keeping government out of the regulation of the internet, and especially the OpenSource (or "Free Software") movement -- a world-wide community of technology experts sharing this ideology, who have loosely collaborated in the development of the highly stable and "freely" available Linux Operating System platform.

I personally am an advocate of these ideals -- of the free and open dissemination of knowledge in society -- which is why I found the following blog entry from the Mises Economics Blog to be quite interesting.

Copying, Not Trolling, Is “Fair Use”

Yesterday a federal judge in Las Vegas held that reproducing an entire article online can fall within the “fair use” exception to copyright law. In dismissing a copyright infringement case brought by a company called Righthaven, LLC — described by Wired as a “newspaper copyright troll” — Judge Philp M. Pro made two important findings. First, he rejected the standing of a third-party to bring an infringement suit based solely on acquiring the “right to sue” from the copyright owner, and second, he found that there was a strong presumption of fair use when materials are reproduced online for “noncommercial” purposes.

Righthaven, owned by attorney Steven Gibson, acquires newspaper copyrights for the express purpose of suing websites that reproduce the original newspaper’s material. As Judge Pro explained, the newspaper, in this case the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “assigned” its right to sue for infringement to Righthaven, subject to the newspaper’s right to revoke the assignment or direct Righthaven not to pursue a particular case:

Stephens Media [the Journal's owner] has the unilateral right, at any time, to terminate the Copyright Assignment and enjoy a complete right of reversion. These carveouts deprive Righthaven of any of the rights normally associated with ownership of an exclusive right necessary to bring suit for copyright infringement and leave Righthaven no rights except to pursue infringement actions, a right which itself is subject to Stephens Media’s veto.

Furthermore, Righthaven had no right to “exploit” the Journal’s copyrighted material except for bringing infringement lawsuits. Accordingly, Judge Pro said Righthaven could not maintain a copyright infringement lawsuit, since it was not the legitimate owner of the material at issue.

That said, Judge Pro further explained why, even if Righthaven had standing, this particular complaint must be dismissed. The defendant, Wayne Hoehn, had posted the entire text of a Journal article, with attribution, on the website madjacksports.com, a forum for people interested in sports handicapping. Hoehn was not the website’s owner, just a user. “It is undisputed that Hoehn did not and could not profit from posting” the Journal’s article, Judge Pro noted. Hoehn said he posted the article “to foster discussion…regarding the recent budget shortfalls facing state governments.” That alone suggests fair use, Judge Pro said.

Additionally, Judge Pro considered three other factors. First, the nature of the work suggested a broad allowance for fair use:

The Work is a combination of an informational piece with some creative elements. Roughly eight of the nineteen paragraphs of the Work provide purely factual data, about five are purely creative opinions of the author, and the rest are a mix of factual and creative elements. While the Work does have some creative or editorial elements, these elements are not enough to consider the Work a purely “creative work” in the realm of fictional stories, song lyrics, or Barbie dolls. Accordingly, the Work is not within “the core of intended copyright protection.”

Second, Judge Pro looked at the fact Hoehn reproduced the entire work rather than just part of it. The judge concluded, “[W]hile wholesale copying of the Work shifts this factor against finding fair use, wholesale copying does not preclude a finding of fair use.”

Finally, Judge Pro examined Righthaven’s argument that Hoehn’s posting the article online somehow “damaged” the commercial market for the Journal’s original article:

Righthaven argues that the market for the Work was impacted negatively because potential readers are able to read the Work on the Website and would have no reason to view the Work at its original source of publication. However, Righthaven has not presented any evidence of harm or negative impact from Hoehn’s use of the Work on the Website between November 29, 2010 and January 6, 2011. Merely arguing that because Hoehn replicated the entirety of the Work the market for the Work was diminished is not sufficient to show harm.

This last point may prove to be the most helpful in combatting future copyright trolling cases. The copyright lobby expends a great deal of energy maintaining, without evidence, that copying “diminishes” the market for a given work. In most cases just the opposite is true. The free movement of information allows for the near-limitless expansion of interest in a particular work or author. This is not a zero-sum game. And it’s good that some judges recognize as much.

(Copied "wholesale" from the following Mises Economics Blog article: Copying, Not Trolling, Is “Fair Use” [which is published under Creative Commons license, CC BY 3.0].)

For those interested in OpenSource technology and the "Free Software Movement," the ideology behind this movement has been defined as follows:

“Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.”

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program's users have the four essential freedoms:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms. Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission to do so.

You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way.

(GNU General Public License: The Free Software Definition)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a user's rights group I have followed since its inception in the early 1990's, describes today's issues as follows:

While early threats to our right to communicate came from the government, current threats come also from industry, as it seeks to control and expand current revenue sources at the expense of traditional fair use. The trend has been for industry to use a combination of law and technology to suppress the rights of people using technology. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of copyright law, where the movie and recording studios are trying to dumb down technology to serve their "bottom lines" and manipulate copyright laws to tip the delicate balance toward intellectual property ownership and away from the right to think and speak freely.

(A History of Protecting Freedom Where Law and Technology Collide)

Both of these groups (EFF and GNU), and many others, including the Ludwig von Mises Institute, are worth the interested reader's time investigating these important economic and civil rights issues.

"To the Victor go the Spoils" ...or... "Trump for President?"

2011-04-23T20:09:00.000-07:00

He's a Conservative. He says he's Prolife. He's against gun control. He's in favor of "concise borders." It sounds like he's in favor of domestic drilling. He has a birth certificate. He's America's prime example of a supreme capitalist. He considers Obama to be the worst President in American history. He declare's "Obamacare" to be a "total disaster" for our country. He's against raising taxes, but is in favor of taking in "vast numbers of dollars" from foreign countries, instead.

He's a Patriot.

We're at war. Economic war. He knows how to fight that kind of war.

For this conservative, he's beginning to look very interesting.

We'll see...

Heralding the Gospel: The Evangelical Function of the Church Steeple

2010-05-12T23:16:00.000-07:00

The Golden Steeple of
St. John Lutheran Church (LCMS), Hermansfort, WI.
Drawing all eyes to the Cross of Christ.

The Steeple and the Cross
The church steeple is that part of the Romanesque and Gothic church architectures which include the tower – often housing bells for announcing Liturgical Hours, the Divine Service, and various other aspects of church life to the countryside – atop of which was often mounted the spire. In congregations not suffering from the poison of iconoclasm, the spire would support a large Cross, visible from the ground and all over the countryside. Here is a technical description from one of my favorite authors, Dr. P.E. Kretzmann:

Église Saint-Paul de Strasbourg
Originally, a Prussian military church,
built during their last
occupation of France in 1897.

The Cross of Christ and the Harvest of Souls
Who is it that Christ has sent us to harvest? Answer: those whom the Holy Spirit has prepared for harvest.

One soweth, and another reapeth

I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour

Jn. 4:35b-38

Those who have laboured before us, making public use of God’s Word to communicate the Gospel’s message to “gather fruit unto life eternal,” have employed the Means through which the Holy Spirit has also begun the work of drawing the unregenerate unto Himself and into fellowship with other Christians in the Body of Christ – that is, in the Church. “He that reapeth” is merely “entering into the labours” of many Christians who have gone before, some whose use of Law & Gospel has served to plant, others whose use of Scripture has served to tend budding faith, until the soul has been fully prepared by the Holy Spirit for harvest. This does not mean that some go planting, some go tending, and some go harvesting. All go harvesting, but such use of the Means of Grace serves to plant and tend as well.

St. John Lutheran Church (WELS)
Popple Creek, WI
Still heralding the Cross of Christ.

The Cross is the single perfect heraldic icon for the purpose of evangelism, for in the Cross is simultaneously the message of the Law – symbolizing the punishment of death and separation from God that we deserve on account of our sin – and the message of the Gospel – symbolizing Christ’s innocent suffering and death on our behalf and on behalf of all sinners. Mounted high atop the steeple spire for every eye to see, and for every soul to consider, such a location is the perfect place from which to herald the cross of Christ. Mounted upon the highest point in the local landscape, the Cross is seen to cover all. Just as the life and work of Jesus Christ was done on behalf of all, the Cross and its full meaning is for all. The repentant sinner, including the soul ready for harvest, is drawn to the Cross, and entrance to the Church of Christ. Those who come to the cross, have been compelled to do so, drawn to it by the work of the Holy Spirit who has worked in them by Means of the Message of Good News. They are His work, through the simple message of Law & Gospel. Over the years, the steeple and Cross has fallen out of favour, ridiculed for being passe, and it seems to me that the decline of Christianity in America has accompanied these opinions. Perhaps truly evangelical churches should once again consider returning the Cross of Christ to a place of prominence in America’s landscape? Using the building as a herald of the Gospel is good evangelical stewardship.

“Programs” in Place of the Cross: Harvesting Green Tomatoes?
Yet, these days, many people fret that the simple heraldic preaching of the Cross fails to produce a harvest of souls, fails to adequately “build the Church,” in their opinion. Assuming faithful and rightly divided preaching of the pure Word, why would this be the case? The answer has already been provided above, but is worth repeating: the souls to whom the message is preached in these cases are simply not ready for harvest. We are equipped with tools of harvest, to reap that which has been prepared by the working of the Holy Spirit. But, if such preaching fails to reap, then, is this preaching in vain? Hardly! Similar to Christ, in the words of John 3, above, Paul explains in his first letter to the Corinthians:

but God gave the increase

but God that giveth the increase

ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building

But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon

1 Co. 3:5-10

Paul is here speaking to the congregation of building the Church. Planting in this reference can be considered roughly equivalent to both sowing and reaping in the analogy used by Jesus in John 3, above. Watering, in Paul’s use refers to keeping the fruit after the harvest Christ spoke of in His analogy. One man plants, another waters, and God uses this labour to grant the increase. Jesus indicates likewise: one man sows, another reaps. The one who realizes numeric increase has no basis for pointing to something he has done – he has entered into the labour of many labourers who have preceded him, and together they rejoice in God’s work of increasing his Church, Who uses such labour merely as an instrument of the Means of Grace, through which God works to give, and keep, increase. The tools for planting and watering in the example of Paul are the same as they are for sowing and reaping in the analogy used by Jesus: faithful and rightly divided preaching of the pure Word.

The dual spires of the Cathedral
in Cologne rise to 515 feet.

In the reference just cited, however, it is interesting to note that Paul transitions from the picture of the evangelist as gardener, to the evangelist as builder. Emphasizing in the first picture that those who come to faith and stay in faith are God’s work not man’s, he shifts in the second picture to give dire warning: how the evangelist and preacher participates in the work of God is no trivial matter. Paul continues:

1 Co. 3:11-13

When Christians get impatient with the Holy Spirit, lose trust in the Means of Grace, and begin to doubt the efficacy of the Word, they resort to laying a foundation other than that which is laid in the simple preaching of the Cross, other than the foundation laid in Jesus Christ. In their impatience for the Lord to prepare His harvest, and “grant them their wages,” they exclaim:

And so these impetuous Christians busy themselves with laying a foundation other than Jesus Christ, as He is found in the faithful preaching of the pure Word in Law and Gospel. They really have no choice: those not prepared by the Holy Spirit for harvest will not be harvested by these reaper’s tools. To harvest souls not yet prepared for harvest, the reaper must use tools not given him by God for this purpose. He must use his own tools. He must lay a foundation other than Jesus Christ, alone. In doing so, he picks fruit otherwise not intended for harvest. He’s intent upon plucking Green Tomatoes. These unripened fruit don’t care about the preaching of the Cross or pure doctrine, nor would they respond to it; they respond to programs for the family and children. They are not drawn as a matter of conscience, by the Holy Spirit’s working, to the Church of Christ; they are drawn by titullating Sunday morning entertainment. The foundation laid by such approaches makes use of man’s tools: popular and common devices used by commercial enterprise to stimulate consumer patronage. But the structure built on this foundation does not look like the Church.

The Place of the Cross in Western Society
In a recent lecture I attended, the Rev. Dr. Frederic Baue (LCMS) commented rather poignantly (and I summarize from memory):

The monuments erected by man are an indication of his culture’s priorities.

Lecturing from aspects of his book¹, The Spiritual Society: What Lurks Beyond Postmodernism?, he was drawing from the recently “rediscovered” writings of Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin and highlighting the nature of cultural transition as cultures oscillate from Ideational to Sensate to Ideational modalities. According to Sorokin, transitional periods between these modalities are marked by cultural upheaval of various sorts. For example, the First Advent of Christ occurred deep in the sensate Roman Era. As happens in Sensate cultures, over time, they become more sensate as they progress toward their demise, making way for Ideational change. With the fall of Rome, the Roman Era gave way to the Mediaeval Era – the most previous era of Ideational modality, an era dominated by Christian thought. Following this, the Renaissance – a “rebirth” of ancient cultural priorities – was a transitional period back to an era of Sensate modality, an era known as the Modern Era. ²

The Rise and Fall of Modernism
Christian influence from the previous era dominating this transition and leaving the distinct mark of Christian thought upon the foundations of Modernism, the Visible church largely oversaw and was an influential participant and contributor to this cultural change; and in nearly every quarter her theology followed suit – with one peculiar exception: the Lutheran Reformation in Germany. While the Roman Church was the primary sponsor of the Renaissance transition, and the forward looking Swiss Reformation under Zwingli, Calvin, Beza and others was responsible for developing distinctly Modern theological systems, the Lutheran Church looked back. The Lutheran Church preserved the teaching of the apostles, which teaching preceded and prepared for the rise of the Mediaeval Era. Resting in conscience, standing on Confession, embracing the mysteries of the Sacraments, the hypostatic union of natures in Christ, and the Holy Spirit’s work through the Means of Grace, the Lutheran Church, in her theology, remained distinctly Mediaeval, distinctly “Ideational,” and preserved this character over following generations, though in ever diminishing influence as the withering onslaught of heterodoxy and pragmatic political machinations worked against her. By the time of the Prussian Union and Evangelical mergers of the early 19^th Century, true Confessional Lutheranism, and the mediaeval theological perspectives she preserved, had nearly been extinguished.

The Strasbourg Cathedral was the tallest structure
in the world, from 1647-1874, during which time
Strasbourg was also at the center of European commerce.
Lutheran during the Reformation, it see-sawed
over the centuries, between Roman and
Lutheran control, as the Alsace was exchanged
by successive military conquest between
France and Germany.

The late 19^th Century, however marked the beginning of a transition to a New Ideational Era – and the beginning of the end of Modernism. We see this in the dramatic changes that occurred in the arts, and in political ideology beginning at about this time. We see this in the political and social upheaval that resulted and intensified into the 20^th Century, and in the increasing diffusion of academic focus through this time. The Holocost, while horrifying solely for the sake of the peoples involved, was particularly galvanizing for a larger reason, also: it permanently extinguished any optimism for Modernism, and marked the end of the Modern Era.

We see the result of this upheaval in greater Christianity today. As Christian perspectives based on Modernistic, “sensate-oriented” cultural modalities slink into irrelevancy, we witness among them the marks of flailing confusion. Modern Evangelicalism is one example. The pragmatic clarion call of the pop-church Evangelical, “We must be Real, Relevant, and Relational,” is incoherent nonsense when placed next to the clear teachings of Scripture, and is itself a recipe for failure. And fail it has. Barna Research – a Christian research firm formerly dedicated to the theories of the Church Growth Movement (CGM), whose mission it was to provide Evangelicals with marketing data and analysis to assist congregations in their implementation of CGM – declared in 2005, after a string of very shrill warnings regarding the demise of the American Church over previous years, that the theories of the Church Growth Movement are a statistical failure. Having invested over $500 billion dollars implementing the methods of CGM over the course of 30 years, no evidence of growth was discernible in American Christianity. None. Denominational shift is all that can be observed or attributed to these methods. In an effort to understand and pragmatically react to cultural change, Modern Christians, still stuck in the previous cultural era, reveal that they are oblivious to the real and monumental changes that have occurred in the past century, and are continuing to occur right now.

Confessional Lutheranism, Liturgical Expression, and the Rise of the New Cultural Era
We see the beginning of the end of Modernism in the late 19^th Century in two other respects. One is the collection and emergence of organized efforts among Christian remnants of the previous Ideational Era – that is, the return of a forceful and learned articulation of Confessional Lutheranism. The Confessional and Liturgical movements we observe today, which, more and more, we Christians are attaching ourselves to, didn’t just begin a few years ago. They are an extension of what was begun by the Henkel’s (Tennessee Synod), Walther’s (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod), Preuses (Norwegian Synod), Krauth’s (General Council), Bading’s and Hoenecke’s (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod) and the Pieper’s (WELS & LCMS) of the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries. In point of fact, “relevant” Christianity in our new Ideational cultural era will be informed by and take its direction from the perspectives of the previous such era, of Mediaeval Christianity, while Modernist systems, outside of the most resilient and tenacious of the Reformed confessions, will mostly just go away. Adopting and incorporating their increasingly irrelevant perspectives into Lutheran teaching and practice is, more than it ever was before, theological suicide.

Cultural Change marked in the Monuments of Man
A second respect in which we can see the beginning of the end of Modernism, is revealed in the increasingly “sensate” nature of the most prominent monuments of Modernism. From the late Mediaeval Era forward until the beginning of the close of the Modern Era, the largest, tallest and most impressive structures built by man were monuments to God: Christian Churches, with steeples reaching as high as 525 ft, atop of which were mounted the Cross of Christ, as a herald of Law & Gospel to the entire countryside, and an announcement that the Word of Peace and Reconciliation with God could be received, along with all of its eternal benefits, in His Church.

But what happened in the late 19^th Century? The most impressive of man’s monuments, far from being reserved for the special honor of God, were instead directed to man himself, boasting of his achievements, and proclaiming that his priorities were no longer his faith in God and his acknowledgment of gratitude toward God, but of accumulating wealth and honor for himself. From 1311 to 1884 AD, the tallest, most adorned, and most impressive structures in the Western world were churches. In 1884, the Washington Monument became the tallest structure, and then in 1889 the Eiffel Tower was built to kick-off the World’s Fair in Paris, completely dwarfing all other structures in the Western world. From 1930 onward, the worlds tallest and most impressive structures have been office buildings – monuments of man to the priority of commercial enterprise and the accumulation of wealth and power³. Accompanying the dramatic decline of Modernism in the 20^th Century, we see that man’s priorities became dramatically more “sensate.”

Today, throwback modernistic Christians consider the church steeple to be passe, impractical, and more expense than it is worth -- and then boast of their stewardship. Yet these same Christians will line up to throw away $500 billion dollars over thirty years on worthless entertainments and other human inventions, to build anthropocentric organizations on the foundation of hedonism. They call it “church” but what is it really? Emptied of Scripture teaching, shunting aside the Marks of the Church, rejecting the straightforward preaching of Law & Gospel and reliance on the Means of Grace, removing Christ from His central position and replacing him with the priorities of man, these organizations look and sound nothing like “the Church.” Their work is being tried, and revealed for what sort it is: after a generation of trying to pluck Green Tomatoes using tools contrived by man, and succeeding mostly in just robbing "harvest fruit" from other church bodies, while little by little depriving it of preservative preaching of Law & Gospel, Christians find they have indigestion. Thus, these church-like organizations are now in dramatic decline -- precipitous decline -- as spoiled fruit oozes out from the organizational structures they have built.

And yet the old stone church buildings remain. Even though some are emptied of people, and others are emptied of sound teaching, these monuments to God continue to herald the Cross of Christ, to focus the eyes of all on Him and His Gospel message, and to draw people to Christ and His Church. The people may be mute, but the stones still conspicuously cry out, publicly assigning worth to God.

A 19^th Century church of Gothic Revival⁴ architecture,
St. Nikolai Kirche in Hamburg, Germany was destroyed
in the bombings of WWII. Yet, the steeple remains,
elevating the Cross of Christ 483 feet above the landscape.

Built on the Rock the Church doth stand,
Even when steeples are falling.
Crumbled have spires in every land,
Bells still are chiming and calling
Calling the old and young to rest,
But above all the soul distressed
Longing for rest everlasting.

Grant then, O God, wher’er men roam,
That, when the church bells are ringing
Many in Jesus’ faith may come
Where He His message is bringing
“I know mine own, mine own know me,
Ye, not the world, my face shall see:
My peace I leave with you, Amen”

Built on the Rock, v1&7
TLH 467, ELH 211, CW 529

------------
Endnotes:

This book is necessary reading for any Christian who would be a student of culture.
This is, of course, Sociological theory, which, in the end, probably holds about as much water as Psychological theories. There are so many different theories because of the difficulty in testing hypothesis, each theory one is found wanting by observation. Nevertheless, the recent “rediscovery of Sorokin’s writings has generated much interest in his ideas, and given a boost to Social Dynamic theories, which for the most part have been based on demographic rather than cultural/ideological criteria. He is considered a “giant” of 20^th Century sociological research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_tallest_structures#History_of_record_holders_in_each_CTBUH_category
All of the structures featured on this page were constructed either in the late Mediaeval Era, or are structures built in the late 19^th Century during the later Gothic Revival, coinciding with “Ideational” influences as they are thought to have been showing their influence.

“Synod Sunday” in the WELS: Mission Closings, Membership Declines, and How the Gospel can Help

2010-05-09T13:10:00.000-07:00

The Gospel used as Law to produce guilt and motivate righteous works.
"Jesus has done this for you, now you must do that for Him!"

I just arrived home from a truly mournful Sunday morning. If it weren’t for the Liturgy, there would have been no spiritual profit in the exercise, at all. Once a year in the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran synod (WELS), we endure what is called “Walking Together” or “Synod” Sunday – a day which should be one of celebrating our mutual Confession and the work we do together in the context of that Confession (i.e., the Lutheran Confessions as expressed in the Book of Concord, for those Lutherans under the mistaken impression that we merely confess the Bible, alongside innumerable non-confessional non-denominational Christians), but which has become a day of marketing the Synod to its members and of using Law to coerce financial contributions and using the anxiety it creates to motivate “outreach activities,” in order to “grow the Synod.” I’m sure that many church bodies in America have much the same sort of “day” which they inflict upon their own members and visitors. In our case, the Office of Church Growth, at Synod headquarters, distributed prayers, sermon outlines, and videos, to accompany the mandate of “Synod Sunday.” It was Church Growth schlock from start to finish.

The unsavory fact is, my own good and faithful pastor – a fine preacher and Confessional fellow – somehow got suckered into delivering this “Synod Sunday” Church Growth sermon, which prepared the congregation for a viewing of the accompanying post-service “Synod Sunday” video, replete with the heart rending boo-hoo’ing of missionaries in New York who are facing an uncertain future in their Vocation. I’m sure that hundreds of other fine pastors in our Synod were duped into preaching the same thing.

The Message of the Law: Are you doing everything to reach the lost?
That was the question which served as the climax of today’s “Synod Sunday” sermon. It was accompanied with a full battery statistics lamenting a decrease in giving, the loss of missions due to lack of funding, and the decrease in Synod membership supposedly as a consequence of bankrupt and closing missions. A Law imperative, hardly Gospel, it was used as the basis for suggesting that the deep dark sinner-in-the-pew reexamine how much he gives, whether his budget priorities maximize the ability of the congregation to reach out with the Gospel, and whether he himself “at all times and in every situation” is maximizing opportunities to share the Gospel. The organization is suffering uncertainty, and the sinner in the pew, of course, is the culprit – the unfailing failure who, because he can’t do “everything” as he should, is the cause of organizational distress.

Everything? Really?
Everything? Let’s examine the impossibility of even considering this question. It’s simple.

Hell will be populated. Vastly populated. We know this because the Bible is clear on this fact: The LORD is known by the judgment which He executeth: the wicked is snared in the work of his hands... The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God. (Ps. 9:16-17; cf. Re. 20:12-15 and elsewhere). The wicked, on account of their work, shall be cast into hell. “Everything” a person can think to do will not change this fact, neither for himself, nor for others. As a result, the Christian burdened with doing “everything” has no way of measuring if “everything” has been done in any given case to bring the lost to faith in the promises of Christ, or if “something more” will keep the lost out of hell.

Moreover, no individual, no congregation, is guaranteed a harvest of any measurable sort. How would anyone know if “everything” has been done or not? No one can know, since unbelief abounds, since those in unbelief are still under sin (Ro. 1:18-25, 28-32; 3:9-10; Ga. 3:22), and since we know that there are those still in unbelief who suffer death and are lost for eternity as a result. If the task is ours, we can only conclude that we have not done “everything.” The question can only be answered in the negative. Thus, directing the thoughts of an individual to the question of whether he has done “everything” is not a question asked to provoke anything other than guilt – it makes the fate of the lost the fault of the imperfect evangelist, rather than the unbeliever’s own obstinacy, and places the impossible task of the Holy Spirit on the shoulders of the weak Christian, who is neither equipped nor expected to carry out His work.

Predestination is a reality. That’s right, we Lutherans believe in predestination (Ep. 1:3-14; Ro. 8:28-30). No one will go to hell, who, if only the guilt-laden Lutheran could have “done a little more” (or done “everything,” for that matter), would have otherwise gone to heaven. Everyone who is supposed to come to faith, and stay in faith, will come to faith – the Holy Spirit will see to it. Under the doctrine of Predestination, there is no cause for guilt whatsoever, if the individual has not done “everything” (whatever that is) to save the lost. None. After all, the Lutheran does not save the lost. The Holy Spirit does, through, and only through, the Lutheran's faithful use of the Means of Grace. It is impossible for the Lutheran to do “everything,” even to do anything, that contributes to his own salvation or the salvation of others. What’s more, the Holy Spirit does everything, and will do everything necessary to call those whom He foreknew into faith and to life everlasting.

Arminians and others who reject the teaching of Divine Monergism, do not believe in the doctrine of Predestination. They object to the teaching of Total Depravity and require the ascent of man’s will to God’s gracious offer of forgiveness, life, and salvation through faith. Believers among them have the Gospel, and having it, the burden is theirs to share it. Under such teaching, the Gospel is shaped into a hammer, to beat the poor Christian into the obligation of sharing the Gospel. Love, no doubt, is part of this effort, but anxiety over the lost and guilt associated with the burden of “doing everything” to save them accompanies this love. By allowing themselves to fall under the influence of non-monergistic influences, our own Office of Church Growth seems intent upon ladling the same sort of guilt and anxiety on the members of our Synod, to work together, not for the truth, not really for the sake of the Gospel, but ultimately for the health of the organization.

“Walking Together” is principally not about sharing the Gospel, together, anyway
It is principally about the task of keeping the Gospel pure, together. The unfortunate thing about the entire tragedy of the “Synod Sunday” Church Growth program this morning is that only a minor aspect of one word in the phrase “Walking Together” was emphasized – the result of having the pure Word, of working to keep the Word pure despite the onslaught of heterodoxy that surrounds us, of being under the teaching of the pure Word, of benefiting from the Holy Spirit’s work through the pure word, such that individuals are motivated, not by anxiety, fear and guilt, but by Joy and Gratitude for what is their’s in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to share the Gospel. What was emphasized today was only the final result of "walking" in “togetherness”: sharing the Gospel. Being a horribly incomplete picture of “Walking Together,” it was grossly out of balance with what “Walking Together” really encompasses. Moreover, it was a calculated imbalance to coerce action in support of the Synod as an organization.

I repeat: regarding our supposed “Togetherness,” there was no mention of our Confessions, of our confessional Unity, of having pure doctrine nor of keeping it pure; there was no distinction given to our “togetherness” with respect to the “otherness” of the heterodox: and regarding our “walking” within this “togetherness,” again, there was no mention of keeping the word pure, no attention given to the preaching of this Word among our own, little to no mention of the role and work of the Holy Spirit through such use of the Means of Grace, no mention given to the consequent working of the Holy Spirit in the individual Christian, and no mention given to the internal motivation that the Gospel promises supply, according to the gifts one has been given. Only the result of all this was dwelt upon: sharing the Gospel. Not only was the entire “Synod Sunday” Church Growth program imbalanced and inadequate in its explanation of “Walking Together,” it was misleading and false, it twisted Gospel Joy into an obligation of Law, and laid the burden of this Law, without Gospel remedy, on the shoulders of the poor Christian in the pew.

Church Workers, and Uncertainty in One’s Vocation
In his commentary on the Book of Genesis, Luther states regarding the distinction of Vocations:

Hence when a maid milks the cows or a hired man hoes the field – provided that they are believers, namely, that they conclude that this kind of life is pleasing to God and was instituted by God – they serve God more than all the monks and nuns, who cannot be sure about their kind of life

for here there is the testimony of the Holy Spirit, who says of His saints that they lived in the faith, the Word, and the confession but were like the rest of men in all other respects

cf. Acts 14:15

Evidently this false notion is so deeply fixed in the hearts of all men that we admire only what is rare, strange, and unnatural. Let us rather remain pupils of the Holy Spirit and of Scripture, and let us imitate the lives and the deeds of those whom Scripture praises and presents as examples

As we are all Priests in the Order of the Universal Priesthood of all Believers, the Vocation of the missionary is no more spiritual or necessary than that of the “layman.” In point of fact, Luther is said to have abolished the laity. All Christians are Priests, some serving in one capacity, others in another capacity, many in more than one capacity. Those with Divine Call are those chosen by God, through the congregation, to a particular Vocation on behalf of the Church.

Everything in this earth is transitory. Vocation is never secure. Those of us in the real world deal with this fact every day. Even union workers are getting a good taste of it these days. That we look for success “in accordance with our way of thinking” is natural, but it is a weakness of our limitations. It is further weakness to refuse to admit “failure” as it occurs “in accordance with our way of thinking.” Yet, in temporal matters, it is considered wise to recognize the end of a Vocation as it draws near – an orderly withdrawal from such tasks often eliminates unnecessary cost and disruption, and serves to position one for alternate work most efficiently. When the door is shut to us in our Vocation, it is time to move on. And it is shut for many causes. Sometimes it is financial. Sometimes it is a physical or geographical limitation. Sometimes we succumb to efforts of a competitor. Sometimes it is the result of a former friend’s betrayal. Sometimes we see it coming, other times we do not. That’s life.

In spiritual matters, however, this is not the case. The Holy Spirit never stops working – Providentially, to create situations where the Gospel message will be communicated, and Supernaturally through the Gospel message when it is communicated – and He will not leave His work undone. All those who are to come to faith, and remain in faith, will do so. No one will be left out. Though our work in a given Vocation may come to an end, the Holy Spirit’s work will continue. It is the Christian's privilege to be a part of His ongoing work, which he gladly enjoins apart from any command to do so, solely for the sake of Christ and His Gospel.

For the Christian motivated by what Christ has done for him, however, not by fear of eternal doom (whether his own or someone else’s) or anxiety wrought from unfavorable statistics, there will always be something to do, always be an opportunity to share the Gospel of Christ with others – not of necessity, but of love. We serve others for the sake of the Gospel out of love for Christ, and for no other reason. The missionaries in New York featured in todays “Synod Sunday” video may well find themselves without their current Vocation in the near future. That’s too bad, as I’m sure they love what they do there, but that ministry is not necessary in the sense that someone will be lost without their effort. The Holy Spirit will seek and find those who are lost, and He will do so through Christians who are enabled, motivated and Called to do so. No guilt should be laid on an entire body of Christians because some missionaries are no longer able to do what they like to do, as if apart from that effort we are all guilty of someone else’s eternal damnation. Those who will suffer for eternity in such a way are under sin, they are themselves guilty of their own sin, and they will have only themselves to blame when they stand before the Righteous Judge on the Last Day. Our job is not to fret about this, but to hold tenaciously to the precious gift of faith which has been given to us. Having it, we can’t help but share it.

Una Sancta and the Liturgy

2010-05-05T17:42:00.000-07:00

The True Visible church represents the Una Sancta

Returning again to JK’s comment, waaaay back in December (an off-topic comment he offered in response to my blog post, Global Warming: What is it all about?), he writes concerning use of the liturgy:

The liturgical church is still a man made entity. ...The caveat for me is when people cling to the liturgical church and say that this is the only way. Then this ceases to be worship and falls into the category of methods.True enough – the historic liturgy that Lutherans follow, if it is “a way of doing something,” is also a “method.” The term “method” applied to CGM, however, has nothing to do with whether it is merely “a way of doing something,” but is a shorthand reference to “a way” which, at it’s root, (a) either replaces or is thought to augment the Holy Spirit’s work through the Means of Grace, (b) subverts the christocentric nature of the Divine Service in favor of anthropocentric priorities, (c) thoughtlessly corrupts the Marks of the Church, and (d) abrogates the practice of a distinctly Lutheran confession, replacing it with popular ecumenical expressions. Hence, in the discussion against CGM, the term “method” is not used in distinction to “no method,” as if methods are not allowed, but is used to highlight it’s negative impact on the Means of Grace, the Marks of the Church, the centrality of Christ in our corporate worship, and our Confessional stand against errorists. In point of fact, “methods” of some sort – where I must be careful to point out that the term method is used here in its broadest sense, as in “a way of doing something” – are a requirement of congregational worship: For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints... Let all things be done decently and in order. (1 Co. 14:26-40). The “ways” which we agree to use, however, are not arbitrary, the order called for encompasses far more than just guiding a worshiper through a process, as if any old process will do. The Divine Service is the chief expression of the Church regarding who she is and what she does. This expression is Public in every respect, directed toward and occurring in the presence of God and before man. Rather than arbitrary anthropocentric “methods,” it is critical that the rites we choose to carry us through the Divine Service properly represent, teach and confess what the Church is, Her relationship with Christ and Her function in this world.

So why is it that “the way” Lutherans worship is the way it is? Why is it Historical? Why is it Liturgical? My brief answer: Chiefly Public Confession (which also teaches and represents). What follows is my long answer.

Practice Teaches, Practice Confesses: The Lutheran Confessions on the Liturgy
This is a subsection title of a post I published back in July 2009, Lutheran Worship and the Confessions: Adiaphora Bounded (Part 2). This series on Confessional worship practices started with Part 1 and culminated in a third part entitled Confessional Anthology: Why is the Lutheran Church a Liturgical Church?, which led off with a link to a very helpful and similarly titled essay by Rev. David Jay Weber (ELS): Why is the Lutheran Church a Liturgical Church? -- A Confessional Anthology.

In the subsection of Part 2, which I titled Practice Teaches, Practice Confesses, I emphasized the confessional nature of Lutheran worship practice, stating as follows:

Practice teaches

that the common people might receive a sort of training

AP XV [20]

in order that they may learn

that they may either learn or pray

AP XV [40]

Lutheran Confessions point our adversaries to our Practice as proof of our Confession

From this condition of the churches it may be determined

AP XV [44]

For ceremonies are needed

that the uneducated be taught what they need to know

Practice teaches

teach the whole counsel of God

Explanation of the Common Service

Practice confesses

1,2

(1)

(2)

we point to our Practice as proof of our Confession

(3)

The reader can satisfy his curiosity by examining the rest of that blog post for himself. One critical point to understand with respect to our Confession regarding the Church and our relationship to it, is that the Reformers were accused by the Romans of being outside the One True Church, of being sectarian. To fully quote AC XXIV referenced in the second paragraph in the above quote,

1 Co. 14:2-9

it needs to be understood that by accusing the Reformers of abolishing the Mass, the Romans were principally accusing them of rejecting their catholicity. This is made abundantly clear in the Apology, where in defense of this article, Melancthon writes:

Moreover, it needs to be understood, contrary to what some modern commentators seem to think, that by the term Mass, the Reformers were not referring merely to the consecration and distribution of the eucharistic elements, i.e. the Eucharistic rite itself, but to the Sacrament together with the preaching of the Word and their supporting ritual apparatus. According to the Reformers, restricting use of the term Mass to the ceremony of the Lord’s Supper (as the Roman’s did) went hand-in-hand with restricting it to the sacrificial act of the celebrant, the benefit of which was derived merely from the act itself, opus operatum; but Mass properly understood, they insisted, is the sacramental benefit of the Lord’s Supper, the same benefit as the Absolution and the preaching of the Word, etc. – in other words, that of the service of God to Man by the ministrations of the Minister, through the Means of Grace, on account of which the ceremonies were established. The idea that the Mass was more than just the Supper was fixed by Luther by 1523, with the issuance of his first new liturgy, An Order of Mass and Communion for the Church at Wittenburg, in which he states, “...properly speaking, the mass consists in using the Gospel and communing at the table of the Lord” (LW 53:25). By 1526, the term Mass was used synonymously with the Divine Service, and Luther uses the two terms interchangeably in the preface and body of his Deutsche Messe (LW 53:49ff).

That these definitions are operative aspects of our Public Confession is represented clearly in article XXIV of the Apology:

Lord’s Supper is not ritual sacrifice, and cannot be separated from the preaching of the Gospel

Malachi 3:3

And He shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering of righteousness

opus operatum

Ro. 15:16

Ministering the Gospel of God, that the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable, being sanctified by the Holy Ghost, i.e., that, the Gentiles might be offerings acceptable to God by faith, etc.

They omit the preaching of the Gospel, faith, prayer, and similar things, although the ceremony has been established on account of these, and the New Testament ought to have sacrifices of the heart

Entire Mass understood as Lord’s Supper together with preaching and ceremony

daily sacrifice

cf. Ex. 29:38f.; Dan. 8:11f.; 12:11

provided that the entire Mass be understood, i.e., the ceremony with the preaching of the Gospel, faith, invocation, and thanksgiving. For these joined together are a daily sacrifice of the New Testament, because the ceremony was instituted on account of these things; neither is it to be separated from these

1 Co. 11:26

As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord's death till He come

ex opere operato

AP XXIV:34-35

The terms Mass and Liturgy are synonymous, and refer to the entire Ministry of the Church in the Divine Service

ex opere operato

Leitourgiva

liturgy

the communion of many

liturgy

but rather the public ministry, and agrees aptly with our belief, namely, that one minister who consecrates tenders the body and blood of the Lord to the rest of the people, just as one minister who preaches tenders the Gospel to the people, as Paul says, 1 Co. 4:1: Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God, i.e., of the Gospel and the Sacraments. And 2 Co. 5:20: We are ambassadors for Christ, as [81] though God did beseech you by us; we pray you in Christ's stead, Be ye reconciled to God. Thus the term leitourgia agrees aptly with the ministry...

2 Co. 9:12

Phil. 2:25

one who ministered to my wants

leitourgia

opus operatum

And it can be called an offering for the reason that prayers, thanksgivings, and the entire worship are there offered, as it is also called a eucharist

ex opere operato

missa

misbeach

liturgia

ex opere operato sine bono motu utentis

missa

liturgia

Missa, in Hebrew, denotes a joint contribution

missa

Likewise, liturgia, in Greek, really denotes an office in which a person ministers to the congregation. This is well applied to our teaching, because with us the priest, as a common servant of those who wish to commune, ministers to them the holy Sacrament.

missa

remissio

Ite, missa est: Depart, you have forgiveness of sins

Lais Aphesis

for in connection with this ceremony forgiveness of sins must always be preached and proclaimed

AP XXIV:78-83,88

The above lengthy quotations from Luther and the Book of Concord are necessary to establish the fact that our Public Confession proclaims, not by accident, that the term liturgy

is not a reference to just any old method, but is equivalent to the Public Ministry and the functions of the Public Minister in the Divine Service;
cannot be separated from the Means of Grace:
- cannot be separated from the proclamation of the Gospel;
- cannot be separated from the Sacraments;
stands as our chief form of Public Confession in Practice.

Regarding this latter point, what is that is confessed? Chiefly, that the local congregation represents the True Church.

Church in the First Sense
The One True Church, or, the Church Universal, exists only by the faith of the Saints, and is therefore Invisible.
I’m going to review what I am certain JK already knows about the term Church, and what we Lutherans confess regarding this term. The Scriptures use this term in several different ways. The first sense is what we refer to as the Church Universal. This is the One True Church, the Communion of Saints, or the Community of Believers. It includes all Saints now living and who have ever lived, who by faith have been incorporated into the Body of Christ, and it excludes all those without faith. Only by fellowship in the Church Universal can one obtain salvation, and only by faith does one enter this One True Church. This sense of the Church is referred to in Eph. 1:22-23 & 5:23-27, 1 Cor. 3:16-17, Heb 12:23 and elsewhere. Because it exists by the faith of the Saints (Saints being “all true believers”), and because only God can see faith, the Church Universal is invisible to the eyes of man, and is often referred to as the Invisible Church.

The Church Universal in two categories
The Church Universal is spoken of in Scripture as a whole, as shown above, but it is also spoken of in parts. Two parts, to be precise. On the one hand, the true Church is recognized in terms of those who have died in the Faith, who, enduring in faith to the end, have gained the final Victory. These are the Saints now in heaven, awaiting the Resurrection, and, on the basis of Rev. 2:10 & 4:4, are referred to as the Church Triumphant. On the other hand, the true Church is also recognized in terms of those still living, clinging to faith in their battle against sin, death and the Devil, as the Church Militant. Scripture describes these struggles in Eph 6:10-11, 1 Jn. 5:4, Ro. 7:14-15, and elsewhere.

The One True Church: Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic
So the One True Church, the Church Universal, or the Communion of Saints, is referred to as the Invisible Church because it exists by the faith of the Saints, and is divided into the categories of (a) the Church Militant, and (b) the Church Triumphant. Heinrich Schmid, in his Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, describes it this way:

Church Triumphant

Church Militant

holy

catholic

apostolic

The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church

Church in the Second Sense

The True Visible church represents the Una Sancta

The local congregation, or the Visible church, being comprised of both true believers and hypocrites is not the One True Church properly speaking, but the Church Militant is among the Visible church.
In contrast to the One True Church – i.e., the Church Universal, the Communion of Saints, or the Invisible Church – a second sense in which we use the term Church is in reference to the visible organization of people called the local congregation. Sometimes people also mean the institutions of the Church on earth, to which local congregations are attached (like Synods). Either way, this is called the Visible church. The Visible church is not True Church, as both those with and without faith will be found in local congregations, but the Visible church will always strive to represent itself as a visible manifestation of the One True, Universal, or Invisible Church – holy, catholic, and apostolic.

Because of the presence of true believers in the Visible church, some refer to the Visible church as the Church Militant – but this is an error. The Church Militant is True Church, it is Invisible Church, being found only among those with faith. However, despite the presence of hypocrites in the Visible church (those without faith and on their way to hell, who yet feign trust in Christ by their public words and actions), the True Church, in the form of the Church Militant, is among the Visible church, and it is the mold of the Church Militant in which the Visible church seeks to cast herself – striving to hold on to the Truth, to maintain her orthodoxy.

Heinrich Schmid continues:

ecclesia universalis – particularis

and for this end to employ the Means of Grace by which individuals can be gained

i. e.

viz.

the Church in the narrow sense, composed of only true believers [i.e., the Invisible Church], and
the Church in the wider sense [i.e., the Visible church], a, by which we understand the congregation of those who have joined themselves together in the same confession in the use of the Sacraments (ecclesia stricte et late dicta)

We do not thereby assume two churches, antagonistic and standing alongside of each other; rather, the relation between them is this, that the Church in the narrower sense exists in the midst of the Church in the wider sense; but not so that the latter is numerically equal to the former, but that it contains, or at least may contain, members within itself whom we dare not count as belonging to the Church in the narrower sense

visible and invisible

widely and narrowly considered

It becomes of the greatest importance, then, if these distinctions be made, not to transfer without ceremony the promises and predicates that are given to the Church in the narrower sense to the Church in the wider sense, which course might easily give occasion to false fear or to false hopes, and to self-deception. Concerning the latter it cannot be said, in the same sense, but only by synecdoche, that it is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, or that it cannot fail or err; rather, from the fact that the call reaches many who do not accept it, it already is manifest, that individuals in it often fail and err, and it is quite as possible that the evil may preponderate in the Church as that the good should do so

true

false

not in consequence of there being a greater or smaller number of believers or unbelievers in it, but just in proportion as the doctrines of the Gospel are preached in it purely or impurely, and just in proportion as the Means by which we attain salvation are more or less purely and liberally administered in it. The pure preaching of the divine Word, and the proper administration of the Sacraments are, therefore, the works by which we may recognize the Church as a true one.

The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church

Practice marks the true Church as it exists among the Visible church: The Marks of the Church – Pure Doctrine preached, Pure Sacrament administered liberally
Minimalistic preaching of doctrine and administration of the Sacraments does not rise to the thresholds of purity and liberality (liberal in this context meaning, “often and/or in great amounts”). When a congregation is fully capable of offering the Lord’s Supper more frequently in the context of the Divine Service, but instead chooses to do so less frequently, both the liberality and the purity of its administration is negatively impacted – it’s liberality in the act of arbitrarily withholding it, and its purity in the consequent act of holding up something else, or nothing at all, as a satisfactory substitute. When the direct preaching of Scripture doctrine is supplanted by the preaching of object lessons, is riddled with homiletic comedy, or is reduced to conjecture, when the preaching of Law and Gospel gives way to preaching the third use of the Law, when preaching Sanctification overshadows the preaching of Justification, the purity of preaching is negatively impacted. Thus the Marks are judged obscured, and on this basis, the connection of the local congregation to the One True Church – that is, the connection of the Visible church to the Invisible Church – is judged less clear.

These comprise but a very short list demonstrating the result of giving in to the perspectives the Church Growth Movement (CGM), which direct the congregation to be “Real, Relevant, and Relational” – for the sake of the unchurched, no less! – because the pure doctrines of the Gospel, themselves, through the work of the Holy Spirit, and His work through the administration of the Sacraments, are somehow not as Real, not as Relevant, and not as Relational as man, through his own innovative augmentation, can make them. In giving in to CGM mandates, the congregation is seeking to answer one question modern folks are thought to have, “How does this apply to me?”; but by corrupting the Marks of the Church to do so, the congregation utterly fails to show her qualifications to authoritatively answer the question to begin with. When the perspectives of CGM are carried into practice, the Marks of the Church fall under attack, our understanding of, and identification with, the One True Church is weakened, and the confession we give to this truth in our practice is vacated. This is quite serious in and of itself, but does not even address the gravity of withholding the only operative Means from those who desperately need them. Christians looking for the One True Church will rightly pass by such congregations.

The Marks and More: Christians in a state of Confession, Lutherans mutually agree to further restrictions in practice
True Lutherans, while united in Confessional stance, also vigorously stand distinct and separate from the heterodox, and prove this separation by putting their Confession fully into practice. Lutherans are orthodox, and so, regarding the Church, reject the notion that membership in the congregation (the particular Church, or Church in the wider sense, as Schmid puts it above) is equivalent to fellowship in the One True Church. Our participation in this Invisible, though very Real, Relevant, and by definition, Relational Fellowship, is by Faith Alone. Thus we stand separate from the Romans who equate the Visible church with the Church Militant, and who attach the necessity of works to man’s Justification. Thus we also reject the practical trappings associated with these false teachings, such as the sale of indulgences and the sacrificial (rather than sacramental) Eucharist, and have ourselves corrected various corruptions of the Western Rite that were introduced by Rome to reinforce and give expression to these false teachings. Lutherans are Evangelical, and so the preaching of the Word was made to predominate the Divine Service rather than Holy Communion, as was the sacramental aspects of our worship (God coming to us through Word and Sacrament) over the sacrificial (man offering before God his sacrifices of praise, thanks, adoration, intercession and petition). As a vehicle for the public use of the Means of Grace, the liturgy was made synonymous with the Public Ministry and the function of the pastor. The liturgy is principally God’s service to man, through the Means of Grace; and the liturgy defines the “method” used by His Called servant, the man who occupies the Office of this Ministry.

Despite our separation from Rome, however, we forcefully reject the notion that we are sectarian, and also reject those practices that are of sectarian signature. Rather, like the Romans, we Lutherans share the confession in Nicene Creed that we are both catholic and apostolic, and show forth these elements of our Confession by retaining the catholic Rites. Thus, the use of the Historic Liturgy (i.e., the Western Rite), rather than any old liturgy someone just makes up – also known as disposable liturgies. Apart from historic rites and hymnody, it is impossible to show forth our catholicity and apostolicity.

Historical and liturgical worship is retained and embraced by Confessional Lutherans because of our Confession regarding the Church and her Ministry. It effectively, and thankfully, separates us from sectarians and other innovators, by maintaining the catholicity and apostolicity of our Public Confession, and the dramatic liturgical reforms introduced during the Reformation (which were reforms, not “changes”) returned the liturgy to the status of evangelical and orthodox practice, and thus also those elements of our Public Confession. The Lutheran Church, on the basis of her Confession and confessional Practice, is the True Visible Church of God on Earth.

Just a Nice Theory?
So, I’ve just let loose with copious quotations from the Lutheran Confessions and reliable sources of Lutheran Doctrine, and followed them with a chain of explanation making it perfectly plain why, from the standpoint of Confessional integrity, the Historical Liturgy must remain the public practice of Lutheran congregations. I have not directly broached the important issues of positive Fellowship (expressions of Confessional Unity with other congregations who publicly declare the same confession we do), nor of the operative liturgical principle of lex orandi, lex credendi and the impact of teaching false doctrine through anthropocentric, or other poorly informed practice. The many discussions on these and related issues on Bailing Water through the latter half of 2008 and early 2009 covered these issues exhaustively. For a review, I think a good post to reference was my response to Ben, initially posted here. Otherwise, Click Here for a more exhaustive list of discussions I was involved in.

Nevertheless, the prime question on the mind of a sold-out CGM’er is, “Uhhh... okay. Well, um, does it, you know, like... WORK?” My answer: Yes – it succeeds very well in confessing what it was designed to. Here’s a bit of anecdotal evidence to back it up.

History? Reading? Doctrine? Confession?
The Church? Hunh???
Ya but, uh, does it WORK?

The Church and Change
I know from experience that life among pop-church Evangelicals is a life of change. Of constant change. Every new “spiritual fad” that comes along is enthusiastically embraced, adopted and put into practice; and what came before is unceremoniously rejected, eliminated and forgotten.

Not only practice, but words change as well. Catch phrases change, everything is expressed in the vernacular of “now.” Old expressions give way to new. Nothing is constant. The result is continuous turnover, not only of practice, but of the ideas that undergird those practices – and as the words that express those ideas change, so does the teaching that accompanies them. As the practices change, so does the teaching. Nothing older than, say, five years old is remembered, and even then “way back when” is a humorous pejorative for what passed by the wayside a couple years before. Christians of previous generation(s) are laughed at as “throwbacks,” cast as those having a “deficient understanding of the Scriptures,” who, at best, may have some interesting insight from time to time, but only in some archaic sense which needs correction or illumination by “contemporary, and therefore more sophisticated and more relevant, thinking.” There is no sense among them that true Christians existed at any time of history, other than the Apostolic era, and Christian history for them ends five years ago, because that is as far back as their changing practices and expressions reach.

However, once a pop-church Evangelical actually begins to read, the a-historical intellectual poverty, doctrinal vacuity, and outright chicanery of modern CGM-infected American Christianity is exposed.

Enter Knowledge of the Past, and Tears of Joy
There are only two times that I can recall shedding tears, as an adult, over spiritual matters. The first was upon discovering and reading Heinrich Schmid’s Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Leading up to this, though I had a conservative Evangelical upbringing – that was never too far from the conservative Lutheranism my parents were raised in – as a college student I nevertheless wandered as an essentially nominal Christian. Nothing new here. After a long period of experimentation with different ideas (a long story), I eventually resolved that Christianity was true, and being true was of significant consequence. I wound up with the pop-church Evangelicals in college – who were overtly and publicly Christian, in confession and works. There were no Lutherans that I could discern, though I later discovered that there was an active WELS Campus Ministry program there. Interestingly, most of the individual Christians I met among the pop-Church Evangelicals, who brought me back to the Christian faith through their own empassioned and convincing explanation and living out of it, were either LCMS, ELS, or CLC – as I discovered long after the fact. There were Pentecostals, as well – but they were mostly just weird. Moreover, as I also discovered long after the fact, this campus, having a nationally acclaimed School of Agriculture, has a student body with a religious representation that is in the neighborhood of 10% WELS.

I formally introduced myself to my future wife at a Bill Gothard Seminar – having recognized her from my family’s home church. I was a graduate student then, and she was just entering college, as I recall. Shame on me? -- Well, let’s just say that by then, I knew what I was looking for, and she was it. Her family had a similar church experience to ours, and that was of primary concern to me. A couple years later, we started seeing each other under the guidance and wisdom of our parents – a two-year courtship arrangement which we had elected to follow. During this time we desired to grow together in our relationship, and we sought to do this by growing closer in our relationships with God, together. For us, this meant studying the Bible together, worshiping together, praying together, etc. Throughout this period we came to recognize very clearly that the Visible church was rife with mutually-exclusive truth-claims regarding the doctrines of Scripture, so we decided on a close study of the Bible with respect to denominational differences on disputed points. In the end, we didn't care what we called ourselves, we just wanted to believe what the Bible taught and to join with Christians who believed the same thing. Given our backgrounds, we were familiar with many claims of various groups – Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, Baptist, Lutheran, etc. By comparing those claims to Scripture, it didn't take long before what we understood as Lutheran doctrine emerged as the true champion of Scripture teaching.

The Impact of Heinrich Schmid, and the Historical Teaching of the Evangelical Lutheran Church
It was about this time that I discovered Heinrich Schmid’s work, Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, in the basement of an old used bookstore in Minneapolis that I would visit on my lunchbreaks (I didn’t have enough money to buy food in those days – not after spending money on books, anyway...). I found the title of this work striking. I hadn’t realized that there was such a thing as “evangelical” Lutherans. To me, the two words simply did not go together. I’d never met a Lutheran who struck me as “evangelical” in the slightest. More amazing to me was the fact that these particular evangelicals had actually worked out a theology! Amazing!, I thought. Considering it a real prize, I bought that book on the spot (overpriced though it was...), though saddened to think that these “evangelical” Lutherans had since long disappeared. I wondered what nuggets of theological perspective I could glean from this old book about the teaching of extinct Christians.

When I brought the book home and began to read, I was brought to tears. After years of struggling to develop my own personal theology from my own diligent study of Scripture (which at one point I had to admit was more philosophy than theology, forcing me to start over), I discovered that the Evangelical Lutherans had worked out a very rigorous theological system that descended directly from the very words of Scripture. It was not passed through philosophical preconceptions in order to reach reasonable conclusions, but concluded only what the Scriptures stated directly. It was exceptionally well articulated, solving many of the problems I had struggled with – original sin and the nature of man, traducianism, the essence and attributes of God, the union of the two natures in Christ, the nature of the Church and its relation to other earthly institutions, etc. The inklings I had developed on my own regarding the tough doctrines of Scripture had been fully worked out by Christians who had gone before me – not five years ago, but five centuries ago. And the more I studied the more I learned that they relied heavily on the orthodox teachers that had preceded them, as well, going back to the apostles. I wept because I knew that the burden of trying to understand and articulate the true teaching of the Scriptures had been lifted – it had always been known, and for the most part, been well articulated. I just needed to hold on it, and confess it. I was no longer alone in a sea of irrelevant “relevancy,” trying to find my way in a doctrinal fog. I wanted to be a Lutheran, to find what was left of these “old evangelicals,” and join them.

I shared the book with my then (still) future wife. I’m not sure that she found Schmid quite as compelling – romantic, even – that I did. But she agreed. By the time I proposed (a few months later), we both knew that we wanted to be Lutheran, and six months later when we were married, I gave away copies of Schmid to my groomsmen. Our challenge throughout this time was to find a Lutheran church that believed its own doctrinal claims, and which preached from the Scriptures. That search lasted through our fourth Sunday as a married couple, which was the first Sunday we visited a WELS church.

The Impact of the Historical Liturgy
This was the second occasion that I can recall shedding tears, as an adult, over spiritual matters. We trembled as we walked into the WELS congregation. We had read their This We Believe. We were unnerved with the use of the word “reject” in the antithesis section, thinking that this carried over into their treatment of visitors. It took ten seconds, however, to realize that they were really nice folks – as nice as the Lutherans featured in the stories of Lake Wobegone, only more intelligent, and more intentional about what they believed and how they expressed it.

We had a few litmus tests. Preaching needed to stick to the text. It needed to include elements of doctrinal teaching, and evidence of exegetical effort (he needed to explain Hebrew/Greek words and concepts and how they applied to the meaning of the text). Equally important, the Order of Service needed to keep us focused on the Object of worship, not on us. That meant no attempt to use music or other devices to manipulate our emotional state. We were hoping for liturgy and hymns, but didn’t quite know what that meant other than, “a conservative and dignified order of service,” as opposed to what the pop-church evangelicals were dishing up every Sunday morning.

Our criteria were met. The text was Psalm 51 – the perfect Law & Gospel text if there ever was one, and the pastor not only clung to the text for dear life, he fired straight Law & Gospel from it like a machine gun, supplying a bit of doctrinal instruction along the way, explaining the difference between sin, iniquity, and trespass, and providing a brief etymology of those words as they are used in the text. We were delighted! But of course, this was icing on the cake, for we had already fallen in love with the congregation on the basis of their liturgical worship.

At first, we were impressed with the formality. People behave formally when in the presence of someone important, and we understood the presence revered by such formality to be that of Christ Himself – the King of kings. It wasn’t hard to conclude this, as all of the language uttered by the Pastor or chanted by the congregation was focused on Christ, either speaking to Him, or about what He had done for them. It was clear to us that this congregation fully believed that Christ was with them through the Service, and that on account of this fact, they were eager to behave accordingly.

The tears flowed, however, with the singing of the Psalm – Psalm 51. Not the words, but the form: Plainsong. We immediately recognized it as an ancient form, and were just as immediately united with the ancient Christians in worship – believing the same doctrines they did, we were singing the same songs they did, the same way they did. Expressing catholicity and apostolicity for the first time, we were unable to remain composed enough to complete the Psalm with the congregation. Up to that point, for us, everything had been fad and fashion, with no history older than five years, no true Christians existed other than those with us today. At that point, we understood that we were one in faith with all true Christians who had gone before us, who sacrificed dearly to maintain pure teaching through the ages and to express it in the Church’s practice. We joined that congregation.

Not just us...
We weren’t the only ones moved by the historic teachings and liturgy of Lutheranism. Serving in that congregation from that point forward for nearly a decade, as Chairman of the Board’s of Education and then Evangelism, in that time the numerous people that joined were almost all by profession of faith, either new Christians or former evangelicals -- and the significance of our worship practice was no small factor. In a discussion with one, now former pop-church evangelical, family, the husband joked, saying, “If you would have told me two years ago that (a) I would be regularly participating in liturgical worship, and (b) enjoying it, I would have laughed in your face. Today, I couldn’t imagine anything else. This is heaven.” Likewise, a conversation with a visiting family revealed that they were keenly interested in joining our congregation, having found us after a long search for a Lutheran church that preached and practiced historical doctrines and liturgy. In another case, after numerous failed attempts to get our services on the local radio station over the years, I finally called the station myself to inquire about the cost of purchasing a time slot on Sunday morning. The response was initially cool. Upon followup two weeks later the response was an enthusiastic, “Yes!” Why the difference? In the interim, the owner of the station visited our congregation to see what would be aired from their station. When I followed-up, it was explained to me that their enthusiasm stemmed from the worship experience and sound preaching: “You are real Church,” I was told. They had no time for pop-church, equating it with Sunday morning entertainment: "We can do better than that," they said, "We air the Packer game every Sunday." We were given the best time slot on Sunday morning, just before the Packer games, and members of that individual’s family have since joined that congregation.

These are only a few examples, and I could go on; but this is sufficient. Practice confesses, and this is no mere theory -- and what Historic Liturgical Lutheran Practice confesses, is quite compelling. By comparison, what faddish sectarian practices confess is neither transcendent nor permanent nor profound nor, in the end, spiritually satisfying, leading us to ourselves and our own fancies, instead of to Christ and His Church.

Poor Poor Pitiful Me

2010-04-21T22:07:00.000-07:00

A Sketch of Sin's Corruption

For we know that the whole creation groatheth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. Romans 8:22-23.

This is not what Warren Zevon meant when in the mid-1970's he penned the words to his song, Poor Poor Pitiful Me, a song made famous (as I recall) by Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Ponies. Zevon was writing more about the woeful things that happened to him in his carnal life (whether fictionally or not), not his own pitiful state of corruption, a state shared by all of humanity and creation as a result of Adam's sin. Nor was he writing about his hope of redemption. A sad song with an upbeat tempo to make it entertaining for modern listeners, it fails to identify true woe and fails to identify any true solution. That is the truth of it – man has limited capacity to identify the problem, and has no solution to offer even if he could. To identify our condition with clarity, to bring mankind to a state of contrition before a Just and Righteous God, the Law must be preached with all of its force, to humble man's pride and reduce him to a state of terror before the reality of God's pending wrath against him. What a wicked thing it is when Christians – especially pastors and evangelists – withhold from sinners the terrible truth!

The Curse of the Law
A curse against mankind is announced in God’s Law – the demand of perfect and continuous obedience to His commands (sinlessness) in all of one’s thoughts, words, and actions, and the requirement of a nature that is set apart for God (holiness). It is a curse because, by nature, mankind has neither sinlessness nor holiness – he is sinful from the time of his conception (Ps. 51:5), his mind dwells only upon evil and regards God’s truth as foolishness (Ge. 6:5; 1 Co. 2:14), he is by nature the enemy of God (Ro. 8:7), and by his works he can in nowise merit favor with Him (Eph. 2:1,3; Ro. 3:10-18). A perfectly Just God demands that man’s sin be punished (Col. 3:25), and the Just punishment is death and eternal separation from God (Ro. 6:23a).

In the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Curse of the Law is Lifted
In the face of the Law, our truly pitiful state is exposed. Yet, Good News comes to mankind through the Gospel: a perfectly loving God, desiring a relationship with man (Eph. 2:4-5; 1 Jn. 4:19) and knowing that mankind cannot reconcile himself with God (Ro. 3:10-18), sent His Son Jesus Christ to live a perfect life under His Law (2 Co. 5:21; 1 Pe. 2:22; 1 Jn. 3:5) and to suffer the punishment of death for the sins of the whole world (1 Jn. 2:2), that by faith in Christ all sinners have forgiveness of sins, spiritual life, and eternal salvation (Col. 1:14; Eph. 2:8 Ti. 2:11, 3:7). Through faith, such a person carries the name of Christ, bears His righteousness before God (Ro. 4:20-25), and is called His child (Gal. 4:4-7).

Yet, Sin Inheres...
St. Paul writes to the Romans:

For we know that the Law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.
For that which I do, I allow not;
for what I would, that I do not;
but what I hate, that I do.
If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the Law, that it is good. Now then, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing; for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.
For the good that I would do, I do not;
but the evil which I would not, that I do.
Now, if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

I find a Law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the Law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the Law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.

O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? Romans 7:14-24

Only the man brought from spiritual death to life through the quickening power of the Holy Spirit can admit that, while the Law fully applies to him, the Law is good – nay, can delight in the Law of God, as St. Paul puts it. The Law is no longer a curse for the Believer, but a blessing; Christ has for us fulfilled the Law in all of its requirements. For the Believer, the Law continues to show him his sin (for he is still sinful) and to work contrition as, in his new nature, he struggles against the lusts of his flesh, against the old nature which is still with him. For the Christian, God's Law stands as a reminder of what he deserves (eternal condemnation) in the face of what he has instead received (full pardon and righteous standing before God), and so continues to remind him of the infinite value of the Gospel he eternally benefits from, and guides him in his acts of service for the sake of Christ. It stands as the basis for his continuing fear of God, that he should take His Law seriously – as Dr. Martin Luther makes plain in the leading phrases of his explanations of the Ten Commandments, We should fear, love, and trust God, that we... (LC I:319-333). The Christian both needs and wants to hear God's Law. He is indeed a wretched man, groaning within himself, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of [his] body.

That our bodies and all of Creation continue to suffer from the corruption of sin is evident. The Second Law of Thermodynamics declares by observation that all closed systems decay to a state of greater disorder (or, greater entropy). Living organisms suffer disease, deformity, and injury. They age and die. Even the stones weather to dust. The motions of the planets have been observed to slow down. Stars and entire galaxies, like people, are born to eventually die, and even the rate at which galaxies form new stars has slowed. Sin's corruption permeates Creation, death and the process of death surrounds us. It is inescapable. Our souls have been redeemed by Christ, and through faith we are given spiritual life, yet our bodies continue to decay under the effects of sin. And so we await the Second Coming of Christ and the Resurrection, wherein we shall receive new bodies uncorrupted by sin.

Death is Swallowed Up in Victory

Raised Incorruptible on the Last Day

Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For the corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

So when this incorruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written,
Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the Law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord (1 Co. 15:51-58).

Faith looks back to the completed work of Christ on behalf of all mankind, His righteous fulfillment of the Law and His payment for our sins on the cross, and appropriates to the believer the promises He offers in the Gospel: forgiveness of sins, spiritual life, and eternal salvation. Holding on to these promises in faith, the believer, full of hope, also looks forward to the Day these promises are finally delivered. Indeed, because Christ has raised Himself from the dead, demonstrating that He is who He said He is, that His payment was sufficient, and that He does what He says He will do, we can have every confidence that the promises He offers us in the Gospel are as good as delivered. Yet, faith alone, being the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen (He. 11:1-2), assures us of what these facts only point to: we are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time (1 Peter 1:3-9).

Further Contemplation

Freddy Finkelstein and the vocation of Home Improvement...

I was contemplating these things over the past few weeks. Two weeks ago, I posted a picture of my hands, displaying injury from “home improvement” activities. The prominent injury, on my left wrist, required a visit to the emergency room along with stitches. The E.R. surgeon was delighted that upon examination of the wound, no real damage was evident: “Oh, good!' he exclaimed, “You only cut skin. We don't need to do any tendon repair in the O.R.” Ten days later, when he pulled my stitches, my G.P. wasn't as thrilled: “Uh, oh.” He said. “We need to get you to an orthopaedic surgeon, fast.” Within an hour I was sitting with an orthopaedic specialist across town, making arrangements for urgently needed tendon and nerve repair surgery.

Over the weekend, awaiting surgery, I was speaking to my father about this and related things, and he mentioned something that is very true. “You've reached an age where responsibility has your attention on a dozen different things at once. Everything you do needs to be done fast so you can get on to the next thing, and in everything you do, you are distracted by what still needs to be done. I've been there.” Of course, there is no real solution to the realities of responsibility, other than to to be aware of them – short of abandoning responsibility in some form, that is.

Freddy Finkelstein and the vocation of Home Improvement.
The rest of the story...

I view such toil as the consequence of sin and part of the curse of the Law. When God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, He said to Adam,

Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, 'Thou shalt not eat of it': Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.(Ge. 3:17-19)

Some people, theologians even, claim that this only applies to farmers. Hogwash, I say. I may not cultivate real thistles, but I see the equivalent result from all of my labor. Most folks with a real job – who, in fact, also “eat by the sweat of their brow” – see it, too. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? ...I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation (Eccl. 1:2-3,14). Thus saith the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes (probably King Solomon). And by experience, I tend to agree. Moreover, the Scriptures would warn us that the responsibilities related to our labours, easily taken out of balance, threaten not physical safety, but our Spiritual welfare: He that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the Word; and the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the Word, and he becometh unfruitful (Matt. 13:22, in Jesus' explanation of the Parable of the Sower).

And yet, in a manner of speaking, man's labour has been redeemed as well. We see this vividly in the Lutheran doctrine of Vocation. This doctrine teaches the Providential aspect of God's work in the affairs of man by means of each person's respective calling in life, or Vocation. It teaches that a Christian’s service to his neighbor does not concern his past (it has been atoned for), it does not concern the future (it is in God’s hands), but focuses on the present (Wingren, G. [1957]. Luther on vocation. Philidelphia, PA: Muhlenberg Press. [pp. 213-234]), on how the Christian puts his God-given talents to use in what he is presently doing (1 Co. 7:17-24) in the interest of his neighbor, for the sake of the Gospel. In other words, he is not trying to earn favor with God, nor striving for special reward for his service, but carries on with contentedness in God’s calling for him and with confidence that He has equipped him for the work He wants to accomplish through him (c.f., Veith, G. [2002]. God at work: Your Christian Vocation in all of life. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books). The author of Ecclesiastes agrees, saying:

There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God. ...For God giveth to a man that is good in his sight wisdom, and knowledge, and joy; but to the sinner he giveth travail, to gather and to heap up, that he may give to him that is good before God. (Eccl. 2:24-26)

Without him saying so, I know that this is what my father was getting at – not in any sense the avoidance of responsibility to avoid physical calamity, or that labour is a curse or a waste of time, but a reminder to keep balance in my toiling and maintain the focus of true joy and purpose.

Excuses, Excuses....

2010-04-09T23:38:00.000-07:00

A WELS church near Atlanta we visited on our way to Florida

That’s all I have to offer in explanation of my silence over the past three months. That and, “Phew, what a quarter!” I have been literally unplugged from all online social networking services, and have had no idea what, if anything, has been going on. I finally began getting caught up earlier this week.

My last post back in December was made from a hotel in Florida – a business trip on which I had taken my family. We rented a van, and on the return sought to visit several places along the Atlantic Coast which would give Mrs. Finkelstein some eyewitness exposure to landscapes and architecture of historical significance that could serve as inspirational material as she seeks to produce fine art for illustration and other purposes. We stopped in St. Augustine, FL, and Norfolk, VA, and had intended to make long stops in Fredericksburg and Manassas before heading west through Front Royal, then south along Skyline Drive and Blue Ridge Parkway through Shenandoah and Appalachia, and then west into West Virginia, north into southern Ohio and back home to Wisconsin.

The USS Wisconsin. What else is there to see in Norfolk?

About a half-hour out of Norfolk, however, it began to snow – the first of the major snow storms in the eastern US, last winter. It was no use stopping in Fredericksburg, so we drove straight through to Manassas. It took us nearly ten hours to get to the Hampton Inn at which we had reservations. The next morning we had a choice: we could stay at the hotel in Manassas, in a cramped room, with nothing to do, or we could head west. Given that this hotel was having problems with it’s internet connectivity, we decided to leave. Once we got out on the road, the going was fairly easy – for those used to traveling in snow storms, that is. The roads were semi-clear, with hard-pack under the loose snow. There were relatively few cars out, and since the roads were basically straight, we were able to tool along at about 50mph. At Front Royal, we intended to head north into West Virginia, Maryland, and then Pennsylvania, where we would then head west over the Alleghenies into Ohio. That would get us west and north of the heavy snow.

All Traffic Stopped on VA I66...

About 3 miles east of the 2^nd exit before Front Royal, however, the traffic came to a dead stop. For the most part, it stayed stopped for over eight hours. This was a challenge. In my haste to get out of Manassas and onto the highway, I decided against provisioning ourselves right away, thinking we could do that easily enough in Front Royal a few hours later. All that we had in the car was a Ziplock sandwich bag half full of candy and a pint of prune juice. And one diaper (for our two-year-old). The candy was gone in two hours, and we didn’t start sipping the prune juice until about an hour before the traffic started moving again. I think that the diapers were pretty well loaded by then, too. The kids were well-behaved through it all, though, understanding that this was out-of-the-ordinary and that there was nothing which could be done. Mrs. Finkelstein did a good job entertaining them with songs and games.

Still stopped on VA I66...

Once we started moving again, we saw what had caused the traffic to stop and accumulate for miles behind us. An abandoned car alongside the road had been buried in snow, causing traffic to slow for safety and investigation. Evidently, one inexperienced winter-driver made one of the worst mistakes that can be made driving on a slick surface: he stopped. Worse – so did those following him. Worse still, they had stopped on a slight grade, and even worse than that, they didn’t have tires for winter driving. They stopped and couldn’t get started again. The semi’s were totally stuck – loaded, with no snow tires or chains, they couldn’t get going. And so everyone waited until heavy equipment could be brought wrong-way down the interstate to move close to ten semi’s off to the side so that traffic could pass.

A Church in Front Royal, VA, 12/19/2009

We left at 9:30am, but didn’t arrive in Front Royal until after 8pm. We were glad to get off the interstate, thinking that we could provision there, but didn’t realize that all of the businesses would be closed early because of the snow. Only one McDonald’s was still open, on the far south end of town. So we packed the car full of junk food, and took off for Ohio, finally making St. Clairsville at about 3am or so. After sleeping, we moved on later that day to Columbus, and stayed there a couple days before heading home.

The snow lovingly cleared to the entrance...

Business seems to be good...

Anyway, March 31^st marked the end of my corporation’s first year in business. We ended in the black with positive cash flow. Previously, in 2006, I had joined a consulting firm to build a Business Integration Services practice as part of a relatively new line of business they had opened. They decided in Q1 2009, however, to entirely exit that line of business, cutting loose 15% of the company, me included. Since no one was really standing in line to hire people, the only option was to start my own company. This wasn’t my first foray into the business world, having run two businesses prior to this, but this the was first one to take off sufficiently to provide for my family. The first business – a partnership – was successful in the sense that we were always in the black, but we never had the client base to sufficiently provide for two families. It was a good first try. The second business, an LLC, was an expensive experiment in undercapitalization. Another learning opportunity that cured some of my naïveté, though it took me some years to recover financially. By April of last year, however, opportunities had developed among key contacts in my consulting profession that made it reasonable for me to form my own C-corp, providing consulting services under exclusive contract with a well-respected BIS firm in the east. I’ve been busy ever since, with enough extra income to work on building Mrs. Finkelstein’s on-again-off-again career in the fine arts (which is where both our hearts really are...) as a separate line of business from my own technology-related efforts. We now work side-by-side in our little family corporation.

In fact, things were going so well that in the first few months of 2010, we were strongly considering adding another employee – that is, until the State of Wisconsin passed their “rape the small business” tax package and minimum wage increases. I was not happy about this, and had a long conversation with our State senator about it. A Liberal power-play, little consideration had been given to minority (Republican) concerns in the process; if they did not offer agreement they had essentially no input. My Senator – a conservative Republican – told me that there wasn’t anything to be done other than elect more conservatives (which means there is nothing for me to do, since we live in a conservative State district...). Other business owners, particularly those in construction who have been struggling to rebuild their businesses, had also contacted my Senator, saying that the new tax package and minimum wage increases will dramatically increase the cost of doing local business, particularly materials costs, and would reduce the feasibility of local construction businesses to compete for smaller jobs. The recent action of our Federal legislature, with respect to the new “health care” laws, was the icing on the cake. Not only will we not be adding employees this year, we will be moving our business to a much more business-friendly state. In addition, we will be adjusting our business model to minimize the need for employees in the future. That is to say, we will not be doing business, or doing business in such a way, that it cannot be mostly automated by machine, or handled under contract with other businesses. Many local businessmen with whom I have spoken recently say the same thing: thanks to the government, if it wasn’t here already, the era of the sub-contractor, or the “1099 employee,” is now upon us. To those who would be “employees,” take heed: you are no longer a person, you are now a business, competing with other businesses. You will need to provide for your own income and your own benefits. Develop your salable skills, your ability to communicate, and your business acumen, or turn over your property to the government-controlled banks and become another government dependent.

Dreary Winter Months are Now Over

While I have traveled considerably the past few months for business, the majority of my work is done remotely: video presentations, audio conferencing, and solutions delivery can all be done from my office – an extra room in my home which I rent to my corporation. This room, unfortunately, is on the north side of the building. Hence, it is dark in this room. And I have not been able to get out of it much. And besides, the ground has been covered with cold and rather uninviting icy snow for some time. Who would want to go out?

Freddy Finkelstein and the vocation of Home Improvement...

In addition, a major renovation effort has made the entire place a dreary, dirty, depressing mess. We’ve been unable to move about without bumping into each other or stumbling over junk displaced from other parts of the house. I sound like my mother. But it is true. I’ve had Cabin Fever since at least February. But all of this is coming to an end. The projects are nearly over. The snow is gone. The Sun is shining. It is warm out. We’ve been able to get out and begin hoeing the garden, in preparation for planting. I can’t remember if I ever felt like I needed Spring in the past, but I needed it this year.

Excuses, excuses... That’s all I have to offer.

Global Warming: What is it all about?

2009-12-14T08:30:00.000-08:00

Click the image to be taken to Dr. Richard Lindzen's Global Warming power-point presentation, given at Rockhurst University, 2/11/2009 .

<-- Nopenhagen: Fata Morgana fades in Truth's Brilliant Light

Nopenhagen: Fata Morgana fades in Truth's Brilliant Light

2009-12-08T21:21:00.000-08:00

Copenhagen talks in chaos after leak of 'Danish Text'
indicates intent to take gross advantage of developing countries...

Fata Morgana is a shimmering mirage, a term used by C.F.W. Walther in his fourth lecture on Communism and Socialism to describe the aspirations of these social/political/economic ideologies. After setting forth the Classic rebuttal to Communism and Socialism, showing that it is entirely unreasonable on the basis of Natural Law, and further exposing the slander committed by Socialists against the Scriptures, he states:

Their aim is a Fata Morgana, i.e. a brilliant airy appearance, like a fairy castle. The pilgrim makes one more effort to reach this castle. He finally reaches the place where the bewitching atmospheric appearance was seen. And behold, it is gone, and the deceived wanderer is now surrounded with a darkness and trouble all the more dreary.

That the aim of Communism and Socialism is nothing but a shimmering mirage follows from the fundamental fact that these ideologies are contrary to human nature. One man is not equal in capability to another, so enforced equality of outcome is a manifest crime against his nature. One man does not find the same measure of happiness as another in the same external advantages, so the aim of realizing equal happiness by an external equalization fails at the start. Mankind is naturally gregarious, but he is not naturally cooperative; on the contrary, due to innate selfishness, he is naturally competitive. Experience shows that these factors always result in the failure of Communism and Socialism.

Indeed, that the aims of Communism and Socialism are but a shimmering mirage is well known to those among the ruling class, the shimmering allure of sharing in the wealth of the rich and of reducing them to modest station serving to exploit envy and sloth among the servile classes – natural weaknesses of human character that they are – and to fool them into giving up their property, and with it, all incentive to use God-given faculty for their own advantage and that of their fellow man. In my November 27 post, EU President: 2009 to be First Year of Global Governance, I developed this point by emphasizing the Depravity of Man and the Scandal of Enforced Fraternity, and concluded that,

Marxism, in the end, will never lead to a classless society. The upper classes – the ruling class – will never allow it, will never divest themselves of advantage. Rather, as if dangling the carrot of social equity before asses, the ruling class serves their own fantasy of a Utopian Society in order to secure their own advantage, by using their power to regulate the middle class out of existence while otherwise duping the servile classes into relinquishing the only means they have of working themselves into their own relative positions of advantage: the free use of their faculties and ownership of their property. In a Utopian Society, the upper class still needs minions to provide labor -- to grow food, to sweep streets, to weed the flower gardens, and to polish golden toilets. This is a truism: there will never be fewer than two classes of people in any society.

"Climate Change" and the Copenhagen Treaty: Fraud in the Works
How interesting then that today, in Copenhagen, developing nations were exposed to the true motives of Global Socialists – not at all in the interest of equalization, but of domination, using the promise of a big pot of gold to sucker them into agreement. The so-called 'Danish Text' of the Copenhagen Treaty was leaked today, the contents of which infuriated representatives of developing countries. An article published today in U.K.'s The Guardian, entitled Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish Text' leak, details these revelations and their political fallout:

The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as "the circle of commitment" – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week.

The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol's principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.

The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as "a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks".

A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to:

Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;
Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called "the most vulnerable";
Weaken the UN's role in handling climate finance;
Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.

Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations.

"It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process," said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless.

Here's more from a CNN correspondent in Denmark:

Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak

The aim of Copenhagen has nothing whatsoever to do with mitigating supposed “climate change,” the Guardian article goes on to point out, as the regulation of carbon output comes nowhere near the 40% reduction that “science” supposedly says is needed. The aim of Copenhagen is one thing alone: to set up a Global Socialist government.

As pointed out in my series of posts on this subject beginning in October – Natural Law, Moral Imperative, and Public Policy: Copenhagen Looms Near, An “Inconvenient Truth:” Climate Change and Scientific Fraud, and EU President: 2009 to be First Year of Global Governance – “Climate Change” hysteria is a Scientific Fraud. Actual data entirely contradicts the fantastical prognostications and ideological fabrications of climatologists' “computer models.” The science is detailed in the previous posts just mentioned. Moreover, the scientists themselves have been caught in the act of fraud – conspiring to prevent fellow scientists from publishing contradictory findings in peer reviewed scientific journals, manipulating data to match their theories, permanently disposing of raw data, and illegally interfering with the release of information requested under the Freedom of Information Act. This, too, has been detailed in the previous posts just mentioned. That popular junk-science regarding impending global climate disaster is fraudulent, is underscored by commentary released today by renowned Atmospheric Scientist and Hurricane forecasting specialist, Dr. William Gray, Professor Emeritus at Colorado State University. Writing on ClimateDepot, he states:

Had I not devoted my entire career of over half-a-century to the study and forecasting of meteorological and climate events I would have likely been concerned over the possibility of humans causing serious global climate degradation.

There has been an unrelenting quarter century of one-sided indoctrination of the western world by the media and by various scientists and governments concerning a coming carbon dioxide (CO_2 ) induced global warming disaster. These warming scenarios have been orchestrated by a combination of environmentalists, vested interest scientists wanting larger federal grants and publicity, the media which profits from doomsday scenario reporting, governmental bureaucrats who want more power over our lives, and socialists who want to level-out global living standards. These many alarmist groups appear to have little concern over whether their global warming prognostications are accurate, however. And they most certainly are not. The alarmists believe they will be able to scare enough of our citizens into believing their propaganda that the public will be willing to follow their advice on future energy usage and agree to a lowering of their standard of living in the name of climate salvation.

Rising levels of CO_2 are not near the threat these alarmists have portrayed them to be... The global climate models predicting large amounts of global warming for a doubling of CO_2 are badly flawed. They should never have been used to establish government climate policy.

The last century's global warming of about 1 degree F is not a consequence of human activities. This warming is primarily the result of a multi-century change in the globe's deep ocean circulation. These ocean current changes have lead to a small and gradual increase in the globe's temperature. We are coming out of the Little Ice Age and into a generally warmer climate state. This is akin to the warmer global climate of the Medieval Period. We can do nothing but adapt to such long period natural temperature changes.

The recent 'ClimateGate' revelations coming out of the UK University of East Anglia are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well organized international climate warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years. This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the e-mails of the publicly funded climate research groups of the US and of foreign governments were ever made public...

As if in coordination Dr. Gray's letter, today, 140 climatologists signed an open letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, stating in part:

We the undersigned, being qualified in climate-related scientific disciplines, challenge the UNFCCC and supporters of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to produce convincing OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE for their claims of dangerous human-caused global warming and other changes in climate. Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.

Specifically, we challenge supporters of the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused climate change to demonstrate that:

Variations in global climate in the last hundred years are significantly outside the natural range experienced in previous centuries;
Humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ (GHG) are having a dangerous impact on global climate;
Computer-based models can meaningfully replicate the impact of all of the natural factors that may significantly influence climate;
Sea levels are rising dangerously at a rate that has accelerated with increasing human GHG emissions, thereby threatening small islands and coastal communities;
The incidence of malaria is increasing due to recent climate changes;
Human society and natural ecosystems cannot adapt to foreseeable climate change as they have done in the past;
Worldwide glacier retreat, and sea ice melting in Polar Regions , is unusual and related to increases in human GHG emissions;
Polar bears and other Arctic and Antarctic wildlife are unable to adapt to anticipated local climate change effects, independent of the causes of those changes;
Hurricanes, other tropical cyclones and associated extreme weather events are increasing in severity and frequency;
Data recorded by ground-based stations are a reliable indicator of surface temperature trends.

It is not the responsibility of ‘climate realist’ scientists to prove that dangerous human-caused climate change is not happening. Rather, it is those who propose that it is, and promote the allocation of massive investments to solve the supposed ‘problem’, who have the obligation to convincingly demonstrate that recent climate change is not of mostly natural origin and, if we do nothing, catastrophic change will ensue. To date, this they have utterly failed to do.

The atmosphere has indeed bewitched the masses – it has almost fooled them into giving up their liberty, thinking that by voluntary economic sanction and shared worldwide misery the masses can save the world and make it a better place. What the masses have instead discovered is the depravity of man. There is no scientific basis for "anthropogenic climate change." The hypotheses of CO2 induced "Greenhouse Effect" causing global warming have been falsified by OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE, namely, the recent research of Lindzen and Choi. Claims of dramatic temperature increases have been fabricated by ideological zealots posing as scientists. The political gathering in Copenhagen has been deprived of all basis in scientific fact. Yet it continues. It continues solely to exploit insecurities of man in order to deprive him of his liberty, property and capital, and to globally deprive him of his access to representational governing authority.

Global Warming: What is it all about? -->

<-- EU President: 2009 to be First Year of Global Governance

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE FOUR)

2009-12-02T02:00:00.000-08:00

COMMUNISM and SOCIALISM

Minutes of
The First German Evangelical Lutheran Congregation, U.A.C.
at
St. Louis, Missouri

A STENOGRAPHIC REPORT OF FOUR LECTURES
DELIVERED, AND BY RESOLUTION OF THE CONGREGATION,
FIRST PUBLISHED BY
PROFESSOR C.F.W. WALTHER, D. D.

Translated from the German by Rev. D. Simon and published in
1879 by Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis Missouri.

(from the 1947 reprint by The Lutheran Research Society)

FOURTH LECTURE

“Lord to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.” Thus Thy disciples once answered Thy question: “Will Ye also go away?” Thus, all, whoever became Thy true disciples, had to exclaim, and thus we too must exclaim. For to whom else in all the world could we go for the truth which we have found with Thee? To whom in all the world could we go for that grace which cancels our debt of sin and which we have found with Thee? And to whom in all the world could we go for that blessed peace which we have found with Thee?—

0 grant then, that no mock wisdom or mock comfort or feigned joy of this world may occasion as ever to become unfaithful to Thee.

Open Thou also the spiritual eyes of those who have as yet no knowledge of the salvation to be found with Thee, that they may know, that with Thee all things are to be found for which the soul of man longs, that they too may come unto Thee and remain with Thee unto death.

We will then praise and bless Thee for, this before Thy throne forevermore. Amen.

We are opposed to the efforts of the socialists:
III. Because the charges of communism against the Church and the Christian religion,
that these rather hinder than promote the material welfare of man, are unfounded and unjust.
There is one point yet which we must consider in our discussion of socialism and communism, if we would proceed with fairness, justice, uprightness and honesty. This is the accusation which socialism and communism make against the Christian religion and the Christian Church.

The first of these accusations is this: “The Church and the Christian religion are in league with capital,” or to say the same thing in other words, “with the rich, the powerful, and consequently also with the oppressors, the tyrants.”

1. the charge that the Church is in league with wealth, oppression and tyranny
“What else compares with the history of the Church,” ask the communists, “than the history of the most atrocious wickedness, of the plundering of the poor, and of bloody persecutions upon those who differed from them?”

And, my brethren, we cannot deny, that in the name and under the covering of the Church and the Christian religion some of the most heinous crimes have been committed, helpless people enslaved, impoverished and plundered, and streams of innocent blood shed. Calling themselves the Christian Church, men have affirmed that, if necessary for the propagation of the Church, fire and the sword should be used. Calling themselves the Christian Church, they claimed that in defense of the Church they had to burn the heretics. Calling themselves the Christian Church, they claimed a full right to demand of the lay members their bodily and earthly treasures brought to them by the Church. Calling themselves the Christian Church, they pretended, that, for the salvation of the world, they had to gain the favor of the wealthy, had to gain riches, honor, respect and power.

That all these abominations were committed by these who call themselves heads of the Christian Church, and that these abominations were committed in league with princes, the great, the powerful, kings and emperors, is a fact which no one can deny. All these things are written on the pages of history in characters of blood, and no one can erase them.

It is not to be denied in this connection either, that even in the so-called Protestant State Church many theologians united with the rich, the honored, the eminent, particularly with the princes, for the purpose of enslaving the common people to rob them as pertains to the body and soul, and to deprive them of all their rights.

But, brethren, what has this to do with the Christian religion and the Christian Church? The dark history of these abominations is not the history of the Christian Church, but rather the history of those TRAITORS AND ENEMIES OF THE CHURCH FOUND IN HER VERY BOSOM.

Or I ask you, when did Christ, or where do the Scriptures command such crimes?

Our Lord Jesus Christ was far from commanding His servants to propagate his kingdom by force with fire and sword as did the lying-prophet Mohammed; on the other hand Christ strictly commanded His disciples: “Go and teach all nations and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned” [Mk. 16:15-16]. Observe then, that Christ did not give the secular sword into His disciples’ hands; His Word is the weapon they were to use, and the means of propagating His kingdom was instruction and conviction; therefore the Lord also told Peter, when he, in his carnal zeal, had drawn his sword in defense of his Lord; “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword, shall perish with the sword” [Mt. 26:47-56].

Our Lord Jesus was also far from requiring of his followers that they should persecute and kill the schismatic and the heretic, but to the contrary He declares that the wheat and the tares shall remain together in the field until the time of harvest [Mt. 13:24-30]. And when those disciples desired that fire should fall from heaven, because the Samaritans would not receive the Lord, the Lord declares unto them: “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.” He accordingly testifies: “It is not the spirit of the gospel, to let fire fall from heaven upon the enemies of the Church” [Lu. 9:51-56].

Christ was also far from commanding His servants to conquer the kingdoms of this world for Him, and to seek after riches, honor and power, but on the contrary he publicly and solemnly declared in the presence of Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence” [Jn. 18:36]. Christ did not, as did the religious leaders of India and Egypt, intend to establish certain castes, as for example the caste of the priesthood and the caste of the laymen: no, the New Testament knows of no privileged priesthood. Christ would have no difference made among the members of His Church. He plainly declares: "Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you, and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant. One is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren” [Mt. 20:20-28].

Christ did not by any means, either, advise his followers to slight and despise the poor as members of less importance than the rich; but to the contrary, Christ associated mostly with the poor and labored mostly among them. He also says: “The poor have the gospel preached to them” [Mt. 11:2-6], and from among the poor He mostly gathered His Church. Therefore, the holy apostle Paul also says: “Brethren, God hath chosen not many noble after the flesh, but the weak things of the world” [1 Co. 1:18-31].

Christ was also far from requiring His followers to associate particularly with the rich commanding that they should do so because these had the greatest influence; that they should flatter them as those who had been especially preferred of God. There is, to the contrary, no book in all the world that speaks so contemptuously of the rich as the Book of Christ, i.e. the Holy Bible. In our last lecture we already considered the significant words of the Lord: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” [Mt. 19:16-26]. An another place he says: "Blessed be ye poor; for yours is the kingdom of God” [Mt. 5:3]. Again: “But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation” [Lu. 6:24]. And by St. Paul the Holy Spirit warns all Christians: “They that will be rich, fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition; for the love of money is the root of all evil, which while some coveted after they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows” [1 Ti. 6:6-11]. James also says in the 5th chapter of his epistle: “Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered, and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall cat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter” [Ja. 5:1-5]. And what is the apostles’ admonition to the master as to his relation to the servant? He says: “Ye masters do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening, knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him” [Ep. 6:9]. Is this flattering the rich? Is this requiring the Christians to associate with the rich, and that because they are rich?

And finally, my brethren, Christ or the Scriptures are far from warning the Christians against losing their respect for tyrants, lest they might fail to have the support of their strong arm; they, to the contrary, inform us that there has been no tyrant who did not come to a dreadful death through the terrible judgments of God. I need only refer you to Pharaoh, to Nebuchadnezzar, to Saul, to Manassa, to Herod. Yes, even more. When Solomon had been led away from the living God by his wives, his fall was also manifest in this, that he fearfully oppressed his people. He repented and died. The people then came to Solomon’s successor, Rehoboam, and demanded of him that he should make the grievous burdens which were oppressing them, lighter. Rehoboam turned a deaf ear, and in his arrogance sent the people away, —and what were the consequences according to the Scriptures? God in his wrath permitted it that ten tribes revolted and thus five-sixths of the kingdom fell away from him.

You see from this, my brethren, that even if men, who are in league with the rich who oppress the poor, who are in league with the tyrants, call themselves Christians and are even found among their number, they are not Christians.

The first accusation of the socialists and communists against the Church and the Christian religion accordingly falls to the ground. For the Christian Church proper is not in league with oppression and tyranny, but is their enemy, and a faithful friend of the poor and oppressed.

2. the charge that the Church is incapable of relieving human suffering.
A second charge which the communists and socialists make against the Church and the Christian religion is this: The Christian Church has proved herself incapable of improving the miserable condition of the poor, incapable of removing the wrong relation which exists between the employer and the employed, and of bringing about such a state of affairs that all men might enjoy themselves in this world.

Brethren, it is even true, that Christianity has in reality not destroyed the old system of oppression. Christianity has not only not destroyed the natural evil of the world, but the world has even continued in her wickedness since Christ came. But could such an effect be expected or required of any religion? Is it not the very object of religion to point out and to bring about the right relation between man and God and to reveal man’s relation to a future life? The Church, by her religion, is to direct our attention to the proper relation which man is to sustain to man, and also to bring about such a relation. But the Church can do this only within her own bounds. Is not the use of physical power in direct conflict with the nature of the Church and the Christian religion? It is therefore a crying injustice to make religion responsible for failing to accomplish what she has no right and power to do.

To this must be added, that where the true Christian religion takes possession of the human heart, there it changes the relation between man and man and actually improves it. It is then that the relation between the rich and poor, between rulers and subjects, between employers and employees, and between the lofty and the low, is really improved. That true faith produces these fruits when it takes possession of the heart, we learned in the last lecture. For when great necessity came upon the Christian congregation at Jerusalem, when the sword hung, as it were, by a hair over the Christian’s head, the Christians had all things common, neither said any of them that aught of the things which he possessed was his own, and all only provided that none might be in want. And such will be men’s relation to each other, where persons have become true Christians, who do not carry their faith at their tongue’s end, but in whose hearts faith dwells.

Furthermore, everyone will admit, that a final judgment of a matter can be given only after a trial. So then, let the socialists and communists give true Christianity a trial, i.e., let them become true Christians: what will be the consequence? They will acknowledge that Christianity is truly a divine, heavenly power for the conversion of man and for the changing of all the relations of men to each other; then they would see, that if Christianity became universal, the sicknesses and weaknesses of this life, failures of crops, accidents, death and other natural evils, would indeed not be put away; and they would see that it would put an end to the tyranny of tyrants and make of them Just rulers, would take away the covetousness of the rich and make them liberal, would take away the selfishness of the employers, so that they would look more to the common interests, and care more for the welfare of the laborer than for their own, would put an end to the envy of the poor and make them contented.

The socialists and communists will no doubt ridicule this; very few will believe it, and will consequently remain in their misanthropy, i.e. enmity to mankind, and will therefore also continue to consider themselves in an unhappy condition. But, my brethren, we believe it. Why! we have experienced it and experience it daily, that Christianity has such power. It does not only make us blessed for the life to come, but it makes us blessed in this world, as it is written in the 128th Psalm: “Blessed is everyone that feareth the Lord; that walketh in his ways. For thou shalt eat the labor of thine hands; happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee.” This we do not only read in the Scriptures, but we have also experienced it. Yes, we have also experienced what Asaph says in the 73rd Psalm: “Lord whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee. My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. But it is good for me to draw near to God; I have put my trust in the Lord God, that I may declare all thy works.”

Let then every Christian take warning against the agitations of the socialists and communists. Their aim is a Fata Morgana, i.e. a brilliant airy appearance, like a fairy castle. The pilgrim makes one more effort to reach this castle. He finally reaches the place where the bewitching atmospheric appearance was seen. And behold, it is gone, and the deceived wanderer is now surrounded with a darkness and trouble all the more dreary.

Oh then, my brethren, let us aim for some other object – that object which presents to us our heavenly calling in Christ Jesus. This is no Fata Morgana, this is reality, this is truth! There are indeed many who say: “No one has yet come from the other world to us to let us know that there is another life.” But One has come from the other world to us, namely, Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who has sundered the bands of death and proclaimed to all of us: “I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live! and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die” [Jn. 11:25-27]. Jesus be our guide then, and we will follow Him over mountains and through valleys, through prosperity and misfortune, through darkness and light! Finally, the eternal and blessed light will make its appearance, then all our tears shall be wiped away, our sighings cease, and eternal unchangeable joy shall take possession of our hearts. Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who has obtained this for us, help that we may secure it. Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria

<-- "America's Martin Luther" Lectures on Communism and Socialism (THIRD LECTURE)

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE THREE)

2009-12-01T16:00:00.000-08:00

THIRD LECTURE

“O Lord, how great and how manifold are Thy works! In wisdom hast Thou made them all, the earth is full of Thy riches.” Such was the language of Thy servant David thousands of years ago, after meditating over the works of Thy creation, preservation and government. We at the present can but repeat this exclamation with Thy servant David, for wherever we turn our eyes, we behold bright and shining traces of Thy endless power, wisdom and goodness.

O preserve Thou us then against that spirit of darkness, which calls itself light, and which is at present poured out upon myriads of unhappy people, which denies Thee the Creator, Preserver and Ruler of all things, or at least maliciously subverts Thy sacred administration and wisely arranged order of things.

Enable us rather, ever more to acknowledge that Thou doest all things well, and that sinful man alone has corrupted Thy work. Grant therefore, that, as often as the troubles- of earth lie heavily upon us, we may reprove ourselves and not Thee. Let us not perish in the rising floods of unbelief, and although thousands and tens of thousands should fall from Thee, help Thou us, that we may continue in the faith to our end, when our faith shall be changed into vision, and our hope into enjoyment. Hear us for the sake of Jesus Christ, Thine only begotten Son, our Lord and Savior. Amen.

All of you here tonight well know the question for our consideration this evening, to wit: Why should and can no reasonable man, much less a Christian, take part in the efforts of communists and socialists?

To this question three answers are given:
Because their efforts are contrary to reason, nature and experience;
because these efforts are contrary to Christianity, and finally
because the charges of communism against the Church and the Christian religion, that they rather hinder than promote the material welfare of man, are confounded and unjust.
The first answer has been considered. We have tested communism by reason, nature, and history, and have seen that it does not stand even these tests. But there have even been Christians, who have claimed that communism and socialism could also be justified by the Holy Scriptures, the only true source of Christianity. Yes, unbelievers have made this claim, some of them communists; of course the latter did so, not because they themselves believed it, but that they might use our own weapons against us Christians.

[And so the second answer shall be now considered:]

We are opposed to the efforts of the socialists:
II. Because these efforts are contrary to Christianity

[firstly because,]

1. What is adduced from the Scriptures in their favor,
either proves nothing, or proves the contrary.
There are particularly four passages of the Holy Scriptures which are adduced to show us, that if we would faithfully adhere to the Bible, we must necessarily also justify the efforts of the communists and socialists. The first passage is found in the first chapter of the Holy Scriptures, where God gives man authority over the earth and all things in the earth. The second [passage] is found in the fourth and fifth chapters of Acts, where the condition of the first Christian congregation at Jerusalem is presented. The third passage is found in the 18th chapter of St. Luke, where an account is given of Christ saying to a rich man: “Sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” The fourth passage is found in the 20th chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. At this place we have a record of the familiar parable of the laborers in the vineyard.

We will, accordingly, in the first place closely examine these portions of Scripture and become convinced whether these are really for or against communism and socialism, i.e. for or against the community of goods or common labor with a common profit.

[First], we read in the first chapter of Genesis:

Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing, that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image..., and said unto them...: replenish the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth... And God said: behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

From this, it is true, we learn that God has given to the human race the earth, together with all things that live and move on the earth, as their possession. But we do not learn from this, how the possessions of the entire human race are to be used, nor in what manner the earth and all things that live and move upon the earth, shall be used. God must accordingly have left the arrangement of these things to man himself, that is, to his reason. If a rich man would give to a carpenter, who had been unfortunate, and had been sold out, a saw, a plane and other tools, bread, meat, coffee, a sewing-machine, a doll, a hobby-horse, and other lay-things, he would have presented these things to the entire family of the poor carpenter; and if he gave no directions, how these things should be used and appropriated, the carpenter would know that all these things, presented to him and his family, were to be disposed of according to his good judgment. The carpenter would know that the hobby-horse and the other playthings were not intended for him, but for his children, and if he had received a cradle, he would well know that it was not intended for him to lie in. Nor would he think that the sewing machine was for him, but for his wife. In short, these possessions would be for the family, and were to be divided among the members of it. God’s doings have been similar. The whole earth and all things therein he has given to man, but he has not determined how man shall use them. Man is no brute, without reason, and without a knowledge of the aim of life. Man has reason, and this he is to use. It is self-evident that at the beginning, when there were no owners on the whole earth, so far as the individual is concerned, everyone could appropriate to himself whatever he desired. Whatever he appropriated was his own. The same would hold good even at the present day. If, for example, a crew should be ship-wrecked and would be driven to an uninhabited island, owned by no one, the crew would simply cake possession of the island. Everyone would have the right to settle down and appropriate a certain portion of the island to himself.

But what was done after God the Lord had given the earth, and all things on the earth, to the entire human race? Did perhaps the people in the earliest times institute communism, community of goods, or common labor with a common profit? In the fourth chapter of Genesis we read: “And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock, and of the fat thereof.” We see accordingly that Abel was a keeper of sheep and carried on breeding of cattle, and that Cain was a farmer, and that each one offered unto the Lord of that which he possessed. Neither Cain nor Abel considered his own the common property of both, but each one offered that which he could justly call his own personal property. Otherwise he could not have presented it as his offering.

We see accordingly, that reason already taught the first persons living on the earth, that the holding of personal property was a necessity among men, for the [first] reason, that without the holding of personal property, neither peace, nor unity could be preserved. The communist Fourier indeed said that in his communist republic everyone should have whatever he needed, and everyone should engage in that work for which he was particularly inclined. But it must be remembered that enjoyments are so altogether different. There is good wine produced and also poor wine. There are a great many poor fruits and few that are extra good. Now who would say: “I will take the poor wine?” Who would say: “I will ride the poor horse?” Who would say: “I will do the meanest kind of drudgery?” Everyone would want to engage in the best and the easiest and the most honorable work, and peace would soon be at an end. Just as necessary then as concord and peace are to the human race, so necessary is the holding of personal property.

[Secondly,] to this we must yet add: Reason further requires the holding of personal property, because there dwells in the natural man a certain desire for liberty and independence. If man is not in a measure free and independent, he cannot be happy. Take away personal property and you put an end to liberty. Others would then prescribe to him what he should do, how he should live, what he should eat and drink, where he should live, and where he should be employed. Truly, I would not stay in a society where I had not perfect liberty in self-determination. I would as soon live under the Russian knout, under the police of China or the despotism of Turkey. For I would then at least be conscious of the fact, that I was forced to it in opposition to my will — and here shall I willingly subject myself to all this? Never, no, never! For this reason Cain, when society became oppressive to him after he had committed murder, left and went into another land and there built a city for himself and family, and called it Enoch.

A modern writer gives a graphic description of the wretched condition which a communist must realize in a communist state. He says: “'La loi' (i.e. law or command) plans and tells the 50 millions of Icarians all they shall do and all they shall leave undone. La loi fixes the time for labor at so many hours and so many minutes; la loi prescribes to the young ladies and gentlemen when and how long they shall make their toilet; la loi introduces a 'new dish of vegetables' into every Icarian family; la loi provides for cold meat at the Icarian picnics; la loi commands, similar to Babeuf’s communist state, that all literature not officially recognized, shall be burned as worthless literature,” etc. (“Communismus” von W. Schulz in Bd. 2. der Supplemente zu Rotteck’s und Welcker’s Staatslexicon. Altona 1846. S. 67.)

This is no exaggeration. It is indeed true that the communists do not imagine that such would be the state of affairs, if their ideas were realized. They will say: “This is all false, we do not think of establishing such a state. We are free people, and we will provide that in such a communist state we shall not sacrifice our liberty.” But they may say what they please, and they may twist themselves as they please: whoever accepts the principle, must also accept the deduction, and that is, that man loses his personal liberty; for this is based, as stated, above all things, on the holding of personal property; and on this, that in accordance with my ability, I can choose the service that I would perform, as well as the calling in which I would labor. I must have liberty to leave my position again; I must have liberty to do with my own as I see fit. All this is denied to me the moment I enter into a communist society. For just as soon as such liberty is granted, the principle on which communism is based, would be destroyed.

The third reason, why the people of the earliest times already knew from reason that the holding of personal property was essential to earthly happiness, is this: if no one held any personal property, that incentive, which almost everyone needs, if he would exert himself and do his work well, would be wanting. Why do many persons work from morning till night? Because they would gain something by it. This is of course not the right motive. Christians should not be induced to labor diligently by the desire to gain something, but they should labor for God’s sake, because of God’s order and command. But nearly everyone labors exclusively for gain; some perhaps not just for money and goods, but then it is for honor, respect and fame. This incentive is taken from man just as soon as he ceases to hold personal property.

The first generation of men was further induced to assert the claim of personal property by an intuitive perception of equity. This dictates to everyone that the pay shall he according to the work done. Diligent, faithful and successful labor should be more liberally rewarded. But just as soon as men enter into a society in which the profit of united labor belongs to all, that true equality which justice demands, is at an end.

And besides what would become of the arts and sciences in a communist state? If, for example, one would apply himself to astronomy, or philosophy, or even to theology or architecture, or painting, many would look upon him as an idler. And why? Because he would earn no money for the society by his art or science. The arts and sciences would undoubtedly be banished from the truly communist state.

Every man has certain religious wants. While many of them would know nothing of religion, others have a certain impulse to serve God. The communists say “In our communist State no religion shall be found, and above all, we will not tolerate any religious teachers, they will be excluded.” But of what benefit is it to them to pass such resolutions? They will never be able to banish the religious wants from human nature, even if man should hear nothing of God from his youth up, even if in such a state God had never been mentioned. Conscience would wake up at any rate. But the communist state would supply no means for the building of churches and the support of preachers of the gospel.

These then are the various reasons why our first ancestors did not introduce the community of goods, but divided all the property among themselves, and thus introduced the holding of personal property, although God had given the human race the whole earth and all things on the earth.

It is even true that there are great dangers and great evils connected with the holding of personal property, as we are compelled to see it daily displayed. But here the government should take steps to prevent a few from appropriating everything to themselves. This sin is also most earnestly rebuked in the Holy Scriptures. We read for example in the book of Isaiah 5:8, “Woe unto them that join house to house, field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!” It is of course aggravating to see how a few are buying up all the land and thereby increase its value. It is well known, that the railroad companies have received, as a donation, millions of acres of land which belonged to the United States, that they might carry out their projects. This is scandalous. For if a poor man would now buy good land, he can no longer buy it at the low rate for which he could have bought it formerly from the government. This may suffice as regards the first Scripture passage cited to justify communism.

The second [passage] is found, as stated, in Acts 4:32ff. We read: “And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart, and of one soul: neither said any of them that aught of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and grace was upon them all. Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. And Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas (which is, being interpreted, the son of consolation), a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus, having land, sold it and brought the money and laid it at the apostles’ feet.” This is certainly a glorious example of the ardent love of the early Christians. It must be remembered that at that time too, only a few rich people accepted Christianity; the greater number of those who became Christians were poor. To this must be added the fact that no Christian’s life was safe even for a single hour. The drawn sword of a blood-thirsty Herod threatened the life of every Christian. During that time of great trouble the Christians bound themselves most intimately together, and so that no one might be in want, those of more means than others sold their real estate and placed the proceeds into a common treasury.

Thus far it seems as if these examples really favored communism. We read, however, of no other Christian congregation of the apostolic age in which such an order of things was instituted. And furthermore we read in Acts 5:1ff, “But a certain man” (Luke thus continues) “named Ananias, with Sapphira, his wife, sold a possession, and kept back part of the price (his wife also being privy to it) and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles’ feet.” This Ananias also wanted to be looked upon as a loving benevolent and merciful Christian man. To this end he sold his possessions, but kept back part of the price, and brought the rest to the apostle Peter under the pretense that this was the entire sum that he had realized. “But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land? While it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?”

It is particularly worthy of note that Peter here says: “While it remained, was it not thine own?” We see from this that the first Christian congregation at Jerusalem had not instituted such an order of things that each one would have been compelled to give up his possessions, but the Christians did this without restraint, from free choice. For Peter here testifies to Ananias: “It would not have been wrong for you to keep your house and land.” Yes, he even adds: “And after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?” “Thou couldst have said: I will give one-half, and all would have been well; no one could have made it a matter of conscience. The reason why it is such a shameful deed, is because thou wouldst be considered a loving and benevolent Christian, whereas thou hast done secretly just the contrary to what thou pretendest to have done.” We read also that the members of the first Christian congregations had houses and possessions, for example Simon, the tanner in Joppa (Acts 10:6), the wealthy seller of purple, Lydia in Philippi (Acts 16:14-15), then even the deacon or almoner Philip in Jerusalem had a house in Cesarea (Acts 21:8) and even the mother of John, whose surname was Mark, owned a house in Jerusalem (Acts 12:12).

From this we must necessarily conclude that the first congregation at Jerusalem was not organized according to communist principles, but that the described condition of affairs was but an unrestrained manifestation of their love in times of extreme necessity. After this we read Acts 9:31, “Then had the churches rest throughout all Judea, and Galilee, and Samaria, and were edified and walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, were multiplied.” From this time forth this arrangement of having in a certain measure all things common ceased in Jerusalem. It continued for a short time only, until after the conversion of Paul about the year 36.

But what we do learn from this example, is this: how a true Christian should be disposed. In his heart, IF RIGHTLY UNDERSTOOD, every Christian should be a communist. In other words, a Christian should always be ready and willing to give up all he has for the benefit of his suffering brethren, whenever their necessity requires it. The apostle John accordingly says: “But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” (1 Jn. 3:17). The Saviour expressly declares: “Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee, turn not thou away” (Mt. 5:42). The apostle Paul commands the Christian to “labor working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth” (Ep. 4:28). He does not command him to labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may obtain a capital and become rich, but “That he may have to give to him that needeth.” The apostle Paul further says: “and they that buy, as though they possessed not” (1 Co. 7:30). He that owns property should then be as if he possessed nothing, his heart should not be attached to it, it should create no inward struggle to give up his possessions when his neighbor is in want or the glory of God requires it. That person is no Christian whose heart and money are one. Christ accordingly declares in the very beginning of his sermon on the mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” What does this mean? Blessed are those, whether they have few or many possessions, who are poor in spirit. He is to be poor in his heart and mind. That man who has riches which have really become riches to him, his most precious treasure, which he secures and would not lose for the whole world, that man has not yet learned the first words of Christ’s sermon on the mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” And if you were very rich, you should be poor in spirit, you should be as if you had none of those things which have fallen to your lot. The Psalmist therefore also says: “If riches increase, set not your heart upon them” (Ps. 62:10).

We shall proceed further. A third passage adduced in defense of communism is Mt. 19:16 ff (compare Lu. 18:18ff):

And behold one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? There is none good, but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother: and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. The young man said unto him, All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet? Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. When his disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, Who then can be saved?

When the communists hear this passage, they say: “Here you see it, here Christ has plainly told the rich, what they shall do: they are to sell what they have and give to the poor.” They make a logical mistake, as is evident. They make the mistake which in the art of logic is called in Latin: Fallacia a particulari ad universale, i.e. a fallacy from the particular to the universal. It is, for example, stated in Scripture, that Christ Jesus commanded his disciples: “Go ye into all the world and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” [Mt. 28:18-20]. Would it not be folly to conclude: “Here you see it, that Christ commands all Christians to go into the world and to preach the gospel?” Christ says to those who had been healed: “Go show yourself unto the priests” [Mt. 8:4; Mk. 1:44; Lu. 5:14, 17:14]. Would it not be extreme folly to conclude from this that all must show themselves to the priests? But it is just as foolish to attempt to show that it is Christ’s doctrine that all the rich must sell all their possessions and give to the poor, from Christ’s command to the rich young man: “Sell that thou hast.”

Why then did Christ address these words to the rich young man? The answer is at hand. This rich man was a ruler, a counselor, who imagined that he had fulfilled all the commandments of God. But although he had, in a general way, led an upright life, he was a wretched miser at heart. Christ, who knows what is in man, knew this. When this man therefore, declared that he had kept all the commandments of God and desired to know what was yet lacking to complete his perfection, the Lord gives him a good lecture from which he can learn where his corruption is to be found, namely, in his infamous heart. Therefore the Lord tells him: “Sell that thou hast and give to the poor.” But when the counselor hears this, he goes away sorrowful. Christ then adds: “A rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven; It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” By these words the disciples were so amazed that they exclaim: “Who then can be saved?” But what is Christ’s answer? He adds: “The things which are impossible with men, are possible with God.” In these words Christ accordingly declares that with men it is impossible to be rich and to be saved, but with God all things are possible, and therefore this also. As soon as a man is converted to the Lord with his whole heart, he not only discards every vice and sin, but also bids farewell to his wealth, saying to it without hypocrisy: “Thou art no longer my treasure; if therefore God again requires my money and goods of me. I will gladly give them back again; my heart is not attached to them.” In a case like this, it is possible with God for a person to be very rich and yet to be saved. An especially beautiful example of this is that of Zaccheus [Lu. 19:1-10]. He had become very rich, partly by cheating others. As soon as he was converted to the Lord Jesus, he was prepared, if he had taken anything from any man by false accusation, to restore it to him fourfold, and to give the half of his goods to the poor. If the communists’ interpretation of the passage under consideration be correct, Christ would have said to Zaccheus: “The half is not enough, thou must sell all that thou hast and give to the poor.” But of this we read nothing. Christ, on the other hand, calls Zaccheus a true Israelite, although he would give only half. Do not think that Zaccheus would not have been ready to give up all that he had; but he knew that God did not require it of him, and that now, after his conversion, he could apply his possessions to a much better advantage than if he had been necessitated to give it all away at once. For if I give all I have to the poor, I can from that time forth extend no helping hand, not would God require it of me.

Finally, the fourth passage adduced to prove that the principles of communism are biblical, is the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. The French communist Proudhon referred to the fact that, according to this parable, those who labored twelve hours received no more than those who labored nine, six and three hours, yes, no more than those who labored but one hour. It is, however, strange, that reference is made to this parable, for there is hardly any passage in the entire Bible more directly in conflict with communism. In the first place we find here a householder who owns a vineyard. In the second place we find laborers who were hired by the householder. In the third place we notice here a contract for wages between the householder and his laborers, to which the householder afterwards refers. In the fourth place we learn that these laborers were hired to labor twelve hours a day. In the fifth place we learn that the master ascribes it all to his mercy and not to justice, that he gave the same wages to those who had labored only one hour as to those who had labored twelve. Every argument adduced in favor of communism on the basis of this parable thus falls to the ground.

These then, are the Scripture passages adduced, in part by believers, and in part by unbelievers, in defense of communism, which, however, either prove nothing or the directly opposite. From this we may know that the efforts of the communists are opposed to Christianity.

But we consider also that
2. The efforts of the communists are in conflict with definite doctrines of Christianity.
We not only do not find anything in the Scriptures in defense of the communist system, but the Scriptures teach directly the opposite.

In the first place, it is in conflict with the scriptural doctrine of personal property, as contained in the seventh commandment. The seventh commandment teaches: “Thou shalt not steal,” and with these words overthrows the entire system of communism. Do not misunderstand me. By this I would by no means say that the communists desire to steal from others. No indeed, they say, on the contrary, that the rich are the thieves, as Proudhon has declared: “Holding possessions is theft.” But this is what I would say: just as certain as the seventh commandment declares “Thou shalt not steal,” so certain it is that everyone should have his own personal property. For, if according to God’s will I should hold no personal property, God would not have forbidden others to take anything away from me. If no one is permitted to take anything from me, it is presupposed that I have something, and that, personal property. Consider this well.

The efforts of the socialists and communists are, in the second place, opposed to the Scriptural doctrine of the fifth commandment and other passages, according to which the government alone has the power of the sword. The communists do indeed preach from the housetops that they would have the new order of things, as suggested by them, introduced peaceably; but if they cannot accomplish it peaceably, they are ready to draw the sword and to fill the world with murder and conflagration, that by this means they may accomplish that upon which they claim the salvation of the world depends. But this conflicts with the Holy Scriptures, in which we have the word of God for these declare: “Thou shalt not ki1l,” and respecting the government alone they say: “He beareth not the sword in vain” [Ro. 13:1-4].

The efforts of the socialists and communists are, in the third place, contrary to the doctrine of the sanctity of the marriage state, as taught in the sixth commandment and elsewhere in the Scriptures. There are indeed many communists and socialists who do not sanction the community of wives; but they must acknowledge that there have been many communists who have taught this doctrine; e.g. Enfantin, Proudhon, Marx and the so-called Egaliteurs. They were only the more consistent; and if the fearful catastrophe of communist rule should come upon us, those opposed to the abrogation of marriage could by no means hold the helm, but the equalization would be rigidly carried out, even to the extremity of introducing the community of wives.

These efforts are, in the fourth place, contrary to the differences between man and man as approved in the Scriptures. These differences pertain not only to parents and children, husband and wife, master and servant, but also to rich and poor. I need but refer to these doctrines and every Christian must say: “Verily, if I will be a Bible Christian, I cannot possibly take part in these movements. The moment I connect myself with such an association, I must cast the Bible into the flames, or I am a wretched hypocrite, who is carrying water on both shoulders, and walks lame on both legs.”

They are, in the fifth place, contrary to the doctrine of the Scriptures, that through all kinds of troubles, God would draw man to Himself, try him and prepare him for Eternity. The communists (when I say "Communists" I refer to their leaders and not to everyone who for want of experience may have strayed into the organization) continually declare and preach it from the house top, that they are sick of having the church hold out to them a prospective eternal life. They ridicule the idea that those who bear the cross with patience in this life can expect the glory of heaven in the life to come. “No,” say they, “we would have our heaven here; in this life we would be happy.” Some say that it is after all very doubtful whether anything will be granted us in the future life; but others say: we are certain that all is a delusion. What Christian then could take part in the efforts of the communists and socialists?

They are, in the sixth place, opposed to the doctrine that man shall eat his bread in the sweat of his face. Those therefore who would make it appear that as soon as the communists have gained the supremacy the golden times will come, that then all will be rich, inasmuch as all will then have access to the great treasury, these would have the people expect times of which there is no mention in the Holy Scriptures. Every Christian is not only to eat his bread here on earth, that is, to have what he needs, but he shall eat it in the sweat of his face.

These efforts are, in the seventh place, contrary to the doctrine of the Scriptures that man shall not seek his happiness in this world, but in God and in the hope of a day of recompense and equalization, and in the hope of eternal life. These, therefore, who say that things shall no longer continue thus, that the human race shall after all finally become happy here below, speak against the Scriptures. God did not promise us happiness in this world. If we have food and raiment, we are to be therewith content. We must know that through many tribulations we enter into the kingdom of God. These are truths which the communists ridicule; however, those who firmly believe in Christ and His word, are fully convinced that they are eternal and blessed truths. This is why we can have nothing to do with a system like that of the communists.

And finally, these efforts of the communists contradict the doctrine of the Scriptures which says that sin is the source of all trouble in this world. For the Scriptures say: “Sin is a reproach to any people” [Pr. 14:34],and at another place: “Wherefore doth a living man complain, a man for the punishment of his sins?” (Lamentation 3:39). The new communist movement is based upon this, that it is made to appear that all that is wanting in the world is a proper social organization. Should this once be effected, all trouble would be at an end. It is not so however! The Scriptures tell us that God did indeed create man perfect in the beginning, but that man has fallen, and that all trouble and wretchedness that exist in the world are but the consequence of this fall. Take sin out of the world and you take all trouble and wretchedness out of the world. But as long as sin remains, there will be no heaven on earth.

This would then be the second answer to the question which we are endeavoring to answer in these evening lectures.

"America's Martin Luther" Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE FOUR) -->

<-- "America's Martin Luther" Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE TWO)

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE TWO)

2009-12-01T04:00:00.000-08:00

SECOND LECTURE

O God, thou hast not created man for this short earthly life. The immortal mind of man is not bound to time and earth, like the soul of irrational animals, but lifts itself beyond all things created, even into boundless eternity. The heart of man cannot be satisfied with things temporal and earthly, like the blind instinct of animals, but it hangers and thirsts for eternal, for perfect gifts. In this present world Thou wouldst only prepare man for his final world, Thou, wouldst only prepare man for his final goal, in another world he shall attain it; here he is to sow, there he shall reap; here he is tot labor, there he shall receive the reward; here he is to pass through trials, there he shall be elevated to glory; here truth and falsehood, right and oppression are to contend with each other, there truth and right shall be crowned victorious.

O grant, then, that we may not seek our happiness, rest and peace in the perishable things of this world; we would not find it after all. Grant also that midst the troubles of this life we may not despair; but that we may be strong like men and cheerfully engage in the appointed contest. But above all, grant that in these times of falling away and infidelity, our faith in Thy Word may not waver, that we may find comfort in Thine only begotten Son Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, and that we may eventually, by His grace, depart this life in peace and behold Thee face to face in the joys of that eternal Day. Amen.

My friends, whoever thinks that we Lutherans take no part in the agitations of the socialists and communists, but rather oppose them, because we are not acquainted with the troubles of the laboring-men, or because we have no sympathy for them, or because under all circumstances we side with the rich, the so-called great and rulers, is greatly in error. How could it be otherwise than that we should be well acquainted with the troubles, particularly of these times, of the laboring-men? The greatest number, by far, of the members of our Lutheran congregations are persons who are oppressed with the troubles common among the 1aboring-men. It is an exceedingly rare occurrence, if once in a great while, a man of wealth or influence connects himself with one of our congregations. We also well know, that the present great troubles which have come upon our laboring-men are not by any means simply a natural necessity; the cause of the trouble is to be found somewhere else; namely, in part, yes, almost altogether, in the self-interest, avarice and selfishness, in the cruelty and heartlessness, and, to speak plainly, in the vampirism and tyrannical oppression of the worker on the part of the rich. Let no one think that we do not sympathize with the laboring-men. When we read of the heart-rending scenes which occur almost daily, particularly in the larger cities, in the shanties of the laboring-men, it causes our hearts to bleed, and we are willing and ready to do our part, little as it may be, to improve the condition of the poor laboring-man. It is not true either, that we side with the rich and influential under all circumstances. No, when the rich are unchristian in their conduct towards the poor, when they look upon them as existing simply for their profit, when they treat them as a cow is treated, which is milked and then turned into the woods, if they will not give the laborer proper wages, if they will not, when such is possible, procure for him paying labor, if they will not pay for damages sustained to the laborer who has been unfortunate while in their services, if they will not support the laborer and his family in case of sickness, if they can live in luxury and be unconcerned when the laborer is suffering: then we are not their friends, but, from principle, their enemies!

O my brethren, what term of reproach might not be justly applied to us, if we sided with the human vampires and not with the oppressed!

We would be the most infamous and abject hypocrites under the sun, or that ever walked on the earth, if we would, notwithstanding this, pretend that the Holy Scriptures were the book of our religion. The Holy Scriptures are the very book, which does not only declare that the first and greatest command is this that “we love God above all things,” but also adds: “And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” [Mk. 12:28-34]. It is this book which declares: “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets” [Mt. 7:12], that is, this is the essence, the sum and substance, the common center of the legal part of the entire Scriptures. It is the Scriptures which cry vengeance upon the heads of the unrighteous capitalists, and which proclaim a thousandfold vengeance upon those who have capital simply to increase it, or to make themselves comfortable, who never concern themselves about their neighbors [Pr. 22:16; Ja. 5:1-5], who never think that it is because of the poor that they are rich, who, accordingly leave the poor Lazarus lying at the door of their palaces, while they are within faring sumptuously every day [Lu. 16:19-31]. No, we do not side with them. We herewith declare that we have nothing to do with them, and if socialism and communism are now causing them trouble and anxiety, it is no more than they deserve.

But, my brethren, notwithstanding this, we cannot side with the socialists or with the communists, and that principally for these reasons: They would go too far, they would accomplish more than they either can or should accomplish, and then again because they would employ means which no God-fearing man can employ. If, accordingly, the communists and socialists would equalize everything in the world, introduce the community of goods, so that no one will be rich and no one poor, or if they would, in order to gain this end, shed blood, if necessary, we cannot side with them. For we know, that it is God’s order, that in spiritual things, i. e. things pertaining to our relation to God, we are all equal, for with God there is no respect of persons [Ro. 2:8-16,10:11-13], but that in this world there must be a difference between men both as respects their possessions and their positions [Ro. 13:1-2; Ep. 5:22-6:9]. Without this difference the world could not exist. In the second place, the Scriptures teach us that the individual does not bear the sword, but this is a prerogative of the government [Ro. 13:3-4]. When the Apostle Peter would defend his Master with the sword, and for which he seemed to have a perfect right — for who was ever more shamefully and unjustly taken by violence than our Lord Jesus Christ! — Christ tells him: “Put up thy sword into the sheath, for all they that take the sword, shall perish with the sword” [Jn. 18:10-11; Lu. 22:49-51]. Even when the Lord was in the presence of Pilate, who among all rulers was the most unjust, he acknowledged: “Thou couldst have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” [Jn. 19:6-16]. Pilate was a ruler and in virtue of his office had the power. Moreover, if the communists and socialists would even partly gain their desired object, they would not only have to gain it by the shedding of blood, but their glory would continue only for a short time, and they would soon see how sadly they had deceived themselves and others. This is the subject which we will now consider more in detail.

We left off with the fourth subdivision of the first part of our essay. The first part reads: No reasonable man, much less a Christian, can take part in the efforts of the communists and socialists, much less become a member of one of their organizations, because these efforts are contrary to reason, nature, and experience. It is then said:

[the fourth proposition]
4. It is a fact well established by experience, that the communists never attained
their professed end, and only introduced sorrow and suffering.
These beautiful whims of the Communists, relating to the future, are of no consequence; the same can be said of their representations of the golden times which will come after they have fully organized the world. History must decide. But history condemns communism. Schiller’s words may well be applied here, although used by him for a godless sense: “The history of the world is the judgment of the world.” There are in reality things which are already judged by history; to these belong these new systems, which are, however, already old.

Going back then in history, we find that the first state, which was to a certain extent arranged communistically, was that of the Spartans. They divided all their goods; but it is doubtful whether the communists and socialists will recognize the Spartans as their real ancestors, inasmuch as they had, in connection with their communistic arrangements, slavery, and at that a terrible slavery. So-called helots had to do the farming, and carry on all trades and professions; the Spartan nobility concerned itself nothing about these things. They concerned themselves only about military affairs. The Spartan state was evidently not altogether communistic. Lycurgus gave Sparta a constitution 800 years before Christ.

Six hundred years before Christ, Pythagoras arranged his school of philosophy on the Communistic plan. But I doubt whether the communists would recognize in him a true ancestor. For no one was admitted into this society until he had abstained from speaking for a number of years — and to this the communists would hardly consent; then again, the Pythagoreans did not intend to organize the whole human race into a society on the basis of these principles, but considered these a more exalted position on which the philosopher must stand, inasmuch as he is not concerned about the earthly and visible, but only regards the idea which governs his mind.

Plato, the renowned philosopher, lived 400 years before Christ. He wrote a book treating exclusively of government and the commonwealth. In this book he also says that the most beautiful and most perfect form of a republic is that of communism. It is remarkable, however, that he forbids only those in the higher stations of life to hold private or personal property; the people, on the other hand, were not to be organized on the principles of communism.

In speaking of an impracticable theory it is now generally said to be a Platonic idea, or a Platonic republic. The expression occurs in the symbolical books of our Lutheran Church in the article treating of the church [AP VII:17-20], in which it is said that the fanatical spirits imagined the church to be a Platonic republic, the description of which looks well on paper, but can never be realized.

Two hundred years before Christ there existed a sect among the Jewish people, called the Essenes, who also had their possessions in common. But it was not their intention to recommend their constitution to the whole world, as do our communists. They did not expect that this form of government would bring happiness to man, but on the contrary, they would live in this manner for the very purpose of denying themselves many things, hoping thereby to merit something before God. It was self-righteousness, feigned holiness, that prompted them to this.

With reference to the early Christians, we will have occasion to speak under the second main division, from which we will see that the early Christians were not for Communism as some affirm.

In the Romish church there is a strong communistic tendency: for every order of monks and nuns is based on communistic principles. But our communists will hardly recognize these either. The Romish monks and nuns also declare that they do not enter the cloister for the purpose of taking part in the common happiness of man, but much rather to withdraw themselves from the happiness of the world, to lead a life of abstinence, that by this means they may gain a more lofty position in heaven. These then do not come into consideration here.

At the time of the Reformation, communism as it is now developing itself, was already in existence. The first communist during Luther’s time was Thomas Muenzer, a Lutheran preacher, a talented man, but very fanatical. History gives us the following account of him.

In the year 1524 there arose a Lutheran preacher in Thuringia, by the name of Thomas Muenzer; he advocated communistic principles, which he summed up in these words: omnia simul communia which he circumscribed as follows: “All things shall be common, and occasionally they shall be distributed according to each one’s necessity; and whatever prince, count, or lord will not submit to this, and being forewarned, his head shall be stricken off or he shall be hung” [LW XVI, 157]. He traveled through Germany and Switzerland and executing his scheme, stirred up the flames of sedition everywhere; returned to Thuringia, took possession of Muelhausen, had cannons cast in the Franciscan cloister, issued a proclamation to all the princes demanding their resignation, finally collected together 8,000 peasants, ransacked the cloisters and the houses of the rich, and after the peasants had rejected the offer of mercy, provided they would deliver up the ringleaders, he gave the princes battle at Frankenhausen, singing the hymn: Now we pray the Holy Spirit. He was, however, most ignominiously defeated, his whole army destroyed, nearly 7,000 of his men perished, and he himself was captured and put to death. This was the beginning and the end of the first communistic movement during the time of the Reformation.

At the same time there was a sedition raised among the peasants in Swabia by the propagation of communistic ideas. Luther’s doctrine of Christian liberty was misunderstood. That which Luther had preached concerning liberty in the kingdom of God, was also applied to the kingdom of this world. The peasants had a preacher to draw up 12 articles which contained their demands. Among other things, they demanded liberty in hunting, liberty in fishing, liberty in cutting wood, deliverance from villenage, etc.; but without waiting for the acceptance of the articles, they marched through the land with devastation and murder, assaulted and destroyed castles and cloisters, declaring that everything wearing spurs should die. They made a fearful slaughter and in many instances in a most inhuman manner. Count Lewis of Helfenstein was driven upon the spears of the peasants during the sounding of the drum and the shalm. His wife, who with her little boy cast herself upon her knees before the peasants and begged for mercy, was hauled away on a dungcart midst jeers and mockery. Many of the nobility yielded. But even a Goetz of Berlichingen, their leader, could endure the horrible crimes only 8 days. 179 castles and 28 cloisters were consumed by the flames. All of Upper-Germany yielded. Finally the princes arose against them, the result of which was that nearly 100,000 peasants perished most miserably, some in battle and some on the gallows, and their condition was made worse.

What Luther thought of this movement, is evident from one of his writings, which he published on this subject. It was called: An admonition for peace, in answer to the 12 articles of the peasants [LW XLVI p.17]. The peasants themselves had sent a request to him, asking him to give his opinion on the matter; for they had thus far seen that he severely reproved all oppression, tyranny and injustice. They hoped that he would side with them; and, in part, Luther did side with them. In the above named writing, he in the first place speaks of the princes, prelates, the great and the rich, and shows them, that in reality they, and no one else, were the cause of this great calamity. — This is truly a good warning to us Lutherans living at this age, that we may not suffer ourselves to be misled by the fact that the communists and socialists are doing wrong, so that we would at once side with all those against whom this warfare is carried on; for truly, if righteousness and love had ruled the world, such agitations would never have been called forth. Unrighteousness is undoubtedly the source of these troubles; only this is to be condemned, that they go too far and do not use the right means to improve the condition of affairs.

Luther did not flatter the princes. He was not afraid of their wrath, for he was thoroughly convinced, that he was called of God, now, after the lie had triumphed so many years, to declare the truth, not only to the poorer class, but also to the big Jacks, as he calls them. — He continues:

The sword is upon your necks; and yet you imagine that you are so firmly seated in the saddle that no one shall be able to lift you out. Such security and obdurate presumption will break your necks; you will see it. I have frequently declared unto you before this, that you should take warning from the 107th Ps. v. 40: “He poureth contempt upon princes.” You are striving for it, and want to receive a blow upon your heads, there is no use in warning and admonishing you. Be it then so, since you have caused this wrath of God, it shall undoubtedly also come upon you, if you do not change your course in time... For this you shall know, my lords, that God so manages affairs, that your raving neither can, nor will, nor should be endured. You must change your course and yield to God’s Word. If you will not do so in a cheerful and friendly way, you will be compelled to do so by force and destruction. Should these peasants not accomplish it, others must do it, and if you should kill them all, you would not be victorious, God will raise up others. For He has determined to destroy you, and He will destroy you. It is not the peasants who are contending against you; it is God himself, He is contending against you with his just retribution for your madness... Now then, my lords, if you will yet receive advice, for God’s sake make way somewhat for their wrath. A load of hay should avoid a drunkard’s way, how much more should not you give up your raving and tyrannical obstinacy and conduct yourselves with reason towards the peasants being either in frenzy or error. Do not begin to quarrel with them, for there is no telling what the end would be. Use kindness first, for you cannot tell what God is about to do, lest a spark should begin to burn and set all Germany on fire, so that no one shall be able to quench it. Our sins have come before God, in consequence of which we are to fear this wrath, even if we but hear the rustling of a leaf, and why not when such a crowd is in commotion?

He says: “our sins.” A true Lutheran must also count himself among those who have deserved it, when such fearful parties arise in society, who are bent on turning everything upside down and on drowning the world, excepting themselves, in its own blood. It is a divine judgment of the world. —Luther continues:

By kindness you lose nothing; and if you should lose any thing, it can be restored to you again in time of peace tenfold, whereas by strife you may lose life and property... They have set up 12 articles, some of which are so just and right that they expose your lack of kindness before God and the world and verify the 107th Psalm, inasmuch as they are pouring contempt upon the princes. But nearly all of these articles were set up professedly for their special benefit and advantage and are really not intended for their good. I might write other articles against you, with reference to the community and government of Germany, as I did in the book to the German nobility, which would be of even more importance than the latter.

He would say: “Principles which care nothing if the rest of the world perish if only help is procured for one particular station in life, can only work injury in the world.” Luther says: “While considering the misery and distress of Germany, even in civil matters, I also had thought of giving advice for the improvement of every station of life, and not only for the clerical in which I stood, — if there is actually such a station.” He continues:

But because you would not take warning, you must needs hear and endure such articles, and it is no more than you have deserved for disregarding the warning. The first article, in which they desire to hear the gospel, and to have the right of electing their own pastors, you can in no way refuse...

At that time Luther made these declarations to the counts and princes, and even today the people in most parts of Germany have no right to call their own pastors: this is done by the consistory, or the princes or the nobility; and the unfortunate people must be satisfied with anyone who may be on good terms with the princes, of whom they can expect that he will rebuke only the sins of the people, but not those of the great. Luther says further:

No government can or should be opposed to this. A government should not oppose anything that is taught or believed, whether it be the gospel or falsehood; it is enough if they oppose the teaching of sedition and dissension.

The brethren can clearly see from this, that Luther was thoroughly in favor of religious liberty. The government shall not oppose the preaching of anything, whether it be gospel or eternal life, but simply for her earthly welfare. It has no right to dictate to anyone what he shall believe, neither what he shall teach or preach. [Luther continues:]

The other articles pertaining to oppressive taxation, as exercised in the escheats, impositions and the like, are no more than just and right. For the government was not instituted that the rulers might be benefited and live in luxury at the expense of the subject, but that they may seek the public welfare. This extortion cannot be endured very long; of what benefit would it be to the peasant if his land would produce as many florins as straws and grains, when the rulers only take the more that they may increase their luxury, and waste the goods like chaff, in dress, in banqueting, drinking, building and the like! This pomp must be put away, these expenses stopped, if the poor are to retain anything... My lords, you have the Scriptures and history against you. See how the tyrants seldom died a natural death, but were generally put to death and perished in their own blood. Since, then, it is certain that you rule in tyranny and recklessness and that you rob and crush the poor, you can have no other prospect than that you shall perish as those of your character have perished before you... I would then, with all faithfulness, advise, that several counts and lords be selected from the nobility, that several councilmen be chosen from the cities, and that the matter be attended to and peaceably composed, that you cool down your rage, — this you will be compelled to do finally whether you desire it or not — at least relax your tyranny and oppression that the poor may also breathe freely. The peasants should also be advised to give up, and pass by several articles which ask too much; so that the matter might then be composed, if not in a Christian manner, at least in accordance with human rights and forbearance (LW, Erlangen Ed. v24, 260, 262, 283, 285).

This rebuke and admonition of the princes and the great who lived in his time, is the beginning of Luther’s address. These quotations cover only a small portion of it. Then he also speaks plainly to the peasants, shows them in particular, that they have no right to call themselves Christians if they would overcome violence with violence, and take up the sword, to which God had given them no right. Otherwise he yields to their position in many things.

This was in 1524 and ’25. Ten years later there was a similar movement in Muenster, in Westphalia, at which place the Anabaptists were forming a conspiracy. A certain tailor, John Bockhold of Leyden, declared himself king, and Mathiesson, a baker of Harlem, became his minister. They made sad work. It is revolting to give an account of the association. Things were carried on so shamefully that it seemed the devil was celebrating his wedding. Among other things they also introduced the community of wives. These doings came to a most fearful end on the 24th and 25th of June, 1535. Although these people continued in Muenster some time, they were finally driven out of their nest, the majority of them were most unmercifully slaughtered and the prisoners cruelly put to death. Such was the beginning and such the end of these communistic movements.

From this time up to the time of the first French revolution, which lasted from 1789 to 1797, there were no developments of the communistic theory worth mentioning. While the leaders of the first revolution in France, the “Jacobins,” still recognized the right of personal property, a certain Babeuf formed a communistic conspiracy with the downfall of Robespierre. The following was his doctrine: “Every individual has the same right to make use of all goods, which right is based on common labor. Every exclusive appropriation of products of the soil and industries is criminal.” Besides, some of the members declared, that the necessary equality required “the destruction of aristocratic cities, the prevention of inequality in knowledge and education and the establishment of a censorship for the preservation of permanent relations.”

Do not imagine then, that communist ideas, if carried out, would introduce liberty. They would much rather bring about the most horrid slavery imaginable. For the holding of personal property, which the communists condemn, is the very condition on which a man may freely develop and exercise himself. However, as soon as a communist state would be established, everyone would receive his orders: “This is what you have to do, you will do so much, and you so much.” They would then be as the helots among the Spartans. Should a person, however, have been in want for a long time, even of his daily bread, and would then get among the communists and sit down to a loaded table, he would of course think he had entered heaven. It would not continue long, however, until he would say: “May God preserve me against such a condition of affairs, let me be liberated from this slavery!” And the censorship is a similar slavery. But no one is more bitterly opposed to it than the communists. It is something dreadful to them; the very word is dreadful to them. And yet whenever they obtained the power, they introduced a most stringent censorship; for they have always feared that if their principles should be found open to objection with the poor and uneducated, these people would begin to doubt their correctness, and their reign would again be overthrown. — Babeuf’s principles are further stated as follows:

“The only rulers should be a board of distributors, whose duty it shall be to appoint each one to his labor and to distribute to the communities and individuals the provisions gathered into the public warehouses. A higher Being is to be recognized, but no Church, no priest, no marriage and no family.” The conspiracy was discovered and called to account; Babeuf permitted himself to be stabbed, some of the others were beheaded, some burned. This was in the year 1796.

This closed the first communist movement during the first revolution in France. The next movement began during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. After the so-called July revolution, new Babeufs arose in France. The strictest among them called themselves Egaliteurs, who declared that they would make all things equal, advocated not only the abrogation of personal property, but also of marriage and family life, and proclaimed Atheism. In consequence of a revolt, they were divided in the year 1839, and thereby lost the influence they had in the beginning. But the seed remained in the hearts of the people and is at present taking root. Now a word regarding other communists of this century.

Count de Saint-Simon (who committed suicide in 1825, after he had lost all his property and had been driven into dire necessity) proclaimed the following theories to the world! “The laboring class must be elevated to the highest position of human society, because they furnish the means by which man’s desires and wants are satisfied, while at present they unjustly occupy the lowest. The self-sacrificing love of all alone makes this possible. This doctrine is the new Christianity, which will introduce the kingdom of God into the world, inasmuch as it converts the religion of love into a religion of joy and pleasure.” His pupil Bazard added to this: “Labor must be freed from the slavery of capital, instead of the individual inheritance, the State alone shall have the right of inheritance, and the State must divide this inheritance according to the principle that labor alone is entitled to possession, that everyone shall labor according to his ability and that everyone be rewarded according to his labor.” Enfantin called Saint-Simon the new Messiah who combined the doctrines of Moses and Christ in demanding the sanctifying of one’s self by means of labor and enjoyment. All things in man are holy, the flesh with its inherent inclinations as well as the spirit. Extensive holy families are to be established in which community of wives shall also exist. This caused a division and finally the entire overthrow of Saint-Simonism.

It is not enough to tell people: “You must love each other, and if you walk in love, heaven will be established on earth.” As true as it is, that such would be the case, so true is it that no one will have love as a consequence of this demand. Love is implanted into the heart by the grace of God alone. Those who know not the grace of God and will not accept it, but despise it, and tread it under foot, they have no love, though their deeds should often appear as if they were deeds of love.

After the overthrow of Louis Phillipp during the revolution of February, 1848, a communist insurrection broke out in Paris on the 23rd of June. A rabble of more than 30,000 took to arms; laborers from the national workhouses and escaped criminals, led by discharged officers or by the leaders of the communist clubs, constituted this rabble. Barricades were erected in the eastern part of the city. The socialist republic aimed to introduce the community of goods and of wives. On several flags was inscribed: “If victorious, we plunder; if conquered, we burn.” Bishop Affre of Paris admonished them to peace, but was shot on a barricade. A furious struggle ensued. Women poured boiling water and oil from the barricades upon the soldiers. On the 26th of June, Cavaignac became victorious. There were 5,000 dead and wounded on both sides, 14,000 were taken captive, of which 3,423 were transported. Louis Blanc was the instigator of the trouble.

The actual pioneers of Communism in Germany were the representatives of the so-called Young-Germany, at the head of whom we find the noted poet Heine, and next to him were the novel-writers Mund and Gutzkow. They declared that the “rehabilitation of the flesh,” as they termed it, must at last be carried out, i.e. the flesh of man must have its former rights restored. To express this intelligibly, man must again have the right to gluttonize, to drink to excess, to carry on fornication, to commit adultery and, in short, to do everything that the flesh might desire. I am not exaggerating the matter, it is even so. Those persons mentioned above announced such principles, even if they did not express themselves so rudely; for if they had used such coarse language, they would not have been able to entangle the inexperienced youth. When I was a student at Leipzig, they were in their glory. They are little noticed now. But the seed sown by them is now growing and bearing fruit. — Now a few words about the German Communists.

A certain Weitling, a tailor’s apprentice in Magdeburg, but a very talented young man (in America he would be called “a self-made man”) had never attended an academy or university, and yet had acquired a good education. This Weitling describes the introduction of the new order of things, as he would have them, in the following words:

All promisory notes, bonds, and exchange, shall be null and void in the transactions of the board of directors. The same holds good with regard to inheritance... Consequently every difference between poor and rich, between the low and the high, between the greatest statesmen and their lowest servants, between the highest officers and the lowest soldiers, shall be forever abolished... All the gold and silver in hand shall be used in purchasing provisions and ammunition in foreign lands. Money shall not be used in the inland trade. All government and church property shall be appropriated for the good of the society. The religious instruction in the schools must be of a general character, favoring neither Catholicism nor Protestantism, nor any other of the many Christian sects (Garantein der Harmonie und Freiheit. 1842. P. 243ff).

He wrote this in 1842. At that time he did not yet venture fully to express his meaning; for if he had really done this, he would have had to say: “We want no particular religion, but only a universal religion, the natural religion, just as we find it in America in the non-religious free schools.”

Of a similar character was Ferdinand Lassalle, a highly gifted and finely educated Jew of Breslau, who wrote many ingenious works in justification of the communist theories. Although yet young, he was killed in a duel with a rival 1869. But before going further we must hear more from our German Weitling. In his book: Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit (1842) he writes:

If I did not want the natural equality of all, I would say with many others: Our principle will be realized alone in the way of progressive enlightenment. Yea, all good may be realized in this way, except the abrogation of the personal interests of all those in possession of power and money. When have such listened to reason? If you doubt it, ask history. Their papers are filled with numberless accounts of struggles between personal interests and the general interests of the people. By wars and revolutions dynasties have changed, obtained power and strengthened themselves. Our principle will be realized by means of revolution. The longer the present confusion shall continue, the more dreadful will be the result of such a revolution... In time of peace, let us instruct, and in time of trouble, let us act. When once the storm is raging, it is folly to waste precious time with speeching, as was done once at Hambach, but we must act quick as lightning, strike blow upon blow, while the people are yet in the first stages of excitement...

Very prudent indeed. As long as the people are drunk with excitement, something can be done. But as soon as they take a second thought, they become sober and will then no longer follow their wild and fanatical leaders into the fire, endangering their own lives for the destruction of thousands of other lives.

Weitling continues: “No armistice, no stipulations with the enemies can be entered into, and no promise shall be trusted. As soon as the struggle begins, they must be considered no better than irrational brutes, who are not capable of understanding a rational language.”

In other words, he says: “We will either send a bullet through our opponents’ heads or hang them on the nearest lamppost, for they will not learn to be rational; they will never say that we are right, and give us their money that we may divide it.”

He further states:

Should those in power, in opposition to the realization of our principle, endeavor to confine us in prison, our philosophers must then let loose that fearful fireship which alone can destroy the plans of our enemies.

He holds in reserve an instrument, even if all the agitators ventured to preach a morality which will make every government for selfish ends impossible, a morality which will convert the gory battlefield on the street, where the people have always fallen short, into a never-ceasing guerrilla war, a morality which will add to us countless numbers of defenders whose assistance we would dread at present...

He means to say: “A morality must be preached by means of which those will then be added to our number, to assist us in our undertaking, whom we at present dread because of their immorality and filthiness; for their principle is: Rob, steal, plunder, murder.” Therefore he continues:

A morality, which leaves our opponents no way of escape, than by the adoption of our principle... This morality can, however, only be instilled into the minds of the masses of those people found in our large cities who have fallen into the depth of misery and have become the victims of despair (Ibid. P. 229).

When Weitling recommended those allies from among the criminals to the French communists, they manifested a little more soberness. They answered him:

Imagine yourself at the head of 10,000 scoundrels, the time for action being at hand. Call upon your assistants to place their body upon the altar of reason and justice, that the system of community may be begun! How you would be ridiculed!

The other evening I already referred to a certain French writer by the name of Fourier. Fourier was the clerk of a merchant in France. He was unfortunate and lost his valuable possessions. He died in 1837. He set up the following communistic theory:

Man’s destiny is happiness. This he can attain only by harmoniously satisfying all his inclinations.

But friend Fourier overlooked the fact, that man is by nature desirous of power, avaricious, envious, rejoices at the misfortune of others, revengeful, cruel, etc. Must also all these inclinations have their way? He says further:

Means are necessary to this end, wealth is accordingly the source of all happiness. Wealth is attained by means of labor. But in order that labor may produce happiness, an order of things must be introduced according to which all work together, and in such a manner that each one engages in the work in which he delights. In order that this may be accomplished, the individual must be persuaded to give his possessions into the hands of the society, for which he would then have a proportionate claim on the income of the whole; and these persons, thus united, will then also give up their separate homes, families, and training.

What, accordingly, is the man entering into this communist society to give up? In the first place he must give up his possessions even if he has acquired them ever so lawfully by means of hard labor. Then he shall give up his home and, in company with many others, move into a large building. He is to give up his marriage, and accordingly his family and the training of his own children. His wife is not his own, but is the property of the society. Neither are his children his own. As soon as they are born, someone appointed for this purpose will take them into care and train them. I ask: Could a theory be more insane than this? Would it not be necessary for a person to have become bankrupt in every respect and despair of every thing, before he could enter into such an organization? If a person had yet any hope at all for the future, would he connect himself with the communists? Truly not! What greater happiness can the earth afford than that of the family? And this is to be sacrificed? —Fourier goes on:

They form clubs or phalanxes (a square mile of land was to be the tract of land on which a phalanx or phalanstery was to be erected) consisting of 1800 to 2000 persons, who are collected in a large house, the phalanstery, where everyone finds work according to his inclination.

As already stated, in putting his theory in practice, he failed. Mr. Fourier went for 12 years to a certain place, to which he had requested any philanthropist to come and bring a million dollars for his use in the endeavor to realize his glorious theory. Fourier’s pupil, Victor Considerant, conducted the phalanstery established on a large tract of land. But the undertaking was a failure. Being accused of high-treason, he left for Texas (Wernicke's History of the World, V, 469). What has become of him I cannot say.

Lawyer Cabet was another French communist. He founded a party called the Icarian Communists. He died here in St. Loius. It was a strange self-ridicule to call his communism the Icarian communism. In the Greek fables we read of a certain Icarus whose father had made him wings and had cemented them with wax, that he might escape with him from bondage and fly across the sea. The fable declares that the father reached the opposite shore in safety, but that the son was too bold, flew too high, and getting too near the sun, the wax melted and he fell into the sea and was drowned. Very strange that Cabet should call his followers the Icarian communists. They were Icarian however, for they flew up high, but had wings cemented together with wax, which would not hold.

Cabet, however, recognized the family and marriage relation, and hoped to secure liberty for the so-called proletariat without using force, by means of equal training, labor, order and, above all, brotherly love. He made an attempt in Texas in 1848, but utterly failed; the colonists sued him for fraud, but he was declared not guilty. He then made a second attempt in Nauvoo, Illinois, where the Mormons formerly had their home; he failed again. The colony was again dissatisfied. Cabet had to flee to St. Louis, where he died in 1856.

Proudhon proclaimed as his principle; “The holding of property is theft; God is the evil; marriage and the family are unnecessary.” He died in 1865.

History brings us yet to the last communist movement in France in 1871. The capitulation of the Parisians to the German besiegers gave the Internationals an opportunity to take possession of the city. Generals Lecomte and Thomas, who had remained faithful to the government, were caught on the 18th of March 1871 and shot that very afternoon. The leader of the national guard, Blanqui, a zealous International, now ordered an election for a so-called "Commune," i.e. for an independent board of directors of the city of Paris. His plan, as well as that of his associates, was to divide the whole of France into “communes,” that is, small independent districts, which should have their own administration of justice and, all combined, should form a French confederacy.

An officer bearing a flag of truce was shot down. Church property was confiscated. The laborers took possession of the factories from which the owners had fled. Arch-bishop Darboy and other prelates and priests were put to death and a stringent censorship instituted. The Commune even excelled Robespierre’s reign of terror. “War against the palaces,” was their watchword. A corps of “rocket-men,” associated with male and female incendiaries, called petroleurs and petroleuses, was formed. Persons of high rank were seized and held as hostages. For an entire week the most inhuman and most frightful scenes of fratricidal massacre took place on the streets. 794 of MacMahon’s soldier’s were killed, and 6,000 wounded. It is difficult to ascertain how many of the Internationals perished, but the number would evidently reach thousands. To conclude, the leaders of the Commune were arrested and tried for life; the most notorious were banished, officers who had deserted, were executed.

This is then the history of communism in its main features. What have the communists accomplished? — Nothing! — They have hurled themselves into indescribable misery, filled the world with dread and apprehension, and continually caused destruction, misery and heart-rending woe. And just as they have been unable to accomplish anything in the past, they will not accomplish anything in the future. The communists will be no more able to realize their fanatical ideas in human society, than they will be able to change the laws of nature, or cause the Mississippi to flow northward, or change the course of the stars. It is, however, apparent that they will do a great deal of mischief. For the number of the poor is continually increasing, many of whom neither believe in God nor in His word, in consequence of which they soon despair when in trouble, having no God and no comfort. These the theoretical communists would combine, and notwithstanding the fact that they have been repeatedly conquered, they would resume their efforts, but only to be again brought under judgment and to be hurled into unspeakable wretchedness.

"America's Martin Luther" Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE THREE) -->

<-- "America's Martin Luther" Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE ONE)

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE ONE)

2009-11-30T09:30:00.000-08:00

FIRST LECTURE

O God, Thou has created man, originally good and happy, and placed him in a beautiful Paradise, that this might be his home. But alas! man has fallen from Thee, and because of this fall, has become a poor, wretched creature, and his life on earth has become a life of toil and trouble.

But instead of accusing himself and pleading for Thy mercy, man accuses Thee, denies the providence and government of Thy mercy, and flees from Thee in despair, or gives expression, in his heart, to the fearful words: “There is no God.”

In mercy keep us from such great blindness and sin, and enlighten our understanding, that, midst the troubles of earth, we may with deep humility, acknowledge the result of our apostasy, and govern Thou our hearts that we may not contend with Thee, our merciful Creator, but humble ourselves, in the midst of our toil and trouble, under Thy almighty hand, patiently await Thy help, and comfort ourselves with the fact, that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in Thy children in the world to come.

Have mercy on the entire human race in their affliction, draw them by Thy Word to Thee, and help them out of every bodily and spiritual trouble, and open to them at last the eternal kingdom of Thy joy and glory. Yea, do this for the sake of Jesus Christ, the common Savior of the world. Amen.

As is known to the congregation, the occasion of this meeting is twofold. The first is the appearance of a daily paper here in St. Louis, which would pretend to be the organ of the laborers, in consequence of which, many, particularly younger members of our congregation, have also made it their paper. The second occasion is the formation of the so-called Labor- Unions, which are to represent the interests of the laborers over against the employers.

If that paper were in reality the organ of the laborers, which would represent the interests of the laboring class in a legitimate manner, who could find fault, if any laborer would select it as his paper and would even prefer it above other secular papers? And if the Labor-Unions were no more than were the Fraternities, Guilds, Tradesmen’s-Unions and Clubs of Germany, who could make it a matter of conscience to join one of them? Does not even the Apostle Paul expressly declare, that if Christians would no longer unite themselves with the children of the world, no not even in civil and business affairs, they would be necessitated to leave the world? But alas! The state of affairs, is entirely different here. The said paper is not, for example, by any means an organ intended for the laborers alone, but it has for its aim the propagation of the modern communistic ideas, peaceably if possible, or forcibly, and that by fire and sword, if necessary. It is only too well known that the Labor-Unions have been conceived and called into existence by the Communists and Socialists, and are intended by them to be nothing else than schools of communism and socialism.

That no one might think these declarations unfounded, I have secured several copies of this paper, called Volksstimme des Westens (“The voice of the people of the West”), without, however, inquiring which number might give the best idea of its character. I have nevertheless secured copies which show its character plainly. In the number dated Dec. 24, 1877, there is a continuation of a novel, written by the editor of the paper, Dr. A. Otto-Walster, in which we read, among other things, the following:

Wintermaerchen

It seems to me that one single quotation of this character should suffice to cause us to wonder how a Christian, who accepts the Holy Scriptures as God’s Word, believes in Christ, and has the hope of eternal life, could support such a paper. Every one can see that this is an atheistic paper, whose editor believes neither in God nor eternal life, but ridicules both. Should he even say that he believes in God and also in a future life, it matters not. We look to what he publishes in his paper. He must suffer himself to be judged by that, and his paper takes the position of atheistic communism!

But observe another proof that this paper is of a communistic character. Had I taken the pains to examine the whole volume, I could no doubt have produced many more proofs, but these few will serve our purpose well. This is what is said in the number dated Dec. 15:

Fire, water, air and earth are the four so-called elements of nature, of which Divinity gave one man as much as the other. Who will, who can deny it? You therefore see, worthy Dr. (it is an article against a certain Dr. Holland) that this communism, recommended by our “Lord Jesus Christ” to his pupils and followers, has been in existence since the creation of world and of man.Our beloved Lord Jesus Christ is accordingly to be considered the chief-communist! It is further said: “An all-wise and beneficent God is himself the author, and 'Christ' the Son, only carries into execution what God, the 'Father' had planned and determined from the beginning.”

It is worthy of note, that the terms Christ, and God, the Father, are given in quotations. By this the writer would give his opponent to understand: “I am now speaking with your understanding; of course I don’t believe in a Christ, neither do I believe in a God, the Father. But I am going to fight for once with your own weapons. You profess to yield submission to the written Word, as you term it. Very well, I will convict you from your own Word of God, and show you, that, if you would be a faithful adherent to the Bible, you must also become a communist.” This is what he means to say. —He continues: “This is God’s command and Christ’s doctrine.” Again:

The laboring men of America do not intend to cast themselves under the wheels of a so-called civilization, which is nothing but barbarism, to be crushed to death, and to see their children condemned to eternal poverty and eternal misery, so that a few fortunate ones may continue in their idleness and wealth. They will no longer kiss the hand that strikes the blow. They will cease to hug the chains with which they are fettered. They will rise up, they are rising up already, in the glory of their power and manhood, to crush to atoms this foul and hideous monster, to assert their liberty like men, and thus to become free and happy.This is yet moderate language. But everyone acquainted with history, knows where this is leading. It is the lightning in the distance which precedes that most dreadful thunderstorm, which these men would call down upon this generation. If they cannot gain their ends in peace, the will resort to violence and bloodshed. This giant, by whom they fancy themselves to be trodden under foot, they would crush to atoms.

As pertains to the working-men's party, of which every labor-union is a part, we find their program in the number for Nov. 30. In this program, we read in the very beginning:

As civil liberty, without economical independence, is a mere form of speech, the party begins its struggles within the sphere of economy, and demands that all material for labor become the property of the society, so that instead of paying wages, the income of the society, as the joint fruits of labor, may be justly divided among the members.When the communists say that material shall become the property of the society, they would not limit it to their circle. For, if a number of men would realize this idea only among themselves, so far as possible, we might calmly look on. Every one has the right to deny himself certain privileges, and by way of agreement, unite with others. There have been different societies of this character. They, however, refer to society in general, to the whole human race; and that is where they would realize these ideas. They would overthrow the existing social relations, and arrange them according to their principles. The following are some of their principles:

“No one shall own any real-estate, but this shall be common property, and shall be managed only by certain persons,” although the various propositions pertaining to this matter differ widely, as we shall presently see. It is then further said: “machinery, ways of transfer, etc.” It is left to the reader to supply anything he pleases under the “etc.” This embraces a great deal. The brethren who enter these labor-unions little anticipate what is implied in this “etc.” Neither do they anticipate what is implied in the idea, that no one shall own any real- estate. They do not consider, either, what fearful overthrow of the order of things it would involve to realize this. They also demand: “The introduction of the eight hour law and the punishment of all who transgress it.” Let every Christian reader decide for himself whether a Christian can enter into such a labor-union. I am of the opinion that he cannot, without violating conscience. He cannot become a member of an association, which has in view, the overthrow of the world, either peaceably if possible, or forcibly if necessary.

It is of importance, however, what Mr. Walster himself discloses in his paper, dated Nov. 30, 1877, concerning the condition of the labor-unions in America. He was assailed by the editor of a Milwaukee paper, the Milwaukee Socialist. He shall, says the Milwaukee editor, confine himself to the field of politics, for here alone can the laboring-man finally gain his liberty. Only get the government into your hands once, and you can readily change all the present relations. The establishment of labor-unions can only detain a good cause. Before a change could be effected in this way, the laboring-men would die of starvation.

To this Mr. Walster answers: “We do certainly not belong to those, who, in their one-sided agitation, would solve the social question by means of corporations (labor-unions), and yet we must unreservedly acknowledge the value of these corporations, in that by their means the socialistic propaganda (principles) are agitated and made known.”

He means to say, that he does not expect much to be accomplished by means of these labor-unions in the near future; he knows how weak they are, even when in the most prosperous condition. But it must be remembered that these unions are only instruments in the hands of socialists and communists, in fact, a school of the socialists. The ignorant are to be drummed together and organized into labor-unions, that in these unions the seed of socialism and communism may be sown, and when the seed has come to maturity, there will be enough muscle to accomplish the desired end by force, if the desired end cannot be attained peaceably. For it is even true, that there is a greater number of poor people, who must support themselves by manual labor, than of those who live from their capital, be it from the interest of the capital or from speculations made with the capital in certain enterprises into which they may have entered; and if the masses were once won over to the socialistic ideas, the communists would undoubtedly gain the day. Verily they could turn the world upside down, and drown all their opponents in their own blood. The idea is certainly not a stupid one. But whether it will be realized is another question. — He says further:

There is, for example, here in St. Louis, one section of the cabinet-makers-union. It is composed of socialists and non-socialists. The socialists developed their propaganda in this section and succeeded in gaining a large majority for socialism; the consequence is, that in this section the socialistic question is discussed at every meeting whereby statistics are brought out and systematized greatly to the encouragement of our agitation.Mr. Walster would accordingly say: “Behold I am doing this more shrewdly than you. You would obtain support for our communism and socialism only by means of political agitations. Do it then, but if you do no more, you are a fool. Our method will accomplish more. We gather those together who are not socialists and convert them into socialists." He means to say that the labor-unions are but schools of socialism and communism. And now I ask: What Christian would enter into such a labor-union and become the willing servant of such a revolution? No Christian can do so with a clear conscience; it is alone the place for him who denies the existence of a God.

Another testimony that the labor-unions are nothing else than the institutions of the communists; used for the accomplishment of their ends, is the following: The English communists cast lots for the benefit of the prisoners of New Caledonia, but not for the benefit of all the prisoners, but only for those who were transported there from France, because in the year 1871, they had committed those well-known, fearful communistic outrages. When the Prussians concluded peace at Paris, the entire French national guard was permitted to retain its fire-arms. This was done on the part of Germany because it was considered good policy, inasmuch as it was feared that a revolution would break out, since all kinds of people had gathered together in Paris. They had miscalculated. Nearly all these fire-arms got into the hands of the communists who made use of the power thus acquired in a frightful slaughter. They established a so-called Commune, and took possession of the city. At once they shot several of the generals, who had remained faithful to the government, shot the arch-bishop and other prelates and priests, erected barricades and from thence shot into the crowd standing on the opposite side, and declared, that if they would not gain the victory, they would level Paris with the ground. “War against the palaces” was their watchword. This was faithfully carried out. On March the fearful catastrophe began, and in May it ended. Blood had flown in streams and the most magnificent buildings lay in ashes. Woe to that city, if the Communists had gained the victory! And for those, who at that time committed those fearful outrages, there are now lots cast. Pertaining to this matter, and in its defense, our labor-unions and their branches are addressed in the following language;

Laboring-men! The revolution of the 18th of March has been shamefully misrepresented by the Capitalists of both hemispheres. You are interested in this revolution: for the principles for which they fought, you have adopted into your platforms. Every one of you is responsible for them, and to deny them would be nothing less than betrayal. You are most intimately united with those who are suffering for the crime of losing the victory, in the struggle for rights which we ourselves demand.This is, however, a declaration that the labor-unions of our land are in reality only branches of that labor-union which has its center in England. This society was founded in 1869 by a Jew named Marx, at which time the directors of the association made the following declarations: “This association declares itself for Atheism.” That is, it declares, there is no God, for an Atheist is one who denies the existence of a God. “It demands the abolition of all religion, the substitution of science for faith, human righteousness for the righteousness of God, the abrogation and suppression of marriage... We demand that the people make the laws directly for the people, that all laws of inheritance be abolished, and that all real-estate become common property.”

These are the principles on which the international labor-union is founded. It is called international, because the members are to be gathered, not only from one nation, but from every nation on earth.

I now ask again, whether a Christian can connect himself with an association, of which he knows that it would carry out the principles just mentioned? It matters not, whether the laboring-man who enters into the association would carry them out or not – he belongs to the association which holds to this purpose. In Paris it was evident that many indeed had belonged to this association, who were merely interested in the society and little thought of being involved in a revolution; but when the fearful moment had come and all were drunk with excitement, there was no escape: whoever belonged to this society had to expect a bullet through his head or cooperate with them. And those who have been in these associations for many years, have not the Christian courage to say: “No, if such are your intentions, I can no longer go with you.” A great number have been drawn into the society, deny God and their Savior, and are on the way that leads to a fearful end, both in time and eternity.

So much to show the character of that paper and the socialistic labor-unions. But the question is of an altogether different character: What shall we say of Communism? i.e. the system according to which all goods shall be equally divided; or, What shall we say of Socialism? i.e. the system according to which no person shall own any property, but by united labor all becomes the property of the society? The former are more radical, the latter less, but as a matter of fact, the most radical are always victorious. This was the case in France. Those who began the agitation, had not intended to do what was afterwards done, but those much more radical than they over-powered them, brought them to the guillotine, until finally the most radical became leaders and ruled, until God brought it to an end. I have a few points noted down, which we will now consider, if the congregation will indulge me. This is the question:

WHY SHOULD AND CAN NO REASONABLE MAN, MUCH LESS A CHRISTIAN,
TAKE PART IN THE EFFORTS OF COMMUNISTS AND SOCIALISTS?

Because these efforts are contrary to reason, nature and experience for
1. it is a fact that men are not equal;
2. it is a fact that men are naturally selfish;
3. it is a fact that happiness- does not consist in external advantages:
4. it is a fact well established by experience, that the communists have never attained their professed end, and only introduced sorrow and suffering.

Because these efforts are contrary to Christianity, for
1. What is adduced from the Scriptures in their favor, either proves nothing, or proves the contrary. It is urged:
  1. that according to the Holy Scriptures, God gave man the earth and all things in the earth for his possession [Ge. 1:27-28];
  2. that the first congregation at Jerusalem had a certain community of goods [Acts 2:44-47];
  3. that Christ did not only warn against striving after riches, but also commanded: “Sell that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shall have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me” Lu.18:22;
  4. that according to the teachings of Christ, the laborers in the vineyard should receive equal wages [Mt. 20:1-16].
2. The efforts of the socialists and communists are in conflict with definite doctrines of Christianity, to wit:
  1. the doctrines of personal property, as involved in the seventh commandment, “Thou shall not steal” and taught elsewhere in Scripture;
  2. the doctrine taught in the fifth commandment and in other passages, that the government alone has the power of the sword;
  3. the doctrine of the sanctity of marriage, as set forth in the sixth commandment and elsewhere;
  4. the difference recognized in the Bible not only
    1. between parents and children, man and wife, master and servant, employer and employed, but also
    2. between rich and poor;
  5. the scriptural doctrine that God would use men’s adversities for their spiritual welfare;
  6. the scriptural doctrine that man shall eat his bread in the sweat of his face;
  7. the scriptural doctrine, that human happiness is not to be sought in this world, but in God and in the hope of a recompense and equalization in the world to come, and in the hope of eternal life; and finally
  8. the scriptural doctrine, that the source of all misery in this world, is sin.

Because the charges of communism against the Church and the Christian religion, that these rather hinder than promote the material welfare of man, are unfounded and unjust, to wit:
1. the charge that the Church is in league with wealth, oppression and tyranny, and
2. the charge that the Church is incapable of relieving human suffering.

These are the points to be considered, if we, as Christians, wish to define our position in regard to communism and socialism.

We are opposed to the efforts of the socialists:
I. Because these efforts are contrary to reason, nature, and experience.
It is madness to think of accomplishing anything contrary to reason, nature, and experience. The heathen of old have already declared: “And if you would drive nature out of man with a pitchfork you will not accomplish it” (Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. [Horat, Ep. 1, 10, 24.]). Nature cannot be driven out, she has, to a certain extent, become identic with us, i.e. we ourselves are our embodied nature.

The first thing we have to consider is:
1. It is a fact that men are not equal.
There are no two things on earth absolutely identical. Of course these communists do not believe in the existence of God; but by this they have not yet put Him out of the way. This great, almighty, omniscient God has shown that He creates nothing a second time. He has created no two things alike. There are no two leaves exactly alike; yea, not an atom can be found that would be exactly like another atom. Throughout the creation every thing differs from everything else. God is accordingly not an equalizer, but one who creates dissimilar things. Man cannot, to save his life, make two things equal. The principle that all things shall be made alike is not founded in nature. The same is evident in man. One man is a deep thinker, but has no wealth of ideas nor a prolific ingenuity; another is healthy and strong, another is an invalid; one man is particularly gifted for mental labor, another for mechanical labor; one has an inclination to this, another to something altogether different; one is naturally economical, another naturally extravagant; one is disposed to anger, another to calmness under all circumstances; one becomes angry only when put to the severest test, another burns with rage at the slightest provocation. These are only a few instances; but now consider what we ourselves have experienced with regard to the diversities of men. And to these instances can be added a great number in which the relations are of a most diversified character. It would therefore be altogether unnatural to place human society in such a condition that all would be equal.

The communists will not deny that if they would institute a communistic State, in whatever manner they might undertake to do it, they must so arrange matters that the society of man becomes an organized body. But in this there must be rulers and subjects. Therefore just as soon as they would realize their ideas, they must also begin with the extreme opposite, appoint rulers and declare to the others: “you must suffer yourselves to be governed by these.”

But the communists will perhaps object to this and say that we misunderstand them. “We would not have all men equal,” they say, “we only want equality in possessions, enjoyments, and the like. Otherwise we would leave man as he is.”

This objection is worthless. Equality in these things presupposes mental equality. For just as soon as there is no mental equality, the communists cannot establish an equality in possessions, much less in happiness. They would have equality in possessions that all may be equally happy; but in a humanity so diversified, happiness is produced in altogether different ways. One is made happy by this means, another by that. Many a one thinks: “it would be dreadful to be in this or that man’s place;” and another one thinks: “I would not be in your position.” I, for example, am happy to think that I am a theologian, another one thinks, it would be a dog-life to sit at these books from morning till evening, day after day. He would not spend his time in idleness, but this kind of work is not to his taste. There are indeed communists who say that when they shall have established such an order, they will ask each one with regard to his inclinations and talents. We would then say: “You shall do the tailoring for us all, you shall make the shoes, you shall carry on commerce, and the like.” But the very thought of realizing such ideas is ludicrous. Who would then say: “I will clean out the sewers!” Who would say: “I am especially inclined to this work!” It is likely that no one would be found for such work.

Again: here is a large hospital in a communistic state. For alas! the communists cannot make men equal in health. This they should be able to accomplish first of all, for it is an essential part of universal happiness, that one man have just as good health as another. Then imagine: Here is a hospital in which there are sick, suffering with the most loathsome diseases. Day and night there is a fearful stench. A single hour in this atmosphere may cause disease. The communistic ruler would then say: “Who is inclined to go to this place and take care of the sick?” The stillness of death would be the answer. Every one would say: “Why should it be in my place to go? There must be equality!” — and because of equality no one does anything. Is this not extreme folly? The paradise to be realized by having all things equal, looks very well on paper. This, then, the socialist, believes; but only so long as they do not take into consideration the relations which would be called into existence by carrying out their principles. Their ideas are mere phantoms.

Communism paints a picture of a fool’s paradise and thinks, if only all property becomes common property, then all will have equal claims upon it, and this will become a glorious world. But it is altogether overlooked that many things would be involved which would make this impossible. The communists would have all possessions equally divided. But if all have been made equal today by such division, how will it be tomorrow? One locks up his money in a drawer, another spends his for drink in a tavern and still another runs through his money at even worse places. By tomorrow the equality is again destroyed.

Infatuated communists! They well see that they are an unhappy people. They bitterly experience the wretchedness of the world and especially now in these perilous times. They experience this, but they do not consider the cause of all this. They have lost God and with Him, the noblest good; this is why they have no comfort. And now the world is to be improved, and that by means of an equalization; for they think, “there is certainly enough wealth in the world that everyone might enjoy as much as his heart desires.” But what folly! Even if everyone would agree to such arrangements, it is evident that they would soon become tired of being made equal with others.

Therefore we say in the second place:
2. It is a fact that men are naturally selfish.
The communists must admit that men will indeed never peaceably suffer themselves to be reduced to equality; they must be forced to it. But it would be contrary to their own principles, continually to force people to submit to these new arrangements. The paradise which they would establish, would then be a perfect hell; the social relations would become worse than ever. Man is selfish by nature. One whose heart has not been changed thinks of self first. Such a person will say: “'I' comes first, and then 'I' comes another time, and then my neighbor may have a bit of a chance.” Man’ s heart is naturally full of envy, ambition and avarice. These are all wild beasts which abide in the natural man, and which the communist will never be able to control with his new social arrangements. Men are not satisfied with just what they need and more than the necessities the socialists could never give. No, the majority of men want more; yes, they want a great deal, and the more they obtain the greater becomes their desire for riches. If one has gained a small amount of wealth, he is like the man who drinks the water of the sea, which never quenches his thirst, but increases it and makes it more scorching.

It is a truth which no one can deny, dreadful as it is, that man is naturally selfish, and a selfish person will not be made equal with others, unless those with whom he is to be made equal are by far his superiors. All those who are in favor of the new communist regulations for society, are in favor of them because they expect to have their conditions improved. After considering your own experience with men, ask yourself whether you believe that many would be found who would consent to the new regulation of things, if they knew that they would thereby reduce their present circumstances? No, with the exception of a few fanatics, only those would consent to such regulations who expected to improve their condition by doing so. This is the reason why the communists can attain their desired ends in no other way than by the shedding of blood, by murder and arson.

Whenever they have aimed to accomplish anything practical they have resorted to these means. The introducers of these ideas saw at once that there was no way of accomplishing their purpose except by striking off the heads of their opponents. However, this is evidently frenzy; for although they should strike off the heads of thousands, yes, of millions, new opponents to this system would continue to make their appearance. How much blood has been shed for this cause in France already during the first revolution in the last decade of the past century! Blood flowed in streams. The beginning was made with the king; he had to be beheaded, together with his wife and daughters. They next turned upon the bishops, the priests, the wealthy, and the most eminent ministers, who had formerly assisted in ruling the land. But what was accomplished? It matters not how much blood had been spilt, thousands and thousands of secret enemies were only waiting for their deliverance from this reign of terror. Is it not terrible, that those, who would make the entire world happy by the establishment of a paradise, must begin by shedding streams of blood? Everyone not of their opinion is put to death and frequently with the most terrible tortures!

It is absolutely true that men are naturally selfish, and this too shows the folly of attempting to help society by means of an external equalization. Help can be secured only by removing selfishness. Then it may be accomplished. But as long as man continues in his selfishness, it is the greatest folly imaginable, to attempt to make all men equal in wealth, equal in honor. —In France they even went so far as to say: “No one shall excel the other in education;” and to symbolize the idea that nothing but equality should be recognized, all the tall, slender trees had to be cut down. It was already determined, that the steeples should also be torn down. For doing this they might seem to have had some reason, inasmuch as the steeples pointed to heaven, of which they want to know nothing, for they would have their heaven here on earth.

Should a man, for example, have spent a great deal in learning his profession or trade, and then receive no more pay for his labor than one who can do no more than make use of his strong arms, he would very soon say: “I have no intention whatever of connecting myself with the communistic society.” The man who simply knows how to use his arms will, of course, say: “Yes, I would be made perfectly equal with the one who spent a number of years for the attainment of his proficiency in his profession or trade.” If all were true Christians, they would say: “I am not working for money at all, but because God has commanded it. My daily bread I expect to receive of God, since He has given me the promise, that if I labor faithfully, He will never leave me nor forsake me.” The true Christian alone is of this mind. The natural man thinks on the other hand: “Why shall I labor, when there is nothing gained by it?” How many merchants say: “Why shall I keep this or that article of goods for there is no profit in it.” Whether the goods are in demand or not, is not the question, because they are serving only themselves, —and thus we find it in every station of life. This is the selfish principle of the natural man as he is born into the world.

If, then, there is to be any help for the world, the people must become Christians, as said above. There is no other way. There are, however, many thousands of people who are called Christians, but who are not such. The communists see this and then exclaim: “What Christians? Why they are the greatest scoundrels on earth.” We must admit, that it is even so, that there are many scoundrels among those who bear the Christian name, who are not worthy of the name. But when we speak of Christians we do not mean those who simply have the name, but those who do not only believe in the Bible, but who, in their life, manifest and carry out the principles contained in the Bible. These alone are Christians, and if all were such Christians, we would have heaven on earth, and the cross, which we must expect, would be easy to bear. Of course no communist will believe this, because he does not know the meaning of the term Christian. He only sees the faults and sins of those who call themselves Christians and perhaps also attend church, and then exclaims: “What? Christianity shall improve the world? ! Are not the Christians worse than we?” And alas! We are forced to say: “O wretched communists! You are indeed fearfully offended, and woe unto him through whom this offense comes; for he hardens you and causes you to believe the more firmly that Christianity amounts to nothing. But it remains true after all, that men are naturally selfish, and they will remain selfish until they become true Christians; it is therefore madness to think of creating a world in which every one is satisfied to have no more than others.”

We must not imagine that many who are very wealthy would be satisfied in having no more than others. To illustrate, there is a man who is worth 10,000, 100,000, 500,000 or even 1,000,000 dollars. Would he accommodate himself to such a communistic society and become a member? The communist Fourier (died 1837) attempted to carry out his communism in France and even succeeded in gathering together here and there little communistic congregations which he called Phalansteres. There 1800 to 2000 persons lived together having all things in common. There were no rulers except the so-called distributors. For someone has to give the command: “So much belongs to you and so much to another; this is your work and that is his.” But alas! money was wanting. Fourier then published a request in the papers that some wealthy person should, out of love for mankind, contribute one million dollars for this purpose. He (Fourier) would go to a certain place every day, to see whether so kind a man would come. He went to the place every day for 12 years, but no one came. All his Phalansteres became bankrupt.

These communistic gentlemen, like Fourier, are either fanatics or swindlers. We will readily believe that the leaders are mostly fanatics, because, having nothing more to do with Christianity, they have asked themselves day after day: “What can we do to elevate the deeply fallen world to happiness again?” And they have devised this plan. But what can it accomplish? People are not made happy, but unhappy by this means; and as the communists continually call the attention of the people to the dreadful condition of the world, they also more firmly fix the idea in the minds of the people: “How wretched is the world! O how unhappy! we must take another course.” This is the poison with which the communists feed the people. This is the poison which is all the more dreadful in its effects, because we know that the condition of the world will remain the same. And if a thousand communistic papers would be published, they could not turn the world upside clown, they cannot change the condition of the world. What do they gain then? No more than this, that people feel that they are unhappy. If one who is poor thinks: “I am poor and cannot follow the pace set by the rich; yet I will not care, but be contented with my condition, if I can only make an honest living” —he is a happy man as poor as he may be.

This then brings us to our third proposition:
3. It is a fact that happiness does not consist in external advantages.
Even the communist must acknowledge that outward equality would not by any means make all men happy, because the wants of the human heart are not alike. One person is happy only in this particular position; another only in that position. He who has not yet learned these imaginary wants, has his cup of coffee, bread and butter for breakfast; a common dinner in the presence of a faithful wife and obedient children; potato soup for his supper, and holds his family worship, does not only think himself happier than a king, he is in reality a thousand times happier. Happiness does not dwell in palaces, it dwells in the heart. Though you give a person all the riches of the earth you will not make him happy. It is a mania, with which nearly everyone is affected, to think: “if we only had as much as others, we would be happy also.” Cares come with riches. Go from castle to castle, enter the rooms where princes and emperors dwell, and you will see how happy they are. You would find, that if Christian faith were wanting, they are unhappy notwithstanding the power, the riches and the honors which they enjoy. Happiness is not found in these things, we simply imagine it. Happiness depends upon the condition of the mind. And if you would fill a man’s house with gold and diamonds, —that would never satisfy the heart. It has wants of a different character.

Even though we do make these statements, they are mostly made in vain for people will not believe us. They say: “O if I only had plenty of money, I would feel right happy.” They are fanatics who make such declarations. Just make an imaginary experiment with yourself and you will find that a fearful burden is placed upon your heart by becoming the owner of a large lump of gold. Gellert beautifully presents the matter in the poem called John, the soap-maker. He speaks of a soap boiler who sang with cheerfulness day and night. He had his daily bread and performed His work gladly. A wealthy epicure lived near him. He is greatly vexed at John's disturbing him in his morning sleep. He entered into a contract with John that he would give him a thousand dollars if he would stop his singing. John said to himself: “I can well afford to stop for a thousand dollars.” He carried the money home. He stopped his singing, but peace and joy fled from his heart and mind. While lying in bed, if he heard a little noise, he would think: “There are thieves about!” In short, his happiness was gone. Finally he gathered up his money again and carried it back to his rich neighbor. He preferred to sing and be joyful. This is of course a fable, but it is based on the experience of millions of people. It is then, altogether contrary to nature, to try to make men happy by means of communism.

The Word of God alone can make us happy. A man may indeed succeed well in some undertaking, and become overjoyed for a time and feel himself very happy. But alas! it is only for a short time! A Christian, on the other hand, is always happy, even while weeping. And if he should be prostrated before his God, he must confess, “happy man that I am” He knows that he has enjoyed God’s goodness, he knows his tears will soon be wiped away. He will be with his God and Father and will stand before His throne forevermore, when once the delusive play on the stage of life is ended. The Christian knows this, and therefore he is happy. He is, of course, not always in a pleasant mood; sometimes he feels very sad, yes, quite frequently so; and the deeper his Christianity, the more he will be troubled with feelings of sadness, inasmuch as he notices every action of his flesh. This causes him trouble and distress. However, one thing no one can take from him: he has a merciful God in heaven; he has found the precious pearl, and when life is at an end, he can cheerfully close his eyes, for he fears neither death nor hell, nor that “Nothing” of which the atheists are continually afraid.

Although there are many who say: “There is no God,” there are really not as many atheists, even in our times, as is generally supposed. Many a one is a very bold atheist by day, but when he retires in the evening and all is dark about him, he hears a silent voice within him, saying: “There is a God after all, it is at any rate doubtful whether there is a God or not, and should there be a God, what will become of me?” This voice can be silenced by nothing less than satanic obduracy and hardness of heart. An atheist may deliver a speech with glowing eloquence against the existence of a God, but we must not think that he is actually in earnest. There are many braggarts who would show their intellectual greatness by speaking against God. Then after they return to their home, they must accuse themselves and say: “What have you done!” They don’t believe themselves what they have said. God has written on the heart of man and no one can erase it: “There is a God, before Him thou wilt be called to an account. He will bring thee before His judgment seat. Woe unto thee if thou hast no Savior? He will judge thee strictly in accordance with His holiness and righteousness.” —

Because, then, it is a fact, that happiness does not consist in external advantages, it is folly to endeavor to make men happy by means of an equalization.

"America's Martin Luther" Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE TWO) -->

<-- "America's Martin Luther" Lectures on Communism and Socialism (CONTENTS)

C.F.W. Walther: Lectures on Communism and Socialism (Contents and Prefaces)

2009-11-30T04:00:00.000-08:00

CONTENTS

FIRST LECTURE

labor unions used by communists;
labor papers atheistic;
French Revolution;
No Christian can take part in efforts of Communists and Socialists;
men are not intended to be equal by God;
men are naturally selfish;
happiness does not consist in external advantages

SECOND LECTURE

Christian sympathy for troubles of laboring-man;
condemnation of greedy employers;
communists have never attained their purpose;
history of real attempts at true communism: Sparta, Lycurgas, Pythagoras, Plato, Essenes, Monasteries, Thomas Muenzer, Peasant’s Revolt;
Luther’s words to nobility;
Joch Bockhold;
First French Revolution, Jacobins, Babeuf;
Egaliteurs, Count de Saint-Simon;
Bazard;
French Insurrection of 1848;
Louis Blanc, Heine and the "Young Germany" movement;
Weitling in Magdeburg;
Fourier in France;
"Icarian Communists”;
Proudhon;
France in 1871 and the "Commune"

THIRD LECTURE

Communism’s attempt to justify itself from the Bible: Genesis 1;
holding of personal property taught by necessity, reason, and for happiness;
dangers in holding personal property must be watched;
Acts 4:32;
Matthew 19:16;
laborers in Vineyard;
Communists oppose definite doctrines of Scripture:

FOURTH LECTURE

Accusations of Communists against Christian Church, church in league with the rich and oppressors;
Christ opposed to conquering world by force;
Christ and Bible are friends of the oppressed;
dreadful end of tyrants, Christianity not out to end corruption in the world. Christ’s Kingdom is above;
Christianity never tried by Communists and Socialists;
Consequence if it were tried;
Christian’s aim is eternal life

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE TO THE 1879 EDITION
That our American people may be enabled the better to understand the true character of Communism, that they may see its blackness in the light of God’s Word, that they may be warned against its dreadful influences, that man may be benefited and God glorified, this English translation of DR. WALTHER’S excellent lectures is herewith dedicated to the American Public, but especially to those who may desire to acquaint themselves with the secret of our nation's troubles.

The translator has endeavored to give DR. WALTHER’S ideas in smooth English, without confining himself throughout to the original wording. Rev. C. T. Steck of Homer, Pa., assisted the undersigned in carefully criticising the language used, in consequence of which he hopes the work will need no further criticism after leaving the press.

God’s blessing accompany this little work then and cause it to do its work right nobly.

D. SIMON, M. A.
Translator

PUBLISHER’S PREFACE TO THE 1879 EDITION
The undersigned yielded with reluctance to the earnest request of the Lutheran Congregation of this place, to publish a stenographic report of extemporaneous lectures on Socialism and Communism, called forth by special circumstances, and delivered at four evening sessions of the congregation. The publisher hopes, however, that the indulgent and unprejudiced reader will overlook the formal defects which were unavoidable in the circumstances under which these lectures originated, and he also hopes, that the reader will not inconsiderately reject the truth presented in these pages, because of these defects. May that which is here presented, occasioned as it was by the special circumstances of the congregation of this place, serve to call attention, also in other circles, to a question which is becoming more and more a burning one, even among Christians, and may it also give them occasion to answer from Scripture, reason and history, every form of this question, in which it may be presented, and that more thoroughly than time would allow.

THE PUBLISHER.
M. C. Barthel, Agt.

"America's Martin Luther" Lectures on Communism and Socialism (LECTURE ONE) -->

<-- "America's Martin Luther" Lectures on Communism and Socialism (INTRODUCTION)

"America's Martin Luther" Lectures on Communism and Socialism

2009-11-29T19:58:00.001-08:00

In my previous post, entitled EU President: 2009 to be First Year of Global Governance, I made much of the progress of Socialism, particularly the fact that the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen is intended to result in a legally-binding agreement among nations – a treaty which will (1) produce a new government with (2) enforcement powers, the intention of which is to (3) distribute wealth worldwide using a measure of each nation's CO2 output as the basis, that is, on the basis of factors directly related to each nation's economic activity (production and transportation of goods and services). This treaty, in setting up a “distributor of wealth” in the interest of supporting an equal “right of sustainable development” for all people and nations, sets up, in effect, a worldwide Socialist government, to economically equalize the world under the guise of a now defunct “Climate Crisis." The key is to recognize the essential function of “government” under this treaty -- to evenly distribute limited resources to all affinity groups. The only rulers in a Socialist society are the “distributors.”

Some commented to me privately on my last post, asking, What's wrong with Socialism? Indeed, I heard through my (rather disgusted) Pastor last Fall, before the 2008 Presidential election in November, that a number of our Canadian pastors were indifferent to the prospect of a Marxist president, reportedly suggesting that A little Socialism would be good for America.

Perhaps we Lutherans pride ourselves a little too much in holding religiously sterile political perspectives! True, in the Kingdom of the Left, Natural Law considerations will predominate, but the notion that this somehow precludes any consideration of religiously influenced convictions is nonsense. In the case of Socialism, Natural Law arguments against it are overwhelming, but religious arguments against it are also warranted, as Socialism overtly militates against Creedal distinctions, against the institution of Family and Marriage (all resources, including family, belong to the community), and against several other positive doctrines of Scripture, such as respect for personal property, the distinctions between classes of people (like husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee, magistrate and citizen, rich and poor), or the fact that misery in this world is caused by sin, not by relative possession or position, and it's cure is to be found outside of man's effort. But I am not about to argue this. On the contrary, Dr. Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther is.

Dr. C.F.W. Walther, still referred to by some as “America's Martin Luther,” was a 19th Century Lutheran theologian who emigrated from Saxony in 1838 with a group of laymen and pastors, lead by Martin Stephan, for reasons of religious conscience. Late 17th-Century Pietism having eviscerated Lutheranism in Germany, the Enlightenment which followed (c. 1750) nearly wiped Lutheran orthodoxy completely out, Valentin Ernst Loescher, the last of the Lutheran theologians from the Lutheran Age of Orthodoxy, having died in 1749. A remnant remained, but when the Prussian Union (1817 & 1830) forced a merger of what was left of the Lutheran Church in Germany with the Reformed Church, true Lutherans were rousted out of Germany. The Stephanites were among them, settling in Perry County Missouri, and later under Walther's leadership, forming the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod in 1848. Walther, being convinced that only Lutheran theology clearly taught the unalloyed doctrines of Scripture, was an ardent proponent of Orthodox Lutheranism and Confessional Unity, and highly influential among Lutherans in America.

The second half of the 19th Century saw the appearance of solidarity movements among the laboring classes in America, giving rise to labor-unions. While a compelling case can always be made for the need of laborers to have their interests fairly represented and defended, the activities of labor-unions of the 19th Century were largely orchestrated by European socialists eager to use unfavorable working conditions as a pretext for establishing schools of communism and socialism among the laboring classes. The thought seems to have been to exploit envy against employers and the political establishment, and under the pretense of “equal happiness through common resources,” use the angst and power of united labor to force them to resign ownership and control of their own property. We don't hear much today about a religious case for it, but since so much of Communism and Socialism flies in the face of basic Scripture teaching, some sort of case has always been necessary in order to route Christian suspicions -- at least temporarily. Such a case has long existed, a rather flimsy case which is largely a gross mis-use of the Scriptures.

As a result, many of the German Lutherans in late 19th Century America, especially those in municipal areas who had access to the periodicals of the labor-unions which directly preached the virtues of Socialism in various ways, were thrown into confusion. In St. Louis, Dr. Walther acted by giving a series of four lectures on Communism and Socialism, concluding, No reasonable man, much less a Christian, can or should take part in the efforts of Communists and Socialists. Typical of classic Lutheran polemic, he is delightfully direct and forceful, offering definitive conclusions on the basis of both Natural Law and Scripture doctrine, where applicable.

This series of lectures is preserved for us in English under the title, Communism and Socialism: Minutes of the First German Evangelical Lutheran Congregation, U.A.C. at St. Louis, Missouri, yet is available nowhere today – neither in print, nor out of print, nor have I found it anywhere on the internet. When I found out about this work many years ago, I searched for years, finally finding an old 1947 reprint. I offer it here, one lecture a day, over the next four days, in hopes that the reader may find it an edifying and welcome change from the notion that political ideals are to be completely divorced from religious convictions.

"America's Martin Luther" Lectures on Communism and Socialism (Contents and Prefaces) -->