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CHAPTER EIGHT
THEOLOGICAL VACUUM, NEOLOGICAL VACUITY AND
THE DECLARATIONS OF DEITY
Shrouds and the Clouds
The word of God is the most important readily available, utterly necessary resource for man.
Man has the wiring, he needs the power source.
He has the soul, he needs its meaning.
He has limited power, he needs the unlimited.
He is coiled up for conduct; he needs the expansiveness of reality.
His body is translatable from code for construction, it is relatable to the Coder for instruction.
Accordingly, His meaning is not to be found in himself, for he is but a product, written indeed into reality by DNA, at the physical level, his frame reticulated with cell construction, the cells with conceptual configurations constrained by construction and command, operative on multi-systematic codes, supervened by mind and completed by spirit so that he might investigate his world, himself, his possibilities, his options, his dangers, and finding his reality, respond to it.
One of the most distortional delusions one has ever met was found in a novel not to be mentioned, since the thing was merely incidental. It was that it was a form of madness to have man made by God so that because he had a soul he could have dominion over all other creatures. This in gross distortion was given the name of fundamentalism, that charred remnant of terminology used as an emotional battering-ram on non-secular, sovereignly instituted, humanly necessary instruction from the God who made man, who made himself liable by follies innumerable for a judgment which grace readily allays into free salvation.
The distortion of this into an alienating, hating derogation without ground, does not call for punishment, but purging in the mind, that truth prevail instead of such irrelevant propaganda. This has nothing to do with the Bible, but is a form of idol made by the mind of a man who did not carefully check. This is typical of man's attitude to the word of God, for distorting Christ was the ultimate, on the Cross. As He is biblically revealed and historically attested to be, God is wonderful; as He is smitten by the distortions of man, the result is an idol, of no mean folly.
The glory is this, that though smitten both verbally almost as a sport at times, and in contortions of concept all but unbelievable in their irrelevant rancour, and summarily on the cross of Calvary, the God of creation and salvation whose incarnate Son was nailed, is still ready to pardon even His would-be tormentors (since there is no opportunity now except through extension, in the murder or smashing of the bodies of His disciples), as He was then (Luke 23:34). The day has not yet come when it is too late, when regeneration ceases to be available and degeneration alone remains (II Corinthians 6:1ff.).
The making of man was accompanied by the rule in this world, which related to one made in His own image, but the purpose is as His actions and words have shown. It is like saying that the purpose of making a car was that there should be seats. True, but blind to reality. It misses entirely the point of transport, purposed back of any mere circumstance in the process, such as tyres that they should meet the road. This error is simply a result of waywardness, itself illustrated the need of man, as if screwing up his eyes, he cannot see the most conspicuous facts about issues involved! (cf. Matthew 113:15ff.).
In fact, as you see in Hebrews, the aim of God, which He fulfilled at the uttermost cost, thus showing as do the Psalms and the prophets, the ultimate design and intention of God, is to bring many to Himself in fellowship, adopted as children; and because of man's sin, this was ordained through the man in whom He became incarnate, Jesus the Christ, so that the result desired in man could be realised, and man not simply dismissed, as a blotted paper, crushed and flung into the rubbish. He SO LOVED the world that He GAVE (John 3).
It was love not lordship which moved the purpose, and gift not vanity which was the end in view. The purpose was profound, issuing from eminent desire to complete the opportunities for man, not by force, but in faith, not by mere government but by grace; but for all that, with the Government in the hands of God and the scope given to man below him, for things imaginative, creative, orderly, rational and realistic, in a universe of grandeur.
In Deuteronomy 4, accordingly, you find this that there were only willing people at the time of the flood rescue operation, to culminate in the cross, where to escape the disease and destiny of sin, once more, the way of deliverance, free as the ark, but constructed by God directly, even the incarnate Son of God, is imaged by an open door (John 10:9). You have to come in, assuredly, but that so hard, to cross a threshold to what is prepared for you ? Is it insanity to trust God ? To trust in your own wisdom when it lacks is nearer to this, and to find salvation where it is clearly attested, in your own Maker is but a lack of self-elevation, a trip away even from spiritual paranoia (cf. SMR, TMR, RELIGION, RELIGIOSITY AND REALITY IN CHRIST).
Thus as was His desire, He has freely purchased, in His kindness towards man (Titus 2-3), those whose hearts do not disdain Him, whose lives ardently desire Him, and whose love relates to the God who IS love, in this, that in design and purpose all is thus originated and in His methods, sought for man. If results of its rejection can be odious, so is food left endlessly on the table.
He has sought a people by His grace and without force in the realm of faith, as becomes what is love, to be so near to Him (Ephesians 2:12-13), and has gone to grace all but inconceivable because of its majesty, to achieve this, for thus "you who were afar off are brought near by the blood of Christ" (that is His life given to death in sacrifice, first to cover the guilt of sin vicariously, and then to bring to fellowship with God through the open rout of death in the resurrection, that hope might be in God and not in flesh).
Accordingly the way is in not hard (Romans 10:9), except for duplicity, ambivalence and self-seeking distortions. Nor is the fall of man any excuse, for God is quite clear, before our kind of time so much as existed, with its cultures and vultures and captures and pathologies of heart, mind and spirit, its vyings and cryings and sighings and distortions and false educations and conditions, God knew His own. Before sin set up deviations, He was aware of who are His (Ephesians 1:4). WANTING ALL (Colossians 1:19ff.), He took those for whom force was not relevant, where His heart's desire for man could be realised in His own wisdom. As to His PURPOSE, it was toward all, as for His attainment in truth, it was to achieve some, for He is a ransom for many.
But are you, reader, one of these ? It is not necessary to try to plumb the depths of the divine results, since the divine desire and open door are both so clear. God having all power, nothing can exclude from His love (as in John 3:15-19), but the desire guiltily to avoid the light, and THAT is statedly the condemnation, for those creations of God for whom He came expressly not to condemn, but that they in the world, might be saved. ONLY you can find hell. God is offering heaven. You do not have to come; but as far as God is concerned, there is the open door and the enabling from eternity. It is simply not possible for you to miss out UNLESS, known to God, you in heart preferred otherwise. If you feel this unfair, it is yet honest; and if you want to contest it, the affair is simple: then come! God is no respecter of persons, and if HE statedly desires ALL, then it is no mean exclusion but an attestation. Since you are not named in some book given to man, then ONLY by refusing to come can you confirm your exclusion.
You WANT to come ? then come. You do NOT want to come, then go and bear the burden of responsibility honestly. It is not God who has desired your exclusion. Foreknowledge is expressive of what He is, not compulsion; and predestination secures His finding, and does not alter His character. What He would like is the point, and what He designates as the ground, despite this, of exclusion is what He states (John 3:17,19). Do not confuse His competence with His character.
Thus Israel at first as a nation called and instituted, constituted and conducted (Hosea 11:1) had vast opportunities. They were called to be NEAR to God, to be in fellowship, a people functional, not fictional, by faith. Such was the divine and ultimate objective in this call, so that likewise they should be exemplars for others (Isaiah 43:10-13,21). Alas, as Hosea here indicates no less, they wavered and wandered, tended to the equivocal and at the very gates of the promised land, failed to enter as many fail to come through Jesus the ultimate Saviour, the door to eternity and its life (John 10:9). Yet some believed and many were those who stood, even Kings in their day.
But what is it like when people come to Him for salvation from sin and restoration to spiritual life in the Lord, for which man is made (Colossians 3:10) ? It resembles the birth of a child in a spiritual sense; but since God is infinite, the only created child would need to be one which, while derivative and brought into existence, yet was in harmony, rejoicing at the splendour of truth and the marvel of peace in the depth of understanding of God (cf. Jeremiah 9:23-24). THIS was why He created mankind (I John 3:1ff., 4:7-11, 10:10). Christ came to overcome the desecration and bring together at length a holy spiritual nation, composed of all His children, the saints, separated to Him and FOR Him over the ages (I Peter 2). Here was love in action, mercy in declaration, practicality in function, God overcoming the cause of sin in the interests of eternal and abundant life. The final cost is the final criterion of the love and the final state the ultimate testimony of the purpose.
So much, then, on the purpose of God in creation of man! Let us revert to the distortion about man and beasts as the purpose of creating man.
As to man's having dominion over beasts because he has a soul, as was almost comically, but charringly alleged, this then is a specious invention. BEING AS STATED, made in the image (God being a Spirit, this is not geometrical or metrical at all, but rather indicative of a spiritual power of liaison so that companionship could occur), man was to exercise a correlative authority in the rest of the world, not made in the image of God at all, but yet made by Him. It was thus a domain for responsibility, delight but watchfulness, since after sin entered the world (Romans 5), so did the curse, the less-than-perfect conditions which were to remind, bind and belittle vaunting pretensions, though these infected man, even at that, still! It was an aspect of being in the image of God, a trial and an opportunity, among the residue of results of being so made, but no more relevant to the ultimate purpose for man, than are windows for a car. You indeed DO see, but the purpose is to complete the journey, and do it with piety, purpose and car, reaching the destination, here, in deity Himself.
All this, however enables us to see something of the gross character of the distortions which the secular mind can invent; and it is not this type of mind only which so acts, but the religious mind also. It is a warning to be aware that the rule of animals is not so important as the rule over one's own soul, for self-control is better than taking a city, the self being seen as finding the wisdom of not making of itself a god, but finding in God its meaning.
Let us consider then distortions, aversions, failures among the religious exercises of men, to become aware of the insidious dangers that threaten man, and readily bring disaster through misdirection.
THE QUASI-THEOLOGICAL VACUUM
Buddhism
Let us take Buddhism.
We look to a formulation from Baron von Hügel, Eternal Life (p. 9). In Hinduism, the case or the chase is for all as one; in Buddhism, it is for one as all.
From The Lord of Longsuffering, Prince of Peace, the Christ of Command Ch. 3, this excerpt presents the position.
Recently a flagrant letter appeared in an Adelaide newspaper, in which the writer despised the contribution of Christianity in this, that he felt Buddha, centuries before Christ, had said much the same thing as is to be found in the Sermon on the Mount. As to this assertion, the date is right, the rest is staggeringly wrong. It is confusion confounded and culture sitting as sovereign over truth.
In fact, Buddha showed no belief in the Creator, or clear understanding of God Almighty. It is difficult, operationally, to distinguish his own work from atheism. It concerns suffering, cause of suffering, way to reduce and finally extinguish suffering, and things to do in the meantime. In extinguishing suffering, however, he extinguishes the capacity for suffering on the part of the devotee, the disciple, who having followed all his life a vision without rational confirmation, governing by appeal of some kind, is to be rewarded by an indistinct and nebulously defined operational end as an individual. In the interim, there is to be degree of passion, desire, singularity of grasp, whether in some form into which man does not fit, some other sort of creation, and even this abortive lowering, if so be, is rather like Romanist purgatory, a place of sorrow.
It is like getting ready for a holiday, firstly from some degree of wanting anything, then from some other degree, and having your spirit, which conveniently is given all necessary adjustments so that it retains some kind of identity before being ready for reincarnation of something quite different from man, so that personality in abeyance, in the highroad to individual nothingness as a reward, it finds itself re-created as the case requires, by no one. For this enormous technical work has to be done, to make suitable adjustments, in fact, like using a Ford chassis, salon, for a Boeing 737, only much more difficult in this, that the liberty of man in thought and comprehension and understanding has to be lost in the format of what lacks these things, and yet be the same, although entirely other.
The rationally testable evidence for this is as absent as is the meaningfulness of the transformation without a transformer. It is one more instance of a result without a specifically adequate cause. Transmigration is a term used, but it is an illusion. If you migrate to Germany from England, then you are you, identity retained, luggage and transport needed, and authorisation to enable the change of citizenship, an adjustment of acceptance, not of intrinsic nature. If however you migrate into the life of a beast, your existence itself is altered, so that the essentials of personality are absorbed into the instinctive and coerced, the debased and unrecognisable, so that all that remains is the fact that you are living, and the entirety of your power to evaluate, remember, be what you were, is lost in a confused muddle of 'life', which being shared with worms, is a mere generality without receptive significance. There is no place to put the reality of man, so man ceases, and with it any sense of continuity that is moral or essential. It is a mirage that transmigrates.
When it gets to Nirvana, it is lost in the infinite, which being precisely what man is NOT, means by this very face the loss of human life, individual life, and the end of man as an operative unit. To say that the self is not regarded as permanent is the same as saying that what we are talking about, a personality, a specifiable human being with power of memory of individual guilt, grace, involvements, actions, no more exists. The system of karma, reward for good and bad deeds in the processes of transmigratory illusion, becomes doubly meaningless when what does the actions, is no more there to experience their results, and in many cases, is insusceptible to the power to know.
Thus morality becomes without base, and discontinuity becomes a withering dynamic making of the most precise and powerful moral dramas, a kaleidoscopic morass of indigestible fragments, failing at last even to be. Seeking always for what is not even to be understood, with the reward of not even being able to understand is a self-contradictory moral constraint. It propels outside continuity of understanding of what is involved, ending in lack of continuity altogether of the being who has so acted. Hence the system is divorced from its (current) meaning in any individual case, and since it is AS an individual, like it or leave it, that ALL of this in the known and attestable world is done, with nothing beyond to act, except the call for the transformations of spirit required to have continuity of vast and organised proportions, which is met with NOTHING DOING. Yet it is done, for otherwise the change could not be achieved.
The error of change and ignoring of criteria and characteristics of individuality resembles the error of David Hume. Like his approach, it ignores reality. For Hume, there is nothing enduring, things follow and series of king. However what envisages series is not series, but comprehending and static, or source of comprehension in unity that has a platform for arresting thought, connecting it, giving to it a setting and substance, functionality and place, so that it might BE thought and the person who uses it has to be there, to HAVE thought. Thus in ignoring himself, the operator, he engages in the most trite and trivial reductionism, solving what lacks the data, with ephemeral ease and irrelevance.
Such is the case with Buddhism. Weary apparently of the gods and agencies proliferating in Hinduism, the teacher of this religion appears to have decided that instead of one being all, he would have something different. Could he however graft onto this underlying sense of ONE which is to BE all that is, what would remove its futility and dysfunction, or so change it that some one or other, would remain to talk about so that there could be some religion or other ?
There was a problem to solve. There was in Hinduism the call for just ONE, nor respite from the manifest, absurd futility and irrelevance of trying to marry stark opposites in one being, good and evil, pain and grace, lying and truth, callowness and wisdom, self-contradictions in the very being itself, which is to BE all, and this at whatever mode of distancing. It was of course basic to the reforming Buddhism. Thus, as one put it, there is a roaring silence ( *1 for present Chapter), or another. There is an inclusive spirit sitting in some sense over all this, merciful and somehow known, while it is also in part constitutive in this ONE, and so in its very being, having its site in a chaos of clangour, contradiction and composition that varies, as to its knowability. That is small wonder, since it incorporates all and neither removes what is contrary to any concept given to it, nor asserts with any power what it is alleged to be. It just is and absorbs all contradictories so making mere muddle, and continues with this within it, with some kind of unity despite the explosion of self-contradiction which it harbours in itself. You cannot avoid it: IF it is one, then it explodes.
If it is not one, then it is necessary to cease declaring that it is. Make the spirit of all as THE ONE, and the rest NOT the one, and you avoid the folly. Then the rest is something else. You move to Creator and creation, what is the basis and what is the result. Have it ALL just there, AND self-contradiction PART of it, AS SUCH, and it can have no meaning, for self-contradiction produces nullity. You have and do not have a million dollars; ARE a cogitative fool and a brilliant thinker. You deny what you affirm and hence have mere verbal muddle. To assert that beyond all this, and yet not a different being from it, is something of this or that moral character, is to confuse the ONE with two. IF it is a comprehensive containing body, then it is self-contradictory, conceptually meaningless, unknowable and an association of what is by nature incapable of unity. It does not matter if something IN or OF the one is looked to, for as long as it IS as one, then these features are inescapable.
IF the confusion is to be removed, then you need a One and an other, and a relationship between them, just to start rationality. If reason is to apply (and if not it is merely an irrational declaration), then to give any understanding. If the new One is to have any character, then it is not in any way the same as the many, itself a characterless confusion. So we would have one of some nature or other, and one of no definable nature, in confusion. Either the One creates the other, or they both always were. If so, then there wholly divergent natures reside in a system containing both, and enabling their communication and inter-action. How did this come if not from what is greater than both! If you abandon reason, then there is no argument. If you use it, this is so.
See also on Buddhism, SMR pp. 995-1026.
The ONE is NOT ONE: that is, the equation is erroneous.
We have good and evil, brilliance and folly, wisdom and futility, realism and unrealism, the functional and the dream, the abased and the exalted, the humbly realistic and the grossly vain and surrealistic, the vaulting pride and the broken stride; you have the idols of fancy that do not answer prayer, as Elijah (I Kings 17) so classically was used to show, and history has confirmed, and the God of power who does, as the entire Bible attests over the millenia and the saints acclaim and have so often noted in things great and small, academic and personal, historical and developmental. Combining the opposites is not apposite, but a self-destructive convulsion and the collapse by convulsion of what cannot agree.
Thus you have expositions concerning the "all-pervading fullness" or as "space that is aware"*1 as ultimates in spiritual apprehension. This precisely shows the distortive illusion: SPACE designates capacity for content. In itself it has nothing. For it to be aware, it must cease to be mere space. It now has a content including consciousness and cognition. In this way the realities of God are downgraded to an internalised concept which is disjoined from what it inhabits, this world, by being emptied. An all-pervading fulness likewise is full of what ?
It is the same anti-cognitive clash with terminological malapropisms, which but masks the incoherence of this effort at conjoining opposites, and importing unacknowledged deity concepts into what has no place or space for them. Oxymorons exhibit but do not express a reality, being here merely a verbalised form of seeking the self-contradictory. It is not to be found in such antinomies, antitheses and antilogies, but in distinct categories. God who made, and creation which is made. Infinitely different, these have nearness when God makes it so, and in the way He chooses, not made up by man, far less in derogation of His very independent deity as cause, basis and beginning for all which so self-contradicts in so many ways, according to the liberties granted to it, and the unwise use of the same.
Again, and in parallel with this, it is not a case of finding a way in the unknowable, the ultimate on which Buddha was so slow to speak as well he might be, for if you CANNOT know what CAN you say, and if you DO say what is it but the offspring of ignorance! Modelling on such a basis leaves only a vast emptiness which some filled with the worship of Buddha himself, though his system made no such provision. Notwithstanding this, the absence being felt, vast fillers to come in due time, as the human spirit sought help where something more than plan and pilgrimage was involved, from deities or powers of this kind and that, inserted into the system. Creating a vacuum is one way to inviting entrants!
With God however, recognised and not distanced, central to the model given man, and not alien, revealing Himself as man's causal basis and, then just as man in his body is made by conceptually conditioned code and its integration in systematic commands, so with the word of God to the mind and spirit of man, the spiritual space is filled. This is not disjunct, but conjunct, not unfitting but precisely fitting, instruction to the instructible and deliverance for what has now fallen.
As the body has its command, in order in each generation and case to be constructed, so does the mind and the spirit have direction from God: and this, it is not to squash its amazing liberties, but to enable their due despatch and dynamic to be used advisedly, giving counsel and scope to man (Proverbs 1-8). When the God of man's creation, is found, and His door of entry (John 10:9) is used, then there is no room for folly. Orientation, perspective and understanding is obtained in clear terms with specifiable elements, not glowing unspeakable spaciousness. It is grace and not space which God gives, just as it is code to command and not a wandering wilderness which makes the human body in its generations, although its genome is declining, as is to be expected in this world of designs impacted.
This includes, for man who can be made to understand God BY God (Jeremiah 9:21-23, John 17:1-3, Romans 1:17ff.), but yet in his splendid liberties can even misunderstand on purpose, in a sleight of mind like sleight of hand, morally similar but at a different level, opportunity for discourse intelligently with the Lord, to put his case and need to Him, to cast his burden on the Lord and WAIT for the answer. If this is only when man comes in the way divinely appointed, in Jesus the Christ (cf. John 15:1-7), entry to a house is normally just the same. It is not anywhere; it is through the door. This is not normally found very crimping, except perhaps for burglars (cf. John 10).
This we find not only in our own lives, but in such delicious attestation as is found from King Jehoshaphat with the prophet Jahaziel, from II Chronicles 20:1-15, from King Asa (II Chronicles 14:11). In these two cases, overwhelming opposition confronted the kings, but faith in the covenantal power of God prevailed, and it was highly articulate before the event, as the event was highly confirmatory after the prevailing faith. Faith does not give overwhelming power whenever trouble arises, but power sufficient for the divine purpose. In that case, this included the continuation of Israel and the attestation of faith in the God of creation and covenant (ours is the NEW Covenant in Christ's blood, then foretold) as vested where the glory, grace and peace is to be found.
In the one case, after the rehearsal of the cause from the King, and the covenant, we hear this from the prophet: "Listen, all you of Judah and you inhabitants of Jerusalem, and you, King Jehoshaphat! Thus says the LORD to you:
"Do not be afraid nor dismayed because of this great
multitude,
for the battle is not yours, but God's."
It was an astonishing tableau, the King and the singers praising God and arriving to find the combined assailants had assailed each other!
In the other case, we find a King (who later erred with opposite results, trusting not in God but in his cunning, contrivance or diplomacy) glorying in the power and the grace of the covenantal God who had made Himself known to them according to the faith from Abraham through Moses, and continued faithful. This he declared:
"Lord, it is
nothing for You to help,
whether with many or with those who have no power:
help us, O LORD our God; for we rest on You,
and in Your name
we go against this multitude.
O LORD, You are our God;
do not let man prevail against You!"
The Psalms are full of just such a faith in the midst of overwhelming odds against the call and commission of David, and as we have seen earlier in this volume, they ascend repeatedly to the prediction of the Saving Messiah, from whom whether backwards in our kind of time or forwards, the power comes, because in Him is the ground of peace, the sacrificial site of reconciliation with God and the blessing that makes rich the heart in peace and understanding, knowledge and direction. So far from this meaning exemption from suffering, it rather means performance of proclamation, living with godliness, attesting the love of Christ to show to a coming generation the grace available in this place (cf. Colossians 1:24). We are no more a theocracy, but those who are Christians are part of the family of God, HIS spiritual generation spread through the age (cf. The Bountiful, the Accountable and the Surmountable Epilogue).
As the case requires, however, the power is provided and the impossible subdued, since with God nothing shall be called impossible, except this, that He should deny Himself, for collapse is not power but its opposite, suitable for the kingdoms of men as divinely revealed (cf. Daniel 2, 7, 9).
Examples could be multiplied, but one more must suffice, lest we lose our way in a sub-topic, and miss the point of the Chapter. Thus in the day of King Hezekiah (II Kings 18), that masterpiece of cruelty and oppression, the Assyrian Empire with its ostentatious leader, Sennacherib, made haste to subdue Judah, having made something of a habit of oppression and invasion. The invasion machine and its leaders were quite gifted in propaganda, as are many false religionists. Sennacherib seemed to have enjoyed trampling on gods that were not actually there, in the power of his own imperial religionists. As to their religion, they had Asshur and from archeology, we find apparently added Babylonian deities, even having an Assyrian monarch shown in the form of a sphinx, indeed, with the Assyrian's regal head on the image, as if to borrow from the glories of Egypt for their own exaltation. Self-exaltation of man or empire can be infectious.
In his roaring assaults on other nations, it was rather like a slightly bigger dog nipping and wounding somewhat smaller ones. When however a dog meets a lion, it is a different case, and when an army meets the God of power in the course of HIS enterprises, it is different, shall we say, again: infinitely different. As we read in II Kings , the Lord brought devastation on the arrogant monarch, and that most swiftly, since it was decidedly and directly a question of His own name, whose mercy is towards man, and this was not on the agenda to remain (II Kings 19:35-37).
What was the process of response in Judah to this threat ? King Hezekiah sought God in prayer in the Temple, aware of the gross distortion of Sennacherib and his ambassador, Rabshakeh, who claimed that there was no hope for them in the God of Israel since Hezekiah had removed some of His altars (in fact a cleansing of multiple altars not divinely authorised, in a spread of dangerous pollution in the cultural midst - II Chronicles 31). Distortion is the name of the game, when it comes to the overbearing pretence if not pretensions of false religion. How can you prevail against truth if not with convenient fiction, at least for a time!
Isaiah the prophet, in a stirring piece of team-work, already sent from the Lord, with his many Messianic messages, had this one for the contemporary situation as well. Though the vast long-term stress all devolved on what God would once and for all do for the human race, and those in it believing in Him and His Messiah, of whom the whole temple was a figure - cf. Hebrews 1-10), he had plenty to reveal concerning nearer things when necessary and as divinely constrained. Whereas Rabshakeh, Asssyrian spokesman, had not only distorted, but brought up earlier Assyrian victories against non-gods in deluded nations, saying, "Has any of the gods of the nations at all delivered its land from the hand of the king of Assyria!" (II Kings 18:33), this provided a divine scope for a simple but direct divine response: no they had not, since gods they were not, for there is but One. Such was the essence of the answer.
This was simply a matter a fact since they were no gods but non-gods clothed in human delusion. This made it a perfect opportunity for the experimental test (as earlier with Elijah's classic case - I Kings 17). In advance of the battle confrontation, therefore, Isaiah spoke in this way in retort to Assyria from the Lord, whose name was involved in this challenge:
"The virgin, the daughter of Zion,
Has despised you, laughed you to scorn;
" The daughter of Jerusalem
Has shaken her head behind your back.
" Whom have you reproached and blasphemed ?
Against whom have you raised your voice ?
And lifted up your eyes on high ?
"Against the Holy One of Israel.
By your servants you have reproached the Lord,
And said, 'By the multitude of my chariots
I have come up to the height of the mountains...
" But I know your dwelling place,
Your going in and your coming out,
And your rage against Me,
Because your rage against Me and your tumult
Have come up to My ears.
"Therefore I will put My hook in your nose
And My bridle in your lips,
"And I will turn you back
By the way which you came."
So the grand monarch of Assyria was but a rampaging bull, and most sensitive to a small part of its anatomy, namely the nose, ready for insertion of a lead. So did the mighty fall to comedy, and the comic become tragic for the outburst of imperial glory! In full concord with archeological findings, Sennacherib was stopped in his tracks, went back and was later killed in a temple of one of his gods, by his sons.
The grace of God which in Christ presents free grace and opportunity for repentance and redemption for every person (Colossians 1:19ff.), for He so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, not coming for judgment, but that the world might be saved (John 3:15-18), it is of irrepressible amplitude. It is such that amazing patience is often present (Romans 2:1ff.), even grace as an aid to repentance. Interpreted out of context and wilfully, this leads many to distort it, just as Sennecherib distorted the facts about God in Judah; and they come to imagine that it is weakness, this profound grace, pity and endeavour to bring mercy to an erring race. Patience is not pity, and perseverance is not weakness, nor is giving folly except in the eyes of pride.
It is IN this patience, the works of glory done in Christ, the Gospel matured through His actions and fulfilments, that many are finding Him, to this hour. Is a 10 hour heart or brain operation the less 'powerful' because it involves patience and care ? As Paul declares in I Corinthians 1, THIS 'weakness' of God is in fact strength, and THIS 'foolishness' is in fact wisdom. Sacrifice often seems weak and foolish, as when a dauntless mother goes needlessly ... just to save a child ... into the flames and comes back, scarred for life, with the precious bundle. It is strength, and not weakness; wisdom and not folly, though many, self-centred, might think otherwise.
There is ONE who is not a ONE OF ALL THINGS, a sort of compendious name for what is basically an orphaned atheistic concept, adorned with worship of Buddha by many, as if to underline the inconsistency and fulfil the aspirations of the human heart anyway. All things are many and varied, morally, spiritually, intellectually, aesthetically, in norm and form, in power and function, whether inert in matter, alert in mind or disposing in perspective conceived, as in spirit. They vary, they contradict, they cavort, they abort.
The mistaken concept that they are, in this Buddhistic format, is thus
THE QUASI-THEOLOGICAL VACUUM
Buddhism.
Turning to reality, we find in the God of creation the missing basis, cause and rational ground for all, as an author, engineer or architect illustrate, each in his own part; and we do not have and use our minds in order to abuse and contradict the requirements of reason. This assuredly means that we are susceptible to the charge of neglect, wilful ignorance or to the opportunities that faith brings. Indeed, when it is all considered, it brings reason and answer on all sides, uniquely and fully (cf. Ch. 6 above, at *1).
Buddhism, however, is indistinguishable from atheism, but imports knowledge from nowhere to have a way. Hence it is not really a theological presentation, but a quasi-one.
What however of the case of Hinduism, which Buddha evidently sought to purge ? This leads us to the next type of theological vacuum, which shows but a vacancy in place of the God of creation and redemption, the reason for all, the basis of all and the Person beyond persons, who has made them in His image so that they might not only know each other as persons, but Him! Because however it has a plethora of gods and becoming gods, and the like, in a vast ramifying system, squarely based on the unknowable, it is ostensibly more akin to what it omits than is Buddhism and can be called
THE PSEUDO-THEOLOGICAL VACUUM
Hinduism
Here we come to Von Hügel's ALL is ONE concept. If Buddha wanted to excise the multiplicity of gods in Hinduism, it was not without reason. It was however the classic case of baby and bath-water. He threw out what these gropings and seekings hoped to find, and formulated so imaginatively, even God Himself, with their several distortions and break-ups into this and that form and formulation.
Small wonder Hindu savants could be found seeking for God and making such classic oxymoron as "roaring silence" in their efforts to find Him. How could they have anything even intellectually competent in expression, if ALL had to be one, and the good and the bad, gods and principles, people and attributes, had to be one, when their diversity was absolute and relentless.
It was a case of the remorseless search for God, on the part of stricken man, bypassing His revelation and seeking to find whatever the searching imagination might provide, and there is more to man than mind, just as there is more to the spiritual, than man's spirit, as you see in I Kings 22:19-22. To seek BEYOND their lavish spirit-world, representing so much in this world, there was for ONE to form, a need for a combination of opposite with apposite, of contradiction with affirmation, to the point that what could be left ? What indeed! Thus we hear this( cf,. SMR p. 996)*2: "Brahman is he whom speech cannot express, and from whom the mind, unable to find him, comes away baffled." That is what MUST be if the only way to have understanding is to be based on the unknowable, available in various, sometimes sinful, expressions, avatars, incarnations ... but of WHAT! There is said by some to be an underlying source of change, but what is it ? How does it differ from the world ? Is it part of it ?
The famous case of the salt put in water, and then to be taken out again, was to illustrate the concept that the ultimate is all through everything, but is not to be isolated (Bhagavad-Gita). The Brahma is not capable, we are told, of conception. This is in part because there is no actual Being, with effect, such as actual creation from nothing by the means of this Being. It is in general a continuum, with a principle (that is a description of a happening, not a person), and so a form of immanence and involvement which is multi-personal on the part of what is not personally itemisable or distinguishable. It bounces back from pantheism, in that all is not God; it moves away from creationism in that there is not, preceding creation, a Being whose mind, power, ability, conception and imagination is such that nothing whatever could have any being without Him, all depends on Him, and could be dispensed with by Him, by removing the power and precision underlying.
There is a certain essential mutuality, and the result is that there CAN BE no real definition, except by abstraction from what it is not, for in simple fact, a principle, or mode of operation, is not the source, even if it is in some way more ultimate than that to which it refers; and what is inseparable in reality, but only in thought. It is thought to underlie the world, to have a being other than matter, but not isolable. There is thence no God whose incarnation is definitive, decisive, declaratory, but all are contributory, partial. There is expressly no formulable ultimate, since such ultimacy being a blend of being and involvement, is on this model, rationally not available. IF you are blended in the nature of things, then you are not the ultimate, but belong in a co-ordinated total, a component.
Superior you may be, distinguishable in name you may be, but sole operating basis of all, as distinct from all, mind of all or any, assuredly, you are not! How then could you speak ? and thus there is much said, from many sources, but come to the ultimate, and it roars, while silent. Interesting jargon, useless chatter when it comes to comprehension, and idle when it comes to apprehension, testable, meaningful or based in rationality. Reason, let us be clear, needs no more reverence than does your right arm; both work. Both need to work. When what you are given points you to what it is for, then listen! When reason finds what God has said, what would you expect ? That having made reason in human format, He would leave it inoperable or useless!
This then is a type of atheism, in which multiple escape hatches for imagination and spiritual reality are provided, but no place is gained for the operationally singular, ontologically alone Author of all, whose command is the cause of all our systems and for temporal causality, the One apart from all, basis for all by being maker of time and matter, and doing so not as an imprint, but as absolute, personal institutor of what was not there. Hence He is undegradable into any type of representation but that OF HIMSELF, BY HIMSELF, and does not come in mixtures of good and bad, righteous and unrighteous, bits or pieces, aspects or agencies of innate types, many incarnations that yet never can say, THIS IS HE and here is the truth! though they pretend to provide it on this and that. On the other hand, He is perfectly capable of the clearest and most comprehensible expression in words, as in the entire Bible! It teaches simply, it challenges mightily, instructs the humble, inspires the mighty: but it is there, coherent, inspectable, consistent, its God unchanging and His instruction susceptible to acceptance or rejection.
He has given testimony in what He has made (Romans 1:17ff.), and truth in what He has said (John 17:17).
The Creator who caused all, disposes all as He will with no help
from any,
none to express Him but Himself,
 |
through His own Spirit, inspiring His word |
|
|
through His own incarnate Son, capable of one
only incarnation, |
Nor does He fail to direct His servants IN their work ACCORDING to His word (John 15:7, 17:17), as He sees fit (Acts 18:9-10).
As to God, He is there to hear, to speak, to direct, and has made the foundations for man in the universe of such wonders, the rebuke for misuse of liberty (Romans 5:1-19), the salvation for those who seek Him in truth, and the scope of history to enable many to find Him, all to be instructed, truth to be verified and vindicated, life to be won by many, freely and vitally, from the victory which He has provided (I John 5).
He is not here in Hinduism any more than in Buddhism. In this context, there is obstruction that distances from the God who created all at His will, including the system of temporal time so that it came to exist, and spoke definitively both in word and in His Eternal Word incarnate, which being God expressive, expresses Him to perfection. Silence does not, after all, speak, and knowledge is not, in the end, to be found in vacuity, however impressive.
What does precisely express Him as adequate for man, and in truth, is not duplicable except by Himself; and He having come ONCE to cover the cause of human suffering, sin, ONCE, and having arisen ONCE, having lived on this earth ONCE, and defeated death ONCE, is ALWAYS available, as HE always has been, in terms of salvation (cf. Barbs... 17), is not available for multiple mix whether by man (Matthew 23:8-10), nor by spirit (I John 4:1ff.), nor by desire.
The world has many ways of losing Him, sin being imaginative in nature since man is; but it has only one way to find Him, rationale of reality, judge of sin, provider of compassion, God of all comfort and all power, subject to no karma, but governing all in Himself, from whom come all things and to whom go all things (Romans 11:36), whether for dissolution when the purpose is done (as in Isaiah 51:6), or for judgment (Acts 17:31).
So far from being an abstracted and unstatable balk to the mind, He who made the mind is utterly comprehensible to the mind, BECAUSE He made man in His image; and while there is much more to learn about Him (I Corinthians 13), there is in Him such a magnificence of harmony of concept, beauty of holiness, a drawing to know more because it IS knowable, that it is like being in a vast mountain area, like the Rockies, where while you can understand its nature, there is ever more to find, delectable, delightful, vast, wonderful and awesome. That reason insists on Him is only to be expected (cf. SMR, TMR), and that all should be verified is no more than reasonable expectation, though in Him this is a unique phenomenon (cf. Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ). Whatever we find, and it is much, from what He has done, we find it definitively and expressly, as one might expect of a personal being, in what He has actually said, both propositionally in the Bible, and personally in Christ, and in accord with this (like a lecturer speaking and then explaining in experimental verification), in history.
It is however faith which, taking Him up, receiving the confrontation with sin, accepts the divine grace of repentance into life, and so finding God, KNOWS HIM, the essence of life and the basis of all understanding (cf. Acts 11:18, John 17:1-3, Jeremiah 9:23-24).
THE
NEO-THEOLOGICAL VACUUM
New Age
In SMR, there is a treatment of this topic which provides for us here, a brief excerpt serving as introduction. It is found at pp. 867ff., part of a larger presentation in this field.
One of the many mountings for the antichrist rocket, the man of sin mood, waiting for the explosion into the lovely lostnesses which space might seem to provide: just one of these is the New Age movement. Gathering force from perhaps 70 years (it differs from country to country somewhat) of theological telemetry - efforts to measure and gauge God - from the depraved morass of unbelieving theologians (not ALL are, but many), it has other sources.
Are there not the defamatory declarations - from the World Council of Churches continually coming, dismissing this doctrine, dispensing with that; having non-proclamatory dialogue with religions that do not know the Lord Jesus Christ, and communing in its Faith and Order Commission with RC emissaries; funding violence in Africa, under colour of racial justice, and refusing to guarantee that funds will not be so used. Morag Zwartz (in her book, The New Age Gospel: Christ or Counterfeit? pp. 127 ff.) provides some tainted dainties of doctrinal deviation such as these: poll taken of WCC delegates' views indicated that 33% denied the existence of God. The WCC World Conference on Faith, Science and the Future contained the opinion that "Christianity must accept different cultures and religions; Christians have no monopoly of moral concern or ethical insight... We do not regard the Bible as the answer book to our ethical questions."
Predictably it made strong representations for gainful insights in this vacuum, producing 'preaching' from Marx. There, in one step, it denies that the supernatural God with OBJECTIVE AND INTELLIGIBLE COMMUNICATION has successfully intimated what He is, wants, and requires in values. WCC-wise, not only the Christian, but Christianity has to accept these moral insights... from atheists and others. A word with Elijah (I Kings 18) would do so much good to such Biblical illiterates who wallow, in their infirmities. Will we go to the witch of Endor then, for instruction, joining Saul in rebuke and disaster ? If Christians are bidden not to seek judgments and equity among each other from the world, but from the wise, how much less should they seek morals from the machine age moral orphans, who are without God and without hope in the world! (I Corinthians 6:1-5; Ephesians 4:17-18, 2:3,11-13.)
Biblically neither economic height, nor depth, is the criterion of one's actual level of elevation! Psalm 62:9 tells us that "Surely men of low degree are a vapour, men of high degree are a lie; if they are weighed in the balances, they are altogether lighter than vapour." These things contribute zero to worth. It is durable riches which matter and are Biblically recommended (Proverbs 8:18), riches found through the Lord (Proverbs 8:33). Disinclination for Him can, on the other hand, be fatal fast - "All that hate me love death," God in His wisdom declares (8:36).
Marx gets no marks on Biblical premises: so will Christians then learn from him the ethics of a diametrical departure from Christ, in that he teaches, Seek first the kingdom of this world, and all the other stuff will be added, for what it may be worth? Splendid teacher! Just the thing. No, the WCC has stumbled in this statement. It was perhaps mesmerised by its own endless double talk, while using the name of Christ for purposes that should shame the soul of those who plan to attend and participate, let alone formally read, such devilish promotions. Yet even in my own Bible-affirming denomination, some time ago, one Minister, participating, attended such meetings, and the author was libelled by a writer in a Church paper, as if the fact, protested, were in doubt, which had been painstakingly, and with great grief, researched. An official body set up to investigate the matter, eventually with grace advised me that they could find no fault in what I had affirmed.
Readily, in this culture, little licences become vast betrayals, whatever the intentions. When God's principles (Romans 16:17) are broken, man's heart may be also, in due course. Such is the blindness that can develop, even in conservative denominations. The ground is strewn with wrecked ecclesiastical aircraft, and attention is needed to air-traffic control, as in the beneficent Bible.
All this has gone on for so long as to create a specialised syndrome; and it has been departed from by many, including some like a former Australian Anglican Primate who condemned the WCC roundly on television, and said those who condemned it should stand up and be counted! Counted... why ? For the better joy of mathematicians? or in order to act and sever the hated ties as commanded! (Titus 3:10, Romans 16:17, Ephesians 5:7-11). It is a part of the great 'falling away' that there is so widespread a defalcation, a misuse of the riches of Christ's wisdom, a departure from simple commands, as if man had become wiser than God; as if Eve's experience was not enough, and it all had to be experimentally learned, over again, in these last days.
All these things, predicted, are abundantly confirmed, and here (and elsewhere in these volumes) attested. (Cf. *11-721 ff., *17-727 ff., 911 ff., 946 ff., 1072 ff..)
Thus, with the viruses made freer to play in some areas which should be thought of, at least, as the body of the Lord Jesus Christ of glory, bacterial infections can come without delay. They do. One is the New Age movement, bold through the decades of failure by so many large denominations to do their duty and condemn; condemning separate; separating warn, and warning expose this antichristian body which, though in vain, would like to swallow up the church of Jesus Christ. like Joseph's visionary calves, dining on the good ones.
New Age... philosophy, religion ? It is quite a little airship. It has transcendental meditation and varied Hindu methods, it has false prophets who advise that there is an office of Christ and there are Masters of the office, to which plateau, Jesus may be referred. What a maleficent misuse of the Glory, Power, Miracles and Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. It has the subtlety of the devil. In what way ?
In this: Christ does the deeds which attract the factual, actual attention in a realistic, demonstrative way; and then, Eastern mysticism and Western radicalism are mixed with it. Stirred till hot (very), it evaporates into the atmosphere with an ill-savour which could slay a witch. The 'Christ' office is then declared vacant... for the time? and who, who do you suppose, is to be selected to fill it now ? Why our old acquaintance... that rose of antichrists, bloom of infernal pits, 'the man of sin', that masterpiece of iniquity (II Thessalonians 2:3-8). Why here, it is claimed, supernature has its very acme and there is the 'office' all swept out... garnished you might say, and ready.
Three points emerge. How nice to allow us more scope to check out in practice the wisdom and prediction of Christ... seven worse devils come to the hearth and home where a reformation has occurred, and not an inhabitation of Christ (Luke 11:26).
The last state of that man is worse than the first!
Secondly, we see again the depth of divine discernment, when Jesus Christ warned in advance:
See, I have told you beforehand. Therefore if they tell you, 'Look, He is in the desert!' do not go out; or 'Look, He is in the inner rooms, do not believe it. (Matthew 24:25-26.)
Now of what did Christ say this ? Of this:
For false christs will arise and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to deceive, if possible, even the elect.
That is the context.
So thousands of years pass and Christ is not... quite... "this same Jesus", so now a New Age will allow the old seat to be invested, infested with the infatuations of cerebral fancy. (Cf. Zwartz op. cit.; see pp. 366-370 supra.) We read from the extensive quotations supplied in this recent volume, that in the renewed and remoulded heart of the participant in the processes of this New Age 'health' movement, comes one's own (very own ?) 'guru' within.
What then is this source of inward wisdom to advise and counsel, in the seat of Christ, if not a devil ? At best it is an invitation (pp. 19-20, op. cit.); and certainly, as to Christ, it is an imitation (Colossians 1:27). On pp. 19-20, in the large list of spiritual potencies ("swelling words" - II Peter 2:18) supplied for the vagrants from the virtue of Christ, there is even a course on miracles... 'an unorthodox contemporary approach to Christianity, based on a profound shift in perception.' What a splendid basis for the scripturally predicted ''lying wonders'' (II Thessalonians 2:9, cf. Revelation 16:14,, 19:20).
Thus we have here something not unlike Hinduism in this aspect, that while it allows, as some in Hinduism might, Jesus as a possible master or avatar or whatever form, formula or format you may wish to endue, and is ready to conceive different exhibits of whatever-it-is in some way or another in a most vacuous seeming inchoate uncertainty, it rejects absolutely and entirely anything of God whose Word became flesh, and whose sacrifice atoned for sin, and in whom faith is the only way to glory, the gory to the glory, the practical to the eternal: of the Eternal having first taken the initiative that we, so easily misled and led astray, might see for ourselves, and test in our own minds and hearts, and seeing believe, believing receive and receiving become children of the only God there is, has ever been, or will be, unchanging source of time itself, with its liabilities and impositions, free of limitations, installer of all.
Its nature is more apparent yet when more is considered as seen in SMR (loc.cit., with slight revision for the present purpose).
As Zwartz NOTES (pp. 36-37, op.cit.):
The divinity of man is never stated, but it is always implicit in the status given to man.
While therefore the equipment of God is prostituted into the paths of men, the antichrist principle finds but new ways of telling its old story. And prophetically, this is just how it 'ought' to be! Zwartz relates from the Humanist Manifesto II, 1973:
We begin with human not God, nature or deity ... humans are responsible for what we are or will become ... No deity will save us; we must save ourselves.
So the testament of antichrist continues with plans to control disease (AIDS must be so disappointing), conquer poverty, alter human development and culture and unlock the... (no, they do not say 'supernatural') 'vast' ? powers of man.
What man is this of whom they speak ? It is still the one whose breath is in his nostrils (Isaiah 2:22) and who is told so simply by God:
Will you still say before Him who slays you,
'I am a god',
when you are a man and not God in the hand of Him who calls you? (Ezekiel 28:9.)As Delitzsch would suggest, in the rather similar Psalm 82: the reference to God in the congregation of 'gods', found there, tells them their sentence! There is something beautiful in this rebuke to the pompous rumblings of human rebels, moving into the haughty idiocy of assuming divine status, or acting as if so to do.
Let us however continue our study of this contemporary pathology.
We read of 'self-actualisation' (and as we shall see, what a self!) and the removal of 'inflexible moral and religious ideologies' and antagonisms (with the lonely apparent exception of their own 'inflexible... ideologies' build on imagination and contrary to testable reality, intended to REPLACE them!).
Yet while 'God' (their debased substitute) is dethroned and irrationally relegated to the relativistic, in this scenario, man makes up his own inflexible gods, which will not tolerate any lore but their own. Man makes... and rather systematically now, almost like a mass assembly plant... a new Christ (with various minor and mob extensions, as we shall see, able to do 'wonders' as if to fulfil with passion, Matthew 24:24). Alice Bailey's 'The Reappearance of Christ' (op. cit. p. 14) or Creme's 'The Re-Appearance of Maitreya the Christ and the Masters of Wisdom' give a lead. Is a 'new spirit' abroad ? This, Sir Ninian Stephen is quoted as affirming (op.cit., p. 44).
'A new spirit of humanity rocks across the globe', came as the relevant headline. 'It would have been unheard of 100 years ago,' ran the reported words.
Bailey advises, with a mischievous seeming parallel to Galatians 4:4, that 'Now, in the fulness of time... there is emerging a group who will bring salvation to the world and who (embodying groups and ideas and emphasising the true meaning of the Church of Christ) will so stimulate and energise the mind and souls of men that the New Age will be ushered in by an outpouring of the Love, Knowledge and Harmony of God...' (Bailey op. cit., cited Zwartz, pp. 21-22.)
Produced by the mini-devil or acolyte of 'evolution' (Bailey loc. cit.), these journeying 'Christ' possessors are to stage a take-over of salvation in themselves; and their Christ ? It is one who doesn't mind what your form of faith is, who embraces indeed all faiths! Not apparently such a faith as has the Almighty for God, since that excludes this, so that it is simply a religious parallel to Communism in this, that it promises much on no ground to many who, loosing what they had, now have corruptible man without balance or impediment, playing God WITH THEM!
If you ask for that, you will pay for it, like any other open-ended contract.
A marvel of modern manipulation that must vie even with Rome for pretension, seems the work of this pseudo-divine crew who may get help, it is made to appear, from such 'spiritual' sources as 'The World Instant of Co-operation'. This is supposed to 'transcend religious boundaries' and proceed from a meditative focus, derived from concentrating people-power. It would seem a mass of persons raise their people-power meditations to whatever it is, in the absence of any actual God, to which they raise such things ... (This Instant movement has part in - an International Peace Year Global Plan, I986.) It is as vague and vacuous as was Hawke's prediction of removal of child poverty. In June 16, 1997, the following report was made on his own reaction:
TWENTY years after pledging no Australian child would live in poverty, former prime minister Bob Hawke has said the comment was one of the biggest regrets of his career."It was a silly shorthand thing. I should have just said what was in the distributed speech," Mr Hawke said yesterday.
He said his government had given extra money to low-income families, but instead of spending it on their kids," they simply wasted it.
For prediction, for function, you need adequate ground, and dreamy imaginations are not it!
Now we move from a single target to a replacement ideology, baseless, vacuous, imaginative, built high like the World Trade Towers, but readily removed by events. It is worse when the tower itself has no rational basis. What an appetite for an antichrist is at work here: and how it reminds one of the already noted yearning of Common Marketeer, Henri Spaak for a leader... 'be he god or devil'.
Whatever may be the conscious state of those who linger in various modes of consciousness, and whatever the motives of some, the nature of this movement seems a modern counterpart of the evasive assertions of Hinduism, or those developed in this aspect of Buddhism: of those authoritatively unbased insistences that, having no knowable cause or origin, have every intention of exhibiting the unattainable truth in a multitude of ways. This then comes under the heading THE NEO-THEOLOGICAL VACUUM, New Age.
We now turn in this group of very different religions, having in common the evacuation of the God of creation and salvation through His gift by grace, to the case of Islam.
THE PLUS AND MINUS THEOLOGICAL VACUUM
Islam
In this we have the plus of another Jesus, careened from deity, launched as righteous however, a new imagination built in visions some 6 centuries after eyes could see and ears hear Jesus the Christ whose named soared as predicted, being based in heaven and face to face with human sin. This is the newcomer, the Islamic Jesus, stripped of deity as He was on earth, stripped of clothing and dignity, enduring the cross. It does not change.
The minus of the Jesus whose words and deeds took history by surprise, till the Roman Empire itself made of this religion its official one, and the Church arose in growing numbers of nations as foretold by Isaiah so keenly, in his prophecies made many centuries before Christ duly came (Galatians 4:4). This was at the predicted date (Christ the Citadel ... Ch. 2), a vast and divine work to show once for all, in experimental, laboratory detail, precisely who God is, what is His program for man, His power and how He can and does announce in advance by centuries, what He has in mind to do, BEFORE DOING IT.
Despite this reconfiguration and reconstitution of God and man, this Islam of Muhammad sustains in form, the norm of the Jewish prophets (SMR pp. 1080ff.), as shown.
What however of Muhammad's early - but continuing - input into this antichrist pattern ? a matter of assertion plus force to overcome ... unbelief in some mock-up, dysfunctional substitute for Christ. In the Koran, Surah 48:29, we find (it. added): ''Muhammad is God's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers'' - and how far? ''Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that God is with the righteous'' (Surah 9:123, cf. 2:191); and indeed, (Surah 9:27-31): ''Fight against such of those to whom the Scriptures were given as believe neither in God nor the Last Day ... until they pay tribute out of the hand and are utterly subdued.'' Yes, he decries (in 8:36-41): ''Tell unbelievers ... [to] reflect upon the fate of their forefathers. Make war on them until idolatry cease ...'' Reflect ? Fate ? ... city assault, tribute money, and then servitude - with the provision for death upon its removal. The 'fate' is the alternative to 'faith' is the alternative to force. (Cf. *17 infra.)
And all this force ? with due provision for occasional defeat, yet it is found written (Surah 8:59): ''Let not the unbelievers think that they will ever get away. They have not the power to do so'' ... Indeed, the prayer was to be: ''Lord forgive us ... our excesses; make us firm of foot and give us victory over the unbelievers" ... and the theme, ''If God helps you, none can overcome you'' (Surah 3:148 and 3:160; cf. Surah 48:22 - "If the unbelievers join battle with you, they shall be put to flight"). In fact, since Moslems almost took Europe, they lost at Tours in 732 A.D.; and again when the sprawling Ottoman Empire fell, with World War I; while in the Middle East from 1917 and from 1948 in particular and repeatedly, Moslem military losses have been sustained, spectacular and even proverbial (*18). This is despite enormous numerical advantage (the EXACT opposite of Surah 8:65 - ''If there are twenty steadfast men among you, they shall vanquish two hundred''). There have not been vicissitudes but repetitive overthrows, dominating almost comically the whole period of the Jew's return (as God predicted, Zechariah 12:6 ff. - cf. pp. 779-822, 851-857 supra.)
The force of evidence overthrows indeed the force of mere utterance. Proclaiming himself ''no more than an apostle'' (Surah 3:140-147), such that ''other apostles have come before me'' (Surah 3:183), Muhammad refers to Abraham and others, to the Jewish Torah (law) - Surah 2:135), and the ''earlier scriptures'' of ''Abraham and Moses'' (Surah 87:179), bowing to history by acknowledging ''the prophets who surrendered themselves judged the Jews ... according to God's Book which had been committed to their keeping and to which they themselves were witnesses'' (Surah 5:44).
Yet the message given from this chameleon-seeming god of the Koran is utterly different from the most fundamental principles of all that went before, which put the day of atonement by the sacrifice for sin, at the centre of things, the approach in this way to the Holy of Holies once per year, the very acme, this the very time of the Passover predicted to be fulfilled indeed, in Christ (Isaiah 50-55, 66)! Here was the exposure of God to man in the blood of sacrifice, distinguishing between destruction and deliverance, at the Exodus, required to be placed on the door of every house to be saved! Here is the beginning of this central Passover event. It is not available for dismissal, divergence or distillation, let alone demolition or replacement! Redemption and ransom are fundamental, quintessential and logically prior to all else in the offer of God to man (cf. Galatians 6:14 in confirmation). Thus as SMR goes on to note (slightly revised), the thing that is Islam, is in collision with itself, as with the God of the Old Testament, and the prefigured Christ of the New.
Witness! Dismiss evidence and what does 'history' become but the unholy butt of romance? While Muhammad says his book ''confirms the Scriptures which came before it'' (5:48), in fact the Messiah is as we have shown with dense-packed scriptures (cf. pp. 768-777 et al. supra), the eternal King irreplaceable, unsucceedable, whose word is final and, if rejected, fatal; and one need only cite words such as Isaiah 9:6-7, 42:1-4, 49:6, 53:11-12, 54:5,10, 55:3-11, Deuteronomy 18:15-18, Daniel 7:13-14, Psalm 72. Not merely is there no successor, this is so because the Son (Psalm 2:5-7) is God (Psalm 45, Isaiah 48:16, Micah 5:1-3), as shown earlier in great detail from many scriptures of which only the Jews were in fact - to use Muhammad's term - 'witnesses'. Successors, declares Christ, are false Christs (Matthew 24:24).
To fortify the contradiction, then: Muhammad wrote material wholly alien to that of the 'apostles' - such on his own admission - who 'went before' him, on the method of salvation, on redemption, on the place of grace and on the work of the Messiah (not really killed, says he - Surah 4:157, despite Daniel 9:25-26, Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, Leviticus 16). To aggravate the impossible, Muhammad has the prior 'apostles' sent by ONE GOD! (Surah 3:40 and 3:21). Should one God send prophets opposed to the very core of Muhammad's words ? Why He gave His 'servants the prophets' among the Jews, such wholly, consistently and persistently clangorous contradiction of Muhammad, the prophet does not manage to attest!
The whole superabundantly attested, textually ancient, intense, immense, detailed racial systematics and salvation dynamics of the interlocking Old and New Testaments (cf. pp. 735-836 supra) are airily dismissed for the infinitely divergent dogmas (cf. Surahs 4,5,9,24 and 48) of the anti-verified Koran. To thunder the point home, God, having disciplined the Jews as Chapter 9 has shown His word predicted He would do, has given them the power He also predicted, abolishing the pretences of the Koran to its very face (cf. pp. 814, 830-834, 989 supra). Of a certainty, the Jews had less than no reason to add the scriptures on the Messiah, whom they murdered, but rather honestly retained them in fear. (See also *4 infra.)
The Koran is not merely unverified, but anti-verified and this with a divine mirth as God's predictive word ploughs through the field of history with the majestic insouciance of a tank in an agricultural field (cf. Psalm 2:8-12, Jeremiah 23:29; and Psalm 111:7-8, Isaiah 59:21 and p. 564 supra). See also pp. 1176-1186C infra for treatment of Joshua as an instrument of theocratic MORAL judgment, not contrary to the love or liberty God gives. Christ categorically did not subject physically, do violence at all to remedy unbelief. Truly He upbraided morally, cleansed, lamented (Matthew 23:37, Luke 19:42) and was subjected. Faith and force have divorce.
For further in this field, see for example *1A of Ch. 6, earlier in this volume. On the topic of power, not man's as used against the God of liberty, against man to induce false 'faith', but God's own use of it to help man see, consider SMR pp. 829 - 831. Here we find the testable results of the power of God and the power of Islam, where in conflict, in our modern setting in the Middle East; and so it has been explicitly these more than 60 years. God in this field has done precisely what He said in restoring Israel to its land, sustaining it, bringing against it many foes, delivering it from their hand in highly disproportionate wars in which they nevertheless prevail, and foretelling the trouble this would cause those who (like the Madrid Quartet) trouble themselves to intervene and meddle with Jerusalem on their own terms. He has His own (cf. SMR Ch. 9, Zechariah 12-13, Ezekiel 36-37, SMR Appendix A, It Calls ... Ch. 10).
Examples multiply, but this here suffices in type, in contest.
Hence we have the God of the Bible, of creation and salvation, of verity and verification, of validation and manifestation personally, not contradictory, but coherent in challenge, unvarying in declaration, moving cohesively from beginning to end, now faced with pluses and minuses, assertions and their opposites. Indeed, here is found force in the realm of faith (cf. SMR pp. 50, 62ff., Divine Agenda Ch. 6), and so without ground in terms of the rationale of suffering. Military power took Mecca before Islam did, and the same nearly applied to Europe, but here the force was rebutted. In this way, since it is all was obtained by power forcing itself into the persons and professions of man, if that were from God, then liberty would not be, and the responsibility for suffering would like squarely with one who made things in such a manner. Mercifully this is not so. God never uses force where faith is concerned (John 18:36), and it is hideous in His sight (Matthew 26:52ff.) accordingly, subject for rebuke. It shows an entire lack of understanding (Luke 9:54ff.).
Some then sought to force till the world was nearly overcome by Islam, while others seek IMPOSITION of sharia, and a universal caliphate. By what means ? entreaty ? Conviction ? as formerly ? Is it not then by power that the grace of God is to reach man ? Is it not a matter of warring till only Allah is named, as in the Korah's prescription in combat ? Is there no slightest desire to IMPOSE this religion by means classically so typical of it ? Is the Koran then to be unwritten, and its insistences on fighting in Allah's name for Allah's glory till all contrariness lies low, on subjugation and degradation civilly, for those not receiving it, to be deleted ? What else then!
Some 600 years after Christ, we have then a new Christ with a new message conjoined, a new bulletin, the latest from heaven, a new surge and urge, a deletion of the Cross and its impact (there seems even doubt about the death at all*3), a new god of a different heart, his cause led on by a militant who gives heaven to victors in its martial cause. It is, to be sure, one more case of insurgency, this time not only into fields in this world, but into the Christian faith, so many parts of which without ground, it differentially adopts, and so many others, without ground, it rejects.
For all of these, the method varies, but the result is the same.
This is THE PLUS AND MINUS THEOLOGICAL VACUUM.
Now we come to -
THE CRYPTO-THEOLOGICAL VACUUM
Romanism
This is in ONE Incarnation, ONE atonement ONCE made, by ONE Mediator so that ALL others who by faith freely received His salvation, a gift by His grace, are brothers while He is Master (Hebrews 1, 13:8, 9:12-28, I Timothy 2, Matthew 23:8-10). It is not cryptic, but manifest, in a non-portable Christ, a Headship God shares with nobody, whether in Hinduism or in Romanism. Whether on earth or in heaven, there is one God and one Christ who as one was sinless, born of a virgin, bore sin and is incomparable with any other. His is the jurisdiction, and only by His written word is His will to be done (Mark 7:7ff.), just as Christ did the will of the Father, using the doctrine given to HIM (John 12:48-50, 14:10).
Thus His disciples go, sent by Him, as He by His Father, keeping to His doctrine as He to that of His Father (John 17:17-19, 20:21, 14:21-23). Just as He statedly did not speak of Himself, but the doctrine commanded before He came, so His disciples do not speak of themselves, but of the doctrine given in accord with the word of God, to the apostles and those with them and received by them, as Paul was (Galatians 1-2, II Peter 3:15-16). This applied to one and to all, and no one was given unique power to forgive sins (John 20:23) nor were even all (Galatians 1) free to determine the METHOD of so doing and the BASIS for so doing, freely proclaimed in Galatians without movability in any regard (Galatians 1:6-9, 1-5).
Rigorous power to denounce wolves was given (II Corinthians 10:5ff.), but even this only in terms of what was donated TO them, which had to abide in them (John 15:1-7), not like a child to be brought up, but as the word of God (I Peter 1:10-22, I Cor. 2:9-13), so that just as Christ is the ONLY foundation (I Cor. 3:10-11), so this is the sanctified word of God, incomparable, touched only by the illicit but applied by the faithful (John 17:17), inextensible except by proud tradition, useful for its annulment but not for its deployment.
The Gospel as it had been preached by Paul, was the ONLY ONE. It was incapable of any change, and anyone, whether angel or the apostle himself - far less any lesser model who might proclaim himself or be proclaimed (Galatians 1:6-9) is here proclaimed accursed! The apostle being thus liable, were he himself to preach any other Gospel than that which he then had preached, even he who inhabited the counsel of the apostles, how much more would there be defilement in anyone later, not found in that initial proclamatory body, even to the point of being accursed. Even so would Paul himself have been, had he then made any change in it! The "THINGS" of which the book of Revelation speak may NOT be added too on supreme pains (Revelation 22:18-19), and these have a vast and central coverage.
Christ did not change; nor was there any addition to His message, point, purpose and program. It was a deity-definitive coming protected from inventive hands from the first. What God has given, let no man put asunder for assertions, pull apart for the introduction of novelties, far less create new christs with new portability (as early attempted - II Corinthians 11). Such is the concept in a repetitive sacrifice at mass, as if the real Christ had committed suicide at the Passover time, by breaking a real body into pieces, which was statedly and on the contrary, for a given purpose: that of remembrance. Such a profound addition not only sacrifices the purpose stated for the Supper, but makes a sacrifice out of it, contrary to reason and revelation, purpose as stated and definition of deity.
Thus the mass is a distortion, as falsely intrusive into the crucifixion, instead of remembrance of it, a thing forbidden, an augmentative addition and a transformative one, a counter-scriptural assertion, a crypto-christ, a bloodless sacrifice when only through blood sacrifice is remission (Hebrews 9:22-28); and it is one without suffering whereas only one with it, is authentic (Hebrews 9:24-28)*3A. So likewise is the authority of the papacy the work of a crypto-christ, since ANY such elevation is expressly forbidden (Matthew 23:8-10), so to differentiate one from the brethren, and this in the very field of teaching and authority. To have such a post, one has to BE CHRIST, JESUS CHRIST, GOD INCARNATE. Otherwise, one is but part of "the brethren" as determined by Jesus Himself. It is in His word, one or the other.
Is then the pope sinless, is He from heaven in all ages, eternal, is he the ONLY begotten Son of God ? If not, his place is Bible-controverting imposture. In his own interest at any time, it is in his own interest to avoid such a post.
This system is not catholic, it is of Rome, where the Emperor resided, where the former religion had its own high priest; so that it is indeed Roman, but not Catholic, nor can it be. We find in this inventive religion, that there is likewise a power for the succour and salvation of sinners vested in Mary guised as the only hope of sinners3 which, since none can forgive sin but God only (Mark 2), is a crypto-potency. There is NO Saviour but God (Acts 3:11-12, Isaiah 43:10-11). To act in this capacity is to become vested with a power exclusively that of deity, and hence becomes idolatry. Such power in Romanism, it is alleged, but hidden; it is asserted, but unbidden.
Thus there is a crypto-christ, a crypto-hope and a crypto-sacrifice, not to mention a new Peter, chief of the apostles, whereas James was in charge as in Acts 15, Paul rebuked him in a cardinal and doctrinal manner (Galatians 2:11ff.), his name is divergent from the foundation name, he being petros, stone, and the foundation being petra, rock, a much more rocky matter! (the ONLY spiritual rock, Psalm 62:1-2, 18:31, II Samuel 22:31-33, Isaiah 28:16,43:10-11, Acts 4:11-12, being God the Saviour Himself, the Christ, belief in whom brings the sinner home!).
Indeed, Peter made the fundamental error of trying to correct Christ at the very point of His moving towards the cross (Matthew 16:21-23), a move Christ attributed directly to Satan. As to that same cross mission, which Christ fulfilled (Hebrews 9:12-28, 10:10-14), of this Paul says, God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ ... As a central part of the plan of salvation of God (Matthew 21:21-23), this is the most untouchable for mutation, the most express for information.
There was a far meeker place for the Peter. To be sure he was a valued apostle, but no head, and had he so acted, we see how far astray he could have gone. Certainly, he did use the keys, being given involved in three important procedural initiatives. It was not as if he could create doctrine, dogma or save sinners, for which there is precisely ONE NAME (Acts 4:11-12), earned by DOING what was required to cover them, that of Jesus Christ. Still, AS an apostle, in the way given for this particular sort of member of Christ's body, he following out the commands of Christ on three occasions. Thus with others, he made his own thrust from God, as John his, and Paul his, all as called and as brethren. There was no two-headed or three-headed or four-headed monster, but there is but one over the undeformed body of Christ. All His people are brethren, members of the body, some apostles, some healers, all in this totally subordinate position, whether the gift seem great or small, and indeed Paul was used to make it clear that even the small gift can have an important place Romans 12, I Corinthians 12, Ephesians 1:22-23).
These last two verses tell us, indeed, that God has put all things under Christ's feet, and it is a very different thing to be under someone's feet and to share headship with him! He is in fact head over ALL THINGS to the Church; there is no sharing or paring or comparing whatsoever in ANY thing. It is Head over the body, in such exalted place over it, as God (John 8:58), that the Church is "the fulness of Him who is ALL IN ALL."
Peter, by absolute contrast, had his place in the body as an apostle who would extend the application of the Gospel, as part of the team of those in that position, and this is the case, neither more nor less. Nor was he someone else, any more than Jesus the Christ was. Each has his own small corner, and no part is to exalt itself, in His body, above any other. Indeed Paul is used to scorn such a misconstruction, in two ways. "If," he is inspired to declare, "the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing ?" There is no exaltation between God and man. Indeed there is not even any exaltation among men: "And on those members of the body which we think to be less honourable, on these we bestow greater honour..." There is no dominion in the kingdom of heaven but that of Christ (Matthew 20:25-28).
Even at that, in the particular sphere of service in which He was chosen to act, Peter went with John to confirm the work of Phillip in Samaria. Even so, they were SENT to so act. Both of them extended this phase of the application, with him laying on hands, thus opening the testimony formally to the often hostile Samaritans. Again, Peter was used in biblical revelation in II Peter, to confirm Paul's writings as scripture (II Peter 3:16) and was formally confirmed no less as apostle to the Jews as Paul to the Gentiles (Galatians 2:7). In the first case, John acted with him, and in the third, other apostles confirmed the thing (Galatians 2:8), so that in the second case, it was already a matter of joint acceptance as an apostle.
Still Peter did make a speech at Pentecost, and he did have a place, not of pre-eminence by any means, but of resourceful love and grace. With John, he bore something of the brunt of the hate and harrowing of priestly officialdom (Acts 4:5-20), and they jointly confronted them roundly, as again with other apostles, they are seen in Acts 5 jointly confronting those who confronted them, indicating that they could work it out for themselves whether it was right for them to obey God rather than man, So spoke Peter and the other apostles, as earlier Peter and John jointly taken, following Peter's accusation, jointly made their confrontation (Acts 4:8-20).
Peter's key role was a role with the keys, but only as a member of the body, whose members had many key roles, as did Thomas and Paul and Phillip. Chosen for robustness, Peter did not receive a translation to forbidden areas, nor did he show the least tendency to do so (I Peter 5:1-4), in fact, in the most delicious way, giving charge to pastors that they should not be "lords over those entrusted to you, but ... examples to the flock." In this, did he exhort them as ruler or authority in particular ? So far from the truth is this that in fact, he showed his basis by starting thus: "The elders who are among you I exhort, I who am a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Chist, and also a partake of the glory that will be revealed, shepherd the flock..." As to this glory, it is precisely this of which he speaks as the allotment to ALL believers in Christ, recipients of free grace through His blood, in I Peter 1:5-8, in the most exalted terms, not at all for, from or of himself, but of THEIR being one and all, with this wonderful destiny.
Setting the Church on the foundation of Peter therefore is as abominably distorting as it is to set hope in Mary or a body in mass, physically present, or a papal primacy. Such steps as these make a new religion with MULTIPLE powers for redemption, hope, authority on earth, and multiple sacrifices, of no effectuality, for only one has efficacy, that with both suffering and blood, as Hebrews affirms. As to blood, Christ died once, not often, as Hebrews indicates, and so suffered once, not often, as it likewise declares; so that just as man dies once, and after this the judgment, so did He once, and after that His saving task in bearing sin is complete. Application is by the Gospel, through the power of the Holy Spirit (John 16); implication like declaration is one of singularity in all things.
Here once more, and again in a different way, in Romanism, is a moulding of biblical Christianity into a different religion (cf. SMR pp. 1032 - 1088H), with multiplicity where there is decisive singularity, for indeed other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid which is Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 3:10-11), and there is no other name given under heaven to man but this one! Thus is Catholicism in Christianity grabbed at, and the universal Gospel and singular Head, infinitely above man and all men, present only as the incarnate deity personally, is subjected to schism. Blessed are those who heed the word of God as in the other cases, and rest only in Him, God as man, inimitable, unrepeatable, incomparable, only Head of the only body which is His, redeemed by necessity, subject for admission by repentance (Luke 13:1-3), so that all become then brethren with one Master, the God who became man that might through Him alone should go to God (I Timothy 2 cf. A Question of Gifts 2 as marked and SMR pp. 911ff.).
In absolute and invariant contrast with all of the above cases, we have
THE UNDYING DECLARATIONS OF DEITY
The word of God
Written, and the Word of God Smitten
Resurrected, Realised and Applied
Did the Church die for you, did it rise for you ? asked Professor John Murray of Westminster Theological Seminary, when I was there a student, and someone asked him to comment on Romanism.
The point is well taken. He obtained eternal redemption through His own blood, entering the holy of holies, a sole, sufficient, effectual, personally given sacrifice gaining pardon and new placement from the guilt and liability of sin.
"But Christ came a high priest of good things to come,
by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands,
that is to say, not of this building; "Not with the blood of goats and calves,
but by his own blood He entered once into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us."For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of a heifer,
sprinkling the unclean,
sanctifies to the purifying of the flesh,
how much more shall the blood of Christ,
who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God,
purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?"(Hebrews 9:11ff., bold added).
There is not only this singularity of Christ's action, effectuality, in having gained not only redemption but eternal redemption (as in Hebrews 10:10-14), but in that He, being God, did it, being received this startling monolithic mission, we find from Hebrews that this is the REASON why this singularity has such effect for such a multiplicity of sinners (as in Romans 5:15-18).
Indeed, it proceeds:
"And for this cause He is the mediator of the new testament,
that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions
those who were under the first testament,
they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance."
Here we find that this is the CAUSE of His being mediator of the New Testament. It is that by means of death He redeemed, He being uniquely the Son of God, begotten of a virgin, the express image of the living God (Hebrews 1); and this is the reason why it works. It is not anything. It is death. It is not any death. It is His own. It is not some survey of it, for it is the death itself which He performed in Himself; for as He declared of His life, "I lay it down of Myself," for no man would take it from Him. It was an entirely personal, non-extensive, uniquely performed, solitary act, and for this reason HE is the redeemer. There neither is nor could be any other Redeemer, and there neither is nor could be any other God, and there neither is nor eve could be any other Gospel, and there is no other way but that prescribed by God, authenticated, verified, confirmed continually and formally, which brings you back to God.
God is not interested in man persuading Him to make up something; He is concerned for man to find from Himself the place for pardon of what has been wrought against Him (Galatians 1:9). We have not reached the point where God is subject to man; His death was a divine performance, prophetically intimated*, executed, glorious in depth, wonderful in love; but never confuse it with the confusions of man who make up gods and paths and ideas. By all means do so, but NEVER in respect to God. As He says, I am who I am.
ONE God, with ONE redemption in ONE way obtained, when in ONE time in history, as ONCE told in Daniel as noted, in ONE plan of salvation (Romans 5, 8, Galatians, Ephesians), which given ONCE (Galatians 1) is NOT to be varied AT ALL, has shown His ONE mind and ONE will in the application of it all, as in the formulation and implementation.
It is not vague; there are not many avatars or mediators as in Romanism; there is no other lurking goddish thing in matter, or elsewhere, nor are opposites apposite to one.
This one God has often spoken, but once in authoritative formulation for man, not as a scatter-brain or loose liver. Rather as the brilliant and precise writer of DNA, to make life the sophisticated, programmatic underlying marvel that it is, for the various types of creation He made, whether these be creations with mind or spirit or not, He is also the brilliant and precise former of His written word to mankind (Titus 2, 3, Matthew 5:17-20, II Timothy 3:16, I Peter 1:10ff., II Peter 1:19ff., Revelation 22, Isaiah 34, 57), by which man must live as to direction and knowledge (Matthew 4:4), as through the Spirit also He is given sanctification that one may both understand and apply it (John 16:8ff., Colossians 1:19ff.), and indeed be guided in the way (Ephesians 3:16, Acts 16).
He has left nothing undone, and it is all finished, except the outcomes in judgment, the dismissal of the earth after His millenial rule, itself following the resurrection of those who have received His free offer and wisdom, knowledge and understanding, yes His very salvation and redemption.
There is nothing more to come, but the conclusion. TO be sure, Israel has yet to have it vast repentance as in Zechariah 12:10-13:1 and Romans 11, as we have considered earlier, but this is an application. The ground is set. The creation is finished; the new creation has its bases finished; the Gospel has its payment complete; the word of God has its issuance finalised, the faith has its base and basis exposed. There is nothing more, but outcomes. There is no other way, but alien incomes.
There is the divine option: theological understanding from the Bible, given by God, verified, validated and attested, confirmed in Christ and applied through Him by His Spirit, or theological vacuity, available in a variety of ways. These, though it has not been the major topic here, are equally available more directly, by rejecting Christ quite simply, ignoring Him quite categorically, chumming up with the world and forgetting the little issues of where you came from, why, how and where you are going to, and why and how, and for what reason, and what is your significance and why do you find it in so much so readily, if you cannot even find it in yourself, of yourself, which makes all these findings, as if an unknown new these things!
If such irrationality appeals, why not try it in your profession, and see how it goes there.
NOTES
EXCURSION:
THE ROARING SILENCE THAT DOES NOT SILENCE GOD
It is in the utmost degree interesting to find the great similarities between the 'roaring silence' of the Tibetan Buddhist beliefs, one which has been spread from various sources over time, and is very close to that of the Persian jurist
Jalaluddin Rumi, who said this:
Why are you so afraid of silence,
silence is the root of everything.
If you spiral into its void,
a hundred voices will thunder messages you long to hear.
Another citation:
A Great Silence overcomes me,
and I wonder why I ever thought to use language.
There is that escape hatch by which words are not good enough, pertinent enough, are to be dispensed with, so that what is THEREFORE not subject to rational analysis and conceptualisation, may dominate in secret. It is a great trick of Satan, to leave one so superbly superior that one can dispense with words, while getting an understanding which, could it be put into words, would remove the incognito aspect of the ultimate, so that you are left bereft.
In SMR pp. 996, this is extended:
Trusting in a 'state of consciousness' of ancient purveyors who saw things 'clearly', as it is felt, they represent merely an odyssey of gods that are no God and a philosophising towards the allegedly 'unknowable' basis of all things, which, as with all such attempts, successfully ensures no logical validity to their declaration, rendering the religion not merely bankrupt, but disbanded and dispersed relative to any positive relation to the truth. (See Chapter 3 supra.)
With the 'unknowable' also inarticulate to man (cf. pp. 43 ff., 88-89 supra), the Hindu religion founders not least on its own inability to know even this, from any basis which could grant validity to such defining prowess about this unknowable; and it falls just where Kant did (cf. pp. 424 ff. supra, and my Predestination And Freewill ... Appendix on Kant).
What cannot be conceived, continues unable to be conceived, and is not available for discussion. It is in fact always marvellous just how much can be said about what statedly 'cannot be known'! After all, the Taitinya Upanishad, as cited by McDowell and Stewart in their Understanding the Non-Christian Religions, p. 23, has this to say:
Brahman is he whom speech cannot express, and from whom the mind, unable to find him, comes away baffled.
Concerning Brahman, they also cite the 'sage' Yajnavalkya: It is
... without anything inside or outside.
Vos, op.cit., p. 34, on the Upanishads connotes the answer to the query as there given: What is reality ? 'The answer given to these questions is that the... reality is... Brahma... regarded as impersonal... self-existent, infinite, omnipresent... The possibility of absorption' into what is called Brahman is regarded as an auspicious one.
We noted how marvellous it is what can be said about what is not known (a fortiori about what 'cannot' be known). It is more marvellous what can be said on the basis of what cannot be known: about what really is... ! For example, what shall be said of all the above divulgements on Brahman ? It has this or that potential relative to absorption, incorporates these and those persons, things, is self-existent. Why we are highly informed in completely articulated categories! All this, when you come to think about it, is an astonishingly clear-cut structure of intellectual concepts: which thing at once violates the pretensions of unknowability.
You find this sort of thing in Hinduism, and indeed wherever authoritative religion based on revealed truth is being 'explained' or suppressed or subverted or replaced, with or without admission of this, such ideas are an answer to the answerable: a sort of conjuror's trick, in logical terms.
HOW on earth can you conceive of the basis of all things by not even having conceptions. How can you avoid conceptions unless the entire charter of intellect is to be replaced, with its logic to test, its data to invest, its exhibits to digest ? The confusion appears not only to lead to catastrophic self-contradictions, where the silence is productive through the inconceivable of understanding, but to amazing amounts of knowledge.
In effect, these emanations from Hinduism, which wants to capture the ALL in ONE, cannot do it since for this you cannot just have the inconceivable, since this is not in the mind at all, and has no explanation of anything accordingly. Indeed, since the mind is the very instrument for propounding these ideas, to bypass it is to become immersed in antinomy. The power of the mind finds that the mind is irrelevant, in the first place: for these things involve CATEGORIES and CONCEPTIONS, even to STATE! The assurance of the finding is the omission of the thing that brings you to see this need ? It is incoherent. Confidence in the inexpressible has emotional overtones; but of logical force it has none.
It is one thing to find elements of mystery in a thing, system, target and so on; but it is quite another that it BE of that nature and escape intellection.
The point of course is very simple; for it is impossible to have any 'one' which incorporates the good and the evil, the beautiful and the odious, the courageous and the whining, the majesty and the gross and horrendous offscouring. This is merely an exercise in self-contradiction, as if one were turning from synonyms to antonyms. The 'solution' only makes the problem worse.
Thus there HAS to be silence and an absence of any feature in such a conglomeration disguised as unity: for NOTHING could be SAID by definition. This allows anything to be said, as in any revolution, where voices of this and that come from the 'great silence' in vociferous terms, now demanding this unthought desire, now propounding that elemental passion. The principle is not dissimilar.
Get rid of authority and you are all authority, and anything any one or group does, bids fair to become THE authority, always without authority, except in this, that it seizes power or platform and TELLS YOU.
Obama's work at the political level and at times the moral level, has something in common with this; but not so much philosophically as practically. Thus, in some cases, ALL are included, whether what is biblically described as perversion or more interested in the human race as a result of reproduction by natural means, whether it be any extreme this way or that. ALL he endorses. Does a President have to do this ? Of course not, for otherwise one would have to capitulate as a man before taking such high political office. If people do not want the perspective and morality which you clearly endorse BEFORE election, they do not need to vote for you. If you want to represent a people democratically, you may do so, they choosing you as having a STATED political platform and STATED personal beliefs, morals and perspective. You can be fair to all, in not favouring some people, but you will properly be in principle moving in what you believe as to morals and religious liberty and fellowship, what is best for the country, to the utmost of your ability.
You cannot be all to all, except in seeking as in Christianity, WITHIN loyalty and devotion to Christ, to avoid NEEDLESS conflicts, if they simply require your own discomfort. What you stand for, however, you may be expected to provide in the manner of your thinking, the quality of your doing and the principles behind your actions, lest you lead them to their own peril, as a blind leader of the blind. Lead them on the path of all things ?
How can you ? When things are diametrically opposed, endorsement of both is either ignorance or toleration of anything.
It may sound tolerant, inclusivist and trustworthy to the uncritical mind. However, in the end, there HAS to be a code of right and wrong. If it is right to tolerate all these things, then it is wrong NOT to so tolerate; and then you move, in the normal fashion, to becoming intolerant of what considers this or that right or wrong, depending on relative forces, mouthings and interests of various kinds. ALL these approaches, including the pseudo-non-judgmental, end up in the same place: THIS is right and THAT is wrong.
It is impossible to have no standards or to include all either politically or religiously. What is right defines what is wrong significantly; and where it is wrong to have anything wrong, then you still cannot escape wrong. This is an analytical self-contradiction.
The result becomes merely an unprincipled holocaust of morals. Into this street scamble of confusion, habitually pour disciplines and directions because of need and climax or disaster; and without basis, people becoming accustomed to this, tend to become a law to themselves. This is precisely what has begun to happen in Britain in August 2011. Then irrational rushes from the libido of life come rushing to the surface, and liberty because not only lost, but put to the shredder; confused and imperious, seeks to fly where no place is. To the extent the situation remains undefined amid catastrophe, the greater is the opportunity for confusion and listlessness, as when France was invaded in World War II. Certainly, some separated off as resistance; but what of the main stream of the nation! What force did its Navy actually use, and what style of collaboration occurred in the shadows of a moral vacuum ?
Similarly, at the more strictly religious level, where a profusion of confusion arises, just as in Hinduism, or confusion barrenness because of sudden exit of all, without regard to base or basis, there is this failure to reach the Creator in any designating sense, so that your thoughts are readily found tending to float about on a sea of mystic revelations (cf. SMR pp. 867ff.). This is often made to look more mellow, by being conceived as concerning what is basically inconceivable, without characteristics. That is indistinguishable from nothing, for the moment you propose ANY aspect, it is not permitted. Taking all in one, you have none. This trend was something doubtless having its effect on reformist Buddha, who wanted not ONE as all (too many gods and bits), but ALL as one, declining words with some care, about the ultimate. What is there to say about what logically, on this model, is not there; and for want of which, the model itself descends into the merely irrational in kind, partial in action and negative in basis.
In his case and for his system, the 'roaring silence' outcome is natural enough, since there is in this case no distinction from atheism, and since much is said, it has to confront silence with a roar, with no divine source, and no rational ground. Envisaged is this compendium of all things packed together, irrationally uninhibited by dangers of clash of ideas, into a oneness. It appears an illusory affirmation in which you seek to pick your way through a labyrinthine series of dangers and difficulties, not allowing yourself to be sidetracked by any one thing, since THE ONE is all, and thus with this, one has to keep walking on till it is all no more a trouble, into some blessed state which since ALL is one, has no characteristics at all, but this, that at last it is OVER.
This appears to be the direction of flow. Roaring silence then becomes what might in one approach be put distinctively, as in the tangential words of Inayat Khan, a thinker indebted to the philosophical Vedanta/Shankara spirituality of Hinduism.
And here are a few quotations from Hazrat Inayat Khan:
In everyday life we are confronted with a thousand troubles that we are not always evolved enough to meet, and then only silence can help us. For if there is any religion, if there is any practice of religion, it is to have regard for the pleasure of God by regarding the pleasure of man. The essence of religion is to understand. And this religion we cannot live without having power over the word, without having realized the power of silence. There are so very many occasions when we repent after hurting friends, which could have been avoided if there had been control over our words. Silence is the shield of the ignorant and the protection of the wise. For the ignorant does not prove his ignorance if he keeps silent, and the wise man does not throw pearls before swine if he knows the worth of silence.
What gives power over words? What gives the power that can be attained by silence? The answer is: it is will power which gives the control over words; it is silence which gives one the power of silence. It is restlessness when a person speaks too much. The more words are used to express an idea, the less powerful they become. It is a great pity that man so often thinks of saving pennies and never thinks of sparing words. It is like saving pebbles and throwing away pearls. An Indian poet says, 'Pearl-shell, what gives you your precious contents? Silence; for years my lips were closed.'
For a moment it is a struggle with oneself; it is controlling an impulse; but afterwards the same thing becomes a power.
from Volume IV, Mental Purification, Silence
Notice that he is indebted to Hinduism, but in fact he moved on to something in line with it, self-developed. The stress on having power over words, here practically applied prudentially, is in silence, and that is of course merely an abdication from mind, such as Hinduism leads to, and Buddhism implies in its roaring silence and no-qualities background in Brahmin. Thus the conception is applied practically and becomes a buffer for ignorance and a ground for non-thought.
In all simplicity, words express truth, and they define or outline it. If you do not know, then they do not help. If you do know, then you had better KNOW what you are talking about, or you might be found wrong very quickly. When you talk about God, there are two obvious dangers. One is to speak without knowledge and attribute your thoughts to Him, a folly Proverbs 30:6 warns against. The other is NOT to use your mind to find the obvious foundational facts about Him, as Paul indicates in Romans 1:17ff.. This can be because you do not WANT them.
If you start on a model which defies logic, then irrational is your religion, unless you become inconsistent,. Then, however, this is merely a confused message. If ONE is all, as in Buddhism, then the obvious collisions of concepts and contradictions in terms, are illimitable. If ALL is one, then the silence is golden, since it is obviously not so, but multiplicitous, were it able to speak. If you want to get to the UNDERLYING oneness, then you cannot distil from the multiplicity of natural things anything that is one. You might talk of law or order, but then you can get war and disorder. In the end, there is, in all this, a ONE which is all in systems and laws and breaches and beauty and guilt and exculpations and inculpations and a not so merry-go-round of kaleisoscopic nothingness. Of this, indeed, NOTHING may be said since there are no qualities to such a jumble of mutually exclusions.
The silence might roar with distaste, if it were able, at trying to be understood when God is missing, the God of truth, who made man and made his mind able to understand and draw near to reality, observe the laws of evidence and logic and discover what is available, looking where it is to be found. This is not wrought as by some compression, with silence a golden substitute for truth, which cannot in this model be found. To confuse self-contradiction further, truth is not around, but it is still able to be freely uttered, and differentiated from other religions!
As to the Creator, however, from whom the diversity of things, the will and spirit of man most active, often wrongly, comes as creation, and not as export of Himself, in a way of which we are all by experience very well aware, He is as articulate as He is competent with others forms of speech, such as the code-language in which our bodies are built. While His works speak of His capacities, and the liberties given to man to conform or deform are profound, there is considerable scope for diversification of His products. This includes that liberty to love or to hate HIM, ourselves, world, culture, civilisation, race or anything else. Morally and spiritually we are given an immense squadron of flying aircraft, to soar and to zoom up above and down into the midst of things; and for this, we are accountable. Creation, not being God, but delimited and contained, controlled in its structure, and given spheres of operation when it is living, has not only a cause in the Eternal God of all competence, but in much also, a moral and spiritual freedom to such an extent that it is awesome to man, hideously misused by many, and with effrontery deployed for assault on the divine, by a large number.
Mangled mankind, the contemporary specialty in the fields and cities of many a nation, is just the same outlet, where pure defence is not the issue, for misrepresentation of God, as if the Maker of speech such as impels the earth, could be dumb, and not we ourselves, when we seek by articulated thoughts to express such a delusion. God is and the cause in eternity, He being always there, for what has temporality, a passing opportunity on this earth; and and to evacuate Him leaves nothing as the sole basis for everything, life and death, war and peace, knowledge and ignorance, being and oblivion, which is mere childish delusion. If what is ADEQUATE for all to come were not always there, but nothing, then nothing would be the outcome, but it is not. SINCE what is there must always be adequate, there being no other resource from which to borrow, then the result is called creation, which is not adequate in itself, being incapable of its own creation, but a mere production without whose eternity, there COULD be no temporality.
Silence! there is much to be said, and it is said, but often unheeded, as God is either ignored, evacuated or inculcated by comic confusion, which ignores what brought things to be, and tries to make them make themselves before they were, or else simply invents them by irrationality in an intemperate break-down of mind altogether, the very opposite of science.
God MAY be ignored, but rationally, He is required, and operationally, He is verified in His word and in Jesus Christ, the Saviour for such a world as this (John 3:15ff.).
This solves the silence need and the silence logical impasse, of which it is merely one symptom. There is no need to be silent about the empirical, the logically assured and the results of thinking rationally to its end. When as in SMR, this reached, then the realities (cf. pp. 50ff.) become intensively clear and challenging, and all the profuse "great swelling words of emptiness" of many religions (II Peter 2:18), come back to a A FORCED MARCH INTO VACANCY. These often appear as foolish attempts to crystallise God into His creation, or into this or that fragment of philosophy, an object of the mind, and not of the necessities which His works impel, and our logic requires. It is indeed wonderful what reason, pursued, requires, the very reason God has given us, only in God is it satisfied as in SMR, TMR.
The beauty and the peace of it is that we CAN think of these things, that they DO lead to the Bible as shown in SMR, and that this does in turn lead to a consistent, eminently empirical, testable result valid in every detail (cf. Deity and Design ... and Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ, Who Answers Riddles, and Where He is, Darkness Departs). Thus avoided are both irrationality and invalidity, each in its place.
This also allows the logic with which we wish to STYLISE a model, to continue, without becoming an exile from the very realm it has, in the first place, designated.
Thus, when you follow logic to its basis and the empirical world with logic to its necessary basis, then you find the Bible and this reveals God and verifies it in myriads of intended testabilities, while retaining a validity which no other religion can have. If you CANNOT be tested, how is this to be a proposition for anything but the mindless, which is merely to throw away the criteria for accepting and rejecting in the first place. If mind is useless, why set up a proposition from mind to that effect! If it were useless, so would your idea that it is useless, likewise be.
Circles are for the straying, as when someone wanders roundabout in the hot and blinding deserts, with sand blowing acridly in the face. Direct lines of thought, on the other hand, have their results. These may be followed with discipline to reach the objective gift of God in the Bible, as when one moves to a distant gleam, only to find an oasis, and testing this, that the water is good and meets the need: here a logical one, not to say moral and spiritual as well.
If you look for truth which shatters not your ideals but your ideas, then you look here not in vain. Here some may be accepted, some rejected; but the basis of your rational search is rationally assessable; and while it is by no means the product of it, it is the confirmation of what is found, the Bible, which then confirms itself with that mutually of coherent operations which is so central in truth. Just as scientific laws, when correct, are not MADE by scientists or others, but FOUND by them, with their conceptual and mathematical formulations inbuilt and intrinsic, gifted to them which do not make them themselves, but merely operate in this manner; so the law of God found where His word is, does not make itself. It does however, being the word of God, make trouble for those who want to make hay while the sun shines, with illicit liberties in thought, life or religion, and ignoring reality, make their own, which is merely a prescription for delusion. Shun rational basis and this is what you get.
Delusions can have different KINDS of pride to animate them, and make the culturally more or less acceptable; but culture is merely what man is doing, and that is by no means a criterion for anything! (cf. II Thessalonians 2:8-10).
Does one then know all about God ? No: but you DO know what He tells you (cf. Barbs 6 -7) and this with coherent and unique verification and validation. Further, while you know only so much about God by logic, by this confirmation you find out much more by discovering what He has said to mankind; and thus all you have need of in order to find the way to be both reconciled to Him and aware of Him inwardly, not as silence but as Speaker, who has not left man in a vain philosophical/moral/religious sea of words, but spoke to His own.
The context of the citation from SMR p. 996 can now be extended.
As Vos puts it in his Christian Introduction to the Religions of the World, p. 37:
Amongst other things, HINDUISM is lacking in:
i. A belief in a personal, almighty God, creator and ruler of all things, who is himself distinct from the universe.
ii. A belief in the doctrine of creation, which is basic to any true understanding of the universe.
Trusting in a 'state of consciousness' of ancient purveyors who saw things 'clearly', as it is felt, they represent merely an odyssey of gods that are no God and a philosophising towards the allegedly 'unknowable' basis of all things, which, as with all such attempts, successfully ensures no logical validity to their declaration, rendering the religion not merely bankrupt, but disbanded and dispersed relative to any positive relation to the truth. (See Chapter 3 supra.)
With the 'unknowable' also inarticulate to man (cf. pp. 43 ff., 88-89 supra), the Hindu religion founders not least on its own inability to know even this, from any basis which could grant validity to such defining prowess about this unknowable; and it falls just where Kant did (cf. pp. 424 ff. supra, and my Predestination And Freewill ... Appendix on Kant).
What cannot be conceived, continues unable to be conceived, and is not available for discussion. It is in fact always marvellous just how much can be said about what statedly 'cannot be known'! After all, the Taitinya Upanishad, as cited by McDowell and Stewart in their Understanding the Non-Christian Religions, p. 23, has this to say:
Brahman is he whom speech cannot express, and from whom the mind, unable to find him, comes away baffled.
Concerning Brahman, they also cite the 'sage' Yajnavalkya: It is
... without anything inside or outside.
Vos, op.cit., p. 34, on the Upanishads connotes the answer to the query as there given: What is reality ? 'The answer given to these questions is that the... reality is... Brahma... regarded as impersonal... self-existent, infinite, omnipresent... The possibility of absorption' into what is called Brahman is regarded as an auspicious one.
We noted how marvellous it is what can be said about what is not known (a fortiori about what 'cannot' be known). It is more marvellous what can be said on the basis of what cannot be known: about what really is... ! For example, what shall be said of all the above divulgements on Brahman ? It has this or that potential relative to absorption, incorporates these and those persons, things, is self-existent. Why we are highly informed in completely articulated categories! All this, when you come to think about it, is an astonishingly clear-cut structure of intellectual concepts: which thing at once violates the pretensions of unknowability.
You cannot have it both ways. (See also Extension 1, Buddhism, The Clashing Clangour of Contradiction. Alas that intended 'correction' appears possibly worse than the sickness it addresses, 'doctor' and 'patient' religions awry and amiss.)
On this, see Dancers, Prancers, Lancers and Answers Ch. 3, *1A
See SMR pp. 1086-1088D. The last supper was for remembrance by Christ's express designation of its purpose (Luke 22:19). The liberty to add to the word of God is nil (Proverbs 30:6, Mark 7:7ff.), its results readily amounting to nullification, as Christ declared.
In the last Supper, there is no reference to a transformative bit of bread, which if broken would require suicide since Christ was a man like ourselves, yet without sin (Romans 8, Hebrews 2) as a very part of the incarnation and its purpose.
It is to the contrary, statedly a remembrance of the transformational Christ. It is in Him, resurrected, that One becomes a new creation. It is in memory of His work on the cross and all that sent as categorically with it, which opens the door freely for all and for all time, for this free gift of eternal life for any who so receives Him, until judgment. Transforming the remembrance function of the Supper, to something very different, adds to His purpose, distorts it, exalts what He did not suffer, and hence demeans what He did, contradicts the scriptures on repetitious formal sacrifice, and the nature of the sacrifice of blood and suffering, by which alone is sin to be covered (Hebrews 9:22), making Mass futile as well as a transcendental assault on the work of Jesus Christ.
Indeed, the offering of Himself often is expressly negated by Hebrews 9:25, and were it even so, then Hebrews 9 declares that He would have had to suffer often. and as Hebrews 9:22 states, there would have to be blood. Nor is this all the contradiction to mass. As to anyone else presuming to offer Him, a fleeced and denuded offering without blood or suffering, contrary to the biblical definition of efficacy and reality, and the purpose of the Supper, all three: His own word again excludes such intervention of flesh, as He declared that no man was taking His life from Him, but that He lay it down of Himself (John 10:18).
In so doing, He had power to take it up again, which no one else possesses, the duo of death and resurrection a seamless robe of His righteousness, in the sole hands of the Redeemer. The life which He lay down, in accord with the command of His Father (John 10:14-18), of Himself, in holy affinity and infinite harmony with His Father, He did Himself, without agency or additive; and the life which He took up again, this also He did, also by command of His Father. To interfere in this trinitarian triumph and intimacy is a polluting passion, unworthy of Him who alone IS worthy, an invasion into a command, a defilement of the purpose of God as stated both for Christ and for the Supper!
Hebrews 9:23 tells us it was necessary that the copies of the things in the heavens should be purged and then how they were purged in a non-repeatable, utterly effectual sacrificial offering, by whom it was made, with what accompaniments of blood and sacrifice, by what Person and for what reason, while Hebrews 10:10-14 declares that by this one offering once and for all, those who are His are made holy, and the coverage is completed. The thing is standardised functionally from above, effectualised in one offering, the results perfected in this, and it is so actualised to meet the divine, supernal specifications. Its purpose is as stated.
The "only hope of sinners" Mariolatry was product of Pope Gregory XV1 - cf. Liguori's The Glories of Mary, pp. 160-170. This "only hope" like "redemptrix", is versus the Bible: Acts 4:12, Titus 2:13-15, John 14:6,9, 10:9,25-28, Hebrews 2:12-18, 9:12-10:39, Isaiah 41:8-14, 44:6, 43:5-14, 53:10-12, 54:5, Hosea 13:4,14, Matthew 12:48-50, John 2:5, I Timothy 2:1-6.
Two attestations follow of this concept. Red colour is to assist recognition of the most relevant sections.
TAKEN FROM THE GLORIES OF MARY
by St. Alphonsus Liguori
Redemptorist Fathers, 1931
with Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur
Published on the Web with Permission
PRAYER TO MARY, REFUGE OF SINNERS 1
According to St. Alphonsus Liguori, St. John Damascene affirmed that Mary is not only the refuge of the innocent, but also the wicked, who implore her protection: "I am a city of refuge of all who fly to me." Alphonsus also attested that St. Bonaventure said of her: "Thou embracest with maternal affection a sinner who is even despised by the whole world, nor dost thou cease thine embrace until thou hast reconciled him with his Judge." Thus, if a sinner has recourse to Mary, the refuge of sinners, not only does she not despise him, but embraces him with affection and does not leave him until her Son Jesus Christ, Who is our Judge, has forgiven him:
Since, then, O my Lady, thou art the Refuge of all sinners, thou art my refuge. Thou, who despisest no one who has recourse to thee, despise me not, who recommends myself to thee:
"Refuge of sinners, pray for us.
O Mary, pray for us, and save us."
PRAYER TO MARY, REFUGE OF SINNERS 2:
TO OBTAIN HOLY PERSEVERANCEO Queen of Heaven, I, who was once a miserable slave of Lucifer, now dedicate myself to thee, to be thy servant forever. I offer myself to honor thee during my whole life; do thou accept me, and refuse me not, as I should deserve.
O my Mother, in thee have I placed all my hopes, from thee do I expect every grace. I bless and thank God, Who in His mercy has given me this confidence in thee, which I consider a pledge of my salvation. Alas, miserable wretch that I am, I have hitherto fallen, because I have not had recourse to thee.
Encyclical of Pope Gregory SVI promulgated on 15 August 1832.
From 24. |
That all of this may come to pass prosperously and happily, let Us raise Our eyes and hands to the most holy Virgin Mary, who alone crushes all heresies, and is Our greatest reliance and the whole reason for Our hope.33 May she implore by her patronage a successful outcome for Our plans and actions.
Given in Rome at St. Mary Major, on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, in the year of Our Lord 1832, the second year of Our Pontificate.
Other attestations have been made
(cf. http://www.angelfire.com/la2/prophet1/maryolotry01.html).j
Pope Benedict XV, in 1918 - “Mary suffered with Christ and nearly died with Him when He died, thus she may rightly be said to have redeemed the human race with Christ.”
Fr. Frederick William Faber: “Mary, being altogether transformed into God by grace and by the glory which transforms all the saints into Him, asks nothing, wishes nothing, does nothing contrary to the eternal and immutable will of God.”
Pope Pius XI, in 1923 - “The virgin of sorrows shared the work of redemption with Jesus Christ.”
Opus Sanctorum Angelorum - “she became, in effect, a close relative of the Blessed Trinity when she was crowned Queen of the Universe by her Son.”
Pope Leo XIII, in 1891 - “No one can approach Christ except through His mother.”
The Catechism, in the Sunday Missal (Catholic Catechism) says, “My salvation depends on Mary's mediation and union with Christ, because of her exalted position as Mediatrix of all grace.”
Vatican II, said, “Mary's intercession continues to win for us the gift of eternal salvation.”
Pius IX: “On this hope we chiefly rely, that the most Blessed Virgin who raised the height of merits above all the choirs of Angels to the throne of the Deity, and by the foot of Virtue 'bruised the serpent's head,' and who, being constituted between Christ and His Church, and, being wholly sweet and full of graces... will turn our sorrow into joy. For ye know very well, Ven. Brethren, that the whole of our confidence is placed in the most Holy Virgin, since God has placed in Mary the fullness of all good, that accordingly we may know that if there is any hope in us, if any grace, if any salvation, it redounds to us from her, because such is His will Who hath willed that we should have everything through Mary.”
See: The Bountiful, the Accountable and the Surmountable Ch. 6 and Epilogue, Joyful Jottings 22-25.