How not to disagree

28 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Faith, Persecution

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We have had much discussion here lately about the tensions between the ideas of God as Love and eternal damnation. It has been a good, well-mannered discussion which I hope has helped those of us reading it; it has helped me. Disagreement is a fact of Christian (as of other) life, and how we express that disagreement is a matter of great importance. How we disagree is also a witness to the faith that is within us.

With that in mind, and after biting my tongue and bridling my internet pen for a day of so, I want simply to say that the statement recently issued by the Anglican primate of Nigeria on “gays” is one of the most digraceful and shameful I have read from a Christian leader. Lest you think this is Jess getting all hyperbolic, let me quote:

A Gay is a Gay, they cannot be rightly described otherwise. In the same vein, we cannot describe people as ‘Christian Murderer’, ‘Christian Adulterer’ and ‘Christian terrorist’; neither should we even have ‘Gay Christian’ or ‘Gay Anglican’. “Without Holiness, no man shall see God” (Hebrews 12 :14).

It might be that the Archbishop might ponder that quotation from Hebrews next time he looks into a mirror. To imply that to be “gay” is to be in the same category as a murderer or a terrorist is simply disgraceful. But, in case that does not quite insult “gays” (really, does anyone still use that language?), he gets his JCB digger and goes deeper:

The deadly ‘virus’ of homosexuality has infiltrated ACNA. This is likened to a Yeast that should be urgently and radically expunged and excised lest it affects the whole dough (Luke 13:20-21; Gal. 5:9).

I make bread every third day at the moment, or did before I got ill again, and it maybe this is a woman/man thing, but I am charitably assuming that the Archbishop does not know that without yeast bread will not rise? But, how DARE the man liken other human beings to a “virus”! Chalcedon, historian that he is, always warns against likening anything to the unique evil of the Nazis, but here the parallel is striking:

“Today,” Hitler proclaimed in 1943, “international Jewry is the ferment of decomposition of peoples and states, just as it was in antiquity. It will remain that way as long as peoples do not find the strength to get rid of the virus.” Both the death camps (the gas chambers of which were modeled on delousing chambers) and the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads that roamed across Eastern Europe followed in the wake of the advancing German army) were responses to what the Nazis perceived to be a lethal pestilence.
‘Less Than Human’: The Psychology Of Cruelty

Given the recent history of ISIS-inspired atrocities against Christians in Nigeria, one might have expected better of the Archbishop. When you live in a gunpowder arsenal, lighting naked matches seems, to put it mildly, unwise.

Same-sex attraction, same-sex marriages, sexuality in general remain hot issues in the Church, despite Our Lord saying rather little about them, and it is understandable that they do, but however strongly one feels, I cannot for the life of me see the justification for writing about other human beings in such terms. The “gays” love someone of their own gender, that is neither “murder” nor is it “terrorism”, and quite often it isn’t “adultery” either. We can, and do, disagree, but this is a prime example of how not to do it. Is anyone going to feel as though this sort of thing is going to change anyone’s mind? Of course not, it is a power-play, designed to say “I am in charge and this is how it ought to be”.

I will pray for the Archbishop as I am told to pray for those who “hate”, but more than that, I shall pray for all those whose “crime” is to love someone of their own gender. When an Archbishop equates love with crime in inflammable and hateful language, one does not have to enquire about the form of witness given. One can only pray for him and those who think that way – and pray for comfort for faithful Christians wounded by such words.

There have been calls for Archbishop Justin to disinvite the Archbishop from the Lambeth conference. That would be a bad way of responding. He should come, and should be open to a dialogue where he can explain how he thought he was helping the Church, and perhaps listen to those who think he was shooting himself in both feet.

The Reformation Martyrs

16 Friday Oct 2020

Posted by John Charmley in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith, Persecution

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Martyrs, reformation

As an undergraduate and then a graduate, this was a view which greeted me most days as I went about my studies. On this day there would be flowers and other tributes laid here. Occasionally a tourist would ask me what it was about, and some of them seemed none the wiser (though at least they were better-informed) when I told them it marked the site of the burning of an Archbishop of Canterbury and two other bishops of the Church of England. On one occasion only did I get an answer which surprises me, less now than it did then: “They took the Faith seriously back then, not like now!” It has not ceased to shock me – no one who toils in the blogosphere could be shocked – but it saddens me, not because I am some milquetoast who wants us all to “lurve” one another, but because it brings to mind Byron’s comment in “Don Juan” about “Christians have burned each other, quite persuaded, that all the Apostles would have done as they did.” God is the only just judge, and anyone who thinks that burning someone to death is a sign of how seriously they take their faith should pause and ponder what Jesus might have meant when he said that “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again”. [Matt. 7:2].

In addition to Bishops Ridley and Latimer, whose burning was on this day in 1555, the more famous Archbishop Cranmer was burned on the same spot six months later, which is why today, in the Church of England calendar is called the memorial of the “Reformations Martyrs”. There were, as any historian can tells you, plenty of Catholic martyrs too, although, perhaps tellingly, it took until 2008 for a small plaque to be erected on Holywell Street in memory of four Roman Catholics — Thomas Belson, Humphrey Prichard, and the priests Richard Yaxley, and George Nichols — who were hanged, drawn, and quartered there in 1589, and beatified as martyrs in 1987. When a memorial was dedicated in 2009 to 23 Catholic and Protestant “Martyrs of the Reformation” in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, there were complaints that this was not what those who had been martyred would have wanted. Perhaps those complaining would have preferred another public burning of a “heretic”, which might well have been what those who were martyred would have wanted?

Violence begat violence, and and whatever one’s view of the English Reformation, and it remains a hotly contested field of scholarship, it was marked by a level of cruelty which to most of us does no service to the name of Jesus or to our common faith, for make no mistake, divided as we are by ecclsiology and history, Anglican or “Roman” Catholic, we share one faith, even as we share a sorry history of intra-communal violence.

None of this is to denigrate the martyrs on both sides, they were men (and women) who paid the ultimate price to stand by their beliefs, but we do their memory no service by continuing to dig ditches and erect barbed-wire to defend positions which a century of ecumenical dialogue has shown need no such defences. As Churchill put it in another context: “Jaw Jaw is better than War War.”

On the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York spoke in the spirit of the fruits of ecumenical dialogue when they spoke firts of the “blessings” of the Reformation:

Amongst much else, these would include clear proclamation of the gospel of grace, the availability of the Bible to all in their own language, and the recognition of the calling of lay people to serve God in the world and in the Church

but also of the:

the lasting damage done five centuries ago to the unity of the Church, in defiance of the clear command of Jesus Christ to unity in love. Those turbulent years saw Christian people pitted against each other, such that many suffered persecution, and even death, at the hands of others claiming to know the same Lord.

Much has been done to try to overcome the resulting legacy of mistrust, and indeed it can seem at times as those the most intense warfare is the internecine sort, where Catholics can be vitriolic about their own Pope and about those Catholics who are vitriolic about him. Maybe we really do learn nothing from history?

The Reformers in the sixteenth century, like later reformers within the Catholic Church, wanted to draw us back to what is at the heart of our faith, and that is the love of God for us, manifested through His Son, Jesus Christ who died for us that we should have life eternal. It is easy, which is why it is done so often, to mock ecumenism as a search for the lowest common denominator, and it may, or may not, be significant that this tendency is often to be found among converts, but properly understood, it is a search for the highest common factor – that the love and sacrifice Jesus made for all who would receive Him, can be made manifest in this vale of tears where we see Him as through a glass darkly, but where the scars of sin run vivid red and orange in the flames which consumed the martyrs.

Black Lives Matter

20 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by John Charmley in Faith, Persecution, Politics

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

Black Lives Matter, politics, religion

jesus-carrying-his-cross

Yes, they do, as do all lives, but let us not use the latter to diminish the claims “Black Lives” makes on us. Historically, migrant people often suffer discrimination. That is not because some “system” is inherently racist – we cannot blame it on something impersonal; it is because mankind is tribal and our nature is a fallen one. The history of “Black Lives” in America is different from in the UK; in the former the ancestors of most “Black Lives” came in slave ships, suffered horrendously, and the marks of that left a deep scar. But that is not to say that “Black lives” in the UK have not also been the subject of discrimination. I am old enough to remember being shocked by some of the words used by adults which I won’t sully the internet with. That this situation is being weaponised by some for left-wing causes should not, and I hope will not, detract from the need to pay attention to the real problems suffered by racial minorities. I missed the protests about the way the Chinese treat their minorities, but I am sure they were equally vociferous within China, although I suspect statues of Chairman Mao may stand a while yet.

What ought to concern us all is the weaponisation of a good cause. That carries with it the potential to polarise society and make things worse. Wherever people feel there are things they are not allowed to say, they do not forget those things, and they are never exposed to the reasons why they might, on consideration, change their attitudes, they become fixed; nay, they become a virtuous cause which dare not speak its name. The most obvious example in the UK is what became the Brexit movement. When what Nixon once called “the silent majority” got a chance to speak, it did so with a vengeance. It may, to some of us, have spoken incoherently and with a force which surprised us, but that is on us; we never asked, we were never told, and so we made ourselves deaf to the feelings of others. We must try to avoid a repetition of this with “Black Lives Matter.” It is about far more than statues, and those focussing on it help the rest of us miss the point, unless we are careful.

Macaulay was correct when he wrote: “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” We might now rephrase this, as there is something more ridiculous, that is “woke Twitter.” If we proceed from the assumption there is one “correct” way of thinking and that all who disagree are bad people with evil motives, we end by creating not a society in which everyone thinks alike, but one in which everyone speaks alike; group-speak is not quite the same as group-think, although those in the solipsism usually mistake it for such. It does not last, and when it goes, it usually involves violence and a sharp move to the opposite extreme.

The origin of our ills is us, as St Paul reminded the Romans long ago:

¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ¹⁶And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. ¹⁸For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. ¹⁹For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

There is but one cure for this, and it is not group-think or group-speak. Indeed, here our own Faith risks being misused as a cover, as Jesus warned us when He spoke about how we should conduct ourselves, not trumpeting our virtues or excoriating the sins of others. We are all sinners, and that stone we wish to cast should, if we have self-knowledge, remain in the dirt where we found it. St Paul knew there was but one answer to this sin operating within us:

So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ²²For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; ²³but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. ²⁴What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? ²⁵Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord

Law can do only so much, and is, of course, necessary given our fallen nature. But only Christ can warm our hearts within us and make us whole. Before he is “cancelled” let us remember that old ex-slaver lost in the mire of sin, John Newton, who received Christ and turned from his sin to campaign against that very slavery of which he had been a victim and in which he had been a protagonist. He rightly bade us sing of that “Amazing Grace” which had saved a wretch like him.

So, as the culture wars take this new turn, and as good causes are weaponised by some for ends which others will contest, let us stop a while and remember we are on a road where we all get hurt, and that only the love of God saves; but let us rejoice that it is bestowed on all who turn to Christ. Though our sins are scarlet, yet shall we be washed clean – black, brown, yellow and white. In Christ there is no division, in Him we are all one. If we can live that as though we truly believe it, then we shall do better, and we may even begin to apprehend why “Black Lives Matter” is something to which we might all, as Christians, attend with prayerful enquiry.

In Denial about Islam

29 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Neo in Church/State, Education, Persecution, Politics

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Church & State, controversy, Faith, history, Islam, Islamic Terrorism, United States

While we were having our tempest in a teapot last week, you may have missed that there was a terrorist attack in London, leaving several dead, and a fair number injured.

Our response here was to continue to argue amongst ourselves. And we wonder why Islam (and No, Mrs. Prime Minister the term is Islam, not Islamic Terrorism, certainly not all Muslims are terrorists, but multiple studies say that a large minority in Britain support Sharia law and/or terrorism) seems to be winning.

So it’s time to get our head out of the muck, look around and reassess.

This is written by William Kirkpatrick, in Crisis Magazine. He’s right, of course, about Europe, but it’s no different here, really. Perhaps Trump understands, but not many others seem to. They seemingly will continue to play the old games in the old way, until we’re all either dead or Muslim. Here are some excerpts.

Rival gangs battle in the streets and set fire to cars. Uncovered women are considered fair game. Molotov cocktails are hurled at police stations.

Syria? No, Sweden. For a long time, Sweden has been importing Middle Eastern immigrants into its small nation, and now it is experiencing many of the problems of the Middle East. The same thing is happening in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, and England.

It’s often said that we in America just have to look at history to understand the fate that may be in store for us. But it’s no longer necessary to consult history books. All you have to do is look at what’s happening right now on the other side of the Atlantic.

In Germany during the first six months of 2016, migrants committed 142,000 crimes. But since the data only includes crimes that have been solved, the actual number of migrant crimes is likely far higher. In many parts of the country, police say they are unable to maintain law and order. More than 20,000 purses are snatched each year in Hamburg, and gangs of migrant youth have taken control of parts of the Jungfernsteig, a prestigious boulevard. The situation is much the same in Bremen, Berlin, Duisburg, Dusseldorf, and Stuttgart. All over Germany, migrant gangs and roving bands of migrant youth operate with near impunity. […]

Unless the French, the Germans, and the Swedes resist at some point soon, they, along with other European states, will someday be Islamic states. Europe is in the midst of a massive historical change, the significance of which rivals the fall of the Roman Empire. What we are witnessing is the gradual but inexorable substitution of one civilization for another.[…]

Of all the factors contributing to Islam’s hostile takeover of Europe, perhaps the most important is denial. If you deny the reality of Islamization, you can’t effectively resist it. The reality is that Europe is in a life and death struggle, but the denialists insist that it’s just business as usual. They assure us that terror has nothing to do with Islam (so don’t worry), that immigration is just cultural enrichment (it’s good for you), and that there are no no-go-zones (but it’s best to avoid them).

In Europe it’s not only the leaders who are in denial. The average citizen is expected to go along with the delusion. If he doesn’t, he can face arrest, prosecution, fines, and even jail time. In the Netherlands, individuals who post Facebook comments critical of Islam or immigration can expect a visit from the police. In Germany, citizens who express “xenophobic” views on social media risk having their children taken away. Meanwhile, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) has ordered the British Press not to report when terrorists are Muslims. […]

Once again, the main problem is denial. The reason that the denialists cling to their denial is that they live in the past. European denialists live mentally in the post-war years. They must prove to themselves that Europe has abandoned its anti-Semitic ways. And for some insane reason, they have decided that the way to make up for Europe’s past sins is to welcome the “new Jews” (Muslims) into their midst. In short, they have made a colossal error and since it’s not easy to admit that you rank with history’s greatest blunderers, they must continue to maintain that the disaster unfolding around them is nothing more than a rough patch on the road to the multicultural Promised Land.

via In Denial about Islam – Crisis Magazine Emphasis mine, and read the whole thing.

Yeah, all that.

Lincoln said this, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present… As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” True then, true now. But so many, especially on the left, have forgotten nothing and learned nothing, not since well before the fall of the Soviet Union.

And since we barely teach history anymore (eminent exceptions gratefully noted) they have in addition learned nothing about how our civilization has overcome these problems. In fact, this exact problem, before. When did you learn about the Battle of Viena? How about the Battle of Lepanto? Maybe the Battle of Tours? The Fall of Constantinople? How about the Islamification of Egypt, or the Middle East?

Exactly the same thing, the west, against Islam, in Europe. We won those, so now they try a different way. and so far they are winning.

Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan had it right, “The time, they are a’changing.”

But will the change favor the west or Islam? That’s for us to decide.

Crossposted from Nebraskaenergyobserver

Martyrdom

29 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by John Charmley in Anti Catholic, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith, Persecution, Politics

≈ 33 Comments

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Catholic Church, Christianity, Church & State, controversy, history, Thomas Becket

Site of Becket's murder

Today the Church celebrates the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, about whom I have written before on this date. His martyrdom was one of the most dramatic moments in the long struggle in the West between Church and State. Unlike in the Eastern Roman Empire, where the Patriarch of Constantinople was firmly under the thumb of the Emperor (a pattern continued in the Romanov Empire and its successors), in the West, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the relationship between monarchs and the Church was a contested one. It was no accident that it was under St Pope Leo the Great that the Petrine claims were systematised and promulgated – these claims provided a firm basis on which to resist the claims of the monarchy to control what the Church did and who was appointed to its offices. Throughout the next thousand years the struggle continued, with monarchs using violence to promote their claims when all else failed; several times the Kingdom of England was put under interdict by the Church, with Henry I, Henry II and King John all finding themselves at odds with the Church. Ironically, it was only with Henry VIII that, in England, the King won the day, and that was at the price of breaking with the Universal Church and settling for a national church with the monarch as the spiritual head; a less unlikely spiritual role model than Henry VIII is difficult to imagine, but the advantage of being an absolute monarch with an army at your back is that few will say so.

The English Reformation was the greatest act of cultural vandalism this country has ever suffered. It is estimated that more than 97% of all art work in the country was destroyed. If you want to get some idea of what happened, your best comparison would be with what ISIS has done in the areas it has controlled over the past couple of years. Animated by the same bone-headed stupidity that animated the Iconoclasts in the Eastern Roman Empire and the Cromwellian Puritans (and some more recent philistines), Thomas Cromwell’s men destroyed works of art designed and created to glorify God. Failing to understand what one might have thought even an ape could grasp, that there is the world of difference between worshipping God and creating works of art in His honour, these moronic philistines destroyed the material culture of a millennium, and transformed our parish churches from being colourful parts of the community to whitewashed preaching barns. As one expert has written:

Statues were hacked down. Frescoes were smashed to bits. Mosaics were pulverized. Illuminated manuscripts were shredded. Wooden carvings were burned. Precious metalwork was melted down. Shrines were reduced to rubble. This vandalism went way beyond a religious reform. It was a frenzy, obliterating the artistic patrimony of centuries of indigenous craftsmanship with an intensity of hatred for imagery and depicting the divine that has strong and resonant parallels today.

And for what?

Just as the English barons had united with the Church to thwart John’s plans to make himself an absolute monarch, so, too did their descendants unite to thwart Charles I and James II’s plans to the same end. The gloomy rule of the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell lasted precisely as long as his powerful presence and his armed force, and no longer. The Monarchy ended up with its wings clipped, and the Church of which the monarch remains the spiritual governor has ceased to have much influence on the nation and declines year on year in attendance.

The relationship between Church and State will always be a vexed one. It is in the nature of Caesar to want to dominate the whole of the public realm, and in our own time, it may even be the case that having an Established Church with the monarch at its head actually preserves England and the UK from the sort of full-scale assault on Christianity which could easily come from an aggressively secular State. Moreover, it would be foolish to ignore the cultural and religious contribution which Anglicanism has made to the creation of a society where, until recently, it was considered immoral to let the poor and sick to their own devices. It would be equally unhistorical not to acknowledge that where the Church has dominated societies, it has not been a good experience for many in those societies.

All that said and acknowledged, a society in which men and women stand up for the rights of the Church is a better one for that fact, and today, as we remember St Thomas of Canterbury, let us also remember all those in this fallen world who bear witness through their suffering to their faith in Christ.

Egypt’s President Says Church Attack Was a Suicide Bombing – ABC News

13 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by Neo in Church/State, Faith, Persecution

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Church & State, controversy, persecution

cairoczyzmoqwqaaisaf Chalcedon put it quite plainly in his The persecution continues. He also gave us the background of the situation. Without denigration, because how we got here is always relevant, that’s all well and good. But where is this likely to go? ABC (The American one) reports thusly:

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said Monday that a suicide bomber caused the blast that killed 24 Christians during Sunday Mass at a Cairo chapel adjacent to St. Mark’s Cathedral, the seat of Egypt’s ancient Coptic Orthodox Church.

It was among the deadliest attacks to ever target Egypt’s Coptic minority, which makes up around 10 percent of the country’s population and strongly supported the military overthrow of an elected Islamist president in 2013, which was led by el-Sissi.

Rather trite, in my opinion, to blame the victims, still again, in a conflict which has been going since the eighth century. But that’s the news media today.

Since then, Islamic militants have carried out scores of attacks mainly targeting the security forces, while the government has waged a wide-scale crackdown on dissent.

Dissent? ABC news describes an attack in a church, that killed at least 24 people, 22 of them women, by a not-so-smart bomb as dissent. What would it take, a nuclear device, maybe a biological weapon, to raise it to the level of terrorism? Oh, of course, then the motive would be “unclear”. Especially if you hide under your bed with your eyes closed.

Speaking after a state funeral for the victims, el-Sissi identified the bomber as 22-year-old Mahmoud Shafiq Mohammed Mustafa, and said three men and a woman were arrested in connection with the attack, which wounded 49 people. Two other suspects were on the run, he added.

Ordinary Egyptians are, I would bet, just as horrified and outraged as the rest of us. There is quite a history in Egypt of Moslems and Christians working together, and grieving together, after this sort of an attack.

And you know, al-Sisi did hit all the right notes at the state funeral (yes, you read that right, a state funeral for Christians in a Moslem country.

“This strike really hurt us and caused us much pain, but it will not break us. God willing, we will win this war.

As long as we are together as one, we will definitely win, because we are people of goodness, not evil, and people of building, not destruction.”

About that funeral:

The coffins were wrapped in Egyptian flags. Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt’s Orthodox Christians, and top government and military officials attended the funeral, held amid tight security provided by hundreds of army soldiers. Earlier on Monday, the Coptic community held its own funeral service.

“God, protect us and your people from the conspiracies of the evil ones,” Tawadros prayed after waving incense over coffins lined up in front of the altar along with crosses made of white roses. “It is the destiny of our church to offer martyrs.”

Only victims’ relatives were allowed to attend the service at the Virgin Mary and St. Athanasius church in the eastern Cairo suburb of Nasr City. Some screamed out in grief or shouted out victims’ names, while the rest sat in silence or quietly wept.

Outside the church, a crowd scuffled with security forces when they were barred from attending the service.

via Egypt’s President Says Church Attack Was a Suicide Bombing – ABC News

It seems to me, that if Egypt has a future, or for that matter peace does, people like al-Sisi are the ones that might just be able to make it happen, as opposed to those who attempt to destroy and eradicate.

Patrick Poole from PJ Media adds this:

Just yesterday Foreign Policy published an article blaming the ongoing attacks on Egyptian Christians on their support for President el-Sisi.

Egypt’s beleaguered Christians thought their new president would save them. He’s doing nothing of the sort. https://t.co/Fauxq6p9nl pic.twitter.com/08lcuoz7R7

— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) December 10, 2016

Nice, eh? Then there is this:

Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, used that article as an opportunity to also attack Coptic Christians.

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) December 10, 2016

The persecution continues

12 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by John Charmley in Faith, Persecution

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Copts, history, Jesus, love

Coptic-saints-e1424293524350

To be a Christian in the Middle East has never been easy. During the long period of Islamic conquest from the seventh century onwards, Christians went from being a majority in countries such as Egypt and Syria to being an embattled minority. During the Ottoman ascendency, the position of the Christians in the empire was one of being second-class citizens, obliged to pay a special tax, and with no legal rights if sued by a Muslim. From time to time local rulers would massacre Christians, who were always a convenient a scapegoat when things were going bad. Across time, the number of Christians lessened, but whilst their position was not one to be envied, active persecution was accompanied by longer periods of co-existence. During the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century, Christians in the Middle East found themselves in an odd position.

Ottoman power was decaying, and the European Great Powers all had considerable influence in the area we now call the Middle East. The Russian Empire, in particular, positioned itself as the champion of Orthodox Christianity, whilst in areas such as greater Syria where there were Catholic Christians, the French did much the same for Catholics. This secured some concessions for Christians, and even when the European Powers began to lose their direct control, local governments such as those of Nasser in Egypt, were of a secularist bent and did not persecute Christians. The growth of Salafist Islam since 1979 began to change that position, and since the first Iraq war, the position of Christians has deteriorated markedly; the second Iraq war accelerated that process. We see, now, very small numbers of Christians left in Iraq, and in Syria they have been targeted by Isis. The Copts, the largest Christian community in the region, have preserved their Christian culture against all attempts to crush it. They have become a regular target of Islamist extremists – and now we have just witnessed another terrible attack on St Mark’s Cathedral in Cairo where at least 25 people have been murdered. May the Lord have mercy on their souls. I hope that those who believe in praying for the dead will do so.

The Copts have endured so much across so many centuries, and yet they have endured. Whenever I have attended a Coptic service I have been struck by the evident piety of the priests and the people. They are proud of the fact that their land sheltered the infant Jesus and the Holy Family, and their Christian tradition is one of the oldest in the world. That they have become the recipient of such hatred tells us more about the character of their enemies than it does about them. But we should not assume that all, or even most, Muslims, approve of the actions of the extremist – there have been some notable examples of Muslims helping Christians and defending their Churches. It is particularly important at these times to remember such examples and not to give the murderers what they want – which is retaliation and bitterness. That is not the way of Jesus, and nor has it been the way of the Copts. Violence begets violence – unless a higher spirit intervenes. The violence unleashed in the region by the West since 2003 has unleashed a hurricane which shows no sign of abating. And what, you ask, are our Governments doings about any of this? Not a great deal – and it might be that, seeing what our intervention has done in the past, the Copts are very glad of it.

A Remarkable Faith

07 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by Neo in Book Review, Church/State, Faith, Persecution

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Church & State, history, Testimony

irina It’s funny sometimes, how things come together. Last night, I was looking at some old posts on NEO, thinking about rerunning a few over Christmas. Some are mine, and some are Jess’. Two that really struck me were two of hers speaking about Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and his not all that favorable view of the west.

This morning I read in the Catholic Herald, from our friend Francis Phillips, about an interview on Radio Four with Irina Ratushinskaya. She was, as I’m sure few of you know, I hadn’t, sentenced to four years in the Soviet labor camps, mostly, I think, because she was a Christian. Well, make that present tense, because she still is.

Here is some of what Francis says.

By coincidence, I happened to visit the friend who had introduced me to Ratushinskaya on the evening of the morning I had heard the broadcast. We both listened to the interview again and I borrowed Ratushinskaya’s subsequent book, In the Beginning, about her life before her mock trial in 1982, from my friend’s book shelf.

It struck me how God can penetrate the most improbable places, such as the rigidly atheistic school environment in Odessa, where Ratushinskaya grew up in the early 1960s. Stalin might be dead but under his successor, Khrushchev, the penalty for anti-Soviet behaviour, such as writing religious poetry, was still extraordinarily harsh.

As a child Ratushinskaya started to pray, convinced that God existed because her teachers kept insisting that He didn’t. She understood almost instinctively that that only through religious faith would her soul “remain my own: nobody will be able to manipulate me.” Later she learnt that her grandmother had her secretly christened when she was a baby.

It struck me, as it seemed to strike Francis, as remarkable how in a society as aggressively atheistic as the Soviet Union, she still managed to think her way into Christianity, as did her husband. It’s also remarkable that they were able to find things like an Orthodox priest to marry them, and to soldier on, carrying the flame of Christ, now finally in the open.

What a remarkable story, do read the whole thing.

Free Speech – at a price?

05 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by John Charmley in Blogging, Education, Persecution, Politics

≈ 86 Comments

Tags

Church & State, controversy, Free Speech

free-speech-voltaire

This week’s Catholic Herald has an interesting piece by Jordan Peterson on his attempts to battle with his own university’s (to him and many) peculiar definition of ‘free speech’. Jordan’s description cannot be bettered, so I shall quote it:

Political correctness has become a force of sufficient strength to pose a threat to the structure of our society. It is primarily a product of university-educated leftist radicals, who demand the adjustment of our institutions, speech and thoughts to their radical-egalitarian and censorious agenda. Anyone who speaks out against their principles and aims becomes a target of mob action, accused of racism and worse.

In the most recent edition of the house journal of my own profession, The Times Higher there are interesting pieces about how universities might cope with a populist political climate which is antithetical to what one author called ‘campus values’; only 11% of UK academics admitted to voting Conservative at the last election. The casual assumption of the piece was that ‘campus values’ were superior to those of the populists, and that universities, especially those in regions where the surrounding natives voted for Brexit, had a duty of education. Here we have had our own experience of this censoriousness, as the blog went private for a while because complaints had been made at my university about it. I blog pseudonomously (not, as one drive by shooter from the Academy accused me of, anonymously) precisely because my views are mine, not those of any institution for which I work. Were I to use my title and affiliation, then I could understand someone saying I was abusing my position; but as I don’t, I find it laughable when they do so all the same.

Even writing this, I am conscious that somewhere there is a troll-like creature sitting in her pants noting every word, as she tries to find yet another way of complaining that in deliberately logging in to this blog she has had her finer feelings offended; she could, of course, not read the blog, but it is its very existence which bugs her and other inhabitants of the same censorship mill.

But ideas which you don’t like, and which you are able to suppress do not vanish. They gather strength and end up breaking out in Brexit or in Trump. Our civilisation has been based on the notion that if an idea is bad, the best thing to do with it is give it oxygen and it can be shot down in open intellectual combat. But perhaps those on the Right (because that has its own version of PC, it is simply that because it is not dominant here, we hear less of it) and those on the Left have no confidence in their ideas or their ability to convince others of them, so they prefer to proceed by way of censorship.

For my own part, as I say, I am conscious that even writing this pseudonymously, it might be wiser not to write it at all, and I have seriously considered taking the blog private again – but that would be to give the trolls their victory. But should we disappear in the near future, you’ll know why.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere

03 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by Neo in Church/State, Faith, Lutheranism, Persecution, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Church & State, Civil Disobedience, Obedience

cvldsbdnc-500x281 I want to follow up on something Phillip Augustine said on my last post because I think it is important. Here is his comment.

Honestly, I’ve said this to a few folks lately, even a good friend who is a Missouri-Synod Pastor agrees, that we need to start resisting secular government that if they force us to betray our moral conscience that we must force them to imprison us. After all, the world will never see us as oppressed unless there are chains on our wrist.

Yes, and it reminded me of Rev Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, where he said this to other clergy questioning him on why he had disobeyed the law.

One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

Now remember, it presupposes that one is willing to pay the price, civil or criminal, as Dr. King, Dr. Boehnhoefer, and even Dr. Luther were. It’s by no means ‘virtue signaling’, there are often real penalties, even including your life, for this.

There is a long tradition for this, stretching back to the Greeks, as so much does. Specifically, the idea of law that transcends the civil law dates back to Socrates, what we would call natural law. In the Christian tradition, it goes back to St Augustine, who said that an unjust law is no law. Although he and Luther both said that we must obey our ‘princes’, well St. Thomas Aquinas would likely disagree, as when he defended the idea that unjust laws did not bind the citizen in conscience.

John Locke (1632–1704) taught that the government derived its authority from the people, that one of the purposes of the government was the protection of the natural rights of the people, and that the people had the right to alter the government should it fail to discharge its fundamental duties.

Thoreau.

The writer who made the theory famous, put it into practice, and gave the practice the name “civil disobedience” was Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). His ideas on the subject are found in the celebrated lecture that he delivered in 1848 to the Concord Lyceum in Massachusetts, under the title “On the Relation of the Individual to the State. […]

Two principles underlie Thoreau’s conception of civil disobedience. The first is that the authority of the government depends on the consent of the governed. The second is that justice is superior to the laws enacted by the government, and the individual has the right to judge whether a given law reflects or flouts justice. In the latter case the individual has the duty to disobey the law and accept the consequences of the disobedience nonviolently.

This is what Bonhoeffer was speaking of, although he found it acceptable to go beyond civil disobedience to actual armed insurrection when he spoke of “The third way “is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself.”

None of these are pleasant prospects, and yet, as Christians, at some point, we are justified to do whatever is necessary to bring our countries back to the rule of God’s (Natural) Law.