The title is the great existential question of 2016.
Leicester City, Brexit, Trump, Ireland beating the ABs, Trump bringing Taiwan back into the fellowship of nations, John Key resigning. There is too much "the unexpected is the norm" going on. Change and decay in all around I see, with emphasis on "change"!
But things are changing.
Here is a pretty thoughtful post on what we could call the big change in the "governing" worldview across many nations.
And here is a post on one tiny but hugely significant change in one Western country ... the kind of change in attitude which exemplifies our post-whatever-used-to-be-common-to-us and now-confusing world.
Meantime. Yes, yes, yes. Post number three on Anglican Apostolicity, featuring the All Blacks, is coming along.
If only Prime Ministers would stop resigning ...
12 comments:
The fall of the West will not come at the hands of Islam, it comes because modern Westerners do not value material objects and do not value children
We are living on borrowed money, murdering the inconvenient in the womb and encouraging non fecund same sex marriage
Meanwhile in the East people are making the trinkets we aspire to and pay for with borrowed money, whether it be christmas lights to gaudify our residences or anal beads to spice up our sex lives
Look at this magnificent beast :) And it will return with recyclables and empty containers.
This is how pathetic we are - our Government co-sponsored a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in Aleppo as the SAA, representing the lawful authorities in Syria are securing it from the terrorists who are on a daily basis controlling less and less of it
You'll not see our Government calling for ceasefires in Sirte, Mosul or Saana at the UN, no way, they only did this to brown nose the Americans who with their allies have been arming Islamic Terrorists for years to create havoc in other peoples countries to advance their own agendas
But most Western people are too busy stringing up tinsel and donning "Santa" hats adorned with flashing LEDs made in Asian sweatshops, to notice what our rulers and their masters are up to or to care less
Its good old St Nicholas day today according to the Western Calendar but the original has zero in common with that ho ho hoing travesty seen sitting in the center of your local mall
Peter; I would never have predicted the Ecumenical Patriarch's apparent approval of the papal exhortation Amoris Laetitia. Of course sections of it are closer to Orthodox teaching than the magisterium, but officially we Romans are still heretics. As for Andrei's comments, there is nothing new. The sin continued right up to the flood. On the one hand, I'd be interested to see what the collapse of the progressive west and its manufactured equality would look like (collapse is likely to some degree), but we need to fill the vacuum. Back to preaching the gospel rather than letting the extreme right fill the gap, I suggest.
Nick
Thanks Andrei and Nick
Yes, the gospel not Trumpism or nationalism or Brexitism or ...
I will post links to the Ecumenical Patriarch's comments.
... but officially we Romans are still heretics.
Correction Nick "schismatics" rather than "heretics" :)
"Yes, the gospel not Trumpism or nationalism or Brexitism or ..."
We can have both Peter. :)
What we can't have is the gospel + Liberalism. Nationalism is no threat to the Church or the Gospel. Liberalism is...
The West needs two things, political reform, and spiritual reform.
Spiritual reform can only be provided by preaching the Gospel and planting Gospel-centred churches.
Political reform means, at this time in history, restoring national sovereignty and defeating Liberalism. The Liberal/Globalist project is a form of imperialism, an ideology repeatedly and stridently condemned in Scripture, from Babel to Babylon to Rome. The Prophets and the book of Revelation are full of anti-imperialist rhetoric. God desires nations, not empires. An empire founded on the UN, transnational political structures like the EU, unrestrained global free trade and migration, is just Rome in a different disguise. The pursuit of this globalist/imperialist project is contrary to the Gospel.
For more on the connection between the teaching of Scripture and nationalism...
http://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2016/09/nationalism-and-the-future-of-western-freedom/
"Brexitism" isn't an "ism".
There is no such thing as "Brexitism". It isn't an ideology or a way of life or whatever.
Incidentally, the idea that the people of Britain should make their own laws and control their own borders is absurd as saying, oh I dunno, that New Zealand should do the same ...
I will add that eight years ago, people of my outlook greeted the Obama years with the sense that it presaged America's withdrawal from the world, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and attacks on Christians in public life - usually over homosexuality. Obama didn't let us down.
The West, like the East, the North and the South, needs to understand the great love of God as revealed in The Son. Men without God have and are nothing. That is the Good News all Christians need to affirm and celebrate. There is no room for fear in God. God is perfect love - where every prospect pleases....etc. What the world needs is reverence for the life God has given. Humankind - made in the divine Image and Likeness - is made to love, not hate.
"What the world needs is reverence for the life God has given."
Does that include unborn children? Because progressives, including progressive Christians, are firmly in the camp of killing the unborn in the name of "reproductive rights". Are unborn children not also the subjects of God's love? Because the vehemence with which progressives advocate abortion suggests hate for the unborn, not love.
Does love for the life God has given mean protecting people from the Islamic terrorism that mass immigration has brought to the West? The recent attack in Columbus Ohio by a Muslim Somalian refugee was the third such attack in that city alone in the past year. And of course there have been dozens of such attacks throughout the West, including the horrific Paris attacks, in which six of the attackers were Muslim "refugees". And progressives are firmly in the mass migration and pro-Islamic immigration camp.
What I notice is that when progressives preach God's universal love for all, a little digging suggests to me that they are in practice selective when it comes to who God loves and who He doesn't.
God loves everything that God has created, Shawn. It has been said that the whole of Creation is an outflow of love from the Blessed Trinity. It is we humans who have the problem of selective loving - based on self-interest. That's why I'm all for 'Inclusive Church'. A Blessed Advent and Christmas is only a beginning.
"God loves everything that God has created, Shawn. "It is we humans who have the problem of selective loving"
Then why do progressive Christians support abortion? That was my point. It is an example of selective loving, which contradicts what they claim to believe about God's love.
When any political position leads to the unjust death of other people, whether through abortion or Islamic immigration, which progressive Christian also support, it contradicts the claim of progressive Christians to be universally loving and to believe in God's universal love. That claim includes the judgement that the rest of us, whether conservative Christians and/or conservative nationalists are not loving but hateful. That is why you keep bringing up the accusation of hatred all the time, as you did here by implying that those of us who are nationalists are promoting hate. My point in a nutshell, with the examples I brought up, is that the judgement is hypocritical.
Anti-national Liberal globalism and mass immigration are not examples of love. They are political policies which have led to grave economic injustices and the deaths of civilians by Islamic terrorism.
Nor are liberal abortion policies an example of love. Killing unborn children, the weakest and most defenceless of our society, is not loving.
Liberals, including liberal Christians, wield words like love and hate with ridiculously casual ease, as weapons to be used against their political opponents. But the results of their preferred political policies reveal the truth.
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