The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Things they won’t teach you at Cult Football

7 September 2010

Access now the “The Wonder Springs Chronicle” Front Page. Be sure to check out the grizzly times wisdom and fresh insights of Brute’ Griz every Friday here at The Wonder Springs Chronicle and every Wednesday at Deep Woods Moola and Redux Rendezvous.

To make a donation to the Wonder Springs community please do so at the address below, or follow the donation links on the website.

>>PDF copy

>>Print copy

With “Our Sin-Cosmos Demise” we began our first significant Sunday post that didn’t relate to some historic Christian doctrine or preacher. During our publishing hiatus the last week of August, the underlying theme seemed to be that things are about to get very serious and hence the focus of the whole of the Wonder Springs concept needs to be “kicked up a notch.” The Sin-Cosmos Demise is the first installment in that effort.

On the Saturday before, was Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” program in Washington DC. As I watched the analysis and commentary of that program, I came to the conclusion that there were a number of things within that theme to which we could add both depth and breadth.

The first installment of that effort was Wednesday’s “Nature’s negative rights myths” which after it was finished left me with a number of questions about the whole article. The article was written above a level beyond what I try to communicate, but I could find no way to simplify what was said. Editing was equally frustrating. So at the end I was left with questions, was it not good, or was I just too dense to understand and edit what I had written?

As I was working on the beginning of today’s article I realized I was trying to describe in natural law terms, expressed in creation, what theologians describe as the nature of the Trinity of the Godhead, unity in diversity. The Founders of the United States understood this Divine concept of Nature’s God applied to humanity, and did a miraculously good job of incorporating this concept into both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The Founders found this concept so significant they made it the motto on the Great Seal of the United States, it is found on many coins, as well as served as the de facto motto of the United States until “In God we Trust” replaced it officially in 1956. That unity in diversity concept is the Latin “E Pluribus Unum” (Out of Many One). So now I don’t feel so bad about the myth article, for I really was in over my head and if you decide to read it again, begin with E Pluribus Unum in mind.

Since I had broken the Sunday threshold, I decided that publishing additional articles Sunday afternoon would not be a bad thing, since from the nation’s and the world’s time zones, the Pacific time zone, is late in the day for most people, so Sunday posts really will be read by most people on Monday, which is also the reason why we now post Spurgeon’s “Morning and Evening” on Saturday afternoon.

With Sunday now set for a publishing date, I needed a title for the series that reflected upon the common religion of the United States. My first thought was, “Things they won’t teach you at church.” That is true for much of American Christianity, especially in a lot of evangelicalism, but it really does make an overly broad statement that really can’t be specifically quantified, especially since most people think they go to a decent church, or they wouldn’t be going there in the first place. I needed another concept.

Thursday was the last of the National Football League’s (NFL) preseason games and now they are making their final roster cuts and getting ready for the new season next Sunday, where the professional goliaths meet in the nation’s most elaborate religious temples. Liberal guru Noam Chomsky claims these events are the opiate for the masses. We will stick with just an interesting faux human religion. Friday evening on the local news they talked about the beginning of high school football programs here in the State of Washington. On Saturday was the beginning of most of the college schedules. Musing about the whole concept, even I am enlightened enough to understand, from now and for the next five months, American football, not that boring soccer football of the rest of the world, really is the American national religion for almost everyone.

While you might learn some profound religious teachings here at Wonder Springs, that you might or might not find at your church, you surely won’t learn them at the football game. That is true with a small crowd at a high school field, or with the hundreds of thousands of rabid fans at some college games, as well as in the NFL. With a little bit of work it wasn’t too hard to come up with, “Things they won’t teach you at Cult Football.” Cult here not necessarily referring to a religious cult, but more of “a popular or fashionable section of society.”

So until we run out of material, or until after the Super Bowl, our Sunday blog category will deal with what you won’t learn from the seasonable American religion of Cult Football.

So Cult Football fans, let us stumble on back to a little unique analysis of Glenn’s Restoring Honor program.

Let us begin with three highly related Old Testament poetry scripture verses:

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; A good understanding have all those who do His commandments. His praise endures forever. Psalm 111:10

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, But fools despise wisdom and instruction. Proverbs 1:7

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. Proverbs 9:10

Now the critical discussion of the Restoring Honor program basically comes from two sources. The first comes from what we are now beginning to call the Lame Stream Media and the cultural elitists. These are highly secular sources that truly deny God has any role to play in the minds and actions of mankind. The three witnesses above, if the Bible truly is the word of God, quantify those discussions, and what is happening in the country, and in the world. Put in down home, primitive, racist, stupid jargon, just too simplistic for these enlightened people to understand, “Their self-righteousness is the seed of their folly, and the fruit of their lunacy.”

The second critique comes from the church crowd, for Glenn Beck is a Mormon you know. After all good Christians know that the Latter Day Saints (LDS) are a Christian Cult. Hence it means that our fashionable definition of cult really doesn’t apply. The proper term is not Cult LDS, but rather Mormon Cult.

This calls for a little true theology, to hopefully put this into a proper context. Glenn Beck says he was raised Roman Catholic. That means a few things that are not part of the typical lexicon of American evangelicalism. First of all that means he was probably baptized as an infant into the church, and secondly he probably went to some catechism so that he could receive the Eucharist or what we Protestants call communion. That catechism teaches the uniform historic orthodox Christian dogma, that Jesus Christ is the savior of mankind. Catholics only differ from Protestants in the applications of God’s grace.

Now baptism in Roman Catholicism, as well as in Lutheran and Reformed Calvinist traditions, are performed on infants, similar to the Jewish tradition of circumcision. This was the standard for churches until the Reformation and the rise of the Baptists and the Anabaptists. The actual meaning of what is actually accomplished in baptism varies somewhat with the tradition, but generally speaking, this sacrament makes you part of the covenant of God’s people.

Beck testifies regularly that he is an alcoholic. There is a saying in describing Catholic priests that, “When you find four Irish priests, you always find a fifth.” If their discussions are serious enough and the blarney is truly flowing, the four Irish priests may need four fifths of good Irish whiskey to make it to Mass the next day. All this is to point out that fermented or distilled spirits are not looked down as mortal sins within orthodox Roman Catholicism.

Now we good Protestants know that those Mormons, don’t drink alcohol, shoot they shouldn’t even drink coffee and sugar laden soda. Theologically they have a different Jesus, they one time believed in polygamy (and some still do). They were so out of the mainstream of America, they were forced into exile in that God forsaken place — Utah. A few other tidbits, every Mormon in good standing tithes their income, hence the church is able to take care of its own, who are truly down and out, and provide the necessary help to make you a productive member of the LDS church and by extension of the broader society. If you are a scumbag drunk and are willing to join the church, that help is available to anyone, including Glenn Beck.

The holiness doctrines of the Wesleyan roots of evangelical pietism focus, not so much on the redemption of sinners, but the use of legalism to keep the adherents from becoming sinners in the first place. Put another way if you were raised a true reprobate and came to Jesus, you might get some help with your disorder, but if you know about Jesus and just can’t make it on your own, well you probably were never saved in the first place.

So back to, “Things they won’t teach you at Cult Football.” Just as in Cult Football many of the churches of American evangelicalism are really theologically and essentially Mormonism lite. That is especially true if you don’t get too heavy into who Jesus really is, what he did for humanity, and you lose the Book of Mormon. This lite form means many evangelical churches don’t have ongoing theological training, something the LDS church requires of its membership.

Ben Franklin is responsible for the famous biblical quotation, “Heaven helps those who help themselves.” Contrary to what you might have heard at the Cult Football game, that is not a Biblical truth, but belongs to one of the oldest Christian heresies. That heresy is called Pelagianism. Pelagianism, in many forms, is essentially the natural religion of mankind.

One of the major tenants of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, was that the reformers believed that the Roman Catholic church was really semi-Pelagian in its teaching. What we see here is that this discussion of God’s grace, human piety, and the good fruits and bad fruits from all of this is much deeper and broader than we have space for at this time. This discussion is the essence of our Cult Football teaching, so will be where we spend most of our time during this series.

However, this week what we want to do is to discuss what makes the Recovering Honor rally different, from those, which have gone before.

The essence of this difference is the unique historical context of the founding of the American republic and the Recovering Honor rally. This unique distinction is the human reliance on God’s Providence rather than Divine Destiny. A version of Divine Destiny or similar terms, is that many if not most of America’s pre-Revolutionary founders, came to these shores to escape the Divine Right of Kings, to establish essentially a shining city on a hill, or in essence God’s kingdom here on earth. As this developed however what you had was a number of these colonies all seeking the same goal, with very divergent methods, many times at the expense and travail of the neighboring colonies.

What this brought about at the proper time, with the right individuals, for a brief miraculous moment, was a deeper understanding and reliance upon Divine Providence. The Providence of God, in this American formational revolution, essentially focused upon what God can do, compared with Divine Destiny, which focuses on what man can do to bring glory to God. It might seem to Cult Football that this is hair splitting, but it really isn’t.

Divine Providence essentially leads you out into the wilderness, where your provisions for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, can only come from reliance on God, providing both the will and the means. Divine Destiny whether resting in kings, or presidents, or human democracy, essentially focuses upon the tower of Babel concept of if we all work together there is nothing we can’t accomplish.

This destiny focus was, in my opinion, the motivating emphasis of the Religious Right, which rightly failed, essentially because it attempted to create a theocracy, in which the religious elite would dictate the moral culture of the nation, and in that attempt, bring about The Rapture, or the return of Christ, depending upon your Christian religious eschatology.

Now in closing this week, the focus of the liberal media attention, was that the Recovering Honor rally was really just another rehash of that human centered theocratic religious desire. All humans, being created in the image of God, are religious beings. What the liberal elite rightly and wrongly believe, is that when it comes to religious utopias, their specific utopia, which centers upon social justice and collective salvation, resting upon the oppressors freeing the oppressed, is a superior worldview.

However what they don’t realize is that their worldview is not the wisdom from God, but rather a sinful desire of the limitations of man. What the Recovering Honor rally tapped was Providential power that we have discussed in the past in the Dry Bones Valley of the prophet in Ezekiel 37. “Oh, LORD GOD, you know.

Divine Providence is beginning to change our nation and our world. The acknowledgement of that reality is the beginning of wisdom that you will need to make your way through this desert valley, not to a human divine city on a hill of this present age, but God’s eternal Jerusalem, the everlasting city of peace.

Next week Cult Football goes professional, and will give us new learning opportunities.