The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Why Me? A Hundred Year Bad Marriage

24 March 2010

Volume 12, Issue 12

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So you think your marriage is great, that is wonderful!

If you think your marriage is awful and you want or need a divorce, sorry about that!

But the really sad thing is if you are married to another party for over a hundred years and then you find out that the troubles you have been experiencing for most of a century are rooted in a mutual codependency. You seemed to want the same thing but you never really understood why you were always arguing about virtually everything in life. It took a hundred years and you recently found out by reading this Wonder Springs article that you have totally incompatible religions. You always thought that you were progressing towards the same goal, and now after all this time you realize that you need to split the sheets.

The two twentieth century religions that are in the process of breaking up after all this time are evolving atheistic materialism and Christendom; better known as those who promoted a social gospel, Protestant liberalism, or in some extreme cases, social justice, and Liberation Theology. Those who were around at the beginning of the marriage believed that it was a marriage made in heaven. After all both parties in that early relationship were interested in creating a utopian city here on earth. A shining city on a hill to show the world how well Christians could get along with pagans and in turn everyone would turn their hearts to Jesus.

The problem that both participants in the marriage did not understand was the vision of creating heaven on earth is really the only religion of man for all of recorded history, with very few exceptions. If you take the Bible, not as a holy book, but rather just a brief synopsis of human history virtually every story is about someone intent on creating the kingdom of God in the here and now. A utopia is the goal, it really doesn’t make any difference on the means required to get there, if we all just work together there is nothing we can’t do.

That is where this article stood as a draft on Monday. As I lay in bed early Tuesday morning I was thinking about where the article would go from this point. As I was juggling the various thoughts in my mind, suddenly the complex pieces seemed to fit together and I thought, “Oh God.” Immediately my inspiration turned to the movie by the same name.

“Oh God” was a 1977 movie starring John Denver as Jerry, a supermarket manager and George Burns, as God. This Jerry was chosen by God to take his message to modern America. As I remember the message, it was basically that God created it all and put mankind on this earth to make it all work out, and Jerry was told to go and tell the world that we were messing it all up.

This “Oh God,” formula is of course the religious message of all time, which is: Basically good people try to do good things during their lives and pass that on to others. That goodness is a common inherited attribute of God given to all people as a witness that they are born in the image of their Creator, and are therefore without excuse not only for their moral responsibility but also their well-defined and separate distinction from all of the rest of God’s creations.

Out of all the people I have met in my life I can probably count the really bad exceptions on my fingers. On the sinistral hand I can think of no more than about five people I would consider totally evil, beyond the opportunity of redemption. On the dextral side I can also come up with only about five so narcissistic that even I could not find anything good to say about their mental delusions.

Putting twentieth century America in perspective, it was the first time in history where a nation of people were so prosperous that they had the time to not just survive, but truly do good things, just because they thought it was the right thing to do.

The problem with creating heaven on earth is essentially certain natural laws of science, especially in thermodynamics apply. In other words there are limits to everything, and just because I think nothing but wonderful thoughts, my faith, resources, or any other personal attribute cannot alter those natural laws. Furthermore, something known as friction occurs, when my concepts of goodness don’t necessarily fit with those who really are not quite as enlightened as I am. Furthermore they have this priggish attitude about their righteous and flawed worldview that I find utterly repulsive.

On the national scale that friction leads to wars and more wars. So a really good thing to do would be to make everyone dependent on each other monetarily. We all want to build that shining city on the hill and turn the rest of the world into a park we can all enjoy once Eden is again established. Then if everyone has enough money all our problems will cease and we will all retire undefeated and play golf, drink fine wine, see the world, and enjoy only the beauty of nature.

“How’s that hopey, changey, stuff workin’ out for ya?”

Well that all depends on where you think this whole experiment is going to end up.

With the passage of healthcare reform in the United States on Sunday, and the signing of the legislation into law by President Obama on Tuesday, things are finally looking better. Slowly since universal healthcare was first proposed by Teddy Roosevelt that dream as finally become somewhat a reality. It is progress toward that grand city of highly evolved people who live in harmony, love one another, and everything is just shall we say, “Peachy keen!”

If you are one of those primitive, knuckle dragging, tea bagging, bigots who don’t believe in this progress then you are by definition, an old fashioned, conservative reactionary. All this rhetoric about how are we going to pay for it, is just fear tactics, as we will always evolve to find a way.

What we really see here is the result of just believing in the potential of potential, or a better way of saying, that things always will progress onward and upward, with only slight setbacks until the end of time. The reality of evolution teaches us that!

This is contrasted with a worldview that everything is going to hell in a hand-basket and if we can just hold on until Jesus returns, or the Rapture occurs, then we can start again and do it right.

What we see here are two different Christian eschatologies that were both ascendant beginning in the mid nineteenth century and continuing until the present day. Both of these eschatologies are different than the generally recognized dominant Christian eschatology that dates from approximately the fourth century.

What you believe generally revolves on how you interpret the Bible in various places, either making the text to be truly literal, or subject to some type of spiritual interpretation. This then leads to the paradigms we use to construct our religion as we interpret the present and move forward into the creation of history.

The historic Christian view that has little application to this marriage is basically known as amillennial or the realized millennium, referring to the time from Christ’s ascension to heaven, to rule and reign with the Father, until his second coming, is the true millennium referred to in Revelation 20. During this time, from the human perspective world events will go up and down without either the triumph of evil or good. The shining utopia is our vision, but shall never become reality, even if we work really hard all the time.

The world going to hell in a hand-basket was a belief that found its present incarnation in the middle of the nineteenth century in which Bible exegesis became more literal and less spiritually subjective. With the literal interpretation became a greater emphasis on Bible Prophesy especially as related to the end of time, and that the way things were going that time was near. For the most part these people believe that the thousand years referred to in Revelation 20 meant a literal thousand years of Christ’s rule on earth, before the great white throne judgment later in the chapter.

This premillennial view of the church eschatology is essentially the early eschatology of Christianity until Constantine, and was revived in our antithesis Calvinism in “Outside the Box” teachings of William Miller and the Adventists and the Mormons of Joseph Smith. The dominant American version however was imported from England and the teachings of John Darby. Here the Rapture of believers occurred before the Great Tribulation (Revelation 4 - 19) where the judgment of God will be poured out on an unbelieving world. This get saved before the Rapture, and don’t be left behind, became one of the significant inducements of Charles Finney revivalism, and was accompanied with strict piety that contributed greatly to the rise of the late twentieth century religious right. The not left behind now currently represents the majority of Protestant evangelicalism and is known formally as Dispensational Premillennialism.

On the left of the eschatological spectrum is what is called the Preterist or post millennial. The significant point of this teaching is that it is again a somewhat antithesis of historic Calvinism. Preterists believe that the true millennial reign of Christ began with the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 70-71 AD. If you accept that premise, the work of the church is to slowly convert the world to Christianity over time. Once that conversion process is completed it will usher in the second coming of Christ.

Now the effect of Preterism on both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson is beyond the scope of this article, but President Roosevelt was a member of the Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) denomination, and Woodrow Wilson was a staunch Calvinist Presbyterian and President of Princeton University before becoming President of the United States. Wilson received his PhD from John Hopkins, named and formed through the philanthropy of Mr. Hopkins who was a Quaker.

Princeton was also the home of Charles and A. A. Hodge, father and son respectively, and the American founders of Preterism. Following the Hodges was B. B. Warfield the last in line of conservative Presbyterian theologians, which nonetheless held there was nothing inconsistent between the theory of evolution and the Bible (especially Genesis 1 & 2). All of these people were either predecessors or contemporaries with Wilson.

So we see that Progressivism as it occurred in twentieth century America really began as a willing marriage between mainline Protestant Christianity and atheistic materialism, which provides the religious paradigm for Darwinian evolution. In other words, evolution is just a method of natural philosophy designed as a revolution of science that outlawed any fundamental “Come to Jesus” expressions. It succeeded beyond the evolutionist’s wildest dreams.

The founders of the American Republic were neither as highly evolved nor as enlightened as their twentieth century compatriots. While they all pretty much believed in God, their God also was sovereign in all things and if mankind was to do anything productive it flowed out of God’s benevolence, not human ingenuity. They also believed that government was essentially the enemy of a free people and government was never to be the instrument of social change.

Of course the founders also had a less than high view of government in the civil common arena, as opposed to the specific revelation of formal religion. The concept of inalienable rights given by God to all humans was the cornerstone of the formation of the nation. Those natural law legal rights provided not only for human opportunity, but also limits to that freedom. This was then tensioned with the concept of the pursuit of happiness, which is a common grace application of the specifics of the Christian gospel.

Human history shows that true democracies rapidly descend into anarchy and then tyranny in some form. The tyrant and his elite minions step in to provide restrictive social order to quench the chaos. In the U. S. Constitution we find a miraculous statement of the rights of the true individual by limiting governmental control to the minimum required to maintain social cohesion and place that requirement for community as a responsibility of the individual. Barack Obama sees the Constitution as a bundle of negative rights placed on the role of government, thereby betraying his belief in the supremacy of human institutions over the providence and gifts of the Almighty.

The new healthcare law essentially makes government controlled healthcare a human right. But as others have pointed out, healthcare is really a product of commerce. If healthcare is a right where does this cancer stop? A house? A job? A car, or two? A free education? All the wishful thinking makes some sense if we really were members of a true heaven on earth. But changing the old concept of “A pie in the sky in the sweet by and by,” we now have ushered in the paradigm of “A pie and a cake, I deserve it right now, without strain or toil, and make sure to give me my trophy and my money in the process.”

This idea seems to be a complete contradiction of present reality, both financially and energetically. The American Dream of self-denial for a better future for us and our children has become the “Why Not Me?” This is so ludicrous because most of us are still trying to adapt to the “Why Me?” financial bailouts and consequences that happened to a good person just trying to get by, before all the compost hit the fan.

What this really means is once the reality of natural law asserts its absolute reality, now not all that far down the road, the unintended consequences of all this social engineering will change the construct of “Why Me?” into the proper natural law prayer of “Help, God!”

So with the passage of healthcare the bottom has gotten deeper and the long term fixes more difficult and longer lasting. If you look at the absence of anything that can be construed as North America or the United States in Biblical end times prophesy, we can now see reasons why that reality may becoming much more of a possibility. A hundred year bad marriage is coming to an end, the truly amazing thing is that it lasted so long.

That is a brief story of what got us here, and I’m sticking to it!