The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Why Me? The American Miracle

3 March 2010

Volume 12, Issue 9

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There is a historical interest article beginning to make its rounds this week delineating a comparison between the ship survivors on the Titanic and the Lusitania. Probably the most interesting in the free literature is the Discovery article, but for those with ten dollars to spare you can get the original from the National Academy of Sciences.

So far, we might conclude the ships of nation states around the world are economically in a potentially perilous position of sinking. From our leadership we hear that such a catastrophe is impossible. So too were the passengers on the Titanic until that pesky natural iceberg forever altered their reality. Then just three years later, no one on the Lusitania believed that a man caused disaster, the small German u-boat torpedo, could sink the ship in just 18 minutes.

The problem with political leadership is that they have a vested interest in projecting the past into a rosy future. If our ship had a hole in it, we have now by our own ingenuity and skills fixed the problem and we are again full speed ahead. Of course if some might ask the question, “Where are we going?” they are met with scorn and ridicule for being a conspiracy theorist, or a primitive common human, not highly evolved to understand the pleasures of a fantastic ocean voyage.

At Wonder Springs we speak a lot about the world being afloat on an ocean of non-energetic debt money. Just as in the “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” there is money, money everywhere, but none of it can you drink. Of course we are told that if we just have hope, someday a few drops of good money will trickle down to us, but just as with seawater, it is undrinkable and the salinity is such that it can’t be used to grow anything, or abstractly create wealth.

The original American Dream was not such an abstract voyage, because it looked that the ocean as a hazard to keep the passengers from reaching the Promised Land. When they reached the new world, they were determined not to repeat the mistakes they left behind. On the shores of North America, they struggled to overcome wildness, by relying on self sufficiency, hard work, and the providence of God. The only difference between the founding of the American Republic and today is, back then the frontier was physical, today it is more metaphysical or philosophical simply because we have focused entirely on the material without God.

The major problems today were created because we want to be pampered, do the least we can do to get by, then retire early to live out our squandered life in luxury, and never think about the God who might interfere with our manifest destiny. Someplace the ocean journey became terrestrial, and the narrow path became, to use a Bible metaphor, a broad path to destruction.

So in true survivor reality the choices are really three.

First, we can stay put and hope and pray for rescue. Even though we hate to admit it, in true survival situations, all survivors pray. For those who don’t survive, well we really don’t know if they prayed or not.

Second, we can look at the map and decide to try to bushwhack cross country to the country road that may just be on the other side of that mountain. That would require some other survival skills and some equipment. Come to think of it if your squandered life luxury SUV got us here, and ran out of gas, we probably didn’t think that we needed any survival training or gear. So other than offering a generic prayer, bushwhacking isn’t really an option either.

Third, it is truly amazing how lonely is the broad path of destruction we would need to follow to retrace our route. Surrounded by the mass of humanity, how can it be that no one really recognized just how special I really am? If they could just see how many awards and trophies I have for just trying! After all we are all winners if we just try. We don’t need to finish, because that would require a destination, destinations require planning, and what’s the use, if this is all there really is anyway.

Therefore after waiting for what seems forever for rescue in our SUV, if we are truly human and value life we remember a historical path we read about on the Internet not all that long ago. It spoke about history repeating itself, with major God caused stupendous changes occurring about every 500 years. We must trek back through history to see where we took the wrong fork to find that woodland path “that makes all the difference.”

“Oh, God, where do we start? Hum, God – Jesus, that happened about 2000 years ago, if I start there perhaps I can construct a map that will get me back to a more achievable fork in the road, to get the narrow path right this time.”

Jesus was born, lived, was crucified and resurrected at the true beginning of western civilization.

Around 400 the Roman Empire essentially ceased to exist and then the Vandals sacked the city of Rome in 455. The culture was nominally Christian when the church headquarters moved to Constantinople in 530.

For about the next 900 years we entered the Dark Ages, some would call it medieval. The Battle of Tours in 732 halted the Moslem advance in Europe. There was an earth warming period from about 900 – 1300. The God rebooting was the separation of the Roman Catholic Church from the Eastern Orthodox in 1054.

Then came the Reniassance where people slowly began to understand again that they were people not just animals. This began slowly about 1300 and ended essentially after the Thirty Years War in 1648. Martin Luther began the church rebooting Reformation in 1517. His right hand man was Philipp Melanchthon provided Luther with an intellectual tension between God and humanism. Battles around Vienna in 1529 and 1683 with the Ottoman Empire, kept western culture Christian.

Then came the period called the Enlightenment, which is still the primary intellectual paradigm of the world in which we live. Once peace was achieved in Europe after the Thirty Years War, human development advanced rapidly as God was slowly pushed out of the picture and human reason and materialism increasingly became the only way people sought to understand life, the world, and our place in the big scheme of things. That worldview is now falling apart due to intellectual and energetic entropy. Our only hope is that we will slowly turn to God again for our survival.

About midway through the Enlightenment, a proper balance was achieved between human reason and Godly pursuits as it relates to matters of common human life. That stress centered within the American Revolution and the codifying of the U. S. Constitution. That time was not extreme, in either its humanity or its Godliness; hence it is the crossroad to which we must return if we are to again understand the tension between wise human governance and anarchy. We have found the narrow fork that America’s Founders established for us to follow. Now how do we reboot those intellectual and energetic opportunities into the twenty-first century?

For that we must go back to the sea and the sinking ships of state, to understand the crossroads of human wisdom and Godly revelation applied essentially to survival. The world’s nation ships of state do seem to be in peril through uncontrolled debt, whether the current fix is sustainable or rather a short term patch, is really the question we all need to determine and make adjustments to our lives. In that respect you may need to pay off your SUV you used to get you to the deep woods, or maybe trade it in on a developing green box to make a statement of civic responsibility.

Three books come to mind to help you understand the American Revolutionary era and how it came about. The First is “The 5000 Year Leap” by W. Cleon Skousen that gives a basic look at this miraculous time, with a strong emphasis toward using the Founders own words to tell the story.

The second is “America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story” by Bruce Feiler. Is America the new Promised Land of God? According to history much of the emphasis on people coming to North America was that pilgrimage of the Biblical Exodus. They left behind the comforts and troubles of a land they had always known, to risk it all to cross over (the Atlantic Ocean) to find (religious) freedom and build a New Testament shining city on a hill, the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation.

The third is “Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became and Urban Movement and Conquered Rome” by Rodney Stark which describes how early Christianity became the religion of western culture. Once Christianity became established it allowed for building a complex society on which our whole way of life rests today.

In today’s world, change happens rapidly. In one sense we demand it, in another way it is the source of our greatest fears. Some of those fears are truly justified; some are created through our own shortcomings and sins. Probably like no time in history our are fears generated through outside human influences. Dare we call it propaganda?

Continuing our shipboard allegory, for the storms of life we need to steer our boat into the wind, secure the ballast, hold on tight, and pray.

While there are those who petition us to join their party on the unsinkable ship, human history and our earlier ship encounters of this article, suggest that may not be the wisest decision. Of course if there are no icebergs or torpedoes that journey will prove to be the fastest and most comfortable. Once to that Promised Land you are told, you truly can retire from your journeys undefeated.

A second alternative is to get your own boat, and outfit it for the journey and make way on your own; that is the true American Dream. First of all you need to face the tempest of change and rebuke its power, then secure your ballast, such as reading the books (and similar others), and finally secure yourself to your ship and pray.

These really are the alternatives that we see today, basically the collective good passage contrasted with the individual adventurous opportunity. However notice with the “Continuing our shipboard allegory,” phrase we never mentioned the type of boat or ship.

The gift of the United States and her Constitution is that there really was no provision for the big unsinkable ship of the Federal Government. That huge one size salvation ark has been constructed over the last century. However true to the Noah typology all those safety ark builders are doing is trying to save themselves, they are planning on taking on those people, things and animals that they think will secure their survival. If you do not fit their understanding of their material ark, they will never let you on board.

Continuing with Noah, he walked with God and was called to build an ark, which would save two of each of God’s creatures on earth before God destroyed the antediluvian world. The flood of Noah takes up five chapters of the book of Genesis. There was room on Noah’s ark for other people but none were willing to make this passage to the first typology of the Promised Land. Following the flood God said that he would no longer destroy the world through water.

So we are forced back to land just as America’s Founders. The theological typology of Jesus is as the consummation of mankind’s Prophet, Priest, and King. There are churches in American Evangelicalism that use Moses as a leadership model wherein the senior pastor serves as a type of Moses. What is never realized that if that model was true, the senior pastor should serve like Aaron as only a priest, and he should hire people to be his prophet and the administrator.

Moses was unique in that he served not as king, but as God’s theocratic administrator and judge, as well as the prophetic leader into the unknown future Promised Land. America’s Founders were well aware of the assumed divine right of kings, and hence vested the administrative leadership powers in a president and then divested him of the authority of the judiciary. This leaves us what to do with religion and the divestiture of administrative powers?

Moses learned the divestiture of administrative powers from his father in law Jethro. In that leadership structure groupings were formed from tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands. In the organization of the America’s legislative branches we see the constructs of fifties (Senate) and hundreds (House) represent the thousands in the respective sovereign states of tens to represent the thousands of individuals.

It is believed that about two million people successfully completed a forty year journey through the Sinai wilderness to reach the Promised Land. The American population in 1780 was a little over three million people. Hence this Moses model would logically flow, with Christians and non-Christians together witnessing a miracle that would change the world into what we take for granted today.

Contrary to what is taught in most churches, while Jesus had the power in his Godhead, in dealing with people he never assumed that power on earth, but rather adopted just the authority he was given by his Father in heaven. George Washington understood that difference and quit after two terms as president because many wanted the easy course of combined or assumed authority and power over human rights and people be vested in just one, a human leader.

Many succeeding presidents have not been so fortunate in their theological and practical education, and so have to learn the limits of authority contrasted with power, through the reality of failure. Our last two presidents learned that lesson that difficult way. Barack Obama is quickly getting an intensive course. So far he seems reticent to those ends. With his lack of true administrative experience and surrounded by like minded Chicago amigos, it might not happen in time for appropriate changes in attitude and policies to save his presidency.

In the meantime, past, present, future debt is not being addressed and soon that window of opportunity will close and that reality will look like a torpedo shot while the crashing into an iceberg. There still is time to save the women and children as well as the young and strong and some old geezers will learn they really are not completely over the hill.

That will be a miracle of another exodus from one type of material bondage into a new freedom and liberty opportunity, when we choose to follow the American Founders narrow path. It will not come through human ingenuity alone, but only with a tension between civic responsibility and individual freedom. Welcome to the Divine gift of the early twenty-first century.