What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

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April 2021 Archives

April 2, 2021

Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Sermon 68, Leo the Great

I. Christ's Godhead never forsook Him in His Passion

The last discourse, dearly-beloved, of which we desire now to give the promised portion, had reached that point in the argument where we were speaking of that cry which the crucified Lord uttered to the Father: we bade the simple and unthinking hearer not take the words "My God, etc.," in a sense as if, when Jesus was fixed upon the wood of the cross, the Omnipotence of the Father's Deity had gone away from Him; seeing that God's and Man's Nature were so completely joined in Him that the union could not be destroyed by punishment nor by death. For while each substance retained its own properties, God neither held aloof from the suffering of His body nor was made passible by the flesh, because the Godhead which was in the Sufferer did not actually suffer. And hence, in accordance with the Nature of the Word made Man, He Who was made in the midst of all is the same as He through Whom all things were made. He Who is arrested by the hands of wicked men is the same as He Who is bound by no limits. He Who is pierced with nails is the same as He Whom no wound can affect. Finally, He Who underwent death is the same as He Who never ceased to be eternal, so that both facts are established by indubitable signs, namely, the truth of the humiliation in Christ and the truth of the majesty; because Divine power joined itself to human frailty to this end, that God, while making what was ours His, might at the same time make what was His ours. The Son, therefore, was not separated from the Father, nor the Father from the Son; and the unchangeable Godhead and the inseparable Trinity did not admit of any division. For although the task of undergoing Incarnation belonged peculiarly to the Only-begotten Son of God, yet the Father was not separated from the Son any more than the flesh was separated from the Word.

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April 4, 2021

Easter 2021

Easter2021.jpg

St. Ignatius of Antioch, a Christian pastor of the immediate post-apostolic generation, was martyred in Rome around the turn of the 2nd century. References in his own works point to death by wild animals for public entertainment. Reliable, if not definitive, historical evidence links him to both St. Peter and St. John the Apostle. Less reliable evidence puts him among those blessed urchins regarding whom Our Lord declared, “suffer the little children to come to me”; and presents him, much later in life, courageously defying Emperor Trajan in person prior to his imprisonment. His journey in chains from Syria to Italy supplied opportunity and inspiration for a series of epistles whose richness of doctrine and eloquence of language mark them as among the early treasures of post-Scriptural Christian literature. The following excerpt comes from his Letter to the Smyrnans, which is noteworthy for its emphatic defense of the bodily, physical, very much real, life, passion, death and resurrection of the Nazarene.

Alleluia, He is Risen!


* * * * *


I glorify God, even Jesus Christ, who has given you such wisdom. For I have observed that you are perfected in an immovable faith, as if you were nailed to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, both in the flesh and in the spirit, and are established in love through the blood of Christ, being fully persuaded with respect to our Lord, that He was truly of the seed of David according to the flesh, and the Son of God according to the will and power of God; that He was truly born of a virgin, was baptized by John, in order that all righteousness might be fulfilled by Him; and was truly, under Pontius Pilate and Herod the tetrarch, nailed to the cross for us in His flesh. Of this fruit we are by His divinely-blessed passion, that He might set up a standard for all ages, through His resurrection, to all His holy and faithful followers, whether among Jews or Gentiles, in the one body of His Church.

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April 11, 2021

Building the wall [Updated]

You remember Pastor Coates in Canada? This guy.

Well, now this is happening. He was released from jail pending his trial. His church continued to meet. The RCMP has now built a big chainlink fence around GraceLife Church. Protesters gathered outside the fence today, though GraceLife itself says that its own members were not being encouraged to join those protestors.

I hope myself that Pastor Coates quietly gathered GraceLife's own congregation somewhere else just to hold a church service out in the prairie or on private property, but I haven't been able to get any information about that. Update: They did! Here is a video. It carefully just shows Pastor Coates and doesn't say where it was recorded. Bless 'em! I bet the police are carefully analyzing the video at this very moment to identify that gray brick wall and figure out where this dangerous, illegal activity is taking place. Click to watch the underground church in Canada meet and pray.

If you're a committed Christian and this barricading of GraceLife and fixation on the part of the Alberta Health Department doesn't bother you, it should.

April 16, 2021

The racial Hatfields and McCoys

Here is something that I recently posted on Facebook apropos of the kind of weak-sauce semi-condemnations of racial rioting and looting. Such statements as I have in mind come with lengthy rationalizations and pleas for walking in the shoes of the rioters (would those be the looted Nikes or the shoes they were previously wearing, one wonders?) on the grounds that they feel so oppressed by [fill in here whatever recent event sparked the current round of looting].

I find all of this frankly shocking when it comes from people that I otherwise like or think well of. The acts in question are so obviously wicked, greedy, and evil, and the downplaying comments are so obviously irrelevant. Indeed, things are usually even worse than what is portrayed in my alternative scenario below, because in many cases the event in question could be seen by a reasonable man as an accident (as recently when an officer accidentally shot someone while believing that she was using a taser). But even if there were real bad acts involved (as sometimes there are), that would be utterly irrelevant to the legitimacy of looting and breaking the property of people totally unrelated to the event! It is a savagely stunted moral judgement that suggests otherwise, a moral judgement that gives us undying feuds in which, "He did that to some of my people, so we're going to hurt some of his people" is followed by the exact same statement on the other side.

Here is what I wrote.

Something to ponder: Suppose that we imagine politically non-favored group A. Suppose that members of group A have, indeed, suffered injustice because of their membership in group A. Suppose that that injustice has seriously harmed them or those whom they love--"their people." Suppose that members of group A go on a spree targeting admittedly completely innocent members of politically favored group B, destroying their property and their livelihoods, with the implicit threat of harming them if they get in the way. Suppose that members of group A make it clear that they are doing so because of their anger due to the perceived injustices and harms done to members of their own group, "their people."

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