Mondays with Mencken: Vox Populi, Vox Dei

Originally Published in 1923.

The voice of the Lord God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, as reflected by the people of the United States and their self-imposed laws and regulations, severally by municipalities and states (including Kansas) or collectively by the union:

1.  God is against cigarettes.

2.  God is against playing cards.

3.  God is against advertisements of Scotch whiskey.

4.  God is against Scotch whiskey.

5.  God is against playing billiards.

6.  God is against playing pool.

7.  God is against moving pictures showing a man kissing a woman for longer than ten seconds.

8.  God is against “Septermber Morn.” [A German song from 1915]

9.  God is against “The Girl with the Whooping Cough.” [Unidentified Reference]

10.  God is against Eugene V. Debs.

11.  God is against Little Egypt.

12.  God is against playing baseball on Sunday.

13.  God is against carrying a pocket flask.

14.  God is against dancing after eleven P.M.

15.  God is against dancing after twelve P.M.

16.  God is against dancing after one A.M.

17.  God is against dancing at all.

18.  God is against secret societies.

19.  God is against German opera.

20.  God is public speaking by a member of the I.W.W.

21.  God is against Boccaccio, Balzac, Fielding and Anatole France.

22.  God is against bare knees.

23.  God is against allowing children to appear on the stage.

24.  God is against the female leg.

25.  God is against congregating on street corners.

26.  God is against letting poor men sleep on the benches in public parks.

27.  God is against birth control.

28.  God is against speaking in public on birth control.

29.  God is against sending birth control literature through the mail.

31.  God is against the minority at all times.

32.  God is gainst all illiterates save those who are American born.

33.  God is against a trade alliance of proficient business men against inferiors.

37.  God believes that if the United States didn’t look after South America, South America would go to the dogs.

38.  God is against Socialists, but loves all Republicans and Democrats.

39.  God is against hoochie-coochie dancing.

40.  God is against walking on the grass in public parks. 

41.  God is against prize-fighting.

42.  God doesn’t believe in betting on the races.

Your Weekly Machen Fix: Faith and Works

From What is Faith? published in 1925.

The Modernist return to mediaevalism in the interpretation of Galatians is no isolated thing, but is only one aspect of a misinterpretation of the whole Bible; in particular it is closely akin to a misinterpretation of a great sentence in one of the other Epistles of Paul.  The sentence to which we refer is found in II Corinthians iii. 6: “The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.”

That sentence is perhaps the most frequently misused utterance in the whole Bible.  It has indeed in this respect much competition: many phrases in the New Testament are being used today to mean almost their exact opposite, as for example, when the words, “God in Christ” and the like, are made to be an expression of the vague pantheism so popular just now, or as when the entire gospel of redemption is regarded as a mere symbol of an optimistic view of man against which that doctrine was in reality a stupendous protest, or as when the doctrien of the incarnation is represented as indicating the essential oneness of God and man!  One is reminded constantly at the present time of the way in which the Gnostics of the second century used Biblical texts to support their thoroughly un-Biblical systems.  The historical method of study, in America at least, is very generally being abandoned; and the New Testament writers are being made to say almost anything that twentieth-century readers could have wished them to say.

This abandonment of scientific historical method in exegesis, which is merely one manifestation of the intellectual decadence of our day, appears at countless points in contemporary religious literature; but at no point does it appear with greater clearness than in connection with the great utterance in II Corinthians to which we have referred.  The words: “The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life,” are constantly interpreted to mean that we are perfectly justified in taking the law of God with a grain of salt; they are held to indicate that Paul was no “literalist,” but a “Liberal,” who believed that the Old Testament was not true in detail and the Old Testament law was not valid in detail, but that all God requires is that we should extract the few great principles which the Bible teaches and not insist upon the rest.  In short, the words are held to involve a contrast between the letter of the law and “the spirit of the law”; they are held to mean that literalism is deadly, while attention to great principles keeps a man intellectually and spiritually alive.

Thus has one of the greaters utterances in the New Testament been reduced to comparative triviality – a triviality with a kernel of truth in it, to be sure, but triviality all the same.  The triviality, indeed, is merely relative; no doubt it is important to observe that attention to the general sense of a book or a law is far better than such a reading of details as that the context in which the details are found is ignored.  But all that is quite foreign to the meaning of the Apostle in this passage, and is, though quite true and quite important in its place, trivial in comparison with the tremendous thing that Paul is here endeavoring to say. 

What Paul is really doing here is not contrasting the letter of the law with the spirit of the law, but contrasting the law of God with the Spirit of God.  When he says, “The letter killeth,” he is making no contemptuous reference to a pedantic literalism which shrivels the soul; but he is setting forth the terrible majesty of God’s law.  The letter, the “thing written,” in the law of God, says Paul, pronounces a dread sentence of death upon the transgressor; but the Holy Spirit of God, as distinguished from the law, gives life.

Bow Wow Worship

Covenant Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles has started a pet service  (HT Brian Blake).  Attendees bring their pets and worship together as part of the human-canine covenant community.  This brings a whole new meaning to Dog-ma.

Mondays with Mencken: Hint to Theologians

Originally published in 1924.

The argument by design, once the bulwark of Christian apologetics, is so full of holes that it is no wonder that it has been abandoned.  The more, indeed, the theologian seeks to prove the acumen and omnipotence of God by His works, the more he is dashed by evidences of divine incompetence and irresolution.  The world is not actually well run; it is very badly run, and no Huxley was needed to point out the obvious fact.  The human body, magnificently designed in some details, is a frightful botch in other details; every first-year student of anatomy sees a hundred ways to improve it.  How are we to reconcile this mixture of infinite finesse and clumsy blundering with the concept of a single omnipotent Designer, to whom all problems are equally easy?  If He could contrive so efficient and durable a machine as the human hand, then how did He come to make such dreadful botches as the tonsils, the ball-bladder, the uterus and the prostate gland?  If He could perfect the hip joint and the ear, then why did He boggle the teeth?

Having never encountered a satisfactory – or even a remotely plausible – answer to such questions, I have had to go to the labor of devising one myself.  It is, at all events, quite simple, and in strict accord with all the known facts.  In brief, it is this: that the theory that the universe is run by a single God must be abandoned, and that in place of it we must set up the theory that it is actually run by a board of gods, all of equal puissance and authority.  Once this concept is grasped all the difficulties that have vexed theologians vanish.  Human experience instantly lights up the whole dark scene.  We observe in everyday life what happens when authority is divided, and great decisions are reached by consultation and compromise.  We know that the effects, at times, particularly when one of the consultants runs away with the others, are very good, but we also know that they are usually extremely bad.  Such a mixture of good and bad is on display in the cosmos.  It presents a series of brilliant successes in the midst of an infinity of bungling failures.

I contend that my theory is the only one ever put forward that completely accounts for the clinical picture.  Every other theory, facing such facts as sin, disease and disaster, is forced to admit the supposition that Omnipotence, after all, may not be omnipotent – a plain absurdity.  I need toy with no such nonsense.  I may assume that every god belonging to the council which rules the universe is infinitely wise and infinitely powerful, and yet not evade the plain fact that most of the acts of that council are ignorant and foolish.  In truth, my assumption that a council exists is tantamount to an a priori assumption that its joint acts are ignorant and foolish, for no act of any conceivable council can be otherwise.  Is the human hand perfect, or, at all events, practicable and praiseworthy?  Then I account for it on the ground that it was designed by some single member of the council – that the business was handed over to him by inadvertence or as a result of an irreconcilable difference of opinion.  Had more than one member participated actively in its design it would have been measurably less meritorious than it is, for the sketch offered by the original designer would have been forced to run a gauntlet of criticisms and suggestions from all the other councillors, and human experience teaches us that most of these criticisms and suggestions would have been inferior to the original idea – that many of them, in fact, would have had nothing in them save a petty desire to maul and spoil the original idea.

But do I here accuse the high gods of harboring discreditable human weaknesses?  If I do, then my excuse is that it is impossible to imagine them doing the work universally ascribed to them without admitting their possession of such weaknesses.  One cannot imagine a god spending weeks and months, and maybe whole geological epochs, laboring over the design of the human kidney without assuming him to be moved by a powerful impulse to express himself vividly, to marshal and publish his ideas, to win public credit among his fellows – in brief, without assuming him to be egoistic.  And one cannot assume him to be egoistic without assuming him to prefer the adoption of his own ideas to the adoption of any other god’s.  I defy anyone to make the contrary assumption without plunging instantly into clouds of mysticism.  Ruling it out, one comes inevitably to the conclusion that the inept management of the universe must be ascribed to clashes of egos, i.e., petty revenges and back-bitings among the gods, for any one of them alone, since we must assume him to be infinitely wise and infinitely powerful, could run it perfectly.  We suffer from bad stomachs simply because the god who first proposed making a stomach aroused thereby the ill-nature of those who had not thought of it, and because they proceeded instantly to wreak that ill-nature upon him by improving, i.e., botching, his work.  Every right-thinking man admires his own heart, at least until it begins to break down; it seems an admirable machine.  But think how much better it would be if the original design had not been butchered by a board of rival designers!

Things I’ve Unlearned

I have taken a long path to Confessional Reformed Theology: KJV-only Fundamentalism; Seeker-Sensitive; Emergent; Evangelical Mega-Church; Expository Preaching Dispensationalism.  Along the way I have had to unlearn quite a bit.  Here are a few in somewhat chronological order:

1.  The King James Version is the Word of God.  All other translations are not the Word of God.

2.  Pre-tribulational, Pre-millennial, Dispensationalism.

3.  Predestination is not in the Bible.

4.  Free will means the ability to make an uninfluenced decision between good and evil.

5.  Nineteenth-Century revivalist songs are the only true Christian music.

6.  Credo-baptism.

7.  Altar Calls.

8.  Topical Preaching.

9.  Door to Door Evangelism.

10.  Every member ministry.

11.  Congregational church government.

12.  Seeker-sensitive worship.

13.  Contemporary Christian music is the only music to be played in the worship service, because it is most appealing to the unchurched.

14.  Worship should be lead by a charismatic musician fronting an energetic praise team instead of by the pastor.

15.  Calvin killed Servetus, ergo predestination is not true.

16.  The worship service is better experienced in candlelight.

17.  Multimedia enhances every sermon.

18.  People who speak more about the Bible than experience or community should repeatedly be cautioned against making the Bible into an idol – Bibleolatry.

19.  Small groups are the lifeblood of the church.  This is where ministry really happens.

20.  The Lord’s Supper should take place at most once per month.

21.  Bigger is always better.

22.  Multi-campus churches with video sermons are the most effective way of reaching people.

23.  Doctrine divides, and that’s always a bad thing.

24.  A person’s entire theology can immediately be evaluated based on his/her view of the end-times.

25.  The Lord’s Supper is strictly memorial. 

26.  Theologians with whom I disagree have nothing to contribute, therefore I should not read them.

27.  People who do not believe in 6/24 Creation do not believe the Bible.

28.  The Anabaptists were right.

29.  Paedo-baptism is a holdover of Constantinian Church/State Christianity.  The Reformers continued the practice solely because they wanted to keep order in the community.

30.  Holding at least 3 of the 5 points of Calvinism earns one the title “Reformed.”  All other aspects of someone’s theology, piety, and practice do not factor in to wearing that title.

Your Weekly Machen Fix: Faith and the Gospel

Originally published in What is Faith, in 1925.

If what we have said so far be correct, there is now living a Saviour who is worthy of our trust, even Christ Jesus the Lord, and a deadly need of our souls for which we come to Him, namely, the curse of God’s law, the terrible guilt of sin.  But these things are not all that is needed in order that we may have faith.  It is also necessary that there should be contact between the Saviour and our need.  Christ is a sufficient Saviour; but what has He done, and what will He do, not merely for the men who were with Him in the days of His flesh, but for us?  How is it that Christ touches our lives?

The answer which the Word of God gives to that question is perfectly specific and perfectly plain.  Christ touches our lives, according to the New Testament, through the Cross.  We deserved eternal death, in accordance with the curse of God’s law; but the Lord Jesus, because He loved us, took upon Himself the guilt of our sins and died instead of us on Calvary.  And faith consists simply in our acceptance of that wondrous gift.  When we accept the gift, we are clothed, entirely without merit of our own, by the righteousness of Christ; when God looks upon us, He sees not our impurity but the spotless purity of Christ, and accepts us “as righteous in His sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.”

That view of the Cross, it cannot be denied, runs counter to the mind of the natural man.  It is not, indeed, complicated or obscure; on the contrary it is so simple that a child can understand, and what is really obscure is the manifold modern effort to explain the Cross away in such fashion as to make it more agreeable to human pride.  But certainly it is mysterious, and certainly it demands for its acceptance a tremendous sense of sin and guilt.  That sense of sin and guilt, that moral awakening of a soul dead in sin, is the work of the Spirit of God; without the Spirit of God no human persuasion will ever bring men to faith.  But that does not mean that we should be careless about the way in which we proclaim the gospel: because the proclamation of the message is insufficient to induce faith, it does not follow that it is unnecessary; on the contrary it is the means which the Spirit Himself graciously uses in bringing ment to Christ.  Every effort, therefore, should be made, with the help of God, to remove objections to this “word of the Cross” and to present it in all its gracious power.

Mondays with Mencken: The I.Q. of Holy Church

Originally published in 1930.

If only because it is manifestly more honest, intelligent and urbane than any of the dominant Protestant sects, the Catholic church usually enjoys good press in the United States.  Ku Kluxers allege that this is because newspaper and magazine editors are afraid of its ire, but that is not altogether true.  Some of the more bullet-headed Irish bishops may occasionally try to put down a critic by force, but not often.  The commoner method is simple remonstrance, and not infrequently is so artfully employed that the offender is persuaded, and emerges from the experience convinced that the church and its agents are excessively amiable, enlightened, sagacious and high-toned.

This judgment, alas, is somewhat over-sanguine.  There are undoubtedly many shrewd fellows among the Catholic clergy, and there are many more who are charming and amusing, but the church as a church, like any other ecclesiastical organization, is highly unintelligent.  It is forever making thumping errors, both in psychology and in politics, and despite its occasional brilliant successes among sentimental pseudo-intellectuals, as in England, and among the Chandala [the lowest caste of Indian society], as in America it seems destined to go downhill hereafter.  Consider its position in the world today.  After 1800 years of uninterrupted propaganda, during 1500 of which it was virtually unopposed in Christendom, scarcely a dozen really first-rate men subscribe to its ideas, and not a single first-rate nation.

Its poverty in this respect is well demonstrated by its almost comical excess of enthusiasm whenever a stray member of the intelligentsia succumbs.  Reading the Catholic papers – I allude, of course, to the more intelligent of them, not to the dismal diocesan rags – an uninformed person might easily gather the impression that Hilaire Belloc is the greatest historian who ever lived, and G. K. Chesterton the most profound metaphyscian.  Both men, obviously, are immensely clever, but the Catholic Hazlitts are not content to say so much: they must make them universal geniuses.  Similarly, at least on this side of the water, the late Joyce Kilmer is converted into a poet comparable to Whitman or Browning, and the late Bertram C. A. Windle becomes a scientist almost equal to Pasteur, Koch, Darwin or Johannes Muller.  The thing proceeds to the lowest and most grotesque level.  Even Harvey Wickham, among Catholic critics, is usually spoken of as if he were a grand and incomparable fellow, glorious alike to the True Religion and the human race. 

This gurgling, it seems to me, is injudicious.  A more moderate rejoicing would be far more convincing.  And a more moderate reviling would probably do more damage to the church’s chief current enemies – the birth controllers and the physical scientists.  The war upon birth control, as it is commonly carried on by virgin bishops, is not only unfair, but also ridiculous, for it is based upon theological postulates that no educated man could conceivably accept.  There is, I believe, a lot to be said against the birth-controllers – for example, on the score of their false pretenses: they really know no more about preventing conception than any corner druggist.  But their Catholic critics, so far as I know, have never said it.  Instead, they ground their case upon a dogmatism that is offensive to every intellectual decency, and try to dispose of their opponents by denouncing them as mere voluptuaries.  This last is sheer nonsense.  The principal birth-controllers are as serious as so many witch-burners, and the theory that they are voluptuaries is easily refuted by looking at one of them, preferably a female.

The war upon modern science, carried on in Boston by Cardinal O’Connell and elsewhere by ecclesiastics even less prudent, is quite as silly.  Its sole effect must be to make every enlightened Catholic blush.  And in the long run, if he be of a reflective habit, it must make him wonder whether he really belongs in the Roman camp.  Every Catholic of that sort, the world being what it is, has a hard enough time already to hold his faith: it is opposed not only by a multitude of objective evidences but also by the inner spirit of his day and generation.  Certainly it does not help him to be told that Belloc is a great historian and that Gibbon was an ass, that Kilmer was a good poet and Hardy a bad one, and that Windle was superior to Einstein.  Nor does it help him to be taught solemly that the hatching of rachitic and syphilitic children is an act of merit, ad maiorem Dei gloriam.

Your Weekly Machen Fix: The Good Fight of Faith

Delivered to students at Westminster Theological Seminary.  Published in God Transcendent, 1949.  Any resemblence to current pugilists or pacifists is purely prophetic.

The human instruments, however, which God uses in those triumphs are no pacifists, but great fighters like Paul himself.  Little affinity for the great apostle has the whole tribe of the considerers of consequences, the whole tribe of the compromisers ancient and modern.  The real companions of Paul are the great heroes of the faith.  But who are those heroes?  Are they not true fighters, one and all?  Tertullian fought a mighty battle against Marcion; Athanasius fought against the Arians; Augustine fought against Pelagius; and as for Luther, he fought a brave battle against kings and princes and popes for the liberty of the people of God.  Luther was a great fighter; and we love him for it.  So was Calvin; so were John Knox and all the rest.  It is impossible to be a true soldier of Jesus Christ and not fight. . . .

You will have a battle, too, when you go forth as ministers into the church.  The church is now in a period of deadly conflict.  The redemptive religion known as Christianity is contending, in our own church and in all the larger churches of the world, against a totally alien type of religion.  As always, the enemy conceals his most dangerous assaults under pious phrases and half truths.  The shibboleths of the adversary have sometimes a very deceptive sound.  “Let us propagate Christianity,” the adversary says, “but let us not always be engaged in arguing in defence of it; let us make our preaching positive, and not negative; let us avoid controversy; let us hold to a Person and not to a dogma; let us sink small doctrinal differences and seek the unity of the church of Christ; let us drop doctrinal accretions and interpret Christ for ourselves; let us look for our knowledge of Christ, not to ancient books, but to the living Christ in our hearts; let us not impose Western creeds on the Eastern mind; let us be tolerant of opposing views.”  Such are some of the shibboleths of that agnostic Modernism which is the deadliest enemy of the Christian religon today.  They deceive some of God’s people some of the time; they are heard sometimes from the lips of good Christian people, who have not the slightest inkling of what they mean.  But their true meaning, to thinking men, is becoming increasingly clear.  Increasingly it is becoming necessary for a man to decide whether he is going to stand or not to stand for the Lord Jesus Christ as he is presented to us in the Word of God. . . .

Where are you going to stand in the great battle which now rages in the church?  Are you going to curry favor with the world by standing aloof; are you going to be “conservative liberals ” or “liberal conservative” or “Christians who do not believe in controversy,” or anthing else so self-contradictory and absurd?  Are you going to be Christians, but not Christians overmuch?  Are you going to stand coldly aloof when God’s people fight against ecclesiastical tyranny at home and abroad?  Are you going to excuse yourselves by pointing out personal defects in those who contend for the faith today?  Are you going to be disloyal to Christ in external testimony until you can make all well within your own soul?  Be assured, you will never accomplish your purpose if you adopt such a program as that.  Witness bravely to the truth that you already understand, and more will be given you; but make common cause with those who deny or ignore the gospel of Christ, and the enemy will forever run riot in your life. . . .

In many lands there are those who have faced the great issue of the day and have decided it aright, who have preserved true independence of mind in the presence of the world; in many lands there are groups of Christian people who in the face of ecclesiastical tyranny have not been afraid to stand for Jesus Christ.  God grant that you may give comfort to them as you go forth from this seminary; God grant that you may rejoice their hearts by giving them your hand and your voice.  To do so you will need courage.  Far easier is it to curry favor with the world by abusing those whom the world abuses, by speaking against controversy, by taking a balcony view of the struggle in which God’s servants are engaged.  But God save you from such a neutrality as that!  It has a certain worldly appearance of urbanity and charity.  But how cruel it is to burdened souls; how heartless it is to those little ones who are looking to the church for some clear message from God!  God save you from beings so heartless and so unloving and so cold; God grant, instead, that in all humility, but also in all boldness, in reliance upon God, you may fight the good fight of faith.  Peace is indeed yours, the peace of God which passeth all understanding.  But that peace is given you, not that you may be onlookers or neutrals in love’s battle, but that you may be good soldiers of Jesus Christ.

Did the Sabbath Go Out with the Old Covenant?

Rev. Danny Hyde explains the doctrine of the Sabbath.

Mondays with Mencken: Confession of a Theological Moron

Originally published in 1920.

One of my heaviest handicaps in this world is the fact that I am absolutely devoid of what is called religious feeling.  That is to say, I have no sense whatever of the divine presence or of a divine personality; neither ever enters into my thinking.  I have faced, in my time, all the great disaster that man must suffer – professional failure, financial catastrophe, social ignominy, the treacher of friends, the loss of a best girl, intolerable physical pain, even the threat of death itself.  Yet I cannot remember that even in the blackest moments of long and ghastly nights have I ever had the slightest impulse to pray to God for help.  Twich I have been shot at, deliberately and at short range.  Both times I was scared stiff, and yet neither time did it occur to me to ask any aid of the celestial hierarchy.  As for the impulse to worship, it is as foreign to my nature as the impulse to run for Congress.

I am anything but a militant atheist and haven’t the slightest objection to church-going, so long as it is honest.  I have gone to church myself many times, honestly seeking to experience the great inward exaltation that religious person speak of.  Not even at St. Peter’s in Rome have I sensed the least trace of it.  The most I ever feel at the most solemn moment of the most pretentious religious ceremonial is a sensuous delight in the beauty of it – a delight exactly like that which comes over me when I hear, say, Tristan and Isolde or Brahms’ stupendous fourth symphony.  The effect of such music, in fact, is much keener than the effect of the liturgy.  Brahms moves me far more powerfully than the holy saints.

As I say, this deficiency is a handicap in a world peopled, in the overwhelming main, by men who are inherently religious.  It sets me apart from my fellows and makes it difficult for me to understand many of their ideas and not a few of their acts.  I see them responding constantly and robustly to impulses that to me are quite inexplicable.  Worse, it causes these folks to misunderstand me, and often to do me serious injustice.  They cannot rid themselves of the notion that, because I am anaesthetic to the ideas which move them most profoundly, I am, in some vague but nevertheless certain way, a man of aberrant morals, and hence one to be kept at a distance.  I have never met a religious man who did not reveal this suspicion.  No matter how earnestly he tried to grasp my point of view, he always ended by making an alarmed sort of retreat.  All religions, in fact, teach that dissent is a sin; most of them make it the blackest of all sins, and all of them punish it severely whenever they have the power.  It is impossible for a religious man to rid himself of the notion that such punishments are just.  He simply cannot imagine a civilized rule of conduct that is not based upon the fear of God.

Let me add that my failing is in the fundamental religious impulse, not in mere theological credulity.  I am not kept out of church by an inability to believe the current dogmas.  In point of fact, a good many of them seem to be reasonable enough, and I probably dissent from most of them a good deal less violently than many men who are assidious devotees.  Among my curious experiences, years ago, was that of convincing an ardent Catholic who balked at the dogma of papal infallibility.  He was a very faithful son of the church, and his inability to accept it greatly distressed him.  I proved to him, at least to his satisfaction, that there was nothing intrinsically absurd in it – that if the dogmas that he already accepted were true then this one was probably true also.  Some time later, when this man was on his deathbed, I visited him and he thanked me simply and with apparent sincerity for resolving his old doubt.  But even he was unable to comprehend my own lack of religion.  His last words to me were a pious hope that I would give over my lamentable contumacy to God and lead a better life.  He died firmly convince that I was headed for hell, and what is more, that I deserved it.