The Law, Anti Semites and why Christ is not nice. [Beyond the Sunday School]

I was reading a book by Chris Hedges on the Liberal system yesterday. It is always wise to know what the thoughtful people who oppose you are thinking. He is correct that our elite are broken, powerless and ineffectual: while at the same time they demand more and more honour. Well, some of them.

Further to the news that the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott flies coach, so does his future sovereign:

…
But it was perhaps surprising to learn that even Prince William can feel the pinch – this weekend he was spotted in economy class when he took an internal flight in the US after celebrating his friend Guy Pelly’s marriage.

Prince William, who was in America with Prince Harry, took the American Airlines flight from Memphis to Dallas on Sunday…

The cost of the trip itself is being met privately by both the princes – Prince William is understood to have changed planes at Dallas Fort Worth to return to the UK.

On the American Airlines plane he took a window seat and is understood to have ordered water during the 1hour 30 domestic flight. A similar flight was on sale today for £250…

It is not the first time that the royals have tried to save money when attending a wedding.

In 2011 passengers were surprised to see Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge settle into seats with the rest of the public after boarding a Flybe jet in Edinburgh for their hour long journey to Manchester following the wedding of Zara Phillips and Mike Tindall in Edinburgh.

Meanwhile, a hungover Prince Harry chose EasyJet to make his way home to London – he also flew to the Scottish city with the airline – checking in his green army-issue bag for £10.

During the recession the Queen urged her family to show restraint and to avoid overt displays of extravagance.

Fortunately, there’s no chance of that happening in a republic of limited government by citizen representatives:

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today, it has obtained records from the U.S. Department of the Air Force revealing that President Obama’s February 2014 Palm Springs, California, and March 2014 Key Largo, Florida, golf outings cost the taxpayers $2,952,278 for flight expenses alone.

Oh, don’t worry. On one of those trips, the President squeezed in four hours of work before hitting the links:

Well, Mark Steyn gets that one right… and Chris Hedges would agree with him. However, Hedges cannot get rid of his assumptions, that the liberal elite are primarily Democrats, Unionists, and liberal theologians. That Liberalism is couched in class warfare. He is correct to state that the first liberals would be anti-corporate, for they were anti-monopolists, but his formulation of liberalism looks back to the 19th century, and sees the 20th century as bad, and the 21st as worse.

Where Hedges is correct when he says that if you demand privileges that come with doing your duty — such as being the conscience of society, working through the moral implications of issues. teaching young people how to think, leading… then society will puke you out.

Part of this liberal project has been the gelding of Christ. He is seen as in the children’s hymn: gentle, meek and mild. Fuzzy. Caring. Non confrontational. Pacifist. Allowing of all things, because he loves us.

But Christ is not that. He was a Jew, teaching to Jews. The Judiac law is an essential part of the gospel… and yes, I’m quoting an Orthodox Jew here.

Nirenberg’s aversion to the traditional understanding of Judaism gets him into trouble at the outset, as he tries to understand the stance of early Christianity towards the Jews. He recites the familiar catalogue of Jesus’ accusations against the Pharisees: they are hypocrites, wicked tenants, and so on, but he misses the decisive point: However much Christians abhorred the Jews, Christianity could not quite extirpate Judaism without destroying its own foundations.

Nierenberg notes the ambivalence of Christian attitudes towards the Jews, citing “Paul’s extraordinary formulation” in Romans 12:28: “As regards the gospel, they are enemies, but for your sake; but as regards those who are God’s choice, they are still well loved for the sake of their ancestors.” But his attempt to explain why the early Church chose not to “other” the Jews out of existence is strained; if anti-Judaism really is the founding principle of the West, why didn’t Marcion succeed in suppressing the Hebrew Scriptures?

Christianity cannot survive severed from its Jewish roots, for the Christian promise of the Kingdom of Heaven stems from the Jewish promise of eternal life, as Benedict XVI argues in the first volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, which cites Rabbi Jacob Neusner. In Matthew 12:8, Jesus compares his disciples’ Sabbath violation to that of the priests who perform sacrifices on the Sabbath at the Temple. If the priests are exempt from Shabbat restrictions, Jesus tells the Pharisees, so can his disciples, for Jesus’ person is the new Temple, the wellspring of eternal life as it was understood by Judaism. Jesus’ break with Judaism is enacted within Jewish terms, and the radical Christology of Matthew 12 exposes its Jewish roots: Jesus’ promise of the Kingdom of Heaven is incomprehensible except in context of its Jewish foundation.

Because Christ said that the law still stands. We may not like this, but the natural and moral laws against promiscuity and adultery, theft, perjury and jealousy (covetousness) along with the laws around honouring God alone are as immutable as gravity. Christ teaches that they are more immutable than gravity.

MATTHEW 5:17-20

¹⁷“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. ¹⁸For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. ¹⁹Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. ²⁰For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

This leads me to a few simple conclusions. none of which will make me popular.

1. Antisemitism is not only hateful and sinful, it is foolish. Because and although the Jews did persecute Jewus and the early church, the Jews are the people of God and through the Law and their witness Christ came who bought salvation to all nations, as promised to Abraham.  So we need to pray that the Jews will see Christ as who he is, and we should support them.
2. The Mosaic law is good. The morality it teaches is true. And we should teach it: we should practice it. We are called to live for the glory of God, and that means that there will be restrictions on our behaviour. For the liberal idea of freedom is freedom of ideas, not unlawfulness (Hedges gets that completely correct) and the liberal ideas of freedom and property rights support family foundation, not destroy them.
3. We need confront the lie that Jesus was some kind of nice wuss. He did not do nice sermons. If you read the Sermon of the Mount with any understanding of the Rabbinical arguments of the days you get a sense that Christ was far more hard core than any Pharisee. Take Divorce. Some argued it required cause. Others argued that it was for any reason. Christ said it existed because our hearts were hardened, but that marriage should be for life, and divorce limited.(and he said that in parentheses). C

Christ is not the liberal pacifist person the Quakers think he was. Nor is he some kind of benevolent teddy bear as in the child’s hymn. He was a man who whipped bankers out of a temple, confronted Rabbis, and generally made the elite squirm.

And the one thing Chris Hedges got right is that the Church has abandoned that role. We need to rediscover it.