Mundabor, God bless his Papist Soul, is thinking bleak thoughts. I have one comfort, said by the Fundamentalist Baptist I talked to yesterday, when I gently said I’m more Presbyterian and Reformed: “Well, in Heaven there will be no Baptists”.
The Church is Christ’s and he will preserve it. There will be a faithful church. Those who abandon the word of God and seek not the guidance of the Holy Spirit nor obey the teachings therein will fall and fail.
Church history is littered with such. But Mundabor sees them attacking that which is faithful and good in his church, and fears.
Christianity will be dismantled in instalments. But the name will remain, and a lip allegiance will continue to be given to something whose meaning has been long lost.
We Catholics are not, at first sight, exempt from danger. We hear now talk of a “theology of love”, which would be – once again – a complete denial of Christianity and is to all intents and purposes a new religion, but under the cloak of the Church.
We are different from the Anglicans, though, because we have the Holy Ghost watching over our (and only) Church, whilst the Anglicans are left alone and free to destroy their sect.
Still, this is the future I can now clearly see. Christianity will die as a mass religion not only in the Attendance to its liturgy or the observance of its precepts, but in the very definition of its values and constituting elements, whilst still keeping the name. People will emphatically assure you that they are Christians, whilst not bearing any resemblance to a Christian in the eyes of every generation before ours. They will, in fact, question your Christian credentials, and they will do so exactly because you adhere to what every generation of Christians before ours adhered to. But the names will still be there, parts of the ceremonies, and a grotesquely distorted echo of the original message.
This is what the Anglicans are doing now with their own sect, and the Kasperites are trying to do with Holy Mother Church.
The first will succeed, the second will fail.
Bar repentance, the most terrible punishment awaits both.
What Mundabor sees is horrible. Niceness and tolerance are the new idols, and all worship them not he whom created them. People build their own mysteries, not realizing they are making their own hell. But there are faithful remnants. In the Baptists, in the Pentecostals, in the Catholic, the Orthodox… and in the Anglicans and Methodists.
Unlike Mundabor, I am hopeful. This secular world is getting worse by the minute, and the disgust of people is increasing just as the conservatives start to despair. The liberals breed not: the believers do.
Christ prunes the dead and heretical from his church, and those who have not another generation are doing that anyway. It is the patriarchal conservatives who procreate. And within such communities the knowledge and teaching of the West will remain, even while the Pagans descend into ignorance.
Our nations, I have less hope for. But the gates of Hell cannot prevail against the church.
