From the Reformation to the Third Reich: Protestantism’s Impact on Western Culture – Part 6
The following is part six of a multi-part series.
Taken from John Immel’s fifth session
at the 2014 Conference on Gospel Discernment and Spiritual Tyranny
~ Edited by Andy Young
The Rise of National Socialism and the Assault on Capitalism
It is my conviction that the anti-Semitism and, of course, the Holocaust directly related to anti-Semitism is what obscures the larger discussion about National Socialism. I know that the eradication of a specific genetic population really hits us where we live. We know that is the one thing we can never escape, and so when there is organized, government-driven hostility towards the genetics of our creation, that’s hard to get out of your head. But you must also remember the National Socialists wiped out almost an equal number of people who were not Jews. They wiped out pretty much anybody who they decided stood in their way of whatever their statist ambitions were.
Let us begin with the champion of all Germans, Martin Luther. Little-known to people who do not pay any attention, Luther wrote a book entitled, On the Jews and Their Lies. I want to give you a few excerpts out of the introduction.
“I had made up my mind to write no more about the Jews or against them. But since I learned that those miserable and accursed people do not cease to lure to themselves even us, that is, the Christians, I have published this little book so that I might be found among those who oppose such poisonous activities of the Jews and who warned the Christians to be on their guard against them…
“We propose to discuss their arguments and boast and prove convincingly before God and the world, not before Jews for, as already said, they would accept this neither from Moses nor from the Messiah himself… To this end, we quote Moses in Genesis 17… When God instituted circumcision, he said, among other things, ‘Any uncircumcised male shall be cut off from his people.’ [Genesis 17:14 ]”
Now I want you to notice Luther’s stated purpose. “We propose to discuss their arguments and boast and prove convincingly before God and the world…” He is trying to make a specific intellectual rebuttal. This is a theological treatise, and this is important. There is a common myth, one of many around us, that Luther was somehow just misled, and these are just some vague ramblings. No. This is just as important in Luther’s mind as the Heidelberg Disputation. This is just as central to Lutheran thought as the rest of his doctrinal works.
As I said, it is often stated in his defense that Luther was a victim of long-held prejudices. He was merely reacting out of his horrible biases, that it is the unfortunate writing of an ignorant soul, that he can’t really be held responsible for the actions of people 400 years in the future. I contend this is all nonsense. Luther wrote this when he was 60, and this is after a long-considered development.
Notice in his first comment he said, “I made up my mind to write no more either about the Jews or against them.” He had a long history of dealing with the Jewish people in his mind. So he writes this at last because he ultimately believes he must organize a defense for Christianity against the Jews. So those people who actually insist that Luther is somehow not culpable here are people who are trying to wipe out reality and rewrite history.
And really, it will take you about an hour and a half to two hours to wade through, but on its face, On the Jews and Their Lies is a theological treatise with the same intentions as Bondage of the Will and the Heidelberg Disputation. The notion that he should not be responsible for the actions of people 400 years later is nonsense. The fact of the matter is that everybody expects people to conform and to act according to Luther in theology. This is a fundamental expectation. You cannot pick and choose. You cannot tell me his doctrine is what everybody should do because of his orthodoxy and then in turn tell me that something he wrote with just as much theological impact is somehow irrelevant to people’s actions. Luther was a definer of his time. He was not a victim of his time. Luther is the intellectual plumb line for all things orthodoxy, and it is expected that people conform, and it is nonsense to assume that he should not be directly accountable.
He goes on to say,
“Shame on you, you damned Jews, that you dare to apply this earnest, glorious, comforting word of God so despicably on your mortal greedy belly and that you are not ashamed to display your greed so openly. You are not worthy of looking at the outside of the Bible, much less of reading it. You should read only the Bible that is found under the sow’s tail, and eat and drink the letters that drop from there.”
Do I really have to unscramble that? This is the kind of language you would find in an elementary school. Gooey poop and pee, really? Now, I didn’t say it was a great theological treatise, and I didn’t say he was a whiz kid of theological defense. I’m only telling you he intends this to be held this way. But I do want to notice the theme that gets lost among the distraction, and that is Luther’s preoccupation with the perception of Jewish “greed”. In this short paragraph there are two references to it; “greedy belly” and “that you display your greed so openly.” Keep that in mind as you consider this next quote.
“They curse us goyim (literally means ‘nations’ but is used as a pejorative for all non-Jews). In their synagogues and in their prayers, they wish us every misfortune. They rob us of our money and goods through their usury, and they play on us every wicked trick they can. And the worst of it is that they still claim to have done right and well, that is, to have done God a service. And they teach the doing of such things. No pagan ever acted thus. In fact, no one acts thus except the devil himself, or whomever he possesses, as he has possessed the Jews.”
Beyond the entirely paranoid ramblings up here, again what is the theme? What is he really criticizing the Jews for? Their money, their wealth, their prosperity. He calls it greed. That’s designed to condemn it. But what he’s really upset about is that they have prosperity and he does not. Notice the theme of this next quote.
“So we, the German Christians, are even at fault in not avenging all the innocent blood of our Lord and of the Christians which they shed for 300 years after the destruction of Jerusalem. We, German Christians, are at fault for not slaying them. Rather, we allow them to live freely in our midst despite their murdering, cursing, blaspheming, lying and defaming. We protect and shield their synagogues, houses, life, and property. In this way we make them lazy and secure and encourage them to fleece us bodily of our money and goods, as well as to mock and deride us, with a view to finally overcoming us, killing us all for such great sin and robbing us all of our property. Now tell me whether they do not have every reason to be the enemies of us accursed Goyim, to curse us and to strive for our final complete and eternal ruin.”
Now I’ve spent a little bit of time searching through history, and I cannot remember any Jewish incursion to oppress the German people. I can think of no place in history where the Jews were pillaging and plundering their way to wealth. I’m being a little facetious here, but the point is I do not know where Luther gets all this. But I do want you to notice again the fundamental theme. Luther thinks that Jewish wealth and greed is a problem. With this in mind, it makes abundant sense why Adolf Hitler could say this:
“Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”
This is from page 65 in my copy of Mein Kampf. Now, it is important to note that even in its original inception, no one objected to Hitler’s thoughts published in Mein Kampf. No one in the Christian Church thought this was a strange thing to say. There was no appreciable theological objection to Hitler equating defending himself against the Jews with being the work of the Lord and it necessarily being a Christian ideal. So what you are actually seeing here, as we roll from Luther to 
Hitler, is that a theologically-founded anti-Semitism was in fact considered Christian orthodoxy for most of Church history. The Christian orthodox position is what shaped how the Germans created their legislation, and this is well-documented.
Here is a guy by the name of Kirche Bischof (which is German for “church bishop”). He makes this comment in June 1933:
“If anyone can lay claim to God’s help, then it is Hitler, for without God’s benevolent, fatherly hand, without his blessing, the nation would not be where it stands today. It is an unbelievable miracle that God has bestowed on our people,”
The “unbelievable miracle” being Adolf Hitler.
Germany’s population was roughly 65 million people in 1930. I want you to notice this next quote from a pastor by the name of Mathias K. This was an interview after the war, and I want you to notice how he describes his mindset and the mindset of the German people.
“Part of my childhood memories is how the cattle were driven past my parents’ home to the cattle market. Those who had control of the cattle were the Jews. In every village it was the Jews who had the trade and traffic in their hands, and they had the cattle business, the grain train, and they had the general store where you could buy everything. The farmers had simply become slaves of the Jews, and they never got anywhere. The Jewish question ate away at those in the countryside.
“All that hatred sat deeply within the people. Strong anti-Semitic concerns were already there. It’s not at all the case that Herr Goebbels invented all of it. Rather the entire ideology and also the rhetoric were there. The Nazis had only to take it and carry it to its conclusion.
“So one can’t overlook the fact that when 1933 came and there were not a few good Christians who had no objection at all if the Jews got pushed back a bit. They didn’t start with concentration camps; it began with propaganda. But people said, ‘Oh, the cheeky Jews, let them get what is coming to them.’”
Again, I want you to notice the theme. The Lutherans equated their poverty with Jewish prosperity. They specifically resented Jewish prosperity. Jew meant prosperous. It meant upper class. This is the root of their hatred.
Here is another quote from a guy by the name of Erich Koch. He was the president of the provincial Protestant Church – actually, the president of the provincial Protestant Church synod, which means he was actually pretty important. I’m trying to think of an American variation, maybe like being the head of the Moral Majority or the Southern Baptist Convention. There will be somebody of that stature within the church.
“Externally, much has changed. But in our church the world of Christ according to the doctrine of Luther remains…Righteousness, truth and love should guide us, but not only at the level of charity but also in the joyful and active struggles for our Protestant confession of faith.”
He also said, and this is after the war in court records,
“I held the view that the Nazi idea had to develop from basic Prussian Protestant attitude and from Luther’s unfinished reformation.”
Now here’s the punch line. Erich Koch ultimately decides to resign his position as president of the synod, and he became one of the leading men to kill thousands of Jews and political dissidents, and he helped to enslave the remaining Slavic population.
This is the cover from a pamphlet called “The Cross and the Swastika.” It was created by a small church group in some Prussian province by Gerhard Hahn, president of the provincial church council. Here’s what he said:
“The cross of Christ and the swastika do not need to oppose each other. They must not do so, but rather they could and should stand together. One should not dominate the other, but rather each should maintain its own meaning and significance.
“The cross of Christ points towards heaven and admonishes us. Remember that you are Christian people carried by the eternal love of the heavenly Father, free through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, sanctified by the power of God’s Spirit.
“The swastika, however, points to the world as a divine creation and admonishes us. Remember that you are German, born in German territory to parents of German blood, filled with the German spirit and essence formed according to German nature.”
He goes on to say later in the pamphlet:
“The cross of Christ and the swastika must have a positive relationship!
“The church must affirm without reservation Adolf Hitler’s total state, the last bulwark against the Satan of Bolshevism. It should not be forgotten that had it not been for Hitler, we would have long since sunk into Bolshevism and probably would no longer have churches and ministers.
“The church must affirm without reservation the Fuhrer of the National Socialists, Adolf Hitler, the Chancellor of the German Reich. He expects the church to help build the Third Reich… It is the task of the Church to create and provide this foundation.”
There is no question in the mind of the Evangelical Lutheran Church that there is a synonymous action. The National Socialists and the church are only divisions in name. They are not divisions in fact. And this is very important for me to point out. The presumption is that somehow the Church was set apart and all this was done to them. This is historical error of the first order. And when I say Evangelical Lutheran Church, if you look at the Lutheran Church here in the United States, we are talking about a denomination with virtually no difference in doctrinal distinctions. The rudiments of Lutheran orthodoxy then are the rudiments of Lutheran orthodoxy today.
So let us ask the question. What causes this kind of devotion? Let us briefly explore the idea that Christians are led astray. There are three variations of this: Hitler was possessed. It was the devil. It was satanic delusion. I have heard this objection a few times, and this is one of those objections that – I’ll be blunt – you shouldn’t utter this in public. And here’s why. If there are Christians that would like to advance this excuse, I’m going to suggest that you should be quiet. You must understand what you’re really saying.
Of the 65 million people in the Germany, 40 million people named themselves “Lutheran.” So if Christians can be deceived by the devil on so massive a scale, Christians should be banned from all political action because their judgment is nonexistent. If you are going to blame this on the devil, delusion, mass delusion, mass hysteria, and say it is confined specifically to Lutheran Christians, then the logical assumption is that Lutheran Christians have no business around anything important.
Blaming mass action on demonic forces makes the governing force of man’s mind malevolent ghosts. If the devil can corrupt Christian epistemology, then the solution is to make sure Christians are kept far away from all the important decisions. There should be no Christian in the White House near the atomic nuclear button. And I guarantee you, if you want to offer this up, and you want to continue to advocate this as something that should be genuinely accepted in public, and you want to reasonably make this case, what will happen by offering this argument in public is going to guarantee that eventually legislation will be passed to prevent Christianity from being part of any public discussion.
Now here’s a variation on the same argument. I call it a kind of “Stephen Spielberg” defense. Remember in the Raiders of the Lost Ark, there was the maniacal Nazi who wanted to find Ark of the Covenant because he wanted to gain absolute power. Here, it was the idea that the Nazis led the world astray because Hitler was obsessed with cultic doctrines. So, if Hitler had not had an obsession with cultic doctrines and held to real Christian doctrines, the Nazis would not have done these things. Well, first of all, this still means that Christians were incompetent to grasp the truth. In other words, they saw what was happening, they heard what Adolf Hitler said, and they still could not grasp what the man was saying. This, of course, still speaks to Christian epistemological incompetence.
But I want to make a secondary point, and it has to do with the source of moral action. I know that this gets to people because, as of right now, most Christians are under the expectation that the last best hope for human morality is Christianity. The Neo-Calvinist movement has set themselves up as the source of this last great hope. Without them, the United States is doomed to total moral chaos, and the reason they say this is because the Bible says thou shalt not whatever. That the Bible is the actual source of morality. And I know why people say that, but what you are really saying is that the source of morality is located in a metaphysical otherworld.
Now here’s the problem. The moment you open the door to the source of morality being in an otherworld, you have severed morality from this earth, and you have no control of what walks back through the door that leads to this otherworld. If the Christian God is the source of morality, then why can it not be the Muslim god or the Hindu god? If morality is merely the product of a transcendent religious world, then the entire spectrum of the transcendent religious world is available. But by simply repeating the mantra of “The Bible says, the Bible says, the Bible says,” Christians think that they are going to somehow gain traction.
The easiest way to defeat this argument is to say, “So what?” It is ultimately no argument, and at its root, it ultimately severs man from morality. If there is no reason to be moral, then man has no means to be moral. This is exactly historic Calvinist teaching, that because there is this transcendent world, this heavenly realm, and man is metaphysically corrupt, he cannot do good anyhow.
So at the end of the day, the Christian doctrine ultimately condemns man to the exact same place as antinomianism does. Antinomianism says that there are no laws man is morally obligated to keep. The doctrine of pervasive depravity is effectively the same thing. The nature of man’s depravity is so vast he cannot keep the law. He cannot be moral. We are in exactly the same place. Ostensibly, Christianity is not advancing morality, and we see the prime example in National Socialist Germany.
Next I would like to actually address the assumption that the people just did not know what Hitler and the Nazis were going to do. Let me first reiterate that there really was no practical distinction between the Church and the National Socialist Party. It does not matter whether Hitler or Goebbels or any of the rest of those guys actually had a statement of orthodoxy in and of themselves. That is irrelevant. The point is that whatever the people heard from the leadership, they saw no conflict within their Christianity. This is crucial.
In 1925, the social malcontent, out-of-work painter, and a ham-fisted scribbler wrote a book about his struggles while cooling his heels in the clink. The miles and miles of rambling prose revealed a mind filled with logical conundrums, philosophical plagiarism, and dead-end German phrases. The book correctly received a cool reception, and from the few that waded through the tedious, often bellicose rants, the “Fuhrer of the Beer Hall Putsch” was a joke rat in an Austrian-Jewish punch line.
The book, of course, was Mein Kampf, and its author was Adolf Hitler. The book was not well-written. Having read it myself, I can tell you it is not compelling. On occasion you’ll run across something that is kind of cool. Since I do not speak German I cannot testify to this first-hand, but some commentators have observed that there are some sections of it in German they cannot translate because it makes no sense even in German, so it has no ability to be translated into any other language.
There are many historically inaccurate details. Hitler was fond of quoting contemporary thinkers but often quotes them inaccurately or draws erroneous conclusions. He is given to long passages that are devoid of reality. There are quite a few of those. Despite all these shortcomings, however, it sold roughly 240,000 copies by 1933, about the time he was voted chancellor.
After he was elected chancellor, Mein Kampf was a wedding gift to every newlywed couple and every soldier. By 1942, 10 million copies were in print, available to a total population of people in excess of 65 million. His ideas were not a secret. There is no way anyone could have honestly said, “I don’t know what this man is about.” He was not a master communicator. He did not have some massive Svengali-like hypnosis or Criss Angel ability to compel you to think things. I read the book, and never once was I compelled to utter, “Sieg heil,” not once.
The error behind assuming that it was Hitler’s force of personality that did this leads people to ignore the ideology. It leads people to equate tyranny with the flamboyant and the charismatic. Political action is not sustained by personality. It is always ideology. Ideology is philosophy turned into political action. There was nothing unclear about Hitler’s program.
Adolf was a shrewd judge of political actions and adversaries. He told everyone what he thought and how the political program should progress. He detailed re-armament in spite of the Treaty of Versailles, territorial expansion in spite of the Treaty of Versailles, the abolition of democracy, which at that time would have been the Weimar Republic, and a commitment to socialism.
He believed in the German state. He believed that the people born of the German blood were property of the German State. He believed in eugenics and the elimination of the Jewish threat. Now mind you, the bulk of Germany believed in eugenics, but the specific application to Jews had not manifested yet. The Final Solution hung out there, but no one ever really objected.
He detailed his contempt for the Catholic Church, because he knew German Catholics were not German first. He knew they were Catholics first, and since he knew he could never influence Rome, he knew he could never dominate them. Since he could never dominate Rome, he knew he would never have access to their minds.
But for all of its failure, what Mein Kampf revealed was threefold:
- It was a crystal clear picture. It was a detailed blueprint for National Socialism.
- It showed a man who had an amazing capacity to size up his political adversaries and allies.
- Above all, it showed that he was a man who believed it was moral to build the first and exploit the second with impunity.
And this is the bottom line. The political ideal, the social ideal, the government ideal was no secret. It was available for anyone paying attention. And the people did pay attention, and they agreed. And that is the point. The people of Germany voted to put Hitler in power. And that’s because they saw no fundamental distinction between what they believed as Christians and his specific policies.
There was no mass delusion. There were no demonic forces. There was no fiendishly clever super secret plot. The German people willingly, openly, purposely took action in accord with National Socialism. From the least to the greatest, they voted for a man who pledged lies in service to despotism, and the Lutheran Church insisted that Hitler was God’s man to protect the people.
So what was the appeal of the National Socialist Party? Before I can explain the answer to that question, I have to lay one more foundation. I have to talk to you about a dirty word in America. I have to talk to you about capitalism. But that will be in the next article.
To be continued…
From the Reformation to the Third Reich: Protestantism’s Impact on Western Culture – Part 5
The following is part five of a multi-part series.
Taken from John Immel’s fourth session
at the 2014 Conference on Gospel Discernment and Spiritual Tyranny
~ Edited by Andy Young
Editor’s note: I realize up front that this next article is long, but the content is powerful and emotional, and I do not want to break up the continuity or diminish the sense of John Immel’s passion in this segment.
The Inspiration of John Locke
Aristotle had become re-institutionalized into Western thought. We now fast-forward about 500 years to the Age of Enlightenment and the Renaissance. Reason has become effective and successful. Man’s life on earth is effective and successful, and we are trending towards where the seeds of political liberty are finally starting to emerge.
The continental rationalists started with Descartes. Descartes started with doubt. He said to himself, “I think. Therefore, I am.” This is an unfortunate formulation because it is effectively a primacy of consciousness formulation. It starts with consciousness first and then presumes being. It presumes existence. This, of course, causes all sorts of problems. Subsequent thinkers like Spinoza and Leibniz take these concepts and run with them. It produces some real conflicts in philosophy.
Finally we arrive at John Locke. John Locke is an empiricist, and he says exactly the opposite. He says, “Wait a minute. It is not reason that is first. It is actually the nature of human experience and perceptions by which we encounter the world.” So that sends us on the right track. It sounds very similar to Aristotle, but it is not Aristotle.
You must grasp that during this time period there are no options in Christianity. You have Catholicism, and you have Lutheran-Calvinist orthodoxy. There are other variants of Christianity out there, but for the most part, they are so politically and socially insignificant as to really not be an option. We are also still within the framework where being an atheist is punishable by death, and that prevails, depending on the country, well into the 19th century. So you really don’t have a genuine secular alternative, meaning a State not wrapped around religious orthodoxy.
Well, people are finally starting to become bold. They can tell that there must be a dramatic shift, and the fundamental problems and conflicts that they are identifying are directly tied to church tyranny and political freedom. Locke is the philosophical apogee of the Enlightenment and the advocacy of reason, and as we will see shortly, the assault against reason starts almost immediately after Locke. Fortunately for us, by the time of the American Revolution, John Locke was a household name, and the concept of natural rights had spread throughout the colonies.
The brilliant thing about John Locke was his political philosophy. Locke wrote a few books. His most influential was The Second Treatise of Government. I do also do recommend you pick up A Letter Concerning Toleration. I’m going to give a few excerpts from that one because it will give a sense of how Locke is arguing against church-statist control.
“Since you are pleased to inquire what are my thoughts about the mutual toleration of Christians in their different professions of religion, I must need answer you freely that I esteem the toleration to be the chief characteristic of the mark of the true Church. For whatsoever some people boast of the antiquity of places and names, or the pomp of their outward worship; others, of the reformation of their discipline; all, of the orthodoxy of their faith – for everyone is orthodox to himself – these things, and all others of this nature, are much rather marks of men striving for power and empire over one another than the Church of Christ.”
There could be no greater truer aphorism. Everybody assumes that their own definition of Christianity is right. Everybody assumes that. And I find it fascinating that he points out that we cannot make orthodoxy the premise by which we have religious toleration. Here is another excerpt.
“In the second place, the care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force. Confiscation of estate, imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as to make men change the inward judgment that they have framed of things.
“It may indeed be alleged that the magistrate may make use of arguments, and thereby, draw the heterodox into the way of truth and procure their salvation. I grant it; but this is common to him with other men. In teaching, instructing, and redressing the erroneous by reason, he may certainly do what becomes any good man to do. Magistracy does not oblige him to put off either humanity or Christianity, but it is one thing to persuade and another to command, one thing to press with arguments, another with penalties. This civil power alone has a right to do; to the 
other, goodwill is authority enough.”
I want you to notice he is correctly making the distinction that authority and force are the same thing. Governments are tools of compulsion. When you hear men making the argument that they have the right to ask you to submit to their authority, they are really declaring the right to use force against you to compel you to a given outcome.
Locke is making the correct assessment that the nature of government compulsion should not be mixed in with religious conviction. This is an evolution of thought. You have lived with this for so long in your lives that you honestly have a hard time conceptualizing it not being true. In all of my subsequent discussions with people, whenever we disagreed, whenever we’ve come at these things at different ways and from different frameworks, one of the things that I find so impressive is how genuinely indignant people are that they shouldn’t be entitled to their own opinion. We are absolutely daughters and sons of the Enlightenment! Until the Enlightenment, such a notion did not exist – it was nowhere – that one has the right to be an independently thinking creature in one’s own behalf. This is absolutely the product of the Enlightenment and more particularly of John Locke’s arguments.
Here’s another quote from A Letter Concerning Toleration.
“The care and salvation of men’s souls cannot belong to the magistrate; because, though the rigor of laws and the force of penalties were capable to convince and to change men’s minds, yet would not that help at all to the salvation of their souls.
“For there being but one truth, one way to heaven, what hope is there that more men would be led into it if they had no rule but the religion of the court and were put under the necessity to quit the light of their own reason, and oppose the dictates of their own conscience, and blindly to resign themselves upon the will of their governors and to the religion which either ignorance, ambition, or superstition had chanced to establish in the countries where they were born?”
That’s a wordy way of saying men should be entitled to the rights of their own lives, and the nature of their religious convictions should be determined by conscience. You take that for granted. In the United States of America, we have a hard time conceptualizing religious wars because our Founding Fathers were brilliant. They approached the nature of government with the expectation of the separation between Church and State.
As a result, the result of our religious disagreements in the United States are church splits for the most part. One group in the church wants the color of the carpet to be pink. Another group says they want it to be blue. They get fussed, and they decide, “You know what? I’ll start my own church. Doctrinally blue is better.”
Well, that’s the sum, and it frankly doesn’t matter how egregious the doctrinal fight. At whatever point of disagreement, everybody goes, “Well, I’m just going to start my own church.” And they do, which is why in America religion has exploded with flavors of denomination, and in almost any given city you can see where first church became second church that became third church that became fourth church 
on all four corners – it was essentially the same people and the same orthodoxy. This is directly tied to the fact that the American Church has never had access to genuine civil power.
I made this point earlier. A secular government is a free government because a secular government should be agnostic. Its interests have no interest in religious orthodoxy it. It is not interested in a doctrinal standard, and I understand why Christians find that truly scandalous, but you must hear me here. Your freedom is directly tied to a secular, agnostic government. Now, that is different than a government that professes atheism and chooses to oppress alternate positions. That is actually the reverse form of political tyranny. What I am talking about is a government that gives no advantage and gives no penalty based on religious conviction.
Here is another excerpt from Lock. I find this example humorous.
“Let us suppose two churches – the one of Arminians, the other of Calvinists – in the city of Constantinople.
“Will anyone say that either of these churches has right to deprive the members of the other of their estates and liberty because of their differing from the same doctrines and ceremonies… (while the Muslims laugh to see with what inhuman cruelty Christians thus rage against Christians?)
“One of these churches has the power to treat the other ill. To which of them does this power belong and by what right?
“It will be answered, undoubtedly, that it is the orthodox church which has the right of authority over the erroneous or heretical. This is, in great and specious words, to say just nothing at all. Every church is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous and heretical.
“So the controversy between these churches about the truth of their doctrines and the purity of their worship is on both sides equal; nor is there any judge, either at Constantinople or elsewhere upon earth, by whose sentence it can be determined.
“If it could be manifest which of these two dissenting churches were right, there would not accrue thereby unto the orthodox any right of destroying the other. For churches have neither any jurisdiction in worldly matters, nor are fire and sword any proper instruments wherewith one convince men’s minds of error, and inform them of the truth.”
At the 2013 TANC Conference, Susan Dohse did a fantastic job of explaining Augustine and his use of violence as a doctrinal standard to compel men to the Church. I invite you to go back and review what she said. What Locke is saying here is in direct defiance of Augustinian ideology. It is in direct defiance of Calvinist ideology. Both men presumed the right of the Church to compel rational compliance.
Locke’s arguments become foundational for what ultimately becomes the secular government of the United States; the belief in the expectation of the division between religious conviction and political power. In his book, Second Treatise of Government, Locke opens his work with a definition of terms. He summarizes his initial thoughts:
“Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death – and consequently all less penalties – for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defense of the commonwealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good.”
Now he is defining his terms about the nature of what political force is, what is the legitimate purpose of government. It is specifically for the defense of the property and the “public good.” Now I want to make this distinction. When I say “public good”, most people confuse this with the collectivist assertion of “common good”. Locke doesn’t mean this. When Locke says for the “public good,” he means the good of individuals.
The State of Nature
This becomes a common phrase in the Enlightenment. Thomas Hobbes used it, Jean Jacques Rousseau used it, and so it is ambiguous and inconsistent. For Hobbes, state of nature meant that man is basically a barbarian and that the nature of his barbarity needs restraint. So because of that need for restraint, government’s function is designed to handcuff man in his most base passions. This idea is echoed by Edmund Burke when he said that it is through government that man forges his fetters by virtue of the fact that he really doesn’t have self-control. This a very Hobbesian position.
Rousseau has a very similar concept of the state of nature, but he doesn’t think man is a barbarian as such. He thinks that the state of nature is man’s highest ideal. Man in his natural form is the height of the perfect predator in nature. He still thinks that the function of government is to restrict man, and therefore man gives something up when he enters society.
Here’s Locke’s definition. To understand political power correctly, man must first understand the state of nature. Man is perfect, so he is free, meaning man is at liberty to act as he pleases. He acts to dispose of his own possessions, and he acts to dispose of his own person. Think of it this way. If you live on a desert island by yourself, you are at liberty to organize your desert island to your own benefit, and it would require of you your highest and best reason to do so. Your very survival would be dependent upon your ability to organize your environment to your advantage, and you are perfectly free to dispose of everything that you create and your entire person to that end. The state of nature is a state of equality. All the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal. All the men are born to the same advantages of nature.
Now expand the example I gave so that now we two people on the same desert island. The exact same state exists between both men. They both have the ability to act and to dispose of themselves in the exact same fashion. That is their natural right. Locke goes on to say this means that God would not and could not appoint some men to subjugate others, and he says that the law that governs the state of nature is reason. Reason teaches all men that all men are equal and independent.
Now notice how this goes. Man’s existence requires his survival, and his survival requires that he successfully manages his own environment, that he specifically sets out to organize that environment such that he disposes all of his work product in service to that survival. All men exist in this state, and the reason they do so, the reason they are successful in this state is because the only way they can survive is by reason.
Notice how Locke is making the equation: Existence → survival → liberty → work → reason. All are integrated.
The state of nature is a state of liberty, but it is not a state of license. The law of reason says that since no man may harm other man’s life, health, liberty, or possessions, there is no subordination among men that authorizes one to destroy another. Inasmuch as man preserves his life, he must also seek to aid the preservation of another’s liberty, health, limb, and property. Notice that Locke’s state of nature requires man to acknowledge exactly the same thing in another man that he demands for himself. Reason, the law of nature, wills peace and the preservation of man.
Therefore, the law of nature puts in everyone’s hand the right to punish the transgressor of reason and to hinder the violation of reason with violence. Without the power of retribution, the law of nature would be in vain. In other words, without the ability to recompense the irrational, to give retribution to the irrational, reason could never thrive and survive. The law must have power to preserve the innocent and restrain offenders. If any one may punish evil, then everyone must be qualified. What any may do in prosecution of the law, everyone must be able to do to prosecute the law of reason.
Man’s power over another is not arbitrary or absolute. Individuals cannot vent their passions against a criminal without limitation. Retribution must be in proportion to criminal action. Violence can only be used to obtain reparation and restraint. But if criminals abandon restraint and reason, and declare themselves outside of the law of reason, these criminals become dangerous to men of reason and peace. So the dividing line of violence is when the un-reasonable and irrational initiate violence against reasonable and peaceful men. They trespass against the peace and safety of the whole of humanity. 
This abandonment grants mankind the right to destroy the one who abandons the law of reason, to make him repent of his actions, to deter him in continued action, and to make an example of those who would follow in his footsteps.
Every man has the right to punish the offender and executioner of the law of nature. The man who has been injured by a man who abandons the rule of reason not only has the right of punishment but also the right to obtain reparations. Furthermore, all people who respect justice may join the injured party to assist in recovering his restitution. The man who murders or commits unjust violence and slaughter has declared war against all mankind and may be destroyed just like you would kill a lion; a tiger with whom man cannot have society or security.
Locke is standing the historic philosophical perspective on its ear!
He is centralizing the entire right of man to exist for the sake of himself, and he is arguing directly that the nature of man’s existence demands that he be able to resist with violence all who wage war against his peaceability.
Locke says that punishment must be proportional to the crime, but the punishment must be sufficient to make continuing in the same action an ill bargain. This leads to Locke’s next point.
The State of War
This is a state of enmity and destruction intended by one man against another by word or action. The state of war is a deliberate intentional design to take a man’s life or property. When a state of war is initiated, the innocent has the right to destroy that which threatens his destruction just like you would kill a wild beast, because they have no commitment to common law or reason. The man who seeks to place another man in his absolute power has initiated a state of war. The man who seeks to place another man in his absolute control seeks to make him a slave. Slavery is merely the same as a state of war.
This was revolutionary. The determinism of Augustinian and Calvinist doctrine placed men in a specific relationship to their Creator. Their Creator appointed them their position. The justification for slavery was that it was your ordained place. Locke’s argument here says this is not true. Slavery is really an act of war. It is the possession of another man’s life that is not yours to possess. The nature of reason and the nature of peace eliminate slavery.
Of course, most of you who have done any work at all with American history know that slavery was one of the hardest things against which we fought. The universal justification for slavery was church doctrine. Modern Calvinists like to pretend that they have always been on the side of peace and prosperity and the brotherhood of all men. That is all nonsense. For centuries the right to enslave was considered an orthodox position. And the same argument that everybody used was when they would point to the fact that Paul consecrated the state of slavery when he told Philemon to go back to his slave 
master. And it frankly doesn’t matter that he ultimately told the slave master to take it easy. Ultimately, what Paul did is confirm that slavery was, in fact, something ordained by God. That’s one among many of the arguments.
The argument that inspired the Methodists and the Unitarians was this argument: natural rights. And this argument from John Locke was the inspiring force that started the Church to rethink the idea behind slavery. Back in the 1700s, if you weren’t Calvinist orthodox or some variation of Calvinist orthodox, there were very few options, but the Methodists and the Unitarians happened to be two of them, and they rejected the fundamental translation making this argument. It took about 30 years to persuade the bulk of the colonies that slavery was in fact immoral.
The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth and not to be under the will or legislative authority of men. In society, the liberty of man is not under any legislative power except what is established by consent. Freedom from absolute arbitrary power is so fundamental to man’s life that he may not part with it, not even by consent.
Did you hear what I said?
Man cannot give up. It is so fundamental, this thing that man is, these natural rights and this reason is so fundamental to who he is he can’t even give it up by consent. Man may not enslave himself to anyone because no man can give more power than what he has. This is a brilliant argument. Slavery is a little more than a state of war sustained by legislative means. It is merely the relationship between conquered and captured.
Private Property
Locke’s definition of private property is an essential evolution of thought. He correctly establishes the roots of private property. Private property is the product of labor. Individuals employ their industry to create the substance of their lives. Man in the state of nature must work to survive. Man’s survival is directly tied to his labor. This makes man’s work a direct function of his life. This makes what he works at his property, and it must be private. Seizing man’s property then is the same thing as seizing his life. In an evolution of thought where it has always been assumed that the state is the political and social primary, where man is disposed to the will of the state, to correctly identify the location for the nature of work product, life and property was a profound advance.
Consider our discussion of the soul-body/mind-body dichotomy from the previous conference in 2013. The ability to take man and divide him in half and distribute those halves across whatever world you want to distribute them. For instance, John Calvin basically says that you have no right to complain about the nature of your existence. Who cares if you are persecuted? Who cares if the government comes and takes whatever they come and take? Ultimately, your treasures, your life, your values are all stored away in some other place, but here on earth you just have to suck it up, and that is your specific Christian responsibility.
That is Calvin’s argument. But notice he succeeds in doing this based on the soul-body dichotomy. He can say that your physical self is actually immoral and irrelevant. Your spiritual self is this thing that gets magically transported someplace else. By dividing man, he can make the moral justification that tyranny is morally acceptable.
The Dark Ages was rooted in this dichotomy. This was the justification for the church to seize earthly production. Man’s focus should be in the afterlife. Man’s material existence is morally inferior which means man’s industry is morally questionable.
But Locke is one of the first philosophers to successfully make the mind-body/soul-body integration. correctly identifies that man is indivisible from his work. He correctly integrates human existence by identifying reason as the root of man’s production and production as the root of man’s life. Thus, man’s life and man’s property are corollaries of the same existence. This is profound and powerful. I want to dance every time I consider this! This is an amazing philosophical achievement.
The standard objection to private property has always been that private property prevents some men from actually getting resources. In tribal cultures this had some validity because tribes did not have the concept of private use, but in fact they held everything in common. This social dynamic historically produced lack. But Locke applies reason to the process of wealth creation. He correctly identifies that man creates his own level of prosperity. Wealth is not static because wealth is the product of labor, and labor is expansive.
I want to read you a prolonged section from Locke.
“This is certain, that in the beginning, before the desire of having more than man needed had altered the intrinsic value of things, which depends only on their usefulness to man’s life; or had agreed that a little piece of yellow metal, which would keep without wasting or decay, should be worth a great piece of flesh, or a whole heap of corn; though men had a right to appropriate, by their labor; each one unto himself, as much of the things of nature, as he could use: yet this could not be much, nor to the prejudice of others, where the same plenty was still left to those who would use the same industry.
“To which let me add, that he who appropriates land to himself by his labor does not lessen, but increases the common stock of mankind: for the provisions serving to the support of human life, produced by one acre of enclosed and cultivated land, are ten times more than those which are 
yielded by an acre of land of an equal richness lying waste in common. And therefore, he that encloses land and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres, than he could have from a hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind: for his labor now supplies him with provisions out of ten acres, which were but the product of an hundred lying in common.”
Notice his reason, that the nature of labor expands human prosperity, and he is exactly right. Man must successfully use his resources as effectively as possible. Private property demands of the man his highest and best reasoning capacity, his greatest efficiency. This is what has always elevated the rise of man’s natural material wealth. Private property is at the heart of increasing and never-ending prosperity. Locke correctly identifies that things laying in common actually do not have the optimal uses, but private property expands human resources because of labor and ownership.
Paternal Power
Locke correctly identifies that men do not give up rights when they join social contracts. They do not give up liberty to gain security, and this is actually a very important concept. It was very common for people to say that men needed to give up something to join society. Like I said, this was Hobbes and Rousseau and pretty much every other philosopher on the other side of this argument. The presumption is that I am only in restraint because there is no government compelling me to some given action, and that for me to enter society, to enter political agreements, what I’m really giving up is the nature of my own liberty. Locke says, “No. This is wrong.”
Remember the Augustinian and Calvinist doctrine of subordination. Government’s function is to restrain men. Government is compulsion to moral action, but Locke says not so.
“So that, however it may be mistaken, the end of law is not to abolish or restrain but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom, for liberty is to be free from restraint and from violence of others, which cannot be where there is no law. But freedom is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do as he lists: (for who could be free, when every other man’s humour might domineer over him?) but a liberty to dispose, and order as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.”
I want you to notice the part I emphasized above. The nature of liberty is to be freed from restraint or violence. The reason I enter into political agreements is because I want to secure for myself security. I want to emphasize this point.
Locke is brilliant here. The legitimate function of government is to defend the individual from all encroachments. The function of government is to secure man’s freedom. Man’s freedom is expressed in his action to dispose his life and property. Government’s limited function is to defend man in that freedom or pursue restitution or retribution for those men who enter a state of war.
Notice how does progression works. Man is the sovereign political unit. Man creates private property. Man needs a means to defend himself from the irrational, so he voluntarily enters into agreements with other men with the exact same premise. They consent to government to gain liberty, not to lose it. Government’s function is no longer fetters. Government’s function is defense. It is the defense of the individual who is living his life in the pursuit of life and prosperity and happiness. Now you can begin to understand where the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the Constitution got the substance of their arguments.
The Beginnings of Political Societies
It is here that Locke identifies the correct order of social relationships. Historically, it was assumed that State was the social primary. Men were born into the State, and their lives were disposed of at State will. Locke says this is backwards.
“Men being by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without consent. A man can only divest himself of natural liberty, and put on bonds of civil society, by agreeing with other men to join and unite for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living amongst another, in secure enjoyment of their properties.
“This any number of men may do, because it injures not the freedom of the rest; they are left as they were in the state of nature. When any number of men have so consented to make one community or government, they are thereby presently incorporated, to make one body politic, wherein the majority have a right to act and conclude the rest.”
Here is his progression. Man is first a free and sovereign agent. Man labors to create property to satisfy his survival and enjoyment. He seeks social relationships to expand his freedom. His consent is to social contacts, and government is by consent of the governed for the express purpose of defending his life, peace, and property.
Legislative Power
The extent of Legislative power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent. The reason man enters into political agreement is to sustain and enjoy his property, so he cannot then enter society and then have society expropriate his property. Thomas Paine echoed this concept.
“It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by contrary effect – that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few…They…consequently are instruments of injustice…The fact, therefore, must be that the individuals, themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, enter into contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.” ~ Common Sense, chapter 5
Dissolution of Government
Since government is by consent, the government is dissolved when the legislature takes upon itself the power to make laws that people do not appoint them to make. This is very important. A legislature does not become autonomous and sovereign by the fact that it was created. The people sustain their political sovereignty. When a legislator acts in this fashion, the people have no obligation to obey the laws. They 
can refuse to obey as an act of refusing to be subjugated. And the logical outworking is everyone returns to the state of nature, at the pleasure of his will as he was before contract.
So rejecting the legislature, an unjust legislature, is not chaos. It is not anarchy. It merely means that man reverts to his original state of nature. This would be the answer to a runaway bureaucracy that is neither elected nor subject to the people like when Congress decided to start giving legislative power to bureaus in the United States. Just an observation.
- Governments are dissolved when a single person sets up his own arbitrary will in place of laws, like presidents who pass endless executive orders.
- Governments are dissolved when a single person hinders the legislature. When this person suspends legislature, he is in effect putting an end to the government the people instituted.
- Governments are dissolved when one man seeks to alter elections and thereby change the legislature to which the people consented.
- Governments are dissolved if the “prince” (Locke’s word) or the legislature deliberately delivers the people into the subjugation of a foreign power.
The people entered into political agreement to be governed by their own laws. They cannot be transferred into a government that was not authorized by their own consent.
Americans, hear me…
It is treason for any member of the American government to act to deliver the American people into the hands of the United Nations!
We did not authorize the existence of them to govern us. Our constitution is unique and proprietary. We have the right to define our own body of laws.
Here is Locke’s summary. When legislators and agents of the government act against the trust of the people by invading their property, they, the government agents, are the ones who are initiating force, and they are the ones who are the rebels. They are the ones committing treason against the people. Never lose sight of the fact that men enter into civil government to exclude force from social interaction and to preserve their individual property and peace and unity. So those representatives of government who use force in opposition to the laws are the rebels against the state of nature. They are hiding behind the pretense. They claim authority to justify their actions, but they are the ones who bring back and initiate the state of war. They are the ones who have overthrown the government.
This is a profound and important distinction. The government of the United States is for the people and by the people. The fact that we elected legislators does not make them the politically sovereign unit. The State in the United States is not sovereign. The people are sovereign, and they grant limited function to the legislators, the state governments, the federal government, and the judiciary.
We have catastrophically lost this concept in the United States, and I want to draw your attention because this point is specifically and expressly made in the Declaration of Independence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they that are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed – that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to those ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it and to institute new Government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing the powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.” ~ from, The Declaration of Independence
Please notice the emphasized part. This is John Locke. This is at the root of our government. The United States government is not the political sovereign. The people are the political sovereign, a people committed to reason, peace, life and prosperity and property. When governments use force in direct violation of the express social contract, the government is committing treason.
Now you can have some sense of scope. Now you’ve seen the evolution from the disaster that was Augustinian ideology to the evolution of thought that began to inspire men to believe and commit themselves to trust in reason and for man to begin to solve his own problems. Then comes John Locke, and he successfully identifies the core elements of political liberty.
This was huge, and it was this event that created the sense of life in the Enlightenment. Generations of European Christians accepted the premise of human depravity as self-evident, as have all socio-political organizations founded on the metaphysical premise that man is a sinner who inhabits a fallen world.
By the late 18th century and early 19th century, this social assumption had been dealt a mortal blow. People were living through the greatest expansion of liberty and knowledge and prosperity the world 
had ever seen. Men had the proof that life was filled with opportunities, that the future could be bright because the future could be built. Every technological advance, every disease, every pain, every new level of mass prosperity was one more example of the fraud the Church had perpetrated on humanity. It was a conclusion born from seeing the world’s harsh and brutal environment mastered and ordered and pacified.
The Medieval Age had no such contrast. The world of gargoyles and superstition and brutality was all anyone had ever known. So there was an internal logic to the Church’s ban on reason and science. All the world knew was despotism and dogmatism and the poverty that those twin destroyers bring. But the 17th century was the beginning of the Enlightenment and the full immersion of Aristotelian thought into the minds of men, and by the time history arrives in the 19th century, man was without excuse.
The Roaring Twenties roared for a reason. Man was fruitful. Man enjoyed life. And for the first time in world history, man could see a vision of life that held endless possibilities. It seemed that man was on the verge of solving the world’s problems. Man woke up seven days a week and saw man’s ability to triumph. He went to church one day a week to be told he was a sinner, life was hopeless, and man’s highest ethical ideal was death. But man knew there was a disconnect. Something was wrong with this picture.
The men of the Enlightenment could see the living contrast between the American form of government and the despotism that had dominated the whole of Europe. Indeed, anywhere medieval doctrines have dominated American life, they could see the manifestations of slavery, poverty, and war.
Church doctrine condemned the whole of man’s existence, but man’s existence was very obviously not the impotent, ulcerous, cancerous sore described by the preacher. America’s founders knew that the Church must be separated from the State, and for only the second time in human history, there was a truly secular state. The state was agnostic, giving no advantage to statements of orthodoxy. Man was free to follow his conscience. Man was free to create and prosper, and the greatest political achievement man had ever known led the world into the greatest expansion of peace and prosperity the world had ever seen.
Government’s only function was the defense of the individual in pursuit of his life, liberty and happiness. The shining light on the hill, the amazing beacon of hope, the culmination of the Enlightenment thought and political organization, was the United States of America.
To be continued…
From the Reformation to the Third Reich: Protestantism’s Impact on Western Culture – Part 4
The following is part four of a multi-part series.
Taken from John Immel’s third session
at the 2014 Conference on Gospel Discernment and Spiritual Tyranny
~ Edited by Andy Young
In the previous article we were discussing the re-introduction of Aristotle into Western thought. This is a breakthrough of epic proportions because the ideas of Aristotle are directly responsible for liberty and the explosion of human achievement that takes place in the 17th century.
Aristotle understood that universals do not exist in some transcendent world of Forms as Plato taught, but rather they are the product of human cognition. Man’s capacity for reason makes it possible for him to understand similarities in identities 
in the physical world and categorize them in such a way that brings order to reality. This is in stark contrast to Plato and other contributors to Western thought to this point. They held human reason in contempt and regarded human senses as inferior for being able to interpret the word around them.
Aristotle’s metaphysical premise regarding the nature of existence and the subsequent epistemological qualification that resulted in acknowledging man having ability to correctly interpret reality led Aristotle to some logical conclusions regarding the behavior of particulars. The behavior of a particular is defined by its nature. The essential characteristics of a particular are what define its identity. The essence of each thing is unique to that thing. This is what all science is based on. The axiom of human existence are understood in three laws.
The Law of Identity
This is the primary axiom of which the other two laws are corollaries. The Law of Identity says that any object cannot both be and not be at the same time. Man cannot be both “man” and “not man.” A horse cannot be both “horse” and “not horse.” “A” cannot be both “A” and “not A.” Aristotle said it this way:
“If, however, a definition, for example, man, horse, A, were not limited, but one were to say that the word is an infinite number of meanings, obviously, reasoning would be impossible. For not to have one meaning is to have no meaning. If words have no meaning, our reasoning with one another and ourselves has been annihilated, for it is impossible to think if anything we do not think of but one thing.”
Think of the conversations that you have had and how frustrating it is how often the Neo-Calvinists change definitions, and they place mutually exclusive ideas together. This is what they are doing. They are annihilating reason.
Paul Dohse is very fond of talking about the grammatical approach. Words are really a description of entities, and it is our means by which we communicate the nature of our perceptual experience. Words hold abstractions and concepts. So when somebody says to you, “the clear meaning of scripture,” what you first must say is “clear by what context?” Because unless you have the Law of Identity in action, you will find that they don’t have a context. It is usually a free-floating abstraction, and they are treating the abstraction as if it is the only thing that matters. The Neo-Calvinists are masters of wrecking the Law of Identity.
The Law of Non-Contradiction
The first corollary to the Law of Identity says this:
“It is impossible then that being a man should mean precisely not being a man. And it is not possible to be and not be at the same time. But the point in question is not whether the same thing can at the same time be and not be in name, but whether it can be [and not be] in fact.”
This is the important part. Can something actually exist as two mutually exclusive things? The answer is no, never. A perfect example of this is the expression coined by Martin Luther, Simul justus et peccator – “simultaneously saint and sinner.”
The Law of the Excluded Middle
The second corollary to the Law of Identity says this:
“But on the other hand, there can be no intermediate between contradictories, but if one subject, we must either affirm or deny on any one predicate. This is clear, in the first place, if we define what the true and the false are.”
He is basically saying you can’t punt. If you cannot figure out how to reconcile a contradiction, you cannot relegate it to the abyss of “mystery.” In the book, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand put it this way:
“Contradictions do not exist. If you believe you have found a contradiction, check your premises. One of them is wrong.”
The problem within the Medieval world was they would never check their premise. They always had an explanation for what it was, and so they could never identify an error. You see this dramatically within churches. It is stunning to watch them rationalize one of two directions, either why God is for them or God is with them. The church’s roof falls on everybody; God is against them. The church’s roof falls on everybody; God is with them. And in each instance, you have mutually exclusive ideas. Is it God’s judgment or is it God’s blessing? And they will do Herculean reasoning efforts to try to justify why are they both and the same – the exact same event is basically two separate outcomes. You are ultimately looking at a violation of the Law of Excluded Middle. You cannot punt. If you find an inconsistency in your thinking, you have something fundamentally wrong with your thinking. Consider how that impacts a vast percentage of Christian doctrines!
In summation, the identity of “A” is in fact the identity of “A”. The particulars of “A” must never contradict. For “A” to maintain its identity, there can be no middle compromise on something not “A”. This is the foundation of causality. It is because man can identify “A” and hold no contradiction on the identity of “A” that empowers man to successfully make a distinction and see the relationship on how the particulars interact.
Without causality, everything in reality remains a totally unprecedented event. Man cannot tell why one thing happens versus another. This is crucial to understanding reality. The foundations of causality, the laws that govern causality, are a corollary to the correct judgment of reality. The inability to identify cause and effect is man’s central and greatest failing, and insanity is directly tied to the inability to act to identify causality. Our internal “reality testers” are directly related to our ability to identify cause and effect between objects in space; abstractions and action and motion.
So now you can begin to grasp why it is that all effective human cognition flows from Aristotle- all laws of logic, all of man’s conceptual capacity, all of man’s reason, and most importantly, man’s capacity to grasp the world in which he lives.
Question: Why is this a threat to despots the world over?
Second question: Why has every oppressive ideology sought to unseat Aristotle?
Third question: Why do tyrants cling to Aristotle’s shoulders while trying to cut off his head?
Here is the answer. Because Aristotelian thought means that:
- Existence is knowable, understandable, and practicable.
- All men have the ability to arrive at the truth.
- Knowledge is available for all who would use the laws and the rules of logic to obtain it.
This foundational concept was revolutionary. It was the original Copernican shift from the transcendent world of Plato’s Forms. Indeed, without Aristotle’s foundation, Copernicus was not possible, and neither is any other advance in human knowledge.
Here is Aristotle’s greatest impact on Western thought. When using the laws of thought, the mind of man is effective to understand man’s existence. An existence that is identifiable is an existence that is understandable. An existence that is understandable is an existence that is explorable. An existence that is explorable is an existence that is controllable. An existence that is controllable is an existence that man can master.
And this is exactly what happened. Thomas Aquinas introduced Aristotle into the horror story that was the Augustinian Dark Ages, where crime was a starving serf eating the king’s deer, where punishment was an iron maiden or the rack or the stocks, where civil liberties meant the government could do no wrong because the king had a divine right to any action, where child labor law was mandatory 16-hour days scratching in the fields of the lord’s property with a stick to plant the lord’s crops so that the father can pay the lord’s taxes, where plagues were heaped on the heads of sinners, where the princes and kings waged yet another war against the Lollards or the Catholics or the Protestants, and teenagers pledged their oath of loyalty to fight in religious wars.
Aristotle’s ideas soon inspired the Renaissance. I want you to notice the contrast between Medieval art and the art of the Renaissance. Consider the impact of Aristotle in the Sistine Chapel. Now man is no longer this cringing, horrified, tormented beast, writhing in the flames in the pit of hell. Now man is 
portrayed as the very image of his own Maker! It is a powerful contrast. This is how the entire progression of ideas have impact as this metaphysical statement rolls out to people, and now they begin to roll back to themselves through art in the images and the pictures that affirm their metaphysical, epistemological and ethical assumptions.
For the next hundred years, this philosophy moves in fits and starts. It travels down blind alleys, intellectual cul-de-sacs. By the time we get to the 17th century, philosophers are exceedingly aware that they need a new start. A new start equated throwing off the Augustinian metaphysical and epistemological framework. Mysticism and dogmatism continued to wreck everything it touched. Something was very obviously wrong.
The thinkers in the 17th century merely had to observe that the human history was dominated by ignorance, superstition, poverty, and despotism. Revelations did not work. “Faith” was merely government-enforced superstition. Dogmatism was really despotism. Despotism led to oppression and poverty. Philosophers needed a new method. This new method was Reason.
The Age of Reason gave way to the Enlightenment of the 17th century. Reason became the standard, and the world was beginning to actually understand the world which man lives. Notice the explosion. You should recognize most of these names – Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Locke. These men represent the core, the explosion of the power of human reasoning and what it ultimately produced. Here is where man finally gains freedom.
There is the one thing, however, that remained to be figured out – political thought. The power of Aristotle’s metaphysics and epistemology ultimately worked out into the area of ethics. We now have an 
ethical standard where man is able to determine value, and the nature of this ability is what empowers him towards self-governance.
I consistently ask this question, who owns man? There have only been two options in the whole history of the human race: either the State owns man or man owns himself. In political action, this is how man finally came out from underneath the horror story that was the Middle Ages, the horror story that was the Augustinian doctrine, the horror story that was made after Calvin.
This brings me to the emergence of John Locke and the issue of capitalism. This will be the central issue in National Socialist Germany and ultimately how it impacts the United States.
To be continued…
From the Reformation to the Third Reich: Protestantism’s Impact on Western Culture – Part 3
The following is part three of a multi-part series.
Taken from John Immel’s third session
at the 2014 Conference on Gospel Discernment and Spiritual Tyranny
~ Edited by Andy Young
The Re-Discovery of Aristotle!
St. Thomas Aquinas
In the previos two posts I have brought you up to the collapse of civilization. That collapse lasts for almost 800 years because Augustine stands virtually intellectually unopposed. There are some medieval theologians and so forth that do rise up, and some of them were pretty smart, but when it came right down to it, they had nothing important to say in the evolution of Western thought. The result is for all of their departures and all of their good ideas, they never abandon the rudiments of orthodoxy.
Then around 1250, St. Thomas Aquinas appears on the scene and reintroduces Aristotle into Western thought in 1250. Aquinas is critical because he integrated the philosophies of Aristotle into Christianity. I cannot understate the importance of this because the re-discovering of Aristotle is what makes the concepts of freedom and liberty as we know it possible. Aristotle is responsible for the coming Enlightenment Era and thinkers such as John Locke. I dare say that the United State would not have happened had it not been for Aristotle.
I want you to notice this timeline. Even with the contributions of Aquinas in 1250 AD, we do not get to freedom, liberty and knowledge until almost 1700! That means that man still spends another 500 years or so in this doleful horror story of the Dark Ages. But it is Aquinas who gives us Aristotle, and Aristotle bails us out of the madness.
The reason I want to talk about Aristotle is because because ultimately I am going to get to the impact of Neo-Calvinism on the United States of America. By the time I get to the next two parts of this series, I want you to be absolutely aware that America is not possible without Aristotle and without John Locke. You must know what you are about to lose and why you are about to lose it. And if you don’t understand this much, then you will never understand why I object so vehemently to Augustine and Luther and Calvin.
Now I’m not going to go over how Aquinas integrated Aristotle into Christianity. That would be a long and tedious project. So I’m just going to start with Aristotle and the elements and roots of Aristotle. Aristotle is the most important figure in all of Western thought. Aristotle was a student of Plato and spent 20 years in Plato’s Academy. For a series of reasons, he left Athens, and eventually, those series of reasons resolve and he came back to Athens and created his own school called The Lyceum. But while he was in Plato’s Academy, he was considered one of Plato’s best students, and he was a committed Platonist.
In the beginning he accepted the premise of Platonism and its full philosophical statement from the beginning to the end. However, during his time away from Athens, he began to rethink, and he decided Plato was wrong, and not just a little wrong, catastrophically wrong. As such, he began to rethink the whole of philosophy and the whole shape and scope of philosophy.
Now in the grand scheme of intellectuals, Plato was a genius on levels that is hard to grasp for people in everyday life. Still, Plato had ideas that came before him that he built on. Aristotle had nothing before him to arrive at his conclusions. Everything before him was exactly the opposite of what he said. So for Aristotle to arrive at the conclusions that he did is illustrative of the capacity of his own genius.
Aristotle objects to Plato’s world of Forms. He rejects Plato’s metaphysics at the root. Plato created a transcendent world where everything you see is actually a shadow of the real thing, of the perfect thing. Those perfect things were actually located in this world called the Forms. There was a perfect table in the world of Forms, and the table that you see is a shadow. It is imperfect and therefore a shadow of this perfect thing.
Aristotle rejected this idea because he believed the Forms are a useless theory because it does not explain this world. This world is filled with particulars, things that move, change, grow and act. Particulars are independent entities that can be categorized by what they have in common, such as a dog, a tree, a man, a remote control. They are self-contained and self-enclosed things, something that exists in and of itself.
This is the world that man needs to understand. Man does not need to know Plato’s static supernatural world.
Here’s an example. This world has chairs, tables, dogs, and Calvinists. Plato says that to understand this world, another world must first have chairs, tables, dogs, and Calvinists. As far as Aristotle is concerned, this creates a useless duplication. All that Plato has done is create a useless metaphor that does not address the root question, how does this world reflect the world of Forms? By what mechanism does this take place? And of course there is no answer, because by definition, all that Plato was saying is this world of Forms is somehow a bright enough light that it casts a shadow here. But yet there is still this fundamental division, which means that man is still living in a world that is somehow functionally unreal.
Here is Aristotle’s major substantive objection. To understand this objection, I need to help you understand the distinction between universals and particulars. I have already defined particulars for you. Aristotle recognized that particulars can be categorized into universals. Universals are what is common to a number of particulars. It is the characteristic possessed by many particulars. What is the common denominator of say table-ness or chair-ness or circle-ness? When men conceptualizes these things, he universalizes the concepts into an abstraction.
Let me see if I can explain this. Consider a remote control for your television. That particular remote controls a particular device, namely your television. You can generalize “remote” into a universal concept. That concept can be abstracted to the nth degree because now you do not have to remember every single remote you have ever see in your lifetime. You can now hold in your head the concept, the abstraction, of 
remote, and it encompasses all of the remotes on the planet. You see, this is an enormously powerful part of human cognition. It is Aristotle’s ability to identify the process of going from a particular to the universal (concept), to the abstraction that gives Aristotle’s metaphysics and epistemology such enormous power.
What Plato did is he took the human mind’s ability to conceptualize a universal and instead said “remote” has a perfect “remote” somewhere else, and that is how we know a “remote” generally. Aristotle says that is silly. What you just did is took the abstraction, “remote-ness”, created universal perfect “remote” somewhere in another world, and then said, oh by the way, this particular remote is only a reflection. So in other words, Plato took the universal and made it a particular. This is a powerful, powerful argument. He pretty much said Plato made up this world that had no function and no purpose and that all that was necessarily important was here and now.
Here’s how Aristotle explains this. We separate common characteristics of entities, particulars, by our selective awareness, by observing the differences among them. We then reduce things to a common denominator. And this is how we go from particulars to universals. When a baby first enters the world, he looks around and sees chair, chair, chair, chair, chair, chair, but he does not understand all of these chairs. At first to him these are all somehow unique and individual events. But eventually, he begins to identify the common denominators of all chairs, and he begins to conceptualize “chair” in general, and then he abstracts to the bigger picture.
Notice Aristotle’s distinction. Just because we can perform the action of abstraction does not mean that the common denominator exists in a separate supernatural reality. Separating things in thought is very different from separating in reality. When man practices this selective process, he is performing abstraction. For example, within your room, you could identify all the shapes of the circle in the room, so you can ignore color, or if it is a part of a chair or connected to the wall you can extract the concept “circle” from each instance. But this mental process does not mean that “circle” is out there somewhere in a Form.
Aristotle called Plato’s world of Forms the “Fallacy of Reification”, literally “thing-making.” Plato is making a particular out of a human cognitive process. This is a brilliant deduction. Aristotle identifies a fundamental flaw by pointing out that this is really nothing more than how the human consciousness works. It is part of the human consciousness identity.
Now you should have some basic insight into how Aristotle conceptualizes the world. Here are the basics. Reality exists. What man perceives is reality. There is no conflict between reality and appearance. Reality is what man observes, and any formulation that says otherwise is error. Particulars are the units of reality. The things you see are particulars. As I said, anything you can physically point at, look at, identify, subtract and blank out everything else and look at, that is a particular. Everything is an individual and a concrete. Individuality is the particular’s irreducible element. The thing that individualizes it is the thing itself.
Here is Aristotle’s distinction, and this is a direct contrast to Plato. Universals are real. Universals are the objects of conceptual thought. Universals are the abstraction of particulars, but only particulars actually 
exist. Let me make a distinction. There was a common tool of debate that was called Zeno’s Paradox. Zeno said you couldn’t actually cross a room because you could not cross distance. You would go to half and then to half again and then to half again and then to half again and to half again, and you could not cross a room by definition. Of course, this is error because it takes the concept of infinity and turns it into a thing. You do not cross infinity. You cross an identity. And the identity is the distance of a room, 30 feet. Aristotle correctly destroyed Zeno’s Paradox by observing that the abstraction “infinity” was not real. We use it as a mental organizer, but it is not in existence like this. So can we cross a room? Absolutely. Why? Because we’re not crossing infinity. We’re crossing an identity, 30 feet.
Side Bar: Most of the conflicts that we have regarding the Neo-Calvinist group and all collectivist ideologies are the failure to grasp the distinction between concretes and particulars, concepts and abstractions. Most of our theological discussion has failed because it has misunderstood these specific distinctions. And the reason the Neo-Calvinists kick our butt so consistently is because they are masters at manipulating the difference between concept and abstraction. I’ll let you mull that over.
Aristotle said matter is the uniqueness of a particular. Form is the universalizing of those things that a particular shares with other things. So he takes over Plato’s concept of form, but he uses it entirely differently. Aristotle noted that you cannot have form without matter, and you cannot have matter without form. This is Plato’s fundamental error; he created a world of Forms without matter. This is the exact same failing in Augustinian doctrine. Augustine’s Form is the heavenly and the universal worldly godly realm. This earth has no Form. Augustine manipulates this to the nth degree throughout the entirety of his ideology.
Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Everybody prior to Aristotle said that consciousness was primary. Some consciousness, whether some variation of man’s consciousness or some divine consciousness, imposed its will on the world and shaped it after its fashion. Aristotle said that is backwards. It is reality that comes first and consciousness engages reality. This is known as the Primacy of Existence, and this is the Copernican shift in philosophy, because it puts reality and consciousness as co-counterweights in the ability to define what is. It gives the ability for objective knowledge.
With the primacy of consciousness, you have no guarantee of objectivity because the first question you must ask is, whose consciousness defines reality? Is it Allah? Is it God? Is it Isis? Or if you are a follower of Hegel, is it the state that defines reality? Can the state impose its collective will on the world? With this, all you have is the term subjectivism. The primacy of consciousness is nothing more than subjectivism. But it is reality first, the primacy of existence first, the correlation of consciousness perceiving that reality that gives you the ability to have objective knowledge; it gives you a plumb line, because man has every confidence that what he sees is.
Man’s obsession to alter reality by the mind is the heart and soul of magic. And this is the primacy of consciousness’ preoccupation. This is how pond scum in the Middle Ages magically became frogs. Everything is and it is not. Everything is mutable and changeable. There is no reality and there is no causality.
Man practices the primacy of consciousness metaphysics all the time. You see something horrible and the first thing you do is start saying, “No, no, that can’t be.” The blogosphere is doing this with Calvinists all the time. They see one more manifestation of Neo-Calvinist abuse and just magically go, “No, that can’t be. It can’t be the doctrine.” They pretend the relationship between ideas and outcomes do not exist. That must mean it is not reality. This is the implication of the primacy of consciousness. They are defining the measure of truth by their own determination at a given consciousness.
Aristotle’s Epistemology.
One of the biggest problems with Plato’s world of Forms is if there is this other world, how does man ever get this concept of “table”? Where does that come from? If he has no ability to perceive it by any means, how does he get it? Well, the historic solution to this was the concept of innate ideas, that somehow man just knew it. Before he was born, man knew it and he remembers it as he grows. All of these things, these innate ideas, all originate pre-consciousness.
If you recall from the 2013 series on the evolution of Western thought, practically every system of thought included the idea that somehow man’s senses and his ability to perceive were impaired or invalid. Aristotle opposed this thought. He said that a man starts his existence tabula rasa, as a blank slate. Man has no innate ideas. The way man gets his knowledge is that it begins with the senses, perceptions. Man’s faculty for understanding reality is his perceptions. All formulations that write off the senses at this point are wrong.
Man sees a rainbow, and he sees it from a distance and it physically looks like it touches the ground. And so he goes to try to find where it is, and of course he can’t find it. And the more he tries to walk towards the rainbow, the harder it is to see the rainbow. Or a similar example is you take a stick. A stick is straight in the air. You stick it in the water and you look at it, and suddenly, the stick bends. The historic criticism was that the senses deceive us. We really can’t rely on the senses.
Aristotle realized that was nonsense. You simply made a crucial error. The senses gave you the correct information, but you interpreted the information wrong. You misunderstood what that information was designed to give you. The stick in the water appears bent because at some point you learn the implications of how water moves and shapes light. The stick didn’t bend. The light coming back at the senses is what changed the appearance of the stick. The same thing is true of the rainbow. A rainbow is the result of light passing through water mist which refracts the light, and so the illusion that you think you see is really the correct manifestation of the entities light and water.
Aristotle’s next epistemological advance was called concept-formation which I have already discussed at length earlier in this article. It is the ability of man to take perceptions and particulars, identify the common denominators between them, and conceptualize abstractions called universals. This is how man brings order to his perceptions and begins to classify reality by identifying identities. It is by this method that man goes from circle to wheel to cart to transportation.
This is how man builds every increasing levels of complexity. He takes the very small, the particular, and he begins to form and shape that until he gets to the broadest abstraction. The order goes this way, perception to conception to abstraction to universal. And I’m going to keep saying this because this is central to the world that we inhabit. Until you understand how this functions, it is very easy to get wrapped up in the Augustinian ideas and their specific effort to divorce the world from reality man’s mind. This is a central attack that we will see over and over again as we progress through this discussion.
To be continued…
From the Reformation to the Third Reich: Protestantism’s Impact on Western Culture – Part 2
The following is part two of a multi-part series.
Taken from John Immel’s second session
at the 2014 Conference on Gospel Discernment and Spiritual Tyranny
~ Edited by Andy Young
I’m going to continue with my case on the nature of philosophy, how it is a driving force of human action. It has impacted the evolution of Western thought in particular, and specifically it shaped National Socialist Germany. It is currently shaping the United States of America.
At the TANC Conference of 2013, I began to explain the evolution of Western thought, and I started all the way back from Thales around 600 BC. One of the biggest challenges I have is that Christians tend to believe that Christianity just sprang up out of a whole cloth, but it actually has a very specific place in the larger context of the evolution of Western thought. The roots of those ideas can be seen as far back as Plato and Pythagoreans, and many of our doctrines come from the Cynics and the Stoics.
I’m going to pick up where I left off in the timeline I began last year, around 150 AD, because this will lay a foundation. I’m going to touch briefly on Plato because the roots of current Christian doctrine can be traced from Plato to Augustine to Luther to Calvin. Actually, it is not really all that much of a dirty secret. The fact of the matter is that anyone can find this relationship with no effort at all. It is hidden in plain sight for anybody to find.
You will recall from our study of the Cynics and the Stoics that they believed the flesh, the material world was corrupt. They were responsible for the introduction of the soul-body dichotomy into Western thought.
Christianity largely picks up this soul-body dichotomy from these ancient Western thinkers. The Cynics and Stoics ultimately believe that the way man achieves knowledge and virtue was by the discipline of the flesh. Because the flesh was weak, it required kind of like an athlete’s training.
Plotinus
Around 200 AD a man by the name of Plotinus picks up on the Cynic and Stoic doctrines. Plotinus takes these concepts to the next logical progression. Not only is the material world inferior, it is in fact totally morally depraved.
Consider what Plato taught. Plato believed that this earth was a shadow variation of a perfect world. This world was not true reality. It was really the reflection, the shadow on the wall of a cave. The otherworldly realm was called the world of Forms. Plato believed that man’s grasp of reality was limited. Plato believed that man’s ethical standard was his subordination to the state. He believed that man was inferior. He believed that certain men, what he called philosopher kings, should be in charge. They should dictate good.
Plato still has a secular philosophy. In other words, he still believed that select men can get to this transcendent world, this world of Forms, by virtue of his reason. Now it wasn’t a clean blanket statement that all men had this ability. It was really reserved for a select few men who specifically practice virtues that gave them access to the forms and higher levels of knowledge, but it was still a secular version.
By contrast, Plotinus dropped all vestiges of the human element. According to Plotinus’ disciples, Plotinus had zero interest in the physical life. His entire obsession was attaining a transcendent reality. But his transcendent reality was a religious transcendence. He accepted the premise of the mystery cults, the Gnostics, where because man is specifically corrupt, there was a certain initiating practice that gave them access to the knowledge, and they were uniquely qualified to get to this knowledge by virtue of their specific denial of fleshly existence.
This means that the secular transcendent world is graspable because man is the secularizing part. But a religious transcendent world is not graspable because man has no place in that world. Here is how Plotinus described this. Listen to the echoes of what becomes Christianity.
“The One is, in truth, beyond all statement; whatever you say would limit It; the All-Transcending, transcending even the most august Mind, which alone of all things has true being, has no name. We can but try to indicate, if possible, something concerning it. If we do not grasp it by knowledge, what does that not mean that we do not seize it. How does man come to seize knowledge of a transcendent being? It is impossible for man to cease transcendent knowledge by reason.”
I want you to notice that he wanted reason to be part of man’s incompetence.
Once you understand Plotinus, it becomes very simple to understand Augustine, because this is the version of Platonism that Augustine got hold of. He did not have the original Plato. Augustine sees in his mind the one, the All-Transcendent, as the Christian God. It is from this framework within which he places Christianity, because there was a problem with early Christianity.
When Jesus showed up on the scene, He was in Israel talking to Israelites about Israel issues. He repeatedly stated that He came to the lost children of Israel. This is why, particularly in the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew, you see virtually no recognition of a world beyond Palestine. You see functionally no understanding of the broader Hellenistic world.
By the time we get to the Gospel of Luke, being a Roman and having much more concern with the broader Hellenistic world, his original works are actually addressed to someone named Theophilus. While Luke’s interest is to a broader Greek world, even then Luke’s focus is only inasmuch as he wants to show the progression of the Great Commission going to the outermost parts of the earth to these people. So even by the time we get to the Book of Acts, he is still just focused on that evolution.
And herein lay the problem. As this Jewish movement, which started out in this little backwater no nothing territory of the Roman Empire, moves in to the broader Hellenistic world it is confronted with some profound intellectual problems.
The Hellenistic world has no association with the Jewish background of the things that Jesus said and did. There was no quick way to explain the nature of the Jesus movement to this broader Hellenistic world because there was no full philosophical statement. It was a collection of stories and aphorisms and parables. And so to that world and to that mind, Christianity did not have a lot of direct relevance.
By the time we get into the 2nd century, Christianity is really reeling. Christianity needed an integration into a broader philosophical statement. One of the first who tried to do this was Philo. Philo was a Jew, and he was definitely a Hellenistic Jew, and his goal was to take Platonism and merge it into Judaism. He is one of a number who were making these attempts at philosophical integration.
This is the fundamental problem that landed on Augustine’s lap. Augustine set out to finalize the integration of these ideas, and he used the turnkey solution of Platonism to do it. Concurrent with this, the Roman Empire was crumbling. There was a lot of chaos happening in the world, both political and social. People were looking for some means and some way to begin to explain these things, so a corrupt material world and a corrupt man in a war-torn and war-ravaged and famine-ravaged existence seems to make an enormous amount of sense.
First Council of Nicea
Then there is the political side of this equation to consider. Around 250 AD, Christianity began to emerge as a player in the social-political structure of the world. By 300, the Church was full of all sorts of political ambition. Bishops became effectively synonymous with rulers.
Constantine then capitalizes on the Christian statist ambition as he presided over the Council of Nicaea. Constantine says, “You know what, guys? I’m tired of hearing you bicker. I’m going to put an end to this.” He declared a specific orthodoxy to be upheld. He called all opposing positions to be demented and insane, and then he proceeded to persecute anyone who happened to believe otherwise.
Constantine galvanized ecumenical support for his power in the failing Roman Empire, using his civil authority to condemn. In trade, the winning bishops pledged their allegiance to Constantine. Constantine died in 337, but the Council of Nicaea lasted for almost another 25 years. With each year that passed, the Church became increasingly more embroiled in civil governance.
Fast forward to the appointment of Flavius Theodosius to emperor in 379. Theodosius’ role in history and more importantly, Church history, has been airbrushed out of existence, as Charles Freeman notes in his book AD 381. This is a profound failing because in 381, for the first time in Greco-Roman history, religious orthodoxy became synonymous with political power. In 381, the power of the state was galvanized into Christianity forever. This forever changed the face of the world. From this point forward, the leading Christian theological concern was who had the authority, the force, to compel doctrinal outcomes. No matter the specific theological hair being split, the underlying fight was who held the force to suppress the dissenting opinion.
Here’s why this is important. Secularism gets a black eye because we tend to assume that secular means immoral. But secularism only means the division of religious orthodoxy from political orthodoxy. A secular state is effectively an agnostic state where the force of government does not care what the specific religious convictions of people are. Even though they believed in hundreds of gods, the Hellenistic world, and in particular the Classical Greek world, was effectively a secular state. Man could believe what he chose. He was not compelled by doctrine to believe anything.
The only other manifestation of a truly secular state in the history of the world is the United States of America. It is important for people to grasp this. The single greatest political achievement the world has ever seen was a secular state, meaning that man was free to believe what he wanted. I’m going to talk about this at length later on.
Theocracy on the other hand is the merging of political power with the theological orthodoxy. A theocracy means that man is compelled to a given theological standard by force of government. And this is exactly what happened with Theodosius. Augustine’s doctrine was then able to reign effectively for the next thousand years without contest. No one could muster an objection because it was considered treason to object to Augustinian doctrine.
Augustine decides he has cared for all the basic premises:
- The soul/body or mind/body dichotomy derived from ancient Greek doctrine
- Man is epistemologically corrupt
- The abandonment of reason
- A commitment the presumption that select men are morally correct to dictate intellectual content (dogmatism)
- The primacy of the state (the church)
Central to all of these premises is asceticism. Asceticism is a philosophical commitment of the individual to destroy every facet of his physical existence. Asceticism is the practical application of the soul-body dichotomy put into practice. Christian asceticism took the apostle Paul’s determination to beat his body literally and seriously.
The Church taught that asceticism gave access to the supernatural through mortification, literally, the death of the flesh. Paul Dohse has written at length about the doctrines of mortification and vivification. Most Christians tend to assume that when we talk about mortification, we’re really talking about something they can pick and choose. But in this case is means the literal death of the flesh. Self-destruction would earn God’s pity. Self-destruction showed that man was full of guilt.
Some examples of ascetic practices included celibacy. This was very common. Virginity was considered an ethical ideal tied to the belief that the natural world was evil. This actually hit women very hard through the Dark Ages because women were either virgins or whores. Women were seen as tempters of men. Celibacy was the means to prevent. Celibacy was also a means by which the Catholic Church could keep their property from disappearing into inheritance. Priests that don’t marry don’t have kids, won’t have wives. The Church gets the money. The Church gets taxes. The Church keeps it, because when the priests dies, he doesn’t give it away to his family.
Another ascetic practice was the renunciation of material possessions. For example, a man by the name of Alexander married poverty, which I think is hilarious considering our current preoccupations with re-defining marriage in America. Alexander would beg for his food and did not keep his excess. One commenter on Alexander’s wife said that his form of monasticism was better because it didn’t create the housekeeping problems of say, the Franciscans. In other words, he didn’t have cleric. I think that’s hilarious.
Another ascetic practice is the renunciation of food. The ideal Christian fasted for 40 days, as practiced by Jesus. It also turns out that starvation past 40 days killed you.
They reduced or prevented sleep. They turned sleep into torture. They slept on beds of nails. They were beaten if they fell asleep. Syrian monks tied ropes around their abdomens and slept standing up. Others hung themselves in awkward positions.
They condemned hygiene. They refused to cut their hair, fingernails, or toenails. They dressed in filthy rags and allowed sweat and dirt to accumulate.
They abandoned movement. It was common to lock themselves away in monasteries, but then they would take it further and lock themselves into ever-smaller and smaller cells. Truly horrific is that some ascetics would go into the desert, sit down on a pile of rocks and stay there until their legs are rotten away. They beat their bodies. Men would stare into the sun until they were blind so that they would never succumb to the lusts of the eyes. Monastic orders wore girdles around their loins so that they would not desire women. Castration and self-flagellation were very common.
Here is the point that I want to make. These practices never made it into general practice for the simple reason that it is not livable. It is by definition designed to kill. It is a commitment to death and destruction that cannot be practiced. But the point is that these kinds of practices were venerated. It was seen as an ethical ideal. The men who did practice such action were considered saints. The Church turned these people into heroes.
Because of Augustine, throughout the Dark Ages we have an entire intellectual collapse. Reason cannot grasp God, and there is no earthly reality. Imagine an entire culture built around this fundamental presumption. This is the proof-text mindset- the need to use authority to validate ideas. The proof-text mind cannot think in terms of causality. It is a mind that equates causality with authority. It is a mind that does not grasp principles.
Of course, what this really means is that we are talking about an entire culture built on rational dependence. In other words, it is a culture that gets all of its rational content from somebody who dictates. This is impossible for a scientific society, because a scientific society is built around rational independence, the ability to independently review and explore the world find commonalities and causalities.
What were the results of the Dark Ages?
Intellectual stagnation. It paralyzed all critical thinking. Authority was what governed human interaction, and the result was war, war, war, and more war. God was always in the business of smiting someone else who got it wrong through the sword of the church/state. The concept of “rights” was really a discussion of prerogatives. The “Divine Right of Kings” is really the divine prerogative of kings.
The intellectual stagnation of the Dark Ages produced infant mortality rates estimated at 50 percent, some sources suggest maybe as low as 30. A villager serf, his wife, and surviving children shared a living space of roughly 700 square feet, and they shared that space with livestock.
By age 12, a boy was considered old enough to pledge his life to his sovereign, meaning he was considered old enough to go to war. By 12, girls were considered old enough to marry. They were sold as a chattel, considered a societal burden because they were a mouth to feed. They could not endure the rigors of agricultural life. The concept of a dowry was designed to make marriageable females more attractive to male suitors. Men were basically paid to take on women.
Ninety-five percent of the population worked at agriculture with farm implements out of the Stone Age. Yields were estimated at a quarter of the seed sown. Therefore, it took roughly two acres to feed one person. By comparison, modern farming methods yield in excess of 80 percent, and it takes less than a third of an acre to feed o
ne person. There was no concept of germs, no antibiotics, no vaccines, no anesthetic. Anesthetic was considered sinful. Your pain was necessarily the product of your sin, and God deliberately did it to you. And this all made sense because suffering was a virtue.
Death was a virtue. Pain was merely the natural state of human existence. Practically 95 percent of the populace were slaves, 2 percent did nothing, and the nobility fought wars of conquests for profit. The largest class were the people called the villani. It means villager, but it is the root of our modern word villain. They were born into generational slavery.
This is important to understand. As a class society based on determination, if you were born a serf, you would be a serf. Your grandson would be a serf. Your great grandson would be a serf. Your great grandfather would be a serf. There was effectively no escape. You were committed. You were basically born into subservience, and there was no ability to get out of it. This is the logical conclusion of Augustine’s theories of predestination carried out to their practical application.
“Justice” was meted out with brutal efficiency. A man who stole from a lord’s property, which was effectively everything in sight, could be penalized by being pilloried, drawn and quartered, cut open, or have limbs, noses, or ears cut off. Women, who were accused of crimes, say, daring to seduce a priest or lord (and when I mean by seduced, I mean they lusted after her) had their genitals impaled with hot irons, were locked in iron maidens, burned at the stake, or drowned.
The Church sanctioned all of these actions by government using Romans 13:1-2
“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”
This is the foundation of the “Divine Right of Kings”; the presumption that the king is appointed of God, and whatever he happens to do is exactly what God chooses. This is also a corollary of the doctrine of predestination. It is what God intends. What you see manifest is specifically what God desires.
The Dark Ages are dark in principle, and it is imperative that you understand what this means. Philosophically, it is specifically trying to separate all of man from any good. The fundamental formulations of Augustinian doctrine sought to eradicate man on every fundamental level. Christianity elevated pain and suffering and pestilence and poverty to the highest ethical ideal.
The whole of historic Christian doctrine revolves around the veneration of death. Human suffering reaches its pinnacle in Western thought. Destruction of the flesh is the ethical ideal. It doesn’t take an art scholar to understand why the symbol of a fish (the Greek word ιχθυς “ic-thoos”) in remembrance of the disciples was replaced by the cross as an enduring icon of Christianity. For the first 400 to 500 
years, the cross does not appear in Christian art. But by the start of the 6th century, the cross, which is an emblem of political subjugation and torture, becomes Christianity’s central icon.
But then, what other icon would be appropriate for a religion built on human suffering? Four hundred years after Jesus came to preach life in the covenants of promise, Christianity became a cult of death that ruled the world with a nihilistic iron fist.
I get some heat on occasion for calling Christianity a cult of death. But I challenge you, show me I’m wrong. The sum of Christian doctrine is based on the death of man. It is obsessed and fixated on man’s death. And it worships an icon of death and culture. It holds out Jesus’ death and destruction as its highest ethical action. At its root, it preaches that man’s highest ethical ideal is his own self-destruction.
In the introduction I challenged you with this statement: The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. But that statement requires a necessary assumption. If there are men who are good, that presupposes they have values. And the nature of values are such that good men must act consistent with those values.
So then, what causes good men to take no action? What must be the primary assumption?
Change the definition of good!
Turn death and destruction into “good.”
If you want to understand what happened in National Socialist Germany, you must understand that the resulting behavior stemmed from a metaphysical premise that assumed a change in the definition of what was “good.”
Now for me to actually explain why this is so important, we are going to have to do some more remedial work, because most people reading this don’t hold the Augustinian standard of “good” in their head. Most modern Calvinists don’t hold the Augustinian, Luther, and Calvin doctrine of good in their head. Most of them get their definition of good from a very different source. And that’s what we’re going to talk about in part three.
To be continued…
Paul's Passing Thoughts 
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