Capitol Ideas: He Keeps on Ticking
Bethell, Tom
"Capitol Ideas: He Keeps on Ticking" by Tom Bethell He Keeps on Ticking Ihave been reading Paul Johnson's new book, The Quest for God (Harper-Collins, 288 pages, $25), and trying to think about God myself. As we all...
...The question has obviously been on Johnson's mind...
...He enjoined his audience to "pray for the courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world...
...Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord cloth come...
...At least, scientists were not able to find out much about evolution, despite their bluster to the contrary...
...God was supposed to be "dead" by now...
...All the texts on which we can base such warrant as we have for hoping that all men will be saved come from St...
...What he has to say is at times highly unfashionable: "Those who find themselves in Hell—if anyone does—will include painters and composers and writers and philosophers as well as dictators and tyrants...
...And stop worrying about minor things, such as Dole vs...
...Matisse was a similar case...
...Not so with Jesus...
...At issue," a Washington Post writer replied a few days later, "is whether Scalia's impassioned and remarkably personal defense of Christianity...
...Wasn't "environmental politics" meant to help the environment...
...Johnson: "Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly...
...Of the Day of Judgment he notes that we hear almost no mention of it today...
...This is really quite untenable...
...When he was 75, this exchange was preserved by Boswell: Dr...
...clashed with his sworn duty to impartially interpret U.S...
...Johnson has less to say on Jesus than one might have hoped, but he makes up for it with two remarkable chapters, one on the Day of Judgment, the other on Hell...
...There are other forms of action which will emerge in due course whereby we will transform and overthrow existing society...
...but my Redeemer has said he will set some on his right hand and some on his left...
...One might well think this a little odd, especially considering that we are "so loquacious about our 'rights' in this world...
...Is not our Culture of Consent a horror in God's eyes...
...The radical agenda my acquaintance listed, with its strong appeal to the idealistic, as well as the materialistic instincts of mankind, especially among young people, does constitute an alternative religion...
...Not that I would advise it...
...He had a vanity in being thought easy...
...As we all should: especially about where we are headed...
...As a rule we try not to think about it, or we tolerate an easygoing muddle of disbelief...
...Starting with the philosophes of the Enlightenment, the idea was that humans could be re-educated, human nature itself be improved, and eventually we would become superior beings...
...The voice continues to nag, and I don't know how to answer it...
...Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth...
...Johnson: "Madame, I do not forget the merits of my Redeemer...
...It is to this effect: that Jesus preached a kindly and simple religion (found in the Gospels) and that St...
...We are still free to go to church without interference, however, and if we cannot work out our own salvation, it will avail us naught to blame the Supreme Court or the Clinton administration for our failings...
...It's rare to hear people talk like that...
...Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away...
...Outlaw that...
...Writers in particular tend to have "huge resentments of the world as it exists...
...True atheists often seem to cause little trouble...
...One of the most remarkable features of the Gospels (of which there are four, not five, as the subversive "Jesus Seminar" would have us think) is that the sayings of Jesus have not become culturally outdated...
...They don't experience their lack of faith as a void and don't need substitutes (as in "building a new society...
...Its economic theory had been a handicap anyway...
...It was all just one more campaign in the war on God...
...I'm relieved he didn't put Bach in that number...
...I came not to send peace, but a sword...
...It seems more likely that norms that remained essentially unchanged for mil-lennia are only now under an aberrant assault that will prove to be temporary or (failing that) highly destructive...
...Cicero and Aristotle had much wisdom to impart but at a certain point they always betray their cultural age...
...Adams: "What do you mean by damned...
...The animus has been there all along, but it might become more direct...
...And this most amazing remark: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth...
...But if we do accept it, we cannot just pick and choose the parts we like...
...Although the doctrine of Hell has undergone a long historical decline from the seventeenth century onwards, the underlying scriptural texts on which it is based have not changed at all, of course...
...They would like nothing more than to nail him on a technicality...
...They may have been the real reason why he wrote the book...
...All the most terrifying texts come from the mouth of Our Lord...
...Many more are searching for new worldly idols...
...That's what worried Samuel Johnson...
...Paul afterwards corrupted it into a cruel and complicated religion (found in the Epistles...
...he said...
...humankind can improve on his creation...
...A man like Beethoven, who saw himself, through the sublimity of his work, as an intermediary between God and man, was walking close to the precipice...
...I don't think the same can be said of anyone else whose writings have come down to us from antiquity, no matter how illustrious...
...God had many reasons for introducing gender into the universe, he writes, "but a desire to differentiate between the spiritual capacities of men and women was not one of them...
...Ex-seminarians and The modern world's losing war on God...
...Those who make trouble in the political arena are not so much atheists as rebel believers...
...So was Tolstoy, whose idea of his own moral righteousness and importance led him at times to see himself— as a friend put it—as 'God's elder brother.' Picasso, in his old age, fancied himself as an art-god...
...By way of antidote, here are a few words from C . S. Lewis (from God in the Dock): A most astonishing misconception has long dominated the modern mind on the subject of St...
...An end to religion was one of the main goals of the whole horrid progressive-evolutionary program...
...Adams: "You seem, Sir, to forget the merits of my Redeemer...
...What wecan now turn to," he said, "are far more attractive and exciting forms of action—race politics, sexual politics, environmental politics, health politics...
...Lucifer and the fallen angels were the original rebels and presumably must be believers...
...Johnson: "...as I cannot be sure that I have fulfilled the conditions on which salvation is granted, I am afraid that I may be one of those who shall be damned" (looking dismally...
...our expectations "so minutely examined in the media, so endlessly debated in congresses and parliaments...
...When told by Boswell that on his deathbed Hume was undisturbed by the thought of his own extinction, Dr...
...johnson has many interesting things to say about art instruction from his father, his Catholic upbringing, the Redemptorists who would come to his Jesuit school in the north of England and preach hell-fire sermons...
...The popular notion that people turn to religion as a self-deluding comfort strikes me as quite wrong...
...The burden of willfulness may in the end prove heavy, and his burden light, but that is not the way it seems at the outset...
...They think God did a lousy job...
...Johnson identifies him as the first well-known European figure who not only proclaimed himself an atheist but died as one (in 1776...
...He foresees that in the twenty-first century our already shaky beliefs about the sanctity of human life "will come under challenge from the innovators, who plan to use new technologies to 'improve' the human condition," just as earlier in this century the state was used...
...Some may have quietly resumed a more conventional faith...
...at the time, "women were discriminated against in many ways...
...laws...
...He ascribes the male Apostles to the cultural climate of Jesus's day...
...I sometimes think that the most serious rift is not so much between belief and non-belief as between submission and rebellion...
...20 July 199 6 • The American Spectator fallen-away priests make the fiercest revolutionaries, Stalin being only the best-known example...
...Samuel Johnson said: "It was not so, Sir...
...Even in religious circles, "it is not much talked about now...
...Nothing is passé: The poor you have always with you...
...Clinton...
...What we are dealing with here is an attempt to set up "alternatives to God," as Johnson says...
...Anyway, we should all try to pray to be able to believe in God, and "those who should pray the hardest are precisely the agnostics and atheists," as Johnson says...
...Its failure has provoked a crisis for those of the progressive faith, although few will admit it openly...
...As Johnson says, a remarkable feature of the twentieth century has been his failure to die...
...The American Spectator • July 1996 21...
...Most of what he says strikes me as sound, although I am sorry that he regards the all-male priesthood as a "lost cause, and rightly so...
...It is a long time since I heard a sermon on the Last Judgment...
...The Promethean spirit — the belief that we can do better without God—has been "growing with dramatic speed over the past 250 years," Johnson says, and is now "perhaps stronger than ever before...
...Here was a case of pride,fed by many decades of universal flattery, taking a frail mortal being to the very brink of eternal damnation...
...The reaction to Supreme Court Justice Scalia's recent speech at a Baptist prayer breakfast in Mississippi was interesting...
...Often, they seek only a modest redemption in libertarian anti-politics...
...In the U.S., we may in consequence be approaching a time of more open antagonism to religion, Christianity in particular...
...Of course, the teaching of Jesus may be rejected in its entirety...
...If it is the temptation of liberalism to substitute the political for the spiritual life, it is the temptation of conservatism to blame the political for our spiritual failings...
...I am not so sure...
...Compared to most places and times, I suspect that the quest for God is to this day more advantageously conducted here...but a nagging voice interrupts: Are not many souls led astray by our indulgent culture, in which everything is okay as long as we don't hurt others...
...Dr...
...More true, I think, is that we skirt serious thought about religion because that liberates us from God's law...
...Mrs...
...Dr...
...He made men and women different...
...We seem to be living at a time of growing interest in religion, although that has been said many times before...
...CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell He Keeps on Ticking Ihave been reading Paul Johnson's new book, The Quest for God (Harper-Collins, 288 pages, $25), and trying to think about God myself...
...Re-education camps were set up and the Soviet Union became the laboratory for the experiment in its most extreme form...
...If that is a contradiction, so be it...
...Along the way we would discard our outmoded superstitions...
...We don't read them and say, "Oh, isn't it quaint what people thought 2,000 years ago...
...American society is dominated by secular, "worldly wise" enemies of Christianity, Tom BETHELL is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...There is no easy way around the Johnsonian position, it seems to me...
...That is how religion really is treated as a comforting delusion...
...The faith in evolution was an accompaniment to this ideology, and had little to do with science...
...The philosopher David Hume may have been the prototype...
...Johnson describes an acquaintance of his, identified only as a former Marxist, who not long ago "expressed himself undaunted by the intellectual collapse of Communism as a system for promoting prosperity combined with equality...
Vol. 29 • July 1996 • No. 7
