C. Northcote Parkinson, Left Luggage (1967)

As a man of advancing years and declining powers, I am naturally disposed to see my melancholy condition reflected in the world around me.  The poet Wordsworth noted a counterpart disposition of ebullient youth to see in the world the progress and promise they feel bubbling up in themselves.  Thus, to ebullient youth, the bloody beheadings in revolutionary Paris were a hopeful sign of good times that were right around the corner—even severed heads being signs of hope to hopeful youth.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.”

Whereas to hopeless old men of advancing years and declining powers,

“A darker shadow falls upon the gloom,
Like I, the world quakes with impending doom.”

* * * * *

Although we live in a word of ubiquitous technology, it is not hard to find gloomy diagnoses of a masked but unfolding disaster of technological (and more fundamentally intellectual) decline.  For the reasons just stated, I do not read these diagnoses with an open, much less an optimistic, mind.  But it is also not hard to find flies of frustration in the ointment of our high-tech conveniences.  Like all of you, I carry an Aladdin’s lamp in my pocket, but the genii in this lamp is not infrequently refractory.  This is partly owing to imperfections in the genii, but more largely to the fact that I am not his maker, his master, or his god.

I could not make a smartphone.  I could not describe how it works.  I cannot always make it do what I wish it to do.  And yet I am armed with one and occasionally make a fair show of being a fair specimen of technological man.

Thus my smartphone is to me what those airlines were to Parkinson’s Mumbojumbo and Nitwitzerland.

And here is the essence of the mask that hides technological (and more fundamentally intellectual) decline.  Quantitative replication of technological devices and their widespread distribution, often with subsidies, or even gratis, permits every ignoramus to appear, and very often to imagine himself, a technological savant.  I have more than once seen a woman loudly facetiming in the grocery store, that same woman being, as appears by the content of her shopping cart, incapable of peeling a potato or bringing water to a boil.

I do not compare myself favorably to these cackling women, at least so far as technology is concerned.  I have an Anglo Saxon sense of public decorum and a middle class horror of synthetic foodstuffs, but when it comes to technology, they and I are ignoramuses hiding behind masks of technological sophistication.

And the smartphone is only today’s epitome of the technological mask (just as the jet airliner was the epitome when Parkinson wrote in 1964).  A million men and women are at this very moment voiding their bowels into flushable ceramic commodes, this same million being incapable of digging a latrine if you handed them shovels and pointed out the spot.

What this all means is that we live in the golden age and paradise of fools, an age in which ignoramuses are not only shielded from the pain and privations with which nature has always rewarded its multitudinous simpletons, but also, and perhaps more importantly, shielded from from the consciousness that they are indeed simple.

As some future Wordsworth may fondly recall,

“Bliss was it in that day to be alive,
But to be a fool was very heaven.”

*) C. Northcote Parkinson, Left Luggage (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), pp. 161-162.

Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 (1851)*

I spotted this living irony in the Houston airport last week.  We live in an age when the people in the First Class cabin dress in tee shirts and plan to burn the world down.

*) Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), pp. 42-43.

James Montgomery, Greenland (1819)

Greenland, as everyone ought to know, is a large but inhospitable island in North America’s far northeast.  Its capital, Nuuc, lies just over two thousand miles from Washington, D.C., although the traffic between those two places has always been meager.  Nuuc is slightly closer to Oslo, Norway, capital of the first European power to plant a colony on that frigid and forbidding shore.

This was in 982 when Iceland got too hot for an obstreperous Norseman named Eric the Red.  Banished from Scandinavia’s El Dorado, that intrepid ginger sought greener pastures in the west.  He found those pastures, then (and briefly) tolerably green, on the far southern tip of a land whose interior was sorely (perhaps symbolically) oppressed by a great mass of frigid whiteness.

Leif Erikson was, as you may recall, a son of this Eric the Red.  Supposed to have been born in Iceland, Leif grew up in Brattahío, his father’s house at the head of a Greenland fjord.

This Brattahío was the site, as it happens, of North America’s first Christian church.

In the year 999, when he was about thirty years of age, Leif sailed from Greenland to Norway.  There in service at the court of King Olaf Trygvason, Leif was converted to Christianity. One year later, young Leif sailed home with the King’s commission to evangelize the New World.

Old Eric proved obdurate, preferring the old gods of his fathers to the new God of his son; but Leif’s mother, whose name was Þjódhild, had been born with ears to hear.  This grieved old Eric because, the sagas inform us, Christian Þjódhild no longer welcomed pagan Eric to their warm connubial bed.

And nights at Brattahío were cold!

Before arriving home at Brattahío, Leif was blown off course and came ashore in a land of even greener pastures he called Vineland, or Wineland, which we today supposed was almost certainly Newfoundland.  After making a sustaining crop in Vineland, Leif sailed north to his home at Brattahío, bearing the good news of the Gospel and what would one day be called America in the self-same ship.

* * * *

My epigraph is from an epic poem called Greenland, written by a James Montgomery, a Scotsman of the Moravian Church, in the year of our Lord 1819.  It tells the story of the Moravian mission to Greenland in 1733, more than seven centuries after the mission of Leif Erikson.  This mission was the work of the Royal Danish College of Missions and sought to evangelize the native people the Norsemen had called Skraelings, a people since more commonly called Inuit or Eskimo.  Speaking of these native people, the poet James Montgomery said,

“Skraellings the Normans call’d these hoards in scorn. . . .
A stunted, stern, uncouth, amphibious stock,
Hewn from the living marble of the rock,
Or sprung from mermaids, and in ocean’s bed,
With orcs and seals, in sunless caverns bred,
They might have held, from unrecorded time,
Sole patrimony in that hideous clime.”

* * * * *

Although now very largely wards of Denmark’s welfare state, the posterity of the Skraellings today retain, albeit precariously, “sole patrimony in that hideous clime.”  The reason they retain sole patrimony is that the clime is hideous.  The reason that patrimony is suddenly precarious is that Donald Trump is ticked that he did not win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Or something.

Trump is surrounded by liars, toadies, and experts in personal enrichment by sophisticated forms of three-card monte.  These reptiles are today inviting Americans to look past Greenland’s uninviting face with something like the eyes of faith.  Indeed, they are telling  Americans to look upon Greenland much as the Moravian Brethren looked upon Greenland in 1733.

“To Greenland then, with quick compassion, turn
Their deepest sympathies; their bosoms burn,
To her barbarian race, with tongues of flame,
His love, his grief, his glory to proclaim.”***

The great difference between 1733 and 2026 is, of course, that the “His” in Montgomery’s line referred to Jesus Christ, whereas the “His” of 2026 refers to Donald Trump (the difference between these men in some eyes being doubtful).

To her barbarian race, with tongues of flame [bribes failing],
His love, his grief, his glory to proclaim.”

Making a large but very safe bet on the ignorant gullibility of the American public, and on the pliant mendacity of her press, Trump and his reptilian courtiers have undertaken to persuade us that Greenland, Gem of the Arctic Sea and Gibraltar of Baffin Bay, is about to fall into Russian or Chinese hands.  While it is true that Russia cannot control the Black Sea and China hesitates to cross the Taiwan Strait, it is no less true that their landing craft and paratroopers are even now poised to strike and seize the second largest ice deposits in the world!

Just as it is no less true that our lumbering empire will in a few years have Skraelings to sell its fentanyl and drive its cabs.

*) James Montgomery, Greenland and Other Poems (New York: Kirk & Mercer, 1819), p. 51.
**) Montgomery, Greenland, pp. 74-75.
***) Montgomery, Greenland, p. 52.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1909)

“But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets.”

Acts 24:14.

Readers have from time to time complained that it is false advertising for me to publish my posts at a website that calls itself the Orthosphere.  What these lovers of the tried-and-true hope to find in the gaudy bazaar of the internet I cannot say, but I readily confess that some of my posts may surprise a reader who infers too much from the name Orthosphere.  And some  of my posts will certainly shock a reader who equates the word orthodoxy with one definite system of eternal truth.

As I have written more than once, I was not one of the happy band who founded the Orthosphere fourteen years ago, but I understand that the name was proposed by Bruce Charlton as a means to advertise the fact that the Orthosphere was a group blog (hence “sphere”) that combined writers who were in some sense traditional (hence the “ortho”).  The tradition from which this group wrote was, very broadly. orthodox Christianity, but it was always a latitudinarian orthodoxy and by no means exclusively the orthodoxy of Rome.

“Latitudinarian orthodoxy” may strike you as an oxymoron, but there are equally serious problems with a strict definition of orthodoxy as one particular and eternal truth.  In my first epigraph, Chesterton defines orthodoxy as the creed and conduct of “everybody calling himself a Christian until a very short time ago,” and thereby owns the paradox that the men he calls “orthodox” had become heretics with respect to the authorized truth, the conventional wisdom, the respectable morality of Chesterton’s age..

They had in fact become heretics in opposition to the teaching authorities that by 1900 ruled the public mind.

.We may use the word orthodoxy in more than one sense, but the dominant sense of this word denotes the opinions of the ovine mass that Orwell calls “good thinkers” and the French call bien pensant.  I think the dominant sense of orthodoxy is expressed with admirable pith by Joseph Henry Allen, a Unitarian clergyman in nineteenth-century Boston.

“Its meaning is simply ‘right opinion’; that is, that set of opinions, which is held to be right by the majority at any time and place.  Its opposite is not falsehood, but dissent, or liberalism, or heresy . . .”**

Thus, Allen recognized what St. Paul conceded in his trial before the Roman governor Felix, namely that his (Paul’s) manner of worship was “after the way which they [the Jewish high priests] call heresy,” while his manner of worship was in Paul’s own view the very opposite of false.

Heresy was therefore in Paul’s mind a minority opinion, regardless of whether that opinion was truthful or false.

Bien Pensant good thinkers naturally use to word “orthodox” to denote opinions that are authorized, conventional, respectable, and (they believe) true, but a dissident, heretical “bad-thinker” naturally negates the fourth criterion.  Orthodoxy in bad-thinkers’ eyes is authorized, conventional, respectable, and (they believe) untrue—it is “blue-pilled” delusion or ideological false consciousness, in short.

A third definition of orthodoxy stands behind the name of this website.  Orthodoxy in this definition is unauthorized, unconventional, unrespectable, and yet true.  It is a formal heresy (i.e. minority opinion) that, like a deposed king in exile, maintains its claim to be rightful possessor of the orthodox crown.  Men who claim they are orthodox in this sense believe their opinions ought to be the authorized truth, the conventional wisdom, the respectable morality of their age, and indeed that they would be had not circumstances, scoundrels, and perhaps Satan conspired to pull them down..

Since “orthodoxy” is a word with these three definitions, it is a word that one uses at the hazard of misunderstanding.  Does it refer to a sane and settled science that is affirmed by good-thinkers whose thinking is actually good?  Or does it refer to the false consciousness of “sheeple” who must, like Kant, be woken from their “dogmatic slumbers” (or given the “red pill”)?  Or does the true definition of orthodoxy  partake of elements in both of these definitions?  Is orthodoxy, in fact, a sane and settled science of life that the dogmatic slumbers of modernity have for a time displaced and deposed?

* * * * *

I would prefer to see the word orthodoxy separated from all questions of falsehood and truth.  I would prefer to define orthodoxy as simply the opinions it is safest to express in a particular time and place.  Orthodoxy should, I think, simply denote the opinions that are promulgated by the most respected organs of popular enlightenment, and that are therefore almost universally reputed to be sober, sensible and sane.  An orthodoxy may be true or false, or, as is more often the case, a confection of truth and pure banana oil.

But orthodoxy is, in every case, a sociological and not an epistemological category.  It is simply what one can say without arousing the suspicion, or worse the accusation, that one is a moron, a menace, or insane.

From Paul’s own mouth we have the confession that Christianity began as a heresy, a set of opinions that was held by only a few, but that was already sweating and scheming to make itself the orthodoxy.  The sweating was its work of evangelization, the scheming was its caution, exhibited by Paul, not to arouse the jealous wrath of the Roman state.  Paul confessed to Felix that his opinions differed from the opinions that were common among the Jews, and from the opinions that were promulgated and enforced by their priests.  But he cautiously denied that he was a revolutionary rabble-rouser who, if left at liberty, would one day cause the Roman Empire no end of trouble.

Christianity thereafter rose to the rank of official orthodoxy, and remained in that rank for nearly fifteen hundred years as the sane and settled science of Christendom.  There were over those centuries many heresies and schisms, but no man risked a raised eyebrow if he publicly affirmed his belief in the Apostles’ Creed.

To do so was in those days as natural as it is today natural to affirm one’s belief that women are quite often born as men.

The orthodoxy (i.e. hegemony) of Christianity died a slow death, but it had all but fully expired by the year 1900 or so.  Outside of rural backwaters, professedly “orthodox” Christians were thereafter viewed, and increasingly, as risible, perhaps dangerous, and if not ignorant undoubtedly insane.

I think we make clear thought unnecessarily difficult when we persist in using the word orthodoxy to describe this set of opinions that the teaching authorities and bien pensant no longer make any effort to understand.

* * * * *

The bien pensant of first-century Judea viewed Paul as a heretic and I say they were right.  Like orthodoxy, heresy should be used as a sociological and not an epistemological term.  A heretic may be right or wrong, but he is always and everywhere the object of rude gibes, sly slanders, sometimes blows.  Like Paul, he is hated by all good-thinkers and suspected of evil designs.  The orthodox may likewise be right or wrong, but they are always and everywhere respected and trusted as men of clear vision and sober good sense.  This is why the members of boards and committees may be dull-witted, mad, or wicked, but are always united in the opinions that their time and place credits as orthodox.

*) G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane, 1909), p. 20.
**) Joseph Henry Allen, Ten Discourses on Orthodoxy second ed. (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1889), p. 2.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1901)*

“‘What is history,’ said Napoleon, ‘but a fiction agreed upon.’”

James Anthony Froude, “The Science of History” (1864)**

We are told that God accosted Moses with the emphatic declaration, “I AM.”  We may infer from this salutation that God lays great weight on the importance of his being.  God did not, for instance, anticipate Descartes and introduce himself to Moses by saying, “I think” (and therefore am).

He instead effectively reversed Descartes formula and said, “I AM” (and therefore think).

A similar reversal should be made when speaking of a member of our species, assuming we are indeed made, as we are told, in the image of God.  Existence is our independent variable, or as the old Romans said, our sine qua non.  Many men exist without thinking, but history furnishes no instance of a man who thought yet did not exist.

From this it follows that a man may have to believe falsehoods if he is going to believe any truths at all.  I say may because I have yet to argue for the fact that there are suicidal truths and salutary fictions.  A suicidal fact is a proposition for which the evidence is very considerable but it is deadly to affirm.  A salutary fiction is not closely tethered to fact but it succors and sustains a human life.

We know there are suicidal truths because the very word courage tells us that courage comes from the heart.  A man is not brave if he follows only the dictates of his reason, but is only brave when his heart knows he has a higher reason to laugh at discouraging odds.  He is in other words brave when he puts on the armor of fiction, and by this means braves the slings and arrows of strictly objective truth.

* * * * *

There are two scripture verses that give Christians an unhealthy respect for strictly objective truth.  The first appears in John and reports Jesus telling a gaggle of quarrelsome Jews that “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (8:32).  Jesus is not here affirming the utility of Truth generally, but rather the utility of the specific truth that ritual sacrifice by paid priests does not effectively wash away human sins.  The “freedom” Jesus promises is, first, freedom from these parasitic imposters, and, second, genuine freedom from the dire eternal consequences of sin.

This specific truth yields this specific freedom.  This does not mean there are not other truths that a wise man leaves alone.

The second verse, also in John, reports Pilate muttering to himself, “what is truth?” These words have caused any number of simpletons to say that poor Pilate was a truth-denying pyrrhonist (18:38).  But Pilate was not a pyrrhonist who denied the existence or discoverability of truth generally.  He was a harried bureaucrat despairing of his ability to discover one specific truth in one specific situation.  He was stuck between powerful priests who reeked of perjury and a wretch who spoke in riddles Pilate did not understand.

It is true that the meaning of those riddles would have been clear to Pilate if he had been “of the truth,” to use Jesus’ words; but this only means Pilate would have believed Jesus if Pilate had believed Jesus.  It does not mean Pilate was so world-weary and jaded that truth was not for him something that could be found.

When Jesus speaks of “the Truth,” this is specifically the truth that was denied, denounced and suppressed by the father of lies and his bewitched brood.  Those who are “of the truth” in Jesus’ sense do not follow the facts or worship objective reality (viz. “things which are seen”).

* * * * *

Descending from divine wisdom to the mundane business of surviving in this world, it should be obvious that every story has at least two sides because truth is putty in man’s hand.  Even when two men agree on all matters of fact, they may disagree on the relevance of those facts and their meaning.  And if they happen to agree, they illustrate the truth of Napoleon’s dictum that history is “a fiction agreed upon.”

When we say a story is fictional, we mean it was made—that it is not a work of nature but is rather a work art.  Whether personal or collective, history is always and everywhere an artifact that was made to serve a purpose, be this purpose concealed or exposed.

As Dr. Faustus says to an eager young student who hopes by long study to discover the Truth in old books,

“My friend, the past ages are to us a book with seven seals. What you term the spirit of the times, is at bottom only your own spirit, in which the times are reflected.”*

Or, translated into verse,

“To us, my friend, the times that are gone by
Are a mysterious book, sealed with seven seals:
That which you call the spirit of ages past
Is but, in truth, the spirit of some few authors
In which those ages are beheld reflected,
With what distortion strange heaven only knows.”

To correct the youth’s delusion, Faustus says,

“Is parchment the holy well, a drink from which allays the thirst forever? Thou hast not gained the cordial. if it gushes not from thy own soul.”***

Or, translated in verse,

“Are moldy records, then, the holy springs,
Whose healing waters still the thirst within?
Oh! never yet hath mortal drunk
A draught restorative,
That welled not from the depths of his own soul!Ӡ

* * * * *

Many things might be said of the proposition that truth comes from within, but the thing to be said here is that the restorative draught that wells from the depths of a healthy soul will embody the will to survive.  Like God accosting Moses, that healthy soul will declare I AM.  This is the cordial that allays thirst forever, that delivers one from the wild-eyed perplexity that caused Pilate to ask himself, with muttering exasperation, “what is truth?”

Everything you hear from a witness is an artifact and fiction that serves a purpose—the purpose of the witness or the hidden hand that jiggers that witness’s hidden strings.  If you hear two witnesses, your will be torn by two purposes, both of these purposes in all likelihood concealed.  You cannot know truth until you know your truth, and you cannot know your truth if you lack the purpose to survive.

(Physical death is not the only extinction it is man’s purpose to avoid, but death before dishonor is hardly the same as suicide.)

*) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values, two vols., trans Anthony M. Ludovici (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910), vol, 2, p. 20.
**) James Anthony Froude, “The Science of History” (1864), pp. 7-36 in James Anthony Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects (New York: Charles Scribner and Co., 1868), p. 22.
***) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Faust, two vols., trans. Anna Swanwick (New York: Harvard Publishing, 1895), vol. 2, p. 466.
†) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. John Anster (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1886), p. 27.

Now the preliminary difficulty in understanding the Rosminian philosophy is that it goes deeper than what are popularly assumed to be the first principles of human thought. It undertakes to account for ideas. But to many people it has never occurred that there is any difficulty in this matter requiring explanation. They have been used to assume with Locke and others, more or less of the same school, that the formation of ideas is so simple that it does not require to be accounted for. It is assumed to be a simple fact like sensation. They say, “We have sensations, and we have ideas; the sensations come first, and they are transformed into ideas by the faculty of reflection.”

Those who talk thus are not aware that between sensations and ideas they have jumped a gulph which is not less than infinite!

This mental condition reminds me of a conversation once overheard in a railway carriage between two countrymen. “John,” said the one, “how about this railway telegraph; how do they send messages by it?” “Oh,” said the other, “it is very simple. You see them wires along the line? They runs from Lunnon to York. They are fastened to a thing at each end with a dial plate and hands to it like a clock, with letters all round, and when they turns the hands in Lunnon this ‘n and that ‘n, the hands in York goes that ‘n and this ‘n.” “Ah,” said the other, “it seems very simple when you have it explained.”

Dormitive virtue alert! “Sensations come first, and they are transformed into ideas by the faculty of reflection;” this of course is no more than a way of saying that sensations are transformed into ideas by the faculty that transforms sensations into ideas.

Chuckling at that story of Lockhart’s, I remembered a similar tale of two rural Hoosiers of Norwegian extraction, learnt in my childhood.

Ole says, “Hey Sven, what do you think is the greatest human invention?” “Well, Ole,” says Sven, “That’s a hard question to answer. There’s fire, of course, if that counts, and the wheel; and then also the aeroplane, of course, and the telephone, and now the television. But I think it must be the Thermos bottle.” Astonished, Ole replied, “The Thermos bottle! How do you figure?” Says Sven, “Well, Ole, just think about it. The Thermos bottle keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold.” Ole answered, “Yah, so what?” Patiently, as if to a slow child, Sven settled it: “Well, Ole, here’s the thing: how do it know?”

Galatians 4: 30

Commenter C. A. Peterson cautions me to eschew “replacement theology,” which is essentially the doctrine that the Christian Church has replaced Jews in God’s providential plan.  The inheritance of father Abraham has passed to his heirs “in spirit and truth,” and not to his heirs in the flesh, be they spurious or real.  I will not here wrangle with C. A. Peterson or plunge into the briar patch of Old Testament prophesy, since I do not wish make an enemy the former or to let the later drive me mad.

Old Testament prophesies have for me only historical interest because, where not superseded, I presume they are adequately summarized in the life, teaching and living spirit of Christ.  I do not understand those who scour the Old Testament for scraps that Christ somehow failed to epitomize.  I am, to state the matter briefly, in the whole-hog Church of St. Paul and not the half-way Church of St. James.

Now Paul told the Galatian churches to “cast out the bondswoman and her son,” the allusion being to the story of Hagar and Ishmael and Paul’s meaning being that all the pomp, parade and bric-a-brac of Jews and Judaism is a thing of the past.

^“But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?  Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years” (Galatians 4: 9-10).

“Beggarly elements” here means not only the Sabbath (“days”), the seasons (‘months”), the rituals (“times”), and the hopes for an earthly millennium (“years”), but also the outdated Torah that Paul later calls “the law.”

“Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?” (4: 21).

For if they had heard (viz. understood) the law, they would know that it told of a time when the sons of God would have to leave the law (viz. scripture) with all its its pomp, parade and bric-a-brac behind.

Not some of it.  All of it, and for good.

* * * * *

Now the “law” (viz. scripture) Paul uses to demonstrate this lesson is curious indeed, for he turns the story of Abraham’s banishment of Hagar and Ishmael on its head.  In the original story, Abraham’s coupling with Hagar, and siring of Ishmael, is a concession to the old man’s carnal desire for an heir in the flesh.  Ishmael is the natural product of the natural desires of a natural woman and a natural man.  Ishmael is therefore, himself, an altogether natural or savage man.  Ishmael is indeed the type of all men who have lived, live, and will live “in bondage under the elements of the world” (Galatians 4: 3).

In the original story, Abraham’s coupling with Sarah, and siring of Isaac, is a supernatural but only very partial escape into a state that we might call semi-savagery. Bondage under the elements of the world is here incomplete, but still very, very strong.

“Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; But is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father” (Galatians 4: 1-2)

Semi-savage Isaac represented spiritual progress when compared with fully savage Ishmael, but he and his offspring are still in their nonage and extremely prone to regress to such “childish things” as dancing round a golden calf like the savages they all but entirely are.

To make it clear that Isaac and his semi-savage offspring have only partly escaped “bondage under the elements of the world,” Paul flips the original story on its head and tells the Galatian churches that the children of Sarah are today’s children of servile Hagar, and that the seed of Isaac is today’s seed of banished Ishmael.  Jews and Judaism are now, in other words, the archaic relicts of a world that is dead and will very soon pass away.

“For these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar [Hagar].  For this Agar [Hagar] is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children” (Galatians 4: 24-25)

The semi-savage “law” (in other words scripture) that was given to Moses; the semi-savage city David and Solomon built with stones on a stony hill—all this pomp, parade and bric-a-brac is now under the ban of savage mother Hagar, because it represents only partial emancipation from “bondage under the elements of the world.”

* * * * *

Semi-savages mix with savages at their peril, as the story of Ahab, among others, makes perfectly clear.  But a similar, perhaps worse, peril looms for those who “worship in spirit and truth” and yet still mix with semi-savage men and their semi-savage creeds, rites and ways.  This is why Paul tells the Galatian churches to,

“Cast out the bondwoman and her son . . .”

The bondswoman is semi-savage Judaism, her son Ishmael the semi-savage people who live under the law and are known to the world as Jews.  Any Jew can, of course, take an undignified, but not degraded, place in Christ; but the old covenant of Sinai and Jerusalem is a relict by which the new covenant of Faith and the Cross can only be pulled down into things of the flesh.

Paul does not tell the Galatians they have much to learn from the the ancient wisdom of this New Mother Hagar; he does not tell them to embrace like a brother her wroth and caviling son; he most certainly does not tell them to expect this New Ishmael to one day return from the wilderness and claim his inheritance as head of the family founded by Abraham.

In fact, absolute and irrevocable disinheritance would seem to be this New Ismael’s destiny in the mind of St. Paul.  So much for alternatives to replacement theology.

“for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.”

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San Antonio Light (June 17, 1923), p. 21.