The Rebellion of Korah

Numbers 16: 1-3:

Now Korah, the son of Izhar, the son of Kohath, the son of Levi, and Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab, and On, the son of Peleth, sons of Reuben, took men:  And they rose up before Moses, with certain of the children of Israel, two hundred and fifty princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown: And they gathered themselves together against Moses and against Aaron, and said unto them, "Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the LORD is among them: wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the LORD?"

Jude 1: 8, 10-13:

Likewise also, these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities... But these speak evil of those things which they know not; but what they come to know naturally as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves. Woe unto them! For they have gone in the way of Cain and have run greedily after the error of Balaam for their reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Korah. These are spots on your feasts of charity when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear. Clouds they are without water, carried about by winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.

It is instructive to note that, according to inspired Scripture, the sin of Korah is possible under the New Testament.  St. Jude characterizes this sin as "speaking against" (v.11) or "gainsaying" (KJV) a higher authority.  When we read the original account in Numbers 16 we see that Korah's rebellion was based on the presumption that since all the people of God are holy, none can be endowed with a holier office above his fellows.  On this view there cannot be gradations of holiness; you're either holy or you are not.
The Protestant priesthood of all believers doctrine teaches that God is "equally accessible to all the faithful, and every Christian has equal potential to minister for God" (from the Wikipedia article).  In principle, this doctrine gainsays the presence of any spiritual hierarchy as well as any distinctly ordained priesthood within the Church.

By entertaining this belief, men like Martin Luther and the early Plymouth Brethren saw the way clear to schismatize from the Church and establish the separate communities that they called "churches" or "assemblies."

The Protestant priesthood of all believers doctrine is the ecclesiological corollary to their soteriological principle of justification by faith alone.  The Protestant doctrine of justification teaches that the individual may intentionally bypass the binding and loosing power entrusted to the Church through St. Peter (Matt. 16: 19; cf. John 20: 22-23) and come directly to Christ to receive the forgiveness of his sins.

By this, Protestantism has deceived millions of innocent souls, exposing them to mortal danger. 

Just because a person can purchase a Bible from a bookseller and read therein that the forgiveness of sins has been made available through the death of Christ, it does not follow that the authority to pronounce absolution has been conferred to his private judgement.

Our Lord Jesus Christ conferred the binding and loosing power once and for all upon his Church after his resurrection.  He does not confer this power anew from Heaven immediately to every person who exercises faith.  The keys of the kingdom were given when Christ was on earth and have been transmitted down through every subsequent age by the successors of the apostles. 

The remission of sins is not received irrespective of the communion of the saints and the hierarchy that structures it.

The Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers participates in the error of Korah, and should therefore be rejected as inherently seditious and, hence, unbiblical.

How To Stop the Bastardy Epidemic (with divorce thrown in for good measure)

Virtue cannot be legislated, but behavior patterns can be reinforced or counteracted.  The wise legislator  devises laws to encourage responsible behavior and discourage behavior harmful to the individual and the community long-term.

1.  No male legally required to provide (financially or in any other way) for the support of a child conceived and born out-of-wedlock.

2.  State aid to unwed mothers cut off one year after the birth of the first illegitimate child.

3.  In no-fault divorces, full child custody automatically awarded to the father.

4.  Illegitimate offspring forbidden by law to receive any portion of the father's estate.

5.  The eldest surviving son conceived in wedlock required by law to receive a double portion of his father's estate (Deuteronomy 21:15-17).

Quotation of the Day

Alan D. Strange writes,

"NL2K [W2K]... seems to be about an absolute dualism that has no integration point, a problem in any system. We must account for both unity and diversity, not simply diversity. I would say that the cosmic Christ who rules over all (and the church in a particular way) is the integration point.

"You may not think that Frame is getting it right, and that he’s all oneness without the proper distinction(s). But the solution is not diversity without unity, because God (who is three persons) is also one in His Trinitarian nature and Jesus Christ is one in the integrity of his theanthropic person in the Incarnation. A dualism that remains a true dualism will never do, any more than Tri-Theism or Nestorianism will.

"This one and many business is difficult stuff, I admit, but the Bible never solves it with an either/or but with a both/and that transcends our reasoning. That Christ is the head and king of the church does mean that He is not the king over all creation. And that the Scriptures teach us the way of justification does not mean that they do not teach us how to live as well (because sanctification is part of our redemption; not part of our justification or adoption, but part of our salvation)."

Unclaimed Territory

There needs to be lands unclaimed by any sovereign state. Where else will the banished go?

Guilt made Personally Manageable

In order for Protestantism to work, the gravity of each sin must be flattened out to equal the gravity of every other sin. Though some Protestants hold to "degrees" of sin, for all Protestants every sin must be forgivable through the mechanism of a private act of faith.

In Protestantism, there can be no such thing as grave or mortal sin *normally* requiring the intervention of a higher ministerial / sacramental agency.  Nor must forgiveness ever depend upon some consequent act of repentance, much less some restitutive token. 

At best, some sort of "memory healing" might be attempted in order that psychological wholeness be restored.

Protestantism has simplified the problem of guilt to what concerns God and the individual alone and what may be managed within the individual's subjective state.

The Protestant project depends for its validity on whether guilt is simply the imputation of personal sin.  But if guilt is a condition and more:  the state of a community of persons--if guilt is a network of disordered relationships its remedy cannot be applied solely in the realm of private subjectivity. 

And here we come to the necessity that faith be not reduced to a movement of a creaturely mind (knowledge, assent, and trust), but must be a public objective reality transcending individual minds.

On Psychiatry

From Susan Lindauer’s Amazon review of Thomas Szasz’ Psychiatry: The Science of Lies:

...by its own standards of mental illness, psychiatry has arguably become a disease in itself. Its practitioners are marked by symptoms of grandiosity, narcissism, and excessive controlling behaviors to the point of psychotic obsession and delusions of power over other lives. One suspects that beneath the grandiosity lies an essential mediocrity and an overwhelming need to reduce others to a lowest common denominator, so as to assert the superiority of the psychiatrists, and thus overcome their own innate insecurities at having been so ordinary. To compensate for this insecurity, they punish what is different, and plow seeds of self doubt into the consciousness of their targets.

Do you believe in the power of God?

Or, is your trust in philosophical simplicity, lifeless Greek matter, and the disjunction between nature and grace?  Do you shut God up in his heaven because--in the name of human freedom--he must be banished from the world?  Has not the Church been turned into a constitutional republic--a usurpation of the Kingdom--in the flight from ecclesiastical tyranny?  Is not the contest between high and low church the ecclesiastical equivalent of the neverending conflict between political right and left?