It is said that exaggeration is the ‘honest’ man’s lie. When E. Michael Jones’ tome on the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit first came out, almost long ago now, regardless of some of its bending, distortions or omission of some facts, it was in no small measure a welcome reply to the slanders of people like Daniel Goldhagen, the ADL, the Southern “Poverty” Law Center, biased history in general, as well as some NeoCons with their zest for immoral wars(1), and so on.
It was a timely recognition that no religions or movements in history — whether Talmudic Judaism, Islamic religion and its sects, and yes, even our Catholic history or Protestant friends, Enlightenment figures, etc.– should be immune from fair criticism, especially when so many distort facts to political ends. I welcomed the book. Especially at a time when so much of the “Jewish media” was going after bad Catholic priests while covering up the sins in their own communities across the world.
Jones’ big book was in some respects an important rebalancing of the historical scholarship.
And he could have stopped there, moved on, and he would have been known as a scholar of some of the history of economic and moral oppression in Europe and beyond, someone you don’t mess with unless you want to show what lays hidden under your own skirts.
But instead he went beyond the evidence and apparently made it his life’s work, alas, to morph into a zealot, in his magazines, subsequent books and his [once] YouTube channel, turning it all into a veritable anti-jewish cottage industry.
The Church herself never behaved this way. The Church moved on, aware of the sin in all.
The Church has always taught with the Word of God that when Christ is not the foundation of our societies the lusts of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life (money, power, all kinds of errors, rulers, revolutionaries) ascend in even greater strength to replace Him [1 Jn.2:15-18].
Our modern errors were in fact driven in great part by Reformation and Enlightenment ideas and practices. Bad ideas have been far more virulent in history than silver and gold. But Jones is way too simple. And there’s the rub.
Decadence, contrary to the main thrust of the book, is hardly just a Jewish product or instigation, it is rather in no small part an Enlightenment attack (born of human sin) on traditional moral values:
think Robespierre, Sade, Voltaire, Kant, Hume … Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Antonio Gramsci, Heidegger, Henry Miller, Sartre, Ezra Pound, Michel Foucault..the Rockefellers, Hugh Hefner, Rupert Murdoch, Hillary, etc., etc, … gentiles all.
And how many others! Must one really compile lists across all disciplines and time to make the point?
I know EMJ acknowledges some of these here and there, but with nowhere near the same emphasis, and it is usually on route to going after the Jews. Everywhere. He simply blames the Jews primarily for it all. They’re the drivers and conspirators of history behind it all according to Jones, not human sin. Not “us”. It’s them!
In YouTube interviews Jones was even warning Jews, sometimes in very ominous and provocative language, of “something worse than Hitler” supposedly coming in history if they don’t quit it.
Careful, Doctor, lest you help egg it on. E. Michael Jones is a provocative, imprudent man.
Sex, Birth Control and Abortion
2. What the courts did in this country relative to sex, birth control and abortions [see Note] from the time of the Henry Miller episode onwards (see link reference below) was more decisive for American culture than anything other monopolies have accomplished, including Hollywood.
Then think too of the gentile Hugh Hefner who started mainstreaming Playboy Magazine in the 1950s, and, not very long after, Larry Flynt [Hustler Magazine]; think also the briiliant vile gentile writer and screen writer Gore Vidal from the 1940s onwards (his book Myra Breckenridge). Think also “Catholic” Bob Guccione of Penthouse Magazine, and, with its original writer Vidal, of Caligula film fame —- and a host of other decadent gentile writers, teachers, Feminists, MTV “singers” (beginning especially with Madonna), etc, etc.
The Jews certainly should take their fair share of blame, of course, obviously. But we gentiles are hardly off the hook. Not by a long shot. Gentiles have never needed to be tricked into decadence. Whose kidding who with such nonsense?
No one people has a monopoly on sin. But Enlightenment philosophy with its decadent exaltation of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” let all the horses quite out of the barn politically, and in earnest.
[For a succinct summary of the Henry Miller episode see Wikipedia.]
Sex As Political Control
It was not Jones on the Jews but gentile Aldous Huxley and Behaviorist B.F. Skinner who long ago first introduced the idea of sexual liberation as political control:
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive or political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and school teachers…
“The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” —Aldous Huxley
B. F. Skinner on Pleasure as Political Control
“Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn’t, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled…nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement—there’s no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.” (B.F. Skinner, Walden Two)
The Strategy of Desire by Ernest Dichter is another early classic in using Freudian technique to target concupiscence and desire for marketing. The bottom line is that everybody in the West has long known that “sex sells”; and political forces on both the Left and the Right increasingly used it. After Roe v. Wade the political corporatocracy stepped on the gas taking advantage of a burgeoning visual media culture to achieve their ends of political power and profits.
Islam
To date [2019], Jones takes up Islam’s causes almost every time. He has visited, toured and lectured in Iran. But it’s always to get the Jews. He’s been all over Iranian television before and since, for instance. This is supposed to be wise?
Jesus Christ, all Christians know, is the Logos [Word] of God made flesh, i.e., Logos purified of the speculative errors of the greeks (Jn.1:1; 1 Cor. 1:17-20). Islam, short of very dangerous heroic conversions, will never accept Logos in the Johannine, Christological sense. Parts of Islam literally crucifies, beheads, harasses and stones those who uphold even the shadows of the Cross to the present day, unless Christians happen to be useful for a time.
The Jews however will one day return to their true Messiah according to Sacred writ(Rom. 9-11).
The Gospel indicts human sin, not racial identities, for all of history’s troubles (Rom.3:9-14, 23, etc) and of our need for redemption.
Would anybody seriously want Tehran in charge of the Christian holy places in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth? What happens when some Muslims get in a bad mood, or become simply aggressive? History shows. (More…)
History shows it was Jews and gentiles, very much together, who invented modern Capitalism, especially from the time of the so-called Reformation (John Calvin especially) onwards. Gentiles weren’t tricked into it.
Blame “the Jews” for Marxism, blame the Jews for Capitalism (Which is it then?) defy the illogic and then bizarrely transcend the stark contradictions involved? Imprudent zealots wish to have their cake and eat it too.
“All thought is an attempt to discover if one’s own conception is true or not.” G.K. Chesterton
Let’s not kid ourselves. Princes would sometimes need money. They knew the Jews had, among themselves, developed rather sophisticated methods of saving / banking and these Princes took complete advantage of the fact over centuries. Then if the economy went sour they too often could blame a Jew and save their own skins. Jews throughout history did not so much plot and start the historical revolutionary spirit in the West but some tended at times to piggyback on and aid such (mostly gentile instigated) movements when they thought it was in their interests. (+)
One could go on and on. But I think people would do better to simply be careful. We can appreciate some of that wily genius in Jones. But we can’t make another cult of him.
God rejected the Jews “because of their unbelief” (Rom.11:20). But He warned the gentiles not to be puffed up by their new election in Christ, since “otherwise you too will be cut off” (v.22). St. Paul teaches that in the mystery of God’s decree the gentiles were chosen to “make Israel jealous” (v.11) that they may return to Him in “full inclusion” again and for which in part St. Paul labored and hoped (v.12) to the extent that he wished he could be accursed instead of them if it would work to their salvation (9:3). Do E. Michael Jones’ followers so hope and labor and pray, in the most earnest love, for the regrafting in of “the Jewish people”? I hope so.
Note: It was not a Jewish Supreme Court which decided Roe v. Wade in 1973. Far from it. And even today: “American Jewish organizations split on Supreme Court decision to overturn ‘Roe v. Wade’By YOSSI LEMPKOWICZ June 26, 2022 —Jewish News Syndicate
Mit Brennender Sorge. On the Church and the German Reich.
By Pope Pius XI – 1937
“Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community — however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things — whoever raises these notions above thheir standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds…
“You will need to watch carefully, Venerable Brethren, that religious fundamental concepts be not emptied of their content and distorted to profane use. “Revelation” in its Christian sense, means the word of God addressed to man. The use of this word for the “suggestions” of race and blood, for the irradiations of a people’s history, is mere equivocation. False coins of this sort do not deserve Christian currency.
“Faith” consists in holding as true what God has revealed and proposes through His Church to man’s acceptance. It is “the evidence of things that appear not” (Heb. ii. 1). The joyful and proud confidence in the future of one’s people, instinct in every heart, is quite a different thing from faith in a religious sense. To substitute the one for the other, and demand on the strength of this, to be numbered among the faithful followers of Christ, is a senseless play on words, if it does not conceal a confusion of concepts, or worse.
24. “Immortality” in a Christian sense means the survival of man after his terrestrial death, for the purpose of eternal reward or punishment. Whoever only means by the term, the collective survival here on earth of his people for an indefinite length of time, distorts one of the fundamental notions of the Christian Faith and tampers with the very foundations of the religious concept of the universe, which requires a moral order.
Read it all…
— The Case Against Pornography— Jewish Journal
— The Judith Reisman Institute v. Pornography
“She was fully committed to do everything she could to protect childhood innocence, and to do so, she took direct aim at Alfred Kinsey and his self-proclaimed pamphleteer, Hugh Hefner. At one point Playboy sued a TV station in the Netherlands for libel for airing Dr. Reisman’s accusations that Playboy had published child pornography. Dr. Reisman prevailed.”
Note. 2: Historian Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth shows why Hitler made his moves. It didn’t even start as antisemitism. It was “lebensraum“. He needed what America had, vast territories, and as America genocided the natives, anyone who got in Hitler’s way was murdered on route to his prize: Russia.
Note. 3: There is no collective “mission to” the Muslims, or to Hindus, or to Jews, etc. Christ in His Church is the Light of the whole world, and His grace attracts, calls and convicts all. Conversions happen one person, one heart, at a time, “every person coming into the world,” individually (Jn.1:9, emphasis added)
“In the history of the Holocaust, Auschwitz was a place where the third technique of mass killing was developed, third in chronological order and also third in significance. The most important technique, because it came first, because it killed the most Jews, and because it demonstrated that a Final Solution by mass killing was possible, was shooting over pits.”— Black Earth, Timothy Snyder, P. 209
Penetrating to the deeper theological meaning of the Cross. Blaming none but ourselves.
Why It Has Always Been Wrong to Focus polemically on the Jews and Romans for the Death of Christ
Peter in Acts chapter 3 proclaimed to the Jews in his hearing regarding the redemptive death of Jesus, “You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go. 14 You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you. 15 You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this…
Now, fellow Israelites, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did your leaders. 18 But this is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Messiah would suffer. 19 Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, 20 and that he may send the Messiah, who has been appointed for you—even Jesus. 21 Heaven must receive him until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets. 22 For Moses said, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you must listen to everything he tells you. 23 Anyone who does not listen to him will be completely cut off from their people”.
Jews need to be saved and we gentiles need to be saved. We all then, sacred Scripture teaches —Jew and Gentile—crucified Jesus Christ, delivered Him to the Cross by and on account of our sins.
Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, died for our sins, “and not for just our sins, but for those of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). Christ the Savior is “the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world.” (Apoc / Rev. 13)
It was we, all of us, every created person in the whole world from the beginning of time, who deserved spiritual death for our rebellions against Truth, Goodness and Beauty, the eternal divine law (Rom. 6:23); But out of God’s love for us, He came to satisfy Divine Justice in our place, to bear in His own Self the Hell of eternal separation, which our sins deserved, and to call us to conversion, into the hopeful salvation of our souls if we will only cooperate with that calling, grace and mercy; and turn away from sin and approving sin, in ourselves, our culture, our world.
The High Priests of the Temple, feeling threatened and resentful of His miracles and calls to repentance (which miracles proved His divine coming) conspired with the Romans to do away with Him, not realizing that such historical contingencies, would in God’s eternal plan effect His saving death for “all”. The Jews had forgotten the messianic prophecies which foretold this saving work:
“ALL we like sheep have gone astray, every one hath turned aside into his own way: and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. [7] He was offered because it was his own will, and he opened not his mouth: he shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer, and he shall not open his mouth.” (Isa. 53)
Therefore it is wrong, and spiritually blind, to focus only or mainly on the mere historical contingencies (High Priests, Herod, Romans, Judas, etc. as if our own hands were clean!) instead of penetrating to the deeper theological meaning of these events, namely the fact that He “was delivered up for OUR sins, and rose again for our justification,” every man and woman who ever lived (Rom. 4:25).
All. Jew and Gentile.
None of our hands are clean. For “ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. [24] Being justified freely by his grace, through the redemption, that is in Christ Jesus, [25] Whom God hath proposed to be a propitiation, through faith in his blood, to the shewing of his justice, for the remission of former sins” (Romans 3)
“He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” (1 Jn. 2:2)
“He, who knew no sin, he hath made sin for us, that we might be made the justice of God in him.” (2 Cor. 5:21).
“For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God” (1 Peter 3:18).
And on the Cross He prayed for the historical protagonists (from whom many Christians came), “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
It is this new attitude of forgiving solicitude which must be ours too, for all, “to the Jews first and to the gentiles”.
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel,” St. Paul, a Jew, told the Romans, “because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.” (Rom. 1:16). The death of the Lord was no mere historical accident.
Where E. Michael Jones Errs Fundamentally As Well: Logos
In another fundamental area Jones errs as well.
The Gospel of John only in his prologue reveals Jesus Christ as the true Logos, the revelation of the Word and “wisdom” of Yahweh (Jn. 1:1, 14), in opposition to Greek philosophical misconceptions and half-truths.
Jesus Christ in the New Testament is proclaimed as “God’s mystery, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” Col. 2:3).
The Logos concept after John’s prologue, practically disappears(1) and is henceforth completely subsumed into the proclamation [Kerygma] of Jesus Christ whom the Church proclaims as the revelation of OT Wisdom and as Salvation in all places and times.
Logos never plays any central role in the Catholic-Christian Proclamation and Meaning of history. The few Fathers who later mention it do not make it in any way central but use it mostly in an explanatory and / or polemical way. For them Logos is viewed in the Hebrew, not Hellenic, sense, since these contrasting concepts (the Hebrew and Hellenic) cannot easily be harmonized. But Jones confounds all this.
It is a misleading direction to advance the Logos as practically the Kerygma, as E. Michael Jones does, the central concept and Meaning of history—- and especially to merge it with Hegel’s erroneous and dangerous “World Spirit,” the telos or direction of history, as Jones seems to do in his lectures and writings to date.
The Johannine use of Logos has a Hebrew, biblical pedigree: cf. Ge.1:1, 11f; Jn. 1:3, and “the Word” of the LORD given to the Prophets. In Jones’ lectures it is primarily Hellenic, to date.
From Christs resurrection onwards the Gospel proclamation is not of a subordinate derivative philosophical concept(1) but is the revelation of a Person, Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, who by His suffering and death on the Cross and Resurrection takes away the sin of the world: that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Phil. 2:10 ). Jesus Christ as the true Logos or “Word” in the Johannine sense is in no small part a rejection of the Greek Logos, even if there are important points of convergence between Greek and Christian thought.
Jesus Christ. This is the Name the Church forever proclaims, the Name of Him who is the Way of salvation, the Name that heralds the Truth revealed. And it is this Name who is the Life, the Name in Whom the Church ever reasons with, and engages all, unto salvation from sin and spiritual death. Christians cannot dodge this Name without peril, even if it sounds more philosophically sophisticated to speak of logos, or any other overriding digressive concept.
John is telling us in passing, then, what is for the Christian (though not for unconverted skeptics ancient or current) an obvious truth, that God created all things, including all order and reason. Likewise St. Paul says, “He is before all things and in Him all things consist” (cohere, are held together). — Col.1:17. Salvation from sin, new creation in Christ, is true order. God is all true order, just as He is all truth, all holiness, all humility, light and love (“God is Love,” John tells us in his epistle), a message meant for all humankind, Jew and gentile. It is the very “Good News”.
But for John and Paul (and St. Thomas, for that matter) logos as a greek philosophical concept is, with all other partial, incomplete, truths, subordinate to the revelation of God, and of all reality, in Christ who is the Creator of all things visible and invisible. It is only the grace of God which awakens man to this truth. It is, as St. Paul teaches, “Christ and him crucified” who is the divine subject of the everlasting Christian proclamation, not any subordinate derivative philosophical concept. We preach a divine Person, Jesus Christ and him crucified, to all, never mere teleological order, and it is this which distinguishes Christians from the greeks.
Tradition
(1) Catholic Encyclopedia: “What is the precise value of this concept in the writings of St. John? The Logos has not for him the Stoic meaning that it so often had for Philo: it is not the impersonal power that sustains the world, nor the law that regulates it.
Neither do we find in St. John the Platonistic concept of the Logos as the ideal model of the world; the Word is for him the Word of God, and thereby he holds with Jewish tradition, the theology of the Book of Wisdom, of the Psalms, of the Prophetical Books, and of Genesis; he perfects the idea and transforms it by showing that this creative Word which from all eternity was in Godand was God, took flesh and dwelt among men.
This difference is not the only one which distinguishes the Johannine theology of the Logos from the concept of Philo, to which not a few have sought to liken it. The Logos of Philo is impersonal, it is an idea, a power, a law; at most it may be likened to those half abstract, half-concrete entities, to which the Stoic mythology had lent a certain personal form. For Philo the incarnation of the Logos must have been absolutely without meaning, quite as much as its identification with the Messias. For St. John, on the contrary, the Logos appears in the full light of a concrete and living personality; it is the Son of God, the Messias, Jesus. Equally great is the difference when we consider the role of the Logos. The Logos of Philo is an intermediary:
“The Father who engendered all has given to the Logos the signal privilege of being an intermediary (methorios) between the creature and the creator . . . it is neither without beginning (agenetos) as is God, nor begotten (genetos) as you are [mankind], but intermediate (mesos) between these two extremes “(Quis rer. divin. haeres sit, 205-06).
The Word of St. John is not an intermediary, but a Mediator; He is not intermediate between the two natures, Divine and human, but He unites them in His Person; it could not be said of Him, as of the Logos of Philo, that He is neither agenetos nor genetos, for He is at the same time one and the other, not inasmuch as He is the Word, but as the Incarnate Word (St. Ignatius, “Ad Ephes.”, vii, 2).
In the subsequent history of Christian theology many conflicts would naturally arise between these rival concepts, and Hellenic speculations constitute a dangerous temptation for Christian writers. They were hardly tempted, of course, to make the Divine Logos an impersonal power (the Incarnation too definitely forbade this), but they were at times moved, more or less consciously, to consider the Word as an intermediary being between God and the world. Hence arose the subordinationist tendencies found in certain Ante-Nicene writers; hence, also, the Arian heresy (see COUNCIL OF NICAEA).
The logos in ancient Christian literature
The Apostolic Fathers do not touch on the theology of the Logos; a short notice occurs in St. Ignatius only (Ad Magn. viii, 2). The Apologists, on the contrary, develop it, partly owing to their philosophic training, but more particularly to their desire to state their faith in a way familiar to their readers (St. Justin, for example, insists strongly on the theology of the Logos in his “Apology” meant for heathens, much less so in his “Dialogue with the JewTryphon”). This anxiety to adapt apologetic discussion to the circumstances of their hearers had its dangers, since it was possible that in this way the apologists might land well inside the lines of their adversaries.” — Catholic Encyclopedia
Reason and Wisdom
1 Cor. 1: 18- 25
“For the word of the cross [Kerygma], to them indeed that perish, is foolishness; but to them that are being saved, it is the power of God.[19] For it is written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the prudence of the prudent I will reject. [20] Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?
[21] For seeing that in the wisdom of God the world, by wisdom, knew not God, it pleased God, by the foolishness of our preaching [Kerygma], to save them that believe. [22] For both the Jews require signs, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: [23] But we preach Christ crucified [Kerygma], unto the Jews indeed a stumblingblock, and unto the Gentiles foolishness:[24] But unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. [25] For the foolishness of God [The Cross and Resurrection, Kerygma] is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”
Colossians 2:6-10
[6] “As therefore you have received Jesus Christ the Lord, walk ye in him; [7] Rooted and built up in him, and confirmed in the faith, as also you have learned, abounding in him in thanksgiving.[8] Beware lest any man cheat you by [Hellenic] philosophy, and vain deceit; according to the tradition of men, according to the elements of the world, and not according to Christ: [9] For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead corporeally; [10] And you are filled in him, who is the head of all principality and power”.
Many possess a great deal of knowledge, a few true ideas, and many publish their own books constantly. Fewer possess good judgement. I fear that Mr. Jones in exalting Logos (Order, Reason and Word) is alas being more self-referential than Christocentric. — SH, updated August 2021
——-
(1) For the record, I am against Iran ever developing nuclear weapons, but short of proof of that, I am otherwise against Western and Israeli mischief against Iran, and so am certainly against any war with Iran unless it is certainly on the real and provable brink of developing such weapons. I am also aware that Israel obtained its own nuclear weapons through deceit and that JFK attempted to thwart such a development by every means, warning Israel that such a development would only guarantee a very dangerous game of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and beyond the region’s borders.
— And on Hegel?
See also, Rocco Buttiglione on John Paul II, Poland and the Hegelian Menace
—Freemasonry. Jones mocks Traditional Catholics for seeing the influence of Freemasonry as a still vital force for errors and evils in our world. Pope Leo XIII did not so mock this ongoing activity and warned Catholics of the future to be vigilant in opposition.
“Full of the spirit of Satan, who, according to the words of the Apostle, knows how to transform himself at need into an angel of light, it [Freemasonry] gives prominence to its humanitarian object, but it sacrifices everything to its sectarian purpose and protests that it has no political aim, while in reality it exercises the most profound action on the legislative and administrative life of the nations, and while loudly professing its respect for authority and even for religion, has for its ultimate purpose, as its own statutes declare, the destruction of all authority as well as of the priesthood, both of which it holds up as the enemies of liberty.” [Emphasis supplied]
And in 1983 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) warned again that Catholics cannot be Freemasons.
— More Leo XIII on Freemasonry, “The Sect of Darkness” behind so many evils in the world.
The Jewish and Gentile Revolutionary Spirit
Sin and unrepentant rebellion makes us all, Jews and Gentiles, “enemies” of God and therefore “of the entire human race’:
“Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior” (Colossians 1:21, Rom. 5:10, 1 Cor. 15:26, etc., etc.).
Some would like to blame the Jews or others for their own spiritually revolutionary decisions, mortal sins, both in their own personal lives and for all the crimes of history.
Like the gentile Roman Procurator Pontius Pilate, they think their own hands are clean. But Sacred Scripture will have none of it, none of such personal evasions, for, as St. Paul declared,
“ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” — Rom.3:23
All! Moreover Paul writes that while under the dominion of sin we were (or are) all rebels, all revolutionaries against the Kingdom of God by nature and by our deeds, working “together” in rebellion:
“for I have already charged that all men, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin, 10 as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; 11 no one understands, no one seeks for God. 12 All have turned aside, together they have gone wrong; no one does good, not even one.”
13 “Their throat is an open grave, they use their tongues to deceive.” “The venom of asps is under their lips.” 14 “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.” 15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood, 16 in their paths are ruin and misery, 17 and the way of peace they do not know.” 18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
For wiful sinners are by nature collaborationists. They conspire together to win their autonomy outside of the grace of God.
C.S. Lewis once wrote, “We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are … rebels who must lay down our arms.”
“By nature, nurture, and choice, you’re a rebel. That’s what you are. But by grace [and through Christ] you can have a different legacy and a better future” (Michael Lawrence).
St James underscores the point both for persons and for history’s crimes:
James 4: “What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? 2 You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have, because you do not ask.
3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
4 Unfaithful creatures! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 5 Or do you suppose it is in vain that the scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit which he has made to dwell in us”?
6 But he gives more grace; therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” 7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
8 Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you men of double mind. 9 Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to dejection. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you.”
Children of Wrath
Eph. 2: “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. 4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved”
James 4:4 “You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”
1 Corinthians 2:14 “But the natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.”
No, it’s not just the Jews who subvert the Kingdom. It is every single human being living outside of the Kingdom of God! We must be set free from our revolutionary spirit!
“When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 But then what return did you get from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Outside of the grace of God we were –or are– ALL enemies of the human race on route to a fearful judgment!
No. It’s hardly just “them!” It’s you and me! So we had better all wake up, Jew and Gentile — and beware false teachers.
Ethnic identity: the “slaughter” (EMJ) relative to Catholic power occurred in many lands, not just the United States. And a diversity of uneven strategies was employed to that end. And it was not so much the Jew that instigated enmity vs Catholic identity and locales. It was largely Enlightenment and Reformation ideologies combined which waged the relentless attacks. It continues to this day and, alas, many Catholics themselves have assisted this slaughter in the interests of Utopian daydreaming.
— Bank of England has apologised for the involvement in Slave Trade
Updated last July 2022.
— Wagner the “Dangerous Misanthrope” and Hitler. Can one separate the art from the man?
— Stalin’s Jews by Sever Blocker YNet News. “After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed…”
Catholic Critique 