Glenn divides himself; breaks all covenant with truth and love

Bizarrely, for an armchair jihadi who loves to judge Catholics and Mormons and other radical Protestants he disagrees with (who’s left to hate?), Glenn posted this quote from Charles Spurgeon:

“The bounden duty of a true believer towards men who profess to be Christians, and yet deny the Word of the Lord, and reject the fundamentals of the Gospel, is to come out from among them.”

Jihadis aren’t known for leaving judgment to God and therefore aren’t known for leaving the world alone. Neither are armchair jihadis. Communicating their hate for God’s world is their vain idea of faithfulness.

The only people who seem faithful to Christian scripture and “come out” from created world of human beings” are the Amish and stricter Mennonites. (Well, and David Koresh and his followers.)

But Glenn doesn’t have that kind of courage of commitment. His need to rhetorically brutalize everyone else is the pagan god he enslaves himself to.

And the Amish, surely, are condemned by Glenn as well. Who would Glenn be if he couldn’t use social media with glee? Probably a lot less hateful. Like the Amish.

Maybe his strategy of hateful speech has unguessed strategic ends: to winnow out all the chaff of Christians who, even just a little, reach out with intentions to love the Samaritans of our world, as it were: those ostracized and segregated by dominant Judaism at the time Jesus reached across to care for them and to glorify them in parables.

Maybe Glenn is right. There is no way to “come out” from God’s creation unless one wants to farm his own food. So, instead of taking up a how, or more dreadfully by non armchair extremists, shooting people, he openly but only rhetorically hates all of creation. And in the process gathers a community of the same. A kind of reverse segregation via sectarianism.

None of this, obviously, can be found in the redemptive and salvific gospel of Jesus Christ.

In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul is talking to families as the church waited for the imminent return of Christ. He recommends that everyone stay in the state they are - married, engaged, single, enslaved - and not to seek any change because the Lord is coming back within days to months to a few years. Apparently, though, the Corinthian church kept blessing marriages as if life was going to on and on. In 2 Cor 6, angrier, Paul tells them to NOT marry unbelievers! And them he starts quoting from Ezekiel and Isaiah about raising a people from the dry bones of a valley and gathering all of Israel back from Babylon.

But, again, this is the Paul that expects the second coming within his lifetime. Which is the whole point of 1Cor 7: the single should stay single, because change was coming. The married should stay married,  cause change was coming. Believers married to unbelievers should stay married because they bless their partners and their children.

The Amish fled Alsace and Switzerland in order to gain land and space from modern civilization. But like the Puritans and, really, all radical Protestants, splintered into many different groups. Unlike the Puritans, the Amish are pacifists and wouldn’t kill natives or each other. Mostly. 

So they depend upon our protection. Which seems to under cut their “coining out from” Christian practice. I have to say, though, they do repay by raising great meat and growing wonderful vegetables. So maybe it’s a symbiosis.

Nonetheless, anabaptist and whatever cult Glenn seeks to make, break their covenant with the New Testament by ignoring Paul’s direction solely regarding marriage in an expectancy of the imminent parousia. And they break faithfulness to the God of Israel by failing to follow God’s salvation history which, in Acts 10, enfolds the Gentiles: otherwise known as the rest of the world aside from Jews. And therefore grafted the Amish and Glenn and me onto the tree of life.

Do not call unclean what God has made clean. It is this that Paul took as his mission. It is for this call of Christ that Paul claims there is no Jew or Gentile, male or female. Jesus gave us the power to *be* the children of God, as John says at the very beginning, born not of blood (biologically) nor of the will of the flesh (psychologically) nor of the will of society (sociologically). Born of God in the Spirit because Christ “gave us the power” so to be.

And what does the writer of 1 John say further about the children of God?

“If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that every one who does right is born of him. See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And every one who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. Every one who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he appeared to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. He who does right is righteous, as he is righteous. He who commits sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. No one born of God commits sin; for God’s nature abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God. By this it may be seen who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother. 

For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another…”

It is undeniable, then, that everyone who follows Christ and loves one another has the gift of the Holy Spirit just like Cornelius and his whole household in Acts 10. But the gay and lesbian and trans Christian, the foreigner, the poor, me, Dan, Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Meninites, Amish, Anglicans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Southern Baptists, Glenn and the other Thugs want to come out from them. 

So, Glenn’s seeming admiration of the quote of Spurgeon’s is just passive armchair spittle on himself. It’s empty and vain “pride and ego thinking” that he’s always right and… must force everyone else to agree.”

This is what he accused me of when I treat him as I do. But my motivation is to blow holes in judgmental pride that replicates what Paul says Judaizers are doing to believers: adding burdens to faith that operate as Law, therefore killing the freedom we have in Christ Jesus. Paul wishes such would emasculate themselves.

Worse, then, is Glenn’s motivation. Like all jihadis, Glenn has also lost faith in God and so must carry out judgment on his own terms. But from the comfort of his puritanically American…La-Z-Boy

I have no doubt that if Glenn got to know Charles Spurgeon there would arise a “point” of “doctrine” on which they would disagree. And Glenn would, again, lament that no one is worthy like himself.

The heart of radical protestantism is sectarian and segregationist. Like Glenn’s heart. He would have to “come out from” Spurgeon.