Jesse prefers the ministry of condemnation. Not so, Paul

And Jesse is just a production of all radical protestants. They feel best when they think they nail down the Spirit in letters. Thus, they live in a 17th century ideology of the European Christian wars that slaughtered hundreds of thousands.

Part of the following comes from the Eucharistic readings (Missal readings for Mass) for this past Wednesday. Just to get an extra dig in. 2 Corinthians 3:

“… and it is plain that you are a letter from Christ, entrusted to our care, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God; not on stone tablets but on the tablets of human hearts.

Such is the confidence we have through Christ in facing God; it is not that we are so competent that we can claim any credit for ourselves; all our competence comes from God. He has given us the competence to even be ministers of a new covenant, a covenant which is not of written letters, but of the Spirit; for the written letters kill, but the Spirit gives life. Now if the administering of death, engraved in letters on stone, occurred in such glory that the Israelites could not look Moses steadily in the face, a because of its glory, transitory though this glory was, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit occur in glory! For if it is glorious to administer condemnation, to administer saving justice is far richer in glory. Indeed, what was once considered glorious has lost all claim to glory, by contrast with the glory which transcends it, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts for ever.”

Luther’s appropriate criticism of the tortured clerical abuse of the graces experienced in the Eucharist by the sale of indulgences, itself opened up Luther to attacks by those who no longer believed the sacraments mediated God’s presence. At Leipzig, Eck pressured Luther into admitting that the Magisterium in Rome was fallible. With that, Luther was at the breaking point with Rome.

But Luther never denied that the sacraments mediated God’s presence for the body of Christ. Rather, the Eucharist was at the center of the church’s life as the free gift of grace, a sign of Christ’s bodily presence in, with, and under the elements, continuingly forgiving our sins. But he preceded that sign with the liturgy of the Word, meaning preaching and reasoning from the scriptures. The scriptures became the authority over and above church council.

Calvin demoted the presence of God in the Eucharist and counted its significance only as spiritual participation by virtue of the work of the Holy Spirit. A disembodied sign of forgiveness not experienced but spiritually trusted. This caused great anxiety in Geneva. How do we know we are saved? Calvin could only console them with promises that God would make them wealthy as a sign of his favor… IF they adhered to the scriptures.

It was Zwingli who took down entirely the New Testament faith that we can experience God in Christ present to our experience by any activity. Reading alone, interpreting the Bible for oneself.

Easy to see the creeping relativism in the fracturing commitment to the authority of Christ IN THE BODY OF BELIEVERS - absolutely not in the individual as priest unto their self - sealed in and guided by the active teaching of the Spirit.

It is a tenet of faith that human persons fall short. It is a tenet of faith that the Holy Spirit continues to teach us. It is a tenet of faith that authority resides in the Sprit’s work through the whole body, and the experience of the Spirit’s work is a learning process by deliberation and consensus. Leadership will get things wrong. The Body is able to be self corrective via the Spirit’s witness.

Acts 10 & 11

The protestant relativism that destroyed Western Christianity was brought by these three things: an increasing denial of God’s presence to us in experience; taking refuge instead in the letter; and investing privatized, siloed individual persons with capacity to discern all truth.

Chaos.

The ensuing centuries became a violent battle for interpretive possession of “the truth.” A way of life preeminently embodied still! - still! - existing in the Thugs, and by them in no one as purely as Glenn.

The desperate need to aggrandize themselves as possessing all Truth like a God, where all others were fatally wrong, rained down the ministry of condemnation for 500 years now.

The hallmarks of protestant sectarianism and segregationalism proved so persuasive for making identity a superior supremacy that even the Catholic Counter-Reformation was protestant in spirit: enforced standardization and uniformity in All things; an aspect never before demanded so absolutely in the Western church.

This brutalizing ideology of supremacy set up and justified a colonizing race to win the Western hemisphere by dispossessing the “pagan “Other” of four continents of their land, their labor, their own limbs and loved ones, and life itself… for the approval of God promised by the Popes, the Catholic and Protestant Kings, Queens, and Calvin.

Eventually, the Anglos of Britain won over all others. And the United States inherited it all after WWII. The continent vanquished via Anglo (White) leadership but with contributions from all other lesser Europeans - the lowest lesser in intelligence and social capacity: the Irish and southern (Catholic) Europeans. A White nation where whiteness was fungible. When numbers were needed, the Dutch and Germans and Scandavians - all protestant - and the secularly “Enlightened” French, the least Catholic of Catholic nations, all were folded slowly into Whiteness. Bans on Italians and Greeks and Eastern Europeans and Jews remained. Limits on the Irish. 

Until  the great migration of southern black folks northward whitened Catholics and Orthodox quite fast.

Protestant relativism titrated the capitalized racialization of the Western hemisphere by lending itself to the relativizing of original Anglo Whiteness.

A constantly expanding (relativizing) horizon of the brutality of White Supremacy. The heir of radical (relativizing) protestant ideology.

“for the written letters kill, but the Spirit gives life”