A Christian Defense Of Civilization And A Summons To Battle

Speech of Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos

Constantine XI was the last emperor of the Byzantine Empire. He fought to defend his empire, his people, and his religion from the invading Turks. Constantine led the Byzantine forces himself during the Fall of Constantinople. He died, as a soldier, on the battlefield on 29 May 1453 at the hands of the Turks, and Constantinople has been lost ever since. This was his final speech he delivered to his men before his death:

“Gentlemen, illustrious captains of the army, and our most Christian comrades in arms: we now see the hour of battle approaching. I have therefore elected to assemble you here to make it clear that you must stand together with firmer resolution than ever. You have always fought with glory against the enemies of Christ. Now the defence of your fatherland and of the city known the world over, which the infidel and evil Turks have been besieging for two and fifty days, is committed to your lofty spirits.

Be not afraid because its walls have been worn down by the enemy’s battering. For your strength lies in the protection of God and you must show it with your arms quivering and your swords brandished against the enemy. I know that this undisciplined mob will, as is their custom, rush upon you with loud cries and ceaseless volleys of arrows. These will do you no bodily harm, for I see that you are well covered in armour. They will strike the walls, our breastplates and our shields. So do not imitate the Romans who, when the Carthaginians went into battle against them, allowed their cavalry to be terrified by the fearsome sight and sound of elephants.

In this battle you must stand firm and have no fear, no thought of flight, but be inspired to resist with ever more herculean strength. Animals may run away from animals. But you are men, men of stout heart, and you will hold at bay these dumb brutes, thrusting your spears and swords into them, so that they will know that they are fighting not against their own kind but against the masters of animals.

You are aware that the impious and infidel enemy has disturbed the peace unjustly. He has violated the oath and treaty that he made with us; he has slaughtered our farmers at harvest time; he has erected a fortress on the Propontis as it were to devour the Christians; he has encircled Galata under a pretence of peace.

Now he threatens to capture the city of Constantine the Great, your fatherland, the place of ready refuge for all Christians, the guardian of all Greeks, and to profane its holy shrines of God by turning them into stables for fits horses. Oh my lords, my brothers, my sons, the everlasting honour of Christians is in your hands.

You men of Genoa, men of courage and famous for your infinite victories, you who have always protected this city, your mother, in many a conflict with the Turks, show now your prowess and your aggressive spirit toward them with manly vigour.

You men of Venice, most valiant heroes, whose swords have many a time made Turkish blood to flow and who in our time have sent so many ships, so many infidel souls to the depths under the command of Loredano, the most excellent captain of our fleet, you who have adorned this city as if it were your own with fine, outstanding men, lift high your spirits now for battle.

You, my comrades in arms, obey the commands of your leaders in the knowledge that this is the day of your glory — a day on which, if you shed but a drop of blood, you will win for yourselves crowns of martyrdom and eternal fame.”

Constantine XI Palaiologos
Last Emperor of the Byzantine Empire

Sanitation Prayer For Plantation Mayor

In light of this,

Wherein this is part of what is publicly prayed,

“Free us from the shackles of partisan politics, political correctness and personal egos and agendas. Let the plantation called New York City be the city of God, a city set upon the hill, a light shining in darkness.”

The prevailing view of this prayer is that slavery is still a condition that exists in New York city. Words like “Plantation,” “Reconstruction Era,” “Auction Block,” “Shackles,” “Emancipation Proclamation,” “Bondage,” “Master,” “Civil Wars,” and “Chain,” characterize the Prayer. Clearly the minister praying has a kind of Liberation Theology and believes that oppression is widespread.

I thought I would offer some counter views by two other Black men and one white man.

http://manningjohnson.org/speech/transcript.html

This one is excellent and was Manning Johnson’s final speech before his death. Given what Manning says here it is not a wonder that he has been dropped down the memory hole. Manning Johnson was a black man who was a Communist at one point in his life but who eventually awakened to the fact that the Communists were only interested in using the black man and that the end result would be even more misery for his people.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362030/early-skirmishes-race-war-thomas-sowell // This one by T. Sowell

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/01/fred-reed/the-pursuit-of-forced-amity/ // This one by Fred Reed

Generations #1

Dear Ella and Lee

Except for the Triune God of the Bible, and one’s integrity in relation to Him, I’ve concluded that there is nothing more important than family. The macro culture that you will grow up in will tell you otherwise at every turn. The culture will tell you that your lineage, heritage and patrimony are insignificant. The culture will push you to despise your past and whisper constantly that you are wiser then your forebears. Don’t you believe them. While it is true that Family can become absolutized and so become an idol, it is also true that when family finds it’s proper place, under the Triune God of the Bible’s authority, there is nothing else that exceeds it in import. The importance of the heritage of a godly family is seen in something that John Calvin observes in his commentary on I Timothy,

“Accordingly, he (Paul) sets before him his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, by whom he had been educated from his infancy in such a manner that he might have sucked godliness along with his milk. By this godly education, therefore, Timothy is admonished not to degenerate from himself and from his ancestors.”

Grandchildren, when one is blessed to have been raised in Christian homes one can not abandon his Kin without abandoning their God.

Because God trumps all, in terms of our allegiance, there may be times when you will have to turn your back on family. This should almost be unheard of when raised in the context of a Christian people but love of God must rise above even the tenderest of family affections if it comes to having to choose between the two.

Having given this slight introduction, I would like to tell you something about your family. One of my chief regrets (and I have my share of regrets) is that I didn’t discover more about my generations while they were still alive. So, I am writing to you to leave you at least a glimpse into some of your forebears. I won’t suggest to you that you are the scions of some great line. You’re not. Still, this family, is the family that God has been pleased to have ordained to make us part of, and so, for good or for ill I welcome you to your people. It is my prayer that you will rise above all the previous generations in terms of understanding God’s character and so having a corresponding zeal for the God of the Bible who has made us who we are, via faith and blood and who has set us in our families.

I would like to tell you a very little bit about your Great-Great-Great Grandparents. I have only the barest of memories of your Great x 3 Grandmother and no memories at all of her husband. Eva Lorraine was born in 1878. Her maiden name was Reid, but any knowledge of the Reid family is completely lost to me. I can tell you that both Reid and McAtee are fairly popular Scottish surnames and so it is not surprising to see someone from Clan Reid marry into McAtee Clan.

She, like most of your people, came from Agrarian stock. Lee and Ella your people were Farmers in these origins. Of course my memories of my Great Grandmother are sketchy as she died in 1963 when I was only 4. She lived right across a dirt road from my Grandparents and I remember going to visit her when we went to visit my Grandma McAtee (her daughter-in-law).

I have been told that when, as a toddler, I had ear aches that Grandma Great would blow smoke in my ear from her pipe in order to alleviate the pain. I was also told that Grandma Great was a bit superstitious as she would prohibit anyone from disturbing a rocking chair that was in motion from the wind, believing that it was rocking to the sway of some supernatural presence of someone gone but now visiting. We should not make too much of this kind of matter because these kinds of superstitions were not that uncommon among some rural folk. I saw a similar kind of superstition again some 35 years later in the first Church I served in South Carolina.

The only other story I have to offer from this generation is what was found when Grandma Great’s belongings were cleaned out. It seems that her husband, Murl, your Great x3 Grandfather, (who had died in 1929) was affiliated with the Klu Klux Klan. We surmise this because a Klan outfit was found in one of the closets when the house was cleaned out in 1963. It is believable, because historically we know that the Klan had a presence in that area of the State at about that time. I’ll let you do your own research on what the KKK was. Keep in mind though that the Klan had several incarnations and you’ll want to keep your eye on which incarnation of the Klan existed in the North in the 1920’s. The Klan of Nathan Bedford Forest was not the Klan of later incarnations.

Grandma Great was 85 when she passed away. She lived to see her husband and two of her children and one daughter-in-law precede her in death. Even in the early 20th century death was much closer to men then it is today and she, doubtless, knew well the pain that death creates. It is interesting to think that she died just about a month before President Kennedy was assassinated even though their worlds were far far apart. She grew up in a world where the biggest innovation was the Railroad Train and she lived to see the advent of the automobile, telephone, light bulb, electricity, record player, and the atomic bomb. As such, most of her life would have been lived without running water in the house, without a telephone, without a bathroom in the house, and she cooked most of her life with a wood stove. When she was born Railroads were the big thing. When she died men were probing space.

My Father (your Great-Grandfather) loved her dearly. To this day his Bible has a pressed rose in it he kept from her funeral.

I don’t know a thing about your Great x3 Grandparents confession of faith in Christ alone or a lack thereof. The Christian faith is typically more consistent with the Farmer then with other occupations as the people who live off the land, generally speaking, have the opportunity to have a greater sense of awareness of Providence as they are so dependent upon the seasons and the weather. Certainly your Great x3 Grandmother had a Christian burial and that says a little bit.

This is all I know or remember about this generation on the McAtee side of the family. It is very little but it is something that you would not have had if I had not given you this little snippet.

By the way … here is a link that tells about where they are buried in Colon, Michigan and gives some bare facts.

http://files.usgwarchives.net/mi/stjoseph/cemeteries/l20002.txt

Augustine’s Postmillennialism

“Turning to Augustine, Wendy Zoba notes, Augustine teaches that history “would be marked by the ever-increasing influence of the church in overturning evil in the world before the Lord’s return” (Zoba, “Future Tense” Christianity Today [October 2, 1995]: 20). This would eventually issue forth in a “future rest of the saints on earth” (Augustine, Sermon 259:2) “when the Church will be purged of all the wicked elements now mixed among its members and Christ will rule peacefully in its midst.” (Cited in Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology [Cambridge: University Press, 1991], 133). This early incipient postmillennialism contains the most basic element of the later developed system: a confident hope in gospel victory in history prior to Christ’s return.

We may also reference Augustine’s comments on Psalm 2. Regarding the Lord laughing at the nations (Ps 2:4) he writes: “it is to be understood of that power which he giveth to His saints, that they seeing things to come, namely, that the Name and rule of Christ is to pervade posterity and possess all nations.” At v. 7 he writes: “‘Ask of Me,’ may be referred to all this temporal dispensation, which has been instituted for mankind, namely, that the ‘nations’ should be joined to the Name of Christ, and so be redeemed from death, and possessed by God. ‘I shall give Thee the nations for Thine inheritance,’ which so possess them for their salvation, and to bear unto Thee spiritual fruit.” (Augustine in The Post-Nicene Fathers, 8:3)”

Calhoun & McAtee On Government

“For just in proportion as a people are ignorant, stupid, debased, corrupt, exposed to violence within and danger from without, the power necessary for government to possess, in order to preserve society against anarchy and destruction becomes greater and greater, and individual liberty less and less, until the lowest condition is reached, when absolute and despotic power becomes necessary on the part of government, and individual liberty extinct. So, on the contrary, just as a people rise in the scale of intelligence, virtue, and patriotism, and the more perfectly they become acquainted with the nature of government, the ends for which it was ordered, and how it ought to be administered, and the less the tendency to violence and disorder within, and danger from abroad, the power necessary for government becomes less and less, and individual liberty greater and greater. Instead, then, of all men having the same right to liberty and equality, as is claimed by those who hold that they are all born free and equal, liberty is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances. Instead, then, of liberty and equality being born with man; instead of all men and all classes and descriptions being equally entitled to them, they are prizes to be won, and are in their most perfect state, not only the highest reward that can be bestowed on our race, but the most difficult to be won—and when won, the most difficult to be preserved.”

John C. Calhoun

Apart from Christ people, at least on a civilizational wide scale, will be ignorant, stupid, debased, corrupt and exposed to violence. He could have lifted those descriptors right out of Ephesians 4,

17 So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, 18 being darkened in their understanding, [m]excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; 19 and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality [n]for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.

Of course the simple idea contained in the Calhoun quote is that people can only have liberty to the extent that they are Biblical Christians. Apart from Biblical Christianity, where self-government, in keeping with God’s law word, is the foundational block for all other government (Civil, Church, Family, etc.), what must be introduced to keep a people in line is force. And all civil Government is, in a pagan context, is organized force.

There is no liberty for social orders where Christ is hated. In such social orders the organizing principle will always be slavery as a people enslaved to their own sin and to the devil will not be a people who can create cultural Institutions that are characterized by liberty. People who are in bondage to their sin create social orders where the theme is bondage and slavery.

This is true regardless of their political organization be it Libertarian, Democratic Socialist, Labor, Whig, Republican, or Democrat. People enslaved to sin can not create social orders that are characterized by Liberty.

Slightly disagreeing with Calhoun, I would say that Liberty is not only a prize to be won but a grace to be given. Sure enough that Liberty must be protected once obtained but I would insist that Liberty is a grace given because it always begins with men set free from the dominion of darkness.

Thus, in the end, this quote reminds us that political or economic liberty can never be obtained apart from a people who are spiritually free. We, as Americans, have lost our political and economic liberty and those will never be re-claimed until we rediscover the truths of God’s majesty and our sin and His provision of Christ to release us from our spiritual bondage. Only a people set free from themselves can build a civilization that is characterized by Governments with boundaries and social orders characterized by Liberty.

As long as we are given over to our sin we will have powerful enslaving Governments.