While reading Matthew Henry I came across something from Henry that really flies in the face of much of what we see in our the mad pursuit of multiculturalism, or in suppositions supporting the idea that nations are social constructs that can be held together merely on the basis of propositions. On Genesis 11 (Babel) Matthew Henry can write,
1. Their language was confounded. God, who, when he made man, taught him to speak, and put words into his mouth fit to express the conceptions of his mind by, now caused these builders to forget their former language, and to speak and understand a new one, which yet was common to those of the same tribe or family, but not to others: those of one colony could converse together, but not with those of another.
Understand the implications of Henry’s statement.
When God dispersed the tongues the variation and number of tongues was equal to the variation and numbers of preexisting tribes. The fact that God dispersed them by language implies that he dispersed them by tribal identity. If Henry is correct here (and I think he is) this drives a stake through the often repeated meme of the Christian cultural Marxists that Babel was about languages and not ethnicities. Henry would have us realize that there is a nexus between the confounding of the language and the tribes to whom the languages belonged. When the languages were dispersed, Henry believed, the dispersal was tribe by tribe according to language. Precisely because it was about languages it was about ethncities.
Henry again offers,
(4.) The project of some to frame a universal character, in order to a universal language, how desirable soever it may seem, is yet, I think, but a vain thing to attempt; for it is to strive against a divine sentence, by which the languages of the nations will be divided while the world stands.
If, according to Henry’s previous reasoning that the confounded tongues corresponded to the confounded tribes, then Henry is telling us that ethnic homogeneity for tribes or nations is the divine standard while the world stands. By Henry’s previous reasoning the attempt to build a universal people at Babel was confounded by dividing the tribes by dividing their languages.
Current Christian Cultural Marxists and Theonomic Alienists, according to Herny, strive against the divine sentence when they insist on pursuing a Christianity that ignores God’s dividing of the peoples.
Now, to underscore Henry’s comments we examine how the enemies of Christianity have consistently striven against the divine sentence of dividing people’s and languages of which Henry speaks.
Humanist Manifesto II
ELEVENTH: The principle of moral equality must be furthered through elimination of all discrimination based upon race, religion, sex, age, or national origin. This means equality of opportunity and recognition of talent and merit. Individuals should be encouraged to contribute to their own betterment. If unable, then society should provide means to satisfy their basic economic, health, and cultural needs, including, wherever resources make possible, a minimum guaranteed annual income. We are concerned for the welfare of the aged, the infirm, the disadvantaged, and also for the outcasts – the mentally retarded, abandoned, or abused children, the handicapped, prisoners, and addicts – for all who are neglected or ignored by society. Practicing humanists should make it their vocation to humanize personal relations.
We deplore racial, religious, ethnic, or class antagonisms. Although we believe in cultural diversity and encourage racial and ethnic pride, we reject separations which promote alienation and set people and groups against each other; we envision an integrated community where people have a maximum opportunity for free and voluntary association.
TWELFTH: We deplore the division of humankind on nationalistic grounds. We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move toward the building of a world community in which all sectors of the human family can participate. Thus we look to the development of a system of world law and a world order based upon transnational federal government. This would appreciate cultural pluralism and diversity. It would not exclude pride in national origins and accomplishments nor the handling of regional problems on a regional basis. Human progress, however, can no longer be achieved by focusing on one section of the world, Western or Eastern, developed or underdeveloped. For the first time in human history, no part of humankind can be isolated from any other. Each person’s future is in some way linked to all. We thus reaffirm a commitment to the building of world community, at the same time recognizing that this commits us to some hard choices.
The 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union
ARTICLE 123. Equality of rights of citizens of the U.S.S.R., irrespective of their nationality or race, in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life, is an indefeasible law. Any direct or indirect restriction of the rights of, or, conversely, any establishment of direct or indirect privileges for, citizens on account of their race or nationality, as well as any advocacy of racial or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law.
We see when we compare and contrast a Father of Historic Christianity (Matthew Henry) with the 20th century Humanists and Communists a marked contrasts between the oikophilia (love of one’s household and one’s faith — I Timothy 5:8, Romans 9:3) of Christianity and the Babelphilia (love of Babel and so hatred of ethnic distinctions) of the Marxists. Now, naturally this one point of harmony of Christians and Marxist does not by itself prove that Christians who embrace a globalism that automatically attacks ethnic homogeneity in a knee jerk fashion are Marxists but it at least should cause us to ask questions.
I am not usually the type who is obsessed with prophetic signs and prefigurations. But I find it an interesting co-incidence that the greatest (most systematic and influential) of Gnostic false prophets, Mani, came from Babylon and was inspired by ancient Babylonian occult doctrines:
“Babylon was still a center of the pagan priesthood; here Mani became thoroughly imbued with their ancient speculations. On Sunday, 20 March, A.D. 242, Mani first proclaimed his gospel in the royal residence, Gundesapor, on the coronation day of Sapor I, when vast crowds from all parts were gathered together. “As once Buddha came to India, Zoroaster to Persia, and Jesus to the lands of the West, so came in the present time, this prophecy through me, the Mani, to the land of Babylonia”, sounded the proclamation of this “Apostle of the true God”.”
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09591a.htm
Thus the matter-despising internationalist religion of Manicheaism was one of old pagan Babylon’s last legacies to mankind. We could thus intimate that flesh-despising cosmopolitanism is going to be one of the trademarks of the end-times Babylonian religion…
When Mani curses here the creator of his physical body, it is almost like a conscious satanic inversion of pious Job’s resignation in refusing to curse God:
“The great universe now moves but as yet there is no life of plants, beasts, or man. The production of vegetation, animal, and rational life on earth is a process of obscenity, cannibalism, abortion, and prize-fighting between the Messenger and the sons and daughters of Darkness, the details of which are better passed over. Finally, Naimrael, a female, and Ashaklun, a male devil, bring forth two children, Adam and Eve. In Adam’s body were imprisoned a vast number of germs of light. He was the great captive of the Power of Evil.
The Powers of Light had pity and sent a Savior, the luminous Jesus. This Jesus approached innocent Adam, awoke him from his sleep of death, made him move, drew him out of his slumber, drove away the seductive demon, and enchained far away from him the mighty female archon. Adam reflected on himself and knew that he existed. Jesus then instructed Adam and showed him the Father’s dwelling in the celestial heights, and Jesus showed him his own personality, exposed to all things, to the teeth of the panther, the teeth of the elephant, devoured by the greedy, swallowed by gluttons, eaten by dogs, mixed with and imprisoned in all that exists, encompassed by the evil odours of Darkness.
Mani’s weird but mighty imagination had thus created a “suffering Savior” and given him the name of Jesus. But this Saviour is but the personification of the Cosmic Light as far as imprisoned in matter, therefore it is diffused throughout all nature, it is born, suffers, and dies every day, it is crucified on every tree, it is daily eaten in all food. This captive Cosmic Light is called Jesus patibilis.
Jesus then made Adam stand up and taste of the tree of life. Adam then looked around and wept. He mightily lifted up his voice as a roaring lion. He tore his hair and struck his breast and said, “Cursed be the creator of my body and he who bound my soul and they who have made me their slave.”
Man’s duty henceforth is to keep his body pure from all bodily stain by practicing self-denial and to help also in the great work of purification throughout the universe.”
Fascinating Warner.
Some of the best exposes of Gnostic and Manichean doctrines and their pernicious influence have been written by the RCs. It is perhaps understandable why the Prods have not been so active in this field; ever since the 8th century Byzantine iconoclasm, RC and EO apologists have defended their cult of images by shouting back at the critics that they are guilty of “Manichean” contempt of matter (by opposing physical images of God). They used a really wide brush with this line of argument, and so Prods began to think that the Manicheans were not such a big deal, or just a bugaboo invented by the Papists.
Biblical Protestants should find the golden mean, or a strict narrow path, between the extremes of grotesque materialism and deceitful over-spiritualism. The Devil can assault from more than one direction; when all the church’s forces are concentrated against materialism (such as the Nazi race-idolatry), they can stab it in the back with demonic spirituality (such as nihilistic denial of any significance of race or gender).
As this RC source says:
http://www.adoremus.org/5-6-96-Groot.html
“We’ve been so busy combatting atheistic materialism that we haven’t noticed: the Devil of the ’90s is entering by a different door. He’s cloaked himself in the purely spiritual. The evidence of mentalism is everywhere. In a San Jose chain bookstore, I measured 150 linear feet of Jungian, Hindu, Gnostic, Buddhist, New Age, occult titles vs. 5 feet of Christian-lite.
That’s not the only way Eastern thought has gone mainstream. Consider the Supreme Court Decision of Planned Parenthood vs. Casey. “At the heart of liberty,” wrote Justices Kennedy, O’Connor and Souter, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.””
More on the subject here from RC perspective:
http://www.waragainstbeing.com/node/51
“Gnosticism: The Nest of the Antichrist”
“What few people realize, however, is that both Kant and Hegel are basically “old hash”. As we have seen, the dialectical view of truth, the concept of reality as being rooted in dialectical becoming rather than substantial being, is absolutely integral to Platonism, Gnosticism in all their forms. The following summary of Hegel’s dialectic should be startling for anyone who believes that Hegel brought anything substantially new to the history of human intellectual folly:
“His starting-point is the concept of pure, absolute, indeterminate being; this he conceives as a process, as dynamic [think of Plotinus’ necessary diffusion of the Absolute, or Dionysius Yearning within the Absolute Super-essential Godhead]. His method is to trace the evolution of this dynamic principle through three stages: 1) the stage in which it affirms, or posits, itself as thesis; 2) the stage of negation, limitation, antithesis, which is a necessary corollary of the previous stage; 3) the stage of synthesis, return to itself, union of opposites….” (1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article on Dialectic).
The above might have been written by Proclus.”
Before the times of French Revolution, the most powerful “anarchist” movements in the world were Gnostic or Manichaean cults that defiantly denied the goodness or trueness of the material world and its natural order, and thus had a logical premise for despising earthly authorities, “archons”, that tried to claim illicit dominion over the divine souls of believers. The initiated spirits were above the petty rules and rulers of the world. Not only Christian but also Islamic and pagan authorities in Diocletian’s Rome, Zoroastrian Persia and even China felt necessary to persecute Manichaeans as social subversives.
Augustine noted that the Manicheans condemned private property and the institution of marriage:
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1401.htm
“Chapter 35.— Marriage and Property Allowed to the Baptized by the Apostles
77. Meanwhile, why do you rage? Why does party spirit blind your eyes? Why do you entangle yourselves in a long defence of such great error? Seek for fruit in the field, seek for wheat in the floor: they will be found easily, and will present themselves to the inquirer. Why do you look so exclusively at the dross? Why do you use the roughness of the hedge to scare away the inexperienced from the fatness of the garden? There is a proper entrance, though known to but a few; and by it men come in, though you disbelieve it, or do not wish to find it. In the Catholic Church there are believers without number who do not use the world, and there are those who “use it,” in the words of the apostle, “as not using it,” 1 Corinthians 7:31 as was proved in those times when Christians were forced to worship idols. For then, how many wealthy men, how many peasant householders, how many merchants, how many military men, how many leading men in their own cities, and how many senators, people of both sexes, giving up all these empty and transitory things, though while they used them they were not bound down by them, endured death for the salutary faith and religion, and proved to unbelievers that instead of being possessed by all these things they really possessed them?
78. Why do you reproach us by saying that men renewed in baptism ought no longer to beget children, or to possess fields, and houses, and money? Paul allows it.”