I happened to see this item, which succintly highlights why Christians in the UK are in trouble. The writer omits to mention the attempt by the last government to make any statement about homosexuality other than warmest approval liable to prosecution. Attempts to introduce a free speech clause were repeatedly voted down. A government minister gloated that the churches had better start hiring lawyers — in a country where no-one other than the privileged can afford to go to law.
Tag: Christianity
Should we blame our sins for plague? Or blame God for not preventing it?
The Ris melle or Brief world history of the East Syriac (Nestorian) monk John bar Penkaye was written ca. 690 AD. It contains in memre (=chapter or book) 15 a harrowing description of the famine and plague of 686-7. It describes the bodies left unburied, people fleeing to the mountains and then being robbed there by bandits, and many other details.
John attributes all these misfortunes to the sinfulness of the church. The latter he describes graphically.
It is quite tempting to see this as medieval superstition. God is the ultimate author of all, true; but to say this without qualification is to omit a substantial portion of the truth. God made the world in which we live; but the process contained many more elements than God snapping his fingers. The world contains both you and me. God is responsible for this, in a way; but my parents might have something to do with it also. Any account of my origins that mentions God but does not mention my parents would be more than a little misleading.
Similarly the world contains disease, and no doubt this is a consequence of the Fall. But that is not to deny that poor sanitation may be a more immediate cause.
Then John goes on:
Those who were alive, wandered in the mountains, like sheep without a shepherd. They wanted thereby to avoid the plague, which continued like a harvester, using dogs and wild beasts to gather them like sheaves, and (what was more distressing) they were constantly hounded by thieves to deprive them of everything and keep them away from their hideouts.
In this way, they were stripped of everything and as naked, and yet they did not think that it was impossible to escape God without repentance and without returning to him, the heart filled with repentance. They beat harshly any that reminded them of this and told him: “Go away from here; for we know that flight is much more beneficial than prayer; we have already repented, but we have not been helped, we can’t even do that any more.”
Men were reduced to despair because of their many sins; such pain came down upon them, and they did not repent at all…
My first impression, on reading this passage, was to sympathise with the fugitives. “We’ve tried repenting, and the plague did not go away, so what’s the point?” Indeed faced with such a disaster, some superstitious cleric admonishing them that it is all their own fault, and that they should ‘repent’, rather than helping them in practical terms, sounds like the very epitome of priest-craft, of the kind of monkish superstition that we are all taught to abhor. Would that “repentance” involve money for church funds, we would naturally ask next.
But then I thought about this some more. I can’t quite imagine the state of mind that says, “I’m going to try to repent to make the plague go away.” What is that about? And “I don’t believe in God, then, because I did repent and the plague did not go away.” There’s something odd here.
There is always a temptation for the clergyman in a superstitious age to make Christianity seem like theurgy — a set of rituals designed to invoke a greater power in order to obtain material benefits. This kind of “religion” is what paganism was, and in a way is more akin to an atomic power plant than a church. Doing this and that will make the sun come up, reasoned the pagans. Pray and the Lord — whoever he may be — will bless your lawsuit.
An clergyman, faced by an ignorant populace that cannot understand any appeal to anything but the most elementary benefit, may find himself preaching thus. I know nothing about what is called “Prosperity theology”, but it is attacked in terms that suggest its foes believe that it is a superstition of just this kind.
We can see, from John’s own account, that the tendency to attribute every misfortune to lack of praying was definitely present in the Nestorian clergy. He more or less writes as if he takes this view himself, although the odd phrase suggests that he is well aware of the limits of such a position.
Because … this is not the Christian view. “Go to church and God will make sure nothing bad happens” is not a Christian view. The life of St. Paul by itself is a refutation of this. The world is a nasty place. Bad things happen all the time, mostly to the better sort. A scumbag Prime Minister triumphs, and marches off, loaded with honours and riches, while a humble gospel preacher is held in a cell for seven hours, fingerprinted and his DNA taken, because an agent provocateur demanded to know whether he endorsed sodomy or not. This is life. It has always been thus, and always will. To the strong the spoils; to the weak… well, the Romans had a saying which epitomised their culture. Vae victis! or “Stuff the losers”.
Those who have come to know Christ, however, have discovered that this picture of the world is not all true. They have discovered that Christ is out there; that there really is someone who can help. It’s not like discovering you’ve won the lottery. Misfortunes do not go away, or diminish, but the reverse. But they find that the Lord is there to help them along the road. That is the Christian way, and it is a million miles away from the kind of complacent journalism — we’ve all seen it — that pretends with a snicker to ask someone accustomed to a life of comfort, who has somehow stubbed their toe, “Has this caused you to lose your faith?”
So I find myself much less sympathetic to the victims after this. To them, “God” was just a tool to get what they wanted. Repentance they did need. They did need God, and John — improbable as it seems, on first sight — was right to make this point.
Of course they also needed medical care. They needed good sanitation, which good government could provide, and proper law and order, which a good government should provide, and many other things.
It’s a warning that we must not be led astray by our instincts. Let’s look carefully, before we condemn.
Links to Mark Ashton’s sermons
Further to my other posts about Mark Ashton, Vicar of St. Andrew the Great in Cambridge, I’ve created a page which links to all the MP3 files of his sermons. It’s here. The files are on the church website, although I have taken a copy should they disappear.
UPDATE: This post at the Vicar’s Wife blog links to a collection of responses from around the web to Mark’s death. It’s a more extensive list than I was able to find myself by Google searching.
UPDATE: Mark’s booklet, On my way to heaven: Facing death with Christ is available for purchase from 10ofThose online here. I’ve just ordered a copy, to sit on my shelves for when I need it. A fund has been established to help his widow, Fiona, here.
Still thinking about Mark Ashton
I still can’t really come to grips with the death of Mark Ashton, of St. Andrew the Great in Cambridge. There’s quite a few of his sermons in MP3 form on the church website, and I have been downloading them.
Somehow this is painful too; because it brings home to me that there won’t be any more; the set is complete, the collection final. I’ve always been in the habit of treating one of his sermons as one in an endless stream, that I could go to hear whenever I wanted to, where I knew that God would speak.
Now I can’t do that. It’s Sunday tomorrow, and I could go. But to what end? Mark is gone, and with him has gone a world of spiritual wisdom and kindness.
All that is left of that wonderful man is some bytes on a disk. Maybe there is a hundred or so; each about 3Mb long; 300Mb or so in total. That’s it. He is now just a soon-fading memory in our minds, and some bytes.
It’s one thing for me to collect the words of the Fathers. I never knew any of them. But to do so for someone I knew? How inadequate those few hundred megabytes are, in exchange for what has departed!
Mark Ashton, Vicar of St. Andrew the Great, has died
I bought a copy of Evangelicals Now today, and saw with delight a picture of Mark Ashton, Vicar of St. Andrew the Great in Cambridge at the top of an article. This is a student church, and I have always thought of it as my ‘home’ church, although I cannot get there very often because I live a long way off.
But looking closer, I saw with alarm that it was a piece about terminal cancer, addressed with his usual clarity. (The whole article is here) And at the end — even worse — was a short note that he had died on April 3rd!
For me this is dreadful news. I had had no idea that he was ill. In my memory he is still a man in vigorous good health. Perhaps I might share some memories here.
When I first went to the Round Church (as it then was) in the early 80’s, Mark had just arrived and was assisting Mark Rushton, who had made the Round the great centre of Christianity in the UK that it was during the 60’s and 70’s. In those days Mark had dark hair, I recall, and he grew grey as I sat under his ministry. When Mark Rushton died soon afterwards, Mark became vicar, a post he held for the remainder of his life.
The congregation outgrew the little church building, and moved to St. Andrew the Great some years later. He led the largest and most successful church in Cambridge, and was a powerful preacher heard with pleasure by his congregation, mainly composed of students and academics. I never heard him preach a bad sermon, nor one that did not lead the hearer to turn his mind to God.
The congregation in turn became too large for that building. Mark was always keen to do “church plants”, sending a clergyman plus a chunk of the congregation to renew a parish church in Cambridge that was on its last legs. I remember the first of these, when Christopher Ash was the clergyman, and it was a great success. I recall a subsequent visit to preach by Christopher Ash, and Mark saying at the end of the sermon how much he loved those sermons, “… I could sit under his ministry all day.” They were indeed excellent; but Mark’s were better.
He was primarily a preacher. There are few such whom I would willingly ask an unbeliever to hear, but he was one. I wish I had asked various people to hear him, now that it is too late. Too many preachers like baby-talk, and their efforts are an embarassment. But his sermons were for adults, and adults who were educated and educated and intelligent to the standard of a Cambridge undergraduate. Nor was the message watered-down; the full gospel was preached, and the non-Christian always had the opportunity to come to Christ. In the last respect, indeed, God blessed his ministry. There are many of his sermons on the church website in audio form — the only form in which they should be encountered.
He was not lacking in pastoral concern either. I remember that he once invited me back to the vicarage after a sermon, together with a few others. He can hardly have known me, but it was typical of the man. At the lunch he mentioned an incident in the previous week when he had found himself near a group of policemen harassing some people for no obvious reason. Mark stopped to see what was happening, and a policeman came up to him and rudely demanded who he was and what he thought he was doing there. Mark replied in his best preachers’ voice “I am the clergyman of this parish, and I am observing how you are treating my parishioners.” The policeman went back to his colleagues without a further word, there was a brief conversation among them, and they all departed promptly.
Indeed it was a mark of his pastoral care to notice the marginalised members, people like myself who could not attend often but would keep right on coming as they could. I remember after a sermon how he invited people who needed to talk to someone about a pastoral issue to come and speak to him. I was suffering at that time in the aftermath of an illness brought on in part by a church which demanded too much of me, was unable to offer commitment to anything, but I went to talk to him. His pastoral advice and encouragment was invaluable to me. He didn’t measure me by an attendance, but encouraged me to walk with God. Without saying so, he also prayed for me for the remainder of that year — I could actually feel the effect on my prayer and bible-reading, and I could feel it when it stopped, at the new year when (naturally) he must have revised his prayer list. From a man in church of a huge congregation this was kindness indeed.
He was also a very humble man. I remember one week that he illustrated his sermon with some cartoons, including a comic devil. I think he must have drawn them himself, although he did not say so, and they were excellent. But the following week he told the congregation that some people had objected that a comic devil was misleading and tended to suggest that we should not take Satan seriously, and apologised sincerely and profusely for them. I suspect that I was not the only person who wanted to kick whoever had criticised!
His preaching was powerful, and at one time I carried around cassettes of sermons from the Round to play in the car. It is unfortunate that his written work was not so good. He preached in 1996 a series of sermons on James, which were master-pieces. They were also issued in booklet form, but the booklet is lifeless and dull, while the sermons were among the best I have ever heard.
He never received any preferment in the Church of England, not even a canonry during the thirty years that he laboured. The congregation must have been the largest financial contributor to the diocese, and the success of the church plants must have increased the numbers of communicants and donors to the diocese. But that did not qualify him, it seems. Indeed we might ask who did fill the stalls at the cathedral, if such a man was not considered suitable. But I never heard Mark even mention the matter.
I only corresponded with him once. After an administrative change to a standing order, I queried the office as follows:
Thank you for this. I have completed it [a mandate] and returned as requested.
May I ask a difficult but necessary question?
Giving goes to maintain the ministry of the Round, and the fabric of its buildings. But this gay priests business leads one to ask, just who owns these buildings? I’ve been watching events in the US where apostate bishops have been seizing the assets of parishes and evicting congregations. Charles Raven had the same experience here. My little contribution is intended for the Round, not to pay a gay bishop to close it down: and I expect the same is true of a lot of people.
Can I ask what measures have been put in place to ensure that, in the event of this happening here, the diocese will not simply appropriate whatever is given to the Round? I know we raised a lot of money to refurbish the building: but I wonder, if the StAG building belongs to the diocese, not to the congregation, why are we raising all this money for it, if we have no guarantee against eviction? This question must be going to hit us in a few years, I would have thought.
It is hard to justify giving money to the Church of England as an institution at the moment, and questions of responsible stewardship come into this. I hesitated a lot before restarting this standing order. Has any thought been given to this?
All the best,
Roger Pearse
I was surprised but pleased to get a reply from Mark:
Dear Roger,
I’ve received your email of the 12th of November (which I will also forward to the church treasurer, in case he wishes to comment).
You are very generous to support us with a standing order and thank you very much indeed for that.
You are perfectly right to put your finger on that particular issue. Of course, the overwhelming majority of our income goes on paying for the staff and current programmes of the church. But the ownership of the church property is a moot question – vested in me while I am vicar, and the Church of England would find it very hard to get it away from me, unless they find me to be heretical or convicted of gross immorality. But at the moment of succession there is great vulnerability, and I’m certainly not in a position totally to reassure you in your misgivings.
We do have a couple of charitable trusts, which, we believe, are safe, and which support gospel ministry, both here and in some other churches. You can always route your giving to these, rather than to the Round Church at St Andrew the Great.
On a slightly more reassuring note, my own faith is not in the morality or faithfulness of the institution, nor even in our own power to resist it, but in the power of the gospel to continue to replicate itself in people’s lives. It always seems to me that the best safe-guard we have against the sort of fears you express is faithful gospel ministry, leading to conversion and growing discipleship amongst a body of people who will be kept by the word and spirit of God from straying out of His paths. It may at times seem a slim hope, but I believe it to be a Biblical one!
With very best wishes,
Mark
The combination of a straight answer combined with a focus on God, not the world, was typical of the man.
I’ve just created the link to Mark’s article above, and I read portions of it, and I admit that I am sitting here in tears. Mark was one of the best of men, and I feel sensibly diminished. My world has grown smaller with his passing.
The church website is here, with video of the service of remembrance here. A great number of his sermons are online at the church website in .mp3 format. There is also a useful talk he gave in March – pretty much his last, his voice showing the sign of illness, in .mpg here. See also a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=en-GB&v=H7Y_GJMnj_4.
De ligno vitae – The Tree of Life
There are a number of short poems which appear in the manuscripts and older editions of the works of Tertullian and Cyprian. In truth their authorship is unknown, but they seem to belong to the end of the 4th century.
One of these is De ligno vitae, The tree of life. I was considering commissioning a translation, but then I came across this lovely translation in Early Christian Latin Poets by Carolinne White in Google books. The text itself is clearly a gem!
There is a place, we believe, at the centre of the world,
Called Golgotha by the Jews in their native tongue.
Here was planted a tree cut from a barren stump:
This tree, I remember hearing, produced wholesome fruits,
But it did not bear these fruits for those who had settled there:
It was foreigners who picked these lovely fruits.
This is what the tree looked like: it rose from a single stem
And then extended its arms into two branches
Just like the heavy yardarms on which billowing sails are stretched
Or like the yoke beneath which two oxen are put to the plough.
The shoot that sprung from the first ripe seed
Germinated in the earth and then, miraculously,
On the third day it produced a branch once more,
Terrifying to the earth and to those above, but rich in life-giving fruit.
But over the next forty days it increased in strength,
Growing into a huge tree which touched the heavens
With its topmost branches and then hid its saccred head on high.
In the meantime it produced twelve branches of enormous
Weight and stretched forth, spreading them over the whole world:
They were to bring nourishment and eternal life to all
The nations and to teach them that death can die.
And then after a further fifty days had passed
From its top the tree caused a draught of divine nectar
To flow into its branches, a breeze of the heavenly spirit.
All over the tree the leaves were dripping with sweet dew.
And look! Beneath the branches shady cover
There was a spring, with waters bright and clear
For there was nothing there to disturb the calm. Around it in the grass
A variety of flowers shone forth in bright colours.
Around this spring countless races and peoples gathered,
Of different stock, sex, age and rank,
Married and unmarried, widows, young married women,
Babies, children and men, both young and old.
When they saw the branches here bending down, under the weight
Of many sorts of fruit, they gleefully reached out with greedy hands
To touch the fruits dripping with heavenly nectar.
But they could not pick them with their eager hands
Until they had wiped off the dirt and filthy traces
Of their former life, washing their bodies in the holy spring.
And so they strolled around on the soft grass for some time
And looked up at the fruits hanging from the tall tree.
If they ate the shells that fell from those branches
And the sweet greenery dripping with plenty of nectar,
Then they were overcome with a desire to pick the real fruit.
And when their mouths first experienced the heavenly taste,
Their minds were transformed and their greedy impulses
Began to disappear; by the sweet taste they knew the man.
We have seen that an unusual taste or the poison of gall
Mixed with honey causes annoyance in many:
They rejected what tasted good because they were confused
And did not like what they had eagerly grabbed at,
Finally spitting out the taste of what they had for long drunk unwisely.
But it often happens that many, once their thoughts are set to rights,
Find their sick minds restored and achieve what they denied
Was possible and so obtain the fruits of their labours.
Many, too, having dared to touch the sacred waters,
Have suddenly departed, slipping back again
To roll around in the same mixture of mud and filth.
But others, faithfully carrying the truth within them, receive it
With their whole soul and store it deep in their hearts.
And so the seventh day sets those who can approach
The sacred spring beside the waters they longed for,
And they dip their bodies that have been fasting.
Only so do they rid themselves of the filth of their thoughts
And the stains of their former life, bringing back from death
Souls that are pure and shining, destined for heaven’s light.
I will look more at the volume. It looks as if Dr. White has done something that should have been done a century ago, and addressed all these Latin poets who are largely neglected.
Dark ages, middle ages, and how it’s all the fault of the Christians
While reading James Hannam’s blog Quodlibeta I noticed this post, discussing the history of vivisection and dissection. It references a rather bad-tempered post by atheist polemicist Richard Carrier here.
The nice thing in the discussion is to see ancient medical writers discussed and quoted. James shows that the Hellenistic physicians Herophilus and Erasistratus carried out human vivisections in Alexandria, as witnessed by Celsus the 1st century medical author. He rightly comments that we should not suppose that, just because we would find this appalling, an ancient would do so. Martial’s epigrams describing things done to criminals in the arena make that plain enough.
I had never heard of Herophilus, still less that a edition of the fragments existed by Heinrich von Staten (Cambridge, 1989). Religious controversy does unearth things that calmer debate would not, and we can all be enriched therevy.
Richard Carrier’s post is too long and too far outside my area of interest (and too unreferenced) for me to read much of it. A couple of passages in it caught my eye accidentally.
He objected to a Christian saying “[The Christians] preserved and copied an enormous amount of Greek mathematics, technical writings, and natural philosophy.” This unexceptionable statement apparently upset Dr. C, who met it with the objection that only a tiny percentage of ancient literature has survived. I was unclear how this evidently true observation refuted the point made, however. Surely both are true?
Much more interesting in the same part of the post was an image of a book cover attached, which proved to be that of Paul Keyser &c, Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists (here). I had not heard of this book, but as regular readers will know I am rather an enthusiast for compedia of authors. But at $360, who of us could buy a copy? Keyser himself is interviewed here; he turns out to be a fellow software engineer, working for IBM, who has also produced Greek science of the hellenistic era on the basis that:
Science accounts for more of the texts surviving from antiquity than any other sort of writing, and yet is rarely studied or even read because the texts are relatively hard to find in translation.
Well said, sir! How many of us are even familiar with the dusty volumes of ancient science, the 20-odd volumes of Galen, and the like?
I don’t pretend to be that interested in the history of science, so much of what was discussed was above my head. But one element involved a curious misunderstanding. Carrier barks repeatedly that the term “Dark Ages” is one that is being suppressed in our day, and being suppressed by the awful Christians, because they are trying to conceal how awful it was.
The attempts to remove the term from our language certainly exist, in our day, but I never heard that the Christians were responsible. After all, whoever used any other term, before our own days? On the contrary; most Christians I ever heard of think the middle ages was a period of degeneration in religion and everything else, and think of the poor conditions in the West during the Dark Ages, rather than the unknown splendours of Syriac and Arabic science.
The people who object to it seem primarily to be the medievalists. Presumably professional pride influences this. Indeed one medievalist has never spoken to me, ever since I queried a gross mis-characterisation of that wretched period of human existence. Another, probably more influential group, seems to be the politically correct. Why these object to it I do not know.
But what seems quite clear to me is that the dichotomy is not between Christian and heathen, but between those like myself who look at the Dark Ages as a time in which we would certainly not like to live, unlike antiquity; and those more interested in it who see things differently.
How not to do it; AbdulHaq’s “Before Nicea”
I’ve come across a Moslem pamphlet rubbishing Christian origins. It’s available as an eBook here. The authors are not orientals, but Britons who have converted to Islam and taken Arabic names. As such they have no access to Eastern literature and have had to make use of whatever anti-Christian literature they could find.
I find it hard to read 99 pages online, but the general approach is to heap up quotations by western writers, whoever they may be, rubbishing the bible, the fathers, and so on. The quotations are plainly taken from atheist literature, quoting such elderly “authorities” as Gibbon and Toland (1718)! Some of the quotations look extremely suspect — F. G. Kenyon is quoted in a sense opposite to every work of his that I have ever read.
But AbdulHaq goes further. He wants to claim that the people he quotes were all Christians, that what is said here by anti-Christian polemicists is what Christians say about themselves. He states:
During conversations whilst compiling this work, it was noted that many evangelical Christians would argue that the Christian scholars quoted in this work for example are ‘not really Christian.’
To this he responds as might be expected.
Unfortunately AbdulHaq has defeated himself before he began. The argument he has borrowed is the old 19th century atheist jeer “Who are you to say who is a Christian and who is not?” Logically that is nonsense, unless the word “Christian” has no meaning. It’s merely a gibe intended to weaken the appeal to the name of Christian, so that people who live by convenience but claim the name of Christian may evade the plain teaching of Christianity.
To assist this process, the establishment — hardly eager to have their lives examined! — has always appointed people to bishoprics who have publicly made clear that Christianity was not true, or were men of immoral life, or both. These men act as cuckoos in the nest, pushing out the real nestlings and in the confusion allowing the vicious to continue as before. A former bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, publicly said that he did not believe in Jesus’ Resurrection. When Christian evangelist David Watson was running university missions calling students to repentance and conversion, he used to run counter-missions to encourage them to remain drunken fornicators as before. Such activity qualified him, in the view of the church appointments committee, for high ecclesiastical office.
We all know that there is a pool of hyopcrites and liars around, and atheists make use of them as the establishment intends, to divert the argument from “Is Christianity true” to “Is this revolting person lying when he claims to be a Christian, and who is to say?” Atheists need confusion, in order that their lifestyle of convenience may be hidden in the smoke.
But none of this helps AbdulHaq. He needs clarity. He needs to attack what Christianity is, not what it is not. Confusion merely obstructs him from coming to grips with the enemy.
If I wrote against Islam, it would be very silly for me to find some depraved soul who drank and never prayed and didn’t believe in the Koran, yet still claimed the name of Moslem, and use his ‘views’ as evidence of what Moslems believed. I would need, for my argument, to make sure that those I quoted were accepted, by Moslems, as Moslems.
AbdulHaq could compile endless quotes from enemies of the church. But it would show nothing except that Christianity attracts the enmity of people who live immoral lives and want to claim the name of Christian! Well, I think we all knew that!
For his polemic to work, he must attack Christians. It does him no manner of good to confuse into his argument people who Christians don’t accept as believers. This element of his book simply fails.
If his argument is that many scholars reject Christianity, it must be observed that this must be a rather dangerous argument for him to make. Do those same scholars accept Islam? Or do they merely repeat what is the fashionable religious consensus of their age? If the latter, their testimony again does not help him.
The Christian-baiting season is now open!
Yes, it’s that time of year again. Time to BASH THE CHRISTIANS! Time to dig out those dog-eared bits of hearsay, and prepare to throw them. Whenever someone dares to suggest that Christmas should be about Christ, rather than drink, gluttony, fornication and selling stuff to morons who should know better, you’ll be ready!
Just scream: “Jesus is really Mithras/ Osiris/ Odin/ Horus/ some Mexican dude you can’t spell/ Elvis/ Angelina Jolie/ an alien spaceship/all of the above at the same time”! That’ll show them that you won’t be listening.
Or “Christmas is really a really really ancient pagan festival of the Tharg-folk / Germans / Greeks / Chinese / whoever”! Not you know, but they sure won’t know. And since they’re all honest folk, they won’t suppose that you would say something you don’t know or care whether it’s true. Just be impudent, and watch them shuffle and make excuses. Then you can get back to self-indulgence!
Who cares if it’s true? The jeer is the thing!
Some sensible discussion on this in patches in here, with some excuses for this conduct which try to blame the victim, and from which I quote this response:
I could care less what someone does in December. But they don’t solemnly celebrate the solstice, they seek Christians out and bash them. God is not real, Jesus was the product of a Roman soldier raping Mary, this is a pagan ritual, etc etc. I don’t go knocking on people’s doors saying put up the nativity, God hates you, your pagans are dead and forgotten, etc.
We tend to think all this rubbish about “25 Dec = birthday of Mithras” is to be met with rational argument. We tend to suppose that most people saying this don’t mean any harm. Perhaps this is true sometimes. But let us never forget that it is circulated out of malice, not out of ignorance. The facts are readily available to anyone who cares to know; and it doesn’t take much logic to work that that we don’t sing carols to Thor.
Let us also remember that Jesus was only a few days old when Herod sought to kill him. There is only one Being who is behind all the lies in the world, and he has hated Christ from the start.
Chrysostom on the fewness of those who will be saved
An article at Virtueonline on a corrupt Episcopalian bishop included in the comments a quote ascribed to John Chrysostom, which is found in various forms around the web, but always without attribution.
The road to hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.
The fullest form seems to be:
The road to Hell is paved with the bones of priests and monks, and the skulls of bishops are the lamp posts that light the path.
But did he say it? There seems to be some knowledge of a context in web pages I have found; that Chrysostom was commenting on the fewness of those known as Christians who will be saved:
I hear Saint Chrysostom exclaiming with tears in his eyes, “I do not believe that many priests are saved; I believe the contrary, that the number of those who are damned is greater.” …
That is the reasoning of Saint Chrysostom. This Saint says that most Christians are walking on the road to hell throughout their life.
One day Saint John Chrysostom, preaching in the cathedral in Constantinople and considering these proportions, could not help but shudder in horror and ask, “Out of this great number of people, how many do you think will be saved?” And, not waiting for an answer, he added, “Among so many thousands of people, we would not find a hundred who are .
Of course in his day of nominal religion, such comments are undoubtedly correct.
But I cannot find the quote in his works. Does anyone have a reference?