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Wednesday, February 25, 2015

A READER WRITES!

What a Breath of Fresh Air is this Man!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 25, 2015

REFERENCE:

I am currently going through my final editing of Time Out for Sanity! 

Sanity is defined in terms of the individual taking charge of his life and control of how he thinks, why he thinks that way, and how solidly it is based on his experience processed through his distinct conscience and perspective. 

Insanity, on the other hand, is never taking the time to think, never having the courage to think other than how others’ think, worrying always if what one thinks may be out-of-step with the prevailing norm and therefore unpopular. 

When the basis of self-approval is dependent on the approval of others, when it is more important to belong, to be accepted, to be one of the popular crowd, than to be one’s own person, then one lives in a cage of his own making (see Who Put You in the Cage? 2015), while life is little more than a merry-go-round of a secondhand experiences. 

This can lead to anxiety, to trying to be everything to everybody but nothing to ourselves; often manifested in depression, boredom, self-negation, and even self-hatred as we try, sometimes desperately, to escape ourselves in some aberrant behavior that can ultimately lead to our self-destruction.   

This is a too common pattern in Western societies, which represents the pathology of normalcy where the inclination is to trust everyone but ourselves.  Yet, all trust emanates from self-trust, and not the other way around.  To have a friend you must be a friend, starting with yourself.   

This is the theme of "Be Your Own Best Friend" (2014), as I have found befriending ourselves is the hardest obstacle to overcome, mainly because we have been led to believe it is narcissistic or egotistic, when clearly, it is precisely the opposite of such an obsession.  

In this busy busy world, we never seem to have time to stop and listen to the rhythm of our own caring souls for our attention is noisily otherwise directed.   

This is offered as preamble to this writer, a frequent correspondent, who expresses what is in his heart to express.  He writes with candor, refreshing originality of thought, openly expressing himself as his mind invites him to think, caring not whether I agree or not, as he has no other ax to grind then to gain a better understanding of himself and his time against all that daily bombards his senses, which too often obfuscates rather than clarifies the thinking and the understanding.


A READER WRITES:

From my point of view I don’t care what people believe, and I have a hard time dealing with all those people whether they be Nazis, Communists, religious or whatever who want to force their belief on everyone else. 

Religion I find particularly fascinating.  If a human being acted like the god of the old and new Testament who wants to be worshiped and feared and who condemns in Christianity and Islam all nonbelievers to hell ( reminds me of the characteristics of most human dictators ), we in this country would certainly not find such behavior as exemplary. 

The other aspect of Christianity and Islam that I find fascinating is that they both believe in an all-powerful god about whom they believe all of the following:

That he created the universe and our world all by himself, that he kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden because he feared they would become like him, he destroyed his creation through a world flood all by himself, he did Sodom and Gomorrah by himself, and he used Moses to get the Israelites out of Egypt. 

However, Christians and Muslims since their inception both believe their god needs their help.  

A being who is characterized as omniscient and omnipotent would need no one’s help.  Also, if that is the case he would have known at the beginning how it would all turn out.

The other day I read that some people who have been wondering whether there was life in other parts of the universe want to try and contact areas where they think life might exist.  

Many of the individuals in the discussion were against such a move because no one knows what sort of beings might respond, and if they were anything like our species, we certainly would not want to make contact since we can’t even get our act together.

Klaus


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

As you know, while working on this editing business for Time Out for Sanity, I have been (at the same time) working on Search for the Real Parents of My Soul.

This has reacquainted me with many scholars that I have read rather eclectically over the years in the field of theology, history, metaphysics and mythology.  

These scholars ponder some of the same celestial topography that you discuss here.  It is surprising how little we know about these two great religions, Christianity and Islam, and yet how much they dominate our existence and our respected cultures.

My efforts are focused on Christianity, which sprung into a great religion from a very unpromising beginning.  Currently, I am reexamining the Fourth Gospel of St. John, which is blatantly a hagiography of Jesus but with some remarkable surprises. 

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke kind of piggyback on each other, telling the same story with little variance promoting the idea of the “Last Supper” and the Eucharist, which is the center of the Catholic Mass.  St. John does not mention the Eucharist.

He also gives less spectacular explanations to miracles.  

In his account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, we find that the fish eaten at this miraculous meal is not ichithus, the normal Greek word for fish, but opsarion, which means “cooked fish,” or “pickled fish.”  

In other words, fish that had been prepared beforehand by a tradesman.  Incidentally, John of the Fourth Gospel was a fisherman and friend and disciple of Jesus.

The first three gospels are so similar, as to be seen as a synopsis, and therefore called the “Synoptic Gospels.”  

Moreover, not to burden you with too much detail here, John places the arrest and condemnation of Jesus before the Passover as Jews were forbidden to carry swords during Passover.  The three other gospel writers place this after the Passover.  Why should we be surprised?

The Gospels are essentially all that we have of the "Jesus Story" (except the Dead Sea Scrolls), but scholars are finding these gospels mainly fictions, the twisting and turning of events to fit Scripture rather than to confirm Scripture with events.  

Stated another way, the Gospel writers started with a set of theological beliefs about Jesus, and then they fitted their narratives into those beliefs, not the other way around.   

Matthew makes Jesus into a new Moses going to the mountain.  Mark has Jesus leading a band of followers (mimicking the Old Testament) on a trek through the wilderness to the Promised Land.  And Luke has Jesus personifying the prophets of the Old Testament. 

These authors, one must accept in good conscience, started out with the assumption that their stories had parallels in the Scriptures.  

They were not making a straight story into a myth, as Oxford Scholar A. N. Wilson puts it, but were starting with a myth, the myth that in the beginning was the Word (A. N. Wilson, “Jesus,” W. W. Norton & Co., 1992, p 54).

The Gospel of John doesn’t see Jesus as God, but the Divine Logos, which is closer to Arius, who was excommunicated for that belief at the Council of Nicaea (318 A.D.).  

Nor does John see Jesus as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.

Men more than 2,000 years ago differed little with men today.  The gospel writers may have been myth makers, but we have our own myth makers today, myths buried or concealed in truths no less so than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the First Century.  

For me, Jesus did exist and was so remarkable that 2,000 years later, I still can't seem to get enough of him, although he is often buried in or locked out of Christianity by ritual and dogma. 

The Old and New Testament are beautiful, exciting and vital stories of a world no less credible even if the stories are how the Mind’s Eye see us as a species.   

Klaus, we need our myths, but by a strange coincidence we are moving away from the New Testament, as literal truth, according to many theological scholars, A. N. Wilson included, towards the Greek view of man as a part of the natural order, and the universe as a whole as one of order, and not of disorder for the want of discipline. 

In the Hellenistic concept of the cosmos, gods and men are part of the same thing, not separate, vital to each other, part of the same harmonious whole.  I will conclude with a quote from A. N. Wilson:

There is a law of nature, expressed in its purest form in mathematics, but discernible in the sphere of ethics and of what we would call natural science from which none could escape, even though the Platonist would wish to escape from the bonds of the physical and ascend to the spiritual, to discard the world of nature, which is merely a shadow of that heavenly reality which can be discovered by intense thought, asceticism and prayer… 

The New Testament is not even remotely interested in concepts of mind, of mathematics, of politics, of law.  The New Testament posits a quite different way of viewing the cosmos, a way which we find in the pages of the Old Testament and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but not among the Greeks.  The closest analogy in the non-theological sphere is the “imagination” as it is was conceived by the Romantics, who, of course, derived their concept as much from the Scriptures as from Kant.


Keep thinking!

Jim 

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

TIME OUT FOR SANITY! -- another excerpt

EXCEPTION TO THE RULE: Doing as a
Creative Tool

       James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 24, 2015


REFERENCE:

This is another excerpt from Time Out for Sanity!  The previous piece dealt with how passive a society we have (thus the reason for “Exception to the Rule”) become focusing on celebrities, entertainers and professional athletes and athletics to make (for that attention) millionaires and in some cases billionaires, while we pay the freight leaving our creative lives dormant, on hold, to eventually wither away and die.  Not the children in this piece.  Incidentally, one of the fourth graders was my son, Michael.


There are breakthroughs that receive little note. I happen to be given a spirited boost when I had the privilege to observe fourth graders at Anona Elementary in Largo, Florida. So moved was I that I wrote a “letter to the editor” of The Clearwater Sun (March 17, 1972), a community newspaper that has since gone out of business.

Mrs. Kampouris was the teacher of a reading class. Her fourth graders put on a program from beginning to end without her assistance. They wrote, directed and acted in the presentation. I can’t remember seeing creativity expressed more delightfully. It was impressive being a kids’ show, but even more so because everyone was having so much fun.

The key of course was the teacher. Her subtle guidance and patient concern enhanced their individual worth. Each of us has an immense reservoir of untapped creative energy. The need to perform, to use that precious store is part of our frustration as our society is not designed as much for participation as it is for watching others perform.

How many more painters, writers, and scientists, indeed, how many more creative artisans in publishing and business might be imaginatively and happily employed should the efforts of this fine teacher segue into their adult lives?

The fourth grade program rose naturally out of a word play with tongue twisting silly phrases. It continued with several students explaining their respective projects: one was making a facsimile of a rocket, another a pencil holder, and so on.

Each demonstration stood out for its personal touch as thoughts and ideas were expressed in a comfortable vocabulary.  It was apparent they were at ease with language, and used words as a natural tool in that context.

Poetry reading followed, and all the poems were original works. The handling of words here caught my fancy. Somehow, as expressed by a child, love of people, places, animals and life resonates with the mind. It comes across with sincerity in direct and simple language devoid of false urbanity or artificial complexity.

Mrs. Kampouris revealed her genius in the next phase. Asked to imagine themselves as a simple inanimate everyday object, these budding artists expressed their thoughts on paper. She had helped this suggestion along by placing an object in front of them—pencil, spool, paper clip, etc.—and asked them to create a story about the object. As a writer myself, I know you have to make like a child to energize wondering, which is the chemistry of creativity.

And then we were treated to the play. While it was entertaining, the banter and giddiness that went on over botched lines, cue or prop failures (one boy lost his beard) only added to its delight.  The fact that this was a reading class is relevant to today. So many children and adults are such poor readers that they take the word of others before checking out information on their own.

This often happens in industry when workers don’t or can’t read the instructions of their work, and go on working on the basis of what a colleague says about the procedure. Since this is often incomplete or erroneous, the quality of the work suffers.

The point is that reading can and should be a pleasant experience.  It can and just might push the bar up to higher expectations and wider horizons. These fourth graders are learning that reading is not a chore but a delight and part of the creative process.

Reading for them has been made an integral part of doing. Mrs. K has not partitioned reading from life or brandished a book list of “must” books to be read. She has not made reading an escape from life but an integral part of its discovery. She has brought language and books and ideas to life for these youngsters. Mrs. K may never know the true import of her teaching model on her students, but the twinkle in her eyes belies this and suggests she already does.

Like many things, the move from spontaneity or “letting go” and doing, to being up tight and following rules passively is a gradual one; so gradual that it is not perceived as happening. We continue to think we are “doing our own thing,” when it is precisely the same thing that everyone else is doing as if responding to a metronome on cue.

Once regions of the country looked quite different from each other; now they all look the same. Once cities had a distinctive individualism to them; now they all have similar glass and steel high rises with almost identical silhouettes.

Should we be able to reconnect with the sparkle of Mrs. K’s model, gone would be the necessity to collect art, for everyone would be an artist. Gone would be millionaire entertainers and celebrities, for the need for their services would have evaporated, as we would have created our own. Even the games scientists’ play would be open to us.

Education with a natural connection to learning fulfills its Greek meaning, which is “to discover.” Gone, then, is the necessity to collect a briefcase of degrees, or to develop a copious curriculum vitae, as the quality of contribution would take precedence to credentials. And gone would be the necessity to pay homage to another man’s mind for we would be too busy using our own.

Some forty years later, 2011 to be exact, I was asked to evaluate essays of eight and nine-year-olds on what the local library meant to them. More than forty young people submitted their work. The library was located in an upscale neighborhood close to the university. So, not surprisingly, many of the essays were quite literate, showing embellishments that suggested parental influence. This included state-of-the-arts Microsoft Word printing and vocabularies of the precocious.

My interest was content, not context, and how the theme of the exercise was conveyed. Of all the essays, one stood head and shoulders above all the others. It was handwritten, and carefully so, but it was the content that was stunning. The author claimed that the library was a magic kingdom to him, where worlds he did not know existed could be explored as if they were in his dreams.

The essay literally jumped off the page with its excitement, wonder, and zest for the privilege to have this “magical place” so close to home. In my comments, I envisioned a writing career for this person, as the magic went beyond its author to make connection with me, the reader. 

When first place was announced, a small African American boy with a smile that stretched from ear-to-ear, jumped up and raced forward to collect his prize. Obviously, the other three evaluators of this contest agreed with me, a contest sponsored by Director Armand Ternak and his staff at the Temple Terrace Library, Temple Terrace, Florida.


Monday, February 23, 2015

FOR YOUR INFORMATION!

About “Time Out for Sanity!”


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 23, 2015


REFERENCE:

This book is in its final editing stages and should be in bookstores and on line by April/May 2015.

AUTHOR’S NOTE TO SECOND EDITION


I thought long and hard about writing this book. The problem was resolved when I convinced myself it could give the reader a new perspective on how we have come to be stuck in our false confidence with a possible way out.

While science is looking for a universal theory, social and economic thinkers seem to be looking for an ecumenical system that answers all the questions, public and private, scientific and historical, moral and aesthetic, individual and institutional. The result is that there is seemingly a constant clash between progressive and reactionary agendas. The obstructionists ignore the complexity of the problems being faced while progressives deny the existence of these problems and turn their attention to irrelevancies.

We see this in our institutions and commerce: in the family which has become an irrelevancy; in the school which despite pouring more and more money into education continues to produce an inferior product; in corporate commerce with its infallible authority and business as usual practices despite nearly throwing the United States as well as the world into another Great Depression; in the religious in which the focus has been more on preserving its survival than discharging its mission; and in government that stays the same, misses the changes, is unable or unwilling to face them, leaving the future up for grabs.

These institutions originally created to respond to real societal needs are no longer capable of fulfilling them. They have been transformed into mere impediments to human progress, in so doing, breeding their own tensions and diseases while generating their own false remedies.

Information Technology is defusing and decentralizing power in America; the impact of which we are only beginning to feel.  Some obscure individual or collection of geeks, because of the way technology works today, can expose a company or, indeed, the government and have a disproportionate influence on outcomes. There are no secrets anymore. Institutional power has maintained its hold on control because it controlled the secrets.

Not anymore! This complicates matters considerably going forward, mainly, because little thought has been given to what has been lost for what has been gained.  Strife, conflict and competition between and among these too human institutions have sometimes bordered on the pathological.

What makes them so is that they keep promoting a hidden agenda and thus keep failing to perform their appointed function.  All forms of behavior are not rational, and as a consequence lead to various degrees of self-distortion and frustration. Therefore, it is possible to analyze the situation correctly but impossible to predict behavioral outcomes.

Nothing is value free much as science would suggest to the contrary. The division between facts and values is a shallow fallacy for every thought involves a reflection, no less than every act a feeling. Values are personified in our general attitude to the world, in the way we think, see, believe, understand, discover and know a thing to be true or not.

The “self ” is not a static entity. Nor are people dispassionate observers free from the values that bombard their senses. To attempt to escape this reality through rational detachment or self-deception is what existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre calls simply “bad faith.”

In revisiting this original essay written in the early 1970s, it was as if everything had changed, when nothing had changed at all except the costumes. So many parallels with our current pathology appear to justify a “Time Out for Sanity!”

Armed with cell phones, smartphones, laptops, Blackberrys, videophones, PlayStations, Game Boys, MP3’s, iPods, iPads, iPhones, or other mobiles soon available, while continually producing more sophisticated digital tools that have become increasingly escape toys, we have sidetracked our evasive minds from an obsession with sex (1970s) to an obsession with cyberspace and social networking at a distance. Now, voyeuristic pixels have replaced tactile fantasies.

Unfortunately, not even the finest handheld electronics can save us from the shock of being stuck in the 1970s. Facts and fantasies are fused in time. Whatever our current proclivities, we are made of what we are by the interplay of these values, facts and fantasies on our delicate psyches.

Look around you, and tell me you don’t see people with glazed eyes running harder than ever and getting nowhere. It would appear that many if not most people don’t like what they are doing or where they are going, but have little idea what they would prefer to be doing or going. It is as if their lives are a fait accompli.

To live is to act. To act is to be doing something useful. The self-conscious know this; the unconscious merely act. Hence, we choose to act and manage our lives or our acts manage us. This then allows us to play the victim.

Where and what we are, may lead us to a state of stasis epitomized by the compulsive routine of a stationary exercise bike, retreat into a recreational facility, or a man cave at home. Or it may find our eyes glued to some kind of a mobile texting and tweeting wherever we are. The retreat of the new century is different, but it is still a retreat that mirrors the 1970s.

We are on the precipice of moving from man the true believer to man the discriminating believer, to man who believes in nothing at all, deceiving himself that he is living in the world on his own terms. We are on the abyss of man having no choice but to grow up, or throw himself into the oblivion.

To put this in perspective, four decades ago, a large rebellious contingent of society’s mainly young people decided to escape boring reality by retreating into a psychedelic wonderland.

They called themselves “hippies,” changed their lifestyle, dress and moral code, and adopted the catchy slogan, “make love not war!”  The Vietnam War was going on, and it was an unpopular war.

The point is that the war provided an escape, not a rational challenge to the system. You might call it a copping out.  Young men of military draft age, said, “Hell, no, I won’t go” (to Vietnam), and fled to Canada or joined a commune.

The irony is that the current “millennials” haven’t had to be so obstreperous.
Consequently, millennials haven’t had to throw tirades or provoke authority figures. They have simply chosen to ignore them.  They don’t choose leaders, but don’t see themselves as followers.  They do what comes to mind without much reflection or pause to assess consequences. To say they are superficially engaged is a moot point.

Millennials are not into counterculture like the “hippies” of the 1970s. While they mirror each other in tacit disregard to the status quo, millennials are not into the idea of culture, or, indeed, what that might imply. Nor are they into rebellion. They have their electronic pacifiers, and at the moment, they are sufficient to float their boat. The escape today is into some kind of electronics.

It never occurs that these electronic gizmo may eventually fry their brains until they have no memory of the damage done. Then they can operate on a schizophrenic high to rival the chemically induced psychedelic highs of the 1970s.

Recently, I visited my granddaughter Rachel Carr at the University of Florida who is a pre-med student. Having been a chemistry major in my undergraduate days, I attended a chemistry lecture with some 300 students. The professor was busy down in the pit writing equations talking about geometric covalent bonds while eighteen and nineteen year old students were busy on their smartphones paying him no mind. Attending class appears a concession as they expect to get the essentials on line or in their text sufficient to “ace” the test subsequently to come from the material presented. It is a kind of confidence I don’t remember having during my college days.

Time Out for Sanity! is written in the hopes that it causes the reader to ponder the choices made hoping they will turn out to be blessings rather than not. To that end, I wish all readers well.

—James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.,

Tampa, Florida, April 15, 2015

Saturday, February 21, 2015

JESUS STORY CONTINUES - Reaction to this question!

Can Jesus and the Jewish religion be reconciled?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 21, 2015


REFERENCE:

A regular reader of this blog who has been following my “Jesus Story” as it is being developed in my book, Search for the Real Parents of My Soul, sent me an Internet article: WND America’s independent News Network’s “The Other Side of the Cross: Can Jesus and the Jewish religion be reconciled?” 

Dr. Don,

By a strange coincidence, my Jesus Story addresses some of these questions in the context of Jesus, the historical Jesus, not the Christ, and his time, against our own, but complicated by such questions -- was Jesus a Pharisee; was Paul a Pharisee; was Paul a Roman citizen? 

There is no definitive information to answer these questions as conjecture is the game of scholars in theology as it is in most other human endeavors.  Believe me when I say (writing this book) that there are literally thousands who have dedicated their lives to looking in every grain of sand for clues as to what is and what is not on the subject of Christianity and Judaism.

Search for the Real Parents of My Soul is only one man's odyssey, and he is not a scholar but a peripatetic philosopher.

Judaism departed somewhat from its undisputed anchor in the Law of Moses and the prophets of the Old Testament when Hellenistic Jews, that is, Jews much influenced by Greece and Greek culture found it amendable to follow or not follow Jewish tradition and laws as they were so inclined. They were also known as Pharisees.

Judaism today is a considerable departure from legalistic Judaism or even Hasidic Judaism, as Jews have the equivalent of many churches as does Christianity. 

Making no attempt to come off as a biblical much less theological scholar, my serious reading on Christianity and Judaism, including the Jewish Torah and Talmud, convinces me that religion is a very human enterprise, and that belief systems, as much as we would like to think otherwise, are man made creations to deal with the unknown and the dark shadows that man creates in his consciousness. It is no accident that subconsciously we feel we have been left here as orphans on this hostile planet, earth. 

We gained consciousness and a conscience on this planet, when or why is open to conjecture, and once that occurred we sought comfort in any way we could find, creating belief systems, some substantive and sustaining, others not. 

In my little book, I go back to the early days of Rome, the city state that built an empire, and by 496 A.D. had totally run out of gas, overrun by the Visigoths and German barbarians from the North.  A thousand years of "forward inertia" called the "Dark Middle Ages" followed. 

Monks in Christianity isolated in monasteries were the equivalent of our computers of that day, preserving what knowledge could be harvested from the devastation.  This included Christianity, our Western culture belief system.

Regarding belief systems, when they are challenged or come to decline in relevance and vitality, then all hell breaks loose, as we now see in the Islam world, have seen in the Christian world, and yes, have also seen in the Judaic world as well. 

Something in our collective DNA seems to feel our legitimacy challenged if everyone else fails to share our same beliefs, which of course is impossible, just as those reading this will have trouble with it, if it in anyway happens to offend their fragile sense of self.

There are more than 7 billion souls on this planet and about 14 million Jews worldwide, a culture, religion and theology that has had major impact on this planet over the past 2,000 plus years, and will continue to do so.

I have great admiration for the Jewish people and Jewish culture, as I was brought up with those feelings with my mother saying, "If I weren't Catholic, I'd be Jewish."

Well, I wouldn't have had much to read if it weren't for Jewish writers, and when I was a student, it was Jewish students that I would find at the Clinton County Library during holidays in my college years, and they were the best students in my classes at the university.

One word described their dedication, and that word was "excellence."  Never met a Jewish student who wasn't afraid to burn the midnight oil to master his studies.  

Just as Christianity has not remained stagnant, neither has Judaism.

Hasidic Judaism (the word mean "piety") came into prominence in the 18th century as a branch of Orthodox Judaism that promoted mystical spirituality and departed from legalistic Judaism.  As Christianity has embraced mysticism, so has Hasidic Judaism. This gave new value to prayer and deeds of kindness by appealing to unlettered or common folk unacquainted with the intricacies of the Jewish tradition.

One can easily get lost or exercised in defensiveness when one is not accepting or disinclined to appreciate another's belief system.  Legitimacy is a matter of choice, including not believing in anything, which is perhaps the most rigid and unforgiving of all belief systems because unbelievers seemingly feel superior for believing they control their own destiny when nothing could be more absurd.

I was reared strict Roman Catholic, and up until the age of thirty, already the father of four children, working on the international stage, believing capitalism was my god, I experienced South Africa and apartheid, and nearly lost my way. 

For the past fifty years, I've been working my way back to believing, not so much in a faith, a religion, a culture, a country, or even a God, but believing in the preciousness of every single human being that walks this earth, knowing that no one is better than another, or that some walk taller than others walk, for we are all God's children, and so was Jesus.

Be always well,

Dr. Jim 

  

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

JESUS STORY CONTINUES



And God Created the Organization




James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 17, 2015


And God created the Organization and gave it domination over man.

Genesis 1, 30A, Subparagraph VIII

Robert Townsend (1920-1998), CEO of Avis Car Rental


CHRISTIANITY AND ORGANIZATION


More than a half century ago, a spunky, glib and brash executive named Robert Townsend went against the prevailing grain of expected executive behavior, challenged the behemoth, Hertz Car Rental Company with an essentially start-up company, Avis that proved a towering success with the clip rejoinder, “We try harder!” 

Moreover, he used his natural Protestant work ethic to harness his energy and channel his individualistic spirit to an improbable success. 

Townsend captured this successful formula (justice, fun, excellence) in a tongue-in-cheek popular book, “Up the Organization” (1970) that reads like the Epistle’s of St. Paul but without all the sorrow as he examines the complex organization.   Ahead of the text, he makes biblical with,

And God created the Organization and gave it dominion over man.  If this was not blasphemous enough he add, Genesis 1, 30A, Subparagraph VIII

Elsewhere such derision shows through to reveal his persistent frustration:

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with our country except that the leaders of all our major organization are operating on the wrong assumptions.

We’re in this mess because for the last two hundred yeas we’ve been using the Catholic Church and Caesar’s legions as our patterns for creating organizations.  And until the last forty or fifty years it made sense.  

The average churchgoer, soldier, and factory worker was uneducated and dependent on order from above.  And authority carried considerable weight because disobedience brought the death penalty or its equivalent (Dismissal and blacklisting brought starvation to an industrial worker; excommunication brought the spiritual equivalent of death to a churchgoer (Townsend 1970).


Forty-five years later, as this is being written (2015), everything is pretty much as it was the prior forty or fifty years, as he puts it, including post WWI and post WWII, when everything changed and yet nothing actually changed at all. 

Companies have grown larger, institutions, too, across the board from education, religion, government to the military with gleaming glass towers called office buildings, but industrial plants, churches, schools and shopping malls looking like windowless fortresses or prisons housing those that find their way through the portals of these buildings to work, worship or shop.  They gleam with touching slogans, colorful décor, cutting edge technology and air conditioning, but they cannot escape the aroma of sweatshops of yesteryear.  

Students of our schools are bright often randy exploding with energy but made to sit and be polite, obedient, punctual, submissive, accommodating, and passive.  For if they are not, they are likely to be put on a regiment of pills to cool their jets and dull their wits as what they consider nonsense is poured into their unreceptive minds.

Most workers today are college trained and often superior in temperament, vision, perception and problem solving skills than those who would be called their managers.  These workers are expected to be loyal and obedient to executive authority, and to do what told to do even if it is wrong. 

When the company goes under, these managers bail out of the fracas with their golden parachutes while the workers are out of their jobs and livelihood.  It was likely this in the 1930s and nearly one hundred years later it is like this in the 21st century. 

Meanwhile, the working middle class has all but evaporated, while the executive class has expanded to the point of obscenity.  The rich have always gotten richer on the backs of the poor, but the poor before did not have the acumen or wherewithal to make a difference due to their lack of education and skills. 

But now, the working class is professional and is trained as well if not better than the managing class that dictates what professionals will and won’t do, as if nothing has changed.  Yet, the managing class is essentially a product of post WWII, which has glutted the corporation, making CEOs and other senior executives comparable to mythological gods with perks and benefits, salaries and bonuses, stock options and hidden concessions of divinity status.

It is apparent that author Townsend thought this was a short term problem, but clearly it is not.  What he is saying, then, is that the old incentives and inducements are not working; that the old saw of company compliance and dependence is no longer relevant, which is true.

Harvard professor Harry Levinson calls this “The Great Jackass Fallacy” (1973), that is, the false unconscious managerial assumption that that management knows best, that management knows what motivates workers, and that it is clearly different than what motivates managers.  

This was absurd in 1973, and equally absurd in 2015, yet as atavistic as this assumption may be many at the top of the pyramid practice as if they believe it is still plausible. 

We have been carried through a very brief outline of how Christianity came into being against considerable odds, not only from the outside but the insider as well.  We have also gone through the Six Ages of the Church to show it is a very human organization.   

The reason for endeavoring to write this Jesus Story from a layman’s point of view is that I recognize how important religion has been in my life, and how important the mythic and historic images of Jesus has captured that essence of my being and propelled me to both the life that I have had and to this stage in that long life. 

There is nothing that is written in this Jesus Story that has not been written tens of thousands of times before by thousands of people who do nothing else but look at or dispute the flimsy evidence of what this man left on earth during his brief stay. 

Born into an Irish Roman Catholic household, schooled in the parochial schools through eighth grade, and devout to the point of excess into my thirties, with all the important lessons of life that Catholicism taught me, it failed in the end to the real parents of my soul.

As I go forward in the balance of this short book, use will be made of an expertise with which I am more familiar as I find I have empathy for the rational-legal system of Max Weber, and with rare exception, a similar appreciation of organization and what it means and doesn’t mean. 

Weber, as you will see, was an acute observer from the outside whereas I by circumstance, inclination and you might even say destiny have been something of an acute observer from the inside, while ironically remaining an outsider, thus giving me the perspective with which I can identify with Weber, but as doer, not an academic.  This is by way of saying, for critics, I am neither fish nor fowl, but so be it.

This is still the Jesus Story, still a continuation of my Search for the Real Parents of My Soul, but now with deeper respect for my Christian training while, at the same time, having a greater appreciation of the Protestant Reformation and why that saved Christianity then, some five hundred years ago, nearly to the day, and continues to save it to this new century.

Most of my adult life has been in hi-tech companies surrounded by brilliant people, many of whom once were religious, but no longer believe, not only in religion, but in God or anything, some of them are atheists, others agnostics, and some have abandoned Christianity for money, fame, or simply because of boredom, expecting to be given something without giving anything.  

If religion doesn’t have the answer in the culture to which one is born, chances are it will not be found in another religion, as all religions, whatever their belief system, are fragile in character, often paranoid, and can be hostile environments as we have already seen in this narrative.

Albert Einstein, a non-practicing Jew, was a religious man with a deeply spiritual conscience.  As often is the case with him, he can say a lot in a few words, such as

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

This odyssey is an attempt to get past this cultural blindness.


ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY: AND GOD CREATED THE ORGANIZATION

Robert Townsend, Up the Organization: How to stop the Corporation from Stiffling People and Strangling Profits, A Fawcett Crest Book, 1970

Ibid, p. 139.

Harry Levinson, The Great Jackass Fallacy, Harvard Business, 1973

Jerry Mayer & John P. Holms, Bite-Size Einstein, St. Martin’s Press, 1996, p. 56.


Thursday, February 12, 2015

THE JESUS STORY CONTINUED!

The Fifth and Sixth Ages of the Church

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 12, 2015


 The Fifth Ages of the Church


The age begin with crisis on crisis as if snowballs in hell that threatened the very existence of Christendom’s survival.  On the one hand, there was the direct challenge of the theological revolution of the Protestant Reformation which separated the greater part of Northern Europe, especially Germany from Catholicism; and on the other, there was the cultural revolution of the new lay culture of the Italian Renaissance.

The Renaissance had replaced the theological and philosophical traditions of the medieval university system with a plethora of secular studies and disciplines.  The external relations of Western Christendom had been transformed by the discovery of America, opening a new vista of the world to the west, while opening energetic European exploration and trade to the Far East.

Man’s horizons were exploding beyond comprehension with science in the wing disproving many of the church’s sacred dictums such as the earth being the center of the universe.  It was an exciting time to be alive for everyone except Doctors of the Roman Catholic Faith.

All these factors affected the character of Roman Catholicism in this Fifth Age of the Church.  The reaction to the Protestant Reformation produced the so-called Tridentine Reform of the Church.
    

The Tridentine Reform of the Church

The word “tridentine” refers to anything or person pertaining to the city of Trent, Italy (Latin: Tridentum).  As common experience to corporate man up to the present (2015), the inclination of our corporate fathers when push comes to shove is to tweet the minutiae and avoid the gross perturbations that are unraveling to corporate security threatening legitimacy if not survival.  This was no different five hundred years ago when the Roman Catholic Church was threatened with the Protestant Reformation.

The Council of Trent, one of the ecumenical councils recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, was held in that city in the 16th century.  The teachings emphasized by the council related to legislation issued by the Popes of the time, especially Pope Pius V.

The council dealt with the Tridentine Mass, which supplanted the various versions of the Pre-Tridentine Mass.   In the 20th century, Pope Paul VI in turn introduced his version of the Roman Rite which meant ceasing many of the ordinary practices of the Tridentine Mass. These changes became official in 1962.

The Traditionalist Catholic movement and its members have adhered to the 1962 or earlier editions of the Roman Missal.

The Reverend John Connely writes of the Council of Trent:

The Council of Trent's (1545-1563) primary focus, liturgically speaking, was to standardize the worship of the West. This was done principally in two ways:

First, the Council (together with Pope Pius V) suppressed all Western Rites that did not have a continuous history of at least two hundred years. This effectively eliminated all but the Ambrosian Rite of Milan, the Mozarabic Rite of Toledo, Spain, and the Gregorian Rite of the City of Rome itself, sometimes called the Roman Rite.

Simple variations within the Roman Rite, such as existed among the Benedictines, Dominicans, etc., were permitted to remain.

In the 16th century, the Gregorian or Roman Rite already had a continuous documented history of more than 1000 years. It therefore became the standard Rite of most of post-Schism Western Christendom.

Secondly, the Council of Trent standardized the rubrics of the Gregorian Rite. This meant that when and how the celebrant and other ministers bowed, genuflected, turned to the faithful, was no longer left to the whim or personal style of the individual clergyman. For the sake of propriety, detailed instructions about how to actually celebrate the liturgy were drawn up and imposed upon the whole of the Western Church.



Most of these rubrics were not new inventions, however. They were mostly adopted from the customary rubrics of the cathedrals and parish churches of the City of Rome and its surrounding countryside towns and villages. This was logical because Rome was the de jure center of Western Christendom. Thus, by the 16th century even the rubrics already had a long and venerable history and were hardly an innovation of the Counter Reformation.

The Rite of St. Gregory was not "created" by the Council of Trent. Furthermore, as used in Orthodox Christianity today, this Rite contains a few corrections and amplifications unknown to the earlier generations of Roman Catholics; these were imposed in modern times by the wisdom of the Orthodox Church in order to bring the Rite fully into harmony with the intent and current practice of Byzantine liturgical theology. With the exception of new Propers introduced to commemorate various saints of the post-schism Eastern calendar, the Rite remains essentially identical to that which was already ancient by the time of Trent.

These Tridentine Reforms were part of the church’s Counter Reformation strategy to the challenge of Protestantism.  From the beginning, corrupt as the church had been over the previous two centuries, the council convened believing Protestant doctrinal error and not church dysfunction had led to the eminence of Martin Luther and his followers.  Consequently, this made rapprochement between the two sides impossible.

Theologian Barrett of Catholic University of America sees this as an ineffective Counter Reformation ploy.  He writes:

The Catholic Church seemed to me very stupid and ignorant. She was an ostrich thinking it could fly who nevertheless kept plunging her head into the dirt in order to avoid any talk that might upset her fantasies. The abuses in the Church that preceded the Protestant movement indicated, to me and the tradition I was growing to love, a lack of contact with God through special revelation. Instead of turning to the source of renewal, the Word of God, the Catholics inoculated their communion against the cure. Everyone knew that the Vulgate had acquired errors that provided purportedly divine authorization for the Catholic view of justification, Purgatory, the penitential system, the veneration of Mary and the saints, and spurious sacraments such as confirmation and marriage. (Council of) Trent made it the official version in an astounding act of arrogance, locking her faithful up in the prison of ignorance about the Scriptures and thus about Christ. I believed this story as did several of my friends.


Once again, there was a revival of the religious life through the influence of new religious orders.  The cultural issue was met by the development of a new form of Christian humanism and education.  The age was followed by a great outburst of missionary activity.  Discouraged but not defeated, thanks to the vigilance and courage of monastics, the church roamed the world for new converts in an attempt to regain its power and theological identity. 

In the first half of the seventeenth century, in Europe it found a new avenue of expression in the emerging Baroque Culture that had commenced to dominate the artistic and intellectual life of Europe.  Baroque was a style in art and architecture that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur from sculpture, painting, literature, music and architecture.

It was a time when the great cathedrals that would grace Europe to this day were being built.  Goethe was moved observing the magnificence of these structures to refer to them as “frozen music.”

The baroque style started around 1600 in Rome, Italy and spread to most of Europe. In music the Baroque applies to the final period of dominance of imitative counterpoint.  The popularity and success of the "baroque" was encouraged by the Catholic Church when it decided that the drama of the baroque artists' style could communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement.

The secular aristocracy also saw the dramatic style of baroque architecture and art as a means of impressing visitors and would-be competitors. Baroque palaces are built round an entrance sequence of courts, anterooms, grand staircases, and reception rooms of sequentially increasing magnificence. Many forms of art, music, architecture, and literature inspired each other in the "baroque" cultural movement.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, nearly ninety percent of the European population could neither read nor write, so these magnificent cathedrals were Catholic selling points.  They encouraged peasants in the feudal system to religiously attend Mass and do the bidding of the Church Fathers.

The canon promulgated at the Council of Trent recognized the power of imagery to fulfill the church's mission viewing the representational arts such as paintings and sculptures with contextual church themes as a way to speak effectively to the illiterate instead of appealing to the tastes if the well-informed.  This was offered for inspiration in the style of the Baroque a generation later.

The turn toward a populist conception of ecclesiastical art is seen in the works of Caravaggio and the Carracci brothers, who were working (and competing for commissions) in Rome around 1600.

The appeal of Baroque style turned consciously from the witty, intellectual qualities of 16th century Mannerist art to a visceral appeal aimed at the senses. It employed an iconography that was direct, simple, obvious, and dramatic.  Nothing did this better than magnificent cathedrals or such sensual sculptures as Prometheus.

Baroque art drew on certain broad and heroic tendencies in Annibale Caracci and his circle, and found inspiration in other artists like Correggio, Caravaggio and Federico Barocci, whose works are sometimes termed 'proto-Baroque'.

A defining statement of what Baroque is provided by the series of paintings executed by Peter Paul Rubens for Marie de Medici at the Luxembourg Palace in Paris (now at the Louvre), in which a Catholic painter satisfied a Catholic patron:

On display was the Baroque conception of the monarchy, iconography, and the handling of paint, exploring new dimensions of compositions in the depiction of space and movement.

Representative of this Baroque art is Bernini's "Saint Theresa in Ecstasy" for the Cornaro chapel in S. Maria della Vittoria.  The Baroque brings together multiple arts, including sculpture and opera. For a time, the engaging appeal to the senses of Baroque art lifted the church out of its lethargy redirecting its critics away from its pervasive dysfunction.

SURVIVAL IS PREDICATED ON REINVENTION

Any institution, the church included, must sooner or later acknowledge The Second Law of Thermodynamics if it is to survive.  This law of physics deals with a phenomenon known as “entropy,” which is that virtually everything returns to its original state.  That means that “things” go back to elemental forms, which is zero, or more poignantly stated, death.  It is as true of man and of his collective corporate constructions: that is, church, state, society.  To postpone the inevitable calls for constant recreation through reinvention.

This reinvention is sometimes referred to as “negative entropy,” or constant recreating or reinvigorating the organization or corporate body by finding new ways of doing old things. This was the intended function of the Council of Trent in 1545.

Reinvention continues to occur to our day.  It nearly failed in the Fifth Age of the Church for the lack of imagination but for the Renaissance.

The church went beyond the theological to embrace the counterculture of the Renaissance for its purposes and survival.  The papacy incorporated Renaissance art, architecture, music and everything Baroque including dress, manner, pomp and circumstance, ritual and rites of passage into the renewed identity of Roman Catholicism.  Thus church survival was predicated on Renaissance humanism and the spirit of Catholic tradition for its revival.

That said the most distinctive feature of this Baroque period was not the Tridentine Reforms, or things Baroque, but Catholic mysticism, which was a another form of Catholicism, but also escape from pressing reality.

Nietzsche would claim in the nineteenth century that “God was dead!"  In the seventeenth century, God was not dead but was thriving in this Catholic mysticism.  The secularism that the German philosopher was referencing was however on the horizon. 

Christian mysticism refers to the development of mystical practices and theory within Christianity. It has often been connected to mystical theology, especially in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions.  The attributes and means by which Christian mysticism is studied and practiced are varied and range from ecstatic visions of the soul's mystical union with God to simple prayerful contemplation of Holy Scripture.

With the Renaissance came the Protestant Reformation, which in many ways downplayed mysticism, although it still produced a fair amount of spiritual literature. Even the most active reformers can be linked to medieval mystical traditions.

Martin Luther, for instance, was influenced by the German Dominican mystical tradition of Eckhart and Tauler as well by the Dionysian influenced ("essence mysticism") tradition. Luther also published the Theologia Germanica, which he believed was the most important book after the Bible.  He credit St. Augustine for teaching him about God, Christ, and humanity.

Even John Calvin, who rejected many medieval ascetic practices and who favored doctrinal knowledge of God over experience of the affect, had medieval influence such as, Jean Gerson’s Devotio Moderna, with its emphasis on piety as the method of spiritual growth.  This involved practiced dependence on God by imitating Christ and the son-father relationship. Meanwhile, Calvin's notion that we can enjoy our eternal salvation through our earthly successes would lead in later generations to "a mysticism of consolation."

Alas, the relevance and survival of the church proved too closely identified with and dependent on the success of Catholic monarchies, such as the Hapsburgs, which were in decline.  The church read the tea leaves correctly in the first instance getting on the Baroque bandwagon, but misread the rise of individualism, the precipitous decline of the feudal system, or the meteoric rise of capitalism and free enterprise as the Baroque culture faded with the social cataclysm of the French Revolution (1789).  This swept away the established order of the church, state and European society as it was known.

Monasteries and universities were destroyed, church property confiscated, and the pope himself deported to France as a political prisoner.  In the eyes of the secular man of the day, the Catholic Church had been all but abolished, a relic of a dead past. 


ANATOMY OF THE UNRAVELING

At the outbreak of the French Revolution, Pius VI (1775 -1799) witnessed the suppression of the old Galican Church, the confiscation of pontifical and ecclesiastical possessions in France, and was burned in effigy by the Parisians at the Palais Royal.

In 1796, French Republican troops under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Italy, defeated the papal troops and occupied Ancona and Loreto. Pius VI sued for peace, which was granted at Tolentino on February 19, 1797.

But on December 28 of that year, in a riot blamed by papal forces on some Italian and French revolutionists, the popular brigadier-general Mathurin-Léonard Duphot, who had gone to Rome with Joseph Bonaparte as part of the French embassy, was killed and a new pretext was furnished for invasion. General Berthier marched into Rome, entered it unopposed on February 10, 1798, proclaiming a Roman Republic, demanded of the pope the renunciation of his temporal authority.

Upon the pope’s refusal, he was taken prisoner, and on February 20 was escorted from the Vatican to Siena, and thence to the Certosa near Florence. The French declaration of war against Tuscany led to his removal to Drôme, France where he died six weeks after his arrival, on August 29, 1799, having then reigned longer than any pope.

Pius VI's body was embalmed, but was not buried until 30 January 1800 after Napoleon saw political advantage to burying the deceased Pope in efforts to bring the Catholic Church back into France. His entourage insisted for some time that his last wishes were to be buried in Rome, then behind the Austrian lines. They also prevented a Constitutional bishop from presiding at the burial, as the laws of France then required, so no burial service was held.

This return of the investiture conflict was settled by the Concordat of 1801. Pius VI's body was removed from Valence on December 24, 1801 and buried at Rome February 19, 1802, when Pius VI was given a Catholic funeral, attended by Pope Pius VII.


The Sixth Age of the Church

The sixth age began in the atmosphere of defeat and disaster.  Everything had to be rebuilt from the foundation.  The religious orders and monasteries, the spine of church courage and resolve, the Catholic universities and foreign missions, the phalanxes of its influence, but worst of all, the church’s veritable identity was now associated with unpopular causes.  The church once controlled the mainstream, but now found itself outside that power center.

Yet, the church did recover.  A church revival took place in the nineteenth century finding the church by 1850 to be far stronger than it had been a hundred years before.  This revival captured the spiritual interest or fueled its renewal in the life of a church from the level of the congregation to the wider society, with a local, national and global impact.

This church revivalism should be distinguished from the use of the term "revival," which is more closely associated with evangelistic meetings or activities.

Revivalism is more often viewed traditionally as a Protestant phenomenon, but it was also a central feature of Catholic life and activity in the 19th century. It suggests that the religion of revivalism not only found a home among Catholics, but was a major force in forming their piety movement (Dolan 1979).  Since it was wider and more pervasive among Protestant denominations, comments are limited to the phenomenon in those churches.

Revivals are seen as the restoration of the church itself to a vital and fervent relationship with God after a period of moral decline. Mass conversions of non-believers are viewed by church leaders as having positive moral effects.

Within Christian studies, the concept of revival is derived from biblical narratives of national decline and restoration during the history of the Israelites. In particular, narrative accounts of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah emphasize periods of national decline and revival associated with the rule of various righteous and wicked kings.

Ancient Judea historian Josiah writes of how revivalism reinstituted temple worship of Yahweh while destroying pagan worship. Within modern church history, historians have identified and debated the effects of various national revivals within the history of the USA, Europe and other countries.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American society experienced a number of "Awakenings." In the twentieth century, revivals included those of the 1904–1905 Welsh Revival, 1906 (Azusa Street Revival), 1930s (Balokole), 1970s (Jesus people) and 1909 Chile Revival which spread into the Americas, Africa, and Asia among both Protestant and Catholic missionary outposts.

Many Christian revivals drew inspiration from the missionary work of early monks, from the Protestant Reformation to Catholic Counter Reformation, and from the uncompromising stance of the Covenanters in 17th century Scotland and Ulster, who came to Virginia and Pennsylvania with Presbyterians to other non-conformists.

The Covenanters were a Scottish Presbyterian movement that played an important part in the history of Scotland, and to a lesser extent that of England and Ireland during the seventeenth century.  Presbyterian denominations tracing their history to the Covenanters and often incorporating the name continue the ideas and traditions in Scotland and internationally. 

They derive their name from the term “covenant” after the covenant sworn by Israel in the Old Testament.  There were two important covenants in Scottish history, the National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant.

The spirit of revivalism and its characteristics also formed part of the mental framework that led to the American War of Independence and the Civil War.

The 18th century Age of Enlightenment had a chilling effect on spiritual movements, but this was countered by the aggressive Methodist revivalism of John Wesley, Charles Wesley and George Whitefield in England and Daniel Rowland, Howel Harris and William Williams, Pantycelyn in Wales and the Great American Awakening prior to the American Revolution. A similar (but smaller scale) revival in Scotland took place at Cambuslang, then a village and is known as the Cambuslang Work.

A new fervor spread within the Anglican Church at the end of the 18th century, when the Evangelical party of John Newton, William Wilberforce and his Clapham sect were inspired to combat social ills at home and slavery abroad, and founded Bible and missionary societies.

In the American colonies, the First Great Awakening was a wave of religious enthusiasm among Protestants that swept the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American religion. It resulted from powerful preaching that deeply affected listeners (already church members) with a deep sense of personal guilt and salvation by Christ.

Pulling away from ritual and ceremony, the Great Awakening made religion intensely personal to the average person by creating a deep sense of spiritual guilt and redemption. Historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom sees it as part of a "great international Protestant upheaval" that also created Pietism in Germany, the Evangelical Revival and Methodism in England.

It brought Christianity to the slaves and was an apocalyptic event in New England that challenged established authority. It incited rancor and division between the old traditionalists who insisted on ritual and doctrine and the new revivalists.

It had a major impact in reshaping the Congregational, Presbyterian, Dutch Reform, and German Reform denominations, and strengthened the small Baptist and Methodist denominations. It had little impact on Anglicans and Quakers. Unlike the Second Great Awakening that began about 1800 and which reached out to the unchurched, the First Great Awakening focused on people who were already church members. It changed their rituals, their piety, and their self-awareness.

The new style of sermons and the way people practiced their faith breathed new life into religion in America. People became passionately and emotionally involved in their religion, rather than passively listening to intellectual discourse in a detached manner. Ministers who used this new style of preaching were generally called "new lights," while the preachers of old were called "old lights." People began to study the Bible at home, which effectively decentralized the means of informing the public on religious matters and was akin to the individualistic trends present in Europe during the Protestant Reformation.


Nineteenth Century Revivalism

The Hungarian Baptist church sprung out of revival with the perceived liberalism of the Hungarian reform church during the late 1800s. Many thousands of people were baptized in a revival that was led primarily by uneducated laymen, the so-called "peasant prophets."

During the 18th century England saw a series of Methodist revivalist campaigns that stressed the tenets of faith set forth by John Wesley and that were conducted in accordance with a careful strategy. In addition to stressing the evangelist combination of "Bible, Cross, Conversion, and Activism," the revivalist movement of the 19th century made efforts toward a universal appeal – rich and poor, urban and rural, and men and women. Special efforts were made to attract children and to generate literature to spread the revivalist message.

England did not undergo a social revolution in the period 1790 – 1832, a time that appeared ripe for violent social upheaval.  Apparently, a politically conservative Methodism forestalled revolution among the largely uneducated working class by redirecting its energies toward spiritual rather than temporal affairs.

The thesis has engendered strong debate among historians, and several have adopted and modified this thesis. Some historians suggest that evangelical revivalism directed working-class attention toward moral regeneration, not social radicalism. Others claim that Methodism, though a small movement, had a politically regressive effect on efforts for reform; that Methodism was not a large enough movement to have been able to prevent revolution, implying antiradicalism has been misunderstood, arguing instead that it was a socially deviant movement and the majority of Methodists were moderate radicals.

Early in the 19th century the Scottish minister Thomas Chalmers had an important influence on the evangelical revival movement. Chalmers began life as a moderate in the Church of Scotland and an opponent of evangelicalism. During the winter of 1803 – 1804, he presented a series of lectures that outlined a reconciliation of the apparent incompatibility between the Genesis account of creation and the findings of the developing science of time, geology.

However, by 1810 he had become an evangelical and would eventually lead the Disruption of 1843 that resulted in the formation of the Free Church of Scotland.

The Plymouth Brethren started with John Nelson Darby at this time, a result of disillusionment with denominationalism and clerical hierarchy.

The established churches too, were influenced by the evangelical revival. In 1833, a group of Anglican clergymen led by John Henry Newman and John Keble began the Oxford Movement. Its objective, however, was to renew the Church of England by reviving certain Roman Catholic doctrines and rituals, thus distancing themselves as far as possible from evangelical enthusiasm.

Many say that Australia has never been visited by a genuine religious revival as in other countries, but that is not entirely true. The effect of the Great Awakening of 1858 -1859 was also felt in Australia fostered mainly by the Methodist Church, one of the greatest forces for evangelism and missions the world has ever seen.

Records show that the Methodist Church grew by a staggering 72 percent between 1857 and 1864, while the Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians and other evangelicals also benefited.  Evangelical fervor was its height during the 1920s with visiting evangelists, R.A. Torrey, Wilbur J Chapman, Charles M Alexander and others winning many converts in their Crusades.

The Crusades of American evangelist Billy Graham in the 1950s had significant impact on Australian Churches.  Stuart Piggin (1988) explores the development and tenacity of the evangelical movement in Australia, and its impact on Australian society.

Evangelicalism arrived from Britain as an already mature movement characterized by commonly shared attitudes toward doctrine, spiritual life, and sacred history. To set the history of the movement in Australia to a certain period calls for examination of the role of revivalism and its oscillation between emphases on personal holiness and social concerns.

The revival movements in Scandinavia require special attention to the growth of organizations, church history, missionary history, social class and religion, women in religious movements, religious geography, the lay movements as a counterculture, ethnology, and the social forces at work.

Some historians approach Scandinavia as a cult process since the revivalist movements tend to rise and fall over time without particular distinction. Others study it as minority discontent as expressed by Scandinavians with the status quo.  For once the revivalists gain wide acceptance, the majority tend to impose their own standards.  For example, the
Grundtvigian and Home Mission revival movements arose in Denmark after 1860 and reshaped religion in that country, and among immigrants to America.

In the United States, the Second Great Awakening (1800 – 1830s) was the second great religious revival in United States history and consisted of renewed personal salvation experienced in revival meetings. Major leaders included Asahel Nettleton, James Brainerd Taylor, Charles Grandison Finney, Lyman Beecher, Barton Stone, Alexander Campbell, Peter Cartwright and James B. Finley.

Rev. Charles Finney (1792 – 1875) was a key leader of the evangelical revival movement in America. From 1821 onward, he conducted revival meetings across many north-eastern states and won many converts. For him, a revival was not a miracle but a change of mindset that was ultimately a matter for the individual's free will.

His revival meetings created anxiety in a penitent's mind that one could only save his or her soul by submission to the will of God, as illustrated by Finney's quotations from the Bible. Finney also conducted revival meetings in England, first in 1849 and later to England and Scotland in 1858 – 1859.

In New England, the renewed interest in religion inspired a wave of social activism, including abolitionism. In western New York, the spirit of revival encouraged the emergence of new Christian denominations such as the Latter Day Saint Movement (including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Community of Christ), and movements such as the Restorationist and the Holiness Movement.

In the West (now Upper South) especially Kentucky and Tennessee, the revival strengthened the Methodists and Baptists. The Churches of Christ and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) arose from the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement. It also introduced into America a new form of religious expression, the Scottish camp meeting.

A movement in Swiss, eastern French, German, and Dutch Protestant history known as le Réveil (German: die Erweckung, Dutch: Het Reveil).  Le Réveil was a revival of Protestant Christianity along conservative evangelical lines at a time when rationalism had taken a strong hold in the churches on the continent of Europe.

In German-speaking Europe Lutheran Johann Georg Hamann (1730 –1788) was a leading light in the new wave of evangelicalism, the Erweckung, which spread across the land, cross fertilizing with British movements. 

The movement began in the Francophone world in connection with a circle of pastors and seminarians at French-speaking Protestant theological seminaries in Geneva, Switzerland and Montauban, France, influenced by the visit of Scottish Christian Robert Haldane in 1816 Р1817. The circle included such figures as Merle D'Aubigne, C̩sar Malan, Felix Neff, and the Monod brothers.

As these men traveled out, the movement spread to Lyon and Paris in France, to Berlin and Eberfeld in Germany and to the Netherlands. Several missionary societies were founded to support this work, such as the British based Continental Society and the indigenous Geneva Evangelical Society.

As well as supporting existing Protestant denominations, in France and Germany the movement led to the creation of Free Evangelical Church groupings: the Union des Églises évangéliques libres and Bund Freier evangelischer Gemeinden in Deutschland.

In the Netherlands, the movement was taken forward by Willem Bilderdijk, with Isaäc da Costa, Abraham Capadose, Samuel Iperusz Wiselius, Willem de Clercq and Groen van Prinsterer as his pupils. The movement was politically influential and actively involved in improving society.  At the end of the 19th century, it brought about anti-revolutionary and Christian historical parties.  At the same time in Great Britain, figures such as William Wilberforce and Thomas Chalmers were active, although they are not considered to be part of the Le Reveil movement.

From 1850 to 1900, in North America, the Third Great Awakening began from 1857 onward in Canada and spread throughout the world including America and Australia. Significant names include Dwight L. Moody, Ira D. Sankey, William Booth and Catherine Booth (founders of the Salvation Army), Charles Spurgeon and James Caughey. Hudson Taylor began the China Inland Mission and Thomas John Barnardo founded his famous orphanages.

Representative was Rev. James Caughey, an American sent by the Wesleyan Methodist Church to Canada from the 1840s through 1864. He brought in the converts by the score, most notably in the revivals in Canada West 1851 - 1853.

His technique combined restrained emotionalism with a clear call for personal commitment, coupled with follow-up action to organize support from converts. It was a time when the Holiness Movement caught fire, with the revitalized interest of men and women in Christian perfection. Caughey successfully bridged the gap between the style of earlier camp meetings and the needs of more sophisticated Methodist congregations in the emerging cities.

In England, the Keswick Convention movement began out of the British Holiness movement, encouraging a lifestyle of holiness, unity and prayer.  Subsequently the period 1880–1903 has been described as a period of unusual evangelistic effort and success, and again sometimes more of a "resurgence" of the previous wave.

Moody, Sankey and Spurgeon are again notable names. Others included Sam Jones, J. Wilber Chapman and Billy Sunday in North America, Andrew Murray in South Africa, William Irvine in Ireland, and John McNeil in Australia. The Faith Mission began in 1886.

On September 21, 1857, Jeremiah Lanphier, a businessman, began a series of prayer meetings in New York. By the beginning of 1858 the congregation was crowded, often with a majority of businessmen.

Newspapers reported that over 6,000 were attending various prayer meetings in New York, and 6,000 in Pittsburgh. Daily prayer meetings were held in Washington, D.C. at five different times to accommodate the crowds. Other cities followed the pattern. Soon, a common midday sign on business premises read, "We will reopen at the close of the prayer meeting." By May, 50,000 of New York's 800,000 people were new converts.

In 1857, four young Irishmen began a weekly prayer meeting in the village of Connor near Ballymena. This meeting is generally regarded as the origin of the 1859 Ulster Revival that swept through most of the towns and villages though out Ulster and in due course brought 100,000 converts into the churches. It was also ignited by a young preacher, Henry Grattan Guinness, who drew thousands at a time to hear his preaching.

So great was the interest in the American movement that in 1858 the Presbyterian General Assembly meeting in Derry appointed two of their ministers, Dr. William Gibson and Rev. William McClure to visit North America. Upon their return the two deputies had many public opportunities to bear testimony to what they had witnessed of the remarkable outpouring of the Spirit across the Atlantic, and to fan the flames in their homeland yet further.

Such was the strength of emotion generated by the preachers' oratory that many made spontaneous confessions seeking to be relieved of their burdens of sin. Others suffered complete nervous breakdown.


Twentieth Century Revivalism

The 20th century Final Great Awakening (1904 onward) had its roots in the holiness movement which had developed in the late 19th century. The Pentecostal revival movement began, out of a passion for more power and a greater outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

In 1902 the American evangelists Reuben Archer Torrey and Charles McCallon Alexander conducted meetings in Melbourne, Australia, resulting in more than 8,000 converts. News of this revival travelled fast, igniting a passion for prayer and an expectation that God would work in similar ways elsewhere. 

Torrey and Alexander were involved in the beginnings of the great Welsh revival (1904). In 1906, the modern Pentecostal movement was born in Azusa Street, in Los Angeles (see Wikipedia, “Christian Revival").


Catholic Revivalism

Protestant revivalism, as we have seen, had an energy and fire, you might even say a kind of rage that propelled it from one success to another, breaking new ground and experimenting along the way to a new sense of focus and purpose.

Catholicism, on the other hand, especially American Catholicism, appears strangely similar to the ground zero stage of Christianity in the time of Jesus and the Apostle Paul.  Peter and Paul ventured into a primarily urban type of society with most of the people clustered in cosmopolitan urban centers.

Christianity, over the years, including during and after the Protestant Reformation, became firmly rooted in the peasant population which was often if not primarily rural.  As many of those from the peasant class became transplanted to urban centers in the United States with the Industrial Revolution.  American Catholicism likewise adjusted its missionary zeal to essentially urban centers where most rural peasants lived in urban ghettos.


Pause to Reflect

The reason for writing this tract on The Six Ages of the Church was not so much to dwell on the historical reality but to read some of the organizational changes that were essential to these spiritual trends.  At the heart of them all was a new sense of organizational life.  Demonstrable as well is that Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular has never been able to remain static or rest on its laurels but has has to continually generate positive energy to combat encroaching negative entropy in order to survive.  In that sense, Christianity and Catholicism are evolutionary movements.

Apostle Paul, although putting in place a somewhat rudimentary organization, sociologist Max Weber would applaud Paul's sagacity to read the spiritual needs of his time introducing and disseminating an appealing theology to catch the attention and devotion of the masses (Weber 1944).

Inherent in Apostle Paul’s efforts in those early days of the Christian church was a strategy that allowed maximum flexibility and latitude for ingenuity and improvisation.  The many sects of Christianity that have failed to be so prudent have faded into history. 

Even so, Christianity has done some stupid and crassly immoral things that have threatened her survival.  There was the tenth century's Pornocracy or the Rule of the Prostitutes/Rule of the Harlots or more politely stated the Saeculum obscurum (Latin for the Dark Age) with the debauchery commencing in the reign of Pope Sergius III in 904 and lasting until 963.

Three hundred years later there was the Avignon Papacy (1309 - 1377), where a plethora of popes, antipopes or would-be-popes including a possible Pope Joan would grace the papacy for nearly a century.  Small wonder there was the Protestant Reformation.

Despite pervasive criticism of the church’s rigid structural hierarchy and the laity’s desire for limits on church dogma and papal infallibility, little has changed in the twenty-first century Catholic Church.

The Roman Curia still reigns supreme, which lacks transparency and accountability or seemingly papal control, as scandals continue to surface involving money laundering, financial corruption, malfeasance, spy gates, assassination plots, and clerical misconduct.  Meanwhile, more than a billion souls claim to be Roman Catholics, the majority in Third World nations.

The church has demonstrated an amazing capacity to survive scandals, change directions, cut her losses and continue seemingly without losing her momentum.  Weber sees this as a manifestation of the girth of her bureaucracy that has accumulated over twenty centuries becoming nearly an impossible to barrier to destroy (Weber 1954).

Does the church have a conscience?  Current Pope Francis I, as we have noted, is the moral physician who is working on the prognosis to prescribe the treatment, as there is no apparent cure.  On balance, as Apostle Paul in his ministry demonstrated, the church’s dedication is to survive and to do end doing whatever it takes.  Roman Catholicism is a political entity; her mission is a theological one, which as we have seen in this survey is often placed on the back burner.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY: SIX AGES OF THE CHURCH

W. A. Billy Sunday, Useful Quotations: A Cyclopedia of Quotations, Tryon Edwards, Grosset & Dunlap, 1933, p. 82

Ibid, Robert Andrew, p. 82

Ibid, Cardinal James Gibbons, p. 82

Ibid, Willard L. Speey, p. 82

E. R. Chamberlin, The Bad Popes, Barnes & Noble, 1969, pp. 77-123.  Benedict Gaetani, Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) was known as “the Lord of Europe.”  The other six bad popes were popes John XII (955-963), Benedict IX (1032-1046), Urban VI (1378-1389), Alexander VI (1492-1503), Leo X (1513-1521) and Clement VII (1523-1534).

Surprisingly missing in Chamberlin’s listings are Sergius III (904-911), Anastasius III (911-913), Lando ( 913-914), John X (914-928), Leo VI (928), Stephen VII (VIII) (228-931), John XI (931-935), Leo VII (936-939), Stephen VIII (IX) (939-942), Marinus II (942-946), Agapitus II (946-955), John XII (955-964). 

It is during this sixty year period that the Church slipped seriously into the embarrassing abuses that was known as “The Rule of the Harlots in Rome” (904-964), as the tenth century papacy of the Roman Catholic Church fell under the influence of harlots in an era termed Pornocracy or the Rule of the Prostitutes/Rules of the Harlots, but was politely known as Saeculum obscurum (Latin for the Dark Age),  It began in 904 with the installation of Pope Sergius III who was completely under the control of Theodora, the beautiful wife of Roman consul Theophylactus, who used sex to wield power.

S. M. Miller, Max Weber, Selections from his Work, Thomas Y. Crowell Col, 1963, pp. 59-82.

Omer Englebert, Lives of the Saints, Barnes & Noble, 1994, p. 218 (St. Boniface); Boniface I and Boniface IV, (St. Boniface) Wikipedia; E. R. Chamberlin, The Bad Popes, Barnes & Noble, 1969, (Pope Boniface VIII) pp. 75-123; Richard P. McBrien, Lives of the Popes, HarperSanFranciso, 1997 (St. Pope Boniface I), pp. 68-69; (St. Pope Boniface IV), pp. 99-100.

Will Durant, The Renaissance: History of Civilization from 1304-1576 A.D., Simon & Schuster, 1953, (Charlemagne) pp. 261, 271, 374, 450 (Charlemagne) Wikipedia.

Christopher Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture, Harper Torchstone, 1960, p. 54 (quote of Pope Gregory VII).

Op. Cit., McBrien: Pope Gregory VII, pp. (multiple); Wikipedia; Will Durant, The Age of Faith: History of Medieval Civilization – Christian, Islamic, and Judaic – from Constantine to Dante: A.D. 325-1300, (Pope Gregory VII), pp. (multiple).

Ibid, McBrien, (Pope Innocent III), pp. (multiple).

Will Durant, The Reformation, History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564, Simon & Shuster, 1957, (Wycliffe), pp. 26-57.

Catholic Encyclopedia (Great Schism of 1378 – Avignon Papacy (Internet)

Avignon Papacy (Wikipedia); Great Western Schism – Cause & Effect (Wikipedia).

Op. Cit., Durant, Renaissance – Council of Trent, pp. (multiple), Tridentine Reform (Wikipedia).

Encyclopedia Britannica – Baroque Art & Architecture; Baroque Styles & Movements (Wikipedia).

Will and Ariel Durant, Rousseau and Revolution: History of Civilization in France, England and Germany from 1756, and in the Remainder of Europe 1715-1789, Simon & Schuster, 1967, (Collapse of Feudal France), pp. (multiple).

Christian Revivalism (Wikipedia).

Stuart Piggin, "Toward A Bicentennial History of Australian Evangelicalism," Journal of Religious History, Feb 1988, Vol. 15 Issue 1, pp 20–37

Catholic Revivalism (Wikipedia).

Op. Cit., Miller (Weber), pp. 75-82.

Op. Cit., Duffy, pp. 11-13.

GENERAL REFERENCE

Nicholai Berdyaev, Christian Existentialism, Harper Torchstone, 1965.

Gustave Weigel, Catholic Theology in dialogue, Harper Torchstone, 1960.

N. R. Wilders, An Introduction to Teilhard de Chardin, Harper & Row, 1968

Stanford M. Lyman, Seven Deadly Sins, St. Martin Press, 1978 

Jay P. Dolan, Catholic Revivalism, University of Notre Dame Press, 1979 

Patrick Madrid, Holy Apostles College (essay on Catholic Revivalism)

Paul Johnson, Jesus: A Biography from a Believer, Viking, 2010.

Michael Baigent, The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.

James Cleugh, Love Locked Out: A survey of love licence and restriction in the Middle Ages, Spring Books, 1963.

A. N. Wilson, Jesus: A Life, W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.