I would like to defend the so-called, the self-styled, the soi-disant, “gender pay-gap.”  I realize this is an impossible task, and not just because the gap does not exist.  I would defend it even if it did exist, for, like Santa Clause, I believe it did exist at one time.  In order to criticize the pay-gap, we must criticize millions of people who led better lives than we lead.  We foolish moderns criticizes them because, “slavery”.  Like most of our idiotic thinking, we insert one sarcastic, arrogant word, for millions of well thought out arguments.  But the fact is they, our Christian ancestors, created a culture in which marriage was sacred, divorce was hard, virginity was prized and men where encouraged to fight for their families in war and in work.  The pay-gap encouraged all of these things.  Women more dependent on men are more likely to say with a man in marriage, than to float around on their own.  When marriage is seen as the only good way for men and women to live together virginity is more prized, you put on your best self when the alternative is poor spinsterhood.  When men have a women, their woman, standing by them, amazing things happen.  They create whole new civilizations and wipe out tremendous evils.  It took a long time to erect this edifice and we are all the beneficiaries of their work.  But the feminists had a different agenda, so they attacked this edifice.  And after a few generations of feminists making the pay-gap argument, where are we?  Are we better off?  I don’t think so.  The pay gap did not favor men unfairly it favored families over the individual.  This was attacked, in order to foster all the “-isms”, the individual must be supreme, institutions like the family must be broken down. 

Who wouldn’t rather complain about their boss than sacrifice to raise impressive kids?

Today the family is in shambles.  Laws are written to undermine the family in favor of the individual and radical egalitarianism.  The worst part is Christians going along with all this.  Do you really think that undermining the family in favor of some sort of radical equality is what Scripture is about?  Do you really think that “he made them male and female” means “we are all the same in every way” .  Well the sad result is this video. Men are playing video games and committing suicide.  Is this ok because women are now ‘equal’ and ‘advancing’?  Is it ok that families no longer stick together? It seems like most people don’t care, most Christians don’t care, and even most Churches don’t care.  Caring will get funny looks from everyone who matters in this world.  Caring will get you kicked out of the clique.  So it’s easier to sit back and go with the flow, even though we are about to go over the fourth waterfall to yet  worse fate.

The sad reality is that no one is home raising the children.  The women are all of pretending their careers are their children, and we all suffer from the tyranny they build.  G. K. Chesterton expounds on this idea in his wonderful book What’s Wrong With the World:

“But though the essential of the woman’s task is universality, this does not, of course, prevent her from having one or two severe though largely wholesome prejudices.  She has, on the whole, been more conscious than man that she is only one half of humanity; but she has expressed it (if one may say so of a lady) by getting her teeth into the two or three things which she thinks she stands for. I would observe here in parenthesis that much of the recent official trouble about women has arisen from the fact that they transfer to things of doubt and reason that sacred stubbornness only proper to the primary things which a woman was set to guard. One’s own children, one’s own altar, ought to be a matter of principle– or if you like, a matter of prejudice.  On the other hand, who wrote Junius’s Letters ought not to be a principle or a prejudice, it ought to be a matter of free and almost indifferent inquiry. But take an energetic modern girl secretary to a league to show that George III wrote Junius, and in three months she will believe it, too, out of mere loyalty to her employers. Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well; and that is why they ought not to do it.”

Can we honestly say that the world needs more professional women enforcing arbitrary rules and regulations as if we were all their children?  Do we have an excess of stellar young people?  Women must put their effort in one or the other.   The problem of the Millennial is almost universally attested, no one disagrees that the stereotypes are true.  Young people have no respect for anything, often including themselves, and certainly for their elders and their progeny.  Children have become an Instagram accessory, and the proof is in the pudding.  You can’t talk to these people, rely on these people or teach these people anything.  They are a heard cowering at the smallest obstacle.  And this is the fruit of the feminist movement.  These people would lose World War II if it were fought today, even if we could take our technology back and fight the Axis powers of 1940.  That is if we would even fight.  I doubt we would have the guts.  As is proven by our inability even to endure current drone wars.

Now the mess we find ourselves in is deeper by the minute.  It will take generations to rebuild.  But we must start the work immediately.  We must begin to see the roles of men and women as our Christian ancestors did.  They worked their fingers to the bone attempting to make a better world for their children, by following the Biblical commands as best they could.  Their success has become our greatest liability, because we have chosen to coast on their efforts.  Or worse destroy them because we are ignorant of the past and only care about making friends with this evil world.

Paying heads of household more money, encourages men to step up and take positions in the work force and it encourages women to stay home. It is a good idea.  It has been tried and tested, it works.  Our current experiment with radical egalitarianism has failed.  Why keep going down this road?  Do you really want to see a next generation so lame that even millennials make fun of it?  Or more likely, an entire country taken over without a fight by China?

Oh you will object that making women subject to men will encourage women to be abused.  But women are already abused, far more so than the vibrant Christian culture of the past.  Every women is passed around in the dating world like a common prostitute, accumulating baggage at every stop until she finally dumps it all on the last guy and her 1.2 designer millennials.  Women hit 40 and realize they missed out on the most important things by not having kids.  Twenty to thirty percent of these women are on anti-depressants, many trying to run away from the horrors of their abortions.  Abortions performed to facilitate this career-over-family insanity.

I have made many cultural arguments, because this is more of a cultural issue.  Most of humanity has had no problem figuring this out.  The realities of premodern life revealed the reality that women are the weaker sex far more blatantly than our mechanized world is willing to admit.  Even in the 50’s before power steering women were far more limited in where they could go and what they could do.  They simply couldn’t operate a car in many normal circumstances, to say nothing of the many problems that could arise.  There were breakdowns, wrecks, nefarious characters, inclement weather and wild animals.  And these are just the travails of travel, one aspect of life.

Paul speaks of women as the “weaker vessel” to Peter(I Peter 3:7), and does not have to explain himself.  Everyone knew what he means.  Let’s talk about the amazing fact that he tells men not to take advantage of their situation and neglect their wives.  He even says God will not listen to their prayers if they don’t consider their wives properly.  This is the Christian ideal and it has been lived out more and more faithfully, culminating in the early days of this country.  But the feminists deride this type of honor as they separate women from their children, with scalpals and the lure of the office.

I just can’t imagine Jesus showing up in 1968 and telling the Church that the main problem is that there aren’t more women in the work force.  You can tell because when he created them male and female he made women to love babies, to nurture babies, and to want to stay home with their babies.  It’s built in.  And every example to the contrary is gut wrenching evil.  Despite generations of lies being fed to us these facts are still born out even in our culture.  When given the choice, women go into fields dealing with people and children, like nursing, teaching and the social ‘sciences’.  Men go into the fields dealing with things, engineering, construction and the hard sciences.  Jesus isn’t going to encourage anyone to send their children to a mass education plant run by the government, so that their mothers can go to work.  Which is why he gave us these natural impulses and his Word.  Which is very clear, don’t fraternize with the evil world, stay separate, raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord(Eph. 6:4), teach them as you walk, sit, stand, work, eat, and every other time to follow the commands of God(Deut. 11:19).  If you don’t—Millennials.

Paying women less does not mean that women are worth less as humans, because working and making money are not the most important things in life.  If only we didn’t worship our work, and money, if instead we valued vibrant family and Church life, this wouldn’t be an issue.  But we have followed the followers of Marx too far, in making the worker-employee relationship the highest that there is.  Instead of realizing that there is evil in the world because of sin, and that the solution is the Gospel of Jesus the Christ. We try to fix the world by  fixing the problems of the workingman.  And so we have a whole country of Neo Christian Marxists complaining about their jobs on social media, instead of pushing back the Darkness and spreading the Light to the entire word.  Rats crawling over each other to get the next career, instead of servants pouring themselves out to tell the whole world the Good News:  Jesus conquered Sin and Death, to make peace with all men.  Your career isn’t going to make you happy, and you wife’s career isn’t going to make you, her or the next generation happy.  It does make Planned Parenthood happy, however.  Your career isn’t the purpose of your life, your life is to serve God.  And sex isn’t the purpose of marriage, it’s to be fruitful and produce Godly offspring.  And we need to start building a culture which does this, right away.  There are more than enough professional psychologists fighting for  their desks, as they peddle more products to our children which rot their brains and their teeth.  We have plenty of female statisticians enslaving us with more rules and regulations in the name of safety.  How about becoming a mom and saving the world?

A wise woman builds her home,
but a foolish woman tears it down with her own hands.
–Proverbs 14:1

So this was concering this nut job Arthur J. Jones, who was running for congress in Illinois’s 3rd District.  He became the Republican candidate unopposed, because normal people wouldn’t bother running.  It’s a Big City district, in the most corrupt state in the Union, run by Democrats, Republicans don’t stand a chance.  Of course he lost getting only 28.8% of the vote.  But I think the unclear, muddle of accusations about ‘Nazi’ and ‘Nationalist’ are important points.

It’s so hard to source these things. This seems to be a collaborative effort by at least three people. So we’ll just chalk it up to the internet.

I am wondering how the thinking goes here.  Though it is probably impossible to get anyone to think about this, I am going to try.  I know it is much easier to just label things you don’t like and run away or attack them.  And if you get enough people with minds similarly closed, you can live a quiet, successful life in your bubble.  But I’m going for it anyway. If you are already upset, just call me a racist and move on.

First of all, I was unable to find any links to this guy’s website.  It seems people would rather characterize, most likely mischaracterize, him than to mock his ideas for what they actually are, insane.  He says he’s not a Nazi why call him a Nazi? It obviously sounds bad.  I’m not sure why it sounds worse to the average American than ‘Communist’, given that they killed far more innocent people. The Russians killed two times more people and the Chinese three times more people than Hitler.  He says he’s not a member of the National Socialist Party.  Who even knew that was a thing?  On the other hand the Communist party in the US is alive and kicking and it’s not so little sister Socialism is thriving.  Socialist Bernie sanders is a hero.  Obama had a number of Communist and Communist sympathizers in his administration.  So it’s not about deaths resulting from poisonous ideologies.  It’s just name calling.

To me the most ridiculous part of what this guy says is his denying the Holocaust.  I’m not sure what the point is when he is clearly blaming the Jews for everything, the same ideas that would logically lead to a Holocaust.  Is the basis of the Jew’s power today the narrative of the Holocaust?  Then why did they enjoy similar power, even in Germany before it?  It’s really a dumb idea.  But since this is so bad why do the liberals sidle up to Holocaust deniers?  Ahmadinejad, a blatant denier, was invited to speak at  Columbia University the Liberal Mecca.  We pretend he is a legitimate member of the UN and allow him and his holocaust agnostic predecessor Rouhani to ramble on for hours there.  Then Obama gives Iran pallets of cash and nuclear weapons.

Ahmadinejad’s position is basically, “there was no holocaust but we want it to happen again”.  Can you get more anti-Semitic?  And that is basically the position of Islam.  It’s fundamentally in the religion laid down by Muhammed.  Muslim nations fought side-by-side with the actual Nazis and they do all they can to kill Jews to this day.  Their fundamental beef with the United States is our support of Israel.  And which political party is it which attacks U.S. support of Israel whenever they can?  Which political party has no problem appointing Muslims to political office in the U.S.?  They not only don’t complain, they cheer as if the diversity gods have showered blessings upon them.  But I do wonder what is there in Islam of any value that is not already in Christianity?  There is nothing good, but there is a lot of evil baggage.  Why all the fawning over anti-semites?  Clearly this is also not the issue with Jones.

So what about white supremacy?  I wonder even about the self contradictory nature of this claim.  A supremacist seems to be a person who says that people with white skin are better, unless they are a Jew.  So we have qualified it to more than being white.  And he seems fine with “Black Christian Patriots, Latino Christian Patriots”. So, it’s not really about skin color.  Everyone knows that, that is ridiculous.  It seems to me that this too is all about name calling.  It’s far easier to call someone a white supremacist than a pro Western Civilizationer.  This notion of basing any belief on skin color is really hard to prove.  As far as I have ever seen, even the craziest supremacist is usually talking about cultural issues and not color.  And the whole notion of seeing things in terms of race is very new.  The term, ‘racist’ only dates back to 1936.  It’s just an ignorant way to make character distinctions.  Before that time groups of people were thought of in terms of tongues or tribes or nations. And of course there was always plenty of hate to go around. I suppose it’s not much of a distinction but hating someone because they are a Hatfield or a Capulet makes more sense than hating them because they are black.   The one religion to cut across these distinctions was Christianity, in stark contrast again to Muhammed and his tribal supremacy religion.  The idea of determining worth based on simple genetic traits comes from Darwin.  The same Darwin praised in front of every school child to this day.  In fact Darwin denying is about the only thing worse than Holocaust denying to today’s Liberal.  And Darwin was what motivated Hitler.  If humans just evolved and it was all about survival of the fittest, then that’s the meaning of life, and we should help nature in this selection process.  In some sense the Germans are the fittest, their GDP is higher than any other European country.  In some sense whites in America are supreme, based on economic or criminal standards. But who cares?  This is only a problem for people who think economic worth or statistical metrics are all that matter on this earth, the materialists.  Again Christians are the only ones with a different answer, a metaphysical answer.  Humans have value because we were created in the image of God.  Today Liberal programs like affirmative action and quotas, are clearly racially motivated.  Rectifying problems based on skin color is just as wrong as blaming people for skin color.  Isn’t subsidizing people because they are black, just another way of saying white people are better?  So again, color is not the issue with this guy.

And finally this guy dared to be against Homosexuality.  Which is actually about the most common view in all of mankind.  Even most of today’s politicians were against it, until a few days ago.  I also can’t help but be reminded of Ahmadinejad being questioned about homosexuality at Columbia.  He said there were no homosexuals in Iran and then asked a student who brought it up, if they knew of any.  Presumably, so he could execute them.  Yet somehow, Liberals find Muslims warm and cuddly.  The fact that Homosexuality was a fundamental part of the actual Nazi party is generally overlooked.  But it’s true.  And the fact that homosexuals were sent to death camps doesn’t make me a liar it just means the house of evil is not divided as you might think.  Does it make any sense that the Jewish George Soros funds Hammas?  Not on the surface but if you look closer, the Hungarian Jew actually participated with the Nazis in confiscation of Jewish property.  His concern for nationality is clearly subservient to his concern for money.  This guy basically funds the Democrat Party.  So it’s no stretch to suggest that homosexuals were rounding up other homosexuals, that type of dominance is exactly what homosexuals do.

So I am wondering what it is that Liberals object to here?  Perhaps some combination of traits thy find acceptable in Soros, Obama’s White House, your average Muslim, Russian Communist, Chinese Communists, Cuba, or Darwinian Atheists,  become evil when mixed together in a certain ratio?  No doubt their real charge against him is that he is not a multiculturalist.  Which is really just the pagan anti-Thological response to the Holocaust.  A response I find quite lame.  They no doubt also object to him being upset at the decline of Christianity and his dislike of the two party system.  They also might object to his criticizing politicians for being lying, cheating, war mongers, who are decadent.  Things which characterize most Democrats.  But I think as always, the line is drawn at Orthodox Christianity.  They hate Jesus and anything associated with him.

Things which are an abomination to God and how many times the concept is repeated in scripture.

Strongs #8441. תּוֹעֵבָה towʿebah, to-ay-baw´; or תֹּעֵבָה tonebah, to-ay-baw´; feminine active participle of 8581; properly, something disgusting (morally), i.e. (as noun) an abhorrence; especially idolatry or (concretely) an idol:—abominable (custom, thing), abomination.

Homosexuality:
Lev. 18:22 You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. Repeated 2 Times

Sexual sins: Anyone can be guilty, does not just apply to God’ chosen people:
Lev. 18:26 But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you 27 (for the people of the land, who were before you, did all of these abominations, so that the land became unclean), X21

Not offering your best:
Deut. 17:1   “You shall not sacrifice to the LORD your God an ox or a sheep in which is a blemish, any defect whatever, for that is an abomination to the LORD your God.

Cross Dressing/Not Acting your Sex:
Deut. 22:5   “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD your God.

Giving money to God that was earned in an evil manner:
Deut. 23:18 You shall not bring the fee of a prostitute or the wages of a dog into the house of the LORD your God in payment for any vow, for both of these are an abomination to the LORD your God. X2

Sending your wife to re-marry, get another’s money, and come back to you:
Deut. 24:4 then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled, for that is an abomination before the LORD.

Dishonest business practices:
Deut. 25:13  “You shall not have in your bag two kinds of weights, a large and a small. 14 You shall not have in your house two kinds of measures, a large and a small. 15 A full and fair weight you shall have, a full and fair measure you shall have, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you. 16 For all who do such things, all who act dishonestly, are an abomination to the LORD your God. X4

Being skilled at evil:
Prov. 3:32
for the devious person is an abomination to the LORD,
but the upright are in his confidence.

Top seven:
Prov. 6:16
There are six things that the LORD hates,
seven that are an abomination to him: X2
17  haughty eyes, a lying tongue, X3
and hands that shed innocent blood,
18  a heart that devises wicked plans, X4
feet that make haste to run to evil,
19  a false witness who breathes out lies,
and one who sows discord among brothers.

Sacrifice by the ungodly:
Prov. 15:8
The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the LORD:
but the prayer of the upright is his delight.(Genesis 4) X3

Those in authority abusing their power:
Prov. 16:12
It is an abomination to kings to commit wickedness:
for the throne is established by righteousness. X2

Praying to God without obeying him:
Prov. 28:9
He that turneth away his ear from hearing the law,
even his prayer shall be abomination.

______________________________________________

Israel Accused of Abmination 53 Times

Jer. 2:7 And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.

______________________________________________

Jesus:
Luke 16:14   The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all these things, and they ridiculed him. ¹⁵ And he said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God.

Revelation, equated with sexual immorality:
Rev. 17:4
The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality. ⁵ And on her forehead was written a name of mystery: Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes and of earth’s abominations.”

Abominations will not enter Heaven:
Rev. 21:27
But nothing unclean will ever enter i[Heaven]t, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.

So let’s say it’s the Wild West and anyone can have whatever weapons they want. It’s like Iran, only perhaps less so because Iran was subsidized by Obama, and the Wild West is more free than Iran. Anyway, that’s what we are supposing here, total free market.But, people are still constrained by monetary limitations. The average middle class family won’t be able to own Nuclear Weapons. But Jeff Bezos could own Nuclear Weapons. Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin could own Nuclear Weapons. And that makes you think; is your ability to monetize a few software tricks really the best way to determine who should have the most weapons? The most power? “That might be dangerous.” “They might hurt people.” But how is this any different from giving them the keys to all information?

Moderns and postmoderns are very good at getting all the minutia of the details correct, but they are not as good at getting the story right.  The Who, What, When and Where are exquisitely laid out and footnoted to perfection but the Why leaves something to be desired.  The element of story is inevitable.  But by chasing those details as they do, the modern often create a story that is the wrong story.  A book review is the story of the story.  It is a suggestion of how a book might interact with you or the general you.  What is Metaxas doing?  What is he trying to do to you?

I am irrevocably in love with C. S. Lewis.  I know his flaws and I know his loves and I want to be his friend and to get into arguments with him.  His final work An Experiment in Criticism, is forever with me.  He teaches us to resist the modern literary temptation to find only ourselves in any given text.  This is not only a fad in our day, it is the established doctrine, of Modern Literary Criticism.  When the Creator God is removed from the equation, all sense of a moral landmark is removed.  Meaning becomes whatever you want it to be.  The Moderns said truth was what made society work best.  The Postmodern says truth is whatever makes you work best.  But Lewis thought this silly.  It really is the definition of narcissism.  And like Narcissus gazing into the mirror and falling in love with himself.  We do the same thing when we gaze into a piece of art, particularly in Lewis’ work, when we gaze into a book.  It is the most natural thing in the world to use a book to reinforce ideas that we like.  To titillate certain grammatical fetishes.  To attack the people we want to attack.  But the highest goal should be to make ourselves better, to get outside of ourselves and to see our situation from another perspective that we might change.

The same thing is true of people.  We can fail to appreciate some of the amazing gifts in another person which could teach us valuable lessons, by simply using another person or imposing ourselves onto them.  And this applies to the writing of biography.  And I believe this is what Metaxas does too much.  I was a little surprised.  I have heard Metaxas speak well of C. S. Lewis.  There is nothing Lewis loved more than the Medieval world.  It was a time before rigid modernism took over.  It was the age of rich stories and metaphors before the machine. Merlin spoke poetry to get what he wanted from the created order, our engineers use science.  But it was not simply that these were the hallmarks of this time but that all times were like this and this was the last one before Modernism put them away.  Luther changed a lot of that, by accident.  And Metaxas takes much of that for granted.  He occasionally mentions it.  That we must put on our thinking caps and try to imagine a time where . . ., to think of a time without. . .  But I don’t think he does a very good job.  Rather than bring us into the Medieval world of Luther he champions the things we like and tries to pull them out of Luther.  No mention is made of the trade offs and the things which might have been lost by the changes.  And just as often as not he mocks Luther’s time, and all it’s predecessors.  Because I don’t think he cares for it at all, much less loves it. He wants to fly the chopper into those dark dirty times and pull out Luther and then fly out with his prize.

In telling the story of this book, I think of the Author and his previous work on Bonhoeffer.  And it really makes sense.  American Christians define themselves today based on disliking the Catholic Church and disliking the Nazis.  So these are the perfect heroes.  Luther who broke the hold of the Catholic Church and Bonhoeffer who resisted Hitler.  I mused to myself that his next biography should be on William Wilberforce.  Because the trifecta would be to champion the man who attacked slavery.  And just searching Amazon I laughed out loud at finding he already had.  It is always nice to have one’s theory confirmed.  But this is the point, this is the problem.  Reinforcing what you already believe is narcissism, and Metaxas does it too much.

Obviously a successful way to sell books today is to tickle the publics fancy.  And the more complex the scaffold upon which you display this fancy the better.  We are sophisticated moderns, we must have our reasons and our facts and our data—if one is to tantalize us.  It is a sort of scientific fairy story.  It is a device used to smuggle in ideas, but unfortunately the only ideas that get smuggled in our the ones you already have.   We go to fairy land and find that we are fine, we have no flaws.  Hello darkness my old friend,  keep me from the light it makes my eyes hurt.   So Luther who loved the Catholic church so much that he was forced to try and reform her, is made to be the founder of the American pluralistic republic.  Oh sure there are a few steps in there, but basically that’s what he did.  And never mind that part about him not passing our ridiculous modern metal detector of racism.  That’s the one part where Metaxas works his best magic to try and understand his times.  And mostly he just sweep it under the rug, because, yay ‘merica!  And in this Metaxas even gets one glaring fact wrong.  As if to gloss over other developments in political though Metaxas all but give Luther credit for the founding of the United States as a country without religion.  He even states that this nation was founded on the idea that no state or the country as a whole could establish a religion.  Which is precisely not the case.  “When the Constitution was adopted, 9 of the 13 colonies had established religions at the state level. The longest surviving of these was the Congregational Church in Connecticut, which was supported by that state down into the 1830’s.”  https://dougwils.com/books/kicking-one-of-the-sacred-geese.html

But Luther was not a racist.  He simply said what scripture says, in a language we are too cowardly to understand.  If Luther spoke in our churches today, we would revive the dead doctrine of church discipline and run him out of town.  He would be on CNN as worse than Trump.  The fact is the Jews were a stiff necked people the Bible says so explicitly.  And it displays that fact throughout every book.  But the point was that this be an example to us.  We are just as bad, if not for Grace we would be worse than the Jews.  That’s the point.  Hitler used the words of Martin Luther, not because Luther was a closet anti-semite, but because Hitler was a liar.  It was the same motivation for any scripture he quoted.    If you think the fact that the Jews killed Jesus and reject him to this day is a reason to kill them, you are insane.  But to heed Luther’s warning at their false doctrine, is not bad advice even for today.

And of course when the topic of the Muhammedans comes up Metaxas has to fawn over them and be aghast at the notion that Luther would dare criticize them. This like most in any academic fields these days, in stark opposition to all of our forefathers.  Perhaps his next biography could be on the Armenian, genocide by the Turks.  No probably not, and even if it were not suppressed like a recent movie on the subject, it wouldn’t sell very well.  And you wouldn’t want to offend the Muhammedans, they might blow you up.  And rather than thinking that perhaps a people who blow you up for telling the truth may not actually be all that virtuous today, to say nothing of their past barbarities, it’s a lot easier to just tow the party line and shame Luther for daring the speak out against them.

It is these and many more cultural markers of our day, which lead me to believe that this is less a story about Luther and more a story about us.  I could probably never write a book this long nor do all the research necessary to write it.  It is an achievement.  But I really think we might be better off reading biographies of the time by Catholic Hilarie Belloc.  It is good for us to hear the other side of the story.  His How the Reformation Happened, is very good.  He does not strictly toot the Catholic horn,  he calls things for what they are.  And in reading such a book, which is not only shorter, but more deep as to the small why of this event and the bigger Why of all events, you will grow.

The story of Luther is not totally buried in this biography by Metaxas.  He was a meticulous German lover of scripture, in all it’s fine details.  He took things very literally and seriously.  He wanted the church to repent and be all that she could be.  He had flaws and things he advocated for got out of hand, caused problems and failed in a lot of ways in Germany.  But the ‘why’ and  the story Metaxas tells are all wrong.  It feeds our worst problems and fails to help us appreciate Luther  and his life in his time for what it was.  It just puffs us up in our time.  And what at time it is where a people demands such works.  If you want more details about Luther read the book but skip the Epilogue.  And first get some appreciation of the Medieval world by reading C. S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image.