Vox: Latest Hit on David Barton

It's entitled, Understanding the fake historian behind America’s religious right. A taste:

Of course, it’s worth saying that all accounts of history — left-wing or right-wing, secular or Christian — can also be, in a sense, a form of propaganda. Any narrative of America’s foundation will, of course, be mediated by the specific biases and concerns of the teller. (Historian Fea does a great job pointing out that the secular counterpart to the Barton narrative, that all founding fathers were non-Christian, deist secularists, is also wrong).

Swedenborg Was Not a Modalist (Sabellian)

I recently received a note from a Swedenborgian minister about this post. He posted these two comments (one, two) clarifying the proper understanding. 

From the second comment:

Swedenborg was not, in fact, a modalist, despite that doctrine being sometimes attributed to him by traditional Christians. He explicitly rejected Sabellianism as a heresy, among many other heresies, in True Christianity #378. 

Though Swedenborg rejected the Nicene/Athanasian Trinity of Persons, considering it unbiblical and false, his version of the Trinity did not, as the modalist Trinity does, consider Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to be various "modes" of a single God, or different ways that a single God appears to humans. Rather, Swedenborg saw Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as "essential components" (Latin: essentialia) of a single Person of God, equivalent to the soul, body, and actions of human beings--whom, according to Genesis 1:26-27, God created "in the image and likeness of God." 

For more on the difference between Swedenborg's Trinity and the modalistic (Sabellian) view, please see my article, "What is the difference between the Swedenborgian and Oneness Pentecostal doctrines of God?"

From the linked article at his site:

However, Swedenborg’s theology rejects the defining characteristic of modalist doctrine, which is that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three different modes of God, or three different ways that God manifests himself to humans. 

Instead, Swedenborg’s theology states that:  

1. The Father is the transcendent, unknowable soul of God, of which we can have no direct knowledge or experience at all. 

2. The Son is the human body or visible appearance of God—and, since the Incarnation, is the sole avenue by which the Father is known to human beings. 

3. The Holy Spirit is the divine truth and power flowing out from God, and in effect is the manifestation of God to human beings.

Swedenborg calls this a Trinity of “essential components” (Latin essentialia) of one God. 

These three are not different modes or manifestations to us of some underlying divine Spirit. 

In Swedenborg’s system, the Father is the underlying divine being, and is not perceivable by us at all. We finite humans are incapable of grasping or comprehending the infinite divine being of God. Only through the Son can we have any knowledge of God. And the Holy Spirit is the knowledge and power of God as it flows out from the Son, enlightening us and giving us spiritual life.

When I first read this, I wondered whether instead of understanding God as the modalists do -- three different forms or modes of one God -- Swedenborg's position was the Trinity is three different functions of one God. Three different functions not forms.

I'm not sure if that's right. Three different components is more like a Voltron like dynamic. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not, individually, fully God, but rather together are fully God. By the way, Swedenborg viewed God as one Person and Jesus Christ is that Person (that is JC IS the Father, Son AND Holy Spirit).

George Washington on Immigration

From George Washington to Joshua Holmes, 2 December 1783

To the Members of the volunteer Associations & other Inhabitants of the Kingdom of Ireland who have lately arrived in the City of New York. 

Gentlemen 

The testimony of your satisfaction at the glorious termination of the late contest, and your indulgent opinion of my Agency in it, afford me singular pleasure & merit my warmest acknowledgments. 

If the Example of the Americans successfully contending in the Cause of Freedom, can be of any use to other Nations; we shall have an additional Motive for rejoycing at so prosperous an Event. 

It was not an uninteresting consideration, to learn, that the Kingdom of Ireland, by bold & manly conduct had obtained redress of many of its greivances—and it is much to be wished, that the blessings of equal Liberty & unrestrained Commerce may yet prevail more extensively in the Mean time, you may be assured, Gentlemen, that the Hospitality & Benificence of your Countrymen, to our Brethren who have been Prisoners of War, are neither unknown, or unregarded. 

The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent & respectable Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights & previleges, if by decency & propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment. 

Go: Washington

Law & Liberty Review on Democratic Religion

The book being reviewed is "Democratic Religion from Locke to Obama," by Giorgi Areshidze. The review is by WILL MORRISEY and you can read it here. 

A taste:

Locke was not historicist. He based liberalism squarely on a doctrine of natural, not historical rights. Very astutely, Areshidze remarks that the argument for religious toleration made by Locke in his 1689 Letter on Toleration differs from his argument in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which he was writing at the same time. The Letter “bases toleration on a religious argument about the sanctity of human conscience” as each individual searches for “religious truth.” The Essay “grounds toleration on the limits of human knowledge”—on a form of skepticism. The Letter rests on an appeal to the prevailing opinion of the time, relying on Biblical exegesis; the Essay relies on reason alone. One book is “popular,” the other “philosophic.” 

Not that the Biblical exegesis Locke propounds in the Letter fully comports with the prevailing Christian orthodoxy of his time—or indeed with the teaching of the Bible itself. Mutual toleration among Christians is alleged to be “the chief characteristic of a true church,” although the New Testament attests to love, not toleration. When Locke does testify to the fact of Christian lovingkindness, he makes it serve toleration and good works. 

Crucially, in enlisting the support of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, Locke accurately quotes Paul as to sins not to be tolerated by Christians—“works of the Flesh,” generally—but leaves out such Pauline sins as “seditions and heresies”—works of the mind, as it were. It was dissenters’ public declarations of such spiritual sins that persuaded Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin to enlist governments in the task of suppressing the full range of un-Christian acts; Aquinas went so far as to urge the death penalty for heretics. (Perhaps glancing back at Rawls and Obama, Areshidze describes this as a “nearly uninterrupted Christian consensus”—bad news indeed for Rawlsian liberals.) 

To this Locke replies in the Letter that coercion can never genuinely persuade, and that only a persuaded soul can enter Heaven through the strait gate. But in the Essay Locke admits that, on the contrary, beliefs are indeed formed by a mixture of coercion and consent. There, he argues not from the Bible but from what later writers would call epistemology: the Bible speaks of “knowing” God, but what is knowledge?