Even St. Augustine Didn’t Trust Government

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – If you’re going to have any chance for survival, you’re going to have to have some foundational things that everyone can agree on and you can build societies and civilizations around, that there’s no disagreement on, or very little disagreement on.  Therefore you have a nucleus around which to rally.  What is that nucleus today, Twitter?  Facebook?  What’s the nucleus, the latest immorality of the moment, whatever is fashionable today?  Check out today’s audio and transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  What I do think is necessary, though, and this is where Buchanan, I think, just hits the nail on the proverbial head.  If you’re going to have any chance for survival, you’re going to have to have some foundational things that everyone can agree on and you can build societies and civilizations around, that there’s no disagreement on, or very little disagreement on.  Therefore you have a nucleus around which to rally.  What is that nucleus today, Twitter?  Facebook?  What’s the nucleus, the latest immorality of the moment, whatever is fashionable today?  So much of this discussion here is just a symptom of a deeper problem.  Again, I was fascinated when I was reading Buchanan last night and Birzer.  Brad Birzer was writing about this, writing that:

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Christopher Dawson, not surprisingly, [Mike: This guy was a great writer in the last century.] credited St. Augustine as “the founder of the philosophy of history.“  Unlike the Greeks, who held a more cosmological perspective on life, St. Augustine, following Virgil, St. John, and St. Paul, believed that history itself had a spiritual meaning. [Mike: No, it doesn’t. We’re not allowed to have spiritual meanings in history. There is no spiritual meaning. There’s only a secular meaning. There are only the events that transpired and God or some deity had no part in it whatsoever, and there certainly weren’t any kind of spiritual people involved. Well, my friends, that is not an accurate view of history, it simply isn’t. I’m not going to sit here and say that all were spiritual and all were of a certain denomination. That would not be true either.] That God chose an obscure nomadic tribe to be his “Chosen Nation” proved his point, the great North African thought. The Christian recognizes that the Jews “had been made the vehicle of an absolute divine purpose, and was to him the very center of his faith,” Dawson wrote. As opposed to the mythologies of the Greeks and the East, the Christian believes in the purpose to history. Indeed, Christ came not at any point, but in the “fullness of time,” when three distinct cultures intersected with one another, again proving that history was vital to God’s plan. Christ, coming in the “fullness of time,” was born into a Hellenistic Jewish culture, controlled militarily and politically by the Roman Empire, and divided, theologically, among several Jewish schools of thought. The Incarnation allows the Church, the representative of the City of God on earth, as Newman put it, “to gather His Saints.” Christian loyalty, then, can be to no nation, but to the Universal, Catholic Church.

This, of course, presents a great dilemma for any Christian. While we are already citizens of Heaven, we must live in the earthly City of Man. “The earthly city,” St. Augustine reminds us, “which does not live by faith, seeks an earthly peace, and the end it proposes, in the well-ordered concord of civic obedience and rule, is the combination of men’s wills to attain the things which are helpful to this life.” Therefore, the City of Man moves in never-ending Polybian cycles of birth, middle age, and death. In the earthly city, “the princes and the nations it subdues are ruled by the love of ruling.” Further, a Christian can never fully trust a government, which is, St. Augustine argued, nothing more than a gang of thieves and robbers that has bested all other gangs of thieves and robbers. When justice dissolves—and justice is a gift from God, not from the world—“what are kingdoms but great robberies?”

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Mike:  For those of you that think Congress ought to be defining marriages or that your state legislature ought to be defining marriages, according to St. Augustine and other early fathers of the Catholic Church, of the Christian faith, I would dare to venture, governments were never to be trusted, ever.  Is that a libertarian thought or is that a spiritual thought, or are the two one in the same?

End Mike Church Show Transcript