History – Page 4 – Anthony G. Flood

Dispensationalism, diversity, and dialectic

Yesterday I referred to my dispensational eschatology, but then realized a note about it might be helpful. The following modifies a post from 2020.

I was not always dispensationally conscious, or even worldview-conscious. Becoming so required me to reorient and regiment my thinking, to trade in (or up) the pretension of human autonomy in philosophy for “heteronomy,” the “hetero” ( “other”) being God as He is revealed in Scripture.

Dispensationalism helps me situate myself not only historically between divine administrations (i.e., between the charismatic dispensation of which the Book of Acts is the history and God’s future manifest Kingdom on earth), but also dialectically among fellow believers who sees things very differently. We must stake out our positions knowing that others will contradict them, ever asking ourselves, “What could be said against what I believe?”

According my interpretation of Scripture, which I summarize tendentiously hereunder (but have defended in many other posts), Christian believers who have lived since the time marked by Acts 28:28 occupy the “parenthesis” between the “ear” stage of the Kingdom and its “full grain in the ear” stage (Mark 4:26-29), a regnum interruptum, if you will.

Bernard Lonergan thought that when we’re linked to each other by shared meaning, but opposed in our interpretations, our societies (families, churches, civil societies, parties) develop, not genetically, but dialectically. The goal of the dialectician, Lonergan writes, is neither to prove nor refute but rather

. . . to exhibit diversity and to point to the evidence for its roots. In this manner he will be attractive to those that appreciate full human authenticity and he will convince those that attain it. Indeed, the basic idea of the method we are trying to develop takes its stand on discovering what human authenticity is and showing how to appeal to it. It is not an infallible method, for men easily are unauthentic, but it is a powerful method, for man’s deepest need and most prized achievement is authenticity.[1]

Continue reading “Dispensationalism, diversity, and dialectic”

Only God can calm the perfect storm

Over at “Maverick Philosopher,” Bill Vallicella’s blog, yesterday’s post got airplay and commentary, for which I’m grateful. I expect he’ll post my response to a commenter, but here are its key paragraphs.

The perfect storm that I conjecture is not necessarily an existential threat to humanity. No member of the crew of the fishing vessel Andrea Gail survived, but their survivors held a memorial service. Millions of Germans and Russians are alive today because, even in the worst years of Stalin and Hitler, people still fell in love, married, and had children. For tens of millions, however, there was no memorial service. They would not have the privilege, as we do, of reading and reflecting upon the history of their era in their golden years. It was simply “over” for them. They await resurrection.

If my mind were a quantum computer with all historical and current data at my fingertips, I could score the accuracy of my Antonesque “cry.” But it’s not, so I can’t. I’m only a Christian struggling to make sense of a fallen world in the light of God’s Word in the day of God’s (relative, gracious, and temporary) silence. (See my series on this topic: “The Silence of God”: Anderson’s 1897 book, Otis Q. Sellers’s 1929 turning point—Part 1.)

Offsetting the gloom-and-doom is knowing that the human drivers of the storm’s vectors are not omniscient or omnipotent. And neither is the Prince of this World (kosmos; or age, aiōnos). It’s a safe bet that he inspires them, even coordinates some of their actions (John 14:30; Eph 2:2-3, 6:12; 2 Cor 4:4). But I foresee no programmatic response to their programmatic attacks except the blazing forth (epiphaneia) of His Kingdom (not yet His second advent) for which I live in expectation (1 Tim 6:14; 2 Tim 1:10, 4:1, 4:8). That is to say, there is a programmatic response, but it’s divine.

A perfect storm of converging crises

The dictionary defines a perfect storm as an “unusual combination of events or things that produce an unusually bad or powerful result.” The latter, as I see it, is life as we’ve become accustomed to enjoying it.

Four years ago, I stated my grounds and posed a question to a writer who thinks Christian Reconstruction or Theonomy meets the level of our times:

The argument . . . is over hermeneutics and confessional commitments that flow from one’s interpretation of Scripture. Do libertarians wish to have that conversation? That would be more than fine with me. I’ll need bullet-proof exegesis, however, to believe that Christians are charged, as Dominion theology teaches, with overthrowing Satan’s dominion of this world with its sex-trafficking, drug cartels, arms dealers, blood diamond trade, supervised as they are by pathological warlords; the totalitarian ethnostate of Communist China; radical Islam whose agents are sprinkled the world over; pandemics exploited by globalists and their medicrat tools; the virtually total loss of privacy at the hands of the Deep State, Big Pharma, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence; the trillions of dollars in unpayable debt and the hyperinflation that must follow central banking as the night the day—just to name some of the enormities that blight our planet.

In that post, I didn’t refer to this concatenation as a “perfect storm of crises,” but since then I’ve used this meteorological metaphor when considering our parlous estate.[1] It has come to mean any situation where a highly improbable concurrent of circumstances leads to an event of unusual magnitude or severity. I’d like to know where it falters, if it does.

The “event of unusual magnitude or severity” I refer to is the total collapse of the good of order—civilization, what’s left of it—on which any regular enjoyment of goods of consumption depends. Continue reading “A perfect storm of converging crises”

Is Green the new Red? Why on Earth does Earth Day fall on Lenin’s birthday?

First Annual Earth Day, Union Square, April 22, 1970

Fifty-four years ago this afternoon, classes being over, I trekked two blocks east from Xavier High School along 16th Street to Union Square Park where I’d take the No. 6 subway to the Bronx. To my astonishment, the park was jam-packed with people. Thousands of them, in the middle of the day. It had the vibe of an anti-war demo. It was replicated elsewhere in Manhattan and in many other cities around the country, all too familiar to us today in its size and planning.

“What’s this?,” I muttered. “Earth Day? You gotta be kidding me!”

A newly minted Stalinist (and Jesuit high school student), I knew that that day marked the centennial of the birth of Vladimir Illych Ulanov, known to history as Lenin. Continue reading “Is Green the new Red? Why on Earth does Earth Day fall on Lenin’s birthday?”

Oppenheimer and Putin’s Suitcases

“You know, when the [United] States already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels . . . . They were carrying the information away not on microfilm but literally in suitcases. Suitcases!” Vladimir Putin, 2012[1]

I recently cited evidence that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb, was a security risk if ever there was one, yet he got what Albert Einstein could not: security clearance to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which the legendary physicist (and leftwing activist and Zionist) had urged on President Roosevelt. As Oppenheimer was a pro-Soviet Communist, I thought it ironic that in 1946 Ayn Rand, who fled the Communist system that had impoverished her family, interviewed him for a stillborn movie project. Neither of them (or anyone else to my knowledge) ever noted that irony.

Oppie’s Red politics was not a youthful, romantic fling from which he was detached only by the imperative of stopping Hitler. Two days ago Diana West, having read my post, wrote to suggest that while Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, the scholarly witnesses that informed my post, established the color of Oppie’s politics, there is evidence that he crossed the line demarcating political activity from disloyalty. I am grateful to her for pointing me toward that evidence, part of which I now pass along to you. Continue reading “Oppenheimer and Putin’s Suitcases”

When Rand Met Oppenheimer: A Neglected Irony

Sometimes a fact can be so plain that it’s overlooked, so obvious as to be devious. Herbert Aptheker’s conspicuous silence about C. L. R. James, for example, took me 40 years to notice. (To my knowledge, no one else had noticed it before or since). The absence of any mention by the passionately anti-communist Ayn Rand about the cerebral Communist “Father of the Atomic Bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer is a silence that neither she nor any Objectivist writer felt comfortable addressing afterward.

From reading Jennifer Burns’s 2009 The Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, I’ve learned that in 1946, basking in the success of her novel The Fountainhead, Oscar-winning film producer Hal Wallis (Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon) tasked her to write screenplays, one of them titled Top Secret:

Rand began a careful investigation of the Los Alamos [New Mexico atomic bomb] project, even securing an extensive audience with the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project. The film was never produced, but Rand’s encounter with Oppenheimer provided fuel for a character in her developing novel, the scientist Robert Stadler.[1]

Burns didn’t source this assertion. (I wish I had picked up Burns’s book when it came out.) I was therefore pleased to find a 2023 essay by Ayn Rand Institute archivist, Brandon Lisi: Continue reading “When Rand Met Oppenheimer: A Neglected Irony”

Otis Q. Sellers, the Scottboro Boys, and me

undefined — The “Boys” with their attorney, Samuel Liebowitz, and Alabama State Militia Guard, 1932.

Ninety-three years ago today, nine Black teenagers, “hoboing” on a freight train between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee, were attacked by a mob of white youths who strongly disapproved of their presence on “a white man’s train.” Thrown off it by their intended victims, the hooligans falsely reported to police in Paint Rock, Alabama, that the teenagers has attacked them. After a search of the train, the police rounded up not only the Black youths but also two white women who then falsely accused them of rape. The prosecution of “The Scottsboro Boys,” the first international cause célèbre of the American Civil Rights Movement, afforded an opportunity for the Communist Party to leave its mark, the first of many, on that movement. This complex historical episode eventually became the subject of academic study, and one of the first scholars to study it was my friend and fellow Aptheker research assistant, Hugh Murray. [1]

Jane, Otis, and Mildred Sellers, probably late 1930s

On that very day, March 25, 1931, Otis Q. Sellers turned 30. He was not yet the grey eminence I knew in the 197os, but the young man finally out of his twenties and on his way to becoming the Bible teacher from whom I learned much. About his life and thought I’ve been blogging into existence, for the past six years, a 96,000-word manuscript. (I’m raising funds to publish it as a book, I hope this year.) Two years into the Great Depression, Sellers was in the middle of his stint (1928-1932) as pastor of Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky, which he left (to shorten a long story brutally) “to do my own studies.” On his milestone birthday, what was transpiring 400 miles south of him was on the mind of few Americans, and his wasn’t one of them. That would soon change.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers, the Scottboro Boys, and me”

Besides race, what did Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Bayard Rustin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King have in common? Hugh Murray on the relationship between civil rights activists and Communists.

New Orleans Woolworth’s sit-in, September 9, 1960: Jerome Smith, Ruth Despenza, Joyce Taylor, Hugh Murray, Archie Allen, William Harrell

My friend Hugh Murray (b. 1938), a native New Orleanian, is a veteran of the African American civil rights movement (CRM), a critic of its betrayal by “affirmative action” (its latest incarnation being “diversity, equity, and inclusion”), and scholar of the 1931 trial of the Scottsboro Boys, the first international American civil rights cause célèbre. Our paths first crossed over a half-century ago in the reading room of the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS) on East 30^th Street in Manhattan. Its director, Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), hired us (and others) as research assistants for the massive project of preparing for publication the correspondence, bibliography, and published writings of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963). For the past few years, Hugh and I have been preparing an anthology of Hugh’s writings for publication later this year, Deo volente.

On his blog, Murray recently explored the tension between the noble, justice-seeking motives of the CRM and the ignoble motives of the Communist movement to which some CRM activists were attracted to one degree or another. (For the CRM one could substitute the labor movement.) It’s a tension I’d rather ignore. It’s easier to concentrate on the horrors of Communism uncomplicated by the fact that many Communists were drawn to it to fight the horrors of lynching and other violence. It was easy for me to call them dupes (among whom I was once numbered) and leave it at that.

Continue reading “Besides race, what did Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Bayard Rustin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King have in common? Hugh Murray on the relationship between civil rights activists and Communists.”

Du Bois Day

Title page of “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the United States of America: 1638–1871,” Du Bois’s Harvard dissertation, awarded in 1895.

Phil Sinitiere, a scholar specializing in W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), recently brought to my attention that today, Du Bois’s 156th birthday, is commemorated as the Third Annual W. E. B. Du Bois Day at Fisk University. Fisk was Du Bois’s alma mater (1885-1888) before he became the first African American to be awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard College in 1895. The birthday occasioned today’s brief post.

I’m linked to Du Bois through my modest involvement a half-century ago in Aptheker’s preparation of Du Bois’s correspondence and bibliography for publication, which I discussed briefly here. In another post I elaborated upon certain grim facts that no admirer of his efforts to secure civil rights for African Americans should forget.

Willie Du Bois with his mother, Mary Silvina Burghardt. (Public domain.)

After graduating from Fisk, Du Bois studied philosophy at the feet of several members of Harvard’s Minervan pantheon, including Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, George Santayana, and William James. James’s mentoring of Du Bois was a major factor in his pioneering of American sociology.[1]

By temperament and education, Du Bois was the furthest thing from “woke”; he had earned a Harvard doctorate when that institution was transmissive rather than subversive of Western Civilization. In the six decades since his passing, unfortunately, the writings of this card-carrying Communist have inspired many of that civilization’s enemies. In the last two decades of his life, his disgust with the West moved him to eulogize Stalin effusively and admire Mao cordially. Should we judge such things less harshly than the inanities of “woke” ideology (which rationalize genocide)? My posts suggest a negative answer.

Herbert Aptheker signs the contract authorizing the sale of W.E.B. Du Bois’s papers to the University of Massachusetts, May 27, 1973

Note

[1] “I became a devoted follower of James,” Du Bois wrote, “at the time he was developing his pragmatic philosophy”; James “guided me out of the sterilities of scholastic philosophy to realist pragmatism.” He recalled being “repeatedly . . . a guest in the home of William James . . . .” Cited in James Campbell, “Du Bois and James,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 28:3, Summer 1992, 569-570. Campbell contrasts the younger man’s star-struck recollection with James’s more sober description: “although James was no doubt concerned with Du Bois’s future and respectful and supportive of Du Bois’s work,” Campbell writes, “it is not clear that James offered him any real help to advance any of his projects” (570).

Two Cheers for Lord Acton

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902)

Instead of posting links to my essays on Lord Acton, as I’ve done in the past on his birthday (e.g., see here and here, which sport links of their own), I will sound a critical note on this master of historical sources.

Like his fellow Victorian, John Henry Newman, he knew better (an understatement) than to take at face value just-so stories about about what Christians have allegedly always believed, even in the first century, despite there not being a shred of evidence to that effect. The Vatican sets the boundaries of what its scholars can find and, more importantly, what they cannot contradict. The First Vatican Council (1869-1870) tested Newman and Acton’s integrity, especially with respect to defining the dogma of papal infallibility, formally binding on members of the Roman Catholic communion.

“To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant,” Newman aphorized, and his reasons for breaking with the Church of England are of biographical interest. To affirm, however, that the Bishop of Rome as the “Vicar of Christ” is protected from propounding doctrinal error (under certain conditions) was the constant and ancient belief of Christians is to abandon history for pious historical fictions and the attendant pleasures of belonging. Same for the earlier dogma of Immaculate Conception (1854) and that of the Bodily Assumption of Mary (1950).

Newman and Acton caved. Newman, a brilliant intellect who, in the end, came to know his place and kept it, smothered his historically grounded “reservations.” Acton sought and got the protection of his diocesan bishop from the grasp of his nemesis, Cardinal Manning. He had an escape hatch as exquisitely lawyerly in its expression as is the dogma.[1]

So, one cheer for his love of liberty, another for his productivity (which, however, never resulted in a book). For his “yielding obedience,” not to sola scriptura, of course, but sola ecclesia, a Bronx cheer.

Note

[1] “. . . Acton protested [to his bishop] ‘that I have given you no foundation for your doubt. . . . I have yielded obedience to the Apostolic Commission which embodied those decrees, and I have not transgressed . . . obligations imposed under the supreme sanction of the Church.’ That satisfied Acton’s ordinary, and that was that.” Anthony Flood, Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic, 2019, 310.