Fast Food (2015): Thirty-Sixth Helping
Violent Constantinian Christianity from day one, October 28, 312, has been a Tattoo Christianity, skin deep with a pagan heart.**
Today among the bishops, priests, ministers and pastors of most of the Christian Churches in the U.S. and England, Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies as the Way to live, to die and to do God’s will is operationally considered only a hypothesis which is no longer needed, relevant realistic or valid. Jesus of Nazareth came up with it and tried it out two thousand years ago but it has proved to be completely untenable and a failure. So the rulers of the Churches replaced Jesus’ teaching with what they considered was needed, relevant and realistic’ i.e., various Christian just war theories. Not a single one of their intellectual creations owes anything to anything Jesus ever said, taught or did. All morally justify as Christian human acts that are in direct contradiction to Jesus’ teaching. None of the Churches who were dissatisified with Jesus’ teaching adhere to their own substitute teaching. And, in most cases the membership of these Churches has little to no idea of exactly what it is that their Church teaches in this area.
The grotesqueries of war in which the paid, professional prelates of these Churches give spiritual and moral permission to their fellow Christians to engage are diabolical in origin and pagan in practice. “We have produced the Christian ethic of the just war. This is not the New Testament and every theologian knows it.” writes the acclaimed Catholic Biblical scholar, the late Rev. John L. McKenzie. Well, maybe every theologian knows it, but evidently few bishops, priests, ministers or pastors know it—and from all appearances do not have any desire to know it. Erasmus (1466-1536) speaking to the sheer folly of the Christian Just War Theory (CJWT) writes, “Just, indeed! ‘Just’ means any war declared in any way against anybody by any prince.”
CJWT is a chronic, systemic infidelity in the Churches, systematically sown into the hearts and minds of Christians by these Churches’ leaders generation after generation for a thousand plus years. It is an inbred infidelity where the unfaithful leaders without fail selected as their protégés Christians who can be counted on to be as unfaithful as they are. There is not now and never has been a public non-CJWT Cardinal in the Catholic Chuch, only a few non-CJWT Catholic Bishops and maybe one non-CJWT Pope over the last thousand years. The same historical reality, for shorter time spans and under different nomenclatures, is more or less the situation in all mainline and Evangelical Churches. And of course this inbreeding like all inbreeding has its bitter fruits, which are on readily ondisplay for all to see or learn .about
But gird your loins if you would confront the logical, historical, psychological, moral and spiritual preposterousness of CJWT in your parish or in your diocese, in your charismatic prayer meeting or your centering prayer gathering, in your Knights of Columbus Council or in your Church’s religious education program. Hell has no fury like the Christian response to an attack on CJWT. However, the nonviolent Paul, who was the violent Saul, tells us exactly how to gird our loins to meet such an attack (Eph 6:13-15) andbe victorious.
In tomorrows beyond our reckoning Christians will look back on this long night of Church leaders propagating CJWT, the evil it has done and the good that was left undone, and wonder what in hell got into them that they would teach and support this relapse into paganism for so long in direct defiance of the explicit teaching in the Gospels of the Word of God Incarnate, Jesus. But today, and for 1700 years of yesterdays, Christian Churches, their leaders no less than their members—whom by God’s choice were to be the vanguard for renewing the face of the earth by loving as the Nonviolent Jesus loved and thereby being agents for releasing the Nonviolent Holy Spirit of the Nonviolent Jesus into the human heart and the human enviorment—have hermetically sealed themselves off from this Mercy Full Project of the Father which was initiated through His Son, and choose instead to be the spiritual and moral support system for “any war declared in any way against anybody by any prince.”
Whether a person is a bishop, priest, minister, pastor or a just an ordinary Church member, having Jesus tattooed on his or her arm is infinitely removed from having the risen and living Jesus in one’s heart and soul, mind and spirit empowering him or her to “Love others as He loves us”—which is with a Nonviolent Love of all under all circumstance, without exception.
Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
**On the night of October 28, 312, Constantine was about to go into battle against Maxentius at Melvian Bridge in order to gain total control of the Western half of the Roman Empire. As the story goes, that night he had a vision of a cross in the sky with the words underneath, “In this sign you shall conquer.” His interpretation of this was that it was a totem given to him for victory in the upcoming battle. So, he had the cross painted on the shields, horse, etc.that were to go into battle that day. This was the first time in history that a Christian ensign was used to lead people into a homicidal battle against an enemy.
