APOCALYPSE 14
WHY AMERICA IS FINISHED
BY REVEREND MARK DANKOF
N.B. I do not share the tenets of Mark Dankof's faith. It is absurd to say that Christ is God or the logos! The logos is just the Greek translation of the unuttered word (of command) (Kun! (Be!) in Arabic) by which God made Christ come to life and to earth, and this belief is a pure matter of faith! By the way the quote from the Bible regarding the logos is a mistranslation!
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Mark Dankof on “America, The Beautiful: Why We’re Finished”
![Arthur Topham's Radical Press News Wire Notes Mark Dankof's "America, The Beautiful: Why We're Finished." [Canada]](http://mark1marti2.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/whywerefinished01.jpg)
Arthur Topham’s Radical Press News Wire Notes Mark Dankof’s “America, The Beautiful: Why We’re Finished.” [Canada]
Arthur Topham’s Radical Press in Canada Notes Mark Dankof’s “America, The Beautiful: Why We’re Finished.”
[I have been receiving a lot of mail from folks asking why I've
taken a mild leave of absence from broadcasting and writing op-ed pieces
for The Ugly Truth. I will appear from time to time, but on a more
limited basis, both with The Ugly Truth and Press TV. I've been
reassessing what good I'm actually doing, given the seemingly inexorable
and disastrous direction the American Empire has embarked upon, and
what seems like the absolute passivity and indifference of the American
public to their own fate in all of this, not to mention the world. In
more recent times, I've been working on theological articles while
preparing to resume my thesis for my last degree along with some
theological German study. I'm also job hunting to supplement my income
as I assess the future. The bottom line is this: The title of this
piece tells you what I've concluded about the country and the American
people. It isn't a happy endgame. What appears below are my latest
thoughts at the present time.]
—————————————————————
Mark Dankof: America, The Beautiful: Why We’re Finished
As he was preparing to leave office in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that “America must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex.”
Borrowing the title from the Frank Capra Defense Department propaganda
films of World War II, documentary film maker Eugene Jarecki chronicled
the Eisenhower warning in Why We Fight, a production that would win the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.
I vaguely remember Eisenhower.
What I didn’t know as a little boy in the summer of 1960 when my family
piled into my Dad’s new white Plymouth Station Wagon to depart
Alexandria, Virginia for McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, was the
fact that Dad was working for the Air Force Technical Applications
Center (AFTAC), the intelligence organization created by Eisenhower to
work with the CIA and the AEC in monitoring Soviet nuclear tests,
explosions, and missile sites around the world. I did not know that my
father was acquainted with Eisenhower, Curtis LeMay, Paul Tibbets of the
Enola Gay, and many other storied names of the Second World
War and the Cold War that followed. I would learn a number of things
about Dad in the decades that followed. There are many other things I
never learned, even as he was losing both coherence and consciousness in
the final days of his life in San Antonio in May of 2009. Allen Dulles
was correct. There are some things that remain secret “from inception to eternity.”
Colonel Karl E. Dankof, USAF, during the Vietnam War.
In 1961, as a denizen of
kindergarten at the Arthur S. Dudley Elementary School on an
American Air Force reservation in Sacramento, I also had no idea that my
father would also become acquainted with President Kennedy. All I knew
was that Kennedy was the most handsome and dynamic man I’d ever seen on
TV, with the most beautiful wife to match. With Kennedy in office,
watching Arnold Palmer on TV winning the British Open, making many trips
to San Francisco’s Candlestick Park to see Willie Mays in his prime,
and trekking to old Kezar Stadium to watch the football 49ers, my
idyllic childhood on the West Coast was wedded to an America filled with
hope, youth, and limitless future. Mythology and visual images seemed
to correspond with reality. The realities of what Seymour Hersh would
reveal in his 1996 chronicle of the Kennedy years entitled “The Dark Side of Camelot,” did not correspond to my universe as a kid in the America of the early 1960s.
Bob Greene of the Chicago Tribune would observe in 1984 that there was a day in Dallas, Texas that would “divide the hemispheres of our lives”
for those old enough to remember. When Jack Kennedy was gunned down in
Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963, I was serving a one year sentence
in a 3rd grade class at Floyd Elementary School in Montgomery, Alabama
during my Dad’s stint at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base.
On that fateful Friday afternoon, American Mythology was slain with
high powered rifle bullets coming from multiple guns and locations. The
visual images of horror emanating from Texas became a precursor of
tragedies future. Hope, youth, and limitless future were buried in
Arlington National Cemetery. Despair, the ravages of time and aging,
and a future lost in the long-departed past, became the defining
elements of the second hemisphere of life in ongoing attempts to recover
the unrecoverable in time and space. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross would later
teach me that denial is the first stage in the process of experiencing
death.
The Day Before The End: The Kennedys in San Antonio on November 21, 1963.
I knew there was something wrong
with the official story on the Kennedy death from the outset. I had
witnessed the Jack Ruby, a. k. a. Jack Rubenstein, slaying of Lee Harvey
Oswald on live TV in my parents’ living room in Alabama. What I did
not know was the magnitude of the significance of what I’d seen. What I
did know half a century ago was that the idyllic days of my earlier
childhood were as dead as the 35th President of the United States. I
would end up spending decades reading thousands of pages and talking to
people who claimed to know something. One of them was a private chat in
May of 2001 with the retired Kennedy autopsy photographer and X-Ray
technician then living in secluded retirement in Norristown,
Pennsylvania.
Ironically enough, it was right after 9-11 that Michael Collins Piper would tie together many of the loose ends of my own research on Dealey Plaza for me. The significance of Final Judgment
was not simply the best and presumably last word on the ultimate
players in the events of Dallas, but the way in which the demise of Jack
Kennedy in my childhood became a pivotal event in understanding the
process of the demythologization of American history and foreign policy
in my critical re-examination of what had preceded it and what would
follow. Piper’s magnum opus would years later join my own presentation on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor for the 2013 National Conference of the American Free Press in Austin, and my discussion of 9-11
for Kourosh Ziabari and the Fars News Agency of Iran, as prime exhibits
in understanding the real Directors of the American Empire, their
endgame, and the corresponding death of the Old American Republic, the
Constitution of the United States, and any true sense of what the
national purpose and destiny of a free American people should really be.
Mark Dankof and Michael Collins Piper of the American Free Press in the Nation’s Capitol: November 2011
My personal odyssey in all of this
began in the fall of 1963 as a child. It would accelerate at the speed
of light after September 11th, 2001. In these last dozen years, I’ve
put my completion of my last graduate degree on hold, and my own career
and economic prospects at extreme risk, by joining people like Piper,
Mark Glenn, Merlin Miller, Adrian Krieg, Philip Giraldi, Paul Craig
Roberts, Tony Cartalucci, and Pepe Escobar in what is known today as
Alternative Media. My stints at the Republic Broadcasting Network and
the American Free Press have been augmented in recent years by a
working relationship with Press TV/Iran, and in more recent times by
some brief segments with Voice of Russia.
And to what ultimate end or purpose?
For if the truth be known, if I could now do one film documentary of
my own under the direction of film producer Eugene Jarecki, it would be
entitled “Why We’re Finished.” For this is precisely what I have come to believe after the passage of all these many years.
Pat Buchanan and Mark Dankof: “Suicide of a Superpower” meets “Why We’re Finished.”
My conclusion is based on what
should be inherently obvious. The United States Government, its
National Security Establishment, and its Corporate News Media are in the
service of a political elite devoted to a New World Order under the control of International Bankers, Globalists, and Zionists. The result is an overextended Empire militarily and economically. We are awash in a national debt
of $17.6 trillion and counting, even as the estimated $5-7 trillion
that will be borrowed and spent on the ill-fated and falsely premised
Iraq and Afghanistan expeditions continues to mount, while deliberately
manufactured reasons to intervene militarily in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine
are bundled in packaged lies by CNN and Fox News for the consumption of
the brain dead on a nightly basis. It is obvious that Israel is the driving force behind these policies, even as its domestic American lobby continues its ownership of the American government. The published annual figures of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA) tell the tale of the tape.
Concurrently, the fiat money policies of the Federal Reserve Board continue apace, even as the manufacturing sector of the American economy continues to be exported abroad. Fractional Reserve Banking
is the ongoing order of the day for a fraudulent and evil financial
system, along with credit-default swaps and derivatives. The corrosive
metastasis of the social and moral agenda of the Frankfurt School’s Institute of Social Research in the United States in the last 50 years seems beyond repair. I agree with Pat Buchanan that the Western World generally and the United States specifically, will be dead by 2025.
The cancer is terminal. Stage 5 has
arrived. There is no political solution that people like me can turn
to for hope in another day, another time yet future. The folks who
control the money supply have purchased our Government, our Media, and
our Educational Institutions. An American Police State has come of age since September 11th, 2001, with the advance of the USA Patriot Acts, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the National Defense Authorization Act
(NDAA), the warrantless surveillance of the National Security Agency
(NSA), and the advent of a militarized domestic police force in our
major cities and communities commensurate with the termination of Posse
Comitatus laws which once prevented the Armed Forces and Federal
Government of the United States from usurping the powers lawfully
designated to the states and their localities. It is a fatal mistake
with recent developments in Ferguson, Missouri to assume that the sole
and primary targets of this Police State are either African Americans or
Americans of Islamic faith. The Missouri Information Action Report (MIAC) of 2008 reveals a partnership between the Israelified Department of Homeland Security, the
Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith (ADL), the Southern Poverty Law
Center, and the police departments of the American states and cities to
target white males who oppose the New World Order, abortion, and gay
marriage while voting for candidates like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, as
potential militia members and terrorists.
This message from Hananiah is contradicted by Jeremiah (Jeremiah 28).
Dr. Adrian Krieg and Dr. Philip Giraldi meet at the critical intersection point: Fascism has arrived in America. Sinclair Lewis has proven prophetic in his prediction that it would be “wrapped in the Flag and carrying the Cross.” This is the true role of the hireling John Hagee of San Antonio’s Cornerstone Church and his Christians United for Israel
(CUFI) organization, to sell genocidal wars with a racially supremacist
and globalist agenda wrapped in the American Flag and the Christian
Cross. The diabolical genius of this is that neither the true national
American interest or the Kingdom of God in Christ has a thing to do with
Fiat Money, Fractional Reserve Banking, or the Talmudic Racial
Supremacist Land Thievery of Netanyahu and Company. But the Giraldi
piece on Fascism in America
this week shows how the pro-Zionist Christian Right in the United
States provides much of the glue which holds this burgeoning tragedy in
perpetual place, even as a national judgment upon this country by the
Biblical God is unfolding. The Chris Kyles of The Realm are the triggermen. The Marquis J. McCantses of The Realm are the benevolent and unsuspecting cannon fodder.
The
American Sniper Receives the “Grateful Nation” award from the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Jewish Air Force Chief
of Staff Norman Schwartz presenting. But what “Grateful Nation” is
referenced at this event?
The final straws would seem
to be the American, Israeli, and EU sponsored coup in Kiev, Ukraine,
and the Neo-Conservative cry for an American military intervention in
Syria and Iraq to combat an ISIS organization which is a specific
creation of the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the GCC states
for just this very purpose.
In the case of Ukraine, the taped conversation of American Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland (the wife of Neo-Conservative/Zionist zealot Robert Kagan),
and the American Ambassador to the Ukraine, reveals the plot which
overthrew that country’s legitimately elected government as part of the
ongoing and irresponsible encirclement policy of Putin’s Russia by NATO.
This policy is not merely the official breaking of the promises made by
Republican Presidents to Gorbachev and Yeltsin that the United States
would not recruit former Eastern Bloc countries for NATO membership or
as hosts of NATO military hardware moved closer to Russian borders. It
has recklessly placed the United States in the position of being in a potential military showdown with a nuclear power,
even as the American government supports an illegitimate government in
Kiev and Ukraine peppered with Dual Israeli Citizen Oligarchs and
EU-Affiliated Bankers. The atrocities against Russian ethnics in
Eastern Ukraine culminating in the fiery murders which resulted from the
Odessa Trade Union torching at the hands of thugs controlled by the installed government, is now matched by the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines MH17.
The American government and media began weaving and spinning the myth
that Russia and the pro-Russian rebels of Eastern Ukraine were
responsible for this atrocity. It proved as false as the phony
accusation that Assad of Syria had used nerve gas against his opponents
in Ghouta. The evidence there pointed once more in the opposite
direction.
The Odessa Trade Union Fire: The Work of the Latest American-Installed “Government.”
In the case of the manufactured hysteria over the operations of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Tony Cartalucci of Land Destroyer
lays out the ultimate endgame of the United States and Israel: the
removal of President Assad of Syria as a precursor to a preemptive war
with Iran to satisfy both Netanyahu and the House of Saud in Saudi
Arabia. In Iraq, the demise of the al-Maliki regime with one more
amenable to an ongoing American military presence in that country in
perpetuity, has already been achieved.
Which brings me back to the foundational premise of this article entitled “Why We’re Finished”:
The American Empire, wedded to
Zionism and a World Government empowered by Globalist Banking and
Multinational Corporations, is the chief enabler of evil on this planet.
It is the chief adversary of peace abroad, even as it serves as the
chief adversary of its own people. The American Military is the armed
Janissary force of this Beast. It exists solely for this purpose, and
is as much a chief threat to the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of
the United States as it is to the people of Russia, Ukraine, Syria,
Iran, Palestine, and elsewhere. The American National Security State
has used Islamophobia and Russophobia to justify the targeting of its
own citizens, especially political dissidents. The American Church has
maintained its 501c3 tax status by wrapping these policies in the Flag
and carrying them with the Cross. The American People are worried about
the Ebola virus and AIDS, when they have been terminally infected with
the Gadarene Swine Fallacy. The cliff is closer than most can possibly imagine.
Sarah Palin and American Fascism: She forgot the Star of Rothschild on her office desk.
This is Why We’re Finished.
For those who have recently inquired, I’m presently reassessing how
and when I continue in broadcasting, news analysis, and op-ed
commentary. If I do at all. At the present time, I question my own
effectiveness in the environment in which I operate, for a constituency
whose vibrancy is a relic of a long forgotten past in the midst of a
people with terminal amnesia and calcified indifference.
For now, I’m working on theological presentations for the remnant church,
and looking at finishing my thesis on Christian Zionism for my last
degree while sustaining a theological German exam in the next year. The
Old American Republic is dead. The American Empire wants to destroy
all of us who believe in Republic, not in Empire. I see no reason to
believe the American public has the insight and the guts to stand up to
this onslaught. We Are Truly Finished.
John on Patmos: Exiled Because of Resistance to the Emperor Worship Cultus of Domitian
(A. D. 81-96).
(A. D. 81-96).
The Hands of Time and the Appearance of Logos: Mark Dankof for the LMS-USA Conference 2014
The Logo of the LMS-USA and the Pillars of Luther’s Reformation: Christ Alone, Faith Alone, Grace Alone, Scripture Alone.
[Mark Dankof’s presentation to the
2014 national conference of the Lutheran Ministerium and Synod–USA in
June 2014 is reproduced in edited/abridged version below. In response
to specific requests, the 2014 message demonstrates the continued
relevance to the Confessing Church of Jesus Christ of the Ancient
Church’s fight to preserve the Biblical witness to the humanity and
divinity of Jesus Christ as pivotal to the reality of the realization of
God’s plan of salvation for humanity, enacted in linear time in the
physical cosmos. Of primary relevance to this 2014 discussion is the
1996 presentation of Pastor Dankof to the Lutheran Ministerium and
Synod–USA in Indianapolis entitled, “Creeds and Confessions as Liturgy.”
“In the beginning was the Word
, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in
the beginning [Genesis 1:1]. Through Him all things were made; without
Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life
was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, but the
darkness has not understood it.” [λόγος: DNTT, vol. 3, pages 1081-1146, esp. p. 1115; B. Klappert, author; Colin Brown, editor ]
The Gospel of John, chapter 1, verses 1-5
“But mark this: There will be terrible times
in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of
money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents,
ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self
control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited,
lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God–having a form of godliness
but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.” [καιροὶ: DNTT, vol. 3, pages 833-39; H.-C. Hahn, author; Colin Brown, editor]
2 Timothy 3: 1-5
“As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of
Olives, the disciples came to him privately. ‘Tell us,’ they said,
‘when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of
the end of the age?’ Jesus answered: ‘Watch out, that no one deceives you.'” [πλανήσῃ: DNTT, vol. 2, pages 457-61; W. Gunther, author; Colin Brown, editor]
Matthew 24: 3-4
“Those who are able to see beyond the
shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone
believed, by the masses.”
Plato (427-347 B. C.)
“One had to look very closely [in
pre-war Germany] to see the cloven hoof beneath the angel’s luminous
robes. . . . If I read the signs aright, we are close to midnight.”
Pastor Helmut Thielicke
Pastor Mark Dankof of the Lutheran Ministerium and Synod-USA, a member of the International Lutheran Council (ILC).
On this beautiful day at the very
beginning of summer at Christ Lutheran Church in Chetek, Wisconsin in
2014, we prepare to take a look back–and a look ahead–at time, and God’s
revelation in time in the Logos [λόγος].
My assignment for the fine people of the Lutheran Ministerium and
Synod–USA today, and for the entirety of the Israel of God, the
Confessing Church of our Lord Jesus Christ, is to do so with reference
to my message delivered to this gathering in Indianapolis in 1996,
entitled “Creeds and Confessions as Liturgy.”
I am proud that the University of Dayton would later see fit to use
this paper in a graduate theology course on the subject. I am equally
proud that my last couple of projects for our yearly gatherings have
made their rounds around the world, thanks to the marvelous technology
of our age. These include “The Famine, The Watchman, and The Remnant” two years ago, and last year’s homily at the concluding worship service of our National Convention entitled, “The Chosen People of God: Who Are They?“.
I shall succumb to the temptation to
begin with a story. My colleagues in secular media and news commentary
refer to me off-camera and off-the-air as The Storyteller.
Stories have enabled me to survive in media and in pulpits for many
years, because good ones illustrate timeless principles and truths that
God reveals to us within time, as a means of understanding transcendent
truths and teaching these truths to others who subsequently apply them
to their own lives in this mysterious odyssey we call life, lived in
linear time and space before our subsequent arrival in the Kingdom of
God in eternity past, present, and future.
This story only goes back in time to
this past Father’s Day evening, June 15th, 2014. I was walking the
dogs in my local neighborhood of Northern Hills in San Antonio. Our San
Antonio Spurs NBA basketball team, which a year ago blew Game 6 of the
NBA Finals–and then the title in Game 7–to the Miami Heat, had just
won the rematch on Father’s Day evening by closing out Miami 107-87 in
Game 5 at the AT&T Center in the Alamo City. The core theme of this
victory in both the national and San Antonio media is one of Redemption.
I could hear the celebratory horn
honkings, the group cheering of the neighborhood block parties, and the
postgame firecrackers and fireworks, in the distant darkness. Although I
was thrilled to see the Spurs win the NBA championship, especially
after last year’s collapse with a 5 point lead and only 28.5 seconds to
play in Game 6, I was suddenly overcome by a strange and overpowering
sadness. My first thought was of my late Father, who passed away 5 years
ago. He had been a Spurs fan since 1977. We had lived and died
together through the fortunes of this storied pro basketball team, and
through the ups and downs of the championship seasons of 1999, 2003,
2005, and 2007. I have many memories of those days with him, in his
final years. But now on this Father’s Day, the miraculous acquisition
of a 5th World’s Championship for the Alamo City suddenly seemed hollow.
My Dad wasn’t here to see it, and to celebrate this San Antonio Spurs
victory with his longtime Army Air Corps/Air Force golfing partners at
the local Windcrest Golf Course. These other boyhood treasures are now
also gone, every last one of them. Where did time in this cosmos go?
Colonel Karl E. Dankof (USAF, ret.) in section 54, Arlington National Cemetery, Washington, D. C., off Admiral Leahy Drive.
There was a second thought
in the night as I walked: Thousands, millions of people can be engaged
in an NBA Basketball Championship quest. But where are these thousands,
millions of souls when it comes to engaging in the study and
painstaking search of God’s Word and its timeless truths, as the Holy
Spirit of God directs?
Coach Gregg Popovitch and Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs after clinching a 5th NBA Title on Father’s Day 2014.
In this regard, in my brief
lifetime, I have personally witnessed the demise of hunger for the Word
of God in American culture and the accompanying demise of Christian
morality that threatens our individual and collective survival. It would seem that the Drug and Sexual Revolutions of the 1960s have won. The Frankfurt School’s Institute of Social Research,
and the gurus of higher Biblical criticism and impoverished American
“Christianity”, have eclipsed the theology and personal piety of
Lutheran and Reformed Protestant Christianity in our land, even as I
speak today. Our cherished American Republic would seem to have died,
only to be replaced by an Empire taking on Beast-like characteristics.
Where are we going? What does it mean? Will the America many of us
knew in the distant past be absolutely gone by 2025, as Pat Buchanan’s
last book seems to predict? Are we truly witnessing the Suicide of a Superpower, and the suicide of the Christian theology and culture of our forefathers? It would seem so.
Pat Buchanan and Mark Dankof in San Antonio, Texas. 1995.
It was not always so, either in the United States specifically or in the Western world generally. Dr. C. George Fry’s essay on Helmut Thielicke for the Handbook of Evangelical Theologians
(Baker, 1993, pages 219-233) documents the hunger of average Germans
for the Word of God and the Gospel in the darkest days of World War II. I
share this wonderful material with you now, in the firm belief that as
the signs point to the impending arrival of an American midnight in
these dark days of the 21st century’s advancing onslaught, the
experience of German believers and Helmut Thielicke seven decades ago
will be used of the Holy Spirit of God to speak to you and to empower
you, as the circumstances of advancing time enshroud each and every one
of us in the days and nights emerging.
Helmut Thielicke: Preaching the Gospel near Midnight in the Stuttgart Cathedral.
Dr. Fry notes that when Thielicke
was ordained as a Lutheran pastor in 1941, it was not at all evident
that he would become Germany’s “preacher for apocalyptic times whose teaching had a sense of eschatological urgency” (Handbook of Evangelical Theologians,
page 219). The Fry essay tells us that Thielicke’s ordination in 1941
was preceded by his 1940 removal by the State from his initial teaching
position at the University of Heidelberg (p. 223). His unemployment
only ended due to the courage and grace of Bishop Theophil Wurm of the
territorial church of Wurttemberg, who provided Thielicke a pastorate in
the little town of Ravensburg in southern Germany, where the Gestapo
imposed an injunction which proscribed Thielicke from traveling or
speaking anywhere else in the country (p. 223). It is noteworthy that
in this time frame, Thielicke’s sole comfort was in absolute immersion
in the study of God’s Word (p. 224). It was perhaps assumed that
Thielicke would remain in a state of exile not unlike John at Patmos
under Domitian (A. D. 81-96), for the duration of his life.
But God had other plans. Emerging
from exile in Ravensburg, Thielicke was called to head the Theological
Office of the Church of Wurttemberg (1943-45), and was inexplicably
given permission by the Nazi authorities to deliver an evening lecture
each week in the historic Stuttgart Cathedral. Fry underscores (p. 224)
that Thielicke knew that he “must prepare people for the terrible
things that lay before them by giving them instruction–quite simply,
just instruction in the mysteries of our faith.”
As Dr. Fry chronicles this, Thielicke chose basic weapons in the fight to equip his listeners: the Word of God itself and the Small Catechism
of Martin Luther. I know these have been my own basic weapons in the
fight to equip a believing remnant in the United States since my
ordination 30 years ago. But like Pastor Spears, Pastor Erickson,
Pastor Thorson, and other faithful teachers of the Word in the LMS–USA, I
see no present larger-scale evidence of what I believe will yet come, a
renewal of hungering for the Gospel on the part of a larger segment of
our communities around the country. What will be the circumstance of
this renewal future? It is my belief that the Confessing Church
will be re-energized in the Refiner’s Fire of the apocalyptic
developments ahead for the United States and the globe in world history. As it was in Germany then, so shall it be with what looms on the political horizon now.
Helmut Thielicke: Being a Christian When the Chips are Down. Is America Nearing Midnight?
I most assuredly am not looking
forward to what this is going to mean in either my life or yours. But I
do look forward to the renewal of Biblical study and the deep yearning
for the Word of God and the Gospel of Christ that will move more people
to seek the truth of the deepest mysteries of God, in the briefly open
window of opportunity that will beckon in the midst of the terror and
calamity prophesied by Christ in the Olivet Discourse. In the time of
Thielicke’s re-emergence from exile in the darkest days of the eclipse
of German national fortunes in the Second World War, he would experience
something I hope every faithful Pastor in this Conference Room will yet
see before the ending of his days. Let Dr. Fry unfold this marvelous
testimony of those days of the Presence of Light in the midst of the
darkness:
“As he lectured [in Stuttgart Cathedral] on its five
principle parts [Small Catechism of Luther]–the Ten Commandments, the
Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, Baptism, and the Lord’s
Supper–‘evening after evening some three thousand persons gathered
together; workers and businessmen, students and professors, soldiers and
generals, Nazi functionaries (naturally in civilian clothes!) and Jews,
Dutch compulsory laborers . . . and sometimes whole classes from the
schools. It was an overwhelming time for me. Never since have I
experienced such intense listening.’ Soon
the massive air raids began. When the streetcars could no longer run,
people ‘came on foot, often from many miles away, through the fields of
ruins and rubble’ even on dark and frightening winter evenings. But
then the [Stuttgart] cathedral was destroyed. Thielicke wrote, ‘I can
still see the towering torch of this venerable house of God. . . . I
stood there holding in my hand a key to a door that no longer existed.'”
The
original Stuttgart Cathedral is located in Stuttgart-Bad-Canstatt. Its
history goes back all the way to 1470. After massive destruction during
the Second World War, the church was rebuilt in 1954/55.
With Thielicke and the destruction
of the Stuttgart Cathedral in mind, with reference to the impending
threats to our country and the world in the 21st century, let us again
turn briefly to my remarks before many of you in Indianapolis in 1996 in
Creeds and Confessions as Liturgy.
The central question of both 1996 and 2014 is the same one posed by
Thielicke 70 years ago to the German people. It is the core question of
all of history and eternity alike: Who is Jesus Christ and Why and How did He become the Word [λόγος] Who Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us? (John 1:14). To effectively answer this question, each and every believer must once again “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints (Jude, verse 3).” We
can only contend when we are immersed in the knowledge of the Word of
God and the Confessions of our Faith as the Holy Spirit of God directs
during countless hours of personal and collective study. We must avail ourselves of the Full Armor of God (Ephesians 6).
The Word (Logos) is God.
The Biblical text from John’s Gospel for today demonstrates the humanity and divinity of the λόγος. As we saw in my 1996 paper to this gathering in Indianapolis, the Ancient Church was not inventing its doctrine of the λόγος. It was fighting for the maintenance of the Biblical witness to the identity of the λόγος against all heretical and apostate teachers with their false doctrine and witness. In 1996, I stated:
“If we assume the legitimacy of
the Sola Scriptura today, and assume a commitment to the Lutheran
Confessions as the normative explication of what the Bible teaches, an
appropriate launching point for answering some of these raised questions
may lie in what occurs first in the Book of Concord of 1580, namely the
listing of the Three Ecumenical Creeds, or Three Chief Symbols of the Church as the foundational basis of all the Confessions which follow. This is important for several reasons. First,
the Confessions wanted to reiterate that their articles of faith were
neither recent nor heretical, but were undergirded by the theological
and historical foundations of the early Church. Second, it is noteworthy
that the controversies of the second, third, and fourth centuries were
consistently deemed applicable to the struggles of the Reformers in the
sixteenth century. Third, if historical and theological struggles and
issues of centuries two, three, and four continued to be relevant in the
sixteenth, one might suspect the possibility of a prima facie relevance
of those developments to a church under renewed attack from similar, in
some cases identical forces, as we approach the beginning of the twenty
first century. The writer of Ecclesiastes states that, ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’—this may well be his verdict on Biblical
theology’s constantly recast conflict with false doctrine — fought time
and again within the confines and context of redemptive history.”
When you and I sing and say today
all of the components of the Ancient Liturgy, which constantly employ
Scripture and the ancient witness to the core teaching in all of
Scripture regarding the identity and significance of the λόγος, we
stand with our ancient brothers and sisters in Christ against the
identical heresies and apostasies of Satan sown in the false teachers
and deceivers of our time. These
range from the Clown Eucharists of the Episcopal, United Methodist, and
ELCA liberals and universalists in our midst, to the Trivial Pursuits
and cultural accommodationism of the Southern Baptist pastor in Houston
two decades ago who conducted a “service” on Super Bowl Sunday vested in
an NFL referee’s uniform and whistle. We stand with the Confessing
Church of the Ages against the apostates of the “Reimagining Conference 1993” who blasphemed the Holy Trinity by worshiping the Goddess Sophia,
and who venerated radical feminism and lesbianism even as the
Conference banner in the sanctuary was an exquisitely embroidered
picture of The Beast. And we stand with our ancient
counterparts as the Lutheran Reformers of the 16th century did, against
the outright Montanism and exhibitionism of a “Prayer and Praise”
service witnessed by people in this Conference Room 24 years ago at the
Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota. The writer of
Ecclesiastes indeed understood the verdict of history and linear time: “There is nothing new under the sun.”
John’s witness to the λόγος is repristinated each time we sing the Kyrie, Agnus Dei, or Nunc Dimittis. It is repristinated each time we confess our faith with the Apostles’, Nicene, or Athanasian Creed. We encounter the λόγος in the mystery of the Eucharist tied to the Biblical Words of Institution of Christ. We encounter λόγος in
the Old Testament, New Testament Epistle, and New Testament Gospel
readings. He is a living reality, yesterday, today, and forever
(Hebrews 13:8). We deny λόγος
when we bend to the whims of the post-Christian spirit of this dark
age, embodied in the false teachers and teachings already enumerated.
And what a blessed Biblical witness to the λόγος lies before us in John’s text today and throughout his Gospel! The identity of the λόγος is clearly stated in John’s prologue, even as it is through the entirety of the book woven around 7 Miracles and 7 Discourses emphasizing the linkage of the λόγος to the I Am of the Old Testament (6:35, 48; 8:12; 9:5; 10:7, 9; 10:11, 14; 11:25; 14:6; 15: 1-5.).
Jesus Christ, the Logos. John, chapter 1.
Klappert gives us the roadmap for understanding John’s Prologue. He divides it into 3 sections:
“ 1) The pre-existent being of the λόγος (John 1: 1-4). ‘In the beginning’ is the λόγος–not ‘at the beginning’ of Creation (Genesis 1:1), but in the ‘time before time’ of divine eternity–was the λόγος (pre-existence of the Word, John 1:1), the λόγος was with God (personal reference, John 1:2), indeed the ‘λόγος was God’ (essential divinity of the λόγος, John 1:1) . By this λόγος , whereby the universe was created, men have their life and the benefit of light (John 1:3f.). 2) The coming of the λόγος to the world of men and his incomprehensible rejection (John 1: 5-13). The λόγος who
came into the world, to whom John the Baptist bore witness (John 1:
6-8; in the Evangelist’s mind vv. 5ff. thus already hint at the
Incarnation), was rejected by men in an incomprehensible way (John 1:
9-11), with the exception of those who came to faith and thus became
children of God (John 1:12f.) 3) The event of the incarnation of the λόγος and its redeeming significance (John 1: 14-18). Without surrendering–indeed, rather, in the application of his essential divinity, the λόγος became
a mortal man (sarx), took up residence amongst men, and, as the
presence of God’s glory with men, signified the gift of God’s grace and
covenant faithfulness to them (John 1: 14, 16), surpassing the OT
revelation of the word in the commandment and becoming event in Jesus
Christ (John 1:17f.).” [λόγος: DNTT, vol. 3, pages 1081-1146, esp. p. 1115, B. Klappert, author; Colin Brown, editor ]
The Who is Jesus Christ? has been answered in John’s Prologue and in linear history in time and space. The Why of Jesus Christ
is also stated in the Prologue, and what is arguably the greatest
summary statement in all of Scripture, found at the conclusion of the
Evangelist’s Gospel:
“And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book: but
these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the
Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name (John 20:
30-31).“
When we confess our Biblical faith through Creeds, Confessions, and Liturgy, we reaffirm the faith of the ages and “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints (Jude,
verse 3)”. We stand with our Lord against the false witness of
Caiphas, the Sanhedrin, and the mob which called for the release of
Barabbas. We stand with the Apostles in witness against the Jewish and
Roman opponents of the Gospel in the first century. We stand with the
Ancient Fathers and Councils against the 5 heresies of Gnosticism, Marcionism, Montanism, Monarchianism, and Arianism that
were chronicled for you in Indianapolis in 1996. We stand with Luther
and Chemnitz against Pope Leo X and the heresies of the Council of Trent
in the 16th century.
And we also stand against the evil
forces and developments of our own day. Our Pauline text from 2 Timothy
3: 1-5, and our Lord’s witness to the events of the future preceding
his Second Coming in Matthew 24: 3-4 guarantee this. Make no
mistake about it. You and I will be challenged and oppressed for our
faith in Christ in ways not previously seen or encountered by most of us. To “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints (Jude, verse 3)” as
our illustrious predecessors did, will require the ongoing presence and
empowerment of the Holy Spirit beyond anything we have known before. The Spirit’s leading and protection will be directly proportional to our involvement with the Word and with the Sacrament.
Our future pathway in faith in Christ is guaranteed to be the toughest
and most taxing journey of our lives, even as the Blessed Return of our
Lord stands at the end of that race.
H.-C. Hahn notes this in DNTT. The καιροὶ of “the final days” (2 Timothy 3: 1-5) is a “tension-laden time“. καιροὶ is a “point of time, a moment” which “characterizes a critical situation, one which demands a decision, one into which man is perhaps led by fate.” Used in a negative sense, it “implies danger” [καιροὶ: DNTT, vol. 3, pages 833-39; H.-C. Hahn, author; Colin Brown, editor].
That danger is linked to the deception our Lord warned us would come in Matthew 24: 3-4 [πλανήσῃ: DNTT, vol. 2, pages 457-61; W. Gunther, author; Colin Brown, editor]. W. Gunther indicates that the classical Greek usage of deception is inextricably linked to injustice (adikia) and evil (kakia). He states that in the New Testament, the active verb for deception is used almost exclusively in an apocalyptic sense and of false teachers.
As an adjective, the term is used to describe deceitful spirits (I
Timothy 4:1). As a noun, it is used to describe a deceiver, an
imposter, a false teacher. In the New Testament, the verb “to deceive” is used interchangeably with the verb “to destroy” (apollyo). And Satan is described specifically as The Destroyer (Revelation 9:11). H.-C. Hahn notes in quoting Oepke in DNTT, Vol. 1. pages 462-65 that we may reliably link deception and destruction in the New Testament sense as “definitive
destruction, not merely in the sense of the extinction of physical
existence, but rather of an eternal plunge into Hades and a hopeless
destiny of death.”
We must be convinced, as John was on
Patmos during his exile at the hands of Domitian (A. D. 81-96), that
earthly exile is far better than experiencing this Second Death.
Surely by now you know the drill.
These are the stakes. This is the apocalyptic struggle of our time,
soon to intensify as the fight of our lives, the fight of our souls, for
everything we have ever believed and confessed in Creeds, Confessions,
and Liturgy. We will indeed, in these final days, “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints (Jude, verse 3).”
As I began today with a story, I will uphold my reputation as The Storyteller by concluding with one. This one goes back to Friday, December 14th, 2012.
I was on a United Arab Emirates flight which had departed Dubai for
Houston, Texas. In a way I have never quite experienced before, I
witnessed something from the distant past, which took me back to some of
the happiest days of my youth, preceding the hardships and tragedies of
later years that often visit me–as they do all of us–in the darkest of
our thoughts in troubled nights. As my experience on the aircraft
suddenly transported me in the speed of light to a time almost 4 decades
prior in a reverse flight through linear time, I was simultaneously
catapulted into eternity in the Kingdom of God, in the presence of the
Triune God and all of the Saints of God by a forward thrust in linear
time ended instantaneously by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. It
goes something like this:
The biggest surprise of the
trip—was the return flight to Texas from Dubai on Emirates Airlines,
after arriving in Dubai from Durban and waiting 4 hours in Dubai for the
connection to Houston. I always prefer aisle seats on
aircraft, for easy access to the restroom and to walk around when
permitted, especially on flights of 25 hour duration. I had forgotten
to request them of Emirates Airlines while in Durban for the return to
the United States and managed to be wedged into a window seat in the
very back of the Boeing 777, in Seat 50 K. There were 3
advantages to this assignment I had not planned on. The first is that
Seat 50 K on a Boeing 777 on Emirates Airlines has one literally right
across from the restroom facility, and with easy access to the back of
the aircraft to procure additional snacks and drinks from the flight
attendants in between peak service times. The second proved to be a
delightful encounter with an African American woman from Texas seated
next to me, who was a schoolteacher in Dubai. She had a great
personality and plenty of inside information on living and working in
that locale in the United Arab Emirates. The third was a ringside seat to scenery of my sojourn of many years ago: Iran.
Unlike the flight from Houston to Dubai on my way to South Africa,
where the plane straddled the Iran-Iraq border as it split the very
middle of the Persian Gulf at night on the approach to Dubai (I did see
the coastal lights of Bandar Abbas from the left side of the aircraft
and my aisle seat of that evening), the return journey took the
interested passenger through the heart of modern Iran and ancient
Persia. There they were again as I proceeded in a South to
North fashion through the central corridor: the combination of
clay-colored desert and jagged mountains with occasional snow caps
beneath me as I traveled an aerial salient with the
Shiraz-Isfahan-Tehran axis to my left (west), and the Kerman-Mashhad
axis to my right (east); I followed the plane’s crossing of the Kerman
to Yazd railroad tracks below, and then the stark, haunting beauty of
the Kavir-e-Lut to the east, followed by the eventual appearance of
the Dasht-e-Kavirdesert (The Salt Desert) in the country’s north-central
interior. Only one question remained. Would I see Tehran
once more after an absence of many years, or would this be the
exclusive privilege of the denizens of the left side of the aircraft
looking westward as we continued our northern route toward the Caspian
Sea? The answer arrived soon enough. I would not
witness Iran’s capital from Emirates Airlines Flight EK 211 traveling
ponderously at an altitude of just under 30,000 feet in a strange arc
from Dubai to Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Texas. What I did see in a marvelous panorama as the plane banked slightly was a view of snow enshrouded Mount Damavand (elevation 18,406 feet/Kuh-e-Damavand,
elevation 5671 metres) as the aircraft approached it, and finally did a
direct flyover. There was another gift of the Divine to me while
seated in seat 50 K: when approaching Damavand, I had a brief, but
clear glimpse of Lar Valley (Daryacheh-ye-Sadd-e-Lar).
Damavand in Winter, just as I witnessed it on December 14, 2012 on Emirates Airlines.
The first American pastor to
serve in Persia described Lar Valley and summer camping in a book
entitled,Persia and the Persians. My late Father and
I would camp and fish there a lifetime ago, in the summertimes during
my visits to my parents in between undergraduate college years in the
United States. The nighttime sky there is permanently etched in my
mind. One does not see stars there, but entire galaxies and planets
seemingly close enough to reach out and touch. Sleeping in pup tents
and sleeping bags is facilitated by the stillness of the Valley in the
nocturnal hours, permeated only by the incessant but soothing presence
of the voice of God in the form of “the rush of many waters” (Revelation
1:15). The words of Hafez in the 14th century came to consciousness:
Lie down beside the flowing stream
and see life passing by and know
that of the world’s transient nature
this one sign is enough for us.
After passing over Damavand, I
looked at my watch and the GPS system screen in front of me in seat 50
K. It was 0210 Central time in Texas in the United States on Friday,
December 14th. Tehran time was exactly 1140 on the same day in history.
All of a sudden, I was no longer a middle aged man of 57 in transit
from South Africa to America. I was a young 19 year old college kid
again, fishing with my Father and swapping stories with him at night in
the Sadd-e-Lar. I was hiking in the hills at the foot of Mount Damavand
in early summer. I was playing center field again on the Air Force
Detachment 333 fast pitch softball team playing against the U. S. Army
team in the stadium at Gulf District, the American military outpost off
Saltanatabad Avenue in north Tehran in the Pahlavi years. I saw myself
wandering around in great wonderment in the ruins of Persepolis,
searching for the treasures contained in the cities of Isfahan and
Shiraz, running the Vacation Bible School for kids in the summertime
atmosphere of Community Church of Tehran, embarking on a 7 mile run at
0500 beginning each day from my parents’ apartment in the city, or
approaching the tomb of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae with the respect
accorded to one mentioned by the Old Testament repeatedly as a prototype
and forerunner of Jesus Christ, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah (2
Chronicles 22-23; Ezra, chapters 1, 3, 4, 5, 6; Isaiah, chapters 44 and
45; and Daniel, chapters 1, 6, 10).
Cyrus
the Great’s tomb at Pasargadae, Iran is captured on a winter night most
magnificently by the astrophotography of Oskin D. Zakarian of Tehran.
It was so long ago. Yet it
was only yesterday. And it all came flooding back in a handful of
minutes on Emirates Flight EK 211 between the United Arab Emirates and
the State of Texas. There was one especially strange
manifestation during this brief gift of God 30,000 feet above earth.
Immediately upon crossing a brief segment of the Caspian Sea in leaving
Iranian airspace, the perfect visibility I had possessed from Bandar
Abbas to Lar Valley and Damavand had absolutely vanished. While the GPS
screen informed me of the Boeing 777′s impending overflight of Baku,
Azerbaijan, a solid sheet of impenetrable white clouds completely
obscured any view from above. This sudden departure of visibility
continued through the Balkans and most of Europe. Had the Hidden Hand
of Creation, Redemption, and theNew Heaven and the New Earth kept this
cloud cover north of the Iranian border for an appointed purpose?
I was neither irritated nor disappointed in what I did not view from
Baku northward. I saw what God wanted me to see, from the humble
vantage point of Seat 50 K in Economy Class on Emirates Airlines Flight
EK 211. The perpetual movement of Time and the relentless advance of
Biological Age in decades speeding by with the speed of light, had
momentarily halted. Eternity was in full view, an Eternity firmly in
the center of the Kingdom of God, occupied by His Saints past, present,
and future. What I witnessed in Iranian airspace on December 14th is a
promissory note promising all good things to come for the true Israel of
God bathed in the blood of the Lamb. Spring is indeed near.
Spring is indeed near, for all the
Saints of God on this beautiful day in Wisconsin in June of the Year of
Our Lord, 2014. Be sure of this! And may the God and Father of our Lord
and Savior Jesus Christ bless you today, tomorrow, and forever (Hebrews
13:8).
A
River Runs Through Iran’s Lar Valley. It presages the soothing presence
of the voice of God in the form of “the rush of many waters”
(Revelation 1:15).
Mark Dankof for Press TV: Israel Lobbyists and AIPAC Controlling American Foreign Policy
Mark Dankof on Press TV/Iran on the Dangers of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as the Agent of a Foreign Power.
This 5 minute conversation is less notable for its reaffirmation of the painfully obvious, than it is for the ground covered in the allotted time. JFK’s attempt to bring the American Zionist Council (the forerunner of AIPAC) into accountability as a registered agent of a foreign power; the racist and terroristic foundations of the Zionist State of Israel from Day One; the recruitment of Senate Foreign Affairs Committee denizen Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, as a virtual agent of Israel by Senator Joseph Lieberman in 2012; the 2012 National Journal story entitled, “Accepting the Neo-Con Torch: Marco Rubio“; and Rubio’s enamorment with Neo-Conservative Robert Kagan, the husband of U. S. Undersecretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and the author of “The World America Made“, are all mentioned in the overview of why AIPAC engaged in a recent broadside of American Secretary of State, John Kerry.
Listen here.
Mark Dankof for Press TV: U.S. Will Continue to Cover For Saudi Crimes
Mark Dankof at KABB-FOX 29 in San Antonio.
Mark
Dankof of The Ugly Truth and ex-US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Richard
Murphy on Press TV’s “The Debate” with hostess Homa Lezgee.
In my recent conversation with Homa Lezgee of Press TV/Iran and ex-U. S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Richard Murphy, I emphasize the significance of the August 15, 1971 decision of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to end the Bretton Woods agreement linking the American dollar to the price of gold, replacing this arrangement with the American accord with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia linking the dollar to all international oil transactions globally. This Faustian bargain has preserved the status of the American dollar as the reserve currency of the world, even as the Federal Reserve Board continues to print fiat money and the American government continues to borrow money from foreign banks.
The Petrodollar and the Zionist State of Israel drive American foreign policy in the Middle East—into the proverbial drink. . . .
Watch here.
Mark Dankof on Press TV’s “The Debate”: Israel’s Con Game Soon to Be Over
Mark Dankof discusses Zionist machinations in Palestine, Syria, Ukraine, and Iran.
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