Mark Dankof talks to Reza Saieedi and Tasnim News: On American Exceptionalism and Other Untruths

Mark Dankof and Ice Cream After the Chat with Reza Saieedi.

Reza Saieedi of the Tasnim News Agency of Iran recently interviewed Mark Dankof on the doctrine of American Exceptionalism and other related controversies. The questions and answers follow:

Reza Saieedi: Regarding the idea of American Exceptionalism, in an article for the Heritage Foundation Matthew Spalding wrote: “America is an exceptional nation, but not because of what it has achieved or accomplished. America is exceptional because, unlike any other nation, it is dedicated to the principles of human liberty, grounded on the truths that all men are created equal and endowed with equal rights. These permanent truths are ‘applicable to all men and all times,’ as Abraham Lincoln once said.”

     In spite of decades of effort to achieve equal rights, we still see minorities–notably blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans–who suffer from injustice inside the US borders. So what does this notion of exceptionalism really mean in terms of daily life in America?

Mark Dankof: I would reject the mythological interpretation of the reign of Abraham Lincoln as a defender of the Constitution and human rights as the 16th President of the United States.

     Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo has written the definitive book on the Lincoln Presidency in my view. It is entitled The Real Lincoln. I reviewed the book some years ago on one of my web sites. In that review, I stated that: “DiLorenzo’s analysis of Lincoln, accompanied by copious historical documentation, shatters the mythology surrounding the 16th President’s motives and agenda in pursuing the War Between The States. The author provides convincing evidence for Lincoln’s overt racism as expressed in his documented views on racial supremacy as manifested in his desire to colonize all American blacks outside the continental United States (p. 4); that Lincoln’s views were matched by a palpable majority in the North who utilized such tools as state constitutional amendments to prohibit the emigration of black people into Northern states like the President’s home state of Illinois (p.4); and that Lincoln’s war which killed 620,000 Americans [equivalent to 5 million deaths in 2002 population numbers and percentages] and destroyed 40 percent of the American economy, was a singularly terrible, unjustified conflict given the proven success in the 19th century of the peaceful end to slavery through the policy of compensated emancipation (p. 4). DiLorenzo duly notes that, ‘Between 1800 and 1860, dozens of countries, including the entire British Empire, ended slavery peacefully; only in the United States was a war involved (p. 4).’”

     What then, does The Real Lincoln lay out as the actual road map for understanding the war and the accompanying strategy and psyche of Abraham Lincoln in resorting to armed force against the Southern states? In his tome, DiLorenzo underscores the mythological President’s political and moral failure in pursuing the bloodshed of fellow countrymen with an evil, unnecessary, coercive methodology. The author insists that the prevailing world-wide trends between 1800-1860 would have resulted in the irenic end to the institution of slavery by; 1) compensated emancipation; 2) an encouraged advance of the industrial revolution in the South with capital-intensive agriculture and manufacturing (p. 277); and 3) the inevitable furtherance of Enlightenment philosophy in the American mind and culture, a philosophy which in the end game would have been ideologically incompatible with the continuation of the institution, as had been the case throughout the British empire (pp. 276-277).

     For the Loyola College Professor of Economics, the real Lincoln agenda in the War Between the States is located in the fact that: “. . .the War Between the States so fundamentally transformed the nature of American government. Before the war, government in America was the highly decentralized, limited government established by the founding fathers. The war created the highly centralized state that Americans labor under today. The purpose of American government was transformed from the defense of individual liberty to the quest for empire. . . . Lincoln thought of himself as the heir to the Hamiltonian political tradition, which sought a much more centralized governmental system, one that would plan economic development with corporate subsidies financed by protectionist tariffs and the printing of money by the central government. . . . It was Lincoln’s real agenda. . . . Henry Clay’s ‘American System.’ For his entire political life Lincoln was devoted to Clay and Clay’s economic agenda. The debate over this economic agenda was arguably the most important political debate during the first seventy years of the nation’s existence. It involved the nation’s most prominent statesmen and pitted the states’ rights Jeffersonians against the centralizing Hamiltonians (who became Whigs and, later, Republicans). The violence of war finally ended the debate in 1861. . . . A war was not necessary to free the slaves, but it was necessary to destroy the most significant check on the powers of the central government: the right of secession. (Introduction)”

     So essentially, the worst aspects of the modern Imperial American Presidency that would be seen in Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, the Bushes, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, are all based on the Lincoln reign. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts agrees essentially with DiLorenzo and with me in these conclusions.

Mark Dankof: Beware of the Lincoln Myth.

     Lincoln’s use of the U. S. Army to engage in the mass murder of American civilians in the American South became the prototype of what would later happen to the American Indians in the Manifest Destiny-driven expansion of the United States westward. This is but one example of where White Americans and Non-White Americans were both victimized by the same dynamics and the same ideology of the allegedly Exceptional American Empire. In the present historical milieu White and Non-White Americans are equally oppressed by a Government destroying the American economy with Globalist Trade Agreements, destroying the legitimacy of American elections with a financing mechanism embodied in the Citizens United and McCutcheon Supreme Court decisions, destroying the American dollar by the fiat money policies of the Federal Reserve Board, destroying the lives of American and non-American alike with the endless wars in the Middle East pursued to further the aims of Israel, the International Central Banking establishment linked to the Petrodollar, and the Energy Consortiums, and destroying the earlier cultural mores of a society rooted in Western Christianity and replacing it with a wholehearted endorsement and promotion of the legitimacy of homosexuality, pornography, abortion, and euthanasia.

     Scott McConnell of Buchanan’s The American Conservative recently quoted historian Walter Russell Mead in
demonstrating how Zionist Neo-Conservatives have wedded the doctrine of American Exceptionalism to the notion of Israeli Exceptionalism. The perversion of historic Christian orthodoxy on eschatology in the interest of affirming the heresy known as Christian Zionism is the glue that holds much of this dangerous ideological poison in place in the United States:

     “. . . Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams backed Netanyahu, quoting in his favor this four-year-old passage from historian Walter Russell Mead:

     ‘Israel matters in American politics like almost no other country on earth. Well beyond the American Jewish and the Protestant fundamentalist communities, the people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul. The idea of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism is profoundly tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. The belief that God favors and protects Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects America.’”

The Result of Linking “American Exceptionalism” to “Israeli Exceptionalism.”

Reza Saieedi: Given the details in the newly released Senate Intelligence Committee report of inmates in America’s prisons being tortured, it seems that human rights violations are implemented in both US foreign and domestic foreign policy. What is your take on this? After the Senate Intelligence Committee report compilation and release, now what? Nothing is accomplished by simply stating that these illegal actions took place without some form of punishment for the offending parties. What is the next step?

Mark Dankof: Thomas Jefferson and America’s other Founders recognized that a government dedicated to promoting global Empire abroad would be the same Government destroying the rights of American citizens at home. The revelations about CIA torture are accompanied by the revelations about illegal NSA spying, the USA Patriot Acts, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Much of this is aimed at suppressing the Bill of Rights and the Constitutional protections of Americans at home. When you add to all of this the fact that companies linked directly and indirectly to the Zionist State of Israel are procuring contracts with American intelligence, law enforcement agencies, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Transportation Safety Administration, one can say that the best way of understanding what has happened to the United States in this increasing evolution toward evil internationally and domestically, especially since September 11, 2001 is inextricably linked to the fact that our Government has increasingly adopted the attitudes and the ethos of Israel since 1948. This has included the demonization and marginalization of Americans who have protested these developments.

The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture is mere public relations window dressing.

Nothing will be done to punish the people involved, or to insure these actions will not be regularly repeated. Ominously, most of the American public doesn’t seem to care. Much of the rest of the public will buy the notion that these actions are justified by “national security.”

Reza Saieedi: The US has recently issued sanctions against Venezuela because of reported police brutality. What is being done to remedy the large number of incidents of police brutality inside America? What entity should issue sanctions against America for their own violations?

Mark Dankof: Nothing is being done. Nothing will be. This is the grim reality.

Reza Saieedi: We call Israel the only true democracy in the Middle East and continue to throw our unconditional support behind it, in spite of its terrible human rights record. Does the meaning of democracy lie in the examples we see in places like Palestine and Ferguson?

Mark Dankof: Israel is an illegitimate State founded in a Talmudic racial supremacist ideology and land theft from its inception. The King David Hotel bombing in 1946 and the Deir Yassin slaughter are microcosms of the larger truth I have stated. It bleeds dry America’s credibility in the world, bleeds dry our economy, and destroys the integrity of our elections and what was once a semblance of journalistic integrity in the mainstream American press. I would be most cautious in comparing the Palestine tragedy with the Ferguson, Missouri tragedy. The American media has deliberately spun the latter in a way which blinds both White and Black Americans to considering the Zionist, Globalist, Neo-Conservative hijacking of our Government and basic institutions. Domestically, the American media has spun Ferguson in a way which intimates that only racial minorities have serious vulnerabilities in the United States to irresponsible police actions against citizens; the American media spin on Ferguson similarly diverts attention from the absolute statistical truths on police crimes against White Americans, and the fact that the most overwhelming problem statistically with violent crime in the United States involves African American crimes against other African Americans, and against White Americans.

Reza Saieedi: Israeli PM Netanyahu has ordered actions that brought about the killing of thousands of women and children and continues a policy of siege in Gaza, prohibiting vital supplies and resources from reaching needy Palestinian families.However he was present at the recent Paris vigil denouncing religious intolerance. What can explain this ironic situation? Can these two attitudes co-exist?

Mark Dankof: Netanyahu’s presence at the Paris vigil in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo incident is a sick combination of tragedy and comedy, as is the presence of the illegitimate President of the Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, who was installed by a coup d’etat launched by the United States, the European Union, and Israeli oligarchs opposed to Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia. Netanyahu’s routine criminality in Gaza is supplemented by the criminal actions of the Poroshenko regime in eastern Ukraine against Russian ethnics as seen by the Odessa Trade Union fire and a shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, a crime with all the finger prints of the Kiev cabal. The United States supports Netanyahu and Poroshenko.

You can draw your own conclusions as to what the larger implications of this happen to be.

Mark Dankof Profile: www.ExpertClick.com/19-2281

Imputation and Declaration: The Links to God’s Grace in Jesus Christ

The Logo of the LMS-USA and the Pillars of Luther’s Reformation: Christ Alone, Faith Alone, Grace Alone, Scripture Alone.

 

[Mark Dankof’s article will appear in the next edition of Table Talk, the national publication of the Lutheran Ministerium and Synod, an affiliate of the International Lutheran Council (ILC). The article is a condensed version of a presentation on the Lutheran version of the doctrine of Justification by Grace Through Faith in Christ made recently to a seminar of evangelical Protestant high school students in San Antonio.]

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“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: (For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed [δὲ οὐκ ἐλλογεῖται μὴ ὄντος] when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come. But not as the offence, so also is the free gift. For if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many. And not as it was by one that sinned, so is the gift: for the judgment was by one to condemnation, but the free gift is of many offences unto justification. For if by one man’s offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign [δωρεᾶς τῆς δικαιοσύνης λαμβάνοντες ἐν] in life by one, Jesus Christ. Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.“

Romans 5:12-19 King James Version (KJV)

 

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God [ἡμεῖς γενώμεθα δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ ἐν] in him.

2 Corinthians 5:21

- King James Bible “Authorized Version” Cambridge Edition

 

       Before we begin to cover the material in earnest, indulge me in a compulsive practice of mine that always characterized my time as an instructor in San Antonio at the former Texas Bible College.  It has characterized my time as a humble pastor in a small and struggling Lutheran parish in the Alamo City when I conduct classes on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings, and in every other pastoral call I’ve ever had.

       That practice is to recommend some of the best books available in assisting believing pastor and lay person alike in the regular and deeper study of God’s Word.  Every one of these books I will briefly mention today has been penned by individuals more gifted than I in this endeavor.  I am thankful I can access their work.  I am thankful I can commend the repository of Biblical knowledge and insight of these men and women to you.

       Consider the following as lifelong resources to add to your individual libraries over the course of time.  The first resource is the newly released update of the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis (NIDNTTE, ISBN 9780310276197) a 5 volume set of 3,552 pages compiled under the supervision and superintendence of Dr. Moises Silva, the Revision Editor who has blessed Westmont College, Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary over time with his brand of painstaking scholarship in complete submission to the authority of God’s Word and the Gospel of Christ. Download a free primer on the NIDNTTE at http://www.bit.ly/nidntte.

       Several one volume introductions to the Old and New Testament will always serve you in good stead.  Try An Old Testament Introduction (ISBN 9780310263418) by Tremper Longman III of Westmont College, and the late Raymond Dillard of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.  Add An Introduction to the New Testament (ISBN 9780310238591) by D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo, both of whom were professors of mine at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.

       Since the Charismatic Renewal movement is something one will encounter in so many places today, I will commend to everyone here the book entitled, Are Miraculous Gifts for Today?: 4 Views (ISBN 9780310201557). The contributors include my old friend and instructor at Westminster Theological Seminary, Dr. Richard Gaffin; Robert L. Saucy; C. Samuel Storms; and Douglas A. Oss.  Another of my New Testament instructors from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School is the editor of this critical book, Dr. Wayne Grudem.

       Finally, I have slavishly used charts as a student and as a pastor trying to plumb the depths of God’s Word.  The Zondervan Publishing Company’s series of charts on every conceivable subject is worth your acquisition for the subjects you are drawn to study and examine as the Holy Spirit leads.

     Every seminar presentation I make is based on a circle.  My reference recommendations are the beginning of the circle which will conclude with where we have now begun.

     Let’s begin in earnest.  I have been asked to give this largely Protestant evangelical, non-Lutheran gathering of fine young people, a presentation of the essential aspects of orthodox Lutheran theological and Biblical insight on the person and work of Jesus Christ and the implications of this Biblically revealed Christology for the plan God has established from all eternity for the salvation of the Israel of God.  By this latter term, I mean all those through the ages who have “confessed with their lips that Jesus is Lord, and believe in their hearts that God has raised Him from the dead” (Romans 10:9).

     Put another way, the person and work of Jesus Christ and its centrality in God’s provision for salvation, is a fact in history if one accepts the Biblical witness.  But what are the implications for each of you?  Do each of you possess eternal life and salvation in the coming Kingdom of God, or not?  If not, the objective truth of the Biblical witness that “. . . the Word became flesh and dwelt among us . . . ” (John 1:14) is for you, an irrelevancy.

     Last summer, I made a presentation to the national gathering of the Lutheran Ministerium and Synod–USA entitled, “The Hands of Time and the Appearance of Logos.”  In turn, that address was based on a 1996 talk and subsequent article entitled, “Creeds and Confessions as Liturgy.”  The 1996 presentation underscored how the early Confessing Church had to wrestle with all of the ancient Christological heresies whose presuppositions and methodology provide the foundation for every modern Christological heresy which threatens the Confessing Church of the present age.  I stated then that:

      “Among many heretical movements of significance to the early church were Gnosticism, Marcionism, Montanism, Monarchianism, and Arianism.  Out of orthodoxy’s clash with these came an increasingly systematized Christian theological rebuttal and the formulation of affirmative creedal statements. These statements may be seen not only as the voice of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church staking out its position in challenges past — but as the bequeathed legacy to today’s church, which must turn, paradoxically, to the past, to understand the ideological lineage and connections of ancient enemies to modern antagonists, as well to recover its own historical memory as the key to the reestablishment of a previously possessed Biblical identity, obscured by compromise with doctrinal relativism and repristinated apostasy.“

       In summarizing these papers of the past two decades quickly, let me simply say that the Biblical witness is clear in the rebuttal of all apostates and heretics in history:  Jesus Christ is True God and True Man.  His active and perfect obedience to God’s law; His passive obedience to God the Father in willingly suffering death on the Cross at Calvary as the Lamb of God without spot or blemish; and the reality in time and space of his Resurrection from the dead are the sole basis for the salvation and eternal life of all who believe (John 14:6).  For those who believe, the Apostle Paul underscores the truism that “. . . no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit” (I Corinthians 12:3).

     Fair enough. But given the comprehensive sinfulness and rebellion of all of humanity described by Paul in Romans 3: 9-20, how is it that the Holy Spirit and saving faith are bestowed upon some and not others? How are some declared righteous by God and not others, since all have an equally and fatally corrosive inability to observe the law perfectly as a prerequisite for earning God’s declaration of righteousness (Romans 3: 20)?

       Put another way, the key question is this:  How is the righteousness of God in Christ, and the benefit of status as one of God’s redeemed through Christ alone for all eternity, transferred or conveyed to each and every comprehensively sinful person in Adam (Romans 5:12f) who is subsequently able to “confess with their lips that Jesus is Lord, and believe in their hearts that God has raised Him from the dead“? (Romans 10:9).

       Enter the ingredients necessary for the appropriate reception of believing faith in Christ through the Holy Spirit of God, and the accompanying priceless gift of eternal salvation in Christ, and Christ alone:  These are the Imputation of God to the believer of an alien righteousness inherently extrinsic to all of humanity impacted by the sin of Adam.  This alien righteousness has its center in the active and passive obedience of Jesus Christ alone. The forensic Declaration of God that the Israel of God is righteous in Christ follows. The believer’s salvific status before God is the result of this process of Imputation and Declaration.  He or she can contribute not one whit to what has been accomplished by the Son of God on behalf of each and every Saint.  In a nutshell, the Protestant Reformational truth that we are justified by God’s grace alone, through Jesus Christ alone, is absolutely and irrevocably linked to what the New Testament tells us about Imputation and Declaration.  The Lutheran tradition and the Reformed are in complete accord on this mysterious truth.

     As a pastor and theologian with but limited gifts, I never attempt to reinvent the wheel built by our best scholars and exegetes in time.  However, God has given me a special gift in enabling me to find, evaluate, and catalog for your use and mine some of the best Biblical scholarship available either now or in the past.  When it comes to Imputation and Declaration, I will summarize what I believe is one of the best recent presentations on the subject of the Evangelical–and truly both Lutheran and Reformed–position on this critical subject.

     I commend to you The Gospel Coalition’s relatively recent book entitled “The Gospel as Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices” edited by D. A. Carson and Timothy Keller (Crossway, 2012).  For purposes of this seminar conversation today, I ask you to zero in on chapter 9, written by Wheaton College President and Reformed Scholar, Dr. Philip Graham Ryken. Chapter 9 is simply entitled, “Justification.”

     My summation of that chapter will hopefully provide your own roadmap to future Biblical study of the link between Imputation and Declaration, and the Doctrine of Justification understood in the context of God’s mysterious and merciful provision for salvation in Jesus Christ.  My summation largely coincides with that of evangelical Armenian scholar Roger E. Olson, except my evaluation of Ryken is more favorable. Olson is certainly a believer in Christ.  But note that his tradition parts with Luther and Calvin on the subject of free will, and with Augustine, Luther, and Calvin on the issue of the semi-Pelagianism of Jacob Armenius.  I cannot deal with this at great length now.  But please do not miss out on the critical differences inherent in these respective interpretations. Here then is the summary of chapter 9:

     1)  Ryken calls Justification the “Chief Article.” He says “This doctrine holds a place near the center of the gospel.” (153)

     2)  Ryken bases most of his exposition of justification on passages from Romans, especially chapters 3 and 5. According to him, these Pauline passages and other passages of the New Testament, taken together, propound the truth that in salvation God “does not simply clear a sinner of all charges; he declares a sinner to be positively righteous. Justification is God’s legal declaration that, on the basis of the perfect life and the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ, received by faith, a sinner is as righteous as his own beloved Son.” (155-156)

     3)  This chapter is, for the most part, a straightforward account of the classical Lutheran-Reformed doctrine of justification as forensic imputation of righteousness. The emphasis is on legal metaphors, on declaration and imputation and not on personal relationship, reconciliation or transformation (of the person being saved). Salvation is primarily a change of legal status in relation to God’s judgment.  While the emphasis is on legal metaphors and change of legal status, this fact does provide the foundation for subsequent sanctification and walking in personal relationship with the Biblical God who is a personal being in constant engagement with His chosen.

     4)  Ryken believes the very doctrine of God is at stake in his doctrine of justification. Anyone who thinks God can simply forgive a repentant sinner without imputing Christ’s righteousness to him or her (something else he makes clear in the chapter) is impugning the character of God.

     5)  The most fascinating portion of the chapter is the logical symmetry Ryken presents in “The Righteousness of Justification: A Triple Imputation.” Ryken argues that Adam’s sin (meaning guilt) is imputed to everyone; our sin is imputed to Christ (on the cross) and Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us in salvation. The key verses he cites for this triple imputation are Romans 5:12-19 (imputation of Adam’s sin to us) and 2 Corinthians 5:21 (our sins imputed to Christ and his righteousness imputed to us).

     As I promised at the beginning of this conversation, we have come full circle at the very end.  Why do I say this?  Let me first ask two questions only you can answer for yourself: Are these Biblical truths appropriated by you and for you in faith? Second, is what has been the understanding of God’s mysterious provision for your salvation and mine articulated by the Lutheran and Reformed traditions historically, and in my presentation of the position of Dr. Ryken today, the correct understanding of the Word of God?

     This is where your journey only begins, as the Holy Spirit of God moves and directs you.  Get the newly released update of the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis (NIDNTTE, ISBN 9780310276197), Moises Silva (ed.) as I directed at the beginning of the circle.

   And obtain Strong’s Greek and Hebrew concordances.  See the words below in Strong’s concordances.  Use Strong’s in conjunction with NIDNTTE.  And begin a journey with our Biblical texts cited when we started today, and a lifelong journey with the entirety of God’s prophetic and apostolic Word.  You will be glad you did.

     Thank you, and may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Amen.

λογίζομαι (logizomai)  Strong’s Number 3049

δίκαιος, ία, ιον (dikaios)  Strong’s Number 1342

δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosune)  Strong’s Number 1343

δίκη, ης, ἡ  (diké)  Strong’s Number 1349

ἐλλογέω (Ellogeo)   Strong’s Number 1677

חָשַׁב  (chashab)  Strong’s Hebrew Number 2803

imputare (Latin)

Mark Dankof on the Charlie Hebdo Affair for the Rasa News Agency of Iran

Mark Dankof on Charlie Hebdo: It’s a Zionist Instrument Dedicated to Blasphemy and Subversion of Christian and Islamic Faiths Alike.

Seyed Muhammad Javad Mousavi of the Rasa News Agency of Iran interviewed Mark Dankof for his perspective on the Charlie Hebdo Affair.  The Persian language version of the discussion may be accessed here.  

1 – What do you think is the main purpose of continuously insulting the Prophet of Islam? 

Mark Dankof:  It is important to remember what Pat Buchanan told us all last week:  The Charlie Hebdo publication in France was also insulting and blaspheming every version of orthodox Christianity when it depicted the God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, as being involved in an incestuous sexual relationship.  Who has a vested interest in blaspheming both Christianity and Islam as part of a world-wide ideological and political game plan? Clearly, it is the global Zionist network which desires to assert the Talmudic doctrine of Jewish racial supremacy on a global basis, and to convince comatose Westerners that their primary enemy in the world is Islam, and not the Zionist hijacking of their own banking system, culture, government, media, and educational establishments.  The Frankfurt School and its Institute of Social Research which destroyed the older Christian civilizations in the West in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith (ADL) by subverting Europe and the United States with pornography, sexual perversion including the LGBT (Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transsexual) agenda, and the abortion/euthanasia industries, is working its demonic magic through all kinds of Jewish-funded media outlets and NGOs to solidify its hold on the Western world, even as it also seeks the subversion of the Islamic societies and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.  Eric Margolis concedes that the Charlie Hebdo publication is financed by Rothschild banking interests in France.  Simply follow the trail of the money.

Pat Buchanan and Mark Dankof: Charlie Hebdo Depicts God the Father and God the Son, Jesus Christ, in an Incestuous Relationship.

Charlie Hebdo’s financiers and handlers clearly seek to falsely equate mainstream Sunni and Shia Islam with the Wahhabi and Takfiri fanatics comprising the ISIS and al-Qaeda organizations, and to discredit Islam generally in the West, even as orthodox Christianity is also lampooned.  Both Islamic and Christian movements must be infiltrated from within with sexual decadence, paid intelligence assets, and internal disorder. The final strategy in the quest for Zionist global supremacy and the final victory of the so-called New World Order will involve the realization of the dream of launching the War of Civilizations envisioned by the Project for the New American Century and its bedfellows.  This will necessitate pitting Sunni Islam and Shia Islam against one another as adversaries, and pitting what remains of a Christian remnant in the West against both Islam and Putin’s Russia.  Divide and Conquer is the age-old methodology used by this evil monolith.  

2 – Some analysts believe that the role of the western intelligence services such as MI6 and Mossad is undeniable regarding the Charlie Hebdo attacks. What’s your take on that? If there is a role, what are the possible reasons behind that? 

Mark Dankof:  While I cannot absolutely prove it, I agree with Ron Paul and Paul Craig Roberts that the Charlie Hebdo affair has all the earmarks of a False Flag operation conducted by the Israeli Mossad, the British MI6, and the American CIA.  It is ludicrous to believe that the national security police states erected in Europe and the United States would be providing money, political, and logistical support to ISIS in a clear attempt to overthrow President Assad in Syria (a clear Zionist objective as a prelude to attacking Iran), and then would subsequently fail to effectively monitor the comings and goings of hundreds of these Wahhabic terror elements traveling with apparent impunity between Syria and both Europe and the United States. These travels are being allowed for a purpose, which is to deliberately enact incidents of this kind, diverting Western public attention from the Hidden Hand financing and directing these operations, as well as diverting public attention from ongoing Israeli atrocities in Palestine, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Additionally, I believe France was being punished for its public deviations as of late from the wholesale support of the Zionist agenda demanded by the power elite in the West.  I refer to the French Parliament’s recent pro-Palestinian vote (s) in public session, and President Hollande’s urging of a reassessment of the wisdom and utility of the economic sanctions being imposed on Putin’s Russia.  

I believe there are additional cracks in the canvas being painted by the real perpetrators of this incident, including the convenient leaving behind of an Identification Card in a getaway car by the alleged assailants, and the equally convenient killing of the accused by the French police.  Dead Men Tell No Tales.  . . . Just ask Lee Harvey Oswald.

3 – In your opinion, what might be the possible reasons behind the Israeli Prime Minister’s attendance in Charlie Hebdo’s post-attack rally? 

Mark Dankof: Netanyahu is a war criminal and murderer simply taking advantage of the Zionist controlled media in France specifically and the West generally. He obviously wants to justify his regime’s criminal policies in Palestine and Gaza by posing as a defender of human rights and freedom of expression in the West against “Islamic Jihadists“.  It is the established Zionist strategy to make the aggressor and the criminal perpetrator appear as the aggrieved victim.  This is especially outlandish, given the legal persecution and economic marginalization of scholars and political activists in the West who have criticized Israel, or who have questioned aspects of the establishment Zionist narrative on what happened in World War II and during the runup to the establishment of the Zionist state in 1948. What Dr. E. Michael Jones of Culture Wars refers to as the “Jewish control of narrative” has served Netanyahu and his predecessors quite well, especially in the United States.  How many Americans know about the Zionist bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946?  The Lavon Affair in 1954?  The dispute between JFK and Ben Gurion in 1963 over the Israeli nuclear weapons plant at Dimona in the Negev? The Meyer Lansky Jewish Crime Syndicate connection to the anti-Castro Cubans, to James Jesus Angleton of the CIA, and the Giancana-Trafficante-Marcello-Roselli led crime syndicates in the United States who were all provably involved in the JFK assassination?  The NUMEC nuclear raw materials thefts in Pennsylvania in the United States for Israel’s weapons program?  The Pollard-AIPAC-Ben Ami spy cases?  And the Arnon Milchan financing of Oliver Stone’s JFK movie which diverted public attention from the Israeli connection to the events in Dallas in November of 1963?  What about the Israeli role in 9-11 and the subsequent coverup of this fact by the Israeli citizens assigned to direct the official American governmental investigation of the event?

The Hidden Hand Behind the Mask of the Truth.

The Zionist-controlled Western media has perfected the Orwellian inversion of truth and falsehood, victim and perpetrator ongoingly.  Look at Syria, where the existence of “Jihadic extremists” being decried in France and the West for involvement in the Charlie Hebdo affair are being simultaneously financed, trained, and introduced into that country by the United States, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, Turkey, and Jordan for the express purpose of overthrowing the Alawite regime of President Assad. Look at the criminals installed by coup d’etat last February by the United States, Israel, and the EU in the Ukrainian regime headquartered in Kiev, with all of the atrocities committed by this regime in the eastern part of that country since, including the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 falsely attributed by Western media to Vladimir Putin or Russian ethnics under his control, and the horrific Odessa Trade Union building burning.

It is noteworthy that the mastermind of these crimes, Petro Poroshenko, joined Netanyahu in Paris for the Charlie Hebdo protests.

The Odessa Trade Union Fire: The Work of the Latest American-Installed “Government.”

These illegal actions continue the NATO encirclement of Putin’s Russia in complete contravention of George H. W. Bush’s explicit promises to Gorbachev and Shevardnadze after the end of the old Soviet Union.  This coup d’etat is also another way of punishing Putin for effectively stymying (for now) American and Israeli plans to employ overt military force against Assad, even as Jewish and CIA financed NGOs in Russia are attempting to subvert Putin and Russian Orthodox Christian resurgence from within by employing the Frankfurt School types like Pussy Riot and Elton John to attack nationalistic culture and morality in that country.  It is all a part of the playbook of the New World Order, as is the False Flag Charlie Hebdo incident and the Orwellian inversion of truth and falsehood, victim and perpetrator, that has predictably followed.

Vladimir Putin: Opposing the Subversion of Christian Culture in Russia and the Target of the Apostles of the Zionist New World Order.

4 – There is a campaign going on throughout Muslim countries named #WeLoveMuhammad. How effective do you see this campaign, especially regarding its reflection in western and US media outlets? 

It will have no appreciable effect in the Western world and in the United States, where the Zionists have a lock on the control of narrative.  Simply look at the way they have marginalized Christian anti-Zionist media critics and activists like me in America.  Having successfully achieved that, what makes anyone believe an Islamic media and political movement will be any more effective in changing the political and media neighborhood in the West?

Mark Dankof for Radio Point: The Guantanamo Transfer to Kazakhstan and What It Means

Mark Dankof: America, The Beautiful: Why We’re Finished

Aliya Mansurbaeva

Radio Point

Kazakhstan

[Mark Dankof’s Observations on Guantanamo and the 5 Prisoners Sent by the US
Government to Kazakhstan from Guantanamo]

Dankof: My observations about the announcement of the transfer of 5 prisoners from Guantanamo to Kazakhstan simply underscore what I and a handful of other informed Americans on both the political Left and Right in the United States have been saying since the events of September 11, 2001: The Government of the United States is pursuing dangerous policies of militarism and interventionism abroad through the use of illegitimate military invasions and occupations, black operational intelligence programs designed to destablize and replace other people’s governments (“regime change“), economic sanctions and extortion, and the employment of prisons like Guantanamo to subject detainees to procedures clearly a violation of both international law and the American Constitutional tradition. The UK Guardian reports today that the 2 Tunisians and 3 Yemenis transferred to Kazakhstan have never been tried in a court of law; were approved for release 5 or more years ago; and are a part of the total of 28 detainees now transferred out of Guantanamo to third countries. 127 prisoners still remain. The conditions Kazakhstan agreed to in accepting these 5 individuals is still apparently unknown. Until that is publicly clarified, it is impossible for me to know why the Government of Kazakstan agreed to this transfer, or what its motivations are.  I believe it is in their interest to eventually explain this to their own people, and to the global community. I will be available for comment on this point once more is publicly clarified. An issue related to the Guantanamo tragedy is the recent release of the CIA torture report, albeit in redacted, edited form.  Lawrence M. Vance discusses some of the implications of this today at Lew Rockwell.

     Four points are essential to emphasize for your listeners and readers: First, the Government of the United States has been hijacked and stolen from the average citizens of this country. By whom and with what in mind? As I have repeatedly emphasized on radio and TV, and in print articles since 9-11, elections for the American Presidency and Congress, the staffing of the American National Security Establishment, and the ownership and control of the 6 major media consortiums in this country are provably traceable to the Zionist/Israeli lobby, Central Banking, Natural Resource Consortiums, and the Armaments Industry. Once this is understood, everything else falls into place. A good summary of my opinions on this may be found for your audience in a transcript entitled, “Reza Saidi of Iran’s Tasnim News Agency Talks to Mark Dankof on the New World Order.”  Another good summary is available in my essay: “America, the Beautiful.  Why We’re Finished.”

The Hidden Hand Behind the Mask of the Truth

     There is a related second point: Average Americans are just as much prisoners of this criminal cabal as those held at Guantanamo and those subcontracted for incarceration and worse in secret locations. They haven’t figured this out yet.  When they do, it will be too late. Our domestic manufacturing economy has been deliberately exported abroad by our political elite well represented in both of the major American political parties. Our national debt is now at $18 trillion dollars and counting. The overextension of our military commitments for the American Empire promises continued quagmires in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen among many other locations on the globe. And the outrages epitomized by Guantanamo have their domestic counterpart for Americans living in their own country: the USA Patriot Acts, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the warrantless spying on American citizens by the National Security Agency, the jettisoning of Posse Comitatus laws, and the police state provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) give one a basic roadmap of what is happening to the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights within American borders. It is not an accident that the American National Security apparatus implementing these illegal procedures has a disproportionate number of individuals involved who have dual Israeli-American citizenship, and where Israeli affiliated companies are getting contracts to implement these operations with the full connivance of the last several Chief Executives of the United States, and with a Congress infested with dual Israeli-American citizens and key Congressional committees entrusted with “oversight” of all of this who are provable assets of Israel and its Lobby here. Look at the people who control the House and Senate Committees responsible for Intelligence, Foreign Relations, Armed Services, Appropriations, and Homeland Security. I conclude that Americans have the best Government that people like Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban can buy.

     There is a third point to underscore for Radio Point listeners and readers: Loyal Americans who love their Constitution and Bill of Rights, and have risked their lives and livelihoods to speak out on what has been happening in the last 13 years, are being quietly marginalized and demonized professionally, economically, and personally. I wish I could tell you more about my own experiences and those of the best people in the American populist movement I’ve worked with. I believe this is only the beginning of what we will experience here, and what the world will experience at the hands of these evil perpetrators driven by a truly demonic power lust. As one example, I knew that when I gave the interview on 9-11 posted on the Internet as “Kourosh Ziabari and Fars News Agency of Iran: A Conversation with Mark Dankof on Israel and 9-11,” my future life in my own country would be forever altered. I accept this fact, knowing that it would happen to me, and to the best of those I work with. It is my conviction that all of this will intensify during, or after the American Presidential Election of 2016. Dr. Philip Giraldi of the Council of the National Interest agrees with my assessment. Those who follow Radio Point will be interested in his essay today entitled, “There Are None So Blind.”

Mark Dankof in 2013: After a TV Debate

     I must be honest about this: Despite the best efforts I’ve made in the last 13 years, and those of my best colleagues, our message has not resonated with a comatose, distracted, intellectually numb, decadent, passive American public. Why? I will leave that to Henry A. Giroux and his Truthout essay entitled, “Data Storms and the Tyranny of Manufactured Forgetting,” to explain. I do enjoy the Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi quote he begins his article with. It summarizes my own conclusions about the metastasizing cancer in the collective American consciousness in the 21st century:

“For in the world in which we live it is no longer merely a question of the decay of collective memory and declining consciousness of the past, but of the aggressive [assault on] whatever memory remains, the deliberate distortion of the historical record, the invention of mythological pasts in the service of the powers of darkness.”

     And Giroux himself adds:

“The reign of ignorance now produces a flood of discourse that clouds understanding and offers up disingenuous politicians and anti-public intellectuals who constantly interview themselves as they move through diverse media sites. Under such circumstances, evil becomes banal or commonplace, as Arendt pointed out, setting the stage for fascism when it becomes difficult ‘to imagine what the other person is experiencing.’ That is, a society of ignorance that idealizes obedience and embraces a culture of cruelty and oppression has moved dangerously close to the kind of total moral collapse that gives rise to authoritarian regimes. [Dankof emphasis]“

Mark Dankof on the International Christian Family Network of California With Bedros Hajian

     Fourthly and finally: As I have already indicated, it is my belief that the catastrophe of which the Guantanamo tragedy is but a microcosm, will intensify in 2016 or shortly thereafter. The turning point will be the global confrontation developing between President Putin and Russia on the one hand, and the Zionist/Globalist elite occupying the Government of the United States on the other. This Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG), as Pat Buchanan terms it, is driving the American policies which led to an illegitimate overthrow of the Yanukovich regime in Ukraine, the persecution and murder of Russian ethnics in Eastern Ukraine, the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH70, the prosecution of economic sanctions against Russia, and the ongoing NATO encirclement of Russia which has broken every promise made by George Herbert Walker Bush to Mikhail Gorbachev and Edward Shevardnadze after the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

The Man the Zionist/Banking Cabal Will Push Too Far?

     I hope that perhaps God will enable me to resume my radio and print commentary abroad as an American expatriate after 2016. Time tells. In the meantime, it is my privilege and pleasure to come out of my chosen sabbatical leave of absence from such endeavors to assist Aliya Mansurbaeva and Radio Point of Kazakhstan today. I hope to have such a privilege again when it proves helpful.

John on Patmos Pens The Apocalypse: Exiled Because of Resistance to the Emperor Worship Cultus of Domitian
(A. D. 81-96).

[Mark Dankof is the radio voice of “Mark Dankof’s America” and the former 3rd party U. S. Senate Candidate of 2000 in Delaware. He is a Lutheran clergyman and maintains a Yearbook of Experts profile in Washington.]

Reza Saidi of Iran’s Tasnim News Agency Talks to Mark Dankof on the New World Order

Mark Dankof in San Antonio, Texas.

Reza Saidi of the Tasnim News Agency of Iran interviewed Mark Dankof on the New World Order and its implications.  The Farsi language version of this conversation published on September 28th, 2014 may be accessed here.

Reza Saidi:  Mr. Dankof is the New World Order currently experiencing a crisis and if so, what is the root of the crisis?

Mark Dankof: The New World Order is definitely experiencing a crisis. The root of the crisis involves what Matthias Chang has referred to as the Anglo-American-Zionist-Military Industrial Complex, which has overextended its reach in the world by using illegitimate military means and political/cultural subversion of individual countries to reach three (3) ultimate goals: 1) The establishment of a world banking system which is committed to the Nixon-Saudi petrodollar of August of 1971 as the global reserve currency of the planet and the only currency to be utilized for all international oil transactions; 2) The establishment of a world government ultimately based in Jerusalem which will have its foundations in this global banking system, even as it is run by the appointed agents of Zionist and Jewish power who control establishment banking, media, and government in all of the individual nation-states globally who have been subverted and brought into this oppressive mechanism; and 3) the achievement of Eretz Yisrael (Greater Israel) in the Middle East, where the Zionist entity will control all of the territory between the Nile River and the Tigris/Euphrates River with a United Jerusalem as the seat of a Globalist Empire which oversees world banking, individual governments, multi-national corporations, world technologies, and the military/intelligence apparatuses of formerly sovereign nation-states. All of this provided the foundational assumptions of World Zionism and the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods in 1944. The present crisis of the New World Order lies in the fact that the United States, the chief enabler of Global Zionism and the New World Order, has a level of national debt and overextension of military involvements globally that is driving a national debt approaching $18 trillion dollars, irresponsible borrowing from foreign central banks to finance its military adventures and profligate spending, and a monetary policy of a Federal Reserve Board which involves the frenetic printing and distribution of American dollars whose worth is tied to nothing else than the Nixon-Saudi petrodollar monopoly of 1971. If that monopoly is threatened or destroyed by effective opposition around the world, the game is over. That would be just fine by me. All of this is on top of the erosion of the domestic American manufacturing economy by Globalist design, and the erosion of the moral and spiritual values of an American population by equal design and intent.

Reza Saidi: As a main player in the NWO, why is the US unwilling to challenge and interfere in certain current international issues? On the other hand, if America tries to use and benefit from the actions of their partners as proxies in these affairs, is this the overall strategy of the US or is it an expression of Democratic Thought?

Mark Dankof: The answer to this is simple. The political elite which owns and runs the United States could care less about “Democracy,” “Human Rights,” or the autonomy of people in America and elsewhere who want no part of its Zionist, Globalist, Totalitarian agenda. The entire method of financing elections in America courtesy of the Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions of the United States Supreme Court, along with Zionist/Globalist ownership and control of Corporate Media Consortiums and news dissemination, guarantees the election of people to office who are owned Lock-Stock-and-Barrel by these interests. The Anti-New World Order Left and Right in the United States understands this. But there is nothing up to now which has proven effective in a counter political strategy to this monolith, either in America, or in places like Syria and Ukraine where economic and political subversion and overt military threats are employed to destroy anyone and anything in its path.

Reza Saidi: Do you believe that American hegemony is approaching its downfall with the appearance of other players on the contemporary world scene, like BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) and if so, what factors have led to that downfall?

Mark Dankof: Yes, the downfall of the American Empire pursuing the interest of the Anglo-American-Zionist-Military Industrial Complex is guaranteed. I believe the overextension of its military deployments, national debt, eventual destruction of the Nixon-Saudi petrodollar, erosion of domestic economic, political, and cultural infrastructure, the proliferation of alternative media, and both domestic and international blowback against the Anglo-American-Zionist-Military Industrial Complex make its downfall inevitable. It is following the pathway of all previous Empires who went into historical eclipse in world history. The BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) consortium is taking the right course of action in making economic moves designed to weaken and marginalize the Nixon-Saudi petrodollar and its present status as the reserve currency of the world. The problem is that its effectiveness is also making the world a more dangerous place in the short term. The Globalist/Zionist elite in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv would not ultimately concede to BRICS without a fight. The irresponsible policies of the United States, Israel, the EU, and NATO in Ukraine suggest the Anglo-American-Zionist-Military Industrial Complex is willing to risk a global conflict with nuclear powers (Russia, especially) to maintain its hegemony. This risk is clearly both immoral and quantifiably insane, which makes the Anglo-American-Zionist-Military Industrial Complex willingness to run it especially terrifying. I agree with Dr. Paul Craig Roberts that the time for BRICS to achieve its goals and for war to be averted is running out. I am not optimistic about any of this, even as I acknowledge that only God knows the final outcome.

Reza Saidi: Have the unilateral decision making tendencies of the US, without consideration for international law, influenced its main competitors, Russia and China, to take a similar stance?

Mark Dankof: Once again, the answer is clearly yes. On Press TV today, I discussed this very thing. America’s CINCPAC (Commander in Chief Pacific), Admiral Samuel Locklear, is publicly upset over last week’s appearance of 6 Russian Bear Long Range Bombers near American airspace in Alaska. I simply would ask the Admiral what else he should expect? The United States has illegimately used NATO to bomb Kosovo, invade Libya, and encircle Putin’s Russia in violation of promises to Russia made by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the wake of the end of the old Soviet Union. The United States is attempting to use Takfiri and Wahhabic Islamic extremists financed by Saudi Arabia and abetted by Jordan and Turkey, to overthrow President Assad in Syria as a prelude to an Israeli inspired attack on Iran. In the Ukraine, we learn from a tapped phone conversation between United States Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland and the American Ambassador to Ukraine, that the American government poured $5 billion dollars into the orchestrated campaign of neo-Nazis and Jewish-financed NGO’s in Kiev to overthrow the legitimately elected Yanukovitch regime. Since that time, the illegal government in Kiev has been attacking defenseless Russian ethnics in Eastern Ukraine with high-tech military weaponry and overt terrorism like the deliberate torching of the Trade Union Building in Odessa to murder innocents. And Admiral Locklear is upset about Russian bomber deployments near Alaska? As I said on Press TV today, this is like an American baseball manager being surprised and upset when his pitcher deliberately throws a knockdown pitch at an opposing batter, only to discover in the next inning that one of his own players is then targeted for retaliation. Who would fail to retaliate and signal future retaliations when done in self-defense? The attempts of Obama, the American Congress, and these Neo-Conservative agents on Fox News and CNN to paint Vladimir Putin as the bad guy in all of this is transparently ridiculous. I’m frankly surprised Mr. Putin has exercised the restraint he has thus far in this confrontation. The people in the American government had better get ready. Mr. Putin’s patience is not unending. Russia has a strong military with a nuclear capability. The Russians are a proud people. If the United States and its Neo-Conservative, Zionist governors believe fighting Russia to be a “cakewalk,” to quote Kenneth Adelman’s oft-quoted statements on the ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003, we are witnessing a historic and frightening transition of a regime from mere criminality to the criminally insane.

Reza Saidi: Human rights are a main principle in US popular culture. Many of America’s international actions are undertaken with the stated intention of establishing human rights. However, the US domestic situation is in a state of great unrest due to extreme racial tensions brought about by repeated instances of police brutality against people of color and various other unfair domestic policies. Do you believe it an accurate observation to claim that the position on human rights that the US holds against other nations is a tool of coercion without any real intention to establish similar rights in their own states first? Can the US continue to use human rights to legitimize its interference in foreign lands?

Mark Dankof: I have already addressed the fraudulent claims of the government of the United States to be interfering in other people’s countries in the name of “Human Rights” and “Democracy.” The American interference in foreign lands is at the behest of the Anglo-American-Zionist-Military Industrial Complex. The latter is interested only in the theft of other people’s land, natural resources, and political autonomy by means of subversion and overt force. As for what is going on domestically in the United States, there are certainly many provable instances of police brutality against people of color. But I must emphasize whites in the United States who oppose the New World Order and have spoken out publicly are also targets. Since 2001, the American Department of Homeland Security, whose first chief was an Israeli citizen, have created “fusion centers” in all 50 States. These fusion centers are blurring the historic Constitutional delineations which separated the American military and the Federal Government of the United States from the law enforcement functions of duly elected State and Local governments. This is not an accident. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith was exposed in 2008 in the State of Missouri (see the Missouri Information Action Center report) for assisting Missouri State Law Enforcement and these Department of Homeland Security fusion centers, in the development of “Profiles of ‘Potential Home-Grown [Domestic] Terrorists’.” What did the Missouri Information Action Center, or MIAC report conclude? It said to watch out for white men who were identifiably Christian, opposed homosexual marriage and abortion, who opposed the New World Order, belonged to Second Amendment (gun ownership organizations), and voted for political candidates like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul! This is a most serious business, because since September 11, 2001, the passage of the USA Patriot Acts, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and the revelations of illegal NSA surveillance of American citizens, has moved the United States closer to the status of a full-blown police state. And at the behest of whom? At the behest of the Anglo-American-Zionist-Military Industrial Complex.

Reza Saidi: How much longer will America continue to support non-democratic Arab states? Isn’t this policy an example of double standards? Are most of America’s claims against their political enemies merely superficial protocols which America is either willing to ignore in its allies or which it violates itself inside its own borders? Do you think American hegemony can continue with appearance of viable opposition such as BRICS? is this time for American hegemony to be diluted and ultimately to collapse in history?

What factors played a role in all of this? Why has this American unilateralism and interventionism tempted Russia and China to follow suit?  How does the United States continue to justify its methods and attitudes? How long can the United States support absolute opponents of Democracy in the Arab world?

Mark Dankof: I believe I have largely already addressed this clearly hypocritical contradiction in public policy. The Anglo-American-Zionist-Military Industrial Complex could care less about non-democratic states run by dictators and thugs as long as these thugs and dictators are doing the bidding of the Anglo-American-Zionist-Military Industrial Complex. The American relationship with the present regime in Saudi Arabia is only the most obvious example of what is going on here. This can only go on for a time. It cannot be sustained forever. There is good news for the world in this. The death of the Anglo-American-Zionist-Military Industrial Complex is in the interest of freedom lovers both in the United States and elsewhere. The question of the day is whether or not this death will be preceded by a tragic global military conflict which could destroy the planet. This is the fear of Dr. Paul Craig Roberts. It is also my fear. Only the God of history knows the answer.

Yearbook of Experts Profile of Mark Dankof (Washington, D. C.) for Tasnim News Agency of Iran: Click here.

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]

 

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).

     

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).