Posts Tagged ‘Pat Buchanan’s “Suicide of a Superpower”’
Mark Dankof’s Open Letter to the Russian People: Growing Older but Wiser in the Mythologies of the American Empire
On what would have been my Father’s 102nd birthday and the day after the beginning of Lent 2022 in the Western Church via Ash Wednesday last evening, I compose an Open Letter to the people of Russia upon request. I once wrote an Open Letter to the youth of Iran in December of 2015. That too, was asked for.
My late Father and the environment in which I grew up as his younger son plays an important part in my life story, both in terms of who I once was as well as who I still am. You can read his story courtesy of his obituary posted in 2009. It is entitled, “Colonel Karl E. Dankof, Shah’s Imperial Iranian Air Force Logistician, Dead at 89.” He is now interred at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 54. In Fremont County, Iowa in his hometown of Hamburg, Iowa, there is a painted “Freedom Rock” which bears his portrait, among others from that County in Iowa’s Southwestern Corner where Iowa suddenly becomes Nebraska or Missouri if you drive either west or south from this place in mere minutes. Recent events have not favored this now declining community. CNN film footage will explain why in a piece entitled, “After the Flood.”
I experienced something rather odd when viewing the magnitude of the disaster. Hamburg, Iowa became for me a sad prototype of the apocalyptic future I believe awaits the American Empire. The eschatological overtones of Jesus Christ in His Olivet Discourse resonate for me in Matthew 24: 39 where the Lord proclaims that ” . . . the flood came and swept them all away.” This has been the case of Empires throughout world history. In the case of the American Empire, it absolutely deserves a most horrible and sudden death, both because of what it has done to other nations courtesy of “Democracy” as well as what it has inflicted upon its own domestic inhabitants in terms of their Constitutional freedoms, the exercise of the Bill of Rights, and the Empire’s Technocratic Surveillance State constructed and deployed in the name of “Security.” If possible, we could all ask Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, or Bradley Manning how safe they feel these days, and how free they are courtesy of the Home of the Brave, the last 4 words of the American National Anthem. One of my late colleagues 20 years my senior who passed away last October cynically but accurately supported the adoption of a slight alteration of those last 4 words some 15 years ago. In the America concocted by the elite denizens and enforcers of The New World Order, he vastly preferred the “Home of the Slaves.”
Come to think of it, I’m not too popular myself since 2006 in San Antonio, home to the American military establishment and the Global Internet Surveillance operation of the National Security Agency (NSA). Interviews like “U. S. Liberal Democracy Turning Into Totalitarian Regime Reminiscent of the Soviet Union” given to the Tehran Times awhile back, years of appearances on TV on Press TV/Iran courtesy of the PBS or Fox-29 studio hookups once grudgingly allowed in the Alamo City, domestic American broadcasts on the Republic Broadcasting Network (RBN) here in Texas, and many past articles and published Op-Ed pieces for the American Free Press (AFP) in Washington and Don Wassall’s The Freedom Times (online as the American Freedom News), have made me a target of a long-term campaign of economic and professional marginalization, demonization, and quiet ostracism I could not have imagined in the America of my youth. That America is long gone. The death of that America began in earnest when a fusillade of bullets ended the life of President John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. I was 8 years old and in the 3rd grade of elementary school.
Believe it or not, when I voted recently in the 2020 Republican (GOP) Primary in San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas, there was a most curious Proposition 4 on the ballot, asking me if I agreed with legislation that would ban the teaching of the Marxist Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Texas public schools (I would, just as I denounce using public schools anywhere in this country to inculcate the young in LGBTQ practices and ideology or the legitimacy of abortion-on-demand.) But the second part of Proposition 4 also asked me in the same sentence to approve the doctrine of “American Exceptionalism” as the view of history to be presented exclusively in these same schools and State-approved textbooks. This idiotic idea carried the day with Republican voters in the entire State of Texas. Can they really believe such nonsense, both in terms of what has happened in this country in my lifetime, and the crimes committed by the American Establishment of both political parties abroad just in the last 30 years alone? Where in the world is such a view of the American Empire as the “exception” to the proven Bell Curve of history for all Empires in the course of linear time? Christ and the understanding of the redemptive history of Scripture would clearly find such a view both imbecilic and blasphemous. And yet the “Christian” Right in the State of Texas actually believes in such colonic detritus, along with the “Exceptionalism” of the Zionist State of Israel in marriage with The Beast, inscribed annually as obligatory mantra in a GOP Party Platform in the Lone Star State that in this arena of simian thought and warped ahistorical theocratic expression, is best used to line a cat litter box if one is Vitaly Milonov in Russia (smile), or Mark Dankof in Texas attempting to house train a new German Shepherd rescue dog.
In my Open Letter to Iranian youth over 6 years ago, the Tasnim News Agency of that country sought my humble opinion of the letter of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution to his young people. I did indeed honor that request. It is available in English and Persian. The English language version is entitled, “Mark Dankof: Leader’s Letter Urges Youth to Ponder West Duplicity.” I cited an article by Alexander Zinoviev of Russia entitled, “The End of Communism in Russia Meant the End of Democracy in the West.”
Truthfully, were it not for my good friend, Charles Bausman, the editor of Russia Insider, I would have never heard of Zinoviev, or his cosmic significance alongside Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. That underscores the pathetic performance of the American educational system all the way from elementary school and high school through the undergraduate collegiate educational process and beyond. It is also a damning indictment of the American news media.
This struck me during my penning of the letter to Tehran in December of 2015 as a macrocosmic prototype of a painful truth: Everything I have ever learned about the real and demythologized history of my own country was largely learned on my own through circumstances I cannot fully discuss and through painstaking reading and research over decades. That began as a youngster in questioning the official version and verdict of what happened to President Kennedy in Dallas. What I learned in American schools over many years in watching and reading mainstream American media growing up proved to be a demonic synthesis of myths, half truths, and outright and deliberately crafted and targeted falsehoods. In many instances, the topics were not even covered at all.
The list of episodes in history concealed or falsely spun by American schools and mainstream media is encyclopedic and seemingly endless: the American Civil War, the American imperialism of the late 19th century, the truth about who really sunk the USS Maine in Havana, Harbor, the establishment of the Federal Reserve Board and the direct Federal income tax on American citizens in 1913, the sinking of the Lusitania, the Versailles Treaty after World War I, the Weimar Republic in Germany before the rise of Hitler, the McCollum Memorandum provided to FDR in October 1940 as a primer on how to provoke a conflict with Japan and goad the latter into attacking the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, the bombing of Dresden in February of 1945, what was really behind the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the circumstances and truth of the death of General George Patton in December of 1945, the truth of all of the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the modern State of Israel, the real truth surrounding the mysterious death of American Defense Secretary James Forrestal in May of 1949, the Lavon Affair, Operation Ajax in 1953 in Iran, the assassination of Diem in South Vietnam in 1963, the subsequent assassination of President Kennedy 3 weeks later on November 22nd, 1963, the Israeli theft of American nuclear materials from the NUMEC plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania after the Kennedy Assassination, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which brought the United States into the Vietnam War, Israel’s attack upon the USS Liberty in June of 1967 in “Operation Cyanide,” the RFK and MLK assassinations in 1968, the PROMIS affair, the Pollard spy case in 1987, what transpired between the United States and Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first American invasion of Iraq in “Operation Desert Storm,” the deaths of Vince Foster and Ron Brown in 1993 and 1996 during the first Clinton Presidential Administration, NATO’s bombing of Belgrade in 1999, the 9-11 attacks, the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in October of 2001 and March of 2003 respectively, the subsequent criminal actions of the United States in Libya and Syria, the assassinations of Iranian scientists over years and then that of General Soleimani in January of 2020, the later emergence of the Mossad sex trafficking ring of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, exposing the earlier Mossad connection to British media magnate Robert Maxwell and his subsequent murder.
In the case of Donald Trump’s authorization of the murder of General Soleimani, I publicly called it what it was in January of 2020: an extra-judicial war crime committed by the Commander in Chief and the 45th President of the United States. You can imagine what Military Town USA, San Antonio, Texas, the American National Security State, the Republican Establishment, and the Israeli Lobby thought of those public statements distributed internationally by Iran’s Tasnim News Agency. The interview is still available but for how long is anyone’s guess. Look for “General Soleimani’s Assassination was an Extra-Judicial War Crime.”
This brings us full circle to the aforementioned deception of “American Exceptionalism” and the tragic implementation of its assumptions by the American Empire throughout history with blood-soaked victims both domestic and foreign. Remember when I mentioned the American Civil War at the top of my list of items? I was never exposed to any of the revelations about Lincoln or the implications of the conflict between North and South until reading “The Real Lincoln” by Thomas DiLorenzo and attending one of his lectures in the greater Washington, D. C. area before 9-11. It is my hope that you will be able to access my review of his book in the Russian language.
The implications for understanding the mentality of the American Empire and the ignorance, blindness, and moral decadence of its subjects in 2022 has many links to the Lincoln Mythology, the American Civil War, and the beginning of the death of the Old American Republic in the aftermath of that conflict. The resulting evolutionary development of the present Leviathan Beast that has brought untold suffering into the world in its progressive implementation of the New World Order goes back to the 16th President of the United States. Thoughtful leaders and citizens of contemporary post-Communist Russia with its current crisis in the Ukraine would have deeper insights as to the demonic character of what is now attempting to destroy them and why, in being acquainted with Professor DiLorenzo’s magnum opus. It changed the course of my own life to the present time.
Understood properly then, anyone who actually has the virus of “American Exceptionalism” in his or her bloodstream with its cancerous and demonic toxicity, operates with certain dangerous and derivative principles which are both all-encompassing and ultimately fatal. These include: 1) the total embrace of the mythologies about the United States, especially its supposedly unique greatness in history and the operation of that greatness in history in uninterrupted perpetuity until the Second Advent of Christ; 2) a metastasizing absolutism which denies any facts or reasonable interpretation of facts about events and individuals past or present which contradict the ideology’s doctrinal presuppositions and predictable conclusions; 3) an adherence to the belief that the histories of other nations are inherently inferior and irrelevant, a belief dependent on knowing little or nothing about the actual histories of these nations, or their contributions to humanity through centuries; 4) and the astonishing belief that “American Exceptionalism” provides the American Empire with the divine commission of God to act domestically or internationally in ways that are inherently legitimate and lawful because of an allegedly “Biblical” mandate.
The most potent and poisonous concoction imaginable occurs when this lunacy is combined with belief in “Israeli Exceptionalism” as part of The Beast’s total composition and manifestation in history. The best example of the Snake Oil Salesman for this nitroglycerin is John Hagee of Cornerstone Church, located not coincidentally, right here in San Antonio, Texas. He preaches a “Gospel” of Zionism and Jewish racial supremacy comingled with American “Christianity” and “American Exceptionalism.” Mr. Hagee has never met a Zio-American war he didn’t love. His Snake Oil is sold on syndicated American Cable TV religious programming and radio around the United States and the world. Demonic it is, but sell it does. The Wall Street Journal estimated some years ago that this “Christian Televangelist” was sitting on a $150 Million Dollar Empire of his own in Hagee’s promotion of the American Empire and World Zionism as a prelude to the appearance of Antichrist in history. Contrast that with what happened to my late friend and colleague, Pastor Dale Crowley, and what continues to happen to me. To my knowledge, Pastor Crowley and I were the only American clergyman of consequence in broadcasting and print commentary to oppose this Satanic agenda at great personal cost. Dale was working on this many years before I ever entered the contest. In order to understand what I have conveyed to a largely unresponsive American audience, it is my hope that a Russian language translation of “Pastor Dale Crowley and Faithfulness Unto Death” will be made available to you.
When Pastor Crowley comes to my mind, I am reminded of the instructions that our Lord Jesus Christ imparted to the Church of Smyrna via the Apostle John in exile on the island of Patmos during the reign of the evil Roman Emperor Domitian (A. D. 81-96). John’s “crime”? He refused to acknowledge Domitian’s proclamation of himself as the virtual incarnation of God on the earth, and the Emperor’s war against the proclamation of the true Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the Roman Empire and those God had commissioned to preach and teach it.
Christ’s instructions via John to the Church of Smyrna are directed to the Confessing Church of Jesus Christ throughout all of linear and redemptive history. We read in Revelation 2: 8-11:
To the Church in Smyrna
8 “To the angel of the church in Smyrna write:
These are the words of him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again. 9 I know your afflictions and your poverty—yet you are rich! I know about the slander of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. 10 Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you life as your victor’s crown.
11 Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who is victorious will not be hurt at all by the second death.
If as a Russian, you have the Holy Spirit’s understanding of Christ’s message through John inscribed in these verses, I rejoice. Because the war against the Russian nation, its leaders, and its people, can only be understood in a Biblical context, as I once explained to a handful of Christian parents and children in Texas in a private lecture I later published. I hope you will be able to access it in your own language. It is entitled, “Christian Martyrdom and The American Empire: Mark Dankof On The New World Order.”
Everything I stated to these Christians in Texas in a private home seminar is now unfolding. I hope they remember my words that dark night quite some time ago. Americans in the main couldn’t care less about my message then or now. Neither have they heeded what I have told the Tehran Times and Sputnik International recently about this present crisis, just before it became an overtly military one. Neither have they heeded Thomas Ertl, James Jatras, Pat Buchanan, David Stockman, Paul Craig Roberts, Mike Whitney, Father Joseph Gleason, and a mere handful of responsible American analysts far more prominent than I in this life, who tried to tell them the truth. Isaiah 59: 8 describes those who follow Emperor Domitian of the Ancient Roman Empire, or Emperor Biden of the American Empire. The Lake of Fire in John’s Apocalypse is their final destination.
The American Empire’s toxic brew of “American Exceptionalism” is the most poisonous of any in all of history. The implications of its existence have eschatological overtones in fulfilling the prophetic words of the New Testament about the exponential increase in demonic activity prior to the blessed return of our Lord Jesus Christ. “American Exceptionalism” in truth has the blended components of Multi-National Corporatism, Cultural Marxism, and Globalism. The methods of its attempted exportation on a global basis are the deployment of sexual perversion and subversion of national sovereignties, the Information War, draconian economic sanctions for blackmail via starvation, assassinations and coup d’etats, and if necessary, military attack. Its Satanic agenda is deliberately cloaked in Messianic clothing and appearance. The Apostle Paul warns us in 2 Corinthians 11: 14-15 that “For Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.” Those who ultimately stand behind this Empire are obvious, even as their naming and identification remains a total secret never to be mentioned in the American media.
The terrible news I share today is what you already know: Russia and President Putin have been targeted because they stand in resistance against this evil Beast in history. The Russian Orthodox cultural renaissance and recovery in your land in the post-Communist era especially outrages The Beast. He will stop at nothing in his attempt to destroy you, or the handful of us in the United States who have consigned ourselves to absolute marginalization, demonization, and probable future incarceration and martyrdom for having merely spoken and written the truth publicly while we could still do so. That window of opportunity is closing.
The wonderful news I share while I can as a Lutheran clergyman in virtual exile in my own country through all of this is that I am convinced that my Russian Orthodox and Traditional Roman Catholic friends are absolutely correct, that in His mysterious and providential wisdom, God has chosen Russia in these final times of the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and the progressive unveiling of its eschatological signs to oppose and defeat The Beast in ways yet to be seen. Polycarp of Smyrna may be your temporal future and mine as well. But rest assured that we will finally be victorious, and the Lord will return in righteous judgment of The Beast and his minions, rewarding His faithful people as He has throughout time in their full inclusion in the Kingdom of God eternal and well beyond present time and space.
The Hands of Time and the Appearance of Logos: Mark Dankof for the LMS-USA Conference 2014
The Logo of the LMS-USA and the Pillars of Luther’s Reformation: Christ Alone, Faith Alone, Grace Alone, Scripture Alone.
[Mark Dankof’s presentation to the 2014 national conference of the Lutheran Ministerium and Synod–USA in June 2014 is reproduced in edited/abridged version below. In response to specific requests, the 2014 message demonstrates the continued relevance to the Confessing Church of Jesus Christ of the Ancient Church’s fight to preserve the Biblical witness to the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ as pivotal to the reality of the realization of God’s plan of salvation for humanity, enacted in linear time in the physical cosmos. Of primary relevance to this 2014 discussion is the 1996 presentation of Pastor Dankof to the Lutheran Ministerium and Synod–USA in Indianapolis entitled, “Creeds and Confessions as Liturgy.”
“In the beginning was the Word , and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning [Genesis 1:1]. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” [λόγος: DNTT, vol. 3, pages 1081-1146, esp. p. 1115; B. Klappert, author; Colin Brown, editor ]
The Gospel of John, chapter 1, verses 1-5
“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God–having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.” [καιροὶ: DNTT, vol. 3, pages 833-39; H.-C. Hahn, author; Colin Brown, editor]
2 Timothy 3: 1-5
“As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. ‘Tell us,’ they said, ‘when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’ Jesus answered: ‘Watch out, that no one deceives you.'” [πλανήσῃ: DNTT, vol. 2, pages 457-61; W. Gunther, author; Colin Brown, editor]
Matthew 24: 3-4
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”
Plato (427-347 B. C.)
“One had to look very closely [in pre-war Germany] to see the cloven hoof beneath the angel’s luminous robes. . . . If I read the signs aright, we are close to midnight.”
Pastor Helmut Thielicke
Pastor Mark Dankof of the Lutheran Ministerium and Synod-USA, a member of the International Lutheran Council (ILC).
On this beautiful day at the very beginning of summer at Christ Lutheran Church in Chetek, Wisconsin in 2014, we prepare to take a look back–and a look ahead–at time, and God’s revelation in time in the Logos [λόγος]. My assignment for the fine people of the Lutheran Ministerium and Synod–USA today, and for the entirety of the Israel of God, the Confessing Church of our Lord Jesus Christ, is to do so with reference to my message delivered to this gathering in Indianapolis in 1996, entitled “Creeds and Confessions as Liturgy.” I am proud that the University of Dayton would later see fit to use this paper in a graduate theology course on the subject. I am equally proud that my last couple of projects for our yearly gatherings have made their rounds around the world, thanks to the marvelous technology of our age. These include “The Famine, The Watchman, and The Remnant” two years ago, and last year’s homily at the concluding worship service of our National Convention entitled, “The Chosen People of God: Who Are They?“.
I shall succumb to the temptation to begin with a story. My colleagues in secular media and news commentary refer to me off-camera and off-the-air as The Storyteller. Stories have enabled me to survive in media and in pulpits for many years, because good ones illustrate timeless principles and truths that God reveals to us within time, as a means of understanding transcendent truths and teaching these truths to others who subsequently apply them to their own lives in this mysterious odyssey we call life, lived in linear time and space before our subsequent arrival in the Kingdom of God in eternity past, present, and future.
This story only goes back in time to this past Father’s Day evening, June 15th, 2014. I was walking the dogs in my local neighborhood of Northern Hills in San Antonio. Our San Antonio Spurs NBA basketball team, which a year ago blew Game 6 of the NBA Finals–and then the title in Game 7–to the Miami Heat, had just won the rematch on Father’s Day evening by closing out Miami 107-87 in Game 5 at the AT&T Center in the Alamo City. The core theme of this victory in both the national and San Antonio media is one of Redemption.
I could hear the celebratory horn honkings, the group cheering of the neighborhood block parties, and the postgame firecrackers and fireworks, in the distant darkness. Although I was thrilled to see the Spurs win the NBA championship, especially after last year’s collapse with a 5 point lead and only 28.5 seconds to play in Game 6, I was suddenly overcome by a strange and overpowering sadness. My first thought was of my late Father, who passed away 5 years ago. He had been a Spurs fan since 1977. We had lived and died together through the fortunes of this storied pro basketball team, and through the ups and downs of the championship seasons of 1999, 2003, 2005, and 2007. I have many memories of those days with him, in his final years. But now on this Father’s Day, the miraculous acquisition of a 5th World’s Championship for the Alamo City suddenly seemed hollow. My Dad wasn’t here to see it, and to celebrate this San Antonio Spurs victory with his longtime Army Air Corps/Air Force golfing partners at the local Windcrest Golf Course. These other boyhood treasures are now also gone, every last one of them. Where did time in this cosmos go?
Colonel Karl E. Dankof (USAF, ret.) in section 54, Arlington National Cemetery, Washington, D. C., off Admiral Leahy Drive.
There was a second thought in the night as I walked: Thousands, millions of people can be engaged in an NBA Basketball Championship quest. But where are these thousands, millions of souls when it comes to engaging in the study and painstaking search of God’s Word and its timeless truths, as the Holy Spirit of God directs?
Coach Gregg Popovitch and Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs after clinching a 5th NBA Title on Father’s Day 2014.
In this regard, in my brief lifetime, I have personally witnessed the demise of hunger for the Word of God in American culture and the accompanying demise of Christian morality that threatens our individual and collective survival. It would seem that the Drug and Sexual Revolutions of the 1960s have won. The Frankfurt School’s Institute of Social Research, and the gurus of higher Biblical criticism and impoverished American “Christianity”, have eclipsed the theology and personal piety of Lutheran and Reformed Protestant Christianity in our land, even as I speak today. Our cherished American Republic would seem to have died, only to be replaced by an Empire taking on Beast-like characteristics. Where are we going? What does it mean? Will the America many of us knew in the distant past be absolutely gone by 2025, as Pat Buchanan’s last book seems to predict? Are we truly witnessing the Suicide of a Superpower, and the suicide of the Christian theology and culture of our forefathers? It would seem so.
Pat Buchanan and Mark Dankof in San Antonio, Texas. 1995.
It was not always so, either in the United States specifically or in the Western world generally. Dr. C. George Fry’s essay on Helmut Thielicke for the Handbook of Evangelical Theologians (Baker, 1993, pages 219-233) documents the hunger of average Germans for the Word of God and the Gospel in the darkest days of World War II. I share this wonderful material with you now, in the firm belief that as the signs point to the impending arrival of an American midnight in these dark days of the 21st century’s advancing onslaught, the experience of German believers and Helmut Thielicke seven decades ago will be used of the Holy Spirit of God to speak to you and to empower you, as the circumstances of advancing time enshroud each and every one of us in the days and nights emerging.
Helmut Thielicke: Preaching the Gospel near Midnight in the Stuttgart Cathedral.
Dr. Fry notes that when Thielicke was ordained as a Lutheran pastor in 1941, it was not at all evident that he would become Germany’s “preacher for apocalyptic times whose teaching had a sense of eschatological urgency” (Handbook of Evangelical Theologians, page 219). The Fry essay tells us that Thielicke’s ordination in 1941 was preceded by his 1940 removal by the State from his initial teaching position at the University of Heidelberg (p. 223). His unemployment only ended due to the courage and grace of Bishop Theophil Wurm of the territorial church of Wurttemberg, who provided Thielicke a pastorate in the little town of Ravensburg in southern Germany, where the Gestapo imposed an injunction which proscribed Thielicke from traveling or speaking anywhere else in the country (p. 223). It is noteworthy that in this time frame, Thielicke’s sole comfort was in absolute immersion in the study of God’s Word (p. 224). It was perhaps assumed that Thielicke would remain in a state of exile not unlike John at Patmos under Domitian (A. D. 81-96), for the duration of his life.
But God had other plans. Emerging from exile in Ravensburg, Thielicke was called to head the Theological Office of the Church of Wurttemberg (1943-45), and was inexplicably given permission by the Nazi authorities to deliver an evening lecture each week in the historic Stuttgart Cathedral. Fry underscores (p. 224) that Thielicke knew that he “must prepare people for the terrible things that lay before them by giving them instruction–quite simply, just instruction in the mysteries of our faith.”
As Dr. Fry chronicles this, Thielicke chose basic weapons in the fight to equip his listeners: the Word of God itself and the Small Catechism of Martin Luther. I know these have been my own basic weapons in the fight to equip a believing remnant in the United States since my ordination 30 years ago. But like Pastor Spears, Pastor Erickson, Pastor Thorson, and other faithful teachers of the Word in the LMS–USA, I see no present larger-scale evidence of what I believe will yet come, a renewal of hungering for the Gospel on the part of a larger segment of our communities around the country. What will be the circumstance of this renewal future? It is my belief that the Confessing Church will be re-energized in the Refiner’s Fire of the apocalyptic developments ahead for the United States and the globe in world history. As it was in Germany then, so shall it be with what looms on the political horizon now.
Helmut Thielicke: Being a Christian When the Chips are Down. Is America Nearing Midnight?
I most assuredly am not looking forward to what this is going to mean in either my life or yours. But I do look forward to the renewal of Biblical study and the deep yearning for the Word of God and the Gospel of Christ that will move more people to seek the truth of the deepest mysteries of God, in the briefly open window of opportunity that will beckon in the midst of the terror and calamity prophesied by Christ in the Olivet Discourse. In the time of Thielicke’s re-emergence from exile in the darkest days of the eclipse of German national fortunes in the Second World War, he would experience something I hope every faithful Pastor in this Conference Room will yet see before the ending of his days. Let Dr. Fry unfold this marvelous testimony of those days of the Presence of Light in the midst of the darkness:
“As he lectured [in Stuttgart Cathedral] on its five principle parts [Small Catechism of Luther]–the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper–‘evening after evening some three thousand persons gathered together; workers and businessmen, students and professors, soldiers and generals, Nazi functionaries (naturally in civilian clothes!) and Jews, Dutch compulsory laborers . . . and sometimes whole classes from the schools. It was an overwhelming time for me. Never since have I experienced such intense listening.’ Soon the massive air raids began. When the streetcars could no longer run, people ‘came on foot, often from many miles away, through the fields of ruins and rubble’ even on dark and frightening winter evenings. But then the [Stuttgart] cathedral was destroyed. Thielicke wrote, ‘I can still see the towering torch of this venerable house of God. . . . I stood there holding in my hand a key to a door that no longer existed.'”
The original Stuttgart Cathedral is located in Stuttgart-Bad-Canstatt. Its history goes back all the way to 1470. After massive destruction during the Second World War, the church was rebuilt in 1954/55.
With Thielicke and the destruction of the Stuttgart Cathedral in mind, with reference to the impending threats to our country and the world in the 21st century, let us again turn briefly to my remarks before many of you in Indianapolis in 1996 in Creeds and Confessions as Liturgy. The central question of both 1996 and 2014 is the same one posed by Thielicke 70 years ago to the German people. It is the core question of all of history and eternity alike: Who is Jesus Christ and Why and How did He become the Word [λόγος] Who Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us? (John 1:14). To effectively answer this question, each and every believer must once again “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints (Jude, verse 3).” We can only contend when we are immersed in the knowledge of the Word of God and the Confessions of our Faith as the Holy Spirit of God directs during countless hours of personal and collective study. We must avail ourselves of the Full Armor of God (Ephesians 6).
The Word (Logos) is God.
The Biblical text from John’s Gospel for today demonstrates the humanity and divinity of the λόγος. As we saw in my 1996 paper to this gathering in Indianapolis, the Ancient Church was not inventing its doctrine of the λόγος. It was fighting for the maintenance of the Biblical witness to the identity of the λόγος against all heretical and apostate teachers with their false doctrine and witness. In 1996, I stated:
“If we assume the legitimacy of the Sola Scriptura today, and assume a commitment to the Lutheran Confessions as the normative explication of what the Bible teaches, an appropriate launching point for answering some of these raised questions may lie in what occurs first in the Book of Concord of 1580, namely the listing of the Three Ecumenical Creeds, or Three Chief Symbols of the Church as the foundational basis of all the Confessions which follow. This is important for several reasons. First, the Confessions wanted to reiterate that their articles of faith were neither recent nor heretical, but were undergirded by the theological and historical foundations of the early Church. Second, it is noteworthy that the controversies of the second, third, and fourth centuries were consistently deemed applicable to the struggles of the Reformers in the sixteenth century. Third, if historical and theological struggles and issues of centuries two, three, and four continued to be relevant in the sixteenth, one might suspect the possibility of a prima facie relevance of those developments to a church under renewed attack from similar, in some cases identical forces, as we approach the beginning of the twenty first century. The writer of Ecclesiastes states that, ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’—this may well be his verdict on Biblical theology’s constantly recast conflict with false doctrine — fought time and again within the confines and context of redemptive history.”
When you and I sing and say today all of the components of the Ancient Liturgy, which constantly employ Scripture and the ancient witness to the core teaching in all of Scripture regarding the identity and significance of the λόγος, we stand with our ancient brothers and sisters in Christ against the identical heresies and apostasies of Satan sown in the false teachers and deceivers of our time. These range from the Clown Eucharists of the Episcopal, United Methodist, and ELCA liberals and universalists in our midst, to the Trivial Pursuits and cultural accommodationism of the Southern Baptist pastor in Houston two decades ago who conducted a “service” on Super Bowl Sunday vested in an NFL referee’s uniform and whistle. We stand with the Confessing Church of the Ages against the apostates of the “Reimagining Conference 1993” who blasphemed the Holy Trinity by worshiping the Goddess Sophia, and who venerated radical feminism and lesbianism even as the Conference banner in the sanctuary was an exquisitely embroidered picture of The Beast. And we stand with our ancient counterparts as the Lutheran Reformers of the 16th century did, against the outright Montanism and exhibitionism of a “Prayer and Praise” service witnessed by people in this Conference Room 24 years ago at the Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota. The writer of Ecclesiastes indeed understood the verdict of history and linear time: “There is nothing new under the sun.”
John’s witness to the λόγος is repristinated each time we sing the Kyrie, Agnus Dei, or Nunc Dimittis. It is repristinated each time we confess our faith with the Apostles’, Nicene, or Athanasian Creed. We encounter the λόγος in the mystery of the Eucharist tied to the Biblical Words of Institution of Christ. We encounter λόγος in the Old Testament, New Testament Epistle, and New Testament Gospel readings. He is a living reality, yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). We deny λόγος when we bend to the whims of the post-Christian spirit of this dark age, embodied in the false teachers and teachings already enumerated.
And what a blessed Biblical witness to the λόγος lies before us in John’s text today and throughout his Gospel! The identity of the λόγος is clearly stated in John’s prologue, even as it is through the entirety of the book woven around 7 Miracles and 7 Discourses emphasizing the linkage of the λόγος to the I Am of the Old Testament (6:35, 48; 8:12; 9:5; 10:7, 9; 10:11, 14; 11:25; 14:6; 15: 1-5.).
Jesus Christ, the Logos. John, chapter 1.
Klappert gives us the roadmap for understanding John’s Prologue. He divides it into 3 sections:
“ 1) The pre-existent being of the λόγος (John 1: 1-4). ‘In the beginning’ is the λόγος–not ‘at the beginning’ of Creation (Genesis 1:1), but in the ‘time before time’ of divine eternity–was the λόγος (pre-existence of the Word, John 1:1), the λόγος was with God (personal reference, John 1:2), indeed the ‘λόγος was God’ (essential divinity of the λόγος, John 1:1) . By this λόγος , whereby the universe was created, men have their life and the benefit of light (John 1:3f.). 2) The coming of the λόγος to the world of men and his incomprehensible rejection (John 1: 5-13). The λόγος who came into the world, to whom John the Baptist bore witness (John 1: 6-8; in the Evangelist’s mind vv. 5ff. thus already hint at the Incarnation), was rejected by men in an incomprehensible way (John 1: 9-11), with the exception of those who came to faith and thus became children of God (John 1:12f.) 3) The event of the incarnation of the λόγος and its redeeming significance (John 1: 14-18). Without surrendering–indeed, rather, in the application of his essential divinity, the λόγος became a mortal man (sarx), took up residence amongst men, and, as the presence of God’s glory with men, signified the gift of God’s grace and covenant faithfulness to them (John 1: 14, 16), surpassing the OT revelation of the word in the commandment and becoming event in Jesus Christ (John 1:17f.).” [λόγος: DNTT, vol. 3, pages 1081-1146, esp. p. 1115, B. Klappert, author; Colin Brown, editor ]
The Who is Jesus Christ? has been answered in John’s Prologue and in linear history in time and space. The Why of Jesus Christ is also stated in the Prologue, and what is arguably the greatest summary statement in all of Scripture, found at the conclusion of the Evangelist’s Gospel:
“And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book: but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name (John 20: 30-31).“
When we confess our Biblical faith through Creeds, Confessions, and Liturgy, we reaffirm the faith of the ages and “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints (Jude, verse 3)”. We stand with our Lord against the false witness of Caiphas, the Sanhedrin, and the mob which called for the release of Barabbas. We stand with the Apostles in witness against the Jewish and Roman opponents of the Gospel in the first century. We stand with the Ancient Fathers and Councils against the 5 heresies of Gnosticism, Marcionism, Montanism, Monarchianism, and Arianism that were chronicled for you in Indianapolis in 1996. We stand with Luther and Chemnitz against Pope Leo X and the heresies of the Council of Trent in the 16th century.
And we also stand against the evil forces and developments of our own day. Our Pauline text from 2 Timothy 3: 1-5, and our Lord’s witness to the events of the future preceding his Second Coming in Matthew 24: 3-4 guarantee this. Make no mistake about it. You and I will be challenged and oppressed for our faith in Christ in ways not previously seen or encountered by most of us. To “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints (Jude, verse 3)” as our illustrious predecessors did, will require the ongoing presence and empowerment of the Holy Spirit beyond anything we have known before. The Spirit’s leading and protection will be directly proportional to our involvement with the Word and with the Sacrament. Our future pathway in faith in Christ is guaranteed to be the toughest and most taxing journey of our lives, even as the Blessed Return of our Lord stands at the end of that race.
H.-C. Hahn notes this in DNTT. The καιροὶ of “the final days” (2 Timothy 3: 1-5) is a “tension-laden time“. καιροὶ is a “point of time, a moment” which “characterizes a critical situation, one which demands a decision, one into which man is perhaps led by fate.” Used in a negative sense, it “implies danger” [καιροὶ: DNTT, vol. 3, pages 833-39; H.-C. Hahn, author; Colin Brown, editor].
That danger is linked to the deception our Lord warned us would come in Matthew 24: 3-4 [πλανήσῃ: DNTT, vol. 2, pages 457-61; W. Gunther, author; Colin Brown, editor]. W. Gunther indicates that the classical Greek usage of deception is inextricably linked to injustice (adikia) and evil (kakia). He states that in the New Testament, the active verb for deception is used almost exclusively in an apocalyptic sense and of false teachers. As an adjective, the term is used to describe deceitful spirits (I Timothy 4:1). As a noun, it is used to describe a deceiver, an imposter, a false teacher. In the New Testament, the verb “to deceive” is used interchangeably with the verb “to destroy” (apollyo). And Satan is described specifically as The Destroyer (Revelation 9:11). H.-C. Hahn notes in quoting Oepke in DNTT, Vol. 1. pages 462-65 that we may reliably link deception and destruction in the New Testament sense as “definitive destruction, not merely in the sense of the extinction of physical existence, but rather of an eternal plunge into Hades and a hopeless destiny of death.”
We must be convinced, as John was on Patmos during his exile at the hands of Domitian (A. D. 81-96), that earthly exile is far better than experiencing this Second Death.
Surely by now you know the drill. These are the stakes. This is the apocalyptic struggle of our time, soon to intensify as the fight of our lives, the fight of our souls, for everything we have ever believed and confessed in Creeds, Confessions, and Liturgy. We will indeed, in these final days, “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints (Jude, verse 3).”
As I began today with a story, I will uphold my reputation as The Storyteller by concluding with one. This one goes back to Friday, December 14th, 2012. I was on a United Arab Emirates flight which had departed Dubai for Houston, Texas. In a way I have never quite experienced before, I witnessed something from the distant past, which took me back to some of the happiest days of my youth, preceding the hardships and tragedies of later years that often visit me–as they do all of us–in the darkest of our thoughts in troubled nights. As my experience on the aircraft suddenly transported me in the speed of light to a time almost 4 decades prior in a reverse flight through linear time, I was simultaneously catapulted into eternity in the Kingdom of God, in the presence of the Triune God and all of the Saints of God by a forward thrust in linear time ended instantaneously by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. It goes something like this:
The biggest surprise of the trip—was the return flight to Texas from Dubai on Emirates Airlines, after arriving in Dubai from Durban and waiting 4 hours in Dubai for the connection to Houston. I always prefer aisle seats on aircraft, for easy access to the restroom and to walk around when permitted, especially on flights of 25 hour duration. I had forgotten to request them of Emirates Airlines while in Durban for the return to the United States and managed to be wedged into a window seat in the very back of the Boeing 777, in Seat 50 K. There were 3 advantages to this assignment I had not planned on. The first is that Seat 50 K on a Boeing 777 on Emirates Airlines has one literally right across from the restroom facility, and with easy access to the back of the aircraft to procure additional snacks and drinks from the flight attendants in between peak service times. The second proved to be a delightful encounter with an African American woman from Texas seated next to me, who was a schoolteacher in Dubai. She had a great personality and plenty of inside information on living and working in that locale in the United Arab Emirates. The third was a ringside seat to scenery of my sojourn of many years ago: Iran. Unlike the flight from Houston to Dubai on my way to South Africa, where the plane straddled the Iran-Iraq border as it split the very middle of the Persian Gulf at night on the approach to Dubai (I did see the coastal lights of Bandar Abbas from the left side of the aircraft and my aisle seat of that evening), the return journey took the interested passenger through the heart of modern Iran and ancient Persia. There they were again as I proceeded in a South to North fashion through the central corridor: the combination of clay-colored desert and jagged mountains with occasional snow caps beneath me as I traveled an aerial salient with the Shiraz-Isfahan-Tehran axis to my left (west), and the Kerman-Mashhad axis to my right (east); I followed the plane’s crossing of the Kerman to Yazd railroad tracks below, and then the stark, haunting beauty of the Kavir-e-Lut to the east, followed by the eventual appearance of the Dasht-e-Kavirdesert (The Salt Desert) in the country’s north-central interior. Only one question remained. Would I see Tehran once more after an absence of many years, or would this be the exclusive privilege of the denizens of the left side of the aircraft looking westward as we continued our northern route toward the Caspian Sea? The answer arrived soon enough. I would not witness Iran’s capital from Emirates Airlines Flight EK 211 traveling ponderously at an altitude of just under 30,000 feet in a strange arc from Dubai to Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Texas. What I did see in a marvelous panorama as the plane banked slightly was a view of snow enshrouded Mount Damavand (elevation 18,406 feet/Kuh-e-Damavand, elevation 5671 metres) as the aircraft approached it, and finally did a direct flyover. There was another gift of the Divine to me while seated in seat 50 K: when approaching Damavand, I had a brief, but clear glimpse of Lar Valley (Daryacheh-ye-Sadd-e-Lar).
Damavand in Winter, just as I witnessed it on December 14, 2012 on Emirates Airlines.
The first American pastor to serve in Persia described Lar Valley and summer camping in a book entitled,Persia and the Persians. My late Father and I would camp and fish there a lifetime ago, in the summertimes during my visits to my parents in between undergraduate college years in the United States. The nighttime sky there is permanently etched in my mind. One does not see stars there, but entire galaxies and planets seemingly close enough to reach out and touch. Sleeping in pup tents and sleeping bags is facilitated by the stillness of the Valley in the nocturnal hours, permeated only by the incessant but soothing presence of the voice of God in the form of “the rush of many waters” (Revelation 1:15). The words of Hafez in the 14th century came to consciousness:
Lie down beside the flowing stream
and see life passing by and know
that of the world’s transient nature
this one sign is enough for us.
After passing over Damavand, I looked at my watch and the GPS system screen in front of me in seat 50 K. It was 0210 Central time in Texas in the United States on Friday, December 14th. Tehran time was exactly 1140 on the same day in history. All of a sudden, I was no longer a middle aged man of 57 in transit from South Africa to America. I was a young 19 year old college kid again, fishing with my Father and swapping stories with him at night in the Sadd-e-Lar. I was hiking in the hills at the foot of Mount Damavand in early summer. I was playing center field again on the Air Force Detachment 333 fast pitch softball team playing against the U. S. Army team in the stadium at Gulf District, the American military outpost off Saltanatabad Avenue in north Tehran in the Pahlavi years. I saw myself wandering around in great wonderment in the ruins of Persepolis, searching for the treasures contained in the cities of Isfahan and Shiraz, running the Vacation Bible School for kids in the summertime atmosphere of Community Church of Tehran, embarking on a 7 mile run at 0500 beginning each day from my parents’ apartment in the city, or approaching the tomb of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae with the respect accorded to one mentioned by the Old Testament repeatedly as a prototype and forerunner of Jesus Christ, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah (2 Chronicles 22-23; Ezra, chapters 1, 3, 4, 5, 6; Isaiah, chapters 44 and 45; and Daniel, chapters 1, 6, 10).
Cyrus the Great’s tomb at Pasargadae, Iran is captured on a winter night most magnificently by the astrophotography of Oskin D. Zakarian of Tehran.
It was so long ago. Yet it was only yesterday. And it all came flooding back in a handful of minutes on Emirates Flight EK 211 between the United Arab Emirates and the State of Texas. There was one especially strange manifestation during this brief gift of God 30,000 feet above earth. Immediately upon crossing a brief segment of the Caspian Sea in leaving Iranian airspace, the perfect visibility I had possessed from Bandar Abbas to Lar Valley and Damavand had absolutely vanished. While the GPS screen informed me of the Boeing 777′s impending overflight of Baku, Azerbaijan, a solid sheet of impenetrable white clouds completely obscured any view from above. This sudden departure of visibility continued through the Balkans and most of Europe. Had the Hidden Hand of Creation, Redemption, and theNew Heaven and the New Earth kept this cloud cover north of the Iranian border for an appointed purpose? I was neither irritated nor disappointed in what I did not view from Baku northward. I saw what God wanted me to see, from the humble vantage point of Seat 50 K in Economy Class on Emirates Airlines Flight EK 211. The perpetual movement of Time and the relentless advance of Biological Age in decades speeding by with the speed of light, had momentarily halted. Eternity was in full view, an Eternity firmly in the center of the Kingdom of God, occupied by His Saints past, present, and future. What I witnessed in Iranian airspace on December 14th is a promissory note promising all good things to come for the true Israel of God bathed in the blood of the Lamb. Spring is indeed near.
Spring is indeed near, for all the Saints of God on this beautiful day in Wisconsin in June of the Year of Our Lord, 2014. Be sure of this! And may the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ bless you today, tomorrow, and forever (Hebrews 13:8).
A River Runs Through Iran’s Lar Valley. It presages the soothing presence of the voice of God in the form of “the rush of many waters” (Revelation 1:15).
Mark Dankof's Catacomb 