Thursday, June 11, 2020

The Vigano Letter

To my colleagues who are impressed by Cardinal Vigano’s recent letter to President Donald Trump: How has it escaped your notice that the letter contains a dualistic heresy in which God, by being locked in an “eternal” struggle with evil, is portrayed as merely equal to that evil? If the struggle is eternal, therefore unresolved forever, if Satan is God’s “eternal enemy,” so that God never wins, how can this be the God we believe in? It can’t be! So limited a being isn’t our God. How has this not clued you in to the logical realization that Vigano (a slanderer of note) speaks by another spirit - a spirit of error? So, his letter goes on by teaching you to be wary of human beings as your enemies, “children of darkness,” instead of as sinners in need of the Gospel, and as objects of God’s love, as well as of yours? How does it not flatter your pride to be told that you are “the children of light” not because you are in Christ, but because you back a particular politician?

It is all so very wrong. In the words of Jesus, I tell some of you: You know not what spirit ye are of. I urge you not to respond to me until you have sought God in prayer. If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Following up my comment of 28 June as to the propriety of addressing practical personal enmity for as long as it is protracted, I propose that, granting that, the question is, how to do so most prudently with hope of varied possible persuasive success? I say, ‘persuasive’, having been struck in the Gospel for the First Sunday after Trinity by the parable of Dives and Lazarus ending with the word ‘peisthesontai’. Having gratefully read your revised post(s) of 15 June about preaching in liturgical context, I would welcome (and, I confidently assume, not I alone) your own thoughts about how best publicly to address in a non-liturgical context the current problems of practical personal enmity, should you find occasion to do so.

Semi-Hookerian