Lux Lucet

This may sound strange to the ears of those under 40, but once there was a time, and not that terribly long ago either, when the big fear talked up in the media was the threat posed by a new Ice Age.  Seriously.  It was going to be all blizzards in June, icicles in August, and the end of the world as we know it.  The fear of a new Ice Age may strike many today as laughable.  But as the 1977 Time cover shows, this was a widespread concern in the late 70s.

But somewhere in the 80s, the narrative changed.  It was not advancing, but rather retreating glaciers that came to be seen as the premier threat to life on planet earth.  Global warming had come of age, and the globalists were quick to promote it.  From the mid-eighties until 2009, it was all global warming all the time.  But that all changed with Climategate.  As a result of the release of emails belonging to researchers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, people came to understand that climatologists had been pulling the wool over their eyes all along.  The term global warming was quickly dropped down the memory hole.

At that point, one might have supposed that the globalists would give up on using the environment as a platform to promote their socialism.  But such was not the case.  Physics has something called the law of conservation of energy, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed:  it can only be transformed from one state to another.  Apparently politics has a parallel idea.   For instead of slinking off the world stage with permanent shame of face, the globalists simply changed their marketing strategy.  The global warming brand name had been sullied beyond repair.  New packaging was needed.  And it didn’t take long for the world’s clever propaganda meisters to come up with something new.  Thus was the world graced with the  new globalist meme, climate change.

Climate Change and Globalism, Vatican Style

2015 holds the promise of big things for the climate change crowd.  This December, the UN will hold a climate change meeting in Paris, “that would for the first time commit all countries to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions.”  Not wanting to let this opportunity go to waste, the pope has decided to push environmental issues this year as well.  In an article titled “Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches,” John Vidal reports on the Vatican’s climate change initiative.  According to Vidal, “In 2015, the pope will issue a lengthy message on the subject [climate change] to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, give an address to the UN general assembly and call a summit of the world’s main religions.”

It really should come as no surprise that the pope would want to hop on the UN climate change bandwagon.  As the original globalists, the popes have long desired to recapture the political power they once enjoyed in Europe prior to the Reformation.  But not only do they seek to recapture Europe for the papacy, they also wish to extend this same power over the whole world.  John Robbins put it this way, “What the Roman Church-State accomplished on a small scale during the Middle Ages is what it desires to achieve on a global scale in the coming millennium” (Ecclesiastical Megalomanian,187).  Some may dismiss such comments as tinfoil hat paranoia, but Rome has declared its desire for world government time and time again in its own official, publically available documents.  Robbins continues,

In its social encyclicals of the twentieth century, the Roman Church-State has frequently called for world government.  One of the major documents issued by the Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, is typical:

It is our clear duty, therefore, to strain every muscle in working for the time when all war can be completely outlawed by international consent.  This goal undoubtedly requires the establishment of a universal public authority acknowledged as such by all and endowed with the power to safeguard on the behalf of all, security, regard for justice, and respect for rights (Ecclesiastical Megalomania, 187).

This likely comes as a new thought to many people, even those in who would identify as being conservative or libertarian.  The web is full or articles by such persons variously blaming the current push for world government on central bankers, the UN, the Rothchilds, the Rockefellers, the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, etc.  That these entities may, in fact, harbor evil intentions and truly desire world government may very well be true.  But it is fascinating to this author that the Roman Catholic Church-State, the one organization with the history, the publically stated ambition, and the global reach to actually bring about world government, is rarely ever mentioned by conservatives or libertarians as a source of globalism.

On the rare occasion when an author from a libertarian or paleo-conservative publication actually does notice Rome’s aggressive globalism, the realization leaves him almost speechless.  Commenting in the American Conservative on Benedict XVI’s call, “for the establishment of ‘a supranational authority’ with worldwide scope and ‘universal jurisdiction’ to guide economic policies and decisions,” Rod Dreher wrote in his article titled “Vatican calls for One World Government. Really.,”

Lord have mercy.  What was once only in the febrile prophetic imagination of Jack Chick and Hal Lindsey is now a press release from the Vatican.  A friend (who is not Evangelical writes:

This is going to FREAK the evangelicals out.  But it makes me wonder what the heck is going on in the minds of these Vaticanites!  Don’t they have a clue how the world will preceive (sic) this?  One world authority?? Really?

Count me with the Evangelicals.  It freaks me out too, and will freak out many Orthodox Christians.  I bet it has the same effect on not a few Catholics as well.  Maybe Malachi Martin wasn’t such a conspiracy freak after all…

Dreher, who started out in life as a Methodist, converted to Roman Catholicism, and now finds himself in the Eastern Orthodox church is shocked, shocked!, that Rome would push for world government.  But as if to prove right Winston Churchill’s statement that  men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened, Dreher later updated his article with the following,

OK, let me take a second stab at this thing.

First, I don’t think there’s anything intentionally malicious about this [Benedict’s] document.  It does not have magisterial authority, so it doesn’t set out the Church’s authoritative teaching on faith and morals.  No Catholic is required to believe any of this.

Nothing intentionally malicious?  Really?  The pope makes a clear-as-a-bell statement calling for world government and we are not to take this as having any negative implications for liberty?  On this logic, Khrushchev’s “we will bury you” must have really been a call for international friendship, peace and understanding.

There is no reason to believe that the Vatican cares about the environment any more than it cares about the poor, about justice, or about  abortion.  Doubtless there are individual Roman Catholics who are committed to these issues, but what neither they nor most of those outside the Church understand is that the Vatican sees climate change as just another tool to further its globalist power ambitions.   If some other cause comes along more useful to the Church’s agenda, talk of climate change will cease in the halls of Rome.

A New Climate Change Encyclical

As part of Rome’s 2015 One Climate, One World campaign, later this year the pope will issue an encyclical specifically on the subject of climate change.  According to Vidal’s article,

Following a visit in March to Tacloban, the Philippine city devastated in 2012 by typhoon Haiyan, the pope will publish a rare encyclical on climate change and human ecology.  Urging all Catholics to take action on moral and scientific grounds, the document will be sent to the world’s 5,000 Catholic bishops and 400,000 priests, who will distribute it to parishioners.

The specific text of the pope’s encyclical is, of course, not yet known.  But given the long history of strident anti-capitalism evident in Rome’s social teaching, and given the Marxism on display in Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, one can safely assume that the upcoming papal encyclical will continue Rome’s longstanding assault on private property, freedom and the rule of law.

More Papal Ecumenism      

Ever since Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church-State has taken to heart the saying that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.  Where the church once hurled anathemas against Evangelicals, it now lulls them to sleep by appealing to them as “separated brethren.”  As such, it comes as no surprise that the papal climate change initiative will feature a heavy dose of ecumenical outreach.

Not content to distribute his encyclical to the bishops and people of Rome, Vidal reports that, “according to Vatican insiders, Francis will meet other faith leaders and lobby politicians at the general assembly in New York in September, when countries will sign up to new anti-poverty and environmental goals.”  Doubtless, this includes Evangelicals.  And doubtless too is that even now not a few prominent Evangelicals are salivating at the thought of serving as one of the pope’s hand-picked dupes during his US visit.  It should be interesting to see who makes the cut.

But as disgusting as it is to watch Evangelical ministers fall all over themselves to be the first to kiss the pope’s ring, this may not be the worst aspect of the current Roman Catholic-Evangelical  ecumenical stampede.  Perhaps more damaging than the outright ecumenism of individuals such as Rick Warren and Russell Moore  is the stealth ecumenism of those Evangelicals, who, on the one hand claim to oppose the pope’s globalist, climate change agenda, but on the other hand serve his interests by themselves engaging in ecumenism of a more subtle sort.  One example of this can be found toward the end of Vidal’s article.  In the next to last paragraph, Vidal observes,

Francis will also be opposed by the powerful US evangelical movement, said Calvin Beisner, spokesman for the conservative Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has declared the US environmental movement to be “un-biblical” and a false religion.

“The pope should back off,” he said.  “The Catholic church is correct on the ethical principles but has been misled on the science.  It follows that the policies the Vatican is promoting are incorrect.  Our position reflects the view of millions of evangelical Christians in the US.”

Beisner, himself an Evangelical, is named on the website of the Cornwall Alliance as, “Founder and National Spokesman The Cornwall Alliance.” In light of the current onslaught of papal environmentalist propaganda, Evangelicals are badly need a spokesman to articulate Biblical principles of stewardship, economics, and ethics.  Unfortunately, the Cornwall Alliance fails to do these things.  As detailed by John Robbins in his 2003 essay The Sin of Signing Ecumenical Declarations, the Cornwall Alliance went wrong right from the beginning.  Wrote Robbins,

Today’s email brought an invitation from the Acton Institute of Grand Rapids, Michigan, to sign the “Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship.”  This Declaration is the latest in a long series of ecumenical religious manifestoes issued in the twentieth century.  It used to be that only those who considered themselves liberals issued ecumenical pronouncements, but now those who profess to be theological conservatives – such as the signers of Evangelicals and Catholics Together – are issuing ecumenical Declarations as well.

Robbins went on to note that the email contained and invitation to review and sign the Cornwall Declaration and provided a list of others who had already signed the document.  This list included:  13 “Jewish Signers”; 21 “Roman Catholic Signers”; 48 Protestant Signers”; and 16 “Other Signers (religious or otherwise).”  Just to show that nothing has change in the nearly 15 years since Robbins wrote his essay, to this day the Cornwall Alliance displays substantially the same ecumenical list of signers on its website as was emailed to John Robbins in 2000.

What, one may ask, is wrong with signing ecumenical documents?  After all, isn’t it a good thing to protect the environment and stand up to the socialists?  Isn’t telling the pope to back off a good thing?  In truth, all of these are good works provided they are done according to principles of Biblical separation.  But when Evangelicals link arm and arm with unbelievers in an attempt to advance the kingdom of God, not only is such activity useless, it is, in fact, positively harmful, both to the cause of Christ generally and to the individual Christians particularly.  As Robbins explains,

The signers have not signed as individuals (that would be bad enough); they have signed as members (and officials) of religious groups:  Rabbis, Priests, Elders; Jews, Romanists (erroneously called Catholics), Protestants (though they seem not to be protesting Romanism any more), and Others.  The Cornwall Declaration is a religious document signed by religious officials.  By signing this Declaration, and others like it, Christians sin in several ways:

1. They “share [are implicated ] in other people’s sins.”
2. They disclose t hat making a joint political statement is more important to them than proclaiming the whole counsel of God.
3. They violate the scores of commands in Scripture to “be separate”; to avoid “unequal yokes with unbelievers”; to be “sanctified”; to be “called out”; to have nothing to do with those who profess to be Christians but are not.
4. They speak useless words.
5. They use words that cannot communicate clear meaning.
6. They teach that the Christian worldview is not unique but shares common ground with the worldviews of Romanism, Judaism, and Otherism.

From Old Testament times to the present, God’s people have sinned when they attempted to do the Lord’s work in the world’s ways.  when faced with invading foreign armies, the kings of Judah failed when they put their trust in the horses and chariots of Egypt rather than the Lord.  In our day, though they would never admit it publically, Evangelical leaders prefer to fight the Lord’s battles with the help of their ecumenical horses and chariots rather than trust in the whole armor of God to carry the day. And one can expect them to reap the same reward as their ecumenical predecessors.  Ecumenism is simply another word for double-mindedness.  And as James tells us, these double-minded men have no reason to expect to receive anything from the Lord.  They are unstable in all their ways.

Conclusion

2015 should prove to be a most interesting year for those involved in the climate change debate.  The socialists, religious and otherwise, have deployed their forces and are aggressively on the march.  There is no question about their determination to carry the day.  On their side is the press, the money, not to mention the prestige of the scientific community.  What they do not have is the truth.  That belongs to the people of God.  But the question remains, are there any Davids to be found among today’s Christian soldiers willing to stand for it?  Let us pray the answer is yes.