Phillip Jensen, and a fundamental view of the evils of the secularists ...

(Above: William Hamilton's 1788 portrait of the fundamentalist Methodist preacher John Wesley, one of some thirty portraits held by the National Portrait Gallery in London. The rest here).

It would be remiss not to catch up with the Jensenists at the Sydney Anglican website on a Sunday, and so to Phillip Jensen's effort Making Sense of the Senseless.

His column's an effort to make sense of the Norway mass murderer Anders Breivik, and perhaps the most singular accomplishment is to write an entire column without once mentioning Breivik - "he", "the perpetrator" - by name.

On the other hand, secularists get five mentions, and provide the wrap up to the piece:

Nothing should surprise us when it comes to humanity’s capacity for good or ill. Humans are the creatures made in the image of the God of truth and life who have chosen to follow the god of lies and death. The sinner is not ‘other’ - he is me. It is the naivety of secularists that teach ‘all people are good and we should have faith in human nature’. Utopias have the unrealistic myth of human perfectibility where all people learn to live in harmony without tribalism, envy, greed or fear. But this man’s fear of others arouses our fear of others – others, like this man.

Uh huh. So far so Calvinist and to be expected, but surely the penultimate sentence is worth relishing, perhaps rolling around on the tongue, and savouring the sweet tang:

Utopias have the unrealistic myth of human perfectibility where all people learn to live in harmony without tribalism, envy, greed or fear.

Well speaking of unrealistic myths, that takes care of heaven as a concept, and perhaps the Garden of Eden along with it.

Meanwhile, earlier in the piece, we learn that Breivik was mildly acceptable to secularists:

... as the week wore on people read the writings of the Norwegian perpetrator and it became abundantly clear that he is not really Christian. He wrote: “If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian”. This is no fundamentalist Christian, nor even a religious Christian, but purely a tribal, cultural Christian – the kind secularists find mildly acceptable.

Yep Breivik isn't really a Christian - no matter that he fancied himself as a Knights Templar Crusader Christian - because he's secularist approved.

But perhaps the best bit came with this lengthy par:

To the secularist mindset all religions are the same – they are ‘not us’ but superstitious nonsense. Secularists make no attempt to differentiate between religions, for ‘they all have the same intellectual architecture, the same psychological pathology’. That is why journalists apply a word like “fundamentalist” to any religion. It is a generic term that means something like “an extremist who actually believes and lives by their religion in the full flower of its irrational, unenlightened, supernatural, superstitious literalism.” The origin and development of ‘fundamentalism’ as a vilifying swear word is ignored. A few years ago I complained to the National Portrait Gallery in London that to label Wesley and Whitfield “fundamentalist” was questionable to say the least but as an historical label put them in the wrong country in the wrong century! To find out more about this see http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/media/video/fundamentalism/

Yep, it turns out that Jensen's explanation doesn't have much to do with Breivik at all, but has a lot to say about the secularists, the secularist press, and wild talk of fundamentalism (never mind the chatter about Islamic fundamentalism this past decade).

Isn't there something entirely piquant about a minister of religion bemoaning the notion of fundamentalism, and then in the same breath scribbling a fundamental complaint to the National Portrait Gallery about the labelling of Wesley and Whitfield as fundamentalists.

This is of course to take the current definition of fundamentalism as it applies to nineteenth and twentieth century fundamentalist Christian and other religious movements, but if we were to take a standard dictionary definition ...

1. A usually religious movement or point of view characterized by a return to fundamental principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views and opposition to secularism. (here)

... then John Wesley would waltz into the category, as befits a plagiarist who helped found the Methodist movement:

Wesley embraced the Arminian doctrines that were dominant in the 18th-century Church of England. Methodism in both forms was a highly successful evangelical movement in the United Kingdom, which encouraged people to experience Jesus Christ personally. (wiki here).

By any order of merit, Wesley was a tub thumper and proselytizer of the first water, and the same could be said of the George Whitefield variant:

...an English Anglican priest who helped spread the Great Awakening in Britain and, especially, in the British North American colonies. He was one of the founders of Methodism and of the evangelical movement generally. He became perhaps the best-known preacher in Britain and America in the 18th century, and because he traveled through all of the American colonies and drew great crowds and media coverage, he was one of the most widely recognized public figures in colonial America. (wiki here)

You barely have to scratch the theological surface of this pair to see present day evangelical fundamentalism bubbling away like the devil's brew.

Presumably the National Portrait Gallery is run by hapless secularists who can't recognise the rich irony of Sydney Calvinist fundamentalists complaining about the mis-labelling of other fundamentalists when fundamentally it turns out that they are indeed bible-bashing fundamentalists.

Never mind. The column is perhaps most notable for the fun to be had in the comments section below the piece. A reader by the name of Grant Hayes determined to get amongst the Jensenists, and from the first post went hard at it:

"Secularists" are simply rife in this essay. Breivik becomes a convenient rod for beating them up - mark well, he's not a Jensen kind of Christian, oh no, he's a "secularist" kind. "Secularists" everywhere take note: you have all tacitly sanctioned massacre!

To this broad-brush tarring of secularists, the Dean adds inconsistency. He begins his piece by deploring the pain and suffering of "innocent citizens" at Breivik's hands, yet finishes by implying that everyone is a Breivik, i.e. "But of course he is just like us". In the eyes of the Dean's god, the victims of Breivik are just as evil as the man himself. The fact that they didn't commit massacre is a mere quibble - they may as well have.

So the victims of massacre are used to drive home a doctrinal point - that Breivik, far from being an aberration, is actually characteristic of the entire human race. He slaughters people, and apparently the billions who manage to go about their daily lives without slaughtering people are proven guilty. The extreme actions of one man are used to smear everyone with doctrinal reprobation.

Thirty posts later, and the flailing efforts of a few Jensen supporters brushed aside, Hayes was still at it:

... murder and jail seem to be God's preferred route for bringing certain chosen lambs into his kingdom. And integrity and goodwill seem to be God's preferred route for sending certain unchosen reprobates to Hell.

Odd, that God.

At that point, the quorum or the energy lapsed, and the motion - that Phillip Jensen is inclined to get fundamentalist when scribbling about secularists - was put, and carried on the voices, and so the wretched fundie secularists were declared to have carried the day .

It hardly seems fair to suggest that readers should do a little trolling on the Sydney Anglican pages, but really, what fun to see Grant Hayes frolic amongst the sheep ...

There should be more of it, especially when the writer of a column can't even bring himself to name "the perp" ...

(Below: John Wollaston's 1742 portrait of fundamentalist Methodist preacher George Whitefield, one of thirteen portraits held by the National Portrait Gallery of London. The rest here).