Expulsion from the Garden of Eden by Thomas Cole, 1828

http://www.explorethomascole.org/gallery/items/39

Crystal Bridges just finished an exhibition of the Hudson River Valley School of Artists. The name was once used to mock the landscapes. Now they are valued, printed, sent out for special viewing. The five giant paintings called The Course of Empire just went back to the NY Historical Society.

Today, the scandal of Cole is his choice of Biblical themes. He painted St. John preaching in the wilderness and his last painting at age 47, The Good Shepherd. The sheep in the foreground has a cross on his fleece, being guided by the Shepherd to the distant flock in Paradise. Cole died soon after the painting was completed.

The Biblical themes are not incidental to Cole's work but foundational.

Detail, The Good Shepherd

Thomas Cole, The Good Shepherd, 1848

Later I will put two favorite Cole series on two separate posts. One is The Course of Empire. The other is The Stages of Life.

I put the Eden painting on Facebook's timeline, and one Lutheran immediately responded to it.

The 19th century was a time in America when the secular was beginning to win the war against the Christian Faith. We are in the last stages of that battle.

An interesting factoid has regular church-goers in America favoring Romney by over 20 points. Those who never go to church favor Obama by over 20 points. Occasional visitors to church are split.

Married women favor the GOP. Single women favor the Democrats.

At Yale Divinity School in the 1970s, married couples without children were called "singles." That was so common that we adopted the same terminology without thinking about it anymore. "Do they have children? No they are single." The reason for the word-play is that marriage and children turn the self-indulgence of youth into mature love for another person and especially for the children. A young couple without children will plan dates, but a married couple with babies will plan for the children's future.

We live in a culture of fake eternal youth, so decisions are astonishingly self-indulgent. Not everyone can have a passel of children, but now people avoid children as being financial burdens and potential headaches. One of my students said, "I don't want children because they will cost me money and take away from my time."

Older people like me become more serious about doctrine because there is not much left to accomplish and eternal life looms ahead. I see younger classmates struggling to stay alive, and that makes me more grateful to God for the energy I have left.

The secular rationalists have won  in Lutherdom. The choices in 1960s Moline were:
1. Liturgical services, with Biblical sermons.

That was taken for granted. With a bit of travel, one could find a congregation from the LCMS:
1. Liturgical service, traditional hymns, Biblical sermon.

At some point WELS built a chapel in a cornfield, on the way to Augustana College. It was a:
1. Liturgical service, with the LCMS-WELS hymnal, and had Biblical sermons.

The choices were so limited in the Quad-Cities that no one thought, "Let's have a pit band, clowns, and a minister dressed like he is going to mow the hay in the back 40." Lutherans were liturgical. Pentecostals were enter-turgical, with predictable beehives for the women and keyboards and ignorant preachers in pompadours.

The secular rationalists see everything in the church as a business. Few people realize that all the Roman Catholic religious orders are manages as self-supporting businesses. They look with gimlet eye at every chance to make money and loathe any obstacle to profits. Mother Theresa was a magnet for gathering money for the poor for the Church of Rome.

The four-letter Lutheran synods (ELCA, WELS, LCMS) are money-making rackets in cahoots with the Thrivent anti-Lutheran insurance business. In each synod a tiny minority rakes off the biggest share of money for themselves. Like Roman bishops, they live like princes and rule like the despots they are.

Just watch one of these synodical wolves meddling with congregations, undermining pastors, enabling dysfunctional members, and then saying "I am helpless to deal with notorious adulterers, flagrant false teachers, and mincing minsters with an eye for the altar boys."

I liked the old system of slavery better. The slave-masters did not charge huge fees to pay for their luxuries, calling them missions, while motivating everyone with a whip.

Here is the biggest laugh of all. The Church Growth Movement came down from the ELCA-WELS-LCMS-ELS leaders. The Church Growth fad was imposed, sold, and funded with offering money, the biggest skimming operation since Congress took office under Obama.

Now that the Church Growth Movement is a colossal and expensive failure, the synods blame the members and pastors for failing to make them look good.

And even funnier - or more tragic - they are now training the dumbest pastors and stupidest members to become generic Groeschel Methodists as the Final Solution for changing demographics. Using Groeschel, they are training people to hate Biblical doctrine and accelerate apostasy. Hate the Confessions. Dump the liturgy. Sing the kiddie songs. Pay the talentless rock group. Copy the sermonette. Steal the graphics.

Trinity design by Norma Boeckler