As Melville Wrote, The Pulpit Still Leads the World

 From the movie, starring Gregory Peck, with Orson Welles as the preacher.

What could be more full of meaning?- for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 8




I must have been 8 when our family went to see the 1956 movie, Moby Dick. The whaling scenes were thrilling and terrifying, but the pulpit scene was puzzling and dark.

We visited Melville's home, where he wrote the novel, where he viewed the mountain's shape from his study as a whale breaching the surface of the ocean.

Between those mile markers was the requirement of reading the novel and reporting on the novel's collection of rhetorical devices, a odious chore. But at his home, I bought a new copy and read it through. For various reasons, the book got me to finish Catholic, Lutheran, Protestant.

The apostasy of the Church, Roman and Protestant, is a perfect example of the preacher's concluding words in chapter 8. As I told one member last night, ELCA paved the way for rainbow ordination and marriage. They passed their new edict in 2009, after 22 straight years of ELCA quotas and propaganda. The retired bishops finally took notice of their cowardice and formed a new Lutheran church body, decades late.

Examine the histories of the Episcopalians, Methodists, and Presbyterians. They did the same -

"Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow."

Obama did not lead the change - the denominations did. That includes the so-called conservative Lutherans who paid lip-service to the Scriptures while imitating ELCA every possible way.

Rolling history back, here are some important milestones that got all of America on this track:

1. 1880s - Inventive and erroneous text editing allowed the Protestant Left to remove the ending of Mark's Gospel, a task completed by LCMS' Concordia Publishing House with its gold-plated Mark commentary. Seminex won, because the Preus Crime Family only fought to win office, not to change anything.
2. 20th century - The denominations accepted Evolution over Creation and invented many verbal contortions to merge the two, a sugar coating for a poison pill.
3. After changing the name of the Communist Federal Council of Churches, the re-baptized ecumenical lobby became the National Council of Churches, aligned with the World Council of Churches, Geneva, Switzerland. The NCC was no less Marxist but more palatable with a different label.
4. Yes, it was this National Council of Churches that gave us the Revised Standard Version removal of the Virgin Birth from Isaiah 7. They backtracked from the national firestorm, but put "or young woman" in the footnote. That itself was an important step, making the removal of divine action routine by changing a few words. So the Federal Council became the National Council from their Communist scandal, and this NCC became the sponsor of the RSV Bible, hailed by the Left-wing denominations. Footnotes matter - see where the ending of Mark is tolerated but attacks on the text put below in tiny italics with a tiny font.
5. NCC activism worked to leaven the seminaries so the Word of God was really a call for secular "peace, justice, and radical reform."
6. Victory Lap. Universities, seminaries, and denominations reject the traditional text of the Bible. The KJV and various modern KJV publications are off the table for discussion. Elite dummies use the ESV while those with even lower reading comprehension score use the NIV.
7. Unstuck.