BOOK REVIEW : CARLOS EIRE’S WAR
AGAINST THE IDOLS
(This review is largely excerpted from J. Parnell McCarter’s book Let My People Go, available at http://www.puritans.net/ .)
Carlos Eire’s book War Against the Idols is being marketed by such conservative Protestant book distributors as Still Water Revival Books and the Trinity Foundation, primarily to show how significantly the Protestant Reformation was concerned with the issue of idolatry. It is indeed useful for that purpose, but should be read with extreme caution because of its subtle deceptions. It serves as an example of Romish casuistry put into practice.
First, let’s consider Eire’s background, and then consider the content of his book.
Carlos Eire is an ethnic Cuban and a Roman Catholic by religion. Here is a short reference to him that appeared in a Christianity Today article (see http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2001/138/53.0.html ):
“My Yale colleague Professor Carlos Eire sometimes visits his relatives in a small community of Cuban immigrants near Chicago. Not long ago, a pious Catholic woman there asked him, "Is it possible for Fidel Castro to be in heaven?" Professor Eire told her that the Christian faith teaches that nobody is beyond the pale of redemption. It is possible for Castro to end up in heaven. There was dead silence. Then she said, "Well, I wouldn't want to be in heaven. I can't imagine a heaven in which I would live with Fidel Castro." This woman could not fathom the scandalous truth that no one—not even our mortal enemies—is beyond divine grace.”
Eire was a teacher for two years at St. John’s University, and even in writing his book he acknowledges the assistance of the Benedictine monks at St. John’s Abbey and University. This school and abbey based in Collageville, Minnesota is run by the Benedictines. It is noteworthy today for its St. John’s Bible Project, described on its website as follows:
“The Saint John’s Bible is of interest to museums because it
is an epic work of art that has great value to historians, manuscript scholars
and bibliophiles. But it is the sacred character of The Saint John’s Bible that
makes it such a divine fit for the MIA. "This is a museum very involved in
sacred art around the world and biblical subjects. It is a very big part of
what we do," noted Maurer. "This is a wonderful opportunity to bring
into focus the larger issues of spirituality, ecumenism, art and
religion."
“Worship is in the seventy-third year of publication. Formerly known as Orate Fratres, it is published by the monks of Saint John s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota. The first issue appeared on the First Sunday of Advent, 1926. It was originally edited by Dom Virgil Michel with the help of other well-known pioneers of the modem liturgical movement… Its primary aim was to develop a better understanding of the spiritual impact of the liturgy and to promote active participation on the part of all men and women in the worship of the Church…
Virgil Michel had four specific objectives in view. The first was a renewed sense of the corporate nature of the Church, the idea that the parish is the body that can most effectively carry the Gospel to the world, and that corporate evangelism must have priority of expression in all activities of a congregation and in all the worship of Christians. He maintained that through lay participation in the liturgy, congregations could be built up into active communities of service and love.
His second insight was that the local Church must be interested in the daily lives of men and women - in their work, in their leisure activities, and in their social concerns. A parish must be equally interested in and responsibly engaged with national questions, both economic and political, and in the world's problems, especially poverty and war. Its worship must come out of human life and return people to the serious business of life formed not only in the abstract realms of theology but in the concrete realities of marriage and family life, work, sickness, and leisure.
His third conviction involved concern for those alienated from the economic order. It was the realization that unemployed industrial workers in Europe felt themselves to be cut off from all hope of a life of fulfillment that led Michel to see the necessity for new Christian ventures. The unemployed and marginalized were the very people whom the Church, if true to the mission of Jesus Christ, should be specially searching for and serving. He was convinced that one thing the lonely and poor needed was to feel wanted and one thing the Church should be able to give was a sense of belonging to a human community. Without community there was no Christian hope for the hungry and the ragged, the oppressed and the over-worked.
Michel felt that this corporate embrace of others was often lacking in both society and the Church, and so he included a fourth emphasis, namely, that the corporate worship of the laity must be renewed everywhere. Michel taught that worship is something that lay persons must do together in order to grow into the unity of the Body of Christ. In this way he sought to correct the religious individualism that characterized so much of the religious activity of the Church. The worship of the Church must express and be seen to express the fullness of the faith, and it must do so in living, material relation to the concrete life of the people. A liturgy in which all participated fully would become a witness in the United States to a new Christian humanism which could safeguard the dignity of the individual person within the context of a larger community. Against the gray landscape of widespread poverty, the breaking of bread and the sharing of the Eucharistic Bread could challenge the selfishness and narcissism, the emptiness and frustration which regularly result in a withdrawal from others.
Virgil Michel was indeed a prophetic figure who had a profound sense of the essential relationship that must exist between liturgy and life, between liturgy and social justice. Since his sudden death in 1938, the editorial policy of the journal has carried on his rich tradition. His immediate successor was Godfrey Diekmann, a monk of Saint John's Abbey, who had studied at Sant' Anselmo in Rome and at the Abbey of Maria Laach in Germany. He was the editor-in-chief for about forty-five years, was one of the prime movers in the North American Liturgical Conference during the 1940s and 1950s, served as a peritus at the Second Vatican Council, and was one of the founders of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy. Since the Second Vatican Council the routine management of the journal has been under the successive direction of Aelred Tegels, Michael Marx, Allan Bouley and Kevin Seasoltz, all monks of Saint John's Abbey. In 1951, twenty-five years after the founding of the journal, its name was changed to Worship, an indication of the growing interest in the use of the vernacular in liturgical celebrations.
Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the journal has tried to help Christian communities internalize the meaning of the extensive liturgical changes that have taken place in the churches of almost all Christian denominations. With a readership that has gone far beyond the confines of the United States and has included not only Roman Catholics but also Anglicans, Eastern Christians and Protestants, it has tried to evaluate critically the effectiveness of liturgical reforms in light of both tradition and contemporary developments in the arts and the social sciences, and has encouraged the development of new rituals that enable worshipers to praise and serve God and to minister to God's people in the midst of rapidly changing cultural patterns throughout the world…
Although the journal is firmly rooted in both a Benedictine and a Roman Catholic tradition, its editorial policy has never been narrowly confessional, as the membership of the editorial board, the list of authors, and the subjects addressed in the journal indicate. The Benedictine tradition has regularly provided a hospitable context in which the human search for God in diverse traditions can both be discussed and experienced. Liturgy, much more effectively than systematic theology, tends to emphasize the truths which unite Christians; hence it is important for ecumenical encounters. Since 1967 Worship has quite consciously sought to contribute to the ecumenical movement by the appointment of Protestant and Eastern Christian liturgical scholars to its editorial board…”
What Eire does to Calvin and the reformers in his works is not very different from what Satan does to the words of God: he twists words for his own wicked end. He seeks to turn Calvin and the reformers into revolutionary liberation theologians on the order of the Jesuit Bellarmine, except with different ends from Bellarmine. He seeks to show the reformers as men dedicated to stirring up popular rebellion against the civil authority for purposes of iconoclasm. Here is what Eire asserts: “When a ruler disobeys the First Table of the Law, when he breaks the covenant of God for pure worship, then and only then is revolution fully justified. This is what Calvinist theorists never tired of repeating.” (p. 309) What an incredible Satanic lie is this!! Here is instead what Calvin wrote in Book IV of his Institutes:
“But if we have respect to the word of God, it will lead us farther, and make us subject not only to the authority of those princes who honestly and faithfully perform their duty toward us, but all princes, by whatever means they have so become, although there is nothing they less perform than the duty of princes. For though the Lord declares that a ruler to maintain our safety is the highest gift of his beneficence, and prescribes to rulers themselves their proper sphere, he at the same time declares, that of whatever description they may be, they derive their power from none but him. Those, indeed, who rule for the public good, are true examples and specimens of his beneficence, while those who domineer unjustly and tyrannically are raised up by him to punish the people for their iniquity. Still all alike possess that sacred majesty with which he has invested lawful power. I will not proceed further without subjoining some distinct passages to this effect.65[7] We need not labour to prove that an impious king is a mark of the Lord's anger, since I presume no one will deny it, and that this is not less true of a king than of a robber who plunders your goods, an adulterer who defiles your bed, and an assassin who aims at your life, since all such calamities are classed by Scripture among the curses of God. But let us insist at greater length in proving what does not so easily fall in with the views of men, that even an individual of the worst character, one most unworthy of all honour, if invested with public authority, receives that illustrious divine power which the Lord has by his word devolved on the ministers of his justice and judgment, and that, accordingly, in so far as public obedience is concerned, he is to be held in the same honour and reverence as the best of kings.”
But Eire turns him into the same wicked liberationist mold that characterizes the Jesuits and other Romanist heretics like the Benedictine monks in Collageville, Minnesota.
But it gets even more dastardly than that. He seeks to turn Calvinism into a form of Jewish cabalism. Here is what he writes: “In Jewish Cabalistic legend, it was believed that those who knew how to harness the creative power latent in the Hebrew alphabet could bring anything into existence, even another man…what Skinner proposes is that Calvinists in the sixteenth century made a golem from medieval resistance theories.” (p. 309) While Eire believes Skinner’s theory fails to take proper account of the central place of iconoclasm in stirring not only personal but also civil change, he leaves in tact Skinner’s charge of Jewish cabalism. This is indeed ironic, because it is in Romish orders that Jewish cabalism has been promoted (see Appendix 10 for the relation of Masonic Templarism with the Romish orders), whereas Calvinism has thoroughly rejected it.
The Satanic stratagem should be apparent to anyone. Twist the words of Calvin so that Calvin’s philosophy regarding political revolution or cabalism is like the philosophy of the Romish Jesuit and Benedictine orders. For example, turn Calvin’s philosophy regarding political revolution into the Jesuit Bellarmine’s. Then once you have persuaded Protestants that their historic leaders really held to this course, sit back and watch as the Protestants take actions consistent not with the actual philosophy of Calvin, but rather with the actual philosophy of Bellarmine, yet without necessarily realizing that they are in fact pursuing a course consistent with Bellarmine.
This is precisely what happened in the American Revolution. The revolutionaries, inspired by Romanists via freemasonry, argued that they were carrying out a tradition of revolution consistent with Calvin, Knox, and the Westminster divines. And this is what Eire argues as well: “Though far from democratic, these [JPM- Calvinistic] theories influenced revolutions that would later usher in democracy in other places. Ironically enough, those later revolutions would also usher in religious toleration, and thus render useless the concept of ‘idolatry.’” The revolutionaries then duped many genuine Protestant Christians at the time towards revolution under their leadership, having persuaded them that it was consistent with historic Protestantism. As we read at http://www.natreformassn.org/statesman/01/poltheo.html, many Presbyterian “Covenanter” dissenters fell into this trap in the past:
“At the time of the War for Independence, Covenanters mingled their blood with that of Christians of various descriptions so that the yoke of tyranny might be thrown off. In 1787, with the establishment of a new, and innovating, written Constitution, the Covenanters found that they had been miserably betrayed.”
But it should be wondered whether “Covenanter” dissenters have yet repented of their error. And Eire’s book is certainly dangerous medicine for that ailment.
In reality, the revolutionaries advocated a theory and a course quite contrary to the historic reformation. The reformers like Calvin and the Westminster divines advocated working with the civil authority insofar as it did not result in sin; and they in no wise advocated popular revolt. The reformed ministers did not advocate that the people rebel against the king and parliament, but rather beseeched the king and parliament to obey Christ. What came out of the American Revolution in America was something far less reformed and Protestant than what had been in place before the political revolution.
Therefore, Protestants should read Eire’s book fully cognizant of its subtle Romish errors. Opposition to idolatry and idolatrous worship was certainly a major pillar of the Protestant Reformation, but revolution and rebellion against political authority was not its method of attack.