The Road Hosea 6:5: "Therefore have I hewed them by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of my mouth: and thy judgments are as the light that goeth forth."
Last night I had a disturbing dream. I was wearing a rough garment—it was brown; it looked like it was a robe made out of burlap. I wore a belt around my waist. I looked like John the Baptist or else I felt like John the Baptist. Everywhere I went people became very angry at me. I would say something and then people would violently reject me. Sometimes I would walk to where people were gathering and I wouldn’t say anything—just my walking into their air space angered them.
Then there was this one guy: he was short and mean-looking. He had a whip. The whip had a wooden handle and several strips of cord attached to the top of it; on the end of each strip of cord was a nail: it looked like the cat-of-nine-tails. This guy hated my guts. Two or three times during the dream he would come after me and whip me. The dream was long; most of the details are gone from me now.
The odd thing about this dream was that when it was over, it was played over again—like a movie reel. The exact same dream was repeated twice. This reminds me of that Scripture: “In the mouth of two or three witnesses let every word be established.” So whatever this dream means, it is established. Or maybe it means that it will happen soon.
Genesis 41: 32: “And for that the dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice; it is because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass.”
In my life, because of my Christian faith, I have been rejected by family, friends and church people, so this dream makes sense.
[The short, mean-looking guy in the dream looked EXACTLY like a so-called Christian that I met in Absarokee, Montana: Jack Burwell. He thinks he is saved because he studies the Bible. Jack Burwell rejects Christ.]
“They were prophets, not scribes, for the scribe tells us what he has read, and the prophet tells us what he has seen.”
–A.W. Tozer
“Let a thing here be noted, that the prophet of God sometimes may teach treason against kings, and yet neither he nor such as obey the word, spoken in the Lord’s name by him, offend God.”
–John Knox
“If ye were not strangers here, the dogs of the world would not bark at you”
About five days ago I was hitchhiking south of Columbus, Montana and this guy picked me up. He drove me to Absarokee.
I told him that I had been hitchhiking for a number of years. I also said that my book High Plains Drifter was published two years ago. He said that a friend of his from Forsyth, Montana saw my book at the public library there and had read it. I never told him that my book was at the library in Forsyth. That was a pleasant surprise.
18 November 2010
This morning I hitchhiked from Victor, Idaho to Wilson, Wyoming. I got dropped off at this gas station in Wilson and I bought a candy bar there. As I walked through Wilson heading towards Jackson, I saw this guy walking to his vehicle that was parked on the shoulder. He looked at me and I looked at him; I thought I recognized him.
He pointed at me and I walked up to him and said something like, “I know you. You’re the guy from Scotland.” (Actually, I think his dad was from Scotland.)
We shook hands and hugged each other. His name was Ian. Ian had picked me up about a year ago and he took me to his place in Wilson and we had a cup of tea; we had a great talk. I think Ian has picked me up twice coming out of Jackson.
So Ian and I were talking and he said, “I read your book and loved it!”
“What?!” I exclaimed. “Wow, no one has ever said that to me before. Thanks. I hope you got something out of it.”
Ian told me that a friend of his bought a copy of High Plains Drifter for him.
We talked for a while longer and then he said that he and his friend were going up to Teton Pass to go skiing. We shook hands and parted company.
God’s timing is always perfect. I could have gotten a ride from Victor to Jackson, but no, the Lord had me dropped off in Wilson instead. It was good to see Ian again. I am guessing I will run into him again in the near future.
This is from my Author’s Note page, High Plains Drifter: A Hitchhiking Journey Across America:
“It was the will of my heavenly Father to hitchhike in thirty-nine states. I did some hitchhiking in 1986 and 1987 and also from 1996 to 2000. In that time I went coast to coast fourteen times. The shortest time on the road was three days; the longest time on the road was eight months. There were times when I was forced to take a bus (like in Wyoming because hitchhiking is illegal); sometimes I would take a bus in cold weather or someone would buy me a ticket to help me out. But for the most part, hitchhiking made up 99% of my travels throughout the United States.
“I was able to share my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ with countless people, the Lord taught me many things on the road and much spiritual bondage was broken on my journey (hitchhiking itself is a type of fasting and prayer).
“I am eternally grateful that the Lord protected me and provided for me in my travels. Because of my hitchhiking experiences, I have come to the conclusion that there are no accidents in the Kingdom of Heaven; God’s timing is absolutely perfect. With God all things are possible—like hitchhiking through a blizzard in the panhandle of Texas.”
Today I hitchhiked from Riverton to Dubois, Wyoming. I read some more from 100 Decisive Battles by Paul K. Davis here at the library.
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Antietam (Sharpsburg), 1862
Gettysburg, 1863
Atlanta/March to the Sea, 1864
Manila Bay, 1898
Marne, Second Battle, 1918
Dunkirk, 1940
Battle of Britain, 1940:
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“The decision to stop attacks on airfields, radar sites, and factories proved to be one of Hitler’s greatest mistakes. Hanson Baldwin wrote, ‘It was one of the great miscalculations of history. The bombing of London gave the great Fighter Command a chance to recuperate, and it forced the Luftwaffe to a deeper penetration and thus exposed the bombers and short-legged fighters to greater loss. It antagonized world public opinion, mobilized global sentiment in support of Britain, stiffened English resolution and helped lead to Germany’s loss of the war.’”
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Pearl Harbor, 1941
Midway, 1942
Normandy, 1944
Okinawa, 1945
Israel’s War of Independence, 1948-1949
Inchon, 1950
Dien Bien Phu, 1953-1954
Tet Offensive, 1968
Desert Storm, 1991
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The Vietnam War The Lord governs in the affairs of men. I believe the Vietnam War happened for a reason. Fighting against Godless communism in its various disguises is always noble. The reason the United States got bogged down in Vietnam was because we turned our backs on the Jewish people in Europe during World War II (from a sermon by John Hagge).
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Someone may counter and say, the death of 58,000 U.S. Military personnel in the Vietnam War does not compare with the death of 6 million Jews in Nazi death camps during World War II. The memory of the Vietnam War paralyzed U.S. foreign policy and a military superpower till the victory in the Gulf War in 1991. If the Lord Jesus Christ wants to hamstring a nation because of sin, then so be it.
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He who curses Israel shall be cursed; he who blesses Israel shall be blessed.
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
By James Webb
Page 121: “Call this war by whatever name you may, only call it not an American rebellion; it is nothing more or less than a Scotch Irish Presbyterian rebellion.”
–A Hessian officer, writing home during the War of the American Revolution.
Page 149: “They built churches, the Scots-Irish first following the Presbyterian faith, but over time becoming more and more inclined to adopt the evangelical Baptist and Methodist denominations, again possibly to draw a line between their communities and the tamer form of Presbyterianism being brought directly from an increasingly enlightened Scotland.”
Page 150: “The Tidewater Aristocracy that had allowed such settlements looked askance at these new Americans, often snidely belittling them for their coarseness and their backward, nonintellectual ways. But their ferocious performance against a variety of Indian attacks that began in 1754 and continued even after the seven years of the French and Indian War gained them not only respect but also an enduring legitimacy. They fought and played by their own rules, expecting no quarter from any enemy and giving none in return. And by the eve of the American Revolution in 1775, they had become a political force in their own right.”
Page 152: “But the migration to America was raising far more dangerous concerns in political circles. The English ruling class, which had begun the century seeking strong people to settle in the colonies, slowly began to see unintended consequences. The Ulster Scots had brought with them not only a desire for a better life, but also a determination to live under their own rules. The democracy of the Presbyterian Kirk, and ancient mistrust of higher authority, and a burning resentment of the English hierarchy that had given them so much trouble in Ulster all fueled their interactions with other cultures from their first days in America. Seasoned observers on both sides of the Atlantic began watching the dynamic of the Scots-Irish migration with increasing concern. The out-migration was causing economic troubles in Ireland, but an even greater problem was percolating across the seas—the very survival of the British colonial system on the new continent. Trouble had almost immediately been set loose in the colonies as a result of the Scots-Irish arrival in America for although political disagreements had been building in the colonies for some time, the ever disagreeable Ulster Scots were injecting a new and violent tone to the debate.”
Page 153: “The first Great Celtic Migration from Ireland [by 1775] was complete, and the people who had traveled to America were now largely positioned in a broad swath of mountains that marked the geographic—and political—boundary between an aristocratic, colonial past and a future so wide and promising that its dimensions were unfathomable. And although it was mainly the English-American aristocracy that framed the intellectual arguments for the movement toward independence, it would be the Scots-Irish who would bring the fire of revolution to the pulpits of almost every frontier church and also would provide a disproportionate share of guns and soldiers to the battlefield once war broke out.
“As the eminent English historian James Anthony Fronde put it in 1872, ‘The resentment which they carried with them continued to burn in their new homes; and, in the War of Independence, England had no fiercer enemies than the grandsons and great-grandsons of the Presbyterians who had held Ulster against Tyrconnell.’”
Page 156: “Just as important, the churches became vital centers of religious, social, and even political activity. From those pulpits, decade after decade, strong men preached about the power of the individual, decried the evil of a government that sought to interpose itself between man and God, and reminded parishioners of the two centuries of discrimination by the Anglican English aristocracy against their people, a discrimination that in many ways still existed in America.”
Page 157 & 158: “The power of numbers and the strength of the rhetoric began to tell. In the late 1740s and early 1750s a wave of religious tolerance swept the region, becoming known as the Great Awakening. This movement was led not so much by the Presbyterians as by the Baptists, who slowly gained great favor in Scots-Irish communities by echoing the strongest edicts of John Calvin that no government had the right to stand between God and His people. Evangelical revivals filled the backcountry. Governments themselves softened, slowly allowing religious freedoms. Transitional figures such as the legendary orator Patrick Henry, whose Scottish father was ‘properly’ Anglican but whose mother was an ardent Presbyterian, took up the cudgel and worked to remove ‘established religion’ from the realm of government. This issue, forced heavily by Scots-Irish and other ‘dissenting’ mountain communities, was a major factor in the creation of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which begins ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’”
Page 161: “As the American colonies moved toward declaring independence from Great Britain, the Scots-Irish were all but unanimous in their desire to be free of the English government. Although the trained minds of New England’s Puritan culture and Virginia’s Cavalier aristocracy had shaped the finer intellectual points of the argument for political disunion, the true passion for individual rights emanated from the radical individualism of the Presbyterian and, increasingly, Baptist pulpits. New political theories of democracy and federal systems were being tested and debated in the learned salons and legislative chambers along the coast. But for the people in the mountains, two centuries of Kirk-dominated Calvinism had already nurtured a raw yet powerful concept—the individual’s moral right to rebel against the unjust policies of any government. This concept, which for the moment dovetailed neatly with the aristocratic forces of revolution in the East, would later form the basis for a more inclusive brand of populism first characterized by the presidency of Andrew Jackson.”
Page 162: “It was reported that King George III characterized the Revolution as ‘a Presbyterian War,’ and that Horace Walpole remarked in Parliament, ‘There is no use crying about it. Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.’”
“A New Englander who opposed the rupture with England declared the Scotch-Irish to be, with few exceptions, ‘The most God-provoking democrats on this side of Hell.’”
Pages 162 & 163: “Estimates vary, but it is undeniable that the Scots-Irish comprised at least one-third and as many as one-half of the ‘rebel’ soldiers during the Revolutionary War. They became quickly known not only for their battlefield tenacity, but also for their loyalty during the brutal winter of 1777 at Valley Forge, where they remained steadfast while large numbers of soldiers deserted George Washington.”
Page 165: “The great majority of the population in the Carolinas was in the mountains, and the bulk of the people in the mountains were Scots-Irish with long memories, deep hatreds, and battle skills that had been continuously honed against the Indians. Blindly—some might say arrogantly—the British ignored that reality as they pressed their campaign further inland. Having toppled the Continentals so easily along the coastline, their leaders reasoned that a policy of terror and intimidation in the western communities would quickly bring the rest of the Carolinas into the fold.
“This misjudgment proved to be perhaps the most costly error of the war. By launching a campaign that in its tone was chillingly reminiscent of Proud Edward’s attempt to hammer Scotland and Henry VIII’s ‘rough wooing’ of the Scottish lowlands in centuries past, the British and their Tory cohorts provoked the anger of the very people who were capable of smashing their advance. And smash it they would.”
Page 169: “From their gathering point at Sycamore Shoals, the over-mountain militias headed southeast, toward the North Carolina Piedmont. In early October they picked up the trail of Ferguson’s meandering battalion and began tracking him. Shortly, other militia units joined them, one coming up from South Carolina, another traveling down from North Carolina’s Piedmont. They now numbered more than 1,000, almost even in size with Ferguson’s 1,300 Redcoats. And on October 7, 1780, they found Ferguson on a narrow ridge that the locals called King’s Mountain.”
Page 170: “The battlefield was small; the length of six football fields on top of a mountain a few hundred feet high. The numbers involved were not huge; a thousand or so on each side. The battle did not last long; little more than an hour. But the victory was so stunning and the differences in military style so complete that one can say without exaggeration that Colonial America, with all its stylistic dependence on European forms of propriety, began conclusively to die along with Ferguson’s soldiers on King’s Mountain. And it was being replaced by the raw individualism of an uneducated and testy group that the Europeans, perhaps always, would quizzically view as ‘mongrels.’ This was not the carefully replicated English society along the coast that was mangling Ferguson on the mountain. Rather, it was something fresh and new, occasionally even ugly, that could not yet even be defined.”
Page 171: “Rock by rock, slope by slope, fighting sometimes so close that a rifle went off into the belly of a Redcoat whose bayonet had pierced the same rifleman’s arm, the buckskin and linen-clad militiamen used every skill that a generation of Indian warfare had taught them. The volleys of Ferguson’s ever more nervous soldiers went repeatedly high, over their heads, while the individual shots from well-used long rifles were seldom off the mark.”
“The over-mountain men had not merely defeated the Redcoats at King’s Mountain, they had totally destroyed them. At a cost of 28 killed and 62 wounded, ‘Ferguson’s detachment of 1,100 men was annihilated.’ Indeed, ‘only 200 Tories sent out earlier on a foraging expedition were able to escape. Hearing of Ferguson’s defeat, Cornwallis began backpedaling into South Carolina.’”
Page 172: “Mindful of Tarleton’s butchery and Cornwallis’s early promise to hang them, they held court on a number of Redcoats who were recognized as local Tory leaders, sentencing thirty-six to death and hanging nine of them before growing tired of the killing. Other prisoners were shot in individual incidents, and still others were left on the trail to die. And then the militiamen who had changed the course of the Revolutionary War simply went home.”
Page 173: “These men and others, great-great-great-grandsons all, fought with purpose on behalf of concepts that were older that the Scottish Kirk, views of human dignity that in time, in many places, became America itself.”
Page 182: “The power—and ultimately the attractiveness—of the Scots-Irish culture stemmed from its insistence on the dignity of the individual in the face of power, regardless of one’s place or rank in society.”
Pages 182 & 183: “The ideas that fueled the concept had been adapted into its religious base through the Scottish Kirk and were further refined in Ireland as the notions of nonconformity evolved, asserting that every individual had the moral right to resist any government that did not respect his beliefs.”
Page 289: “For nearly two thousand years, in one form or another, this culture’s unbending individualism—and its ingrained hatred of aristocracy—has been in conflict with a variety of authoritarian power structures, and it remains so in today’s American.”
Page 343: “We helped build this nation from the bottom up. We face the world on our feet and not on our knees. We were born fighting. And if the cause is right, we will never retreat.”
Last night I had a dream where I was in a room in the White House (it may have been the lobby just outside the Oval Office). I was talking with President Barack Obama. Then this other guy walked into the room. He was the next President of the United States. He looked at Barack Obama and asked, “When are you going to leave? When are you going to resign?”
Milton and the English Revolution
By Christopher Hill
“The civil war of the seventeenth century, in which Milton is a symbolic figure, has never been concluded. . . . Of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions, conscious and unconscious, inherited or acquired, making an unlawful entry.”
–T.S. Eliot, Milton (1947)
Page 1: “Milton is a more controversial figure than any other English poet. Many of the controversies relate to Milton’s participation in the seventeenth-century English Revolution, yet Milton is more controversial even than that Revolution itself. Those who dislike Milton dislike him very much indeed, on personal as well as political grounds. How could the American who proclaimed himself Royalist, Anglo-Catholic and classicist have any use for England’s republican anti-Catholic? Blake, Shelley and Herzen were more attuned to Milton: so were Jefferson, Mirabeau and the Chartists.
“Yet the controversies around Milton are not simple. He was, for instance, a propagandist of revolution, a defender of regicide* [killing of the king] and of the English republic. Dr. Johnson and many since have found it hard to forgive him for this, or to be fair to him. Yet Milton frequently expressed great contempt for the common people, and so cannot be whole-heartedly admired by modern democrats. He was a passionate anti-clerical, and in theology a very radical heretic. Since he was also a great Christian poet, ‘orthodox’ critics have frequently tried to explain away, or to deny, his heresies. We may feel that these attempts tell us more about the commentators than about Milton, but they have not been uninfluential. On the other hand, Milton’s radical theology is far from conforming to the sensibility of twentieth-century liberal Christians.”
Page 3: “It is, in my view, quite wrong to see Milton in relation to anything so vague and generalized as ‘the Christian tradition’. He was a radical Protestant heretic. He rejected Catholicism as anti-Christian: the papist was the only heretic excluded from his wide tolerance. Milton shed far more of mediaeval Catholicism than did the Church of England. His great theological system, the De Doctrina Christiana, arose by a divorcing command from the ambiguous chaos of traditional Christianity. Milton rejected the Trinity, infant baptism and most of the traditional ceremonies, including church marriage; he queried monogamy and believed that the soul died with the body. He cannot reasonably be claimed as ‘orthodox’.”
Page 4: “Milton was not just a fine writer. He is the greatest English revolutionary who is also a poet, the greatest English poet who is also a revolutionary.”
Pages 105 and 106: “Milton rejected not only ‘the corrupt and venal discipline of clergy courts’, but all ‘coercive jurisdiction in the church’. He thought not only that the Pope was Antichrist, but that bishops were more antichristian than the Pope. Like John Saltmarsh, he thought that any state church was necessarily antichristian. When he made Antichrist Mammon’s son Milton may even have hinted at social interpretations akin to those of Gerrard Winstanley. Milton pointed out that Christ used force only once—to drive money-changers out of the Temple. The coercive power of the secular magistrate in religious matters Milton similarly denied. ‘Since God became flesh’, John Reeve told the Lord Mayor of London in 1653, ‘no civil magistrate hath any authority from above to be judge of any man’s faith, because it is a spiritual invisible gift from God.’ Milton would have agreed with the conclusion. Repudiation of a state church divided sectaries from Episcopalians and Presbyterians; denial of the authority of the magistrate brought about a division somewhere farther to the left. In each case Milton came to be with the more radical party.
“If there is no distinction between clergy and laity, ordinary people have the right to interpret the Bible for themselves. This led to what Edwards called anti-Scripturism—criticism of the contradictions of the Bible, denial that it was the Word of God. Milton did not go so far as Clement Writer, Walwyn, some Ranters and the Quaker Samuel Fisher. But—unlike Edwards—he would have insisted on the principle that the individual had a right and indeed a duty to study the Bible for himself, not taking his religion at second hand from Pope, church or priest. He likewise insisted that ‘the spirit of God, promised alike and given / To all believers’ was the test for interpreting the letter of the Bible. Such ‘spiritual illumination . . . is common to all men.’ The distinction is a narrow one between his position and the Ranter and Quaker view that the spirit within believers was superior to the letter of Scripture, overriding it.
“Milton’s belief that worship is discussion, that the spirit in man is more important than any ecclesiastical authority, that each of us must interpret the Bible for himself, thus aligns him with Ranters, Quakers, antinomians: so does his conviction that men and women should strive to attain perfection on earth, even though Milton did not think they could ever succeed. His ultimate belief in the necessity of good works for salvation, the consequence of his emphasis on human freedom, aligns him with Arminians of the left like John Goodwin, General Baptists and Quakers, whilst his total rejection of sacramentalism and a state church puts him at the opposite pole to the Laudian ‘Arminians’ of the right. Milton accepted the heresy of adult baptism, at a time when the medical reformer William Rand thought that Henry Lawrence’s publication of his Treatise of Baptism was a more courageous act than risking his life on the field of battle. This links Milton with Socinians and Anabaptists, though he seems to have joined no Baptist congregation. His decisive rejection of sabbatarianism also puts him beyond the pale of ‘respectable’ Puritanism.
“Milton was a radical millenarian long before Fifth Monarchism was thought of: he equated monarchy with Antichrist. In 1641, he associated his belief that Christ’s kingdom ‘is now at hand’ with his confidence in the potentialities of free and democratic discussion. He had a vision of England as leader of an international revolution, which links him both with the Fifth Monarchists and with the pre-pacifist George Fox, who in 1657 rebuked the English army for not yet having sacked Rome.”
Pages 299 and 300: “The doctrine of the sonship of all believers is of course Biblical. ‘As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the Sons of God’, St. Paul said (Romans 8: 14). It is therefore accepted by all Protestants, and is mentioned in the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647. But the emphasis I have been citing was especially characteristic of the radicals. In the early seventeenth century the covenant of John Smyth’s General Baptist church declared ‘We shall be his sons, calling him Father by the spirit whereby we are sealed.’ The church believed that ‘Christ’s redemption stretcheth to all men.’ This version of the doctrine, as Milton very well knew, trembled on the edge of antinomianism. ‘What have we, Sons of God, to do with Law?’ Many of his contemporaries were pushing it over the edge, as Thomas Munzer had done a century earlier when he said ‘We must all become gods.’
“Edwards quoted sectaries who said ‘Every creature is God. . . . A man baptized with the Holy Ghost knows all things even as God knows all things.’ Winstanley in 1648 believed that ‘God now appears in the flesh of the saints.’ Jesus Christ and his saints make one perfect man. He soon extended this from the saints to all mankind. ‘Every creature . . . is a Son to the Father.’ The same spirit that filled Christ ‘should in these last days be sent into whole mankind’. ‘Christ . . . is now beginning to fill every man and woman with himself.’ This Christ in everyone, ‘that perfect man, shall be no other but God manifest in the flesh’. ‘He will spread himself in sons and daughters . . . till this vine hath filled the earth.’ ‘Everyone that is subject to reason’s law’, Winstanley declared, ‘shall enjoy the benefit of sonship’—which for him meant participation in communal ownership and cultivation.
“George Fox criticized Ranters who claimed to be equal with God, but he himself was accused of affirming ‘that he had the divinity essentially in him’, ‘that he was equal with God, . . . that he was as upright as Christ’. Ranters and Quakers blended Familist and Hermeticist traditions in a very democratic mixture. The Hermetic texts described how man could discover the divine within himself, and through knowledge become like God. ‘A man on earth is a mortal God; . . . a God in heaven is an immortal man.’ In Paradise Lost the Father himself seems to recall some such idea when he tells the angels ironically
O Sons, like one of us man is become
To know both good and evil, since his taste
Of that defended fruit.
(XI. 84-6)
“The Hermeticist doctrine had been taken over by the Familists, who believed that every member of the Family of Love by obedience of love became a Son of God. Or, as Croll put it, man ‘riseth to such perfection that he is made the Son of God, transformed into the same image which is God and made one with him’. Robert Fludd taught that heaven was attainable on earth. ‘The Rosicrucians call one another brethren because they are the Sons of God’ in this sense. Christ dwells in man ‘and each man is a living stone of that spiritual rock’. Of these the true Temple will be constructed, of which the temples of Moses and of Solomon were only types. ‘When the Temple is consecrated, its dead stones will live . . . and man will recover his primitive state of innocence and perfection.’ This may perhaps enrich our sense of the scene in Paradise Regained when the Son of God miraculously stands on the pinnacle of the Temple. ‘The Son and the saints make one perfect man’, declared William Erbery; ‘the fullness of the godhead dwells in both in the same measure, though not in the same manifestation. . . . The fullness of the godhead shall be manifested in the flesh of the saints as in the flesh of the Son’—i.e. on earth.”
Page 307: “This is the basis for Milton’s theory of toleration: no Protestant ‘of what sect soever, following Scripture only, . . . ought, by the common doctrine of protestants, to be forced or molested for religion’. ‘No man in religion is properly a heretic at this day but he who maintains traditions or opinions not probable by Scripture (who, for aught I know, is the papist only’) (cf. Luther: ‘Neither pope nor bishop nor anyone else has the right to impose so much as a single syllable of obligation upon a Christian man without his own consent.’) ‘Chiefly for this cause do all true protestants account the Pope antichrist’, Milton continued; ‘for that he assumes to himself this infallibility over both the conscience and the Scripture.’ Hence the arguments for complete toleration for all Protestants do not apply to papists.
“A great many conclusions follow from this absolute emphasis on conscience, on sincerity. The efficacy of any sacrament depends on the proper attitude of the recipient, and therefore ‘Infants are not fit for baptism’, since ‘they cannot believe or undertake an obligation.’ Attendance at church is not necessary: ‘the worship of the heart is accepted by God even where external forms are not in all respects observed.’ But Samson Agonistes suggests that Milton agreed with Muggleton that we should abstain from attending the worship of the restored Church of England.”
Page 309: “Many radicals spoke in Joachite terms of three advents of Christ—first in the flesh in Palestine, finally in the Last Judgment, but in between there will be a ‘middle advent’ when Christ rises in believers. Or there are three resurrections of the dead—the first of Jesus in A.D. 33, the last at the general resurrection: in between comes the rule of the saints in the new dispensation. For Winstanley Christ’s resurrection is not in one single person. ‘Mankind is the earth that contains him buried, and out of this earth he is to rise’, within us. ‘The rising up of Christ in sons and daughters . . . is his second coming.’ Every saint is a true heaven, because God dwells in him and he in God, and the communion of saints is a true heaven. For Ranters too Christ’s coming meant ‘his coming into men by his spirit’. Fludd had believed that man could attain to heaven on earth. Seekers, Saltmarsh, Dell, Quakers and Muggletonians held similar views. Erbery, whose views are close to those of Milton on many points, believed that the Second Coming meant ‘the appearing of that great God and Saviour in the saints. . . .The saints shall judge the world, that is first destroy but afterwards save and govern the world.’”
Page 314: “On the dictionary definition it is difficult to say that Milton was not an antinomian. Like the Ranters he believed that ‘the entire Mosaic Law is abolished’—not just the ceremonial law but ‘the whole positive law of Moses’. Milton indeed wore his antinomianism with a difference, for he thought that ‘the law is now inscribed on believers’ hearts by the spirit’; but many whom we call antinomians would have said the same, and for Milton when the spirit is at variance with the letter ‘faith not law is our rule’.”
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*In the spring semester of 1995, I took a class on John Milton (1608-1674) at Iowa State University. I wrote a ten-page paper on Milton for that class.
Because of Milton’s writings (his essays like Areopagitica, A Second Defense of the English People and On Christian Doctrine) and influence with the Puritans of the American colonies, I came to the conclusion that he was a father of the United States of America.
If there had never been an English Civil War (1642-1651) or a Glorious Revolution (1688) (and the English Bill of Rights in 1689), there might never have been an American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) or the U.S. Constitution (1787).
I believe that John Milton and George Fox were by far the most influential men in seventeenth-century England. Milton was a great Christian intellectual/writer; Fox was a great preacher/apostle of the Gospel; they both spent time in prison for their beliefs.
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Antinomian—“One who holds that, under the gospel dispensation, the moral law is of no use or obligation, faith alone being necessary to salvation.”
Sabbatarian—“One who keeps the seventh day of the week as holy, in conformity with the letter of the fourth commandment.”
Arminian—“Of or pertaining to James Arminius (1560-1609), a Dutch protestant against the tenets of strict Calvinism. The theology of the Wesleyans of Great Britain and Methodists of America is Arminian.”
—Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary
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“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
“Winner Take All” by J.R. Moehringer The Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist rolls the dice on life in Sin City
Here are some quotes from Moehringer’s article:
“And it’s not just about books. Vegas discourages everything prized by book people, like silence and reason and linear thinking. Vegas is about noise, impulse, chaos. You like books? Go back to Boston.”
“Just after I moved in, Caligula, rang my bell. He invited me over for an afternoon ‘cookout.’ I didn’t yet know he was Caligula. Wanting to be neighborly, I went.
“I met several statuesque young women in his backyard, in his kitchen. I thought it strange that they were so out-going. I thought it odd that they were named after cities—Paris, Dallas, Rio. But I didn’t dwell on it. Then I wandered into a room where the floor was covered with mattresses. An ultraviolet light made everyone look super tanned or vaguely satanic. Suddenly I got it. I told Caligula that I just remembered somewhere I needed to be. I shook my head at his offer of a grilled hot dog, thanked him for a lovely time and sprinted home to my books and earplugs.
“As a kid I was a gypsy, as a young man I was a journalist, so I’ve lived everywhere. I’ve unpacked my bags in New York, New Haven, Boston, Atlanta, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle, Tucson. Each of my adopted cities has reminded me of some previous city—except Vegas, because Vegas isn’t a real city. It’s a Sodom and Gomorrah theme park surrounded by hideous exurban sprawl and wasteland so barren it makes the moon look like an English rose garden.’
“ . . . transience is in the DNA of Vegas. Transient pleasures, transient money, thus transient people.”
“More than 36 million people go through Vegas each year.”
“Though people enjoy coming to Vegas, what they really love is leaving. Every other passenger wanting to board a flight out of Vegas wears that same tell-tale look of fatigue, remorse, heatstroke and get-me-out-of-here-ness. I spent two months reading Dante in college, but I didn’t really understand Purgatory until I spent five minutes at McCarron International Airport.”
“Years from now my clearest memories of Sin City might be the ceaseless stream of commercials for payday loans, personal injury lawyers, bail bondsmen, chat lines and strip clubs. . . From TV, I concluded that a third of Vegas is in debt, a third in jail and a third in the market for anonymous hookups.”
I am standing on the steps of the courthouse in Greensburg, Kansas. I just hitchhiked from Pratt to Greensburg this afternoon on U.S. 54. A year ago (4 May 2007) a tornado hit Greensburg; it looks like it totally destroyed eighty per cent of the town. Houses were taken off of their foundations, lots of trees were uprooted and there are still pieces of metal embedded in many of the trees that are left standing. Locals told me that the tornado was two miles wide. I have never seen devastation like I have seen here in Greensburg. The people of Greensburg have done an excellent job in cleaning up their town; you see brand new homes going up everywhere.
I walked past a CBS News trailer. President Bush is going to be in town this weekend to speak at the Greensburg High School Graduation Commencement. I am sure there will be a lot of media in town for the President’s visit.
This past week I stayed at Lawrence and Cheryl’s place in rural Stafford, Kansas. I met Cheryl and her daughter, Jessica, and Jessica’s husband, Grisha, six years ago when I was hitchhiking through St. John. My home base from November 2001 to August 2002 was St. John. I knew several people in St. John and would stay at their homes whenever I was passing through. Those people no longer live in St. John. So it definitely was the Lord’s will to go to Stafford.
While I was staying at Lawrence and Cheryl’s place, a lady named Connie phoned me and asked me to speak at the First Baptist Church in Stafford on Sunday. So I preached on Acts Chapter 10 and on obedience to the Lord. The Lord really blessed me for preaching at First Baptist. The congregation also gave me a generous offering, so I was able to get a motel in Pratt last night, I got a haircut this morning and I made photocopies of High Plains Drifter and Dreams from the Lord and mailed them to Lawrence and Cheryl. Cheryl is not into computers and the Internet, so now she can read the photocopies instead of using the Internet.
Since I saw Jessica and Grisha last (2002), they have had four kids. The oldest is Jesse (5 years) and the second oldest is David (3 years); they also have baby twins—a boy and a girl. Jessica later told me that when she was praying with the kids before bedtime, David said this: “Dear God, thank you that Mr. Tim is not dead. If Mr. Tim wants a toy, please give him a toy. If Mr. Tim needs a car, please give him a car.” I thought it was so funny.
It was a very blessed week for me. I spent part of three days pruning the trees and cleaning up broken limbs around Lawrence and Cheryl’s place—there was an ice storm in January. They let me use the car, so I was able to go to the library in Stafford and in St. John to get some work done on my website. Lawrence and Cheryl have a beautiful, peaceful place out in the country; I enjoyed taking walks down the gravel road and in the fields with their four pet dogs. It looks like the winter wheat is doing very well—they must’ve had plenty of snow this winter.
The courthouse here in Greensburg is still standing, but it doesn’t look like it is being used at this time. To the west and south of here (the corner of Florida and Oak Street) is where most of the devastation happened. Someone told me that eleven people died because of the tornado. On the corner of Florida and Main Street, there is a lone, brick building standing. All around this building nothing was left, just rubble. It looks like this building was at “ground zero.”
Looks like I will head west to Garden City. From Garden I will then mosey on up north into Nebraska on U.S. 83. It has been a beautiful, breezy day. It is nice to be in this part of Kansas again. When I hitchhiked back to St. John and Stafford, it felt like I was coming home.
Last night I had a dream where I was watching a movie reel—I was watching the movie slowly, frame by frame. Then I noticed this one frame. On the frame was one word: “Jericho.” I believe “Jericho” means “Walls of Jericho” or –http://wallsofjericho.50megs.com/—the name of my website.
Two days ago, when I was at the public library in Arco, Idaho, I typed up the dream that I had about the destruction of Las Vegas (17 December 2006) onto my website. I believe the Lord is telling me that he wants me to warn as many people as I can about the coming destruction of Las Vegas.
3 August 2007
Concerning the dream that I had on the 1st of August. In the dream, I saw three movie reels going at once. The three films were moving very slowly–they were on the horizontal—you could see each individual frame very well. On each frame was a word or a few words. Then I noticed the word “Jericho” on a frame in the middle movie reel. The film was going either right to left or left to right. When I noticed the word “Jericho”, the film stopped moving and the dream ended.
I believe this dream means something other than what I had first thought. At first, I thought this dream meant that the Lord wanted me to warn people about the coming destruction of Las Vegas. Now, I don’t think so. “Jericho” obviously means my life or the work that I am doing for the Lord (intercessory prayer—destroying satanic strongholds). The three films must mean something—maybe mass media or public relations. The frame with “Jericho” on it was right in the center where I could easily see it; it was in the middle, sandwiched between the other two movie reels.
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Last night I had a dream where I was on a passenger train. It looked like the train was going through some mountains. Sitting across the aisle from me were Ronald and Nancy Reagan and their two small children: the boy looked like he was three years old and the girl looked like a few years older. Ronald Reagan was singing a song—I believe it was an American patriotic song. His wife, Nancy, glanced at me.
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Then the train stopped at this station. We were in a foreign country. The Reagan family filed out of the train and onto the platform. It looked like we were in China. I followed behind the Reagan family as they left their seats. I did not get off at the exact place that they did. I may have got off the train at the next station.
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A Chinese Christian Gives Me a Ride
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. Dreams from the LORD 2011-2012
1 August 2009
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Last night I had a dream where I saw President Ronald Reagan. He was playing a guitar and looked very old. It looked like he had been out of the White House for several years. President Reagan was surrounded by many people—they looked like reporters.
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President Reagan saw me, smiled at me and walked over to where I was standing. We spoke for a short while.
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Then this woman walked up to me; she looked like a reporter. We talked for a while. I told her that I had a book published. She said that she had heard of it and told me the title of a book. It was the wrong title. I told her my book was High Plains Drifter. I found a piece of paper, folded it in two and began writing High Plains Drifter: A Hitchhiking Journey Across America. I was writing with an old-fashioned fountain pen—the ink dripped onto the paper in a couple of places. I was almost finished writing the title of my book when the dream ended.
. Quotes from Thomas Jefferson President McKinley’s Dream Ronald Reagan’s Dream [Rewind] The Audacity of Obama’s Sneering Tribute to Ronald Reagan Harry Truman, Hoboes and the Santa Fe Railroad A Dream about Donald Trump
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Dreams from the LORD 2007-2010
31 December 2008
Last night I had two dreams. In the first dream, I saw this Chinese man rob another man of his money. I walked up to the Chinese man, who was now standing with his friend—this man was also from China. I took a sharp stick, pressed it against his neck, and told him to give me all of his money. He gave me a wad of bills from his back pocket. I kept the wad of money for a couple of minutes and then threw it back at him because I felt sorry for him. I then walked away.
The Road 