Are you one of those people who think America is about to collapse?

If so, let me tell you the sign you need to see to indicate the end is near.

There are many commentators who tell us that the USA is no longer a great nation, that financial irresponsibility has driven the value of the dollar down, inflation is rampant, and only the right presidential candidate will solve the problem.

If you’re like me, you’ve heard these challenging commentaries and predictions for many years. The present financial issues with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are an indicator, they say, that the end is nigh.

There are, of course, some parallels with the Roman Empire. It, too, collapsed from within. Excessive taxation, debased currency, and a social welfare system gone astray.

But there is one particular aspect of the fall of Rome that is not present in the USA or any other western nation –at least, not yet, anyway. It is this.

The Roman government became so oppressive that the nearby alternatives, in comparison, were a much better deal.

So here’s the challenge. If you could leave the USA, or you could invite another nation’s government to come in and manage, where would you go or who would you select?

Are there any countries more productive than America that offer the same benefits?

Are there any nations around the world with a better taxation system?

Is there any foreigner you — if you’re an American citizen — would invite in to manage the nation? Margaret Thatcher might be an option, but probably a bit too late. There are no follow ups to Ronald Regan. That might leave Ron Paul as the only valid candidate, but there is insufficient support for his election.

William Carroll Bark, in his book Origins of the Medieval World, makes references to Salvian’s analysis of Rome in the fifth century. Bark says:

“Salvian was quite aware that the Romans, even when faced by a foreign enemy, instead of standing shoulder to shoulder, were betraying one another — unlike the barbarians who respected the bonds of tribal membership and the rule of the king, and lived together in amity” (p. 57)

If there are lessons from the Roman collapse, it is this: the collapse does not happen until the people welcome an alternative with open arms.

I don’t think the USA is at that place — and probably still a long way from it.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be another nation on earth that is not headed in the same direction as the USA, so a foreign solution is not an alternative.

That leaves an internal solution. But it will require a church with character, conviction, commitment, and a faith in the whole Word of God to fix the problems everywhere. Because that is what replaced the broken Roman Empire.

Click Here For Part 2.

The Medieval period in Europe, for all its faults, was a system of low taxes, local self-government, and a period of economic expansion.

This is in contrast to the Roman Empire which it replaced. it is also in stark contrast to those non-European nations that had not embraced Christianity.

We, however, no longer live in the medieval world. Instead, we live at the end of a period that has seen the rise of the nation-state that has effectively replaced localized self-government.

This change to the medieval world could only take place when three steps were completed:

1. The kings/rulers got control of the courts.
2. The kings/rulers got control of taxes (and money)
3. People were willing to abandon loyalty to family and church in favor of the state.

These were the steps necessary to create the modern nation-state. These were the essential steps for people to lose their freedom, their independence, and become a part of the nation. According to Joseph Strayer, in his book, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, this process started in the fourteenth century and, in principle, was in place within a century or two.

Thus, it is right to use the term sovereignty when discussing the position of the nations in which we live. They see themselves under no higher authority than themselves. They believe that they alone determine the limits of their jurisdiction, even though they might set up a framework of multiple houses of congress or parliament and a supreme law court to maintain some semblance of limitation on what they do.

If these are the steps that created the modern nation state which sees itself as a law unto itself, then it is easy to see what must be done to abolish the statism of the various nations of the world.

1. Take control of justice away from the nation-state.
2. Remove taxation and monetary control from the political order.
3. Reinstate loyalty to family and church over and above loyalty to the state.

There are some signs that this battle is the one that has been emerging for the past quarter century or more. The Christian school and home school movement is an attempt to limit the political order and reassert priority of the family and the church.

That leaves justice and finance. Still a long way to go.

Have a great week.

Click Here For Part 1.

The victors write the history books, it is claimed.

Yet history is being rewritten in our own age by a new breed of scholars who are telling us a different story about the “Dark Ages.” In this case, it is not only a different story, it is a better story.

With the rise of the Enlightenment and its rampant anti-Christianity came a view of the past called the “Dark Ages”. It referred to the period after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and covered the next few hundred years; for some people, the “Dark Ages” remained until the humanistic Renaissance appeared. Why? Enlightenment thought was so critical of Christianity it could not face the facts. The facts being that the Bible and Christianity were the cultural reference points that replaced pagan Rome.

Imagine this. You are the last Roman Emperor. Your area of jurisdiction is dissipating in front of you. You have insufficient money to wage war, even defensive war. The tax demands you have inherited have created such hostility among the citizens, they don’t care any longer. Anything is better than this.

Among this mess was a veritable army of Christian monks and citizens who had answers. In fact, your predecessor, Constantine, not only permitted Christianity to exist, but helped established the local priests and monks as a surrogate source of justice. The Roman courts were too expensive for justice, whereas the local church was not only a cheap alternative, it had some better answers to the problems of life. So magnificent was the result of their Christian answers, that one historian noted: “[T]he early Middle Ages represented the age par excellence of ‘applied Christianity’.” (Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd ed., Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003, p. 25, emphasis in original).

This is a fascinating observation, for it identifies that the Dark Ages culture was the result of applied Christianity. A culture that was noticeably Christian was the outcome. Success.

But what of the failure of our own age? We have difficulty seeing a neighbor converted let alone the street, the town, the state, or the nation.

Is there something to learn if we recover and understand an earlier methodology? Almost everything we hold of value in our culture that we call Christian, came out of this period after the collapse of Rome. Charlemagne and Alfred the Great were two of the prominent outcomes of the evangelistic efforts that took place in the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries.

What was that message of early Christianity? According to Brown,

The problem was not to create a new message nor to contest the old ones, but to make sure that a message whose alloy had already been tried and found true in the days of the Fathers of the Church, should sink ever deeper into the hearts of individuals and of the Christian people of entire Churches (p. 26).

This is a fascinating observation. It goes against many things you might think are needed to change the culture. Some want a redefinition of the faith; others want a return to the Reformation, the age of Luther and Calvin. Others are trying Seeker Friendly and any other form of “get comfortable with Jesus” program that might bring people into the church, and from there . . . .? Many people don’t know where the next step should be.

And therein lies the problem with contemporary Christianity. But since this “Dark Ages” example is the supreme example of success of major, lasting, cultural change in the past 2,000 years, maybe it’s time to take notice of the past and see if there are lessons to learn and apply today.

As I said earlier in this e-zine, imagine you’re the last Caesar — or in modern times, the last President or Prime Minister — of a failing humanism. What will follow you? There will be no more political solutions to apply, since the money has run out and the will of the people has gone elsewhere.

Brown paints this picture of the past.

For kings and aristocrats had been, in many ways, the principal victims of the general “abatement” of the age. The ending of the relentless system of taxation which had characterized the later Roman empire considerably weakened their ability to extract wealth on a regular basis from their inferiors. No longer policed and bullied every year to pay taxes, the peasantry slipped quietly out of the control of their landlords. Rents fell as taxes vanished. It has been cogently argued, indeed, that in many regions of Europe the Dark Ages were a golden age for the peasantry. Less of their agrarian surplus was taken from them than at any other time in the history of Europe from the foundation of the Roman empire to the end of the ancien régime (p. 31).

This is the “Dark Ages”, a 1,400-year remarkable testimony to the power of the Gospel in a different age. If this is the “Dark Ages” then they cannot return too soon. We need another “Dark Ages” like the first one, only let’s see if it can be taken further.

If it was a “golden age” for the peasants, then it was also a “golden age” for “applied Christianity”. The ancient Church would not recognize the contemporary churches. Contemporary liturgy is weak; its theology is narrow; and there is no forum for producing resolutions to different opinions.

If Brown’s history is correct, you could make a good start with the application of the creeds of early Christendom, a return to a liturgical framework that regularly reminds everyone of sin, our need for the Savior, and God’s Law as the moral framework for the new society.

What’s holding you back?

God bless you as you serve the King.

This article was written while I was in Nova Scotia and had just returned from having supper with a local family.

This part of the world, Clare County, has several municipalities that are Old French culture and language. The schools in these municipalities hold their classes in the old Acadian language, while the municipalities either side are English. In the seventeenth century, the French living in the valley of Nova Scotia were forcibly relocated by the British. Some found their way to the western shores of Nova Scotia while others were settled in Louisiana. The Cajuns and the Acadians are linked culturally — and share an understandable attitude towards the British. In Nova Scotia, the Acadians have been promised an apology from the monarch of England, but it is yet to arrive.

This caused me to reflect on the turmoil of Europe at the time of their dislocation. The Acadians, French in origin, tried to remain neutral in the struggles between Britain and France. They were not permitted to do this. The result is turmoil and conflict that stretches over centuries, with pain and hurt and memories of families forcibly separated — the men sent one direction, the women and children another — never to be erased.

This is the outcome of the turmoil of Europe at the time and turbulent times of Catholic versus Protestant, French versus English, as each group tried to attain supremacy over the other.

The result is the world we have today. It is anti-Christian — Protestant or Catholic – each country governed by an all-powerful, all controlling secular state that sees no limitations to its authority.

The long struggle for supreme authority, church versus state, was finally won by the secular authorities, and this had been completed in principle by the 17th century. It has taken another three centuries for the results to become evident.

The Acadian culture — Catholic — is struggling to maintain itself in a changing world. Their schools conduct classes in Acadian French, and the people speak this language in their homes. As I was told by my hosts, they even dream in French. But many of them speak English without any hint of a foreign accent. There is little local work, and in the next municipality there are often signs discouraging Acadians from applying for an advertised job. In this changing world, speaking Acadian is a handicap, unless you live in the Acadian communities. It even limits which universities you can attend, since there are few French-speaking universities in Canada.

Here, the local Catholic church is conducting a survey to find out what people might like in a church that will attract them to it. Marketing has finally arrived to the Catholic parish in Clare County.

For all its alleged weaknesses, the church of the first millennium after Christ changed the face of Europe for over a thousand years. But for several hundred years there have been attempts to reverse those events, and the churches — Catholic and Protestant — seem powerless to stop the reversal.

For some, preaching on grace alone, faith alone, and the Bible alone is going to change the world. Yet it has failed to do this in almost 500 years. When will they learn this is apparently not enough?

Something is missing, and until we find out and get it back in place, no amount of pulpit thumping on these important themes is going to change anything. By themselves, they are powerless.

So what is missing? Send me your answer to share with others on this list.

Until next, week, God bless you in your endeavors to serve Him.

You cannot understand how far we’ve come away from Christian culture until you realize what was necessary to get our non-Christian culture. And this little book helps explain the necessary steps to abolish freedom and Christian culture.

Read it!