The Road Emmaus and IAI
A Word from Dr. Earle Fox
A “thank you” to Prof. Olavo de Carvalho and The Inter-American Institute for the gracious invitation to myself (Earle Fox) and the Road to Emmaus to participate in its project of creating an inter-American force which will promote a return to philosophy, government, and other cultural foundations with intellectual, moral, and spiritual integrity. That would include a return to a free market of ideas in schools instead of an intellectual diet of mind-control, and to a limited government for a free people, as mandated by the Declaration of Independence, America’s founding document — not under the laws of men but under the law and the grace of God.
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Of Interest at the Road to Emmaus The Narrow Gate |
The ink was hardly dry on the American Constitution in 1789 before the forces of secularization and centralization set out to undermine that limited character and those freedoms. In Europe just a few years later, the forces of centralization won the war in France, from which they spread all across Europe, infiltrating America and other countries in North and South America, expanding into Asia and Africa, now subversively dominating much of the world.
Christians in America lost the struggle for leadership and public respect during the 1800’s because they thought they had “won”, that winning the war with King George III and writing a superb constitution settled the matter. They forgot that there is a spiritual war, and that all other strife (military, political, or otherwise) is just a subset of the larger spiritual war going on all the time — until the return of the real King. Christians had been successfully neutralized and secularized.
The result was the gradual and non-violent takeover of America by forces of secularization and centralization: (1) the privatization of the spiritual life, and thus surrender of the public arena to secularism; (2) the rise of a secular “cosmology” through the adoption of random evolution to explain the world; (3) the resurgence of the old pagan “positivist” law which did not operate out of moral principle higher than the civil government itself, and thus in effect turned the government into God; and (4) most importantly, the granting by Christians to the government of the right to educate their children and thus to form their minds and hearts, i.e., to secularize, and now paganize, their children. Christians had lost (i.e., surrendered) the capacity to defend their beliefs against these assaults.
The same destructive forces were taking over the rest of the West also — with well-planned strategies of subversion and chaos to “justify” centralization of government. The mindset of those subverters of truth is the subject of much of Prof. de Carvalho’s work.
Despite the current flood of bad news, deep in the American soul, there has survived a spark of Biblical spirituality, perhaps more so than any other place in the West. It remains to be seen whether Americans will submit themselves to the Spirit of God to fan that spirituality back into a blaze, or, like Rome, sink into “interesting history”.
The negative forces have succeeded, not by virtue of their own arguments and grasp of truth (which are meager and corrupt), but mostly by the default of the Judeo-Christian community in understanding their own faith, that God and God alone (not the secular philosophers) holds the intellectual, moral, and spiritual high ground (all three).
Christians have even opposed reason to revelation as though reason were contrary to revelation, a fatal mistake which sealed the fate of Christendom for the 18- and 1900’s — because people were rightly and increasingly looking for good reasons and reasonable beliefs. The Christian community floundered most of that time, with just a few exceptions such as C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. Those brilliant minds created a following among Christians, but even they were not able to capture the public imagination to begin a turn-around of the disaster which was upon us. Christians for the most part remained cowed and silent as secular governments gave us the most brutal and deadly century in human history — the 20th (see www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ ).
They bid fair to do the same in the 21st — except for the rising possibility of an intellectual, moral, and spiritual renewal in the Biblical community. A healthy Judeo-Christian civilization is the worst enemy of tyranny. And they know it. That is why our current (2010 AD) American administration is openly and systematically undermining the Biblical foundations of America.
Civil government is rightly and by nature about the use of coercive force, over which it has a near monopoly. Some things ought to be coerced. And some things ought not.
Godly government limits the use of that force by the law and grace of God, administered by the moral and spiritual consensus of we, the people. There is no other way to limit centralized government other than by a strong spiritual and moral consensus of the people under the law and grace of God. Secular and pagan government, the lurking place of the power-hungry, acknowledges no such limitation, and soon becomes the controller of more and more details of the lives of its citizens, reducing the people eventually to slavery.
But truth is stable, no matter how unstable its believers (or unbelievers) might be. And the Lord of truth is not going away just because many people stop trusting and obeying Him. He will raise up defenders of honest truth-seeking from a depth which no hostile power can touch. He is doing it in every nation around the world. We must enlist in North and South America willing persons who know that they are called to high things.
Professor de Carvalho has begun a potentially powerful project to help reestablish the true meaning of the search for truth, much of which began in the Greek and (especially) the Hebrew cultures. I am honored and delighted to be a part of it. The work of the Road to Emmaus, I believe, will fit in very handily.
[Note: Those interested in Seminars (in English) by Dr. Fox, click on “Online Seminars” in the “Of Interest” box above.]
