Maggie's Farm

From Part 5 of Takuan Seiyo's The Bee and the Lamb, a rambling but interesting essay at Gates:

What emanates now from important Christian leaders, not to speak of such bona fide faithful as the Johnson, Carter, Kennedy, Bush, Blair, Brown and Atlee names adduced in a previous chapter, is something entirely different: it is secular solipsism and utopian eschatology masquerading as enlightened Christianity. It harks back to 2nd century Gnostics and not to the great Christian thinkers of the Renaissance or Enlightenment. It’s the lamb lying down with the lion that’s still a lion. It’s redistributive socialism and minorities-exalting Progressive doctrine that has nothing to do with the recognition of God’s presence on Earth.

and

The glow of Jesus has come to us distorted by the distance light has to traverse over 2000 years to reach the here and now, bounced along the way off such cracked mirrors, bent copper pans and dented silver chalices that the Gospel writers and Church leaders have been, and all men are. It’s miraculous that unknown outside a little sliver of a remote, benighted province at its inception, and multiplexed with great noise as it has been since, the transmission has reached us at all. Admitting that we don’t know where the noise ends and the transcendent music begins could rebuild a stout foundation for a new Christian spirituality. “There lives more faith in an honest doubt,“ wrote one of the great 10-percenters of the 19th century, Alfred Tennyson, “than in half the creeds.”