Jerusalem vs. Athens

What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?  What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?... Our instructions come from “the porch of Solomon”.... Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition!  We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus...!
Tertullian, Prescription against Heretics (VII). 

Micah 1:1
The Word of the Lord that came to Micah of Moresheth in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, which he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem.

Micah 4:4
For the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

Micah 4:6
“In that day,” says the Lord,

We believe the Bible is the Word of God. Some people call this "Bibliolotry." Fine. Whatever.

• The Bible is the most important book in the history of the human race. It is the blueprint for "civilization."
• It is a textbook for every subject of human thought and action.
• It is a Manifesto of Love, standing in opposition to the "military-industrial complex" of the Athenian State and University.
• The Bible was breathed out by God through human penmen. The very existence of the Bible is a threat to Autonomous Man.

The issue is Authority. Who is in charge? Who decides what is right and what is wrong? See "Theonomy" below.

Demonism. The Greeks were polytheistic. Greek family life rested on a system of sacrifice to demons that masqueraded as the spirits of dead male relatives. So did clan life, which became political life. These demons also presented themselves as underground gods and spirits, who demanded sacrifices and special rituals to keep from destroying people. On this point, see the works of the early 20th century archaeologist-historian, Jane Ellen Harrison. This never gets into the textbooks, although specialists are well aware of it.

Micah 4:1
And it will come about in the last days
That the mountain of the House of the LORD
Will be established as the chief of the mountains
And it will be raised above the hills

Jesus is the Christ, today. | "The Mountain Established"

• Jesus became the Messiah in the past. (Acts 2)
• Not one Bible College in America teaches this.
• Not a single one.
• www.JesusistheChrist.today

Reincarnation and other eastern concepts keep threatening a resurgence against the Christian concept of linear progress in history.

Cyclical View of Time. The Greeks did not believe in long-term progress or a final judgment -- just endless cycles forever: rise and fall, rise and fall. According to the historian of science, Stanley Jaki, this was why the Greeks never developed science, only technologies.

And the peoples will stream to it.
And many nations will come and say,
"Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD
And to the House of the God of Jacob,

The World will be Christianized.

"All nations, all peoples"

• True "diversity" means all ethnic groups are invited to become Christian
• Not "European," or "American," or "Western," but Christian.
• This has been happening for two millennia.
• The world is not getting worse and worse
• No Bible College in America will admit that the world is dramatically more Christian today than it was 2,000 years ago.
• No Bible College in America confidently believes that the best is yet to come.

Slavery. At least one-third of Athens was enslaved. The figure was as high in Sparta. Every household owned a slave. This provided leisure for their owners, who despised physical labor as beneath them -- servile. Slavery was a universal institution in Greece.

The Greeks used the term barbarian for all non-Greek-speaking peoples, including the Egyptians, Persians, Medes and Phoenicians, emphasizing their otherness. According to Greek writers, this was because the language they spoke sounded to Greeks like gibberish represented by the sounds "bar..bar..;" the alleged root of the word βάρβαρος, which is an echomimetic or onomatopoeic word. The Ancient Greek name βάρβαρος (barbaros), "barbarian", was an antonym for πολίτης (politēs), "citizen" (from πόλις – polis, "city-state"). 
Barbarian - Wikipedia 

Gentiles ("The Nations") Join Israel's Covenant

That He may teach us about His ways
And that we may walk in His paths."
For from Zion will go forth the Law
Even the Word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

Part of God's path in Old Covenant Jerusalem was a system of blood sacrifices, including what Athens calls "capital punishment."

Jesus is the Lamb of God, the final scapegoat. If you reject Christ's atonement, you punish yourself (masochism) or others (sadism) in a futile attempt to gain atonement.

• Political Masochism
• Masochism and Atonement
• Blood, Atonement, and "Capital Punishment"

And He will judge between many peoples
And rebuke mighty, distant nations.
Then they will hammer their
swords into plowshares
And their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation will not lift up sword against nation
And never again will they train for war.

Peace through Peace, not through "Strength." | "Swords into Plowshares"

• Jesus is our Savior, not the Pentagon
• Vengeance belongs to God
• No Bible College in America will admit that Jesus commands us to be pacifists, we should not "support the troops," and we should abolish "the Department of Defense."
• "Archism" is sinful.

Jesus is "The Prince of Peace."
Jerusalem beats "swords into plowshares."

Warfare. At the center of the literature of classical Greece was Homer's poem, The Iliad. It is the story of how Achilles' resentment against King Agamemnon raged because the king took his kidnapped concubine for himself. All the other men had concubines for the ten years they were at war. But no children are mentioned by Homer. Now that's real Greek mythology! Their wives stayed home and kept the ritual home fires burning -- to placate the family's departed male spirits. Athens destroyed itself in Pericles' needless imperial war against Sparta. Then the Macedonians conquered war-ravaged Greece. But the textbooks praise Pericles as a pillar of wisdom, reprinting Thucydides' posthumous version of Pericles' suicidal imperial oration.

And each of them will sit under his

• Christian morality begins at home.
• Vine & Fig Tree is a decentralized family-centered society
• God created us male and female.
• Women were the first to believe in Christ's resurrection, and the authors of the Gospel did not shrink from reporting that fact in a misogynistic culture.
• The monogamous heterosexual family is the foundation of civilization. Adultery and homosexuality destroy civilization.
  Monogamous Civilizations
• Homosexuals, transgenders, cross-dressers, and others who violate Biblical commands are invited to enroll in Vine & Fig Tree University -- an offer no Bible College in America will make. (And possibly an offer no "gay activist" will accept.)

The Family vs. The Polis

• Jesus is our Priest and King
• All Christians are priests and kings
• No humans are priests or kings.
• Imagine a society made up entirely of loving families and no clergy and no politicians (philosopher-kings).

Pederasty. This is the homosexual union of an older married man with a teenage boy. The men often met the boys on their way to the gymnasium, the building in which the boys danced and played sports naked. The men then became the boys' lovers and teachers.

Female Inferiority. Wives were only for procreation. They could not be citizens. They had no legal rights. A man needed a male heir to perform the ritual sacrifices to feed him after he died. Women had no political influence except as prophetesses and mistresses.

Vine and under his  fig tree,
With no one to make them afraid.
For the LORD of hosts has spoken.

• But Man's goal and purpose is to bring the Garden to maturity as "the City of God." (Revelation 21-22)
• Is "Industrialism" possible without the sword (police and military) of "the State?"
• Will we have "agrarianism" or "technocracy?"
• Who gets to decide?

The Greek word for "city" is polis, from which we derive the English word "political."

POLIS: The Empire of Man vs. the City of God

Christmas: A Celebration of Paradise

Paradise Restored

Though all the peoples walk
Each in the name of his god,
As for us, we will walk
In the Name of the LORD our God
forever and ever.

The commandments of God, lived out in practice. Examples

What if all the politicians, university professors, TV commentators, bloggers, newspaper editors, rock stars, scientists, CEO's, athletes, authors, and think-tanks repudiate the Vine & Fig Tree vision and tell you not to believe it?

Grow up. Be strong. Resist the mainstream.

Service is better than domination or celebrity status.

Love isn't just a feeling, it's a life-long commitment to Christian Civilization.

Arete (Greek: ἀρετή), speaks of moral excellence. Some "classical"-Christian schools promote Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics:

Support Aristotle | Hillsdale College

We support the Bible, not Aristotle.
Since Aristotle was created in the Image of God, and showed the work of God's Law written on his heart (Romans 2:15), there are some elements of Aristotle's ethics and ideal character which seem to parallel God's standard of moral excellence. But we should go to the Source, the True Authority, which is found in Jerusalem, not Athens.

"Classical" schools contend that Americans today lack even the Greek ideal of moral excellence. True enough. But if we pursue Athens rather than Jerusalem, we will eventually end up with

1. Pederasty
2. Demonism
3. Warfare
4. Slavery
5. Autonomy ("Man is the Measure")
6. Welfare State
7. Human Sacrifice
8. Cyclical View of Time
9. Female Inferiority

We must go to Jerusalem, not Athens.
True character and moral excellence ("Arete") means resisting the city of man and pursuing the City of God.

In that day, saith the LORD,
will I assemble her that halteth,
and I will gather her that is driven out,
and her that I have afflicted;
And I will make her that halted a remnant,
and her that was cast far off a strong nation:
and the LORD shall reign over them in mount Zion
from henceforth, even for ever.

"No man is an island."

Community: Serving the weak rather than the powerful | The "driven out" and "afflicted"

• First step for students: mentoring.
• Second step: "works of mercy."
• Third step: production. Selling something other people buy voluntarily. A Godly calling.
• The world's poor are best served by a division of labor under a Free Market, directed by an "Invisible Hand" who "assembles," "gathers," and "makes strong."

Welfare State. At least one-third of all male Athenians were on the government's payroll in the time of Pericles.

Community is impossible in a society where every man thinks he is his own god. As the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre put it, "If I am god, my neighbor is the devil."

Philippians 3:18-20
¹⁸ For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: ¹⁹ whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame—who set their mind on earthly things. ²⁰ For our citizenship is in heaven

For those whose god is their belly and their own material advancement, cut-throat competition replaces community. The weak will be trampled on in the quest to climb the ladder of material success.

James 1:27
Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.