12 a Movie by Nikita Mikhalkov (Seeing the Other)

Do the Russians love their children too?   Is the United States the only country dealing with new issues of relevancy in the 21st century?  12 is a completely new, original work based on 12 Angry Men (by Sidney Lumet.  The movie examines the rare truth, in an post-modern age where anything is true as long as you think it is.  

The movie asks: How can we trust each other when are pasts have colored so much of our present?   What biases do we look through in order to see the OTHER?   We must seek to make clear the centrality of God's wisdom in our daily lives, this movie shows why!

Interlude: Christianity Today?

Very funny and thought provoking? Enjoy!

A Slice of the Battle: Kingdom of Heaven

Augustine and the City of God I.2

Augustine and the City of God Chapter Two

Romans had embalmed themselves, made themselves Frightened Lost Sheep, excommunicated from the source of truth, God:

The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
10 “I the Lord search the heart
and test the mind, [1]
to give every man according to his ways,
according to the fruit of his deeds.”

Jeremiah 17:9-10

Augustine and the City of God I.1

Augustine and the City of God (II)

Chapter One of Augustine's City of God

"To their very threshold the blood-thirsty enemy raged; there his murderous fury owned a limit." (Augustine I:5) The limit to the murkiness and the deep darkness is the LORD and Savior Jesus Christ. But once we are saved we go back again, "Yet now, in ungrateful pride and most impious madness, and at the risk of being punished in everlasting darkness, they perversely oppose that name under which they fraudulently protected themselves for the sake of enjoying the light of this brief life." (I:13)

Augustine and the City of God Introduction

Augustine and the City of God (Introduciton)
Augustine was 56 years old when Rome was sacked. He asked himself, "Do cities consist of walls or men?" Rome was no more, it had been blown to pieces by the horde of Barbarians. To Augustine there were two cities, Las Vegas or Boulder Colorado. "Heavenly city outshines Rome beyond comparison.. instead of victory is truth."

431 Augustine Of Sin and Grace (3/4)

Westminster Confession of Faith:

III. This infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith but that a true believer may wait long and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it: yet, being enabled by the Spirit to know the things which are freely given him of God, he may, without extraordinary revelation, in the right use of ordinary means, attain thereunto. And therefore it is the duty of everyone to give all diligence to make his calling and election sure; that thereby his heart may be enlarged in peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, in love and thankfulness to God, and in strength and cheerfulness in the duties of obedience, the proper fruits of this assurance: so far is it from inclining men to looseness.

"The more merit-mongers labor and sweat to bring themselves out of sin, the deeper they are plunged into it. There is no means to take sin away but grace alone." - (Luther 32)

Belloq: You and I are very much alike. Archeology is our religion, yet we have both fallen from the pure faith. Our methods have not differed as much as you pretend. I am but a shadowy reflection of you. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. To push you out of the light.
Indiana: Now you're getting nasty.

Indiana Jones is a true gritty American, who carries the red, white and blue at the beginning of the regiment. Belloq appears pure evil, a Nazi, in with the great forces of evil. But both are fallen; their faith is humanistic and they both believe that knowledge will make them victorious in a fallen world.

330 New Christian Capitol- Constantinople

Constantine was a divine tool to chip and destroy the faulty idols that were placed on Christ's thrown. Men of Bosporus found their idols had lied to them, had deceived them, driving them down and out amongst the bones.

But Seven Sleepers held to the truth of the Cross, and named a Christian Capitol Constantinople.

_______________________________________________
Every gal in Constantinople
Lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
So if you've a date in Constantinople

She'll be waiting in Istanbul

They Might be Giants - Istanbul not Constantinople

312-337 Christianity UberDog

Christianity gained traction under Constantine. Constantine shows us that God is bigger than an earthly kingdom. God is greater than any terror organization. God is greater than our sins...He will bring us out from our inner slavery, as he did in Mitzrayim, bringing us forth with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm.

Obermann Once More
by Matthew Arnold

"She broke her flutes, she stopp'd her sports,
Her artists could not please;
She tore her books, she shut her courts,
She fled her palaces;

"Lust of the eye and pride of life
She left it all behind,
And hurried, torn with inward strife,
The wilderness to find.

"Tears wash'd the trouble from her face!
She changed into a child!
'Mid weeds and wrecks she stood--a place
Of ruin--but she smiled!

"Oh, had I lived in that great day,
How had its glory new
Fill'd earth and heaven, and caught away
My ravish'd spirit too!

"No thoughts that to the world belong
Had stood against the wave
Of love which set so deep and strong
From Christ's then open grave.

284-305 AD: Diocletian divides Rome .

Diocletian pondered the state of Rome in a season of discontent. " it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, the Barbarians kept destruction a foot, the din of the people stifled Rome....How must I get rid of these muckrakers?"

Interlude: Charles Dickens and the Christian Cause

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
English novelist (1812 - 1870)