THE letter below, dated May 16, 2000, was written by the writer Lawrence Auster to a minister of the prominent St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Mr. Auster died ten years ago yesterday at the age of 64. Born and raised Jewish, he followed Eastern religious beliefs for years as a young adult. He was then baptized at St. Thomas in the 1990s after a powerful mystical experience of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Here he addresses the pastor of the church, honing in with his characteristically unsparing intensity on its atmosphere and beliefs. In the letter, among other interesting things, he notes the infuriating tendency of modernists (or postmodernists) to speak out of both sides of their mouths.

A letter from Lawrence Auster was not always welcome by its recipient (and often went unanswered). Perhaps in reading this you can sense why.

Here is the letter:

Dear Fr. —-,

If you were wondering what I was talking about with Bishop S. in the narthex after Sunday services, this is what I said to him: ‘Where in the Bible does it say that we discover the meaning of Christ’s resurrection by ’embracing our particularity’?

He replied: ‘That’s my interpretation.”

When I objected to his interpretation, he clarified that he did not mean that it’s about all of us just going off in our own direction (which had been my impression), but that we live ‘in Christ.’

I was glad he said this. Combined with his evident sincerity of manner, it mollified me somewhat. However, that’s not what he said in his sermon. In his sermon, he said nothing about living in Christ. In his sermon he threw out an endless series of rhetorical and sophomoric-sounding questions (there must have been about twenty of them), such as ‘How do we know what the meaning of the resurrection is?’, ‘How can we tell tht Christ is risen?’ and so on and on. They were questions that led nowhere, questions that to my mind betokened a lack of genuine engagement with the Gospels. They were posed not in the spirit of a man who is looking for the truth or who is leading up to an exposition of the truth, but in the spirit of a man who is saying that there isn’t any truth.

If that suspicion seems extreme and unfair, it was confirmed at the end of his sermon when he said — yes, he actually said this — that there is no answer, that each of us must find the answer for ourselves, by living our lives, meeting the diversity of life, being kind to people, blah blah blah. (I’m not quoting exactly but this is very close to what he said.) Finally he said by living this way, by “embracing our particularity,” we would understand that Jesus was risen and with us.

This was not quite as bad as Bishop G.’s remark in his 1998 Christmas Eve sermon, that we come to the truth of Christianity by realizing that it’s ok to be ‘fat and sloppy,’ since Christ loves us any way we are. But it was in the same ballpark.

This is not only a man-centered teaching, which would be bad enough, but it represents an exceptionally low level of man. At least the old liberal humanism had some sense of universality and higher ideals that was being offered as a replacement for religion. By contrast, the teaching of S. and G. is a species of postmodernism, in which there is no truth at all, just impulses, personal inadequacies, and compassion for everybody’s dysfunctions.

In other words, the teaching of the current leaders of the Episcopal Cburch doesn’t even rise to the religion of man. It is the religion of the Last Man.

In either case, it has nothing to do with divine truth. It is in fundamental respects indistinguishable from the secular liberal belief that what religion is about is “being a good person,” believing in social justice and not harming anyone, or, alternatively, that it’s about “realizing yourself,” “getting in touch with your feelings.” To put the best possible construction on it, these modern Episcopalians believe that secular experience and the embrace of diversity is the vehicle through which Christ is realized. Even under that more charitable interpretation, however, they still seem to have little or no conception of Christianity as something beyond the human, beyond our little selves and our relationships and all the rest of it. Christian experience doesn’t come out of our particularities. What crap! Christian experience comes from beyond our particularities, it comes from God. It is what shows us the true meaning of our particularities and helps us relate to them in a true, God-centered way. It is the key to right living in this world because it comes from beyond this world.

I thought of saying to Bishop S. (though I didn’t say it), that if he is not equipped to preach Christ and the Gospels then he ought to find another line of work.

[For brevity’s sake, a page and a half of similar commentary about Episcopal higher-ups has been omitted here.]

Fr.–, I have often felt grateful to you for something you said to me prior to my baptism, and I am even more grateful now: You said that I was not being baptized into the Episcopal Church, but into the Church of Christ. It was an inspiration that it occurred to you to say that, and it has been a grace to me ever since, because if I believed that my being a Christian depended on believing in the Episcopal Church as it currently exists and respecting and following its Bishops, I could not be Christian.

How, then, do I keep coming to St. Thomas, since it is a subordinate part of that same Episcopal hierarchy? The answer is that somehow, by God’s providence, there are these pockets within the Episcopal Church, following the Anglo-Catholic tradition, with medieval Christianity behind that and the original Christianity behind that, where the truths of our religion are being communicated by genuine ministers of Christ, such as yourself and Fr. K. and Fr. B.

But as for the Episcopal Church as a whole, it is, as far as I can see, simply an adjunct to the decadent, anti-God culture in which we live.

Sincerely,

Lawrence Auster

Lawrence Auster left St. Thomas not long after and, rejecting Vatican II, he converted to Catholicism a few days before his death.

— Comments —

KSG writes:

I loved this letter to the modernist pastor, and that he converted to the (pre-V2) Catholic Church before his death. I followed the link to his archives. His position on the Jewish question were a bit naive, I thought. Paul Gottfried expressed a more realistic assessment: the Jews collectively tend to utterly despise Christians, and white Europeans, even the secular ones, and are genociding them. As a Christian, this hatred is difficult to comprehend, but is expressed quite openly by people like Netanyahu. LOL! I am so naive myself, I kept seeing these white college profs and celebrities blathering about white privilege and the need for whites to die, and it made no sense…til it dawned on me that they were Jews. Duh. It is increasingly obvious and without basis, the more we learn about true history. It seems we deserve horrific torture and death merely for refusal to willingly and knowingly be enslaved by and worship them. But a lot has happened in 10 years. I would love to know Mr Auster’s views if he were alive now. I am not judging him. Christians simply do not think the same way Jews do, it is an entirely different paradigm and worldview, and I do not think it is as much a matter of IQ as a value on education and knowledge, and a cunning, a constant watchfulness for opportunity and angles, a narcissistic self-worship, and an absence of religious scruple. It is a taqqia religion, like Islam, and treachery against people of other religions (animals) is considered a commendable thing. Every day the battle of Satanism (the level of deception has reached supernatural proportions, hearts are hardened and intellects darkened) against Catholicism becomes more obvious. Without God, we are hopelessly outmatched. With God, we are unstoppable. Leading Catholics away from God has devastated us, and they know it.

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