Theyism

Theyism and Demonism: Floating Pigs of the cross

“And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.

6 But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him,

7 And cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not.

8 For he said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit

9 And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many….And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine” (Mk.5)

“Teen Was Prescribed 10 Psychiatric Drugs. She’s Not Alone. Increasingly, anxious and depressed teens are using multiple, powerful psychiatric drugs, many of them untested in adolescents or for use in tandem” (NY Times)

“Who Is Going to Therapy in America” blares NY Times Front Page? “A Lifelong Churchgoer,” they gloat.

“Irish teacher jailed following his refusal to use student’s gender-neutral pronoun is member of evangelical Christian family” (Daily Mail).

“The Left is engaging in “psychological terror,” (German Cardinal Gerhard Muller).

Here’s what Canadian parents are forced to accept.

The Gadarenes looked at the healed maniac and got the point. Missing were the mental swine which still dwelt in them. They did not take the spoiling of their bacon joyfully, for like Noah’s unclean raven, they had an appetite for uncleanness: the pigs are the “sin at the door” of Cain’s heart. That is, treasured. The raven was in his element: this was Broadway beyond his dreams. The straited dove couldn’t even find space to “rest her sole.” Those floating pigs, the Gaderenes understood, represented what was in them. They counted the cost like the rich young ruler and rejected the offer. They wanted the Cross, but not at the price of the cross. Even as they now understood that the maniac was but a more extreme version of themselves, for the unclean spirit is born and nourished in the unleaness around him. tHEy were at home among them. The demons were at home in Gaderene. They were not tormented there. They had never begged to be sent elsewhere. Seeing the floating carcasses, they now understood that Jesus had laid the ax to the root of the tree. For Jesus had not “christianized” their pagan straitjacket by which they sought to tame the “excess of riot” that became destructive. He did not fashion a larger chain. This man did not need therapy “or christian counfseling”: simpering self-help Dreck. He needed a “hewing prophet,” not self-help “counfseling.” One blow of the ax is all it took: “Go,” the Hewer replied to their suicidal request. Theyism is but “the excess of riot” of the uncelaness around them, the wallowing swine who turned “the house of prayer into a den of thieves.” The preachers of the Temple were but the swineherds feeding the swine. The abundance of demons (‘unclean spirits”) were but manifestations of the unregenerate people around them: they embraced the doctrine of devils because “they were of their father, the Devil,” Jesus said. Demons were at home here. They had made their home in “the house of prayer.” This is what the Gadarenes saw in this healed man with the floating pigs in the background. He no longer needed a straitjacket because he was on the Straitway. There, demons fear to tread. The rich young ruler wanted the Cross, but not at the price of the cross, and they could not take the spoiling of their bacon joyfully. They saw the work of the Cross sitting before them, and the way of the cross in the floating pigs (crucified flesh) behind them. Like the rich young ruler, they would gladly have embraced the Cross on Broadway: a token Cross around the neck of the washed sow. But here they saw a sea of washed sows, the hewing power of the preached Cross/cross. The preachers of the Temple were but swine washers. Demons are not more than “washed swine” who keep bolting back into the wallow. Evangelicalism tried to deal with Theyism among themselves with “conversion therapy”: polished Evangelicals. Theyist swine quickly returned to the wallow worse than before. They snapped their bands as if they were spider webs. Jesus gave them washed swine: the entrance of Straitgate is littered with the carcasses of washed swine. The Gadarene hog market crashed. This was the spoiling of goods on a Wall Street scale, and Broadway did not take the “spoiling of its goods joyfully.” Straitgate would make a short end of Theyism as it would thoroughly purge the Church, which in turn would cause the demons to flee even from Broadway, because the “salt hath found its savor.” Evangelicalism is but the “preaching of smooth things.” “Preach unto us smooth things, preach deceits” (Is. 30:10). “Counfseling,” they simper. Here is the root of Theyism. Sowwashing. The Cross/cross is a great sowwasher. Too much so for the Gadarenes. The Straitcross was a Straityoke worse than a straitjacket. They begged Jesus to simply leave, before He did more damage. But they got the point. He didn’t say a single word to them.

When Jesus dealt with the pronouns by “laying the ax to the root,” the Gadarenes begged him to leave their country. They themselves had dealt with the man by trying to contain him (unsuccessfully) in a straitjacket. Now, when they saw him “sitting calmly, clothed, and in his right mind,” they were greatly troubled. If he had terrified them before when he rained blows on them as Legion, he was but afflicting them in the flesh. Now they felt the deep pangs of spiritual conviction. They were not pleased with the results. The enormous loss of the swine would not have helped. But it was the transformation of the man that terrified them. Extremism. “Buchstablish (a literalist),” Germans would shriek. Going off the deep end? They drew the connection between the demons, the swine, and themselves. The healed man now represented something alien to their country, and they wanted the source of his transformation removed. They did not ask the man to follow suit, although he himself made the same request. With Jesus gone, they probably reasoned, he would likely moderate, and conform. Besides, he did not have to come to terms to stay. Unlike Lot, he had family privilege and “a man’s foes shall be those of his own household.” “I come to bring a sword.” This is war by other means. “Hewing by the prophets.” Jesus is the chief of the prophets, “a prophet like myself,” Moses said. The maniac, we are told, preached throughout Decapolis, without being sent to the Temple seminaries to become qualified. Jesus commissioned him on the spot. “I was smitten and knew it not.” Caesar threw a bridge across the Rhine, marched his army across, returned to the other shore and dismantled the bridge, just to show the Germans what he could do–an idle boast, as Rome was to learn. Jesus stepped off the boat, and left with but one soul to show for his trouble, whom he commissioned as a preacher. A maniac one day, a preacher the next. The maniac was but an extension of the pigsty, and they were themselves victims of his violence, but they were not unhappy in the pigsty, even as they had to fashion bigger and bigger chains to bind him. 10 of the most powerful drugs in their arsenal to treat teen “depression and anxiety.” The relief will be short. The demon will return with “7 demons more wicked than himself” (Mt. 12). The suicide rate is highest among those who are guided into Theyism. In the eighties it was eating disorders attended by wrist cutting. They’re trying to escape something within, something that fills them with self-loathing. What is this?” The infinite weight of sin in the human soul. When they’re told that everything within them is who they are (Freud’s categories of unspeakable depravities), and that they need but to embrace themselves, they see exactly the opposite. This man was fatally attracted to “the tombs.” Death is a constant refrain here. Theyism is by its nature a cult of extinction. There is no fruit here, only decay and decadence. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace.” Here depression, anxiety, deformation: “they turned, but not to the Most High.” Theyism is the Un-Creation, the Anti-Creation. Man is created in God’s Holy Image, a sanctuary for the Holy Spirit. Now imagine filling that sanctuary with the unspeakable filth of Freud, point to it and say, “this is who I am.” Theyisn is but the latest version of the same evil. The + at the end is telling, for every day brings a dozen more versions. There are now over 100 genders/nongenders, all very accurately defined. Soon there will be a 1000, and then 10,000. When the Judge of all the earth commanded tHEm to self-identity, they all answered to the same name: Legion. They differ but in this respect: some “are more wicked” than others (Mt. 12:45). Legion says nothing about them but their number. Otherwise they’re exactly alike, like the flies on the stink of Baalzebub. From beginning to end they are but Demon. That’s how Jesus non-sorted them. But now the man was unrecognizable, and they knew that here was someone who would no longer “run after the excess of riot.” He, unlike Jesus, would be able to live among them without having to constantly prove his social credits. He would be able to get away with a lot. An ambassador who didn’t need credentials. They didn’t ask him to leave because he was among his own. He would vex them without himself being vexed. Unlike Lot, he didn’t have to pitch his tent toward Sodom. Unlike Lot he could speak his mind without being told, “you came here to sojourn, and expect to be a judge?” But this was a standoff nonetheless. The conflict of Genesis 3:15. Jesus would unleash him on them now. He came, He preached, He conquered–and left.

This was the hard line of Abraham towards the world. As he and Melchizedek stood worlds apart from the rest, he refused any entanglement with them: “not by so much as a shoelatchet.” And Jesus said not a word to them. He didn’t have to: “By their fruits, shall ye know them.” Such is the power of a redeemed life. “Live among us is no better than among the Papists,” Luther would say. “Doctrine is what matters. Have the right doctrine and sin boldly.” He actually said that. The demons had perfect doctrine. They identified Jesus perfectly. But right doctrine is incompatible neither with demons (though it makes them tremble–James) nor the pigsty. Righteous Lot was vexed in the pigsty. Abraham left Babylon for a lonely life outside the pigsty. But the Straitway was too much for even Lot. But now he was straited in his soul: vexed.

But here we are again with the hard line of Abraham. Jesus did not blur the line. The man at his feet was the line in the sand. “Except a man be born again, he shall not see the kingdom of God.” The mental swine will have to go–every last one of them. The demons felt tormented in Jesus’ presence. Now the Gadarenes felt tormented by what they saw at Jesus’ feet. Jesus never said a word. The very presence of a true believer, Paul says, is to the unbeliever “a token of perdition.” Like here, they feel “tormented before their time” in the presence of believers. The demons asked permission to escape the torment of holiness and seek relief in the pigsty. The Gadarenes were no less tormented and begged Him to leave them alone.

Cardinal Muller speaks of “psychological terror” in the pigsty. Abraham did not experience “psychological terror” because he understood perfectly that he could not sit in the gates of Sodom without having his “hair shorn and his nails pared” to suit the fashion. Perhaps if you get enough Lot’s to take up abode in the city, you could sue for “vexation.” After all these years of "hiding your light under a bushel? “This fellow came in to sojourn, and now he wants to be a judge. We’ll deal worse with you….” What would it have taken for Jesus to gain acceptance with the Gadarenes in silence? Vexation. And having made his abode among them, does He now sue to get his rights back? Or does He hide His light and hope for some miraculous breakthrough to end “the vexation.” Because the Gadarenes made it very clear that they had no room for extremism. Today the swine, tomorrow…. What do the swine have to do with anything in the first place? Jesus left without saying a word. He will not cast more pearls before swine. But He did not leave Himself without witness.

All you have to do is watch the pronouns zipping past to see a modern crisis unfold here on the pages of the Bible: Pronouns, nakedness, self-mutilation, uncontrollable violence, confusion, desperation, destruction, etc. Yet–despite all that, this man was still in control. For he could still “want” to be delivered. He was full of demons and yet still worshiped (or was this because he was one of the elect?). Or perhaps he had faith that he could be delivered. Elisha was in the midst of many unhealed lepers. They lacked the faith of Naaman the Syrian. “Unbelief,” Jesus said. Cain wanted to “be accepted,” but “sin lay at the door.” “You must rule over it,’ Jesus said. But he doesn’t want to rule over it because “men love darkness rather than light.” “You, yourself must be born again,” Jesus commanded. “How can I make myself be born?” How can Cain make himself want to “rule over sin?” Did God really want Cain to be saved or is He just engaging in verbal horse trading here to add the special effects. We know that God was not really “grieved” at having created man (how could He be grieved when He had ordained the Fall), nor that the serendipitous Deity “strove with man” so that He wouldn’t have to bring on the Flood which He had ordained in eternity. As Aristotle says: God is the Unmoved Mover. Did God really think Cain could “rule over his sin?” Did He really want him to make himself “accepted.” Or, as with Pharaoh, did He create Cain just so He could destroy him? Shouldn’t God first make him reborn so that he will want to? Did God elect to make Naaman want to be healed, but left the Covenant children of Abraham in their leprosy? “God reaps whether I sow or not,” the wicked servant said. In the end, He makes things come out His way, regardless of what I do? And yet He takes perverse delight (“an hard man”) in watching me go through the motions. Everything this man says is true. Yet he is condemned for his conclusions. The Calvinist will be condemned for concluding that God could not both elect man and allow man to choose to be damned. The Arminian will be condemned for concluding that free will is incompatible with election before the foundation of the world. This is how the Bible was written. God decreed that “offenses should come”--they would not be necessary otherwise. But “woe to the man by whom they come.” And what power moved this man? The wicked servant could see through all that, and he was clearly disgusted by what he considered knavery on a cosmic scale. This is playing with people. God was “a hard man.” The other two knew God did all that. They probably figured there was more to it than that, far beyond human comprehension. On the other hand if God is indeed “a hard man,” you do best for yourself if you hit the ground running if you know what He wants. This man knew the will of God, but disobeyed because he had discovered a perverse motive in God’s Will. God was not playing with a full deck. He saw through Him. Behind all the goodness, blessings, mercy–all window dressing–he detected a cruel streak in God. God revealed Himself in page after page of a very thick Book engaging in the everyday affairs of human life to show that he can be taken at face value, that He’s dealing in good faith understandable to the common man. If the Bible says “God was grieved in His heart,” it means that God actually has a heart that can be grieved. If God tells Cain to “rule over his sin,” it means that God wants Cain to rule over his sin, because “He is not willing that any should perish.” The Calvinists say that means “He is not willing that any of the elect shall perish.” What’s the point of reading the Bible if every verse is stripped out from under your feet? If it doesn’t mean what it says, how is God dealing in good faith? But the Church is imploding because the Bible has been exploded. People’s heads are so full of the “traditions (additions) of the elders” that they unknowingly read those traditions into the very words they’re reading.

This (therapy seeking), says the Times pointedly, is now in the Church. Drugs are now the weapon of choice among shrinks, for they are now diagnosing mental superbugs who snap the bands of Freud and send his practitioners reeling like the seven apostate sons of Sceva. And this upon the heels of the opioid crisis. “She’s not alone,” the Times would have us know. We thank them for the warning. For while most Americans read about the social carnage every day, few realize the extremities the shrinks now have to reach for to contain it. And some of these mental bombs are untried. This shows the desperation. Even cancer patients are given access to unproven drugs only at the point of certain death. The vilest diagnosis in the Psychiatric Manual is Paranoid Schizophrenic Psychosis, which marks the utmost limit of treatable human derangement without a physical mental makeover. The 10-drug cocktail is meant to do that. A chemical strait-jacket for demons, is what this is. And these are children.

The 2000 Gadarene swine not only point to the fitting abode for “the unclean spirit” in this man, but represent the spiritual condition of the children of Abraham in the Holy Land. For just as the House of Prayer had become a “den of thieves” (Lu. 19), so the Land of Promise resembled a spiritual pigsty. The pigs and the demons were but symptoms of the same disease. Both could only exist in the presence of unbelief and unholiness. In Jesus the maniac is confronted by someone very unlike himself and immediately cries for relief from the “torment.” He does not feel “unsafe.” He feest unbearable torment. There are no drugs for sin. And he is not the least confused. He self-identifies perfectly. He is in torment because he knows who Jesus is and what he represents. He knows who he is as well, and his ultimate destiny. His only request is that he not be hastened toward it, and that they might escape the presence of Christ by taking shelter in a herd of swine. “Go,” Jesus commands the theys. And now the grammar goes back to normal. They are gone–and their violence and the confusion of language. The demons, having petitioned Christ to be spared the sea, their prayer was answered but for a short duration, for the swine plunged into the deep.

“Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid.”

“Sitting,”--poor man, who knows when he sat last, without cutting himself. “In his right mind”--think of Brook’s and Justice Jackson’s inability to distinguish between even the most basic form in Nature: Man, and his opposite, Eve. Before, tHEy wanted nothing more than the furthest space from Jesus: the pigsty. The torments (sins) were of that nature. He wanted to be among his own. They did not seek accommodation. The last thing they want is accommodation. To sit at the feet of Jesus would already be torment. They want out, and away, and to be done with. Relief in the pigsty would not come too soon. They would not ask for a law granting them membership privilege in Jesus’ church. In a 1000 years not one of them would come to Jesus’ church man-in-dress.

Baalzebub is the author of this confusion. It took one word from God (“go”) to clarify the pronouns. Which is why “Theyism” can never be a problem in the Church. The swine represent the unclean spirits at home in the Temple. Desantis has a tape of the M.I.C.E plotting to insinuate depravity into the vitals of their adversaries. The only plot of the demons here is how to get as far away and as fast as possible. They knew their own kind.

“Life among us is as bad as among the Papists,” Luther used to smirk. By which he meant “we both live in the pigsty.” Legion would have been at home here. “The difference,” he said, “is we have the right doctrine.”

All demons, James says, have perfect doctrine, “and tremble.” These demons had perfect doctrine when they went into the pigsty. You can have perfect doctrine in the pigsty. Jesus was the opposite of the pigsty. His followers are the opposite of the pigsty. Christian shrinkery has long been a lucrative business among Evangelicals. They hear little more than self-help babble from the pulpit. They hope that by paying for the snakeoil they will in fact get the real thing. When the demons snap those bands they then run off to the secular pros who are licensed to administer drugs in doses strong enough to make a demon swoon. The swine will only get worse and more violent until they self-destruct. “I have hewed them by the prophets,” God said. If “the ax is laid to the root of the tree,” Agag will cease to trouble Israel. “Sin,” Cain was told, “lies at the door, because you indulge him there as a pet. He crouches there and you could rule over him, but you will not.” The NY Times points to the church member on the couch to let you know that, obviously, the Church does not have the answer. Here, the ax was laid at the root of the tree and the man had instant relief–and he did absolutely nothing. He didn’t need therapy. “Repent and believe, and you will be saved,” the Apostles said. This man was “right minded” in the blink of an eye. He wanted to follow Jesus. You don’t need a follow up, Jesus said. To prove it, He appointed him as His ambassador. An instantly qualified therapist. All free too. No state funding, not even an offering. The power of resurrecting life, which Christ gives to his followers without measure (Mt. 28).

This was like confronting an alien: The Gadarenes were happy the way they were. They didn’t think that they were full of swine, nor that they were not in their “right mind.” These would have been the respectable people of the land, not unlike the rich young ruler who “lacked but one thing.” Yet they sensed that Jesus held them to the same standard as the maniac. Imagine putting a high Pharisee in the same category as a publican. They got the point perfectly in what they saw, and found it repugnant. Cain liked the world as it was. He wouldn’t have changed anything. And Cain was even flippant about it. Most people die as they have lived, with little care for their soul. The rich man only cared after his funeral. Jesus simply left. He didn’t cast more pearls before the swine.

The reaction of the Gadarenes is likely the key feature of the story. Did Jesus come to Gadarene to heal the maniac? To cleanse the land of the swine? Or to preach to the Gadarenes? Trump, the Rev Dobson says, was led to Christ by the Rev Paula-in-between-divorces-White. The Gadarenes were led to Christ by swineherds. “Who then can be saved,” the Apostles asked as they observed Jesus preaching the cross of the Cross? My dear, dear, fellow, the Gadarenes would answer, the question is rather, Who needs to be saved? From what? Why do perfectly normal, decent people need to be saved? This man here has become normal like ourselves. The rich young ruler was likely one of the first men in Jerusalem. He knew the Law, and did not feel condemned by it. They were “holding down the truth in unrightousness.” They did not love darkness more than light, because they were ignorant of the light. The light never shone more brightly than it did on the shores of Gadarene. But what caused the greatest repugnance was the cross of the Cross which they saw in both the dead swine and the healed maniac. The rich young ruler wanted the Cross without taking up the cross. Cain was an unconverted preacher who invented a way to be both religious and unrighteous: politics. For God, we are told, rejected his worship because he was wicked. But he did not think he was wicked, so what was there of which to repent? What’s legal (that is what you can get away without being punished) is the righteousness of the State. The Gadarense were obviously upstanding citizens. Don’t worry, they knew what was meant by those dead swine. They just didn’t feel wicked, so why fix what isn’t broken. Jesus didn’t give them one word of clarification.