Tag: religion

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Epistles Scripture

True Religion (James 1:1-27, 2:14-17)

James 1:1-27
James 2:14-17

As we continue in our series through the Word of God we come to the Epistle of James. Scholars agree that the writer is the brother of Jesus (Matt 13:55). James became the leader of the Church at Jerusalem after the departure of Peter in Acts 12:17. He was the spokesman at the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:13-21), and was a “pillar” to whom Paul reported his missionary experience (Gal 2:2,9, Acts 21:18-19)

Notice is verse 1 how James introduces himself as a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. Never in this epistle does James “drop names”. What do I mean? Well, James grew up with Jesus. He was His brother. If there was anyone who could rightfully call Jesus his brother and be proud of it, it was James. He could say, “Yeah, I remember when I was growing up with Jesus”¦.” Isn’t that the way of the world? James is a humble man ““ a bondservant of Christ. No confidence in the flesh but simply confidence in Christ.

In verse 2, James begins with a very strange command: “Consider it all joy when you encounter various trials”¦.” Another way of stating that is to consider it pure joy. Perhaps some of his readers thought that James was some guy out of touch with reality living safely in Jerusalem but, surely, James was not unaware of the trials around him. He had witnessed the death of Stephen and the persecution that followed. There is something more behind these words.

The Christian does not have a command to pretend like everything is OK and pretend there is no grief or suffering in the world. Yet, we understand that God stands behind every trial and test. We keep our trust in our heavenly father for we know that he sends us trials to test our faith and we know He is in complete control of every situation.

The joy spoken of is pure because it looks beyond the present circumstances that might cause some real grief even as Christ wept with those who wept. Yet behind that grief is the knowledge that God is working together all things together for the good for His saints. We also understand that the trials are a refining process.

And so, in verse 4, we are instructed to persevere so that our faith will be mature and complete. This is not something that can be rushed. It’s not something that can be produced by simple steps or 40 days of purpose. It’s something that is lived out in the day-to-day life of the believer who trusts and rests in the work of the Cross. It is laying hold of that truth at 5 in the morning when our mind is groggy and we’re in a bad mood. It’s found in these times and not merely our times of ecstasy or things that we enjoy in our worship experiences. True Christianity is lived out on the ground as we mature in the faith.

Another way of saying “mature” is the word “complete”. In the name of Jesus, Peter healed the lame man who sat begging at Solomon’s Colomnade. The account in Acts 3:16 notes that the beggar was given complete healing. The man’s feet and ankles became strong so he could function as a complete human being with no handicap.

And so we’re supposed to mature and James continues naturally by noting: “But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him”¦.” For God is a generous God. What are we to be asking for? Wisdom. God always grants that request. James is saying: “I know some of you won’t admit it but you need wisdom.” Beloved, you and I need wisdom for wisdom is what we’re after. This is not about being proud. Men and women never want to admit they lack anything but we need wisdom for it is a treasure. Wisdom is not mere knowledge though it surely must include knowledge. Wisdom is the ability to have eyes to see things as the Scriptures see them ““ to have a heart that rightly interprets everything around us and not as the world does.

But, as verse 6, notes many of us are double-minded in the Church. We’re “hedging our bets”. We’ll try on religion as long as it helps us out. We’ll add Christianity and Scriptural principles to our lives to complement the other parts that we have all worked out. We’ll go to God when it suits us and we can’t work things out on our own. James reminds us all that this will not work. You receive nothing from the Lord in such cases. You receive no wisdom because you have not begun with the fear of the Lord. In fact, if Christ is just an option for you then you have not even received salvation for faith requires a recognition that we are utterly lost without Christ as our only hope. In fact, Paul states that, if Christ be not raised then your religion is vain. The Scriptures say that there are two options here: Either Christ is raised or He isn’t. If He is raised then believe upon Him but if He is not raised then the Word of God commands you this in 1 Cor 15:32 ““ “If the dead are not raised, LET US EAT AND DRINK, FOR TOMORROW WE DIE.” If you don’t believe that Christ is raised then you’re wasting time that could be better spent on a Sunday morning.

But don’t fear, double-mindedness does not mean that we never doubt or suffer unbelief. Our faith in Christ need not be perfect ““ that’s the reason we have a Savior to begin with. One of my favorite stories is when the father of the epileptic pleads with Christ to heal his son in Mark 9. Christ asks him if he believes. The father answers with emotion: “Lord I do believe: help me overcome my unbelief!” That is my daily cry. I know that if I hold on to the feet of Christ as a beggar then my faith never needs to be perfect as long as I am always looking to Christ for my hope and salvation. But I can never view that as simply an option. It is the only way or it is no way at all.

And so, throughout the rest of Chapter 1, James encourages us all to trust, to believe, to persevere in believing throughout trials. We need to understand that God brings us these trials to cause us to grow even as a son is disciplined by his father so that he’ll mature as a man. Paul notes that a man, in fact, hates his son if he doesn’t discipline him and reminds us that God’s refinement of us is proof that He loves us. We need to stop being convinced that we’re mature to begin with so we can view the trials and the suffering that He sends our way as a sign that God is not with us or doesn’t care.

In fact, as James notes in verse 13, many will even blame their sin upon God. You see, the sinful human heart will always reason like this: “God is in control of everything, He knew this would tempt me to sin, He allowed the temptation to occur, I sinned, and so it’s God’s fault.”

Remember Adam and Eve in the Garden when God asks them who told them they were naked. Adam says to God: “The woman YOU GAVE ME brought some fruit”¦.” Yeah, that’s right God, I was fine, I had all my ribs and I was asleep when you made her. It’s her fault but, really God, it’s YOUR fault.

This attitude is as old as mankind and it still doesn’t work. We’re responsible for our own sin. We need to look to God for strength to endure temptation and, in fact, that He would make us wise so that we don’t walk into temptations.

Faith that is born from above must persevere to the end because God has born it within us but we must exercise the faith given us. We must be those who are never content to trust in ourselves or consider ourselves too strong for temptation. We must be learning to hate our sin and fleeing from situations that lead to sin. Our hope is to be eternally blessed as our perseverance perfects our faith until, to the end, we reach the goal. The goal isn’t that we’ve ever clung to Christ and never let go of His life.

But James warns us not to deceive ourselves and think that we can just be playing around with sin and that it won’t affect us. Our problem is that we don’t consider, enough, how horrible sin is and we even deceive ourselves that we deserve the occasional sin because we’ve been good for a while. Beloved, you haven’t been good enough for the last minute to deserve heaven. We need to realize that if not for Christ we have no hope. And so, we should not be deceived that we can just start leaving the things that Christ loves and embrace all the things that God hates in this world. If we do so then eventually we prove to everyone that Christ does not abide with us, for if He did, then we would bear His fruit. So James warns us all that we stay away from sin ““ this is something the true believer will always do because true believers fear the things that God tells them to fear.

James reminds us all where this is all flowing from in verse 18: “In the exercise of His will He brought us forth by the word of truth, so that we would be a kind of first fruits among His creatures.”

Everything we’re talking about here is something that we’ve been born to do. We’ve been re-created by God for this work. It is a fruit of the Christian life. It comes naturally from a Christian. It is only because sin yet abides that we are conflicted and sometimes view what ought to be natural as un-natural but a Gospel-transformed life, a born again life, ought to be seeking this type of transformation.

And so it should never be a burden for us to live according to this Word. It should be sweet to us. So I have to ask myself why it is that I don’t view these next verses as sweet sometimes: “This you know, my beloved brethren. But everyone must be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger; for the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God.”

Over the past couple of weeks, after everything that has been going on in this Church, I prepared this message and then I started studying these verses and knew, right away, that I had come up short. I’ll always come up short but my problem is that I sometimes don’t even pursue these things. I am too quick to speak and too slow to listen. I am quick to anger.

But this is not a recipe for self-improvement. It drove me to Christ to beg of Him for wisdom ““ to beg of humility. You see, I believe in this Christ, I believe that He will give me the very thing that He is demanding of me because I’m united to Him by faith in His finished work. I begged of Christ that I would love this kind of demand on my life and be transformed by it. I need to live this out too but it will only be lived out when it is a fruit of my heart. And so I trust and in my trusting, I strive.

I hope after all that, we can understand better how James is able to sum up everything so far by saying this: “Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

At first this may seem strange but, when you understand why widows and orphans are mentioned, then you’ll understand this.

There is a regular pattern that jumps out at you in the Old Testament. It got to be such a regular theme as I taught through the Old Testament this year that I sometimes felt like saying to the class: “Remember what we talked about last week? Here’s another Prophet that is reminding the people of the same thing.”

The pattern is this: Men abandon God in their hearts and God gives them over to idolatry. Because men become idol-worshippers they lose the knowledge of God in their hearts. Because they lose the knowledge of God then they lose the value of the men and women that are created in God’s image. Because men and women no longer have any value, they are things to be used and thrown away when they no longer serve any purpose.

Widows and orphans can’t do anything for us. They were the downtrodden and had no political power. They were destitute among all people because they had nobody to care for them in society. You’re not going to become rich or famous our get any political power from them or by helping them. And so, is it any wonder that those who have the least power in our society, the unborn, can be killed wantonly and without mercy. Society views them as a mere collection of cells. There is no image of God to consider. There is nothing sacred that makes them valuable.

But recreated hearts love the things that God loves and true worshippers of God, people who truly have faith in God, have hearts that are tender to the things that God is tender toward. I read into James 2 because this is completely about what true religion is and what the nature of faith is. It demonstrates whether or not you have the kind of faith that just says you love God and trust God on the one hand but, when the flesh and blood people are around you that God loves, do you love them? If you do not, then you do not love God and you have no faith in God no matter how much you say you love God. This convicts my hearts too brothers and sisters.

James, in fact, warns us all that a faith that just says it loves our brothers but then refuses to do anything to help them proves we have no love for them at all and we have no faith in God and we will not be saved. It’s not the helping of them that saves us. It’s faith in Christ that saves us. BUT, LISTEN, faith in Christ transforms human hearts to love the things that God loves! If you don’t love the things that God loves then you DON’T HAVE FAITH!

Three weeks ago, before everything happened in the Church, I was a mess. It wasn’t because of the situation in the Church though that has been painful for me. It was because my wife and children were away. They were only following me by a week but I missed in the strangest ways. I couldn’t sleep well at night because it was quiet. I woke up sad because there was nobody to hug or hold.

Then Sonya and the kids returned on a Thursday night. I had to get up at 5 am the next morning to get to work but at 4 am I heard James crying out from the next room sweet words: “Daddy!” I got out of bed to find James holding his nose from a nose bleed. Blood dripping on the floor. I took him to the bathroom to clean him up. I was exhausted but what if I had merely said to James: “God bless you little brother, be at peace, I’m sorry you have a nose bleed but I really do love you.” What kind of love would it be if I went back to sleep and left a 5 year old to fend for himself and a bloody nose? Would anyone say that I loved my child? It was not a burden at all, beloved, to clean up that blood. I did it with joy for I had ached for my family and now I had an opportunity to clean up my son. I had an opportunity to love him. It was natural for me to do so because a father loves his son. I didn’t become a loving father because I cleaned up the blood on James’ face. No, beloved, I cleaned up the blood because I was a loving father.

And so we should be toward one another ““ everyone in this Church. If it is hard for you to love the other Saints in the congregation then pray for true trust in Christ. You’re not going to become a Christian because you do things for others. You’re not going to buy God’s favor because you sacrifice for Him. You need birth from above my friends. You need faith in Christ that transforms your hearts and your minds so that loving your brothers and sisters, forgiving them their failings, serving them with joy, is something that flows from you like the love that a father has for His son.

For we are born from above to be like our heavenly Father who was willing to come to those who hated Him and said: “Not because you deserve it, not because you love me, not because you’re nice, and not because of anything that you will ever do for me but BECAUSE I WANT TO BLESS YOU, I am sending my Son into the world to die for the sins of the ungodly. I am sending Him to die for the sins of the ungrateful. I am sending Him to die for the downtrodden that can give me nothing in return.”

And the words of that Gospel penetrated our heart. The words of that Gospel overcame our hate and caused us to love God. And as we continue to trust in that Gospel, even as beggars struggling with unbelief, we can be confident that He will perfect us to the very end if we put our trust in Him.

Let us pray.

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Quotes

Spring on Revivalism

I have somewhere met the remark, that “˜the chariot of the gospel never has free course, but the devil tries to be charioteer’. There is nothing he is so much afraid of as the power of the Holy Ghost. Where he cannot arrest the showers of blessing, it has ever been one of his devices to dilute or poison the streams. . .With the obvious signs of the times in view, who does not see that this artful foe would enjoy his malignant triumph, if he sould prejudice the minds of good men against all revivals of religion? This he does, not so much by opposing them, as by counterfeiting the geunine coin, and by getting up revivals that are spurious and to his liking. Revivals are always spurious when they are got up by man’s device, and not brought down by the Spirit of God.

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Book Reviews

Further Reading in Dabney and Some Thoughts on Creation, Its Laws, and the Irrationality of Evolution

From my blog


Once more, quotations are taken from Robert L. Dabney: The Sensualistic Philosophy, Naphtali Press, 2003.

Robert L. Dabney’s philosophical observations of science are not stale; on the contrary, his observations are still crisp and refreshingly prescient after more than 125 years.

The permeation of scientific thought with Sensualistic philosophy displaced religion with Materialism; creation with force, motion, and chance; God with unknowable, impersonal forces; the soul with nerve bundles; and consciousness with organically advantageous neural impulses. As Dabney notes, we are compelled to look beyond science and philosophy to Biblical revelation “to learn that a man goeth upward and a beast downward” (p. 125).

“That a fortuitous conjunction of atoms should account for all the marvels of design in the universe, and that material mass should be endowed with consciousness, reason, and conscience, are difficulties common to this and all the other phases of this philosophy” (p. 128).

Anyone who studies modern science, or has children studying modern science, is exposed to the difficulty of which Dabney speaks.

Bad science shares eye space with celebrity affairs in grocery store aisles. It is inescapable but not irrefutable. Refutation requires background, and Dabney, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, provides background.

Noting the teleological arguments (we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here) evolutionists use to refute Christianity, Dabney remarks that the evolutionist “requires us to go back, discarding all the acquisitions of human civilization in this department, and immerse ourselves in the stupidity of barbarism” (p. 147).

Further, he asserts:

“These speculations are to be deplored, in that they present to minds already degraded a pretext for materialism, sensuality, and godlessness. The doctrine can never prevail permanently among mankind. The self-respect, the conscience, and the consciousness of men will usually present a sufficient protest and refutation. The world will not permanently tolerate the libel and absurdity that this, wondrous creature, man, “˜so noble in reason, so infinite in faculties, in form and moving so express and admirable, in action so like an angel, in apprehension so like a God,’ [quoting from Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2] is but the descendant, at long removes, of a mollusk or a tadpole” (p. 141).

I pray Dabney is not overly optimistic.

Evolution is based on compact records; its star theory is also its undoing. If lifeforms evolved to the fortunate fittest, where are the intermediates representing the unfit? Um…well, they haven’t exactly been discovered yet. Dabney published this book in 1875 and we’re still waiting for the fossils to vindicate the theories of their existence.

Evolution is a theory that has to fabricate missing links from whole cloth because its hypotheses are untestable and unsupported by evidence–and yet its conclusions remain on the books as facts. Perhaps this is why evolution theory has had to resort to the force of law in the courts: It has no recourse in the laws of science.

I happen to agree with Dabney, and not with some other Christians, in that I do not subscribe to the idea of “creation by law.” I believe in creation by fiat of the spoken Word of a particular Creator, the triune God who calls himself Jehovah in the Bible. I perceive the existence of laws as evident in creation, not causal of creation. I think this is more consistent with the Christian world view.

I see the existence of laws evident in, and not causal of creation, because I perceive a Who behind the act of creation, as opposed to a “how.” God created the heavens and the earth. The “how” God employed is given as: moving, speaking, dividing, making, creating, blessing, forming, breathing, and planting. None of these initial acts of creation originated in natural law. There was no natural law before there was a creation–there could be no such thing as preexistent laws waiting for something to act upon. Natural law originated in the template of God’s creation and is expressed in that creation. God is the First Cause and the Lawgiver. Creation by law implies secondary causes on which God was reliant. Creation is reliant; God is not.

The same God who created us and this world for us gave us the ability to know something of himself. By grace he gave to some more ability than others. This truth impelled Pharisees to pick up stones to hurl at Christ. It still does today.

Evolution is a pragmatic theory that violates the very carbon and silicon of pragmatism: It doesn’t work.

Categories
Book Reviews

Ayn Rand: The Failure of Mind as God

From my blog

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was the great white hope of atheists determined to commandeer rationality. Her philosophy, “Objectivism,” was unique in its separation from the sensualists and its rejection of relativism. She did, nevertheless, hold man’s “own happiness as the moral purpose of his life,” and thus hearkens to John Stuart Mill.

Rand was influenced by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Nietzsche; from Aristotle she took the rational premise, “A is A.” She vehemently attacked every type of gnosticism and every form of empiricism, refuting the notion of what she called “the primacy of consciousness.” The primacy of consciousness is the cornerstone of postmodern thought: the notion that man’s conscious perception defines reality. Thus in this arena, Rand and Dabney were allies.

Unfortunately, Rand’s Objectivism is an atheistic system. While appearing rational in its propounding of an objective reality independent of consciousness, Objectivism also advocates that no divine consciousness underlies reality. Perception does not define reality, but neither is there a creator, nor a soul. The human mind is the moving force behind man’s potential, and man’s potential as a fully self-actuated individual is the only object of interest to the Objectivist. Nothing that came before is of any interest at all.

Rand rejected religion, as she did postmodern philosophy, as “evil” and “irrational.” She dismissed religion categorically as irrational because its premise is altruistic. Rand likened the alliance she perceived between church and state to “Attila and the Witch Doctor”–perhaps one of her more compelling insights.

The mind of man, according to Objectivism, is simply here, a priori, the most important thing in the universe, and not to be hindered. There is nothing higher and nothing more potentially rational. “Potentially” is the operative term here; Rand considered virtually everyone outside of her small coterie of followers to be irrational.

Rand was untroubled by any considerations of “where it all came from.” In an interview with Bill Moyers, Moyers asked Rand whether she was not impressed with all the things of creation around her. Her candid response: “Not really, no.” That which did not originate within her mind was unworthy of the further exercise of her mind.

Although Rand faulted Hobbes, her philosophy, as did his, held self-interest to be the bonding force of civilization. Self-interest was the greatest virtue in the Objectivist scheme, and altruism the greatest evil. She differed from Hobbes largely because of her “Benevolent Universe” world view. By what algorithm she reconciled benevolence with a contempt for altruism is unclear. As for the “why” behind the benevolent universe, she would not be accountable. It simply was. Self-existence implies self-existent properties.

Rand’s novels depict heroic humans with godlike brilliance of achievement; they are, in fact, creators. Titanic battles take place between creators and destroyers. Meekness was not the key to the Objectivist kingdom.

Rand, who emigrated from Bolshevik Russia, held strong anti-Communist convictions. The prevailing theme in her novels, as well her nonfiction, is the individual pitted against the collective. While rightly vilifying the unthinking and parasitic collective, Rand wrongly deified the mind. Sadly, she failed to apprehend atheism as the fatal essence of Communism.

Unfortunately, Rand’s scenarios are stage-set after a staunch Calvinist work ethic; but rather than accountability to God for one’s moral parameters, there is accountability only to the “rational self-interest” of her creator-heroes. Nor do her heroes lean toward a Calvinist chastity ethic. And they occasionally find it justifiable to kill someone who gets in their way.

An affair with her protégé undid Rand’s moral credibility, and with it, the credibility of Objectivism as a moral system sustained in self-will. Atheism lost a paragon in which to billet its cause.

Rand was right: Reality is objective. It is not subject to change according to men’s whims or perceptions. But Rand was wrong: Rational self-interest is unavailable to the perception of the natural man. The natural man’s self-interest cannot be rational because the natural man is not rational. He does not seek God because he believes he can live by his own reasoned righteousness. Man’s only true rational self-interest lies in his salvation from sin through belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Ultimately, Objectivism is a philosophy of self-will, self-interest, and self-undoing.

Ayn Rand was buried, at her own request, wearing her wedding ring, a photograph of her husband placed in her hands.

Categories
Devotion

The Pontiff of Humanity

from my blog Board Housewife & The Cat

“The Pontiff of Humanity”

Advisory: Scary content.

The Cat enjoys scaring his friend Zack. He has urged me, therefore, to write about Positivism’s arch scion, Auguste Comte, about whom we were just reading in Dabney. Comte had the modest aspiration of becoming “Pontiff of Humanity.”

Ideas that reject sources of knowledge can get very weird, and Comte quite possibly attained the zenith of weirdness. If we owe our ideas to no sources of knowledge outside of our own experience of phenomena, we tend to become a bit obsessed with ourselves. Thus, atheism is the predictable logical consequence of positivism.

Positivism denies the supernatural, even in light of the evidence of supernatural facts. Thus, the documented miracles that Christ performed on earth before thousands of witnesses would be denied or explained naturally–an impossibility untroubling to a positivist mind.

The cosmological implication of this is, or should be, terribly frightening: self-existence without God. As Dabney puts it so well, “Thus, matter is clothed with the attributes of God” (Robert L. Dabney: The Sensualistic Philosophy, Naphtali Books, 2003, p. 81).

Comte, who lived from 1798 to 1857, was certainly not the first person to attempt to recreate God; nor was he original in his attempt to introduce worship of himself. However, there is a certain novelty to his approach of denying the existence of any god, while introducing a religious system of worship with himself as the center, and expecting liberty-enjoying people to go along with it.

To the psychotic Comte, a religion without God was a reasonable concept. His religion included the necessary element of worshipers. To ensure a prodigious number of them, he devised a congregation known as the “Great Being,” consisting of all humanity, living, dead, and those who will live. Evidently hip to the utility of liturgical worship principles, Comte devised a system of worship with 84 holy days in a year and nine sacraments (p. 83).

Comte’s system was to consist of a “spiritual order” of positivist philosophers and educators (reminiscent of Plato’s philosopher kings, but in Plato’s gnostic model, at least knowledge was understood to come from without the visible world). These people would be presumed infallible and defiance of their dicta would not be tolerated. Above the oligarchy would be the Pontiff of Humanity, with Comte, of course, to be the first to hold this office. The Pontiff, imbued with unsurpassed wisdom, would select his own successor.

Comte had a plan for the United States of America, wherein three bankers were to govern each of the States. The spiritual order would be absolute in its authority, and its authority would be absolute in its sphere of human control–social, spiritual, educational, and, economic.

Comte suffered from manic depression in addition to his obvious megalomania, and was rescued in the course of several suicide attempts. But consider the burden under which he labored–the pressure of ruling every soul that ever lived, did live, and ever would live–equipped only with the laws of nature directly sensible to him. No wonder he held such a hopeless, fatalistic world view, holding “intellectual skepticism as the most advantageous state of mind” (Dabney, p. 84). The irony was likely lost on him that he could not even trust the validity of his own “infallible” ideas.

Unchallenged deference to experts because they are experts, regardless of competence, is a current manifestation of Comte’s positivist world view. I would submit that Comte’s view is not extreme, but rather the logical outcome of positivism, and that it exists around us more than makes us comfortable to think.

Dabney said this in the 19th century, and it is as true in our day as it was in his: Positivism’s “most deplorable result is the impulse which it gives to irreligion and open atheism. Thousands of shallow persons, who have no understanding of any connected philosophy, and are too indolent and inattentive to acquire it, are emboldened to babble materialism and impiety, by hearing it said that the “˜positive philosophy’ has exploded the supernatural” (Dabney, p. 85).

Adherence to positivism and its sequelae is shallow and uncomplicated; it is a giving over to a reprobate mind. Paul presaged the philosophy long before Dabney warned America: “for that they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator…” Ro 1:25. “And even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting…” Ro 1:28.

Positivists would profess that their philosophy advocates nothing specifically immoral, that nature itself is sufficient revelation of proper moral conduct. Whose nature–Auguste Comte’s? Their scheme forecloses any moral source outside of nature and sensibility; therefore, how can morality be known? But this is a rude question to ask an all-knowing Pontiff of Humanity.