Mike Starkey writes: During the 2018 Centennial of World War I, Donald Trump was scheduled to visit the Aisle-Marne American Cemetery in France. The relentless rain made helicopter travel to the Cemetery impossible, but aides informed the President he could be driven instead. Trump’s response, according to accounts from a senior Defence Department official, was that he didn’t want to visit the cemetery, as it was ‘filled with losers’.
On the same trip, Trump reportedly said the 1,800 US marines killed in the World War I Battle of Belleau Wood were ‘suckers’ for being killed. When reports of Trump’s dismissive language about dead American service personnel appeared in the Atlantic magazine, a media storm erupted. Trump denied the reports, but in 2023 his former Chief of Staff John Kelly confirmed that Trump had, in fact, used both slurs on the French trip.
What is beyond doubt is that the language of losers and winners has long been Trump’s characteristic benchmark for evaluating humanity, the trumpian equivalent of Jesus’s sheep and goats. In interviews, social media posts and rally speeches, loser has been his insult of choice.
On the campaign trail in Iowa, Trump said of Senator John McCain (a former prisoner of war in Vietnam), ‘He lost, so I never liked him as much after that because I don’t like losers’. London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan was a ‘stone cold loser’; presidential rival Hillary Clinton was ‘the biggest loser of all time’; former Director of Communications Anthony Scaramucci was ‘a loser who begged to come back’. The mainstream media was not only a dispenser of fake news, it was full of ‘losers’.
Trump’s playground-style slurs are given context by his niece Mary Trump. In her 2020 memoir of Trump’s dysfunctional family background, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, she reveals that Donald’s father, Fred Trump Sr, operated with a cruel, black-and-white framework for life. Trump Sr held that life was a zero-sum game – in which there could only be one winner, and everybody else was a loser. Kindness was weakness; to be seen as a ‘killer’ was the ultimate compliment; no mistake or oversight should be apologised for.
Trump Sr ran his family along the same lines as his businesses. Mary’s father (and Donald’s brother) Freddy Jr, was sensitive and softly-spoken – so was deemed weak by his father. Donald, on the other hand, modelled the amoral tough guy persona his father admired. According to Mary Trump, Donald learned from childhood that kindness and empathy were weaknesses of character, the traits of losers.
Trump rose to fame in 14 seasons of reality TV show The Apprentice. At the end of each episode he would point to an unsuccessful participant and spit out his catchphrase: ‘You’re fired!’ Trump built his public persona identifying and humiliating losers.
Dudes Posting Ws & Ls
Winning and losing isn’t a framework unique to the Trump presidency. But it is a distinctively US framework, so normalised in North American culture that it has become the default language of insult and accolade – from the taunts of ‘loser!’ in teen movies to the flood of motivational memes from the gurus of positivity:
‘Winners train; losers complain.’
‘Winners focus on winning; losers focus on winners.’
‘Winners see the gain; losers see the pain.’
‘Winners make it happen; losers let it happen.’
Digital playlists are compiled to inspire a ‘winning mindset’, with tracks such as Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger, Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, Katy Perry’s Roar, and David Guetta’s Titanium. These memes and songs are offered as motivational aids with wide-eyed earnestness and lack of irony.
When I first ventured onto the social media site Twitter (since renamed X), I was baffled by posters with names such as Dudes Posting their Ws. I had no idea what a W was, or why a dude might want to post one. I discovered it meant posting their ‘wins’, or personal successes. By contrast, posting your Ls meant posting ‘losses’ or personal failures, as well as exposing other people’s poor decisions. Twitter/X and other social media users routinely express positive outcomes, in characteristically American style, as winning, and humiliation as losing.
Manosphere & Incels
The language of winners and losers is at its starkest in the manosphere, the world of online male influencers – where it verges on self-parody. The manosphere operates with a binary, ultra-competitive language of winners and losers, with masculinity narrowly defined in the vocabulary of financial markets and sporting achievements.
Winners are dominant Alpha males, financially successful and emotionally distant, dedicated to self-improvement and superiority over women and weaker men. Losers are weak, unassertive Betas. Society is an emasculating Matrix that reinforces a man’s status as a loser and must be resisted. Levelling up is the conscious shift from lower-status loser to high-status winner.
The mirror image of the manosphere is the world of the incels, ‘involuntary celibates’. They share the same binary language of winners (those with sexual access to women), and losers (those without it). Incels are resigned to remaining hopeless losers, because the basis of attraction is inborn traits they don’t possess, such as conventional male good looks and being tall. They resignedly claim that the dominant 20% of men, dubbed chads, attract 80% of the women. The result is a profound self-loathing. They, the hapless incels, may as well LDAR (Lie Down and Rot).
Ironically, one thing unites manosphere influencers and incels: a deep misogyny. The former think they should dominate women; the latter are fuelled by resentment towards women. Either way, women end up as accessories in the male psychodrama of winners and losers.
Pentecostal Winners
Another world where talk of winners and losers is used motivationally and unironically is Pentecostal Christianity, particularly African Pentecostalism. The Nigerian megachurch Winners Chapel International emphasises prosperity, success and signs and wonders. Its Faith Tabernacle in Ota, Nigeria, has a 50,000-seat capacity, with a new 100,000-seat stadium currently being built, and the church has members in 147 countries. It defines winners as overcomers: people of faith destined for success, supernatural breakthroughs, and a life of continuous victory. Church is described as a Winning Camp, and a Family of Winners.
When I was a vicar in south London, we shared our church building with independent Nigerian and Ghanaian Pentecostal churches. The language of winning was frequent – and frankly made me squirm. At the same time I felt it wasn’t for me, as an affluent white Brit, to condemn a poor West African for aspiring to a better life, materially and spiritually.
In any case, it’s inconveniently true that some verses in the Hebrew Bible do imply material rewards for faithfulness:
Honour the Lord with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops; then your barns will be filled to overflowing, and your vats will brim over with new wine. (Proverbs 3:9-10)
In addition, it’s historically undeniable that spiritual revival has often led to improvement in material conditions, as people start to reorder their lives and priorities. This happened with the early working-class Methodists in my own family history. I may feel personally uneasy with African Pentecostals’ emphasis on material winning, but in their context it’s at least understandable.
I’m a Loser, Baby
A more playful, ironic take on losers and winners can be found in popular music. By the mid-1960s, John Lennon was increasingly influenced by Bob Dylan and listening to melancholy, introspective Americana. His song I’m a Loser on the 1964 album Beatles for Sale is about losing in love, and the hypocrisy of keeping up appearances:
I’m a loser, and I lost someone who’s near to me.
I’m a loser, and I’m not what I appear to be.
In 1976 Steely Dan’s Deacon Blues, from their iconic album Aja, celebrated the underachiever who knowingly settles for a mediocre life. Steely Dan songwriter and vocalist Donald Fagen later reflected that the song’s narrator embodies the idea that ‘nerds and losers’ should be memorialised too:
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose.
In 1993 the experimental US singer Beck released his hit Loser, widely seen as a wry commentary on the apathetic, underachieving ‘slacker’ culture of the 1990s:
I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?
The Dark Side
Beck’s suggestion that losers may as well be killed off is clearly ironic, the unhinged rambling of the song’s narrative persona. But there is a darker tradition that takes the elimination of losers with utter seriousness.
In the late 19th century, the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer applied Darwin’s biological survival of the fittest ideas to human societies. Some people-groups were seen as winners, others as losers. Conquest was dignified as something nobler than mere greed or chauvinism: it was an engine of progress and enlightenment. Claiming evolutionary biology as a moral foundation, it held that strong and developed nations were right to prosper, while the weak and underdeveloped were legitimate candidates for elimination.
Social Darwinism lent pseudoscientific legitimacy to eugenics, imperialism and ultimately Hitler’s ‘final solution’ for the Jews. If nature, history and fate had decided a group of people were losers in the human race, who were we to prolong their miserable, inferior existence and allow them to hold back progress for the rest of us?
Yardsticks of Winning & Losing
This begs an important question. When Trump and others today use language of winners and losers, what measure is being used? By what yardstick do we decide that winners are winning and losers losing?
In the world of sports, the answer is uncontroversial. One person wins a running race or tennis match; one team wins a game of football or hockey; others lose. In economics, there is legitimate study of which groups ‘win’ or ‘lose’ when particular economic policies are followed. The neutral use of ideas of winning and losing helps factual analysis.
When a poor Nigerian Pentecostal sees himself as a winner due to his new-found faith, or an insecure teenager in Ealing feels her confidence boosted by singing that she is titanium or a roaring lion, it would be churlish to object. Again, the language of winning here is relatively uncontroversial.
But when a bully calls a classmate a loser, when a manosphere influencer writes off other men and most women as losers, and when a President calls enemies and critics losers, darker forces are at play. There is a knowing belittling and dehumanising, a stripping away of value and dignity. It’s language that inhabits a tradition that goes back through the Third Reich and Herbert Spencer to ancient empires that saw neighbours as inferior and uncivilised barbarians, and invasion or elimination as a moral duty.
To lash out and describe another human being as a loser, online or in person, is creepy and abusive. The point of the labelling is to discourage, demean and dehumanise. It’s delivering a cruel and chilling verdict: that losers deserve to lose.
Trump, Cyrus & Jesus
Donald Trump’s Christian base makes great play of his redemptive role under God, a claim encouraged by Trump himself. In recent weeks Trump has compared himself to Jesus, and has been compared to Jesus by his spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain. In addition, Trump is compared by Christian and Israeli supporters to the 6th century BC Persian King Cyrus the Great. Cyrus is seen in later biblical tradition as an ‘imperfect vessel’, who was nonetheless anointed by God to bring about good.
But are comparisons with Cyrus and Jesus remotely legitimate? The role of Cyrus in the biblical narrative was to free the people of God from Babylonian captivity, protect them and allow them to return home. His legacy was about liberation and dignity.
Jesus in the Gospels turns conventional wisdom about losing and winning on its head. Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for his sake will find it. Jesus sought out and dignified the losers and the lost of his day: tax-collectors, lepers, prostitutes, the ritually unclean. The only true loser, according to Jesus, is the one who gains the world but loses their soul.
A repeated emphasis from Jesus, as well as in the New Testament letters of Paul, Peter and James, is that the God-honouring life is lived in humility. Later, the early church shockingly embraced and dignified the ‘losers’ in the culture of their day – including slaves, women, and the unwanted babies abandoned in remote places and left to die. Little surprise that a cluster of Jesus’s most potent parables is about lost things—a sheep, a coin, and a child.
In the upside-down kingdom of Jesus, the script of winning is flipped, the lost are found, the humble raised, and the meek inherit the earth.
Mike Starkey is a London based writer and ordained Anglican minister. He regularly contributes to BBC Radio 2’s Pause for Thought, and writes features on culture and faith at Flaneur Notes.
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Linking Trump with Hitler?
Pathetic.
Desperate bile and ‘loser’ behaviour.
https://www.nathantmorton.com/post/the-overlooked-kindnesses-of-donald-trump
https://freedomandwhiskeyus.com/the-lesser-known-good-deeds-of-donald-trump-a-legacy-of-quiet-generosity/
https://thinkcarebelieve.blog/2024/10/22/how-president-trump-really-helped-real-people/
https://buckthegovernment.com/blogs/saving-america/donald-trumps-generosity-a-lifetime-of-giving-back
Who is ‘linking Trump with Hitler?’
The observation is that dividing the world into winners and losers, and making untrammelled competition the whole principle of life has disastrous consequences. And it does.
(On the same basis, Trump is ‘linked’ with African Pentecostals…)
I think the catalogue of music is somewhat limited and culturally skewed, to make a point.
There are numerous counter cultural, bed-sit doleful singers and musician as well as icons of rock.
Leonard Cohen, is one. His book, ‘Beautiful Losers’, is a paean to a counter-sub- culture.
As for the prosperity, health, wealth and happiness gospel, as embedded in the American Constitution, that is a whole different and contested biblical theological discussion. Maybe it is an outworking, or an undefined stream, of liberation theology
But we are all lost, until we are found, by Jesus.
And the dead may be more than winners in eternity, and the winners may be eternal losers. Loser Lazarus or the unnamed, unknown rich man.
This for me seems to be the representative voice of a particular iteration of the Anglican Evangel, somewhat Corinthian.
St. Paul remarks “There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification……
[But]For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?
There is only one winner and His co-heirs the overcomers.
Internationalism, its secular philosophical roots as annunciated in this Nobel peace address in 1921.
Idealist ? Delusionist?
Who, today, subscribes to its underpinnings in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, from the remainder of 2O century and continuing world wide. The 20 Century bearing witness to (an estimated 231 million deaths, through war and conflict, genocide and state sponsored mass murders. AI generated)
On the basis of this 1921 address, Trump, and not only him, as a potential recipient, could be seen as denunciation of the award.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1921/lange/lecture/
The 30 Years War (1618-1648) resulted in an estimated 4.5 to 8 million deaths (some say more). Some parts of Germany suffered a 40-50% reduction in population. One important aspect of the war is that the two sides were identified by being Roman Catholic and Protestant.
At about the same time in the British Isles there were the wars of the three kingdoms. The English Civil Ware killed an estimated 4% of the population. The war in Scotland – the Scots did not like that the English had killed their king – killed an estimated 8%. The war in Ireland – Roman Catholics not liking their new Protestant rulers – killed an estimated 40% of the population. Until I read this last figure, I did not really understand why the Irish hate Oliver Cromwell.
Is the 20th Century is not the peak of violence or just the latest episode? The causes of WWI where not Internationalism. On the contrary, that war was a war of empires: British, French, the new kids on the block the Germans, the Russian, the fading Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman. These empires all considered that their god was on their side. Perhaps it not surprising that in its aftermath people were looking for a solution which is ‘internationalist’ and even ‘secular’.
WWII was produced, at least in Europe, as a result of WWI, and the persistence of nationalism and imperialism, not internationalism.
My point is that internationalism as described in the address, has not and does not work out in reality. It is a secular , idealist, fiction, or phantasy.
Only the return of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, will bring eternal longed- for peace, but at a price, cost.
I agree. God divided us by language at Babel for a reason. Internationalism will give rise to a world government lead by a man who makes Hitler, Mao and Stalin look like doves.
I don’t know where you get that from. I am sure it has no basis in Scripture.
I think you do know where I get it from; we just disagree over matters of exegesis!
There is a lot more to the Thirty Years War of 1618-48 than Catholic vs protestant. It began when protestant Bohemia objected to an ardently Catholic new ruler, Ferdinand II, who had already stamped out protestantism in Styria (in Austria). The protestant regimes of Denmark and Sweden joined in on behalf of the protestant States, and against the Habsburg dynasty of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand. (Sweden’s ruler Gustavus Adolfus was bribed by Cardinal Richelieu to fight the Habsburgs!) Spain was also ruled by Habsburgs and was already battling to maintain its interests in the Low Countries, and it entered on behalf of the Catholic States and the Emperor. Then France, though Catholic-ruled, joined in directly in 1635 *against* the Catholic Habsburgs who confronted it on two borders. Its major aim was to grind down Germanic bellicose capacity for a generation forward, and it succeeded. The cost in German blood was terrible.
The Scottish Covenanters fought for the English Parliament *against* the Stuart monarch Charles I, because they were not willing to return from presbyterianism to the episcopal church system demanded by Charles. With their help, Parliament won the largest battle of the war in summer 1644, on Marston Moor in Yorkshire. The north of England came under parliamentary control as a result, and Charles was unable to link up with a royalist uprising in Scotland led by the Earl of Montrose in the absence of the Covenanters’ fighting men. After Charles surrendered to Scottish forces outside Newark in 1646, they handed him over to English parliamentarians and went home, where they put down Montrose’s insurrection.
Charles ended up in detention in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. From there he took an action for which he had accused five prominent members of Parliament of treason a few years earlier: he fomented a Scottish invasion of England. In clandestine negotiations, the Scots agreed to intervene to restore him to the throne in England in return for a period of presbyterianism in the English church. The next summer, in 1648, the Covenanters crossed the border again and invaded England on Charles’ behalf. But the New Model Army held its discipline and faced off against Scottish forces it had recently been allies with, outside Preston in August 1648, and the Army won. Within 12 months Charles I was beheasded for treason.
Cromwell then took his army to Ireland to remove the threat of an Irish Catholic invasion of England – which, allied with English monarchists, might restore and then dominate the monarchy. Different military tactics were needed in a uniformly hostile country, and Cromwell was ruthless toward his foes there. By 1653 Ireland had been completely subdued, but Cromwell had to detach from the campaign in 1650 because of a new risk of invasion from Scotland, which was willing to crown Charles’ oldest son, who was living in exile on the Continent, if he would accept presbyterianism. Like his father two years earlier, he took the deal with the Covenanters and sold out his episcopalian principles (and also his most loyal Scottish supporter, Montrose). To pre-empt another Covenanter invasion of England, Cromwell invaded Scotland, and the New Model Army again won its campaign. While Cromwell’s forces were deployed to the north of Scotland’s new king, young Charles broke southward with an army. He sought allies in northern counties of England which had supported his father, but Cromwell moved south and caught up with this force at Worcester, where he defeated it in battle in September 1651. Young Charles eluded search parties by hiding up a tree – the ‘royal oak’ – and got away to France.
Let me make a suggestion. Rather than the Commonwealth, there was an obvious reconciliation candidate for the crown after 1649: Prince Rupert of the Rhine, an Anglophile whose mother was a daughter of James I. He had led King Charles’ armies in the Civil War after being an effective military commander in the Thirty Years War, during which he had been captured and had refused freedom on condition he convert to Catholic from protestant. Rupert was an intelligent man, who could have been offered the throne provided he accept something like the Bill of Rights drawn up four decades later (but based on Parliament’s demands of the 1640s). As a former Royalist commander working with Parliament, Rupert could have promoted reconciliation, and a suitable bride could have been found, perhaps from Scotland. But Republican sentiment had grown in the New Model Army.
David Your analysis of the “war in Ireland” is somewhat ambiguous, not least your estimation of ‘40%’ and secondly the ‘Irish hate Oliver Cromwell’ syndrome! Are you saying that Roman Catholics ? were responsible for killing -or exactly who? I’m perplexed! Actually,many deaths in this whole era were caused by widespread illnesses and plagues.
In other words, we must allow for the fact that this particular outpouring of violence can be traced back to the 1641 rebellion directed primarily towards the Protestant population. There are contemporary nationalist organizations which are prepared to admit that at least 4000 members of that community were murdered and thousands more died through ejection from their homes and subsequent freezing to death. While Cromwell was ‘clearing the ground’ to prevent a Royalist assault on England, he also wanted to avenge the massacre of Protestant settlers . Had James1 not initiated the “Plantation at the beginning of the century, it is possible that a Royalist invasion of England would not have happened anyhow. ncidentally, I am of that Protestant stock, but by birth, upbringing and name I am Irish. Irish history is more complex than some who reside across the Irish sea will allow!
It is indeed. The complexity of the intersecting issues over which war was fought in 1640s Ireland is staggering.
“Christianity is a religion for losers” – US media mogul Ted Turner, in 1990. He is now aged 87.
Blimey, news of his death emerged 3 hours after I typed that!
You are J. D. Vance and I claim my £10!
best not to quote anyone else…
Not exactly wrong of course…
We were all lost. That’s why we needed God to save us. All like sheep have gone astray…
The focus on secondary causes and the appeal to the Jesus of history
does not take into account the first and last cause, the Sovereignty of God,the Sovereignty of the Resurrected, glorified Christ, or of the Sovereign Holy Spirit.
Ps 77:19 Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known.
Ps 68:24 They have seen thy goings, O God; even the goings of my God, my King, in the sanctuary
Ps 85:13 Righteousness shall go before him; and shall set us in the way of his steps.
All worth reading in their contexts. Though it is not always obvious to many the steps of God are ordered, fixed, predetermined they are made known to us in Christ [the sanctuary] the (Sovereign) King who leads us to walk as He walked.
We really do need to “understand and Know that He is Lord”, The Sovereign.
Otherwise, we are living in Disney Land.
That Nigerian church sounds like hell.
It preaches a major theological error but so do many Anglican churches, if a different error.
I see that Donald Trump has perfected the art of not just living rent-free in the heads of millions of Americans, but also in the heads of hundreds of millions worldwide.
He does not have security of tenure! It is severly time limited, even without a notice to quit it will lapse with time.
And articles will wither away unlike the international, universal fall which is in denial.
He doesn’t live rent free in my head, I pay 30p per litre at the pump for the privilege of his residence there.
https://youtu.be/gvbqL2Wfkeo Ron Kenoly – Jesus is the winner man/Winna Mon
Before transatlantic travel became common, my brother went to the US on business. When he came back he said that they look like us and talk like us but they are enmtirely different, having developed 4,000 miles away for over 200 years.
I don’t like Trump’s persona or triumphalist Pentecostalism, but I welcome difference and challenge. I hear far too much on the mainstream media about how awful and strange are those who are not middle class metropolitans (Times Radio is comfortably the worst for this).
Trump and Pentecostals are here to shake us out of our complacency. Good for them.
The two principal strands in US culture are the puritanism of the Pilgrim Fathers and the secular humanism of the Founding Fathers a century and a half later. They are incompatible, of course, which explains the fascination of American life. It took me a dozen visits to boil it down to those two sentences.
Yet, it is recalled hearing a talk on Good Friday to the great and good (with some exceptions) in the locality of a market town Abbey, by a liberal CoE Bishop that Jesus had failed in his ministry, mission, which had been brought to a dead end terminus!
I was a new born babe in Christ, still wet behind the ears, as it were, as a new midult believer discerning greivous living unbelief, paradise lost and unregained in continuity, even intellectually and philosophically flaccid as it was.
The ancient Greeks had a very ”winner takes all” attitude to competitive sport
and other aspects of life. Most of the Romans seem to have thought that power and success validated everything. Can it be that early Christianity with its strongly communitarian ethos offered something that was generally lacking in the pagan world – a sense of the infinite value of the lives of ”losers”? And wasn’t the very idea of a crucified Messiah a stumbling block to the Jews? The Messiah cannot possibly be a loser. I think that this shows that the study of the New Testament in its historical environment has so much to teach the Church today, and cannot be left to professional academics writing for each other.
I have no comment about “winner” takes all. And I don’t believe Trump nor Starmer are saints (and wouldn’t make that a criteria for voting for either.) But one point of view that differs here.
While these supposed comments by Trump make good fodder for your article, they were denied by many individuals including the Secretary of State, White House Chief of Staff, Trump himself and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders (a very public Christian). Plus if you watch Trump’s treatment of the military and police he is very respectful of they risk they have faced in their roles.
So whether it did or didn’t happen, hope you got your mileage out of it!
Which statements are you saying were merely reported? Several of those cited are in the public domain.
The statements the article says were “confirmed” by a virulent Trump hater*. The actually bad comments that the article begins with to try and tarnish-by-association his perfectly reasonable comments.
Whose words on paradise do we listen to? The railing bandit, or the messiah who conquered death?
* Not mentioning that he is a virulent Trump hater in the article, whose appointment was an olive branch to the never-Trump establishment.
As the writer of the article, a couple of thoughts:
1) I used quotations that are in the public domain and well attested. Hence mentioning that his quote about John McCain happened on the campaign trail in Iowa, and that his former Chief of Staff more recently confirmed he really did say the ‘loser’ comments about the Cemetery.
2) Whatever you think of Trump’s politics (I’m with him on gender ideology and cancel culture, but against him on other issues), there is no doubt that he lies constantly. His normal way of talking is to say what he wants to be true rather than what is true. So I’d take his denials with a pinch of salt.
Mike S
Starmer is a bit of gaslighting surely? Donald Trump personal history is peppered with ghastly sayings… all perfectly attributable to him. Too many to list… so a very small taste… True, some quotes can’t be verified…though maybe they are believed because they seem in character…
“John McCain is… not a war hero. He’s a war hero – he’s a war hero ’cause he was captured. I Like people that weren’t captured, OK, I hate to tell you.” –Iowa Family Leadership Summit, 18/7/15
“Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest – and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.” Twitter, 2013
“Show me someone with no ego and I’ll show you a big loser.” –Trump: How To Get Rich, 2004
“But there is a darker tradition that takes the elimination of losers with utter seriousness.”
Thank you for highlighting this. While Spencer et al explicitly applied evolutionary ideas to society, Darwin described human history in terms of competition and replacement:
“At some future period… the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races…” (Descent of Man, 1871)
Once the Genesis account of a shared human origin is set aside, it becomes easier to see humanity not as one family, but in terms of hierarchy, competition and replacement—and such thinking has at times had devastating consequences.
From late 19th-century racial hierarchies to the exhibition of Ota Benga in a zoo, such ideas were drawn upon to legitimise notions of human inferiority, exclusion, even extermination. The persistence of racial abuse today shows how enduring these ways of thinking can be.
Christianity offers a different account:
“From one man he made all the nations…” (Acts 17:26–28)
Not a story of competing races, but of a shared origin, shared dignity, and a shared calling to seek God.
Sam Tippetts – instead of your last sentence, how about shared depravity, shared rejection of the living God, each of us (individually) in need of redemption irrespective of race or nationality?
Other than that – I agree with the comment.
Thanks very much Jock, I heartily agree. Paul goes on in the following verses to call “all people everywhere to repent”, and that universal call makes sense in the context of humanity originally made in the image of God, yet now fallen in Adam and in need of redemption.
Modern evolutionary theory, whether right or wrong, no longer includes *social* Darwinism. It is more about who has genes that assist survival when a virus comes through, thereby granting immunity to their offspring and, as waves of the virus hit, eventually to the whole population. The philosophers are, as usual, far behind the scientists.
Survival? For what purposes? Philosophy precedes science, and is embedded in it, with the philosophy of science which is not much highlighted, especially by some scientists, verging on Scientism, which is a philosophy even on its own terms.
Evolutionary theory – right or wrong (that is not my subject here) – does not deal with purpose.
In my own subject, physics, we get on very well without philosophers. We have more to do with technologists and engineers. All that philosophers do is tell us that we can’t know anything. We don’t claim to know everything but we insist that we know *something*. Augustine’s neo-platonism held back the interplay of theory and designed interventionist experiment for a thousand years because of the Greek view that introspection and smart enough intelligence was all you needed in order to make sense of the material world, despite its overwhelming contingency.
Hi Anthony,
My view is that Augustine – because of the huge influence his unbiblical worldview has had over Western Christian tradition – has caused more distress to humanity than any other person who has ever lived.
And I suggest that would be a great Masters degree subject in theology to address.
Thanks for highlighting this. So Herbert Spencer wasn’t saying something radically alien to Darwin’s original thinking. That’s really interesting.
What is so unusual? Trump lies! Starmer, Putin, Iran, N.Korea etc.
“All men are liars” (Psalm 116:11) is a statement made by the psalmist in a moment of panic, distress, or “haste,” expressing that human promises are fragile and unreliable.
It highlights human fallibility, sinfulness, and the tendency to deceive compared to the perfect truthfulness of God.
It is often echoed by Romans 3:4,
Let God be true and every man a liar. As it is written: “So that You may be proved right when You speak and victorious when You judge.”[See Barnes commentary at biblehub]
stressing that God is always true, while humans are fundamentally unreliable.
.” Both declarations highlight the unreliability of human words compared to the perfect truthfulness of God.
It is not necessarily a statement that every person is actively lying at all times, but rather a commentary on the fallen human nature prone to sin, inconsistency, and deception.
” In God we Trust”? If only.
Colin Hamer,
The Fall.
All of this week there has been a short daily podcast with transcripts on the Fall, by a thoroughly reformed living theologian.
There is no mention of Augustine. The only consideration is scripture, except with a concluding quotation from John Owen about experimental communion, with our Father, in love.
Taken as a whole the talks also lay to waste your oft mentioned contention that reformed theologians take no account of satan: here satan takes centre stage.
The Fall, satan, rebellion, hatred, strategies, the Lie, countered today with the truth.
How do you see it Colin? No need for an master’s or doctorate to respond nor deep knowledge of Augustine nor Pelagius is required; but a sweeping yet profound knowledge and understanding of scripture is. It is only then, as with most other fields of study, can it be made simple, comprehensively so.
Starting with Mondays
‘The Tragedy of The Fall.
https://learn.ligonier.org/podcasts/things-unseen-with-sinclair-ferguson
Thank you Geoff for the link to Sinclair Ferguson’s ‘The Tragedy of the Fall’. Very good stuff. But (given that) I can’t help but wonder again why you are so averse to Pinnock, Boyd, Sanders & Co. Just sayin’ 😉
Yes Bruce, it is good. I’m always astonished how he can get so much in so little time.
On one weekend Ferguson was the main speaker at a nearby conference. He spoke each time for an hour without notes, always holding attention.
To me, he me brings a wealth of scriptural study, scholarship, but it is not mere scholarship, It is spiritually affecting.
It is suggested that it would be beneficial to continue with Ferguson. Last year he was the a main seminar speaker, for a whole week at the Keswick Convention. I watched it on the computer. Friends were there. The total combined sessions were remarkable, yet sadly rare within Christian circles. They are worth spending time on, to dig out.
One of his key themes is Union with
Christ. There is much on the internet.
And , his book The Whole Christ is a theological gem. There is a series of his lectures based on the book, which can be found on the Christian Institute’s site, resources, the last time I looked. I prefer the book, to chew over.
Last, this brings to mind a 45 min or so talk on the whole of Romans, that I came across on the internet!
As for the rest you mention, they have a greatly diminished view of God, and his greatness and glory, it seems to me. None Greater, by New Anglican Matthew Barrett, is a challenging look into God’s immensity.
This is far too much from me.
Yours in Christ, Geoff
On the subject of the Nigerian Pentecostal church and the ‘prosperity gospel’ (which is no gospel at all, and in fact thoroughly evil from a Christian point of view) isn’t this the basic error that Job’s ‘friends’ were making? He had lost his wealth, his family and his health – this was an indicator to them that he had done something absolutely horrid and sinful, God had put him on the naughty seat and therefore he had to repent. In the first discourse of Eliphaz, he seems to be telling Job that if he confesses and repents, then he will be restored and that this restoration may happen rather quickly.
The other point of interest is that Eliphaz seems to have been a Pentecostal. In Job 4:12-16, he builds up with this fantastic vision that he received during the night, as if he is saying, ‘Oh, you must listen to me. I’m one of those super-spiritual people; I received a vision!’ He inserts an awful lot of detail in the build-up to the vision in order to big up his spiritual credentials. And then, when he declares what the vision was, it seems (Job 4:17) utterly trivial (all the commentators seem to have picked up on this point) and one is left thinking ‘did he really need a vision to tell him that?’
Very interesting that while the book of Job is of great antiquity, written long before the Messiah came in the flesh – and also long before Isaiah, it is still a thoroughly Christian book, where Job’s faith seems entirely Christian – and all the other characters (Job’s wife, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar) are badly mistaken in ways that one sees in ‘Christian’ churches today. I’m struck by just how Christian the book actually is.
Yes, Job is the first book to mention the need for a personal redeemer (“I know that my redeemer liveth and shall stand on the latter day upon the earth” – can’t you just hear Handel?). Job realises that the sacrifices he performs – in person, so this is pre-Moses too – are inadequate. Job is one of three people especially noted for their righteousness in the Old Testament (Ezekiel 14). God’s choice of a man to suffer *because* he is righteous clearly prefigures his own son. Job even sees the general resurrection, going on in the same passage to say “though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.”
At first Job’s friends sit with him in empathy, but then they start to tell him what they think is going on and become accusers. They don’t know of the bet in heaven, and they cannot answer Job’s question of why greater sinners suffer less than him. They cannot tell Job what sin to repent of, and he can’t think of anything exceptional. Speech by speech, each friend gets sharper with him, and he with them; they bring out the expression of his deeper feelings but bring him no comfort.
Finally Elihu barges in. He carries a spirit (32:18); the word ‘ov’ in 32:19 means this in its other 16 uses in Hebrew scripture. Use of its occult gifts would be a capital offence in Mosaic Law (e.g. Leviticus 20:27). Elihu is angry (32:2-5) and full of words, and after hearing the dispute he talks at his elders, even using the vain argument that he knows what he is talking about and is right (36:2-4). He is like the fortune-teller who followed Paul around yelling (Acts 16:16-18).
Job gets out of his fatalistic desperation by in effect putting a lawsuit on God, since in law you can cross-examine your opponent, who loses if he stays silent. Putting God in the dock is not a new idea. It was Eliphaz’s bad suggestion (5:8), but Job believes (rightly) that a man cannot win against God (9:2-3), and he (wrongly) does not trust God enough to hear him out (9:14-17), saying that God would find him guilty whatever (9:20). Unlike Bildad (8:3), Job does not believe that God, as one party and also judge, would be impartial (9:30-31). Only in a neutral court could Job state himself without fear (9:35-10:1), but no court is above God, so Job does not wish to resort to law (9:28). He wants a mediator (9:33-34) and is even confident that one exists (16:19-21), as mentioned. He is goaded by his friends’ insistence that some sin of his must be the cause, which God should explain. Chapter 13 consists largely of legal formalities of the era. Later, with God still silent, Job swears his innocence (chs. 29-31). He rests his case at 31:35. Now it is up to God to respond or, in theory, lose. [Legal insights by Edward L. Greenstein.]
Job was wise to be scared to sue God. It is unwise for the clay to talk back to the potter (Isaiah 29:16, 45:9). “Who are you to talk back to God?” (Romans 9:20); “Do not put Yahuweh your God to the test” (Deut 6:16). God does respond but, instead of answering Job’s question, cross-examines *him* – not about Job’s sin, which he was expecting to hear about, but about his ignorance and presumption. And then restores him.
It is an amazing story, told incredibly well.
Job, my favourite book.
God declares His Sovereignty, Job repents at this Revelation.
His friends were commanded by God to take a sacrificial offering to God’s new priest who He will pay attention to.
When he fulfilled his priestly role 42:10 And the LORD turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends: also the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before. i.e. He made Job abundantly fruitful in life and ministry,
There are many of the “friends” ilk who attempt to diagnose other people’s predicaments,
follies’ and failings, who call on folks to repent, who have no concept of the Sovereignty of God.
God will command those miscreants to go consult a priest who is approved of God and does “understand and know God that He is the LORD. Jer 9:24
Isa 48:17 Thus saith the LORD, thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel; I am the LORD thy God which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldest go.
Those “friends” are on very perilous grounds as far as God is concerned, for the Priest declares what is true of God. Shalom.