swift

Treasure in Earthen Vessels, A Review of a Sermon by Wesley Swift

It is relatively easy for a Christian to maintain his faith and to profess his beliefs so long as he enjoys worldly comforts, and so long as his faith is never really tried. But once some trial does come along, there is a very real danger that a man may forsake his beliefs and run off into some heresy, thereby being tried all the more, and in the long run, exposing himself to an even much greater degree of suffering and anguish. This year we have had several friends who have lost loved ones, and we have also lost several friends. We will miss them, but we have comfort in the fact that they are not truly lost. As Christians, we have an assurance, and we of all others should know with confidence, that all of our true friends are alive in Christ, that if we are in Him, we shall all one day be reunited. As Paul of Tarsus wrote in Romans chapter 6, “5 For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection…”

However one event troubles us greatly, that one dear friend has fallen off in despair at the sudden loss of a loved one, and had also questioned why he suffered such a trial in spite of his service to our Christian Identity community. So we are afraid that in his pursuit of the unknowable, because my own answers to him did not seem to satisfy his demands for knowledge, that he has either abandoned his faith completely, or has gone off into some heresy. Therefore, while we share the grief of our friend, we also grieve for him, because we are afraid that we have lost him. It is one thing if he turned away from us, but it is a terrible thing if he turned away from God. Peter himself had warned of the trials which we would face in spite of our faith, in chapter 4 of his first epistle: “12 Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: 13 But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.”

The Day of Deliverance

While I have often criticized Wesley Swift for some of the fantastic tales that he spun, or because in his sermons he had often cited dubious and even nefarious sources as if they were authorities and fountains of truth, frequently Swift was on target and quite accurate in certain important areas. One of those areas was his early awareness of the descent of our nation into a state of tyranny and communism. Swift understood that as an ongoing process, and he also understood that many of the people would volunteer themselves into tyranny in exchange for a false sense of security.

But this is not a new phenomenon. The vaunted democracy of ancient Athens, which certain “combinations”, or special-interest parties had always sought to undermine, was subverted several times during the Peloponnesian War, where Thucydides explained in Book 8 of his history of the war that after an oligarchy of certain wealthy Athenians was imposed, “The people, hearing of the oligarchy, took it very heinously at first, but when Pisander had proved evidently that there was no other way of safety, in the end, partly for fear and partly because they hoped again to change the government they yielded thereunto.” When the oligarchy failed a couple of years later, Pisander, whose proofs were evidently only propaganda for the elites of his time, had been attacked by the poets for corruption and cowardice and he was also ridiculed for being fat. So he fled to the enemy, to Sparta, and was convicted of treason in absentia.

A Critique of Wesley Swift, and why we must preserve his work: so first we explain our motives and methods at Christogenea.

I want to give people the opportunity to understand some of the logic behind Christogenea and how it evolved, so I have to sort of start from the beginning. Everything we do is carefully considered, whether we succeed or we fail. I remember telling Clifton Emahiser in a phone conversation, perhaps as early as 2005 or 2006, that one day I would put all of his material on a website of his own. At that time I wanted to call it john844.org. Of course, I was still in prison. There is currently a john844.org website which I created, but I did not use it for the purposes I had originally intended and in its current state it is still not complete. Then a short time later I thought of what I thought was a better term, and, so far as I remember, I kept it to myself.

When I was released from prison in December of 2008, I had a concept for a website for my own writing that I was going to call either Christogenea or Christogenos. I eventually settled on the former because I thought it better resembled its meaning in English, but I still like Christogenos a little more. I continue to retain ownership of both domain names.

I really thought that Christogenea would just be a small blog and a place for my essays and translations, and that I would keep my promise to Clifton. I never had any idea that it would grow into a collection of websites with over 12,000 pages, not counting the forum. I never imagined there would be a forum. By the end of April of 2009, I accomplished those things which I originally set out to do.