Jack Shannon

Christian | Reformed Catholic | Priest

[The English Remnant @Englishremnant]

If capital punishment was once morally permissible but is now considered morally unacceptable, that is a contradiction, not a development of doctrine.

Pope Innocent I (401–417)

“Why should we condemn a practice that all hold to be permitted by God?”

Pope Innocent III (1198–1216)

“The secular power can without mortal sin carry out a sentence of death.”

Pope Pius V (1566–1572)

The Roman Catechism, published under his authority, defended the right of civil authorities to impose capital punishment.

“Such an execution of justice is precisely an act of obedience to it.”

Pope Pius XII (1939–1958)

“Human life is untouchable except for legitimate individual self-defense, a just war carried out with just methods, and the death penalty meted out by public authority for extremely grave and very specific and proven crimes.”

Yet Pope Leo XIV upholds the modern Roman Catholic position that capital punishment is inadmissible.

For centuries, popes explicitly defended its moral legitimacy. Now Rome teaches that it is inadmissible.

You cannot simply call two apparently opposing teachings a development of doctrine and expect the contradiction to disappear.

Either the earlier popes were wrong, or Leo is wrong.

The teachings of the Church cannot be true in one century and false in another simply because a different man occupies the papal throne.

Thank God for the English Reformation 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

[Andrew Isker 🌳🪓 @BonifaceOption]

The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm.

[pagemasta @AdamPage85]

Nidal Malik Hasan bringing people together.

[Jack Shannon @JackAttacks1]

Jezebel, Clytemnestra, Herodias, Lady Macbeth, Margaret Sanger, Lindsay Clancy, and the modern feminist spirit are all the same thing.

Started reading Shakespeare's Macbeth for the first time. Macbeth's wife offers this wicked prayer to evil spirits basically petitioning them to help her convince her husband to kill the king. She does this after discovering a coven of witches has prophesied her husband's ascension to the throne. Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.

"Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood. Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between Th’ effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry “Hold, hold!”"

- Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Act 1: Scene 5

[Ted Cruz @tedcruz]

Can’t wait to watch it.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

lol

[doomer @uncledoomer]

this is disgustingly irresponsible. get that child an ipad and a bag of red 40 treatslop RIGHT NOW

[The Modernist @TheModernist_CA]

Exvangelicals lose their belief in God while retaining everything about evangelicals that make them annoying

[Jack Shannon @JackAttacks1]

@Young_Anglican

[Jack Shannon @JackAttacks1]

@apologistlayman Philip Schaff's The Principle of Protestantism

Douglas Wilson's and Douglas Jones' Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision of Middle Earth

[Jack Shannon @JackAttacks1]

The highest form of public execution which Christ has commanded is for the Church to excommunicate unrepentant Christians. And this isn't merely prohibiting them from the Lord's Table, and continuing to fellowship with them at Thanksgiving, etc. This is their removal from all interaction with Christ's body, sacramental and ecclesial, until they repent. Every member of the body is to avoid them as Article 33 says, "That person which by open denunciation of the Church is rightly cut off from the unity of the Church, and excommunicated, ought to be taken of the whole multitude of the faithful, as an Heathen and Publican, until he be openly reconciled by penance, and received into the Church by a Judge that hath authority thereunto." Most churches no longer do this. Even most so called conservative churches don't excommunicate for things which merited excommunication in the past. We are a Church filled with unrepentant sinners. The failure of her shepherds to publicly execute the unrepentant means the people are not spiritually acclimated to public execution. The Church's ministry of grace is such that when we execute a sinner (via excommunication), they are given an opportunity to resurrect from the dead (via repentance and restoration). Otherwise they are handed over to Satan for the destruction of their flesh so that their spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. I have literally seen multiple people, including family members, die within a year of being excommunicated. Another ultimately gracious act, which isn't acheived if we don't excommunicate. If the Church were practicing this more regularly, there would be less need for capital punishment from the civil magistrate. And when the need arose to physically execute a criminal, the body politic, being familiar with spiritual executions, will find criminal executions fitting and appropriate. But we first need men who are willing to deal in discipline and death rather than gynocentric, therapeutic, coddling.

[Jack Shannon @JackAttacks1]

Keep up the good work, Mr. Hazony. We need more sober, charitable, and intelligent engagement like this.

[Yoram Hazony @yhazony]

A few comments about William Wolfe’s speech at NatCon Jerusalem:

1. William came to Jerusalem because I asked him to come and explain to Israelis why Israel is losing support among young American conservatives. He came in the middle of a war to help Israeli Jews understand this issue better just because we needed his help with this. That’s the act of a friend, and I and many other conference participants are grateful to him for joining us for these discussions.

2. William gave a very good and very appropriate speech that did exactly what it was supposed to do: It accurately reflected what’s going on among young Republicans on the subject of Israel. There is nothing illegitimate in this speech. Every argument William made is worthy of consideration. More than that: It is crucial that Israeli Jews hear and understand these arguments.

3. I know that some of William’s arguments are hard for some Jewish and Christian supporters of Israel to hear. In fact, there was one conference participant who was unable to maintain his composure in the wake of William’s comments and was in the end asked to leave the conference hall. Together with the other organizers, I regret this rare departure from the norms of civil conversation at our conferences. But most of the Israeli conservatives in attendance were able to recognize that the time has come for these arguments to be heard, and they were able to discuss them honestly and openly.

4. I’m proud of the conversations that William and the other American NatCons in attendance were able to help get started in Jerusalem. These are necessary conversations. The US and Israel are not the same countries they were thirty years ago. So the relationship between the US and Israel is changing. It’s not surprising that some are going to have a hard time adjusting to these changes. But we are going to have to adjust.

5. Thanks again to William, as well as to Kevin Roberts, Amanda Milius, Jon Keeperman, Matt Peterson, and the other US participants for making the trip over and engaging in such good spirit with their Israeli counterparts on these subjects.

[Jack Shannon @JackAttacks1]

Yes, this is the only kind of nationalism that will win. And that’s a good thing.

[Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry @pegobry_en]

Listening to Fuentes on NatCon because of course. And he's saying the purpose of NatCon is to dilute nationalism to make it acceptable.

"They (figures like Rubio, De Santis, and Vance) will find ways to synthesize a race-blind view of America and a pro-Israel policy with nationalism. They will say: 'We're in favor of nationalism. We're pro-God, pro-family, close the borders, against immigration--just like Israel does.'"

And it's like...aren't you sawing off the branch you're sitting on?

What it sounds like to me is...with the Zionists, you win.

Like, if the price for getting rid of DEI and shutting down immigration is having race-blind rhetoric and being moderately pro-Israel, 90% of young nationalists will happily make that bargain.

(The remaining 10% will scream bloody murder, but, well, that's what happens when you lose. And you lose because...with the Zionists, you win.)

[Jack Shannon @JackAttacks1]

Amen.

[Jeff Taylor @JeffTaylorLR]

The 1689 reading of 1 Cor 7:14 only survives by evacuating Paul’s vocabulary. Paul does not reach for a civil term. He reaches for ἅγιος — the covenantal word, the Abrahamic word, the Levitical word, the apostolic word. And once Paul’s vocabulary is allowed to mean what it means everywhere else in Scripture, the Baptist reinterpretation collapses under its own weight.

Paul’s architecture is explicit:

• The unbelieving spouse ἡγίασται — sanctified in relation to the believer
• The children are ἅγια — holy
• Otherwise they would be ἀκάθαρτα — unclean

This is not legitimacy language. This is covenant polarity. It is the same holy/unclean axis that governs Genesis 17, Leviticus, Ezra–Nehemiah, Acts 10–11, and Acts 2:39. Paul is not improvising. He is applying the canonical architecture.

ἅγιος never means “legitimate.” Not once. The Baptist reading requires Paul to be the only biblical writer who uses ἅγιος to mean “legitimate,” and only in this one verse. That is hermeneutical isolationism — a system protecting itself from the text.

Paul’s contrast is covenantal: holy vs. unclean.
In Scripture:

• Holy = inside the covenant sphere
• Unclean = outside the covenant sphere
• Unclean children = covenantally excluded
• Holy children = covenantally included

This is why Paul’s logic mirrors Abraham’s:

• The believer is a covenant bearer
• The unbelieving spouse is sanctified in relation to the believer — covenant proximity
• The children are holy — covenant inclusion
• Covenant inclusion → covenant sign
• Covenant proximity → no sign

Genesis 17 is the load‑bearing beam:
The sign is promised to the seed, never to spouses. Covenant proximity does not equal covenant membership. Paul simply applies that architecture to a mixed marriage.

The Baptist reading must flatten Paul’s covenant vocabulary into civil vocabulary because their system cannot accommodate covenantal holiness without covenantal membership — and covenantal membership implies covenantal sign. But Paul’s architecture will not flatten. It is too thick, too canonical, too Abrahamic.

This is why the children are baptized and the unbelieving husband isn’t.
Paul is not arguing for infant baptism. He is assuming the covenant architecture that makes infant baptism intelligible.

Architectural punchline:

Paul uses ἅγιος — the covenantal word — and applies it to children, not spouses.
Holiness belongs to covenant members, and the sign belongs to the seed.

Everything else is commentary.

#1Corinthians714
#CovenantChildren
#FederalHoliness
#AbrahamicArchitecture

[Jack Shannon @JackAttacks1]

It is far more humane to give heinous criminals a set time to repent, get their soul right with the Lord, and speedily execute them, than to let them rot in a prison cell for life on the public tax dollar where their life consists of navigating prison gangs, beatings, and rape.

Public executions are a way of the civil magistrate showing they actually love the people under their care. And are willing to protect them. It also instills fear into criminally minded people, and curtails their willingness to engage in such anti-social behavior.

[Lila Rose @LilaGraceRose]

We have not had a public execution since 1936.

Now is not the time to restart this dehumanizing practice.

Conservatives who are foolishly defending this: how will you feel when the Left holds federal power again?

Remember: Terrorists aspire to martyrdom — he will be another martyr for them.

Repent and stop the bloodlust.

[Jack Shannon @JackAttacks1]

This is complete nonsense. But even if we grant whatever convoluted point Mrs. Rose is trying to make here, we could respond by saying modern America is now the extreme circumstance. Have you seen what's happening in America?

[Lila Rose @LilaGraceRose]

Capital punishment can be just in extreme circumstances if necessary to protect the common good, but not in modern America. The Bible does not mandate capital punishment in America. To argue God demands the death penalty today in America is not biblical.

[Jack Shannon @JackAttacks1]

Gynocentric popery will be our downfall. Less Mrs. Rose. More public executions of murderers where Jesus will be glorified and pleased and sin curtailed in exactly the way He intended civil magistrates to curtail sin. God's interactions with the world as recorded in Scripture are often soaked in blood. Lots of it. And God gave men the authority under the Noahic covenant to execute murderers. It is part of our becoming like God. Mrs. Rose, along with the official teaching of Rome at this point, are simply in rebellion to God. And they need to repent.

[Lila Rose @LilaGraceRose]

Bloodlust will be our downfall.

[Jack Shannon @JackAttacks1]

@Gnosisinformant This is a particularly Romanist and Eastern Orthodox cope. Protestants accept and affirm the data on this without trying to impose a revisionist history. Dr. Gavin Ortlund is great on this issue. @gavinortlund

[Jack Shannon @JackAttacks1]

@B_A_Purtle Amen. Genuine question: I've been wrestling with this - How do you harmonize this with the promises that those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed?