Personal Status Report
I’ve recently been challenged to think again through how the raw reality of divided Christianity should cash out in my life. I don’t think I’ve been getting that right, and I’m working on it (without for one second doubting the claims of Orthodox Christianity).
For one thing, viewed from the 30,000-foot level, my convictions combined with a propensity for polemics, may have led me to sin against Christian charity. I’ll leave it enigmatically there for now.
As I work through this, the tone of my posts may change.
Crypto-casuistry
Ken Myers: … Until the middle of the 20th century, Catholic moral theology and pastoral guidance were dominated by a series of moral manuals, which approached ethical decisions casuistically, lists of rules and authoritative citations. One of the mid-twentieth century critics of these manuals, a French Jesuit, judged that they were “far too negative and concerned chiefly with minimal obligations. Virtues were passed over in favor of commandments and law.” When I talk with Matthew Levering about his book. I asked whether he agreed with the judgment that the approach of these manuals was too minimalistic.
Matthew Levering: In terms of today’s morality, you wouldn’t call the moral manuals minimalist, but what you would do though is you would say they sort of encourage a minimalist perspective because because the idea was to exercise your… freedom up to the very limit of what was permissible and then allow law to have its place. So in other words, you could be constantly trying to figure out, you know, what’s the limit that I can get away with? Yeah. You know, that kind of thing. Like, what can I get away with while still acting as a Christian? And so you would be then always going up to the line and testing the line and trying to find different authorities that would give you permission to exceed the line. The moral life then becomes not this glorious thing of being in Christ and of charity and sort of this expansive sense of charity and then all the other virtues. But instead what happens is the more life becomes about trying to identify the minimum and trying to make sure you’re not crossing the line You know, but still getting it’s having as much freedom as you you can possibly get without crossing the line You know these type of these type of things you can see how in practice it led to a certain minimalism.
Matthew Levering on the role of conscience in moral life, Mars Hill Audio Journal volume 158, track 7.
My Evangelical boarding school experience was casuistic in this sense, including bright lines to be pushed against and neglect of positive virtues. The term we used was “legalism,” but it was not easy to entirely escape that mind-set. It left its mark on me. I particularly wish there had been an emphasis on chastity and not just on abstention from sex, which is a pale imitation of chastity.
Calvinball Christianity
I don’t join the local basketball league hoping to convert it to pickleball. That’s what pickleball leagues are for. Although at least switching from one sport to another would be intelligible. More often, the [biblicist] objection to [catholic] Christianity’s immutability assumes the only good sports league would be one that changed constantly, randomly, and according to no rhyme or reason. Such an objection does not actually like sports. Or rather, it likes one sport only: Calvinball. And every league should be Calvinball or be shut down.
Brad East, The great Christian divide
Community
… a concrete human community-not merely a de facto “society” of autonomous individuals who kept their private views to themselves and lived as they pleased within the state’s laws-was not only the social product but also the social producer of embodied Christian faith. It always had been. Without it, beyond the micro-social context of one’s family, it is unclear how one might learn to live as a Christian, as opposed simply to learning what to believe and how one should spend an hour or two each Sunday.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation
To restore and preserve the faith in robust form, there must be community. I think even the biblicists understand this in practice, if not in theory.
Televangelists
Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation, which they never learned from me. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end.
John Ames, the protagonist pastor/narrator in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.
Losing savor
Liberal Christians no longer need theology to make their case. They can couch their argument entirely in terms of secular political rights … In fact, arguments based on rights were probably more convincing than theological arguments even to them. The mainline remains as committed as ever to the social causes of our day—to gay rights, immigration reform, and a stronger social safety net. They still decry racism and economic exploitation, too. They’ve hardly remained silent, but there’s a reason you can’t hear them anymore. They sound just like everybody else.
…
I suspect the twin movements of anti-intellectualism and anti-populism in the United States cannot adequately be told without reflecting on the split of mainline Protestantism into, on the one hand, de-institutionalized fundamentalist and evangelical movements and, on the other, a culturally elite yet increasingly faithless institutionalism.
…
Evangelicalism is a populist movement in that it was founded on patterns of mass consumption; it’s a movement within which a person like Joel Osteen thrives, yet a publication like Books & Culture perishes.
Great art, culture, and learning has generally depended on the support of elite patrons and institutions, not least the church and the state (perhaps especially monarchies). In mass, populist, or highly democratic movements, such excellence receives much less support. The existence of a thriving “high culture” or academic elite requires non-democratic structures that are harder to develop in a mass society. Where mass culture prevails, there’s often a pressure to cater to less cultivated tastes or, alternatively, to rebel against them in dysfunctional ways that signal an elite status.
…
All this is one of the underlying reasons, seldom mentioned, why so many formerly conservative Protestant scholars and writers have gone in the direction of Rome. Conservative Protestantism has an impoverished elite, an unimpressive scholarly culture, and is poorly networked. With the rank apostasy of mainline Protestantism and the exodus of conservatives from such institutions, conservative Christian thinkers feel as though they have no intellectual home. What’s more, they operate in a culture that is more populist in orientation, which can stifle excellence rather than empower it.
Evangelicalism doesn’t produce intellectual and cultural elites like Rome and the mainline traditionally have. Nor do we have strong academic and higher cultural networks. Granting this, it’s no surprise Rome attracts some conservative scholars and writers who wish to make an difference.
Paul Gleason, quoted by Alastair Roberts
Remarriage in Orthodoxy
Q: I’ve heard that the Orthodox Church permits remarriage. Isn’t this a departure from the Lord’s teaching in scripture?
We should start by countering a common misconception that remarriage is allowed. It would be logical to ask the same question with a small variation: Why does the Orthodox Church allow robbery, rape, or murder? Each of these sins, with repentance and a period of separation from the sacraments, can be forgiven and the person restored to full Communion. That does not imply that the Church winks at these sins; rather it acknowledges that a person who makes harmful choices is not a lost cause; he is capable of restoration, and our goal is his repentance and healing, not his exclusion in order to maintain our imagined purity ….
The human voice: That we can sing seems basis for conjecture that, despite our stupidities and our sinfulness, we might be the reason the universe exists.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 