Virtue by excision
After recounting two anecdotes, Alan Jacobs asks:
What do [these actors in these two anecdotes] have in common? The belief that one can achieve virtue through omission and excision. This is the belief shared by all forms of purity culture — and purity culture always leads to katharsis culture, that is, the practice of cleansing yourself, restoring your purity, by casting out the unclean thing.
But what if that’s not how virtue works? What if after having cast out every unclean thing you can find you just end up in the foul rag and bone shop of your own heart? What then?
That’s why these periods of desperate and manic katharsis always burn themselves out — why Robespierre ends by executing the executioner. And when they’ve done all they can do, they are succeeded by a bacchanal, an era of pseudo-festive delight in transgression. Our culture oscillates between “cast out the unclean thing” and “let us sin the more that grace may abound” — that is, between legalism and antinomianism, the very pairing that St. Paul in his letters is always trying to subvert.
Paul is the greatest of psychologists: he knows that human beings perfectly well understand legalism, which they rename “justice,” and perfectly well understand antinomianism, which they rename “freedom.” What we can’t understand is the grace of God.
Alan Jacobs, The Next Turn of the Wheel
Alan is an Anglican, teaching at a baptist university (Baylor), but he’s awfully sharp. You could do worse than reading a few of his books.
Mutual incomprehension
It is easier for Protestants and Catholics to understand each other, even if they fundamentally disagree on their conclusions, than for Orthodox and Catholics to understand each other, even though they share many similar outward characteristics—liturgy, priesthood, hierarchy, sacraments, and so forth.
Not only the content but the approach to theology differs. The Orthodox Church has almost no “official” teachings or statements, and it purposely avoids making them. So how do we explain ourselves to Western Christians, who are accustomed to exact definitions and official statements?
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Wesley was an odd bird
Wesley found inspiration in the writings of Makarios of Egypt, whose early practice of monasticism was directed toward the experience of deification. This set Wesley apart from earlier Protestant fathers, who inherited a forensic understanding of salvation from their Roman Catholic predecessors.
John Strickland, The Age of Utopia
That’s not how I used to understand Methodism; rather, it was shoved in the “yes, one can lose one’s salvation” pigeonhole (versus the “once saved, always saved” Calvinist pigeonhole; I was a Calvinist). Although Dr. Constantinou in the preceding item is correct, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Orthodox Christianity rejects the “forensic understanding of salvation,” and finds its origins in Western Christendom after Rome went into schism from the Christian East.
Tocqueville on American popular piety
The notebooks de Tocqueville kept during his travels contain decidedly pessimistic observations about the quality of popular piety. As a Roman Catholic with Jansenist tendencies, he looked aghast at untamed evangelicalism.
John Strickland, The Age of Utopia
Two confessions
(1) I have been insufficiently appreciative of the benefits of living in the place that used to be Christendom, partly because I’m so aware of where Western Christianity has gone wrong in so many ways.
My denseness has come to my attention as people are becoming Christians (or at least turning favorable towards Christianity) because of its social benefits (see Holland, Tom, Dominion).
(2) I also have insufficiently appreciated how mere cultural Christians, who can’t recite the Creed without lying, nevertheless contribute to a better civilization for all of us. They may be living on the whiff of (as they imagine) an empty bottle, but for the sake of all the rest of us, they could do much worse.
Cringemaxxing
There is no way in the world to make going to church cool, and the most cringe thing of all is trying. Here’s the thing though: data consistently show that the happiest people – those who feel that their lives are most filled with purpose and fulfilment – are not necessarily those with kids – it’s those who go to church. Those, in other words, who are not just to be indifferent to cool, but actively anti-cool. The first step to a happy and fulfilled life, it appears, is cringemaxxing.
There are, no doubt, a great many reasons for this. But I am convinced that whatever your relationship to religious worship, a central reason why religious attendance is associated with happiness is that in order to make that commitment you need already to have abandoned the pursuit of cool.
Mary Harrington, You Need to be Cringemaxxing
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 