The Calvary Option
Alan Jacobs posted this recently. It still haunts me.
In a similar vein, Carl Trueman (How Pop Nietzscheanism Masquerades as Christianity):
[W]hen Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option was the talk of the town …, the big threat to the faith was the emerging pressure on religious freedom, focused then on the issue of gay marriage. The threat to religious liberty remains and has indeed expanded, but a new one has also emerged: the temptation to combat this by fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same. For want of a better term, it’s a kind of pop Nietzscheanism that uses the idioms of Christianity.
…
For those of us who grew up in Europe in the latter half of the twentieth century, confessional orthodox Protestantism has always been culturally marginal and despised. Ours was always the negative world, albeit perhaps less intensely so than now. For American evangelicals, this is a new experience, one that is disorienting and infuriating. That is why it is important to remember that the message of the Christian gospel has always stood in antithesis to the thinking of the surrounding world, even when the churches and that world had a broadly shared moral imagination. …
… “Prophetic” does not mean “triggering the libs.” It means calling anyone and everyone to faith and repentance, no matter the social and political exigencies of the day.
… Of course, none of this quite compares to engaging in an apocalyptic culture war or crushing one’s opponents or seizing worldly power by worldly means. So weak is it that it’s not even as glamorous as fantasizing about such things online. But that’s the problem with Christianity. It is routine. It is by turns foolish and offensive to those who look on from outside. Its weapons look ridiculously weak to the watching world. …
This is, of course, despicable. It is the work of slave morality, as Nietzsche would say. Indeed, one can hear the criticisms now: If the Calvary Option means that all the Church does is faithfully point people to Christ in word and sacrament, the world is going to crucify us. Quite so. That’s why it’s called “the Calvary Option.”
Code-switching
What is required of serious religious believers in a pluralistic society is the ability to code-switch: never to forget or neglect their own native religious tongue, but also never to forget that they live in a society of people for whom that language is gibberish. To speak only in the language of pragmatism is to bring nothing distinctive to the table; to speak only a private language of revelation and self-proclaimed authority is to leave the table altogether. For their own good, but also for the common good, religious believers need to be always bilingually present.
Alan Jacobs
Original sin
In [Orthodox Christian] perspective, however, the “original” sin is not primarily that man has “disobeyed” God; the sin is that he ceased to be hungry for Him and for Him alone, ceased to see his whole life depending on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God. The sin was not that man neglected his religious duties. The sin was that he thought of God in terms of religion, i.e., opposing Him to life. The only real fall of man is his non-eucharistic life in a noneucharistic world. The fall is not that he preferred world to God, distorted the balance between the spiritual and material, but that he made the world material, whereas he was to have transformed it into “life in God,” filled with meaning and spirit.
Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World
The Filioque Ramifies
The Cappadocians, followed by later Orthodox theologians, answer that there is one God because there is one Father. The other two persons trace their origin to the Father and are defined in terms of their relation to Him. As the sole source of being within the Trinity, the Father constitutes in this way the principle or ground of unity for the Godhead as a whole. But the west, in regarding not only the Father but also the Son as the source of the Spirit, finds its principle of unity, no longer in the person of the Father, but in the essence which the three persons share. And in this way, so many Orthodox feel, the persons are overshadowed in Latin theology by the common essence or substance. This, according to the stricter group within Orthodoxy, has the effect of depersonalizing the Latin doctrine of the deity. God is conceived, not so much in concrete and personal terms but as an essence in which various relations are distinguished.
Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church.
The filioque was itself a big bone of contention between Rome and the Eastern Patriarchs. But its ramifications, elaborated and internalized over a millennium, are major causes for skepticism about the prospects for healing the Great Schism.
Think of it this way: if Ware is right, the Orthodox Church worships Father, Son and Holy Spirit (about that, he’s definitely right) whereas the Western Churches, relatively speaking, worship Godiness.
Having come to Orthodoxy from a Western Church, that, too, seems right — witness my former Protestant horror at referring the Christ’s Mother as “Mother of God,” which in my dimmed eyes meant that Godiness originated in her.
The genius of the authors of the United States constitution was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical Protestantism that was the prime religious inheritance of their fledgling nation.
Tom Holland, Dominion
… 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)
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 