Western Civ
The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov expressed the non sequitur at the heart of Western civilization with a deliciously sarcastic aphorism: “Man descended from apes, therefore we must love one another.”
Andrew Wilson, Remaking The World
Irony
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 don’t know where it will end.
Rev. John Ames via @dswanson and @KyleEssary on micro.blog.
I follow @dswanson and @KyleEssary on micro.blog. They seem like very nice guys and pretty well-educated and sensible (I wouldn’t follow them otherwise; if I want outrage, I can visit my disused X account or rejoin Facebook).
But I gotta say (the preface to many a gratuitous and unnecessary comment) that Orthodox Christianity often has a similar gripe against Protestantism, and its incorrigible devotion to novel doctrines that kept it from returning to Orthodox Christianity as it failed to reform schismatic Latin Christianity.
Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant
In my experience, really committed Protestants tend to think of themselves as “saved” because they have accepted Jesus; Roman Catholics, on the other hand, see themselves as “sinners” in need of weekly absolution. Orthodox just think themselves lucky.
Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul
Inquisition
In 1184, bishops who previously might have been content to let sleeping heretics lie had been instructed actively to sniff them out. Then, in 1215, at the great Lateran Council presided over by Innocent III, sanctions explicitly targeting heresy had provided the Church with an entire machinery of persecution.
Tom Holland, Dominion
Ethics
[T]he recent (as in, since the nineteenth century) evangelical Protestant practice of building ethics on proof texts is remarkably limited in our day and age. Proof texts work when the moral intuitions of the culture track with the broad shape of biblical teaching. That is no longer the case. Further, advances in technology now raise all kinds of questions about what it even means to be human—which in turn raises questions not only about fertility, but about other issues, from end-of-life care to the use of AI. The broader biblical account of human nature, not isolated proof texts, must now factor into Christian discussions of the most pressing ethical issues that we face.
Carl R. Trueman, We Need Good Protestant Ethicists
Identitarianism is anti-Christian
Fr. Andrew: The human identity, as we were made to be, is something that is always in the future. Because we, being finite, will never arrive at being God.
Fr. Stephen: Right, our identity is always in the future, my existence is what I am today … There’s this gap, there’s this lack between me and it … even when we’re in the life of the world to come, we are not going to be in a static state.
Fr. Andrew: Right, which also implies that if our progress is always this point in the future—future for us—which is the fullness of the stature of Christ, to use St. Paul’s language, then that means that this modern thing that we see now, identitarianism, where people take these labels and apply them to themselves and that becomes the end-all … of how they conceive of themselves, looking for their identity either in something in the past or something at this moment … [i]t’s really an anti-Christian philosophy, and it’s really kind of an unhopeful philosophy, because it means I’ve arrived, I am this thing, and this is what I am and who I am, period. The becoming is not on the plate, on the table. It’s a distortion, really.
Fr. Stephen: Right, and one way, one devastatingly destructive way in which we are faithful to something other than Christ is when we’re faithful to some version of ourselves. We have this idea that we’re not allowed to break character, that whoever I was yesterday I have to be someone consistent with that today, even if who I was yesterday was wretched and miserable.
Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “This is just who I am!” No, you can be better!
Fr. Stephen: Right, “I can’t make a break…” And this is something I say to people over and over and over again in confession, is that the devil doesn’t spend his time trying to get us to sin; we do that on our own. The devil spends his time, when we fall, telling us not to get up, telling us that this is where we belong, this is who we are, don’t bother trying to do better, to be better, to make any progress …
Fr. Andrew: I can’t remember—didn’t one of the saints say something to the effect of the demons always whisper two lies? One is: “You’re doing great!” And the other is: “There’s no hope for you!” And, I mean, those are the roots of… I don’t know, I’ve heard confessions for well over a decade and a half now; I’m pretty sure those are the roots of basically most sins.
Fall of Man Part 1: Garments of Skin | Ancient Faith Ministries
The Gospels are not a software license
The four Gospels are not a software user license — do not skip to the end and click “I agree.”
Read them. Realize the implications. Count the cost. Commit to live this life under the laws of this Kingdom, and set your feet on the road of repentance.
If more people wrestled with the difficult commands and expectations of Christ, then there might be fewer people called Christians — but they would be more ready for life in Christ.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 