I’m situated geographically in a place so sports- and Indy500-obsessed that in my former Church, men would disappear en masse on “Race Day.” Granted, I lived away from here 20-ish years, but it’s still a point of sinful pride that I’ve never been. Not to the race, not to the trials, not to carburation day.
(I apologize for some funky formatting today. After all these years, I still have trouble dealing with numbered or bulleted lists within block quotes.)
Filioque
As a protestant, I had no idea that the filioque (the words “and from the Son” in the Nicean Creed concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit) was added to the Creed hundreds of years later, nor that it was rejected from the beginning by Christians outside the jurisdiction of the Roman Patriarch, nor even (very distinctly at least) that there were catholic Christians outside the jurisdiction of the Roman Patriarch.
Since becoming Orthodox, I have taken it as a matter of high importance to reject the filioque, but I don’t recall previously seeing all of these reasons for the rejection:
Eastern Europe was converted to Christianity by Byzantine missionaries, the most prominent of whom are Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius. These bonds of religion created a deep sympathy between Bulgar to Byzantine. The Franks attempted to sever these bonds by sending missionaries into Eastern Europe, claiming that the Byzantines had taught them a heterodox version of Christianity and encouraging them to use the filioque.
I know Catholics are tired of Orthodox apologists going on about the Franks. But this really is an important test-case, for the following reasons:
1. The threat of Arianism was resolved 300 years before the Schism. So, adding the filioque served no pastoral function. On the contrary, it was deeply divisive. 2. The underlying theology of the filioque was hotly disputed, especially by the Eastern patriarchs. So, adding the filioque did not express the mind of the universal Church. 3. The original Creed had been drafted in Council for a reason: it was supposed to express the *consent* and *concensus* of the orthodox, catholic bishops. So, adding the filioque defeated the whole purpose of the Creed. 4. For about six hundred years, Popes had taught the dangers of inserting the filioque into the Creed. So, adding the filioque violated even Rome’s local customs. 5. The Ecumenical Councils had ruled that the Creed should not be modified. So, adding the filiioque violated the Holy Canons. 6. Rome was advancing the *filioque* for worldly reasons only. So, adding the filioque would have allowed a single bishop to advance his own political and economic interests at the whole Church’s expense.The Eastern Patriarchs had every reason to reject the insertion of the filioque, and no reason to accept it—none except, “The pope said so, and we have to do whatever the pope says.”
Michael Warren Davis, ‘Papal Minimalism’ Is Eastern Orthodoxy
Worship
To anyone who has had, be it only once, the true experience of worship, all this is revealed immediately as the ersatz it is. He knows that the secularist’s worship of relevance is simply incompatible with the true relevance of worship. And it is here, in this miserable liturgical failure, whose appalling results we are only beginning to see, that secularism reveals its ultimate religious emptiness and, I will not hesitate to say, its utterly anti-Christian essence.
Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World
Protestant, Catholic, Non-Denom
As my readers know, I’ve been an Orthodox Christian ever since I began blogging. The more attentive readers may know that before that I was Reformed (i.e., Calvinist, and specifically Christian Reformed) and before that, I was a generic Wheaton-College type evangelical.
Or maybe I should say “a generic Wheaton-College type evangelical as evangelicalism was configured in the 1950s through the mid-1970s.” Because it has come to my attention more forcefully, and in a way that more painfully implicates and pronounces doom on the kinds of Christian I once was, that things are changing. The evangelicalism I knew is not as powerful as it once was; evangelical denominations are shrinking and dying. So are Calvinist denominations. The Protestantism I knew most closely is increasingly nondenominational, and doesn’t care much about doctrine or sacraments, and increasingly doesn’t even want to be called “evangelical” or even “Protestant.”
This affects me closely because my wife remains Christian Reformed, and I consider it a pretty good penultimate tradition for an Orthodox Christian. And there is a very strong trend toward those denominational Churches dying out in favor of non-denoms.
And it worries me because those nondenominational Churches tend far too much to be personality cults and hotbeds of rampant sexual and other clergy abuse. And God only knows what they’re teaching, insofar as they’re teaching anything other than a mooshy-gooshy relationship with Jesus and a firm commitment to the GOP as a way of gaining power.
Yeah, this means I’ve gained some fresh respect even for the progressive Protestant denominations (which are also dying, even faster than the conservatives). At least there’s some accountability to hierarchies less likely than local parishioners to be mesmerized by Mr. Charisma. And some of them retain a liturgy that will expose worshippers to more scripture and doctrine than Joel Osteen can even imagine.
In any event, I say all that to introduce you to four of the thought-provoking articles (presented in the order in which I encountered them) that brought to my attention how much things are changing in my former haunts. A common thread is that denominational Protestantism is in deep, deep trouble; one goes so far as to suggest that nondenominational Churches are not really Protestant, but a whole new tradition:
- Goldilocks Protestantism – First Things
- LONG FORM: Does Traditional Protestantism Have a Future?
- How ‘Christian’ Overtook the ‘Protestant’ Label – Christianity Today
- Low Church in High Places: The Fate and Future of American Protestantism – Public Discourse
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
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead
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 