Ecclesiology 101
- When Cardinal Newman was asked at a dinner party why he became a Catholic, he responded that it was not the kind of thing that can be properly explained between soup and the fish course.
- An ecclesial Christian is one who understands with mind and heart, and even feels with his fingertips, that Christ and his Church, head and body, are inseparable. For the ecclesial Christian, the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church are not two acts of faith but one.
- Across the street from the parsonage of St. John’s [Missouri Synod Lutheran Church] was an evangelical Protestant church. Also across the street lived my best friends, the Spooner brothers, who with their devoutly Catholic family attended St. Columkil’s Cathedral. I am sure it was unarticulated but self-evident to me by the time I was five years old that St. John’s and the cathedral had more in common than either had with the evangelical chapel. For one immeasurably momentous thing, our churches baptized babies. Then too, our being saved was something that God did through His Church; it was a given, a gift. It did not depend—as it did for Dougy Cahill, our evangelical friend—upon feelings or spiritual experience. It depended upon grace bestowed through things done.
Trendiness
One thing I’ve never quite understood about our Evangelical friends is why they are so susceptible to trendiness. A reader of this blog with whom I corresponded earlier this year told me that she and her family recently left their Evangelical megachurch to join an Orthodox congregation. A big part of it was that the church fell all over itself trying to accommodate the Next Big Thing in worship trends, and theological trends, to keep growing the church, and to keep people interested so they wouldn’t leave. Discipleship was neglected, and theologically, it became decadent. Though my correspondent is non-white, she became frustrated at how this multicultural megachurch’s leaders began putting race consciousness at the center of that congregation’s life. But then, that’s the contemporary trend.
Mile wide, inch deep
What the Fathers decried as schism is now regarded as normal church growth. So long as the new church does not make a point of denying the Trinity, it remains a part of the una sancta.
Counter-hegemonic thinking
The dominant system today is built on analysis. And it’s worth remembering that the root meaning of analysis is the reduction of things into parts.
Holistic thinking, in contrast, is always inherently Romantic. You can also call this visionary thinking.
Ted Gioia’s Substack is consistently good. Sometimes it’s great, as in 25 Propositions about the New Romanticism, which he made a public post.
This is one of the best things I’ve read in a long while – an unironic analysis of our tendency to analyze everything to death (“we murder to dissect”).
Iain McGilchrist would approve.
(And no, I don’t think this is out of place in a Sunday post. Getting caught up in rationalistic analysis of everything is spiritually stultifying.)
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
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 