Our inescapable reality
Nor does this allow for any kind of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox triumphalism, whereby the historical continuity and unity of the institutions can be presented as an antidote to Protestant fragmentation. To be a Roman Catholic today is to make a choice. Thoughtful Roman Catholics may object to this claim by pointing to the sacramental power that they ascribe to baptism. But that does not really address the matter of lived experience: every faithful cradle Catholic has still made a decision to live his or her Christian life as a Catholic amid a world of other possible options, from atheism to Islam to Bible churches and Pentecostalism. When it comes to how we think of ourselves, we are all expressive individualists now, and there is no way we can escape from this fact. It is the essence of the world in which we have to live and of which we are a part.
Carl Trueman and Rod Dreher, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
Provincial
A giant in the Evangelical world, John M. Perkins, has died at age 95. I clipped two obituaries for later reading. When I got around to reading the first, I was struck by the provincialism of an indictment Perkins handed down in 1987:
I think that makes a difference between whether or not that church is an action church or whether it’s just become a self-centered worshipping congregation. And I think most churches are sort of self-centered worshipping. They see the church as ‘meeting my need, meeting my need,’ and the church doesn’t have a ministry, and a concept of ministry, and a philosophy of ministry, and a statement of mission to the world.
(Italics added.)
Perkins was an evangelical, and one mark of evangelicalism is activism (to the neglect of so much else, in my opinion). His indictment is of evangelicals, and for not living up to an intentional and full-orbed activism — not living up well to his vision of how things should be.
Self-centered worshipping congregation is an oxymoron (hypothetical self-worship aside). To worship is to ascribe high worth to another. So this indictment starts off wrong-footed.
The he shifts voice, from talking about a congregation to the demand of each individual member — “meeting my need, meeting my need.” And there is where he, and much of evangelicalism, miss the boat.
They really have made Church about “meeting my felt need” in an effort geared more toward growth than toward making disciples.
Frederica Matthewes-Greene wrote of inviting a friend to her Orthodox Church. At the end of the Liturgy, her friend exclaimed “Wow! That was soooo not about me!” And I’d say Church in the 21st Century can be perceived as “meeting my need” by the masses only if it’s pandering to something other than real human needs, the foremost of which is to move from the image of God to the image and likeness of God, to grow God-ward.
Unfortunately, that’s not on evangelical radar.
Overlearned
Freddie DeBoer had a post this week on “overlearning,” which he descibed as:
the error … that learns too much, that overfits the curve, that extrapolates irresponsibly, that takes a genuinely correct observation and rides it so far past its destination that it ends up somewhere just as wrong as pure ignorance, only with more confidence.
He gives many examples, such as extrapolating a dismissal of all social science research because much of it fails replication.
Without looking for them, I found a few artifacts of overlearning in Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind:
The wood and stone from which idols are made do not deserve to be worshiped; because God made them, however, they deserve to be studied as wood or stone.
And:
I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance. (Irish poet Evangeline Paterson)
A book note
A few years ago, I tried to read The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, but I quit because it felt voyeuristic for me, an Orthodox convert from Evangelical and Evangelical-adjacent Christianity, to read it. But my interest shifted from finding fodder for schadenfreude to figuring out how it came to pass that something went scandalously wrong with one of America’s most visible and vocal Christian traditions. So I read it afresh, finishing this past week.
As the author, Mark Noll, wound down, he had this summary:
The scandal of the evangelical mind seems to be that no mind arises from evangelicalism. Evangelicals who believe that God desires to be worshiped with thought as well as activity may well remain evangelicals, but they will find intellectual depth — a way of praising God through the mind — in ideas developed by confessional or mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, or perhaps even the Eastern Orthodox. That conclusion may be the only responsible one to reach after considering the history sketched in this book. Even if it leaves evangelical intellectuals trapped in personal dissonance and the evangelical tradition doomed to intellectual superficiality (or worse), the recent past seems to point in no other direction.
A fair clarification of that paragraph, in context, is that there seems to be no mind that arises from what is distinctly evangelical about evangelical Christianity: conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism (in a classic and widely-accepted taxonomy), to which Noll crucially adds intuitionism, a dogmatic reverence for “common sense.” It is particularly intuitionism that must be set aside for an evangelical even to have the patience to engage in the sustained, intense study of a subject that characterizes a life of the mind.
So evangelicals can live the life of the mind by adopting what I’d call “methodological mere Christianity,” much as, I’ve come to suspect from outside the sciences, a scientist who hopes to contribute to specifically scientific knowledge, will need to adopt methodological naturalism even if his personal convictions are not naturalist.
That’s not a conclusion I anticipated when I decided return to Noll’s book and finish it, and it leaves me with the kinds of personal questions that make the reading worthwhile.
An unexpected answer to fervent prayer
I pray fervently that Mr. Dreher will return to the Catholic Church—not only for his sake, but for ours. I’m afraid the Benedict Option project will remain incomplete until Mr. Dreher commits to restoring the Holy Catholic Church as the central pillar of Western Christianity.
Michael Warren Davis, September 25, 2020.
Within four years of this plea, Michael Warren Davis left the Catholic Church and entered the Orthodox Church. He currently writes a Substack.
A Contrast
Shortly before he died in 1860, George Croly penned the prayer “Spirit of God, Descend upon My Heart.” In its second stanza Croly described what he felt would happen if he were to experience a deeper walk with the Spirit:
I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
No sudden rending of the veil of clay,
No angel visitant, no opening skies;
But take the dimness of my soul away.For Croly, to know God better would make our vision of the world clearer. In 1922, Helen H. Lemmel wrote the words and music to a gospel song that is as moving as it is characteristic of the fundamentalist-Holiness outlook:
Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace.While the essentially Christian motivation of this song is clear, its ironic meaning can be understood better now than when it was written — under the influence of fundamentalism, evangelicals turned their eyes to Jesus, and the world grew very dim indeed.
Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
The “science” of theology
“The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches…. The duty of the Christian theologian is to ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to Him. These facts are all in the Bible.” On the basis of these assertions, [Charles] Hodge then went on to suggest that “the Theologian [is] to be guided by the same rules as the Man of Science.”
Mark A. Noll, America’s God. I am dumbstruck by the arrogance of this, and humbled at the thought that 30 years ago I probably would have applauded it.
It is very difficult to make our contemporaries see that there are things which by their very nature cannot be discussed.
René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World.
Satan at work
The accusation that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city are abducting and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs relies not on one falsehood but on a web of them. The rhetoric evokes racist tropes about “savages” who do not conform to our civilized Western world. There’s also a religious angle: the idea that Haitian refugees are voodoo occultists who might be worshipping the devil. As an evangelical Christian who actually believes in the existence of Satan, I agree that we can indeed see the work of the devil at play here, only it’s not on the menu of the Haitian families but rather in the cruelty of those willing to lie about them.
…
To sing praise songs in a church service while trafficking in the bearing of false witness against people who fled for their life, who seek to rebuild a life for their children after crushing poverty and persecution, is more than just cognitive dissonance. It’s modeling the devil himself, whom Jesus called “the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). That’s especially true when the lies harm another person. “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer,” the apostle John wrote, “and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 Jn 3:15).
Russell Moore, Trump’s Lie Is Another Test for Christian America.
I have a beef with Moore: if memory serves, this was JD Vance’s lie before Trump picked it up with delight and ran with it.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 