Category: Christendom

Saturday 8/8/26

Legalia

Ten Commandments at the Statehouse?

About 25 years ago, a court order barred the monument from the Indiana Statehouse. After a shift in case law, a federal judge agreed to reopen the case in late May, setting off a renewed legal fight over whether the Ten Commandments can be returned to the Capitol’s grounds.

Gov. Mike Braun and Attorney General Todd Rokita, both Republicans, want the monument restored. They argue it reflects the nation’s history and traditions.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana opposes the move, saying it would violate the First Amendment’s religious freedom clause.

Now, the monument’s fate depends on the federal court system’s appetite to specify what it means to maintain a separation of church and state under modern precedent.

Cate Charron, Indianapolis Star USA TODAY NETWORK (likely paywall)

I’m oddly neutral on the display, though I would have opposed it a few decades ago. That’s what I feel. What follows is “let’s write about it to see what we think.”

I’ve never wanted to thrust Christianity of any sort, strong or debased, into the public square with government’s imprimatur. I’ve moved from opposition to neutrality, then, because I’ve lost even the muscle memory of the Ten Commandments being a key part of Christianity rightly practiced. Underlying that, I think, is that I’m a Realist on the Ten Commandments rather than a Nominalist; the “second tablet” in particular is written on the heart, at least while the heart remains tender. Its value does not so lie in God’s sheer command that God could have as well commanded, rather than forbidden, things like murder, theft and adultery.

So I don’t see the monument as a distinctly Christian or even Judeo-Christian thing, but as an instantiation of American history and traditions, and the Ten Commandments inscribed on the monument as part of what C.S. Lewis called the Tao.

Why not support it then? Because we are, as Ross Douthat said, a nation of heretics, and the Commendments are still, as a matter of American folk-religion at least, “Christian.” My reflexive (but earned) suspicion Todd Rokita (a less blatant version of Texas’ Ken Paxton) led me circuitously to realize that the people he’s pandering to will chortle at this monument as fresh proof that we’re a “Christian nation,” because in their muscle memories the Ten Commandments are distinctively a part of Christianity rightly practiced. We’ve already got quite enough of that kind of high-sulfur Christian Nationalist coal in Newcastle.

It has happened

It was inevitable that DOJ lawyers mandated from the White House to do dumb, dishonest and disreputable things would cease getting any benefit of the doubt (in this context, “presumption of regularity”) from judges, and that inevitability has arrived. Federal Judges now challenge and even mock government lawyers’ representations to the court.

My main consolation is that there ought to be a bunch of idealistic lawyers ready to join up at the DOJ and District Attorney offices as soon as the leadership from the top is no longer trying to corrupt even the legal system. The corruption of DOJ is not a legacy that will last, I believe, hope and pray.

Now our President probably thinks that he’s just doing openly what all his predecessors have done surreptitiously, and that the courts are just picking on him. But that’s what happens when you’re 80 years old and have been pursuing personal gain and sexual conquest and limelight and power all your life: you think everyone else is just like you (only infinitely weaker).

Heck, Frodo’s one advantage over the consummately evil Sauron was that Sauron could not imagine anyone who possessed the One Ring actually seeking to destroy it and its power.

Short Circuits

I get a Friday summary of U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decisions from the Institute for Justice. Their pithy summaries can be pretty funny:

  • When you order food through apps like DoorDash, Grubhub, or Uber Eats, the app gets all sorts of useful consumer data, but the restaurant preparing the food only gets your first name, last initial, and the order contents. New York City thinks that’s unfair because of course they do, so they require the apps to share all the customer information with any restaurant that asks. The apps sue, alleging the law violates the First Amendment. Second Circuit: Correct. Concurrence: I just want to point out that the law is naked economic favoritism toward restaurants, which isn’t a substantial gov’t interest.
  • The Supreme Court has famously (and somewhat dubiously) held that the design on state-issued vanity license plates is “government speech” to which the First Amendment does not apply. But what about the character combination on vanity plates like, say, “FTP&ATF”? Fourth Circuit: Private speech to which the First Amendment applies.

Iran War

Both of the following items are via Rod Dreher. My doubts about Rod’s judgment are at an all-time high (though that may “just be me”), but he publishes so very, very much that he’s bound to get a few things right (or to quote people who get it right).

It has been a while since I filed a clipping under “New World Order,” but that’s where this one fits. We’re no longer undisputed, omnipotent top dog.

At the strategic level, it’s over and we lost

Five months into this conflict, a sober analysis reveals a truth that Washington’s foreign policy establishment refuses to stomach: America’s war against Iran has already been lost at the strategic level. Nothing we do from this point forward can reverse that outcome. All we can do now is limit the damage — or refuse to acknowledge reality and make the cost of failure worse. The roots of our strategic failure lie in a fundamental miscalculation of Iranian leverage.

Daniel L. Davis in Stars & Stripes of all places.

How our loss combines with our past wins to demean us

We are in a pickle. And because we did gain so much strength and we punished so many people in the world, and we destroyed so many civilizations in the world—I mean that—we’re now hated as much as we are looked at as being crazy. And I don’t know how you compensate for that while you try to fix enough so that at least you can go out with a fairly decent—maybe something like England went out after the ’56 Suez crisis. Not a really good example, but nonetheless it’s the end of empire. England had started—Britain had started—going down long before that. But I don’t know. I don’t know how you put this in geopolitical terms, in geostrategic terms, in inexorable power-shift terms, and deal with it with what we have in Washington right now. I don’t know how you can take it apart. He should have been impeached. He should have been relieved of his duties. He should have been frog-marched out of Washington. Indeed, he probably should be in jail, but he’s not. Which, on a lower scale, demonstrates the inadequacy of our structure right now and the feebleness of our structure, as well as its having atrophied over the 250 years it’s been in place.

Excerpt from a recent interview with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (italics added)

Miscellany

“Cultural appropriation” is a dumb name for acknowledging indebtedness

I can choose someone from another century or continent as my creative ancestor. I can imagine myself as an heir to Dante or Miles Davis or Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf or Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Some people will tell you that this is cultural appropriation. But I don’t think they grasp how indebted we all are to the great creators of the past. If we tried to cut ourselves off from them, we would lose all vitality and purpose in our lives. This is the most fruitful way of owning a work of art. All other ways fall far short of it.

Ted Gioia in Image Journal.

Why now this “socialist” surge

Socialism’s most enthusiastic promoters are quick and clever—comparatively well-educated, very online. Their talent lies primarily in media, having been immersed in it from birth—the internet, its apps, its entertainment and information flow. They know all about how people get and absorb a feeling, an impression; they know how to produce a sensation, as opposed to a thought. One of the great tricks in life is to have a talent suited to your times, and they do.

I am sorry to say they never strike me with their warmth, as, say, your great-uncle Billy was warm when he spoke about the Industrial Workers of the World. Today’s socialists strike me as colder, less human, fiercer and occasionally sociopathic. In general, they appear to have an idea of history rather than attachments to existing people and institutions. Most strike me not as people who love America and wish to make it better, but people ready to exploit its freedoms to build a movement that if successful would transform America’s fundamental nature. It will no longer be the freedom place but something else, and more common.

This isn’t happening in our politics only because people “hate the status quo” and “want change.” Americans always hate the status quo and want change. I believe what we’re seeing traces back to these factors:

A voter who is 25 was in grade school during the 2008 economic crash, and saw everything—frightened parents, lost jobs. In the years after, he saw bailouts and no one on Wall Street paying a price. It lessened his allegiance to the free-market economic system.

A voter who is 25 also sees AI rising, and wonders if the economy as it exists today has a place for him. Will he be able to afford a house someday? Widespread home ownership brings a feeling of investment, of stability and satisfaction. What does its absence bring?

The Cold War has receded as a living memory. The enforced communism and socialism of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was a disaster—shortages, drabness, economic lifelessness. Censorship, secret police, all the bad things big unaccountable governments bring. That was long ago. “Socialism” now is a dream of Scandinavia—national healthcare, generous benefits, equal enjoyment of resources.

As religion recedes, politics takes its place. The young have been educated within a general framework of assumptions and language of the left—structures of power, oppressor groups, critical theory, intersectionality.

…

At a Gaullist campaign rally in 1968, [André] Malraux put his finger on a weakness of conservative economic thought. “ ‘Capitalism’ does not carry us in its heart,” he said. By inference, it’s also hard to carry capitalism in your heart. It isn’t a great belief, only an economic system. Socialism is a belief, and it summons feeling. Capitalism is a thing of reason, a disadvantage in an age of sensation.

Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan is a voice who generally sees humanity where others see demons. This was one of those times.

Sacrilege

I also began to understand why the American culture wars involved so many battles over sacrilege. Is a flag just a piece of cloth, which can be burned as a form of protest? Or does each flag contain within it something nonmaterial such that when protesters burn it, they have done something bad (even if nobody were to see them do it)? When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums? Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, “If you don’t want to see it, don’t go to the museum”? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded?

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.

The book has been around for a while. Do our culture wars still fit this pattern — taking offense that the other side is profaning something sacred?

What are the sacred cows of (in broad strokes) American progressives versus American conservatives these days?

Willful ignorance

It was the easiest, silliest con of all time. His story began to unravel with simple plagiarism claims, which I didn’t care about last week because all sociology professors just copy-paste their fake studies, back and forth. For me, it doesn’t matter if “A history of the London fashion scene through a transracial lens, 1914–1916” was plagiarized because it actually doesn’t matter at all. But this week things escalated: First, it looks like Arday truly just invented his research, and quite clumsily (read this from a University of Toronto professor digging through it, or this from the UK Times). Then it snowballed. People started looking into his super believable bio: He says he has autism and didn’t speak until he was 11, then at 18 he learned to read and write and went to university. Seems odd. Kind of miraculous. The claims go on. He says he did volunteer work overseas for a particular water charity (the charity says it never sends volunteers abroad). He says he ran 600 miles between Edinburgh and London in six days. Oh! Also that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, adding that he did the last nine marathons on a broken leg. Right. Prior to his Cambridge appointment, he claimed he was a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, and an honorary professor at Durham University. All of these institutions have denied that he held such positions. The man is freestyling extracurriculars. The list goes on. Was he even a mute? How much of this is a lie? And how come I had never heard of Arday, who is apparently one of the most accomplished athletes of all time?

When people started to question all this, the defenses were robust, with a group of famous professors, politicians, and other luminaries writing indignantly: “We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Arday. We call on universities not only to defend academic freedom and robust scholarship, but also to confront racism wherever it manifests itself, whether overtly or through persistent attempts to discredit exceptional Black academics.” I’m not sure you want to stake all of black academics on Jason Arday and these broken-leg marathons.

Nellie Bowles

I didn’t want to pay any more attention to this story (on which I hadn’t blogged before), but the stupidity of Arday’s defenders breathed fresh life into it.

Valedictory

[W]atching this crisis unfold, I find that I’ve lost my sense of which contemporary worldview is most in need of criticism or opposition, where the good guys and bad guys are. Each major faction seems potentially dangerous, tempted toward the dark side in some unique way, contested or cross-pressured to a degree that makes me uncertain where the side of the angels really lies.

…

Once I would have imagined a valedictory essay offering some stirring brief for religious conservatism, some last foray into the territory where I was most likely to be in disagreement with my readers. But I don’t think that quite fits the moment.

Instead, I’ll express — along with incalculable gratitude to The Times itself, my colleagues and editors — a hope that I have contributed illumination. I hope my writing has added something to your understanding of America’s complexity, the world’s uncertain future and the strangeness of our times.

Ross Douthat‘s final column for the Grey Lady.

Artificial Intelligence

A conundrum

AI hasn’t made any money yet. And I’ve been hearing, repeatedly, that that new AI searches don’t automatically decrease the losses, bringing them close to a profit. That is to say, the marginal cost to the AI company of responding to another chat or project does not go down.

This is a major reason why I would not be surprised at a bursting of the AI bubble (and why I might be a NIMBY about data centers that might be left broke, empty, rusting).

The economics of this puzzled me, so I asked Claude (AI, for all my readers in the distant future after AI collapses) about it:

Most businesses improve their profit margin with additional customers until they hit a maximum. Then they must add staff or equipment or something and suffer higher marginal costs for a while in their new growth toward greater overall profits.

But I’ve been hearing that AI works differently. It sounds as if a hypothetical AI with, say, 100 users experiences more than 10% increased costs by adding 10 more customers.

Is that true? Why?

Turns out I was wrong that 10% more customers adds more than 10% costs, but it does add about 10% — not less.

I’ll very briefly quote the nut of Claude’s reason (I generally don’t quote AI):

Each inference (query) consumes GPU/TPU compute, and each unit of compute costs money. Add 10% more users making queries of similar length, and you add roughly 10% more compute cost—at least at constant hardware efficiency.

If you want more detail, go ask your own AI; this isn’t a tech blog. But maybe for you, like me, this answer’s enough for now. If you’re losing money on every sale, you can’t make up for it by higher volume.

The AI future (if AI survives the present)

I wonder sometimes how AI has changed the practice of law since my retirement.

I was always “the tech” guy within my firm’s four wall (we eventually hired more methodical outside IT support), and I might have been on AI as well.

But I hear theorizing and actual stories about AI turning its human users toward machine-like behavior — for instance, juggling multiple AI Agents (Agents are different than Chatbots) that are performing various tasks with need for human input at frequent intervals. Leaving your agent paused waiting for input is, ahem, sub-optimal.

That indeed sounds dehumanizing, but I can’t say yea or nay to it being the eventuality of AI.

Shorts

  • [I]f you ask me why I robbed an old lady, I could reply: ‘I needed the money’, ‘I had just watched a violent video’, ‘I inherited my dad’s psychopathic tendencies’, ‘I was high on crystal meth’, ‘I heard a voice tell me to do it’, ‘I was brought up in a subculture where it was considered normal to steal’, ‘the government cut my welfare payments’, ‘my serotonin levels were depleted’, and so on. What counts as a possible cause depends on the context of the question. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things.
  • He’s gilding everything: The aging and patinated statues of D.C. are getting regilded. This pair of statues hadn’t been touched since the 1970s, and now they glow, which my Gen-Z translators tell me means shine. Seeing the results here, I’m actually surprised this wasn’t a term-one priority for Trump. By the time the man leaves office the Lincoln Memorial is going to be bedazzled. He is President Liberace, the first gay leader of this nation.(Nellie Bowles)
  • When I look at the biographies of recently-victorious “Democratic Socialist” candidates, I regain my love for the brilliant distillation “luxury beliefs.” (Tipsy)
  • Charisma can be just as repellent as it is attractive, so it usually baffles or disgusts anyone not under its thrall. (Molly Worthen, Charisma Rules the World)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Sunday, March 1

Heresies

Dispensationism declining

By embedding [John Nelson] Darby’s complex [dispensationalist] eschatology directly into the margins of the biblical text, Cyrus Scofield effectively imposed an ahistorical and not-traditional interpretation on the Bible, an irony given that the work has appeal to nuda scriptura Christians who see the Bible alone as authoritative and exclude tradition.

Albert Russell Thompson.

That irony was lost on me as a 15-year-old, when I asked for, and got, the ultimate pious kid’s Christmas gift (short of a KLH compact stereo system, of course): a Scofield Reference Bible (looseleaf for inserting note pages) with my name embossed on the leatherette cover.

But the irony finally hit me in my late 20s, when I used those loose-leafs for typed-up Calvinist-oriented notes repudiating the dispensationalist heresies of that Bible version. (I still have that Bible with my Calvinist notes. I have not superseded the Calvinist notes with Orthodox rebuttals.)

Thompson’s overall point, though, seems to be that dispensationalism is losing its grip on the evangelical imagination:

The dominance of dispensationalism is currently being hollowed out by a dual-front migration. First, some younger evangelicals are abandoning the religious innovations of the 20th century in favor of older, more rooted forms of Christian worship. Central to this is a burgeoning interest in Anglicanism, framed not as a liberal departure, but as a return to a foundational, traditionalist, and robust Anglo-American Protestant tradition. Similarly, the move toward Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism represents a rejection of the “rapture culture” in favor of a sacramental worldview that is fundamentally non-dispensational.

Also, many evangelicals of all ages have moved beyond dispensationalism. There were no successors to Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsey, and Tim LaHaye. Dallas Theological Seminary, once a headquarters of dispensationalist theology, has largely moved on. And Christian commentators are no longer anxious to relate contemporary events to biblical prophecy ….

I’m stunned that dispensationalism held that grip as long as it did after failures like predictions of Christ’s “Second Coming” no later than 1988 based on the 1948 establishment of the modern state of Israel starting a prophetic clock that would go off no later than the “generation” that saw that.

All else being equal, evangelicalism sans dispensationalism is an improvement, less likely to distract folks from the real business of following Christ.

(Although he acknowledges that dispensationalism is not required for support of Israel and the Jews, Thompson suggests, not implausibly, that the American upswing in antisemitism and the waning of support for Israel is linked to dispensationalism falling out of favor.)

“Merely to enumerate them would be impossible”

In 1832 Achille Murat, an exiled Bonapartist, whose religious ideal was a unitary society with an established church, nonetheless could not help but be impressed by “the thousand and one sects which divide the people of the United States. Merely to enumerate them would be impossible, for they change every day, appear, disappear, unite, separate, and evince nothing stable but their instability…. Yet, with all this liberty, there is no country in which the people are so religious as in the United States.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

To say that an America fractured into innumerable, shape-shifting sects is extremely “religious” is damning by faint praise, as I see it.

The heresy litmus test

What defines this consensus, above all—what distinguishes orthodoxy from heresy, the central river from the delta—is a commitment to mystery and paradox. Mysteries abide at the heart of every religious faith, but the Christian tradition is uniquely comfortable preaching dogmas that can seem like riddles, offering answers that swiftly lead to further questions, and confronting believers with the possibility that the truth about God passes all our understanding.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

The way of the Protestant world today

The local Church I grew up in has changed its name to “The Grove” to de-emphasize its denominational affiliation (well, officially “God wanted to give us a name that better reflected and communicated what he has been doing in our midst over the past few years”).

Growth in the unequivocally Protestant world these days seems to be in (1) nondenominational thingies and (2) denominational churches that function like nondenominational thingies. I guess my childhood church has decided to be the second sort of thingy.

(Then there’s the Anglicans – think “conservative dissidents from the Episcopal Church USA” – apt to think of themselves as lower-case catholics. I think they’re growing, too, though I wouldn’t bet anything on that unless I could afford to lose it.)

The Mercenary Love of God

Those wary of commending Christianity for its capacity to deliver rewards, benefits, and consolations have a point. Belief for the sake of avoiding hell, saving Western civilization, or just finding something to hold onto in a cold, meaningless world is not the same as the disposition of faith, properly understood, which is rooted in love of God, not fear of damnation, civilizational collapse, or soul-destroying nihilism. Nonetheless, count me among those who are not quick to dismiss appeals to the usefulness of Christianity. What is different is not necessarily contradictory. St. Catherine of Siena recognizes that a “mercenary love” of God is imperfect; nevertheless, it can spur us toward a pure and selfless love.

R.R. Reno, Dilbert’s Wager

Orthodoxy

Planting a seed

My name-changing childhood Church (see The way of the Protestant world today, above) made passing reference in the rationale for their name change to a favorite Bible passage from my teen years:

And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts, living within you as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love; and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God’s children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God himself.

I still think that’s lovely and apt. In fact, I now see that I was longing for Orthodoxy over one-and-done conversionism. I was an outlier, with my evangelical classmates preferring verses like “God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.“

The way back to The Garden

The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility. The Earth is our home now. … These are the consequences of our pursuit of knowledge and power, but we keep pursuing them because we know no other means to escape from our exile. We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. Outside the garden, we are homeless and can never be still. We forget the creator and worship ourselves. All of this happens inside us every day. … The path back to the garden can only be found by giving up the vainglory, the search for power and the unearned knowledge which got us exiled in the first place. The path is the path of renunciation, of love and of sacrifice. To get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross.

Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

Rome, viewed from Patmos

In the years leading up to the Schism, it would have been hard for the Eastern patriarchs to have taken seriously the claim that the popes of Rome were the vicars of Christ on earth and had inherited his sanctity and authority. The papacy had been in the gift of the German emperor since King Otto I had had himself crowned emperor by the pope on February 2, 962. He then decreed that all future popes should take the oath of allegiance to his office. In the following century, twenty-one out of twenty-five popes were handpicked by the German crown. They did not do a good job. Simony flourished; popes had their mistresses; and they were poisoned, strangled or just mutilated by their rivals. By 1045, only nine years before the Great Schism, there was no pope. Instead, there were three rival claimants to the papacy, each with his own army.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Sunday, November 2

The final blow

A campaign led by the kings of France and England to recapture it had failed. A second expedition, launched in 1202 in obedience to Innocent’s own summons, had been diverted to Constantinople. In 1204 it had stormed and sacked the city. A stronghold that for long centuries had withstood the envy of pagan warlords had fallen at last—to a Christian army. Its captors justified their storming of the city by charging that its inhabitants were rebels against the papacy: for the churches of Rome and Constantinople, ever since the age of Gregory VII, had been divided by an ever-widening schism. Innocent, however, appalled by the despoliation of Christendom’s bulwark, lamented the fall of Constantinople as a work of hell.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

The Great Schism between the papacy and Eastern Christian patriarchs is conventionally dated 1054, and not without reason. But those who dig deeper (or, like me, who read those who have dug deeper) tend to think that the 1054 schism was curable until this sacking of Constantinople by Crusaders.

A quintessential American heresy

[L]iving by no rule but the Bible turned out to be a defense against virtually the same list of enemies as living up to the standards of republicanism: “Many are republicans as to government, and are yet half republicans, being in matters of religion still bent to a Catechism, creed, covenant, or a superstitious priest. Venture to be as independent in things of religion as in those which respect the government in which you live.” Few Protestants expressed themselves as flamboyantly as [Elias] Smith in the early republic, but most followed where he led.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

I was reminded this week of a distinction that’s relevant here. I believe I learned it from the late Richard John Neuhaus, who I followed closely starting sometime in the 1980s. I won’t give a name (other than “quintessential American heresy”) to the view expressed so flamboyantly by Elias Smith, a view which I once effectively held, but I’m now in the camp of “ecclesial Christians”: those for whom faith in Christ and faith in His Church is one act of faith, not two.

I decidedly do not venture to be independent in things of religion, but very consciously submitted to the tradition of the Church particularly about Mary, the Mother of God-in-the-flesh, who was a stumbling-block to me as she has been to other Protestants (who in our generation call her “blessed” only sullenly, bound by scripture to do so).

The worst of the worst

Church management is a tricky and complicated business. I am glad that it is not my job. But I do know this much: The church is there for Gyp the Blood and Humpty Jackson, for Charlie Whitman and John Wilkes Booth and me. If there is no room for the worst of the worst in your church, then you do not have a church: You have a crappy book club.

Kevin D. Williamson (hyperlinks added).

Work and play

But there is the question. What, precisely, is “the business of life”? We can get onto an endless carousel if we try to decide which is the serious stuff of life, work or play. It is possible to take either view: either we toil away our eight hours so that we can get down to the real stuff—pleasure and love and recreation—or we enjoy periodic intervals of escape from the real stuff, the work.

Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance? I would not have retired had I thought the real stuff was work; that’s just livelihood, not life.

What evangelism can obscure

With the clergy focused on the task of evangelism, their doctrines received so little scrutiny that laypeople took them for granted: the Bible was an infallible guide in every situation, and the church taught what was written in it. Coming into contact with people who read the Bible differently, southerners, unconscious of their own scrim of interpretation, concluded that those others were not Christians.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals.

Fallen hero

Jérôme Lejeune was a hero of the National Right to Life Committee for his stance against aborting unborn children with Down syndrome.

He also was a thief—a stealer of glory that belonged to others.

It was apparently how the game was played back then. (Gift Link) That may not have changed much.

There’s probably a better moral to this little story than I can write: convention is no assurance of morality.

Upright life, sound doctrine

Over and over again he insisted that in electing an abbot upright life and soundness of doctrine were to be the prime considerations, not rank or family influence. ’I tell you in all sincerity,’ he said, ‘that as a choice of evils I would far rather have this whole place where I have built the monastery revert forever, should God so decide, to the wilderness it once was, rather than have my brother in the flesh, who has not entered upon the way of truth, succeed me as abbot. Take the greatest care, brothers, never to appoint a man as father over you because of his birth; and always appoint from among yourselves, never from outside the monastery.

Bede et al, Bede

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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Pope Leo XIV

I didn’t anticipate blogging much about the new American Pope, but I’ve come across several surprisingly good and insightful (i.e., they fit my biases) commentaries.

Nick Catoggio

Nick Catoggio doesn’t entirely fall into the fallacy of reducing religion to crypto-politics (see Ross Douthat, below), but he does write for a politically-oriented Dispatch. So it’s no surprise to see him muse about political implications among other things:

The last thing Leo wants for his papacy, I’m sure, is to see it sucked into the sleazy reality show that is Trump-era American politics, a black hole of shame and nihilism from which no dignity can escape.

In fact, my guess is that he’s less likely to comment on policy in the United States than the other candidates to succeed Francis would have been. Doing so might tempt Catholics here to choose between their loyalty to an American-led church and their loyalty to Trumpism, and not all would choose the church. It would also demean the pontificate, as surely the Holy Father has more exalted business to attend to than serving as the president’s latest foil in America’s degenerate “politics as pro wrestling” populist spectacle.

Most of all, it would show a world that’s been dominated by the United States for 80 years that even the papacy can’t prevent an American from parochially and narcissistically prioritizing his own country’s affairs. In an age of “America First,” where Uncle Sam unapologetically cares only about himself, the so-called Ugly American has never looked uglier. If Leo really does mean to prove that he “cares about the entire world,” the easiest way to do it is to reject that narcissism by ignoring the United States as completely as possible.

Jonathan Last

Catoggio pointed me to another article that’s spicier than his summary:

I expected to see an African pope in my lifetime. I never expected to see an American pope.

Why?

Because the Vatican is dominated by Europeans and they are deeply suspicious of America and American Catholics. To them, we are toddlers with shotguns.

Earlier this week, Bishop Robert Barron explained to a reporter from CBS why the next pope wouldn’t be American:

Cardinal George of Chicago, of happy memory, was one of my great mentors, and he said: ‘Look, until America goes into political decline, there won’t be an American pope.’ And his point was, if America is kind of running the world politically, culturally, economically, they don’t want America running the world religiously. So, I think there’s some truth to that, that we’re such a superpower and so dominant, they don’t wanna give us, also, control over the church.

Barron is one of America’s MAGA priests, so naturally he could not imagine that anyone else in the world might view America as being in decline.

But we are and it’s obvious.

It’s obvious to the people of Canada, who just elected a prime minister exclusively on the grounds that the American century was over.

It’s obvious to the Chinese, who are planning to step into the vacuum and establish their own world order.

It’s obvious to our European allies, who are now making plans for a future in which America is toothless, lazy, and impotent.

And maybe—just maybe—this reality was obvious the College of Cardinals, too.

Maybe they looked at America and realized that it was no longer a colossus bestriding the globe. No longer exceptional. Not just in decline, but deluded about its reality.

Maybe Robert Prevost was elected pope because the Church realized they no longer needed to be concerned about America power.

Jonathan V. Last, MAGA and the American Pope

Ross Douthat

I hoped that someone who doesn’t focus on the crypto-politics of religions would write about Pope Leo.

Ross Douthat stepped up: What the World Needs From Pope Leo (shared link). If I could put it in a nutshell, I wouldn’t share the link, but this jumped out at me:

This is a much weirder landscape than the one in which liberal and conservative Catholics clashed over contraception or gay marriage, and it’s likely to get weirder still as we move deeper into a digital and virtual and artificial-intelligence-mediated existence.

Catholicism has had little of note to say thus far about what it means to be Christian and human under these conditions or how Catholics should think morally and spiritually about their relationships to these technologies. But if Leo XIV reigns as long as Leo XIII did, no issue may be more important to the faithful — or the world.

Why should I care?

My fascination with the Pope (and his precedessors since John Paul II) has a couple of sources:

  • He is seen as the very Vicar of Christ by 1.4 billion of my separated brethren.
  • He is one of a handful of distilled symbols of Christianity for my countrymen. (The MAGA response confirms that MAGA hates any remotely authentic Christianity because there’s too little hate in it. “Men loved darkness rather than light” and all that.)
  • UPDATE: Therefore, the only way to be an inconsequential Pope is to die quickly after elevation.
  • What he cannot yet undo are barriers to healing the Great Schism, but Popes can undermine (and have undermined) those barriers so that they may someday collapse.

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.

St. John Climacus, 2025

Denying our ancestry

Just as the Bishop of Oxford refused to consider that he might be descended from an ape, so now are many in the West reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of belief, might be traceable back to Christian origins.

Tom Holland, Dominion

The virtue of essays

I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.

My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead. That last sentence is a gem.

Notional Evangelical Bibicism

As a public relations stunt, Trump’s Bible photo might seem unserious, but the president certainly understood the importance of Christian scripture to a significant voting bloc. Evangelicals are biblicists, and the extent to which American religiosity has been dominated by evangelical Protestantism correlates to the degree to which American culture has been shaped by the Bible.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

I would be remiss were I not to recommend Brad East’s ‌Biblicist churches that don’t read the Bible — Brad East. Historian Gutaker may be missing something contemporary.

The one, true meaning of the text

When I try to explain to people why we need to recover patristic interpretation, the biggest obstacle I face is the desire of my interlocutors to establish the one, true meaning of the text. When I assert that there is no such thing, I provoke raised eyebrows: I must be playing fast and loose with the biblical text, making it echo my preconceptions. My insistence that biblical texts have multiple, even innumerable meanings contradicts our modern objectivism. My defense of patristic allegorizing likewise elicits fears of arbitrariness and subjectivism.

Hans Boersma, No Method but Christ

Whither the magisterial Reformation?

Nearly two decades ago, Bruce McCormack, professor of systematic theology at Princeton ­Seminary, wrote: “The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches.” He went on:

if current rates of decline in membership continue, all that will be left by mid-century will be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches. . . . The churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene—and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation. What all of this means in practice is that it will become more and more necessary, for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the ­Orthodox.

This is a grave prediction, but its sobriety makes it not just prescient but practical. Non-catholic varieties of Christendom are here for good, but Goldilocks Protestantism was always doomed to fail. It presumed too much, relying on a common inheritance—patristic, medieval, and cultural—that was bound to be called into question by future reformers in search of their own style of biblical renewal.

In any case, McCormack is right: Whether, in the coming decades, magisterial Christians look “up” or “down” for friendship and cooperation, they will be living in a world without Protestantism. In truth, they already are.

Brad East, Goldilocks Protestantism

Martyrdom

Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.

John Henry Newman

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

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.

Belated thoughts on the Olympic opening ceremony kerfuffle

Since I finally decided that the content of the Lord of Spirits podcast outweighed the obscure pop-culture references and other drollery, I’ve been binge-listening, and I’m now within seven months of being current.

Seven months ago, the Summer Olympics were airing, and you may recall the calculated provocation of one Opening Ceremony tableau, reminiscent of Leonardo’s Last Supper:

So those people freaking out about this whole Olympics thing. It is if they’ve suddenly discovered that the Olympics are pagan. And if you’re one of those folks who just discovered this I have bad news for you because the Olympics have always been pagan. They started out pagan.

… Like the first one a guy sacrificed a baby. [He] committed an act of cannibalism to get demonic power to win the Olympics, okay? The Olympics are pagan.

Why am I pointing this out? Not just to say like, “yeah duh, why do you think the opening ceremonies look like that?” But I think this is emblematic of a larger thing, a larger cultural thing, that while it’s not germane to tonight’s topic, it’s very germane to the theme of our show, as a whole.

And that’s that we’ve been sold this bill of goods. since we were kids in our education. We’ve been taught about this thing that isn’t real, and it’s called Western civilization where they try to draw a historical throughline starting in like ancient Sumer and ending — depending on your vintage — either in like 19th century Germany, or 19th century British Empire, or if you’re more my age, ending in late 20th century United States of America. And this is the March of Civilization. This is all one thing, one stream.

And uh, religiously, what this does, is it tries to draw through line from Sumerian religion, a development line from there to 19th century German Lutheranism, the 19th century Church of England, or 20th century, late 20th century American evangelicalism, as the culmination not just of Christianity but is of human religion as a whole. Finally got it right, but everything along the way is part of this tapestry part of this one tradition, right? We all grew up thinking that cupids were cherubs; they’re not.

When this whole idea was concocted through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when the basically European pagan tradition was fusing itself to the Western Christian tradition, it was sort of a devil’s bargain from both sides, right? There were people who, didn’t much like the Western Christian tradition and were chafing at it, because they wanted to live their lives or exercise their intellects in other ways, and so they wanted the freedom that a revised and hollowed-out version of the Western pagan tradition offered them. And then on the other side, there were people who were still loyal to the Western Christian tradition, but who wanted to claim credit for the glories of Greece and Rome and all the pagan stuff and pagan art and culture. And so they came to this agreement we’ll just fuse all this together and call it Western culture and Western civilization.

And now very timely you can go all over YouTube — you know it’s in some of our own circles, so shall we say — people talking about the demise of the West, and the demise of Western civilization and Western culture — this thing that was phony and never existed, that we were all pretending to exist it.

It’s not that this thing was real and now it’s going away. It’s that those two things which are fundamentally incompatible, Christianity and paganism, are pulling themselves apart again. And guess what: The paganism side is rediscovering its antipathy toward Christianity faster than the opposite is happening.

Because the folks who are still on the Western Christian side still want to keep things like the Olympics. still want to keep a bunch of these things that ultimately are not germane to the Christian tradition that come out of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the pagan alt recovery they’re in — they want to cling to those they want to keep those right and just keep pretending that they’re Christian. But… the pagan side won’t accept that bargain anymore. They’re feeling their oats now right and they want to take the back (sic) and just be pagan, as pagan as they could be.

Now that’s going to lead to them to very dark places; hopefully some of them will yo-yo back to Christianity and realize what they’ve lost. But that’s what’s happening in our culture right now. That’s what everybody could observe in the opening ceremony of the Olympics was, oh, the Olympics are now just being openly pagan again. They’re not pretending anymore.

…

The nations worshiped demons, not God. Both the Torah and St. Paul say so, and we need to stop trying to fuse the city of God and the city of man and trying to hold those things together and pretend that they’re the same city.

Fr. Stephen De Young, August 1, 2024 (emphasis added)

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Sunday, 12/15/24

Theology isn’t all deductive

Catholics find it impossible to theologize without deductive reasoning—a characteristic shared by virtually all Western Christians…

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Puritan Phobia

The Puritans quickly developed a phobia about ritual, going so far as to resist “rote” recitation of the Lord’s Prayer:

Henry’s Method culminates with his most fascinating phrase-collection of all, “A Paraphrase on the Lord’s Prayer, in Scripture Expressions.” Christ’s own form of prayer given to his disciples had long been a thorn in Puritans’ sides, to be plucked out by being understood as only a general guideline. Henry’s strategy is to neutralize the prayer’s form in a pages of verses elaborating on the one phrase “Our Father, who art in similar method; he provides, for instance, an amazing two and a half Heaven” (MP, 163-65), a general topos, he says, from which begins. Many editions of the Method were printed as Henry intended, interleaved with one blank page between each printed one, to enable the reader to pen in his own collection of phrases to supplement Henry’s own. Like Bunyan’s demand for scrupulous sincerity, Henry’s lists and blank pages, figures of accumulation and abstraction, combine literally to efface the Lord’s Prayer and erase it from Dissenting practice.

Between the ledgerlike pages of Henry’s collected phrases and the blank sheets for scribbled lists of readers’ personal prayer phrases, one senses of variety of fears: that without this careful accounting, the business might go bankrupt, that in the copious, nervous quoting from God’s word to talk and talk and talk to God, God might not listen or respond at all.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity

Hyperpluralism’s roots

Moreover, Reformation scholars tend analytically and in their division of labor to hive off the magisterial Reformation-Lutheranism, Reformed Protestantism, and the Church of England-from the radical Reformation. Consequently, whether oriented primarily toward theology or toward social history, they have overlooked the significance of the principle of sola scripture for contemporary hyperpluralism.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

A catholic vision of Christian faith

When I first opened A Severe Mercy nearly 20 years ago I had needed a vision of Christian faith that was unapologetically devoted to Christian doctrine without being materialistic, more American than Christian, and completely uprooted from history. Up to that point, the expressions of Christianity I had encountered were simply different forms of sectarian faith—a vapid progressivism or a parochial and narrow fundamentalism. Vanauken gave me catholicity ….

Jake Meador (hyperlink added)

Know-it-alls

In practical terms, the Reformed commitment to the theological significance of everyday life led to the development of something like Protestant metaphysics, Protestant epistemology, Protestant science, Protestant politics, Protestant social and economic theory, Protestant art, and Protestant poetics. The development of these Reformed spheres of intellectual and cultural activity never occurred without substantial influence from sources not specifically religious. In Switzerland, the southern German regions, Hungary, Holland, and the British Isles, the Reformed perspective could be used to mask economic or political aggression. More commonly, it emerged from a complicated mix of sacred and secular motives. Yet wherever sufficient Reformed strength existed, the assumption also existed that biblical Christianity had something fairly definite to say about everything.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Some of us have been glued to the BBC on a Sunday evening this autumn watching Mark Rylance return mesmerically as Thomas Cromwell in the second series of Wolf Hall. This all takes place in the era of the Reformation, and a particular scene has stayed with me. Surrounded by crosses lifted from churches, Cromwell says the following:

The English will discover God in daylight, not hidden in a cloud of incense. They will hear his word in their own language from a minister who faces them, not turning his back and muttering in some obscure, foreign tongue…no one will ever believe the poor once bowed and scraped to stocks of wood, and prayed to lumps of plaster.

I have such a mixed response to this brilliant bit of writing.

I went to such a daylight church and could not find God there. I didn’t find him in a cloud of incense either. I found him in a moonlit, midnight forest. I found him in a place with almost no human imprint. That was where he suddenly said NOW.

And I suppose I have become someone who ‘bows and scrapes’ to icons and prays to ‘lumps of plaster’. But, of course, to reduce them as Cromwell does is to misunderstand their function, what they do to the spirit and heart of the faithful. It’s not to the wood or plasterness of them I am praying. It’s just that I am not entirely just a brain on legs fed by sermons. These scorned ‘lumps’ of Cromwell become luminous by attention and repetition, by their physicality, by their evocation of tradition, what exudes through them. They gather and focus devotion, taking it from a lyric (entirely personal) into an epic (collective) encounter with the divine. Their materials are not the thing.

I have sympathies with all that want to hear gospel in their own language, and I’m glad that happened. Surely we all, really, want a profound sense of both tradition and innovation?

Maybe we long for a God of daylight and moonlight, of lyric and epic, of straight talking and unknowable mystery. I’d find it hard to imagine someone who didn’t. We stand on the Mount of Olives with our teacher and surely all is possible. Surely anything less than this is just silly.

But human history is human history and we make our choices. They are rarely ideal, but we chew, we rail, then we decide.

Martin Shaw

A personal favorite

I have three lists of Maxims or such that I review regularly. This one, which I think was originally embedded in a longer blog post by Father Stephen Freeman, seems more precious (in the good sense, not the snarky sense) every time I read it:

  1. First, live as though in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has been inaugurated into the world and the outcome of history has already been determined. (Quit worrying)
  2. Second, love people as the very image of God and resist the temptation to improve them.
  3. Third, refuse to make economics the basis of your life. Your job is not even of secondary importance.
  4. Fourth, quit arguing about politics as though the political realm were the answer to the world’s problems. It gives it power that is not legitimate and enables a project that is anti-God.
  5. Fifth, learn to love your enemies. God did not place them in the world for us to fix or eliminate. If possible, refrain from violence.
  6. Sixth, raise the taking of human life to a matter of prime importance and refuse to accept violence as a means to peace. Every single life is a vast and irreplaceable treasure.
  7. Seventh, cultivate contentment rather than pleasure. It will help you consume less and free you from slavery to your economic masters.
  8. Eighth, as much as possible, think small. You are not in charge of the world. Love what is local, at hand, personal, intimate, unique, and natural. It’s a preference that matters.
  9. Ninth, learn another language. Very few things are better at teaching you about who you are not.
  10. Tenth, be thankful for everything, remembering that the world we live in and everything in it belongs to God.

Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.

Paul Kingsnorth

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.

Sunday, 11/17/24

Permeable walls

Yesterday was the 27th anniversary of my formal entry into the Orthodox Christian Faith. Unlike my departure from frank evangelicalism for Calvinism two decades earlier, this felt like a conversion, not an incidental change of denomination.

Part of that feeling may have been that the evangelical-to-Calvinist transition was largely invisible to observers: I didn’t quit our Baptist church and go to the tiny PCA startup in town; instead I moved across the country to go back to school, so of course I had to find a new church; I graduated, moved, and began practicing law in my hometown, so again I had to find a new church.

That each of those steps was away from evangelicalism and toward Calvinism would have been apparent only to someone for whom the permeability of denominational walls in Protestantism seems odd, and I think there most Protestants who take that permeability for granted (if they even think about “denominations” in an age of tens of thousands of crypto-baptist nondenominational pastoral fiefdoms). Indeed, during this transition, I published a law journal note titled Church Property Disputes in an Age of Common-Core Protestantism, based on the premise that someone who became a Presbyterian or Methodist or Episcopalian was unlikely to be buying into denominational ownership or control of the local church’s temporalities that he (or she) now donated to maintaining.

But another part of the “conversion” sensation certainly was that I had to be catechized to enter Orthodoxy. Its walls are not permeable. I became an “ecclesial Christian” as Richard John Neuhaus described it: one for whom faith in Christ and faith in His Church is one act of faith, not two. I finally believed that the one holy, catholic and apostolic church is visible and distinct, not invisible and amorphous.

Today, I’m more interested in a question one could phrase in an article title as Church Discipline in an Age of Permeable-Wall Protestantism. Others have doubtless gone deeper into the topic of how there can be effective church discipline, how can flagrant sinners be brought to repentance, when they can just move to another church before the heat melts their hearts? Maybe he can even start and pastor his own church (or get nominated as Attorney General). In a largely Protestant nation, it’s hard for an ecclesial Christian convert not to at least dabble in other people’s business.

A bold claim

I’ve been reading Fr. Stephen De Young’s book St. Paul the Pharisee, which I hoped would focus on this bold claim:

Mostly it doesn’t, or it doesn’t do so explicitly except for that quote.

But Fr. Stephen’s “interpretive translation” of Paul’s epistles subtly undermines the tendency to view them as theological treatises rather than pastoral guidance.

Instrumentalist faith

In the last few years, there has been no shortage of political commentary—much of which I agree with—that has argued that Christianity is needed for Western civilization and its guiding principles to survive. Famously, the essay in which the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke about her conversion—the authenticity of which I do not doubt —focused on the role that Christianity plays in Western civilization. But one should be clear-eyed about this matter. If the point of Christianity is the survival of the West, then Christianity may be treated as a useful fiction or a necessary evil alongside things like police forces and the military. The place of Jesus in such a Christianity is clear: he is a mascot, a long-dead victim of Roman imperialism and religious zealotry whom we invoke when we need a symbol, so that we may display him for all to see, pinned to the cross by our highest values and current political aspirations.

The outcome is not a secret. The churches that live as though Jesus is optional have been, despite their best verbal efforts, saying effectively and forcefully to their members and to the world that what the church uniquely has to offer is not needed, and that the church is here to serve those realities which already exist beyond the church’s baptismal boundaries.

…

I have become convinced that one of the primary challenges for Christians today is to come to terms with the overwhelming success of secularized Christianity. It is a great comfort to a Christian to say to himself or herself that secularized faith doesn’t actually work: it is how we tell ourselves that secularism will collapse under its own weight and that we’ll be here waiting when it happens, ready to welcome the world back into our arms. But of course, this is a fantasy about our own relevance. We are the secular culture’s ex-girlfriend, and telling ourselves that the new girlfriend isn’t pretty and that the culture will eventually see that it needs us is a pathetic expression of our need, not the world’s.

Matthew Burdette, Is the Church Obsolete? (H/T Brad East)

I honestly don’t think I’ve heard any Orthodox Christian talking about the importance of the Orthodox Church in secular instrumental terms. But to be honest, I sometimes think of the Catholic and Protestant churches as important to the survival of western civilization — and for some of its peculiarities.

Enculturation

Sometimes I have the unsettling sense that everyone possesses a spiritual secret but me. Other students speak of God as an intimate friend. They seem perfectly content studying the Bible all day, and unquestioningly accept whatever the professors say. More often, I conclude there is no secret, just a learned pattern of conformity, of mimicking others’ behavior and parroting the right words.

Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

Of this “learned pattern of conformity, of mimicking others’ behavior and parroting the right words,” I recently heard the sympathetic observation that people can believe absurd things, even contradictory things, because of where they are enculturated.

For anyone who thinks he (or she) has found the truth, and who can’t understand why others cannot see it, this is helpful to remember — in both directions. I don’t mean there’s no truth, only enculturation, but something about empathy and humility.

The American Hermeneutic

The problem with race and the Bible was far more profound than the interpretation of any one text. It was a problem brought about by the intuitive character of the reigning American hermeneutic. This hermeneutic merged three positions: (1) The Bible was a plain book whose meanings could be reliably ascertained through the exercise of an ordinary person’s intelligence; (2) a main reason for trusting the Bible as true was an intuitive sense, sealed by the Holy Spirit; (3) the same intelligence that through ordinary means and intuitions could trust the Bible as true also gained much additional truth about the world through intuitive processes that were also deliverances of universal common sense. The first position was a traditional Protestant teaching intensified by the American environment; the second was historically Protestant and Reformed; the third was simply a function of the American hermeneutic.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Of Nietzsche

Ironically, the fallen antichrist spent his long years of decline in the same female company that he claimed to have detested as a boy. He ended his life as the charge of his sister, but for many years after his collapse he was cared for by his mother. We know almost nothing about this quiet, pious woman, the widow of a Lutheran minister. But her act of taking the invalid into her home and enduring his catatonic silence, marked by occasional screaming fits, could only have been motivated by maternal love and Christian pity, two of the most debilitating values in what the philosopher had called the “slave morality.”

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

The flight into nondenominationalism

I’ve noticed Churches changing names to drop denominational identifiers. The Church I grew up in is considering dropping “Evangelical” from its name, not because it identifies the denomination but because of the debasement of the term into a political category.

Mites and motes

People who want to bring heaven upon earth have turned the earth into hell and made rivers run red with blood, because the first thing they must do is the one thing they cannot do, which is to cure themselves.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Complicit

The spectacle of [John] Lennon imagining a world without possessions while sitting in a huge mansion did nothing to put off his admirers. As Nietzsche spun furiously in his grave, ‘Imagine’ became the anthem of atheism.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Command performance

The logic of those prayers, if one was reading between the lines, was something like this:

“Dear Heavenly Father, in Your Word You say that when two or three are gathered together, You will be in the midst of them. Well, we’re gathered here, so do what we’re telling You to do because we have You over a barrel and can quote Your own book back at you! And in case You’re thinking of weaseling out of this deal, we claim Your promises, and because You can’t break any of those since You wrote it all in the Bible, You’ll do what we say, and You’ll do it NOW! Amen!”

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God

Any questions?

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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

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.

Sunday potpourri

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.

Fr. Silouan Thompson

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

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.

Sunday, 6/9/24

Ayan Hirsi Ali update

Sorry if the headline is misleading; I really don’t know more about Ayan Hirsi Ali’s conversion from “New Atheist” to some kind of Christian. But I have been thinking about what I do know.

I listened this week to a predictably futile, moderated public discussion between New Atheist Richard Dawkins and his friend, lapsed New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. If you, too, want to waste some time on something that seems like the sort of thing that smart people should listen to, break a leg.

Ali said one thing in the discussion that I thought was worth preserving. When she was one of the elite New Atheists, the author of Infidel, probably the leading vocal apostate from Islam in the democratic West, and a despiser of Christianity as well, she travelled with 8 bodyguards. They were not there to protect her from angry Christians. Instead, she recalls Christians contacting her to say “we think you’re mistaken and we’re praying for you.”

Some of Ali’s answers in the discussion bothered me. They are not the answers of a well-formed Western Christian, let alone of an Orthodox Christian. But then (duh!) she hasn’t really been at this long enough to be a well-formed Christian of any sort, and they were things Dawkins pressed her on — not prideful heresies she blurted out to ingratiate herself with someone. Moreover, her conversion, like many (most?) seems to be kind of a “right-brain” thing, not as easily articulated as syllogisms.

“Why don’t you just say ‘I trust the Church on some things I haven’t personally grokked yet’,” I wanted to say. But I’m not even certain that she has settled in any church yet; I just don’t know.

Further, her path into the faith from atheism surely is vastly different from my path within the faith (very broadly construed) from a Protestant tradition to Orthodoxy. Of that path I wrote almost two decades later:

I had my qualms about some specifics, like the Theotokos, who is a hangup or blind spot for many low-church Protestants. But I had reached the point where I trusted the Church’s dogma (the title “Theotokos” is a dogma of an Ecumenical Council) more than I trusted my own, likely-skewed, judgment.

(Hyperlink added) I don’t think that paragraph distorts the reality of my 1997 formal conversion. I was becoming for the first time an “ecclesial Christian,” which the late Richard John Neuhaus described:

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. In the words of the third century St. Cyprian, martyr bishop of Carthage, “He who would have God as his Father must have the Church as his mother.”

And I indeed have come to agree with the Church, not just to trust it while holding my doubts in abeyance.

But for now, I think Ali is sorting through the good she sees in Western Christendom (and post-Christendom) and the doctrinal and ecclesial specifics of the faith that gave birth to it. That’s not a quick or easy task — or so I imagine, having not walked that particular path myself.

I’m praying for her to grow up into her new faith, to shun limelight as much as she can for a while, and to preface her doubts, if she must voice them at all, with something like “I’m still learning and settling in, but for now, no, I don’t quite believe [X]. Maybe I will later.”

I have little doubt that if she doesn’t apostatize, she will wind up Episcopalian/Anglican, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox.

Christian Nationalists for real

I am skeptical of press alarmism about “Christian Nationalism” in the U.S. It’s generally a cheap trick to marginalize some conservative-ish folks without getting into the weeds on what they actually believe and teach.

But I believe there are two Christian Nationalist movements worth a wary and sustained eye:

  1. Douglas Wilson’s hard-core Calvinist confessional Christian nationalists, based in Moscow, Idaho.
  2. C. Peter Wagner and his merry Seven Mountain Mandate heretics. I hate to cite Wikipedia on this, but the other information I have is too scattered. If you want to go the the source, search Amazon books for “Seven Mountain Mandate” focusing on books by Johnny Enlow and Lance Wallnau, two figures who I know are mandate fans.

I rather doubt that these two groups could make common cause. Wilson’s folks are Calvinists, Wagner’s spawn charismatic flakes who claim to have prophetic apostles. That’s oil and water, folks.

Wagner’s group probably is a bigger threat because its following is excitable and flaky; Wilson’s young, intellectual Calvinists are unlikely to match their volatility (American Evangelicalism was pretty much born in anti-Calvinism 200-ish years ago).

Proto-Jihad

Of the Crusades:

Daringly, he offered his listeners an electrifying new formula for salvation. Listed as an official decree of the council held at Clermont, it promised warriors a means by which their trade of arms, rather than offending Christ and requiring penance to be forgiven, might itself serve to cleanse them of their sin. ‘For, if any man sets out from devotion, not for reputation or monetary gain, to liberate the Church of God at Jerusalem, his journey shall be reckoned in place of all penance.’

Tom Holland, Dominion

Secularist concessions

A modern secularist quite often accepts the idea of God. What, however, he emphatically negates is precisely the sacramentality of man and world.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Irony

In our consumption, we are consumed.

L.M. Sacasas, What You Get Is the World

… 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.