Trump in Warsaw

It sounds as if the President’s speechwriters gave him some very lofty things to say in Poland. I almost laughed out loud, derisively, at the thought of Donald Trump as the defender of what’s noble in the western tradition.

I wish I could credit him with believing — even understanding while uttering hypocritically — any of the better things he said. But I can’t.

If he follows through, he will enhance my faith in miracles.

* * * * *

I had every intention of leaving Trump’s Warsaw comment there, with nothing more said. But something bizarre has happened:

The shocking thing here is that this is controversial at all. It shows how decadent we’ve become.

Let’s sample some of the left-liberal freakout, shall we?

Here’s Peter Beinart in The Atlantic:

In his speech in Poland on Thursday, Donald Trump referred 10 times to “the West” and five times to “our civilization.” His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means. It’s important that other Americans do, too.

… The West is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white.

…

More Beinart:

The most shocking sentence in Trump’s speech—perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime—was his claim that “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” On its face, that’s absurd. Jihadist terrorists can kill people in the West, but unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, they cannot topple even the weakest European government. Jihadists control no great armies. Their ideologies have limited appeal even among the Muslims they target with their propaganda. ISIS has all but lost Mosul and could lose Raqqa later this year.

Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. The “south” and “east” only threaten the West’s “survival” if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the West’s “survival” if by “West” you mean white, Christian hegemony. A direct line connects Trump’s assault on Barack Obama’s citizenship to his speech in Poland. In Trump and Bannon’s view, America is at its core Western: meaning white and Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian). The implication is that anyone in the United States who is not white and Christian may not truly be American but rather than an imposter and a threat.

Poland is largely ethnically homogeneous. So when a Polish president says that being Western is the essence of the nation’s identity, he’s mostly defining Poland in opposition to the nations to its east and south. America is racially, ethnically, and religious diverse. So when Trump says being Western is the essence of America’s identity, he’s in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. He’s not speaking as the president of the entire United States. He’s speaking as the head of a tribe.

…

Let’s move on. Here’s a tweet by Slate’s Jamelle Bouie:

Imagine being a political writer in this moment and being utterly unable to identify clear white nationalist dogwhistles.

— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) July 7, 2017

…

Here’s James Fallows on the Warsaw speech:

Has Donald Trump ever heard of Leni Riefenstahl?

These are collected by Rod Dreher, who detests Trump about as much as I do. I don’t recall much about Peter Beinart and nothing at all about Jamelle Bouie, but this kind of crap from James Fallows is bitterly disappointing. No, it’s worse than that: it’s unhinged. The real paranoiacs in this story are the deranged eisegetes.

I can’t give Trump credit for playing the media like a violin this time because I don’t think he intended anything provocative. He neither intended nor uttered anything racist or white nationalist, and the grievance-mongers aren’t likely to persuade me otherwise.

Dreher explains pretty well why Trump’s themes are legitimate and timely while David Frum and Ross Douthat explain what really was jarring about the speech (articulating what I had only intuited).

Douthat:

One key to understanding Trump, always, is that he appeals to people by attacking the decadence that he himself also embodies.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) July 7, 2017

Frum:

As presidential speeches go, Trump’s address in Warsaw was fair. Ish. If you forget who is speaking and what that person has been saying and doing since Inauguration Day—since the opening of his campaign in 2015—and really through his career.

But if you remember those things, the speech jolted you to attention again and again.

…

[T]he most troubling thing about the speech was the falsehood at its core; the problem is not with the speech, but with the speaker. The values Trump spoke for in Warsaw are values that he has put at risk every day of his presidency—and that he will continue to put to risk every day thereafter. Trump’s not wrong to perceive a threat to the Euro-Atlantic from the south and east. But the most recent and most dramatic manifestation of that threat was the Russian intervention in the U.S. election to install Donald Trump as president. The threat from outside is magnified by this threat from within—and it is that truth that makes a mockery of every word President Trump spoke in Warsaw.

Maybe this is analogous to the trick bag the Left thought Trump was in on immigration (the one President, in all of American history, forbidden to limit immigration is Donald J. Trump because he promised to do so in terms connected to the religion of Islam): the one person forbidden to defend Western Civilization is Donald J. Trump because we know it’s racist dog-whistles when he does it.

Back to Dreher, who says what I was starting to feel:

If you tell people that to love and to want to defend the culture of the West is a racist act, then they will cease to care about your judgment on the matter, because you are requiring them to hate themselves as an act of virtue. In that regard, Jamelle Bouie’s sentiment here is a much greater gift to the racist alt-right than anything Donald Trump said in Warsaw.

I mean, really, how ignorant and provincial do you have to be, Messrs. Beinart and Bouie, to hear Trump’s speech and think of it as a #MAGA version of a Nuremberg Rally Address? Is the degree of self-hatred of the West required to be a virtuous, woke person such that you cannot tell the difference between Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus and the Horst Wessel Song? Do they really think Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (all of which is available on YouTube, starting here) is a plummy version of Triumph of the Will? If standing against this kind of liberal insanity means I have to stand with Donald Trump, well, okay, I’ll stand with Donald Trump. I won’t like it, but at least Donald Trump doesn’t hate his own civilization.

…

It is necessary to criticize ourselves constructively, for the sake of growing in virtue.But that is not what these people are doing. By anathematizing any and all who cherish the culture and history of the West, they will ultimately force conservatives to embrace Reaction as the only bastion of resistance to their nihilistic crusade. But they don’t see it anymore than the Social Justice Warriors grasp that their militant illiberalism is calling up and equal and opposite reaction from the people they have demonized.

…

“Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?” Trump asked. Maybe he was thinking about Islamic terrorists. I’m thinking about the educated barbarians who cannot create a living culture, only live off the last vestiges of one they inherited, even as they scatter salt in its fallow fields. Donald Trump may be the enemy of culture in many respects, but he is in no way as potent an enemy as these mad evangelists for the Anti-Culture.

…

But then here comes respectable commenters on the left, like Bouie, Beinart, and Fallows, yammering about fascism, Leni Riefenstahl, and racist dog whistles, and you realize that whether he meant to or not, Trump’s speech was clarifying. I don’t think Donald Trump could write ten meaningful sentences explaining why the West matters, but that’s beside the point. The point is, when talking about the worth and the defense of Western civilization makes you into Hitler McGoebbelsface in the eyes of liberal commentators, then you suddenly see the situation in starker relief.

(Emphasis added)

Finally, I really want to share Dreher’s beautiful response to the “‘Western civ’ is white nationalist and racist” crap:

Broadly speaking, what we call the West are the countries and peoples formed by the meeting of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Hebrew religion. There’s a great deal of diversity within the West, but religion, ideas, art, literature, and geography set it apart from other civilizations …

Go to Istanbul. Turks are heirs to a great civilization; you have to look no further than the religious architecture of the city to know that. But you also would never mistake Istanbul for a city of the West. So what?

Every descendant of Africa and Asia who lives in the West and broadly affirms the values that shaped Western civilization is a Westerner. Louis Armstrong and Muddy Waters are as much sons of the West as J.S. Bach and Ludwig von Beethoven. I wrote a book about how reading a poem written by a 14th century Tuscan, Dante Alighieri, utterly changed my life. I have no Italian blood in me at all, but I am part of Dante’s civilization in a way that I simply am not part of the civilization that produced, say, the Analects of Confucius. If not for my mind having been shaped by the Christian narrative, and by Greco-Roman narratives, the poem would not have meant at much to me. Again: so what? This is normal human experience the world over. The civilization shaped by Islam have broad diversity too, but they all share a core belief and experience that binds them.

Thank God that the deracinated, de-Christianized EU elite plan to integrate Turkey into the European Union did not work. And if I were a Turk, I would thank Allah for preserving my Islamic country from that fate too. Elites in both countries wish to deny the religious basis of their respective cultures, and pretend that we’re all a bunch of universalists. We’re not, and never will be.

* * * * *

“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Cultural Liturgies

Let’s get this out of the way: James K.A. Smith reviewed Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option book in a way that struck Dreher and (assuming Dreher was truthful about Smith’s efforts to woo him to Smith’s publisher) me as low-down and deceitful. Since March 10, I don’t think Dreher has mentioned him nor, I believe, have I.

But I, too, have been accused of betrayal — unjustly, in my opinion, but this isn’t about me. My devastatingly effective boycott of Smith must now come to an end. Smith is saying too many important things to ignore him.

For Smith, we are not primarily “thinking things” we are “loving things,” and people pursue what they love. Smith writes: “Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow. Our wants reverberate from our hearts, the epicenter of the human person.” This prompts an obvious question: what if you don’t love the right things? Going further, Smith observes that “you might not love what you think.” For fallen people, that will always be true to greater and lesser degrees. The remedy to disoriented loves is to be immersed in a liturgy that reforms your loves, pointing you in the right direction, to use Smith’s metaphor of the compass. The majority of the book then provides ways to work that liturgy down into your bones, so that you begin to long for the right things.

When hearts are pulled to negative things that work against flourishing, that life starts to be characterized by vice. Smith observes that humans “can’t not be headed somewhere,” and those liturgies, those stories, that capture our hearts move us to action for good or for ill. Unfortunately, many Americans are listening to a story that praises consumption over production and pulls people toward the path of least resistance, or sloth …

Smith is using this model to aid churches and communities in forming citizens of the Kingdom of God—pilgrims on the way to the New Jerusalem, paying attention to the liturgy of God’s people and letting it form and remold their affections. [Sen. Ben] Sasse wants to use the model to form citizens dedicated to republican virtues: commitment to neighbor, affection for their inherited Western tradition, engagement in Puritan-style industriousness, and appreciation for the diverse regions and cultures of the United States. Sasse proposes a liturgy to create mature, honorable citizens—and rulers—of the Republic. Indeed, he believes that this is not just an ideal that Americans could pursue it; it is a mandatory component of the American project. If families do not raise children who exhibit these traits, we might as well call it quits, warning that “if the idea of America is not reborn in our children’s hearts, we will all suffer a shared orphanhood.“

Sasse’s American liturgy is certainly not a know-nothing patriotism committed to “blood and soil.” Instead, it is one that is committed to the republican ideals of the Founding, which spoke of the American government as securing rights and privileges guaranteed by God. Indeed, the patriots made an “appeal to heaven” in their cause, believing they were engaged in a godly, and righteous movement. Sasse sees this American liturgy as a positive, and one that he, a Christian, can heartily embrace. Yet, Smith has emphatically warned Christians about the dangers of the American liturgy. In Desiring the Kingdom, Smith highlights that we are being formed when we are standing for the national anthem, reciting the pledge of allegiance, and praising members of the military for making the “ultimate sacrifice,” and for Smith, this forming tends to push Christians away from the Kingdom of God; instead of being compatible with the Christian liturgy, it, subtly, erodes allegiance to Christ and his kingdom by communicating that the defining characteristic of a person is his or her citizenship in an earthly kingdom. Though he allows that it can ‘make room for additional loyalties,” he believes “it is not willing to entertain trumping loyalties.”

If that is true, then patriotism seems to be antithetical to a religion that claims Jesus is Lord, not Caesar. Sasse and Smith, ultimately have a disagreement over the nature of the American liturgy ….

(Ben Sasse, James K. A. Smith, and Smuggling in Virtue, emphasis added) This article, by the way, summarized Sasse’s book in a way that sort of moots my prior mild dismissal:

Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse has written a book about raising children to be adults, and strangely for a book written by a sitting politician, it contains no concrete policy proposals. It’s a truism, especially on the political right, that politics is downstream of culture. From this perspective, politics and politicians are limited. The problems plaguing our society are rooted in communities and families; and the solutions must be formed by communities and families. Instead of passing the buck impotent politicians, Americans must take a long, honest look in the mirror. Sasse acknowledges this and writes from the point of view of a husband, father, historian, Augustinian, and American.

The aim of his book then is to help parents recalibrate their family culture in order to produce someone who is habituated toward doing virtuous deeds. Sasse wants to help parents in “nudging affections” toward a shared conception of the good ….

* * * * *

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Albert Mohler and his guests

Jacobs on the temptation of Christian Public Intellectuals
Jacobs on Christian Public Intellectuals and the Sexual Revolution
Kevin Vanhoozer on Biblical Authority after Babel
Rod Dreher on you-know-what

Continue reading “Albert Mohler and his guests” →

Channeling the Tradition

I’ve been out of blogging commission for a week because of vacation with a strangely buggy internet connection. Everything worked, albeit a bit slowly, except my WordPress blogging platform, which consistently wouldn’t let me save my work and presumably wouldn’t have let me publish, either.

It was a very eventful week in “public affairs,” but I was kind of glad for the excuse to take a break from commentary. And at least today, I’m focusing on things more eternal than urgently timely.

My traveling soundtrack with Mrs. Tipsy invariably includes Mars Hill Audio Journal, this time Volume 134, which included retired history professor Chris Armstrong, author of Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis.

Excerpts, including a striking suggestion about the primary value of C.S. Lewis — a suggestion which makes a lot of things about Lewis fall into place for me:

Ken Myers: Now again, you repeatedly in this book, deal with mistaken assumptions that many Christian people have about medieval faith, and you’ve already alluded to one. And that is I’ve heard many Protestants say that before the Reformation, Christians weren’t concerned with all of life and one of the great boons of the Reformation was that, suddenly, people realized that the Gospel had consequences for all of life, and God begat Abraham Kuiper.

Chris Armstrong: Yeah, Grant Wacker said once, and I think this may have ultimately come from David Steinmetz, that ever since the Protestant Reformation broke Christendom, Protestants have been trying to figure out how to get back to that original concern for these questions, I suppose you might say, of Christ and culture. And so it’s certainly true that there was a great concern for that in the Reformation and after the Reformation, but it seems to have come not from a previous lack, but from having broken an earlier synthesis.

…

Chris Armstrong: … As it turns out, [C.S.] Lewis in fact was not just a professional medievalist, but what I call an intuitive Medievalist …

Ken Myer: His consciousness, if you will, was more Medieval than modern, or so it seems.

Chris Armstrong: In fact he claimed that … when in the ’50s he was made Chair of Medieval and Renaissance studies … when he said that “I am a dinosaur. I am an artifact, a creature of the past. You should use me as an example as much as a teacher.” … He uses the distinction between contemplating and enjoying something. If you contemplate something, you look directly at it in an analytical mode. If you enjoy it, you begin to look along it, like along the sunbeam, to see what it illuminates ….

Ken Myers: … Given Lewis’s popularity among Evangelicals, and particularly the popularity of the Chronicles of Narnia — but also I suppose you could include a lot of his books of apologetics — that given the popularity of this person with a pre-modern mentality, pre-modern disposition, who seems to be so affable and helpful as guide to seeing the world and understanding how we understand God, how is it that the Medieval mentality that he embodied is still regarded with such suspicion among people who otherwise might really like his work?

Chris Armstrong: I think that’s a wonderful question. What I would say is the more I read Lewis, the more I thought that his primary value is as a conduit of The Tradition. And I just don’t think that people have seen him that way often. They see him say something that deeply affects them, or that strikes them as being deeply true, and they assume … that he’s simply telling them in a clearer way what Scripture already says, and “Isn’t it good that he’s such a good rhetorician and that he helps us understand these things that are so clearly in Scripture.” What they don’t know is that what he’s doing is actually channeling The Tradition to them. They won’t read those sources, probably, most Evangelicals won’t read Athanasius’s On the Incarnation … of Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. But he had read both ….

(Emphasis added)

A podcast I recently began following is Albert Mohler’s Thinking in Public. Last September, he interviewed Alan Jacobs, a regular on Mars Hill Audio Journal as well, following up on Jacobs’ Harpers article The Watchmen: What Became of the Christian Intellectuals?

One thread of their discussion reminds me that Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, insofar as it stands for building parallel consciously Christian institutions to preserve and channel the tradition, even at the price of less “public involvement,” is nothing new:

Mohler: … I was reminded of the fact—and this was important to my response to your article—just how important Reinhold Niebuhr was in the Cold War, and the fact that his realism, in terms of prescriptions for American foreign policy, became very much appreciated by the Truman administration, also by the Eisenhower administration, and by Henry Luce who was the founder of TIME, who put Reinhold Niebuhr on the cover. But at the same time I was reminded again of how routinely Niebuhr was dismissed by the academy. I was reminded of James Conan, the President of Harvard, trying to bring him to Harvard and to no avail. This is such a mixed picture.

Jacobs: Yeah, it really is a mixed picture. In the article, there’s a point where I’m putting what I think to be the key issue, the key issue is this: for the Christian public intellectual, if there is to be such a thing, that person has got to be both audible and free. That is, if you’re going to be genuinely public, then you’ve got to be audible, you’ve got to be somewhere where people can hear you, people across the range of the culture can hear you. But you’ve also got to be free. You’ve got to be free to be able to speak out of genuine Christian conviction or else what’s the point of you? Why would you even be there if you don’t have that to say? And finding that audibility, along with the freedom, has been really problematic for a long time. And you can lose freedom, not because people are constraining you, but because you’re constraining yourself. And I think that is—you mentioned this in your response—the downfall of liberal Protestant establishment in America. And I think that that downfall happened. Now what a lot of people will say in the liberal Protestant world is that well, we lost our—people stopped listening to us, and so we became marginal. And my argument is that they stopped listening to you because you ceased to have anything distinctive to say; when you didn’t want to say anything that was distinctly or particularly Christian; when all you could really do was to say “Me too” to what the rest of the world was saying. Then why should they listen to you anymore? You became inaudible because you chose to speak in ways that were no longer particularistically, distinctively, recognizably Christian. So everybody else was already saying that stuff, who needs you? So I think they marginalized themselves in that regard. There was a certain self-marginalizing by evangelicals and traditionalist Catholics also, but for almost opposite reasons.

Mohler: … I want to ask you—because this is also something that engendered controversy in your essay—and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but you basically say, or imply, that evangelicals, or Christian intellectuals, a better way to put it, willingly withdrew and that it’s largely our fault that there are no Christian intellectuals in the larger public square. And let’s go back to Mannheim for a minute with the cultural production. What didn’t happen that should have? Even trying to take it on those terms, I’m up against a hard place trying to answer the question, What didn’t happen that should have?

Jacobs: Well, Dr. Mohler, I’m not sure that there was anything that should have. Here’s what I mean by that: Christians—orthodox, biblical, Nicene Christians, evangelicals, yes, but also traditionalist Catholics—found themselves in a situation where the intelligentsia and educated classes were to some degree drifting away from them. It was becoming more difficult for them to get a hearing. They became concerned, I think, to make sure that their positions didn’t get lost, that their positions were passed down to the next generation of believers. They chose to do that primarily—not exclusively by any means—but primarily by building up Christian institutions, which in the post-war years with the economic boom there was some money to do. This is an analogy, rather than example. But, Father Hesburgh at Notre Dame was able to transform Notre Dame into a research university because those poor immigrant Catholics in the pre-WWII era, who didn’t have much money to support Notre Dame, had a lot more money after the war and were able to support it. And I think you see the creation of institutions like the National Association of Evangelicals, the founding of Fuller Seminary, and then, existing institutions like Wheaton College, where I taught for 29 years, were able to develop their resources to have, for instance, smaller class sizes, more individual attention to students. They were able to hire people who were more academically ambitious. They were able to build themselves up, and strengthen themselves in such a way that they were able to pass down core Christian convictions to the next generation. But the more energy you spend doing that, the less energy is left over to be a player in the larger, broader, especially secular, culture. And, I’m not sure, I don’t think any of those people were wrong to make the choice that they made.

(Emphasis added) After carefully transcribing audio, I discovered that Dr. Mohler has provided a complete transcript at the site above linked. Help yourself.

* * * * *

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

The Hank Hanegraaf teachable moment

Ed Stetzer’s Christianity Today blog on the conversion of the Bible Answer Man to Christian Orthodoxy has been eating at me.

Here’s the part that bugs me, in what I consider the relevant context:

The early church was indeed more focused on the Eucharist and was more liturgical in structure, nature, and expression. There are things we can learn from that today, but we have to also acknowledge that much of what we see was, indeed, cultural. As a missiologist, I’m not drawn into early Christian cultural forms and am concerned that some are equating them with eternal truth.

The question I want to answer: Are we looking for the right things? Do we want to model with exactitude the cultural form of the early church? Is that the ultimate value?

…

Don’t normalize cultural church forms.

I’m not moving toward Eastern Orthodoxy, so let me add why. For one, I think the tendency towards (big-O) Orthodoxy and its liturgy is missiologically unhealthy, not just theologically problematic. Many segments of Orthodoxy take Hellenistic (or other) cultural forms, consider them normative to today’s context, and apply them as the “true” or “authentic” way.

That’s not helpful and it actually hinders the advance of the gospel, which in part explains why American Orthodoxy has far more converts from evangelicalism than it does from secularism.

Don’t import, export.

A better approach than importing and normalizing cultural church forms is one that is built on Sola Scriptura. In the way of Jesus, and walking in the Spirit, I believe we need to go back to scripture for each and every generation of Christians and ask, “What would it look like to live out this timeless scriptural faith in this time and in this place?”

This, then, exports the truth of scripture to our modern context.

Perhaps the 500th anniversary of the Reformation is a good time to remember the value of Sola Fide, Sola Gratia, Solo Christo, and Sola Deo Gloria as signposts for our unique expression of the gospel that goes deeper than tradition. In fact, it brings us to principles which are expressed in different cultural languages using different cultural methods.

(Where would we be without “missiologists”?)

“In the way of Jesus, and walking in the Spirit, I believe we need to go back to scripture for each and every generation of Christians and ask, “What would it look like to live out this timeless scriptural faith in this time and in this place? …” That sounds benign, even noble. But — lex orandi, lex credendi — the attempt to separate “timeless” message from the liturgical medium strikes me insouciant at best, mad or disingenuous perhaps:

Lex orandi, lex credendi (Latin loosely translated as “the law of praying [is] the law of believing”) is a motto in Christian tradition, which means that it is prayer which leads to belief, or that it is liturgy which leads to theology. It refers to the relationship between worship and belief, and is an ancient Christian principle which provided a measure for developing the ancient Christian creeds, the canon of scripture and other doctrinal matters based on the prayer texts of the Church, that is, the Church’s liturgy. In the Early Church, there was liturgical tradition before there was a common creed and before there was an officially sanctioned biblical canon. These liturgical traditions provided the theological framework for establishing the creeds and canon.

After almost twenty years in Orthodoxy, serving a pretty rich array of parish-level portions of the Divine Service, I’m pretty confident in adding some qualifications to that description:

The liturgical tradition, the lex orandi, was not superseded by creed. The creeds and canons of ecumenical councils were responses to particular heresies that were troubling the Church. The Church could recognize heresy, and refute it by creed and canons, partly because heresy departed from the tradition. The creed was not the telos of liturgy or a comprehensive distillation of the credendi. But doesn’t it hit “the essentials”? Darned if I know, though I doubt it. I have little interest in the putative “essentials” of the faith; I want the fullness.
The liturgical tradition, the lex orandi, was not superseded by the biblical canon. I confess some tension here. Christians in richly liturgical ancient traditions can be tempted to neglect personal familiarity with scripture. But Christians who despise the tradition often butcher the scriptures beyond recognition. We don’t have thousands or tens of thousands of denominations because God spoke with forked tongue in the Scriptures, but because people have consecrated themselves as mini-Popes.

I have no great confidence in claims to follow “the way of Jesus, and walk[] in the Spirit.” To my ear, that sound like the standard of most every liberal Christian incitement to apostasy.

“… Many segments of Orthodoxy take Hellenistic (or other) cultural forms, consider them normative to today’s context, and apply them as the ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ way.“

I’m not sure exactly what missiologist Stetzer is alluding to here, but I know the counter-danger and I’m going to describe it bluntly and maybe even a bit hyperbolically. Adapting the faith to culture has no limiting principle. Applying putative essentials of the faith to, for instance, an individualist, consumerist, capitalist culture in the name of “contextualizing,” produces a faux and feckless faith. It treats as normative “Altar Calls” (in Altarless Churches), where one prays The Sinners Prayer and walks away with unjustified reassurance that he or she is now saved, once and for all, no matter what, for ever and ever. It’s not entirely certain that someone baptized as an infant who has implicit faith that has never wavered is a Real Christian without ever responding to such Altar Call.

Or maybe that was one or two generations ago. The irrepressible Babylon Bee hasn’t actually done any altar call parodies, now that I mention it. Who knows what hip missiologists are into today without following the ~~fads~~ contextualization assiduously?

Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times has now twice interrogated iconic Evangelicals (Tim Keller, Jimmy Carter) on how little he can get away with believing in terms eerily reminiscent of Stetzer: “What does it mean to be a Christian in the 21st century?” He then adds specific questions that Stetzer avoids: “Can one be a Christian and yet doubt the virgin birth or the Resurrection?”

Is this not the spirit of the culture into which Stetzer wants to enculturate the “timeless scriptural faith”? What’s the minimum I can pay for this “salvation” thingy? Let’s make a deal. It’s 2017, after all. Let’s have another look at the (truncated Protestant) Bible and see if there aren’t some loopholes. Maybe all I need is a “Life Verse.”

Such is the eventuality of rolling your own faith in every new generation.

Apparently, at least one Evangelical radio network has cancelled the Bible Answer Man broadcast in the wake of host Hank Hanegraaf becoming Orthodox. I was reminded of an earlier parallel at Wheaton College:

Evangelicals and Catholics, Not-So-Together

In 1994, prominent Wheaton historian Mark Noll endorsed and promoted an ecumenical manifesto titled “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” With the signing of that document, the once-yawning distance between Wheaton and South Bend seemed to close just a bit. But then, eight years later, an assistant professor named Joshua Hochschild felt called to join the Roman communion. Hochschild dutifully informed the administration and assured them that—as a Catholic—he could still fully endorse the Statement of Faith and the Community Covenant.

Litfin, however, disagreed on the grounds that no Catholic could share Wheaton’s commitment to the Reformation principle of sola scriptura. Hochschild disputed this in a series of letters and conversations, and most members of his department took his side. Ultimately Litfin conceded that there was nothing explicit in the Statement of Faith that Hochschild could not affirm; rather, it was Wheaton’s implicit interpretation of the preamble to the Statement—an interpretation of which Litfin claimed to be both arbiter and mouthpiece—that allows no wiggle-room for Catholics.

Thus, in an irony that was lost on no one, an academic administrator laying claim to magisterial interpretive authority fired someone for … not being a Protestant. “This is a matter of preserving our heritage,” Litfin said at the time. “Why change the DNA of the institution?” Hochschild was given a year to find a new job, and is now the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland. Soon after the Hochschild affair, Mark Noll himself decamped for Notre Dame. When asked why he left after 27 years, Noll replied that it was more a matter of being drawn toward a new opportunity than of fleeing problems at Wheaton. But he also pointed to his comments in “The Future of Christian Learning: An Evangelical and Catholic Dialogue”—comments which clearly suggest that evangelical institutions would greatly assist their efforts by employing sympathetic Catholic faculty like Hochschild.

Litfin, for his part, offered an articulate defense of the all-Protestant policy in his book, and again on some Catholic blogs after the Hochschild affair. Still, English professor Alan Jacobs hopes that a new president will revisit the issue: “There are many Catholic and Orthodox teacher-scholars who are very sympathetic to Wheaton’s historic mission. Granted that incorporating such people into our community would be a complex task, one not without pitfalls, I think we have to ask ourselves whether it makes sense to deprive ourselves of those resources.”

(Whither Wheaton? See also The Hochschild Affair, the formatting of which has gotten mangled sometime in the past 11 years.)

Khouria Frederica Mathewes-Green addresses some of the salient fallacies about Orthodoxy in one report of Hanegraaf’s termination. As my friend Tavi put it, “This text is not about a radio show, but rather about how orthodoxy is lived. Worth reading”:

I have been away from the internet for several days, and only today saw the Baptist Press article reporting that one of the radio networks that carries Hank’s show has decided to replace him, since he has become Orthodox. (For some reason Facebook says the link to that article isn’t working.) The article questions the validity of his interpretation of Scripture, because of his chrismation.

The article is mistaken (understandably) at several points. First, it claims that there are many different Orthodox churches, eg Russian, Greek, etc, and you can’t join “the Orthodox Church” by itself, but have to go through one of those subsets. Yes, that is true, you have to join a specific local congregation. I think that is true of all churches, in every denomination. You can’t join a church in theory, you have to get along with other people in a local setting.

But there is no international administration or organization for Orthodoxy. When people band together naturally, it is along the lines of “people, tribes, tongues, and nations,” and that is the highest level at which the Orthodox Church is administratively united. While some other churches have an international organization that unites at the global level, the Orthodox Church does not. Orthodoxy rejects the idea of a “vicar of Christ” because Christ doesn’t need a vicar–he himself is with us. He is the head, not any earthly person or organization.

This author claims that there are “cultural and theological” differences, and of course there are cultural differences, eg what kind of foods people eat in different lands. There are similar cultural differences among Protestants who are in the same denomination but live on different continents. Cultural differences are not a problem. (I’ll get to theological differences below but, basically, they don’t exist.)

Traditionally, missionaries go out to a new “people, tribe” and bring them the Gospel. At first the missionaries might be Greeks going into Russia, for example, a thousand years ago. In time, the natives of Russia have their own Russian Orthodox Church and are no longer a part of the Greek Orthodox Church. In 1794, the Russian Orthodox Church sent missionaries into Alaska. Orthodoxy spread south and east from there, and then Eastern European immigrants spread from the East coast of America westward. At present most Orthodox churches will still have in their name the nation that originally sent the missionaries, but there will eventually be a single American Orthodox Church here. It is frustrating to some of us that this administrative unity is taking so long, but one reason it does is that these various-nationality churches in America already function as a single church. We attend each others’ services and take communion; if we move to a new city, we might join a church of a different background than our old church. It doesn’t make a lot of difference (I like to say, the main difference is the kind of pastries at coffee hour). Since we are already experiencing unity at the ground level, the irksome task of dismantling and re-building administratively doesn’t feel particularly urgent, to ordinary churchgoers.

Yet even though the Orthodox Church appears in various national groupings, they all have the same theology. This seems impossible in the West, where even very forceful leadership is unable to compel theological agreement. When I was Episcopalian, the Episcopal church one mile away taught different theology than we did. It seems impossible to have everyone willingly embrace and uphold a single theology. And yet Orthodoxy does.

One reason is that we didn’t have the intra-Christian struggles that the West did. Orthodox cities were attacked and conquered by people of other faiths, and Orthodox were clear about how their faith differed from non-Christian, which perhaps caused them to bond more closely to each other and overlook disagreements. Yet they grasped this unity without being overseen by a powerful international organization; it happened more organically than that, and voluntarily.

The main reason for this unity is that the faith is taught mainly by participation in worship. You don’t even have to be able to read–you can get the equivalent of a seminary education by just attending worship. And worship is held in the local language. The tradition has always been that Orthodox missionaries translate the Scriptures, prayers, and hymns into the local language; if there is no written language, they produce an alphabet and then translate. So there’s no language barrier; every member of the church, from a milkmaid to an empress, can learn the faith just by going to worship. If the priest starts preaching something wrong, the laity can recognize it and refuse to follow him. St. Basil the Great describes lay people praying in snowy fields rather than worship in a church led by a priest of the Arian heresy.

(I recount a story in “Welcome to the Orthodox Church” about a Brooklyn priest who went to a conference in Chicago in 1893, and talked about his belief that all religions are equal, they all worship the same god, it doesn’t matter what name you use. When he got home again he put his key in the lock and it wouldn’t turn. His congregation had already changed the locks on him.)

Since no one has the authority to change those prayers and hymns, the faith remains the same. What the grannies remember is what their grannies remember, and on back through time. A person who advocated changes could only demonstrate that he had left the Church.

The faith *constitutes* the Church. The faith *itself* is the authority.

The role of the Bible: No one believes literally in sola scriptura. Everyone believes that the bible has to be responsibly interpreted. Everyone believes that some interpretations of the bible are better, more accurate, than others. And everyone believes that leaving a wholly untaught person free to invent his own interpretation of the bible is dangerous.

The question is: where do you get your interpretation?

Protestants often look back to one or several of the Reformers: Calvin, Luther, etc. But these men lived only 500 years ago. What’s more, they were the inheritors of a deeply-established theology based on reading the Bible in Latin translation.

The early church, on the other hand, were people who spoke bible Greek (koine Greek) in their everyday life. It was the language of commerce, as English is today. The authors of the New Testament were members of that community, and wrote with that same community in mind, picturing them as their audience. The early-Christian interpretation of the Bible is going to be more accurate than that of other Christians–no matter how learned or sincere–who lived at a distant time and place. (Especially if they have already thoroughly absorbed an interpretation of the Bible based on century after century of reading it in Latin translation. Just one example is the word energy, or energeia in Greek, which St Paul uses some 30 times to describe God’s presence within us. Paul says God “energizes” in us, but there was no Latin equivalent, so modern bibles say, much more weakly, that he “works.”)

More-recent Bible interpreters are simply at a disadvantage, in comparison with the early church. This is not a claim that the early church was more holy than Christians today, only that they had a distinct advantage when it comes to understanding the Bible. Theirs is the interpretation held by the Orthodox Church.

The role of the Church Fathers is to be a chorus expressing that interpretation eloquently and usefully. No one of them is an expert, as Calvin or Luther might be seen to be. All Church Fathers are capable of asserting ideas that are mistaken (someone said “100% of the Church Fathers are right 80% of the time.”) The Church Fathers are not the authority; the faith itself is the authority, the faith handed down from the Apostles. But the Church Fathers often express that interpretation in a useful and clear way. They learned the faith the same way everybody did: through listening to worship over the years, as the cycle of the year repeated again and again and understanding deepens.

Every church and denomination offer an interpretation of the Bible. The Orthodox interpretation is the earliest, carried forward from the time of the Apostles.

I could write a whole other post about how the the Orthodox continually faces a test of “Is it working?” We Orthodox expect the faith to *do* something. We expect that life in Christ will transform people, most of us in quiet ways, but always some few in every generation who become so united with Christ that it shines out of them in miraculous ways. The existence of such saints in our own time, who repeat the pattern from every age and century, are the evidence that Orthodoxy actually *works.*

This is perhaps the biggest difference between Orthodoxy and Western versions of Christianity: that the latter became occupied with battling over ideas, and so ideas became the most important things, and personal transformation often ignored. In Orthodoxy we believe that, if your theology is right, then you will know God, you will shine with his light (in occasional cases, literally). Orthodoxy can continually test whether its theology is correct by checking to see whether it is still producing saints. Look up a few 20th century saints, like St Porphyrios, St Paisius, St. Silouan, St Sophrony, St. Gavrilia; you’ll see what they have in common, the marks of humility and love (and, in some cases, a good sense of humor) that are the proving ground of Orthodox theology.