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

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Sunday of the Last Judgment

No, that’s not a prediction. That’s the formal name of this last pre-Lenten Sunday in Orthodox Christianity. It’s also known as “meatfare,” because tomorrow we begin abstaining from meat until Pascha, April 20 this year.

State of the Union, February 23

A lot of people are trying to find precedents for what’s going on with the USA over the last 34 days. May I suggest that this is a fall of Babylon?

The US as Babylon was first suggested to me by a schismatic (when I was unwittingly schismatic) almost 60 years ago. I’ve never quite shaken it, and I think that there was a seed of truth there that’s compatible with Orthodoxy. One important divergence in my application is that I absolutely wouldn’t say “When the Bible says ‘Babylon,’ it means the USA.” Rather, I think Babylon is a typology, and that the USA fits it to a “T” today. In a few hundred years (“if the Lord tarries,” as they say), it could be China.

On the other hand, we don’t read Revelation liturgically, and I’ve never heard an Orthodox Priest or academic suggest this directly. I can’t rule out that the thought is just a bit of mental baggage from my past. It hasn’t caught on in white American Evangelicalism because — well, read the passage. It’s not holding up a flattering mirror.

In all this, friends, remember that God’s judgments are true and righteous, that He is gracious and loves mankind, and that the end of a world isn’t the end of the world.

Atheism in the Church

Last week, I quoted the ever-provocative Stanley Hauerwas

Atheism slips into the church where God really does not matter, as we go about building bigger and better congregations (church administration), confirming people’s self-esteem (worship), enabling people to adjust to their anxieties brought on by their materialism (pastoral care), and making Christ a worthy subject for poetic reflection (preaching). At every turn the church must ask itself, Does it really make any difference, in our life together, in what we do, that in Jesus Christ God is reconciling the world to himself?

Might this be profitably expanded to include political mobilization? …

The Atheist Liturgical Calendar

… Or our “liturgical calendars”?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so … what any calendar does, because any calendar you use is going to be cyclical, is going to be a series of weeks that make up a series of months that make up a series of years, and that cycle is going to repeat. There’s going to be a May 23 every year. It loops back around.

Even if you want to talk about— Let’s talk about the most secular calendar I can think of, which is the American consumer calendar, meaning it’s structured around holidays that are built to sell things. So we just had Memorial Day: sell barbecue supplies and flags. We’re going to have—now, Juneteenth has been added to the list; I think that’s also going to be a lot of barbecuing for most people. Fourth of July, sell fireworks, sell flags. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is in there: buy gifts for Dad, get the tie cake from Carvel. Valentine’s Day. St. Patrick’s Day: sell a lot of beer and green stuff, etc. So this is the most— about as secular as you can get of a calendar; even though some of those dates are still named after saints, it’s pretty secular.

That calendar, if you follow it, will shape the rhythm of your life. And that’s what it’s designed for! … Retail establishments want that to shape the rhythm of your life. That “seasonal” section at your local Walmart, where they have the stuff for whatever the next one of these holidays that aren’t really holy days per se in most cases— They’re counting on that cycle. They want that to shape your life. “Oh, now I go and buy and consume this. Now I go and buy and consume that.” They’ll shape your life; it’ll form you.

This, to me, is one of the worst backlashes of particularly the Puritan movements that come out of the Protestant Reformation. Bear with me here, Protestant friends. Really think about this. They had such an antipathy for [things] like saints’ days… Some of those Puritan movements— Well, most of those Puritan movements wouldn’t celebrate Christmas, the birth of Christ. Some of them won’t even celebrate Easter, Pascha. But definitely we don’t want a lot of, you know, feast days. I think it’s in the Westminster Standards that says you must guard against the proliferation of saints’ days.

Fr. Andrew: Nice! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Protect everyone from this, right? So all of this stuff from the Christian liturgical calendar gets removed. And most American Christianity, American Evangelicalism really comes out of those Puritan movements, just historically. But then what do you end up centering even your church life around? You’ve got Mother’s Day sermons, Father’s Day sermons.

Fr. Andrew: You’re going to have a liturgical calendar one way or another.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! Fourth of July sermons when you sing patriotic songs in a church!

Fr. Andrew: I know.

Fr. Stephen: All of these things. It’s the same thing! You’ve just chosen the most secular possible version!

Fr. Andrew: What I want to know is—and I’m pretty sure the answer to this question is yes; I just haven’t encountered it yet because I haven’t googled it up yet— Are there Amazon Prime Day sermons?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, I’m sure. I know there are Black Friday sermons.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, of course!

Fr. Stephen: [Sigh] Right? Just pause and think about it for a minute. What’s better: to base and structure your liturgical life on the life of Christ and the stories about Christ recounted in the Bible, or to base the cycles of your church life on random national holidays that often don’t even have any particular religious significance? I mean, the answer to that seems so obvious to me. I think the Puritans would be horrified by Fourth of July sermons and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day sermons! So think about that. But this is why, again, the calendar is so important.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and (mostly) Fr. Stephen De Young

Science and religion

Just as colonial officials and missionaries, traveling to India, had imposed the concept of ‘religion’ on the societies they found there, so did agnostics colonize the past in similar manner. The ancient Egyptians, and Babylonians, and Romans: all were assumed to have had a ‘religion’. Some peoples—most notably the Greeks—were also assumed to have had ‘science’. It was this that had enabled their civilization to serve as the wellspring of progress. Philosophers had been the prototypes of scientists. The library of Alexandria had been ‘the birthplace of modern science’. Only Christians, with their fanatical hatred of reason and their determination to eradicate pagan learning, had prevented the ancient world from being set on a path towards steam engines and cotton mills.

Tom Holland, Dominion (spelling Americanized)

History Rhymes

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Naked suffering

My grandparents did not have a car, but they hired one to go in to the hospital, when the end finally came. I went with them in the car, but was not allowed to enter the hospital. Perhaps it was just as well. What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it? In that sense, Mother was right. Death, under those circumstances, was nothing but ugliness, and if it could not possibly have any ultimate meaning, why burden a child’s mind with the sight of it?

Thomas Merton, The Seven-Story Mountain

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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Sunday After Nativity

Intellectual converts

The Free Press yesterday published a longish item, How Intellectuals Found God by Peter Savodnik.

I was familiar with all the intellectuals named except Jordan Hall, and they all seem to fit Brad East’s year-old Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline commenting on the rarity of intellectual conversions to Protestantism as opposed to catholic traditions. Add to Brad East’s exploratory hypotheses about that phenomenon those of Fergus McCullough, Why don’t intellectuals convert to Protestantism?.

Tyler Cowen chimes in, in a somethat different key:

Not too long ago, I was telling Ezra Klein that I had noticed a relatively new development in classical liberalism. If a meet an intellectual non-Leftist, increasingly they are Nietzschean, compared to days of yore. But if they are classical liberal instead, typically they are religious as well. That could be Catholic or Jewish or LDS or Eastern Orthodox, with some Protestant thrown into the mix, but Protestants coming in last.

As an Orthodox Christian, I take no offense at intellectual converts gravitating in a catholic direction, but for a number of reasons, I’m not doing an end-zone dance about it, either, unlike one (Roman) Catholic bishop in Texas:

Catholicism will be nihilism’s last competitor on the dance floor of history, and Catholicism will see it drop from exhaustion as the orchestra plays on. The music itself will testify.

Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas

But so what?

Men are apt to prefer prosperous error to an afflicted truth.

Jeremy Taylor

Both quotes via R.R. Reno

Those evangelicals of intellectual bent should be wrestling with this question, though.

Carefully Rehearsed Spontaneity

The framers of the Directory [for the Publique Worship of God] were not unaware of its paradoxical stance vis-à-vis ritual, either. Its preface obliquely acknowledged the oddity of institutionalizing a prescribed means of praying when Puritan teaching held that converted people would pray aright by the Spirit, but offered it as “some help and furniture” to the minister, so that he might “furnish his heart and tongue with Materials of Prayer and Exhortation, as shall be needful” (7-8). The careful, italicized language of the Directory, meant to be paraphrased but not displaced altogether, embodies a sort of anxious, secret checking of spontaneity that is in fact part and parcel of its logic. In spite of the selection of a man who appeared a trustworthy minister of God’s word, not only might his prayers stray from sound doctrine, but more than that, they might not flow freely, spontaneously, and affectively at all. In referring to the guide as “help and furniture,” the Directory portrays what it believes should be a modern, rational, self-transparent, and spontaneous self, operating under what it figures as deformities, weaknesses, and handicaps: seeking to authenticate its goodness and wholeness, yet perennially afraid of its inner divisions, the demand of its repeated performance, and perhaps most of all of its silences.

In this way, the Directory also looks toward the spiraling anxiety. That is one of the enduring legacies of Protestant and English dissenting spirituality in the restoration and enlightenment. More paradoxically than the writers of the Directory, Dissenters later wrote a vast literature to instruct those within their camp in the art of praying spontaneously. This literature too begs the question of why free prayer needed coaching, a query many dealt with directly. But it also sets forth as its most common recommendation for achieving true prayer the collection of lists of phrases, usually from Scripture, which once memorized would roll off the tongue and be easily assembled into prayer on the spur of the moment. Where the Directory‘s very form expresses the implicit knowledge that spontaneity is no real guarantor of (doctrinal or spiritual) truth, these free-prayer guides murmur with the fear that spontaneity may not come at all. While they seek to fill the mind with scriptural phrases, constructing, in Matthew Henry’s words, a “Storehouse of Materials for Prayer,” they also speak another truth. Besides being furnished with nonorthodox materials, the self that flees performativity and ritual, looking inward for authentic substance, finds itself fluctuating and, in the face of the demands of performance and empirical, experimental repetition, often silent and empty.

…

[Matthew] 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 similar method; he provides, for instance, and amazing two and a half pages of verses elaborating on the one phrase “Our Father, who art Heaven” (MP, 163-65), a general topos, he says, from which prayer 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.

…

The more individualized these spiritual practices became, like the personalized collections of scriptural phrases, the more readily their constructedness-their nonspontaneity-was apparent, opening the believer to a sense of isolation and perpetual, nearly neurotic self-critique …

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity, pp. 55-57, 60.

This fake spontaneity persists in verbal tics like “Father God, we just” this, that, or the other thing. It’s like refrigerator magnet poetry only less creative.

The sober prayers of the Book of Common Prayer always secretly guided me when, as a Calvinist Elder, I was to lead congregational prayer, and those of the Orthodox Prayer books had an outsized influence on my eventual embrace of Orthodoxy.

Watch what they do, not what they say

Paradoxically, therefore, the structures necessary for the Reformers to extend the sacred into all of life included a whole constellation of structures and practices that they undermined. For if everything is sacred, then in another sense, nothing is sacred. This struck me in a particularly visceral way one Sunday morning at the Calvinist church in Idaho. After the service, I went to use the restroom and found leftovers of Communion bread in the bathroom garbage. The clergy routinely gave leftover bread and wine to the children to consume as a snack, which the children could then take wherever they wished.

Robin Phillips, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation

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

Paul Kingsnorth

Sunday before Nativity, 2024

David Brooks

I have long admired David Brooks, and a few years ago I heard fairly detailed rumors about his embrace of Christian faith — without ceasing to identify as Jewish.

This week, he wrote at some length about his pilgrimage (unlocked article). So far as I know, this is his public “coming out”:

When I was an agnostic, I thought faith was primarily about belief. Being religious was about having a settled conviction that God existed and knowing that the stories in the Bible were true. I looked for books and arguments that would convince me that God was either real or not real.

Some people are spiritual but not religious; during that time, you could say I was religious but not spiritual.

…

When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences …

…

Sometimes people hear about my religious journey and ask me about my “conversion,” but that word is a relic from the rationalist mentality — as if I traded one belief system for another. The process felt more like an inspiration, like someone had breathed life into those old biblical stories so that they now appeared true.

Today, I feel more Jewish than ever, but as I once told some friends, I can’t unread Matthew. For me, the Beatitudes are the part of the Bible where the celestial grandeur most dazzlingly shines through. So these days I’m enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang. My Jewish friends, who have been universally generous and forbearing, point out that when you believe in both the Old and New Testaments, you’ve crossed over to Team Christian, which is a fair point.

…

We religious people talk about virtue so much you’d think we’d behave better than nonreligious people. But that’s not been my experience. Over the past decade, especially in the American church, I’ve seen religious people behaving more viciously, more dishonestly and, in some ways, more tolerant of sexual abuse. I sometimes joke that entering the church in 2013 was like investing in the stock market in 1929. My timing could have been better.

Still, I’ve been grateful to live in an enchanted world, to live toward someone I can seek and serve. I’ve been grateful to have to learn and relearn yet another startling truth, that faith is about yearning but it’s not about striving. You can’t earn God’s love with good behavior and lofty thoughts, because he’s already given it to you as the lavish gift that you don’t deserve. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness, Lord,” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “and you gave them to me.”

Three decades ago, I might have snorted and said “this guy is no Christian!” Or maybe I wouldn’t have. It’s hard to remember all of my past attitudes, and tempting to caricature them. But I’m confident that I would at least have felt that this account was alien and challenging to my then-understanding of Christian faith. Today, I find his account quite sympathetic, as, I think, the late Bishop Kallistos Ware would have as well:

Faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there.

And I have it on reasonably good authority that most uses of “faith” in English-language Bibles would better be rendered as “faithfulness,” which is especially salient this morning as the gospel reading (on the Orthodox “new calendar”) is much of Hebrews chapter 11.

Chistianities: thin, sharp, thick

Jonathan Rauch, in conversation with David French (unlocked), divides Christianity in the US into thin, sharp, and thick versions. It’s of concern to him — gay, atheist and Jewish — because he has come to see that Christianity is congruent with liberal democracy and our liberal democracy may need it for survival.

I’ve rejected untold times the idea that Christianity is only important in publicly instrumental ways, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important in those ways. And I thought Rauch’s descriptions of thin and sharp Christianities are pretty well on target.

It seems to me, though, that Rauch’s example of what constitutes thick (i.e., useful) Christianity is off-base:

This is what’s been missing. Christians have a teaching about how individuals should relate to the world around them. If there’s a hurricane in Asheville, the stories of what the church is doing are fantastic. But they don’t have a teaching about how to engage politics as Christians. And that leads me to realize what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is actually modeling is a whole civic theology, and that’s what Christianity needs more of: teachings about how would Jesus approach politics.

I think my concern arises because Rauch is seeing Christianity largely in instrumental terms. Or maybe it’s because I’m having trouble figuring out how a Church stays thick while diverting attention to thinning civics (“teaching about how to engage politics as Christians”). Or maybe I recoil at the thought that anything good could come out of Salt Lake City.

The inevitability of ritual

In England, the two kinds of churches I do still see filling appear rather different. In a local baptist church the pews are crammed with young families having powerful, intimate encounters with their faith. Something immediate is being accommodated. I remember seeing a guy fresh from a building site, dusty with a high viz jacket. Family with him, arms outstretched, tears on his cheeks. It would bring a lump to your throat.

Then I see my own parish, hushed and seemingly antique, but with more young people than ever before. In both I see people who look spiritually fed. Then out there in the wider audit of emptying churches there seems often to be a sense of weariness, or simple lack of oomph. There will be exceptions to this last sentence, I have no sneer in writing it. I sometimes go sit in those congregations simply out of love for the yards they’ve put in as parishioners. Solidarity, a hand held across the fence to a fellow worker bee.

It seems, from a distance, the two churches are very different, and I am well aware of the theological wrestles that create distance. What I don’t go along with is the notion that one is completely improvisational and unencumbered by tradition, and the other set-and-only-set in a kind of endless, ancient theatre or lifeless ceremony. Dame Mary Douglas, a cultural anthropologist, encapsulates something she calls the ‘anti-ritualist’ approach:

The confirmed anti-ritualist mistrusts external expression. He values a man’s inner convictions. Spontaneous speech that flows from the heart, unpremeditated, irregular in form, even somewhat incoherent, is good because it bears witness to the speaker’s real intentions.

I think actually, ritual is inevitable, even when tacit. We are ceremony people, no matter how spontaneous we think we may be. There will be a loved formula, a linguistic groove long established, a shared initiatory language in common for any community that lasts. It’s about the dynamic counterpoints of tradition and innovation. We may have done away with the candles, offerings and holy smoke, but simply to feel safe repetition will always have value.

Martin Shaw.

Don’t forget the Christian East

It is noteworthy that no institutional form of religious persecution was ever introduced in the Christian East. Because of Western historiographical ignorance of the Orthodox Church, however, the inquisition would come to represent, for secular intellectuals in modern times, the illegitimacy of any civilization grounded in Christianity, whether Western or Eastern.

John Strickland, The Age of Division

Fully God, fully man

And from this we draw a refutation of Eutyches: since Christ is declared to be the fruit of the womb. And all fruit is of the same nature as the parent plant: so it follows that the Virgin also was of the same nature as the Second Adam, Who takes away the sins of the world. And let those be ashamed at the true child-bearing of the Mother of God, who have invented some fantastic notion concerning Christ’s Body; for the fruit proceeds from the very substance of the tree. And what of those who say that Christ passed through Mary as water through a channel? Let them hearken to the words of Elizabeth, who was filled with the Holy Ghost; saying that Christ was the fruit of the womb.

Severus (of Antioch) via Jonah (of micro.blog). Emphasis added because I heard somebody on WMBI say exactly that (actually, she said “pipe” rather than “channel”).

If Christ passed through Mary as water through a pipe, where did He get His humanity, which all Christians now confess? How do you get to “fully God and fully man” if Mary was just a pipe?

Denying Christ’s humanity is a pretty high price to pay for dodging her whose “fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum” is a crucial element in the story of our salvation.

A terrible choice

Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

Paul Kingsnorth

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:

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)
Second, love people as the very image of God and resist the temptation to improve them.
Third, refuse to make economics the basis of your life. Your job is not even of secondary importance.
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.
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.
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.
Seventh, cultivate contentment rather than pleasure. It will help you consume less and free you from slavery to your economic masters.
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.
Ninth, learn another language. Very few things are better at teaching you about who you are not.
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

Sunday 12/8/24

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of my parish’s first Divine Liturgy in our purpose-built building. I have a handy way of remembering the date.

Two living churches

In England, the two kinds of churches I do still see filling appear rather different. In a local baptist church the pews are crammed with young families having powerful, intimate encounters with their faith. Something immediate is being accommodated. I remember seeing a guy fresh from a building site, dusty with a high viz jacket. Family with him, arms outstretched, tears on his cheeks. It would bring a lump to your throat.

Then I see my own parish, hushed and seemingly antique, but with more young people than ever before. In both I see people who look spiritually fed. Then out there in the wider audit of emptying churches there seems often to be a sense of weariness, or simple lack of oomph. There will be exceptions to this last sentence, I have no sneer in writing it. I sometimes go sit in those congregations simply out of love for the yards they’ve put in as parishioners. Solidarity, a hand held across the fence to a fellow worker bee.

It seems, from a distance, the two churches are very different, and I am well aware of the theological wrestles that create distance. What I don’t go along with is the notion that one is completely improvisational and unencumbered by tradition, and the other set-and-only-set in a kind of endless, ancient theatre or lifeless ceremony. Dame Mary Douglas, a cultural anthropologist, encapsulates something she calls the ‘anti-ritualist’ approach:

The confirmed anti-ritualist mistrusts external expression. He values a man’s inner convictions. Spontaneous speech that flows from the heart, unpremeditated, irregular in form, even somewhat incoherent, is good because it bears witness to the speaker’s real intentions.

I think actually, ritual is inevitable, even when tacit. We are ceremony people, no matter how spontaneous we think we may be. There will be a loved formula, a linguistic groove long established, a shared initiatory language in common for any community that lasts. It’s about the dynamic counterpoints of tradition and innovation. We may have done away with the candles, offerings and holy smoke, but simply to feel safe repetition will always have value.

Martin Shaw. I finally was able to begin reading Rituals of Spontaneity, which (if I’m not sorely mistaken) elaborates the folly of Christians dispensing with ritual.

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

Best listicle ever?

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

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)
Second, love people as the very image of God and resist the temptation to improve them.
Third, refuse to make economics the basis of your life. Your job is not even of secondary importance.
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.
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.
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.
Seventh, cultivate contentment rather than pleasure. It will help you consume less and free you from slavery to your economic masters.
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.
Ninth, learn another language. Very few things are better at teaching you about who you are not.
Tenth, be thankful for everything, remembering that the world we live in and everything in it belongs to God.

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)

Delusion

Christians can give their bodies over to the nation-state while continuing to express in textual terms that worship belongs to God alone.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Flipping the Script

On regular Christian campuses, there “are higher expectations for presidents than members of the faculty, and members of the faculty live with greater expectations than students,” noted religious-liberty activist David French, writing at The Dispatch. “Liberty flipped this script. The president lived life with greater freedom than his students or his faculty. The message sent was distinctly unbiblical – that some Christian leaders can discard integrity provided their other qualifications, from family name to fund-raising prowess, provided sufficient additional benefit.”

Terry Mattingly, What Next for Liberty University? Press Should Watch Future Campus Worship Services (September 2020)

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.19 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

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

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

Paul Kingsnorth

Sunday, 11/24/24

Formatting things a bit differently today, without “headlines.”

After he had twice visited the United States in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a perceptive essay contrasting Christian development in America with parallel developments in the parts of Europe most directly shaped by the Protestant Reformation. His assessment included an observation that was as shrewd in its comparative wisdom as it is relevant for the themes of this book: “The secularization of the church on the continent of Europe arises from the misinterpretation of the reformers’ distinction of the two realms [of church and society]; American secularization derives precisely from the imperfect distinction of the kingdoms and offices of church and state, from the enthusiastic claim of the church to universal influence in the world.” What Bonhoeffer saw has been described with other terms here: The key moves in the creation of evangelical America were also the key moves that created secular America.
It is a matter of great historical significance that American Protestants almost never cited biblical chapter and verse to defend their interpretive practices. Precisely as it worked on Scripture, the Reformed, literal hermeneutic revealed most clearly how it arose from the special circumstances of American life. Yet even if this hermeneutic itself was not necessarily rooted in a literal reading of Scripture, it was nonetheless the American norm for the generations between the writing of the Constitution and the end of the Civil War.

Mark Noll, America’s God. (You may need to chew on that a bit. Or read the book.)

Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.

C.S. Lewis via Paul Kingsnorth, who situates Lewis’ insight in our age.

Brad East once pondered:

Why do people convert to Christianity? Why do intellectuals and other public figures convert so often to Catholicism (or Eastern Orthodoxy) and so rarely to Protestantism?

Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline. I suspect he’s still pondering, though I don’t think he’s addressed the topic as explicitly as in the quoted article.

I keep coming back to the article deliberately, feeling as if I haven’t exhausted it. Maybe you’d find it helpful, too.

The west, so it seems to them, tends to think of the Crucifixion in isolation, separating it too sharply from the Resurrection. As a result the vision of Christ as a suffering God is in practice replaced by the picture of Christ’s suffering humanity: the western worshipper, when he meditates upon the Cross, is encouraged all too often to feel an emotional sympathy with the Man of Sorrows, rather than to adore the victorious and triumphant king.

Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church

No, St. Paul wasn’t a perv:

When teaching non-Jewish Christians, one of the most radical disjunctions with their former way of life was sexual morality. Sexual continence had simply not been a concern for most of them before, so it became Paul’s focus. Paul’s frequent emphasis on this area was not based on prurient interest but on the continuing education and reorientation of former pagans.

Fr. Stephen De Young, Saint Paul the Pharisee. Actually (I’m sure Fr. Stephen noted it elsewhere), fornication with temple prostitutes was the former practice of some of these non-Jewish Christians. That’s why Paul had to focus there.

“Man is what he eats.” With this statement the German materialistic philosopher Feuerbach thought he had put an end to all “idealistic” speculations about human nature. In fact, however, he was expressing, without knowing it, the most religious idea of man. For long before Feuerbach the same definition of man was given by the Bible.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

“The clock,” [Lewis] Mumford has concluded, “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” … [A]s Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

It’s profoundly significant that of all the Christian groups, only the Orthodox include the babies at the Holy Chalice, completely recognizing and demon-strating their full incorporation into the Church, the Body of Christ. This alone, it seems to me, shows forth the truthfulness of our Church’s claim to be the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, alone preserving the fullness of the Christian Faith.

Frederica Mathewes-Green & Rod Dreher, Healing Humanity

Only a few peoples—the odd German tribe and, inevitably, the Jews—had stood aloof from the exposure of unwanted children. Pretty much everyone else had always taken it for granted. Until, that was, the emergence of a Christian people.
Islamic the Islamic State may have been; but it also stood in a line of descent from Anabaptist Münster. It was, perhaps, the most gruesome irony in the whole history of Protestantism.
When scholars in Europe sought to justify the Spanish conquest of the New World, they reached not for the Church Fathers, but for Aristotle. ‘As the Philosopher says, it is clear that some men are slaves by nature and others free by nature.’
The concept of secularism—for all that it was promoted by the editor who invented the word as an antidote to religion—testified not to Christianity’s decline, but to its seemingly infinite capacity for evolution.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Several narrower books linger more persistently in my mind, but Dominion has in a sense penetrated deeper than mere “mind.”

Even after His Resurrection, Christ instructed disciples on the road to Emmaus when “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). The Christological key to unlock the Jewish Scriptures was given to the Church by Christ Himself…
Two centuries later, fundamental differences in phronema would again be an obstacle to union between the West and the East at the Council of Florence in 1439. Catholics presented rational arguments for their positions, and the Orthodox responded by citing apostolic Tradition. It was “the constant conviction of the Latins that they always won the disputation, and of the Greeks that no Latin argument ever touched the heart of the problem.”

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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

Paul Kingsnorth

Sundays are joyful days, but there’s a little cloud on this one: 26 years ago, my father died, quite unexpectedly.

His was a quick and apparently painless death — what we think of as a good death these days. But I’m not so sure. Meeting God face-to-face is a serious business. I’m inclined to think a slow and painful death, with lots of time to face the reality and to set aright things that are our of kilter, has its own advantages.

We brought nothing into this world

Modernity equates liberty with the freedom to decide and choose, to define ourselves and the world around us. In the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy (Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, 1992):

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

We relish this concept of unfettered freedom. But, of course, it is absurd, even for a secularist. For whether we choose to admit it or not, we “brought nothing into this world” (1 Tim. 6:7). Everything in our lives is derived and gifted. We are not the inventors of the world nor of our lives. And though we struggle to understand and even master our own DNA, it remains a primary component of our destiny, a genetic memory of the history of our coming into being across the ages. To be told that we have some portion of DNA contributed by Neanderthals reminds us that even such obscure ancestors are “selves we have received” through our genetically traditioned existence.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

There has never been a “Positive World”

I was a casual follower of Aaron Renn until Alan Jacobs demolished Renn’s famous February 2022 piece, The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.

Without defining Christianity, Renn says the world used to be positive toward it. You can read Renn for yourself, and Jacobs, too (and you really should read Jacobs if you think Renn is onto something important), but here’s the gist (via Jacobs) of why there was never a “positive world” for thoroughgoing Christianity:

Professing Christianity is what Renn calls a “status-enhancer” when and only when the Christianity one professes is in step with what your society already and without reference to Christian teaching describes as “being an upstanding citizen.” If you don’t believe me, try getting up on stage in an evangelical megachurch and reckoning seriously with Jesus’s teaching on wealth and poverty. Even a sermon on loving your enemies, like Ruby Bridges, and blessing those who curse you, can be a hard sell — as many pastors since 2016 have discovered. News flash: if you make a point of never saying anything that would make people doubt your commitment to their preferred social order, they’ll probably think you an upstanding citizen. (Who knew?)

There are pretty much always some elements of Christian teaching that you can get away with publicly affirming; but you can never get away with affirming them all. If American Christians sixty years ago felt fully at home in their social world, that’s because they quietly set aside, or simply managed to avoid thinking about, all the biblical commandments that would render them no longer at ease in the American dispensation. Any Christians who have ever felt completely comfortable in their culture have already edited out of their lives the elements of Christianity that would generate social friction. And no culture that exists, or has ever existed, or ever will exist, is receptive to the whole Gospel.

Renn is Evangelical or Evangelical-adjacent (PCA Presbyterian). I was once very friendly toward the PCA, so I think I can say that it’s not a church that rocked the social order (at least until Orgasms for All! became the unofficially established religion of the USA).

The bloom is entirely off my Renn Rose. I deeply discount articles that take his “three worlds” model as their premise.

A Christian Is An Outlaw

Apropos of “negative world”:

It would be honour in modernity for a Christian to be called such an outlaw, for surely they do not conform to the laws of this world.

Martin Shaw, A Christian Is An Outlaw

God in a box

There’s a brilliant episode of King of the Hill where Bobby, the thirteen-year-old boy, gets really into Christian rock. At the end of the episode his dad, Hank, shows him a box where he keeps tokens from all the different phases he has gone through. There’s a Beanie Baby, a Tamagotchi, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle… Bobby cringes—and that’s the point. “I know you think the stuff you’re doing now is cool,” says Hank to his son, “but in a few years, you’re going to think it’s lame. And I don’t want the Lord to end up in this box.”

Theophan Davis, How Not to Be a Saint

This Orthodox novice’s section on prayer (“Play to your weakness”) was also very good.

Sufficiently Rawlsian?

I might appeal to the second chapter of Genesis when speaking about the fundamental importance of male–female complementarity. But I do so because the biblical witness so succinctly and powerful states a fundamental truth that every civilization has honored.

R. R. Reno, responding to a transcribed speech of Oren Cass on how to construct a secular conservatism.

Would John Rawls accept this as public reasoning?

Sola Scriptura

Even as they claimed to rely on the Bible alone, antebellum Protestants frequently turned to Christian saints, exegetical traditions, the practices of Christians past, and official church teachings, employing these sources to complement or clarify what they took the Bible to mean. Perhaps this betrays a deeper sense that the Bible was not as self-interpreting as many Protestants hoped. At the very least, it shows the inescapability of tradition. American Protestants never read, or argued over, the Bible alone.

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

What the heck is a Carpatho-Rusyn?

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Byzantine Rite Christians from the Carpathian mountain region began to arrive in America. It is difficult to label these people: they came from an area that today is divided among Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine, and they were known by a great variety of names, including Carpatho-Russians, Rusyns, Ruthenians, Galicians, and others. Their ancestors were originally Orthodox Christians, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they submitted to the pope of Rome through a series of “unions,” which is why they have long been known to the Orthodox as “Uniates.” Despite their subordination to the pope, they retained most of the external forms of Orthodox worship and practice, including allowing married men to become priests.

Matthew Namee, Lost Histories.

These people are the historic core of my diocese. And my parish’s Patron Saint, Alexis Toth, led multitudes back to the Orthodox faith, after he was spurned by Archbishop John Ireland.

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

After the Reformation

\[After the Reformation,\] though sacraments remained important (at first), they were deeply suppressed in favor of “the word.” The Scriptures were emphasized but in a new manner. They were the treasure-trove of all information. Believers were to be instructed constantly and urged towards right choices. Christianity quickly morphed into a society of religious morality (information+decision). This arrangement and understanding are so commonplace today that many readers will wonder that it has ever been anything else.

However, liturgy itself was never meant to convey information in such a manner. It has a very different understanding of what it is to be human, what it means to worship, and what it means to liturgize in the Church. Human beings learn in a variety of ways. Young human beings do almost nothing but learn every waking moment of the day. But they primarily learn by doing (kinesthetic memory) and mimicry (play). It is possible to acquire some information in a lecture format but this remains perhaps the least effective human activity when it comes to learning. It has almost nothing to do with liturgy.

Christianity, prior to the Reformation, was largely acquired as a set of practices … The pattern of feasts and fasts, the rituals of prayer, the preparation for and receiving of communion, all of these, far too complex and layered to be described in a short article, formed a web of nurture that linked the whole of culture into a way of life that produced Christian discipleship …

…

We are not an audience in the Liturgy. We are not gathering information in order to make a decision. We are in the Liturgy to live, breathe, and give thanks, in the presence of God. There is often a quiet movement within an Orthodox congregation. Candles are lit and tended. Icons are venerated. Members cross themselves at certain words, but are just as likely to be seen doing so for some reason known only to them and God. It is a place of prayer, and not just the prayers sung by the priest and choir.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, An Audience of None.

I doubt that these excerpts suffice to summarize Fr. Stephen’s observations. Do read it all, because it’s all I have on offer today.

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

Sunday, 6/28/24

Are we all expressive individualists now?

Nor does this allow for any kind of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox triumphalism, whereby the historical continuity and unity of the institutions can be presented as an antidote to Protestant fragmentation. To be a Roman Catholic today is to make a choice. Thoughtful Roman Catholics may object to this claim by pointing to the sacramental power that they ascribe to baptism. But that does not really address the matter of lived experience: every faithful cradle Catholic has still made a decision to live his or her Christian life as a Catholic amid a world of other possible options, from atheism to Islam to Bible churches and Pentecostalism. When it comes to how we think of ourselves, we are all expressive individualists now, and there is no way we can escape from this fact. It is the essence of the world in which we have to live and of which we are a part.

Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

It has always seemed to me that this argument, which is important for someone to make, is missing some things: truth, historicity, holiness, apostolicity, catholicity. I’m only free to leave the Orthodox Church in the way Shem, Ham or Japheth would have been free to leave the ark on day 30 of The Deluge. We’ve been in a sort of Deluge — the last days — for 2000 years now.

For good reason, though I was nearly 50 years discovering it, I never felt that the Evangelical Covenant Church, Wheaton Bible Church, Lakewood Presbyterian Church in Dallas, First Baptist Church in Prescott, or the Christian Reformed Church in my hometown was the Ark of Salvation.

Western Modernity

It might not be too much of a stretch … to suggest that modernity in itself is primarily a war against religion – and that Western modernity is therefore primarily a war against our Christian heritage.

Paul Kingsnorth, God in the Age of Iron

Images flying around the internet, of a drag Last Supper tableau in the Olympic opening ceremonies, make the snippet more salient than when I first snipped it.

Kill your enemies, but not so much

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

It is a very simple statement. However, when anyone begins to suggest what that might look like, critics quickly begin to offer egregious examples that would ask us to bear the unbearable, with the inevitable conclusion: “Kill your enemies.” What is suggested, in effect, is that Christians should respond in the same way as any tyrant would, only a little less so. “Kill your enemies, but not so much.”

…

The patriotic mythologies that came into existence together with modernity’s nationalisms are siren songs that seek to create loyalties that are essentially religious in nature. World War I, in the early 20th century, was deeply revealing of the 19th century’s false ideologies. There, in the fields of France, European Christians killed one another by the millions in the name of entities that, in some cases, had existed for less than 50 years (Germany was born, more or less, in 1871). The end of that war did nothing, apparently, to awaken Christians to the madness that had been born in their midst.

…

These passions are worth careful examination, particularly as they have long been married to America’s many denominational Christianities. I think it is noteworthy that one of the most prominent 19th century American inventions was Mormonism. There, we have the case of a religious inventor (Joseph Smith) literally writing America into the Scriptures and creating an alternative, specifically American, account of Christ and salvation. It was not an accident. He was, in fact, drawing on the spirit of the Age, only more blatantly and heretically. But there are many Christians whose Christianity is no less suffused with the same sentiments.

…

Asking questions of these things quickly sends some heads spinning. They wonder, “Are we not supposed to love our country?” As an abstraction, no. We love people; we love the land. We owe honor to honorable things and persons. The Church prays for persons: the President, civil authorities, the armed forces. We are commanded to pray and to obey the laws as we are able in good conscience. Nothing more.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Universal Therapy

Late last week on his Substack Jemar Tisby shared with his readers some simple counsel:

You, presumably all of you, need to go to therapy:

You need to go to therapy. This is your gentle but firm reminder that mental health is part—perhaps the most crucial one—of your overall health. Physical exercise, a healthy diet, getting enough sleep–all of those matter and impact your mental health. But there is nothing quite like talking to someone who is trained in all the ways our mind can help and hinder us.

…

… It’s not that therapy is bad, of course. Tisby is correct that there can be value in talking to someone with a particular sort of expertise who will help you think through a problem, make better sense of a painful experience, or develop new ways of understanding or handling complicated relationships. That is certainly true.

Yet to suggest that everyone needs therapy is an excellent example … in which therapeutic concepts effectively become our doctrine of sin. … If you can’t think of anyone who does not need therapy or any time when someone might not need therapy, then you’ve elevated therapy to a place it oughtn’t occupy.

Jake Meador, Therapy and Bug Men

JD Vance’s journey

There is no doubt that the J. D. Vance of Hillbilly Elegy has changed. While news outlets will be tempted to tell this story of Vance’s transformation as a simple parable of power’s corrupting effects, there is a more illuminating account of what happened to Vance: namely, his own.

In 2020, Vance wrote an essay about his conversion to the Catholic faith: “How I Joined the Resistance.” Hillbilly Elegy has often been hailed as essential reading for “anyone wanting to understand Trump’s rise.” Vance’s 2020 essay might be the same for anyone wanting to understand the shifting currents in conservative Christianity and politics. Vance’s journey toward religion—the first millennial on a major party ticket—is the same that is and will be trekked by many millennial and Gen Z Christians of a political orientation.

…

Some conservatives (even religious conservatives like myself) still hold to the same economic outlook Vance did in his 2016 memoir. Some of us even hold to that economic program of tax cuts, Social Security cuts, and a suspicion of even the best-intended of regulations for reasons we find consonant with the Christian faith. But it’s important to note that J. D. Vance abandoned that outlook for religious reasons. While Vance blasts his journey to atheism as “both conventional and boring,” the truth is that his journey to Catholicism and a certain set of politics is becoming increasingly conventional as well—in ways that students of both politics and religion would be foolish to ignore.

John Shelton, When The Resistance Comes To Rule: J. D. Vance and the Apotheosis of Postliberal Politics

Hauerwas on personal relationship with Jesus

Hauerwas also addressed his emphasis upon concern around self-deception and his disagreement with piety, which he sees as an invitation to setting oneself up as a self-exemplar.

The Duke theologian is a curiosity for his disavowal of theological liberalism and simultaneous extreme dislike for evangelicalism. “I’m not a follower of either, because, one, I don’t think you get to make Christianity up: you receive it through the exemplification of people who live in a way that scares you.”

… I just don’t know the Evangelical world, but what I know of it I dislike intensely. I mean, the last thing one should want is a personal relationship with Jesus – I mean, that’s letting yourself control who Jesus is.

Stanley Hauerwas

… 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)