Category: Christianity generally

G.K. Chesterton on Biblicism

Catholic writer/blogger Mark Shea today delivered up this Chestertonian gem, in response to a question about the Dan Brown-ish sort of “lost gospels” nonsense, and how Evangelicals who get a lot of book larnin’ are apt to throw over the Bible, as has pop scholar Bart Ehrsman:

Every great heretic had always exhibit three remarkable characteristics in combination. First, he picked out some mystical idea from the Church’s bundle or balance of mystical ideas. Second, he used that one mystical idea against all the other mystical ideas. Third (and most singular), he seems generally to have had no notion that his own favourite mystical idea was a mystical idea, at least in the sense of a mysterious or dubious or dogmatic idea. With a queer uncanny innocence, he seems always to have taken this one thing for granted. He assumed it to be unassailable, even when he was using it to assail all sorts of similar things. The most popular and obvious example is the Bible. To an impartial pagan or sceptical observer, it must always seem the strangest story in the world; that men rushing in to wreck a temple, overturning the altar and driving out the priest, found there certain sacred volumes inscribed “Psalms” or “Gospels”; and (instead of throwing them on the fire with the rest) began to use them as infallible oracles rebuking all the other arrangements. If the sacred high altar was all wrong, why were the secondary sacred documents necessarily all right? If the priest had faked his Sacraments, why could he not have faked his Scriptures? Yet it was long before it even occurred to those who brandished this one piece of Church furniture to break up all the other Church furniture that anybody could be so profane as to examine this one fragment of furniture itself. People were quite surprised, and in some parts of the world are still surprised, that anybody should dare to do so.

This is one of many issues on which Catholic and Orthodox traditions (which were unified for the first millennium) are in substantial agreement. We would differ in emphasis if not in substance from Shea’s oversimplified version how the canon of Scripture came to be the canon (from which Protestant Bibles omit a number of books, by the way), but we agree on this:

  • The early Church had no canon other that the Old Testament, with lots of evidence that the Septuagint was favored.
  • The early Church had a vital Christianity before the first book of the New Testament had been written.
  • Gnosticism beset the Church early on, and many gnostic pseudo-Christian documents were written.
  • The Church rejected those writings in practice and eventually in precept.

I’m not foolish enough to try to top Chesterton’s colorful fable of how today’s “conservative Evangelicals” treat the Church which gave them the Bible they misuse to abuse the Church.

“To be deep in history is to cease being Protestant.”

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Standing advice on enduring themes.

Faiths, politics, prooftexts

D.G. Hart, one of the denizens of the Front Porch, has written a book “From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism.” He makes a pretty good case that Evangelicals persist in considering themselves “conservative” despite pervasively unconservative substance – a thesis that presumably sets off waves of incredulous giggles in secular leftist quarters.  Continue reading “Faiths, politics, prooftexts” →

MED Christianity

Last year, I read Timothy Ferris’ new book, The Four-Hour Body. He’s a fan of the idea of the minimum effective dose (MED): “the smallest dose that will produce a desired outcome.” He applies it to things like time in the gym, surprising the reader with phenomenal muscle gains and fat loss with just 2 30-minute workouts per week. “Why waste your time on anything beyond what it takes to produce the desired result?,” is the unsurprising question/message from the author of The Four Hour Work Week. Continue reading “MED Christianity” →

Godbaby (and mom)

Back in my Conscientious Objector days, I had a passionate pacifist quote from Menno Simons (whence Mennonite, I believe) on my wall for several years, and even tried attending a Mennonite church because of their historic pacifism. I was kindly disposed toward them.

So that was the first reason it especially caught my attention when I came across this Thursday night:

Another Radical Reformation theologian set forth a Christology that said the Son of God became man not “of the womb” of Mary, but rather simply “in the womb” (Menno Simons), which means that Jesus’ humanity is a new creation, not an assumption of the humanity created in Adam. Mary becomes a kind of surrogate mother, and Jesus is not truly a member of our race.

(Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Exploring Belief Systems through the Lens of the Ancient Christian Faith) So I’d been unwittingly flirting with a novel (yes, 500 years old is “novel”) Christology, though even then, I knew that Christology was where most cults (in the theological sense, not necessarily sociological) became cultic. (For the record, I don’t know if Menno Simons’ Christological heresy is held by Mennonites today.)

It caught my attention for a second, bigger, reason: I heard this same sort of “Mary was just a conduit for the godbaby, Jesus” thing from a Breathless Woman’s Inspirational Show on WMBI in Chicago (flagship station for Moody Bible Institute’s mainstream Evangelical radio network) while driving a Chicago expressway, and I startled my wife when my head exploded at the heresy of it. (I’ve learned a few things in 40 years.)

Breathless Woman’s Inspirational Show is a peculiar radio genre. I can literally tell, within seconds, that I’m listening to “Christian” radio, just by the tone of voice, even if what the hostess is saying is “take two eggs and fold them into two cups of flour.” It’s the same with CCM (Contemporary Christian Music); I’ll know within eight bars, apart from the lyrics, that this is “Christian” music.

But BWIS is a little like Rush Limbaugh in a way. These “ministries” are on the air so many hours per week that they can’t possibly be working from a script – not a real, written one, anyway.

So on the one hand, I need to cut heretical Breathless Woman’s Inspirational Show hostess a little slack. She may not really have meant it. She surely hasn’t thought it through.

But she has an unwritten Romophobic script: don’t say anything about the Virgin Mary that might give aid and comfort to Catholicism. So “incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary” blithely becomes “Wow! Isn’t it amazing! Mary allowed her womb to be used so Jesus could zoop down to earth through her! What a gal! (Not that she’s anything more than an inspiring example, mind you.)”

I cannot cut that any slack at all, even if I cut some slack for the airhead ministress that utters it.

In contrast (and here, I enter dangerous territory, because I’m blogging without taking time to look up everything), the historic teaching is:

  • “And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds (æons), Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man ….” (Nicene Creed)
  • What is not assumed is not redeemed. (St. Athanasius, I believe). Jesus had to be a full member of the human race to redeem the human race.
  • “Who’s the only human who ever gave God something that He didn’t already have?” (Riddle) Answer: The Virgin Mary gave God human flesh.
  • “… ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father ….” (Nicene Creed) Note: human flesh, which the second person of the Holy Trinity assumed permanently, is seated at the Father’s right hand right now. (Salvation is bigger than you may have thought.)

And that, folks, is why we call her Theotokos or just “Mother of God.”

But if you’d rather be a heretic than give aid and comfort to Roman Catholicism (and Orthodoxy, and the Magisterial Reformation), it’s a free country. Just don’t say I didn’t tell you.

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I also have some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Putting “Christ” in “Black Friday.”

Social conservatives will soon be “trying to take Christmas back” or to “put Christ in Christmas.” Perhaps they’ll be calling, again, for boycotts of stores that don’t say “Merry Christmas.”

I’ll not be joining them. Because it isn’t “the Christmas season.” Continue reading “Putting “Christ” in “Black Friday.”” →