Category: Ecclesiology
The World Vision kerfuffle
World Vision’s same-sex marriage flip-flop this week would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.
My impression is that it’s been under-covered journalistically, but Terry Mattingly says that at least Christianity Today (which is no longer on my regular reading list) covered it. Also:
Note the reference to the “international operating budget of nearly $1 billion.” Question: Where does most of that money come from? How much of it is from religious groups, how much is from donors and, crucial point, how many of those dollars now come from private foundations and government sources that may be lobbying for the modernization of any nasty old doctrines that define World Vision’s mission? Trust me, there is a story there. The World Vision showdown is not about secularists opposing religious people. It’s a story — from the viewpoint of many government leaders and journalists — about good Christians with modernized doctrines striving to cause reform among the bad Christians who are in part (repeat, “in part”) defined by, well, 2,000 years of Christian doctrine on sexuality, family and marriage.
(Terry Mattingly) Still, how can this happen:
The agency had announced Monday that its board had prayed for years about whether to hire Christians in same-sex marriages as churches took different stands on recognizing gay relationships. World Vision says its staff members come from dozens of denominations with varied views on the issue.
followed just 24 hours later by this?:
The aid group told supporters in a letter that the board had made a mistake and was returning to its policy requiring celibacy outside of marriage “and faithfulness within the Bible covenant of marriage between a man and a woman.” “We have listened to you and want to say thank you and to humbly ask for your forgiveness,” the agency said in the letter, signed by World Vision president Richard Stearns and board chairman Jim Bere.
This story ought to be driving serious Evangelicals to serious thinking about their roots, the firmness of their real foundation. Instead, we get Andrew Walker at First Things exulting that
Evangelicalism did triage this week, and did it well. We saw through the malaise (sic) of theological indifferentism and insisted that while evangelicalism remains a big tent, at some point, the canopy ends.
The exulting seems facile to me, though I confess that trying to read Evangelicals arguing with one another over this makes me realize that I’ve become almost incapable of understanding their manner of speech. Not that I disagree necessarily, but that I see English words stream by my eyes on the page but cannot apprehend, or can barely apprehend, a coherent thought behind it. (If you can translate Walker for me, I’d appreciate it. Really.) So I am genuinely uncertain what Walker means except “horray for our team!,” or as they say at Yale
Boola, Boola; Boola, Boola; Boola, Boola; …
Then Walker adds this:
In each age, intellectual surrender and compromise has stood before the church, yet she keeps on going. The faith persists. As G. K. Chesterton said that bears repeating: “Time and again, the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. But each time, it was the dog that died.”
Got that?
- “The Church.” You’d almost think Evangelicalism actually has an ecclesiology, even though clearly World Vision was not a Church, but one of those parachurch thingies, unanswerable to any putative Church.
- You’d almost think that “intellectual surrender and compromise st[anding] before the church” was a formidable foe instead of a second weird metaphor.
- You’d almost think that what Evangelicals mean by “the Church” is what Chesterton meant – that Evangelicalism actually has a deep “time and time again” to look back at with admiration – but you’d be quite mistaken if you did. Chesterton was writing of Roman Catholicism, against which Evangelical tends to define itself (when it’s not cannibalizing Catholic thinkers).
In the hour of real trial, will Evangelicalism field 7,000 unbent knees, a squadron of Polycarps who won’t offer even a pinch of incense? Is it God’s Ark?
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Tony Woodlief’s Sand In The Gears blog, which appears infrequently but is almost always good, has a confessedly angry response to “worldly vision” that barely overlaps with my thoughts, including this (emphasis added):
Those of you who were outraged by World Vision’s state-pressured recognition of same-sex marriages, would you turn your backs on the little girl in danger of being sold into sex slavery in Thailand, the little boy in Haiti whose mother cannot feed him, for a point of dogmatic purity in an organization which is not the Church?
Leah Libresco at American Conservative identifies some of those who called for a World Vision boycott (Billy’s son Franklin for one) and explores, with a little help from her friends, what it would be like if the boycott mindset were universalized.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Wednesday 3/19/14
Thursday 3/6/14
Sunday, 1/26/14
Church unity
This started as a “share” with an Orthodox group on Facebook, but outgrew it.
Frederica Mathewes-Green’s podcast thoughts on ecumenical Church unity, though gentle and irenic, amplify my own skepticism on the topic. Her primary focus is the desired unity between Roman Catholicism (the 800 pound gorilla) and Orthodoxy (America’s best-kept religious secret) — or at least the mutual recognition that disunity is a scandal.
So far, so good: disunity is a scandal; real unity would remove that scandal.
But the proposed terms of unity coming from Rome provoke not so much hostility – “Take this Olive branch and shove it!” – as indifference because Rome seems to desire a “unity” that’s strained, synthetic, and in many ways superficial compared to the unity of Orthodoxy.
Frederica nailed that one when she noted that we’re much more comfortable with the Oriental Orthodox than we are with Rome, which went into schism much more recently. The Oriental Orthodox could not agree with the Council of Chalcedon’s verbal formulation of how the two natures of Christ are united.
The Council of Chalcedon issued the ‘Chalcedonian Definition,’ which repudiated the notion of a single nature in Christ, and declared that he has two natures in one person and hypostasis; it also insisted on the completeness of his two natures: Godhead and manhood.
…
The Oriental Orthodox teach ‘one nature’ in Christ, “Jesus Christ, who is identical with the Son, is one person and one hypostasis in one nature: divine.”
(Wikipedia) But the Oriental Orthodox seem nonetheless to have “kept the same faith,” and I understand they feel the same toward us. It’s fair to say we long for a solution to the Chalcedonian conundrum.
Not so Rome. Their schism was more recent, but their drift after schism much greater. The Roman Catholic reflex seems to be that,
well, of course, being in communion with the Bishop of Rome is essential, and of course it must be on essentially Roman terms. After all, everyone knows you other guys are at fault. But we’re magnanimous, and we’ll let you keep your signature theological perspectives. That’s what “catholic” means: big tent.
That just leaves us cold. On the one hand, we don’t think we, the heirs of four of five pentarchs who remained in communion, are the schismatics. We think the fifth pentarch went into schism when, after we ignored his pretensions and affectation, he started getting too pushy to ignore.
Of course unity will bring us all into communion with one another, but it’s unlikely to happen on terms that signal even tacitly Orthodoxy’s admission of error on the filioque, universal direct jurisdiction of the Pope, infallibility and the other illicit dogmas of the West.
This is not for lack of considerable affection, at least on my own part. Rome has had a great run of Popes lately. John Paul II will be in my thoughts again today, as he was “dying on NPR” as we returned eastward across I74 from a visit to some friends Mrs. Tipsy and I are visiting again.
But even when John Paul II tried to reach out, he proved tone-deaf to a very fundamental matter, our different views of what salvation is:
The teaching of the Cappadocian Fathers on divinization passed into the tradition of all the Eastern Churches and is part of their common heritage. This can be summarized in the thought already expressed by Saint Irenaeus at the end of the second century: God passed into man so that man might pass over to God. This theology of divinization remains one of the achievements particularly dear to Eastern Christian thought.
(Orientale Lumen, italics added) That is a bad misquote, a demotion of the doctrine’s importance in the East, and as tone-deaf as a Protestant, courting Catholics or Orthodox, saying:
The teaching of the Early Fathers on communion passed into the tradition of all the “traditional” Churches as part of their common heritage. This can be summarized in the words of Jesus in the 6th chapter of the Gospel of John: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat bread symbolizing the flesh of the Son of man, and drink wine symbolizing his blood, ye have lowered your odds of having life in you.” This theology of transubstantiation remains one of the achievements particularly dear to “traditional” Christian thought.
The dogmatic differences are deep and perhaps intractable. But suppose we achieve agreement in principle. Having cleared away those stone cold deal killers, how would the rest of the deal look? It would be an awfully big tent that would accommodate the remaining, non-dogmatic differences.
But the Roman Catholic Church already looks to me (and I think to many other Orthodox) like multiple Christian traditions synthetically united though communion with the Pope.
Maybe I misunderstand “catholicity.” I mean that. I lived nearly 50 years where we didn’t give a hoot about that idea, and even now my view is colored by the seemingly intractable dogmatic differences. It’s hard to see clearly. Perhaps with the dogmatic differences out of the way, I could see a path to one big happy family.
But I’m not holding my breath.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.
50th Anniversary
It’s my fiftieth anniversary. No, not that one. And not this one, belatedly, either.
50 years ago today, my father and I loaded a few suitcases full of my clothes and personal effects and headed for West Chicago, Illinois in the family’s 1959 Buick. Continue reading “50th Anniversary”
What Sunday IS this?
Today is variously Pulpit Freedom Sunday 2013 or, in relevant contrast, the 6th Sunday of Pascha, the “Sunday of the Blind Man.” Continue reading “What Sunday IS this?”
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 