Category: Evangelicalism

With doctrine and church attendance.

Sunday, 8/18/24

Red Letter Day

Mark your calendar, for I’m now going to pass along, in all sincerity, tips on how believing Evangelicals (i.e., excluding the “I never knew I was Evangelical until I went to a Trump rally” types) can do Christianity better — without necessarily becoming Orthodox (although, as always, the invitation to “come and see” remains in effect).

These tips ring true to me, but I left frank Evangelicalism 45 years ago; your mileage may vary:

Here’s the problem: That sociological environment that birthed evangelicalism as we know it today is basically over. The economy that shaped that world from the 50s to the 2010s is ending. That much has been clear for nearly ten years now—Brexit and the Trump election both represented quite explicit movements against the post-war open society model. …

…

Because the sociological environment that created evangelicalism is winding down, it has created enormous anxiety and uncertainty for evangelical believers who simply don’t know how to imagine a Christian movement outside of the unique environment created by the 1950s economic environment, the Baby Boom generation, and the post-Cold War pax Americana.

…

People who aren’t as steeped in evangelicalism as a sociological entity often find all this mystifying. One friend with ties to an eastern Christian tradition once remarked to me that, “you evangelicals are kind of a joke, you know? My people have been persecuted for centuries. Our children have been stolen from us. We’ve had martyrs. Our churches have been burned. But still we are faithful. We still follow God. We still meet for worship. We still pray. We still raise our children in the truth. But you evangelicals discover that critical race theory is a thing that exists and six months later you’re devouring each other.”

So what should you do in this environment if you are a Protestant Christian concerned with the life of the church? One tip: Stop caring so much about “evangelicalism” and the celebrities who define it as a sociological phenomenon.

…

To stop caring about “evangelicalism” is not the same thing as no longer caring about Christianity or Jesus or the church in general or even specific churches in our communities. It is, rather, to turn away from the mostly fake discourses that pervade Christian media and to focus instead on actual flesh-and-blood Christian communities and Christian believers.

Jake Meador, The Importance of Not Caring about Mark Driscoll

Was there ever a “positive world”?

I am on a social medium with Alan Jacobs of Wheaton, Notre Dame and now Baylor. I’m so glad. He’s got a very good detector for the kinds of plausible nonsense I’m still too likely to fall for. For his powerful critique of the idea that we lived in a culture that was “positive” toward the conscientious practice of Christianity (not mere profession) before 1994, for instance, see here, here and here.

Like the commemoration of martyrs in Orthodox Matins, I find strangely encouraging the thought that lived Christianity has never been popular.

Disjunction

I join a reunion of my Bible-college class. … At the reunion later that day, my classmates speak in phrases we learned as students: “God is giving me the victory…I can do all things through Christ…All things work together for good…I’m walking in triumph.” Yet they speak a different vocabulary when relating their lives after college. Several are suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, and others from clinical depression. One couple has recently committed their teenage daughter to a mental institution. I wince at the disconnect between these raw personal stories and the spiritual overlay applied to them.

Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

The incoherence of American Folk Religion

I took to studying the ones of my teachers who were also preachers, and also the preachers who came to speak in chapel and at various exercises. In most of them I saw the old division of body and soul that I had known at The Good Shepherd. The same rift ran through everything at Pigeonville College; the only difference was that I was able to see it more clearly, and to wonder at it. Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins—hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust—came from the soul. But these preachers I’m talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.

Wendell Berry , Jayber Crow

Hubris

Popular authority figures like Bill Bright, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson all assume that no previously existing educational enterprise is capable of meeting the demands of the hour. Despite the absence of formal educational credentials, each man presumes to establish a Christian university.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

I distinctly remember Jerry Falwell dreaming of “a Christian University with a first-class football program,” thus giving the back of the hand to Notre Dame and, by implication, to Roman Catholics generally.

I’m puzzled, though, about the claim that Bill Bright established a Christian University. I don’t recall any such thing and Wikipedia’s article on him doesn’t mention it.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Saturday, 8/17/24

A hectic week in which I forgot things, including blogging (though not clipping blog fodder). Enjoy.

Culture

America the unadorned ugly

While I was driving through some of America’s most majestic natural beauty, almost everything in it built by humans was unadorned ugliness. Pre-fab bland buildings that look like they were airlifted in and plopped down in plots of land bulldozed flat, with zero shade or attempt to integrate them into the surrounding nature.

It didn’t help that I was also feeling physically gross, unable to walk, and eating trash, since that’s what’s almost exclusively available on the road in the US, because that’s what most Americans eat — prepackaged globs of fat and sugar.

America’s diet, outside of a minority of successful neighborhoods, has gotten worse since my last American Dream trip, with everything now somehow bigger, sweeter, and fattier: Mass produced, highly processed gunk, that has as much connection to what the rest of the world considers food as pornography does to intimacy.

… [M]y last three years of trips to countries as different as Vietnam, France, Uganda, and Istanbul, has highlighted and strengthened my view that while the US certainly provides our citizens with the most opportunity, and the most stuff, we don’t provide them with the most fulfilling, beautiful, and elevating life.

Chris Arnade

Changing from Häftlinge to men again

When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed. Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said: “eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor,” and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead. It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again.

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

My pet peeve

When Sarah Kate Ellis was named president of GLAAD more than a decade ago, the LGBTQ advocacy organization was in dire financial straits. “I was given a scary mandate,” she told The New York Times in 2019: “Fix it or shut it down.”

She should have done the latter.

Founded in 1985 as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the nonprofit originally had the mission of promoting more empathetic media coverage of people with AIDS. Over the years, its remit expanded to countering negative portrayals of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in advertising and entertainment. Today, the proliferation of LGBTQ characters on our screens, largely sympathetic coverage in mainstream media, and the ubiquity of same-sex couples in advertisements and commercials all suggest that GLAAD achieved its mission. The group should have long ago taken the win and dissolved—just as the organization Freedom to Marry announced it would do shortly after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the summer of 2015.

Accepting victory, however, can be difficult for people who devote their lives to a cause, and not only for emotional reasons. The impulse among activists, once successful, to keep raising money necessitates that they find things to spend it on ….

James Kirchick, How the Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way

I may be particularly sensitive to this sort of thing because my father once joined “Ad hoc Committee [to Accomplish Somethingorother].” They accomplished it, but soon Dad got a letter, on the Committee’s letterhead, supporting some other cause, and listing him as a committee members. I don’t recall if he didn’t support the new cause at all of if he merely had not enlisted to go on record on that cause, but some co-belligerent failed to grok “ad hoc.”

I’m confident there are conservative groups that should have declared victory and gone home (some have crossed my mind in the past but I don’t now recall them. Right to Life is not an example because it wanted to outlaw abortion, not just reverse Roe.). Human Rights Campaign is another example on the sexual-liberation Left:

Flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage, many gay-rights groups pivoted to a related but fundamentally different cause: transgender rights. Rather than emulate the movement’s past approach—seeking allies across the political spectrum and accepting compromise as a precondition for legal and social progress—they have taken hard-line left-wing positions. LGBTQ groups repeat the mantra “the science is settled” on the extremely complex and fraught subject of youth gender medicine and insist that anyone who questions the provision of puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children is transphobic. They continue to spread this message even as many European countries have backed away from such treatments after concluding that the evidence supporting them is weak. The reflexive promotion of major medical interventions for minors should be a red flag for gay men and lesbians, considering the research indicating that many gender-distressed and gender-nonconforming children grow up to be gay.

Whence the phrase “transing away the gay” as the newest iteration of “praying away the gay” (and checking some of the same emotional boxes). The whole Kirchick article is quote-worthy, and I commend it to you.

Politics generally

BOTS

Blunt talk:

[T]he key to a Harris win in November won’t be the support of black Americans or Indian Americans or even “brown Americans” — though she has identified at various points in her political life as all three. Rather, Harris is a flesh-and-blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic: never-married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45.

Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.

The Democratic Party’s political engineers first sensed the centrality of BOTS to the Party’s power base during Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. The Obama campaign then duly rolled out a storybook ad called “the Life of Julia”, which explained how Obama’s policies, from Head Start to Obamacare to contraception coverage to Medicare reform, would care for Julia from graduation through motherhood and finally to the grave without her needing to form a human relationship with anyone outside the government.

David Samuels, The march of Kamala’s brides

Fundamentalist America at Defcon 2

What you’re seeing throughout American Christianity now is the fundamentalist wing is really exerting itself. And so what that means is when you encounter somebody who’s a fundamentalist and you say, “I’m not voting for Trump,” they often don’t look at that as a debatable point for which Christians in good will can disagree. They will look at this and say, “It is the natural and inevitable consequence of applying Christian principles that you will support Donald Trump.”

David French

As long-time readers know, I spent most of my first three decades as a Wheaton College/IVCF-flavored Evangelical. What I’ve mentioned less often is that schools of that flavor had some taboos that, although mostly sensible, did not merit the label “biblical.” How often Christians who purport to base everything on the Bible come up with extrabiblical Shibboleths is telling.

Political violence and threats of violence

Political violence and threats of violence have no place in the American democratic process. Yet threats and intimidation follow the MAGA movement like night follows day. One of the saddest stories of our time is the way in which even local election officials and local school board members fear for their safety. The level of threat against public officials has escalated in the MAGA era, MAGA Republicans often wield threats as a weapon against Republican dissenters, and every American should remember Jan. 6, when a mob of insurrectionists ransacked the Capitol.

David French, To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris

I appreciate French reminding me about the violence and intimidation that follows MAGA, even quite apart from January 6. He will suffer attempts at intimidation as a result of this piece.

(For the record, though, some Trump supporters allegedly fear the consequence of letting it be known that they support Trump)

French also points out some legitimate complexifiers even on abortion, which so many millions consider a categorical reason to vote Republican: (1) the 2024 GOP platform plank on abortion is effectively pro-choice; (2) abortion rates and ratios have been lower under pro-abortion democrats.

“Caring” politicians

About 4 in 10 say Harris is someone who “cares about people like you” while about 3 in 10 say that about Trump.

Via John Ellis news items. It’s gratifying that a majority is directionally correct about politicians caring about people like them. But nobody, not even 1 in 10, should be so stupid as to think that Trump cares about anybody but Trump.

Trump in particular

On message?

The silliest spectacle in politics this month has been Republicans pleading with Trump to get back on message, as if he’s somehow forgotten that inflation and immigration are his strongest lines of attack against Harris.

He didn’t forget. And he assuredly does want to win. He’s off-message because he can’t help himself. There’s something wrong with him.

The New York Times reported this weekend on a dinner he held with wealthy donors in New York on August 2. “Some guests hoped Mr. Trump would signal that he was recalibrating after a series of damaging mistakes,” the paper noted. Instead he babbled about stolen elections, repeated his “black or Indian?” critique of Harris, and assured the crowd that he’s “not nicer” following the attempt on his life last month that had supposedly left him a changed man.

One attendee told the New York Post’s Charles Gasparino that when a donor advised him to tone down some of his attacks, Trump replied, “They tried to put me in jail; they tried to ruin my reputation and then they tried to assassinate me. At some point, you have [to] be truthful to yourself.”

Being true to himself is the whole problem. His advisers are “deeply rattled by his meandering, mean and often middling public performances since the failed assassination attempt,” per Axios. One source claimed that Trump “is struggling to get past his anger,” the sort of thing one might say about a temperamental child (no wonder), not the nominee of a major party fewer than 100 days out from an election.

Trump being undisciplined and self-indulgent isn’t news, though, any more than him resorting to childish cruelty toward his enemies is. What’s newsy is how his anxiety about Harris’ surging popularity has led him into outright fantasy to try to explain it.

Nick Catoggio

Ominous words, especially from this quarter

“It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath,” LaCivita said in a recent interview with Politico at the Republican National Convention. “It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day.” An investigation by Rolling Stone last month found that nearly 70 pro-Trump election deniers serve as election officials in key battleground counties.

In Georgia, Trump supporters on the state election board have adopted rules requiring “reasonable inquiry” before election results are certified, a move that could give GOP county-election-board members the ability to reject the 2024 election’s outcome. And as The Guardian reports, the lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell “has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections.” At the national level, the Republican National Committee says that it hopes to mobilize 100,000 volunteers, including thousands of poll watchers, to focus on “Democrat attempts to circumvent the rules.” Meanwhile, one RNC senior counsel for election integrity, Christina Bobb, was criminally indicted earlier this year for her role in trying to overturn the 2020 election (she pleaded not guilty).

Then there is the mood of the MAGA base. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have become a litmus test in the GOP, and a recent Pew Research Center poll found that although 77 percent of Democratic voters believe that the election will be conducted “fairly and accurately,” less than half of Republican voters have faith in the system. Despite Harris’s recent surge, the majority of Trump supporters are confident that he will be victorious. (A recent YouGov poll found that nearly eight in 10 Trump supporters think he would win if pitted against Harris.) Trump fully intends to stoke his supporters’ disbelief and anger at the possibility that he could lose. As Wehner warned recently: “If you have friends who are Trump worshippers, a word of counsel: They’re heading to a very dark place psychologically … They felt this race was won; now it’s slipping away. Expect even greater self-delusion and more toxic rants.”

Charles Sykes, Trump Is Setting the Stage to Challenge the Election. The only steal of the 2024 Election is the one Trump and his minions are planning — and strategically placed to advance.

Not the unity they craved

Never has the GOP been more unified, and Donald Trump deserves all the credit. The issue uniting pundits, editorial boards, virtually all Republican politicians, GOP consultants, MAGA warriors, and rallygoers: the need for Trump to lay aside personal gripes and grievances and to stick to the issues and attack Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz on their records.

Jonah Goldberg

A Political Fat Elvis

The whole landscape of the campaign has been transformed. The rise of Harris instantly cast Trump in a new light. He formerly seemed more ominous and threatening, which, whatever its political drawbacks, signaled strength; now he seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis.

Trump is much better equipped psychologically to withstand ferocious criticisms than he is equipped to withstand mockery. Malignant narcissists go to great lengths to hide their fears and display a false or idealized self. Criticism targets the persona. Mockery, by contrast, can tap very deep fears of being exposed as flawed or weak. When the mask is the target, people with Trump’s psychological profile know how to fight back. Mockery, though, can cause them to unravel.

Peter Wehner, Trump Can’t Deal With Harris’s Success

Lazy, stupid, childish

Trump’s three big problems as a candidate are precisely the same qualities that mitigated the worst of what might have been a much worse Trump presidency the last time around: He is lazy, he is stupid, and he is childish. 

I can hear you objecting: “Hey, we came here for serious analysis, not name-calling!” But, in this case, the analysis and the name-calling end up in the same place: finding that the most politically relevant traits of Donald Trump are that he is lazy, stupid, and childish.

… Anyone who has heard Trump speak or read his unedited writing knows that he is not an especially intelligent man. But his native stupidity is compounded by his ignorance—which is to say, by the fact that he is too lazy to do his homework and acquire the kind of grasp of the issues that would make him a more effective candidate.

… There is a reason he wanders all over the place in his speeches—it isn’t only arrogance and self-centeredness. He’s dumber than nine chickens. That’s why he was an incompetent real-estate investor even though he was a successful reality-television grotesque. He isn’t the first dumb person to find success in the celebrity business, where stupidity seems to be an asset.

…

His penchant for using demeaning nicknames as a substitute for political argument might be thought of as an aspect of his laziness or his stupidity, but it is, at heart, part of his childishness. The same childishness is what has him insisting that he doesn’t need to run a conventional campaign, because he is a very special little boy. Never mind that after his fluke win in 2016, he has led his party from one electoral defeat to another—often in close succession, as when he pissed away Republicans’ chances in Georgia in a snit after his humiliating loss to the human eggplant in 2020.

Trump’s personality defects were, perversely enough, this country’s saving grace while he was president. He wanted to be a caudillo but ended up being very little more than a poisonous buffoon thanks to the laziness, stupidity, and childishness that kept him from realizing the worst of his ambitions as president. That very well may keep him from realizing any of his political ambitions in 2024.

I am not quite sure that I believe the maxim that “character is destiny.” Stupidity, on the other hand …

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Sunday July 7

Why classical education? Why ecclesial Christianity?

(Sorry if this item feels a bit stream-of-consciousness. If you can’t get into my stream, it’s probably my fault. Skip to the next item if you get lost.)

A cyberfriend, who is both an Anglican rector and a classical school headmaster, posted this as an audio file, which I have (with a little help from VR) transcribed:

I occasionally find myself talking to folks who know that I moved into the classical Christian tradition from other educational models and they’re curious what the draw was into the classical Christian world.

Similarly, I find myself talking to many people who know that I moved into the Anglican tradition from the beginning of the century. from other Christian traditions and they have similar questions. What was it that drew you into the Anglican tradition?

Every once in a while, I also encounter people who are curious about both at the same time. Kind of what moved you into the classical Christian world while you were being moved into the Anglican world as it were, and in conversations with folks like that, I’ve begun to pinpoint some movements, some understandings of who God is, that moved me along in both of those worlds, the worlds of education and the world of Anglicanism.

Here’s one example. Seeing God as infinitely grand was one of those movement moments for me. Once I saw God as infinitely grand, I realized he could no longer be contained to a religion class or a Bible class, and all other disciplines just carry on as usual.

If God is infinitely grand, he must appear pretty thoroughly and visibly and noticeably across all disciplines, and that’s something that the classical Christian movement has focused on for some time. Seeing God in all disciplines.

Similarly, if God is infinitely grand, then he cannot be contained by words alone. We can’t worship him with just words if he’s infinitely grand. Our worship must capture more of the human person than just our words. We can’t fully grasp him, though we can sometimes helpfully describe him with words, but we can’t fully grasp him through doctrine alone. There has to be an element of mystery involved, and when we capture God in some ways through words, we do our best to be as broad as possible with those words. So a preference, for example, for something as broad and ancient as and as ecumenical as the Nicene Creed as a statement of faith, as opposed to some later post-enlightenment, more detailed statements of faith.

… Once I saw God as infinitely grand, that vision moved me both into the world of classical Christian education, where God is throughout all disciplines. It moved me more into a Catholic or Anglican tradition that is going to describe and understand and participate in worship of that infinitely grand God in ways that go beyond mere cognition and mere words.

Things like this make me feel much closer to Anglicans than I do to most Western Christian traditions — some of which I’ve been having trouble seeing even as authentically Christian, so far down Nathan Hatch’s Democratization road have they gone. (But then I go to the website of a Mount Pleasant, South Carolina Anglican parish, pastored by the newly-elected Anglican Presiding Bishop for North America, and find what looks like a cringey megachurch. If I had no Orthodox option, I personally would prefer a dignified Episcopal liturgy to any plexiglas-podium, praise-band “Anglican” operation.)

I don’t remember how far I’d gone along the road into Orthodox Christianity before I internalized that it didn’t have anything equivalent to, say, the massive and detailed Catechism of the Catholic Church, and that wasn’t just because they were too lazy to prepare one.

That was a surprise. I’d previous identified “orthodoxy” as detailed doctrinal rectitude. Now I was finding that it was like a high plateau, with dangerous cliffs all around it. The Nicene Creed was a fence to keep people from careening unwittingly over any of the cliffs; but the plateau was large, and diverse. The residents were not clones. Our priests and confessors may prescribe individual conduct on the plateau, but that can vary from person to person according to the discernment of priests and confessors.

Fr. Jon hints at why this is proper: God’s infinity makes Him apprehendable, but incomprehensible. We can’t fully define Him or cabin him, although doing so would make Him ever so more convenient and comforting. And it’s a fearful responsibility to be a spiritual guide who needs discernment, not just a rulebook with a good table of contents.

In fact, Orthodox (and orthodox) Christianity can feel kind of wild. Coincidentally, or likelier providentially, I’ve been getting a lot of exposure to that wildness lately in ways that I’m not (yet?) ready to articulate.

[John] Moriarty spoke of himself as a singing Christian. I would also suggest we may need to be grieving Christians, earthy Christians, happy Christians, and yes, on occasion, troublesome Christians. How did this Middle-Eastern mystery religion get so corralled?

Martin Shaw

Democratized heresies

Despite the variety of Christian idioms that flowered in the early republic, most seemed to spring from the common conception that Christian tradition since the time of the apostles was a tale of sordid corruption in which kingcraft and priestcraft wielded orthodoxy to enslave the minds of the people. Ties with Catholic and Protestant traditions were severed, with a heady sense that a restoration of the primitive church was at hand.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

21st Century Rabbinic Judaism isn’t New Testament Judaism

As explained at the outset of this chapter, scholars today commonly presume that a form of Rabbinic Judaism that uniformly promoted a form of unitarian monotheism predated Christianity. New Testament scholars who have accepted this incorrect presupposition and marginalized the Old Testament evidence to the contrary have produced all manner of conjectures to explain how a supposed “transition” to belief in the Holy Trinity must have come about.

Fr. Stephen DeYoung, Religion of the Apostles.

At least two things gave rise to Rabbinic Judaism in the centuries after Christ:

  1. Christ and Christians. From a controversial sect within the worship of the first century synagogue and temple, to the casting out of Christians therefrom, to the growth of Christianity and its eventual embrace by the emperor, Christ and Christianity haunted and bedeviled the Scribes and Pharisees and Rabbis.
  2. The final destruction of the Jerusalem temple in A.D. 70. No temple means no sacrifice. So what do we do now? That, along with “how do we repudiate these Christians?”, led to a refashioning along the lines we see today (though not in final form).

I am told that well-educated modern Rabbis will readily admit this, but cannot confirm it.

Not the only, or last, amnesiac

He was a pure product of the postwar period; his heroes were the post-Left French who suffered for their apostasies, like Aron and Furet and Revel. He was right to honor them.

Right, I say, in what he honored, but wrong in what he ignored. Even on his own terms, [Clive] James should have read, memorialized, and found profit in Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Maritain, Eliot, Belloc, Knox, Greene, Undset, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Weil, Mauriac, Bernanos, de Lubac, Auden, Lewis, Tolkien, Fermor, Solzhenitsyn, Ratzinger, Percy, Illich, Berry, MacIntyre, Taylor, Levertov, and so many others. Instead, it’s as if religion in any form except the severely private disappears from the world by the end of the long nineteenth century. You certainly wouldn’t know that theists of any kind put pen to page in the twentieth, much less that it was good, sometimes, and that their words and deeds regularly made a difference on the public stage.

A writer like James, for all his erudition, has amnesia of his own, both in the immediate past and in the distant past. It’s a deficit common to most of his peers: highbrow journalists and elite critics who can’t bother to glance in the direction of the pious (at least, not without cringing). The deficit may be understandable, but it’s not defensible. It renders all that they write incomplete from the outset, by definition. Not just their knowledge but their love is circumscribed artificially by choice, and this alienates them from every human culture of which we have evidence.

Brad East. I’ve quoted most of it, but it would be worth your time to read the rest. Clive James wasn’t the only, or the last, amnesiac.

IVF reconsidered

If you are uneasy about IVF, as am I, you may benefit from reading this brief against it on Christian grounds. I hope I’m not just being contrarian, pushing against a pro-IVF consensus whose “arguments” I find unpersuasive.

Miracles and science

Given the assumptions and endeavor of the modern natural sciences, the profound irony is that science precludes any possible verification of the claim that miracles worked by a transcendent God are impossible. Only a transgression of science understood as an empirical investigation of the natural world could rule out the possibility of miracles. The philosophical belief that natural laws are necessarily exceptionless is not empirically verifiable in our own or any conceivable configuration of human knowledge, because verification would require the observation of all natural events in all times and places.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

America’s Puritanism

America’s Puritan …, while possessed of many virtues, also brought about deformations of central Christian themes and ideas. The danger of Puritanism lay not just in the incipient utopianism of the “city on a hill” metaphor, but in an excessively low view of nature and creation.

Gregory S. Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Pentecost …

(at least in the Eastern Church)

For the very first time, I vetted this post with AI. I didn’t change so much as a jot or a tittle.

Evangelicals

Overlooking the obvious

In the past year I have visited the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America, and Europe as the guest of churches and ministries. In each place, evangelicals exude life and energy. While staid churches change slowly, evangelicals tend to be light on their feet, adapting quickly to cultural trends.

The Jesus movement, the house-church movement, seeker-friendly churches, emergent churches—evangelicals have spawned all of these. In their wake, worship bands have replaced organs and choirs, PowerPoint slides and movie clips now enliven sermons, and espresso bars keep congregants awake. If a technique doesn’t work, find one that does.

Although I admire the innovation, I would caution that mimicking cultural trends has a downside …

Perhaps we should present an alternative to the prevailing culture rather than simply adopt it. What would a church look like that created space for quietness, that bucked the celebrity trend and unplugged from surrounding media, that actively resisted consumerist culture? What would worship look like if it were directed more toward God than toward our entertainment preferences?

…

While writing a book about prayer, I learned more from Catholics than from any other group. They have, after all, devoted entire orders to the practice. I learn mystery and reverence from the Eastern Orthodox. In music, in worship, in theology, they teach me of the mysterium tremendum involved when we puny human beings approach the God of the universe.

As I survey evangelicalism I see much good, but also much room for improvement. Our history includes disunity—how many different denominations do this magazine’s readers represent?—and a past that includes lapses in ethics and judgment.

Phil Yancey’s 2009 farewell column for Christianity Today (illustration added). I don’t understand why the farewell wasn’t because he was going somewhere more conducive to prayer or reverence. Does it not occur to him that one decision for Christ plus good works does not a complete Christian make, that emotion is not the same as the Holy Spirit?

Biblicist Guruism

Reflecting on a story about exvangelicals:

So how do you help address the problem that Miles is describing in his review, a culture of biblicist guruism in which the churches do not even look recognizably Protestant in any real way? How do you address the massive gaps and holes in a person’s Christian discipleship that result from sustained exposure to such churches?

…

If the Gospel was not clear or was not preached, then what you had was more a religious assembly than a church. If the sacramental life of the church was non-existent, you had a religious assembly, not a church. And if there was no aid in Christian discipline… well, you know the drill.

When I came to Grace Chapel in 2007, a small PCA church that was at the time located in central Lincoln, I didn’t know that I’d not really been part of a church before, at least as the church was traditionally understood. What I found at Grace was something I hadn’t even known to look for because I didn’t know it existed. I found something obviously and unapologetically Christian—the Gospel was clear in every sermon, and clear in a way I’d never heard it from a pulpit before, the Eucharist was celebrated regularly, and the pastor at the church actually seemed to know the people in his church and to think it was his job to care for them and aid them in their discipleship. I’d never seen anything like it before.

And the services themselves helped to reenforce the basics of Christian belief and practice: We prayed the Lord’s Prayer corporately. We confessed our sins corporately. We sang old hymns. Every week we received a benediction. The grammar and vocabulary of Christianity pervaded the liturgy; it wasn’t just a guy in a pulpit pontificating, loudly proclaiming his own loosely assorted thoughts about life and expecting you to take him seriously because he attempted to root them in scripture.

Jake Meador (italics added).

The non-church “church” Jake came from may have been an example of what he calls “biblicist guruism.”

Second Great Awakening

While Methodists, Disciples, and Mormons disagreed radically on what constituted belief in the gospel, they all shared an intense hostility to the passive quality of Calvinist religious experience, and they all made salvation imminently accessible and immediately available.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

I have alluded to this antipathy toward Calvinism previously, having first encountered it in Hatch’s book (I’m pretty sure). When I moved from frank Evangelicalism to Calvinism, it felt as if I was moving to a much different worldview, and I guess my intuitions were sound.

Protestants

… [Luther] had been wrestling with an unsettling conundrum: the failure of the Spirit to illumine all those inspired by his teachings as he himself had been illumined.

Tom Holland, Dominion

It seems fair to distinguish Protestants from Evangelicals, contrary to lifelong habit. I’m not positive that Evangelicals circa 2024 AD are no longer Protestant, but along with Jake Meador, I’m entertaining that possibility quite a lot lately. If they’ve left Protestantism, it strikes me as a continuing outworking of Luther’s conundrum.

Catholics

According to Catholic doctrine, sin offends God, disrupts the moral order, and deprives God of His glory and majesty. Punishment for the sin restores order and the glory of God.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

When I first read that, it made me a bit nauseous. The Orthodox mind is quite different from that.

Orthodoxen

Start with the Psalms

It came to me a few days ago, during morning devotions, that it would be very easy for a 21st century convert to Orthodox Christianity, from Protestantism or Evangelicalism, to overlook one very important and durable tradition of the church.

Perhaps because the Anglophone church has gained so many converts, and because those converts were accustomed to regular preaching from a wide range of scripture, we have available to us, notably on Ancient Faith “Radio,” an array of Orthodox versions of Bible studies. One of them even bears the title “The Whole Counsel of God,” and has progressed through all books of the Old and New Testaments and started over again.

In my mind, those podcasts risk obscuring from the view of converts that the basic scripture for Orthodox Christians is the Psalter — the book of Psalms. As Father Jonathan Tobias emphasized,

Chant the Psalms every morning and every evening. Two kathismata in the morning, one in the evening as appointed. This will form your mind into prayer and life.

There’s nothing wrong with going beyond that, and I should do more of general Bible study than I do, but start with the Psalms. Always start with the Psalms.

(Weird historic fact: Back in the day, Evangelicals would do some Evangelistic spadework by distributing inexpensive copies of the Gospel According to John — not the whole New Testament, but just that one Gospel account. In contrast, the Orthodox Church didn’t expose converts to the Gospel According to John, the most profoundly theological of the four Gospels, until after significant preliminary catechesis and baptism. See text at fns. 2 & 3.)

Thanks but No Thanks

Without entering into particulars, we say that as long as the Church of the Saviour shall stand upon earth, we cannot admit that there is in her bosom a Bishop Supreme other than our Lord Himself; or that there exists an infallible Patriarch, who can speak, ex cathedra, superior to Ecumenical Councils – to which Councils alone belongs infallibility, because they have always conformed to the Sacred Scriptures and apostolical tradition. Nor can we admit that the Apostles were unequal, inasmuch as they were all illuminated by the Holy Ghost up to the same measure; or that to this or that Patriarch a precedence has been given, not by any synodal or human resolution, but by right Divine, as you assert.

Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory VI, firmly refusing to attend Vatican I, which was poised to declare papal infallibility at the behest of Pope Pius IX. Via Matthew Namee. The Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria was no less firm, but pointed out (though the Pope surely knew it) what the Pope needed to do:

But not to prolong this discussion let me repeat once, and for all, that as this new attempt on the part of his Holiness the Pope has miscarried, it is necessary, if he sincerely desires the unity of the Universal Church that he should write to the patriarchs individually, and acting in concert, endeavor to come to an understanding with them respecting the course to be adopted – renouncing every dogma on which opinions may clash in the church. By so doing his efforts might perchance be crowned with some degree of success.

Involuntary sin

According to Scripture, the cause of all sin that is involuntary lies in what is voluntary.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Juneteenth

I have nothing to say about Juneteenth except that emancipation was a legitimately huge landmark in our nation’s history and worthy of annual commemoration.

Public affairs

Indiana’s GOP Lieutenant Governor nominee

Indiana over last weekend nominated as its Lieutenant Governor candidate, Micah Beckwith, a pastor of some sort who:

  • Thinks that the “progressive left has taken over the Republican Party in Indiana,” and that some Republicans today are “champions of Communism.”
  • Said on a Christian(ish) podcast “We are in a season of war right now … People need to wake up, or else this mental and heart battle that we find ourselves in culturally, it will lead to bullets and bombs. It’s just a matter of time.”
  • Said God had told him, on January 7, 2021: “Micah, I sent those riots to Washington. What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.” (This is what every story on him seems to pick up.)

Those quotes are from Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times. Goldberg also says, sans quote, that he’s a “self-described Christian Nationalist.”

Beckwith was forced onto the ticket against the wishes of the Gubernatorial nominee, retiring U.S. Senator Mike Braun.

Yeah, I guess it’s national news.

I didn’t support Braun for Governor. I was unenthusiastic about him when he ran for Senate in a GOP primary whose theme was “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the Trumpiest of them all?” (but I preferred him to Todd Rokita, now our Attorney General and a truly loathsome person). I’m not certain I’ll vote for him in the General Election.

My decision will hinge to some degree on how effective he is at keeping a reassuring distance from Beckwith without, of course, repudiating him so firmly as to hand the election to Democrats. So far, his pointed message “I’m in charge” seems about right.

I’ve noted repeatedly that I repudiated any loyalty to the Republican Party on Inauguration Day 2005. But I still have a reflex to vote Republican over Democrat, and to mourn what already has become of the Republican party, and what one likely future holds.

On Christian Nationalism

Having noted Micah Beckwith’s purported Christian Nationalism, I’m reminded that I may not have staked out my own position openly.

First, I define it narrowly. There have been ridiculous accusations of Christian Nationalism based on undisclosed or untenable definitions. Real Christian Nationalists are still pretty rare, I think (but what do I, a contrarian, know?).

I’m not unaware that American pluralism is an experiment. I’m not sure whether it will succeed or fail. I’m familiar with and friendly toward the phrase “worst form of government except for all the others.” I’m not ready to abandon it.

At the risk of ad hominem, I don’t trust the “Christians” who expressly advocate for Christian Nationalism. One of my older blogs, on what we then called “culture wars,” remains relevant, but I’ll paraphrase excerpts rather than do direct quotes.

My distrust of Christian Nationalists stems fairly directly from my disagreements with their form of our putatively shared faith — disagreements that lead me to chronic use of scare-quotes around the word Christian or the use of “Christianish.”

The pious Protestants among them tend functionally believe that God’s only presence in the world is His rules, so they “honor” Him by keeping his rules. But the age of Trump has brought many to profess that they’re Evangelicals even if, in the extreme case, they’re Muslims or even atheists, because of something they like about the politics now associated with that label.

The most coherent, maybe the only, Protestant theorists of Christian Nationalism are theonomists, or more specifically Reconstructionists. If these Calvinist intellectuals had their way, there would be 18 Old Testament Capital Crimes in our law books – including sassing parents. They’d shut down my Church and desecrate its icons. They might, for all I know, execute me for idolatry for the icons in my home prayer corner.

Ummmm, no thanks.

The Catholic theorists of Christian Nationalism (Integralism, they call it) are much better — not okay, but less bad. But I don’t think their side would get the levers of power anyway.

There is no remotely viable Orthodox version of Christian Nationalism, Byzantium being long-gone. And we’d lack the numbers to staff government if there were.

So I think “Christian Nationalism” in America would be, in ascending order of likelihood:

  1. Catholic Integralism
  2. Calvinistic Reconstructionism
  3. A blasphemous mish-mash of right wingnuttery in the name of God. (Like Indiana’s GOP Lietenant Governor nominee or the yard sign “Make Faith Great Again: Trump 2020.”)

I reject them all. I think all of them would be hostile to Orthodox Christianity. I prefer to continue our flawed experiment with pluralism. But I suspect I’ll live to see one of them.

We Orthodox have survived similar or worse circumstances before.

America’s enemies

American leaders have a great need to identify an enemy or group of enemies that the U.S. can define itself against in order to justify the dominant position that they want the U.S. to have. It doesn’t occur to these leaders that the pursuit of dominance itself is what creates so many enemies or that the U.S. would be far more secure by renouncing the pursuit.

…

Losing the Soviets as an enemy created a hole in U.S. foreign policy that Washington desperately tried to fill with anything our leaders could find, but the substitute villains (Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, etc.) were so weak by comparison that the threats had to be massively inflated.

Daniel Larison (who had fallen off my radar)

We seem hellbent on creating intractible enemies in at least three corners of the world. Depending on their political stripe, American politicians speak as if Russia, China, and/or Iran pose existential threats to us. Yes, we do have substantive differences with all, but I can make a case for all three that they simply wish to live their lives in their own ways in their part of the world without our interference. Look at the flash points with each: Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan. All are American dependencies; all are projections of our hegemony into the very heart of their respective spheres. Regardless of your sentiments, the fate of none of those areas have any existential meaning to the U.S.; and yes, I am including Israel in that. They do, however, have existential meaning to our supposed adversaries.

Terry Cowan

J.D. Vance

I commented on June 13 about Ross Douthat’s interview with J.D. Vance.

There doubtless have been many commentators weighing in on the interview, but I’ve read only one so far: Andrew Sullivan. He made some excellent observations about places where Vance was tap-dancing around the unvarnished truth (to stay in Trump’s good graces?) or omitting crucial facts that eviscerate his argument.

Of the changes in voting rules to deal with Covid?:

The new pandemic rules, moreover, were endorsed by the Congress, which passed $400 million in the CARES Act for the election’s unique challenges, which Trump himself signed into law. If the rules were rigged, Trump helped rig them!

…

Vance’s case is completely undermined by Trump himself. Trump, after all, did not say after the election that the Covid rules were why he’d lost. He said he’d lost because votes were stolen, stuffed, and hidden, and the voting machines had been rigged. He’s saying the same things today. And the reason for all of it was not some genuine concern about easier mail-in and absentee voting (he endorsed absentee voting, after all), but Trump’s basic, characterological inability to function in a system that doesn’t guarantee him victory every single time.

That is not the system’s fault. It’s the fault of the party that nominated a malignant, delusional loon.

Putin

This week in Budapest, I met with an American academic active in the struggle for international religious freedom. We spoke about the Russia-Ukraine war, and established that we both believe Russia ought not to have invaded its neighbor. I added that as an Orthodox Christian, it grieves me how Putin has instrumentalized the Church to advance his war aims.

Then the American, a conservative Christian, posed a provocative question, that went something like this: For all his thuggishness, do you think that Vladimir Putin is on the right side of broad civilizational trends? My interlocutor brought up Putin’s harsh criticism of Western secularism and its emptiness, contrasting it to a Russia built on traditional values, including religion. Yes, Russia is in deep social and demographic trouble, and yes, Putin might be a colossal hypocrite, but, said the American, on the deep civilizational questions, isn’t Putin, you know … right?

I knew the answer, but as a man of the West, was too depressed by the question to admit it ….

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Degrowth

The case for degrowth is not about martyred self-denial or constraining human potential; it is about reorienting socioeconomies to support collaborative and creative construction of lives that are pleasurable, healthy, satisfying, and sustainable for more people and more places. End goals of degrowth – dignified work, less selfish competition, more equitable relationships, identities not ranked by individual achievement, solidary communities, humane rhythms of life, respect for natural environments – are also the means through which people exercise and embody, day by day, the lifestyles, institutions, and politics of degrowth worlds to come.

The Cauldron of Degrowth – Front Porch Republic

Euro-skepticism

The European Union began as a trading bloc, but by the early 1990s, it had evolved into a moral project fueled by elite distaste for (even revulsion against) the nationalistic sentiments these elites had become convinced were the source of all the crimes of the European past, including imperialism, racism, fascism, and genocide. What Europe needed was an inoculation against these sentiments, and the EU would be the vaccine, giving the continent a collective goal of striving to overcome particularistic attachments and the cruelty, suffering, and oppression they supposedly implant and encourage. Nationalistic sentiments would be sublimated into the transnational idea of the EU, with the EU itself eventually expanding without limit as the leading edge of a world without borders or walls impeding trade, the free movement of people, products, capital, and labor.

Damon Linker

I am enthusiastically European; no informed person could seriously wish to return to the embattled, mutually antagonistic circle of suspicious and introverted nations that was the European continent in the quite recent past. But it is one thing to think an outcome desirable, quite another to suppose it is possible. It is my contention that a truly united Europe is sufficiently unlikely for it to be unwise and self-defeating to insist upon it. I am thus, I suppose, a Euro-pessimist.

Tony Judt

Matters of Opinion

The continuing siege of Samuel Alito

I’m a journalist. We’re journalists. There are certain things we do. When we interview somebody, we make it clear that I work for the New York Times, the “NewsHour,” the Washington Post. Like, we make it clear who we are. We don’t lie. We don’t misrepresent ourselves. We don’t hide a tape recorder somewhere, and we don’t lead people on with a bunch of ideological rants. And this person did all that. It’s a complete breach of any—the basic form of journalistic ethics. And I was, frankly, stunned that all of us in our business just reported on it, just like straight up. And to me, this information is so doctored by her attitudes, the way she’s leading on Alito and his wife. It’s just—it’s unfair to them, frankly, to treat this as some major news story. We should be treating it as somebody, a prankster. And there’s a right-wing version of this called Project Veritas, where they lie too—as some prankster who’s creating distorted information.

David Brooks, on the Journalist who plied Justice Alito with a red-meat rant and got only a very anodyne response.

I found myself hoping that she will forever be known as the journalist who engaged in sleaze and then made it worse by publishing the nothingburger results. And then I remembered an incident in my past, when I may have been older than she is now, when I broke the rules to get the true story — not as a journalist, but as a lawyer. I, too, came up dry — and exposed for my wrongdoing.

I’m glad that did not follow me the rest of my life. I hope she has learned her lesson as I learned mine.

Worst Matter of Opinion podcast ever?

With Ross Douthat on vacation, Michelle Cottle, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen invited their hardcore colleague Jesse Wegman to join them.

Synopsis: Some justices blame the press for distrust of the U.S. Supreme Court. But that’s not it. It’s really Justice Alito’s [first exaggeration about Justice Alito] and [generalization built on exaggeration] and Clarence Thomas [Oh, hell, let’s just lump him with Alito] and dismissing Alito’s version of flag-gate and laughing out loud at Justice Alito saying [garbled version of he has a duty to deliberate if he’s not required to recuse, which is true] and Mitch McConnell, who played unprecedented political hardball to defeat Merrick Garland (by delay) and confirm Justice Barrett (by contrasting haste), so that Trump’s two appointees have cooties-by-association.

I will give Carlos Lozada credit for pushing back. The bias, dishonesty, and inexcusable ignorance of the other three make me want to cancel my Times subscription.

Intuition

“I have the feeling that I understand it.” But then he adds, “In fact, it is not ‘understanding,’ and it is not ‘knowledge.’ It is a direct awareness, or intuition. It’s not the kind of thing you ‘understand.’ It’s like I said before to you: one grain of rice, and the whole earth, they are the same. You can’t learn that from a book.”

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less

Mordant observation

The more people came to know gay people and understand the aims of the movement for gay marriage, the more accepting they became of it. The more people come to know trans people and understand the aims of the transgender moment, the more skeptical they become of its claims.

Wesley Yang on new polling. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

Books

There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.

Pete Hamill via Robert Breen on micro.blog.

I know what Hamill means.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Sunday of the Fathers

This “Fathers Day” in the USA also happens to be the Sunday of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council in the Orthodox Church. That was the Council that dealt with Arianism, the heresy of Arius, who taught that Christ was a creature — very special and exalted, but a creature nonetheless.

That council responded that Christ was “very God of very God, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father,” words of the Nicene Creed, so called because that Council met at Nicea.

Theological definitions

Theological definitions were declared only reluctantly by the Church, only if absolutely necessary, and only to the extent necessary to oppose specific heresies.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.

Such was the practice of the early church, before the Great Schism. It’s still that way in Orthodoxy, although the whole story now is a bit more complicated. An Orthodox cyberfriend summarized it: If it weren’t for heretics, we would have no theology.

Reminiscenses

The Red Shoes

There are many versions of The Red Shoes, but it basically tells of a young girl without much money who is entranced by a pair of red shoes she sees a princess wearing. They are so different to the heavy black shoes that everyone tramps in and out of church with. They all seem so serious, so weighed down. Through various kindnesses she gets a similar pair of red shoes.

One day outside the church she meets a man returning from a great war, far away. He has a long white beard and very bright eyes. He starts to play a fiddle. While others disapprove, he coos and simpers over the girl’s shoes, even asking her to give him a little twirl, a little dance. Feeling shamed by the churchgoers and affirmed by his gaze, she starts to dance. For a while it’s quite wonderful, even liberating. She twirls past the villagers, round the graves, laughing and in wild excitement. She hollers and pirouettes, all the time with the old man playing his fiddle and making her feel seen. For a few minutes this is quite the spectacle, but after a while, the crowd grow bored, gather their kids and go home for Sunday dinner.

Point made, the laughing girl tries to stop dancing and finds she can’t. As the panic grows in her eyes, this excites the old man even more. He starts to play faster and leads her out of the graveyard and onto the moors and through the woods. For many hours she splashes through streams and over hills, growing more and more crazed, more exhausted. Under a full moon she spasms and twists as the fiddling man keeps pace. The ecstasy has descended into nightmare, the passion into enchantment. Her feet are bleeding and somehow twined to the shoes.

Finally she dances into the arms of an angel who frees her from the ghastly parade and liberates her feet. The old man melts away into the trees. The angel washes her feet in a stream and over time she recovers. She is never going to wear those big heavy black shoes of the others, but she finds gentler, sweeter rhythms to move to. When she wants to stop, she simply sits down and takes her handmade shoes off.

…

In more brutal versions of the story, the girl meets not an angel but villagers, who, at her prompting, cut her feet off to stop the dance. She is now crippled but safe, being wheeled in and out of church for the rest of her life, chastened but wiser.

Martin Shaw, On Sex: Dancing With The Passions

Martin Shaw is a storyteller, but he upacks this story, with two of its alternate endings, nicely for the hard of hearing, including:

This grotesque scenario just exaggerates further the juxtaposition of rabid licentiousness and morbid ideas of purity. There is a distinct lack of imagination in both forms of acting out.

I’d never heard this story until last Sunday. Today’s blog is so full (too full?) of personal reminiscences that I’ve deleted an awkward one here.

The Refrigerium

Did ye never hear of the Refrigerium? A man with your advantages might have read of it in Prudentius, not to mention Jeremy Taylor.

The name is familiar, Sir, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what it means.

It means that the damned have holidays—excursions, ye understand.

Excursions to this country?

For those that will take them. Of course most of the silly creatures don’t. They prefer taking trips back to Earth. They go and play tricks on the poor daft women ye call mediums. They go and try to assert their ownership of some house that once belonged to them: and then ye get what’s called a Haunting. Or they go to spy on their children. Or literary ghosts hang about public libraries to see if anyone’s still reading their books.

This forgotten passage from C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce popped up recently.

The Great Divorce is one of the most important books in my spiritual biography. There’s not a single word of explicit theology that I remember, but the tacit theology that struck me — that one might, by indulging habitual sins (including distortions of things like the maternal instinct, or pride), make his soul unfit for heaven and even repelled by it — shook me out of a dangerous rut. Since I didn’t think that God would hold an unwilling soul hostage in heaven, just because he’d once said “the sinner’s prayer” in a fit of pious enthusiasm, I in due course left Calvinism (which suggested something like that) for Orthodox Christianity (which decidedly does not).

(That’s not the whole story. There have been 26 or 27 intervening years as I’ve lived an active corporate life in Orthodoxy, and my thinking doesn’t exactly run along those lines any more. But an effort to put the change into words has failed me.)

Proto-exvangelical

When I left evangelicalism, it certainly was not because I was disillusioned with the faith of my early childhood. I have sweet (if somewhat nutty) memories of all those days … I think my problem with remaining an evangelical centered on what the evangelical community became. It was the merging of the entertainment business with faith, the flippant lightweight kitsch ugliness of American Christianity, the sheer stupidity, the paranoia of the American right-wing enterprise, the platitudes married to pop culture, all of it . . . that made me crazy. It was just too stupid for words.

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God

I do not recommend books by Frank Schaeffer, but I read them “back in the day” for reasons not worth going into again. This quote popped up recently and seemed on point to some other things I’ve been thinking about.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how much Evangelicalism has changed since my youth. It really shouldn’t have surprised me; Evangelicalism is built on shifting sands, because the Bible they claim (or claimed in Evangelicalism1967) as their sole authority is easily twisted and manipulated.

The nondenominational Evangelical/Charismatic/Clericalist syncretism described in this piece would have been recognized, back in my Evangelical days, as cultic and outside Evangelical boundaries. Apparently it’s not so recognized any longer, but some people, God bless ‘em, become “exvangelical” by abandoning it.

IVCF & CCC

… on many campuses the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship flourished and became a locus for evangelical dissent. Founded in Britain and rooted in the tolerant English evangelical tradition, the ministry emphasized fellowship and religious studies. It published books, encouraged critical thinking, and gave students leave to raise the issues of their generation, such as racism and the Vietnam War.

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals.

I was an IVCF kind of Christian, not a Campus Crusade for Christ (now “Cru”) kind of Christian, I found when I left Evangelical hothouses and entered a secular university. (Navigators wasn’t much of a thing on my campus.) Now a great chasm lies between me and both, as both are Western and Protestant, but I can say with some confidence that IVCF prepared me in many ways for Orthodoxy, and I still feel kindly toward it.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Making a virtue of necessity

I just finished reading The Old Faith in a New Nation, a 2023 book by one Paul J. Gutacker. I can write no better summary of the author’s purpose than the publisher’s:

Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and “the Bible alone.” The Old Faith in a New Nation challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals found themselves returning, time and again, to Christian history. They studied religious historiography, reinterpreted the history of the church, and argued over its implications for the present. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, American Protestants were deeply interested in the meaning of the Christian past.

The book

I concur with the 4-star rating at Amazon, mostly because the sympathetic academic author obviously spent a lot of time researching a narrow topic, off-the-beaten track. When I stumbled across it, I knew that I needed it to challenge the “conventional wisdom” resident in my own imagination.

It would be churlish to complain of faults in a book that did what I wanted it to do, and was passably readable to boot. I now have a better idea of how nineteenth-century American Evangelicals (and a few mainstream Protestants and Unitarians) treated Christian history.

Generally, the Evangelicals settled for tendentious 18th-Century historiography. It’s hard to blame them — the laymen, at least. There are only 24 hours in a day, and the 8-hour workday didn’t exist. We’re still that way:

The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.

Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

Mnemohistory

A lover of obscure mots justes, I was pleased to meet the word mnemohistory, which to my disappointment isn’t even in the online Merriam-Webster. It is “the history of memory … The past is not only remembered by later generations, it also exerts by itself an influence on later times.” A near-equivalent, I guess, is “cultural history.”

The 19th-century American Evangelical mnemohistory was fiercely anti-Catholic — especially, and oddly, anti-celibacy, though the anti-Catholicism was comprehensive.

Somewhat to my surprise (I had already read in Frances Fitzgerald that it was anti-Calvinist), it was quite contemptuous of the Protestant Reformation as well — largely because the Reformation wasn’t adequately anti-Catholic. The Reformers baptized infants? Mumbled vague nothings about Christ’s presence in the Eucharistic elements? Damnable papacy!

Though the Magisterial Reformation opened Pandora’s box with its sola scriptura même, I’m newly-appreciative of its merits, at least compared to what followed. The Magisterial Reformers didn’t intend the whirlwind, and Rome did need reform.

That the best-laid plans chronically go astray is enough to make one suspect all is not right in the pre-eschaton world. (It’s also an imaginative buttress for temperamental conservatism.)

The acid test

The acid test of American Evangelical mnemohistory came in the debates over slavery, when there arose an urgent need to shuffle the deck chairs. Gutacker summarizes:

This was only one of many ironies in the debates over slavery, which saw Catholics ignoring or reinterpreting papal decrees, Episcopalians celebrating early American Puritans, Presbyterians defending medieval society while criticizing the Reformation, Baptists treating patristic exegesis as authoritative, and anticlerical abolitionists praising the pope. Not all of this irony was lost on contemporaries. As has been discussed, African American historians, in particular, took pleasure in pointing out the hypocrisy of proslavery authors who cited North African church fathers in their arguments for white supremacy.

Antebellum 19th-century American Evangelicals didn’t so much revere history as to use it to confirm their priors. They rejected tradition and precedent, those inconvenient facts, in favor of congenial theories they called “history” — again, a relatable vice, but it’s how we got Baptists and Southern Baptists, Methodists and Southern Methodists, and even Presbyterians and Southern Presbyterians (a division that leaves fewer contemporary traces than the Baptist and Methodist schisms).

Oh, yeah, almost forgot: It’s also a substantial explanation of how we got a Civil War.

I think that qualifies as failing the acid test.

Bless their hearts!

I’m fond of the expression “making a virtue of necessity.” 19th-century schisms over slavery were lamented at the time. Today’s more mercenary schisms pass without much objection as “isn’t-it-nice-that-there’s-a-church-for-all-preferences?” nondenominationalism. All hail the religiopreneur! (Bless their hearts!)

Christians were until recently (and in ecclesial Christianity, still are) horrified by schism. But what to make of the continued fissiparousness of movements themselves born in conscious schism, as was post-Second Great Awakening evangelicalism? Is it all that bad when badness can’t cohere?*

I confess a bit of schadenfreude, mitigated morally by faint hope for the epiphany “this isn’t working; our first principles must be wrong” — and for return to the Church that remained, albeit centered outside the West, when the Roman Church went into schism from it. There, Holy Tradition is preserved and transmitted as the warp and woof of liturgies, hymns, prayers, scripture, and all that goes into a lived faith.

* (An aside about coherence: Ken Myers, muse of Mars Hill Audio Journal, once suggested that today’s evangelicalism coheres, is united, not by orthodoxy but by orthpathos — not right shared doctrine but right shared feeling. Insofar as it does loosely cohere, I have no better explanation, and if I did it would be a topic for another day.)

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday of the Paralytic, 2024

No sectarians in post-Christian foxholes

… churches centered on the Bible, evangelism, and personal faith in Jesus; often but not necessarily nondenominational, with moderate to minimal emphasis on sacraments, liturgy, and ecclesiastical authority; and marked by a revivalist style as well as conservative beliefs about sex, marriage, and other social issues. Historically, … white and middle- to lower-class …

Brad East, describing the sorts of churches in which he has noticed a loosening of social taboos (and in some cases, abandonment of prior understandings of scripture), and some putting on of liturgical airs, in The Loosening of American Evangelicalism.

East describes a lot of the changes he sees, and then speculates on the reasons for them. His fourth suggested reason got my attention as a plausible “silver lining” to secularization:

Fourth and finally, there are no sectarians in post-Christian foxholes. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the same forces leading evangelicals to start drinking, getting tattoos, and watching HBO are also leading them to say the creeds, receive ashes on their forehead, and read Pope Benedict XVI. When the world feels arrayed against faithfulness to Christ, you need all the friends you can get. Doctrinal differences that aren’t relevant to current cultural battles—think infant baptism, not theologies of sex and gender—can be overlooked in a pinch.

What intellectuals are searching for

[S]uppose you are an atheist or agnostic exposed, over time, to the desert fathers, or to the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, or to Saint Maximus Confessor or Saint John of Damascus, or to Benedictine monks, or to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, or to Julian of Norwich, or to Saint Francis or Saint Bernard or Saint Anselm. It would simply never occur to you that what you find in these authors is what you’d find in the Methodist congregation on the corner, or the Baptist church around the block, or the non-denom start-up across town. Not only do the devotional and liturgical, spiritual and theological worlds conjured by these writers and texts not exist in such spaces. The traditions themselves do not claim the figures in question. You go, therefore, to the people and the places who are bold enough to say, “Those names are our names; those saints are our saints; those books are our books. We nurture and preserve and pass them on. Come learn them from us; indeed, come learn from us what they learned themselves, in their own time.”

In sum: What intellectuals, especially agnostic intellectuals in midlife, are restlessly searching for is something not man-made, but divine; not provisional, but final; not a question, but an answer. They are looking for rest, however penultimate in this life, not more open-ended restlessness. Something that lasts. Something that can plausibly make a claim both to antiquity and to permanency. A bulwark that will not fail. Something to defer to, submit to, bow one’s head in surrender to; something to embrace and be embraced by: a teacher but also a mother. And the truth is that Rome plausibly presents itself as both mater et magistra, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Orthodoxy does as well. The plausibility explains why so many intellectuals find port of harbor with each of them. The reverse, in turn, explains why so few of those sorts of people convert from rudderless adult atheism to Protestantism with a capital-p.

Brad East, musing on why intellectuals and other public figures convert to Christianity in Catholic, Orthodox (or perhaps Anglican) traditions.

A life-giving gift

I’m almost certain I’ve shared this before, but I share it again not only because it seems wise, but because I lived it — with a big caveat: happy-clappy is not confined to youth groups, and I wasn’t young when I discovered ancient Christianity.

For those young people who are either scared or suspicious of happy-clappy versions of youth group Christianity, ancient Christian disciplines and historic Christian worship can be received as a life-giving gift. When you have only seen forms of piety that value spontaneous expression and clichéd sincerity, to be given the cadences and rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer can be like receiving the gift of tongues. In my experience, many young people are intensely ritual animals without realizing it. And when they are introduced to habit-forming practices of Christian faith, invited into ways of following Jesus that are ancient and tested, their faith is given a second life.

James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love

Context is broader than the text itself

Context includes not only the historical and cultural setting and textual elements such as literary arrangement and relationship of the words. Context includes the original setting in which the Scriptures were written—the Church. The author belonged to the community of faith, as did his anticipated audience…

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

The democratic spirit at prayer

Much of what today passes for Protestantism is nothing of the sort. Rather, it is a thinly veiled cloak for the democratic spirit at “prayer.”  “Salvation by grace through faith” is a slogan for individualism, a Christianity “by right.” There are no works, no requirements, only a “grace-filled” entitlement. For the ultimate form of democracy is the person who needs no one else: no Church, no priest, no sacrament, only the God of my understanding who saves me by grace and guarantees that I can do it alone.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

If you think that’s a cheap shot, you need to read Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity.

Nine paths of complicity

I returned to following the Mere Fidelity podcast after a year or two absence (when I was more preoccupied with other things). One back episode I manually downloaded was Moral Complicity, which took as its springboard a controversy over one Alistair Begg’s faux pas.

It was an interesting episode, part of which lamented Evangelicalism’s lack of tools and training in moral reasoning, leaving Evangelicals to live in ambiguous situations based on shibboleths.

I was surprised at my own inability to justify my reaction to the particular question posed. Then I remembered that even my tiniest prayer book has some resources:

NINE WAYS OF PARTICIPATING IN ANOTHER’S SIN

  • By counsel.
  • By command.
  • By consent.
  • By provocation.
  • By praise or flattery.
  • By concealment.
  • By partaking.
  • By silence.
  • By defense of the sin committed.

THE CHIEF SPIRITUAL WORKS OF MERCY

  • To admonish sinners.
  • To instruct the ignorant.
  • To counsel the doubtful.
  • To comfort the sorrowful.
  • To suffer wrongs patiently.
  • To forgive injuries.
  • To pray for the living and the dead.

Wise eunuch

Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go near and overtake this chariot.” So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he asked Philip to come up and sit with him.

Acts 8:29-31.

I was rather old when I learned (as I understood it) that reading silently, sola mentes, was unknown in the ancient world.

I wasn’t quite as old when I realized that “How can I, unless someone guides me?” was a wise answer, not a pathetic one.

Col. R.B. Thieme, Jr.

“Well-nigh 50 years ago,” wrote the geezer, “I heard a guy who in retrospect was the weirdest, but most mainstream, preacher I ever heard.”

I’m the geezer. The guy I heard was “Col. R.B. Thieme, Jr..” See also R. B. Thieme, Jr., Bible Ministries | Home

Thieme was not outside the Evangelical Overton Window, but I recall two really weird things he said during the week or so of meetings I attended in Prescott, Arizona (I have a vague idea that I listened to him on the radio even longer):

  1. Nothing pleases God more than doctrine in the frontal lobe. It is fair to say that this was an obsessive theme of Thieme, if you’ll pardon the wordplay.
  2. The human ovum is the only sinless cell in the human body. Were it not sinless, Christ would have inherited sin from Mary.

I immediately thought the first thing quoted (almost verbatim) was weird and off-key. Now I’m quite sure it was wrong to the point of heresy. God desires several things more than storing up doctrine in one’s wetware. It is spiritually perilous not to value them as He does.

But the idea that mastery of doctrine was paramount was mainstream western Christianity. Since Thomas Acquinas, over-intellectualizing the Christian life has been (dare I say it?) a major way of avoiding actual encounter with God. In that sense, he was mainstream. And his website doesn’t put this idea front and center, portraying instead an extraordinarily hard-working dispensational premillennial evangelical pastor — adherent to a doctrinal scheme that led me to distance myself from evangelicalism around the time I encountered Thieme, though I don’t recall any cause-and-effect relationship.

The ovum remark was not an obsession, in my limited experience. The idea of inheriting sin and guilt is ubiquitous in Western Christianity (and repudiated in Eastern Christianity, which recalls that the wages of sin is death, not guilt — but that’s a longer story, and one that I’m probably not qualified to tell). Nevertheless, I don’t recall any other teacher ever making anything like Thieme’s weird remark.

Wedding rites

Contrast the vision of family carried in these cultural liturgies—and played out in television dramas and romantic comedies—with the countercultural, biblical vision that is carried in an Orthodox wedding rite. The rite has two “movements” or stages. The first is the Service of Betrothal. In the entrance or vestibule of the church, the priest asks both the groom and the bride a question. To the groom: “Have you, Nicholas, a good, free, and unconstrained will and a firm intention to take unto yourself to wife this woman, Elizabeth, whom you see before you?” And to the bride: “Have you, Elizabeth, a good, free, and unconstrained will and a firm intention to take unto yourself to husband this man, Nicholas, whom you see before you?” Each in turn replies, “I have,” and these are the only words they will speak in the ceremony. This won’t be an expressive opportunity for them to “show their love.” There’s no fixation on novelty in the idiosyncratic writing of their own vows. The actor and agent here is the Lord, the church’s Bridegroom, and their lives as husband and wife (and as mother- and father-to-be) are here being taken up into that life. The Triune God is the center of this ceremony, exhibiting a vision of marriage in which this is also true. This is beautifully signaled in vows that echo their baptism “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

It occurred to me as I was posting this that Smith’s book is one of extremely few contemporary Protestant-written books I can commend — not that I read all that many, mind you. It’s one of a few (along with books by Hans Boersma) that leave me wondering “why haven’t these guys shed their obviously uncomfortable Protestantism for Orthodoxy?”

When I heard the learn’d theologian …

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman

Do American Evangelicals despise history?

Last night, I began reading Paul Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past. Gutacker doesn’t buy the standard narrative that bibicist American Evangelicalism has no interest in Church history and traditions. It sounded promising enough that I bought it without any personal recommendations from trusted sources.

I’m especially interested to see whether it will call into question anything I’ve internalized from Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity. So far, it seems to accept Hatch’s work.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

St. Thomas Sunday 2024

Creed

The theologian William Placher defends the importance of creeds by citing Lionel Trilling: “It is probably true that when the dogmatic principle in religion is slighted, religion goes along for awhile on generalized emotion and ethical intention—morality touched by emotion—[but] then it loses the force of Its impulse and even the essence of Its Being.” Placher elaborates: Even if I have a warm personal relationship with Jesus, I also need an account of what’s so special about Jesus to understand why my relationship with him is so important. If I think about dedicating my life to following him, I need an idea about why he’s worth following. Without such accounts and ideas, Christian feeling and Christian behavior start to fade to generalized warm fuzziness and social conventions.

Kendra Creasy Dean, Almost Christian

Protestants

Then

The truth is that, while St David’s is a beautiful place, full of history, it feels somehow … dead. Maybe I’m being unfair. I only visited for a day. But I’ve seen enough living religious sites to know what they look – and feel – like. In Ireland, and even more so in places like Romania or Greece, a site like this would not only be hung with offerings, but would often be full of pilgrims lighting candles or kneeling in prayer. Here? Just tourists like me with hiking boots and cameras.

This is not an observation unique to St David’s: it’s the norm throughout Britain. I’ve only realised the depth of the problem since I moved out of the country and began to understand what others still had – and what we once had here.

…

Britain, almost uniquely amongst the many countries I have visited in my life – at least those in the ‘old world’ – feels spiritually dead, and this in turn feels like the root cause of the many problems that plague the land today. I don’t say this with any relish: this is my homeland, and I wish it were different. But since I have become a Christian, in particular, I have come to see just what has been lost there. Much of this is the legacy of the inaptly-named ‘Reformation’, which in Britain led to a frenzy of iconoclasm and sacrilegious violence. The ransacking of the monasteries, along with the centuries of spiritual tradition they held, the destruction of shrines like that of St David, the beheading of statues, the whitewashing of churches, the banning of festivals, the filling-in of holy wells: the wonder of medieval British Christianity will never be regained. And this was all done by Christians. It’s hard not to resent it sometimes.

Paul Kingsnorth, The God-Shaped Hole.

To be deep in history is to cease being Protestant.

Cardinal Newman

Now

Much of the Republican Party, including white evangelicals and fundamentalists, would line up in support of Trump even if he did order the assassination of a political opponent. If you don’t think so, you’re simply not familiar enough with the MAGA mind. You’re not listening closely enough to what Trump is saying to his supporters, and what they’re saying to one another.

It’s easy to anticipate just how their argument would unfold: first, deny that any amount of evidence could be amassed to prove that Trump tried to assassinate anyone; second, dismiss the allegations because they are being made by “haters” who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome; third, point the finger at the “Biden crime family,” whose corruptions far exceed what we see from Trump and his kin; and fourth, insist that even if the former president did order the assassination of a political opponent, it’s essential that Trump retain the presidency, because his absence would lead to dystopia. Unfortunately, for the sake of America, some people must perish. Or so Trump supporters would say.

Peter Wehner

Sacred covenants

True, the Methodist church adopted a statement about marriage. It affirms “marriage as a sacred, lifelong covenant that brings two people of faith (adult man and adult woman of consenting age or two adult persons of consenting age) into a union of one another and into deeper relationship with God and the religious community.” But what does “sacred” mean when divorced from the traditional theological and ethical beliefs that underpin Christianity? The description is nothing more than an aesthetic gloss to conceal what’s transpiring: the reduction of marriage to an emotional bond rather than the mysterious union of a man and woman that would normatively lead to the most sacred and godlike of events, the creation of new life.

Carl Trueman in the Wall Street Journal Opinion pages

A very big deal

Normalizing homosexuality is a very, very big deal, no matter which side you are on. Some progressives have a habit of accusing conservatives of making too big a deal of it. But this is hypocritical. If it weren’t a big deal, then progressives wouldn’t wreck whole denominations over it. To be fair, if I believed about homosexuality and the human person what progressives believe, I would probably be doing exactly what they’re doing, as a matter of justice. I would hope, though, that I would have the humility to recognize that what I was asking of my fellow churchmen was to accept and affirm a massive theological and historical change within Christianity, one that overturns the clear and unambiguous testimony of Scripture and Tradition. But they don’t. Those people typically act like it’s no big deal, except to the bigots who resist Progress.

… [A]ll ecclesial bodies have to have within them an agreed-upon method of authoritatively determining moral and theological truth. Simply as a sociological claim, if a church body cannot agree on an authoritative means of resolving these questions, what holds it together, except some combination of sentiment and historical inertia?

… It is an interesting psychological question as to why the leadership class within churches believes that the future of their church requires liberalizing … even though the evidence that liberalization doesn’t stop decline, but if anything increases it, is overwhelming. I believe it was Schumpeter who said that every institution, over time, will be led by people who mistake what’s good for them personally with what’s good for the institution.

[F]or the orthodox (theological conservatives), religion is in part a means through which we discover the structure of reality and conform ourselves to it. For the modernists (theological liberals), religion is a means by which we make ourselves at home in this world. It’s not that the orthodox don’t want to make a home in this world, or that the modernists don’t want to live in reality. Rather, it’s that the orthodox believe that all of reality is undergirded, and founded, in a sacred order of which we are a part. We can’t make it up as we go along; we must instead be open to divine revelation, and organize our lives from what has been revealed from God, because it tells us what is really Real. The modernists, by contrast, more or less disbelieve that the material world has a telos (end purpose), and that things have a logos (rational purpose) intrinsic to themselves.

Rod Dreher, When Is It Time To Schism?, quoting Mircea Eliade, The Sacred And The Profane.

This was an unusually good piece by Rod, who has become hard to read much of the time. I recommend all of it.

Protest is who the West is

Thomas Aquinas is often held responsible by Eastern Orthodox theologians for some of the key theological errors which led the Roman branch of the Church astray. Those errors in turn, they say, led to the internal Western schism known as the ‘Reformation’, whose ‘protestant’ rebels were themselves reacting against the impact of those errors. Catholic Christians naturally disagree. What we can say with certainty is that since Luther et al began their protest, the protest has never stopped. Protest, now, is what the West does. There has been so much protesting against the Church, in fact, that Christianity itself has died as the foundation of our moral order, and we are only now dimly becoming aware of what a catastrophe this is.

Paul Kingsnorth

Ecclesial Christianity

One man’s move to ecclesial Christianity

One thing I like about both Orthodoxy and Catholicism is that you have to do these things, whether you like it or not, whether you’re in the mood or not, sometimes whether you believe or not. You just have to plow ahead. I want that. If it’s left up to me, I am one lazy son-of-a-bitch. I will not do anything unless someone comes along and says, “You need to do this. This is really important. This will shape your life. Come on, Galli. Get off your butt.”

Yonat Shimron, Mark Galli, former Christianity Today editor and Trump critic, to be confirmed a Catholic (Religion News Service, September 10, 2020)

Stones to bread

I have heard various naive Orthodox opine that we need jurisdictional unity in the United States so that we can have a stronger voice and a more visible presence. It would seem that they have yet to renounce the world and are still thinking about the stones/bread problem. Unity is good because the Church is One (as is affirmed in the Creed). But it is not good because it is “useful.” Indeed, I suspect that God has allowed our disunity for His own purposes – including saving us from ourselves.

…

Our modern world, it would seem, has won the debate concerning turning stones into bread. We imagine that Christianity’s superiority lies in the fact that it would somehow make better bread ….

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Where’s the problem?

Archbishop Chaput’s brief critique of the theology of Cardinal Fernández in “Cardinal Fernández Misleads” (April 2024) seems to capture what many of us outside the Roman Catholic Church see as the real character of the Francis papacy: It is a form of liberal Protestantism in papal vestments …

Yet as an orthodox Protestant, I take no pleasure in the theological disaster that has been unfolding in Rome over the last decade. Rome has status, money, and power that could, if her leadership so desires, be used to hold the line on key social and political issues. And all Christians potentially benefit from that. But to act with conviction, one must believe with conviction. And there lies the problem, as the archbishop has so helpfully indicated.

Carl R. Trueman

A favorite prayer

LORD our God, Who art rich in mercy and Who hast no equal with respect to Thy compassion, Who alone art sinless by nature and becamest man, though without sin, for our sakes, Hearken at this hour unto this, my painful entreaty, for I am poor and bereft of good works, and my heart is troubled within me. For Thou knowest, O King most high, Lord of heaven and earth, that I have wasted all my youth in sins and, following after the lusts of my flesh, have become wholly an object of scorn to the demons. Continually have I followed wholly after the Devil, wallowing in the mire of the passions; for darkened in mind from my childhood, and even unto the present time, I have never desired to do Thy holy will; but, held wholly captive by the passions which assail me, I am become the butt of the mockery and scorn of the demons, being in no way mindful of the threat of Thine unendurable wrath against sinners and the fiery Gehenna which awaiteth. As one who hath thus fallen into despair and is in no way capable of conversion, I am become empty and naked of Thy friendship. For what manner of sin have I not committed? What demonic work have I not done? In what shameful and prodigal activity have I not indulged with relish and zeal? I have polluted my mind with lustful thoughts; I have sullied my body with intercourse; I have defiled my spirit by entertaining; every member of my wretched flesh have I loved to serve and enslave to sin. And who now will not lament me, wretch that I am? Who will not bewail me who am condemned? For I alone, I, O Master, have stirred up Thy wrath; I alone have kindled Thine anger against me; I alone have done that which is evil in Thy sight, having surpassed and outdone all the sinners of ages past, having sinned without rival and unforgivably. Yet, because Thou art most merciful and compassionate, 0 Lover of mankind, and awaitest the conversion of man, Lo! I throw myself before Thy dread and unendurable judgment seat, and, as it were, clutching Thy most pure feet, cry out from the depths of my soul: Cleanse me, O Lord! Forgive me, O Thou Who art readily reconciled! Have mercy upon my weakness; condescend unto my perplexity; hearken unto my supplication; and receive not my tears in silence. Accept me who repenteth, and turn me back who am gone astray; embrace me who am returning, and forgive me who prayeth. For Thou hast not appointed repentance for the righteous, nor hast Thou appointed forgiveness for them that have not sinned; but it is for me, a sinner, that Thou hast appointed repentance for those things wherein I have caused Thee displeasure, and I stand before Thee, naked and stripped bare, O Lord, Who knowest the hearts of men, confessing my sins; for I am unable to lift up mine eyes to gaze upon the height of heaven, being weighed down by the heavy burden of my sins. Enlighten, therefore, the eyes of my heart, and grant me remorse unto repentance, and contrition unto amendment of life, that, with good hope and true confidence, I may proceed to the world beyond, continually praising and blessing Thy most holy name: of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Prayers After Reading the Tenth Kathisma, A Psalter for Prayer: An Adaptation of the Classic Miles Coverdale Translation

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Pascha 2024

I was nurtured on stories as a child that contrasted Christ’s “non-judging” (“Jesus, meek and mild”) with Christ the coming Judge (at His dread Second Coming). I was told that His second coming would be very unlike His first. There was a sense that Jesus, meek and mild, was something of a pretender, revealing His true and eternal character only later as the avenging Judge.

This, of course, is both distortion and heresy. The judgment of God is revealed in Holy Week. The crucified Christ is the fullness of the revelation of God. There is no further revelation to be made known, no unveiling of a wrath to come. The crucified Christ is what the wrath of God looks like.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

The Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection reconcile man to God, not God to man. The difference in outlook is immense. God never departs from us. It is we who depart from Him. It is we who become spiritually ill through sin. It is we who need to be cured and restored. The Orthodox view is that “by his sacrifice on the Cross Christ did not propitiate his Father, but he cured the ailing nature of man.”

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

That is a good segué to my “what I learned during Lent this year” report.

I learned, at a deeper-than-usual level, the grace of God. That doesn’t mean He’s fine with us as we are; it means that He doesn’t forsake us, and that that nothing we’ve done is too bad for Him to forgive if we repent.

Repentance, though, is a constant, daily need, and doubly so when even religion and Christian education can be off the mark and unhelpful, even toxic.

Alexander Schmemann in For the Life of the World described America as a place “where the religious ‘boom’ is due primarily to the secularization of religion.”

Father Schmemann has been gone for decades now, but his observation still seems true. Most religion in the US is secular because the media and the society teach nonstop that secular and political concerns are real, religion ephemeral. Shallow Christianity, in response, secularizes itself because it wants to be considered real.

Politics is one obvious secularization in North America (I thank Thee, O Lord, that I am not like other man, especially those icky evangelicals who’ve been taken in by an orange con man, let alone an integralist or a Seven Mountain Mandate flake), but if politicization of faith were to end overnight, all would not be well. No, it wouldn’t:

Finding a (Real) Christian College.” For college decision day, I wrote for Christianity Today about what students should look for when deciding on what college to attend: “the most overlooked and therefore most insidious threat to Christian education in America right now [is] not progressive theology. It’s a pervasive consumerist anthropology. Theological anthropology concerns our assumptions about the nature and purpose of humanity. And by ‘consumerist anthropology’ I mean the belief—often subconsciously held—that people are essentially consumers who should maximize their earning potential so they can consume as many entertaining experiences and products as possible.

Jeffrey Bilbro

“Consumerist anthropology” is the new water.

… 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)

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