With doctrine and church attendance.
I spent much time Saturday writing a blog that says some things I really believe. Unfortunately, I also really believe that many who read it might find it offensive, and it would hurt, rather than help, the objective for which I wrote it. So I’m going to distill it, and see if it works better.
I’m writing for Evangelicals, so don’t be shocked if you “don’t get it” coming from somewhere other than Evangelicalism.
NPR’s Talk of the Nation Thursday had a 30-minute segment on “Christians Divided Over Science of Human Origins. Apart from a few callers and e-mailers, the discussion was basically between Daniel Harlow of Calvin College and Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
I will not even try to sort out their debate overall, but Mohler said something I believe to be demonstrably false. Continue reading “Adam & ho anthropos”
I have cited and quoted Fr. Stephen Freeman a great deal in this blog. His quiet learning and wisdom (not the same thing) have made him one of my very favorite Orthodox bloggers.
With Friday as an exception (which I nevertheless cited and quoted yesterday), he tries to “write within the known bounds of the Eastern Orthodox faith.” So when he uses his distinctive trope – “Christ didn’t come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live” or simply “morality is not Christian” – that is a bit shocking.
His expression is not any part of standard Orthodox “insider lingo,” but I’m convinced that it truthfully teases out something that’s deeply Orthodox, and helps makes sense of it.
Continue reading “Christianity in a radically different key”
Pat Robertson, who regularly gets mis-identified as a “Rev.” or “Evangelist” (it’s so hard to tell the difference between Evangelical “Rev. Celebrities,” “Evangelist Celebrities,” and “Batshit Crazy Celebrities”), gives a big ole Bronx Cheer to Christian tradition on marriage by saying that it’s okay to dump a spouse with Alzheimers. Continue reading “Pat Robertson Creeps Me Out – Again”
Rep. Anthony Weiner, whose “Weiner shot” probably will not linger in the political lexicon as long as “The Lewinsky Maneuver,” has been replaced – in a seat held by Democrats for almost 100 years, in New York’s 75%-Democrat 9th Congressional District – not by the Democrat chosen to run after he resigned, but by a Republican.
A conservative Catholic Republican. By a full 8%.
The Wall Street Journal, somewhat predictably, plays up the “dissatisfaction with all things Obama” angle, which almost certainly is in the GOP talking points list now. But the New York Times concedes that SSM played a role, along with – surprisingly, since the Democrat was “an observant Jew and strong supporter of Israel” – Obama’s position toward Israel.
The Democrat voted for Same-Sex Marriage in New York, which did not play well with folks who were hard-working immigrant Democrats, including Orthodox Jews and Hispanics.
40 Orthodox Rabbis have signed a letter “blasting” Weprin’s gay marriage vote. The Jewish Journal and NY Assemblyman Dov Hikind (also an Orthodox Jew) have crossed over and endorsed Weprin’s Republican opponent, the Catholic Bob Turner. NY Senator Ruben Diaz, a Democrat and an ordained minister, well-respected by the Hispanic Community has taped a radio ad against Weprin — because Diaz puts faith and marriage in front of his political party.
(CatholicVote.org, cited and linked in item 1 of Saturday’s Tidbits)
Robert P. George reports at Mirror of Justice later today what I had not seen elsewhere:
In the run up to the election, a group of Orthodox rabbis, most from Brooklyn, but including others, notably Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky and Rabbi Simcha Bunim Cohen, two nationally prominent Orthodox Jewish authorities, published a letter stating that “it is forbidden to fund, support, or vote for David Weprin.” The reason? As a member of the New York state legislature, Weprin, despite his Orthodox Jewish beliefs, voted to redefine marriage to include same-sex partnerships. This, the rabbonim declared, was chillul Hashem—a desecration, or bringing of shame, on God’s name. The rabbis went on to say that “Weprin’s claim that he is Orthodox makes the chillul Hashem even greater.”
…
The letter from the rabbonim went farther than anything I recall Catholic bishops saying by asserting that under Jewish law “it is incumbent on every Jew” to support and vote for Weprin’s opponent, “if the opposing candidate is committed to safeguarding the moral values that made made this Republic great, including the educational, religious. and parental freedoms of Torah adherents, defending family values, opposing abortion on demand, protecting the moral environment, opposing the radical LGBT (To’aiva) agenda, including opposing legislation of civil unions, as well as defending the security of our brothers internationally, particularly in Eretz Yisroel.”
(Emphasis added. I guess that last clause lamely supports the New York Times’ “Israel” angle.)
My gut tells me that Weprin would have survived the Obama baggage had the extra SSM baggage not been there, and that Obama’s abandonment of even doing his duty to defend the Defense of Marriage Act may have played into the story. Who really believes that Obama’s formal opposition to SSM is anything more than tactical political timing?
But the Rabbis’ letter surely played a role, and the press silence on what would be trumpeted as a dangerously theocratic transgression of the Church/State boundary if uttered by a Conservative Catholic Bishop/Archbishop/Cardinal or Evangelical celebrity is … well, pick one:
Materialism cannot explain the human person, and I suspect that it never will unless an extremely reductionist view of the human person becomes standard issue.
But what if materialism is equally incapable of fully explaining (choose one) matter/nature/creation? What if we need a sacramental ontology of creation?
A sacramental ontology was once assumed by virtually all Christians, says Evangelical Theologian Hans Boersma, both by book and in the current Mars Hill Audio Journal (links you to the site, but audio requires subscription). All things find their reality and identity in the eternal word of God, the Logos who became flesh to reconcile all things.
Much of Western Christianity now shares the assumption that there are barriers between heaven and earth, between the supernatural and the natural, between God and creation. The world, in effect, was independent (once the “watchmaker” had finished and wound it up), worked just fine, and was of no particular, Incarnation-prompting interest to God, until sin messed it up, and that’s why God is sort of interested now. Were it not for sin, God and creation could go their respective ways again.
[Between the writing of the preceding paragraph and its publication, I realized via a podcast (that’s how I multitask on bike rides) that the falsehood that the world is fundamentally independent of God is an echo of the primordial sin, into which the serpent tempted Eve with the the promise that she would be like God — and have no further need of Him.]
Mars Hill’s Ken Myers and Boersma acknowledge that they’re exploring a different, and historic Christian view, as they must since they’re exploring patristic writings and finding the “sacramental ontology” there.
Boersma is part of a movement of Nouvelle Théologie, which like neo-Orthodoxy before it is grasping for something its proponents sense has been lost.
This is a hopeful sign, as is Rob Bell’s questioning, in Love Wins, of whether a Hell to which an angry God consigns people who’ve never uttered the prescribed pieties, is really quite so central as Evangelicalism has “traditionally” held.
Such dabblers or deep diggers into Patristics may some day realize that they’re not discovering something that’s been lost or suppressed in Christianity, but merely discovering something that was lost in the portion of Christendom that drank deeply at Enlightenment wells and thus entered into a sort of thralldom. That’s why there are knowing winks among Orthodox (and probably Catholic) former Evangelicals when they hear that Wheaton College has opened a Patristics center. We know what tends to happen when people get deep in history.
Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain famously discovered that he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. The late Church History titan, Jaroslav Pelikan, entering Holy Orthodoxy in the last decades of his life, acknowledged that (through his deep steeping in Church history) he had been thinking Orthodoxly for decades already.
Is Hans Boersma or Ken Myers next? Has Myers already made the move, but stayed with Mars Hill Audio’s format to serve as a bridge for others?
Meanwhile, I’ve got another book on my wish list, with a Kindle sample downloaded to whet my appetite.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 