Samaritan Woman/Midfeast

Colonizers

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

Tom Holland, Dominion.

Fissiparous

Those who, like him, had dared to repudiate the Roman Church but had then been guilty of what Luther condemned as a failure properly to understand the Spirit, had also been the objects of his ire. Theologians in Swiss or German cities who presumed to dispute his views on the eucharist; Anabaptists, with their wild contempt for infant baptism and secular authority; Henry VIII, who seemed to think he was God. Luther, fretting where it all might lead, had not shrunk from contemplating a nightmarish prospect: a world in which the very concept of truth might end up dissolving, and everything appear relative. ‘For whoever has gone astray in the faith may thereafter believe whatever he wants.’

Tom Holland, Dominion.

“Fissiparous” is my favorite blanket term for the innumerable clans descended from the Reformation. It sounds appropriately sinister to me.

Lofty rhetoric, grubby reality

When the Supreme Court announced a “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”, some thought it was rejecting the very idea of natural law. Really it was asserting a degenerate theory of natural law, one widely held in the culture—or at least in those parts of it which our controllers choose to recognize, such as law schools, abortion facilities, and liberal seminaries. It was propounding a universal moral right not to recognize the universal moral laws on which all rights depend. Such liberty has infinite length but zero depth

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know

Catechesis

If you read through the Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem (mid-4th century), you discover that they have a strongly moral character. The “theology” is quite simple and straight-forward. The extended period of catechesis (often three years in length) was about turning Roman pagans into believing Christians. The habits of the heart (another word for “character”) take time to change or be formed. They are, indeed, the product of a lifetime.

…

We modern people have been nurtured in the heart of a great project and the character of “project managers” has been deeply stamped on us. We expect our own salvation to be something of a project and that w e should be its managers. How frustrating it is to be told that “it does not yet appear what we shall be.” How can we manage the project of our salvation if we do not know what it is we are working towards? How can we tell if we are any closer? Our modern character is formed to expect upward movement – improvement. But St. Sophrony taught that “the way up is the way down.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman.

One of the things I can’t un-see

In my youth, we zealous Evangelicals condemned Roman Catholic Bibles for all the annotations that we thought distorted the Bible’s message. We did so, with no sense of the absurdity, while clutching our Scofield Reference Bibles, with notes that, for instance, put Genesis Chapter 1 at 4004 B.C.

This is the sort of thing you can’t un-see once you’ve seen it. That the dispensationalist heresies of the Scofield Reference Bible have (or so I understand) become passé in Evangelicalism doesn’t change that. Newer Bible versions with study notes fill the void, though perhaps the antipathy to Rome has diminished (I simply don’t know).

The Mother of God

Despite the clear views of the original Reformers, the Church’s devotion of honor and love for the Holy Virgin Mary is one of the greatest stumbling blocks for today’s Protestants to overcome. As on many points of Orthodox doctrine and practice, the Protestant view has devolved radically since the time of the Reformation. For evangelicals in particular, the traditional veneration offered to the Theotokos through praise and prayers evokes not merely theological objections, but often highly charged negative emotional reactions.

Michael Shanbour, Know the Faith

Thoughts from a freshly-minted Saint

No matter how ‘right’ you may be on various points, you must be diplomatic also. The first and important thing is not ‘rightness’ at all, but Christian love and harmony. Most ‘crazy converts’ have been ‘right’ in the criticisms that led to their downfall; but they were lacking in Christian love and charity and so went off the deep end.

St. Seraphim Rose, newly-Canonized in one North American Orthodox jurisdiction, via Michael Warren Davis.

The most tragic Orthodox downfall I’ve seen personally fit that pattern.

This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.

I John 1:5-7

Southern Gothic

Her stepdaughter, Kate, is twenty-five, fragile, sensitive, a weak woman raised by a strong one. She yearns to have her suicidal despair overcome through raw experience. Storms make her feel wonderful. Sometimes, she tells Bolling, she stays up all night having “revelations.” The happiest moment of her life, she claims, was when she was in a car crash on the Natchez Trace. Her fiancé was killed. She survived. “I went over and looked at Lyell and everybody thought I was an onlooker. He had gravel driven into his cheek. There were twenty or thirty cars stopped on the road and then a bus came along. I got on the bus and went into Natchez. There was some blood on my blouse, so when I got to a hotel, I sent it out to be cleaned, took a bath and ordered a big breakfast, ate every crumb and read the Sunday paper.”

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, characterizing a portion of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.

I guess I thought of this as “Sunday fare” because it reminds the reader, albeit with Flannery O’Connor’s “large and startling figures”, just how screwed up we humans are.

I like the Southern Gothic writers, I think, because their literal meaning is opaque; they write what feels like long, evocative poetry.

No graven images

It says a lot about our current president that in response to the news that a giant gold statue of Donald Trump was dedicated this week, you have to ask, “Which one?”

(Margaret Hartmann, Gold 22-Foot Trump Statue Definitely Isn’t a False Idol).

After a 22-foot gold statue of Donald Trump went up outside the Trump National Doral Miami golf course, Pastor Mark Burns, a friend of the president who helped organize the project, felt obliged to explain at its “dedication” that “this is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone.” (Margaret Hartmann, ibid.)

Two observations:

Any Protestant who approves of this statue should never again accuse Orthodox Christians of idolatry because of our icons.
Responding to Orthodox Christians saying “We don’t worship icons,” a common Protestant response is “The hell you don’t! You bow and kiss them!” An Orthodox apologist responding to that denied that bowing and kissing was worship, but sort of understood Protestant confusion: “Protestants venerate God and worship nothing.” (Obviously, that stuck with me.)

Incomplete Renunciation

Please let me have
a 10-room house adjacent to campus;
6 bedrooms, 2-1/2 baths, formal
dining room, frplace, family room, screened porch, 2-car garage.
Well maintained.
And let it pass
through the eye of a needle.

(Marilyn Nelson, in Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology)

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

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 and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Friday, May 8

Trump’s secret sauce (and where it falls flat)

I don’t plan anything else pointedly about Trump today, but David French’s latest (gift link) struck me as surprising and unusually powerful. And actually, it’s as much or more about the Republican politicians who now dance to Trump’s pipe and the 77 million voters who put him back in the Oval Office even after January 6.

Trump’s central political insight (and perhaps his key political advantage) is that he understood that Americans weren’t quite cynical enough about many of our politicians. As much as we already thought they placed power over principle, we didn’t know the half of it. He could see our politicians more clearly than we could — perhaps because he’d spent a lifetime in their presence, writing them large checks while hearing their empty promises.

And he showed it by placing a big carrot and a giant stick in front of the Republican political class, and then we watched as virtually everyone fell in line.

…

Trump is not a man who values dissent, to put it mildly. The idea of a “team of rivals” is completely alien to him. Talk to virtually any prominent person who breaks with Trump, and they can tell you stories of terrifying days and sleepless nights as MAGA’s minions made their lives a living hell.

At the core of Trump’s worldview is a belief that the world is a fundamentally transactional place, and that everyone has a price.

The Republican Party has done nothing to disabuse him of the notion. Even the religious leaders around him are fundamentally transactional. As they’ve demonstrated, they’ll put up with virtually any behavior from Trump so long as he delivers on a few, simple promises. And now — especially when it comes to abortion — he doesn’t even have to deliver on those. For some it seems as if access to power alone is compensation enough.

The key to Trump’s power isn’t just that he accurately sensed that much of the Republican establishment paid lip service to principle but really cared about power — it’s that he knew millions upon millions of voters possessed similar values. Their commitments to character or ideology took a back seat to the simple desire to defeat their opponents. The most important thing was to win. Anything else was a luxury.

…

Like calls out to like, and over time Trump has built one of the most purely transactional coalitions in politics. It should surprise no one that prosperity gospel pastors were among the first Christians to answer Trump’s call. Their entire religion is transactional — with God dispensing health and wealth in direct response to the financial donations of the faithful.

…

But [n]ot everyone is transactional. Some people — for better and for worse — actually have beliefs that they’re willing to die for, and Trump is painfully, obviously baffled when he encounters belief like that.

It’s embarrassing, for example, to watch him flail his way through the Iran war …

…

Trump plays the only cards he knows how to play — alternating between threatening death and destruction and proposing business deals. Remember when he considered a “joint venture” to control the Strait of Hormuz with Iran?

It turns out that there is an immense difference between your median South American autocracy and Twelver Shi’ism, the dominant religion of the Iranian regime. Threatening death to people who are willing to die for their cause doesn’t have the same effect as threatening people who seek mainly wealth and power. They are also quite willing to make other people die for their cause as well — and that means the Iranian regime (like Putin’s Russia) will endure catastrophic casualties without shaking its commitment or tempting it to yield.

Why hasn’t Trump been able to force an end to the Ukraine war? There are true believers on both sides. The Ukrainians won’t willingly yield an inch to the man who wants to destroy them, and Vladimir Putin is infused with his own sense of religious purpose and historic destiny.

…

At home, Trump has obviously been flummoxed by judges who stubbornly stick to principle and seem immune to his bluster. Constitutional fidelity is alien to him. He cannot understand why the justices he appointed will not do exactly what he wants.

At the same time, it’s no coincidence that the members of the MAGA coalition who are most apt to break with him are the cranks and conspiracists — people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, and even Tucker Carlson. They came into the MAGA coalition as true believers, and they’re the ones who seem genuinely outraged when Trump breaks his promises and betrays their trust.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the last 10 years of American political life has been the way that Trump has exposed layers of differences in American life beyond right versus left. In fact, in many ways right versus left has been the least consequential aspect of the American divide. The Republican Party bears little ideological resemblance to the G.O.P. of even the very recent past.

Instead, it’s been between decent and indecent. Honest and dishonest. Transactional and principled.

(Bold added)

Read the whole thing: True Believers Blow Trump’s Mind (gift link).

I cannot think of a more elegant solution to the mystery of how putative conservatives and professing Christians turned into, well, whatever the hell it is that they’ve become: they were just waiting to be bought.

This does not bode well for post-Trump America; the problem is pandemic, not confined to the White House.

The new calendar of Saints

I don’t think this readily reads as rage-bait, but just in case: I intend it as a light change of pace from the real rage-bait all around us. I don’t even intend to “own the libs” by posting it.

[C]onsider a recent Substack post by Ed West, a British conservative writer I enjoy reading. West is the kind of conservative who treats social-justice progressivism as a form of religion. I’ve done the same at times, agreeing with those who treat the trend as a post-Protestant moral crusade. But West goes much further in his post, pointing out just how many special days and months every year are now set aside in the UK for celebrating this or that protected or privileged group—and likening these celebrations to the feast days that comprised the liturgical calendar back during eras of Christian cultural dominance. Hence the tongue-in-cheek title of West’s post: “The New Calendar of Saints: Do you know your World Mental Health Day from your International Pronouns Day?”

In addition to those two, West highlights:

International Women’s Day

Zero Discrimination Day

Equal Pay Day

The International Day to Combat Islamophobia

The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

The International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

And the International Transgender Day of Visibility

If you’d like to see more, West provides a link to an organization based in Washington DC that compiles these and many more progressive feast days, including the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia on May 17, the International Nonbinary People’s Day on July 17, and many others.

It’s certainly possible to go about your life without giving such culturally mandated celebrations much thought. But in public schools and many workplaces in the United States, they will be announced, sometimes with programming added to ensure everyone within earshot learns proper moral lessons about each group and its mistreatment at the hands of … those who aren’t members of the group.

The question, once again, is who devised these occasions, proclaiming them into existence? And why did others in positions of authority and influence decide to go along with it, expecting that the rest of us would welcome the conjuring of a novel series of public celebrations of various multicultural-intersectional victim groups? Did I miss the election in which we cast ballots for this? Was even an opinion poll taken beforehand to gauge support for it? Or did someone simply decide for us, for our own good? And what about the “international” aspect to so many of these special days and months? That raises a slew of additional questions, including: Is there a committee at the United Nations or the Hague where such things are decided and imposed upon the nations, and through them the citizens, of the world?

Damon Linker, Mar 15, 2024

Abortion politics

There was a time when I was very much in the abortion fray on the pro-life side. I even was paid some legal fees to help. How I came to disengage is not worth telling, even assuming that I could tell the story with fly-on-the-wall accuracy, but it wasn’t because I switched to the pro-choice/abortion side.

I continued to watch developments, though, and the current kerfuffle over interstate distribution of mifepristone is a nice chance for me to say “I told you so.” I knew that the overruling of Roe v. Wade would not remotely lay the abortion issue to rest, and not just because 50 years of readily available abortion would not be relinquished without a fierce fight. What too many people didn’t seem to understand was that reversal of Roe would merely return abortion law to the political realm, where “chemical (pharmaceutical) abortions” via interstate mails was most definitely foreseen as a battle field.

We’re on that battle field now, even if other public affairs overshadow it for most of us.

Insatiable

What makes this sin so strange, counterproductive, and perhaps unforgivable, is that popular views on basic issues of tolerance and equality have become much more liberal over the years. The very things the Left was originally fighting for have become less controversial and more accepted—from gay marriage to women’s and racial equality to opposition to discrimination. The Left won.

Ruy Teixera, The Five Deadly Sins of the Left

This reminds me of a quip, from William F. Buckley, I think, about a liberal being the kind of person who cannot say what social improvements would be enough to turn him into a conservative.

Shorts

St Seraphim of Sarov, who lived at the turn of the 19th century, observed, “We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves.” (Peter Bouteneff, How to Be a Sinner)
Spoken of a post-op patient in Waco, TX, by her nurse — a grizzled Jerry Garcia with a thick Texas accent — “You’ve probably had a good many more drugs today than you have in a typical day. I don’t want to rush to judgment, but your tooth-to-tattoo ratio suggests that you’re not a heavy drug user.” (Alan Jacobs)
In the late 1970s, I was a teenager in Winona, Minnesota, a sleepy Mississippi River town defibrillated by three colleges and a few residual hippies. (Kevin Fenton)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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 my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Sunday, March 1

Heresies

Dispensationism declining

By embedding [John Nelson] Darby’s complex [dispensationalist] eschatology directly into the margins of the biblical text, Cyrus Scofield effectively imposed an ahistorical and not-traditional interpretation on the Bible, an irony given that the work has appeal to nuda scriptura Christians who see the Bible alone as authoritative and exclude tradition.

Albert Russell Thompson.

That irony was lost on me as a 15-year-old, when I asked for, and got, the ultimate pious kid’s Christmas gift (short of a KLH compact stereo system, of course): a Scofield Reference Bible (looseleaf for inserting note pages) with my name embossed on the leatherette cover.

But the irony finally hit me in my late 20s, when I used those loose-leafs for typed-up Calvinist-oriented notes repudiating the dispensationalist heresies of that Bible version. (I still have that Bible with my Calvinist notes. I have not superseded the Calvinist notes with Orthodox rebuttals.)

Thompson’s overall point, though, seems to be that dispensationalism is losing its grip on the evangelical imagination:

The dominance of dispensationalism is currently being hollowed out by a dual-front migration. First, some younger evangelicals are abandoning the religious innovations of the 20th century in favor of older, more rooted forms of Christian worship. Central to this is a burgeoning interest in Anglicanism, framed not as a liberal departure, but as a return to a foundational, traditionalist, and robust Anglo-American Protestant tradition. Similarly, the move toward Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism represents a rejection of the “rapture culture” in favor of a sacramental worldview that is fundamentally non-dispensational.

Also, many evangelicals of all ages have moved beyond dispensationalism. There were no successors to Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsey, and Tim LaHaye. Dallas Theological Seminary, once a headquarters of dispensationalist theology, has largely moved on. And Christian commentators are no longer anxious to relate contemporary events to biblical prophecy ….

I’m stunned that dispensationalism held that grip as long as it did after failures like predictions of Christ’s “Second Coming” no later than 1988 based on the 1948 establishment of the modern state of Israel starting a prophetic clock that would go off no later than the “generation” that saw that.

All else being equal, evangelicalism sans dispensationalism is an improvement, less likely to distract folks from the real business of following Christ.

(Although he acknowledges that dispensationalism is not required for support of Israel and the Jews, Thompson suggests, not implausibly, that the American upswing in antisemitism and the waning of support for Israel is linked to dispensationalism falling out of favor.)

“Merely to enumerate them would be impossible”

In 1832 Achille Murat, an exiled Bonapartist, whose religious ideal was a unitary society with an established church, nonetheless could not help but be impressed by “the thousand and one sects which divide the people of the United States. Merely to enumerate them would be impossible, for they change every day, appear, disappear, unite, separate, and evince nothing stable but their instability…. Yet, with all this liberty, there is no country in which the people are so religious as in the United States.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

To say that an America fractured into innumerable, shape-shifting sects is extremely “religious” is damning by faint praise, as I see it.

The heresy litmus test

What defines this consensus, above all—what distinguishes orthodoxy from heresy, the central river from the delta—is a commitment to mystery and paradox. Mysteries abide at the heart of every religious faith, but the Christian tradition is uniquely comfortable preaching dogmas that can seem like riddles, offering answers that swiftly lead to further questions, and confronting believers with the possibility that the truth about God passes all our understanding.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

The way of the Protestant world today

The local Church I grew up in has changed its name to “The Grove” to de-emphasize its denominational affiliation (well, officially “God wanted to give us a name that better reflected and communicated what he has been doing in our midst over the past few years”).

Growth in the unequivocally Protestant world these days seems to be in (1) nondenominational thingies and (2) denominational churches that function like nondenominational thingies. I guess my childhood church has decided to be the second sort of thingy.

(Then there’s the Anglicans – think “conservative dissidents from the Episcopal Church USA” – apt to think of themselves as lower-case catholics. I think they’re growing, too, though I wouldn’t bet anything on that unless I could afford to lose it.)

The Mercenary Love of God

Those wary of commending Christianity for its capacity to deliver rewards, benefits, and consolations have a point. Belief for the sake of avoiding hell, saving Western civilization, or just finding something to hold onto in a cold, meaningless world is not the same as the disposition of faith, properly understood, which is rooted in love of God, not fear of damnation, civilizational collapse, or soul-destroying nihilism. Nonetheless, count me among those who are not quick to dismiss appeals to the usefulness of Christianity. What is different is not necessarily contradictory. St. Catherine of Siena recognizes that a “mercenary love” of God is imperfect; nevertheless, it can spur us toward a pure and selfless love.

R.R. Reno, Dilbert’s Wager

Orthodoxy

Planting a seed

My name-changing childhood Church (see The way of the Protestant world today, above) made passing reference in the rationale for their name change to a favorite Bible passage from my teen years:

And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts, living within you as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love; and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God’s children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God himself.

I still think that’s lovely and apt. In fact, I now see that I was longing for Orthodoxy over one-and-done conversionism. I was an outlier, with my evangelical classmates preferring verses like “God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.“

The way back to The Garden

The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility. The Earth is our home now. … These are the consequences of our pursuit of knowledge and power, but we keep pursuing them because we know no other means to escape from our exile. We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. Outside the garden, we are homeless and can never be still. We forget the creator and worship ourselves. All of this happens inside us every day. … The path back to the garden can only be found by giving up the vainglory, the search for power and the unearned knowledge which got us exiled in the first place. The path is the path of renunciation, of love and of sacrifice. To get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross.

Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

Rome, viewed from Patmos

In the years leading up to the Schism, it would have been hard for the Eastern patriarchs to have taken seriously the claim that the popes of Rome were the vicars of Christ on earth and had inherited his sanctity and authority. The papacy had been in the gift of the German emperor since King Otto I had had himself crowned emperor by the pope on February 2, 962. He then decreed that all future popes should take the oath of allegiance to his office. In the following century, twenty-one out of twenty-five popes were handpicked by the German crown. They did not do a good job. Simony flourished; popes had their mistresses; and they were poisoned, strangled or just mutilated by their rivals. By 1045, only nine years before the Great Schism, there was no pope. Instead, there were three rival claimants to the papacy, each with his own army.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

Tuesday, 11/18/25

Tucker the Marcionite Heretic

Jason Willick’s Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and the targeting of Judeo-Christian tradition was deeply disappointing in many ways, but it levels a charge against Tucker Carlson that I’m going to assume arguendo is substantially true (I assume that because I’m not going to ~~wallow in~~ audit Carlson’s entire logorrheic output to synthesize my own opinion on it):

The former Fox News host is targeting a distinctively American, 20th-century concept: The Judeo-Christian consensus … A recent theme of the podcaster is that the Old Testament (the part of the Bible subscribed to by both Jews and Christians) is dark and tribal, while the New Testament (the part subscribed to only by Christians) is the fount of enlightened Western values …

Carlson explained in an August podcast that on a recent reading of the Old Testament, he “was pretty shocked by — as I think many people who read it are — shocked by the violence in it, and shocked by the revenge in it, the genocide in it.” By contrast, he explained this month as the Fuentes controversy raged, “Western civilization is derived from the New Testament.” …

Carlson is trying to heighten what he sees as contradictions between the Old and New testaments — and by implication between Judaism and Christianity.

I’m not going to pause to defend the Old Testament’s “violence,” “revenge” and “genocide.” There’s a whole lot of theology behind any such defense and I no longer delude myself into thinking I’m a pretty good “lay theologian.”

But I am going to point out that Carlson’s belief about the contradiction between Judaism and Christianity rhymes with an ancient heresy, Marcionism:

Marcion preached that the benevolent God of the Gospel who sent Jesus into the world as the savior was the true Supreme Being, different and opposed to the malevolent deity, the Demiurge or creator deity, identified with Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible … Marcionism was denounced by its opponents as heresy and written against by the Church Fathers – notably by Tertullian in his five-book treatise Adversus Marcionem (Against Marcion), in about 208 … The premise of Marcionism is that the ministry of Jesus is incompatible with the actions of God in the Old Testament … Marcionites held that the God of the Hebrew Bible was inconsistent, jealous, wrathful and genocidal, and that the material world he created was defective, a place of suffering ….

Wikipedia (hyperlinks omitted).

For me, at least, identifying Tucker as Marcionite or Marcionite-adjacent is more potent than the vaguer charge of “Christian identity politics.”

(For purposes of politics in 2025, moreover, it seems prima facie relevant that the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 A.D. and the expulsion of Jews from Judea destroyed “Second Temple Judaism,” forcing the formation over subsequent centuries of today’s “Rabbinic Judaism, which rests on more than the Old Testament.” So it’s not as simple as “Judeo-Christian” in 2025 amounting to a discordant and untenable mashup of a blood-stained Old Testament with a sublime New Testament. This is part of what Willick omits that makes his piece a disappointment.)

MTG Repents?

It is very late in the game for Marjorie Taylor Greene to suddenly be waking up to this, particularly given the occasional harassment and intimidation to which she stooped in her not-very-long-ago activist days. “I would like to say humbly I’m sorry for taking part in the toxic politics,” she told CNN in an interview when asked about that on Sunday. “It’s very bad for our country, and it’s been something I’ve thought about a lot, especially since Charlie Kirk was assassinated … I’m committed, and I’ve been working on this a lot lately, to put down the knives in politics. I really just want to see people be kind to one another.”

Nick Catoggio, who’s having none of it:

I don’t believe a word of it. Her conscience was never bothered before (publicly, at least) when Trump put a Democrat or centrist Republican in MAGA’s crosshairs, which he does routinely. No one with earnest qualms about leopards eating people’s faces would wait until their own face was devoured to articulate them.

But the fact that she’s insincere shouldn’t blind us to the significance of her pretending otherwise.

I have no need to decide whether she’s sincere and, unless you’re in her Congressional District, you probably don’t either. That doesn’t stop Kevin D. Williamson, though.

James Comey walks

Well, not yet, technically, but I’d bet a modest amount that he will walk, without a trial, especially after this:

It is extremely unusual for judges to examine how prosecutors act in front of grand juries, let alone to openly criticize their conduct. But that is exactly what Judge Fitzpatrick did to Ms. Halligan.

He noted that during her grand jury presentation she appears to have misrepresented a basic tenet of the law by suggesting that Mr. Comey did not have the right, under the Fifth Amendment, to avoid testifying at his own trial.

She also appears to have made another astonishing error, Judge Fitzpatrick said. In his ruling, he pointed out that she told grand jurors that they did not have to rely solely “on the record before them” to return an indictment against Mr. Comey, but instead “could be assured the government had more evidence — perhaps better evidence — that would be presented at trial.”

Alan Feuer, Judge Says Justice Dept. May Have Committed Misconduct in Comey Case

Between the Lines: The Trump Department of Justice deservedly has lost the “presumption of regularity” in this court, and is busily losing it in others.

Shorts

Oh, look, it’s a road sign saying, “Lame Duck-ville, next three exits.” (Jim Geraghty, The first glimpse of post-Trump MAGA has arrived)
To be honest, I’ve expected a primary ever since I came out against mid-cycle gerrymandering. But I ran on not becoming a politician, and I’m trying to teach my kids to do what’s right, no matter the consequences — so there was never really another option. (Indiana State Senator Spencer Deery, on his unwillingness to approve mid-decade gerrymandering of Indiana’s Congressional districts, via Based In Lafayette)
None of this is presidential, any more than it’s precedented. It is, instead, pestilential. (Jill Lepore via Frank Bruni).
The American university system is the envy of the world, and we are burning it down because there’s a couple of nonbinary gender studies professors at Bryn Mawr who say crazy stuff from time to time and there is a brain-dead gaggle of Jew-hating weirdos at Columbia. Of course, there is room for reform. But you don’t have to love every feather on the goose when it is laying golden eggs. (Kevin D. Williamson via Frank Bruni.)

Elsewhere in the Tipsysphere

Imagine that!

Speaking at an event over the weekend about tensions with the United States, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro broke out into song with John Lennon’s “Imagine.” And with that, TMD officially endorses regime change in Venezuela.

The Morning Dispatch November 17

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

Sunday, 11/9/25

No excuses

I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different. I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory.

I spent almost five decades in churches that didn’t do sacramental confession, and I confess that I have not “taken to it” as I have taken to other aspects of Orthodoxy.

But in reading early in my Orthodox walk about how to confess well sacramentally, I was struck by this: there should be no excuses in confession; you’re there to confess how you sinned, missed the mark, not to indict the person who provoked you or or distracted you.

It’s a mark of how right Lewis is in the above quote that this is sometimes very hard to do. We are provoked. We are distracted.

And yet we are responsible (and in my mind equally weighty: we are ourselves damaged by it), needing forgiveness, penance, and healing.

(In my experience of Orthodoxy, penance is generally an exercise of the spiritual muscles. Like maybe reading James 3 every day if one of your sins is a foul mouth—not that I’d know anything about that, mind you.)

Victimless sins?

In our modern culture, it is claimed that all things should be allowable as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. This is not the Orthodox approach, since it is impossible that our spiritual condition should not affect those around us. As the poet John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” By virtue of the contact we have with others, the consequences of our words and actions, or even the energy that emanates from our soul, we bring either grace or harm to others, directly or indirectly. St. Seraphim of Sarov famously expresses this when he advises, “Acquire the Spirit of peace, and thousands around you will be saved.”

Michael Shanbour, Know the Faith.

Moreover, one should care about hurting oneself. See generally, Lewis, C.S., The Great Divorce.

Bad Religion

America has … become less traditionally Christian across the last half century … But certain kinds of religious faith are as influential as ever … [T]o the extent that there’s an ongoing crisis in American culture, the excesses of the faithful probably matter more than the sins of unbelievers.

…

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion.

Prayer

No one may mock another’s form of prayer. Extempore prayers and set prayers both reach the Throne if there is any spark of desire in the one praying that they do so. God is not a literary critic or a speech teacher. He does not grade our prayers. But it is for us to realize that there is great help available for us in our prayers. Spontaneity is impossible sooner or later; there only remains for us to choose which set of phrases we will make our own. The prayers of the church lead us into regions that, left to our own resources, we might never have imagined. Also, in this connection, it is worthwhile remembering that prayer is as much a matter of our learning to pray what we ought to pray, as it is expressing what we feel at given moments. The prayer of the church gives us great help here.

Tom Howard, Evangelical is not Enough.

Mixed marriage

At a recent Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi, JD Vance remarked that he hoped his wife, Usha, would convert to Catholicism. The backlash was swift and savage. People criticized the vice president for being a bad husband and not respecting his wife’s choices and Hindu faith. Most of it was just noise. The backlash does, however, express an unfortunate reality. It is the terminus of American small-l liberalism: The ultimate truth is individual autonomy, and by publicly expressing a desire for his wife to convert, the vice president committed the cardinal sin in the religion of liberalism.

…

First, a simple directive: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it” (Eph. 5:25). Given that to love is to will the good of the other, that God is the greatest good, and that religion is an aspect of the virtue of justice whereby we render unto God what is owed him, it follows that husbands are to will that their wives believe and practice the true religion. JD Vance ought to will that his wife convert. To do otherwise would be unloving.

I told my wife on more than one occasion that I hoped she would convert, and I even expressed that desire publicly. Willing the good of the other is a concept mostly lost on liberalized Americans. “You do you” is the motto of our day. But it is an uncharitable motto.

Jeremy M. Christiansen, On Converting Your Spouse

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Sunday, November 2

The final blow

A campaign led by the kings of France and England to recapture it had failed. A second expedition, launched in 1202 in obedience to Innocent’s own summons, had been diverted to Constantinople. In 1204 it had stormed and sacked the city. A stronghold that for long centuries had withstood the envy of pagan warlords had fallen at last—to a Christian army. Its captors justified their storming of the city by charging that its inhabitants were rebels against the papacy: for the churches of Rome and Constantinople, ever since the age of Gregory VII, had been divided by an ever-widening schism. Innocent, however, appalled by the despoliation of Christendom’s bulwark, lamented the fall of Constantinople as a work of hell.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

The Great Schism between the papacy and Eastern Christian patriarchs is conventionally dated 1054, and not without reason. But those who dig deeper (or, like me, who read those who have dug deeper) tend to think that the 1054 schism was curable until this sacking of Constantinople by Crusaders.

A quintessential American heresy

[L]iving by no rule but the Bible turned out to be a defense against virtually the same list of enemies as living up to the standards of republicanism: “Many are republicans as to government, and are yet half republicans, being in matters of religion still bent to a Catechism, creed, covenant, or a superstitious priest. Venture to be as independent in things of religion as in those which respect the government in which you live.” Few Protestants expressed themselves as flamboyantly as [Elias] Smith in the early republic, but most followed where he led.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

I was reminded this week of a distinction that’s relevant here. I believe I learned it from the late Richard John Neuhaus, who I followed closely starting sometime in the 1980s. I won’t give a name (other than “quintessential American heresy”) to the view expressed so flamboyantly by Elias Smith, a view which I once effectively held, but I’m now in the camp of “ecclesial Christians”: those for whom faith in Christ and faith in His Church is one act of faith, not two.

I decidedly do not venture to be independent in things of religion, but very consciously submitted to the tradition of the Church particularly about Mary, the Mother of God-in-the-flesh, who was a stumbling-block to me as she has been to other Protestants (who in our generation call her “blessed” only sullenly, bound by scripture to do so).

The worst of the worst

Church management is a tricky and complicated business. I am glad that it is not my job. But I do know this much: The church is there for Gyp the Blood and Humpty Jackson, for Charlie Whitman and John Wilkes Booth and me. If there is no room for the worst of the worst in your church, then you do not have a church: You have a crappy book club.

Kevin D. Williamson (hyperlinks added).

Work and play

But there is the question. What, precisely, is “the business of life”? We can get onto an endless carousel if we try to decide which is the serious stuff of life, work or play. It is possible to take either view: either we toil away our eight hours so that we can get down to the real stuff—pleasure and love and recreation—or we enjoy periodic intervals of escape from the real stuff, the work.

Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance? I would not have retired had I thought the real stuff was work; that’s just livelihood, not life.

What evangelism can obscure

With the clergy focused on the task of evangelism, their doctrines received so little scrutiny that laypeople took them for granted: the Bible was an infallible guide in every situation, and the church taught what was written in it. Coming into contact with people who read the Bible differently, southerners, unconscious of their own scrim of interpretation, concluded that those others were not Christians.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals.

Fallen hero

Jérôme Lejeune was a hero of the National Right to Life Committee for his stance against aborting unborn children with Down syndrome.

He also was a thief—a stealer of glory that belonged to others.

It was apparently how the game was played back then. (Gift Link) That may not have changed much.

There’s probably a better moral to this little story than I can write: convention is no assurance of morality.

Upright life, sound doctrine

Over and over again he insisted that in electing an abbot upright life and soundness of doctrine were to be the prime considerations, not rank or family influence. ’I tell you in all sincerity,’ he said, ‘that as a choice of evils I would far rather have this whole place where I have built the monastery revert forever, should God so decide, to the wilderness it once was, rather than have my brother in the flesh, who has not entered upon the way of truth, succeed me as abbot. Take the greatest care, brothers, never to appoint a man as father over you because of his birth; and always appoint from among yourselves, never from outside the monastery.

Bede et al, Bede

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Fanatics and others

Fanaticism

The Minnesota Assassin

The Minnesota political assassin (who I won’t name) had some red flags in initial biographical information. From my perspective (Eastern Orthodox, formerly Evangelical and Calvinist, always active in my faith and never “charismatic”), the biggest one was his invocation of new apostles and prophets as what America needs spiritually — an indication of New Apostolic Reformation beliefs or something adjacent.

(Surprisingly few NAR advocates will own up to it; either it’s so loosely structured that adherence is ambiguous – which I suspect is the case – or they’re told to lie, or something.)

Now Stephanie McCrummen at the Atlantic has dug a little deeper and confirmed my suspicions.

Now comes the hard part: Assuming his guilt (which I’m allowed to do because I’m not a criminal court), dare we blame his assassinations, and the apparent intention to assassinate as many as 70 others, on his NAR ideas, or do we hold open the possibility of insanity or some other explanation?

Blaming NAR is tempting for me because I so detest it. But I have seen no information that NAR actually encourages physical violence, and not just vehement rhetoric. (Their “violent prayer” talk seems, preliminarily, to be a red herring.) The theory of stochastic terrorism has always struck me as plausible, but it’s hard to imagine any forcefully-expressed opinion that has zero chance of pushing some random person over some edge.

So I’m glad Stephanie McCrummen withheld judgment about causation. It’s still the extremely early days in the criminal proceedings, and more, if not all, will be revealed eventually.

Christianity is not an instrument of political power

David French comes closer than McCrummen to linking the assassination effect to the N.A.R. cause, and also had this observation:

Last election cycle I helped create a new Christian curriculum for political engagement …

As I talked about the curriculum in gatherings across the country, I was struck by the extent to which I was asked the same question time and again. “Sure,” people would say, “we need to be kind, but what if that doesn’t work?”

The implication was clear — victory was the imperative, and while kindness was desirable, it was the contingent value, to be discarded when it failed to deliver the desired political results.

David French

A “Christian” who thinks political victory is more important than living as Christ taught (let’s say, in the Beatitudes for instance) is a sorely confused Christian.

I’ve probably said it before, but I’ll say it again. One of the countless blessings I’ve received in Orthodox Christianity is the company of martyrs, many of whom died because they knew that gaining the world wasn’t worth losing one’s soul. If you’re in a “Christian” tradition where leaders or laity act as if that’s a good trade (none of them are wicked enough to actually teach it), get out before it’s too late.

Who are the fanatics?

We know now that the FBI’s infamous Richmond Memo, targeting traditional Catholics as potential terrorists and comparing them with Islamists, was not merely the product of a few rogues in a single field office, as the agency had claimed. Multiple offices were involved in drafting it, and it was distributed to over a thousand employees.

This post is not going to be a rant against the Biden administration. What interests me is what was going on in the analysts’ heads. I credit them with sincerity. But why did they think traditional Catholicism is comparable to the ideology of radical Islam?

The most generous interpretation which can be placed on the memo is that the analysts thought of fanaticism simply as strong belief, and assumed that any strong belief is potentially violent.

But a sensible definition of fanaticism would emphasize the content of belief, not its strength. You aren’t a fanatic for believing very strongly that you should “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” The more strongly you believe that, the less likely you are to be a terrorist.

On the other hand, you really are a fanatic for believing that you should “kill them wherever you find them,” meaning Jews and infidels. The more strongly you believe that, the more likely you are to be a terrorist.

The content of belief did come into the analysts’ definition in one way. They plainly believed strongly in their own ideology, yet it seems never to have occurred to them to view themselves as fanatics. It seems, then, that in their view, the term “fanatic” must have meant not just “anyone who believes strongly,” but rather something like “Anyone who believes strongly enough in God, rather than in progressive dogma, for his belief to influence the rest of his life” – and the full force of the federal government must be used to surveil and suppress all such people.

So by their definition, yes, traditional Catholics are fanatics. But by a more sensible definition, which ideology is a better candidate for being called by that label?

J Budziszewski

Evangelical Religion

I return to the subject of Evangelicalism so often, I think, because there is some stubborn something within me that believes, against so much journalistic “evidence” (thousands of profiles of self-identified Evangelicals doing bizarre things), that a significant number of Evangelicals are acting and believing in perfect good faith, and that I simply need to find the magic words to help them see what I can’t un-see.

There is some tenderness mixed with my frustration at 28 years of almost complete failure in that regard. And there is some perversity in my rejection of the wisdom of Orthodoxy, which really does not encourage trying to argue people into the Orthodox faith. “Acquire the Holy Spirit and thousands around you will be saved,” said Saint Seraphim of Sarov, but something there is about an American ex-Evangelical that still loves a short-cut.

Over the years, I have cast a lot of shade on the concept of “religion.” I’m starting to think I should have self-critically cast similar shade under the concept of “Evangelicalism.”

Here’s what I think I’ve been doing that’s sorely mistaken:

The “good faith” Evangelicals I’m trying to persuade are basically wealthy white church-going Evangelicals in, or in orbit around, Wheaton, Illinois (and maybe Grand Rapids, Michigan). The former are the kind of people I hung out with for roughly 6 years of my life (five years in school plus one year in my young adulthood), the latter for 15 years. They are the kind of people I see at my Wheaton Academy homecomings every five years. I like them; no, I love them. We don’t talk politics when we get together. I fancy they’re not Trump fans, but I really don’t know and I fear I’d be disappointed if I found out.
The evangelicals I’m yelling about are random self-identified Evangelicals or flakes identified as Evangelical by journalists in mainstream media, who may or may not attend church and who may have adopted the Evangelical label simply because they’re Trump supporters. I have little experience of them. The “good faith” Evangelicals may be as baffled by them as I am.

My impression, which I’ve had but suppressed for rather a long time, is that “Evangelicalism” isn’t coherent, though we seem not to be able to live without it. So when I shout at Evangelicals, it’s like shaking my fist and cursing at the clouds.

It has always been notoriously difficult to define what an Evangelical is. Probably the most widely-accepted attempt is the Bebbington Quadrilateral. But my favorite is from Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio Journal. I’m not going to take the time to dig it up verbatim, but the gist was that Evangelicals recognize one another not by right doctrine, orthodoxy, but by “right feeling,” orthopathos. They sing the same songs, and pray similar extemporaneous prayers, supported Billy Graham Crusades, and so forth.

I don’t know whether that is even true today of the motley crew that journalists identify as Evangelical.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows: You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well … Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story—and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

Michael Crichton (via ChatGPT because I couldn’t remember “Gell-Mann Amnesia effect”).

The press tends to garble Eastern Orthodoxy, so why should I believe them about Evangelicalism?

Many of them probably labeled the Minnesota assassin “evangelical.” Was he? Is the evidence that he wasn’t a No True Scotsman fallacy?

I know Orthodoxy; I just really don’t know Evangelicalism or its outer boundaries any more, if ever I did.

So you have my permission to go back to everything I’ve written about Evangelicals and Evangelicalism and say “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” because much of the time I’ve been Gell-Mann-ing it.

I’ll try to do better, but old habits die hard.

Sanity (a/k/a The Gospel for people battered by bad religion)

Having dwelt long on some pretty sorry stuff, a very long but infinitely more positive note:

I know that what I’m about to talk about is something I’ve talked about probably even fairly recently on the show, but I find myself in real life — meaning as a priest dealing with a group of parishioners, and trying to help them and guide them and just family members and everybody in general — I find myself having to say this over and over and over again, which tells me that probably if I say it over this microphone to people, there’s probably at least some folks out there who need to hear it again, even if I have talked about it recently.

The Christianity that those of us, at least in the United States — and I can only speak about that experience because I haven’t had any others — the Christianity we grew up around came from one of two categories largely. And people who want to defend those types of Christianity will call this a caricature. I don’t care anymore. But what I’m about to say, even if you think it’s a caricature of what they’re trying to teach, this is what a lot of the people within these traditions have actually received. Right? So it’s very easy to defend some tradition based on what’s in the books, and what we would mean to say, right? But I’m talking about what the people who I encounter, the people who talk to me about spiritual things. come to me and give confessions, what they’ve received from the Christianity they’ve grew up around, how that has shaped them, how they think because of it. And if people, representatives of those groups want to say that’s not what they meant to teach, cool, but maybe some introspection on why that’s not what people are receiving.

Anyway, what people have received comes in two categories. One is sort of the smilin’ Bob Shuler School of, “God loves you just the way you are and you don’t have to do anything. Just don’t worry about it. Just smile and be happy and listen to the hymns of your choice that you enjoy.” … That worked really well with boomers. That seemed to answer something they needed to hear. Maybe they’re a generation who grew up with very dissatisfied perfectionist parents, and so just hearing you’re fine just the way you are was what they needed, right? But that doesn’t work on subsequent generations, because subsequent generations are more realistic or nihilistic depending on your point of view, and know there’s something deeply wrong with themselves and with the world around them. So just telling them over again, “No, no, you’re fine, everything’s fine, it doesn’t work.” That’s why those kind of churches are all empty now.

The other school of thought is pretty much the exact opposite. It’s God doesn’t really love you. Right. In fact He’s pretty angry with you and He’s getting ready to send you to hell. Right? And the only way to avoid that is, depending on your tradition, right, is, for you to love him nonetheless, really sincerely — and there’s a rabbit hole to go down. How sincere am I ever really? — and do that plus live your life at a certain way and follow certain rules. Which will differ based on tradition, and which you will inevitably fail at.

That second one is most of the people who I interact with on spiritual matters, and it’s almost like they’ve been taught and they’ve internalized that. Their life in this world is this sort of really horrible reality show, almost like Squid Games, and like God is about weeding out contestants and narrowing it down to this faithful few and everybody else goes to hell, goes to eternal punishment except for this faithful few who, again, depending on your tradition, he may just pick. Or, you know, they’re the ones who really did it right. They’re the ones who really loved him sincerely, or they’re the ones who really lived their life the right way.

And any way you slice those things, most people again are realistic enough that when they look at their life, they don’t see a lot of evidence in their life and their actions that they’re one of the people God picked, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really sincere about following God, or they don’t see a lot of evidence of their life that they’re really toeing the line and living the life they know they should be living, meaning most people are walking around — like religious people — walking around thinking they’re probably going to end up in hell. That God is probably mad at the most of the time, and that He’s looking for them to make some missteps so, boom!, they can get nailed.

Also most atheists are walking around doing the same thing they’re protesting constantly that there is no God because they can’t deal with that guilt and stuff that they’ve internalized. They can’t live like that. No one can live like that their route to trying to live like that and deal with the cognitive dissonance is just to deny that any of it’s true, over and over and over again publicly, loudly to everyone who will listen. Right.

Whereas the religious people are just in this kind of quiet desperation of how do I figure this out. Right.

So let me reiterate again, right, and Penal Substitution plays a big part in this. That’s why I’m bringing it up in this context:

God loves you. Jesus said so. St. John’s Gospel, the Father Himself loves you. He is not angry at you. He does not want to destroy you for your sins. There is no power of justice that commands him to do so. No one commands him to do anything. He loves you. He wants you to find salvation, but salvation is a thing you have to actually do. He wants you to do it. The Bible says so. God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. But you have to do it. He empowers you to do it. He forgives you when you mess up trying to do it. He heals you when you damage yourself trying to do it and failing. He is entirely on your side. The God who created the universe is entirely on your side and the saints are on your side and the church is on your side. Everyone is on your side. Christ is advocating for you. Everything is set up for us.

When Saint Paul says to us, continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. You don’t stop them like Kierkegaard did. Read the next verse because it is God who is working in you to will and to do according to his pleasure. We continue on and we work out our salvation because we know that God is on our side and empowering us to do it and loving us and loving other people through us. We need to pray about that. We need to pray it. We need to repeat it. We need to kind of imitate what the atheists are doing. We need to say it out loud. We need to say it to each other. We need to say it to everyone who will listen right? That God loves you and wants you to find salvation, wants you to be healed, wants you to be set free from sin. He wants all these things for you. It doesn’t mean you have nothing to do. That doesn’t mean you’re fine just the way you are. You know you’re not fine just the way you are, right? But it means that He is there to help you to grow to be transformed into the person who you need to be and want to be. The person he created you to be for eternity. That’s the actual message of Christianity. Don’t accept any substitutes for that, ever at all for any reason.

Fr. Stephen De Young.

I probably will publish this from time to time for the rest of my blogging life.

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

Great and Holy Race Day

I’m situated geographically in a place so sports- and Indy500-obsessed that in my former Church, men would disappear en masse on “Race Day.” Granted, I lived away from here 20-ish years, but it’s still a point of sinful pride that I’ve never been. Not to the race, not to the trials, not to carburation day.

(I apologize for some funky formatting today. After all these years, I still have trouble dealing with numbered or bulleted lists within block quotes.)

Filioque

As a protestant, I had no idea that the filioque (the words “and from the Son” in the Nicean Creed concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit) was added to the Creed hundreds of years later, nor that it was rejected from the beginning by Christians outside the jurisdiction of the Roman Patriarch, nor even (very distinctly at least) that there were catholic Christians outside the jurisdiction of the Roman Patriarch.

Since becoming Orthodox, I have taken it as a matter of high importance to reject the filioque, but I don’t recall previously seeing all of these reasons for the rejection:

Eastern Europe was converted to Christianity by Byzantine missionaries, the most prominent of whom are Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius. These bonds of religion created a deep sympathy between Bulgar to Byzantine. The Franks attempted to sever these bonds by sending missionaries into Eastern Europe, claiming that the Byzantines had taught them a heterodox version of Christianity and encouraging them to use the filioque.

I know Catholics are tired of Orthodox apologists going on about the Franks. But this really is an important test-case, for the following reasons:
  1. The threat of Arianism was resolved 300 years before the Schism. So, adding the filioque served no pastoral function. On the contrary, it was deeply divisive.  
 2. The underlying theology of the filioque was hotly disputed, especially by the Eastern patriarchs. So, adding the filioque did not express the mind of the universal Church.  
 3. The original Creed had been drafted in Council for a reason: it was supposed to express the *consent* and *concensus* of the orthodox, catholic bishops. So, adding the filioque defeated the whole purpose of the Creed.  
 4. For about six hundred years, Popes had taught the dangers of inserting the filioque into the Creed. So, adding the filioque violated even Rome’s local customs.  
 5. The Ecumenical Councils had ruled that the Creed should not be modified. So, adding the filiioque violated the Holy Canons.  
 6. Rome was advancing the *filioque* for worldly reasons only. So, adding the filioque would have allowed a single bishop to advance his own political and economic interests at the whole Church’s expense.  
The Eastern Patriarchs had every reason to reject the insertion of the filioque, and no reason to accept it—none except, “The pope said so, and we have to do whatever the pope says.”

Michael Warren Davis, ‘Papal Minimalism’ Is Eastern Orthodoxy

Worship

To anyone who has had, be it only once, the true experience of worship, all this is revealed immediately as the ersatz it is. He knows that the secularist’s worship of relevance is simply incompatible with the true relevance of worship. And it is here, in this miserable liturgical failure, whose appalling results we are only beginning to see, that secularism reveals its ultimate religious emptiness and, I will not hesitate to say, its utterly anti-Christian essence.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Protestant, Catholic, Non-Denom

As my readers know, I’ve been an Orthodox Christian ever since I began blogging. The more attentive readers may know that before that I was Reformed (i.e., Calvinist, and specifically Christian Reformed) and before that, I was a generic Wheaton-College type evangelical.

Or maybe I should say “a generic Wheaton-College type evangelical as evangelicalism was configured in the 1950s through the mid-1970s.” Because it has come to my attention more forcefully, and in a way that more painfully implicates and pronounces doom on the kinds of Christian I once was, that things are changing. The evangelicalism I knew is not as powerful as it once was; evangelical denominations are shrinking and dying. So are Calvinist denominations. The Protestantism I knew most closely is increasingly nondenominational, and doesn’t care much about doctrine or sacraments, and increasingly doesn’t even want to be called “evangelical” or even “Protestant.”

This affects me closely because my wife remains Christian Reformed, and I consider it a pretty good penultimate tradition for an Orthodox Christian. And there is a very strong trend toward those denominational Churches dying out in favor of non-denoms.

And it worries me because those nondenominational Churches tend far too much to be personality cults and hotbeds of rampant sexual and other clergy abuse. And God only knows what they’re teaching, insofar as they’re teaching anything other than a mooshy-gooshy relationship with Jesus and a firm commitment to the GOP as a way of gaining power.

Yeah, this means I’ve gained some fresh respect even for the progressive Protestant denominations (which are also dying, even faster than the conservatives). At least there’s some accountability to hierarchies less likely than local parishioners to be mesmerized by Mr. Charisma. And some of them retain a liturgy that will expose worshippers to more scripture and doctrine than Joel Osteen can even imagine.

In any event, I say all that to introduce you to four of the thought-provoking articles (presented in the order in which I encountered them) that brought to my attention how much things are changing in my former haunts. A common thread is that denominational Protestantism is in deep, deep trouble; one goes so far as to suggest that nondenominational Churches are not really Protestant, but a whole new tradition:

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

Thomas Sunday

Pope Francis

Friend of the Orthodox

In the Orthodox Churches they preserve that pristine liturgy. So beautiful. We have lost a bit the sense of adoration. They preserve it. They praise God, they adore God, singing. Time stops. The center is God. . . . Once, speaking about the western Church, of western Europe, above all the grown-up Church, they told me this phrase: Lux ex oriente, ex occidente luxus. [“Light comes from the East, luxury from the West.”] Consumerism, well-being, have done much harm. Instead, you preserve this beauty of God at the center, the point of reference. When reading Dostoyevsky, I believe that for all of us he must be an author to read and reread, because he has wisdom. One perceives the Russian soul, the Eastern soul. It is something that will do us all good. We need this renewal, this fresh air from the East, of this light from the Orient. . . . Too often, the luxus of the West causes us to lose the horizon. I don’t know. This is what I’m moved to say.
During the first millennium, the universal communion of the Churches in the ordinary course of events was maintained through fraternal relations between the bishops.
The bishop of Rome did not exercise canonical authority over the churches of the East.

Pope Francis via Michael Warren Davis

These are important concessions by a Pope. Much more remains to be done to heal the Great Schism. Meanwhile, against my initial gut reaction, I now pray for the soul of God’s servant, Francis.

The worst of all possible Christian worlds

Not everyone feels as kindly toward Francis as does Michael Warren Davis:

Francis was thus my own worst Protestant nightmare: an authoritarian Roman pope driving a liberal Protestant agenda, a leader who embodied the worst of all possible Christian worlds.

Time will tell whether the next pope will follow in Francis’s footstep and permit the continuation of liberal Protestant policies. It’s up to the men who will be gathering in the Sistine Chapel in the coming weeks. As a Catholic friend once said to me about the last papal election, the Holy Spirit never errs. But, he added, the same cannot be said for the College of Cardinals.

Carl Trueman

Prompted by Francis’ death

I’m not claiming to be a good Catholic. I’m far from it. I’m a terrible one in many ways. I honestly, sincerely believe the church is wrong in some — but by no means all — of its teachings on sexuality. Lust has undoubtedly mastered me at times the way it has many men, and always will. But I also know my soul has far deeper problems than my love for other men, however muddied with desire; and that the world has lost its way so much more profoundly in other parts of life: in our materialism, our selfishness, our wealth and comfort, our smugness and distraction, and our abuse of our sacred planet.

Andrew Sullivan, Why I Loved Pope Francis (italics added).

The italicized portion of the block-quote bespeaks a genuine Christian faith, and I don’t have to agree with the rest to view it so.

A bitter pill

for every advance, there was an asterisk, and for every proclamation of love, a delineation of limits, so that Francis — who died on Monday at the age of 88 — personified the indelible tension in the church’s official teaching about homosexuality, which he never squarely renounced. That teaching holds that being gay isn’t a sin but that acting on those feelings is “intrinsically disordered.”

That’s tough to get your head around in the abstract. It’s even more difficult if you’ve spent much time in the church and with its clergy ….

Frank Bruni (italics added)

I’ve never seen how Rome’s position is all that tough to get your head around. “A bitter pill to swallow” is what I think Bruni may intend.

Be it remembered

What’s church good for?

[O]ur religious institutions are most important not for reasons of civic utility, such as running soup kitchens or cleaning up after natural disasters. No, their highest function is offering us access to the fullest truth about our world.

Yuval Levin via Joshua T. Katz. I encountered this quote for the first time this week, and I love it because it defies every effort to instrumentalize Church (or Synagogue, as in Levin’s case, or Mosque).

God does not have an anger problem

It is sinful to ascribe to God the characteristic features of fallen man by alleging, for example, that God is angry and vengeful, and therefore He must be propitiated and appeased. Such an attitude wants to make it appear that it is God Who needs curing, and not man. But this is sacrilegious. The sinful man, who is characterized by egoism and arrogance, is offended. We cannot say that God is offended. . . . Consequently, sin is not an insult to God, Who must be cured, but our own illness, and therefore we need to be cured

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Other stuff

The Gramscian Heresy

The Protestant integralists belonging the New Apostolic Reformation school, with their Seven-Mountain Mandate, certainly look Gramscian, don’t they? They want the power that comes from control of key institutions.

That’s not necessarily a mike-drop observation. We have an overabundance of Gramscians trying to march through our institutions these days, but few who are Gramscian as part of an explicitly “religious” movement.

Orthodox hagiographies are full of Saints who had to be dragged kicking and screaming (as it were) to accept ordination to the Priesthood, or elevation to a Bishopric. I’ll drive my stake in the ground here: A Christian may legitimatly be led to office, but hunger for power over others is anti-Christian.

An old truth that we keep forgetting

Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning.

C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory

A surprising possibility

What’s driving young people to Christianity? In UnHerd, Niall Gooch argued the answer may lie in the strict moral demands of modern secularism. “At its best, Christianity is not a moralistic religion — in other words, it does not place the expectation of perfect behaviour at its core. It is repentance and reconciliation, not respectability, that are central to the internal logic of the faith. The Christian moral system is also coherent and predictable,” he wrote. “Modern secular morality, by contrast, is extremely censorious and has a strongly arbitrary element, as we have seen in the last decade or so of ‘cancel culture.’ People have been subjected to storms of anonymous criticism, resulting in lost jobs and lost livelihoods, with no clear limiting principle and no real interest in proportionality. To make matters worse, this is all highly impersonal and offers no clear pathway for restoration and forgiveness.”

The Morning Dispatch

Mystery, not random

To call the unknown “random” is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known. . . . To call the unknown by its right name, “mystery,” is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns. . . . But if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter , The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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 2025

I put the final touches on this as I waited for our Paschal/Easter Vigil. When it posts, I should be fat, happy — and sound asleep in a “meat coma.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman says “I can think of at least two times in my life that the failures of Church, or its hierarchy, drove me from the ranks of the Church, or what passed for Church at the time.” I can think of only one, but heightened apprehension of the Resurrection kept me from leaving what passed for Church at the time. So it seems personally fitting that this is Orthodoxy’s “Feast of Feasts,” surpassing even Christ’s Nativity (which seems more prominent in the West — forgive me if I err).

All around the world tonight and tomorrow, Orthodox priests will be spared writing an “Easter Sermon” because it’s customary to read this one from a master preacher. We even do a bit of call and response, shouting “It was embittered!”

Christ is Risen!

One more Easter thought

[Saint John] Chrysostom commented on this reality: I, for instance, feel differently about these subjects than an unbeliever. I hear, “Christ was crucified” and immediately I admire His loving-kindness to men. The other hears and esteems it as weakness. I hear, “He became a servant” and I wonder at his care for us. The other hears and counts it as dishonor. I hear, “He died” and I am astonished at His might, that He was not held in death, but even broke the bands of death. The other hears and surmises it to be helplessness. He, on hearing of the resurrection, says the thing is a legend. I, aware of the facts which demonstrate it, fall down and worship the dispensation of God. . . . For not by the sight do I judge the things that appear, but by the eyes of the mind. I hear of the “Body of Christ.” In one sense I understand the expression, in another sense the unbeliever.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Heresy, not secularism

Ten years ago I published a book called “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics,” which offered an interpretation of the country’s shifting religious landscape, the sharp post-1960s decline of institutional faith. Before the book’s anniversary slips away, I thought I would revisit the argument, to see how it holds up as a guide to our now more de-Christianized society.

What the book proposed was that secularization wasn’t a useful label for the American religious transformation. Instead, I wrote, American culture seems “as God-besotted today as ever” — still fascinated with the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, still in search of divine favor and transcendence. But these interests and obsessions are much less likely to be channeled through churches, Protestant and Catholic, that maintain some connection to historical Christian orthodoxies. Instead, our longtime national impulse toward heresy — toward personalized revisions of Christian doctrine, Americanized updates of the Gospel — has finally completed its victory over older Christian institutions and traditions.

Ross Douthat, The Americanization of Religion – The New York Times

Redemption (a venerable poem)

Having been tenant long to a rich lord,
Not thriving, I resolvèd to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old.

In heaven at his manor I him sought;
They told me there that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possessiòn.

I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts;
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of thieves and murderers; there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

(George Herbert, Redemption, via Sally Thomas at Today’s Poem).

I’m sorry that this won’t format exactly like the original I saw without using some coding that ends up rendering an ugly post.

The search for certainty

The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that ‘everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with [what are now thought of as] airy images.’ In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty. … What is so compelling here is that the motive force behind the Reformation was the urge to regain authenticity, with which one can only be profoundly sympathetic. The path it soon took was that of the destruction of all means whereby the authentic could have been recaptured.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Pecking Order Ecclesiology

It isn’t strange to learn that Prestigious Scholar X on the law/econ/poli-sci faculty at Ivy League School Y is Roman Catholic. It is a bit of a surprise to learn that he’s an evangelical. The moment you hear it, though, you wonder (or ask) whether he’s an evangelical Anglican or some such.

Brad East, Conversions, Protestantism, and a New Mainline

Misinterpreting the Bible

Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

It’s not just the “higher critics.” Lots of lazy unbelievers have their little proof-texts to illustrate that absurdity or barbarity of the Bible. But they read them as fundamentalists do, not as the historic Church does.

Balancing Rites

The campaign for same-sex marriage has triumphed, and I can’t imagine a successful counter-offensive (Maybe some day when I’m long dead and gone?). Meanwhile:

Maybe the prospective customers, like many Americans, do not see transcendent meaning in the ceremonial commencement of matrimony, because they associate a wedding as admittance to an institutional legal fiction that allows one access to nothing more than a cluster of political and social privileges not available to other friendships. So, given this understanding, it is not surprising that the customers see the provider’s refusal as a negative judgment on the public legitimacy of their union. Thus, it’s easy to see why the customers would be offended by the provider’s refusal and subsequently seek legal redress. But what the customers fail to see is that their demand that the courts force the providers to rescind their denial and be punished for it is really a demand that the state force the providers not to exercise their freedom of worship, the liberty not to participate in, or not provide assistance to, ceremonies that one believes have sacramental significance.

Francis J. Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously

Convert shock

Steve Robinson on his initial experience in an Antiochian (f/k/a Syrian) Orthodox parish back when they weren’t really used to Protestant converts:

I can summarize the mutual culture shock, ours and theirs, over the next few years pretty succinctly: They didn’t know why we were so serious about Orthodoxy and we didn’t know why they weren’t. We had zeal with a little knowledge and no experience, they had some knowledge, a lifetime of experience, and little zeal (at least for the things WE thought “real Christians” should be zealous about). And for all of our decades of zealous “Christianity” we brought to the table, we didn’t know what love looked like.

This is one of the sorts of culture clashes that make Fr. Stephen De Young think that there will be no single “American Orthodox Church,” independent of traditional Orthodox lands, for a very long time — and a good thing it is! We converts (e.g., Steve Robinson, Fr. Stephen, me) are good for the Church, but we don’t have everything right. We might well push the “cradle Orthodox” aside in our arrogance and create something syncretistic under the “Orthodox” name.

I came to the Church for respite and healing of my evangelical battle scars. After all, it is “the hospital for sinners” originally founded by The Great Physician, who organized and staffed it with his own hand picked specialists who were guided by an inspired Mission Statement.

…

I think of all I have learned in twenty six years, perhaps this is the most important: The Hospital is also The Arena. It is a place of a brutal, to the death cage fight with my demons and I will not finish the battle un-scarred. The Hospital treats my wounds with the sacramental medicine of immortality and arms me with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, sometimes in spite of the attending physician. I cannot pick only one wing of the building, they co-exist in the same place.

Standing, Still

Evangelical political theology

Though it feels rather remote now, it is important to recall that back in the 2000s and 2010s, popular level evangelical political theology basically did not exist. The two dominant paradigms on offer were a kind of lazy baptizing of conservative fusionism that was shockingly indifferent to historic Christian reflection or a watered down evangelical Hauerwasianism that attempted to locate Christian political witness within the church, all while being mostly unaware of how impoverished evangelical ecclesiology had become.

Jake Meador, Anti-Wokeness and the Evangelical Fracturing

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.