Sunday before Nativity

I had a mid-week post that dealt with a detour in my religious history. Other than that, I have just one tidbit today:

In our desire to be real we start thinking that authenticity is another word for spontaneity, as if everything we say at the spur of the moment is more true, more sincere than words we craft carefully. For many, the Freudian slip is considered more authentic than the measured reply. Indeed, sometimes what we blurt out thoughtlessly is actually what we mean and feel. But more often than not, what we blurt out is ill-considered and something we either need to qualify or apologize for.

Mark Galli, Beyond Smells & Bells: The Wonders and Power of Christian Liturgy.

I have not read this book, but I stumbled across this quotation anyway.

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 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.

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.

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.

Sunday of the Last Judgment

No, that’s not a prediction. That’s the formal name of this last pre-Lenten Sunday in Orthodox Christianity. It’s also known as “meatfare,” because tomorrow we begin abstaining from meat until Pascha, April 20 this year.

State of the Union, February 23

A lot of people are trying to find precedents for what’s going on with the USA over the last 34 days. May I suggest that this is a fall of Babylon?

The US as Babylon was first suggested to me by a schismatic (when I was unwittingly schismatic) almost 60 years ago. I’ve never quite shaken it, and I think that there was a seed of truth there that’s compatible with Orthodoxy. One important divergence in my application is that I absolutely wouldn’t say “When the Bible says ‘Babylon,’ it means the USA.” Rather, I think Babylon is a typology, and that the USA fits it to a “T” today. In a few hundred years (“if the Lord tarries,” as they say), it could be China.

On the other hand, we don’t read Revelation liturgically, and I’ve never heard an Orthodox Priest or academic suggest this directly. I can’t rule out that the thought is just a bit of mental baggage from my past. It hasn’t caught on in white American Evangelicalism because — well, read the passage. It’s not holding up a flattering mirror.

In all this, friends, remember that God’s judgments are true and righteous, that He is gracious and loves mankind, and that the end of a world isn’t the end of the world.

Atheism in the Church

Last week, I quoted the ever-provocative Stanley Hauerwas

Atheism slips into the church where God really does not matter, as we go about building bigger and better congregations (church administration), confirming people’s self-esteem (worship), enabling people to adjust to their anxieties brought on by their materialism (pastoral care), and making Christ a worthy subject for poetic reflection (preaching). At every turn the church must ask itself, Does it really make any difference, in our life together, in what we do, that in Jesus Christ God is reconciling the world to himself?

Might this be profitably expanded to include political mobilization? …

The Atheist Liturgical Calendar

… Or our “liturgical calendars”?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so … what any calendar does, because any calendar you use is going to be cyclical, is going to be a series of weeks that make up a series of months that make up a series of years, and that cycle is going to repeat. There’s going to be a May 23 every year. It loops back around.

Even if you want to talk about— Let’s talk about the most secular calendar I can think of, which is the American consumer calendar, meaning it’s structured around holidays that are built to sell things. So we just had Memorial Day: sell barbecue supplies and flags. We’re going to have—now, Juneteenth has been added to the list; I think that’s also going to be a lot of barbecuing for most people. Fourth of July, sell fireworks, sell flags. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is in there: buy gifts for Dad, get the tie cake from Carvel. Valentine’s Day. St. Patrick’s Day: sell a lot of beer and green stuff, etc. So this is the most— about as secular as you can get of a calendar; even though some of those dates are still named after saints, it’s pretty secular.

That calendar, if you follow it, will shape the rhythm of your life. And that’s what it’s designed for! … Retail establishments want that to shape the rhythm of your life. That “seasonal” section at your local Walmart, where they have the stuff for whatever the next one of these holidays that aren’t really holy days per se in most cases— They’re counting on that cycle. They want that to shape your life. “Oh, now I go and buy and consume this. Now I go and buy and consume that.” They’ll shape your life; it’ll form you.

This, to me, is one of the worst backlashes of particularly the Puritan movements that come out of the Protestant Reformation. Bear with me here, Protestant friends. Really think about this. They had such an antipathy for [things] like saints’ days… Some of those Puritan movements— Well, most of those Puritan movements wouldn’t celebrate Christmas, the birth of Christ. Some of them won’t even celebrate Easter, Pascha. But definitely we don’t want a lot of, you know, feast days. I think it’s in the Westminster Standards that says you must guard against the proliferation of saints’ days.

Fr. Andrew: Nice! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Protect everyone from this, right? So all of this stuff from the Christian liturgical calendar gets removed. And most American Christianity, American Evangelicalism really comes out of those Puritan movements, just historically. But then what do you end up centering even your church life around? You’ve got Mother’s Day sermons, Father’s Day sermons.

Fr. Andrew: You’re going to have a liturgical calendar one way or another.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! Fourth of July sermons when you sing patriotic songs in a church!

Fr. Andrew: I know.

Fr. Stephen: All of these things. It’s the same thing! You’ve just chosen the most secular possible version!

Fr. Andrew: What I want to know is—and I’m pretty sure the answer to this question is yes; I just haven’t encountered it yet because I haven’t googled it up yet— Are there Amazon Prime Day sermons?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, I’m sure. I know there are Black Friday sermons.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, of course!

Fr. Stephen: [Sigh] Right? Just pause and think about it for a minute. What’s better: to base and structure your liturgical life on the life of Christ and the stories about Christ recounted in the Bible, or to base the cycles of your church life on random national holidays that often don’t even have any particular religious significance? I mean, the answer to that seems so obvious to me. I think the Puritans would be horrified by Fourth of July sermons and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day sermons! So think about that. But this is why, again, the calendar is so important.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and (mostly) Fr. Stephen De Young

Science and religion

Just as colonial officials and missionaries, traveling to India, had imposed the concept of ‘religion’ on the societies they found there, so did agnostics colonize 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 civilization 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 (spelling Americanized)

History Rhymes

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Naked suffering

My grandparents did not have a car, but they hired one to go in to the hospital, when the end finally came. I went with them in the car, but was not allowed to enter the hospital. Perhaps it was just as well. What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it? In that sense, Mother was right. Death, under those circumstances, was nothing but ugliness, and if it could not possibly have any ultimate meaning, why burden a child’s mind with the sight of it?

Thomas Merton, The Seven-Story Mountain

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.

St. John Climacus

Today we commemorate St. John Climacus, author of The Ladder of Divine Ascent.

I’m a religion skeptic

I have had the good fortune of presenting portions of this work to audiences who have pondered this difficult question with me. On one of those occasions, the historian Edwin Judge suggested a three-step procedure to follow when one encounters the word “religion” in a translation of an ancient text. First, cross out the word whenever it occurs. Next, find a copy of the text in question in its original language and see what word (if any) is being translated as “religion.” Third, come up with a different translation: “It almost doesn’t matter what. Anything besides ‘religion’!” According to Judge, simply allowing “religion” to stand in an ancient text leads to a kind of “miasma of thought” that prevents one from seeing how ancient people might have organized their worlds.

Brent Nongbri , Before Religion

Miasma or not, so deeply embedded is “religion” in our vocabulary and thought-patterns that it’s hard to avoid it.

Faithfulness precedes understanding

Only a Christian who stands in the service of his faith can understand Christian theology and only he can enter into the religious meaning of the Bible.

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge

But what if knowledge does not require certainty? Indeed, what if knowledge is incompatible with certainty?

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

Mind and heart

Unlike the mind, which is acquisitive, aggressive, critical, and competitive, the heart is receptive, open, pliable. It is an organ to be filled, a thing to be ignited. The mind receives on its own terms, filtering, discriminating, judging, but the heart is patient; it waits, watches, listens, makes space for what it is to receive. The heart delights not in cleverness but in the presence of the beloved. The work of prayer is the tutoring of the heart, a quite different thing from the training of the mind.

Robert Louis Wilken Praying the Psalms.

That “the work of prayer is the tutoring of the heart” also means that it’s not cajoling The Almighty into giving us stuff.

Like receiving the gift of tongues

I’ve probably shared this before:

“We have effectively communicated to young people that sincerely following Jesus is synonymous with being ‘fired up’ for Jesus, with being excited for Jesus, as if discipleship were synonymous with fostering an exuberant, perky, cheerful, hurray-for-Jesus disposition like what we might find in the glee club or at a pep rally,” Smith wrote. “For those young people who are either scared or suspicious of happy-clappy versions of youth group Christianity, ancient Christian disciplines and historic Christian worship can be received as a life-giving gift. When you have only seen forms of piety that value spontaneous expression and clichéd sincerity, to be given the cadences and rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer can be like receiving the gift of tongues.”

Jon Ward, Testimony

That’s not my story: I was well beyond the youth group stuff when I left Evangelicalism, and I didn’t immediately find the truly ancient pastures, sojourning instead for decades in Reformational Protestantism that often felt Evangelical-adjacent. But it’s close enough to my story to ring very true. Substitute Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom for Book of Common Prayer and it gets even closer to my story.

Last of the Fathers

Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) … made formative contributions to scholasticism while still at the French monastery of Bec. It is true that as a monk (rather than professor) he bucked the trend toward professional theology. The university system was only in its infancy, and there was little question of him participating in it. He has been called the last of the fathers and the first of the scholastics.

John Strickland , The Age of Division

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

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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

Sunday, 12/17/23

As we close in on the Feast, artifacts of Western Christendom loom larger. I’ll spend this morning singing in my Orthodox Church, this afternoon singing two more-or-less traditional Lessons & Carols. (I’ll spend this evening and tomorrow resting my voice.)

Too obvious

Two young fish are swimming along when they are passed by an older fish. He says, “Good morning, boys. How’s the water?” And one of the younger fishes asks the other, “What’s water?”

Most famously attributed to David Foster Wallace

Exceedingly sad is the blindness of the sons of men, who do not see the power and glory of the Lord. A bird lives in the forest, and does not see the forest. A fish swims in the water, and does not see the water. A mole lives in the earth, and does not see the earth. In truth, the similarity of man to birds, fish, and moles is exceedingly sad.

People, like animals, do not pay attention to what exists in excessive abundance, but only open their eyes before what is rare or exceptional.

There is too much of You, O Lord, my breath, therefore people do not see You. You are too obvious, O Lord, my sighing, therefore the attention of people is diverted from You and directed toward polar bears, toward rarities in the distance.

St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Prayers by the Lake

Endless doctrinal controversies and formidable erudition

Most competing Protestant protagonists in the sixteenth century did not draw from their disagreements the conclusion that the Reformation’s foundational principle or its adjuncts were themselves the source of the new problem. (Those who did so tended to return to the Roman church. Rather, they usually reasserted—and argued, in endless doctrinal controversies and sometimes with formidable erudition—that they were right and their rivals wrong.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Why do people go to Church?

If there’s one thing I learned in all my research on religious enchantment, it’s that mankind’s religions emerge from a primal experience of awe; everything else is commentary. A highly intellectualized religion diminishes the experience of awe, and turns it into a moral and ethical system. Don’t misunderstand: morality and ethics are important, and should not be set in opposition to primal religious experience. But the point of religion is the encounter with God; anything less than that is a diminution of true religion. The way we in the West approach religion since the Enlightenment is an outlier on human experience — and, as we now see everywhere around us, a dead end.

A new Protestant friend here in Hungary asked to go with me to the Orthodox liturgy recently … He told me that after a lifetime in Protestantism, he has grown weary of church-as-academic-lecture. He explained that he appreciates the intelligence and the teaching of the kind of sermons he has become used to, but as he gets older, his soul craves “enchantment” (the word he used) in faith. A learned discussion of theology and morality leave him thirsting for more — which is why he approached me to ask me about Orthodoxy.

Rod Dreher, Why Do People Go to Church?

How do we measure what’s good?

In medieval England, just prior to the Reformation, there were between 40 and 50 days of the calendar (apart from Sundays) that were feasts of the Church on which little to no work was done … By the end of the Reformation period, such days had largely disappeared, with Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost (Whitsunday), alone remaining – with only Christmas being a possible weekday celebration …

It is possible to think about this shift in Christian thought in economic terms. Fifty days in the year on which work is interrupted can have an enormous impact on productivity and efficiency … The shift itself can be seen in the very use of economics to measure what is good and salutary in a society. … Strictly speaking, the modern world has not been disenchanted. Rather, it is now enchanted with money and the “invisible hand” of the market.

Fr. Stephen Freeman (emphasis added)

Conservation of energy

Religious energy once so animated cultures that massive wars were fought over interpretations of holy writ. Where did this energy go? I might get annoyed with excesses of other faiths, but I’m mostly in the “you do you” camp. Perhaps the energy has been sublimated into other areas, other arenas of focused attention. Its apparent dissipation must be accounted for.

This energy has found a home in sports and politics

These are the arenas in which we wage holy war. The war has jumped out of the arena and entered the stands. We are caught in our symbols, our totems, our liturgies. Can these energies be tamed and contained?

Kale Zelden

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

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

Sunday, 12/10/23

Prelude

This item follows on my enigmatic first item on December 3.

I’ve very frequently been quite harsh toward Evangelical Christians — “Why can’t you stupid people see that you need to be Orthodox!!!” has been the gist. So to anyone who has felt hectored, I apologize. If you’re still here, forgive me — and thanks for bearing with me in my chronic (26 year) convertitis.

I should know from my own experience that it’s not illegitimate to settle into a religious tradition and not be looking for the location of the exits immediately; that was my demeanor toward Calvinism for 20 years or so, and toward Evangelicalism for nearly 30 years before that. Both times, I was sort of blind-sided into recognizing the need to change.

Further, phenomenology and theology sometimes co-exist awkwardly. For instance, I now thoroughly believe that Baptism is not just a symbol, but is one’s initiation in the Church — a very important matter (theology). But I can’t help but feel that my Christian life began, in a non-trivial sense, 12 or so years before my Baptism when I realized (after being caught in flagrante delicto) that beating up on my brother to take away a toy was disappointing to Jesus and I needed Him to forgive me — and to “come into my heart,” as my then-tribe put it (phenomenology).

Bereft though they were of sacrament, Liturgy, incense, Church Fathers, icons, beauty and so forth, that realization and my response were important. But I’ve concluded that Evangelical Is Not Enough.

But I’ve tried to hector others into recognizing that it’s not enough. I wouldn’t have put it that way, but that’s what it amounted to.

I could say more about why I felt driven to hectoring people, but for reasons I need not share, I won’t.

Anyway: I need to reconcile myself to the reality of divided Christianity — that not all sincere Christians have entered the Ark, the one holy catholic and apostolic church of the Nicene Creed, and almost certainly some never will. The most I can do under my own power is to produce discontent with where they are — unholy discontent, which could lead them out of Christianity entirely. I don’t intend that.

But if you ever do feel any holy discontent, be sure to give Orthodoxy a look.

And I’ll probably be unable to completely eliminate critiques because Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism differ in important regards (more about that below), and where they do differ, I believe Orthodoxly.

The Main Act

Two kinds of believers

I sometimes think that the modern world’s true cultural divide is not between believers and unbelievers but between those who think life is a puzzle that is capable of being solved and those who believe it’s a mystery that ought to be approached by way of silence and humility. I am a problem solver by disposition, but in my heart I am strongly on the side of the mysterians.

…

It’s a mistake to treat [the tradition of Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Karl Rahner] as a watered-down version of the more certain expressions of faith typically associated with organized religion. The most sincere believers I’ve known have also been the most humble, the most perplexed. It may be that those who feel most powerfully the presence of God in their lives likewise feel most powerfully the impossibility of adequately capturing that presence in words. And it may be that those for whom God is not a symbol or a cudgel but a lived reality find this reality most mysterious.

Christopher Beha, Jon Fosse and the Power of Faith at 1 a.m.

I’m with Beha: “I am a problem solver by disposition, but in my heart I am strongly on the side of the mysterians.” I’ve been trying to solve the puzzle for many decades now, and I probably see more open questions than when I started.

So I now plan, after some fear that it was being over-hyped, to read Jon Fosse’s Septology.

This is not unrelated to the preceding item.

Why intellectuals don’t convert to Evangelical Christianity

My social medium friend Kyle Essary engages Brad East’s speculation about why intellectuals who become Christian tend to become Roman Catholic or Orthodox rather than Evangelical:

But there’s one area that Brad doesn’t mention. And I think this reason keeps many intellectuals away from many Protestant traditions. Catholicism and Orthodoxy don’t have crazies. There may be a few here or there, but when you hear about a Christian group making fools of themselves publicly, you can be fairly certain that they are Protestant—and probably evangelical. Our low-church, anti-institutional biases breed these types. If you are an intellectual considering Christianity, you will not naturally move toward Christian groups that oppose science or higher education. But evangelical Protestants have groups that oppose both.

Kyle has distilled this aspect better than I ever had.

Certainty, Ferocity and Solidarity

[T]he true distinction between fundamentalism and mainstream beliefs isn’t what fundamentalists believe but how fundamentalists believe. As Richard Land, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “Fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.”

…

I’ve never encountered a fundamentalist culture that didn’t combine three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.

Certainty is the key building block. The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt. In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement …

That certainty breeds ferocity. Indeed, ferocity — not piety — is a principal trait of every truly fundamentalist movement I’ve ever encountered. Ferocity is so valuable to fundamentalism that it can cover a multitude of conventional Christian sins. Defending Trump in 2016, Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, an evangelical megachurch, explained, “Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find. And I think that’s the feeling of a lot of evangelicals.”

…

Yet certainty and ferocity are nothing without solidarity … I’m reminded of an infamous quote by Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, regarding the necessity of loyalty. Explaining Trump’s hostility toward Ron DeSantis, Huckabee said, “I think there are two virtues — loyalty and confidentiality. Be loyal to the people who helped you and learn how to keep your mouth shut.”

Again, that’s not piety. It’s solidarity.

David French, Why Fundamentalists Love Trump

I appreciate this dissection of what makes “fundamentalism” fundamentalist, and it rings true to my 75 years’ experience. That’s even more interesting to me than why fundamentalists love Florida Man.

Note three things, though:

So described, fundamentalism is not merely distinct from “mainstream” beliefs, if by mainstream one means the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism, but also distinguishes it from non-fundamentalist evangelicalism. Indeed, there’s no major difference between Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists in theology (see J.I. Packer, ”Fundamentalism” and the Word of God), but there are evangelicals who are blessedly low on certainty, ferocity and solidarity.
So described, it becomes clearer how there can be Islamic as well as Christian fundamentalists — even Orthodox Christian fundamentalists (though I strongly believe that such Orthodox fundamentalism is not very good Orthodoxy).
[Fundamentalists] “can have a steamrolling effect in institutions because their opponents — almost by definition — have less certainty, less ferocity and less solidarity” (French again).

Not a Freudian slip

Victor I. Masters, the head of Home Missions from 1909 to 1921, reflected and influenced denominational thinking when he argued that the North had lost its religion to Romanism and rationalism, and that the SBC’s divine mission was to spread “the Anglo-Saxon evangelical faith.”

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals

Interlude

Quanta

Quantum physics: Electrons moving, but photographing them affects path and speed. Why? How? Quantum theology: God’s mind doesn’t change, but he tells us to pray, and somehow our prayers affect the outcome.

Marvin Olasky, The Wonder of the Universe’s Weirdness

Theology

The classic Orthodox definition of a theologian is well known and frequently repeated in Orthodox circles: “A true theologian is one who prays,” or “One who prays is a true theologian.” This legendary saying reflects the Orthodox phronema and stands in stark contrast to the Western Christian phronema, which strongly emphasizes use of the mind for comprehension of theological truths and rational deduction as a theological method.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Gratitude

I am a millionaire.
My bedroom is full of gold
light, of the sun’s jewellery.
What shall I do with this wealth?
Buy happiness, buy gladness,
the wisdom that grows with the giving of thanks?

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

Postlude

Orthodox Teaching does not merely differ from Western Christianity in content, but the reason for the difference is equally important. After reading this book, Western Christians still may not understand our mentality, but perhaps they will begin to realize that the difference between Orthodoxy and Western Christianity is significant and more far-reaching than a few doctrines, ancient rituals, and a refusal to submit to the pope. The variance is deeper than appears on the surface, extending to how theology is conceived, conceptualized, taught, and approached. To complicate matters, often the same terminology is used in East and West, but basic terms or concepts do not have the same meaning at all. What is sin? What is salvation? What is forgiveness?

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)

Sunday, 7/16/23

Imagine there’s no Rapture …

Orthodox Holy Tradition says clearly that the Second Coming, the General Resurrection, and the Last Judgment are three facets of one single, overwhelming event. There is no divide (which is the meaning of the heresy of chiliasm, which was rejected in the Second Ecumenical Council, and the reason why we say “and His Kingdom shall have no end” in the Creed). There is no Rapture. There is no Seven Year Tribulation. There is no single human individual who is the Antichrist or the Beast — the Antichrist is not a Jew, not a Muslim, not a Communist, nor is he the Pope or any one of the many theories that have been published over the centuries.

There is no literal thousand-year-long Millennium. There is no reappearance of Satan setting off the last Armageddon.

There will indeed come the Great Universal Transfiguration that overwhelms time and space and all Creation.

This is the Kingdom if its infinite, almost terrifying fullness and glory.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias, the last judgment and the problem of goathood

This I believe.

I will not say that the Orthodox Church is the only church that rejects all the rapture crap, because I don’t believe it is. But it’s also true that not every church that rejects all the rapture crap still believes in the Second Coming, the General Resurrection, and the Last Judgment. That kind of narrows things down a lot.

A periodic reminder

I’ve no doubt posted this quote before:

The shift from church power to state power is not the victory of peaceable reason over irrational religious violence. The more we tell ourselves it is, the more we are capable of ignoring the violence we do in the name of reason and freedom.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

Liturgy

In a culture that values spontaneity, liturgy grounds us in something enduring. In a culture that assumes truth is a product of the mind, liturgy helps us experience truth in mind, body, and spirit.

Book blurb for Mark Galli’s Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy

Modern worship

On a related note:

[A]ny attempt to “modernise” liturgy in terms of making it more acceptable to modern society (i.e. “pastoral respectability”) should be undertaken with extreme caution; the warning of Charles Davis is paramount here:

My thesis is that there is no modern form of worship, because worship itself is outdated in the modern world and Christian Faith a state of deviancy from contemporary culture.

Bryan D. Spinks, “Christian Worship or Cultural Incantations?”, Studia Liturgical, vol. 12 (1977), 1, 12-13 (quoting Charles Davis, “Ghetto or Desert: Liturgy in a Cultural Dilemma” in Worship and Secularization (1970), pp. 10-27, p. 12).

Thanks to @letters on micro.blog who appears to read such things voraciously.

The teleological void

My college students have worked hard getting impressive credentials since at least middle school and will continue to do so long after college. When I ask them where this is all going, they are befuddled. “This is just what you do,” they often answer. Anything else is impractical, unrealistic, and useless. They have been going their whole lives without asking or being asked “where to?” Asking such a question means stopping, thinking, and perhaps changing direction, all things that religion and humanities have us do. But our society has no interest in silence or pausing.

Terence Sweeney, Why Religion and the Humanities Are in Decline

The evangelical soul

This baffling essay proves that although Mere Orthodoxy is consistently good, it’s not unvaryingly good. The author lost me at the construct “the evangelical soul.”

(Mere Orthodoxy, by the way and once again, is not a Orthodox website; it is a Reformed-leaning Protestant website that considers itself orthodox and “leans young.” It’s usually pretty good; I don’t subscribe to anything for the sole purpose of dissing it.)

What if?

Our professor asked a hypothetical question: “If the bones of Jesus were discovered, and if there were some way to absolutely confirm that they were the bones of Jesus, would you still be a Christian?”
Every other member of the class confirmed that he or she would remain a Christian, making statements such as “I would not lose my faith,” or “Jesus was a great teacher and philosopher.”

I was dumbfounded and utterly dismayed. How was it possible that such intelligent, committed, and educated Catholics could give such responses? Did they not realize the fundamental importance of the Resurrection of Christ? If not, why not? My response was, “If the bones of Jesus were discovered, I would be outta here! I would no longer be a Christian!” I explained that the Resurrection is an absolute necessity to the Christian faith. The class listened politely, but no one seemed at all impressed or influenced by my answer.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

Sunday, April 30

Expressive or Formative?

When you have only seen forms of piety that value spontaneous expression and clichéd sincerity, to be given the cadences and rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer can be like receiving the gift of tongues.

James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love, via Jon Ward, Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation.

This quote was what finally persuaded me to buy a highly-touted book by a Protestant academic. There is at least one other Protestant religious academic, Hans Boersma (author of Heavenly Participation), for whom I have high respect.

Having raced (considering my usual book-reading pace) through the book, I pronounce Smith not quite as good as Boersma, at least for my interests, but he has his moments, and there are quite a few of them:

[W]orship is formative, not merely expressive, … When you unhook worship from mere expression, it also completely retools your understanding of repetition. If you think of worship as a bottom-up, expressive endeavor, repetition will seem insincere and inauthentic. But when you see worship as an invitation to a top-down encounter in which God is refashioning your deepest habits, then repetition looks very different: it’s how God rehabituates us. In a formational paradigm, repetition isn’t insincere, because you’re not showing, you’re submitting. This is crucial because there is no formation without repetition. … If the sovereign Lord has created us as creatures of habit, why should we think repetition is inimical to our spiritual growth?

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

The distinction between worship as expression and worship as formation pervades most of the first two-thirds or so of the book, which strikes me as very congenial to Orthodox Christianity (as Smith is at least partially aware).

Right-Brain Christianity

Orthodoxy theology defines only what is necessary and always leaves unspoken that which cannot be explained. This approach was part of the Christian faith from the beginning. But the Western phronema often suppresses, dismisses, minimizes, or ignores this stance. The Western mind is compelled to define and explain everything, since without a rational explanation a concept or fact cannot be considered true, or, conversely, all truth can be proven rationally.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox: Understanding and Acquiring the Orthodox Christian Mind

Just-So Stories, conversion edition

Years ago, when I converted to Orthodox Christianity, I heard a common explanation that passed a number of folks. They said that “Stephen could not deal with modern uncertainty and has run away to hide inside Orthodoxy.” On the one hand, nothing was more “certain” among them than the platitudes of modernity. My rejection needed an explanation. The reality was that I was abandoning the false certitudes of mainline American Protestantism for the frightening journey of the soul into the mystery of Christ that lies at the heart of the Orthodox faith. Orthodoxy is not a bastion of answered questions. Rather, it is a way of life, whose teachings are the abiding testimony of those who have walked that path and borne witness to what they found. Indeed, apophatic theology, the preferred manner of Orthodox thought, draws us towards the nakedness of our ignorance and dares to stand in that state before the wonder of God.

I am not suggesting that we elevate ignorance to the exalted position it holds in the panoply of anti-Christian rhetoric (for our adversaries hide from their own ignorance). Indeed, I do not suggest beginning with our ignorance at all. Rather, I suggest that we begin with what we know and move towards its depths.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

When I converted to Orthodox Christianity, I initially expected great doctrinal certainty, in the left-brain sense of certainty that had earlier drawn me to Calvinism. What I found instead was the Nicene Creed without the filioque and seven ecumenical councils that posted warning signs to keep me from falling over Christological cliffs. That left a remarkably capacious plateau in which to move without losing the right to be called “Orthodox.”

I think that field is part of the concept of “catholicity,” which concept I fear I’ll never grasp due to 50 years of sectarian baggage.

Oh, heck! Let’s Just Go Shopping

Given the destructive fruitlessness of religio-political conflicts in the Reformation era, Catholics and Protestants alike built on trends that antedated the Reformation and decided to go shopping instead of continuing to fight about religion, thus permitting their self-colonization by capitalism in the industrious revolution. In combination with the exercise of power by hegemonic, liberal states, a symbiosis of capitalism and consumerism is today more than anything else the cultural glue that holds together the heterogeneity of Western hyperpluralism.

Bradford Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

Stage props

You see, the Anglicans in the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) represent the growing (in some cases booming) churches of Africa, Asia and the Third World. They do not, however, represent the zip codes in which the major newsrooms of the Western world are located. They also do not represent the world’s richest Anglicans. Thus, to be blunt, what these “lesser” Anglicans say is NEWS is not news until the New York Times says that it’s news. Right?

Terry Mattingly.

Anglicans in Africa, Asia and the Third World need to know their place. They’re supposed to be stage props, diverse tokens to make First-World Anglicans feel virtuous. They’re not supposed to contend for the faith when the First-Worlders are fleeing it.

Who qualifies as “Christian”?

[J. Gresham] Machen, for his part, published numerous articles insisting that modernists were not Christians because, no matter how much of the Christian doctrine they affirmed, they affirmed it as a matter of inner experience and not as a fact.

Frances FitzGeraldThe Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America.

I had quite forgotten that little tidbit, which intrigues me more than it probably should if I’m to honor the admonition “judge not.”

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

Sunday reflections

In progress we trust

Faith in progress is just as basic to modernity as the Second Coming was to Christianity.

Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies

Sorry if I’ve posted this before. It just says so much in so few words.

Seen and unseen understood

We celebrated Theophany, the third-most important of the Church’s feasts, on January 6. The feast technically continues several days, and included last Sunday:

The true Light has appeared and bestows illumination on all. Christ is baptized with us, even though He is above all purity; and thus He infuses sanctification into the water, which then becomes the purifying agent of our souls. What is seen belongs to earth; but what is understood transcends the heavens. By means of a bath comes salvation; by means of water comes the Spirit; by means of immersion does our ascent to God come to pass. How wonderful are Your works, O Lord! Glory to You.

One of the "Praises" ("Lauds") in Matins ("Orthros") January 9 (emphasis added, because that caught my attention).

American Christianity collection

The "democratic" seeds sown

Every theological vagabond and peddler may drive here his bungling trade, without passport or license, and sell his false ware at pleasure. What is to come of such confusion is not now to be seen.

Philip Schaff, The Principle of Protestantism (1844)

178 years later, we can see a bit more clearly.

To see ourselves as others see us

Author and speaker Christine Caine recently shared that she was stunned by what she encountered when she first visited churches in the United States.

Before coming to the U.S., “I had never seen a flag in a church,” said Caine. “Never.”

Jessica Lea

Unguarded candor

I found my way into this Twitter thread because John MacArthur was quoted as saying:

I don’t even support religious freedom. Religious freedom is what sent people to hell. To say I support religious freedom is to say I support idolatry. It’s to say I support lies. I support hell. I support the kingdom of darkness.

Unfortunately, the quote was accurate, and he doubled down disastrously. MacArthur is a big-name Evangelical of the sort I would have thought fairly moderate.

Comic and tragic

I’m from the Midwest, the home of emotional withdrawal, where I grew up among serious Bible scholars for whom the result of scholarship was schism and bitterness ….

Garrison Keillor.

That Keillor is a low-key comic doesn’t mean it’s not true. Witness this:

New podcast: Reformed Church in America split points to rising tensions in Calvin country — GetReligion

The "Alliance of Reformed Churches" to which conservatives from the RCA are fleeing, is attracting interest from Churches of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) as well. Both a roiled by similar contentious issues, implicating sexuality.

I was already an adult, when the PCA was forming from dissident members of the United Presbyterian Church. Our church was considering affiliating with PCA. They were until recently reputed to be rock-ribbed conservative Calvinists. Now, they’re in some trouble.

Upon completing law school, and before entering the Orthodox Church, I spent roughly 15 years in the CRC.

It blows my mind how the PCA and CRC have changed in so short a time. (If you’re curious, or just not conversant with the polyglot Protestant world, "Presbyterian" and "Reformed" historically are the English and continental Calvinist Churches, respectively; for an American, there’s no high doctrinal barriers between them.)

We’re not total outliers, though

I have been reviewing some of my personal notes, and one portion of Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary has particular religious valence. McGilchrist is a Brit, and so his observations aren’t focused on America, but presumably apply throughout the post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment West:

One can see the second process (a rejection of the right hemisphere’s world) in the way in which the decline of metaphoric understanding of ceremony and ritual into the inauthentic repetition of empty procedures in the Middle Ages prompted, not a revitalisation of metaphoric understanding, but an outright rejection of it, with the advent of the Reformation … 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 … 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.
Decapitation of statues by the Reformers took place because of the confounding of the animate and the inanimate, and the impossibility of seeing that one can live in the other metaphorically. In a world where metaphoric understanding is lost we are reduced to ‘either/or’, as Koerner says. Either the statue is God or it is a thing: since it is ‘obviously’ not God, it must be a thing, and therefore ‘mere wood’, in which case it has no place in worship.
Protestantism being a manifestation of left-hemisphere cognition is – even though its conscious self-descriptions would deny this – itself inevitably linked to the will to power, since that is the agenda of the left hemisphere.
Removing the places of holiness, and effectively dispensing with the dimension of the sacred, eroded the power of the princes of the Church, but it helped to buttress the power of the secular state.
In essence the cardinal tenet of Christianity – the Word is made Flesh – becomes reversed, and the Flesh is made Word.
There are obvious continuities between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. They share the same marks of left-hemisphere domination: the banishment of wonder; the triumph of the explicit, and, with it, mistrust of metaphor; alienation from the embodied world of the flesh, and a consequent cerebralisation of life and experience.
The destruction of the sacerdotal power of the Church was a goal of the French Revolution, as it had been of the Reformation. The Reformation, however, had not been nakedly, explicitly, secular: it had purported to replace a corrupt religion with a purified one. All the same its effect had been to transfer power from the sacerdotal base of the Catholic Church to the state, an essential part of the relentless process of secularisation, in the broadest sense – by which I mean the re-presentation of human experience in purely rationalistic terms, necessarily exclusive of the Other, and the insistence that all questions concerning morality and human welfare can and should be settled within those terms – which I would see as the agenda of the left hemisphere. (I am fascinated at the pregnant qualifiers "nakedly, explicitly".)
Eichendorff said that Romanticism was the nostalgia of Protestants for the Catholic tradition.