Nominalism is rampant in Western Christendom
Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!
[T]he Hosanna-Tabor case … revolved around the ability of a Lutheran academy in Michigan to fire a teacher. Here, the Obama administration advanced another extreme argument, claiming that job regulations prevented the academy from being able to fire anyone over a difference in beliefs.
The lawyers for the Obama administration went far beyond the issues of the case to instead advance the legally absurd position that there is no general ministerial exception, arguing that religious groups don’t even have the Constitutionally protected right to select their own ministers or rabbis.
Thankfully, here, the administration’s extreme position was rebutted by the Supreme Court in decisive fashion, with a 9-0 decision opposing its perspective. You have to take a pretty extreme position for Elena Kagan to join with Samuel Alito on an opinion.
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Third, for those of you who follow pop culture, you may have taken note of the recent flap between The Robertson family of Duck Dynasty fame, and the A&E Network that produces and broadcasts the Duck Dynasty show. And you may have further observed that the one of the loudest and most aggressive defenders of the Robertson family was the Governor of Louisiana.
You may think that I was defending the Robertsons simply because I am the Governor of their home state, the great state of Louisiana. You would be wrong about that.
I defended them because they have every right to speak their minds, however indelicately they may choose to do so. Of course, A&E is a for-profit business, and they can choose what they want to put on the air.
But there was something much larger at stake here. There was a time when liberals in this country believed in debate. But that is increasingly not the case for the modern left in America. No, the modern left in America has grown tired of debate.
Their new strategy is to simply try to silence their critics. So these leftists immediately mobilized and did all they could not to debate the issues, but rather to attempt to silence the Robertsons.
There was a time when the left preached tolerance. And they are indeed tolerant, unless they disagree with you. To paraphrase William F. Buckley, a liberal is someone who welcomes dissent, and is astonished to find there is any.
The modern left in America is completely intolerant of the views of people of faith. They want a completely secular society where people of faith keep their views to themselves.
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Finally, let me finish by mentioning an incredible irony. I’ve been working on this speech for a good while. And last Thursday, exactly one week ago, something truly bizarre occurred.
The person who is at the tip of the spear prosecuting this quiet war on religious liberty spoke at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. The topic he chose to speak about was defending religious liberty.
I was stunned, and I bet the President of Hobby Lobby, who was in the audience, was stunned as well. Yes, President Obama did wax eloquent, as he always does, about the horrors of religious persecution that are occurring beyond our borders. And good for him.
To be clear, churches in America are not being burned to the ground, and Christians are not being slaughtered for their faith. There is really no comparison to the persecution of people of faith inside our borders and outside.
Yet, it is stunning to hear the President talk of protecting religious liberty outside the United States, while at the very same time his Administration challenges and chips away at our religious liberty right here at home. Once again, there is a Grand Canyon sized difference between what this President says and what he does.
Here is what the President said last week, no doubt playing to his audience — “History shows that nations that uphold the rights of their people — including the freedom of religion — are ultimately more just and more peaceful and more successful.” Well said Mr. President, I couldn’t agree more.
So I leave you with this — The President is very concerned about religious liberty…and also, if you like your religion you can keep your religion.
(Bobby Jindal, 2/13/14; H/T Andrew Walker)
Speaking of which, I wrote this two weeks ago:
[A] religion held deeply and with integrity carries with it a view of what is truly true, and of what constitutes human well-being. In other words, anyone who can, upon demand, distinguish
- what he thinks is truly true from
- what is merely religiously true
is truly irreligious beneath the thinnest and most nominal veneer.
Guess who fits that description:
“I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian — for me — for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.” – April 17, 2008, while running for president, defining marriage at the Saddleback Presidential Forum.
“I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” – May 9, 2012, as president, in an interview with Robin Roberts of ABC News.
(Both quotes from Politico, emphasis added)
I knew he was lying temporizing with his “for me as a Christian” dodge on April 17, 2008. I knew that when the time seemed right, he’d drop the “Christian” grounds.
I’ve allowed that he’s a “liberal Christian.” I now say that he’s “irreligious beneath the thinnest and most nominal veneer.”
I do not mean that every liberal Christian is irreligious other than nominally. I’ve tended to believe that for most of my life, but I’ve been moving away from it – not because I understand liberal Christianity better, but because (a) I better understand how invisible the historic Christian option is to people whose brains or sensibilities won’t let them swallow the visible “conservative” Christianity and (b) I’m more inclined generally to grant a presumption that others are acting in good faith.
I also don’t mean that Obama has no convictions – that he is merely a sort of political weather vane. I think he has some very deep convictions – to which some adjective other than “Christian” applies.
I also see abundant evidence that of conservative Christians who are merely nominal.
Obama’s not an exception to that presumption of good faith, by the way, but it’s rebuttable, and the evidence rebuts it thoroughly.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
The veneration of saints, the honoring of icons and relics, the place held by the Mother of God are deeply offensive to modern democracy. The complaints heard by those who reject such things are quite telling. It is rarely the classical protest of true iconoclasts that are heard. Rather, it is the modern declaration, “I don’t need anyone between myself and God.” It is the universal access to God, without interference, without mediation, without hierarchy, without sacrament, ultimately without any need for others that is offended by the hierarchical shape of classical Christianity.
A spiritual life without canon, without custom, without tradition, without rules, is the ultimate democratic freedom. But it unleashes the tyranny of the individual imagination. For with no mediating tradition, the modern believer is subject only to his own whim. The effect is to have no Lord but the God of his own imagination. Even his appeal to Scripture is without effect – for it is his own interpretation that has mastery over the word of God. If we will have no hierarchy, we will not have Christ as Lord. We cannot invent our own model of the universe and demand that God conform.
It is a great spiritual accomplishment to not be “conformed to this world.” The ideas and assumptions of modern consumer democracies permeate almost every aspect of our culture. They become an unavoidable part of our inner landscape. Only by examining such assumptions in the light of the larger Christian tradition can we hope to remain faithful to Christ in the truth. Those who insist on the absence of spiritual authority, or demand that nothing mediate grace will discover that their lives serve the most cruel master – the spirit of the age.
(Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Sins of Democracy)
Re-read that, because although I say it differently, I can’t say it better.
So deep-seated is the democratic bias that most readers will, despite this trenchant indictment, locate “the problem” within the “hierarchical shape of classical Christianity.”
But a few readers may have begun to catch a glimmer that all is not well with individualism, that the spirit of the age is insidious, and that most American religion feeds rather than fights The Beast. For individualist religion to proclaim the Lordship of Jesus is always followed, tacitly, with “And what a congenial and accommodating Lord He is! So very like me in all his preferences!”
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When I write such finger-pointing things, three fingers point back at me, as I lived with an accommodating “Lord” for a very long time.
My own interpretation had mastery over the word of God.
I may be a poor example of an Orthodox Christian, but I’d not go back for anything.
I have found one “downside,” though, of becoming Orthodox.
The time I spent memorizing the books of the Bible and doing “sword drills,” is now substantially useless when it comes to the Old Testament, because the Septuagint on which we base our Old Testament is complete (i.e., we have all the original books, many of which Protestantism has abandoned), some book names differ (e.g., there’s no I Samuel & II Samuel, I Kings and II Kings, but I, II, III & IV Kingdoms instead; Ezra is split), and the book order changes after Ezra. I must use the index of my Bible still for most Old Testament readings.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
[W]e find ourselves on utterly familiar ground with our LGBTQIA neighbors, and they with us, when we turn from matters of the body to matters of the heart. All of us know, in the depths of our heart, that we are queer. Our yearnings, especially those bound up with our sexuality, are hardly ever fully satisfied by the biblical model of one man and one woman yoked together for life. Every one of us is a member of the coalition of human beings who feel out of place in our bodies east of Eden. And every one of us has fallen far short of honoring God and other human beings with our bodies.
(Andy Crouch in Christianity Today)
I cannot endorse Christianity Today as a reliable source for anything – well, almost anything. I once read it assiduously and considered it serious stuff. I watched it become considerably dumbed-down, a process which notably included publishing a tragically naïve side-bar by me 40 or so years ago, which I have regretted whenever I’ve thought of it for several decades now.
But CT probably is a reliable barometer of “respectable” Evangelical opinion, and even a blind pig finds an acorn occasionally. Andy Crouch (H/T Robin Phillips on Facebook) perceives the gnosticism implied by LGBTetc Groin Pieties:
Christians will have to choose between two consistent positions. One, which we believe Christians who affirm gay and lesbian unions will ultimately have to embrace, is to say that embodied sexual differentiation is irrelevant—completely, thoroughly, totally irrelevant—to covenant faithfulness.
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There is one other consistent position that Christians can hold, though we will hold it at great social cost, at least for the foreseeable future: that bodies matter. Indeed, that both male and female bodies are of ultimate value and dignity—not a small thing given the continuing denigration of women around the world.
Indeed, that matter matters. For behind the dismissal of bodies is ultimately a gnostic distaste for embodiment in general. To uphold a biblical ethic on marriage is to affirm the sweeping scriptural witness—hardly a matter of a few isolated “thou shalt not” verses—that male and female together image God, that the creation of humanity as male and female is “very good,” and that “it is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18, NRSV).
Sexual differentiation (along with its crucial outcome of children, who have a biological connection to two parents but are not mirror images of either one) is not an accident of evolution or a barrier to fulfillment. It is in fact the way God is imaged, and the way fruitfulness, diversity, and abundance are sustained in the world.
Apart from some hand-wringing about “difficult pastoral challenge[s]” and “complex hermeneutical questions,” the article is an acorn, and I think I’ve heard other occasional good things about Andy Crouch. May he some day awaken, as have some of his bretheren, to the insight that gnosticism is an Evangelical feature, not a bug, and that he needs to get him up into a land that his Lord shall show him.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 