All Souls, 2026

This is not a day when the Orthodox Church remembers all saints, but I thought a reminder that Halloween is the eve of All Saints Day in the Latin Christian world would be timely.

What is Church for?

In the vast, overwhelming majority of places around the Western world that refer to themselves as a “Christian church,” the men and women who lead these assemblies frame themselves primarily as weekly teachers.

The pastor is expected to spend the week:

Studying Scripture.
Communicating various theological concepts.
Providing practical applications in their sermon for their congregants to take to heart.
Addressing various contemporary cultural and political issues of the day.
Delivering a stirring message that will leave congregants feeling like they “got something from the message.”

…

An Orthodox priest’s primary job is not to deliver a homily every week that ministers theology, inspiration, and a type of motivational message to his congregation that will stir the congregants to come back again week after week.

The two different traditions, Orthodox Christianity and modern Evangelical Protestantism, exist side by side with two entirely different assumptions:

The Sunday Divine Liturgy is not a lecture.
The priest is a spiritual father, not a professor.
Discipleship is experiential, not something I simply receive by way of a message.

…

If there is anything that I see differently than I did when I was a young man, it is this: being a Christian is primarily not about the theological information I learn; it is about learning to confess my sins before God and clothe myself in humility.

When I was a young man, I viewed my relationship with Jesus Christ primarily as one in which I amassed knowledge about God, the Bible, theology, etc.

However, the longer I am in the Orthodox Church, the more I begin to realize that a relationship with God begins and ends with humility.

Kenneth B., The 14-Hour Sermon: Have We Forgotten What Church is For? He wrote it, but I’ve experienced the same thing.

How are we to live in an AI Age?

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

C.S. Lewis via Martin Shaw

Wild and wasted virtues

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

G.K. Chesterton via Fr. Stephen Freeman, Hope: The Unashamed Virtue

Enabling lies, activating lies

The problem is that all too many Christians are in the grips of two sets of lies. We’ll call them the enabling lies and the activating lies. And unless you deal with the enabling lies, the activating lies will constantly pollute the body politic and continue to spawn violent unrest.

What’s the difference between the two kinds of lies? The enabling lie is the lie that makes you fertile ground for the activating lie that actually motivates a person to charge a thin blue line at the Capitol or take a rifle to a pizza parlor.

Here’s an enabling lie: America will end if Trump loses. That was the essence of the Flight 93 essay in 2016. That was the core of Eric Metaxas’s argument in our debates this spring and fall.

Here’s another enabling lie: The fate of the church is at stake if Joe Biden wins.

And here’s yet another: The left hates you (this sentence sometimes concludes with the phrase “and wants you dead.”)

I could go on, but the enabling lies that have rocketed through the church for years share important characteristics. They not only dramatically exaggerate the stakes of our political and legal disputes, they dramatically exaggerate the perfidy of your opponents. Moreover, when the stakes are deemed to be that high, the moral limitations on your response start to fall away.

David French

This may look political, but that’s not my intent. Believing those enabling lies corrodes your soul. Refusing to dwell on them is a matter of spiritual health.

Nice Summary

Their job is to be silent in a world that doesn’t stop talking.

Catherine Bauer, Director of Development and Marketing for the Carmelite Sisters of Fairfield, an Order that is building a stone monastery in Pennsylvania with a vision of it lasting a thousand years.

Not four bare walls and a lectern

… I had this kind of Protestant idea that one should beware of beauty ….

Dr. David Bradshaw in his account of why he became Orthodox

Beautiful church buildings respect the mysteries that occur within, chiefly the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. If we have a high view of the Eucharist, then just as we will want to use a beautiful chalice to show respect to Christ’s sacrifice, we will also want to have a beautiful temple in which these sacred mysteries occur. By contrast, a low view of the Eucharist often finds expression in church buildings that proclaim a type of architectural Docetism: God is everywhere generally but nowhere in particular.

Robin Phillips, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics

Scholasticism

The more I studied, the more I saw the Scholastic tradition as an effort to cling to the god of the philosophers while somehow saying of God that which Christians know they must.

Nathan Jacobs, My Wild Ride to Orthodoxy (around the 21 minute mark)

I have just discovered Nathan Jacobs and I’m pretty enthusiastic about it.

The Crusades

The Crusades, for instance, could not have taken place in a world in which the principles of the Christian religion were fully understood: from the Christian point of view, the ‘events’ of Christ’s life are repeated wherever and whenever members of the Church participate in the Mysteries, and the notion that it was important to ‘liberate’ one particular place where they had occurred in one particular time could only have developed to the extent it did as a consequence of extraneous, or what one might call superstitious, influences.

Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West

The Christian East did not participate in the Crusades, and in fact suffered particularly in 1205 A.D. from rampaging Crusaders. Some historians of Christianity mark that as the point beyond which the Great Schism of 1054, when the Pope severed the West from the rest of the Church, became permanent.

Really?!

Even though Pope Leo XIV is recovering well from lung cancer surgery and is going ahead with a big trip to Latin America next week, the diagnosis is “a bit of a game-changer” for the Vatican and Leo’s still-young papacy, a top Vatican official said Tuesday.

Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Holy See’s foreign minister, said there had been a temptation to think that Leo was a “Superman, a Superpope” after he was elected in 2025 and “hit the ground running” following the drawn-out illness and death of Pope Francis.

“The fact that he has fallen ill with, in many ways, one of the most common illnesses of our age means that he is a poor mortal like the rest of us. And I think that that is going to change how we see him and possibly how he sees himself as well,” Gallagher told reporters at the Italian foreign press association.

Top Vatican official says pope’s cancer diagnosis a ‘game-changer’ for the papacy (emphasis added).

Is Abp. Gallagher a Protestant mole or something? Why would he think that Catholics, and the Pope himself, had such idiotic ideas?

My antidote to beating dead horses

Having left the Protestant religious world finally and officially 29 years ago this month, I nevertheless remain interested in its goings-on — sometimes horrified, sometimes filled with schadenfreude, occasionally pleasantly surprised — because America is deeply Protestant and I cannot entirely escape that fact short of getting me to an Orthodox monastery and forever eschewing news and political involvement.

But I’ve become increasingly aware that, in David Foster Wallace terms, because Protestantism is not the water I deliberately swim in, there not only are things about it that I’m better equipped to see than those in it but also important currents I’m oblivious to.

My version of Protestantism has scarcely been updated since 1997 and a lot of my version is shaped by my experiences in the 1960s and early 1970s, when I was caught in a backwater of Wheaton-style evangelicalism — a strongly dispensationalist milieu adjacent to a broader mainstream. So I’m still beating a dispensational premillennialist horse, though I see glimpses that it’s virtually dead.

That evangelical fads of my youth should be gone by my dotage, replaced by other fads, is a proof, I think, that Protestantism in general and Evangelicalism in particular are built on shifting sands, not solid rock, despite the gospel song to the contrary (which probably nobody under 50 even knows these days).

But mocking or gently critiquing the fads of my youth doesn’t do much good for people living today. So I’m updating my understanding of Protestantism through reading The Protestant Mind, a blog-like project of First Things with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

In this epoch when “Evangelical” is almost synonymous with “MAGA” in the popular press, The Protestant Mind’s principal author, Dale Coulter, helpfully provides a taxonomy of the Christian Right in America 2026 (“The Two Evangelical Rights”). The major rubrics are New Protestant Right” and “new evangelical populism.”

It helped me clarify a lot. I was tempted to speculate about which one I’d likely be in were I still Protestant, but that’s just a counterfactual too far.

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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 of the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council

The mind of the Fathers

Western Christian theology is founded on the phronema of Augustine. The East did not acquire the mind of one Father, but the mind of the Fathers.

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

There’s a lot more that could be said about this, but I’m not the guy to say it nor is this a good forum. That’s why I give you the link.

Redemptionist Theology

Christian horizons are limited by the drama played between God, who is infinitely offended by sin, and man, who is unable to satisfy the impossible demands of vindictive justice. The drama finds its resolution in the death of Christ, the Son of God who has become man in order to substitute Himself for us and pay our debt to divine justice. What becomes of the dispensation of the Holy Spirit here? His part is reduced to that of an auxiliary, an assistant in redemption, causing us to receive Christ’s expiated merit. . . . The price of our redemption having been paid in the death of Christ, the resurrection and the ascension are only a glorious happy end of his work, a kind of apotheosis without direct relationship to our human destiny. This redemptionist theology, placing all the emphasis on the passion, seems to take no interest in the triumph of Christ over death. The very work of the Christ-Redeemer, to which this theology is confined, seems to be truncated, impoverished, reduced to a change of the divine attitude toward fallen men, unrelated to the nature of humanity.

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

No creed but the Bible

By the 1840s one analyst of American Protestantism concluded, after surveying fifty-three American sects, that the principle “No creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion. John W. Nevin surmised that this emphasis grew out of a popular demand for “private judgment” and was “tacitly if not openly conditioned always by the assumption that every man is authorized and bound to get at this authority in a direct way for himself, through the medium simply of his own single mind.”48 Many felt the exhilarating hope that democracy had opened an immediate access to biblical truth for all persons of good will. Americans found it difficult to realize, however, that a commitment to private judgment could drive people apart, even as it raised beyond measure their hopes for unity.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

John Wilson Nevin, Philip Schaff and Mercerburg Seminary are three names that bring a wistful smile to my face. American Protestantism would, I’m almost positive, be much healthier had it heeded these far-seeing voices.

Change and decay around me all I see

I Didn’t Leave Protestantism Because I Hated It. I Left Because It Kept Changing

Frankly, that’s not why I left Protestantism. My church was changing relatively slowly. But I agree with the author completely about the facts: Protestantism does keep changing, and the more thoughtful Protestants make a virtue of that necessity: “Isn’t it wonderful that everyone can find a church to suit them!”

No. It would be wonderful if we were all one. You can look that up.

Meaning

They were freed from worry about getting their souls into God’s heaven by the discovery that they had no souls and that God had no heaven. They were freed from the terror of devils and plagues by the knowledge that the thing that was making them scream and foam was not an imp but only their own inability to cope, and that the thing that was clawing out their entrails was not divine wrath but only cancer. Altogether, life became much more livable since it was clear that in fact nothing lay behind things. The age was called enlightened.

The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything.

Tom Howard, Chance or the Dance?

Ancient Presbyterian mistrust

What she disapproves is not that I am doing public penance. No, what bothers her is an ancient Presbyterian mistrust of things, things getting mixed up in religion. The black sweater and the ashes scandalize her. Her eyelid lowers—she almost winks. What have these things, articles, to do with doing right?

Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

… and worst of all

This is so cringe.

It misrepresents (I’m pretty sure) Catholic teaching on the relationship of works and righteousness.
It cherry-picks and decontextualizes an Orthodox source who would disagree with its conclusions.
Worst of all, it reminds me of something equally cringe I wrote, and Christianity Today published, when I was young and foolish.

Sunday, 10/4/26

An oddly busy last week leaves me a little short-handed today: just two items.

No room for racism

I didn’t know or didn’t remember this statement:

The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America stands with all people of good will in condemning the hateful violence and lamenting the loss of life that resulted from the ⁠⁠shameful efforts to promote racial bigotry and white supremacist ideology in Charlottesville, Virginia.⁠⁠

⁠⁠The Orthodox Church emphatically declares that it does not promote, protect or sanction participation in such reprehensible acts of hatred, racism, and discrimination, and proclaims that such beliefs and behaviors have no place in any community based in respect for the law and faith in a loving God.⁠⁠

The essence of the Christian Gospel and the spirit of the Orthodox Tradition are entirely and self-evidently incompatible with ideologies that declare the superiority of any race over another. Our God shows no partiality or favoritism (Deuteronomy 10:17, Romans 2:11). Our Lord Jesus Christ broke down the dividing wall of hostility that had separated God from humans and humans from each other (Ephesians 2:14). In Christ Jesus, the Church proclaims, there can be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female, but all are one (Galatians 3:28). Furthermore, we call on one another to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather to expose them (Ephesians 5:11). And what is darkness if not hatred? The one who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness (1 John 2:11)!

Furthermore, in 1872, Hierarchs from around the world assembled in Constantinople and denounced all forms of xenophobia and chauvinism (phyletism). They agreed that the promotion of racial or national supremacy and ethnic bias or dissension in the Church of Christ is to be censured as contrary to the sacred teachings of the Christian Gospel and the holy canons of the Church. It is formally condemned as heresy, the strongest category of false teaching.

Finally, such actions as we have witnessed in recent days, by self-proclaimed white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and various racists and fascists, betray the core human values of love and solidarity. In this, we pray wholeheartedly for the families of those who lost their lives or suffered in these tragic events. In like manner, we cannot condone any form of revenge or retaliation by any group or individual. Therefore, we fervently appeal to every person of good will, and especially the leaders of our great nation, to consider and adopt ways of reconciling differences in order to rise above any and all discrimination in our history, our present, and our future.

My point in quoting this is that unrepentant racists do not have a natural home in the Orthodox Church. No Orthodox country was involved in the kidnapping of Africans, the slave trade, or the building of an American slave economy.

I’m old, firmly attached by clerical responsibilities to a single healthy parish, and out of first-hand touch with what’s happening elsewhere. But I read suggestions that some mostly-young mostly-men are flirting with or entering the Orthodox Church under the impression that its Holy Tradition is congruent with their unholy racial obsessions and with white nationalism.

I doubt that this is any true trend. But Orthodoxy is exploding in the U.S. (along with Roman Catholicism, I’m told), and I knew that when that happened, when Orthodoxy finally “got on America’s radar,” the calumnies would begin. Orthodoxy’s resistance to novelties (“stagnant” is what critics who knew about us tended to say) is a nice, big target for misrepresentation.

Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven.

There is no room for racism in Orthodoxy; there is always room for repentant sinners of all sorts, including repentant racists.

Transgressive Art

I’ve come to think of art that requires a willingness to transgress, not (to be clear) morality, or convention per se, but the limits of our understanding. And I think that one of the ways that art can bring us closer to ultimate Reality, or even to God, is by helping us see where our narratives of ourselves and of the world around us have become stale and rote … I think that engaging with art in this way requires a leap of faith. For things that break me open not to break me totally, I have to believe that not everything is broken.

Tara Isabella Burton

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Thoughts on American religion and Orthodoxy

[John Williamson] Nevin and [Philip] Schaff also discerned certain common intellectual patterns and reflexes beneath the rampant pluralism of American Protestantism. They attributed the breakdown of theological coherence to attitudes that American Christians had assumed. These two felt that a radical Bible-centeredness was the reigning theory among Protestant sects. After surveying the statements of belief of fifty-three American denominations, Nevin surmised that the principle “no creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion.

…

Despite the variety of Christian idioms that flowered in the early republic, most seemed to spring from the common conception that Christian tradition since the time of the apostles was a tale of sordid corruption in which kingcraft and priestcraft wielded orthodoxy to enslave the minds of the people. Ties with Catholic and Protestant traditions were severed, with a heady sense that a restoration of the primitive church was at hand. Men such as Benjamin Randal, founder of the Freewill Baptists, called for a new dispensation of gospel liberty. According to Francis Asbury, the apostolic order of things was lost in the first century, and the Reformers had beat off only part of the rubbish of intervening centuries. Methodism claimed emphatically to reinstate the apostolic form of the church in doctrine, discipline, conversion, and sanctification. In John W. Nevin’s view, the American republic had given free reign to an “abstract supernaturalism” empowering believers to transcend the corruptions of eighteen hundred years and return to the simplicity, authority, and power of the age of the apostles. “Every congregation has power to originate a new Christianity for its own use,” Nevin concluded, “and so may well afford to let that of all other ages pass for a grand apostasy.”

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Kindle Edition pp. 166-167, italics added.)

So what are we to make of these new “Christianities”?

If you find yourself in bars, as I sometimes rarely do, and if you find yourself in heated conversation therein with people hostile to religion, as I often do, you may have a strong desire, as I always do, to establish a widely agreed-on way of distinguishing between what you believe and what Colorado Springs believes. Well at long last I’ve done it:

If someone were to shorten the field by forty yards, widen it by twenty, give you thirteen downs to advance twelve yards for a first down, and award you six points for doing so, you’d rightly object to his calling this new game “football.” You’d say to him, “that one’s taken. Find another name.”

I think the same applies to that fairly old, solid, and stately religion known as “Christianity.” Those who have altered the faith beyond recognition should come up with a new name for what it is they’re practicing. I suggest “Krustianity.”

Jason Peters, sometime in September of 2009 at Front Porch Republic, at a link that’s now dead. I used “Krustianity” and “Krustian” a lot in my blogging back then, but the usage never got any traction and I pretty much gave it up. But the impulse remains, and I sometimes feel guilty using the term “Christian” to refer to the “new Christianit(ies)” concocted by those who think they know better than the Church that gave them their beloved Bible.

So what’s the alternative?

Orthodox Christianity reads the account of Christ on the road to Emmaus more often than I ever encountered in the Protestant world. I mused on that narrative thirteen years ago.

Excerpt:

How do you suppose Christ expounded the Old Testament that day? It turned these disciples from disconsolate to rejoicing, so it must not have been what they were used to hearing. It made simultaneous sense of His sufferings and his Messiahship. It removed the scandal of His being numbered among sinners, and crucified — a particularly scandalous way to die.

Some of His interpretation has come down even into Protestantism, or else Protestants would be unevangelized as they learned Old Testament. For instance, we Christians all understand Isaiah 53 as referring to Christ — contrary to typical Jewish understanding.

I suggest that He interpreted the Scriptures in a way that’s preserved not only in subsequent Apostolic writings called the Gospels and Epistles, but in the interpretive tradition of the Orthodox Church, including its hymns, prayers and service texts. I can’t prove it, but I … can prove that the New Testament writers didn’t write down everything that was important.

Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.

That’s why we call it “the fullness of the Christian faith.”

And you can only get the fulness of the faith in an Orthodox Church. You can’t get it by reading about it or watching YouTube videos from Orthobros, because we’re not disembodied brains. You need to get your body to Church — again and again and again.

Those who sell you shortcuts are ravening wolves.

⁠⁠Those of us in Western Culture have been reared with what I believe is an entirely incorrect framework; we’ve been taught that knowledge is somehow related to holiness.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the throngs of young people who have been flooding into Orthodox Churches the past few years, many of them coming from various Protestant and Evangelical traditions, where “knowing the Bible” and “knowing theology” are often considered very central to their faith.

Amongst the converts to Orthodoxy, especially among the young men, though not limited to them, there is this thirst for knowledge and all things related to the mind⁠⁠ …

…

⁠⁠A few years ago, a number of young men were received into our parish, in what was really the first small wave of converts that I began noticing in recent years.

All of them were obsessed with Orthodoxy.

A couple of them would stay after the Liturgy with me and talk for hours on end about Orthodox Christianity.

They kept obtaining icons the way young people obtain Pokemon cards, and they would rush to show me their newest acquisitions, proud of how many images of saints they could display on their wall and how many stories about saints they could retell.⁠⁠

⁠⁠Yet not all of these young men wanted to meet regularly with our spiritual father.

They didn’t like that he spent precious little time teaching them theology or teaching them church history. What they wanted was for him to teach them the kind of Orthodox Christianity they were familiar with seeing online; as though that was truly representative of the faith.

My spiritual father is positively a saint. Nobody will ever be able to convince me otherwise, and he could see what these young men needed was not to be educated in the mind about Orthodox Christianity, but rather they needed to learn;

how to be calm
how to meditate on Jesus
how to quit focusing on the external and how to learn to be more aware of the internal

They needed to learn how to be present. Both present before God and present with others. Because at the core of their place in life was an obsession with the external; on knowing things, on material knowledge, as opposed to building a deeper personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Church.⁠⁠

Kenneth B

The Orthodox Church is not a denomination serving an ethnic niche, nor is it one of many Christian communions that happens to have certain emphases, oddities, or decorative extras; rather, it is simply and merely the historical Christian Church.

Michael Shanbour, Know the Faith

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Bigger on the inside

My last few Sunday blogs felt pretty “meh” to me, but not this one. The post quoted in my first item particularly grabbed me as a true and wise observation that I needed to hear.

Bigger on the inside

[W]hen my friend Leah Libresco Sargeant talks about her conversion to Catholicism, she sometimes notes that focusing on the conversion story is a little bizarre. Like imagine (this is the analogy she’s used) that the Pevensie children come back from Narnia, and they start telling people about it—and everyone’s reaction is, “Oh sure, talking lion, mysterious lands, terrible betrayals and redemptions, I get it. Tell us more about the wardrobe!”

There’s been a rebound in adult conversions to Catholicism. This just seems to be true by now, as far as I can tell. … [T]here are all kinds of questions one could raise …

But the question online-people seem to want to talk about, instead, is, “Are these people converting for the right reasons?” There’s a lot of Discourse about whether people are coming to the Catholic Church because it’s right-wing (? not the most obvious option here but okay), or because they want to be manly men (hmm), or because of Catholic “influencers” etc. To put the fear or criticism most charitably, it’s a fear that people are entering the Church for a political persona, not an encounter with Jesus Christ.

And yet I guess all of this seems to me like an obsession with the wardrobe. Nobody stays in the Faith for the same reasons they converted. The Church is bigger on the inside. Having entered, you may discover how much there really is, beyond the little alcove where you happened to find a door.

…

So the real thing here is that when people enter the Church through small, weird, insufficient, or warped doors, they need wise guides to show them the path deeper in, into the heart of the Church ….

Eve Tushnet, Nobody Converts Right. Tushnet is a convert to the Roman Catholic Church, but her observations fit Orthodoxy as well (or perhaps even better; the press seems to have discovered Orthodoxy and to be hinting that it’s a dark masculinist and nationalist hotbed).

May you find yourself in a Church this morning that has depths to explore beyond “the Wardrobe,” that isn’t all “alcove.” And if you’re an old-timer there, may you be a wise guide to newcomers.

Nobody sticks right, either

At the conference, I had drinks with a devout Lutheran friend. We discovered that we shared a love for Carlos Eire’s stupendous history of Early Modern Western Christianity, Reformations. I told my friend that reading the book has caused me to realize, to my personal shock, that had I been alive back then, I might well have been tempted to join Luther, simply because of my personal temperament (that is, easily inflamed by corruption and abuse). To my surprise, my Lutheran interlocutor said reading the book made them realize that, given their deeply conservative temperament, they probably would have stayed Catholic. We got a good laugh out of that.

Rod Dreher

As hard as it must be

It would be silly for physicists to complain, “The truth about quantum mechanics is too hard!” In the same way, it would be silly for us to complain that the truth about God is too hard. The truth about God is just exactly as hard as it has to be in order to fit how things really are with Him.

J Budziszewski

Losing the trail

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

I didn’t remember that quote at all, but it perfectly fits the arc of the narrative in this, one of the most important books in my spiritual journey.

Theology as infomercial

Growing up in church, we were taught that Jesus was the answer to all our problems. We were taught that there was a circle-shaped hole in our heart and that we had tried to fill it with the square pegs of sex, drugs, and rock and roll; but only the circle peg of Jesus could fill our hole. I became a Christian based, in part, on this promise, but the hole never really went away. To be sure, I like Jesus, and I still follow him, but the idea that Jesus will make everything better is a lie. It’s basically biblical theology translated into the language of infomercials. The truth is, the apostles never really promise Jesus is going to make everything better here on earth.

Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Agree or disagree, there’s something worthy to chew on: Where in scripture is the promise of Jesus filling up a hole in you and making everything better? My initial, long-ago commitment to Christ was not based on that, but I heard that message a great deal in my teenage years.

(I was surprised to stumble across this quote because the book, which I read after it got a lot of buzz a few years ago, was almost completely unmemorable to me otherwise.)

Talking the talk

A Christian polemic—a Christian serrated edge—must be based on the Word of God, and not based on the sensibilities of men who spend Sunday mornings swaying side to side, moaning along to the newest Hillsong release.

Promotional blurb for provocateur Doug Wilson’s book The Serrated Edge. This isn’t a book or an author I would recommend, but having come across it, I’m reminded of how Wilson appeals to a certain sort (and such once was I).

Hannah Anderson profiles Wilson:

In a weird twist, evangelicals are more likely to follow the person who talks or writes about the importance of virtue than the person who is actually virtuous.
…
when you pull back the curtain to reveal the man behind it, you find someone with a history of speaking philosophically about the goodness of common life while also undermining it. You find a man who was raised within mainstream evangelicalism who intentionally chose marginality.

You find a man who speaks a lot about submission to authority while refusing to submit himself. You find a man who easily discusses the most extreme hypotheticals, seemingly unmoved by how they would actually affect the person sitting in front of him.

Wilson is not dangerous because he is an ideologue. He is dangerous because he’s comfortable entertaining radical ideas to further pragmatic ends, knowing that if they go wrong, he can always retreat to the safety of the theoretical. In this way, Wilson finds a natural home among the protected class of lawmakers and bureaucrats in Washington who seem beyond the reach of voters—who increasingly engage in the work of public policy as if it were a game or reality show, who are insulated from the consequences of their choices, who remain theoretically detached while others suffer and even die under their watch.

Hannah Anderson, The Great and Powerful Doug

Discernment

Sometimes the God Within isn’t God at all, but just the ego or the libido, using spirituality as a convenient gloss for its own desires and impulses. Sometimes your books and teachers are right, and what seems your Highest Thought is really emanating from the lower reaches of your soul.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

What is an evangelical?

For quick surveys, often tied to elections, national polls tend to measure evangelicalism by self-ID. That is, if a respondent says she is an evangelical, so she is.

This is a defensible method: replicable and quick. And it generally produces serviceable results. But it also makes evangelicalism whatever survey participants suppose it to be, which is how we have 7 to 20 percent of American Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and people of no religious affiliation telling pollsters they’re evangelical Christians.

Bonnie Kristian, There Will Never Be Another Billy Graham. The title is derived from the once-useful, now-fading, definition of an evangelical as “someone who likes Billy Graham.”

The difficulty in defining “evangelical” may be a problem, but to bring today’s post full circle, a larger problem seems to be that it’s not bigger on the inside. It’s all alcove, all the time.

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Sunday, July 12, 2026

I saw a theme trying to emerge from what I’m calling the main course, but I don’t think I teased it out successfully. Read with your heart and you may see it.

The main course

Road to Emmaus

Most Christians are presumably familiar with the account of Luke and Cleopas encountering Christ on the road to Emmaus. But I think I missed a lot about it in my years as a low-brow, then middle-brow, Protestant.

For one thing, the “between the lines” message of Luke 24:27, which is echoed in the story of the Ethiopian Eunuch:

The Old Testament is full of Christ, but a lot of it is typological, and thus easily overlooked.
We cannot rightly interpret scripture on our own, without a guide and without Christ as the interpretive key.
The details of Christ’s explanation to Luke and Cleopas, and of Philip’s explanation to the Eunuch, are surely important but are not given in scripture; that, along with John 21:25 suggests an important tradition that was not enscripturated, but passed down (from Luke and Cleopas to Philip, perhaps) in the Church, the pillar and foundation of truth.

Later, in Luke’s narrative, the double mention of Christ becoming know to the Apostles “in the breaking of bread” hints at the Eucharist. Perhaps Christ “broke bread” in a distinctive way both in the upper room and in Emmaus. I’m not now, and perhaps never, going to try to unpack that very far. Suffice that Roman Catholic and Orthodox teachers focus on different aspects of that in ways that feel complementary to me, but I sense treacherous ground here.

Orthodoxy and Syncretism

Being Orthodox in mind requires that one accept ambiguity, uncertainty, mystery, and paradox. Perhaps this encourages humility before God. We cannot rely on clever explanations or beloved definitions, and we must accept that we cannot completely explain or fully understand our faith. Therefore, we must rely solely on the grace and mercy of God. Perhaps this allows us to focus less on the mind and more on the heart, which is where we encounter God.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.

This is an amazing book, which captures better than I thought possible the experience of being Orthodox. I know that because I had been officially Orthodox for some 20 years when it came out, and had (because I’m my parish’s Cantor) attended more services that just about anyone besides Priests and Deacons, and thus was beginning to get the hang of things. But reading it and trying to think the way it describes will not make you Orthodox. Becoming Orthodox requires reception into a Parish and a lot of humble attention. Anything less will make you a syncretist.

One of the little mysteries

Yesterday I gave a friend a ride to church. She is a scholar in town this week to do some research. Because of a serious injury in a car accident last year, she can’t drive. Her ability to speak is greatly diminished, and I had to listen closely to understand what she said. After liturgy, though, her speaking was normal again. What?!

“This happens after I receive the Eucharist,” she said. “Everything is normal again, for a while.”

Rod Dreher

Propositional truth, practical results, efficiency

Discourses that could speak of the value of uncertainty and of belief as opposed to certainty, of the repetitive shaping of the self rather than a deterministic operation according to natural tendency, and of personal interaction with a God not operating according to predetermined, fixed laws-these were in a very real sense swallowed up by Western modernity’s esteem for propositional truth, practical results, and efficiency, and the languages in which these were valued.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity.

“The repetitive shaping of the self” is why being parish Cantor, which requires my presence in services that are sparsely attended, is such a blessing.

A lay Orthodoxen encounters Calvinism

I had to make a long drive yesterday, and took my reading of historian Carlos Eire’s Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650 to audiobook.

…

The long chapters on Zwingli and Calvin were amazing — but they put a chill on me. Eire explains that the dispute between Luther and the Swiss Reformers had a lot to do with metaphysics. The Reformed were strongly anti-sacramental. They believed that there was no real correspondence between the realm of the spirit and the material realm. Listening to Eire’s explanation of Reformed theology, and its fruits, I thought that this is the Perfect System designed by brilliant men who don’t understand what it means to live in a body.

Rod Dreher

For what it’s worth

Context matters

Wives, therefore, are called to submit to their husbands—not that they had much choice within the Roman Empire. What is radical, however, about Paul’s statements on marriage for this era is his command that husbands love their wives and do so self-sacrificially.

Stephen De Young, Saint Paul the Pharisee

Everything matters

I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.

Poet Evangeline Paterson (H/T Mark Noll)

An antichrist

Niebuhr counseled in Christianity and Power Politics that the “man of power is always to a certain degree an anti-Christ.” Such a sentiment would be entirely alien to TheoBros, who want nothing more than to be men of power.

Ed Simon, Where Have All the Protestants Gone?.

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

Commendation and Critique

Commendation

Evocation 1

But how could we ever relate to God or, even more challenging, truly unite with Him? Of all religions, only Orthodox theology emphasizes union with God—in a real and actual sense—as the goal and purpose of all human life. We rarely speak of “going to heaven,” as though it were a destination. We do not speak of experiencing a “beatific vision” of God, as though God could be viewed but remained at some distance from us. Rather, Orthodox Christianity speaks of theosis, the divinization of the human person. We expect, hope, and strive for actual union with the perfect, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, and changeless God. But we are flawed, limited, and come into existence for a brief time; we are confined to one place at one time, and we are constantly changing. So how is union with God possible? The Incarnation, the enfleshment of the Son of God, gave us the ability to truly connect to God and become united with Him, transformed and illumined by Him, not simply because He died for us but because of the way He lived among us.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Evocation 2

“Yes, but Christ lived in the world. He did not lock himself into a monastery.”
“Let me ask you something Thomas,” father Maximaus replied. “How many years did Christ live in the world? Thirty-three years right? How many years did he preach?”
“Almost three”
“Right. Of the Thirty-three years, he preached for only about two and a half. What was he doing the previous thirty or so years?”
“Well there is the apocryphal life of Jesus that we don’t know much about,” Thomas replied.
“That means,“ father Maximos went on to say, “for that for thirty years Christ maintained a life of silence. …”

Kyriakos Markides, The Mountain of Silence

A Wise Policy

I’m starting at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary this autumn. By your prayers, I’ll be ordained a priest in about three years.

Wisely, St. Tikhon’s does not allow seminarians to “teach.” That includes blogging and podcasting about the Faith.

Michael Warren Davis. What a wise policy! If memory serves, Davis is a fairly recent convert to the Orthodox faith from a reactionary Catholic stance — which is a second good reason why he shouldn’t be teaching (so why was I subscribing to his Substack?).

I wish we could put an effective ban on all newly-illumined Orthodoxen blogging or otherwise yammering about the faith for three years after conversion. My impression, from YouTube (since my social media practice is very narrow these days), is that, unrestrained, new converts can spew a lot of nonsense into the cybersphere.

Critique

America’s Ancestral Sin

Many say that slavery is our ancestral sin. I’m not so sure that it isn’t Puritanism. In fact, I can make a case for the outgrowth of Puritanism putting the wind in the sails of slave owners. Instead, I will lay two charges at the feet of the Calvinistic Puritans in America:

Avarice was refashioned as a virtue, and

Community was sacrificed to the solitary individual.

…

The sine qua non of Calvinism was their peculiar understanding of Predestination. The word does indeed exist, a time or two, in Scripture. But in over 1500 years, the Church never constructed an entire theological edifice upon this foundation. But to these novice Protestant interpreters of Scripture, no longer bound by the received teachings of the Church, the concept bespoke a sovereign God who had foreordained everything, and whose justice must be satisfied. Gone was the loving God of mercy, the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, etc. Gone was the forgiveness inherent in the sacramental cycle of liturgical life. In its place, a wrathful God, in His sovereign omnipotence, had decreed the fate of every living thing, and there was simply nothing that any individual could do to add or subtract from this judgment.

This doctrine was as cold and unforgiving as concrete. If that was all there was, if everyone’s fate was already cut and dried, as it were, then the best response would be to simply live the best life, with as much enjoyment and pleasure as possible, for in the end, nothing you did really mattered. There certainly wouldn’t be any need to go to church, as it wouldn’t move the needle an iota. There would be no need for preachers to pound pulpits, and no need for anyone to show up to listen to them even if they did.

Terry Cowan, Predestinated America

Like Terry, I’ve never read Max Weber’s famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but I own it now and plan to cure my unwarranted reduction of it to being something about the “Protestant work ethic.” It seems, per Cowan, that it’s more about Puritans than about Protestantism in general.

English Puritans in particular sought to shore up religious meaning by grounding it solely in the Bible and in a literalist approach to its interpretation.

In this literalist approach, ritual acts such as baptism were no longer trusted as working or signifying salvation; rather, to be saved, one must believe-in propositional, clear, biblical language-in God’s sole and definitive action in salvation, at most looking for evidence that this has taken place …Configuring salvation in these terms, the Reformation religious subject gradually became less a participant in communal, bodily ritual action, and more and more the Cartesian cogito, an individual, inward-looking possessor of knowledge drawn from evidence and analysis. If the “Cartesian moment” is that moment when as Francis Barker has asserted the self can be conceived of without the body, it is also the moment when it can be conceived of without ritual; by what might be called a Cartesian logic, the later English Reformation places efficacious signs of salvation elsewhere than church ritual, first in a literalist reading of Scripture, and ultimately in the individual conviction of the particular truths of Scripture and in the self who experiences it.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity

If you’re skeptical about Puritans being that influential:

Puritanism is the only colonial religious system that modern historians take seriously as a major religious influence on the Revolution.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

And again:

Conflating prosperity with providence and opting for acquisitiveness as the lesser of two evils until greed was rechristened as benign self-interest, modern Christians have in effect been engaged in a centuries-long attempt to prove Jesus wrong. “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” Yes we can.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Tim Keller on Fundamentalism

Keller wanted evangelicals to recognize the difference between sound doctrinal convictions and what he called the “sociological location” of churches—the cultural attitudes and practices that are merely social characteristics of Christians in particular places, not theological doctrines. Keller was no fundamentalist. He saw the return of fundamentalism in the form of the Moral Majority as part of the problem. In 2022, he began speaking of the six social marks of evangelicalism, which he essentially equated with fundamentalism. These were moralism over gracious engagement, individualism over social reform, dualism over a comprehensive vision of life, anti-intellectualism over scholarship, anti-institutionalism over accountability, and enculturation over cultural reflection.

Dale Coulter, Remembering Tim Keller

Creationism

The word creationism by rights should define all who discern a divine mind at work in, with, or under the phenomena of the natural world. Yet by a most unfortunate set of events, the term has come to mean only the view that God created the world ten thousand or fewer years ago and that God used a worldwide flood in the days of Noah to form the geological conditions that most modern scientists think reveal an ancient earth with evolutionary changes over great expanses of time.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

I agree with Noll. I applied the term “creationist” to myself until, sometime during law school (where lunchtime bull sessions were far-ranging), I learned that “creationism” had become a term of art for “young-earth creationism” — a position I’m not sure I ever held (though it’s likely I did hold it as an adolescent in an evangelical boarding school).

I wonder whether the young-earth creationists themselves contributed to that narrowing by calling guys like me CINOs (Creationist in Name Only) or something like that.

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.

Sunday of the Blind Man

This thing never seen before, American Orthodoxy

On an Australian podcast episode, exploring an emerging narrative that the American Orthodoxy is full of toxic, hypermasculine “Orthobros,” Khouria Frederica Matthewes-Green expressed appreciation for how Orthodox Christianity doesn’t change. Another participant, Fr. Doru Costache, challenged that by noting, correctly, that the Liturgy we do now isn’t exactly what the Orthodox Church used to do.

Now on her blog, Frederica replies:

It’s possible that people raised in the Orthodox Church, “cradle Orthodox” (I’ll adopt Fr. Doru’s term), don’t see the Church’s essential changelessness like outsiders do, because they’ve never experienced the raucous, rending change that drove converts to their doors. I could only think, you have no idea what I mean by “change.”

Change is when your bishop says that the Theotokos was not a virgin, and the evangelist Matthew “invented the Virgin Birth to respond to criticism that Jesus was a bastard.”

Change is when your bishop says it wouldn’t matter if an archeologist found Jesus’ remains, because the Resurrection was not “a conjuring trick with bones.”

Change is when a Protestant pastor asks his bishop what he thinks of a famous bishop’s assertion that Jesus did not rise from the dead, and he replies, “I haven’t made up my mind about that yet.”

(This pastor told me, “I went home and started packing.” He ended up as an Orthodox priest.)

Change is when a national gathering of bishops doesn’t have enough votes to pass this resolution: “Clergy should abstain from sex outside of marriage.”

Change is when a diocesan convention doesn’t have enough votes to pass this resolution: “Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father except by him” (John 14:6).

Or, to go from tragedy to absurdity:

Change is when your bishop builds a giant “helter skelter” carnival ride inside the cathedral.

Isn’t there something really creepy about this? Creepy in a Tolkien sense. [Fox News 2019-8-8; photo PA News Agency, dist. by Associated Press]

Change is when your bishop builds a mini-golf course inside the cathedral.

One clever journalist called it a “Fairway to Heaven.” [BBC.com, 2019-7-30]

Change is—and “God Forbid” indeed—a “clown communion service.”

…

Oh yes indeed, I know what change looks like. But the evolution of the Liturgy in the early centuries? That’s not what I mean by “change.”

The Changeless Core. When I say Orthodoxy is changeless, I mean that there is an inner core that persists across all nations and jurisdictions, across all centuries. It is a practical thing, a way to get closer to Christ. And that’s what I love about Orthodoxy, that it has brought me closer to him. (Fr. Doru asked “Why so much effervescence?” That’s why.) The Apostles must have known this deep-rooted longing, and it stretches from them to the present, through everyone who loves him, through all the ages.

Krouria Frederica’s blog post, Cradles, Converts, and Orthobros, is unusually long, and convincingly takes on some falsities in current media narratives about Orthodoxy.

I appreciate the narratives, perversely, as milestone of sorts. I entered the Church realizing how different it was, and that it was at least a tacit rebuke to modern Western Christianity (and culture). But almost nobody was attacking or critiquing it; we were too few, too “ethnic,” to be taken seriously. For an example, my Christian Reformed pastor, with whom I spoke about my interest in Orthodoxy, could only critique it as if it were Roman Catholicism.

So as I entered Orthodoxy, I braced myself for the day (for I had a gut feeling Orthodoxy was going to grow in America) when we were big enough to be attacked and critiqued more often.

So no, you can’t prove by me that there are any Orthobros in the Church (as opposed to internet noise or guys who show up with some twisted thinking but lose it in catechesis), but I appreciate that you’re taking us seriously enough now to concoct lurid narratives.

An aside: I notice on re-reading them, that the quotes above about real “change” all involve bishops. Khouria Frederica and her husband came to Orthodoxy from the Episcopal Church, ECUSA, which has long had notorious bishops (Bishop Pike being the first one I remember). So, much as I contrast Orthodoxy with Evangelicalism, she contrasts it, mostly, with Episcopalianism and progressive outposts in Roman Catholicism.

But don’t think that “lower” churches are exempt from baneful changes. Khouria Frederica, beginning with a section under the rubric “More masculine,” compared to what? writes about changes and distortions that, in my impression, mostly occur in Churches that try to avoid “liturgy” and denominational ties.

Back to the main subject, with a little stage-setting. I’m a Cantor in my parish. I have duties in my Parish that keep me from being a roving sociologist of Orthodoxy in America generally. I probably haven’t been in more than a dozen other parishes over my nearly thirty years in Orthodoxy, and I’ve only been in a handful of liturgies overseas during travels (and most of them were in monastic settings).

That my mental stage when I got to Khouria Frederica’s final thoughts, which opened new mental vistas for me (and made me suspect that my parish “vibe” is pretty typical of American Orthodoxy):

I tried to express this to Fr. Doru, but went overtime, and some of it was cut from the ending of the show. But here’s a summary of what I wanted to say, with some further thoughts that came to me, as I drove on into the night:

Penitence. I love Romanian Orthodoxy. I was blessed to have Fr. George Calciu, a survivor of Soviet torture, for my spiritual father. And I loved Fr Roman Braga, another survivor of the prisons. It was something Fr. Roman said that I’m thinking about now.

Fr. Roman Braga at his third arrest, 1958

Fr. Roman always said that every ethnic group has to work out its own kind of Orthodoxy. Americans will have to make an American Orthodoxy, and it won’t look like Romanian or Greek or any other kind. We will create our own American kind of Orthodoxy.

But I suspect that this American kind will be offensive, to some … We’re too loud, too bold, too informal. We smile too much … it’s just what Americans are like. We laugh, we’re loud, we’re expansive.

An example of the difference is that cradle Orthodox don’t want to have noisy children or babies in the church. People raised in Orthodoxy have a profound sense of awe about the temple, and treat the building itself with great respect. So they say, “Don’t bring a baby in the church! This is a holy temple, not a nursery!”

But Americans like having babies in church. They say, “If you can’t hear crying, the church is dying!” A church with wandering toddlers, and little boys gazing at a candle flame, and schoolgirls cuddling newborns—all that seems exactly right.

I know how beautiful Orthodoxy is, so I need to ask your forgiveness, because what Americans are going to do with it might look cheap to you. It might look like marketing. It might even look disrespectful. It won’t look like Romanian Orthodoxy. It will be the Orthodoxy that grows out of our distinctive American life. Forgive me, forgive us, for what we are nevertheless going to do, as we create this thing never seen before, American Orthodoxy.

It’s not just babies we welcome. It’s visitors, too. Come and see.

Apophatic

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.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.

I experienced this apophatic approach to theology, gradually over decades losing my tendency toward being the kind of person who today cataphatically thinks, oh, for instance, that he could create a computer administered questionnaire that would logically force people to confess the correct version of Christianity.^*

Only then did I encounter neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist. Getting to know McGilchrist confirms for me the deep wisdom of the Orthodox way, and I believe McGilchrist has been quoted as saying that if he became a Christian (in the narrow sense, not “culturally Christian”), he would be Orthodox.

In my mind, this is closely related to what I consider the Orthodox view of the Nicene Creed and the Ecumenical Councils more generally.

Ecumenical Councils are not summoned because Bishops need some way to spend their lavish expense accounts (as if!). They are called because of the perception that some rascally teacher or teaching is threatening the Church. A Council convenes, considers the matter, and declares the mind of the Church. At the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople, two of the earliest Councils, they considered the teachings of rascally Arius, condemned them, and set forth the Church’s mind in the form of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, typically shortened to “Nicene Creed.”

In Orthodoxy, we call the Creed “the Symbol of Faith,” which itself signals our view: the Creed is not, and was never intended to be, a precis of all mandatory parts of the faith.

As a consequence of this limited role of Councils, I view the Creed and the Canons to be markers of boundaries to keep the faithful safe — as if to say “this is a cliff; stay away!” or “here be dragons.” That leaves a whole lot of geography in which believers can and do move around fairly freely.

As in paradise, so many delights are allowed, so few forbidden — and even that for our good.

(^* Actual delusion, but I was a Calvinist at the time.)

The cultural formations of western Christianity

Christianity as we see it in eighteenth-century Britain or twenty-first-century America is not Christianity as it has always been, and the more fundamental changes may not be those that the received history of religion narrates. The cultural formations of western Christianity, growing as they do in good part from binary, Protestant-Catholic debates, can be thrown into stark relief, for instance, when studied in comparison to that much neglected third term in Christendom: the Eastern Orthodox churches from which Rome severed itself nearly half a millennium before the Reformation, charting a course for Western Christianity wed to rationalism and enamored of individual authority, whether papal or personal.

Lori Branch, Conclusion: on the Religiousness of Criticism in her book Rituals of Spontaneity.

I just noticed, with much delight, Branch’s gimlet-eyed phrase “the Eastern Orthodox churches from which Rome severed itself” (italics added). This Great Schism is one of those fundamental changes that in received Church history in the West almost invariably inverts, by commentators Catholic, Protestant or unbelieving — who assume reflexively that four patriarchs in a pentarchy severed themselves from the fifth, which on the face of it is less plausible than the one severing from the four.

Something that sticks with me

Some decades ago, the late Richard John Neuhaus coined (so far as I know; I’d never heard it before) the term “ecclesial Christian.” He describe an ecclesial Christian as one for whom faith in Christ and faith in His Church is one act of faith, not two. (That may not be exact, but it’s how I’ve appropriated it for myself.)

I feel compelled to surface the term periodically to try popularizing it.

In the American fissiparous (there I go again!) nondenominational/megachurch/religiopreneur environment, the term is useful, and maybe even necessary, to demarcate the boundary between that sort chaos from a handful of Christian traditions in which the Church is central, not just more or less helpful to individual believers.

I was probably on the chaos side when I first encountered the term (I think it was the early ‘90s, the early days of First Things magazine) but it stuck with me, and I now, though firmly Orthodox, I feel a special kinship with ecclesial Christians outside my specific faith.

Christian America

Sociologists who look at American politics right now say that a major thing that’s driving our politics, maybe the major thing among white evangelicals, is that this is the group that has always assumed it should have the predominant role in American society. It’s the founding faith. It’s what the founders were.

David French and Jonathan Rauch, What if Our Democracy Can’t Survive Without Christianity?

No, the founders were not evangelicals, especially not in the contemporary devolved sense. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it. David Barton and his ilk have never persuaded me otherwise.

Far too good

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Flash: Hot-headed convert grows into Saint!

As a new convert, [St. Seraphim Rose] had some pretty strange views … Fr. Seraphim called it the “crazy convert” phase. But as he got older, more mature, he outgrew those views—as we hopefully do. And he helped his spiritual children to do the same. And that is what made him a saint.

He came to realize that what Orthodoxy had to offer isn’t a pure, unbroken tradition. It’s not a perfect adherence to the canons. It doesn’t make us better than everyone else. No! Fr. Seraphim said (and this is a quote):

The deepest and most attractive thing about Orthodoxy today is its message of love. The most discouraging thing about today’s world is that it has become so cold and heartless. In the Gospel of St. Matthew our Lord tells us that a leading characteristic of the last times will be that the love of many will grow cold. And the Apostle of love, St. John the Theologian, records our Lord as saying that the chief distinguishing mark of His disciples is the love they have one for another.

(…)

Being filled with the Gospel teaching and trying to live by it, we should have love and compassion for the miserable humanity of our days. Probably never have people been more unhappy than the people of our days, even with all the outward conveniences and gadgets our society provides us with. People are suffering and dying for the lack of God, and we can help give God to them. The love of many has truly grown cold in our days—but let us not be cold. As long as Christ sends us His grace and warms our hearts, we do not need to be cold.

Michael Warren Davis, on Monk-Priest Seraphim Rose, who reposed in 1982, and is now becoming officially recognized as an Orthodox Saint.

15th Antiphon for Matins of Great and Holy Friday

I sing it at Church, but my friend and colleague Bethany is obviously ready to step up when I auger in.

Saint John Climacus Sunday, 2026

Our inescapable reality

Nor does this allow for any kind of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox triumphalism, whereby the historical continuity and unity of the institutions can be presented as an antidote to Protestant fragmentation. To be a Roman Catholic today is to make a choice. Thoughtful Roman Catholics may object to this claim by pointing to the sacramental power that they ascribe to baptism. But that does not really address the matter of lived experience: every faithful cradle Catholic has still made a decision to live his or her Christian life as a Catholic amid a world of other possible options, from atheism to Islam to Bible churches and Pentecostalism. When it comes to how we think of ourselves, we are all expressive individualists now, and there is no way we can escape from this fact. It is the essence of the world in which we have to live and of which we are a part.

Carl Trueman and Rod Dreher, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Provincial

A giant in the Evangelical world, John M. Perkins, has died at age 95. I clipped two obituaries for later reading. When I got around to reading the first, I was struck by the provincialism of an indictment Perkins handed down in 1987:

I think that makes a difference between whether or not that church is an action church or whether it’s just become a self-centered worshipping congregation. And I think most churches are sort of self-centered worshipping. They see the church as ‘meeting my need, meeting my need,’ and the church doesn’t have a ministry, and a concept of ministry, and a philosophy of ministry, and a statement of mission to the world.

(Italics added.)

Perkins was an evangelical, and one mark of evangelicalism is activism (to the neglect of so much else, in my opinion). His indictment is of evangelicals, and for not living up to an intentional and full-orbed activism — not living up well to his vision of how things should be.

Self-centered worshipping congregation is an oxymoron (hypothetical self-worship aside). To worship is to ascribe high worth to another. So this indictment starts off wrong-footed.

The he shifts voice, from talking about a congregation to the demand of each individual member — “meeting my need, meeting my need.” And there is where he, and much of evangelicalism, miss the boat.

They really have made Church about “meeting my felt need” in an effort geared more toward growth than toward making disciples.

Frederica Matthewes-Greene wrote of inviting a friend to her Orthodox Church. At the end of the Liturgy, her friend exclaimed “Wow! That was soooo not about me!” And I’d say Church in the 21st Century can be perceived as “meeting my need” by the masses only if it’s pandering to something other than real human needs, the foremost of which is to move from the image of God to the image and likeness of God, to grow God-ward.

Unfortunately, that’s not on evangelical radar.

Overlearned

Freddie DeBoer had a post this week on “overlearning,” which he descibed as:

the error … that learns too much, that overfits the curve, that extrapolates irresponsibly, that takes a genuinely correct observation and rides it so far past its destination that it ends up somewhere just as wrong as pure ignorance, only with more confidence.

He gives many examples, such as extrapolating a dismissal of all social science research because much of it fails replication.

Without looking for them, I found a few artifacts of overlearning in Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind:

The wood and stone from which idols are made do not deserve to be worshiped; because God made them, however, they deserve to be studied as wood or stone.

And:

I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance. (Irish poet Evangeline Paterson)

A book note

A few years ago, I tried to read The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, but I quit because it felt voyeuristic for me, an Orthodox convert from Evangelical and Evangelical-adjacent Christianity, to read it. But my interest shifted from finding fodder for schadenfreude to figuring out how it came to pass that something went scandalously wrong with one of America’s most visible and vocal Christian traditions. So I read it afresh, finishing this past week.

As the author, Mark Noll, wound down, he had this summary:

The scandal of the evangelical mind seems to be that no mind arises from evangelicalism. Evangelicals who believe that God desires to be worshiped with thought as well as activity may well remain evangelicals, but they will find intellectual depth — a way of praising God through the mind — in ideas developed by confessional or mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, or perhaps even the Eastern Orthodox. That conclusion may be the only responsible one to reach after considering the history sketched in this book. Even if it leaves evangelical intellectuals trapped in personal dissonance and the evangelical tradition doomed to intellectual superficiality (or worse), the recent past seems to point in no other direction.

A fair clarification of that paragraph, in context, is that there seems to be no mind that arises from what is distinctly evangelical about evangelical Christianity: conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism (in a classic and widely-accepted taxonomy), to which Noll crucially adds intuitionism, a dogmatic reverence for “common sense.” It is particularly intuitionism that must be set aside for an evangelical even to have the patience to engage in the sustained, intense study of a subject that characterizes a life of the mind.

So evangelicals can live the life of the mind by adopting what I’d call “methodological mere Christianity,” much as, I’ve come to suspect from outside the sciences, a scientist who hopes to contribute to specifically scientific knowledge, will need to adopt methodological naturalism even if his personal convictions are not naturalist.

That’s not a conclusion I anticipated when I decided return to Noll’s book and finish it, and it leaves me with the kinds of personal questions that make the reading worthwhile.

An unexpected answer to fervent prayer

I pray fervently that Mr. Dreher will return to the Catholic Church—not only for his sake, but for ours. I’m afraid the Benedict Option project will remain incomplete until Mr. Dreher commits to restoring the Holy Catholic Church as the central pillar of Western Christianity.

Michael Warren Davis, September 25, 2020.

Within four years of this plea, Michael Warren Davis left the Catholic Church and entered the Orthodox Church. He currently writes a Substack.

A Contrast

Shortly before he died in 1860, George Croly penned the prayer “Spirit of God, Descend upon My Heart.” In its second stanza Croly described what he felt would happen if he were to experience a deeper walk with the Spirit:

I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
No sudden rending of the veil of clay,
No angel visitant, no opening skies;
But take the dimness of my soul away.

For Croly, to know God better would make our vision of the world clearer. In 1922, Helen H. Lemmel wrote the words and music to a gospel song that is as moving as it is characteristic of the fundamentalist-Holiness outlook:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace.

While the essentially Christian motivation of this song is clear, its ironic meaning can be understood better now than when it was written — under the influence of fundamentalism, evangelicals turned their eyes to Jesus, and the world grew very dim indeed.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

The “science” of theology

“The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches…. The duty of the Christian theologian is to ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to Him. These facts are all in the Bible.” On the basis of these assertions, [Charles] Hodge then went on to suggest that “the Theologian [is] to be guided by the same rules as the Man of Science.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God. I am dumbstruck by the arrogance of this, and humbled at the thought that 30 years ago I probably would have applauded it.

It is very difficult to make our contemporaries see that there are things which by their very nature cannot be discussed.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World.

Satan at work

The accusation that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city are abducting and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs relies not on one falsehood but on a web of them. The rhetoric evokes racist tropes about “savages” who do not conform to our civilized Western world. There’s also a religious angle: the idea that Haitian refugees are voodoo occultists who might be worshipping the devil. As an evangelical Christian who actually believes in the existence of Satan, I agree that we can indeed see the work of the devil at play here, only it’s not on the menu of the Haitian families but rather in the cruelty of those willing to lie about them.

…

To sing praise songs in a church service while trafficking in the bearing of false witness against people who fled for their life, who seek to rebuild a life for their children after crushing poverty and persecution, is more than just cognitive dissonance. It’s modeling the devil himself, whom Jesus called “the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). That’s especially true when the lies harm another person. “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer,” the apostle John wrote, “and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 Jn 3:15).

Russell Moore, Trump’s Lie Is Another Test for Christian America.

I have a beef with Moore: if memory serves, this was JD Vance’s lie before Trump picked it up with delight and ran with it.