(This brief blog likely will be of interest only to Orthodox readers.)
I had unsubscribed to the Ochlophobist blog for a while because he got off, it seemed to me, on an unedifying prolonged rant against the Antiochian Archdiocese. But I can report that it’s relatively safe to go back in the water again, and that this March 8 posting made me wince in a most edifying way. And of his past 25 blogs, the only one that poked at things Antiochian seemed fairly well-placed.
(This may be the most controversial and polemical thing I’ve posted. I’ll tell you in advance, and in conclusion, that I’m disinclined to be dogmatic about most of it. Your mileage may vary.)
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One of the minor irritants in my life is Franky Schaeffer. I’ll go long spells without thinking of him, and then I get a catalogue from his publishing company, or maybe he pops up in the news (having once again found limelight). And I seethe.
But lots of people love limelight. Why does he, of all people, irritate me? Probably because his life is so parallel to mine, through all the twists and turns.
But he’s too strident and angry. He’s sort of a Christian James Howard Kunstler (another approximate contemporary of mine) but without Kunstler’s ubiquitous F-Bombs. Kunstler acknowledges that his speeches are a form of theater (listen to Kunstlercast #103 here); I think that’s true of Schaeffer, too, though he’d probably deny it.
I sense, too, that my reasons for dropping out of the culture wars are different than Schaeffer’s. I sense that partly because he seemingly just changed sides, now inveighing against his former friends, writing screeds, kiss and tell books, dubious fiction (his Calvin Becker fiction trilogy was quite calculatedly ambiguous about the extent to which it was autobiographical), paranoid apologies for Barack Obama, and sucking up to media personages who call him things like “a former leader of the anti-choice movement.” (They just love to get some sound-bites from an angry ex-whatever.)
But I really dropped out because:
1. The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms. We may get a majority vote for the “right” side on this issue or that, but that will not end the war. There will be other battles. There will be guerilla warfare. There will be no peace, and there’s only a minimal chance for the “Right” to win. Not until the Right’s own culture changes.
Changing culture is the work I’m about now – feeling my way rather than barreling ahead. That’s much subtler work than culture war. I’m not sure how good I am at it. But I’m convinced, to take just one Culture War example, that we won’t stop abortion until we change the toxic combination of unchastity and avarice that gets women pregnant and then justifies aborting the innocent child to maintain prosperity (greater or lesser).
The Right is not with us on that. Fox Radio recently aired an ad, between Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly, for an online service for married men seeking adulterous affairs. (I didn’t hear it, but read about it from someone who didn’t note the incongruity of this appearing on a putatively conservative news source.)
Whaddya think? I’m betting that the ad wasn’t there for the 13 liberals who were eavesdropping on Fox that day, but for the red-meat, red state regulars.
TownHall.com syndicated columnist pages every day have ads for “conservative” slogan t-shirts draped on attractive young lasses, selling conservative politics, like everything else, with sex. Today there’s a sexy avatar for some video game, too. It’s all a racket.
This could as well go under the caption “I don’t really trust my former allies.” But on present terms I think the idiocy of modern pseudo-conservatives belongs in this “unwinnable” category, if only because their position on the sexual side of the culture wars seems to be “anything goes, so long as it’s not gay.” That’s a losing position long-term as well as being a sign of untrustworthiness.
2. The Culture Wars are unwinnable on present terms partly because stridency and contempt beget stridency, contempt and alienation.
Whichever side of the Culture Wars you’re on, think about the fundraising letters you get. Are you edified by their tone? Do you appreciate the sober, educational emphasis? Do you find yourself walking away with something of substance to ruminate on?
If so, I’ve got bad news for you: you’re an idiot. (Shall I write that slower? You. Are. An. Idiot.)
The groups who used to send me fairly sober letters have gone strident. The groups that used to send me strident letters are now frothing at the mouth. And I’m sure the other side is doing the same. Shrill is the new green.
I don’t care who fired the first volley. That’s lost in the mists of history like the instigation of the Hatfields versus the McCoys. I’d like the shooting to stop. I’d like artificial divisions to end. I suspect there’s more common ground than either side presently will admit because of how things have been framed. Let’s tone it down a bit and then explore what the real divisions are. The more we insult the other side, the more we paint both sides into corners from which dialog, let alone truce, is impossible.
3. The culture wars are unwinnable on the present terms, too, because there’s darned little difference between the two sides on some of the deep presuppositions.
They’re both, ironically, secular. One side is secular because they don’t believe in any divine rules. You know which side I’m talking about. (Hint)
The other side – my side – is mostly secular because they functionally believe that God’s only presence in the world is His rules. They “honor” Him by keeping his rules – sort of the way a rank amateur “paints” by number. That’s why I don’t really trust them. The tranformative significance of the Incarnation: God the Son, Who took on our flesh forever – qui sedes ad dexteram patrem (who sits at the right hand of the Father) in resurrected human flesh – is lost on them. God is up to something more than commandment monitoring and forgiving transgression of the commandments. The incarnation changes everything.
“Love God and do as you will” would strike them as modern relativism. They’re very anti-relativist. Except on Ecclesiology. Then they’re apt to utter Babbitry like “Isn’t it swell that there’s a church for every taste!”
At the other end from the relativist “conservatives,” there’s a Protestant Church in my home town that produces a disproportionate share of Religious Right activists. Several of them have been elected to public office. But they’re theonomists, or more specifically Reconstructionists. If they had their way, there would be 18 Old Testament Capital Crimes in our law books – including sassing parents. They’d shut down my Church and desecrate its icons. They might, for all I know, execute me for one of those 18 capital offenses for the icons in my home prayer corner.
“And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of …” the folks I encountered who dreamed of kingdoms, feigned righteousness, broke promises, shot off their mouths, tried to set fires, escaped the edge of euphemisms …. (Cf. Hebrews 11:32-34) These are the folks with whom I’d be a “co-belligerent” (Francis Schaeffer’s coinage to distinguish temporary and unreliable political friends from reliable “allies”) were I to continue in the culture wars. And they outnumber many-fold any well-formed Christians of historical and liturgical bent.
We Orthodox have been here before. After the attempted union with the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Florence (see also here), the Orthodox decided they’d risk rule by Sultan over rule by Pope.
That is not a throw-away line: I’m not so sure a secularist regime would be worse than what Christian Reconstructionists would bring upon me and my fellow Orthodox Christians that I’m willing to be bedfellows with Recontructionists.
4. In the current terms of the Culture War, the highest form of involvement, other than sending money in response to strident or frenzied letters, is to vote for Republicans. Any Republican.
In 2000 and 2004, it was Dubya. He was, we were told, a good Evangelical Christian. He cited Jesus as his favorite philosopher. He talked about America walking humbly in the foreign policy world.
Then 9-11 came, and he turned into a fierce Commander In Chief. And, oddly, Imam-In-Chief, as he assured us that “true Islam is a religion of peace.” (Well I’m glad he cleared that up!)
And then came, too, the second inaugural, when he declared as U.S. policy the eradication of tyranny from the world and the planting of democracy. If you don’t understand how delusional that is, read it again: eradicating tyranny from the world. As national policy.
Many Religious Right figures in 2008 backed Mitt Romney, Mormon and heir of a 50s moderate Republican, George Romney. Mitt was, deep down, one of us – despite his left-leaning administration as governor of Massachusetts – they assured us. Now they’re pushing Sarah Palin, about whom I’ll not say much except that I do not now support her and see no sign that she has the goods to gain my support later. (I don’t even think she’s all that “hot,” for whatever that’s worth.)
I’m not gonna play Charlie Brown the placekicker to the GOP’s Lucy Van Pelt any more.
5. I still believe pretty much what I believed before on what makes for good living and a just society. I’ve even kept a hand in the debates by writing letters to the editor on a few hot-button issues. Those letters are far less demonizing of the opposition than the sort of letters I used to write. But I check the online comboxes and see that the other side has no lack of equally-but-oppositely mad partisans of its own, leveling vitriolic attacks on me, no matter how reasoned my argument, just because I reach conclusions they don’t like.
But even at more elite levels than smalltown cyberpaper comboxes, I’m still convinced that the other side is untrustworthy. One occasionally will catch one of them committing candor, as has Chai Felblum of Georgetown law school. Imagine a constitutional case with this issue:
Whether the inferred right to marry a member of the same sex, which is inferred from the right to engage in homosexual sodomy, which is inferred from the right to privacy, which is inferred from penumbra of he 4th, 9th, 10th, 14th and other consitutional amendments, is of sufficient constitutional gravity to warrant compromise of the explicit constitutional command against laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion?
Chai Feldblum would answer “yes.” I’m not making up her response (though I did make up the highly tendentious – but brutally accurate – faux issue statement). I appreciate her candor.
But her candor tells me that there’s no home for me in the left where Frank Schaeffer has seemingly pitched his tent.
The Orthodox Wedding service includes, for just one example, “grant unto these Your servants …a peaceful life, length of days, chastity, love for one another in a bond of peace, offspring long‑lived, fair fame by reason of their children, and a crown of glory that does not fade away.” You can’t pray that with integrity over a same-sex coupling, whatever you might think of it otherwise.
So while the Chai Feldblums of the world might not smash my icons like the Reconstructionists, they’ll soon enough take away my Church’s tax exemption, or otherwise put on the squeeze, because they’ll consider us a hate group for continuing the two-millennia-long practice of connecting marriage to procreation.
6. If I’m a prominent culture warrior, it will spill over harmfully into other areas of life. I was reminded Sunday how diverse my parish is. We have Romanians and Russians who were born, or even came of age, under communism. We have Greeks who think that 2nd Amendment mania is barbaric (in at least one case with justification that I can’t gainsay – a family member gunned down in cold blood by someone who went postal). We have young people and middle-aged academics who lean left. We have demographically unknown visitors most Sundays. I have something to learn from some of them.
Just as I don’t want someone to ask me “why are you here since you’re not Greek?,” I don’t want people of Right-leaning disposition to come up to me at Church and make some dismissive remark, which they assume I’ll find hilarious or profound, about a Left-leaning idea that may be held by another parishioner within earshot. I don’t want there to be ethnic, racial, socio-economic or political barriers to people. Political trash talk about trifles at Church is apt to drive people away though we have a faith in common and should be together on Sunday.
7. Maybe I should try a bit more empathy. Maybe I’m not angry because, unlike Frank Schaeffer, I have a day job, with a comfortable living, and don’t have to raise a fuss to sell my newest book. Maybe a brain or personality disorder prompted Franky to call Barack Obama’s election “miraculous” and to prophesy epochal political healing on Obama’s watch.
Maybe Frank’s suburban Boston parish (I think he’s in Brookline, Michael Dukakis‘ hometown) has a leftist litmus test and he caved in. Or maybe he’s rebelling against his upbringing in neutral Switzerland as I declare myself a Swiss-like neutral in the Culture Wars.
Or maybe I’m not angry, by and large, because I’m a child of the 60s, a former Conscientious Objector to conventional war, and now old enough that I’m kind of tired of fighting of all sorts – worn out, if you will. Maybe we really need young, testosterone-crazed Christian guys (and gals crazed by whatever crazes women) who still are eager for a fight. I see my role as one to ask questions of any such young hotheads from the perspective six decades gives. Such as the ones implied by what I’ve just written.
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So who am I hangin’ out with these days if not with the Alliance Defense Fund and the acolytes of R.J. Rushdoony? Check the bloglinks to the right* – Especially Front Porch Republic (“Place. Limits. Liberty.”), Distributist Review (guardedly). Small Is Beautiful has taken on new meaning for me. (My benighted generation got a few things right before we sold out or got complacent – and appreciating E.F. Schumaker was one of them).
I can’t even rule out Father Stephen. Nothing he writes is “about politics,” but everything he writes is about sane, human and humane living, which surely connects up somehow.
Basically, I’m going back and rethinking all things political and cultural. I’m wisdom-hunting. I read Wendell Berry essays and poetry, Bill Kauffman books, Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, Scott Cairns’ Poetry, W.H. Auden (“For the Time Being” is now on my list for every Advent).
My conversion to Orthodox Christianity started it in a way. I soon realized that the Church has not always prevailed, and has produced martyrs in every century. And that’s okay. Better we should lose honorably than win by selling our souls.
I really don’t intend to channel Fr. Stephen day-by-day. You can subscribe yourself, after all. I don’t even intend to have Orthodox testimonials as a regular feature. That’s a worthy goal, but I bring nothing unique to such efforts.
But for the second day in a row Fr. Stephen has hit it out of the park, contrasting the Orthodox view of salvation to views common today – a theme that “recurs because it is so fundamental to the Christian faith and is at the same time largely unknown in our modern world.” Indeed it is.
Reduced to aphorism, the Orthodox view is that “Christ did not come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live.”
We have a problem that is rooted in the very nature of our existence, not in our behavior. We behave badly because of a prior problem. Good behavior will not correct the problem.
The sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit view that Christ indeed came to make bad men good strikes me as a variety of “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”
It is the deism that distinguishes the non-Orthodox view at issue today from the view that Christ came to secure the forensic declaration of our righteousness so we could get into heaven. This view I know first-hand to be common among evangelicals, fundamentalists and Calvinists – all of which I arguably have been in the past, though I would have denied being a fundamentalist.
Among the ramifications of the Orthodox view are some interesting comments Fr. Stephen makes about drinkin’ ‘n smokin’ and other fundy taboos.
Father Stephen posted Wednesday one of his best blogs in weeks, by my lights.
This one captured eloquently a big factor in my embrace of Orthodoxy: salvation as ontological change more than forensic transaction.
There is no denying that grace is a free gift and that it is the true means of our salvation. But what if our problem is not to be primarily understood in legal terms? What if that which needs saving about us is not our guilt before the law of God, but the ravages worked within our heart and life from the presence of sin and death? This is probably the point where many discussions about salvation fall apart. If one person has in mind primarily a forensic salvation (I go to heaven, I don’t go to hell), while the other is thinking primarily in terms of an ontological change (I am corrupted and dying and were I to go to heaven I’d still be corrupted and dying). The debate comes down to a question of whether we need a change of status (forensic) or a change within our very heart.
The italicized parts are Father Stephen’s eloquent expression of what hit me early on the road to Orthodoxy. It’s a lot of what kept me on that road, in fact.
When I was in my Christian boarding school, I was taught that salvation could be broken down into justification, sanctification and glorification – a dim and dumb reflection of the more glorious truth. I now tend to think that justification – in the stark forensic sense of God pronouncing me righteous – is all but meaningless if I don’t cooperate with Him in beginning to become righteous in fact, not in legal fiction. And remarkably enough, it doesn’t feel like some sort of living martyrdom. There’s real, deep joy in the journey.
Unless I do get to work on becoming conformed to His image, becoming a “partaker of the divine nature,” I’d probably storm out of heaven, breaking a few plates or punching a hole in the wall on my way out, after spending my threescore and ten living entirely for myself and then finding out that heaven isn’t about me.
As Father Stephen puts it, “were I to go to heaven I’d still be corrupted and dying.” And I’ll make life a bit more nasty, and Christianity of my sort more distasteful, as I experience corruption and dying here, as poor Antsy McClain experienced one day:
Don’t miss his second (of three) potent points:
The life of grace is central to our existence as Christians and must not become secularized. In a secular understanding, the Church has a role to play in a larger scheme of things (the secular world).
No, the secular world is passing away. The Church is “the larger scheme of things.”
Can you identify the third major point? It’s the one I’ve been slowest making habitual to my thought patterns. I get about half of it, and I’m starting to get the other half. Maybe other people grasp it more readily.
Mosab Hassan Yousef, now 32, was the son of a key Hamas leader, who he seems still to admire despite having secretly embraced Christianity and then becoming a spy for Israel’s Shin Bet:
He’s a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he’s doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn’t matter if he’s a terrorist or a traditional Muslim.
Living now around San Diego, Yousef
says he had reached the conclusion that terrorism can’t be defeated without a new understanding of Islam. Here he echoes other defectors from Islam such as the former Dutch parliamentarian and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
So much for his theories about terrorism and Islam, which I offer to introduce Yousef and to provoke thought about Islam if the reader be so inclined.
What’s really interesting to me is Yousef’s reason for embracing Christianity:
“I found that I was really drawn to the grace, love and humility that Jesus talked about,” he says in “Son of Hamas.”
Mr. Yousef has some of the evangelist in him, even as he insists he is not a particularly devoted Christian and is still learning about his new religion. He wants Palestinians and Israelis to learn what he did from the Christian God.
…
“I converted to Christianity because I was convinced by Jesus Christ as a character, as a personality. I loved him, his wisdom, his love, his unconditional love. I didn’t leave [the Islamic] religion to put myself in another box of religion. At the same time it’s a beautiful thing to see my God exist in my life and see the change in my life. I see that when he does exist in other Middle Easterners there will be a change.
“I’m not trying to convert the entire nation of Israel and the entire nation of Palestine to Christianity. But at least if you can educate them about the ideology of love, the ideology of forgiveness, the ideology of grace. Those principles are great regardless, but we can’t deny they came from Christianity as well.”
I have an enduring intuition that there are millions in the United States – Muslims, Jews, New Agers, Wiccans, Druids, self-declared Agnostics and Atheists, and even lapsed Christians – who are secretly drawn to Jesus Christ “as a character, as a personality,” and who love him, his wisdom, his unconditional love.
But they hear from some prominent Churches (or is it many? I’ve lost touch with that subculture, but I know it was around within my lifetime) a message that sounds too much like Jonathan Edwards’ “Angry God,” a staple of English lit classes when I was younger.
Or just as likely, they see in mainstream Christianity or in the Megachurches (the effete spiritual descendants of Edwards; “Entropy: It’s Not Just About Physics Any More”) a moralistic therapeutic deism that they can do quite well without, thank you. I have an often-oblivious, sometimes-perceptive friend who was frank and perceptive when he said that the sermons in his mainstream Church were such smarmy encouragement they weren’t worth his time. He could do better, quicker, elsewhere if he wanted a pep talk.
Or maybe they catch on that their emotions are being manipulated, not their spirit nourished, through the praise band and other hubbub. Or maybe pick up a total con man, who promises fabulous wealth in return for a “word of faith” backed up with a generous donation. That’s a massive turnoff.
So such Christ-admirers must choose, they think, between (1) the Jesus they see in the New Testament, or (2) the Churches they know. There’s something seriously wrong with that picture. Christ promised, after all, to build and preserve His Church, so how can it be in conflict with Him?
I have another enduring intuition that the heart-longing of such conflicted people will find its home in Orthodox Christianity, which is not like anything most people in America have ever seen. Contrary to what it connoted to me 15 years ago (forbidding ritualism of some sort coupled with doctrinal rigidity), is all about Jesus Christ (“it is sooooo not ‘about me’!” one visitor exclaimed) and becoming His worthy image and likeness by the healing of the human soul (Greek “nous”). (Matthew Gallatin coincidentally has a current podcast that vividly but fairly contrasts the Orthodox view of salvation from that typified by Jonathan Edwards. Orthodoxy’s different on the surface partly because it’s different deep down on such things.)
Do I dissemble? Didn’t I just tacitly fault “moralistic therapeutic deism”? How does Orthodox “healing of the soul” differ from MTD?
Well, first, it’s not moralistic. Really. (Once you really get the hang of it, you live far more by love than by rule.)
Second, it’s not deism.
Third, the therapy/healing in Orthodoxy starts not with faddish self-esteem and positive thinking, as in MTD, but with repentance.
John Romanides, in the posthumous collection of his Greek University Lectures on Patristic Theology, summarized Orthodox dogma:
I don’t think either point is ever lost in any Orthodox Church, or could ever be lost if the cycle of services is maintained, though it can be obscured by human foibles.
Though repentance may sound grim (that presumably is why is has disappeared from Krustianity), it is a seed, and then a spiritual horticulture, that flowers into the glorious and all-laudable Saints. There’s no shortcut.
And ironically, that soul healing in the end really is about the worshipper, whose real, deepest needs are met, after years of worship and asceticism (that’s what deep repentance looks like), even if the Divine Liturgy does not immediately appear much of a balm for yesterday’s pink slip, dust-up with a lover or such. (I do recall, though, in addition to a riot of sensory impressions at my first Orthodox Liturgy, my first taste of Orthodoxy’s healing calm.)
I pray, too, that Yousef may find Orthodox Christianity, as I think he’ll find some real Krustian shortcomings in Southern California Evangelicalism. (Some of it in his vocabulary in the interview may foreshadow that, though he acknowledges that he’s “still learning about his new religion.”)
