Most of what is written about Christian nationalism is silly. Critics and analysts sweepingly deride conventional Christian conservatives as Christian nationalists. By some counts, there are, by this definition, tens of millions of Christian nationalists. Sometimes even civil religion, with its homage to a vague deity, is labeled Christian nationalism. If so, all presidents from George Washington to Joe Biden are Christian nationalists. Sometimes the target is folk religionists who conflate God and country. They sometimes sport paraphernalia with American flags draped around the cross. These folk religionists typically aren’t aware they are Christian nationalists. They don’t publish articles, much less books. And they typically don’t have policy agendas, just an attitude that God and country should be interchangeably honored.
…
Christian nationalism is distinct from conventional Christian conservatism. The former are typically post-liberals who want some level of explicit state established Christianity. The latter have been and largely still are classical liberals who affirm traditional American concepts of full religious liberty for all. Both groups want a “Christian America.” But the former want it by statute. The latter see it as mainly a demographic, historical and cultural reality.
This looks like a solid and helpful piece from a more religiously-sophisticated source than the Politico piece it’s responding to. But it seems to me superficial insofar as it’s credulous about “nations.”
Not this:
The patriotic mythologies that came into existence together with modernity’s nationalisms are siren songs that seek to create loyalties that are essentially religious in nature. World War I, in the early 20th century, was deeply revealing of the 19th century’s false ideologies. There, in the fields of France, European Christians killed one another by the millions in the name of entities that, in some cases, had existed for less than 50 years (Germany was born, more or less, in 1871). The end of that war did nothing, apparently, to awaken Christians to the madness that had been born in their midst.
…
These passions are worth careful examination, particularly as they have long been married to America’s many denominational Christianities. I think it is noteworthy that one of the most prominent 19th century American inventions was Mormonism. There, we have the case of a religious inventor (Joseph Smith) literally writing America into the Scriptures and creating an alternative, specifically American, account of Christ and salvation. It was not an accident. He was, in fact, drawing on the spirit of the Age, only more blatantly and heretically. But there are many Christians whose Christianity is no less suffused with the same sentiments.
Asking questions of these things quickly sends some heads spinning. They wonder, “Are we not supposed to love our country?” As an abstraction, no. We love people; we love the land. We owe honor to honorable things and persons. The Church prays for persons: the President, civil authorities, the armed forces. We are commanded to pray and to obey the laws as we are able in good conscience. Nothing more.
For fifty years I worshipped at the shrine of an Unknown God. It’s better than nothing. This tells us something of the intrinsic nature of humans. That we are wired to adore. It’s been a deception that we can get along without bending our heads, or ‘think’ our way out of our essential religiosity …
I lit candles for the Unknown God, coaxed exotic incense, sought out quiet places, wrapped myself in antelope skins and read ancient texts, hundreds of them. I got myself out into the bush, I abandoned work without real substance, I became a scholar and a seeker. I lived in a circle for four years, no screens anywhere near me. I blew my lantern out early and woke to birdsong. I was devoted, and I was led.
But I would tell by the camp fire every story but the story. The vast, glorious, uneasy elephant in the room.
I loved the Unknown God because it seemed beautiful, ancient, intensely mysterious, but didn’t infringe on how I actually lived. Not if I didn’t want it to. Had no bearing on my ethics or morality – what there was left of them. I dwelt in a world of strong emotion, intuitions and elaborate ceremonies. I learnt an awful lot about being human. I learnt an awful lot about the value of beauty.
And yet, I remained absolutely unaccountable. At the flick of a switch I could be the same old degenerate I’d always been …
Those fifty years got me an awfully long way. They’ve enabled me languages and experiences that gird me well in middle age. They haven’t required abandoning, or disowning, or shamefully chucking on a bonfire. I was a Romantic, that was what I was. But if you’ve really committed to a quest, a day will come when everything you think you know gets rocked, challenged, shaken. That happened to me four years ago up in the forest at the end of a 101-day vigil. When the unthinkable happened.
My unknown God decided to make himself visible to me.
Clause not yet adopted at Rome … omitted from manuscripts of the Creed … inclusion perhaps a copyist’s mistake! H’m … Upheld by Paulinus of Aquileia at the Synod of Friuli, 800, yes, yes, yes … but only adopted among the Franks … Here we are! Frankish monks intoning the Filioque clause at Jerusalem! Outrage and uproar of Eastern monks!’ He paused and rubbed his hands. ‘I wish I’d been there!’ He pushed back his spectacles for a moment and then resumed. ‘Pope Leo III tries to suppress the addition, in spite of the insistence of Charlemagne – a Frank, of course! – but approves of the doctrine.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water. Patrick Leigh Fermor is not where I expected to find a saucy account of where the filioque came from.
Untenable but appealing
To read [Elaine] Pagels and [Bart]Ehrman, the Jesus Seminarians, and many others, the reader would think that orthodox interpretation of the Christian story has no claim to greater antiquity, and no stronger connection to the first followers of Christ, than the many and various heretical interpretations. In their view, the New Testament reflects only the theological-ideological biases of the “proto-orthodox” party, and the canon as we know it was imposed retrospectively, rather than developing organically in the early Church. These claims are enormously appealing to the modern religious mind, but they aren’t particularly tenable.
Ross Douthat, Bad Religion
Iconodules
A key turning point in my life, during my thesis (“The Icon as Theology”) defense, came with the question, “Do you believe the veneration of icons to be necessary to salvation?” I hesitated (I was an Anglican priest at the time), and responded, “I believe that their veneration is necessary to its fullness.” I have lived with that answer for many years and pondered it and the question as well. Christ, according to the Scriptures, is the “icon of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). I cannot imagine a salvation that is somehow separate from the veneration, indeed, the worship of that Icon.
Florida’s most notorious abortion clinic is located at 1103 Lucerne Terrace in downtown Orlando. On the sidewalk directly in front of this clinic, the Orlando Women’s Center, there are two prominent marks in the concrete. They are signs of an extraordinary story.
The concrete was worn away by the feet of John Barros, who for nearly two decades stood outside this clinic as a sidewalk counselor …
I asked him, once, how he’d felt called to the pro-life movement. “I wasn’t called to the pro-life movement,” he replied. “God called me to forty feet of sidewalk.”
The new Christendom’s penitential system was often experienced as external to the needs of the penitent. It was based on new patterns of canon law that codified sin and the penances that negated it. The system could be overwhelmingly legalistic and for some authorities was centered not on the penitent but on his clerical confessor. It was concerned more with divine satisfaction than with human transformation.
John Strickland, The Age of Utopia. The “new Christendom” Strickland is referring to is Western Christendom after the Great Schism of roughly 1,000 years ago. Human transformation remains the focus of confession, absolution and penance in the Christian East (and in American Orthodoxy).
Anecdote contra data
Writing on X, a priest reports: “A bit of good news . . . I’ve had more confessions of the ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned, it’s been 20, 25, 30, 40, 50 years since my last confession . . .’ sort this year than I ever remember. I’m seeing more people at Mass than I ever remember.”
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
I sometimes fear that tantalizing quotes like this will make a reader think “I ought to read that book.” What I really intend is that the reader think “Maybe I ought to become an Orthodox Christian.”
Iconoclasm
At the time of the Reformation, the effigies of saints had sometimes been dragged to the public square and there decapitated by the town’s executioner. This not only in itself prefigures the French Revolution, and emphasises the continuity between regicide and the abolition of the sacramental, but also powerfully enacts two other left-hemisphere tendencies that characterise both the Reformation and the Enlightenment, to which we now might turn.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
Hubris
Zwingli’s work also repudiated the entire patristic and medieval theology of the sacrament: “I can conclude nothing else but that all the doctors have greatly erred [vil geirret habend] from the time of the apostles. . . . Therefore we want to see what baptism actually is, at many points indeed taking a different path against that which ancient, more recent, and contemporary authors have taken, not according to our own whim [nitt mit unserem tandt] but rather according to God’s word.” Just like his Anabaptist opponents, Zwingli was following God’s word.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.
On a European Tour with the Wheaton College Men’s Glee Club, long ago and far away, I was thrilled to sing at Grossmünster Church in Zurich, where “Huldrych Zwingli initiated the Swiss-German Reformation in Switzerland from his pastoral office …, starting in 1520.” (Wikipedia)
That thrill is a mark of my delusion. I now think Zwingli a particularly fiendish Reformer, and as regards the sacraments, the true father of the kind of gnostic Evangelicalism I inhabited for 30 years, more or less. Neither Calvin nor Luther was so thoroughly iconoclastic.
And if you think “iconoclastic” is eulogistic, may God have mercy on your soul.
Imagine there’s no religion
In the the pre-modern West, as in much of the world today, there was no such thing as “religion”. The Christian story was the basis of peoples’ understanding of reality itself. There was no “religion”, because there was no notion that this truth was somehow optional or partial, any more than we today might assume that gravity or the roundness of the Earth are facts we could choose to engage with only on Sunday mornings.
About a third of the way through the discussion, Douthat asks Ahmari to explain a couple of chapters in his recent book, The Unbroken Thread. The second chapter Ahmari discusses is entitled “Is Sex a Private Matter?” In that chapter, Ahmari turns to a surprising authority: Andrea Dworkin. Ahmari appeals to Dworkin to argue that sex is never purely private: what is done in the bedroom or viewed on a screen has inevitable public consequences …
The plausibility of anthropogenic climate change ought to be abundantly evident to Christians; scripture is full of admonitions on how the sinfulness of man has cosmological consequences. See also Prayers by the Lake number 39. (H/T Fr. Steven DeYoung)
Do you know, my child …
Rod Dreher has a book coming out on re-enchantment of our world. This “prayer” may be all the re-enchantment I need:
Do you know, my child, why the clouds are closed when the fields are thirsty for rain, and why they open, when the fields have no desire for rain? Nature has been confused by the wickedness of men, and has abandoned its order. Do you know, my child, why the fields produce heavy fruit in the springtime, and yield a barren harvest in the summer? Because the daughters of men have hated the fruit of their womb, and kill it while it is still in blossom. Do you know, my child, why the springs have gone dry, and why the fruits of the earth no longer have the sweetness that they used to have? Because of the sin of man, from which infirmity has invaded all of nature. Do you know, my child, why a victorious nation suffers defeats as a result of its own disunity and discord, and eats bread made bitter by tears and malice? Because it conquered the bloodthirsty enemies around it-self, but failed to conquer those within itself. Do you know, my child, how a mother can feed her children without nourishing them? By not singing a song of love to them while nursing them, but a song of hatred towards a neighbor. Do you know, my child, why people have become ugly and have lost the beauty of their ancestors? Because they have cast away the image of God, which fashions the beauty of that image out of the soul within, and removes the mask of earth. Do you know, my child, why diseases and dreadful epidemics have multiplied? Because men have begun to look upon good health as an abduction of nature and not as a gift from God. And what is abducted with difficulty must with double difficulty be protected. Do you know, my child, why people fight over earthly territory, and are not ashamed to be on the same level as moles? Because the world has sprouted through their heart, and their eyes see only what is growing in the heart; and because, my child, their sin has made them too weak to struggle for heaven. Do not cry, my child, the Lord will soon return and set everything right.
(St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Prayers by the Lake, XXXIX)
Miscellany
Is silence violence?
There are more evil things going on in the world than any one person can respond to. You could spend all day every day on social media just declaring that you denounce X or Y or Z and never get to the end of what deserves to be denounced. If my silence about Gaza is complicit in the violence being done there, what about my silence regarding the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uighurs? Or the government of Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya? Or what Boko Haram has done in Nigeria? Or what multinational corporations do to destroy our environment? Or dogfighting rings? Or racism in the workplace? Or sexism in the workplace?
…
[P]ick your spots and pick them unapologetically. It’s perfectly fine for people to have their own causes, the causes that for whatever reason touch their hearts. We all have them, we are all moved more by some injustices than by others; not one of us is consistently concerned with all injustices, all acts of violence, nor do we have a clear system of weighting the various sufferings of the world on a scale and portioning out our attention and concern in accordance with a utilitarian calculus.
…
The silence-is-violence crowd, to their credit, don’t think that money is the only commodity we have to spend: they think we can and must spend our words also. And they always believe they know what, in a given moment, we must spend our words on. What they never seen to realize, though, is that some words are a debased currency. As the Lord says to Job, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” To speak “words without knowledge” is to “darken counsel,” that is, confuse the issue, mislead or confuse one’s hearers. The purpose of counsel is to illuminate a situation; one does not illuminate anything by speaking out of ignorance or mere rage.
You can’t fight something with nothing. If the French don’t like the Islamification of French public life, then they aren’t going to stop it by doubling down on laïcisme.
Anthony Lusvardi, S.J., teaches sacramental theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. In “Confessing Other People’s Sins” (The Lamp, Issue 19), he takes issue with the practice of apologizing for historic wrongs. In his experience, there’s a certain type who enters the confessional only to launch into complaints about other people’s misdeeds, which amounts to a spiritual evasion of his own sins. Is something like that happening when a city council or college president issues statements that repent of past harms? “The problem with historical apologies is that they never involve taking responsibility for one’s own actions but necessarily mean confessing sins committed by others.” And it is in the faux penitents’ interest to exaggerate those sins. “The more heinous the crimes of others, the more venial our own offenses seem. We can get off the hook for our smaller sins by spotlighting the graver sins of others.”
Christians are often tempted, particularly in this time called modern, to say more than we know. We are so tempted because we fear we do not believe what we say we believe. So we try to assure ourselves that we believe what we say we believe by convincing those who do not believe what we believe that they really believe what we believe once what we believe is properly explained.
I believe there’s a rational way to begin sketching what people like Murray, Ali, Tom Holland, and other “Christian atheists” in this space are attempting to articulate. On Twitter, my friend Jay Richards proposes a sort of first inference to the best explanation. It goes something like this:
(1) I’m far more certain of the truth of my moral convictions A, B, and C than I am certain that atheism is true. So, let’s take A, B, and C as given.
(2) A, B, and C don’t make a lot of sense given atheism.
(3) A, B, and C are consistent with and seem to follow from the truth claims of Christianity.
(4) A, B, and C historically emerged from a broadly Christian culture.
(5) Given (1) through (4), the truth of Christianity seems more likely than the truth of materialism/atheism.
Fine and good. I’ve heard far stranger ways that people began their Christian lives. But that’s only a beginning. Rationality is not the telos of the Logos.
However human reason is construed or understood, it cannot fathom what is by definition unfathomable, and so despite traditional Christian theology’s pervasive and variegated use of reason it can never finally grasp directly that with which it is chiefly concerned. This makes it a sort of intellectual endeavor different from any other.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation
Why true Christianity can’t be a political faith
Philip Sherrard has further noted that Christianity is uniquely ill-suited to function as a political religion because, alone among the Abrahamic faiths, it has no body of legislation intended to function as civil law. The Christian Church is set up to facilitate communion between the human and the divine. This is obviously a process from which the coercive sanction of positive law and coercive violence is excluded. If the Church is conceived of as a voluntary assembly of believers in communion with God, then no political party can claim to be a part of either its successes or its failures; politics is, after all, nothing more the organized use of violence.
Put Not Your Trust in Princes, an article I no longer can access at nationalreview.com, though I retain the URL. The title is from Psalm 146.
Incense
If you think there’s something fishy about incense in Christian worship, read Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Sweet Smoke of Prayer
Dogma
Dogmas are important, but not as the building blocks of some comprehensive account of the Divine Mysteries, but rather a series of decisions, arrived at by the Church, that are there to prevent ways of thinking that might obscure or bypass the mystery of God before which we stand in awe.
This is a very Orthodox attitude toward dogma. I don’t know if there are any other Christian traditions that so view it. My former traditions definitely did not.
Reductionism
One of the oddest thoughts to have crept its way into the Christian mind is the notion of what is “necessary to salvation.” The simple questions within the New Testament, “What must we do to be saved?” quickly become the stuff of bumper-stickers and a reduced version of Christianity unable to sustain a genuine spiritual life.
In my seminary years (Anglican), I had a professor who stated that he did not believe in angels. I was puzzled and asked him why. “Because they are not necessary. Anything an angel can do can be done by the Holy Spirit.” And there you have it. Only things that are necessary need to be posited as existing …
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation
Paradox
The quest for unity that drove people to discard formal theology for the Scriptures drove them further asunder.
“Every theological vagabond and peddler may drive here his bungling trade, without passport or license, and sell his false ware at pleasure.”
Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, quoting Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, who in turn is quoting a mainstream Protestant pastor’s lament about the new sects.
Conversion
“There is no point in converting people to Christ if they do not convert their vision of the world and of life, since Christ then becomes merely a symbol for all that we love and want already –without Him. This kind of Christianity is more terrifying than agnosticism or hedonism.”
Rod Dreher, Schmemann and Social Justice (quoting Fr. Alexander Schmemann)
Listening to that other voice
[T]he real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.
We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through. He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When he said, “Be perfect,” He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment.
In Orthodoxy, you won’t commit mortal sin for missing liturgy. There is no concept of “mortal sin”. That’s just not how the Orthodox “model” works. You are supposed to be at liturgy, not because you fear punishment, but because being present at liturgy is an aid to theosis. It draws you closer and closer to unity with God. On the occasion I miss liturgy, I regret it, and if I don’t have a good reason (traveling, or sick), I confess it when I next go to confession. But I don’t lie there fearing for my everlasting soul.
The demons are still with us, but they have lost. They and their chief, the devil, are still trying to draw us into damnation with them, but they will never again wield the power they once did. All they have left to them is deception. Against their deceptions we have humility in repentance, and the reason that weapon is so powerful is because by humbling ourselves we join ourselves to Jesus Christ, who in His humility threw down that great dragon and banished him forever at the point of the swords of the archangels, angels, and all the saints.
Andrew Stephen Damick and Stephen De Young, The Lord of Spirits (book, not podcast)
Without comment
It’s dangerous to try analyzing a Christian tradition that’s not, and never has been, one’s own — though I’ve probably done so repeatedly. This time, I’ll leave Catholic commentary to a card-carrying Catholic, author of the authorized biography of John Paul II:
To make matters worse from a journalistic standpoint, the only witnesses cited in defense of today’s papal autocracy were such acolytes of the pontificate as Austen Ivereigh, David Gibson, and Massimo Faggioli—the functional equivalent of Tucker Carlson writing a piece entitled, “Donald Trump takes on unprecedented attacks from his opponents” and sourcing it with quotes from Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert. This isn’t journalism; it’s blatant advocacy. And it should be named as such.
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.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
There’s a tremendous amount distilled there. You can’t read Augustine’s Confessions and easily deny that he was a saint. But he was peerless in the West and was not in serious dialog with the many Greek-speaking Fathers in the East, so he went awry in ways that have ramified mightily in the West and that accordingly lead us in the East to keep him at arm’s length.
Seems about right
The collapse of U.S. Mainline Protestantism also included a collapse in Protestant confidence, intellectual life, and public influence. Modern Evangelicalism lacked the institutions and traditions of centuries-old Mainline groups. They typically could not compete directly with vigorous Catholic intellectual life. And so rising Evangelicalism often relied on Catholic intellectual resources to make needed public arguments.
Looking for a news hook? Duke’s latest report in 2021 (.pdf here) showed evangelicals to be the nation’s least politicized Christian grouping. Only 43% of local evangelical congregations participated in even one of the 12 types of political involvements that were surveyed, compared with the more liberal “mainline” Protestants (at 52%), Catholics (81%) and Black Protestants (82%) or (not part of this study) the well-known activism at Jewish synagogues and Muslim mosques.
The Guy takes the savvy author to task on one detail, the tic of applying words like “Christian” or “church” while referring only to white evangelicals. We’re told that these past few years the radicals “seemed poised to capture the controls inside of the American Church.” True for Catholicism? For Black Protestantism? How about for mainstream evangelical denominations and parachurch groups?
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
On this eve of the The Nativity According to the Flesh of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ (that’s the official name in Orthodox Churches), I deviate somewhat both from my usual tone (because, as you may have noted, there was some fairly big religious news over the past week) and from much particular nativity piety.
What’s wrong with this plan?
The neighborhood will do the luminaries (sic) again this year on Christmas eve. Board member [name/phone omitted] will take point this year distributing the luminaries on Christmas Eve. Distribution will be from my house at [address omitted] beginning at 9:30am. If you would like to volunteer to help with the distribution, be at my house promptly at 9:30 Sunday morning.
Email from my HOA President. I could add emphasis, but I’ll let you ferret out the solecism on the grammar of Christian piety on your own.
Contemporary Pharisaism
The Pharisees of Christ’s time thought that Jews had lost God’s favor through transgressions of His law. To regain God’s favor, they were punctilious about keeping His law — and tried to force other Jews (Jesus, for instance) to do so as well.
I regret that Pharisaism in common parlance has come to connote hypocrisy, censoriousness and self-righteousness, because that sounds prissy and self-satisfied, whereas the real Pharisees were more like theocrats, more like our myths about grim-faced Puritans.
In my preferred sense, I would apply “Pharisaical” to Michael Cassidy, Ron DeSantis and Charlie Kirk:
On Dec. 14, a Christian veteran named Michael Cassidy walked into the Iowa State Capitol and destroyed a display erected by the Satanic Temple of Iowa. The display was an idol of Baphomet, a robed figure with a goat head. Cassidy told Fox News host Jesse Watters that he had destroyed the statue in an act of “Christian civil disobedience.”
…
But the right-wing response to the Baphomet vandalism was notable … Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, tweeted, “Satan has no place in our society and should not be recognized as a ‘religion’ by the federal government. I’ll chip in to contribute to this veteran’s legal defense fund. Good prevails over evil — that’s the American spirit.” The Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk said, “A Christian veteran just beheaded a monument to Satan in Iowa’s State Capitol. If this is Christian Nationalism, we need more of it. Hero.”
David French, who goes on to describe in his words the spirit that makes me (not him) want to call them “Pharisaical”:
To understand the moment, one has to understand the extent to which many religious activists believe that free speech itself is responsible for America’s ongoing secularization and alleged moral decline. They believe the doctrine of viewpoint neutrality — that is, the requirement that the government treat private speakers equally in their access to government facilities — is a proxy for “moral relativism.” …
This claim is a Christianized cousin of the secular idea that defending the free-speech rights of those with whom you vehemently disagree is, in essence, providing aid and comfort to racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia. In this view, your role as a citizen is first to determine whether any given speech meets with your moral approval, and then — and only then — to rally to its defense.
I would add that at least some religious activists believe not just that we decline morally as a virtual synonym for acting badly, but that America’s plight is a direct judgment (i.e., not just a natural consequence) from a god who’s angry at us because of our collective sins.
Those are the clearest case of modern American Pharisaism.
Fiducia supplicans
Black holes (Rorschach proclamations)
In a by now familiar sequence of events, the Vatican released a document on Monday which caused instant confusion. “Pope says Roman Catholic priests can bless same-sex couples,” the headlines announced. Optimistic Catholic apologists said the media had misunderstood the document, which permitted no such thing. Pessimistic Catholic apologists said the headlines were, alas, correct, and that the pope had erred. Part-time ultramontanists said that the document could only be read in a conservative manner and that it was an outrageous insult to the pope to think otherwise. Full-time ultramontanists said that the document could only be read as a “development of doctrine” and that it was an outrageous insult to the pope to think otherwise. The liberals rejoiced, with a slight undertone of impatience. The world took a brief interest, concluded that the Church was at least making some slow progress, then yawned a little and moved on to the next headline.
I have spent what feels like years parsing these much-debated Vatican documents, checking the exact translation of Italian words, badgering learned canonists and theologians for comments, comparing one sentence with another. And to be honest, I am thinking of retiring from the game. Because in the era of Pope Francis, such “controversial” statements are generally less statements than black holes.
A black hole, according to NASA, is “a great amount of matter packed into a very small area—think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City.” That slightly exaggerates the density of Fiducia supplicans’ five-thousand-word text, but the point is the result—which, as NASA explains, “is a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.”
This seems the perfect frame. I’m less experienced and less connected than Dan Hitchens when it comes to the Roman Church. If he can’t figure it out, I can’t.
But it seems fair to say that Pope Francis has, by Fiducia supplicans, at least given cover to those who have been clamoring for recognition of same-sex couples (and to a lesser extent, divorced and civilly remarried couples).
Fr. James Martin conveniently photographed and posted on social media his “spontaneous” blessing of one couple. (Yes, there is something oxymoronic about a social media photograph of a supposedly spontaneous encounter.)
Untenable tension
Of Monday’s extraordinary action by Pope Francis:
What does it mean to bless a couple without blessing that couple’s relationship? Millions of words will be expended in the coming months to try to explain this, but I can guarantee that none of them will make sense. … It’s hard to see how historic Catholic teaching on marriage and historic Catholic teaching on papal authority can emerge unscathed from this.
There has been speculations that Fiducia supplicans will produce a schism in Catholicism and/or drive orthodox Catholics to Orthodoxy.
The late Jaroslav Pelikan was a Church Historian at Yale. Somewhere in the 20-25 year-ago range, he left Lutheranism to embrace Orthodox Christianity, where his heart had been for some time already.
I emailed the news a Protestant friend who’d studied at Yale. He responded that the development would create a real buzz at Yale.
I followed up with the puzzled question about whether Yale was really so religious that this would be scandalous. “Au contraire,” he replied. “The scandal is that anyone at Yale should take religion seriously enough to change affiliations like that.”
In this situation, Catholics who take religion seriously enough to object to things like Fiducia supplicans probably have been those who in the past attended carefully to the words of Popes and defended the most lavish claims about the authority of the Pope. This is going to be a tough call for them.
… and not just them
[I]t is not a sufficient reason to come to the Orthodox Church if someone is dissatisfied with his own Church community, be it a Catholic Church or a Protestant community. There is something more in the Orthodox Church … and it is simply not enough to be a protester or to this like something happening in your own community in order to become Orthodox.
Metropolitan Hilarion. It will be tempting for some Orthodox priests to treat dissatisfaction with Catholicism over this shift of position as a sufficient basis for receiving them into Orthodoxy. Who doesn’t like “church growth”?
On greener grass
It is important that before any of you choose to abandon your declining church for a different communion, that you not have any false hope. This is true of Orthodoxy as well. It is not the case that all churches are the same, so it doesn’t matter which one you belong to. Nor is it the case that because all churches are dealing with corruption of one kind or another, you might as well stay put. I’m simply saying that one should try to be as realistic as possible, and not allow oneself to be swayed by one’s understandable hope that the grass is greener Over There, With Those People.
It might be greener than where you are, but I assure you there will be problems. As a Catholic priest once put it to me, discussing the decadence within all the churches today, “Churches are made of people, including the clergy. Whatever sins the people of a time and place have, they will bring them into the church.” His point was not that we should reconcile ourselves to sin, much less engage in woke mumbo-jumbo to declare sin to be a blessing. His point, rather, was that we should not allow our idealism to get the better of us, such that we become scandalized by the failures within ecclesial bodies.
I have loved this story before and I love it still:
I am reminded of leaving the RCIA (catechesis) program I had enrolled in at the LSU Catholic Student Center in 1991, under the naive assumption that though I was two years out of college, I would find a more intellectually challenging catechesis there. In fact, it was a liberal priest and a liberal nun leading us all on guided meditations. Zero teaching of what we would be required to believe as Catholics. When I realized at last that this wasn’t going to get any better, and that we were all going to end up being received into the Catholic Church without knowing anything about the Catholic faith, I left.
I found my way to Father Dermot Moloney, an elderly Irishman who pastored the Latin mass parish downtown. He took me on as a catechumen. He said to me on that first day, in his thick brogue, “Lad, by the time I get t’roo with ye, ye might not want to be a Catlick, but you’ll know what a Catlick is.” God bless that priest’s memory. I so respected him for that. The problem today is that a Catholic can be just about anything he or she wants to be, and the administrative class of the Church doesn’t care. If you care, the Pope considers you to be “rigid,” and part of the problem.
Your purpose in life, in all likelihood, is quotidian
I live in Phoenix, the home of Grand Canyon University that has become a fairly major player in the Christian college scene. They have billboards all along the I-17 freeway through town that market their programs as “finding your purpose”. And that in a nutshell, I think, is the “spirit of the age” of our cultural Christian spirituality. The concept that you are potentially a “Bible character level” servant of God is foundational to evangelical Christianity. … [I]t all boils down to this: You exist to be something and do something specific (and great) in the universe and apart from fulfilling that utility you are a failure (or sinner…).
…
I don’t know exactly when “God has a plan for your life” stopped making sense, or more like it stopped making sense to put any energy or investment into trying to make it make sense. I think it was around the time (almost 20 years ago) when I faced the reality I was never going to be ordained to the priesthood, something I “KNEW” was my calling and purpose since first grade. That thought drove my life and I had spent decades in churches, ministries, cultivating relationships, and making preparations of one form or another to prepare for its inevitable, providential fulfillment. It never happened. I’ve ended up being a construction worker for the past 40 years instead. But even so, I found ways to spiritualize my life as a common laborer and make it “significant”.
…
At 71, … [a]s simplistic and tritely “zen” as it sounds, there is some peace accepting the reality that if I hadn’t done what I did, I wouldn’t be where I am (for better or worse) and I just have to deal with my present moment.
…
There was a woman who asked God, “What do you want me to do, what is your will for my life?” His answer? She said, “He told me, do your dishes. What a let down!” But that’s really the answer for all of us. “Do what is in front of you, and then the next right thing.” Yes, even doing the dishes is spiritual warfare sometimes.
The Christian Way, as its first followers referred to it, is in other words a path of internal transformation — what the Orthodox call the “unseen warfare” that goes on in the heart every minute. The battle between the way of God and the way of the world: every religion I know of teaches some version of this.
Being human, though, we like to take these teachings and overlay them onto the world. In Christian history, this has often taken the form of crusading — sometimes literally — to transform the kingdom of Man into the kingdom of God by force …
Currently, this trend is manifesting most obviously in the form of a “cultural Christianity” promoted by anti-woke public figures on the Right. In this reading, the Christian Way is a weapon which can, in the words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, writinghere as a recent convert, “fortify us against our menacing foes”. Ironically, this spiritual-warfare-as-civilisational-warfare attitude is most obvious at present in the rise of the violent Islamism which so frightens Hirsi Ali, and with good reason. The nervousness with which Europeans have been shopping in their Christmas markets this month is testament to the reality of the violence which some people think God will help them justify. The warning should be clear.
… Religion, despite the many calcified failures of its history, is not at root a weapon in anybody’s culture war. Religion and culture reign in separate domains. A faith wielded as a stick with which to beat the “cultural Marxists” will end up being as empty as the consumer void it seeks to challenge, and potentially as toxic. C. S. Lewis had already spotted the trap more than 60 years ago: “Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.”
Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture.
Soon enough, Africa will be sending Christian missionaries to darkest America.
Orthodoxy
Anglophone Christians appropriating Orthodoxy
Fr. Stephen DeYoung’s podcast bible studies have brought me one revelation after another. Those on Galatians (from almost three years ago; I came to these podcasts late and have been listening in chronological order) have been particularly helpful for my understanding of how little I understand — and by extension a challenge before all who come to Orthodoxy from a Protestant millieu.
This exchange between Fr. Stephen and a parishioner “went meta” on the challenge:
C1: I have a question that may be a distraction, but… You read this in English, in this English translation.
Fr. Stephen: Yes.
C1: First of all, it makes almost no sense.
Fr. Stephen: Yeah.
C1: Second, if you live in the Western culture that we live in, and you try to make sense of it, you’re going to come to the wrong conclusion.
Fr. Stephen: Yes.
C1: What do we do about that?
C2: Well, we have a Fr. Stephen.
Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] We need… Honestly, we need an Orthodox translation of the New Testament in the English language. And we as English-speaking Orthodox Christians have not fully appropriated the Orthodox tradition and faith yet. We just haven’t. We’re still doing that. We’re still working on that.
C1: Our language is actually a barrier.
Fr. Stephen: Right, because the English language that we’re using, terms like “justification” and things, it’s the vocabulary of Protestant theology. So it’s not just a question of how do we express the Orthodox faith in English; it’s [that] we’re trying to express the Orthodox faith in Protestant terminology, and that’s kind of not going to work. So we have to continue—mostly we’re doing that just by using borrowed Greek words like apophatic theology and cataphatic theology and theosis. We’re just taking the Greek words and using them instead of the Latin ones like justification, to try and help with that, but that’s something we’re just going to have to continue to do.
But, yeah, any New Testament you’re going to pick up, including the New King James Version that you find in the Orthodox Study Bible is translated by a Protestant committee. So, number one, they’re coming at it from a Protestant perspective, but, number two, it’s a committee, so they’re also trying not to take sides, usually, in any internecine Protestant debates. So it’s not [just] that it’s Protestant; it’s that it’s vaguely Protestant, which is what makes it even harder to understand. Because if they just let a Calvinist translate it themselves, it would be skewed, toward Calvinism, obviously, but it would at least make sense. [Laughter] But because they’re trying not to do that, you end up with translating participles with a gerund, just “-ing,” going because we don’t want to interpret beyond that; or just putting “of”—“of faith,” “the hearing of faith.”
…
Fr. Stephen: We’ve got a lot of work to do. And you folks are just as responsible for doing your piece of it as I am for doing my piece of it. So that’s why it’s hard. That’s why it’s hard is that there’s this cyclical [Sic. I think he probably meant more like “recursive”] thing, where Protestantism has read these passages a certain way, and so the English translations all reflect that reading. So you could either go back and read the Greek— but even then, who put together the lexicon you’re using that tells you what the words mean? Yeah, some 19th-century German Protestant liberal. [Laughter] So that’s going to be skewed another way, too.
And again, I’m not saying any of this to bash Protestantism. It’s just we as Orthodox Christians are reading New Testaments that reflect the Protestant tradition of the people who translated it. Just like, if I translate something, it’s going to reflect my Orthodox Christian understanding of it. As humans, none of us is a robot, none of us is completely objective—there’s no way to do a completely objective translation anyway, because words in one language do not equal words in another language, so you can’t mathematically do a translation. You can’t have a computer do a… If you want to see how a computer does a translation, go use Google Translate and see how that works for you! [Laughter] I don’t want a Google translated Bible! That’s going to make a whole lot less sense than this, right? [Laughter]
C1: It also means that we have to struggle within our own minds to deal with thoughts that have been skewed in advance. I mean, you say “justification,” and my mind immediately says, “by faith,” and I know what that means. I’ve heard that in church; wait a minute.
Fr. Stephen: Right, or the word “faith.”
C1: Yeah, the word “faith” itself.
…
C1: So it’s a constant mental struggle.
…
Fr. Stephen: … But to a certain extent, that’s always been true. That’s why we have homilies and sermons. That’s why we don’t just stand up and read a text from the Bible and sit back down. It’s always required teaching and explanation and that kind of thing.
I’ve very frequently been quite harsh toward Evangelical Christians — “Why can’t you stupid people see that you need to be Orthodox!!!” has been the gist. So to anyone who has felt hectored, I apologize. If you’re still here, forgive me — and thanks for bearing with me in my chronic (26 year) convertitis.
I should know from my own experience that it’s not illegitimate to settle into a religious tradition and not be looking for the location of the exits immediately; that was my demeanor toward Calvinism for 20 years or so, and toward Evangelicalism for nearly 30 years before that. Both times, I was sort of blind-sided into recognizing the need to change.
Further, phenomenology and theology sometimes co-exist awkwardly. For instance, I now thoroughly believe that Baptism is not just a symbol, but is one’s initiation in the Church — a very important matter (theology). But I can’t help but feel that my Christian life began, in a non-trivial sense, 12 or so years before my Baptism when I realized (after being caught in flagrante delicto) that beating up on my brother to take away a toy was disappointing to Jesus and I needed Him to forgive me — and to “come into my heart,” as my then-tribe put it (phenomenology).
Bereft though they were of sacrament, Liturgy, incense, Church Fathers, icons, beauty and so forth, that realization and my response were important. But I’ve concluded that Evangelical Is Not Enough.
But I’ve tried to hector others into recognizing that it’s not enough. I wouldn’t have put it that way, but that’s what it amounted to.
I could say more about why I felt driven to hectoring people, but for reasons I need not share, I won’t.
Anyway: I need to reconcile myself to the reality of divided Christianity — that not all sincere Christians have entered the Ark, the one holy catholic and apostolic church of the Nicene Creed, and almost certainly some never will. The most I can do under my own power is to produce discontent with where they are — unholy discontent, which could lead them out of Christianity entirely. I don’t intend that.
But if you ever do feel any holy discontent, be sure to give Orthodoxy a look.
And I’ll probably be unable to completely eliminate critiques because Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism differ in important regards (more about that below), and where they do differ, I believe Orthodoxly.
The Main Act
Two kinds of believers
I sometimes think that the modern world’s true cultural divide is not between believers and unbelievers but between those who think life is a puzzle that is capable of being solved and those who believe it’s a mystery that ought to be approached by way of silence and humility. I am a problem solver by disposition, but in my heart I am strongly on the side of the mysterians.
…
It’s a mistake to treat [the tradition of Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Karl Rahner] as a watered-down version of the more certain expressions of faith typically associated with organized religion. The most sincere believers I’ve known have also been the most humble, the most perplexed. It may be that those who feel most powerfully the presence of God in their lives likewise feel most powerfully the impossibility of adequately capturing that presence in words. And it may be that those for whom God is not a symbol or a cudgel but a lived reality find this reality most mysterious.
I’m with Beha: “I am a problem solver by disposition, but in my heart I am strongly on the side of the mysterians.” I’ve been trying to solve the puzzle for many decades now, and I probably see more open questions than when I started.
So I now plan, after some fear that it was being over-hyped, to read Jon Fosse’s Septology.
This is not unrelated to the preceding item.
Why intellectuals don’t convert to Evangelical Christianity
But there’s one area that Brad doesn’t mention. And I think this reason keeps many intellectuals away from many Protestant traditions. Catholicism and Orthodoxy don’t have crazies. There may be a few here or there, but when you hear about a Christian group making fools of themselves publicly, you can be fairly certain that they are Protestant—and probably evangelical. Our low-church, anti-institutional biases breed these types. If you are an intellectual considering Christianity, you will not naturally move toward Christian groups that oppose science or higher education. But evangelical Protestants have groups that oppose both.
Kyle has distilled this aspect better than I ever had.
Certainty, Ferocity and Solidarity
[T]he true distinction between fundamentalism and mainstream beliefs isn’t what fundamentalists believe but how fundamentalists believe. As Richard Land, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “Fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.”
…
I’ve never encountered a fundamentalist culture that didn’t combine three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.
Certainty is the key building block. The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt. In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement …
That certainty breeds ferocity. Indeed, ferocity — not piety — is a principal trait of every truly fundamentalist movement I’ve ever encountered. Ferocity is so valuable to fundamentalism that it can cover a multitude of conventional Christian sins. Defending Trump in 2016, Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, an evangelical megachurch, explained, “Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find. And I think that’s the feeling of a lot of evangelicals.”
…
Yet certainty and ferocity are nothing without solidarity … I’m reminded of an infamous quote by Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, regarding the necessity of loyalty. Explaining Trump’s hostility toward Ron DeSantis, Huckabee said, “I think there are two virtues — loyalty and confidentiality. Be loyal to the people who helped you and learn how to keep your mouth shut.”
I appreciate this dissection of what makes “fundamentalism” fundamentalist, and it rings true to my 75 years’ experience. That’s even more interesting to me than why fundamentalists love Florida Man.
Note three things, though:
So described, fundamentalism is not merely distinct from “mainstream” beliefs, if by mainstream one means the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism, but also distinguishes it from non-fundamentalist evangelicalism. Indeed, there’s no major difference between Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists in theology (see J.I. Packer, ”Fundamentalism” and the Word of God), but there are evangelicals who are blessedly low on certainty, ferocity and solidarity.
So described, it becomes clearer how there can be Islamic as well as Christian fundamentalists — even Orthodox Christian fundamentalists (though I strongly believe that such Orthodox fundamentalism is not very good Orthodoxy).
[Fundamentalists] “can have a steamrolling effect in institutions because their opponents — almost by definition — have less certainty, less ferocity and less solidarity” (French again).
Not a Freudian slip
Victor I. Masters, the head of Home Missions from 1909 to 1921, reflected and influenced denominational thinking when he argued that the North had lost its religion to Romanism and rationalism, and that the SBC’s divine mission was to spread “the Anglo-Saxon evangelical faith.”
Quantum physics: Electrons moving, but photographing them affects path and speed. Why? How? Quantum theology: God’s mind doesn’t change, but he tells us to pray, and somehow our prayers affect the outcome.
The classic Orthodox definition of a theologian is well known and frequently repeated in Orthodox circles: “A true theologian is one who prays,” or “One who prays is a true theologian.” This legendary saying reflects the Orthodox phronema and stands in stark contrast to the Western Christian phronema, which strongly emphasizes use of the mind for comprehension of theological truths and rational deduction as a theological method.
I am a millionaire. My bedroom is full of gold light, of the sun’s jewellery. What shall I do with this wealth? Buy happiness, buy gladness, the wisdom that grows with the giving of thanks?
Orthodox Teaching does not merely differ from Western Christianity in content, but the reason for the difference is equally important. After reading this book, Western Christians still may not understand our mentality, but perhaps they will begin to realize that the difference between Orthodoxy and Western Christianity is significant and more far-reaching than a few doctrines, ancient rituals, and a refusal to submit to the pope. The variance is deeper than appears on the surface, extending to how theology is conceived, conceptualized, taught, and approached. To complicate matters, often the same terminology is used in East and West, but basic terms or concepts do not have the same meaning at all. What is sin? What is salvation? What is forgiveness?
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali very recently announced that she now identifies as a Christian. She followed up the announcement with an essay in UnHerd explaining somewhat more fully.
I noted the UnHerd essay, and noted its arguable inadequacy, but held counsel, commenting only guardedly in my personal journal. Now two others,*Rod Dreher and Mark Tooley, have published comments, and they’re on roughly the same wavelength with me.
Both note the arguable inadequacies of her UnHerd essay, but both graciously defend her.
Tooley:
It sounds like she is church going but not does not describe herself as a confessional Christian. Maybe she is where the English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge was after his conversion from atheism (also like Ali disdaining British atheist Bertrand Russell), at which point he affirmed the idea but not the specific historicity of Christianity.
…
There are of course many, many people who convert to Christianity not because of an intense personal spiritual crisis resulting in a cathartic acceptance of Jesus Christ but because of revulsion against the world’s distortions. For such converts, Christianity is at first an intellectual and aesthetic oasis to which they flee from an arid desert. Later they often in their spiritual journey become more theologically specific. Muggeridge, in his interview with William Buckley, said he did not care if Jesus Christ physically arose from the dead. Presumably later, upon joining the Catholic Church, he did in fact care.
Dreher, who definitely suffers logorrhea and bouts of exhibitionistic transparency, had more to say:
Absent a ‘road to Damascus’ conversion moment for Hirsi Ali, it seems to these critics that she is merely a ‘cultural Christian’ as opposed to a believing one.
…
My fellow conservative Christian intellectuals who call out Hirsi Ali’s ‘instrumentalist’ Christianity may mean well, but they are making a serious mistake. For one, they lack charity. It is an astonishing thing to see a woman who renounced the idea of God because of the cruel and insane treatment she received from Muslims, and who turned herself into a prophet of atheism, now publicly attest to being a follower of Jesus Christ. Note well that she has done this while living around Stanford University in northern California, one of the most woke and anti-Christian places in America. This is difficult and very brave. It seems to me that we owed her more understanding than some of us gave her in light of her news.
More importantly, these critics misunderstand the nature of religious conversion, and do so in a way that is particular to intellectuals. St. Paul’s dramatic experience on the aforementioned road to Damascus is the paradigmatic conversion: in a flash of overwhelming awe, a man experiences God, and is changed instantly. That’s not how it works with most people.
…
The thing is, faith is poetry, not syllogism.
…
To be honest, I was for a long time ashamed of my conversion to Orthodoxy, because it wasn’t intellectually clean. I wanted to be able to state with the kind of clarity of an expert witness in the dock that I had examined the claims for authority of the Roman church, and of the Eastern churches, and the weight of evidence lay with Byzantium. It didn’t happen that way. I came into Orthodoxy as a drowning man desperate to keep his head above water. In the end, this was the best way for me to have done it. My intellectual pride—my sin, not the Catholic Church’s—had led to my spiritual shipwreck. By showing me the primacy of the conversion of the heart, and teaching me how to achieve it, Orthodox Christianity showed me out of the dark wood.
I say all this not to make a pitch for Orthodoxy, but simply to show, by using my own example, how ragged these things can be.
…
When I heard her in London, and read her testimony in Unherd, I felt not like marking down a theology undergraduate paper with a red pen, but like rushing in with my prayers to help a broken angel learn to fly. She is imperfectly Christian today; she may be more perfectly Christian tomorrow. And so, by God’s grace, will you and I.
Note especially Dreher’s identification of an “astonishing thing.” This is not a woman who would just go along to get along with her current post-Christendom milieu; her announcement means something.
Now, please! please! please! please! please!, just leave her alone and don’t try to put her on the Christian speaking circuit. Give this seedling a chance to grow.
* Doubtless more than two have commented, but I try to stay away from the internet’s garbage pails.
The coincidence of birthday and name day isn’t universal in Orthodoxy, but I chose St. John the Merciful (or Almsgiver) by looking at Saints commemorated on my birthday after a futile search for inspiring lawyer-saints (the jokes almost write themselves). I do find his open-handedness admirable, and I presumably was underwhelmed by Bl. John “the Hairy”, Fool-for-Christ, at Rostov, also commemorated today.
A timely Psalm
In the midst of our domestic political chaos, the wars and threats of war in the world, and three-quarters of a century on this earth, this Psalm hit a sweet spot:
If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, let Israel now say— if it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us, then they would have swallowed us up alive, when their anger was kindled against us; then the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would have gone over us; then over us would have gone the raging waters. Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us as prey to their teeth! We have escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped! Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
Psalm 123/124, Revised Standard Version, via Bible Gateway (reformatted)
“Religion”
Religion has played such a large part in the lives of human beings throughout human history. In some ways, I wish we could outgrow it; I think at this point it does a lot of harm. But then, I’m fairly sure that if we do outgrow it, we’ll find other reasons to kill and persecute each other. I wish we were able to depend on ethical systems that did not involve the Big Policeman in the sky.
I’m not sure what religion she has in mind — nor, I suspect, is she.
“Religion” is, in the grand scheme of things, a neologism invented in the Western world. It obscures as much or more than it reveals. I’m reminded of a cartoon I saw more than 50 years ago:
Speaker 1: All religions are alike. Just name any two and I’ll prove it. Speaker 2: Christian Science and Melanesian Frog Worship.
Despite all that, “religion” seems to have become an indispensable word, and I confess to using it even without scare quotes. But it worries me that discussion about religion may be a diversion from growing closer to God.
A possible example of where the term “religion” might be indispensable:
False religions, perpetuate the great divide between flesh and spirit, rather than between good and evil where Christianity says it lies.
Tom Howard’s book, just quoted, cleared away some of my mental rubble and spiritual biases on my road to Orthodoxy (though Howard himself “swam the Tiber” to Catholicism).
Unlike many people from backgrounds roughly like mine, I found his approach more persuasive then Peter Gillquist’s Becoming Orthodox, written about a clique of Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru) staffers who entered Orthodoxy en masse. Suffice that Howard’s evangelical millieu was more aligned with my temperament than Gillquist’s.
I would do well to emulate Howard, who wrote sincere appreciation for all he gained through his evangelical childhood before reaching his eponymous conclusion. My own evangelical childhood was not dissimilar, but then in adolescence I encountered a fuller evangelical culture, and that’s what I (too often) excoriate. And I won’t even get started on the devolution of “evangelical” to a political label, which is beyond the control of sober evangelicals to remedy.
More Howard:
The evangelicalism of my childhood church taught me true doctrine about the incarnation. It taught me about creation and about Eden and about the Fall. But somehow it never, at least in its piety, put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. … A whole array of pickets had been thrown up between us and civilizations, lovely diversions, such as ballet, theater, cinema, and wine, and each point had its rationale, certainly. But the net effect was the plant in our imaginations the notion that spirituality was more a matter of excision than of transfiguration.
Speaking of God …
Although one must think of God constantly, he said, one must not speak of God quickly or readily. One acquires knowledge of God through the mind, but only with the aid of prayer and ascetic discipline. Gregory taught that theology is not for all people or for all occasions. Knowledge of theological matters is not necessary for salvation; only simple faith is needed. Speaking of God is a great task, but spiritual purification is far more important.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Who finds the Orthodox Church?
This is kind of the culture that we’re up against. The only people who are finding the Orthodox Church, essentially right now, are people who are discontented in a current Christian experience and who have read widely enough, or are theologically savvy enough, to at least have a intellectual connection to the existence of the Orthodox Church.
My father’s theology was formed in a particularly bitter moment and never evolved along with the rest of his thinking. The theological battles of the 1920s and 1930s shaped Dad in the same way that political battles would shape the Vietnam generation in the 1960s. Passions forged in those battles became part of a personal identity that was difficult for people who did not share the passionate and polarizing experiences to understand.
It has been a long time since I mentioned or quoted from Frank(y) Schaeffer. Suffice that I’ve read most of his books and do not recommend that you do so. But this theory joins one other quote from him as worth sharing.
The most dangerous foe, as seen from Mercerburg
The most dangerous foe with which we are called to contend, is again not the Church of Rome but the sect plague in our own midst; not the single pope of the city of seven hills, but the numberless popes—German, English, and American—who would fain enslave Protestants once more to … mere private judgment and private will. … the deceived multitude, having no power to discern spirits, is converted not to Christ and his truth, but to the arbitrary fancies and baseless opinion of an individual, who is only of yesterday.
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, quoting “Mercerburg Theologians” Philip Schaff and John W. Nevin.
I did not know of Mercerburg Theology until after I’d become Orthodox, though Philip Schaff compiled a collection of patristic writings that’s still popular, perhaps because it’s free on the internet.
Mercerburg is a fascinating “so near yet so far” moment in Protestantism.
Straight answers, true answers
We often avoid giving a straight answer because the nature of true answers [is] often not straight.
The human voice: That we can sing seems basis for conjecture that, despite our stupidities and our sinfulness, we might be the reason the universe exists.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Like Billy Graham, [Francis Schaeffer] took American capitalism as a given and never thought about how it might be contributing to the secularization of the country.
In the century from 1123 to 1215, it was popes who called together synods of bishops that were thereby declared ecumenical. And they did so with the principal goal of reforming the Church. Historically, ecumenical councils had been called to address great heresies, such as Arianism, Nestorianism, or iconoclasm. Not so those designated ecumenical by the reform papacy. In less than one century, no fewer than four such councils were called at the papal headquarters at the Lateran Palace.
I shared a meal this week with some Orthodox friends. One had just returned from Thessaloniki, Greece, where he visited a parish where a newborn baby who had been pronounced dead was given a kind of baptism ritual, even though he was not alive. The child was born on the feast of St. Demetrios, the early fourth-century patron of the city. When the priest baptized him “Demetrios,” they all heard a sharp intake of breath, and the baby began to cry. This just happened.
…
[J]ust as the prayers of St. Demetrios raised a baby from the dead the other day, none of us know what God has in mind for us if we choose to turn away from our corruption and to Him. At that same meal with the Orthodox guys, another told a story about an American Orthodox priest of his acquaintance who was serving liturgy when an elderly man dropped dead. He rushed over to him to try to help, but it was too late. He was quite dead. Paramedics were called. The priest anointed the dead man with holy oil … and he woke up. It was a miracle. We need a miracle like that.
That hits home as I was in Thessaloniki, in Church named for St. Demetrios, within the past two weeks.
(I heard a more coherent version of the first story, no less miraculous, from another source, but I’m too lazy to transcribe that podcast account. I believe the accounts. Help, O Lord, my unbelief.)
Catholicism had, by this time, reoriented my theological concerns around the concerns of the Church catholic. My assumptions, and the issues that animated me, were those of the Church of history. My evangelical upbringing had led me to believe that Protestantism entailed the rejection of these concerns. But this notion exploded upon contact with the Protestantism of history.
Onsi A. Kamel, Catholicism Made Me Protestant, H/T Rod Dreher. I’m not sure how I missed this four years ago; it’s quite good. The key, though, is that Evangelicalism, as Kamel experienced it, didn’t even seem to ask the right questions.
Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them. Enemies have driven me into Your embrace more than friends have. Friends have bound me to earth, enemies have loosed me from earth and have demolished all my aspirations in the world. Enemies have made me a stranger in worldly realms and an extraneous inhabitant of the world. Just as a hunted animal finds safer shelter than an unhunted animal, so have I, persecuted by enemies, found the safest sanctuary, having ensconced myself beneath Your tabernacle, where neither friends nor enemies can slay my soul. Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them. They, rather than I, have confessed my sins before the world. They have flagellated me, whenever I have hesitated to flagellate myself. They have tormented me, whenever I have tried to flee torments. They have scolded me, whenever I have flattered myself. They have spat upon me, whenever I have filled myself with arrogance. Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them. Whenever I have made myself wise, they have called me foolish. Whenever I have made myself mighty, they have mocked me as though I were a dwarf. Whenever I have wanted to lead people, they have shoved me into the background. Whenever I have rushed to enrich myself, they have prevented me with an iron hand. Whenever I thought that I would sleep peacefully, they have wakened me from sleep. Whenever I have tried to build a home for a long and tranquil life, they have demolished it and driven me out. Truly, enemies have cut me loose from the world and have stretched out my hands to the hem of Your garment. Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them. Bless them and multiply them; multiply them and make them even more bitterly against me – so that my fleeing to You may have no return; so that all hope in men may be scattered like cobwebs; so that absolute serenity may begin to reign in my soul; so that my heart may become the grave of my two evils twins: arrogance and anger; so that I might amass all my treasure in heaven; ah, so that I may for once be freed from self-deception, which is entangled me in the dreadful web of illusory life. Enemies have taught me to know – what hardly anyone knows – that a person has no enemies in the world except himself. One hates his enemies only when he fails to realize that they are not enemies, but cruel friends. It is truly difficult for me to say who has done me more good and who has done me more evil in the world: friends or enemies. Therefore bless, O Lord, both my friends and my enemies. A slave curses enemies, for he does not understand. But a son blesses them, for he understands. For a son knows that his enemies cannot touch his life. Therefore he freely steps among them and prays to God for them. Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
I came across a lot of things recently that illuminate the Orthodox Christian faith.
Collected thoughts on Orthodoxy
The knowledge about God results in definitions and distinctions. The knowledge of God leads to this one, incomprehensible, yet obvious and inescapable word: holy. And in this word we express both that God is the Absolutely Other, the One about whom we know nothing, and that He is the end of all our hunger, all our desires, the inaccessible One who mobilizes our wills, the mysterious treasure that attracts us, and there is really nothing to know but Him.
Tradition will always feel nebulous, indefinable, and inscrutable, and yet we differentiate between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, Orthodox and not Orthodox based on whether the idea comports with Tradition.
Orthodoxy is not so much a series of doctrines and practices to be grasped once and for all, but a way of life that one takes up, growing in perfection with each passing year.
From the rising of the sun even to the place where it goes down, my name shall be great among the nations; and in every place incense shall be offered to my name, and a pure offering: for my name shall be great among the nations, says the Lord of Hosts.
Malachi 1:11 (emphasis pointedly added)
Grokking Orthodoxy
What changed my mind is my own writing. The older I got, the more I felt the need to share my belief with others. I felt it in a good and peaceful way in the Catholic Mass. I prefer the Orthodox Mass, but for a Westerner, it’s very hard to get into the Orthodox mindset — the references are quite different. I knew so much of the Catholic Church that I didn’t manage to jump over to the Orthodox Church.
This comment surprised me yet, considering what I’d learned about Fosse’s prose style, didn’t entirely surprise me.
He is correct that “for a Westerner, it’s very hard to get into the Orthodox mindset.” I’ve been at it for more than 26 years now, and it’s still a challenge. But it seems to me that the “problem” is the Western mindset — drilled into me pervasively for almost 50 years, including in church to a shameful extent — not the Orthodox mindset.
For most of the world
Wise government, and knowledge in general, were deemed more likely to come from ancient learning than experimental progress. Similar things were true in the Islamic world. Europeans were the anomaly here. Historically speaking, virtually all cultures put a higher value on tried and tested ancestral wisdom than on newfangled, unproven contemporary innovation. That is easy to forget in the contemporary West, where we are so shaped by the notion of progress and the expectation that we will know more tomorrow than we do today. But from an eighteenth-century perspective, what needs explaining is not why Chinese education centered on two-thousand-year-old Confucian texts, or Islamic learning on the Koran, or why traditional societies prized certainty over possibility. These represent the norm in almost all times and places, including medieval Europe. What needs explaining is why early modern Westerners started doing the opposite. Why did their cafes, museums, and stately homes fill with “curiosities”? Why did the pursuit of novelty, discovery, and possibility begin to win out over antiquity, familiarity, and fidelity?
Three factors were particularly significant. The first was [Western] Christianity, whose influence on the psychology, sociology, eschatology, and theology of Western Europeans over the course of a millennium or more can scarcely be exaggerated. Psychologically, as we saw from Joseph Henrich’s work in chapter 2, we can thank the Roman Catholic Church and its theology of marriage for the “highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical” way our brains work. Sociologically, the Western Church also created the European bourgeoisie—the urbanized middle class of “burghers” or “townsfolk” with their charters, guilds, and universities—as an unintentional by-product of the papal revolution in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Eschatologically, the hope of the coming kingdom generated an expectation that the future would be better than the present, and that progress was therefore possible (in contrast to religious systems in which history is a series of cycles, or even a steady decline from a Golden Age in the distant past).
There’s more to it than this, but this is important: Orthodoxy is more like the rest of the world than like the progress-seeking Westerners. Yet living here, I’m still subject to all the blandishments of our WEIRDER culture:
Western
Educated
Industrialized
Rich
Democratic
Ex-Christian
Romantic
Martin Shaw’s Christian journey
Of his Christian journey, fairly recently begun:
I’ve grown a little in a sense of theology and church history, but not, I hope, at the exclusion of the thing itself; a stumbling encounter with divine ground. And the more I experience that, the quieter I feel. I remember St Ignatios of Antioch: ‘he who possesses the word of Jesus can even hear his silence’. I would make no claims to have that mastery, but I do have experience – however briefly – of to what he’s referring.
And for us Christian worker-bees, some of us have to be careful of gargling with too much overt mysticism. It can distract us from the voluminous-ordinary. Me at least. We start proclaiming about hesychasm when we’ve spent roughly five minutes being vaguely quiet and twiddling our prayer rope.
(I think the silence of God is for me partially a sense of an abiding presence as well as active instruction. By their nature, these things require sitting with.)
I’ll be “sitting with” on Mt. Athos for a while, during which imminent trip I won’t be blogging.
Dogma
Dogmas are important, but not as the building blocks of some comprehensive account of the Divine Mysteries, but rather a series of decisions, arrived at by the Church, that are there to prevent ways of thinking that might obscure or bypass the mystery of God before which we stand in awe…
The result is a religious landscape dominated by popular Christian ideas that have “gone mad,” as G.K. Chesterton once put it, “because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” This America has a church of self-love, with prophets like Oprah Winfrey preaching a gospel of the divine self, a “God Within” spirituality that risks making selfishness a virtue. It has a church of prosperity, with figures like Joel Osteen as its bishops, that insists that God desires nothing more for his elect than American prosperity, capitalist success. And it has churches of politics, preaching redemption through political activism — a Christian nationalism on the right, by turns messianic and apocalyptic, and a progressive utopianism on the left, convinced that history’s arc bends always in its favor.
Now that we are comfortably on the other side of scarcity, tyranny, ignorance, and the likelihood of dying young, it’s easy to overlook the material, moral, and political accomplishments of modernity and note only its fragmentation, irrationalities, alienation, and malaise. For some religious people, malaise provides a motivation to re-enchant the world, and, indeed, the theme and hope of re-enchantment is prevalent among young Christians. While I have genuine sympathy for their frustrations at the state of the world, too often they express a craving for meaning more than truth, and not always in entirely reasonable ways, including ways that exacerbate the anxieties and frustrations of the moment.
That paragraph encapsulates a lot. I’m one of those who tends “to overlook the material, moral, and political accomplishments of modernity and note only its fragmentation, irrationalities, alienation, and malaise”.
As noted, I’m heading for Mount Athos, and when this posts, I’ll already be in Thessaloniki, preparing for a Monday boat trip to the Mount. I’ll not be posting this week and will be largely incommunicado.
I found myself very recently worrying about Paul Kingsnorth and his sorta-kindred spirit Martin Shaw:
It is dubious to thrust Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw onto the Orthodox “Christian stage.” Nothing they’re saying offends me, but I see an analogy to the qualifications of deacons in the New Testament, who are not to be novices lest they get puffed up. I saw countless Evangelical let-downs as celebrity converts crashed and burned.
Both of these men — moderately famous overall and certainly with devoted fans — have arrived at Orthodox Christianity from paganish backgrounds (I mean pagan as a descriptor, not as dismissive) within the past five years. Both lost fans who felt betrayed, and both risked (or incurred) a financial hit as a result. Both have added Christian followers, especially from Orthodoxy, as well as losing followers.
But there’s a great risk in newbie Christians being thrust forward for adulation. (“Let them be tested first.” I Timothy 3:10) Am I being an enabler by subscribing to their Substacks? Am I spurning a brother in Christ who needs to replace his former, more pagan, income sources if I don’t subscribe?
A new Christian with a platform who wants to write about his Christian journey is sailing on a sea which could sink him any time. I have prayed about this consistently, of course, and I’ve asked advice of everyone I know. Friends, family, teachers, my spiritual father, wise heads both Christian and not. I’ve even sought – and been given – answers from monks on Mount Athos. Should I really be writing about this? I have asked, over and over. I don’t know anything.
The answer has always been the same, and it has always been: yes, you should. Sometimes that has excited me, and at other times it has felt like a millstone around my neck. Of course, the ‘yes’ always comes with important caveats. If I start writing as if I were a teacher or a leader or some kind of wise or accomplished Public Christian, or somebody who knows much at all of any depth, I will fall on my face. Probably some people would enjoy that, and perhaps it would be a good lesson in humility, but still, I am going to try and avoid it.
It’s good that he recognizes the risk and is asking wiser heads. It’s good that they have given, and he apparently has heard, cautions on how he should write as a Christian novice.
So here’s some of how he’s struggling with his new task:
Here I am, surprisingly and yet not suprisingly, a Christian. It is on the one hand not surprising, because I have never been a materialist; I have always had some intuition of God or gods or spirits, usually experienced for me through the natural world, and I have always been searching for the truth of that, always scanning the horizon for the true harbour. Yet it is surprising too, because I never imagined that, in the words of Seraphim Rose, patron saint of Lost Western People, the truth was ‘a person, not an idea.’
…
I have noticed in the last few years a constant temptation to systematise Christianity; to bend it into a shape that fits a pre-existing pattern in people’s heads…
My version of this temptation is to view the deep mystery of creation and creator through the prism of my attitudes to the Machine, and then to bend the former to suit the latter, rather than the other way around. I think that I have been stuck for words all week because I was struggling with this tendency. I found, when I stood outside myself and looked in, that I was almost unconsciously seeking a grand theory big enough to accommodate Christ. The old habit of constructing some thesis or other was refusing to die. It was as if I couldn’t write about this journey at all without knowing the destination in advance. As if this ancient spiritual pathway were not an exploration or an unfolding, but a thesis or an argument.
…
‘Ideas create idols’, said St Gregory of Nyssa. ‘Only wonder leads to knowing.’ St Augustine agreed. ‘If you understand,’ he said, ‘it is not God you understand.’
Christian Zionism is the term used to describe the view that the Old Testament prophecies of the return of exiled Israel to the Promised Land find their fulfillment in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, and not in Christ and the Christian Church. This theological view is comparatively recent, and is totally at odds with the views of the Church Fathers. A more detailed critique of this theology can be found here.
Fr. Lawrence Farley. I quote this for its succinctness, first, and to retell (briefly, I hope) why I have a particular wariness of Christian Zionism.
My Evangelical boarding school of 60 years ago was less homogenous in thought than I imagined going into it, but I didn’t tease out that observation until much later. (This is because “Bible only Christianity” has always produced flaky opinions and eventual schisms.) One teacher was, by Fr. Lawrence’s definition, a Christian Zionist, but with an overlay on that.
The founding of Israel in 1948 started the end-times clock running.
The Great Tribulation, the rule of Antichrist, and the return of Christ would all be within 40 years of the founding of Israel.
A Biblical generation is 40 years.
Therefore we would not see 1988 before Christ’s return.
(And therefore, I would not live to age 40.)
I add the obligatory caveat that my parents did not inculcate stuff like this, and I don’t recall whether I mentioned it to them. By God’s grace, and perhaps partly by the parents’ sobriety about “Bible prophecy,” I never fully bought into this. I thought this lurid schema stretched the plain meaning of the Bible past the breaking point and I (tacitly) rejected approaching the Bible as if it were some kind of cypher, which if broken could satisfy our curiosity about the near future.
Still, it haunted me a little.
So far as I can tell, the false prophets who peddled that sort of crap (I’m looking at you, Hal Lindsey) never repented but presumably came up with just-so stories on how they were fundamentally right all along — just like all the Adventists and other 19th-century sects they deride.
Young, headstrong, and hurtful
There must have been moments during those formational years when someone said something like this: “We don’t really know what we are doing. We need to join a larger group or institution or denomination. We need oversight and accountability and guidance.” But that attitude did not prevail. If these young, headstrong men had more fully embraced all that history and tradition had to teach them, they might not have tried to reinvent the wheel. It would have spared many people some of the pain to come.
Jon Ward, Testimony.
Irreligious Right
[W]e are far more likely to see the coming of a right-wing, essentially pagan political order than we are the restoration of anything meaningfully Christian … The Left, by attacking Christianity directly and indirectly, has torn down the greatest barrier holding back political paganism of the Right. Christian parents now have to worry that their children will be seduced by cultural leftism (including the sanctification of LGBT and other forms of sexual paganism), or by post-Christian right-wing paganism, which entails white identity and other forms of militant racism. We have to watch out for syncretism of white identity with hardline conservative Christianity …
You can lose your Christian soul to the far right as easily as you can to the far left. The devil doesn’t care how you lose it; he just wants you to lose it.
I quote Rod much less than I used to for reasons I haven’t entirely sorted out in my own head. I’m not going to try to sort them out here in public.
But on this, I’m confident that he’s right, including about the infiltration of the most “conservative”-looking versions of Christianity. Pastors looking for disciples of Christ must be on alert; pastors happy with disguised pagans in the pews may be in for a bonanza.
Of what one may not speak one must remain silent
The full doctrine of the Church was made available only to baptized Christians. It still is. Much of it is written and so accessible to all, but the most important aspects are passed on orally and symbolically because they can only be transmitted to someone who is ready to receive them. And by their very nature they cannot be written. By taking the first step, by being baptized into the Orthodox Church, I had not experienced any new convictions but had opened myself to an evolving mystery which the Church has preserved and which exists to communicate to its members. And, on Patmos, I had become normal.
Peter France, Patmos: A Place of Healing for the Soul
New eyes
How do we become uncomplicated and unsophisticated? Can we simply unlearn all that we have learned?
No, we cannot, but what we can do is to separate ourselves from it in order to look at it with new eyes. For us Westerners to truly enter into the ancient Christian transmission and catch the essence of Christ’s teaching, it is necessary for us to crucify our rationalizing minds and arise above the level of thought and emo for a society founded on Descartes’ proposition “I think, therefore I am,” this of course means a kind of suicide; and it is to precisely such an ego-death that Christ calls us. Contemporary western Christianity trained us how to think and what to think; whereas Christ himself, as did Lao Tzu before Him, taught us how not to need to think.
To be a devout Christian or a believing Jew or Muslim is to be a bit like a conspiracy theorist, in the sense that you believe there is an invisible reality that secular knowledge can’t recognize. But the great religions are also full of warnings against false prophets and fraudulent revelations. My own faith, Roman Catholicism, is both drenched in the supernatural and extremely scrupulous about the miracles and seers that it validates. And it allows its flock to be simply agnostic about a range of possibly supernatural claims.
”How has it come about,” C. S. Lewis once asked, “that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?” It is, Lewis suggests, because the dominance of the machine in our culture altered our imagination. It gave us a “new archetypal image.”
Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes
Just askin’
Why is it unjust for a nation, convinced of the truth of Islam or Christianity or Judaism, to give preference to truth over falsehood in education, law, and cultural institutions? Don’t all regimes claim to give preference to truth over falsehood? Or, to bring the question down from the metaphysical stratosphere: Is it unjust for, say, Ireland to give discriminating support to Irish holidays, cultural traditions, or language? If that is unobjectionable, why can’t Ireland give preference to its traditional Catholic religion? Questions of truth aside, why should religion be treated differently than other national traditions?
Peter J. Leithart, Rethinking Religious Freedom. Leithart presumably used and Irish example because he is not Roman Catholic.
Evangelistic gimmickry is nothing new
”Original sin, [Charles Finney] declared, is not a “constitutional depravity” but rather a deep-seated “selfishness” that people could overcome if they made themselves “a new heart.” “Sin and holiness,” he declared, “are voluntary acts of mind.” He was just as clear about the role of the preacher in bringing people to salvation. “A revival,” he wrote in 1835, “is not a miracle, or dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means.””
Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals
And now for something quite different …
I syng of a m[a]yden that is makeles. kyng of alle kynges to here sone che ches. he cam also stylle there his moder was as dew in aprylle, that fallyt on the gras. He cam also stylle to his moderes bowr as dew in aprille, that fallyt on the flour. He cam also stylle ther his moder lay as dew in aprille, that fallyt on the spray. Moder & mayden was never non but che– wel may swych a lady godes moder be.
A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
