Category: Faith & Ideology

Isn’t that what friends are for?

From The Writer’s Almanac for July 6:

It was on this day in 1535 that Sir Thomas More was beheaded in the Tower of London for refusing to recognize his longtime friend King Henry VIII as the head of the Church. Thomas More was a barrister, a scholar, and a writer. He was the author of Utopia (1516), a controversial novel about an imaginary island, where society was based on equality for all people. It is from this novel that we get our word “utopia.”

Sir Thomas More was a champion of King Henry VIII and helped him write rebuttals to Martin Luther’s attacks on Henry. More presented sound theological arguments, and he also said things like, “Come, do not rage so violently, good father; but if you have raved wildly enough, listen now, you pimp.” And (also about Luther): “If he proceeds to play the buffoon in the manner in which he has begun, and to rave madly, if he proceeds to rage with calumny, to mouth trifling nonsense, to act like a raging madman, to make sport with buffoonery, and to carry nothing in his mouth but bilge-water, sewers, privies, filth and dung, then let others do what they will …”

Thomas More was a staunch Catholic, and so for a while, he and King Henry were both aligned against Protestantism, and Henry made More his Lord Chancellor. But then Henry decided to break with the Church and declare himself Supreme Head of the English Church, and More refused to sign an oath recognizing Henry above the rest of the Church. Finally, Henry had More beheaded.

Be it noted that this beheading was loosely motivated by “religion,” but rather more proximately by the King’s desire to keep the realm united after he apostatized in pursuit of a piece of tail successor to the throne.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Striking a balance

Perhaps the eager/anxious anticipation of the Supreme Court decisions on California’s Proposition Eight and the Defense of Marriage Act moved Elizabeth Scalia to write about why, confronted with an accusation of hypocrisy by an unknown internet scold, she nevertheless would neither condemn a gay friend’s decision to “marry” his partner nor offer him her felicitations:

First, I will not be held hostage to an ascendant social mood toward compulsory conformity; I will not give up my own (imperfect but free) thought and reason, whether it be to anonymous e-mailers who want me to prove my faith, or to an over-emotive era that demands that I prove my love. To the former I offer the words of Christ Jesus: “Go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘I desire mercy.’”

To the latter I offer a simple truth: Real love models God. God loves us unconditionally, and accepts all we are, but not all we do.

Secondly, I do not wish to surrender to the twin tyrannies of sentimentalism and relativism that overwhelm our society; within them resides neither justice nor truth …

Thirdly, I did not offer my friend public felicitations because I do not wish to be misunderstood, or to further add to the diminution of the concept of agape—the God-rooted depth of friendship that we have undervalued and left under-explored. Our pop culture portrays every first kiss as leading to a sexual tumble, and our society has largely adopted that mindset and practice. To us, it seems inconceivable that any love goes unconsummated or unconditionally approved. This makes it difficult for us to believe, or even to imagine, that sometimes God has other plans for love …

There follows a remarkable illustration of her third point. Do read her wonderful column, and don’t miss her self-referential link to an inspired bit of madness, “Jesus Never Said I Couldn’t Paint the Baby,” from April 9. (During the day, after I started writing this but hadn’t finished, Rod Dreher weighed in.)

What Scalia calls the “diminution of the concept of agape” others, like Robert P. George et al, see as threatening a drought of deep friendship, as here:

Misunderstandings about marriage will also speed our society’s drought of deep friendship, with special harm to the unmarried. The state will have defined marriage mainly by degree or intensity — as offering the most of what makes any relationship valuable: shared emotion and experience. It will thus become less acceptable to seek (and harder to find) emotional and spiritual intimacy in nonmarital friendships.

On the same day as Scalia’s “On the Square” column, Daniel Mattson adds there an installment to a slow-motion discussion of the appropriate vocabulary for discussion same-sex attraction (and its overt symptoms). “The danger [of adopting the language of our fallen experience] lies in getting mired in faulty narratives created by fallen man, which lead men and women to be at cross purposes with their divinely created nature.” “Hard teachings” can nevertheless be part of the Good News.

Mattson is opposed, he acknowledges, by “gay but chaste” voices like that of Eve Tushnet:

Eve Tushnet, for example, shows great disdain for the Church’s language when she writes, “the ‘intrinsically disordered’ language sucks and is a mark of privilege, the kind of thing you only say if you don’t feel it yourself or don’t care about the other people who feel it” and believes that part of her mission, and of others who think like her, is to work to “come up with a vastly broader and better set of vocabularies than the ridiculously, painfully limited set the Church is working with right now.”

It really does seem to be an important discussion, which is being carried on with commendable civility among people, most of whom have a very strong personal interest in the topic because they experience same-sex attraction.

The goal, I think, is not a compromise or via media – unless by via media is meant a course that is neither reflexively homophobic nor homophilic. The goal is truth, perceived in a way that can be taken in as pastoral by those who are willing to entertain the possibility that they, like every other sinner in the world, have their own mix of besetting sins and temptations, and that it’s not forbidden for a physician of souls to call your temptation a “temptation” instead of a “gift.”

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

What would induce me to revert?

My cyberfriend John, a Texan who blogs occasionally (and interestingly) and apparently is half a decade or so younger than I, embraced Orthodoxy at about the same age that I did. Ten years having passed, he published on Tuesday a “revisit [to] my initial exposure to Orthodoxy – the thing that attracted me to the Faith in the first place.”

Most Texas converts seem to come from Baptist or Church of Christ backgrounds. John was one of the latter:

For many people, the Churches of Christ are just another entrée in the broad smorgasbord of American evangelical Protestantism.  Those readers who hail from Texas or Tennessee know differently, however.  Like the Mormons, they are Restorationists and retain a unique self-perception.  Churches of Christ believe in a pristine First-Century-New-Testament-Christianity that quickly apostatized after the death of the Apostle John.  They neither identify with the Reformation nor believe they are connected with that movement in any way.  The Reformers were moving in the right direction, mind you, but according to Churches of Christ did not go nearly far enough.

Their particular history began in early 19th century frontier America during the religious ferment of the Second Great Awakening.  Alexander Campbell (and others) urged a return to New Testament simplicity, arguing that a sincere student of the Bible could know what God required by reading the “blueprint” of Scripture.  One simply had to free their minds of all preconceived religious prejudices and look at the Scriptures objectively and rationally.  Campbell believed he had done that very thing, and  he and his followers concluded that they were the first to ever really and truly do that, hence the “restored” church.  Other religionists who looked at Scripture and arrived at different conclusions were dismissed as insincere, still holding to the “traditions of men.”  These early Restorers were eager to debate this point with others, though their self-serving and circular reasoning was a bit like arguing with Calvinists about predestination.

These “New Testament Christians” proudly claim to be neither Protestant nor Catholic, but simply “the church.” In fact, they are perhaps the most Protestant of any group, taking sola scriptura to all new levels ….

It’s surprising how tenacious this idea of “restoration” is in American Protestant religion (or at least in the Evangelicalism in which I was steeped from 1963 to roughly 1970 – high school and halfway through college – which largely exonerates my parents of anything more serious than naïvete about the religious ambience of the boarding school we collectively chose). What’s unique about the Churches of Christ is their denial that they’re Protestant and their extraordinary indifference to any history:

Two areas, however, continued  to frustrate me.  These days I can truly call myself a historian—I have the degree, I teach the classes, etc.  But historical research has always been my passion.  I studied our particular religious history in great detail.  Where I now have a wall of Orthodox books, I once had a wall of Church of Christ volumes.  I still have the complete works of Alexander Campbell, Barton W. Stone and Walter Scott (the evangelist, not the Scottish novelist.)  I knew our history inside and out.  I wrote my master’s thesis on the “Stoneite” wing of the Church of Christ in Texas, 1824-1865.   But outside of an occasional professor at our Texas, Tennessee or Alabama colleges, there was absolutely no interest in our history—or really anyone else’s for that matter.  I gave talks on the subject from time to time, and my congregation was polite, but uninterested.  The attitude bordered on active disinterest.  The reason is not hard to fathom.  The Bible is the “blueprint” and the Church of Christ is the “restored” church built on that plan.  This rendered history and the normal historical forces to be irrelevant, as at any time an individual could open their Bible and “restore” the church, regardless of their historical perspective (provided of course, they concluded as Campbell and his successors.)  I always knew this to be inane.  Writing these words makes this belief sound almost childish, but that was indeed the attitude.  History was unnecessary to the church.   I always knew better.

Churches of Christ imagines a 1st-Century church much along their own lines:  small autonomous congregations, each ruled by a plurality of elders, under the guidance of Scripture.  They hold that soon after 100 AD, the church started to apostatize in a big way–bishops, sacramental view of the Supper, infant baptism, etc.  Churches of Christ do not hold that the church began to go astray with the decrees of Constantine.  Rather, they believe that the rot had set long before, the Byzantine emperor’s actions only confirmed what was already in place.   This is a pleasant enough story, but no more based in reality or real history than the fantasy of the [tribes invented by Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon] created by their contemporary Restorationists.

To be deep in history is to cease being Protestant. The Churches of Christ, disdaining history entirely, fairly deserve John’s “the most Protestant” label. But while their disdain may be unexcelled, the Evangelicalism I was steeped in tried to excel it, and shared the notion that no later than the Emperor Constantine’s decree that Christianity be tolerated, things went down hill rapidly.

But history is not what drew John (or me, for that matter) to Orthodoxy initially. He loves travel, and traveled Bulgaria ten years ago:

Five hundred years of severe Ottoman domination precluded development of the castles and palaces that dot other parts of Europe.  What Bulgaria does have, however, is monasteries–destroyed and re-built time and again over the centuries.  Unless you are going to the Black Sea beaches, monastery hopping is what one does in Bulgaria.  And so, that was our plan.

In various monasteries, he saw “something completely new – real, observable reverence,” “a truly Holy place,” “[s]imple and genuine hospitality” (from someone deterred neither by work needing done nor by a language barrier) and “a real community of Christians.”

I returned home to my life and routine.  And while I did not forget these experiences, I was not yet launched off onto any new path.  The trigger for that would come in a couple of months.  And when it did, I had the context of my experience in Bulgarian Orthodoxy, characterized by reverence, holiness, hospitality and community.

Recently, I stumbled across an online survey for ex-members of the Churches of Christ.  The pollsters were analyzing the reasons why this fellowship is failing to keep their own.  (And in fairness, I have no doubt that there is a similar survey somewhere that addresses the former Orthodox.)  Just for kicks, I took the survey.  I remember one question in particular.  The pollster asked what would induce me to return to the Churches of Christ.  The question took me aback, and I realized that I was probably coming from a much different perspective than the average disgruntled ex-CoCer.  I concluded then that the poll was pointless and the pollsters did not grasp the real problem.  They were searching for ways to tweak or reform the church, to make it less objectionable to the dissatisfied.  But they did not consider that the basic premise itself was misguided.  For the Church of Christ did not do sola scriptura wrong.  If anything, they carried it to at least one of its logical conclusions.  I do not recall exactly how I answered the question, but I believe I said something about the Pearl of Great Price.

(Emphasis added) His blog has some beautiful pictures of places his visited. Don’t just take my word for his story.

Were I to stumble onto an online survey for former members of the Christian Reformed Church, in which I was an Elder before my conversion to Orthodoxy, the question “what would induce you to return” would be well-nigh unanswerable. It probably wouldn’t occur to me to say “The Pearl of Great Price,” but I might tauntingly play my conversion backward:

  1. Persuade me that Christ didn’t build one Church (or that the one He built was the CRC, or that the one Church is divided by design so that everyone can have a church that “suits them” even if it disagrees fundamentally with other churches that suit other folks).
  2. Persuading me that sola scriptura works just fine, and that those who conclude something other than Calvinism from scripture are insincere, tradition-bound or stupid.

I’m not holding my breath. I really cannot begin to imagine any reversion.

The only further Big Religious Change I can even imagine is that of  a “little light going on” some day, illumining a path to Rome that I cannot (and really care not) to see now. I’m not holding my breath for that, either, but epiphanies are unpredictable.

For now, it seems to me that Orthodoxy, Rome and relativism are the three choices.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.