Category: Faith & Ideology

Richard Mourdock’s teachable moment

For all those who feel or feign outrage at Richard Mourdock’s abortion/rape theodicy, a few sage words from a guy who’d have been called “Joe” were he not second in command to a guy called “Pharoah.”

Talking to his brothers, who had sold him into slavery and told their dad he’d been eaten by a lion, in circumstance where the brothers were thinking “We are soooooo screwed,” he said:

But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.

(Genesis 50:20, King James version)

Change, certainty and salvation

Orthodoxy often gets the back-handed compliment of complaints that it hasn’t changed. For every such compliment, I’m grateful.

But Chris Castaldo pays us the same compliment intentionally:

The notion that Rome doesn’t modify authoritative teaching such as the articles and canons of Trent is, with all due respect, out of step with reality. If you were looking for an example of a church that hasn’t changed for over a millennium, you’ll want to consider Eastern Orthodox Churches, not Rome.

It’s kind of odd after that affirmation to see Castaldo tear into Rome, instead of lovingly caressing Orthodoxy. But I guess Rome’s the 800 pound gorilla against which all western Evangelicals must contend – especially if one was raised Catholic, rather as I tend to obsess a bit about the subspecie of Evangelicalism in which I was instructed beginning in boarding school.

But it’s still puzzling. Castaldo works in a pretty smart setting: Wheaton College and formerly College Church of Wheaton, with both of which I’m pretty familiar. Why doesn’t it occur to him to question the magisterial Reformation not having turned Eastward? Why does he accept (as I assume he does) Evangelicalism’s break with the Magisterial Reformation during and after the First and Second Great Awakenings? (Maybe if I had followed his blog over time, I’d find that he has questioned all this and still come out where he is.)

But he does a good job of arguing that Rome changes. Really. It sounds to me as if Rome is nowhere to go if you want stable, clear doctrine, P.R. to the contrary notwithstanding.

On the one hand, for instance, you’ve got extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, but then it’s a matter of disputed and changing interpretation just who is extra Ecclesiam.

You have a purportedly infallible Magisterium, but nobody to interpret what the Magisterium truly teaches, or even whether Pope so-and-so was speaking ex cathedra when he uttered this or that. And in this election season, I’d be remiss not to note that liberal Catholics cite Catholic social teaching on the preferential option for the poor to justify voting for a feticidal maniac while conservative Catholics insist that voting for feticidal maniacs is intrinsically evil, whereas the best approach to helping the poor is a matter of prudential judgments. (It’s not my fight, but I give the edge to the conservatives there, in case my scrupulously neutral contrast left you wondering.)

That doesn’t sound to me like much of an improvement over an infallible Bible with no infallible interpreter. Infallibility – of Bible or of Magisterium – is a nice dogmatic theory, but not much practical use, it seems. (Calvinists have the same tap-dancing problem. When one of The Elect apostasizes, it just goes to prove he wasn’t really Elect. Some “eternal security,” huh?)

Good form seems to dictate that I now pronounce that you should come to Orthodoxy for stable, clear doctrine. But I won’t. “Stable” we’ve got down pat. “Clear,” not so much. Or so it seems to me.

But I don’t think the faith is about certainty about everything. What’s certainty got to do with union with God? Devils know the right factoids about God, for goodness sake.

Lack of certainty about some things doesn’t mean I’m confused about what matters. I know what I should do this morning first thing when I get up: thank God for another day to repent as my feet hit the floor, say my morning prayers and read today’s epistle reading. The morning prayers are pretty much universal; the Bible reading’s there because I’ve decided that’s when I’ll do it daily (if no other time). I know what I should do at mealtimes: more prayers. I know what I should do at bedtime. Still more prayers. Seven times a day would be good, actually. “Without ceasing” better still. And repentance, not pride, through it all. (I’m lousy at living this out. I’ll never be saved by my own effort.)

Saturday night? Vespers. Sunday morning? Matins and Liturgy. The texts are set. The music is sober, in whatever musical tradition it’s done. It’s a privilege to be obligated as a Reader (the lowest level of Clergy) to do these services.  They form me; they shape my soul.

The Creed? Definitely. It keeps me away from cliffs over which souls have been plunging for 2000 years. But it doesn’t tell me exactly where inside the protective fence I should be. It doesn’t tell me a lot of things about which I might feel idle curiosity. It wasn’t meant to be a Procrustean bed. And that’s okay.

So, what’s the conclusion? I’m not sure. I’ve only been Orthodox 15 years this month, and I had 49 years of bad habits to break. They’re not all broken yet. I’ve noticed for about 14.9 years that the Church isn’t pumping me full of right answers to rattle off to any question or objection, just like all the other ideologues on the block. I sometimes long for greater certainty, but then I’m ashamed of the pride that feels entitled to know instead of trusting.

I may be selling certainty and clarity short. But it seems to me that much as Abraham was told “get thee up into a land I shall show thee,” we walk by faith, not by the sight of a detailed roadmap with reservations staked out each night along the way. It that scandalizes you, and if I’m wrong, then I pray you’ll stumble onto someone who’ll set the record straight.

That someone would be in an Orthodox Church, by the way.

Reformation Day thoughts

Today is Reformation Day. In 5 years, there presumably will be a huge shindig for the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses.

Some people take this very seriously, as do I (it’s hard to understand America without it), but some are invested in it so much as to take it very, very seriously.

In the “very seriously” camp is Russell Saltzman, “dean of the Great Plains Mission District of the North American Lutheran Church, an online homilist for the Christian Leadership Center at the University of Mary, and author of The Pastor’s Page and Other Small Essays.” How he took it seriously is the subject of a recent essay:

The post in question was called “Why Can’t Lutherans Take Catholic Communion?” which would seem to be self-explanatory. Nevertheless, Reverend Saltzman explains how he, a Lutheran, came to receive Holy Communion in a Catholic church. (Hint: It required an archbishop.) He goes on to lament that, while Catholics are free in most cases to receive the sacrament in Lutheran churches, Lutherans are still barred from receiving in Catholic churches.

I read the same Saltzman essay Strange Herring (who’s in the “very, very seriously” camp) read, and had some of the same reactions. But since I am not now, nor have I ever been, a card-carrying member of the Lutheran party, I did not take time to do the take-down Strange Herring presented, from which the preceding block quote is taken.

I particularly like his quote of “Mary,” who commented on Saltzman’s essay:

Lutherans are welcome to take Communion on the same terms as everyone else. Make your profession of faith at the Easter Vigil and be received.

If you think your differences from us are too big for that, they are too big for you to receive.

The eventuality of Saltzman’s way of thinking – that no serious differences remain between Lutheran belief and Roman Catholic belief – if one takes schism as seriously as the Church always did until the centrifugal force of sola scriptura required turning it into a virtue, is what the late Richard John Neuhaus did 22 years ago: return to Rome.

My take on the Reformation is “Why, oh why, didn’t Luther & Co. return to the Church from which Rome is in schism?”

The One True Sadness

The one true sadness is “that of not being a saint,” and how often the “moral” Christians are precisely those who never feel, never experience this sadness, because their own “experience of salvation,” the feeling of “being saved” fills them with self-satisfaction; and whoever has been “satisfied” has received already his reward and cannot thirst and hunger for that total transformation and transfiguration of life which alone makes us “saints.”

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World.

Demonology Lives

According to some modern interpreters of Christianity, “demonology” belongs to an antiquated worldview and cannot be taken seriously by the man who “uses electricity.” We cannot argue with them here. What we must affirm, what the Church has always affirmed, is that the use of electricity may be “demonic,” as in fact may be the use of anything and of life itself. That is, in other words, the experience of evil which we call demonic is not that of a mere absence of good, or, for that matter, of all sorts of existential alienations and anxieties. It is indeed the presence of dark and irrational power. Hatred is not merely absence of love. It is certainly more than that, and we recognize its presence as an almost physical burden that we feel in ourselves when we hate. In our world, in which normal and civilized men “used electricity” to exterminate six million human beings, in this world in which right now some ten million people are in concentration camps because they failed to understand the “only way to universal happiness”, in this world the “demonic” reality is not a myth.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Stay off the Roof

Rachel Held Evans committed the kind of painfully protracted performance art that happens when Evangelicalism has utterly lost its sense – of decorum and of how to read scripture – and its publishing houses have become a commercial racket:

Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles in the home, Evans decides to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible for a year. Pursuing a different virtue each month, Evans learns the hard way that her quest for biblical womanhood requires more than a “gentle and quiet spirit” (1 Peter 3:4).​
It means growing out her hair, making her own clothes, covering her head, obeying her husband, rising before dawn, abstaining from gossip, remaining silent in church, and even camping out in the front yard during her period.

Evans’ schtick incited Deborah Cruz at The Stir, reportedly secular herself, to indict her for making a mockery of the Bible:

Here’s my issue — isn’t it better to just be honest about your beliefs in the first place? I may not be living biblically, but I am living honestly. I’m not so sure the same can be said for Evans. She appears to be poking fun with her book, though she vehemently denies that she is. But you don’t make a spectacle, write a book, and make videos in a “poking fun” manner if you are taking a challenge seriously.

But Cruz, while right about Evans making a mockery of the Bible, may have inadvertently become a bedfellow (if that term isn’t too evocative) with Evans, says Strange Herring:

Interesting that that’s how the book is being read by some, although Cruz is making the same mistake Evans is. Which is to say, by trying to follow Old Testament precepts only to show them up as unrealistic in 2012, Evans has succeeded in proving absolutely nothing. Like the people who demand that Christians endorse “X” because we no longer stone adulterers or forbid the eating of shellfish — and those things are in the Bible! So it’s all relative!
As if the “New” in “New Testament” really meant “Same Old.”
…
If you have to “assume” roles — whether you believe them to be biblically based or culturally normative for a 21st century couple — you sure as hell aren’t being you, something is being buried or ignored, and your marriage is doomed, I don’t care what you call it.
…
Say the Creed, say your prayers, go to work, feed your face, and try and actually enjoy your life together.
Flip the bird to the rest of it.
And stay off the roof.

Is Evans really crazy enough to think that her mocking (or is it merely “playful”?) treatment – of the Bible, of marriage, of sex roles – builds up marriage, which as a married, albeit “feminist” Christian, she presumably supports?

Maybe I should add Judaizing to my list of blows by the 98% to traditional marriage.

(For the record, I’d have seen none of these trendy young websites were I not following the Tweets of MZHemingway.)

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.