Category: Protestantism

Zaccheus Sunday 2026

Explanation of the title.

History

Theology the authorities can work with

Predictably, secular authorities convinced by the reformers’ truth claims liked the distinction drawn between the necessity of obedience to them and of disobedience to Rome. They liked hearing “the Gospel” accompanied by such “good news”—it would allow them, for starters, to appropriate for themselves all ecclesiastical property, including the many buildings and lands that belonged to religious orders, and to use it or the money from its sale in whatever ways they saw fit. In two stages during the late 1530s, seizing for himself the vast holdings of all the hundreds of English monasteries and friaries, Henry VIII would demonstrate how thoroughly a ruler could learn this lesson without even having to accept Lutheran or Reformed Protestant doctrines about grace, faith, salvation, or worship.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

The long shadow of Puritanism

Long after Puritans had become Yankees, and Yankee Trinitarians had become New England Unitarians (whom Whitehead defined as believers in one God at most) the long shadow of Puritan belief still lingered over the folkways of an American region.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed

Human Rights

Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

That’s pretty terrifying if Holland is correct and if a lot of Muslims are still faithful to that command ethic.

Salvation (“Soteriology”)

Hacking Eternity

I’m glad the authors or editors at Dispatch Faith came up with that “Hacking Eternity” title for a little bit of musing on Scott Adams’ (creator of Dilbert) self-reported deathbed conversion. It’s perfect:

For whatever reason, Adams delayed his conversion … In that January 4 X post, only nine days before his death, Adams said, “So I still have time, but my understanding is you’re never too late.” His final message, read by his first wife after his death, confirmed his plans: “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior … I have to admit, the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks so attractive to me. So here I go.”

I cannot categorically rule out the sincerity of Scott Adams’ “conversion,” but with all the Pascal’s wager trappings, and delaying claiming Christ as Lord until the very last minute (when the formulaic Lordship carried no practical meaning, no period of following Christ’s example or commandments) I can’t not put conversion in precatory quotes, either.

I recall one classmate in my Evangelical boarding school who declared his intent to become a Christian some day, but not before he’d whooped it up as much as possible. Last I knew, he was whooping it up at age 50+ with pneumatic wife #2. His declaration was so consistent with the logic of evangelical soteriology (study of salvation) pervasive in that time and place that the only refutations I can recall were:

  1. That he might be murdered, or have a fatal car collision, or otherwise die too suddenly to effectuate his last minute “conversion.”
  2. That refusing salvation for too long risked “hardening of the heart” to where could not repent.

Better would be this, I think, though it would probably be dismissed as “works righteousness”:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

Galatians 6:7-8.

Yeah, that’s a proof-text, taken without context. But I’d still say it fits.

The current milieu

The denominations

A new era of martyrdom

The Episcopal Church of New Hampshire is ready for frickin’ war. The Episcopalians are amped up. Bishop Rob’s reflection from earlier this month: “We are now, I believe, entering a time, a new era of martyrdom.” Of his priests: “And I’ve asked them to get their affairs in order—to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.” These guys are not kidding around anymore. They are ready to die. And there will be cookies after the sermon.

Nellie Bowles. Bishop Rob’s letter has to be seen to be disbelieved. It features an ecclesiology straight from the lowest-church fever swamps:

As soon as the Christian church became linked to the empire by Constantine in the year 325 or so, the church immediately became corrupt.

(Italics added)

Ummmm, that’s just not credible. I don’t even think that educated clergy of low-church persuasion would defend that if pressed. To hear it from a Bishop of a high church is shocking but evocative. After all, what authority does a corrupt church have to tell Bishop Rob,

a man of profound historical privilege, … one who has made statements that, [he has] to say, have been really good and eloquent,

that he can’t innovate like mad to drive out that millenia-long corruption?

I’m still trying to figure out if “Rob” is his last name or if it’s an aw-shucks affectation. (Googles the question) Of course: it’s affectation.

Ostensibly Protestant; functionally, what?

There is another obvious fact that few denominational Protestants in the SBC or PCA seem willing to admit: The growth in these ostensibly traditional denominations stems almost entirely from the work of the Non-Denom churches. As already mentioned, pan- or pseudo-denominational organizations now own the church planting space. All church plants, to a great extent, utilize the methods and mores of Non-Denom Church. Most no longer even have their host denomination in their names. Therefore, I wager that whatever growth exists in the SBC and PCA is almost entirely the result of the Non-Denom churches growing within the husk of the world of traditional Protestantism.

Casey Spinks, Does Traditional Protestantism Have a Future?

Christianity and nationalism

Christianity does not simply fade away with the rise of nationalism; the process is more one of the reconfiguration of Christian elements to fit within a nationalist framework. When the holy migrates from the church to the nation-state, the church does not disappear but generally takes a supporting role to the creation of national identities.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

The nondenominations

Nondenominational Protestantism

Douthat: Right. But I’m going to ask you to generalize. … For people who aren’t familiar with that world, what is nondenominational Protestantism right now?

Burge: They’re evangelical. Not all of them, but the vast, vast majority are evangelical in their orientation and theology and practice and all the things that we would call evangelical.

One thing is, they’re anti-institutional. They’re anti-authority in a lot of ways. Where does your money go when you put it on the plate? Well, it goes right here. It stays right here in these four walls. So what we’re going to have is a very fragmented Protestant Christianity, where you’ve got a little fiefdom here of 15,000 people in this church, and 20,000 people in this church.

I think the problem is, it’s going to be harder to conceptualize, to measure, to really understand what these groups look like, because now you’ve got these little pockets. You’ve got Joel Osteen in Houston, Texas. He’s an evangelical, but he doesn’t interface with most other evangelicals. You got Paula White down in Florida, whom Trump loves, but she’s Pentecostal and believes in the gifts of the spirit. And other evangelicals, like Franklin Graham, would never talk to Paula White.

You’ve got all these little pockets, and they don’t add up to a cohesive “What is evangelicalism?” In 30 years, that question is going to be almost impossible to answer. Not that it’s easy now, but it’s going to be 10 times harder because of this amorphous nature of nondenominationalism.

Ross Douthat and Ryan Burge (shared link). Ryan Burge is the most interesting social scientist focused on religion that I know. The transcript of his podcast is worth reading in full; I both listened and then read, highlighting heavily.

For my money, “amorphous” and “fiefdom” are the keys to nondenominational evangelicalism, and the two are related. The substantive religious content of the nondenominational religious landscape is amorphous, despite the shared term “evangelical,” because they are individual fiefdoms. The pastors may well be untutored and unorthodox, and they certainly are unaccountable to any higher authority.

But be careful: Burge leaves the impression, inadvertently I think, that these nondenominational churches typically number in the thousands. I’d be surprised if the median number of members or attenders was as high as 200. Burge no doubt would know the numbers on that if asked directly.

Orthopathos

Because of the divorce from the historic Church, Evangelicalism has sought for a new way to satisfy the need for materiality. This is why such believers have welcomed pop music and rock-n-roll into their churches. It is why emotion is mistaken for spirituality. It is why sentiment is substituted for holiness. Sincere feeling is the authenticator. Instead of icons of Christ, whose piercing stare calls you to repentance, the Evangelical can go to a Christian bookstore and buy a soft-focus, long-haired picture of Jesus. He’s a “nice” Jesus, but it is hard to believe that He is God.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

I bang on a lot about Evangelicalism, my former affiliation, and specifically about the difficulty of defining it so as to be able to say “no, that’s not evangelical.” Ken Myer, founder of Mars Hill Audio Journal, once offered the possibility that while evangelicals don’t really share a coherent common doctrine, an orthodoxy, that they do share a common feeling or sentiment, an “orthopathos.”

Christianity Today

Sometime within the past year, I subscribed to Christianity Today. It is a magazine whose founding described it as “A fortnightly journal of evangelical persuasion” or something very like that.

I thought very highly of it. Just as I was an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship guy instead of a Campus Crusade for Christ guy, so I was a CT guy instead of a Moody Monthly guy. I even wrote a very cringe item they published. (I’ll give you no further hints whereby to unearth it.)

By and large, CT today has been a big disappointment, and I do not intend to renew.

The main part of the disappointment has been less the content of their articles (which certainly need a critical filter for evangelical bias), but the banality (it seems to me) of the topics of their articles. We’re just not remotely on the same wavelength any more. This “dumbing down” began nearly 50 years ago, and even then I took that as a sign that the evangelical appetite for chewing on meaty topics was waning.

But Thursday past, they finally floated on their RSS feed a story the topic and timeliness of which got my attention: How to Know If You’re Growing in Patience—or Just Giving Up.

Yes, it should be “whether” instead of “if,” but I’ll not dwell on that. It just seems to me as we, to whatever degree, watch the ICE terrorism and murders in Minneapolis, powerless to do anything, the spiritual line between patience (with prayer and trust in God’s providence) and giving up is an important one.

Jaw-dropping nadir

Majorities of white evangelicals favor deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, or Libya without allowing them to challenge their deportation in court (57 percent), and approve of placing immigrants who have entered the country illegally in internment camps (53 percent).

“It has become virtually impossible to write a survey question about immigration policy that is too harsh for white evangelicals to support,” Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute, recently wrote.

Tobias Cremer is a member of the European Parliament. His book The Godless Crusade argues that the rise of right-wing populism in the West and its references to religion are driven less by a resurgence of religious fervor than by the emergence of a new secular identity politics. Right-wing populists don’t view Christianity as a faith; rather, Cremer suggests, they use Christianity as a cultural identity marker of the “pure people” against external “others,” while in many cases remaining disconnected from Christian values, beliefs, and institutions.

…

The Trump administration has gone one step further, inverting authentic Christian faith by selling in a dozen different ways cruelty and the will to power in the name of Jesus. It has welcomed Christians into a theological twilight zone, where the beatitudes are invoked on behalf of a political movement with authoritarian tendencies. This isn’t the first time in history such things have happened.

…

Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals—not just cultural Christians, but also those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings—prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus. Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It’s rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist—who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless. The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for.

Peter Wehner

Sacraments or notions?

Christianity that has purged the Church of the sacraments, and of the sacramental, has only ideas to substitute in their place. The result is the eradication of God from the world in all ways other than the theoretical.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present

Orthodoxy

Rescue

He is Jesus, the name chosen before his birth. The angel spoke separately to Mary and Joseph, and told them that the baby’s name would be Jesus, “because he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). The name Jesus means, in Hebrew, “God will save.” When Gabriel says “he will save his people” the Greek verb sozo means “save” as in rescue, like “saved you from drowning.” That kind of “saved,” not “intervened and paid your debt.”

I had been a Christian decades before it occurred to me that this means Jesus can rescue us from our sins, not merely from the penalty for our sins. He can free us from the sins themselves. We will still fail over and over to take his outstretched hand and be lifted from the mire. We like mire. But he can do it, and make us not merely debt-free in his Father’s sight, but transformed and filled with his light.

Frederica Matthewes-Green

Repentance

Repentance is everything you do to get sin, those inborn passions, out of you. It’s reading, thinking, praying, weeding out disruptive influences in your life, sharing time with fellow Christians, following the guidance of the saints. Repentance is the renunciation of what harms us and the acquisition of what is beneficial to us, writes a holy counselor.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

A glimpse into an Orthodox mind

The Protoevangelium of James is not a text that itself holds a position of authority in the life of the Church. Indeed, the West formally rejected it well before the Great Schism. Nevertheless, the Church preserved the text through centuries of copying and recopying. It stands as the earliest written witness to the antiquity of a number of important traditions related to the New Testament Scriptures regarding the lives of the Theotokos, St. James, and their family. The Protoevangelium of James did not originate these traditions, nor does it provide their authority. Their authoritative form exists in the liturgical life of the Church, in hymnography and iconography.

Fr. Stephen DeYoung, Apocrypha (bold added).

All the well-educated Orthodox teachers agree on this. If you hear an Orthodox layman answer “How do you know that?” with “We get it from the Protoevangelium of James,” know that s/he’s got that backwards.

Darkness and Light

As Stephen Wormtongue Miller pronounces from the White House that the way the world works is by force, I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, 1/18/26

Ecclesiology 101

  • When Cardinal Newman was asked at a dinner party why he became a Catholic, he responded that it was not the kind of thing that can be properly explained between soup and the fish course.
  • An ecclesial Christian is one who understands with mind and heart, and even feels with his fingertips, that Christ and his Church, head and body, are inseparable. For the ecclesial Christian, the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church are not two acts of faith but one.
  • Across the street from the parsonage of St. John’s [Missouri Synod Lutheran Church] was an evangelical Protestant church. Also across the street lived my best friends, the Spooner brothers, who with their devoutly Catholic family attended St. Columkil’s Cathedral. I am sure it was unarticulated but self-evident to me by the time I was five years old that St. John’s and the cathedral had more in common than either had with the evangelical chapel. For one immeasurably momentous thing, our churches baptized babies. Then too, our being saved was something that God did through His Church; it was a given, a gift. It did not depend—as it did for Dougy Cahill, our evangelical friend—upon feelings or spiritual experience. It depended upon grace bestowed through things done.

Richard John Neuhaus

Trendiness

One thing I’ve never quite understood about our Evangelical friends is why they are so susceptible to trendiness. A reader of this blog with whom I corresponded earlier this year told me that she and her family recently left their Evangelical megachurch to join an Orthodox congregation. A big part of it was that the church fell all over itself trying to accommodate the Next Big Thing in worship trends, and theological trends, to keep growing the church, and to keep people interested so they wouldn’t leave. Discipleship was neglected, and theologically, it became decadent. Though my correspondent is non-white, she became frustrated at how this multicultural megachurch’s leaders began putting race consciousness at the center of that congregation’s life. But then, that’s the contemporary trend.

Rod Dreher

Mile wide, inch deep

What the Fathers decried as schism is now regarded as normal church growth. So long as the new church does not make a point of denying the Trinity, it remains a part of the una sancta.

Fr. Lawrence Farley

Counter-hegemonic thinking

The dominant system today is built on analysis. And it’s worth remembering that the root meaning of analysis is the reduction of things into parts.

Holistic thinking, in contrast, is always inherently Romantic. You can also call this visionary thinking.

Ted Gioia’s Substack is consistently good. Sometimes it’s great, as in 25 Propositions about the New Romanticism, which he made a public post.

This is one of the best things I’ve read in a long while – an unironic analysis of our tendency to analyze everything to death (“we murder to dissect”).

Iain McGilchrist would approve.

(And no, I don’t think this is out of place in a Sunday post. Getting caught up in rationalistic analysis of everything is spiritually stultifying.)

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Is Evangelicalism Protestant?

In recent years, I’ve read a lot of American religious history, and I’ve shared snippets of those histories constantly. This year brought a particular question into focus:

A theological Rip Van Winkle falling asleep in the early 1740s and waking up half a century later would have found Americans speaking his language with such a decidedly strange inflection as to constitute a new dialect; yet those Americans would have been hard-pressed to tell him why and how their speech had grown so different from his own.

…

The striking contrast was that amid America’s post-Revolutionary tide of antiformalism, antitraditionalism, democratization, and decentralization, trust in the Bible did not weaken but became immeasurably stronger. It was still “the Bible alone,” as proclaimed during the Reformation, that American Protestants trusted. But it was also “the Bible alone” of all historic religious authorities that survived the antitraditional tide and then undergirded the remarkable evangelical expansion of the early nineteenth century. … Deference to inherited authority of bishops and presbyters was largely gone, obeisance to received creeds was largely gone, willingness to heed the example of the past was largely gone. What remained was the power of intuitive reason, the authority of written documents that the people approved for themselves, and the Bible alone.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

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

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity.

I highly, highly recommend both Noll and Hatch if American religious history is of interest to you. Their two tomes are among my most heavily-highlighted (along with Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, which sort of sets the stage for America’s religious tragedy). But I never synthesized them explicitly.

One of the big ideas that captured my imagination this year, and that seemed at least a start on my overdue synthesis, is that Evangelicalism is not unequivocally Protestant. It took Brad East to water and fertilize Noll’s and Hatch’s seeds:

As I use it, “evangelical” names non-Catholic Christians who are “low church.” By this I mean that evangelicals are:

1) biblicist, meaning the Bible isn’t just chief among many authorities, including church tradition, but the one and only authority;

2) autonomous, meaning their organizational leadership structures are either local or, if trans-local, then voluntary and quite loose;

3) egalitarian, meaning they either do not ordain pastors or, if they do, then the qualifications for and prerogatives of the ministry are modest;

4) entrepreneurial, meaning churches are often analogous to start-up business ventures, founded and led by charismatic individuals who cast a vision for the community;

5) evangelistic, meaning proselytization is high on the agenda, using money, grassroots training, and parachurch ministries to support foreign missions and local efforts at gaining new converts;

6) affective, meaning their piety is focused on the heart, which is more likely to find expression in music, song, and spontaneous spiritual gifts than in robes, rituals, and sacraments.

Brad East, describing

a third species in the genus of Western Christianity. Neither Catholic nor Protestant, it has taken more than two centuries to come into clear view. It goes by many names, but the best is also the most hotly contested: evangelical.

But that third species has changed:

[A]s I have documented almost obsessively, biblicist churches are moving in a post-biblicist direction while younger generations have utterly lost even the rudiments of biblical literacy, along with literal literacy. (Translation: They don’t read, period.)

Beyond such literacy—beyond intensive, universal lay Bible study (should we call it IULBS?)—there is nothing left; at least, not if you remain, on the surface or even beneath the skin, biblicist-primitivist-congregationalist in polity, doctrine, and practice. The rug has been pulled out beneath your feet, the branch you were sitting on has been sawed off, the pillars have all been thrown down: there is nothing left.

Besides, that is, the Zeitgeist. But discerning the spirits is no longer possible when the word of the Lord in Holy Scripture is no longer known, cherished, prized, read. Where else is there to turn? Either to tradition or to the culture. I see no third option.

Brad East, Biblicist churches that don’t read the Bible

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Sunday, 12/7/25

Just a few items today.

A world without Protestantism

Imagine a world without Protestantism.

I don’t mean a world without Christians who are neither Catholic nor Orthodox. I mean a world in which there are only two groups of Christians. The first group encompasses believers who belong to ancient fellowships led by bishops and ordained priests, who confess the Creed and their sins and celebrate the Eucharist in a traditional liturgy of word and sacrament. These believers hand on tradition, petition the saints, venerate icons, and baptize their babies. Call them “catholic.”

Call the other group “evangelicals.” They have no creed but the Bible. They have no bishops or priests; instead, they have ministers and elders, who are rarely ordained. They baptize not infants but adults, who can make a public declaration of faith. They reject the interposition of anyone or anything between the individual and Jesus, who is known immediately in the soul and clearly through the Scriptures.

Imagine a world in which every Christian is either catholic or evangelical, with nothing in between. It is a world without Protestantism—for the religion of the magisterial Reformers in the sixteenth century did not desire, commend, or practice either of these options. Theirs was a via media. They baptized babies, recited the Creed, ordained pastors to the service of word and sacrament, practiced baptism and communion as sacraments (not as symbols), and insisted on the validity of the early councils.

The world I invite you to imagine, then, is one in which this middle way—neither Roman nor Anabaptist, both traditional and reformed—has vanished. Is such a world possible? It is. In fact, we are living in it right now. Ours is a world without Protestantism.

German Saucedo, Goldilocks Protestantism.

A very arresting five-paragraph introduction to an article earlier this year in First Things. Saucedo goes on to analyze how very few Christians remain “in between” the catholics and the evangelicals. My wife is part of that remnant, as was I before entering Orthodoxy (one of the “catholic” churches).

I think Saucedo may have a point that I need to digest: at some point (during my lifetime, I think, though maybe 200 or so years ago in the Second Great Awakening), the Venn Diagrams of “Protestant” and “Evangelical” lost most of their overlap.

I believe there’s no paywall for First Things articles older than the current issue.

Standpoint epistemology

I, for instance, feel differently about these subjects than an unbeliever. I hear, “Christ was crucified” and immediately I admire His loving-kindness to men. The other hears and esteems it as weakness. I hear, “He became a servant” and I wonder at his care for us. The other hears and counts it as dishonor. I hear, “He died” and I am astonished at His might, that He was not held in death, but even broke the bands of death. The other hears and surmises it to be helplessness. He, on hearing of the resurrection, says the thing is a legend. I, aware of the facts which demonstrate it, fall down and worship the dispensation of God. . . . For not by the sight do I judge the things that appear, but by the eyes of the mind. I hear of the “Body of Christ.” In one sense I understand the expression, in another sense the unbeliever.

Saint John Chrysostom

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, 11/30/25

Prayer

On sin

Most Holy Trinity, have mercy on us. Lord, cleanse us from our sins. Master, pardon our transgressions. Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Your name’s sake.

This is part of the Orthodox Trisagion (“thrice-holy”) prayers. And the first time I heard or read that prayer, I thought they get it!

I had recognized for a long time that part of the way I contributed to the chaos and evil in the world was not by shaking my fist in God’s face and saying “I know what You want, but I’m gonna do it my way!” Part of my contribution was cluelessness, self-absorption, clumsiness.

And my Protestant milieu seemed totally not to get that.

I remember being told in my Evangelical and Evangelical-adjacent Protestantism that sin was rebellion against God. “Period. Full stop.” as they say. Those four short trisagion sentences would not compute in that scheme as anything but redundant. “Transgression” was a synonym for “sin.” There was no concept of “infirmity” that needed healed, or of “sin” that needed cleansed rather than simply forgiven.

In Orthodoxy I learned that the Greek for “sin” is amartia (sometimes render hamartia), meaning essentially “missing the mark.” In that broad sense, it probably includes transgression and infirmity. “Transgression” strikes me as being the fist-shaking defiance my former milieu called sin. Infirmity strikes me more as the inability to know or do what’s right in some situations.

If I’m serious about the Christian life, I don’t just want God to forgive me of transgression after transgression. I want cleansing and healing as well so that I can “do better” and become more like Christ.

I suffer from all three, sin, transgression and infirmity (mark-missing, defiance and cluelessness) and I suspect my readers do, too. All three hurt those around me. All three make the world a worse place. It reassured me that Orthodoxy, which I was just exploring when I first noticed that prayer, was wiser than where I’d been all my life, and that it recognized that each of the three needs something a bit different (cleansing, pardon, healing) from God.

Frederica Matthewes-Green distills some of this Orthodox view:

[S]in is a danger, a poison, not merely superficial matter like breaking a law. Sin is infection, not infraction.

Breastplate

I came across another version of St. Patrick’s breastplate, this one rhymed:

I bind unto myself today
The strong Name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One and One in Three.

I bind this day to me for ever.
By power of faith, Christ’s incarnation;
His baptism in the Jordan river;
His death on Cross for my salvation;
His bursting from the spicèd tomb;
His riding up the heavenly way;
His coming at the day of doom;
I bind unto myself today.

I bind unto myself the power
Of the great love of the cherubim;
The sweet ‘well done’ in judgment hour,
The service of the seraphim,
Confessors’ faith, Apostles’ word,
The Patriarchs’ prayers, the Prophets’ scrolls,
All good deeds done unto the Lord,
And purity of virgin souls.

I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun’s life-giving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea,
Around the old eternal rocks.

I bind unto myself today
The power of God to hold and lead,
His eye to watch, His might to stay,
His ear to hearken to my need.
The wisdom of my God to teach,
His hand to guide, His shield to ward,
The word of God to give me speech,
His heavenly host to be my guard.

Against the demon snares of sin,
The vice that gives temptation force,
The natural lusts that war within,
The hostile men that mar my course;
Or few or many, far or nigh,
In every place and in all hours,
Against their fierce hostility,
I bind to me these holy powers.

Against all Satan’s spells and wiles,
Against false words of heresy,
Against the knowledge that defiles,
Against the heart’s idolatry,
Against the wizard’s evil craft,
Against the death wound and the burning,
The choking wave and the poisoned shaft,
Protect me, Christ, till Thy returning.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

I bind unto myself the Name,
The strong Name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same.
The Three in One, and One in Three,
Of Whom all nature hath creation,
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.

(Source: Fr. Stephen Freeman)

Authority

Bible

Harold Lindsell launched … a “theological atom bombing.” … history provided no example of a group that had given up on inerrancy when defections from other basic doctrines did not follow. After all, if the Bible could err, it lost its authority. … Inerrancy was a watershed issue—and those who denied it were not evangelicals at all. … None of the neo-evangelical scholars Lindsell named changed their positions because of it. Northern evangelical institutions were too many and too various to be brought into line. Instead of leading to a purge of noninerrantists, the threat of excommunication merely helped to demonstrate that neo-evangelicals were irreparably divided—and further, not in control of northern evangelicalism.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals.

After so much controversy and so many books on inerrancy, it seems mad to think that there’s a mike-drop response to it all, but here goes: What good is an inerrant Bible without inerrant interpreters?

So far as I know, nobody in the Evangelical world has claimed that there are such interpreters.

Related: One qualification on inerrancy was that the Bible was inerrant “in its original autographs.” This was the position I came to hold, and which I think I relinquished only on discovering Orthodoxy.

But again: of what use is that doctrine when we don’t have a single original autograph?

So what position do I hold on inerrancy now? I don’t know. The question seems irrelevant in Orthodox context. We’re not a Bible-only Church, nor were we built on the Bible:

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

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.

Yet I’m bold to boast that we revere the Bible more than Evangelicals do. We literally elevate the Epistles and the Gospels in our Liturgies. Our services are suffused with scriptural quotations (not in a preachy or proof-texty way) and allusions. If you really know the Bible, you’ll recognize its ubiquity in the Church’s services.

Come and see, I’ve got to say, though my parish is closed today because of treacherous travel conditions. Maybe next week.

Harmonizing evolution and creation

In years past (mostly long past), I’ve read a lot about the widely-assumed conflict between faith and science, but I hadn’t encountered this interesting, almost Chestertonian, twist:

One of the things that put me off of Christianity when I was young (beyond an intellectual vanity that was out of place) was that the greater part of Christian conversation and teaching, in my experience, had been intended to keep us from thinking about it too hard or taking it very seriously. Simple faith. That old-time religion. Just believe. Most of us have met That Christian—I sat next to her at my local café earlier in the week, and she was trying to convince her college-age children that there were no dinosaurs. “You have to ask yourself who pays for those studies,” she said. “I just believe the Bible.” I tried to concentrate on my eggs. 

But what I wanted to tell her is that there is an interesting concurrence between certain implications of evolution and the plainest kind of Christianity. From evolution, we learn that our bodies and our behavior were shaped by natural pressures to maximize our chances of survival in ancestral conditions of radical scarcity and, hence, we could reasonably assume that at least some of our modern problems—the prevalence of obesity and anxiety, for example, in the rich, digitally saturated world—are the result of living in an environment that is radically different from the one for which we were optimized by evolution. From Christianity, we learn that man is fallen and out of step with his intended place in creation, that we have been separated from that condition for which we were fitted. And at whatever level of literalism you wish to apply to Genesis and whatever degree of sophistication you can bring to bear on your biological analysis, there is a point of commonality:

This is not the world we were made for. We are outcasts and misfits—or, if our separation is sanctified, we are pilgrims.

Kevin D. Williamson, We Are Pilgrims, Still. I think of Williamson as a political writer, not religious, but he’s been returning to religious topics for a week or so.

Dogma

Christian or Pagan?

T.S. Eliot wrote:

Our preoccupation with foreign politics during the last few years has induced a surface complacency rather than a consistent attempt at self-examination of conscience. Sometimes we are almost persuaded that we are getting on very nicely, with a reform here and a reform there, and would have been getting on still better, if only foreign governments did not insist upon breaking all the rules and playing what is really a different game. What is more depressing still is the thought that only fear or jealousy of foreign success can alarm us about the health of our own nation; that only through this anxiety can we see such things as depopulation, malnutrition, moral deterioration, the decay of agriculture, as evils at all. 

And what is worst of all is to advocate Christianity, not because it is true, but because it might be beneficial. 

Towards the end of 1938 we experienced a wave of revivalism which should teach us that folly is not the prerogative of anyone political party or anyone religious communion, and that hysteria is not the privilege of the uneducated. The Christianity expressed has been vague, the religious fervour has been a fervour for democracy. It may engender nothing better than a disguised and peculiarly sanctimonious nationalism, accelerating our progress towards the paganism which we say we abhor. To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion; and we may reflect, that a good deal of the attention of totalitarian states has been devoted, with a steadiness of purpose not always found in democracies, to providing their national life with a foundation of morality—the wrong kind perhaps, but a good deal more of it. It is not enthusiasm, but dogma, that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society.

Kevin D. Williamson.

No “kumbaya moment” here

The expression “what unites us is greater than what divides us” is typically a liberal ecumenical manner of speaking, spoken to inspire us to ecumenical charitable and “social reform” efforts. But Fr. Stephen DeYoung thinks the current and more threatening version, from the perspective of the Orthodox Church, is a right-coded version:

The threat right now is this idea that there is a thing called “conservative Christianity,” and the Orthodox Church is a branch of it.

He’s having none of it:

What divides us is a fundamental difference in how we think God works in the human heart to bring about salvation. [Many people believe] that there is a one-time act, done unilaterally by God, that labels them as being saved so that when they die they will go to heaven.

[But] I believe that God is continually pouring forth his love and his mercies and his goodness in the world and that by cooperating with what God is doing in the world I could be transformed into his likeness and find salvation.

Those are not the same thing. Those are not two different ways of describing the same thing. And one of them is a lie.

I know I’m being super hardcore today, but I don’t care, because this is really bothering me, and if this offends you as an unorthodox listener, maybe you need to be offended by it and think about it. Those aren’t the same thing.

My religion centers on the Eucharist. If yours doesn’t, we don’t practice the same religion.

I don’t relish that. Like I’m not rejoicing in the fact that there are people who consider themselves Christians—and who honestly are Christians in the sense that they’re people who love our Lord Jesus Christ as they understand him and they’re doing their best to follow him as best they understand as best they can … Mostly if they’re wrong. It’s because they’ve been misled. So I’m not judging you as a person if you’re one of those people.

But what I want for you is not to hold your hand and say “kumbaya” and pretend that there’s no difference between us and those differences aren’t significant. I want you to come to know the truth. I want you to come to know Christ more deeply. I want you to understand how salvation actually is and I want you to experience it yourself ….

Podcast, beginning about 10 minutes from the end (Edited for clarity).

Fissiparous

Luther’s nuclear reaction

…in the wake of his defiant appearance at Worms, he found himself impotent to control the explosions that he had done so much to set in train. Nor was he alone. Every claim by a reformer to an authority over his fellow Christians might be met by appeals to the Spirit; every appeal to the Spirit by a claim to authority. The consequence, detonating across entire reaches of Christendom, was a veritable chain reaction of protest.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Pandering

I have long wondered at the sad side-effect of the Reformation, that there were suddenly many different versions of Christianity to choose from. Each person was free to hear the current thought-leaders, read the Scriptures, and come to their own conclusions.

That meant churches were in competition with each other to attract members. (I’m not arguing about the content of the Reformation now—just focusing on this inevitable side-effect.)

Horribly, in 20th century America the choose-your-own-theology option blended with the developing consumerist ethos, and churches began thinking they’d better “be relevant” (there were dire warnings about that, in the 1960s) and “seeker-friendly” (likewise dire, 1980s).

Churches yearned to reach unbelievers by identifying their “felt needs” (hoo boy), that is, what unbelievers thought their needs were. Churches should find out what unbelievers thought they needed, and offer it, to attract them.

It was assumed that people felt sad and lonely, so these churches offered comfort and reassurance. And entertainment. Mega-churches were mega for a reason. Sadly, their offerings largely attracted already-Christians rather than unbelievers, so the earnest motivation of evangelism went mostly unfulfilled.

Frederica Matthewes-Green, Men and Orthodoxy Revisisted

A motley crew

Americans are a motley bunch when it comes to religion—unorthodox, undisciplined, and wildly entrepreneurial, having invented more religions, Christian sects, and Christian-adjacent sects in our few short centuries than the Fertile Crescent did in an active millennium or two. Within a few decades, often within a few miles of one another, and sometimes involving some of the same people, Americans dreamt up Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of God in Christ, the Unity Church, the Theosophical Society, the Christadelphians, the Restoration Movement, Ethical Culture, the Reformed Mennonites, and many more—not to mention more recent developments such as the Nation of Islam and Scientology. Americans may have given up, en masse, on most forms of orthodoxy and on practically all forms of discipline, but we remain God-haunted and Bible-spooked.

Kevin D. Williamson.

So, 60 years or so ago …

… my world was solidly and unequivocally “evangelical,” and my critical faculties were not well-enough honed for anything to bother me about my world very much.

Fast forward ten or fifteen years and some of the not-very-much” bothers had encountered some attractive resolutions. Generally speaking, I discovered that evangelical obsessions like “the Rapture” (which I had thought were obligatory but suspiciously convenient) were not obligatory unless one put solidarity with evangelicalism ahead of historic Christian truths. In short, I became a convinced Calvinist, which in my mind made me sort of evangelical-adjacent or equivocally evangelical.

I have recounted my subsequent spiritual life elsewhere, which included leaving behind Protestant and Evangelical worlds unequivocally 28 years ago this month. So active evangelicalism is but a fading memory for me, and though I read about developments there, it’s not the same as living there or next door.

But from what I read, evangelicalism is in much turmoil. And reading the many accounts of huge majorities of evangelicals supporting Donald Trump, that’s to be expected; I still think too well of evangelicalism, maybe naïvely, to see Trumpism as anything but an aberation—because that man ticks every box of vice and vulgarity, not because “real evangelicalism” inexorably leads to preferring a different political flavor.

With the end of the month approaching, and some of my New York Times gift articles set to expire, unused, I want to share with you an article from someone who I think is more in touch with evangelicalism these days than I am: David Brooks.

If you know Brooks, you likely think of him as Jewish, but he’s been on a long spiritual pilgrimage and came to identify as Christian (without, as I recall, ceasing to identify as Jewish or adopting the “Messianic Jew” moniker. I’m not sure how that works.). He’s now married to a Wheaton College alum (likely evangelical). And almost 4 years ago, he took a pretty deep dive (gift link) into how Trump and other things have divided/corrupted evangelicalism and how some prominent evangelicals are fighting back.

The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism From Itself is a long read but I found it rewarding then and still find it so when I occasionally revisit it.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, 10/19/25

The cultural formations of western Christianity

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

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity (italics added).

The italicized phrase warms my heart because almost every non-Orthodox writer in the West, including anti-Catholic polemicists, inverts it to Orthodox Churches severing themselves from Rome.

A well I keep returning to

It’s mind-bending in a good way to consider the possibility that Protestantism is effectively dead because the nondenominational megachurchy world is something, or some things, else:

Imagine a world without Protestantism.

I don’t mean a world without Christians who are neither Catholic nor Orthodox. I mean a world in which there are only two groups of Christians. The first group encompasses believers who belong to ancient fellowships led by bishops and ordained priests, who confess the Creed and their sins and celebrate the Eucharist in a traditional liturgy of word and sacrament. These believers hand on tradition, petition the saints, venerate icons, and baptize their babies. Call them “catholic.”

Call the other group “evangelicals.” They have no creed but the Bible. They have no bishops or priests; instead, they have ministers and elders, who are rarely ordained. They baptize not infants but adults, who can make a public declaration of faith. They reject the interposition of anyone or anything between the individual and Jesus, who is known immediately in the soul and clearly through the Scriptures.

Imagine a world in which every Christian is either catholic or evangelical, with nothing in between. It is a world without Protestantism—for the religion of the magisterial Reformers in the sixteenth century did not desire, commend, or practice either of these options. Theirs was a via media. They baptized babies, recited the Creed, ordained pastors to the service of word and sacrament, practiced baptism and communion as sacraments (not as symbols), and insisted on the validity of the early councils.

The world I invite you to imagine, then, is one in which this middle way—neither Roman nor Anabaptist, both traditional and reformed—has vanished. Is such a world possible? It is. In fact, we are living in it right now. Ours is a world without Protestantism.

Brad East, Goldilocks Protestantism, First Things.

Stumbled onto this …

As a 14-year-old I had embraced Jesus as my Savior but had confused the abundant Christian life with the great American dream: I was a Christian and would lose weight, get good grades, get voted captain of the hockey team, go to college, marry a wonderful man who made $250,000 a year, and we’d have 2.5 children. It was me-focused: What can God do for me? I almost thought I had done God a great big favor by accepting Jesus ….

Joni Eareckson Tada.

I recently got a digital subscription to Christianity Today, a magazine I’ve known all my life, in order to keep up a little with doings in the non-Orthodox Christian world. Eareckson Tada was a big deal in the Evangelical tradition decades ago and apparently has remained so, living a remarkably long life for a quadriplegic – perhaps because she has kept so busy with her talents.

Related: Frederika Matthewes-Green reported in one of her books the comment of a first-time visitor to an Orthodox Church: “Wow! That was soooo not about me!”

Duly Noted

A line is being crossed in Canterbury. I share a communication published by a priest who received it:

Almost inevitably, these “Forward in Faith” and other GAFCON Anglicans will be painted in the popular press as schismatic for not going along with a radical provocation. I hope, but faintly, that the popular press will report their claim (encountered elsewhere) that they are the Anglican Church.

I make no facile prediction that “history will vindicate them,” but I’d rather be among them than the innovators when, at the end of history, Christ comes from heaven to judge the living and the dead.

Not every wound is PTSD

Therapists themselves are noting that if every time a soldier confesses his soul wound from combat we then label him with PTSD, that we will find ourselves recommending psychological therapies and prescribing psychiatric medications when what is needed is something like a religious ritual of purification and forgiveness.

Timothy Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty.

Note to Peter Thiel

In the Lateran, at a council held in 1513, a formal prohibition had been issued against preaching the imminence of Antichrist.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Evangelicals and Calvinists

A lot of the evangelical world leaves the dirty work to the Calvinists.

Derek Rishmawi, Calvinist.

Caveat: Political Application is Patent

On Sundays, I rarely post things with pointed political applications. For that matter, I rarely post political items with explicit Christian underpinnings on Mondays through Saturdays. Today marks an exception where I judged that these fit Sunday better than weekdays because my target readers are specifically Christians.

Salt & Light

Christians who vote for Republicans are called to be salt and light within the Republican Party. That means being a voice calling the Republican Party to obey the rule of law. Yours should be the loudest voice condemning Trump’s pardon for January 6 rioters and pushing against his challenge to the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the executive . You should speak up in favor of the poor and powerless and against the culture of cruelty, spite, and vengefulness Trump cultivates. It corrodes our public square and demeans our shared citizenship even as it poses more specific dangers to those targeted by Trump’s weaponization of federal law enforcement. If you do not speak up, you are both credulous and culpable, complicit with the party’s sins—including those yet to come.

Paul D. Miller, A Confessing Church for America’s Weimar Moment

MAGA Christianity

In last Sunday’s “Dispatch Faith” Column, Paul D. Miller asks Is MAGA Christianity True Christianity?, and essentially answers “no”: MAGA Christianity often mixes Christian symbols and Scripture with partisan rhetoric and calls to fight enemies, producing superficially Christian religion that departs on key theological and ethical points.

Commenting on The Charle Kirk Moment, Nijay Gupta resurrected a saying I’m pretty sure I last heard decades ago:

What you win them with is what you win them to.

Gupta’s role in this podcast was that of a more progressive Christian, relatively skeptical of the work of Charlie Kirk, and this comment had in view Kirk’s interweaving of conservative politics and evangelism.

I repeat from prior posts: I knew very, very little about Kirk until he was killed. From what I’ve learned since, I suspect he’d have insisted that conservative politics is such a concomitant of Christian faith that it is meet and right to interweave them from the podium/pulpit. (He said repeatedly that one cannot be a Christian and vote for Democrats.)

That is a message I’ve heard (though almost always tacitly) most of my life, and have resisted for almost as long. Despite my impression that most conservative Christians in North America lean right, and acknowledging that I, too, do so (though the meaning of “right” grows ever fuzzier), I nevertheless endorse the shared thrust of Miller and of Gupta.

And that’s why I consciously avoid political talk at Church coffee hour. All are welcome, regardless of politics, though some politics will prove to be baggage that must eventually be shed, as I’ve had to shed some of my own baggage.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, 10/12/25

Total apostasy?

… Mormons claim that “total” apostasy overcame the church following apostolic times, and that the Mormon Church (founded in 1830) is the “restored church.” …

A bullet-point in an anti-Mormon tweet after the attack on a Michigan Mormon meeting place. (My source identified the tweeter as “fundamentalist.”) The bullet-points built to the conclusion that Mormons (Latter-Day Saints) are not Christian.

Fine. But the Evangelical and Evangelical-adjacent world in which I spent many decades believes something very much like that Mormon “total apostasy” story. They may think it started in the 4th century and ended in the 16th instead of the 19th, but a lot of them (including former-me) functionally think it ended in the 19th, with the revivals of the “Second Great Awakening,” when the distinctive style of Evangelicalism emerged. (BTW: Try to define “Evangelical.”)

Here, I submit, is a more accurate summary of Church history:

There’s no need of a restored church because Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church never went away.

And I stumbled onto it …

Speaking of which, I had occasion this week to reread an eight year-old blog constituting, my only published spiritual biography (it was reprinted elsewhere one time). There are a few things I’ve written over the years that stick in my mind as worthy efforts, not throw-away lines or curations, and that post is one of them.

Some things bear repeating, and so I shall:

Having settled in for a few decades, what have I found uniquely true about the Orthodox Church?

It’s hard to put into words. That’s why Orthodox evangelism tends to consist of “come and see.”

Harder still for me personally, I need to find words for feelings and tendencies that an intellectualoid has trouble trusting — things that may be true but approach ineffability. I have a Dostoyevsky “Beauty Will Save the World” sticker on my office window, but long habit and self-image keep pulling me back toward “Spock-like logic (think of that tidy, air-tight 5-Point Calvinism) will save the world.”

But here goes. Turn on your feeler.

I’ve found, again, the love of God. Over and over and over and over we hear liturgical exclamations “for You are a gracious God and love mankind.” There’s no contrary stream of wrath that I’ve noted. The steadfast love of the Lord endures forever.
I’ve found true worship of God, which was something I longed for and agitated for in my prior Evangelicalism and Calvinism, as best as I then understood worship. For instance, I wanted no “hymns” in worship that were addressed to encouraging one another rather than praising God. Yet somehow bathos kept cropping up, and emotionally manipulative gospel songs kept elbowing out too many hymns. I really had no idea what real worship looked like, but my longing was wholesome. I am very much a member of homo adorans.
I have found sobriety and balance. The Christian Reformed Church was on the right track when it aspired to “Catechism Preaching,” an effort to tie sermons to the prescribed portion of the Heidelburg Catechism appointed for that Sunday, rather than letting pastors riff on whatever they read in Saturday’s newspaper or National Review. But Catechism Preaching was a tradition honored more in the breach than in the observance. I have found the Orthodox liturgical cycles (very complex and overlapping) to produce sobriety and balance in homilies, but more, in the entire service (hymnody, Epistle and Gospel readings, etc.)
I have found a hard path which, if I faithfully walk it, will make me more Christlike — a nice Protestant way of referring to becoming a “partaker of the divine nature.”
I have found a Church that really is a hospital for sinners instead of a club for self-styled saints. Some patients have more embarrassing ailments than others, but we’re all chronic cases; sacramental confession helps to drive that home. Not one of us is a hopeless case: the lives of the Saints help drive that home. Some check out of the hospital against medical advice, but we don’t do involuntary discharges of anyone who knows (s)he’s sick and wants to get well.

Another’s conversion

She elaborates the point with more than a little self-deprecation: “I’d backed myself into a corner. There wasn’t anyone else in the world who talked about ‘the Platonic ideal of the Good as an active agent with a special care for humankind’ without shortening that whole cumbersome phrase to simply God.”

In short, although she resisted the conclusion (or was it a solution?) with all her strength, she finally welcomed its inevitability. “I had just enough love in me to be able to be warmly surprised to find out the rules I loved, loved me back.”

… If one can know what she thinks by reading the Catechism, what’s left to surprise?

Answer: not her background convictions, but how she applies them to concrete questions, especially questions about public policy and the modern household ….

Brad East, quoting Leah Libresco Sargeant’s conversion from atheism to Roman Catholicism. The occasion, of course, is that she has written a new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto.

Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism are not in communion with each other since, in the simplified version, the Great Schism of 1054 (see the timeline above). But a lot of people coming out of Protestant traditions have felt that those were the only two viable Christian alternatives, and I have never found it in me to criticize those who made the wrong-but-plausible choice, like Leah did.

Fallen

Of course, we speak of human beings as “fallen.” However, in Orthodox teaching, this does not refer to our nature itself. Rather, it refers to the fact that we have been made subject to death – we are mortal. It is “death at work in us” that we describe as “sin.” But the origin of sin is not found in our nature. Our nature is inherently good. Understanding this makes a huge difference when we think about human relationships and the character of our common life.

If you take the view (which is common in certain corners of Western Christianity) that human beings have a “sin nature” – that we are, in fact, essentially bad – then how we view one another and the character of our common life takes on a different caste. In an Orthodox understanding, a Bible verse such as, “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” can mean little more than “children need discipline in their lives to help them”. Whereas in a world in which human nature is held to be a “sin nature,” then “sparing the rod,” would be seen as letting evil run amok. It would hold that our nature not only needs to be restrained but requires a vigorous regime of reward and punishment. It has not been that long since the notion of “beating the evil out of a child” was common.

When we speak of our nature as “good,” we are not declaring that human beings are born as saints. Rather, we are saying that our nature (“what we are”) tends towards the good, desires the good. We desire beauty. We desire well-being. We desire truth. Even when we engage in evil actions, they are most often grounded in a misperception of the good. Dictators do not come to power by asking people to be evil – they come to power by distorting the image of the good.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Nature of Being Human

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Great and Holy Race Day

I’m situated geographically in a place so sports- and Indy500-obsessed that in my former Church, men would disappear en masse on “Race Day.” Granted, I lived away from here 20-ish years, but it’s still a point of sinful pride that I’ve never been. Not to the race, not to the trials, not to carburation day.

(I apologize for some funky formatting today. After all these years, I still have trouble dealing with numbered or bulleted lists within block quotes.)

Filioque

As a protestant, I had no idea that the filioque (the words “and from the Son” in the Nicean Creed concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit) was added to the Creed hundreds of years later, nor that it was rejected from the beginning by Christians outside the jurisdiction of the Roman Patriarch, nor even (very distinctly at least) that there were catholic Christians outside the jurisdiction of the Roman Patriarch.

Since becoming Orthodox, I have taken it as a matter of high importance to reject the filioque, but I don’t recall previously seeing all of these reasons for the rejection:

Eastern Europe was converted to Christianity by Byzantine missionaries, the most prominent of whom are Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius. These bonds of religion created a deep sympathy between Bulgar to Byzantine. The Franks attempted to sever these bonds by sending missionaries into Eastern Europe, claiming that the Byzantines had taught them a heterodox version of Christianity and encouraging them to use the filioque.

I know Catholics are tired of Orthodox apologists going on about the Franks. But this really is an important test-case, for the following reasons:

  1. The threat of Arianism was resolved 300 years before the Schism. So, adding the filioque served no pastoral function. On the contrary, it was deeply divisive.  
 2. The underlying theology of the filioque was hotly disputed, especially by the Eastern patriarchs. So, adding the filioque did not express the mind of the universal Church.  
 3. The original Creed had been drafted in Council for a reason: it was supposed to express the *consent* and *concensus* of the orthodox, catholic bishops. So, adding the filioque defeated the whole purpose of the Creed.  
 4. For about six hundred years, Popes had taught the dangers of inserting the filioque into the Creed. So, adding the filioque violated even Rome’s local customs.  
 5. The Ecumenical Councils had ruled that the Creed should not be modified. So, adding the filiioque violated the Holy Canons.  
 6. Rome was advancing the *filioque* for worldly reasons only. So, adding the filioque would have allowed a single bishop to advance his own political and economic interests at the whole Church’s expense.

The Eastern Patriarchs had every reason to reject the insertion of the filioque, and no reason to accept it—none except, “The pope said so, and we have to do whatever the pope says.”

Michael Warren Davis, ‘Papal Minimalism’ Is Eastern Orthodoxy

Worship

To anyone who has had, be it only once, the true experience of worship, all this is revealed immediately as the ersatz it is. He knows that the secularist’s worship of relevance is simply incompatible with the true relevance of worship. And it is here, in this miserable liturgical failure, whose appalling results we are only beginning to see, that secularism reveals its ultimate religious emptiness and, I will not hesitate to say, its utterly anti-Christian essence.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Protestant, Catholic, Non-Denom

As my readers know, I’ve been an Orthodox Christian ever since I began blogging. The more attentive readers may know that before that I was Reformed (i.e., Calvinist, and specifically Christian Reformed) and before that, I was a generic Wheaton-College type evangelical.

Or maybe I should say “a generic Wheaton-College type evangelical as evangelicalism was configured in the 1950s through the mid-1970s.” Because it has come to my attention more forcefully, and in a way that more painfully implicates and pronounces doom on the kinds of Christian I once was, that things are changing. The evangelicalism I knew is not as powerful as it once was; evangelical denominations are shrinking and dying. So are Calvinist denominations. The Protestantism I knew most closely is increasingly nondenominational, and doesn’t care much about doctrine or sacraments, and increasingly doesn’t even want to be called “evangelical” or even “Protestant.”

This affects me closely because my wife remains Christian Reformed, and I consider it a pretty good penultimate tradition for an Orthodox Christian. And there is a very strong trend toward those denominational Churches dying out in favor of non-denoms.

And it worries me because those nondenominational Churches tend far too much to be personality cults and hotbeds of rampant sexual and other clergy abuse. And God only knows what they’re teaching, insofar as they’re teaching anything other than a mooshy-gooshy relationship with Jesus and a firm commitment to the GOP as a way of gaining power.

Yeah, this means I’ve gained some fresh respect even for the progressive Protestant denominations (which are also dying, even faster than the conservatives). At least there’s some accountability to hierarchies less likely than local parishioners to be mesmerized by Mr. Charisma. And some of them retain a liturgy that will expose worshippers to more scripture and doctrine than Joel Osteen can even imagine.

In any event, I say all that to introduce you to four of the thought-provoking articles (presented in the order in which I encountered them) that brought to my attention how much things are changing in my former haunts. A common thread is that denominational Protestantism is in deep, deep trouble; one goes so far as to suggest that nondenominational Churches are not really Protestant, but a whole new tradition:

  1. Goldilocks Protestantism – First Things
  2. LONG FORM: Does Traditional Protestantism Have a Future?
  3. How ‘Christian’ Overtook the ‘Protestant’ Label – Christianity Today
  4. Low Church in High Places: The Fate and Future of American Protestantism – Public Discourse

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

St. John Climacus, 2025

Denying our ancestry

Just as the Bishop of Oxford refused to consider that he might be descended from an ape, so now are many in the West reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of belief, might be traceable back to Christian origins.

Tom Holland, Dominion

The virtue of essays

I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.

My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead. That last sentence is a gem.

Notional Evangelical Bibicism

As a public relations stunt, Trump’s Bible photo might seem unserious, but the president certainly understood the importance of Christian scripture to a significant voting bloc. Evangelicals are biblicists, and the extent to which American religiosity has been dominated by evangelical Protestantism correlates to the degree to which American culture has been shaped by the Bible.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

I would be remiss were I not to recommend Brad East’s ‌Biblicist churches that don’t read the Bible — Brad East. Historian Gutaker may be missing something contemporary.

The one, true meaning of the text

When I try to explain to people why we need to recover patristic interpretation, the biggest obstacle I face is the desire of my interlocutors to establish the one, true meaning of the text. When I assert that there is no such thing, I provoke raised eyebrows: I must be playing fast and loose with the biblical text, making it echo my preconceptions. My insistence that biblical texts have multiple, even innumerable meanings contradicts our modern objectivism. My defense of patristic allegorizing likewise elicits fears of arbitrariness and subjectivism.

Hans Boersma, No Method but Christ

Whither the magisterial Reformation?

Nearly two decades ago, Bruce McCormack, professor of systematic theology at Princeton ­Seminary, wrote: “The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches.” He went on:

if current rates of decline in membership continue, all that will be left by mid-century will be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches. . . . The churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene—and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation. What all of this means in practice is that it will become more and more necessary, for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the ­Orthodox.

This is a grave prediction, but its sobriety makes it not just prescient but practical. Non-catholic varieties of Christendom are here for good, but Goldilocks Protestantism was always doomed to fail. It presumed too much, relying on a common inheritance—patristic, medieval, and cultural—that was bound to be called into question by future reformers in search of their own style of biblical renewal.

In any case, McCormack is right: Whether, in the coming decades, magisterial Christians look “up” or “down” for friendship and cooperation, they will be living in a world without Protestantism. In truth, they already are.

Brad East, Goldilocks Protestantism

Martyrdom

Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.

John Henry Newman

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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.

Sunday, 3/9/25

Superpower

Contentment in our current world is a superpower. Contentment sets you free.

Contentment isn’t having all your desires fulfilled, but being at peace with having unfulfilled desires.

Contentment is something we need to practice, like patience. And because of the way our society is organized, when you try to practice contentment, nobody will understand it. You’ll be called unambitious, unmotivated, lazy. But the people who say that are the ones that are still enslaved.

(Fr. Stephen De Young), paraphrased and slightly glossed.

Another thought, from the same podcast and again paraphrased and glossed:

Kennth Hagen, Benny Hinn, Paula White Cain and their ilk are not Christians. Their preaching is not Christian. Instead of repentance and faithfulness to Christ, they preach that you can speak things into reality. That’s sorcery, not Christianity. And it usually doesn’t work (the Deceiver, like a casino, knows how to addict people with random reinforcement).

And when people’s pocket have been emptied, and the riches they tried to speak into reality have not materialized (of course, it’s their own fault: their faith was too feeble), they’ll have no interest in real Christianity because they’ve been told that’s what they’re currently practicing.

I’m not poor. Far from it. But even apart from my advancing age, I’d stay content with much less if the price of more was a millstone around my neck like these prosperity preachers have donned.

Religion

“Religion” is not easy to define. Here’s an attempt by Fr. Stephen De Young again:

Religion is a way of being in the world that encompasses all levels of reality and expresses itself in practices.

Lord of Spirits Podcast, Bible, the Prequel.

This is a singular, or at least unusual, hyperlink right to the relevant part of the YouTube version of this podcast.

Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and other Protestants

Paul Tillich has frequently paid tribute to Nietzsche’s influence on his own thought, actually hailing Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the greatest modern “Protestants.”

Basic Writings of Nietzsche, (Walter Kaufmann, Translator). Hyperlink added because I’m getting old enough that some readers may not remember him.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.