Category: Protestantism

You can’t make this stuff up

I recently stumbled upon a fundamentalist site, so absurd that it has lingered with me, explaining “why the Apocrypha isn’t in the Bible.” It’s absurd as any patent circular “reasoning” is absurd: the Apocrypha isn’t in the Bible, in substantial part, because it teaches false doctrine. And how does one discern false doctrine? By seeing if it’s in the Bible. Continue reading “You can’t make this stuff up” →

Deep down, Emergent Church is shallow

I left the Evangelical world decisively about the time Bill Hybels’ Willow Creek Church was its fad du jour, so Emergent Church was largely unknown to me. Having left, and after a few years having given up on the idea that surely the folks over there are just waiting to hear what stunned me 14 or so years ago (Orthodox Christianity), I haven’t really kept up with the characteristic novelties, fads, charlatans, personages and artistes of Evangelicalism. (Oh yeah: I did read Blue Like Jazz and kept thinking that Donald Miller was channeling Holden Caulfield.)

But Father Gregory Jensen apparently has kept up, with the Emergent-flavored variety of Evangelicalism at least, and despite some sympathy, sees it as rooted in Oedipal adolescent rebellion.

From his review of Andrew Farley’s new book, “The Naked Gospel: The Truth You May Never Hear in Church,” extended quote:

Whatever might have been the justice of his criticisms of the Medieval Catholic Church, Martin Luther began a historical process that embodied a fundamentally different understanding of what it means to be Christian. For Luther and those who followed in his footsteps, to be a Christian meant not to live according to Tradition of the Church but to protest against it. We have reached a point now that when tradition–even Christian tradition–conflicts with the individual and his desires it is the individual and not tradition that is given the primary place.

…

Within the broad context of Protestantism is that people criticize yesterday’s critics. (sic) We come to see yesterday’s heroes as those who would bind us, the new generation, even as they were once bound by those who came before them.  The dynamic here is almost Oedipal.  Just as a man rebels against his father, his son in turn rebels against him.  But this isn’t maturity but childishness.

…

Thanks to my relationship with the Ooze, a site “dedicated to the emerging Church culture,” I’ve had the opportunity to read and reflect on works significant to the Emergent Church movement.  For all that I admire the energy and enthusiasm of this movement, I’ve concluded that it is simply the latest manifestation of the anti-Traditionalism that is at the core of both Protestantism and neoliberalism.  And like both, I fear the Emergent Church movement will in time fragment into every smaller sects, leaving it is wake spiritually and psychologically damaged men and women.

…

Contrary to his own assertions, Farley’s book is not about the Gospel.  While I think he is right in rejecting the deformation of Evangelicalism, he simply substitutes his own idiosyncratic view of the Gospel for the one under which he grew up.  This is simply another in a long string of attempts to justify Evangelical Christianity’s love affair with rebellion against Tradition.  St Anthony the Great warns his monks about just this when he says “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”

The problem here is that without a solid grounding in the Christian Tradition, the Emergent Church movement, like Protestantism and Evangelical Christianity before it, has little to offer.  My earlier reference to Oedipus was not accidental.  Like the rebellious adolescent, Farley’s book confuses criticism with mature thought and supplanting one’s father with being an adult.  This is not a surprise; criticism is easy.  But stripping away the neuroses of Evangelical Christianity is different from presenting the Gospel in its fullness.

Farley does not present the Gospel in its fullness; he wants to present the “Naked Gospel.”  But the Gospel isn’t, and never has been, “naked.”  Like Joseph, the Gospel has always worn that divinely tailored coat of many colors (see Genesis 37:3) called Holy Tradition.  “Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle” (2 Thessalonians 2:15, NKJV).

If readers finds Farley’s critique compelling, they owe it to themselves to seek out an Orthodox Church and discover the Christian Tradition in its fullness.  It is possible to live a life that is more than criticism.  Through the sacraments of the Church you can become a “partaker of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), progressively freer from your sins and evermore the person God created you to be.

In a sense, the only thing remarkable about this is that there’s a felt need to remark on it. The glimmers I’ve gotten of the Emergents suggested that they are the latest Evangelical schtick (sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper), wherein the distinctive transgressivism is borrowed artifacts — candles, incense, silence, maybe a few icons — from Christian traditions that actually are rooted in something.

But maybe if Father Gregory has earned their respect, they’ll hear him when he says the Emperor’s new clothes look suspiciously like the old clothes — under the nice-smelling Fabreze, the same superstructure of rebellious and novelty-seeking thought, convinced that only the chains of the past prevent fulfillment, and that going back to the Bible (or the “Naked Gospel”) will unlock the door thereto.

I was privileged for a year and a summer to attend Evangelicalism’s best, Wheaton College, preceded by four years at Wheaton Academy, its loosely-affiliated Christian boarding school. Many (not all) of my friends from there have crashed and burned. Some know they’ve apostasized. But some still think of themselves as Evangelical Christians of some sort, while manifesting by attitude (and in at least one disappointing case, by explicit words) that there’s no love of God, but only some cheap fire insurance. Church attendance pays the premiums. They never saw, or long ago ceased seeing, the rabbit. I was one of them (I’d ceased seeing what I saw as a child), though I hadn’t yet abandoned the chase before Orthodox Christianity blessedly blind-sided me.

What’s at stake is not bragging rights, much as we all love to brag. What’s at stake is sheep without a Good (and stable) Shepherd, becoming over time Father Gregory’s “spiritually and psychologically damaged men and women.”

Perhaps what deters them from the fullness of the Gospel is precisely that it’s not shallow; that you can’t jump in and feel the bottom; that the Christian tradition “is what it is” despite your pet theories of what this (or that) verse “means to me” —and that what it is is 2000 years deep; or just that it brings God so uncomfortably near (rather than freezing Him in a book one can manipulate to mean most anything).

The best lesson I learned coming into Orthodoxy was that if it and I disagreed, it was probably right. Time has proven that true in many ways, is still proving it true in some ways, and has in no wise ever proven it false.


The beheading of Anne Boleyn

From today’s Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1536 that Anne Boleyn was beheaded for the charge of adultery, only a few years after she had inspired King Henry VIII to create an entirely new church just so that he could marry her.

When she met Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn was an 18-year-old girl who had plenty of admirers. She was beautiful, but she was also smart. She could debate theology and discuss literature.

Henry wanted Anne as a mistress, but she was an extremely ambitious young woman. And so she told the king that she couldn’t give herself to him unless they were married. He was genuinely smitten with this young woman, and he was also desperate for a male heir. So he decided to break with his wife of more than 20 years, and asked the pope for an annulment of his first marriage. The Pope refused, for both political and religious reasons. Henry had spent his life as a devout Catholic, and took very seriously his role as a defender of the faith. But when the Pope stood in the way of his love, Henry declared himself the head of the new Church of England, and granted himself an annulment in his own matrimonial suit.

Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn in 1533. It was only the second time in English history that a king had married for love, and it was possibly the only time in history that a new church has been founded just to facilitate a marriage. And yet, that marriage didn’t last long. He didn’t like that their first child was a girl. The one thing that might have saved Anne would have been a male child. Historians think she may have had several miscarriages or stillborn children, and it is certain that she miscarried in 1536, a stillborn male four months into her pregnancy. A few months later, she was arrested on charges of adultery and was set to be executed. Most historians believe the charges were false.

After her death, portraits of her were destroyed, along with her books and correspondence, and poems and songs she wrote. Her rivals spread rumors and made up stories about her, to defame her reputation in the history books, claiming that she’d been ugly and deformed, with a sixth finger on one hand and a huge hump on her neck. But despite all that, her daughter Elizabeth, the daughter who had so disappointed Henry VIII, grew up to become one of the most influential queens in history.

The ECUSA, part of the “entirely new church” Henry VIII created “just so that he could marry her,” still isn’t letting anything stand in the way of sexual desire.

Hostettler for Senate

I longish essay at Front Porch Republic yesterday wonders “what if William Jennings Bryant …?” The whole thing is worth reading if you’re contrary like me, but knowing that few will, I’ll quote the very, very contemporary Indiana implications — contemporary like Tuesday, May 4:

This brings us to contemporary political application.  History can be interesting but so what?  Are there any modern-day Bryans?  Can we find any candidates who exemplify FPR values?  Yes we can.  …

John Hostettler of Indiana could be a Feingold counterpart across the aisle if he’s elected to the Senate this year.  A genuine Republican maverick, Hostettler is a former six-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Like Ron Paul, Hostettler is a constitutionalist on domestic issues and a noninterventionist (anti-imperialist) in foreign affairs.  He opposed Clinton’s wars in the Balkans.  In 2002, he was one of only six Republican members of the House and one of only three conservative members to vote against the resolution endorsing Bush’s desire to preemptively wage war on Iraq.  At the time, he said the intelligence backing the claim of WMDs was “tenuous at best.”

Following his defeat for reelection, in 2006, Congressman Hostettler self-published Nothing for the Nation: Who Got What Out of Iraq.  The book is endorsed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who writes, “We waged war because the president wanted to do so for his own reasons. . . . Congress made an unconstitutional delegation of authority to the president and it was the most tragic such delegation ever made.  Had we listened to Hostettler at the time, we would not have done it.  If we listen to him now, we might save ourselves the pain, regret, and shame from doing it again. For years I have known I was wrong.  Now I know why I was wrong. I’m sorry so many had to pay such a dear price for me to learn what I should have known before I took that office.”

Hostettler is a populist who has never taken PAC money, which is quite a contrast with his main opponent in the senatorial primary, former Senator Dan Coats.  Coats left the Senate in 1999, was an ambassador for a while, and then cashed in on his “public service” by becoming a lobbyist.  He worked for Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Chrysler, and other big corporations in their successful efforts to feed at the public trough.  Now he has moved back to Indiana in an effort to regain his Senate seat.  Dan Coats is a typical corporate-centrist-establishment Republican à la Bob Dole.

John Hostettler is something quite different.  He voted for Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party for president in 2008, not John McCain.  There are mavericks and then there are mavericks.  If Feingold’s blind spots on some social issues, notably his support for legalized abortion and same-sex “marriage” are too off-putting to overlook, then maybe Hostettler is your man.  He is a Bible-believing Christian who is conservative on social morality.  He supports traditional marriage and the rights of unborn children.  He was the lead sponsor of the Marriage Protection Act that passed the House in 2004 but died in the Senate.  Invoking a power of Congress granted by the Constitution, the MPA would have stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to rule on the Defense of Marriage Act.  He opposes illegal immigration.  He supports Second Amendment rights.  He has championed First Amendment religious freedom.  He voted against NCLB on federalism grounds.  These stances have earned him the support of conservatives like Bay Buchanan, Tom Tancredo, and some portions of the Tea Party movement.

The Republican senatorial primary that pits Hostettler against Coats, and a few other contenders, takes place THIS TUESDAY, May 4.  He could use some money now.  Hopefully, he will win the primary and be the odds-on favorite to win in November.

I would note that Dan Coats, the slight favorite Tuesday, is a Wheaton College graduate. The last time he ran, that meant something to me. I learned more at Wheaton with a 2.5 GPA than I learned elsewhere with a 3.5+. But evangelicalism is culturally captive, I now see, and I fear that lobbyist Coats is no exception. So come Tuesday, I’m not voting for him, or Marlin Stutzman, but John Hostettler.

Franklin Graham

There is a kerfuffle about Franklin Graham being excluded from some upcoming government-sponsored events because of his criticism of Islam as “evil” (not my scare quotes; I unequivocally believe in evil). For instance, testosterone-crazed Doug Giles rails here against the political correctness of it all.

I doubt not that Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse is a reputable enough charity, but the younger generation Graham, like the younger generation Frank Schaeffer, far surpasses his father in delusions that he has been given a prophet’s mantle, rather than the more modest platform of an evangelist. His mouth too frequently shoots off about matters of which he is ignorant.

He has, for instance, gently calumniated Orthodox Christianity, as in his 2007 Ukraine crusade, with charges of which it is entirely innocent. The gist was that the Orthodox Church, despite its antiquity and grandeur, doesn’t teach a personal relationship with Christ. (I believe, but cannot track down, that he has said much worse of Orthodoxy in the past.)

His comments about Islam are certainly undiplomatic. I’ll leave it to others to debate whether Islam is evil – the kinds of people who get suckered into other debates where the key terms are too equivocal to invite anything more than a shouting match. But on Orthodoxy, Graham is deeply wrong.  As is so often the case, Father Stephen Freeman says it better than I:

The salvation into which we are Baptized is a new life – no longer defined by the mere existence of myself as an individual – but rather by the radical freedom of love within the Body of Christ. To accept Christ as our “personal” savior, thus can be translated into its traditional Orthodox form: “Do you unite yourself to Christ?” And this question is more fully expounded when we understand that the Christ to whom we unite ourself is a many-membered body.

Read the whole article.