Category: Protestantism

St. Thomas Sunday 2024

Creed

The theologian William Placher defends the importance of creeds by citing Lionel Trilling: “It is probably true that when the dogmatic principle in religion is slighted, religion goes along for awhile on generalized emotion and ethical intention—morality touched by emotion—[but] then it loses the force of Its impulse and even the essence of Its Being.” Placher elaborates: Even if I have a warm personal relationship with Jesus, I also need an account of what’s so special about Jesus to understand why my relationship with him is so important. If I think about dedicating my life to following him, I need an idea about why he’s worth following. Without such accounts and ideas, Christian feeling and Christian behavior start to fade to generalized warm fuzziness and social conventions.

Kendra Creasy Dean, Almost Christian

Protestants

Then

The truth is that, while St David’s is a beautiful place, full of history, it feels somehow … dead. Maybe I’m being unfair. I only visited for a day. But I’ve seen enough living religious sites to know what they look – and feel – like. In Ireland, and even more so in places like Romania or Greece, a site like this would not only be hung with offerings, but would often be full of pilgrims lighting candles or kneeling in prayer. Here? Just tourists like me with hiking boots and cameras.

This is not an observation unique to St David’s: it’s the norm throughout Britain. I’ve only realised the depth of the problem since I moved out of the country and began to understand what others still had – and what we once had here.

…

Britain, almost uniquely amongst the many countries I have visited in my life – at least those in the ‘old world’ – feels spiritually dead, and this in turn feels like the root cause of the many problems that plague the land today. I don’t say this with any relish: this is my homeland, and I wish it were different. But since I have become a Christian, in particular, I have come to see just what has been lost there. Much of this is the legacy of the inaptly-named ‘Reformation’, which in Britain led to a frenzy of iconoclasm and sacrilegious violence. The ransacking of the monasteries, along with the centuries of spiritual tradition they held, the destruction of shrines like that of St David, the beheading of statues, the whitewashing of churches, the banning of festivals, the filling-in of holy wells: the wonder of medieval British Christianity will never be regained. And this was all done by Christians. It’s hard not to resent it sometimes.

Paul Kingsnorth, The God-Shaped Hole.

To be deep in history is to cease being Protestant.

Cardinal Newman

Now

Much of the Republican Party, including white evangelicals and fundamentalists, would line up in support of Trump even if he did order the assassination of a political opponent. If you don’t think so, you’re simply not familiar enough with the MAGA mind. You’re not listening closely enough to what Trump is saying to his supporters, and what they’re saying to one another.

It’s easy to anticipate just how their argument would unfold: first, deny that any amount of evidence could be amassed to prove that Trump tried to assassinate anyone; second, dismiss the allegations because they are being made by “haters” who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome; third, point the finger at the “Biden crime family,” whose corruptions far exceed what we see from Trump and his kin; and fourth, insist that even if the former president did order the assassination of a political opponent, it’s essential that Trump retain the presidency, because his absence would lead to dystopia. Unfortunately, for the sake of America, some people must perish. Or so Trump supporters would say.

Peter Wehner

Sacred covenants

True, the Methodist church adopted a statement about marriage. It affirms “marriage as a sacred, lifelong covenant that brings two people of faith (adult man and adult woman of consenting age or two adult persons of consenting age) into a union of one another and into deeper relationship with God and the religious community.” But what does “sacred” mean when divorced from the traditional theological and ethical beliefs that underpin Christianity? The description is nothing more than an aesthetic gloss to conceal what’s transpiring: the reduction of marriage to an emotional bond rather than the mysterious union of a man and woman that would normatively lead to the most sacred and godlike of events, the creation of new life.

Carl Trueman in the Wall Street Journal Opinion pages

A very big deal

Normalizing homosexuality is a very, very big deal, no matter which side you are on. Some progressives have a habit of accusing conservatives of making too big a deal of it. But this is hypocritical. If it weren’t a big deal, then progressives wouldn’t wreck whole denominations over it. To be fair, if I believed about homosexuality and the human person what progressives believe, I would probably be doing exactly what they’re doing, as a matter of justice. I would hope, though, that I would have the humility to recognize that what I was asking of my fellow churchmen was to accept and affirm a massive theological and historical change within Christianity, one that overturns the clear and unambiguous testimony of Scripture and Tradition. But they don’t. Those people typically act like it’s no big deal, except to the bigots who resist Progress.

… [A]ll ecclesial bodies have to have within them an agreed-upon method of authoritatively determining moral and theological truth. Simply as a sociological claim, if a church body cannot agree on an authoritative means of resolving these questions, what holds it together, except some combination of sentiment and historical inertia?

… It is an interesting psychological question as to why the leadership class within churches believes that the future of their church requires liberalizing … even though the evidence that liberalization doesn’t stop decline, but if anything increases it, is overwhelming. I believe it was Schumpeter who said that every institution, over time, will be led by people who mistake what’s good for them personally with what’s good for the institution.

[F]or the orthodox (theological conservatives), religion is in part a means through which we discover the structure of reality and conform ourselves to it. For the modernists (theological liberals), religion is a means by which we make ourselves at home in this world. It’s not that the orthodox don’t want to make a home in this world, or that the modernists don’t want to live in reality. Rather, it’s that the orthodox believe that all of reality is undergirded, and founded, in a sacred order of which we are a part. We can’t make it up as we go along; we must instead be open to divine revelation, and organize our lives from what has been revealed from God, because it tells us what is really Real. The modernists, by contrast, more or less disbelieve that the material world has a telos (end purpose), and that things have a logos (rational purpose) intrinsic to themselves.

Rod Dreher, When Is It Time To Schism?, quoting Mircea Eliade, The Sacred And The Profane.

This was an unusually good piece by Rod, who has become hard to read much of the time. I recommend all of it.

Protest is who the West is

Thomas Aquinas is often held responsible by Eastern Orthodox theologians for some of the key theological errors which led the Roman branch of the Church astray. Those errors in turn, they say, led to the internal Western schism known as the ‘Reformation’, whose ‘protestant’ rebels were themselves reacting against the impact of those errors. Catholic Christians naturally disagree. What we can say with certainty is that since Luther et al began their protest, the protest has never stopped. Protest, now, is what the West does. There has been so much protesting against the Church, in fact, that Christianity itself has died as the foundation of our moral order, and we are only now dimly becoming aware of what a catastrophe this is.

Paul Kingsnorth

Ecclesial Christianity

One man’s move to ecclesial Christianity

One thing I like about both Orthodoxy and Catholicism is that you have to do these things, whether you like it or not, whether you’re in the mood or not, sometimes whether you believe or not. You just have to plow ahead. I want that. If it’s left up to me, I am one lazy son-of-a-bitch. I will not do anything unless someone comes along and says, “You need to do this. This is really important. This will shape your life. Come on, Galli. Get off your butt.”

Yonat Shimron, Mark Galli, former Christianity Today editor and Trump critic, to be confirmed a Catholic (Religion News Service, September 10, 2020)

Stones to bread

I have heard various naive Orthodox opine that we need jurisdictional unity in the United States so that we can have a stronger voice and a more visible presence. It would seem that they have yet to renounce the world and are still thinking about the stones/bread problem. Unity is good because the Church is One (as is affirmed in the Creed). But it is not good because it is “useful.” Indeed, I suspect that God has allowed our disunity for His own purposes – including saving us from ourselves.

…

Our modern world, it would seem, has won the debate concerning turning stones into bread. We imagine that Christianity’s superiority lies in the fact that it would somehow make better bread ….

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Where’s the problem?

Archbishop Chaput’s brief critique of the theology of Cardinal Fernández in “Cardinal Fernández Misleads” (April 2024) seems to capture what many of us outside the Roman Catholic Church see as the real character of the Francis papacy: It is a form of liberal Protestantism in papal vestments …

Yet as an orthodox Protestant, I take no pleasure in the theological disaster that has been unfolding in Rome over the last decade. Rome has status, money, and power that could, if her leadership so desires, be used to hold the line on key social and political issues. And all Christians potentially benefit from that. But to act with conviction, one must believe with conviction. And there lies the problem, as the archbishop has so helpfully indicated.

Carl R. Trueman

A favorite prayer

LORD our God, Who art rich in mercy and Who hast no equal with respect to Thy compassion, Who alone art sinless by nature and becamest man, though without sin, for our sakes, Hearken at this hour unto this, my painful entreaty, for I am poor and bereft of good works, and my heart is troubled within me. For Thou knowest, O King most high, Lord of heaven and earth, that I have wasted all my youth in sins and, following after the lusts of my flesh, have become wholly an object of scorn to the demons. Continually have I followed wholly after the Devil, wallowing in the mire of the passions; for darkened in mind from my childhood, and even unto the present time, I have never desired to do Thy holy will; but, held wholly captive by the passions which assail me, I am become the butt of the mockery and scorn of the demons, being in no way mindful of the threat of Thine unendurable wrath against sinners and the fiery Gehenna which awaiteth. As one who hath thus fallen into despair and is in no way capable of conversion, I am become empty and naked of Thy friendship. For what manner of sin have I not committed? What demonic work have I not done? In what shameful and prodigal activity have I not indulged with relish and zeal? I have polluted my mind with lustful thoughts; I have sullied my body with intercourse; I have defiled my spirit by entertaining; every member of my wretched flesh have I loved to serve and enslave to sin. And who now will not lament me, wretch that I am? Who will not bewail me who am condemned? For I alone, I, O Master, have stirred up Thy wrath; I alone have kindled Thine anger against me; I alone have done that which is evil in Thy sight, having surpassed and outdone all the sinners of ages past, having sinned without rival and unforgivably. Yet, because Thou art most merciful and compassionate, 0 Lover of mankind, and awaitest the conversion of man, Lo! I throw myself before Thy dread and unendurable judgment seat, and, as it were, clutching Thy most pure feet, cry out from the depths of my soul: Cleanse me, O Lord! Forgive me, O Thou Who art readily reconciled! Have mercy upon my weakness; condescend unto my perplexity; hearken unto my supplication; and receive not my tears in silence. Accept me who repenteth, and turn me back who am gone astray; embrace me who am returning, and forgive me who prayeth. For Thou hast not appointed repentance for the righteous, nor hast Thou appointed forgiveness for them that have not sinned; but it is for me, a sinner, that Thou hast appointed repentance for those things wherein I have caused Thee displeasure, and I stand before Thee, naked and stripped bare, O Lord, Who knowest the hearts of men, confessing my sins; for I am unable to lift up mine eyes to gaze upon the height of heaven, being weighed down by the heavy burden of my sins. Enlighten, therefore, the eyes of my heart, and grant me remorse unto repentance, and contrition unto amendment of life, that, with good hope and true confidence, I may proceed to the world beyond, continually praising and blessing Thy most holy name: of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Prayers After Reading the Tenth Kathisma, A Psalter for Prayer: An Adaptation of the Classic Miles Coverdale Translation

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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 of Palms

Yes, we’re that much later than the West this year.

This wild Christ

We are living in a time where we need more imagination, more courage, and a deeper understanding of freedom. We are told we are free than ever; then why do we feel so? so tyrannized.

I went out into a forest to be wedded to the wild and came out wedded to the Galilee Druid. There is no easy way to talk about what happened.

So, I’m going to go to the forest and see what happened.

The God of the Christians is a scandal from the beginning, born a fugitive, dies an outlaw is butchered on a hill and has the audacity to return. Jesus of the slaves, Jesus of the desert, Jesus of love, Jesus of hard and troubling ideas. This mystical egalitarian, this burning wheel, this one who kneels and drinks the darkness of the world. He is the fundamental poetic event, and he is nothing at all like what I thought he was.

But this wild Christ may be the strangest God of all.

Martin Shaw, in the narration of the embedded film clip here (italics added).

Zwingli

I attended a socially obligatory reception and dinner recently, where I was seated with an Evangelical couple of my acquaintance. Discussion turned to European travels (there was a reason for that turn), and it developed that both of us had visited, indeed sung in, Grossmunster Church in Zurich.

I commented that I had been particularly thrilled at singing there, but now consider its most famous pastor, Zwingli, an arch-villain of the Reformation. The husband was clearly puzzled. I answered him, but his puzzlement remained. I think we now occupy different religious worlds, divided by our common “Christianity.”

Here’s an expression of my side:

The memorialism of certain Reformation groups, in which the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is reduced to a simple remembrance on the part of believers, is among the most egregious examples of the triumph of linearity. Here, the Eucharist is celebrated, but the presence of Christ is reduced to historical memory, the weakest possible interpretation of His words and commandments and a deep distortion of the role of anamnesis (memory).

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present

Nutshell

  • Believing in papal supremacy is the sina qua non of Roman Catholicism.
  • Sola scriptura is the sina qua non of Protestantism.
  • Preserving and transmitting the apostolic tradition unaltered is the sina qua non of Orthodoxy.

Paraphrasing Presb. Jeannie Constantinou.

What words suffice?

The Orthodox Tradition, which is often described by many as “mystical,” is not “mystical” in any sense of “esoteric” or “strange.” Such adjectives for the faith are simply a reaching for words to describe a reality that is richer than any merely rational scheme or metaphysical explanation. It is the largeness of a Kingdom that cannot be described or circumscribed, and yet is found in the very heart of the believer. What words do we use to describe something which dwarfs the universe and yet dwells within us?

…

It is for such reasons that I always find myself repelled by efforts to reduce doctrine to simplified formulas. Doctrine – the teaching of the faith should not reduce our understanding but enlarge it – to the very point of silence – and beyond. It is why it is so frustrating to try and explain icons. No one has an argument with the presence of words in the Church – the icons do the same things words do – only with color and in the language of silence. I can enter the Church, remain in silence and yet see (and hear!) something other than the incessant chatter of my own mind. The icons speak with the texture of the Kingdom – opening windows and doors that transcend every height and depth, things present and things to come.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Texture of Life and the Kingdom

Hell

“… We first need to understand what hell means.“

“I thought it is a state of being cut off from God.“

“It is that, of course. It is ignorance of God, but it is not only that. According to the Holy Elders, hell is the experience of God, not as light and eternal grace, but as eternal fire instead. God, however, is not eternal fire. It is human beings who create the distortions, not God. It is therefore the souls of human beings that need to be healed so that they may be able to have the version of God as light and not as fire that torments.”

Kyriakos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence

Sometimes (and this is one of those times), I feel as if I need to say You don’t need to read this book; rather, you need an Orthodox Christian Church.

Settling for everything

[I]t is in fact impossible to combine Christian virtues, for example meekness or the search for spiritual salvation, with a satisfactory, stable, vigorous, strong society on earth. Consequently a man must choose. To choose to lead a Christian life is to condemn oneself to political impotence: to being used and crushed by powerful, ambitious, clever, unscrupulous men; if one wishes to build a glorious community like those of Athens or Rome at their best, then one must abandon Christian education and substitute one better suited to the purpose.

…

The whole argument illustrates Berlin’s one great theme: the incompatibility of certain “Great Goods” with one another. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the inability to grasp this point is one of the greatest causes of personal unhappiness and social unrest. Millions of American Christians don’t see how it might be impossible to reconcile (a) being a disciple of Jesus Christ with (b) ruling over their fellow citizens and seeking retribution against them …

Everybody wants everything, that’s all. They’re willing to settle for everything.

Alan Jacobs, ruminating on Machiavelli via Isaiah Berlin.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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.

April Fools Day

Schism and “church growth”

Protestantism thus gradually came to lose the primitive Christian horror of schism. As time went on, with the continuing multiplication of Protestant denominations, what now matters among them is purity of doctrine, not unity—and sometimes doctrine takes a back seat to lesser things. The concept of schism has all but vanished from the theological glossary of Evangelicals: if they don’t like their church, they simply leave and start another one down the street. 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, The Necessary Revolution (hyperlink added)

I’ve mused for decades that calling schisms “church growth” was an attempt to make a virtue out of a wicked “necessity” (compulsive fissiparousness, rooted in disagreements about what the Bible teaches).

Will liberal Protestantism ever fail utterly?

For generations the more liberal-leaning Protestant denominations have been declining. But liberal Christianity is a renewable resource, as long as there are conservative Christianities to inspire rebellion and disillusionment.

Ross Douthat

Holy Week in MAGAworld

The signs are everywhere. First, there’s the behavior of the savior himself, Donald Trump. On Monday of Holy Week, he compared himself to Jesus Christ, posting on Truth Social that he received a “beautiful” note from a supporter saying that it was “ironic” that “Christ walked through his greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you.”

On Tuesday, he took to Truth Social to sell a $60 “God Bless the USA Bible” (the “only Bible endorsed by President Trump”), an edition of the King James Bible that also includes America’s founding documents. “Christians are under siege,” he said. The Judeo-Christian foundation of America is “under attack,” Trump claimed, before declaring a new variant on an old theme: “We must make America pray again.”

Two weeks ago, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, told a Christian gathering that Democrats “want full and complete destruction of the United States of America.” Kirk is a powerful Trump ally. He has millions of followers on social media and is hoping to raise more than $100 million in 2024 to help mobilize voters for Trump.

“I do not think you can be a Christian and vote Democrat,” Kirk said, and “if you vote Democrat as a Christian, you can no longer call yourself a Christian.”

All of this is unfolding against the backdrop of so-called prophetic utterances that place Trump at the center of God’s plan to save America. According to these prophecies, Trump is God’s choice to lead America out of spiritual darkness, to save it from decline and despair. In this formulation, to oppose Trump is to stand against the will of God.

David French.

Yes, the signs are everywhere: Trump is an antichrist.

Oh wait! That’s not what French said! He said the signs were of this:

When people are angry and afraid, they will look for a savior. When that anger and fear is latched to faith and prophecy, they will yearn for a religious crusade.

There’s a version of this same story playing out in the United States, but because the anger and fear are so overwrought, the prophecies so silly, and the savior so patently absurd, we may be missing the religious and cultural significance of the moment. A significant part of American Christianity is spiraling out of control.

On my second reading, I lost my frustration that French was missing the point. I think he gets the antichrist point just fine, but that talk of “antichrist” is a little bit alien to a PCA Presbyterian and utterly alien to the New York Times. This is as clear as French and his employer can make it. Let him who has ears hear.

An distracting mistake

Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Orthodox Christians, who together claim around 1.5 billion members, describe the Bible as a final authority in matters of faith …

Esau McCaulley

I cannot think of a sense in which Prof. McCaulley is correct here. Sola scriptura (the Bible as a final authority in matters of faith) was a Protestant Reformation novelty, not a claim of the ancient church. And McCaulley’s mistake contributes little or nothing to his argument about the outrage of Trump’s Holy Week endorsement of a MAGA Bible.

McCaulley continues:

… Evangelicals, who have overwhelmingly supported Mr. Trump over the course of three election cycles, are known for their focus on Scripture, too. None of these traditions cite or refer to any American political documents in their doctrinal statements — and for good reason.

Well, duh! You know what else Orthodox Christianity doesn’t say in its creed?* It doesn’t say that the Bible is an authority in the Christian faith at all.

Our practice shows how highly we regard the scriptures, as our liturgies and other services are pervaded with them. But scripture is not of creedal status. Indeed, the New Testament canon was not settled until decades or more after the Nicene Creed was formulated.

Again, Prof. McCaulley’s banal observation adds little to his argument about MAGA Bible.

[* Two eye-openers for me in the Orthodox Church were (1) the use of scripture and (2) the source and use of the creed and other decisions of ecumenical counsels. But those are beyond today’s scope.]

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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, March 10, 2024

Grushenka and the Grumbler

Grushenka, a character in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, relates a now-famous fable about an old woman:

Once upon a time there was a woman, and she was wicked as wicked could be, and she died. And not one good deed was left behind her. The devils took her and threw her into the lake of fire. And her guardian angel stood thinking: what good deed of hers can I remember to tell God? Then he remembered and said to God: once she pulled up an onion and gave it to a beggar woman. And God answered: now take that same onion, hold it out to her in the lake, let her take hold of it, and pull, and if you pull her out of the lake, she can go to paradise, but if the onion breaks, she can stay where she is. The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her: here, woman, he said, take hold of it and I’ll pull. And he began pulling carefully, and had almost pulled her all the way out, when other sinners in the lake saw her being pulled out and all began holding on to her so as to be pulled out with her. But the woman was wicked as wicked could be, and she began to kick them with her feet: ‘It’s me who’s getting pulled out, not you; it’s my onion, not yours.’ No sooner did she say it than the onion broke. And the woman fell back into the lake and is burning there to this day. And the angel wept and went away.

It reminds me of a small scene in CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce. Angels are trying to help a soul make the journey from hell to heaven. One, a woman, seems mostly to a grumbler. Lewis’ soul has this conversation with his own guide:

‘I am troubled, Sir,’ said I, ‘because that unhappy creature doesn’t seem to me to be the sort of soul that ought to be even in danger of damnation. She isn’t wicked: she’s only a silly, garrulous old woman who has got into a habit of grumbling, and feels that a little kindness, and rest, and change would due her all right.’ ‘That is what she once was. That is maybe what she still is. If so, she certainly will be cured. But the whole question is whether she is now a grumbler.’ ‘I should have thought there was no doubt about that!’ ‘Aye, but ye misunderstand me. The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. If there is a real woman— even the least trace of one— still there inside the grumbling, it can be brought to life again. If there’s one wee spark under all those ashes, we’ll blow it till the whole pile is red and clear. But if there’s nothing but ashes we’ll not go on blowing them in our own eyes forever. They must be swept up.’

Both stories have in common a tiny, insignificant thing: an onion, a grumble. There is in Scripture a similar “tiny thing,” a single moment that serves as a hinge in a human life. The exchange between the “Good Thief” and Christ on the Cross is hymned during Holy Week with the words, “The Wise Thief entered Paradise in a single moment…” It is a remembrance of the extreme measure of God’s grace.

Father Stephen Freeman, bringing together two of my favorites. Then there’s this:

The story of the Old Woman and the Onion is a parable stated in the extreme manner of absurdity. I was first drawn to it by the simple fact of its willingness to ascribe such mercy to God. A single, rotten onion, given as charity would be sufficient to get you out of hell! It was the imaginative force of such a thing that shook my soul when I first read it. In my childhood, there could never have been such a Christian mercy. Hell is hell is hell.

He’s not wrong about that, and I now think that the Grushenka story is truer than “hell is hell is hell.”

Ecclesial Christians

I’m pretty sure it was the late Richard John Neuhaus who described “ecclesial Christians” as “Christians for whom faith in Christ and faith in His Church is one act of faith, not two.”

I like that very much and my experience as a former non-ecclesial Christian who became ecclesial 26+ years ago, it rings true.

IYKYK, as the kids say

A distinction that may be of interest

For the Roman Catholic prayer, said by the priest after the penitent confesses, states, “I absolve you,” whereas in the Orthodox Church the wording reflects the original understanding: “May God forgive you, through me, a sinner.”

Michael Shanbour, Know the Faith

Entertainment

The Divine Liturgy is rightly understood as a theophany – an appearance of God (Christ) in our midst. We stand in the place of Moses, and wrestle in the place of Jacob. We gaze with Ezekiel and the fiery wheels with the Son of Man in their midst. We stand with St. John the Theologian and the vast crowds of heaven before the Lamb-slain-from-the-foundation upon the altar with the four beasts and angels surrounding Him.

…

This is profoundly significant. Our culture has trained people to become an audience. A theater performance, a concert, and a Church service are all of a piece. Worse than this, we are trained to be an audience that expects to be entertained ….

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Getting priorities straight

Photographers have long had an uneasy relationship with the sacred. There is the age-old anxiety that a photograph can steal a soul. And last week, more than 900 wedding photographers signed a petition complaining that “problematic vicars” can be “rude, humiliating, aggressive and abusive”. The fact is, the sacred has a deep and visceral distrust of the whole business of taking photos, which — in our Instagram-addled age — has resulted in a colossal culture clash.

One photographer, Rachel Roberts, who launched the petition, took a pop at problematic vicars. “They basically forget the fact that two people are getting married, and it’s the most important day of their lives. They put their own objectives and their own rules first and forget the reason why we’re all actually here.” Talk about getting things the wrong way round. The reason we are all there is for two people to enter into holy matrimony, not for wandering photographers to get the best angle for the album.

The problem is that photographs don’t just record reality — they change it. Quantum physicists talk of the observer effect: the very act of observing reality causes a disturbance within it, and thus changes it. Something similar is true of wedding photography. We pose for photographs. We behave differently when we are being captured on film …

So when the photographer turns up 10 minutes before the service and tells me how it’s going to be, that this is how the bride wants it, it makes little difference. They will stay behind the pillar and take photographs from the back, and not follow the bride down the aisle as if this were some catwalk show. They hate it, of course. But you don’t just walk into the house of God and expect the place to bend to your needs. The fact that this space is different, reflects different values, is precisely why people choose to be married here.

Giles Fraser, The narcissism of wedding photographers

Others

A seed was planted today in my head, and I don’t know where it will go. It is the possibility, even the likelihood, that a lot of people we call “Protestants” are not unequivocally Protestant because they’re not rooted in or in continuity with the classical Protestantism of the Reformation.

That’s all the speaker said, but already I’m thinking about the many denominations that grew out of the American revivalism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, much of which was explicitly in rebellion against the Reformed/Calvinist stream of Reformation thought.

We probably call them “Protestants” because we don’t have a term for “not Roman Catholic, not Orthodox, not unequivocally Protestant, but calling themselves Christians.”

“Protecting” God, stripping away all meaning

[Jonathan] Edwards sought to intensify God’s control of creation. Yet ironically, Edwards ended up colluding with the Gnostic denigration of the material world to the degree that his entire philosophical project aimed at guarding God from the perceived threat posed by materiality. For God to truly be glorified, things in the world cannot have distinct natures or identities; rather, God must impose all meaning externally through will-acts that remain, in the final analysis, purely arbitrary. There is no actual meaning within the realm of space and time because the cosmos is simply a passive instrument of divine control.

Robin Phillips, Recovering the Goodness of Creation

Be it remembered

Margaret Sanger specifically drove the Evangelical Protestants into the pro-birth control column. She used the ever-reliable anti-Catholic sentiment of this group to overcome their natural aversion to birth control and to the Progressive Social Gospel Mainline. Thanks to Sanger’s efforts, by the time of the Griswold v. Connecticut decision, the entire country considered opposition to birth control to be a uniquely Catholic position.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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, 1/28/24

A most palatable “gospel”

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

Strong advice

There are also obvious reasons why a Christian should never attend a gay wedding. Many wedding liturgies, including that of the Book of Common Prayer, require the officiant to ask early in the service if anyone present knows any reason why the couple should not be joined together in matrimony. A Christian is at that point obliged to speak up. I would hazard a guess that such an intervention would be far more offensive than simply refusing to be at the service. 

The issue can also not be separated from the broader question of sex, gender, and human nature. If marriage is rooted in the complementarity of the sexes, then any marriage that denies that challenges the Christian understanding of creation. It is one thing for the world to do that. It is quite another for Christians to acquiesce in the same.

Carl Trueman

FBI and the RAD-TRADs

This week marks the one-year anniversary of the so-called Richmond memo, the leaked FBI paper calling for surveillance and infiltration of “radical-traditionalist Catholic” parishes to combat their supposed threat to national security.

Ed Condon, The Pillar

My favorite C.S. Lewis

  • If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.
  • “Milton was right,” said my Teacher. “The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends. Ye call it the Sulks. But in adult life it has a hundred fine names—Achilles’ wrath and Coriolanus’ grandeur, Revenge and Injured Merit and Self-Respect and Tragic Greatness and Proper Pride.”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce.

This short book has become my favorite Lewis less for its literary qualities than for its effect on me.

Sometime during my journey to Orthodoxy from Calvinism, it made me ask myself “What are you doing, Mr. Once-Saved-Always-Saved, to become the kind of person who wouldn’t get back on the bus at the end of the day trip?” (I saw some reason to think I was such a person.)

Contra the Gnostics

  • “The central truth affirmed by the doctrine of the resurrection of the body,” writes the British theologian and priest Fr. Andrew Louth, “is that human beings are not simply spiritual, but are constituted by both soul and body: a body on its own is a corpse, a soul on its own is one of the departed. Human beings only exist as soul-and-body.” … “The inclination, in the late classical culture in which Christianity first developed, to think of human life in essentially spiritual terms is to be resisted. At death, the body becomes a corpse; the gift of life in the kingdom of heaven means, in some sense, the restoration of the body.
  • “Antipathy to the body now carries the day in many a Christian funeral, particularly among suburban, educated, white Protestants, where the frank acknowledgement of the pain of death and the firm hope in the resurrection of the body get nosed out by the sort of vague, body-denying, death-defying blather expressed in this popular anonymous funeral poem. Do not stand at my grave and weep; I am not there, I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain. It is important to emphasize that these are not the sentiments of non-Christian services but the funerals of modern Protestants.

Robin Phillips and Stephen De Young, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, 1/21/24

Re-enchantment

The secularist’s cosmology

A modern secularist quite often accepts the idea of God. What, however, he emphatically negates is precisely the sacramentality of man and world.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

I sometimes fear that tantalizing quotes like this will make a reader think “I ought to read that book.” What I really intend is that the reader think “Maybe I ought to become an Orthodox Christian.”

Iconoclasm

At the time of the Reformation, the effigies of saints had sometimes been dragged to the public square and there decapitated by the town’s executioner. This not only in itself prefigures the French Revolution, and emphasises the continuity between regicide and the abolition of the sacramental, but also powerfully enacts two other left-hemisphere tendencies that characterise both the Reformation and the Enlightenment, to which we now might turn.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Hubris

Zwingli’s work also repudiated the entire patristic and medieval theology of the sacrament: “I can conclude nothing else but that all the doctors have greatly erred [vil geirret habend] from the time of the apostles. . . . Therefore we want to see what baptism actually is, at many points indeed taking a different path against that which ancient, more recent, and contemporary authors have taken, not according to our own whim [nitt mit unserem tandt] but rather according to God’s word.” Just like his Anabaptist opponents, Zwingli was following God’s word.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.

On a European Tour with the Wheaton College Men’s Glee Club, long ago and far away, I was thrilled to sing at Grossmünster Church in Zurich, where “Huldrych Zwingli initiated the Swiss-German Reformation in Switzerland from his pastoral office …, starting in 1520.” (Wikipedia)

That thrill is a mark of my delusion. I now think Zwingli a particularly fiendish Reformer, and as regards the sacraments, the true father of the kind of gnostic Evangelicalism I inhabited for 30 years, more or less. Neither Calvin nor Luther was so thoroughly iconoclastic.

And if you think “iconoclastic” is eulogistic, may God have mercy on your soul.

Imagine there’s no religion

In the the pre-modern West, as in much of the world today, there was no such thing as “religion”. The Christian story was the basis of peoples’ understanding of reality itself. There was no “religion”, because there was no notion that this truth was somehow optional or partial, any more than we today might assume that gravity or the roundness of the Earth are facts we could choose to engage with only on Sunday mornings.

Paul Kingsnorth, Is There Anything Left to Conserve?

The public effects of private matters

About a third of the way through the discussion, Douthat asks Ahmari to explain a couple of chapters in his recent book, The Unbroken Thread. The second chapter Ahmari discusses is entitled “Is Sex a Private Matter?” In that chapter, Ahmari turns to a surprising authority: Andrea Dworkin. Ahmari appeals to Dworkin to argue that sex is never purely private: what is done in the bedroom or viewed on a screen has inevitable public consequences …

Onsi Kamel, The Power of the Catholic Intellectual Ecosystem

Anthropogenic comological consequences

The plausibility of anthropogenic climate change ought to be abundantly evident to Christians; scripture is full of admonitions on how the sinfulness of man has cosmological consequences. See also Prayers by the Lake number 39. (H/T Fr. Steven DeYoung)

Do you know, my child …

Rod Dreher has a book coming out on re-enchantment of our world. This “prayer” may be all the re-enchantment I need:

Do you know, my child, why the clouds are closed when the fields are thirsty for rain, and why they open, when the fields have no desire for rain?
Nature has been confused by the wickedness of men, and has abandoned its order.
Do you know, my child, why the fields produce heavy fruit in the springtime, and yield a barren harvest in the summer?
Because the daughters of men have hated the fruit of their womb, and kill it while it is still in blossom.
Do you know, my child, why the springs have gone dry, and why the fruits of the earth no longer have the sweetness that they used to have?
Because of the sin of man, from which infirmity has invaded all of nature.
Do you know, my child, why a victorious nation suffers defeats as a result of its own disunity and discord, and eats bread made bitter by tears and malice?
Because it conquered the bloodthirsty enemies around it-self, but failed to conquer those within itself.
Do you know, my child, how a mother can feed her children without nourishing them?
By not singing a song of love to them while nursing them, but a song of hatred towards a neighbor.
Do you know, my child, why people have become ugly and have lost the beauty of their ancestors?
Because they have cast away the image of God, which fashions the beauty of that image out of the soul within, and removes the mask of earth.
Do you know, my child, why diseases and dreadful epidemics have multiplied?
Because men have begun to look upon good health as an abduction of nature and not as a gift from God. And what is abducted with difficulty must with double difficulty be protected.
Do you know, my child, why people fight over earthly territory, and are not ashamed to be on the same level as moles?
Because the world has sprouted through their heart, and their eyes see only what is growing in the heart; and because, my child, their sin has made them too weak to struggle for heaven.
Do not cry, my child, the Lord will soon return and set everything right.

(St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Prayers by the Lake, XXXIX)

Miscellany

Is silence violence?

There are more evil things going on in the world than any one person can respond to. You could spend all day every day on social media just declaring that you denounce X or Y or Z and never get to the end of what deserves to be denounced. If my silence about Gaza is complicit in the violence being done there, what about my silence regarding the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uighurs? Or the government of Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya? Or what Boko Haram has done in Nigeria? Or what multinational corporations do to destroy our environment? Or dogfighting rings? Or racism in the workplace? Or sexism in the workplace?

…

[P]ick your spots and pick them unapologetically. It’s perfectly fine for people to have their own causes, the causes that for whatever reason touch their hearts. We all have them, we are all moved more by some injustices than by others; not one of us is consistently concerned with all injustices, all acts of violence, nor do we have a clear system of weighting the various sufferings of the world on a scale and portioning out our attention and concern in accordance with a utilitarian calculus.

…

The silence-is-violence crowd, to their credit, don’t think that money is the only commodity we have to spend: they think we can and must spend our words also. And they always believe they know what, in a given moment, we must spend our words on. What they never seen to realize, though, is that some words are a debased currency. As the Lord says to Job, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” To speak “words without knowledge” is to “darken counsel,” that is, confuse the issue, mislead or confuse one’s hearers. The purpose of counsel is to illuminate a situation; one does not illuminate anything by speaking out of ignorance or mere rage. 

Alan Jacobs, Silence, Violence, and the Human Condition

Pointed question

In 2024, do priests and pastors have influence on their people anywhere near as that of random internet influencers?

You can’t fight something with nothing

You can’t fight something with nothing. If the French don’t like the Islamification of French public life, then they aren’t going to stop it by doubling down on laïcisme.

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative (where he reins in his catastrophism)

Confessing others’ sins

Anthony Lusvardi, S.J., teaches sacramental theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. In “Confessing Other People’s Sins” (The Lamp, Issue 19), he takes issue with the practice of apologizing for historic wrongs. In his experience, there’s a certain type who enters the confessional only to launch into complaints about other people’s misdeeds, which amounts to a spiritual evasion of his own sins. Is something like that happening when a city council or college president issues statements that repent of past harms? “The problem with historical apologies is that they never involve taking responsibility for one’s own actions but necessarily mean confessing sins committed by others.” And it is in the faux penitents’ interest to exaggerate those sins. “The more heinous the crimes of others, the more venial our own offenses seem. We can get off the hook for our smaller sins by spotlighting the graver sins of others.”

R. R. Reno at First Things.

Talking out of class

Christians are often tempted, particularly in this time called modern, to say more than we know. We are so tempted because we fear we do not believe what we say we believe. So we try to assure ourselves that we believe what we say we believe by convincing those who do not believe what we believe that they really believe what we believe once what we believe is properly explained.

Stanley Hauerwas via Jake Meador

Christian atheists

I believe there’s a rational way to begin sketching what people like Murray, Ali, Tom Holland, and other “Christian atheists” in this space are attempting to articulate. On Twitter, my friend Jay Richards proposes a sort of first inference to the best explanation. It goes something like this:

(1) I’m far more certain of the truth of my moral convictions A, B, and C than I am certain that atheism is true. So, let’s take A, B, and C as given.

(2) A, B, and C don’t make a lot of sense given atheism.

(3) A, B, and C are consistent with and seem to follow from the truth claims of Christianity.

(4) A, B, and C historically emerged from a broadly Christian culture.

(5) Given (1) through (4), the truth of Christianity seems more likely than the truth of materialism/atheism.

Bethel McGrew

Fine and good. I’ve heard far stranger ways that people began their Christian lives. But that’s only a beginning. Rationality is not the telos of the Logos.

However human reason is construed or understood, it cannot fathom what is by definition unfathomable, and so despite traditional Christian theology’s pervasive and variegated use of reason it can never finally grasp directly that with which it is chiefly concerned. This makes it a sort of intellectual endeavor different from any other.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Why true Christianity can’t be a political faith

Philip Sherrard has further noted that Christianity is uniquely ill-suited to function as a political religion because, alone among the Abrahamic faiths, it has no body of legislation intended to function as civil law. The Christian Church is set up to facilitate communion between the human and the divine. This is obviously a process from which the coercive sanction of positive law and coercive violence is excluded. If the Church is conceived of as a voluntary assembly of believers in communion with God, then no political party can claim to be a part of either its successes or its failures; politics is, after all, nothing more the organized use of violence.

Put Not Your Trust in Princes, an article I no longer can access at nationalreview.com, though I retain the URL. The title is from Psalm 146.

Incense

If you think there’s something fishy about incense in Christian worship, read Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Sweet Smoke of Prayer

Dogma

Dogmas are important, but not as the building blocks of some comprehensive account of the Divine Mysteries, but rather a series of decisions, arrived at by the Church, that are there to prevent ways of thinking that might obscure or bypass the mystery of God before which we stand in awe.

Andrew Louth via Martin Shaw, What We Don’t Know, We Don’t Know

This is a very Orthodox attitude toward dogma. I don’t know if there are any other Christian traditions that so view it. My former traditions definitely did not.

Reductionism

One of the oddest thoughts to have crept its way into the Christian mind is the notion of what is “necessary to salvation.” The simple questions within the New Testament, “What must we do to be saved?” quickly become the stuff of bumper-stickers and a reduced version of Christianity unable to sustain a genuine spiritual life.

In my seminary years (Anglican), I had a professor who stated that he did not believe in angels. I was puzzled and asked him why. “Because they are not necessary. Anything an angel can do can be done by the Holy Spirit.” And there you have it. Only things that are necessary need to be posited as existing …

Fr. Stephen Freeman, * An Unnecessary Salvation*, who disagrees.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Leavetaking of Theophany

Virtue by excision

After recounting two anecdotes, Alan Jacobs asks:

What do [these actors in these two anecdotes] have in common? The belief that one can achieve virtue through omission and excision. This is the belief shared by all forms of purity culture — and purity culture always leads to katharsis culture, that is, the practice of cleansing yourself, restoring your purity, by casting out the unclean thing. 

But what if that’s not how virtue works? What if after having cast out every unclean thing you can find you just end up in the foul rag and bone shop of your own heart? What then? 

That’s why these periods of desperate and manic katharsis always burn themselves out — why Robespierre ends by executing the executioner. And when they’ve done all they can do, they are succeeded by a bacchanal, an era of pseudo-festive delight in transgression. Our culture oscillates between “cast out the unclean thing” and “let us sin the more that grace may abound” — that is, between legalism and antinomianism, the very pairing that St. Paul in his letters is always trying to subvert.

Paul is the greatest of psychologists: he knows that human beings perfectly well understand legalism, which they rename “justice,” and perfectly well understand antinomianism, which they rename “freedom.” What we can’t understand is the grace of God. 

Alan Jacobs, The Next Turn of the Wheel

Alan is an Anglican, teaching at a baptist university (Baylor), but he’s awfully sharp. You could do worse than reading a few of his books.

Mutual incomprehension

It is easier for Protestants and Catholics to understand each other, even if they fundamentally disagree on their conclusions, than for Orthodox and Catholics to understand each other, even though they share many similar outward characteristics—liturgy, priesthood, hierarchy, sacraments, and so forth.

Not only the content but the approach to theology differs. The Orthodox Church has almost no “official” teachings or statements, and it purposely avoids making them. So how do we explain ourselves to Western Christians, who are accustomed to exact definitions and official statements?

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Wesley was an odd bird

Wesley found inspiration in the writings of Makarios of Egypt, whose early practice of monasticism was directed toward the experience of deification. This set Wesley apart from earlier Protestant fathers, who inherited a forensic understanding of salvation from their Roman Catholic predecessors.

John Strickland, The Age of Utopia

That’s not how I used to understand Methodism; rather, it was shoved in the “yes, one can lose one’s salvation” pigeonhole (versus the “once saved, always saved” Calvinist pigeonhole; I was a Calvinist). Although Dr. Constantinou in the preceding item is correct, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Orthodox Christianity rejects the “forensic understanding of salvation,” and finds its origins in Western Christendom after Rome went into schism from the Christian East.

Tocqueville on American popular piety

The notebooks de Tocqueville kept during his travels contain decidedly pessimistic observations about the quality of popular piety. As a Roman Catholic with Jansenist tendencies, he looked aghast at untamed evangelicalism.

John Strickland, The Age of Utopia

Two confessions

(1) I have been insufficiently appreciative of the benefits of living in the place that used to be Christendom, partly because I’m so aware of where Western Christianity has gone wrong in so many ways.

My denseness has come to my attention as people are becoming Christians (or at least turning favorable towards Christianity) because of its social benefits (see Holland, Tom, Dominion).

(2) I also have insufficiently appreciated how mere cultural Christians, who can’t recite the Creed without lying, nevertheless contribute to a better civilization for all of us. They may be living on the whiff of (as they imagine) an empty bottle, but for the sake of all the rest of us, they could do much worse.

Cringemaxxing

There is no way in the world to make going to church cool, and the most cringe thing of all is trying. Here’s the thing though: data consistently show that the happiest people – those who feel that their lives are most filled with purpose and fulfilment – are not necessarily those with kids – it’s those who go to church. Those, in other words, who are not just to be indifferent to cool, but actively anti-cool. The first step to a happy and fulfilled life, it appears, is cringemaxxing.

There are, no doubt, a great many reasons for this. But I am convinced that whatever your relationship to religious worship, a central reason why religious attendance is associated with happiness is that in order to make that commitment you need already to have abandoned the pursuit of cool.

Mary Harrington, You Need to be Cringemaxxing

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday after Theophany

Mythbusting I

Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Paradox

The quest for unity that drove people to discard formal theology for the Scriptures drove them further asunder.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

“Every theological vagabond and peddler may drive here his bungling trade, without passport or license, and sell his false ware at pleasure.”

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, quoting Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, who in turn is quoting a mainstream Protestant pastor’s lament about the new sects.

Conversion

“There is no point in converting people to Christ if they do not convert their vision of the world and of life, since Christ then becomes merely a symbol for all that we love and want already –without Him. This kind of Christianity is more terrifying than agnosticism or hedonism.”

Rod Dreher, Schmemann and Social Justice (quoting Fr. Alexander Schmemann)

Listening to that other voice

[T]he real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day.  Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

We can only do it for moments at first.  But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us.  It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through.  He never talked vague, idealistic gas.  When he said, “Be perfect,” He meant it.  He meant that we must go in for the full treatment.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, via J Budziszewski

Sin or regrettable failure

In Orthodoxy, you won’t commit mortal sin for missing liturgy. There is no concept of “mortal sin”. That’s just not how the Orthodox “model” works. You are supposed to be at liturgy, not because you fear punishment, but because being present at liturgy is an aid to theosis. It draws you closer and closer to unity with God. On the occasion I miss liturgy, I regret it, and if I don’t have a good reason (traveling, or sick), I confess it when I next go to confession. But I don’t lie there fearing for my everlasting soul.

Rod Dreher

The power of repentance

The demons are still with us, but they have lost. They and their chief, the devil, are still trying to draw us into damnation with them, but they will never again wield the power they once did. All they have left to them is deception. Against their deceptions we have humility in repentance, and the reason that weapon is so powerful is because by humbling ourselves we join ourselves to Jesus Christ, who in His humility threw down that great dragon and banished him forever at the point of the swords of the archangels, angels, and all the saints.

Andrew Stephen Damick and Stephen De Young, The Lord of Spirits (book, not podcast)

Without comment

It’s dangerous to try analyzing a Christian tradition that’s not, and never has been, one’s own — though I’ve probably done so repeatedly. This time, I’ll leave Catholic commentary to a card-carrying Catholic, author of the authorized biography of John Paul II:

To make matters worse from a journalistic standpoint, the only witnesses cited in defense of today’s papal autocracy were such acolytes of the pontificate as Austen Ivereigh, David Gibson, and Massimo Faggioli—the functional equivalent of Tucker Carlson writing a piece entitled, “Donald Trump takes on unprecedented attacks from his opponents” and sourcing it with quotes from Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert. This isn’t journalism; it’s blatant advocacy. And it should be named as such.

George Weigel, The MAD Magazine Caricature of U.S. Catholicism

Father or Fathers?

Western Christian theology is founded on the phronema of Augustine. The East did not acquire the mind of one Father, but the mind of the Fathers.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

There’s a tremendous amount distilled there. You can’t read Augustine’s Confessions and easily deny that he was a saint. But he was peerless in the West and was not in serious dialog with the many Greek-speaking Fathers in the East, so he went awry in ways that have ramified mightily in the West and that accordingly lead us in the East to keep him at arm’s length.

Seems about right

The collapse of U.S. Mainline Protestantism also included a collapse in Protestant confidence, intellectual life, and public influence. Modern Evangelicalism lacked the institutions and traditions of centuries-old Mainline groups. They typically could not compete directly with vigorous Catholic intellectual life. And so rising Evangelicalism often relied on Catholic intellectual resources to make needed public arguments.

Mark Tooley

Mythbusting II

Looking for a news hook? Duke’s latest report in 2021 (.pdf here) showed evangelicals to be the nation’s least politicized Christian grouping. Only 43% of local evangelical congregations participated in even one of the 12 types of political involvements that were surveyed, compared with the more liberal “mainline” Protestants (at 52%), Catholics (81%) and Black Protestants (82%) or (not part of this study) the well-known activism at Jewish synagogues and Muslim mosques.

The Guy takes the savvy author to task on one detail, the tic of applying words like “Christian” or “church” while referring only to white evangelicals. We’re told that these past few years the radicals “seemed poised to capture the controls inside of the American Church.” True for Catholicism? For Black Protestantism? How about for mainstream evangelical denominations and parachurch groups?

Latest dissection of Trump-Era evangelicalism offers one dose of insider savvy — GetReligion.

“Tic.” I like that and should remember it.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, 12/3/23

Personal Status Report

I’ve recently been challenged to think again through how the raw reality of divided Christianity should cash out in my life. I don’t think I’ve been getting that right, and I’m working on it (without for one second doubting the claims of Orthodox Christianity).

For one thing, viewed from the 30,000-foot level, my convictions combined with a propensity for polemics, may have led me to sin against Christian charity. I’ll leave it enigmatically there for now.

As I work through this, the tone of my posts may change.

Crypto-casuistry

Ken Myers: … Until the middle of the 20th century, Catholic moral theology and pastoral guidance were dominated by a series of moral manuals, which approached ethical decisions casuistically, lists of rules and authoritative citations. One of the mid-twentieth century critics of these manuals, a French Jesuit, judged that they were “far too negative and concerned chiefly with minimal obligations. Virtues were passed over in favor of commandments and law.” When I talk with Matthew Levering about his book. I asked whether he agreed with the judgment that the approach of these manuals was too minimalistic.

Matthew Levering: In terms of today’s morality, you wouldn’t call the moral manuals minimalist, but what you would do though is you would say they sort of encourage a minimalist perspective because because the idea was to exercise your… freedom up to the very limit of what was permissible and then allow law to have its place. So in other words, you could be constantly trying to figure out, you know, what’s the limit that I can get away with? Yeah. You know, that kind of thing. Like, what can I get away with while still acting as a Christian? And so you would be then always going up to the line and testing the line and trying to find different authorities that would give you permission to exceed the line. The moral life then becomes not this glorious thing of being in Christ and of charity and sort of this expansive sense of charity and then all the other virtues. But instead what happens is the more life becomes about trying to identify the minimum and trying to make sure you’re not crossing the line You know, but still getting it’s having as much freedom as you you can possibly get without crossing the line You know these type of these type of things you can see how in practice it led to a certain minimalism.

Matthew Levering on the role of conscience in moral life, Mars Hill Audio Journal volume 158, track 7.

My Evangelical boarding school experience was casuistic in this sense, including bright lines to be pushed against and neglect of positive virtues. The term we used was “legalism,” but it was not easy to entirely escape that mind-set. It left its mark on me. I particularly wish there had been an emphasis on chastity and not just on abstention from sex, which is a pale imitation of chastity.

Calvinball Christianity

I don’t join the local basketball league hoping to convert it to pickleball. That’s what pickleball leagues are for. Although at least switching from one sport to another would be intelligible. More often, the [biblicist] objection to [catholic] Christianity’s immutability assumes the only good sports league would be one that changed constantly, randomly, and according to no rhyme or reason. Such an objection does not actually like sports. Or rather, it likes one sport only: Calvinball. And every league should be Calvinball or be shut down.

Brad East, The great Christian divide

Community

… a concrete human community-not merely a de facto “society” of autonomous individuals who kept their private views to themselves and lived as they pleased within the state’s laws-was not only the social product but also the social producer of embodied Christian faith. It always had been. Without it, beyond the micro-social context of one’s family, it is unclear how one might learn to live as a Christian, as opposed simply to learning what to believe and how one should spend an hour or two each Sunday.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

To restore and preserve the faith in robust form, there must be community. I think even the biblicists understand this in practice, if not in theory.

Televangelists

Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation, which they never learned from me. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end.

John Ames, the protagonist pastor/narrator in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

Losing savor

Liberal Christians no longer need theology to make their case. They can couch their argument entirely in terms of secular political rights … In fact, arguments based on rights were probably more convincing than theological arguments even to them. The mainline remains as committed as ever to the social causes of our day—to gay rights, immigration reform, and a stronger social safety net. They still decry racism and economic exploitation, too. They’ve hardly remained silent, but there’s a reason you can’t hear them anymore. They sound just like everybody else.

…

I suspect the twin movements of anti-intellectualism and anti-populism in the United States cannot adequately be told without reflecting on the split of mainline Protestantism into, on the one hand, de-institutionalized fundamentalist and evangelical movements and, on the other, a culturally elite yet increasingly faithless institutionalism.

…

Evangelicalism is a populist movement in that it was founded on patterns of mass consumption; it’s a movement within which a person like Joel Osteen thrives, yet a publication like Books & Culture perishes.

Great art, culture, and learning has generally depended on the support of elite patrons and institutions, not least the church and the state (perhaps especially monarchies). In mass, populist, or highly democratic movements, such excellence receives much less support. The existence of a thriving “high culture” or academic elite requires non-democratic structures that are harder to develop in a mass society. Where mass culture prevails, there’s often a pressure to cater to less cultivated tastes or, alternatively, to rebel against them in dysfunctional ways that signal an elite status.

…

All this is one of the underlying reasons, seldom mentioned, why so many formerly conservative Protestant scholars and writers have gone in the direction of Rome. Conservative Protestantism has an impoverished elite, an unimpressive scholarly culture, and is poorly networked. With the rank apostasy of mainline Protestantism and the exodus of conservatives from such institutions, conservative Christian thinkers feel as though they have no intellectual home. What’s more, they operate in a culture that is more populist in orientation, which can stifle excellence rather than empower it.

Evangelicalism doesn’t produce intellectual and cultural elites like Rome and the mainline traditionally have. Nor do we have strong academic and higher cultural networks. Granting this, it’s no surprise Rome attracts some conservative scholars and writers who wish to make an difference.

Paul Gleason, quoted by Alastair Roberts

Remarriage in Orthodoxy

Q: I’ve heard that the Orthodox Church permits remarriage. Isn’t this a departure from the Lord’s teaching in scripture?

We should start by countering a common misconception that remarriage is allowed. It would be logical to ask the same question with a small variation: Why does the Orthodox Church allow robbery, rape, or murder? Each of these sins, with repentance and a period of separation from the sacraments, can be forgiven and the person restored to full Communion. That does not imply that the Church winks at these sins; rather it acknowledges that a person who makes harmful choices is not a lost cause; he is capable of restoration, and our goal is his repentance and healing, not his exclusion in order to maintain our imagined purity ….

Fr. Silouan Thompson

The human voice: That we can sing seems basis for conjecture that, despite our stupidities and our sinfulness, we might be the reason the universe exists.

Alexander Riley

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, 11/5/23

Blind spot

Like Billy Graham, [Francis Schaeffer] took American capitalism as a given and never thought about how it might be contributing to the secularization of the country.

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals

Ecumenical Councils

In the century from 1123 to 1215, it was popes who called together synods of bishops that were thereby declared ecumenical. And they did so with the principal goal of reforming the Church. Historically, ecumenical councils had been called to address great heresies, such as Arianism, Nestorianism, or iconoclasm. Not so those designated ecumenical by the reform papacy. In less than one century, no fewer than four such councils were called at the papal headquarters at the Lateran Palace.

John Strickland, The Age of Division

Miracles you won’t see on TV

I shared a meal this week with some Orthodox friends. One had just returned from Thessaloniki, Greece, where he visited a parish where a newborn baby who had been pronounced dead was given a kind of baptism ritual, even though he was not alive. The child was born on the feast of St. Demetrios, the early fourth-century patron of the city. When the priest baptized him “Demetrios,” they all heard a sharp intake of breath, and the baby began to cry. This just happened.

…

[J]ust as the prayers of St. Demetrios raised a baby from the dead the other day, none of us know what God has in mind for us if we choose to turn away from our corruption and to Him. At that same meal with the Orthodox guys, another told a story about an American Orthodox priest of his acquaintance who was serving liturgy when an elderly man dropped dead. He rushed over to him to try to help, but it was too late. He was quite dead. Paramedics were called. The priest anointed the dead man with holy oil … and he woke up. It was a miracle. We need a miracle like that.

Rod Dreher

That hits home as I was in Thessaloniki, in Church named for St. Demetrios, within the past two weeks.

(I heard a more coherent version of the first story, no less miraculous, from another source, but I’m too lazy to transcribe that podcast account. I believe the accounts. Help, O Lord, my unbelief.)

Historic Christianity, Reformational Christianity, Evangelicalism

Catholicism had, by this time, reoriented my theological concerns around the concerns of the Church catholic. My assumptions, and the issues that animated me, were those of the Church of history. My evangelical upbringing had led me to believe that Protestantism entailed the rejection of these concerns. But this notion exploded upon contact with the Protestantism of history.

Onsi A. Kamel, Catholicism Made Me Protestant, H/T Rod Dreher. I’m not sure how I missed this four years ago; it’s quite good. The key, though, is that Evangelicalism, as Kamel experienced it, didn’t even seem to ask the right questions.

I recommend this review of In Search of Ancient Roots as a companion to the Kamel essay.

One of my favorite prayers

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
Enemies have driven me into Your embrace more than friends have. Friends have bound me to earth, enemies have loosed me from earth and have demolished all my aspirations in the world.
Enemies have made me a stranger in worldly realms and an extraneous inhabitant of the world. Just as a hunted animal finds safer shelter than an unhunted animal, so have I, persecuted by enemies, found the safest sanctuary, having ensconced myself beneath Your tabernacle, where neither friends nor enemies can slay my soul. Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
They, rather than I, have confessed my sins before the world.
They have flagellated me, whenever I have hesitated to flagellate myself.
They have tormented me, whenever I have tried to flee torments.
They have scolded me, whenever I have flattered myself.
They have spat upon me, whenever I have filled myself with arrogance.
Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
Whenever I have made myself wise, they have called me foolish.
Whenever I have made myself mighty, they have mocked me as though I were a dwarf.
Whenever I have wanted to lead people, they have shoved me into the background.
Whenever I have rushed to enrich myself, they have prevented me with an iron hand.
Whenever I thought that I would sleep peacefully, they have wakened me from sleep.
Whenever I have tried to build a home for a long and tranquil life, they have demolished it and driven me out.
Truly, enemies have cut me loose from the world and have stretched out my hands to the hem of Your garment.
Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
Bless them and multiply them; multiply them and make them even more bitterly against me –
so that my fleeing to You may have no return; so that all hope in men may be scattered like cobwebs; so that absolute serenity may begin to reign in my soul; so that my heart may become the grave of my two evils twins: arrogance and anger;
so that I might amass all my treasure in heaven;
ah, so that I may for once be freed from self-deception, which is entangled me in the dreadful web of illusory life.
Enemies have taught me to know – what hardly anyone knows – that a person has no enemies in the world except himself.
One hates his enemies only when he fails to realize that they are not enemies, but cruel friends.
It is truly difficult for me to say who has done me more good and who has done me more evil in the world: friends or enemies.
Therefore bless, O Lord, both my friends and my enemies.
A slave curses enemies, for he does not understand. But a son blesses them, for he understands.
For a son knows that his enemies cannot touch his life.
Therefore he freely steps among them and prays to God for them.
Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Prayers by the Lake

Where to begin an answer …?

A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.

David French

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.