The secularists’ god

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

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Peter Pan and Prosperity

There was a strangely gripping part of the televised Peter Pan of my childhood (featuring Mary Martin as Peter) where Tinkerbell drank poison to save Peter, but she “could get will again if children believed in fairies.” The children watching were encouraged to clap to let Tinkerbell know they believed.

Her recovery was nothing short of miraculous. No thanks to me.

I’m almost positive I didn’t clap because I didn’t believe in fairies. I even felt a bit resentful at the manipulation, (Yeah, I was that kid.)

Believe hard enough and good things will happen to you, from earthly to heavenly riches (so it’s your own fault if you’re not rich) is not a message that has gone away.

Christian America or White America?

We often hear that the most significant trend in religion in America is the rise of the “nones,” those who profess no religious affiliation. That demographic group is indeed important for the future of religion, culture and politics in America, and as of 2021, Pew reported that 29 percent of all adults identified as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.” But alongside that trend, the changing demographics of Christianity promise to transform faith and religious discourse. We cannot assume that America will become more secular so long as the future of America is less white.

…

I quickly recognized that the standard American religious survey categories no longer account for the realities expressed in the church in America. “White evangelicalism,” “Protestant mainline” and “progressive” are categories that are largely defined by a white majority. This “browning” of the church in America, as some scholars call it, scrambles all the categories. What we are seeing isn’t simply that white evangelicalism is changing; it’s that something new is emerging.

… What will it mean for politics and religion in America when religious conservatives are by and large voices of color? Even now, when white progressives criticize “conservative Christians” or “conservative evangelicals,” they, perhaps unknowingly, are largely critiquing people of color from the majority world. On the other hand, when conservatives for so-called family values take anti-immigration stances, they are ironically abetting the secularization of America.

This influx of nonwhite believers will challenge white religious conservatives to choose between xenophobia and building alliances with immigrants who share their views on social issues. These trends will also challenge them to unbundle their religious views on social issues from a kind of libertarian economics that harms those who are less wealthy. In the same way, white progressives will be in the awkward spot of choosing whether to continue to push boundaries about sexuality and gender — which will put them on the side of largely white, wealthier Westerners — or to be in solidarity with those from the majority world who most likely hold views that are out of step with social progressivism.**

Tish Harrison Warren.

I skipped over this once or twice the day it appeared, on the assumption that it was demographic stuff I already knew. But while I knew the “arc,” I did not know how far the trends have progressed nor had I thought about the political ramifications of conservative Christians of several colors making political cause against white progressives.

(Silly me! I tend to think about “religion” in religious terms, not political. And in religious terms, some of the groups Warren describes do not sound unequivocally Christian.)

Ambiguity about creation

Put in biblical imagery, this tension might be expressed as follows: On the one hand, we want, with the psalmist, to see the lion stalking its prey as seeking its food “from God” (Ps 103/4.21). On the other hand, we also want to say, with the Book of Isaiah, that when God’s ultimate purposes are fulfilled, “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid” (Is 11.6). And in wanting to use both of these images, we are implicitly admitting to an ambiguity in our attitude to God’s creation as we experience it.

Christopher C. Knight, Science and the Christian Faith

It takes a family to raise a Christian

Protecting mumbo-jumbo and mummery?

Legislators in Washington State, Vermont, and Delaware are trying to abolish clergy-penitent privilege in the context of mandatory reporter laws. In other words, a Clergyman who hears a confession of child sexual abuse would have to report it.

Eric Kniffin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has been fighting these legislative efforts and explains persuasively why the bills are “impractical, discriminatory, and unconstitutional.”

All I want to add (or emphasize), as a retired attorney and a Christian in a tradition that practices sacramental confession, is that I’m offended by an odious implication of abolishing the clergy-penitent privilege while continuing the attorney-client privilege: that implication is that the attorney-client privilege is important because it allows attorneys to do important jobs properly while the clergy-penitent privilege merely protects some mumbo-jumbo and mummery.

Fortunately, that very invidious implication is part of the reason why the laws are unconstitutional.

Epistle of James

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

James 1:27

I’ve always been more diligent about avoiding spots than about visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction.

Getting real

You look so good the slum must be inside you

Poet Tomas Tranströmer via Martin Shaw

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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.

Converts

I very recently discovered that Paul Kingsnorth equivocates about whether he is a convert to Christianity. “In a sense, I was always Christian but didn’t know it.”

I suppose the same could be said of my “conversion” to Orthodox Christianity from (seriatim) Evangelicalism and Calvinism. I always intended to belong to this historic, most original Church.

As an Evangelical, I thought the historic, most original Church was that which lived most faithfully by the New Testament pattern. I now see that as a very naïve view, starting with the fact that “the New Testament Church™” did not and could not live by the New Testament (because it did not yet exist).

As a Calvinist, I thought the historic, most original Church was that which believed as the early church believed, and since I saw the progenitor of predestination in Augustine, and Augustine was about as early a Christian figure as I knew, then Calvinism (a/k/a the Reformed faith) was it. I now see that as fairly naïve because Augustine was an outlier in Christendom, who looms large in the post-Christian West because the other profound figures were all in the Greek-Speaking Christian East.

As an Orthodox, I don’t deny the validity of my prior concerns, but have added unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity.

Sacred rite or admission to political and social privileges?

On the indignant litigants who sue bakers, florists, photographers and such for declining services to same-sex weddings:

Maybe the prospective customers, like many Americans, do not see transcendent meaning in the ceremonial commencement of matrimony, because they associate a wedding as admittance to an institutional legal fiction that allows one access to nothing more than a cluster of political and social privileges not available to other friendships. So, given this understanding, it is not surprising that the customers see the provider’s refusal as a negative judgment on the public legitimacy of their union. Thus, it’s easy to see why the customers would be offended by the provider’s refusal and subsequently seek legal redress. But what the customers fail to see is that their demand that the courts force the providers to rescind their denial and be punished for it is really a demand that the state force the providers not to exercise their freedom of worship, the liberty not to participate in, or not provide assistance to, ceremonies that one believes have sacramental significance.

Francis Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously

I’m aware that this war is over and my side lost. Considering how poorly Christian people have realized the sacrament of marriage, the loss probably was deserved. But I want the truth remembered. History’s arc does not bend toward falsehoods.

Marriage, terrestrial and celestial

Dreher also alluded to a bit of controversy in the Evangelical World.

A flamboyant pastor/author, Josh Butler (whose credentials are unknown to me), has written a book sort of on the topic of Christ’s relationship with the Church being recapitulated in a husband’s relationship with his wife (a thoroughly biblical comparison, but he had to spice it up with “How God’s vision for sex points us to the good, unlocks the true, and (sort of) explains everything.”)

Butler has caught a lot of flak for that, the gist being some mixture of objections to the extent to which he took the simile awfully literally if not graphically and that he was contributing to the patriarchy. See here, here and here.

Four points:

1. I’m not going to try any deep investigation into this story, which I would need to do before opining on the substance or taking sides. (Why should I take sides in a battle within an alien tribe?)
2. I presume (and see some circumstantial evidence) that Butler’s a bit of a provocateur and that he dropped some provocations into his book. Otherwise, I don’t think he’d have gotten so much pushback.
3. I’ll credit Butler’s critics with tacitly (maybe explicitly — see point 1) trying to nip another Mark Driscoll/Mars Hill Church scandal in the bud.
4. Point 3 does not negate mixed motives including jealousy.

Capturing the ineffable

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that Rod Dreher is laboring mightily on a book about re-enchanting our imaginations. (I’d be more skeptical about the chance of the book achieving its objective had not another writer captured amazingly well something that I thought was ineffable.)

I have other concerns about this project, especially as it touches theology.

Nevertheless, I did appreciate this, which almost perfectly echoes my (much longer) experience in Orthodox Christianity:

I didn’t set out to write an “Orthodox” book, but all the research I’ve done has drawn me out, like a riptide, deeper into Orthodoxy. I have learned what Iain McGilchrist meant when he said that Eastern Christianity is the form of the faith that best corresponds to what he has learned about the way the mind relates to the world.

…

Being Orthodox has meant a long, slow letting go of the Western way of seeing reality. When I first became Orthodox in 2006, I assumed, as many converts do, that I had taken on a version of Christianity that was more mystical and more liturgical, but basically the same thing. A woman at our church told us that it would take us at least ten years to start thinking like an Orthodox Christian. That made no sense to me then. It does now. I couldn’t have known this at the beginning of the journey, because I did not know what I did not know.

Beauty And The Sacred

Martin Shaw (who I have no reason to think follows Dreher’s musings) is still quite a novice Orthodoxen, but like the hedgehog, he seems to have understood one big thing:

For years I was looking for a bigger form of shamanism, never thinking for a moment that could be Christianity. But it’s turned out to be a Christianity I’ve never seen before, strange as that sounds.

Better late than never

I let two parts of a (so far) three-part series, over more than a year, slip by until my attention was arrested by the third this week.

• ‘Spiritual but not Religious’ Revisited: An Urgent Case for the Psychiatric – Front Porch Republic
• A Case for the Psychiatric, Part 2: Dostoevsky’s Christianity – Front Porch Republic
• Deeper than Religion, with Powys and Chesterton – Front Porch Republic

What’s most striking is that this Catholic Deacon author draws his most penetrating insights into the disease of “religion” from Orthodox sources.

Christian discipleship

If our churches have behaved as if “Christian discipleship” largely consists of “holding the right ideas in your head” and “consuming the right content,” then it isn’t terribly surprising that many Christians would encounter the difficulties of life and feel radically unprepared for them. Their churches didn’t teach them to expect suffering, didn’t give them models for resilience and dependence on God, and didn’t provide practical guidance in mortifying sin and offering oneself up to God. So of course we now have many Christian people who are a bit at sea, particularly given how chaotic, angry, and uncertain this cultural moment has become.

… [W]hile I understand that the failures of the attractional model created a vacuum that therapeutic technique has rushed in to fill, I also know that the cost of allowing therapeutic technique to persist in this work is far too high.

Jake Meador, who I suspect will one day recognize the incorrigibility of Evangelicalism and become Orthodox — where, ironically, he will discover a well-developed, non-faddish therapeutic approach, as in the phrase from the Orthodox Trisagion Prayer “Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities” (following “Lord cleanse us of our sins; Master pardon our transgressions”).

Tao

I have a few books I try to revisit regularly. One is C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man. I’m now adding Christ the Eternal Tao, which I finished not quite a year ago. Lewis’s use of the Tao was a sort of preparation for taking the second book as other than a syncretistic novelty.

Anyway, off to China:

Other creatures follow their natures without creating chaos or disaster. They change by themselves without seeking change. People, meanwhile, race through the realm of existence and never know a quiet moment. They abandon their original innocence and don’t practice the true Tao of doing nothing. They don’t care about their lives, until one day they offend and retribution arrives.

Sung Ch’ang-Hsing via Jack Leahy, Caffeine and Repentance.

More Leahy:

Not coincidentally, perhaps, during my morning reading of Christ the Eternal Tao I was pointed to Chapter 37 of the Tao Te Ching. Which goes:

The Tao does nothing yet there is nothing it doesn’t do if a ruler could uphold it the people by themselves would change and changing if their desires stirred he could make them still with simplicity that has no name stilled by nameless simplicity they would not desire and not desiring be at peace the world would fix itself

—Red Pine translation.

As it turns out I have thought about that passage for a long time now. It is a passage that has long resonated with me to my core. And yet, it is a bit disappointing how little of its message has affected the way I have chosen to live over the years. Despite my decades-long attempt of trying to put this into practice something deeper in me more strenuously seeks the opposite. The world can dole out great rewards for those who will achieve its goals. This is no small thing. To truly put this seeking aside is to become, in many ways, a non-person.

(Emphasis added)

Futility to the Nth power

As I continue to read the works of liberal theologians with their many and varied alternatives in which the cardinal points of our faith are denied I cannot help thinking how ultimately insignificant their works all, for all their ingenuity and prolixity.  That is, millions of Christians who believe the Faith, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant alike, have no time for them, write them off as unbelievers, and leave their books unread.  Millions of secular people who share their unbelief never read their books, since the books profess to be works of theology, and such people who disbelieve the Christian faith have (not unnaturally) no interest in theology.  They are, it seems, writing their books for the select liberal academics who inhabit the same liberal echo chamber.  Their works have no real significance in the minds of the overwhelming majority of men who live and work in the real world, despite the fact that their books continue to multiply like mushrooms sprouting after the rain.  For all their labour, their work deserves to be forgotten.

Fr. Lawrence Farley

Apophatic Ecclesiology

Orthodoxy cannot be simply reduced to the Orthodox doctrine of apostolic succession, seven sacraments, three degrees of hierarchy, and it is even doubtful whether such doctrines exist in a clearly defined form …

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

ECUSA celebration of Annunciation?

Is this how Episcopalians now celebrate the Feast of Annunciation?: a “solemn Service of Apology [note: not “Repentance”; and “solemn Service of Apology” makes it sound like there’s an established service for such purposes] for the participation and complicity of the diocese and its members in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and in that trade’s continuing aftermath and consequences.”

(I am not condoning slavery, of course.)

Wordplay

Where no oxen are, the trough is clean; but much increase comes by the strength of an ox.

Proverbs 14:4

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

Franklin P. Adams (via The Economist, The World in Brief for March 23)

Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.

Nothing new here except the possibility that the coinage is George Bernard Shaw, which I didn’t know.

I enjoy a climate with four seasons. Just not all in the same week.

@dwalbert on micro.blog

In consequence of inventing machines, men will be devoured by them.

Jules Verne

• Persiflage: Frivolity or mockery in discussing a subject.

There are related definitions, too. Try as I might, this one just doesn’t seem likely to enter my working vocabulary. I encountered it in Arthur Machen’s The Hidden Glory

Candor is the public posture of a person whose inner life is well ordered and who is grounded in their sure confidence in the love of God.

Jake Meador

‘Anthropocene’, an age in which humans have replaced nature as the big influence on Earth.

I didn’t know that was the definition of the term I’ve heard on-and-off.

We live in a culture where one of the most embarrassing things you can do is blush at the embarrassing behavior of others.

Jonah Goldberg

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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.

God the creator

As Peter Geach puts it, for Aquinas the claim that God made the world “is more like ‘the minstrel made music’ than ‘the blacksmith made a shoe’”; that is to say, creation is an ongoing activity rather than a once-and-for-all event. While the shoe might continue to exist even if the blacksmith dies, the music necessarily stops when the minstrel stops playing, and the world would necessarily go out of existence if God stopped creating it.

Edward Feser, Aquinas. I view Aquinas as a notable landmark on the path of Western Christian decline, but if this comment by Mr. Geach is accurate, and especially if the minstrel versus blacksmith image is Aquinas’ (not Geach’s), then I for once applaud him.

Another misrepresentation is the not-uncommon assertion that any kind of evolutionary theory is completely alien to the patristic understanding. An evolutionary scenario was, admittedly, unavailable to the Fathers on scientific grounds, which is perhaps why few of them suggested it. We should not forget, however, that some of them did hint at the possibility of a gradual unfolding of the potential of what God had created “in the beginning.”

Christopher C. Knight, Science and the Christian Faith

Aquinas again

This difference between Aquinas and the voluntarists is related to the reasons for which Aquinas’s position is, as we saw in chapter 3, immune to the famous “Euthyphro objection” to religiously based systems of ethics. The objection, it will be recalled, is in the form of a dilemma: either God wills something because it is good or it is good because he wills it; but if the former is true, then, contrary to theism, there will be something that exists independently of God (namely the standard of goodness he abides by in willing us to do something), and if the latter is true, then if God had willed us to torture babies for fun (say) then that would have been good, which seems obviously absurd. Ockham essentially takes the second horn of the dilemma, but for Aquinas the dilemma is a false one. What is good for us is good because of our nature and not because of some arbitrary divine command, and God only ever wills for us to do what is consistent with our nature.

Edward Feser, Aquinas.

Instrumentalizing Christianity

People who take an instrumental and political view of Christianity, however well-meaning (Dennis Prager is an example of this kind), sometimes argue that only “Judeo-Christian religion”—and there is no Judeo-Christian religion, nor are there “Judeo-Christian values” in any meaningful sense—provides a possible basis for a sound moral life, including the moral basis of national political life. This is, of course, what T. S. Eliot called the “dangerous inversion,” i.e., the argument that we should accept the supernatural claims of Christianity because they are useful for fortifying a moral sensibility when we should, instead, derive our moral sensibility from the truth of Christianity, if we believe it to be true, or from something else that we believe to be true rather than merely convenient. In a sense, the non-believer who sympathizes with Christianity is more of an enemy than is the frank atheist who hates Christianity—because the “cultural Christian” trivializes Christianity. The cultural Christian believes that Christianity is false and that this does not matter, while an evangelical atheist such as the late Christopher Hitchens believes that Christianity is false and that this does matter—that it matters a great deal.

…

Some of you will be stuck on the fact that I wrote that there are no Judeo-Christian values in any meaningful sense. I know that this flies in the face of the conservative catechism, but I think it is true. Christianity and Judaism are very different religions, but they have a great deal in common when it comes to moral prescription—but they have this in common not only with one another but with many other religions and with the moralities of many other cultures. With apologies to my learned Christian friends who sometimes insist that it is otherwise, Christianity is not especially radical as a purely moral position. Those Christians who take a view of life based on “natural law”—which really means only that we can use reason to discover how it is we should live—should not be surprised to find that Christianity is not a moral outlier, inasmuch as the ancient Greek philosophers and Hindu sages and Confucian scholars had fully functioning powers of reason, too. It is not that there is nothing at all distinctive about Christianity, but even its most radical moral demand—that we should love our enemies—would not be alien to a pagan Stoic.

Kevin D. Williamson, Who Are These ‘Cultural Christians’?

So what?

[I]f you did convince an unchurched young American to go to services, what would they encounter? Wonder? Enchantment? Or dull bourgeois ceremonial, mixed with greeting-card uplift or political exhortation, either left or right?

Rod Dreher

This invites me to reveal my “heresy”: I’m surprisingly ambivalent about the “revival” at Asbury University. I don’t think anyone’s fibbing about it, but the form of revived Christianity is terribly problematic from the perspective of historic Christianity.

The longing of all the nations

It is a strange yet incontrovertible fact that, when God did take flesh, He in many ways (though certainly not all) revealed himself to be closer in spirit to the Tao of Lao Tzu then to God as conceived by the Hebrews at that time, even though the Hebrews had the revelation of Moses. This might be difficult to accept by those who are accustomed to thinking of Christ as the fulfillment of the expectation specifically of the Hebrews. Ancient Christian tradition, however, holds that Christ satisfied the longing of all the nations.

Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao

New American Religion

[W]e ended our Disney World visit in the Animal Kingdom, going through the Avatar-themed rides (drenched in pantheism, like their source material) and then heading out as dusk fell over the vast (artificial) Tree of Life at the center of that park, its trunk carved with a bestiary and its leaves suffused by colors for the park’s magic-hour light show.

There was a big crowd gathered near its rearing shape, watching both the lights and the images of the natural world projected on the trunk — a show called “Tree of Life Awakenings,” though I didn’t know that at the time. And there was a different vibe there than at the fireworks show; less celebratory and boisterous, more meditative and awe-struck, with people in a lotus position or taking other pious-seeming postures toward the tree, the show, the lights, the visions of the natural world.

It felt a little different from the rest of Disney World — more reverent than the other quasi-religious elements, less nakedly commercial, more distant from Disney’s 20th-century origins, an intimation of a 21st-century paganism or pantheism slowly taking over the Mouse Cult from within.

Ross Douthat

Poetic Wordplay

I am the singular
in free fall.
I and my doubles
carry it all:

life’s slim volume
spirally bound …

R.S. Thomas

I was vicar of large things
in a small parish.

R.S. Thomas

Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

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.