What color is your church?

For the last four years, I’ve been part of a church that some would describe as “purple.” I don’t like this term because it suggests a blending that doesn’t accurately portray the relationships I experience there. Still, the faithful who gather in the pews and serve elbow to elbow do sit along the political spectrum. Even more curiously, the church itself is part of a denomination in which the clergy skews more politically progressive than the laity—by a wide margin. Despite these differences, I can honestly say that I’ve never before experienced the kind of belonging I now experience in this church. I don’t think that is incidental.

Hannah Anderson, Will Politically Moderate Christians of Both Parties Work Together?

For the last twenty-nine years, I’ve been part of a church that some would describe politically as … heck, I don’t know.

I’m not interested in my fellow-believers’ political leanings. Sitting in coffee hour, I just don’t hear people talking politics. I knew one Greek fellow who detested American gun culture, but he had a pretty good reason: a disgruntled graduate student hunted down his brother (a professor) at UCLA and shot him to death. I suspect that some of our Greeks, and Romanians, and Russians, and Ukrainians, and our Serb, may be somewhere to my left if only because their roots are in Europe and Europe is generally left of the USA. Heck, most of the developed world is to our left.

So what? Are you really going to let political differences trump Christian unity? The only reason I would consider bringing politics up is to hear how and why someone else perceives the “fit” between their politics and their faith in order to expand my own understanding. And that seems more like a topic for “would you like to meet up for coffee sometime this week?” than for church coffee hour.

I became particularly sensitive to this sort of question when someone pointed out the chronic tendency of the New York Times, which famously does not “get” religion, to treat religion (or at least Christianity) as crypto-politics. I’m not really thrilled with the Dispatch for following suit.

So I guess I won’t have Hal Lindsey to kick around any more

Following up a hunch, I posed to AI a question about whether dispensational premillennialism is on the wane (I’ve lost track because it was never a thing in Orthodox Christianity, my home for 29 years now). The answer was “yes, decisively,” explicitly citing Daniel Hummel’s 2023 book The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, which concludes that dispensationalism is no longer considered a viable option among most Christian leaders or institutions.

That’s intrinsically good because dispensationalism is a relative novelty (~200 years, not 2000) and leads people to focus on lurid speculations, not on Christ.

Better yet, AI tells me that younger evangelicals are increasingly embracing amillennialism and postmillennialism; amillennialism is where I arrived 20 years before discovering Orthodoxy, and it’s one aspect of my mental living space where I didn’t have to rearrange any furniture on becoming Orthodox.

Postmillennialism is a little iffier. It comes in at least two flavors:

Christian Reconstructionist theocracy — Christians (usually Calvinists) ruling in accordance with God’s word. (Think of the “iconoclastic hammers and scraping-tools of conviction Protestantism” as described in Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars)
Social Justice ushering in the Kingdom.

Forced to choose between 1 (jackboots) and 2 (squishes), I’d take 2, but I’m glad there is no forced choice.

Blessing and curse

American Orthodox theologian Thomas Hopko once remarked: “As the grandson of Carpatho-Russian immigrants to the United States, I cannot imagine my life in any other society, and I feel extremely grateful for my personal destiny. But as an Orthodox Christian . . . I cannot imagine a way of life more insidious to Christian Orthodoxy and more potentially dangerous to human being and life.”

John P. Burgess, Orthodoxy at War

Unintended Reformation

The best known and most successful modern example is probably the American polygamist and putative prophet Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in early nineteenth-century upstate New York. Smith’s assertions about the significance of the revelatory vision he claimed to receive … are strikingly similar to claims made by the Quaker George Fox: the confusing cacophony of competing Christian groups and their countervailing claims characterized New York’s “burned-over district” during the Second Great Awakening no less than it had England’s “world turned upside down,” in which Fox started preaching in 1647.

Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.

I was taught to distrust a short list of putatively pseudo-Christian “cults” because of, among other things, their demonstrable novelty:

Mormons
Jehovah’s Witnesses
Christian Scientists
Seventh Day Adventists

But I was taught that as a 20th-century American Evangelical, whose departure from Reformation Protestantism (itself a departure from the Roman Catholic departure from the original undivided Church) dates to the same period and from some of the same sort of impulses, with an unhealthy democratic egalitarianism — heck, call it “populism” — thrown in. Their theorists would tell you they were recovering the uncorrupted early church.

But what if the faith of the early church was always maintained in a visible Church and didn’t need to be recovered?

History Rhymes, of course

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

A heartening convergence

Orthodox theology defines only what is necessary and always leaves unspoken that which cannot be explained. This approach was part of the Christian faith from the beginning. But the Western [mindset] often suppresses, dismisses, minimizes, or ignores this stance. The Western mind is compelled to define and explain everything, since without a rational explanation a concept or fact cannot be considered true, or, conversely, all truth can be proven rationally.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

One of the interesting convergences I’ve noticed is between Orthodox apophaticism and the importance of the right hemisphere (versus the more analytical left) as explicated by Iain McGilchrist. I feel affirmed.

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

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

Sunday, August 16, 2026

From “High church” perspective

The man who is entirely convinced

It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Anselm’s god

It is nothing short of blasphemous to base an understanding of salvation on the idea that God gets angry or has a brittle ego. Anselm’s god is not the God of the Church, but a medieval monarch projected into the heavens.

Clark Carlton

Theotokos

Yesterday, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox celebrated the Assumption (Catholic)/Dormition (Orthodox) of the Theotokos, the Mother of God — a title we recognize for good reason:

Mary was not just a temporary or purely physical conduit of the Incarnation. The relationship between Jesus and his mother was transpersonal and transcendent to biology. She was truly the mother, and not simply the “bearer,” of God’s Son.

Patrick Henry Reardon, The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth About the Humanity of Christ

I have heard this important truth dismissed, with Mary discussed as if she were a pipe and Jesus were water flowing down from heaven to earth through her, disguised as a human I guess. In fact, I heard it on WMBI, the flagship station of mainstream Evangelicalism in my day.

And no, I’m not exaggerating. Granted, it was a kind of devotional show, not deeply theological, and aimed at women, which may or may not have contributed to such slop passing whatever filters Moody Bible Institute had. If this were actually a firm opinion of the speaker, she would be a heretic.

The early Ecumenical Councils were all focused on the person of Christ. One such Council rejected calling Mary “Mother of Christ” in favor of “Mother (birth-giver) of God,” the point being to give no quarter to those who would divide Christ’s humanity from his deity. But Mary gets a lot of glory reflected onto her from her Son.

Nietzsche

Nietzsche was limited in his understanding of Christianity by the forms it assumed following the eleventh-century Papal Reformation and the later sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. He therefore suffered, as have all Westerners since the Great Division, from a deficit in the experience of Orthodoxy. For hundreds of years, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism were the only Christian options known to Western thinkers. The old Christendom of the first millennium was forgotten, and the new Christendom that evolved from the Great Division was separated from Eastern Christendom.

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

I would not suggest that Nietzsche would have dropped all objection to Christianity had he encountered the first millennium expression, preserved in the Christian East, nor that his critique of Christianity is like rain off the back of a duck to Eastern Christians. He’s still an acid test for the Christian profession of anyone of a philosophical bent.

From, loosely speaking, middle church

Spittle-flecked modernism

[Ralph] Elliott said his liberal professors knew how not to run afoul of the more conservative base by knowing just how to speak: one way in the doctoral seminar, another at a revival meeting. I once heard one professor of this generation speak, a biblical scholar who taught his graduate students the then-standard historical-critical view that the Book of Isaiah was written by two or three or many people, centuries apart, one of whom may have been the actual Isaiah.

In the pulpit, though, this scholar said, “Some people get all sidetracked over whether there was one Isaiah or more. I say, if one Isaiah is good, two’s better! Amen! And if two Isaiahs are good, then three’s better! Amen! In this fallen world in need of Jesus, we need every Isaiah we can get.” The crowd roared in approval, none the wiser that they had just amen-ed modernist biblical criticism.

… Elliott concluded the doublespeak was about power, not truth. People employed theological jargon precisely because it enabled them to camouflage what really mattered to them: organizational power.

Russell Moore, Blasphemy Laws Are Blasphemy.

For what it’s worth, Orthodoxy doesn’t choke on modern biblical scholarship as much as fundamentalists and evangelicals do. That’s a long story, and I’m pretty sure I’m not qualified to tell it. But I benefit from it.

Still, having lived in an anti-“modernist” world for almost two-thirds of my life, I found this anecdote interesting. You could do worse than reading Moore’s whole column.

Something to cling to

To know that the Biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing. The poor fundamentalists are trying to cling to their moral structure. I understand why, because it does organize their societies and their psyche. So they’ve got something to cling to, but they don’t have a very sophisticated idea of the complexity of what constitutes truth. They try to gerrymander the Biblical stories into the domain of scientific theory—promoting creationism, for example, as an alternative scientific theory. It’s like, that just isn’t going to go anywhere. The people who wrote these damned stories weren’t scientists to begin with. There weren’t any scientists back then—there’s hardly any scientists, now.

Jordan Peterson, Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God Transcript.

I’m not endorsing Jordan Peterson as a Bible interpreter or as anything else. My personal fascination with him is long over — because logorrhea wears me out, I think. So I don’t even know whether he’s broadly right or broadly wrong about things.

But he’s at least directionally right here about the protestant fundamentalist approach to the Bible.

The sects and the Bible

A similar, but more sophisticated, complaint of monograph length came from John W. Nevin in 1849 when he rounded on what he called the sect system. According to Nevin, “This professed regard for the Bible” was what “distinguishes the sects in general.” But to Nevin the difficulty in that profession was as manifest as it was stupendous: “If the Bible be at once so clear and full as a formulary of Christian doctrine and practice, how does it come to pass that where men are left most free to use it in this way…they are flung asunder so perpetually…instead of being brought together?” This anomaly showed that the principle of “no creed but the Bible” was “absurd and impracticable”; it breathed “the spirit of hypocrisy and sham.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Panning low church

Sundry flakes

Ellen Davis, who teaches theology at Duke Divinity School, recounts how one of her students “had a job interview at a Christian school in California where staff members cited the lack of recycling bins as an expression of their faith: by using up ‘resources’ as quickly as possible, they were hastening the coming of the Lord.”

Robin Phillips, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation

Granted, that’s nut-picking, but it’s a “truth is stranger than fiction” nut. Much commoner is to watch conflict between Israel and its neighbors with unseemly intensity because one is convinced that “the coming of the Lord” becomes more imminent particularly as peace goes south in the Bible lands.

I “followed” Phillips, the author of Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation, on his journey to Orthodoxy through Calvinism — superficially like my journey, but Phillips was far more philosophically inclined than I. He was fretting about gnosticism infiltrating putative Christianity while still Protestant, penning one pivotal piece titled Are Calvinists Also Among the Gnostics?. I don’t know how he would modify it were he to write on the topic again from an Orthodox position.

Reductionist Evangelicalism

Rod Dreher recounts his argument with a nondenominational Evangelical who contended that church in the Metaverse is the wave of the future:

At one point, I asked him if there was, to him, any spiritual difference between worshiping in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and doing so in a tent church set up in a Wal-mart parking lot. He said no. At that point I gave up. For him, churchgoing was about nothing more than exchanging information and being in the company of like-minded worshipers. You could do that in the Metaverse, he said; there was no meaningful difference between fellowshipping in person, and virtually.

This reductionist view was not one I can recall holding, and my not holding it may have contributed to my separation from what I call “frank evangelicalism” to a Reformed faith that was occasionally evangelical-adjacent. I hope it’s a fringe position, but I catch a whiff of it every time someone says Orthodox and Catholics spend too much money beautifying the places where they worship.

Not just a little manipulation, but a deeply pernicious manipulation

Here’s a typical Friday night youth group meeting. After the songs had been sung and the sermon had been preached and the eyes were closed (by most) and the mood was soft, the pastor would come up on stage and lay it on thick. “How many of you are still holding something back from God? He wants all of you!” The problem is, he would say this to thirteen-year-olds who had no clue who they were yet. So to say, “I give all of myself to God” can easily morph into “I give all of myself to whatever the leaders tell me to do.” Talk of surrender is more credible, and a lot more respectful of each child’s humanity, if leaders are also giving young people critical thinking skills. Why not teach them Bible basics and the creeds while giving the child space to think for themselves, without emotional manipulation? Well, I can think of a reason. It’s harder to control kids that way.

Jon Ward, Testimony (bold added)

I knew long ago that the wheedling “evangelists,” who Ward portrays accurately (though my encounters were in evangelistic crusades, not regular Friday night youth groups) were engaged in a kind of psychological manipulation. But Ward, in the italicized portion, heightens my understanding of the perniciousness of that manipulation.

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Onus probandi, nihil obstat, imprimatur – Tipsy goes all Latin

Onus probandi

[W]herever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position. The legitimate reformer endeavours to show that the precept in question conflicts with some precept which its defenders allow to be more fundamental, or that it does not really embody the judgement of value it professes to embody.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

What happened to the nihil obstat and imprimatur?

[T]he very thought of an imprimatur on the front of a book—the approbation of a bishop, allowing the book to be printed on the grounds that it contains safe doctrine—is something that drives some people almost out of their minds with indignation.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain It has been a very long time since I thought of the nihil obstat and the imprimatur. Do they still do that?

I’m not asking that question in the spirit of “How barbaric!”, but simply because it feels like decades since I saw one. Inasmuch as the Roman Catholic Church has no power in the US, or anywhere in the world so far as I know, to prevent publication of a book, the nihil obstat or imprimatur would serve, if used, entirely as a guide to the faithful, and I cannot object to that.

Orthodoxy and Israel

The prophecy of Isaiah 42 about Israel’s king was fulfilled in Christ and His Church, and in this it is typical of all the Old Testament passages about the Kingdom of God. However, within the last century or so, a school of thought has arisen (sometimes called “Dispensationalism”) which sees the Old Testament prophecies of Israel’s restoration fulfilled in the creation of the modern State of Israel. For this school, the “Israel” in the Old Testament prophecies refers to the Jews generally and the Zionist state in particular. … Whatever one’s sympathy for the State of Israel, it must be recognized that this school of interpretation is in flat contradiction to the apostolic view of the Old Testament prophecies. Each and every time the Old Testament prophecies are quoted by the apostles, it is in connection with Christ and His Church.

Lawrence R. Farley, The Gospel of Matthew.

I could say “this is the Orthodox agnosticism about the Israeli nation-state,” but I think that would be too narrow. Rather, the claim is that it is the Biblical view, with which claim I agree.

This do in remembrance

If recollecting Christ’s sacrifice cognitively were the only purpose of the sacrament, then we would do just as well skipping those tiny plastic cups and wafers that taste like cardboard and simply recite the Scriptures instead.

Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Sunday, July 12, 2026

I saw a theme trying to emerge from what I’m calling the main course, but I don’t think I teased it out successfully. Read with your heart and you may see it.

The main course

Road to Emmaus

Most Christians are presumably familiar with the account of Luke and Cleopas encountering Christ on the road to Emmaus. But I think I missed a lot about it in my years as a low-brow, then middle-brow, Protestant.

For one thing, the “between the lines” message of Luke 24:27, which is echoed in the story of the Ethiopian Eunuch:

The Old Testament is full of Christ, but a lot of it is typological, and thus easily overlooked.
We cannot rightly interpret scripture on our own, without a guide and without Christ as the interpretive key.
The details of Christ’s explanation to Luke and Cleopas, and of Philip’s explanation to the Eunuch, are surely important but are not given in scripture; that, along with John 21:25 suggests an important tradition that was not enscripturated, but passed down (from Luke and Cleopas to Philip, perhaps) in the Church, the pillar and foundation of truth.

Later, in Luke’s narrative, the double mention of Christ becoming know to the Apostles “in the breaking of bread” hints at the Eucharist. Perhaps Christ “broke bread” in a distinctive way both in the upper room and in Emmaus. I’m not now, and perhaps never, going to try to unpack that very far. Suffice that Roman Catholic and Orthodox teachers focus on different aspects of that in ways that feel complementary to me, but I sense treacherous ground here.

Orthodoxy and Syncretism

Being Orthodox in mind requires that one accept ambiguity, uncertainty, mystery, and paradox. Perhaps this encourages humility before God. We cannot rely on clever explanations or beloved definitions, and we must accept that we cannot completely explain or fully understand our faith. Therefore, we must rely solely on the grace and mercy of God. Perhaps this allows us to focus less on the mind and more on the heart, which is where we encounter God.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.

This is an amazing book, which captures better than I thought possible the experience of being Orthodox. I know that because I had been officially Orthodox for some 20 years when it came out, and had (because I’m my parish’s Cantor) attended more services that just about anyone besides Priests and Deacons, and thus was beginning to get the hang of things. But reading it and trying to think the way it describes will not make you Orthodox. Becoming Orthodox requires reception into a Parish and a lot of humble attention. Anything less will make you a syncretist.

One of the little mysteries

Yesterday I gave a friend a ride to church. She is a scholar in town this week to do some research. Because of a serious injury in a car accident last year, she can’t drive. Her ability to speak is greatly diminished, and I had to listen closely to understand what she said. After liturgy, though, her speaking was normal again. What?!

“This happens after I receive the Eucharist,” she said. “Everything is normal again, for a while.”

Rod Dreher

Propositional truth, practical results, efficiency

Discourses that could speak of the value of uncertainty and of belief as opposed to certainty, of the repetitive shaping of the self rather than a deterministic operation according to natural tendency, and of personal interaction with a God not operating according to predetermined, fixed laws-these were in a very real sense swallowed up by Western modernity’s esteem for propositional truth, practical results, and efficiency, and the languages in which these were valued.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity.

“The repetitive shaping of the self” is why being parish Cantor, which requires my presence in services that are sparsely attended, is such a blessing.

A lay Orthodoxen encounters Calvinism

I had to make a long drive yesterday, and took my reading of historian Carlos Eire’s Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650 to audiobook.

…

The long chapters on Zwingli and Calvin were amazing — but they put a chill on me. Eire explains that the dispute between Luther and the Swiss Reformers had a lot to do with metaphysics. The Reformed were strongly anti-sacramental. They believed that there was no real correspondence between the realm of the spirit and the material realm. Listening to Eire’s explanation of Reformed theology, and its fruits, I thought that this is the Perfect System designed by brilliant men who don’t understand what it means to live in a body.

Rod Dreher

For what it’s worth

Context matters

Wives, therefore, are called to submit to their husbands—not that they had much choice within the Roman Empire. What is radical, however, about Paul’s statements on marriage for this era is his command that husbands love their wives and do so self-sacrificially.

Stephen De Young, Saint Paul the Pharisee

Everything matters

I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.

Poet Evangeline Paterson (H/T Mark Noll)

An antichrist

Niebuhr counseled in Christianity and Power Politics that the “man of power is always to a certain degree an anti-Christ.” Such a sentiment would be entirely alien to TheoBros, who want nothing more than to be men of power.

Ed Simon, Where Have All the Protestants Gone?.

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

June 7, 2026

First, become human

“Not too many years ago,” I read, “a young monastic aspirant went to Mount Athos. In talking with the venerable Abbot of the Monastery where he wished to stay, he told him, ‘Holy father! My heart burns for the spiritual life, for asceticism, for unceasing communion with God, for obedience to an elder. Instruct me, please, holy father that I may attain spiritual advancement.’ Going to the bookshelf, the Abbott pulled down a copy of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. “Read this, son,“ he said. “But father!“ objected the disturbed aspirant. ‘This is heterodox Victorian sentimentality, a product of the western captivity! This isn’t spiritual; it’s not even Orthodox! I need writings that will teach me spirituality!’ The Abbot smiled, saying, ‘Unless you first develop normal, human, Christian feelings and learn to view life as a little Davey did – with simplicity, kindness, warmth, and forgiveness – then all the Orthodox spirituality and patristic writings will not only be of no help to you – they will turn you into a spiritual monster and destroy your soul.’”

Kyriacos Markides, The Mountain of Silence

When I entered Orthodoxy, several years before Markides wrote this book and before I can recall hearing this (or similar) stories, I was intrigued by the teaching that theosis, deification, was the goal of the Christian life — even the very meaning of salvation. But somehow I discerned, and said, that my goal for the foreseeable future was the more modest one of becoming human. This story gives me hope that I was right.

What should we do?

I am not remotely shocked that Fr. Stephen Freeman, in the beforetimes, lived in a Christian commune:

Our questions were framed in the only language we knew: what does the Bible say? The questions and answers of that dialog were informative. With those questions in mind, we became aware of a steady stream of admonitions in the New Testament urging believers towards a life of asceticism. Fasting, vigils (praying through the whole of a night), sacrificial giving, radical forgiveness are all considered commonplace and normative. We had no tradition to draw on, and thus we practiced such things without guidance. We learned many things the hard way. There is now a long string of decades that separate me from those fervent years.

No one told us to do the things we did, and no one told us to read the Scriptures in the manner we undertook. What we did was to read the Scriptures with the question in mind, “What should we do?” That stands in stark contrast to the typical question, “What should we believe?” Had our study been primarily directed to matters of doctrine, I think we would have lost our way. Strangely, our instincts were correct.

The teachings of Christ are not, primarily, metaphysical pronouncements about the nature of things. Instead, they are commandments regarding what we should do – based on who God is. “Love your enemies – because God is kind to both the good and the evil.” This pattern holds throughout Christ’s teachings. It is a directive that intends to shape our lives such that our lives themselves become a “living theology,” a revelation of the nature of God made known in the shape of our actions.

It’s not about rules

Orthodoxy is not about following rules but about inner transformation. Extremists and schismatic Orthodox are not Orthodox, in spite of any Orthodox appearance and rigorous observances, because they lack an Orthodox phronema.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Going to the well and finding it shallow

What J. S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Jonathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A. H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle’s research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T. S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind — precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Humility

Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility. … Tolstoy: “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”

James Gleick, Chaos

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

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

Pentecost

Yes, in the Christian East, it’s Pentecost. It’s a long story.

Taking God more seriously than Caesar

The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

A Virtuous Circle

Orthodoxy has always known that attention is not neutral. What you repeatedly give your mind to begins to shape what you love. And what you love begins to shape who you become.

Frederica Matthewes-Green, commenting on this video.

Lumped together

In the present age it is fashionable to lump Jesus with the prophets and the Buddha, with Confucius, Lao-tze, and Zen, with the mystics and Spinoza-sometimes even with the French Enlightenment and Freud-as if everybody who had been at all attractive must, of course, have been a humanist, and only Hitler, Stalin, Calvin, and the Catholic Church had been authoritarian.

Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

Start with a bad premise, end with confusion

A similar, but more sophisticated, complaint of monograph length came from John W. Nevin in 1849 when he rounded on what he called the sect system. According to Nevin, “This professed regard for the Bible” was what “distinguishes the sects in general.” But to Nevin the difficulty in that profession was as manifest as it was stupendous: “If the Bible be at once so clear and full as a formulary of Christian doctrine and practice, how does it come to pass that where men are left most free to use it in this way…they are flung asunder so perpetually…instead of being brought together?” This anomaly showed that the principle of “no creed but the Bible” was “absurd and impracticable”; it breathed “the spirit of hypocrisy and sham.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

I don’t know how I ignored this stupendous and manifest difficulty for almost 50 years, but I did. Others still do.

Insofar as such epiphanies are the reason for my conversion (and I periodically read very plausible suggestions that such rational observations are not how we humans roll our major life decisions), this one was foremost.

Is Evangelicalism really Protestant?

Reading James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity rekindled a feeling that I’ve had many times before in reading books like this. Every time I read a book that describes the religious history of America that talks about the nature of Protestantism in the country, it strikes me that the Protestantism of the American past is alien to today’s evangelicalism. They are different enough to raise the question as to whether or not American evangelicalism is actually Protestant in important ways.

Hunter writes in his book:

For most Americans—whether deist or Calvinist, rationalist and intellectual or revivalist and popular, high church establishmentarian or sectarian—there was a God more or less active in the universe and in human affairs. Indeed, this God was, for most, Christian and, even more, Protestant. Though hegemonic and certainly oppressive to those who dissented, this belief nevertheless provided a language and an ontology that framed understandings of both public and private life. And yet this was also a culture, following Weber and so many others, that was inner-worldly in its orientation and ascetic in its general ethical disposition, an ethic that shunned extravagance, opulence, and self-indulgence and prized hard work, discipline, and utility. In ethics it was individualistic, to be sure, but informed by biblical and republican traditions that tempered individual interest and moved it toward the public interest and common goods. [emphasis added]

It’s certainly hard to argue that contemporary American culture generally, or evangelicalism in particular, are ascetic and oriented towards a traditional disciplined WASP ethic. Undoubtedly, they are if not opulent, consumerist in orientation. I’d be lying if I said I were any different.

Aaron Renn, Is Evangelicalism Really Protestant? (emphasis in original)

God and Man at Anthropic

What follows isn’t Orthodox Christianity; it’s not orthodox Christianity; it’s not Christianity in any robust sense, nor is it Jewish in a robust sense.

But it is evidence that there are people in the AI world who are morally serious, and that it’s not all hubristic atheists thinking they literally are “building God.”

From outside San Francisco, the joke is sometimes heard as a reflection of spiritual lacking—that the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a stand-in for a God-shaped hole, that clever technologists who reasoned their way out of the old faith are now building an idol to fill the vacancy. I do not think that is quite what is happening. People need meaning, and intense, world-shaping work is one of the oldest ways to find it; that part is not new and often not sinister. What is different here is that this particular work sits so close to the old questions—what are we, where did this come from, what comes after—that you cannot do it long without staring into them. They are not building God because they miss Him. They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.

…

The reason the God-shaped-hole critique lands a glancing blow rather than a clean one is that the Bay Area’s irreligion is not quite the absence of religion. You cannot stand this close to questions of omniscience and immortality without being pulled toward the territory religion has always occupied.

Consider what people in this city expect AI to do, in roughly decreasing order of certitude and arrival time: cure all diseases, solve aging, widen science until we know how the universe began and whether we are alone in it . . . and also, potentially, cause cataclysms of various kinds. And so a community of materialists has ended up—without anyone intending it—inside something with many of the working parts of a faith.

It starts with conversion stories. Ask almost anyone when they got “AGI-pilled” and they will tell you the year, the paper, sometimes the conversation—if they have not already written a blog post on it.

…

When I tell people I am attending churches and synagogues, the response is almost always: “It’s great to have community.” But I do not go for the community. I want what happens when we are silent, or praying, or singing. I want communion with that greater, stranger thing—a transcendent sense of meaning, a call to be better than I am.

…

If Chesterton could see us now, I think he would feel vindicated, but the larger part would be sorrow. He said religion provided a frame that suited us as creatures. Many of us decided we could see more clearly without it. Now we are neither astonished at the world nor at home in it; perhaps the two came as a package, and we returned the package.

And in this city, we are building something unprecedented inside a spiritual and moral frame that many feel is inadequate to the weight. Many of the builders sense this. Few have the vocabulary for it. They try to rationalize it, to confine it to the map, and they go back to work, and they build.

Avital Balwit, Searching for God in Silicon Valley.

Balwit is the Chief of Staff to the CEO of Anthropic, which is currently my chosen AI because it at least talks a reasonably good game of thinking deeply about what they’re doing, and how it affects humans.

Kudos to the Free Press for publishing it. I overlooked it until others cited it because I’ve generally ceased expecting very much from Free Press.

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

7th Sunday of Pascha

Everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed

The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. As Schleiermacher put it, the Reformation and the Enlightenment have this in common, that ‘everything mysterious and marvellous is proscribed. Imagination is not to be filled with [what are now thought of as] airy images.’ In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty. … What is so compelling here is that the motive force behind the Reformation was the urge to regain authenticity, with which one can only be profoundly sympathetic. The path it soon took was that of the destruction of all means whereby the authentic could have been recaptured.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary. (For related thoughts, though I didn’t plan a sequence on this general topic.)

Conscientious objector to arbitrary binaries

An Irish teacher at my grammar school used to tell this joke: A rabbi was wandering the streets of Belfast late one night and was confronted by an armed member of one of the local paramilitary organizations. “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?” the armed man demanded. “I’m a Jew,” the rabbi replied. “Well, are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?” came the response. Now, this may not be that amusing as a joke, but it makes an important point: societies have categories for thinking about people and identity, and a real problem occurs when those categories are simply not adequate or appropriate.

Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Only one sacrament?

How many sacraments does the Orthodox Church have? This is a question that an inquiring 16th century European might have posed. The Catholics had seven, while the Lutherans (and some other Protestants) said there were only two. “Of course,” thought the Orthodox in struggling to answer a question that had never been spoken in the Orthodox world, “We surely can’t have fewer than the Catholics.” So, “Seven.” Someone else in the Orthodox world thought, “But we’re more excellent.” So, the answer came back, “Nine.” Then, in the modern world of flourishing Orthodox thought a patriarch said, “The whole world’s a sacrament.” The counting of sacraments risks reducing them to moments of ritual, the concern of priests and churchly events: “We need to get the baby done…” I once heard as an Anglican. However, to say that “the whole world is a sacrament” runs the risk of saying nothing at all.

At its core, all of these statements beg the question: what is a sacrament? In the Orthodox world of the past, the term “sacrament” is missing from its vocabulary. Instead, Orthodoxy speaks of a “mystery.” It is well spoken, in that what is described is something hidden that is being made manifest. What we find, I think, is the very life of Christ being given to us. That is the mystery hidden from before the ages.

…

[R]ather than saying that the “whole world is a sacrament,” it is more accurate to say that there is only one sacrament – that of union with the death and resurrection of Christ.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Theodicy in a nutshell?

At this point, it might be objected that the problem of evil casts doubt on this claim; for if God is good, why hasn’t he eliminated the evil that obviously exists in the world? But there are several problems with this objection. First of all, it could only undermine Aquinas’s argument for God’s goodness if we assumed that a good being could not possibly have a reason to allow evil. But it is notoriously difficult to show that such a being could not possibly have such a reason, and even most contemporary atheist philosophers would not make such a strong claim.

Edward Feser, Aquinas

Cheap evangelical dates

From the outset of his brief political career, Trump has viewed right-wing evangelical leaders as a kind of special-interest group to be schmoozed, conned, or bought off, former aides told me. Though he faced Republican primary opponents in 2016 with deeper religious roots—Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee—Trump was confident that his wealth and celebrity would attract high-profile Christian surrogates to vouch for him.

Mackay Coppins. The photo illustration to the article vindicates Trump’s cynicism about “high-profile Christian surrogates.”

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

Samaritan Woman/Midfeast

Colonizers

Just as colonial officials and missionaries, travelling to India, had imposed the concept of ‘religion’ on the societies they found there, so did agnostics colonise the past in similar manner. The ancient Egyptians, and Babylonians, and Romans: all were assumed to have had a ‘religion’. Some peoples—most notably the Greeks—were also assumed to have had ‘science’. It was this that had enabled their civilisation to serve as the wellspring of progress. Philosophers had been the prototypes of scientists. The library of Alexandria had been ‘the birthplace of modern science’. Only Christians, with their fanatical hatred of reason and their determination to eradicate pagan learning, had prevented the ancient world from being set on a path towards steam engines and cotton mills.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

Fissiparous

Those who, like him, had dared to repudiate the Roman Church but had then been guilty of what Luther condemned as a failure properly to understand the Spirit, had also been the objects of his ire. Theologians in Swiss or German cities who presumed to dispute his views on the eucharist; Anabaptists, with their wild contempt for infant baptism and secular authority; Henry VIII, who seemed to think he was God. Luther, fretting where it all might lead, had not shrunk from contemplating a nightmarish prospect: a world in which the very concept of truth might end up dissolving, and everything appear relative. ‘For whoever has gone astray in the faith may thereafter believe whatever he wants.’

Tom Holland, Dominion.

“Fissiparous” is my favorite blanket term for the innumerable clans descended from the Reformation. It sounds appropriately sinister to me.

Lofty rhetoric, grubby reality

When the Supreme Court announced a “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”, some thought it was rejecting the very idea of natural law. Really it was asserting a degenerate theory of natural law, one widely held in the culture—or at least in those parts of it which our controllers choose to recognize, such as law schools, abortion facilities, and liberal seminaries. It was propounding a universal moral right not to recognize the universal moral laws on which all rights depend. Such liberty has infinite length but zero depth

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know

Catechesis

If you read through the Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem (mid-4th century), you discover that they have a strongly moral character. The “theology” is quite simple and straight-forward. The extended period of catechesis (often three years in length) was about turning Roman pagans into believing Christians. The habits of the heart (another word for “character”) take time to change or be formed. They are, indeed, the product of a lifetime.

…

We modern people have been nurtured in the heart of a great project and the character of “project managers” has been deeply stamped on us. We expect our own salvation to be something of a project and that w e should be its managers. How frustrating it is to be told that “it does not yet appear what we shall be.” How can we manage the project of our salvation if we do not know what it is we are working towards? How can we tell if we are any closer? Our modern character is formed to expect upward movement – improvement. But St. Sophrony taught that “the way up is the way down.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman.

One of the things I can’t un-see

In my youth, we zealous Evangelicals condemned Roman Catholic Bibles for all the annotations that we thought distorted the Bible’s message. We did so, with no sense of the absurdity, while clutching our Scofield Reference Bibles, with notes that, for instance, put Genesis Chapter 1 at 4004 B.C.

This is the sort of thing you can’t un-see once you’ve seen it. That the dispensationalist heresies of the Scofield Reference Bible have (or so I understand) become passé in Evangelicalism doesn’t change that. Newer Bible versions with study notes fill the void, though perhaps the antipathy to Rome has diminished (I simply don’t know).

The Mother of God

Despite the clear views of the original Reformers, the Church’s devotion of honor and love for the Holy Virgin Mary is one of the greatest stumbling blocks for today’s Protestants to overcome. As on many points of Orthodox doctrine and practice, the Protestant view has devolved radically since the time of the Reformation. For evangelicals in particular, the traditional veneration offered to the Theotokos through praise and prayers evokes not merely theological objections, but often highly charged negative emotional reactions.

Michael Shanbour, Know the Faith

Thoughts from a freshly-minted Saint

No matter how ‘right’ you may be on various points, you must be diplomatic also. The first and important thing is not ‘rightness’ at all, but Christian love and harmony. Most ‘crazy converts’ have been ‘right’ in the criticisms that led to their downfall; but they were lacking in Christian love and charity and so went off the deep end.

St. Seraphim Rose, newly-Canonized in one North American Orthodox jurisdiction, via Michael Warren Davis.

The most tragic Orthodox downfall I’ve seen personally fit that pattern.

This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.

I John 1:5-7

Southern Gothic

Her stepdaughter, Kate, is twenty-five, fragile, sensitive, a weak woman raised by a strong one. She yearns to have her suicidal despair overcome through raw experience. Storms make her feel wonderful. Sometimes, she tells Bolling, she stays up all night having “revelations.” The happiest moment of her life, she claims, was when she was in a car crash on the Natchez Trace. Her fiancé was killed. She survived. “I went over and looked at Lyell and everybody thought I was an onlooker. He had gravel driven into his cheek. There were twenty or thirty cars stopped on the road and then a bus came along. I got on the bus and went into Natchez. There was some blood on my blouse, so when I got to a hotel, I sent it out to be cleaned, took a bath and ordered a big breakfast, ate every crumb and read the Sunday paper.”

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, characterizing a portion of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.

I guess I thought of this as “Sunday fare” because it reminds the reader, albeit with Flannery O’Connor’s “large and startling figures”, just how screwed up we humans are.

I like the Southern Gothic writers, I think, because their literal meaning is opaque; they write what feels like long, evocative poetry.

No graven images

It says a lot about our current president that in response to the news that a giant gold statue of Donald Trump was dedicated this week, you have to ask, “Which one?”

(Margaret Hartmann, Gold 22-Foot Trump Statue Definitely Isn’t a False Idol).

After a 22-foot gold statue of Donald Trump went up outside the Trump National Doral Miami golf course, Pastor Mark Burns, a friend of the president who helped organize the project, felt obliged to explain at its “dedication” that “this is not a golden calf. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and Him alone.” (Margaret Hartmann, ibid.)

Two observations:

Any Protestant who approves of this statue should never again accuse Orthodox Christians of idolatry because of our icons.
Responding to Orthodox Christians saying “We don’t worship icons,” a common Protestant response is “The hell you don’t! You bow and kiss them!” An Orthodox apologist responding to that denied that bowing and kissing was worship, but sort of understood Protestant confusion: “Protestants venerate God and worship nothing.” (Obviously, that stuck with me.)

Incomplete Renunciation

Please let me have
a 10-room house adjacent to campus;
6 bedrooms, 2-1/2 baths, formal
dining room, frplace, family room, screened porch, 2-car garage.
Well maintained.
And let it pass
through the eye of a needle.

(Marilyn Nelson, in Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology)

The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.

Saint John Climacus Sunday, 2026

Our inescapable reality

Nor does this allow for any kind of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox triumphalism, whereby the historical continuity and unity of the institutions can be presented as an antidote to Protestant fragmentation. To be a Roman Catholic today is to make a choice. Thoughtful Roman Catholics may object to this claim by pointing to the sacramental power that they ascribe to baptism. But that does not really address the matter of lived experience: every faithful cradle Catholic has still made a decision to live his or her Christian life as a Catholic amid a world of other possible options, from atheism to Islam to Bible churches and Pentecostalism. When it comes to how we think of ourselves, we are all expressive individualists now, and there is no way we can escape from this fact. It is the essence of the world in which we have to live and of which we are a part.

Carl Trueman and Rod Dreher, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Provincial

A giant in the Evangelical world, John M. Perkins, has died at age 95. I clipped two obituaries for later reading. When I got around to reading the first, I was struck by the provincialism of an indictment Perkins handed down in 1987:

I think that makes a difference between whether or not that church is an action church or whether it’s just become a self-centered worshipping congregation. And I think most churches are sort of self-centered worshipping. They see the church as ‘meeting my need, meeting my need,’ and the church doesn’t have a ministry, and a concept of ministry, and a philosophy of ministry, and a statement of mission to the world.

(Italics added.)

Perkins was an evangelical, and one mark of evangelicalism is activism (to the neglect of so much else, in my opinion). His indictment is of evangelicals, and for not living up to an intentional and full-orbed activism — not living up well to his vision of how things should be.

Self-centered worshipping congregation is an oxymoron (hypothetical self-worship aside). To worship is to ascribe high worth to another. So this indictment starts off wrong-footed.

The he shifts voice, from talking about a congregation to the demand of each individual member — “meeting my need, meeting my need.” And there is where he, and much of evangelicalism, miss the boat.

They really have made Church about “meeting my felt need” in an effort geared more toward growth than toward making disciples.

Frederica Matthewes-Greene wrote of inviting a friend to her Orthodox Church. At the end of the Liturgy, her friend exclaimed “Wow! That was soooo not about me!” And I’d say Church in the 21st Century can be perceived as “meeting my need” by the masses only if it’s pandering to something other than real human needs, the foremost of which is to move from the image of God to the image and likeness of God, to grow God-ward.

Unfortunately, that’s not on evangelical radar.

Overlearned

Freddie DeBoer had a post this week on “overlearning,” which he descibed as:

the error … that learns too much, that overfits the curve, that extrapolates irresponsibly, that takes a genuinely correct observation and rides it so far past its destination that it ends up somewhere just as wrong as pure ignorance, only with more confidence.

He gives many examples, such as extrapolating a dismissal of all social science research because much of it fails replication.

Without looking for them, I found a few artifacts of overlearning in Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind:

The wood and stone from which idols are made do not deserve to be worshiped; because God made them, however, they deserve to be studied as wood or stone.

And:

I was brought up in a Christian environment where, because God had to be given pre-eminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. I have broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance. (Irish poet Evangeline Paterson)

A book note

A few years ago, I tried to read The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, but I quit because it felt voyeuristic for me, an Orthodox convert from Evangelical and Evangelical-adjacent Christianity, to read it. But my interest shifted from finding fodder for schadenfreude to figuring out how it came to pass that something went scandalously wrong with one of America’s most visible and vocal Christian traditions. So I read it afresh, finishing this past week.

As the author, Mark Noll, wound down, he had this summary:

The scandal of the evangelical mind seems to be that no mind arises from evangelicalism. Evangelicals who believe that God desires to be worshiped with thought as well as activity may well remain evangelicals, but they will find intellectual depth — a way of praising God through the mind — in ideas developed by confessional or mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, or perhaps even the Eastern Orthodox. That conclusion may be the only responsible one to reach after considering the history sketched in this book. Even if it leaves evangelical intellectuals trapped in personal dissonance and the evangelical tradition doomed to intellectual superficiality (or worse), the recent past seems to point in no other direction.

A fair clarification of that paragraph, in context, is that there seems to be no mind that arises from what is distinctly evangelical about evangelical Christianity: conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism (in a classic and widely-accepted taxonomy), to which Noll crucially adds intuitionism, a dogmatic reverence for “common sense.” It is particularly intuitionism that must be set aside for an evangelical even to have the patience to engage in the sustained, intense study of a subject that characterizes a life of the mind.

So evangelicals can live the life of the mind by adopting what I’d call “methodological mere Christianity,” much as, I’ve come to suspect from outside the sciences, a scientist who hopes to contribute to specifically scientific knowledge, will need to adopt methodological naturalism even if his personal convictions are not naturalist.

That’s not a conclusion I anticipated when I decided return to Noll’s book and finish it, and it leaves me with the kinds of personal questions that make the reading worthwhile.

An unexpected answer to fervent prayer

I pray fervently that Mr. Dreher will return to the Catholic Church—not only for his sake, but for ours. I’m afraid the Benedict Option project will remain incomplete until Mr. Dreher commits to restoring the Holy Catholic Church as the central pillar of Western Christianity.

Michael Warren Davis, September 25, 2020.

Within four years of this plea, Michael Warren Davis left the Catholic Church and entered the Orthodox Church. He currently writes a Substack.

A Contrast

Shortly before he died in 1860, George Croly penned the prayer “Spirit of God, Descend upon My Heart.” In its second stanza Croly described what he felt would happen if he were to experience a deeper walk with the Spirit:

I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
No sudden rending of the veil of clay,
No angel visitant, no opening skies;
But take the dimness of my soul away.

For Croly, to know God better would make our vision of the world clearer. In 1922, Helen H. Lemmel wrote the words and music to a gospel song that is as moving as it is characteristic of the fundamentalist-Holiness outlook:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace.

While the essentially Christian motivation of this song is clear, its ironic meaning can be understood better now than when it was written — under the influence of fundamentalism, evangelicals turned their eyes to Jesus, and the world grew very dim indeed.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

The “science” of theology

“The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches…. The duty of the Christian theologian is to ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to Him. These facts are all in the Bible.” On the basis of these assertions, [Charles] Hodge then went on to suggest that “the Theologian [is] to be guided by the same rules as the Man of Science.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God. I am dumbstruck by the arrogance of this, and humbled at the thought that 30 years ago I probably would have applauded it.

It is very difficult to make our contemporaries see that there are things which by their very nature cannot be discussed.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World.

Satan at work

The accusation that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city are abducting and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs relies not on one falsehood but on a web of them. The rhetoric evokes racist tropes about “savages” who do not conform to our civilized Western world. There’s also a religious angle: the idea that Haitian refugees are voodoo occultists who might be worshipping the devil. As an evangelical Christian who actually believes in the existence of Satan, I agree that we can indeed see the work of the devil at play here, only it’s not on the menu of the Haitian families but rather in the cruelty of those willing to lie about them.

…

To sing praise songs in a church service while trafficking in the bearing of false witness against people who fled for their life, who seek to rebuild a life for their children after crushing poverty and persecution, is more than just cognitive dissonance. It’s modeling the devil himself, whom Jesus called “the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). That’s especially true when the lies harm another person. “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer,” the apostle John wrote, “and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 Jn 3:15).

Russell Moore, Trump’s Lie Is Another Test for Christian America.

I have a beef with Moore: if memory serves, this was JD Vance’s lie before Trump picked it up with delight and ran with it.

Sunday, March 1

Heresies

Dispensationism declining

By embedding [John Nelson] Darby’s complex [dispensationalist] eschatology directly into the margins of the biblical text, Cyrus Scofield effectively imposed an ahistorical and not-traditional interpretation on the Bible, an irony given that the work has appeal to nuda scriptura Christians who see the Bible alone as authoritative and exclude tradition.

Albert Russell Thompson.

That irony was lost on me as a 15-year-old, when I asked for, and got, the ultimate pious kid’s Christmas gift (short of a KLH compact stereo system, of course): a Scofield Reference Bible (looseleaf for inserting note pages) with my name embossed on the leatherette cover.

But the irony finally hit me in my late 20s, when I used those loose-leafs for typed-up Calvinist-oriented notes repudiating the dispensationalist heresies of that Bible version. (I still have that Bible with my Calvinist notes. I have not superseded the Calvinist notes with Orthodox rebuttals.)

Thompson’s overall point, though, seems to be that dispensationalism is losing its grip on the evangelical imagination:

The dominance of dispensationalism is currently being hollowed out by a dual-front migration. First, some younger evangelicals are abandoning the religious innovations of the 20th century in favor of older, more rooted forms of Christian worship. Central to this is a burgeoning interest in Anglicanism, framed not as a liberal departure, but as a return to a foundational, traditionalist, and robust Anglo-American Protestant tradition. Similarly, the move toward Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism represents a rejection of the “rapture culture” in favor of a sacramental worldview that is fundamentally non-dispensational.

Also, many evangelicals of all ages have moved beyond dispensationalism. There were no successors to Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsey, and Tim LaHaye. Dallas Theological Seminary, once a headquarters of dispensationalist theology, has largely moved on. And Christian commentators are no longer anxious to relate contemporary events to biblical prophecy ….

I’m stunned that dispensationalism held that grip as long as it did after failures like predictions of Christ’s “Second Coming” no later than 1988 based on the 1948 establishment of the modern state of Israel starting a prophetic clock that would go off no later than the “generation” that saw that.

All else being equal, evangelicalism sans dispensationalism is an improvement, less likely to distract folks from the real business of following Christ.

(Although he acknowledges that dispensationalism is not required for support of Israel and the Jews, Thompson suggests, not implausibly, that the American upswing in antisemitism and the waning of support for Israel is linked to dispensationalism falling out of favor.)

“Merely to enumerate them would be impossible”

In 1832 Achille Murat, an exiled Bonapartist, whose religious ideal was a unitary society with an established church, nonetheless could not help but be impressed by “the thousand and one sects which divide the people of the United States. Merely to enumerate them would be impossible, for they change every day, appear, disappear, unite, separate, and evince nothing stable but their instability…. Yet, with all this liberty, there is no country in which the people are so religious as in the United States.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God.

To say that an America fractured into innumerable, shape-shifting sects is extremely “religious” is damning by faint praise, as I see it.

The heresy litmus test

What defines this consensus, above all—what distinguishes orthodoxy from heresy, the central river from the delta—is a commitment to mystery and paradox. Mysteries abide at the heart of every religious faith, but the Christian tradition is uniquely comfortable preaching dogmas that can seem like riddles, offering answers that swiftly lead to further questions, and confronting believers with the possibility that the truth about God passes all our understanding.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

The way of the Protestant world today

The local Church I grew up in has changed its name to “The Grove” to de-emphasize its denominational affiliation (well, officially “God wanted to give us a name that better reflected and communicated what he has been doing in our midst over the past few years”).

Growth in the unequivocally Protestant world these days seems to be in (1) nondenominational thingies and (2) denominational churches that function like nondenominational thingies. I guess my childhood church has decided to be the second sort of thingy.

(Then there’s the Anglicans – think “conservative dissidents from the Episcopal Church USA” – apt to think of themselves as lower-case catholics. I think they’re growing, too, though I wouldn’t bet anything on that unless I could afford to lose it.)

The Mercenary Love of God

Those wary of commending Christianity for its capacity to deliver rewards, benefits, and consolations have a point. Belief for the sake of avoiding hell, saving Western civilization, or just finding something to hold onto in a cold, meaningless world is not the same as the disposition of faith, properly understood, which is rooted in love of God, not fear of damnation, civilizational collapse, or soul-destroying nihilism. Nonetheless, count me among those who are not quick to dismiss appeals to the usefulness of Christianity. What is different is not necessarily contradictory. St. Catherine of Siena recognizes that a “mercenary love” of God is imperfect; nevertheless, it can spur us toward a pure and selfless love.

R.R. Reno, Dilbert’s Wager

Orthodoxy

Planting a seed

My name-changing childhood Church (see The way of the Protestant world today, above) made passing reference in the rationale for their name change to a favorite Bible passage from my teen years:

And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts, living within you as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love; and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God’s children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God himself.

I still think that’s lovely and apt. In fact, I now see that I was longing for Orthodoxy over one-and-done conversionism. I was an outlier, with my evangelical classmates preferring verses like “God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.“

The way back to The Garden

The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility. The Earth is our home now. … These are the consequences of our pursuit of knowledge and power, but we keep pursuing them because we know no other means to escape from our exile. We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. Outside the garden, we are homeless and can never be still. We forget the creator and worship ourselves. All of this happens inside us every day. … The path back to the garden can only be found by giving up the vainglory, the search for power and the unearned knowledge which got us exiled in the first place. The path is the path of renunciation, of love and of sacrifice. To get back to the garden, we have to go through the cross.

Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

Rome, viewed from Patmos

In the years leading up to the Schism, it would have been hard for the Eastern patriarchs to have taken seriously the claim that the popes of Rome were the vicars of Christ on earth and had inherited his sanctity and authority. The papacy had been in the gift of the German emperor since King Otto I had had himself crowned emperor by the pope on February 2, 962. He then decreed that all future popes should take the oath of allegiance to his office. In the following century, twenty-one out of twenty-five popes were handpicked by the German crown. They did not do a good job. Simony flourished; popes had their mistresses; and they were poisoned, strangled or just mutilated by their rivals. By 1045, only nine years before the Great Schism, there was no pope. Instead, there were three rival claimants to the papacy, each with his own army.

Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot