On this eve of the The Nativity According to the Flesh of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ (that’s the official name in Orthodox Churches), I deviate somewhat both from my usual tone (because, as you may have noted, there was some fairly big religious news over the past week) and from much particular nativity piety.
What’s wrong with this plan?
The neighborhood will do the luminaries (sic) again this year on Christmas eve. Board member [name/phone omitted] will take point this year distributing the luminaries on Christmas Eve. Distribution will be from my house at [address omitted] beginning at 9:30am. If you would like to volunteer to help with the distribution, be at my house promptly at 9:30 Sunday morning.
Email from my HOA President. I could add emphasis, but I’ll let you ferret out the solecism on the grammar of Christian piety on your own.
Contemporary Pharisaism
The Pharisees of Christ’s time thought that Jews had lost God’s favor through transgressions of His law. To regain God’s favor, they were punctilious about keeping His law — and tried to force other Jews (Jesus, for instance) to do so as well.
I regret that Pharisaism in common parlance has come to connote hypocrisy, censoriousness and self-righteousness, because that sounds prissy and self-satisfied, whereas the real Pharisees were more like theocrats, more like our myths about grim-faced Puritans.
In my preferred sense, I would apply “Pharisaical” to Michael Cassidy, Ron DeSantis and Charlie Kirk:
On Dec. 14, a Christian veteran named Michael Cassidy walked into the Iowa State Capitol and destroyed a display erected by the Satanic Temple of Iowa. The display was an idol of Baphomet, a robed figure with a goat head. Cassidy told Fox News host Jesse Watters that he had destroyed the statue in an act of “Christian civil disobedience.”
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But the right-wing response to the Baphomet vandalism was notable … Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, tweeted, “Satan has no place in our society and should not be recognized as a ‘religion’ by the federal government. I’ll chip in to contribute to this veteran’s legal defense fund. Good prevails over evil — that’s the American spirit.” The Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk said, “A Christian veteran just beheaded a monument to Satan in Iowa’s State Capitol. If this is Christian Nationalism, we need more of it. Hero.”
David French, who goes on to describe in his words the spirit that makes me (not him) want to call them “Pharisaical”:
To understand the moment, one has to understand the extent to which many religious activists believe that free speech itself is responsible for America’s ongoing secularization and alleged moral decline. They believe the doctrine of viewpoint neutrality — that is, the requirement that the government treat private speakers equally in their access to government facilities — is a proxy for “moral relativism.” …
This claim is a Christianized cousin of the secular idea that defending the free-speech rights of those with whom you vehemently disagree is, in essence, providing aid and comfort to racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia. In this view, your role as a citizen is first to determine whether any given speech meets with your moral approval, and then — and only then — to rally to its defense.
I would add that at least some religious activists believe not just that we decline morally as a virtual synonym for acting badly, but that America’s plight is a direct judgment (i.e., not just a natural consequence) from a god who’s angry at us because of our collective sins.
Those are the clearest case of modern American Pharisaism.
Fiducia supplicans
Black holes (Rorschach proclamations)
In a by now familiar sequence of events, the Vatican released a document on Monday which caused instant confusion. “Pope says Roman Catholic priests can bless same-sex couples,” the headlines announced. Optimistic Catholic apologists said the media had misunderstood the document, which permitted no such thing. Pessimistic Catholic apologists said the headlines were, alas, correct, and that the pope had erred. Part-time ultramontanists said that the document could only be read in a conservative manner and that it was an outrageous insult to the pope to think otherwise. Full-time ultramontanists said that the document could only be read as a “development of doctrine” and that it was an outrageous insult to the pope to think otherwise. The liberals rejoiced, with a slight undertone of impatience. The world took a brief interest, concluded that the Church was at least making some slow progress, then yawned a little and moved on to the next headline.
I have spent what feels like years parsing these much-debated Vatican documents, checking the exact translation of Italian words, badgering learned canonists and theologians for comments, comparing one sentence with another. And to be honest, I am thinking of retiring from the game. Because in the era of Pope Francis, such “controversial” statements are generally less statements than black holes.
A black hole, according to NASA, is “a great amount of matter packed into a very small area—think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City.” That slightly exaggerates the density of Fiducia supplicans’ five-thousand-word text, but the point is the result—which, as NASA explains, “is a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.”
Dan Hitchens at First Things.
This seems the perfect frame. I’m less experienced and less connected than Dan Hitchens when it comes to the Roman Church. If he can’t figure it out, I can’t.
But it seems fair to say that Pope Francis has, by Fiducia supplicans, at least given cover to those who have been clamoring for recognition of same-sex couples (and to a lesser extent, divorced and civilly remarried couples).
Fr. James Martin conveniently photographed and posted on social media his “spontaneous” blessing of one couple. (Yes, there is something oxymoronic about a social media photograph of a supposedly spontaneous encounter.)
Untenable tension
Of Monday’s extraordinary action by Pope Francis:
What does it mean to bless a couple without blessing that couple’s relationship? Millions of words will be expended in the coming months to try to explain this, but I can guarantee that none of them will make sense. … It’s hard to see how historic Catholic teaching on marriage and historic Catholic teaching on papal authority can emerge unscathed from this.
Changing communions
There has been speculations that Fiducia supplicans will produce a schism in Catholicism and/or drive orthodox Catholics to Orthodoxy.
The late Jaroslav Pelikan was a Church Historian at Yale. Somewhere in the 20-25 year-ago range, he left Lutheranism to embrace Orthodox Christianity, where his heart had been for some time already.
I emailed the news a Protestant friend who’d studied at Yale. He responded that the development would create a real buzz at Yale.
I followed up with the puzzled question about whether Yale was really so religious that this would be scandalous. “Au contraire,” he replied. “The scandal is that anyone at Yale should take religion seriously enough to change affiliations like that.”
In this situation, Catholics who take religion seriously enough to object to things like Fiducia supplicans probably have been those who in the past attended carefully to the words of Popes and defended the most lavish claims about the authority of the Pope. This is going to be a tough call for them.
… and not just them
[I]t is not a sufficient reason to come to the Orthodox Church if someone is dissatisfied with his own Church community, be it a Catholic Church or a Protestant community. There is something more in the Orthodox Church … and it is simply not enough to be a protester or to this like something happening in your own community in order to become Orthodox.
Metropolitan Hilarion. It will be tempting for some Orthodox priests to treat dissatisfaction with Catholicism over this shift of position as a sufficient basis for receiving them into Orthodoxy. Who doesn’t like “church growth”?
On greener grass
It is important that before any of you choose to abandon your declining church for a different communion, that you not have any false hope. This is true of Orthodoxy as well. It is not the case that all churches are the same, so it doesn’t matter which one you belong to. Nor is it the case that because all churches are dealing with corruption of one kind or another, you might as well stay put. I’m simply saying that one should try to be as realistic as possible, and not allow oneself to be swayed by one’s understandable hope that the grass is greener Over There, With Those People.
It might be greener than where you are, but I assure you there will be problems. As a Catholic priest once put it to me, discussing the decadence within all the churches today, “Churches are made of people, including the clergy. Whatever sins the people of a time and place have, they will bring them into the church.” His point was not that we should reconcile ourselves to sin, much less engage in woke mumbo-jumbo to declare sin to be a blessing. His point, rather, was that we should not allow our idealism to get the better of us, such that we become scandalized by the failures within ecclesial bodies.
Catechesis
I have loved this story before and I love it still:
I am reminded of leaving the RCIA (catechesis) program I had enrolled in at the LSU Catholic Student Center in 1991, under the naive assumption that though I was two years out of college, I would find a more intellectually challenging catechesis there. In fact, it was a liberal priest and a liberal nun leading us all on guided meditations. Zero teaching of what we would be required to believe as Catholics. When I realized at last that this wasn’t going to get any better, and that we were all going to end up being received into the Catholic Church without knowing anything about the Catholic faith, I left.
I found my way to Father Dermot Moloney, an elderly Irishman who pastored the Latin mass parish downtown. He took me on as a catechumen. He said to me on that first day, in his thick brogue, “Lad, by the time I get t’roo with ye, ye might not want to be a Catlick, but you’ll know what a Catlick is.” God bless that priest’s memory. I so respected him for that. The problem today is that a Catholic can be just about anything he or she wants to be, and the administrative class of the Church doesn’t care. If you care, the Pope considers you to be “rigid,” and part of the problem.
Edward Feser (emphasis added) via Rod Dreher
Religion generally
Your purpose in life, in all likelihood, is quotidian
I live in Phoenix, the home of Grand Canyon University that has become a fairly major player in the Christian college scene. They have billboards all along the I-17 freeway through town that market their programs as “finding your purpose”. And that in a nutshell, I think, is the “spirit of the age” of our cultural Christian spirituality. The concept that you are potentially a “Bible character level” servant of God is foundational to evangelical Christianity. … [I]t all boils down to this: You exist to be something and do something specific (and great) in the universe and apart from fulfilling that utility you are a failure (or sinner…).
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I don’t know exactly when “God has a plan for your life” stopped making sense, or more like it stopped making sense to put any energy or investment into trying to make it make sense. I think it was around the time (almost 20 years ago) when I faced the reality I was never going to be ordained to the priesthood, something I “KNEW” was my calling and purpose since first grade. That thought drove my life and I had spent decades in churches, ministries, cultivating relationships, and making preparations of one form or another to prepare for its inevitable, providential fulfillment. It never happened. I’ve ended up being a construction worker for the past 40 years instead. But even so, I found ways to spiritualize my life as a common laborer and make it “significant”.
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At 71, … [a]s simplistic and tritely “zen” as it sounds, there is some peace accepting the reality that if I hadn’t done what I did, I wouldn’t be where I am (for better or worse) and I just have to deal with my present moment.
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There was a woman who asked God, “What do you want me to do, what is your will for my life?” His answer? She said, “He told me, do your dishes. What a let down!” But that’s really the answer for all of us. “Do what is in front of you, and then the next right thing.” Yes, even doing the dishes is spiritual warfare sometimes.
Steve Robinson, The Peace of Purposelessness Steve’s not prolific, but he’s always worth reading.
God is not a djinni
The Christian Way, as its first followers referred to it, is in other words a path of internal transformation — what the Orthodox call the “unseen warfare” that goes on in the heart every minute. The battle between the way of God and the way of the world: every religion I know of teaches some version of this.
Being human, though, we like to take these teachings and overlay them onto the world. In Christian history, this has often taken the form of crusading — sometimes literally — to transform the kingdom of Man into the kingdom of God by force …
Currently, this trend is manifesting most obviously in the form of a “cultural Christianity” promoted by anti-woke public figures on the Right. In this reading, the Christian Way is a weapon which can, in the words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, writing here as a recent convert, “fortify us against our menacing foes”. Ironically, this spiritual-warfare-as-civilisational-warfare attitude is most obvious at present in the rise of the violent Islamism which so frightens Hirsi Ali, and with good reason. The nervousness with which Europeans have been shopping in their Christmas markets this month is testament to the reality of the violence which some people think God will help them justify. The warning should be clear.
… Religion, despite the many calcified failures of its history, is not at root a weapon in anybody’s culture war. Religion and culture reign in separate domains. A faith wielded as a stick with which to beat the “cultural Marxists” will end up being as empty as the consumer void it seeks to challenge, and potentially as toxic. C. S. Lewis had already spotted the trap more than 60 years ago: “Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.”
Paul Kingsnorth, Our Godless era is dead
Blank slate hermeneutics
Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture.
Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens
This is akin to the argument against my wading too deeply into Fiducia supplicans.
Anglicans
There are more Anglicans in church on Sunday morning in Nigeria alone, for instance, than in all of North America and Great Britain combined.
Soon enough, Africa will be sending Christian missionaries to darkest America.
Orthodoxy
Anglophone Christians appropriating Orthodoxy
Fr. Stephen DeYoung’s podcast bible studies have brought me one revelation after another. Those on Galatians (from almost three years ago; I came to these podcasts late and have been listening in chronological order) have been particularly helpful for my understanding of how little I understand — and by extension a challenge before all who come to Orthodoxy from a Protestant millieu.
This exchange between Fr. Stephen and a parishioner “went meta” on the challenge:
C1: I have a question that may be a distraction, but… You read this in English, in this English translation.
Fr. Stephen: Yes.
C1: First of all, it makes almost no sense.
Fr. Stephen: Yeah.
C1: Second, if you live in the Western culture that we live in, and you try to make sense of it, you’re going to come to the wrong conclusion.
Fr. Stephen: Yes.
C1: What do we do about that?
C2: Well, we have a Fr. Stephen.
Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] We need… Honestly, we need an Orthodox translation of the New Testament in the English language. And we as English-speaking Orthodox Christians have not fully appropriated the Orthodox tradition and faith yet. We just haven’t. We’re still doing that. We’re still working on that.
C1: Our language is actually a barrier.
Fr. Stephen: Right, because the English language that we’re using, terms like “justification” and things, it’s the vocabulary of Protestant theology. So it’s not just a question of how do we express the Orthodox faith in English; it’s [that] we’re trying to express the Orthodox faith in Protestant terminology, and that’s kind of not going to work. So we have to continue—mostly we’re doing that just by using borrowed Greek words like apophatic theology and cataphatic theology and theosis. We’re just taking the Greek words and using them instead of the Latin ones like justification, to try and help with that, but that’s something we’re just going to have to continue to do.
But, yeah, any New Testament you’re going to pick up, including the New King James Version that you find in the Orthodox Study Bible is translated by a Protestant committee. So, number one, they’re coming at it from a Protestant perspective, but, number two, it’s a committee, so they’re also trying not to take sides, usually, in any internecine Protestant debates. So it’s not [just] that it’s Protestant; it’s that it’s vaguely Protestant, which is what makes it even harder to understand. Because if they just let a Calvinist translate it themselves, it would be skewed, toward Calvinism, obviously, but it would at least make sense. [Laughter] But because they’re trying not to do that, you end up with translating participles with a gerund, just “-ing,” going because we don’t want to interpret beyond that; or just putting “of”—“of faith,” “the hearing of faith.”
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Fr. Stephen: We’ve got a lot of work to do. And you folks are just as responsible for doing your piece of it as I am for doing my piece of it. So that’s why it’s hard. That’s why it’s hard is that there’s this cyclical [Sic. I think he probably meant more like “recursive”] thing, where Protestantism has read these passages a certain way, and so the English translations all reflect that reading. So you could either go back and read the Greek— but even then, who put together the lexicon you’re using that tells you what the words mean? Yeah, some 19th-century German Protestant liberal. [Laughter] So that’s going to be skewed another way, too.
And again, I’m not saying any of this to bash Protestantism. It’s just we as Orthodox Christians are reading New Testaments that reflect the Protestant tradition of the people who translated it. Just like, if I translate something, it’s going to reflect my Orthodox Christian understanding of it. As humans, none of us is a robot, none of us is completely objective—there’s no way to do a completely objective translation anyway, because words in one language do not equal words in another language, so you can’t mathematically do a translation. You can’t have a computer do a… If you want to see how a computer does a translation, go use Google Translate and see how that works for you! [Laughter] I don’t want a Google translated Bible! That’s going to make a whole lot less sense than this, right? [Laughter]
C1: It also means that we have to struggle within our own minds to deal with thoughts that have been skewed in advance. I mean, you say “justification,” and my mind immediately says, “by faith,” and I know what that means. I’ve heard that in church; wait a minute.
Fr. Stephen: Right, or the word “faith.”
C1: Yeah, the word “faith” itself.
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C1: So it’s a constant mental struggle.
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Fr. Stephen: … But to a certain extent, that’s always been true. That’s why we have homilies and sermons. That’s why we don’t just stand up and read a text from the Bible and sit back down. It’s always required teaching and explanation and that kind of thing.
Galatians, Chapter 3 Continued (emphasis added)
This is so good and so helpful to me that I’ve added it to a selective list of things I need to review periodically.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 