Sunday after Theophany

Mythbusting I

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

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Paradox

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

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

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

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

Conversion

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

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

Listening to that other voice

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

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

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

Sin or regrettable failure

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

Rod Dreher

The power of repentance

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

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

Without comment

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

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

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

Father or Fathers?

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

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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

Seems about right

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

Mark Tooley

Mythbusting II

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

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

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

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

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

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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New Year’s Eve

A New Year’s Wish

A cyber-friend asked If you could wave a magic wand and have Christians in the USA instantly and deeply understand a concept, mental model, biblical theme, theological topic, etc. etc., what would it be?

My reply: That the Church did not begin at Azusa Street, in a Second Great Awakening tent revival, during the First Great Awakening, or with Henry VIII, Menno Simons, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Johannes Gutenberg, Augustine of Hippo or even the first New Testament codex.

Pragmatic Xianity

Bryan assumed the truth of Christianity, but his defense of it was essentially pragmatic. Rather than arguing for its factuality, as Machen did, he argued the good it did for humankind. “There has not been a great reform in a thousand years that was not built about [Christ’s] teachings,” he proclaimed, and “there will not be in all the ages to come.”

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals

I doubt that Bryan’s faith, as described, is “saving faith.” On the other hand, Christendom can always use allies.

The American Sense of Scripture

When Vice President Mike Pence delivered his speech at the Republican National Convention, it was like witnessing a Walker Percy satire. Pence remixed Hebrews 12:1-2 and 2 Corinthians 3:17, by replacing “Jesus” with “Old Glory,” the “saints” with “this land of heroes,” and even interjected his own biblical gloss—“that means freedom always wins.”

People rightly recoiled from Pence’s failed attempt at civic religion. How could the Vice President replace Jesus “the author and perfecter of our faith” with the American flag? Why would he substitute American heroes for the saints? And, what definition of freedom could Pence be using to conclude that “freedom always wins”? After all, the American sense of Scripture is not one of the classic senses of Scripture. Those would be the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses.

If you have read Percy’s Love in the Ruins, which is about—as the subtitle tells you—“The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World,” then Pence’s speech would sound strangely familiar ….

Jessica Hooten Wilson, Percy and Pence and the American Sense of Scripture

I never understood the hatred of Hoosier liberals for Governor Mike Pence. But I cringed when he agreed to run as Trump’s Vice President, and I’ve never found his Christianish faith a great reassurance.

It’s harder than a camel passing through the eye of a needle

L’Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers’ fortune passed $100 billion this year. But here’s what I found intriguing (besides her black hair at age 70 — after all, she’s worth it):

Ms Bettencourt Meyers is said to favour privacy over attending social events frequented by many of the world’s wealthy.

She is known to play the piano for several hours a day and has written two books – a five-volume study of the Bible and a genealogy of the Greek gods.

“She really lives inside her own cocoon. She lives mainly within the confines of her own family,” said Tom Sancton, who authored the book The Bettencourt Affair.

BBC

Now, we do it to ourselves (or do we?)

“But all the same,” insisted the Savage, “it is natural to believe in God when you’re alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death . . .” “But people never are alone now,” said Mustapha Mond. “We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them ever to have it.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

My sorta kinda “life verse”

In my Evangelical boarding school, there was a little bit of pressure to identify your “life verse” — one snippet of Scripture that was your very own guiding light.

That’s asking a lot of immature kids, and I don’t recommend it.

But as a matter of fact, one verse did kind of grab me, and looking back 56+ years, I could even see it as my unexpected guiding light:

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

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

That’s my other New Year’s Wish for my readers, though it’s more closely related to the first than you might think.

Sunday, 12/17/23

As we close in on the Feast, artifacts of Western Christendom loom larger. I’ll spend this morning singing in my Orthodox Church, this afternoon singing two more-or-less traditional Lessons & Carols. (I’ll spend this evening and tomorrow resting my voice.)

Too obvious

Two young fish are swimming along when they are passed by an older fish. He says, “Good morning, boys. How’s the water?” And one of the younger fishes asks the other, “What’s water?”

Most famously attributed to David Foster Wallace

Exceedingly sad is the blindness of the sons of men, who do not see the power and glory of the Lord. A bird lives in the forest, and does not see the forest. A fish swims in the water, and does not see the water. A mole lives in the earth, and does not see the earth. In truth, the similarity of man to birds, fish, and moles is exceedingly sad.

People, like animals, do not pay attention to what exists in excessive abundance, but only open their eyes before what is rare or exceptional.

There is too much of You, O Lord, my breath, therefore people do not see You. You are too obvious, O Lord, my sighing, therefore the attention of people is diverted from You and directed toward polar bears, toward rarities in the distance.

St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Prayers by the Lake

Endless doctrinal controversies and formidable erudition

Most competing Protestant protagonists in the sixteenth century did not draw from their disagreements the conclusion that the Reformation’s foundational principle or its adjuncts were themselves the source of the new problem. (Those who did so tended to return to the Roman church. Rather, they usually reasserted—and argued, in endless doctrinal controversies and sometimes with formidable erudition—that they were right and their rivals wrong.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Why do people go to Church?

If there’s one thing I learned in all my research on religious enchantment, it’s that mankind’s religions emerge from a primal experience of awe; everything else is commentary. A highly intellectualized religion diminishes the experience of awe, and turns it into a moral and ethical system. Don’t misunderstand: morality and ethics are important, and should not be set in opposition to primal religious experience. But the point of religion is the encounter with God; anything less than that is a diminution of true religion. The way we in the West approach religion since the Enlightenment is an outlier on human experience — and, as we now see everywhere around us, a dead end.

A new Protestant friend here in Hungary asked to go with me to the Orthodox liturgy recently … He told me that after a lifetime in Protestantism, he has grown weary of church-as-academic-lecture. He explained that he appreciates the intelligence and the teaching of the kind of sermons he has become used to, but as he gets older, his soul craves “enchantment” (the word he used) in faith. A learned discussion of theology and morality leave him thirsting for more — which is why he approached me to ask me about Orthodoxy.

Rod Dreher, Why Do People Go to Church?

How do we measure what’s good?

In medieval England, just prior to the Reformation, there were between 40 and 50 days of the calendar (apart from Sundays) that were feasts of the Church on which little to no work was done … By the end of the Reformation period, such days had largely disappeared, with Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost (Whitsunday), alone remaining – with only Christmas being a possible weekday celebration …

It is possible to think about this shift in Christian thought in economic terms. Fifty days in the year on which work is interrupted can have an enormous impact on productivity and efficiency … The shift itself can be seen in the very use of economics to measure what is good and salutary in a society. … Strictly speaking, the modern world has not been disenchanted. Rather, it is now enchanted with money and the “invisible hand” of the market.

Fr. Stephen Freeman (emphasis added)

Conservation of energy

Religious energy once so animated cultures that massive wars were fought over interpretations of holy writ. Where did this energy go? I might get annoyed with excesses of other faiths, but I’m mostly in the “you do you” camp. Perhaps the energy has been sublimated into other areas, other arenas of focused attention. Its apparent dissipation must be accounted for.

This energy has found a home in sports and politics

These are the arenas in which we wage holy war. The war has jumped out of the arena and entered the stands. We are caught in our symbols, our totems, our liturgies. Can these energies be tamed and contained?

Kale Zelden

So walk on air against your better judgement

(Seamus Heaney)