Reformation

An indifferent history student in my youth, I now enjoy it very much.

Pandora’s box

…in the wake of [Luther’s] defiant appearance at Worms, he found himself impotent to control the explosions that he had done so much to set in train. Nor was he alone. Every claim by a reformer to an authority over his fellow Christians might be met by appeals to the Spirit; every appeal to the Spirit by a claim to authority. The consequence, detonating across entire reaches of Christendom, was a veritable chain reaction of protest.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Seizing Church properties

Predictably, secular authorities convinced by the reformers’ truth claims liked the distinction drawn between the necessity of obedience to them and of disobedience to Rome. They liked hearing “the Gospel” accompanied by such “good news”—it would allow them, for starters, to appropriate for themselves all ecclesiastical property, including the many buildings and lands that belonged to religious orders, and to use it or the money from its sale in whatever ways they saw fit. In two stages during the late 1530s, seizing for himself the vast holdings of all the hundreds of English monasteries and friaries, Henry VIII would demonstrate how thoroughly a ruler could learn this lesson without even having to accept Lutheran or Reformed Protestant doctrines about grace, faith, salvation, or worship.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Beauty

Conversion

The prevailing image of religious conversion today is one that is individualistic—conversion is in some sense experienced within the self—and sentimental—one is transported by emotions—which then cause one to affirm a certain set of religious dogmas. Such things do happen and to be absolutely clear they are great, but this individualistic and pietistic model is also of modern, recent vintage. Such experiences have always happened but they were not thought to be the majority, even less the default or only case.

“The best argument for the Catholic faith, in the end, is the beauty of her art, and the life of her saints,” once said none other than Benedict XVI, and the argument presented there is really a different version of Ali’s: look at what Christian civilization has produced, look at how uniquely beautiful and praiseworthy it is; the fact that a civilization animated by such ideas produced such unique and surpassing greatness must be an indication that these ideas are in a profound way true.

This is a perfectly rational train of thought, a perfectly legitimate thing to believe, and a perfectly legitimate route to the Church!

…

I have seen many people stumble on the path of faith because they have an expectation that religious belief or practice must, of necessity, produce some sort of deep personal or emotional effect, and therefore feel that they’re “doing it wrong” or that it’s “not for them” or that they just “haven’t been touched” or “called”. No! These people have also been called and touched, just in a different way. In the meantime, this pietistic understanding of faith has done a lot of damage.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, In Defense Of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conversion

I perhaps should note that while Gobry is of the Roman Catholic faith, “Catholic” is also an appropriate adjective for the Orthodox Church.

Divine and counterfeit beauty

During his American tour in 2011, Archimandrite Vasileios of Iveron spent considerable time teaching Americans how to reorder their affections toward divine beauty. Speaking to Americans, who are known for their love of pleasure and their worship of the body, the Athonite monk warned his audience not to mistake the call of divine beauty by settling their affections on lesser objects that lure us with a counterfeit beauty.

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

One of the huge confusions in our time is to mistake glamour for beauty.

Poet John O’Donohue, interviewed by Krista Tippett.

The sects

Achieving our country

For all its notional secularity, much of today’s liberalism is still informed by the essentially messianic assumption that “achieving our country,” in the words of Richard Rorty, the post-Christian grandson of the great Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, can be a substitute for the consolations of traditional religious faith.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

The Force

When I was studying systematics, one of our seminars required us to read about a dozen different, so-called, systematic theologies, from across a very broad spectrum. I recall someone presenting a paper on the doctrine of God in the writings of the radical feminist Catholic, Rosemary Radford Ruether. When the student finished reading the paper, there was a dead, stunned silence in the room. Finally, a sheepish voice piped up, “Isn’t that the Force in Star Wars?” We broke out in laughter because it was precisely what she had articulated. It might make for interesting reading, but it certainly could not be called “Christian.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Ties that bind

The reality is that while many in the evangelical movement thought their bonds were primarily (or exclusively) theological or missional, many of those bonds were actually political, cultural, and socioeconomic.

Michael Graham, The Six Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism

Or, as Ken Myers had it decades ago, binding by feelings manifested in a common sensibility.

Christology

There is a cooperation of the divine and the human, the uncreated and the created. Christ is the perfect man, the complete man, the whole man. But Christ is also God. That is to say, paradox as it may sound, it is God alone who is the perfect man. Only God is completely and utterly human. As we said, in so far as man fails to realize the divine in himself, to that extent he falls short of being completely human. He remains less than human … It is not accidental or a cause of surprised that man’s attempts to be only human — to fulfill the ideals of the non-religious humanism of the last centuries — results in the dehumanization both of man and of the forms of the society which he has fabricated around himself.

Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature

Miscellany

Benedict Option

Socialized to believe that their culture was the majority, it seems Christians have invested much less than Orthodox Jews in four key elements of faithful living required to thrive as a minority: educating children separately from the broader society, marking space and time to bolster community cohesion, strengthening local institutions, and reducing the influence of secular media.

…

A Christian reader may counter that Jewish rules seem legalistic. Yes, Jewish rules are indeed commands. This is a key difference in our faiths, and Christians seem to enjoy a liberty that Jews do not. I wonder, though, if community-held “constraints” would bring Christians greater freedom. Could they leave you unhindered by the burden of trying to change the majority culture and free instead to pursue joy as a flourishing minority?

Seth Kaplan, How to Flourish as a Creative Minority

It’s true that a Christianish civil religion lulled a Christianish people into complacency. That possibility if over for the foreseeable future; neither wokeism (all is allowed, nothing forgiven) nor MAGA is bringing it back. Kaplan’s advice is good, though I don’t really see more than a tiny minority (e.g., the Bruderhof) re-arranging life to live in close physical proximity to other Christians.

In a manner of speaking …

Nancy French talks about David French’s return from war (he enlisted gratuitously and served in a war zone as a J.A.G.):

Before he left, he’d been patient, slow to anger. But now my formerly carefree husband was foul tempered and anxious. Many of his friends had been killed, but war did not provide him time to process the trauma. After someone was killed, he had to focus on the next thing and the next and the next. But now he was swallowed up by grief. Plus, his faith had taken a hit. And since he was the one who’d introduced me to Christianity, it was unnerving.

Nancy French, Ghosted (emphasis added).

Nancy French grew up in the Church of Christ denomination. She attended (albeit resentfully) a Church of Christ college. That she should say so casually that David introduced her to Christianity is quite telling.

1. Was the Church of Christ devoid of Christianity?
2. Were her ears stopped, her heart embittered, by something she experienced in the Church of Christ (she was sexually abused in early adolescence by a youth pastor)?
3. Is she fibbing a bit to zip up her book a bit?

I have heard things like this so many, many times. I heard a nationally famous figure say he’d “never heard the gospel” in the Church my wife and I were attending; I found that an indefensible swipe at a very sound Church (as Protestant Churches go), but it’s kind of the way Evangelicals tell their stories.

From my current perch, I can’t defend the adequacy of any Protestant Church. But it’s jarring to hear a Baptist or PCA Presbyterian or nondenominational Evangelical say that they never heard the heard the gospel (or never encountered Christianity) in the Baptist or PCA Presbyterian or nondenominational Evangelical church they left in favor of some other Baptist or PCA Presbyterian or nondenominational Evangelical Church.

I’m just not really buying it.

---

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

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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