Tag: civilzation

Sunday of the Paralytic 2026

Supralapsarian theology of the Incarnation

The notion of the Incarnation as remedy for idolatry is found most explicitly in infralapsarian theologies of the Incarnation, that is, theologies that see the Incarnation as God’s response to human sin.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry.

There are, I discover, multiple uses of “infralapsarian” and “supralapsarian,” and this use was new to me (my prior acquaintance was in the context of intramural Calvinist fights over predestination). But it fits nicely.

In any event, it presents an opportunity to mention something that I don’t think I’ve mentioned before: a school of thought that says the Second Person of the Holy Trinity would have become incarnate even if Adam and Eve had not fallen — indeed, that the Incarnation was the plan of the Godhead from the beginning of creation.

That school of thought is so prevalent in Orthodox Christianity that it’s all-but-dogma so far as I can tell. I certainly believe it.

Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation of the Word, famously (and startlingly to Western Christian ears) says the Word “was made man that we might be made God,” framing the Incarnation as the Word’s necessary act to restore and fulfill human nature (not, or at least not merely, to atone for transgressions). The list of those who follow along the same tracks, albeit without such an arresting formulation, is long and spans to the present (I have read only a few of these in full):

Essentially, this “supralapsarian” Christology answers “No” to the question “Did Christ become incarnate solely to deal with humanity’s sin …?” and “Yes” to “were there other motives?”

That anything could be on the level with atonement for sin accurately suggests a Patristic scope of “salvation” broader than is common these days and ‘round these parts.

There be riches here, folks. Come and see.

Pray for America

My hatred of political violence makes me bewildered by my own response to the news of a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I glanced at my phone, took in the essential facts, and didn’t really feel anything at all. It just seemed like one more event that hovered on the edge of the real and the unreal. I was at a dinner party and when I got back to the table and told the other people sitting there what had happened, they all seemed to have the same response I’d had. Nobody reached for a phone to learn more, no one wondered about a motive; we had all absorbed the essential fact that nobody had been injured and we went on to other things.

That’s when I realized that political violence is truly back, that an attempt to assassinate the American president is within the realm not just of possibility but of the unremarkable, and that we’ve once again crossed the river where we may not countenance violence of this kind, but we understand it as an aspect of the known world.

… This is America right now, where nothing seems real and where your sympathies are open to constant manipulation. When I was a girl, the priest always asked for prayers for the United States, which seemed silly to me, like asking for prayers for the moon or gravity. For the first time in my life, I’ve been doing what those priests instructed.

Caitlin Flanagan’s debut column at the Free Press

Bracing Stuff

Every single one of [His] teachings, were we to follow them, would make the building of a civilization an impossibility. So what we’re really hearing about, then, when we hear talk about defending or rebuilding Christian civilization, is not Christianity and its teachings at all, but modernity and its end-game. It’s the idol of material progress, the progress which has shredded both culture and nature, which is causing such grief everywhere.

…

All of these thoughts were swirling around in my head as I listened to “Against Christian Civilization”, the 2024 Erasmus Lecture delivered by Paul Kingsnorth. It is (at the risk of sounding excitable) one of the greatest speeches ever given about anything, ever.

Michael Warren Davis, Crucify Your Mind. This was published at a Substack titled Yankee Athonite, which no longer exists, though Mr. Davis has had two more recent Substacks, Spruce Island and Owl in the Ruins (a/k/a MichaelWarrenDavis). So I have been unable to find the article only.

Here, though, are three alternate sites for Kingsnorth’s speech.

So: what is a Christian to do who finds himself in an already-existent civilization?

The sea of the faith

If the Christian faith is the basis of Western culture, what happens when that faith retreats—or is rejected? We know the answer, because that rejection, or retreat—what the poet Matthew Arnold called the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the “sea of the faith”—has been going on perhaps since the Renaissance. As we survey the twenty-first-century landscape, at least in Western Europe, we can see that our founding religion is now defunct as a guiding force and a cultural glue.

Paul Kingsnorth, Against Christian Civilization

Cultural glue

Amid the hyperpluralism of divergent truth claims, metaphysical beliefs, moral values, and life priorities, ubiquitous practices of consumerism are more than anything else the cultural glue that holds Western societies together.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

I’ve been saying this for many years. So of course, I think the author is brilliant.

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.