Sunday, 11/24/24

Formatting things a bit differently today, without “headlines.”

After he had twice visited the United States in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a perceptive essay contrasting Christian development in America with parallel developments in the parts of Europe most directly shaped by the Protestant Reformation. His assessment included an observation that was as shrewd in its comparative wisdom as it is relevant for the themes of this book: “The secularization of the church on the continent of Europe arises from the misinterpretation of the reformers’ distinction of the two realms [of church and society]; American secularization derives precisely from the imperfect distinction of the kingdoms and offices of church and state, from the enthusiastic claim of the church to universal influence in the world.” What Bonhoeffer saw has been described with other terms here: The key moves in the creation of evangelical America were also the key moves that created secular America.
It is a matter of great historical significance that American Protestants almost never cited biblical chapter and verse to defend their interpretive practices. Precisely as it worked on Scripture, the Reformed, literal hermeneutic revealed most clearly how it arose from the special circumstances of American life. Yet even if this hermeneutic itself was not necessarily rooted in a literal reading of Scripture, it was nonetheless the American norm for the generations between the writing of the Constitution and the end of the Civil War.

Mark Noll, America’s God. (You may need to chew on that a bit. Or read the book.)

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.

C.S. Lewis via Paul Kingsnorth, who situates Lewis’ insight in our age.

Brad East once pondered:

Why do people convert to Christianity? Why do intellectuals and other public figures convert so often to Catholicism (or Eastern Orthodoxy) and so rarely to Protestantism?

Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline. I suspect he’s still pondering, though I don’t think he’s addressed the topic as explicitly as in the quoted article.

I keep coming back to the article deliberately, feeling as if I haven’t exhausted it. Maybe you’d find it helpful, too.

The west, so it seems to them, tends to think of the Crucifixion in isolation, separating it too sharply from the Resurrection. As a result the vision of Christ as a suffering God is in practice replaced by the picture of Christ’s suffering humanity: the western worshipper, when he meditates upon the Cross, is encouraged all too often to feel an emotional sympathy with the Man of Sorrows, rather than to adore the victorious and triumphant king.

Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church

No, St. Paul wasn’t a perv:

When teaching non-Jewish Christians, one of the most radical disjunctions with their former way of life was sexual morality. Sexual continence had simply not been a concern for most of them before, so it became Paul’s focus. Paul’s frequent emphasis on this area was not based on prurient interest but on the continuing education and reorientation of former pagans.

Fr. Stephen De Young, Saint Paul the Pharisee. Actually (I’m sure Fr. Stephen noted it elsewhere), fornication with temple prostitutes was the former practice of some of these non-Jewish Christians. That’s why Paul had to focus there.

“Man is what he eats.” With this statement the German materialistic philosopher Feuerbach thought he had put an end to all “idealistic” speculations about human nature. In fact, however, he was expressing, without knowing it, the most religious idea of man. For long before Feuerbach the same definition of man was given by the Bible.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

“The clock,” [Lewis] Mumford has concluded, “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” … [A]s Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

It’s profoundly significant that of all the Christian groups, only the Orthodox include the babies at the Holy Chalice, completely recognizing and demon-strating their full incorporation into the Church, the Body of Christ. This alone, it seems to me, shows forth the truthfulness of our Church’s claim to be the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, alone preserving the fullness of the Christian Faith.

Frederica Mathewes-Green & Rod Dreher, Healing Humanity

Only a few peoples—the odd German tribe and, inevitably, the Jews—had stood aloof from the exposure of unwanted children. Pretty much everyone else had always taken it for granted. Until, that was, the emergence of a Christian people.
Islamic the Islamic State may have been; but it also stood in a line of descent from Anabaptist Münster. It was, perhaps, the most gruesome irony in the whole history of Protestantism.
When scholars in Europe sought to justify the Spanish conquest of the New World, they reached not for the Church Fathers, but for Aristotle. ‘As the Philosopher says, it is clear that some men are slaves by nature and others free by nature.’
The concept of secularism—for all that it was promoted by the editor who invented the word as an antidote to religion—testified not to Christianity’s decline, but to its seemingly infinite capacity for evolution.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Several narrower books linger more persistently in my mind, but Dominion has in a sense penetrated deeper than mere “mind.”

Even after His Resurrection, Christ instructed disciples on the road to Emmaus when “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). The Christological key to unlock the Jewish Scriptures was given to the Church by Christ Himself…
Two centuries later, fundamental differences in phronema would again be an obstacle to union between the West and the East at the Council of Florence in 1439. Catholics presented rational arguments for their positions, and the Orthodox responded by citing apostolic Tradition. It was “the constant conviction of the Latins that they always won the disputation, and of the Greeks that no Latin argument ever touched the heart of the problem.”

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.

Paul Kingsnorth

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.

Sunday, 11/17/24

Permeable walls

Yesterday was the 27th anniversary of my formal entry into the Orthodox Christian Faith. Unlike my departure from frank evangelicalism for Calvinism two decades earlier, this felt like a conversion, not an incidental change of denomination.

Part of that feeling may have been that the evangelical-to-Calvinist transition was largely invisible to observers: I didn’t quit our Baptist church and go to the tiny PCA startup in town; instead I moved across the country to go back to school, so of course I had to find a new church; I graduated, moved, and began practicing law in my hometown, so again I had to find a new church.

That each of those steps was away from evangelicalism and toward Calvinism would have been apparent only to someone for whom the permeability of denominational walls in Protestantism seems odd, and I think there most Protestants who take that permeability for granted (if they even think about “denominations” in an age of tens of thousands of crypto-baptist nondenominational pastoral fiefdoms). Indeed, during this transition, I published a law journal note titled Church Property Disputes in an Age of Common-Core Protestantism, based on the premise that someone who became a Presbyterian or Methodist or Episcopalian was unlikely to be buying into denominational ownership or control of the local church’s temporalities that he (or she) now donated to maintaining.

But another part of the “conversion” sensation certainly was that I had to be catechized to enter Orthodoxy. Its walls are not permeable. I became an “ecclesial Christian” as Richard John Neuhaus described it: one for whom faith in Christ and faith in His Church is one act of faith, not two. I finally believed that the one holy, catholic and apostolic church is visible and distinct, not invisible and amorphous.

Today, I’m more interested in a question one could phrase in an article title as Church Discipline in an Age of Permeable-Wall Protestantism. Others have doubtless gone deeper into the topic of how there can be effective church discipline, how can flagrant sinners be brought to repentance, when they can just move to another church before the heat melts their hearts? Maybe he can even start and pastor his own church (or get nominated as Attorney General). In a largely Protestant nation, it’s hard for an ecclesial Christian convert not to at least dabble in other people’s business.

A bold claim

I’ve been reading Fr. Stephen De Young’s book St. Paul the Pharisee, which I hoped would focus on this bold claim:

Mostly it doesn’t, or it doesn’t do so explicitly except for that quote.

But Fr. Stephen’s “interpretive translation” of Paul’s epistles subtly undermines the tendency to view them as theological treatises rather than pastoral guidance.

Instrumentalist faith

In the last few years, there has been no shortage of political commentary—much of which I agree with—that has argued that Christianity is needed for Western civilization and its guiding principles to survive. Famously, the essay in which the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke about her conversion—the authenticity of which I do not doubt —focused on the role that Christianity plays in Western civilization. But one should be clear-eyed about this matter. If the point of Christianity is the survival of the West, then Christianity may be treated as a useful fiction or a necessary evil alongside things like police forces and the military. The place of Jesus in such a Christianity is clear: he is a mascot, a long-dead victim of Roman imperialism and religious zealotry whom we invoke when we need a symbol, so that we may display him for all to see, pinned to the cross by our highest values and current political aspirations.

The outcome is not a secret. The churches that live as though Jesus is optional have been, despite their best verbal efforts, saying effectively and forcefully to their members and to the world that what the church uniquely has to offer is not needed, and that the church is here to serve those realities which already exist beyond the church’s baptismal boundaries.

…

I have become convinced that one of the primary challenges for Christians today is to come to terms with the overwhelming success of secularized Christianity. It is a great comfort to a Christian to say to himself or herself that secularized faith doesn’t actually work: it is how we tell ourselves that secularism will collapse under its own weight and that we’ll be here waiting when it happens, ready to welcome the world back into our arms. But of course, this is a fantasy about our own relevance. We are the secular culture’s ex-girlfriend, and telling ourselves that the new girlfriend isn’t pretty and that the culture will eventually see that it needs us is a pathetic expression of our need, not the world’s.

Matthew Burdette, Is the Church Obsolete? (H/T Brad East)

I honestly don’t think I’ve heard any Orthodox Christian talking about the importance of the Orthodox Church in secular instrumental terms. But to be honest, I sometimes think of the Catholic and Protestant churches as important to the survival of western civilization — and for some of its peculiarities.

Enculturation

Sometimes I have the unsettling sense that everyone possesses a spiritual secret but me. Other students speak of God as an intimate friend. They seem perfectly content studying the Bible all day, and unquestioningly accept whatever the professors say. More often, I conclude there is no secret, just a learned pattern of conformity, of mimicking others’ behavior and parroting the right words.

Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

Of this “learned pattern of conformity, of mimicking others’ behavior and parroting the right words,” I recently heard the sympathetic observation that people can believe absurd things, even contradictory things, because of where they are enculturated.

For anyone who thinks he (or she) has found the truth, and who can’t understand why others cannot see it, this is helpful to remember — in both directions. I don’t mean there’s no truth, only enculturation, but something about empathy and humility.

The American Hermeneutic

The problem with race and the Bible was far more profound than the interpretation of any one text. It was a problem brought about by the intuitive character of the reigning American hermeneutic. This hermeneutic merged three positions: (1) The Bible was a plain book whose meanings could be reliably ascertained through the exercise of an ordinary person’s intelligence; (2) a main reason for trusting the Bible as true was an intuitive sense, sealed by the Holy Spirit; (3) the same intelligence that through ordinary means and intuitions could trust the Bible as true also gained much additional truth about the world through intuitive processes that were also deliverances of universal common sense. The first position was a traditional Protestant teaching intensified by the American environment; the second was historically Protestant and Reformed; the third was simply a function of the American hermeneutic.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Of Nietzsche

Ironically, the fallen antichrist spent his long years of decline in the same female company that he claimed to have detested as a boy. He ended his life as the charge of his sister, but for many years after his collapse he was cared for by his mother. We know almost nothing about this quiet, pious woman, the widow of a Lutheran minister. But her act of taking the invalid into her home and enduring his catatonic silence, marked by occasional screaming fits, could only have been motivated by maternal love and Christian pity, two of the most debilitating values in what the philosopher had called the “slave morality.”

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

The flight into nondenominationalism

I’ve noticed Churches changing names to drop denominational identifiers. The Church I grew up in is considering dropping “Evangelical” from its name, not because it identifies the denomination but because of the debasement of the term into a political category.

Mites and motes

People who want to bring heaven upon earth have turned the earth into hell and made rivers run red with blood, because the first thing they must do is the one thing they cannot do, which is to cure themselves.

Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Complicit

The spectacle of [John] Lennon imagining a world without possessions while sitting in a huge mansion did nothing to put off his admirers. As Nietzsche spun furiously in his grave, ‘Imagine’ became the anthem of atheism.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Command performance

The logic of those prayers, if one was reading between the lines, was something like this:

“Dear Heavenly Father, in Your Word You say that when two or three are gathered together, You will be in the midst of them. Well, we’re gathered here, so do what we’re telling You to do because we have You over a barrel and can quote Your own book back at you! And in case You’re thinking of weaseling out of this deal, we claim Your promises, and because You can’t break any of those since You wrote it all in the Bible, You’ll do what we say, and You’ll do it NOW! Amen!”

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God

Any questions?

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

Sunday, November 10

On an American Orthodox Church

The beginning is context, analogy; just wait for the provocative “aside.”

Fr. Stephen: … [R]eligions that are separate things … didn’t exist in the ancient world. What it meant to be a Greek was not just to have grown up in Hellas or to have your people be from there for many generations; what it meant to be a Greek was also to worship the Greek gods and to participate in the ritual life of Greece that surrounded the gods, the public festivals, all of those things. That’s what it meant to be Greek.

So what does it mean to be a Greek Christian? Now we take that for granted, but for St. Paul that wasn’t something you could take for granted. And so you can understand why, in the early Church, you get the opponents of St. Paul in Galatians who were saying, “Well, okay, you can’t be pagans any more. So why don’t, uh, you be Jews? You can’t be a Greek any more. You have to have some culture. You have to be something. So you need to get circumcised, you need to keep Torah, you need to do all these things. You need to be Jewish. You can’t be Greeks any more, because being Greek is being a pagan.” And St. Paul is saying, “No! You’re not to become Jews, because you’re not Jews. You’re going to remain Greeks, but what it means to be Greek is going to change.” So a Greek Christian identity is forged, and that takes a couple centuries. St. Paul starts it, but you read all the problems he’s having, for example, in 1 and 2 Corinthians that we already referred to. This is a difficult process.

Fr. Andrew: And even while the concept and the way of life gets worked out, the terminology largely isn’t kept even, early on. By the time you get to the Cappadocians and so forth, “Greek” in terms of something other than language, “Greek” is used to refer to pagans. If you’re Christian, you’re a “Roman.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. Greeks are the ones still following that way of life.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, the word “Greek” in various ways gets revived again in the 18th, 19th century for other reasons, but, yeah, that identification of “Greek” with “pagan” holds on for a long time, even while they’re kind of developing a Greek Christian life, just calling it something different

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so St. Paul is going to affirm… So he’s got those folks on the one side who want people to become Jewish; on the other side, he’s got the Jewish zealot tradition that wants to overthrow societal structures within Roman life. And St. Paul is going to want to keep those social structures. That’s the part of the Gentile identity that he can keep, sort of, you know: families! Marriage in general! We don’t need to get rid of marriage in general. All of these relationships, all of these structures we can keep, but they need to be re-infused. Paganism needs to be drawn out; they need to be re-infused with Christ. So that’s part of this transformation.

And as a kind of aside, when folks… One of many things I’m a pessimist about is there being an American Orthodox Church any time soon. The big reason is that we still have to do precisely this. Not figure out what it means to be American and Christian, because there’s an American Christianity, and the more American it gets, the less it looks like Christianity, frankly. But figuring out what it means to be American and Orthodox Christian: we can’t just take for granted that that’s just an easy sub.

In fact, the fact that America is deeply steeped in another form of Christianity—a sort of Puritan, Calvinist, Protestant Christianity—sometimes makes it harder for us to make the distinctions that we need to make in order to form an American Orthodox identity. If America was a Muslim country or a Hindu country, when we looked at cultural institutions, it would be a little easier for us to spot, in the Hinduism case, the paganism, in the Muslim case, the Islamic parts, but when it’s another form of Christianity, the distinctions get more subtle and more tricky, and that identity can be a little harder to form.

(Underlining added)

When an American Orthodox Christian steps to either side of the safe corridor cleared by the Church, she’s likely to hit a Puritan land mine or a Calvinist IED. When an American Orthodox Christian feels we’re missing out on something good in the larger society, what he wants us to import may well be a Puritan version of a Trojan Horse.

About that American brand of Christianity

William Craig Brownlee “contrasted the genuine religion that flourished in America with ‘the mixed Christianity that began its career at an early period in the history of the church’”.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past.

To these Orthodox Christian eyes, that reads as perversely the opposite of reality. The religion that flourished in America, and of which we are still heirs, is the later, entropic version.

The starting point of Christian faith

To be Christian, to believe in Christ, means and has always meant this: to know in a transrational and yet absolutely certain way called faith, that Christ is the Life of all life, that He is Life itself and, therefore, my life. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” All Christian doctrines—those of the incarnation, redemption, atonement—are explanations, consequences, but not the “cause” of that faith. Only when we believe in Christ do all these affirmations become “valid” and “consistent.” But faith itself is the acceptance not of this or that “proposition” about Christ, but of Christ Himself as the Life and the light of life. “For the life was manifested and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us” (1 Jn. 1:2). In this sense Christian faith is radically different from “religious belief.” Its starting point is not “belief” but love.

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

When will they ever learn?

Only slightly tempered by a sense of their own limitations, these reformers espoused private judgment as the sure route to coherence and harmony. Unfortunately, the more confidently they attacked the traditional order and espoused individual autonomy, the more confusing their limitless world became. In one of the early republic’s severest ironies, the determination to quiet theological wrangling resulted in a proliferation of voices.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

Iconoclasm

God was understood to have physical form, but that form was to be described only verbally, not represented iconographically.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Purging

I am greatly looking forward to reading St. Paul the Pharisee by Fr. Stephen De Young. An ex-Calvinist Orthodox Priest with deep knowledge should be perfect for purging my involuntarily-retained Calvinist readings of St. Paul.

Mute

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

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

Sunday, October 27

Booknotes

From Mark A. Noll, America’s God from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.

The startling reversal in which America’s religious leaders took up the language of republicanism was the most important ideological development for the future of theology in the United States.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.

[I wish I had a better handle on this very central thesis of Noll’s dense book. All I really can say is that American Christians were essentially alone in embracing republicanism; European Christians rejected it fairly vehemently.]

Although identifiably evangelical churches by 1860 made up the vast majority of American congregations (at least 85%), these churches did not present a homogeneous faith. In fact, evangelicals fought each other over a host of Streitpunkte—over how to interpret the Scriptures; over the definition of many Christian doctrines, including human free will, the atonement, eschatology, the meaning of the sacraments, and the nature of the church; over slavery and other social issues; over the ecclesiastical roles of women and laymen; over whether to sing hymns or psalms only; over whether churches should use creeds; over principles and practices of the market economy; and over every imaginable kind of personality conflict. … Evangelicals called people to acknowledge their sin before God, to look upon Jesus Christ (crucified—dead—resurrected) as God’s means of redemption, and to exercise faith in this Redeemer as the way of reconciliation with God and orientation for life in the world.

…

The most important conclusion that can be drawn from a survey of writings about money, markets, and the economy in this period is that Protestants regularly, consistently, and without sense of contradiction both enunciated traditional Christian exhortations about careful financial stewardship and simply took for granted the workings of the United States’ expanding commercial society.

…

Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), which is discussed at greater length below in chapter 15, was important for summarizing a new approach toward reaching the lost. Since God had established reliable laws in the natural world and since humans were created with the ability to discern those laws, it was obvious that the spiritual world worked on the same basis. Thus, to activate the proper causes for revivals was to produce the proper effects: “The connection between the right use of means for a revival and a revival is as philosophically [i.e., scientifically] sure as between the right use of means to raise grain and a crop of wheat. I believe, in fact, it is more certain, and there are fewer instances of failure.” Because the world spiritual was analogous to the world natural, observable cause and effect must work in religion as well as in physics. The wine of revival—confidence in God’s supernatural ability to convert the sinner—may have looked the same in antebellum America as it had in earlier centuries, but the wineskin was of recent manufacture.

[Finney’s “scientific” revivalism strikes me as a terrible error, but a persistent one. However, this mechanistic approach has been instantiated in evangelistic crusades during my adolescence, and I assume since then as well. The rising and falling of the preaching voice; the shouting followed by the whisper; these are the rhetorical tricks (science) to get people to “make decisions for Jesus” – or Amway or Tupperware or just about anything else.]

On that score there was for Smith not a dime’s worth of difference between Samuel Miller and John Henry Hobart. Through a life of energetic peripateticism (from Lyme, Connecticut, to Vermont and then Portsmouth, New Hampshire, later to Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, and Portland, Maine), as well as frequent redirection of career (as minister—successively Baptist, “Christian,” Universalist, and “Christian” again—physician, dentist, publisher, and merchant), and in the midst of incessant polemical creativity, one thing remained constant for Elias Smith. His anchor was unshakable belief in a radically egalitarian biblicism. If the religion of formalist Presbyterians and Episcopalians was tinctured with American values, Smith’s religion represented a more complete assimilation. That religion was, in the words of a solid recent biography, “a specifically Christian republicanism growing out of a New Light evangelical heritage, conjoined with a rapidly evolving national political culture in a climate of strident partisan conflict.”46 Smith was especially important as a founder of New England’s “Christian” movement, a radically antielitist drive that sought a harmonious, unified church for all who wished to live according to the New Testament’s “perfect law of liberty.” To build such a church, however, it was necessary to clear away traditional biblical interpretations, traditional denominations, and traditional clerical authority.

…

“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, Hodge then went on to suggest that “the Theologian [is] to be guided by the same rules as the Man of Science.”

[I once admired Hodge, and would have been pleased, if not thrilled, by this declaration.]

[No longer. But this sort of approach was part of how “America’s God” became so unlike the true God.]

Selective resistance to secularity

In his book Fault Lines, Voddie Baucham argues that

The social sciences may be useful tools, but they are far from necessary. ‘All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work’ (2 Timothy 3:16–17). In no area does God require me to walk in a level of righteousness for which the Scriptures do not equip me — including any and all aspects of justice.

The logic of Baucham’s argument, which permeates his book, is that the Bible is enough. It is enough to parse the complexity of race in the United States, and enough to provide a roadmap for justice. Let’s be clear: Baucham agrees that the gospel has social implications. He is also clear that the social sciences are simply unnecessary to illuminate what those social implications are, and how the gospel compels us to act.

This is, in fact, explicitly outlined in the Dallas Statement:

We deny that Christian belief, character, or conduct can be dictated by any other authority, and we deny that the postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory are consistent with biblical teaching. We further deny that competency to teach on any biblical issue comes from any qualification for spiritual people other than clear understanding and simple communication of what is revealed in Scripture.

According to Baucham and the signers of the Dallas Statement, the claim that secular scholarship is necessary to understand and address the contemporary racial landscape are violating the doctrine of sufficiency, and compromising their fidelity to Scripture. Despite passing affirmations that Christians ought to read broadly, insofar as it pertains to matters of race and justice, Baucham, et al., clearly view secular scholarship as suspect, and inessential to comprehending and shaping responses to the social problems we face.

Of course, in their view, not all secular sources are suspect. Many of the signers of the Dallas Statement happily employ the work of James Lindsay or Thomas Sowell in their analysis of our social realities. The real concern lies in a particular set of sources: “postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory.” It is these sources which consume massive amounts of energy expended by Owen Strachan, Voddie Baucham, Tom Ascol, and many others. Summarized by many under the slushy appellation “wokeness,” these writers are convinced that reliance on anything that smacks of woke is deleterious to the faith given once for all to the saints.

Josh Fenska, Thin Discipleship‌

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

Sundays are joyful days, but there’s a little cloud on this one: 26 years ago, my father died, quite unexpectedly.

His was a quick and apparently painless death — what we think of as a good death these days. But I’m not so sure. Meeting God face-to-face is a serious business. I’m inclined to think a slow and painful death, with lots of time to face the reality and to set aright things that are our of kilter, has its own advantages.

We brought nothing into this world

Modernity equates liberty with the freedom to decide and choose, to define ourselves and the world around us. In the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy (Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, 1992):

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

We relish this concept of unfettered freedom. But, of course, it is absurd, even for a secularist. For whether we choose to admit it or not, we “brought nothing into this world” (1 Tim. 6:7). Everything in our lives is derived and gifted. We are not the inventors of the world nor of our lives. And though we struggle to understand and even master our own DNA, it remains a primary component of our destiny, a genetic memory of the history of our coming into being across the ages. To be told that we have some portion of DNA contributed by Neanderthals reminds us that even such obscure ancestors are “selves we have received” through our genetically traditioned existence.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

There has never been a “Positive World”

I was a casual follower of Aaron Renn until Alan Jacobs demolished Renn’s famous February 2022 piece, The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.

Without defining Christianity, Renn says the world used to be positive toward it. You can read Renn for yourself, and Jacobs, too (and you really should read Jacobs if you think Renn is onto something important), but here’s the gist (via Jacobs) of why there was never a “positive world” for thoroughgoing Christianity:

Professing Christianity is what Renn calls a “status-enhancer” when and only when the Christianity one professes is in step with what your society already and without reference to Christian teaching describes as “being an upstanding citizen.” If you don’t believe me, try getting up on stage in an evangelical megachurch and reckoning seriously with Jesus’s teaching on wealth and poverty. Even a sermon on loving your enemies, like Ruby Bridges, and blessing those who curse you, can be a hard sell — as many pastors since 2016 have discovered. News flash: if you make a point of never saying anything that would make people doubt your commitment to their preferred social order, they’ll probably think you an upstanding citizen. (Who knew?)

There are pretty much always some elements of Christian teaching that you can get away with publicly affirming; but you can never get away with affirming them all. If American Christians sixty years ago felt fully at home in their social world, that’s because they quietly set aside, or simply managed to avoid thinking about, all the biblical commandments that would render them no longer at ease in the American dispensation. Any Christians who have ever felt completely comfortable in their culture have already edited out of their lives the elements of Christianity that would generate social friction. And no culture that exists, or has ever existed, or ever will exist, is receptive to the whole Gospel.

Renn is Evangelical or Evangelical-adjacent (PCA Presbyterian). I was once very friendly toward the PCA, so I think I can say that it’s not a church that rocked the social order (at least until Orgasms for All! became the unofficially established religion of the USA).

The bloom is entirely off my Renn Rose. I deeply discount articles that take his “three worlds” model as their premise.

A Christian Is An Outlaw

Apropos of “negative world”:

It would be honour in modernity for a Christian to be called such an outlaw, for surely they do not conform to the laws of this world.

Martin Shaw, A Christian Is An Outlaw

God in a box

There’s a brilliant episode of King of the Hill where Bobby, the thirteen-year-old boy, gets really into Christian rock. At the end of the episode his dad, Hank, shows him a box where he keeps tokens from all the different phases he has gone through. There’s a Beanie Baby, a Tamagotchi, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle… Bobby cringes—and that’s the point. “I know you think the stuff you’re doing now is cool,” says Hank to his son, “but in a few years, you’re going to think it’s lame. And I don’t want the Lord to end up in this box.”

Theophan Davis, How Not to Be a Saint

This Orthodox novice’s section on prayer (“Play to your weakness”) was also very good.

Sufficiently Rawlsian?

I might appeal to the second chapter of Genesis when speaking about the fundamental importance of male–female complementarity. But I do so because the biblical witness so succinctly and powerful states a fundamental truth that every civilization has honored.

R. R. Reno, responding to a transcribed speech of Oren Cass on how to construct a secular conservatism.

Would John Rawls accept this as public reasoning?

Sola Scriptura

Even as they claimed to rely on the Bible alone, antebellum Protestants frequently turned to Christian saints, exegetical traditions, the practices of Christians past, and official church teachings, employing these sources to complement or clarify what they took the Bible to mean. Perhaps this betrays a deeper sense that the Bible was not as self-interpreting as many Protestants hoped. At the very least, it shows the inescapability of tradition. American Protestants never read, or argued over, the Bible alone.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

What the heck is a Carpatho-Rusyn?

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Byzantine Rite Christians from the Carpathian mountain region began to arrive in America. It is difficult to label these people: they came from an area that today is divided among Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine, and they were known by a great variety of names, including Carpatho-Russians, Rusyns, Ruthenians, Galicians, and others. Their ancestors were originally Orthodox Christians, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they submitted to the pope of Rome through a series of “unions,” which is why they have long been known to the Orthodox as “Uniates.” Despite their subordination to the pope, they retained most of the external forms of Orthodox worship and practice, including allowing married men to become priests.

Matthew Namee, Lost Histories.

These people are the historic core of my diocese. And my parish’s Patron Saint, Alexis Toth, led multitudes back to the Orthodox faith, after he was spurned by Archbishop John Ireland.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

Sunday Potpourri

Consider the following question. What is closer to the original Easter: January 3, 1975, or Easter Sunday 2023? According to human reason, we would say that January 3, 1975, is forty-eight years closer to the original Easter (or “Pascha,” as I prefer to call it) than Easter Sunday 2023. But that is a secular way of approaching time. With our thinking informed by a Judeo-Christian worldview, we understand that Easter Sunday is actually closer to the events of Christ’s Resurrection, though on a different axis from secular time.

Robin Phillips and Fr. Stephen DeYoung, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation

The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern Age

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The nation that spends more on its military than the next ten largest militaries combined bases its group identity on violence.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Because we are confident in the Church, we do not replace its teachings and guidance with our own individual opinions. That itself is part of the phronema.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

Sunday June 2

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.

Was the Church of Christ devoid of Christianity?
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)?
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)

St. John Climacus

Today we commemorate St. John Climacus, author of The Ladder of Divine Ascent.

I’m a religion skeptic

I have had the good fortune of presenting portions of this work to audiences who have pondered this difficult question with me. On one of those occasions, the historian Edwin Judge suggested a three-step procedure to follow when one encounters the word “religion” in a translation of an ancient text. First, cross out the word whenever it occurs. Next, find a copy of the text in question in its original language and see what word (if any) is being translated as “religion.” Third, come up with a different translation: “It almost doesn’t matter what. Anything besides ‘religion’!” According to Judge, simply allowing “religion” to stand in an ancient text leads to a kind of “miasma of thought” that prevents one from seeing how ancient people might have organized their worlds.

Brent Nongbri , Before Religion

Miasma or not, so deeply embedded is “religion” in our vocabulary and thought-patterns that it’s hard to avoid it.

Faithfulness precedes understanding

Only a Christian who stands in the service of his faith can understand Christian theology and only he can enter into the religious meaning of the Bible.

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge

But what if knowledge does not require certainty? Indeed, what if knowledge is incompatible with certainty?

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

Mind and heart

Unlike the mind, which is acquisitive, aggressive, critical, and competitive, the heart is receptive, open, pliable. It is an organ to be filled, a thing to be ignited. The mind receives on its own terms, filtering, discriminating, judging, but the heart is patient; it waits, watches, listens, makes space for what it is to receive. The heart delights not in cleverness but in the presence of the beloved. The work of prayer is the tutoring of the heart, a quite different thing from the training of the mind.

Robert Louis Wilken Praying the Psalms.

That “the work of prayer is the tutoring of the heart” also means that it’s not cajoling The Almighty into giving us stuff.

Like receiving the gift of tongues

I’ve probably shared this before:

“We have effectively communicated to young people that sincerely following Jesus is synonymous with being ‘fired up’ for Jesus, with being excited for Jesus, as if discipleship were synonymous with fostering an exuberant, perky, cheerful, hurray-for-Jesus disposition like what we might find in the glee club or at a pep rally,” Smith wrote. “For those young people who are either scared or suspicious of happy-clappy versions of youth group Christianity, ancient Christian disciplines and historic Christian worship can be received as a life-giving gift. When you have only seen forms of piety that value spontaneous expression and clichéd sincerity, to be given the cadences and rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer can be like receiving the gift of tongues.”

Jon Ward, Testimony

That’s not my story: I was well beyond the youth group stuff when I left Evangelicalism, and I didn’t immediately find the truly ancient pastures, sojourning instead for decades in Reformational Protestantism that often felt Evangelical-adjacent. But it’s close enough to my story to ring very true. Substitute Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom for Book of Common Prayer and it gets even closer to my story.

Last of the Fathers

Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) … made formative contributions to scholasticism while still at the French monastery of Bec. It is true that as a monk (rather than professor) he bucked the trend toward professional theology. The university system was only in its infancy, and there was little question of him participating in it. He has been called the last of the fathers and the first of the scholastics.

John Strickland , The Age of Division

… 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)

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)

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

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.