Sunday, 11/30/25

Prayer

On sin

Most Holy Trinity, have mercy on us. Lord, cleanse us from our sins. Master, pardon our transgressions. Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Your name’s sake.

This is part of the Orthodox Trisagion (“thrice-holy”) prayers. And the first time I heard or read that prayer, I thought they get it!

I had recognized for a long time that part of the way I contributed to the chaos and evil in the world was not by shaking my fist in God’s face and saying “I know what You want, but I’m gonna do it my way!” Part of my contribution was cluelessness, self-absorption, clumsiness.

And my Protestant milieu seemed totally not to get that.

I remember being told in my Evangelical and Evangelical-adjacent Protestantism that sin was rebellion against God. “Period. Full stop.” as they say. Those four short trisagion sentences would not compute in that scheme as anything but redundant. “Transgression” was a synonym for “sin.” There was no concept of “infirmity” that needed healed, or of “sin” that needed cleansed rather than simply forgiven.

In Orthodoxy I learned that the Greek for “sin” is amartia (sometimes render hamartia), meaning essentially “missing the mark.” In that broad sense, it probably includes transgression and infirmity. “Transgression” strikes me as being the fist-shaking defiance my former milieu called sin. Infirmity strikes me more as the inability to know or do what’s right in some situations.

If I’m serious about the Christian life, I don’t just want God to forgive me of transgression after transgression. I want cleansing and healing as well so that I can “do better” and become more like Christ.

I suffer from all three, sin, transgression and infirmity (mark-missing, defiance and cluelessness) and I suspect my readers do, too. All three hurt those around me. All three make the world a worse place. It reassured me that Orthodoxy, which I was just exploring when I first noticed that prayer, was wiser than where I’d been all my life, and that it recognized that each of the three needs something a bit different (cleansing, pardon, healing) from God.

Frederica Matthewes-Green distills some of this Orthodox view:

[S]in is a danger, a poison, not merely superficial matter like breaking a law. Sin is infection, not infraction.

Breastplate

I came across another version of St. Patrick’s breastplate, this one rhymed:

I bind unto myself today
The strong Name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One and One in Three.

I bind this day to me for ever.
By power of faith, Christ’s incarnation;
His baptism in the Jordan river;
His death on Cross for my salvation;
His bursting from the spicèd tomb;
His riding up the heavenly way;
His coming at the day of doom;
I bind unto myself today.

I bind unto myself the power
Of the great love of the cherubim;
The sweet ‘well done’ in judgment hour,
The service of the seraphim,
Confessors’ faith, Apostles’ word,
The Patriarchs’ prayers, the Prophets’ scrolls,
All good deeds done unto the Lord,
And purity of virgin souls.

I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun’s life-giving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea,
Around the old eternal rocks.

I bind unto myself today
The power of God to hold and lead,
His eye to watch, His might to stay,
His ear to hearken to my need.
The wisdom of my God to teach,
His hand to guide, His shield to ward,
The word of God to give me speech,
His heavenly host to be my guard.

Against the demon snares of sin,
The vice that gives temptation force,
The natural lusts that war within,
The hostile men that mar my course;
Or few or many, far or nigh,
In every place and in all hours,
Against their fierce hostility,
I bind to me these holy powers.

Against all Satan’s spells and wiles,
Against false words of heresy,
Against the knowledge that defiles,
Against the heart’s idolatry,
Against the wizard’s evil craft,
Against the death wound and the burning,
The choking wave and the poisoned shaft,
Protect me, Christ, till Thy returning.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

I bind unto myself the Name,
The strong Name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same.
The Three in One, and One in Three,
Of Whom all nature hath creation,
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.

(Source: Fr. Stephen Freeman)

Authority

Bible

Harold Lindsell launched … a “theological atom bombing.” … history provided no example of a group that had given up on inerrancy when defections from other basic doctrines did not follow. After all, if the Bible could err, it lost its authority. … Inerrancy was a watershed issue—and those who denied it were not evangelicals at all. … None of the neo-evangelical scholars Lindsell named changed their positions because of it. Northern evangelical institutions were too many and too various to be brought into line. Instead of leading to a purge of noninerrantists, the threat of excommunication merely helped to demonstrate that neo-evangelicals were irreparably divided—and further, not in control of northern evangelicalism.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals.

After so much controversy and so many books on inerrancy, it seems mad to think that there’s a mike-drop response to it all, but here goes: What good is an inerrant Bible without inerrant interpreters?

So far as I know, nobody in the Evangelical world has claimed that there are such interpreters.

Related: One qualification on inerrancy was that the Bible was inerrant “in its original autographs.” This was the position I came to hold, and which I think I relinquished only on discovering Orthodoxy.

But again: of what use is that doctrine when we don’t have a single original autograph?

So what position do I hold on inerrancy now? I don’t know. The question seems irrelevant in Orthodox context. We’re not a Bible-only Church, nor were we built on the Bible:

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.

Yet I’m bold to boast that we revere the Bible more than Evangelicals do. We literally elevate the Epistles and the Gospels in our Liturgies. Our services are suffused with scriptural quotations (not in a preachy or proof-texty way) and allusions. If you really know the Bible, you’ll recognize its ubiquity in the Church’s services.

Come and see, I’ve got to say, though my parish is closed today because of treacherous travel conditions. Maybe next week.

Harmonizing evolution and creation

In years past (mostly long past), I’ve read a lot about the widely-assumed conflict between faith and science, but I hadn’t encountered this interesting, almost Chestertonian, twist:

One of the things that put me off of Christianity when I was young (beyond an intellectual vanity that was out of place) was that the greater part of Christian conversation and teaching, in my experience, had been intended to keep us from thinking about it too hard or taking it very seriously. Simple faith. That old-time religion. Just believe. Most of us have met That Christian—I sat next to her at my local café earlier in the week, and she was trying to convince her college-age children that there were no dinosaurs. “You have to ask yourself who pays for those studies,” she said. “I just believe the Bible.” I tried to concentrate on my eggs.

But what I wanted to tell her is that there is an interesting concurrence between certain implications of evolution and the plainest kind of Christianity. From evolution, we learn that our bodies and our behavior were shaped by natural pressures to maximize our chances of survival in ancestral conditions of radical scarcity and, hence, we could reasonably assume that at least some of our modern problems—the prevalence of obesity and anxiety, for example, in the rich, digitally saturated world—are the result of living in an environment that is radically different from the one for which we were optimized by evolution. From Christianity, we learn that man is fallen and out of step with his intended place in creation, that we have been separated from that condition for which we were fitted. And at whatever level of literalism you wish to apply to Genesis and whatever degree of sophistication you can bring to bear on your biological analysis, there is a point of commonality:

This is not the world we were made for. We are outcasts and misfits—or, if our separation is sanctified, we are pilgrims.

Kevin D. Williamson, We Are Pilgrims, Still. I think of Williamson as a political writer, not religious, but he’s been returning to religious topics for a week or so.

Dogma

Christian or Pagan?

T.S. Eliot wrote:

Our preoccupation with foreign politics during the last few years has induced a surface complacency rather than a consistent attempt at self-examination of conscience. Sometimes we are almost persuaded that we are getting on very nicely, with a reform here and a reform there, and would have been getting on still better, if only foreign governments did not insist upon breaking all the rules and playing what is really a different game. What is more depressing still is the thought that only fear or jealousy of foreign success can alarm us about the health of our own nation; that only through this anxiety can we see such things as depopulation, malnutrition, moral deterioration, the decay of agriculture, as evils at all.

And what is worst of all is to advocate Christianity, not because it is true, but because it might be beneficial.

Towards the end of 1938 we experienced a wave of revivalism which should teach us that folly is not the prerogative of anyone political party or anyone religious communion, and that hysteria is not the privilege of the uneducated. The Christianity expressed has been vague, the religious fervour has been a fervour for democracy. It may engender nothing better than a disguised and peculiarly sanctimonious nationalism, accelerating our progress towards the paganism which we say we abhor. To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion; and we may reflect, that a good deal of the attention of totalitarian states has been devoted, with a steadiness of purpose not always found in democracies, to providing their national life with a foundation of morality—the wrong kind perhaps, but a good deal more of it. It is not enthusiasm, but dogma, that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society.

Kevin D. Williamson.

No “kumbaya moment” here

The expression “what unites us is greater than what divides us” is typically a liberal ecumenical manner of speaking, spoken to inspire us to ecumenical charitable and “social reform” efforts. But Fr. Stephen DeYoung thinks the current and more threatening version, from the perspective of the Orthodox Church, is a right-coded version:

The threat right now is this idea that there is a thing called “conservative Christianity,” and the Orthodox Church is a branch of it.

He’s having none of it:

What divides us is a fundamental difference in how we think God works in the human heart to bring about salvation. [Many people believe] that there is a one-time act, done unilaterally by God, that labels them as being saved so that when they die they will go to heaven.

[But] I believe that God is continually pouring forth his love and his mercies and his goodness in the world and that by cooperating with what God is doing in the world I could be transformed into his likeness and find salvation.

Those are not the same thing. Those are not two different ways of describing the same thing. And one of them is a lie.

I know I’m being super hardcore today, but I don’t care, because this is really bothering me, and if this offends you as an unorthodox listener, maybe you need to be offended by it and think about it. Those aren’t the same thing.

My religion centers on the Eucharist. If yours doesn’t, we don’t practice the same religion.

I don’t relish that. Like I’m not rejoicing in the fact that there are people who consider themselves Christians—and who honestly are Christians in the sense that they’re people who love our Lord Jesus Christ as they understand him and they’re doing their best to follow him as best they understand as best they can … Mostly if they’re wrong. It’s because they’ve been misled. So I’m not judging you as a person if you’re one of those people.

But what I want for you is not to hold your hand and say “kumbaya” and pretend that there’s no difference between us and those differences aren’t significant. I want you to come to know the truth. I want you to come to know Christ more deeply. I want you to understand how salvation actually is and I want you to experience it yourself ….

Podcast, beginning about 10 minutes from the end (Edited for clarity).

Fissiparous

Luther’s nuclear reaction

…in the wake of his 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

Pandering

I have long wondered at the sad side-effect of the Reformation, that there were suddenly many different versions of Christianity to choose from. Each person was free to hear the current thought-leaders, read the Scriptures, and come to their own conclusions.

That meant churches were in competition with each other to attract members. (I’m not arguing about the content of the Reformation now—just focusing on this inevitable side-effect.)

Horribly, in 20th century America the choose-your-own-theology option blended with the developing consumerist ethos, and churches began thinking they’d better “be relevant” (there were dire warnings about that, in the 1960s) and “seeker-friendly” (likewise dire, 1980s).

Churches yearned to reach unbelievers by identifying their “felt needs” (hoo boy), that is, what unbelievers thought their needs were. Churches should find out what unbelievers thought they needed, and offer it, to attract them.

It was assumed that people felt sad and lonely, so these churches offered comfort and reassurance. And entertainment. Mega-churches were mega for a reason. Sadly, their offerings largely attracted already-Christians rather than unbelievers, so the earnest motivation of evangelism went mostly unfulfilled.

Frederica Matthewes-Green, Men and Orthodoxy Revisisted

A motley crew

Americans are a motley bunch when it comes to religion—unorthodox, undisciplined, and wildly entrepreneurial, having invented more religions, Christian sects, and Christian-adjacent sects in our few short centuries than the Fertile Crescent did in an active millennium or two. Within a few decades, often within a few miles of one another, and sometimes involving some of the same people, Americans dreamt up Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of God in Christ, the Unity Church, the Theosophical Society, the Christadelphians, the Restoration Movement, Ethical Culture, the Reformed Mennonites, and many more—not to mention more recent developments such as the Nation of Islam and Scientology. Americans may have given up, en masse, on most forms of orthodoxy and on practically all forms of discipline, but we remain God-haunted and Bible-spooked.

Kevin D. Williamson.

So, 60 years or so ago …

… my world was solidly and unequivocally “evangelical,” and my critical faculties were not well-enough honed for anything to bother me about my world very much.

Fast forward ten or fifteen years and some of the not-very-much” bothers had encountered some attractive resolutions. Generally speaking, I discovered that evangelical obsessions like “the Rapture” (which I had thought were obligatory but suspiciously convenient) were not obligatory unless one put solidarity with evangelicalism ahead of historic Christian truths. In short, I became a convinced Calvinist, which in my mind made me sort of evangelical-adjacent or equivocally evangelical.

I have recounted my subsequent spiritual life elsewhere, which included leaving behind Protestant and Evangelical worlds unequivocally 28 years ago this month. So active evangelicalism is but a fading memory for me, and though I read about developments there, it’s not the same as living there or next door.

But from what I read, evangelicalism is in much turmoil. And reading the many accounts of huge majorities of evangelicals supporting Donald Trump, that’s to be expected; I still think too well of evangelicalism, maybe naïvely, to see Trumpism as anything but an aberation—because that man ticks every box of vice and vulgarity, not because “real evangelicalism” inexorably leads to preferring a different political flavor.

With the end of the month approaching, and some of my New York Times gift articles set to expire, unused, I want to share with you an article from someone who I think is more in touch with evangelicalism these days than I am: David Brooks.

If you know Brooks, you likely think of him as Jewish, but he’s been on a long spiritual pilgrimage and came to identify as Christian (without, as I recall, ceasing to identify as Jewish or adopting the “Messianic Jew” moniker. I’m not sure how that works.). He’s now married to a Wheaton College alum (likely evangelical). And almost 4 years ago, he took a pretty deep dive (gift link) into how Trump and other things have divided/corrupted evangelicalism and how some prominent evangelicals are fighting back.

The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism From Itself is a long read but I found it rewarding then and still find it so when I occasionally revisit it.

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

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

Sunday, 11/16/25

The temptation of simplicity

When an Orthodox Christian is asked questions about the faith, there is often a hesitation. The questions that come to mind (for me) are: “Where do I begin?” and “How much do I try and tell them?” For, in many ways, the amount of information includes about 2,000 years of history and an encyclopedia’s worth of teaching, practice and customs. Sometimes, in the middle of such a conversation, the other person’s eyes become dull and a rebuke comes: “I think the Bible is enough.” …

This drive towards simplicity is a common hallmark within almost all deviations from traditional Orthodoxy. No one, it seems, ever wants to make things more complicated than they already are within the tradition! But there’s the rub. The nature of Orthodox tradition is its commitment to the unchanging fullness of the faith. In that sense, the faith is everything. It is not a small set of religious rules and ideas set within the greater context of the world (that is the essence of modern, secularized religion). The faith is the whole world. Rightly spoken and understood, it must account for everything.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Abbreviated God

Is it really as easy as identifying with the sinner instead of with Christ?

Whenever a traditional Christian defends some point of traditional Christian morality, you’ll hear one of our lefty friends cry, “I thought Jesus ate with prostitutes and tax collectors!” Once again, the proper response is: Do you identify with Jesus in that parable?

This is where liberal Christianity becomes—ironically; hilariously—elitist. Sorry, folks, but God’s not saying you must condescend to eat with sinners. No: you are the sinner. He condescends to eat with you.

Michael Warren Davis, You’re Not Jesus (the link I had is now dead)

Not to get too meta about this, but when I first read it (I’ve published it before), I missed the gratuitous jabs at “lefty friends” and the suggestion that “traditional Christians” trigger their response by defending “traditional Christian morality.” I missed that all because (back to earth from the metasphere) the identification with Jesus instead of the sinner was, and often remains, my own default position.

That’s not entirely unwarranted, either. We’re taught to model our lives after Jesus (I Pet. 2:21), and we should, like Jesus, not disdain to eat with sinners.

Identify with Jesus, I say, but not so exclusively as to lose sight of our own need to repent.

Praying the Hours

Several years ago, I decided to marry technology (my smartphone) to piety.

You see, in monasteries—Orthodox monasteries at least—the Monks or Nuns pause their work seven (I believe) time per day to “pray the hours.” You’ll see the roots if you pay attention to Psalms where the Psalmist writes “seven times a day have I praised Thee because of thy righteous judgments” (ps. 118/119:164).

After retiring, I thought “why shouldn’t I at least gesture toward that practice, even if I won’t take ten or fifteen minutes to do the whole shebang multiple times per day. So I looked over the full 1st, 3rd, 6th and 9th Canonical Hours to get their drift and then distilled them down to four ejaculatory prayers:

Clock	”Hour”	Distilled Prayer
7 am	1st Hour	Guide my footsteps in Thy paths, and so let no sin have dominion over me.
9 am	3rd Hour	Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.
12 pm	6th Hour	Thou who didst stretch forth Thy hands on the Cross at this hour, draw all men to Thyself.
3 pm	9th Hour	Thou who didst taste death in the flesh at this hour, mortify my sins in me.

(I’m a little fuzzy on the remaining monastic services, but I believe they’re Vespers, Compline, and Midnight Hour. Compline and Vespers are hard to distill, and I don’t anticipate getting up at midnight.)

Then I pasted those little prayers into daily reminders (Apple is my computer cosmos) that pop up on computer and phone at the appointed time. (They popped up on my watch, too, but I’ve retired that.)

It provides daily reminders of events in the life of Christ or the Church and keeps me more consciously coram deo.

Silly? I need all the help I can get. Your mileage may vary, but borrow freely if you care to.

Religious Left, Religious Right

Last Sunday’s Dispatch Faith column was awfully good – in the sense of making conceptual sense out of something I hadn’t analyzed myself. Titled How the Religious Left Ceded Political Power to the Religious Right (gift link), it does what it says on the label.

The religious right began building infrastructure in the 1950s, eventually emerging in the 1970s and ’80s with a set of powerful leaders and movements such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. Over time, robust networks, both formal and informal, developed to connect churches, media, think tanks, and political campaigns.

In comparison, the religious left inherited the United States’ once powerful Protestant establishment. Protestant elites were almost always more liberal than the majority of people in the pews, but their voice carried real authority. Pastors, denominational leaders, and theologians from this group regularly appeared on the cover of Time magazine, while liberal Protestant publications like the Christian Century and Christianity and Crisis, along with denominational magazines like the Methodist Christian Advocate and The Lutheran collectively reached millions of households monthly.

…

But after the 1960s, the Protestant establishment’s power waned as fewer Americans attended mainline Protestant churches, and the infrastructure that sustained it began to collapse. With fewer people in the pews, budgets declined, clergy lost their social influence, seminary enrollments dropped, and denominational publishing houses sold fewer books. It is not that liberal clergy stopped engaging in political and social rhetoric. It’s just that there were fewer people to hear the message.

…

Many religious conservatives, particularly those in the Reformed tradition, inherited a Puritan theological legacy that emphasizes God’s sovereignty, power, and glory. This theology breeds comfort with wielding power: If God is sovereign over nations, Christians should seek positions of influence to advance divine purposes. Even the megachurch pastor wrapping theology in self-help packaging is teaching congregants that God cares about outcomes, and importantly, that the faithful should pursue the levers that produce them. The line from “God is in control” to “Christians should control institutions” is short and straight.

The religious left learned different lessons from its history and theology. Influenced by the Progressive Era Social Gospel movement and, later, by liberation theology, progressive Christians came to see power structures themselves as suspect …

Liberation theology, fused with critical theory’s analysis of oppression, taught progressive Christians that power corrupts and that prophetic witness from the margins was more virtuous than wielding influence from the center. But this theological framework emerged after the Protestant establishment had already begun to collapse.

I quote so freely (a) to think through the article myself and (b) because I’ve used a gift link to share the full thing with you. Recommended.

Entry barriers? Not so much.

It was easy to start a nondenominational church. There was no institutional leadership to report to. There was no accreditation or credentialing needed for those who wanted to serve in positions of leadership, including lead pastor. If you were a good speaker and knew a few good musicians, you could start a church.

Jon Ward, Testimony.

Tens of thousands did exactly that, and tens of millions followed.

I have no idea how many of America’s 44,319 nondenominational congregations (2020) are outright heretical, and I’m not sure anyone else reliably knows, either – partly because we have no consensus on what is sound doctrine and practice versus heretical doctrine and practice.

But in a preference poll (that I just made up and has no external existence), I trust a generic institution’s judgment on doctrine more that I trust some random religiopreneur’s judgment.

Random observation

Onlookers jeered when Christ hung on the Cross. But the Gospels do not record any punditry.

Robert Wyllie, commenting on the instapundit reaction to the Charlie Kirk assassination.

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

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Sunday 10/5/25

Fullness

Orthodoxy holds that the fullness of the Faith was revealed to the Church at Pentecost, once and for all. The Greek Fathers utilized their education in the service of the Church to explain doctrine, not to find new truths, since the fullness of the truth was received at Pentecost.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Secularism

Secularism was not a neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Ring-lust

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Can Teach Us About U.S. Politics, Christianity and Power.

In the US, we decided, twice, that if we gave Sauron the ring, he’d use it for good. How’s that workin’ out for ya?

Conversion and cosmology

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.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann. Again:

A modern secularist quite often accepts the idea of God. What, however, he emphatically negates is precisely the sacramentality of man and world.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann (different source).

Climbing the elite ladder

Here’s one way to think about it. An evangelical who climbs the elite ladder is more or less required, by the nature of the case, to shed vital elements of her evangelical identity. But a Catholic is not. And a Catholic is not for the same reason that, once upon a time, a liberal Protestant was not.

Brad East, Conversions, Protestantism, and a New Mainline. I would add that an Orthodox Christian need not shed identity either.

East’s post is target-rich with suggestions about questions that fascinate me.

Politically homeless

According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s annual census last year, upward of 80 percent of Republicans described themselves as Christian …

Ryan Burge. It might surprise you that I’m unimpressed and un-encouraged by that. I don’t even know what “Christian” means in common parlance any more if 80% of Republicans think of themselves as Christians.

Ain’t. No. Way.

… But the Democratic coalition is a very different spiritual universe. It is made up of a big mix of faiths — Christians of various kinds, Jews, Muslims — as well as somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of nones, or people who describe their faith as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular.

Ryan Burge again. These figures are a surprise, but they may be correlated to the Democrat party positions that keep me politically homeless instead of joining the Dems.

Chicago archbishop Blase Cardinal Cupich, who has stirred some controversy recently, said one true thing that made my heart leap when it was misattributed to the new Pope by a commentator: that Christians (Cupich said “Catholics”) are now politically homeless in the US.

I have recognized my political homelessness for twenty years now.

On reading the Bible

Most North American Christians assume that they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important than for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to all children when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked, such as eighth-grade commencements. Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own ….

Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas wrote the book this quote comes from 32 years ago. It seems to me that those corrupt habits haven’t been reformed.

Get ready

You may have heard these famous lines from Cardinal Francis George, the late archbishop of Chicago …:

I expect to die in bed. My successor will die in prison. And his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.

Kevin D. Williamson, The Totalitarian Tendency and the Confessional, reflecting on a new Oregon law requiring that Catholic priests report certain sexual crimes that might be communicated to them in the confessional.

Starving the beast

In our last episode, I wrote “I don’t think I frequent any websites that use algorithms to target my inferred vulnerabilities.” It may be worth noting that I also have unsubscribed from some blogs and Substacks that I felt were grinding out agitprop aimed at people like me.

Go thou and do likewise.

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

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Sunday before Theophany

Myth and Truth

A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it.” So claimed C. S. Lewis in his 1944 essay “Myth Became Fact.” Lewis insisted that myth lies at the heart of the faith—even if it embarrasses those moderns who would cover over the mythic imagery of Scripture with the whitewash of literalism, replacing lively stories with morals, principles, and ideas. The similarities between the Christian faith and the myths of the pagans need not occasion unease, Lewis argued; rather, they manifest a “mythical radiance” that should be preserved within our theology.

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Jordan Peterson is an especially vivid example of one who feeds upon the Christian story as myth, while not believing it as fact. He is far from alone, and though We Who Wrestle with God is not a true Christian reading of Holy Scripture, it represents an encouraging trend of serious thinkers recognizing the vital cultural significance of the Bible. This trend may be a much-needed beachhead for the evangelization of righteous pagans—and a spur to Christians to return to a spiritual reading of Holy Scripture. In myth, as Lewis recognized, meaning is encountered neither as abstract nor as bound to the particular, but as reality. And in the Incarnation, myth and fact are joined.

Alastair Roberts, Jordan Peterson’s “God”.

My attitude toward Jordan Peterson is vexed. I pray for him as a very important Christian-adjacent “influencer” — that he will lead his (mostly young, or so I hear) followers to good places and that he himself will embrace the Orthodox Christian faith to which he is is multiple ways very close. On the other hand, I don’t have time for his logorrhea and circumlocution.

Ritual

The genius of ritual is that it allows us not to articulate our feelings. It allows us to express our faith through an act.

Andrew Sullivan via Peter Savodnik

Why so much doctrine in catechesis?

Frs. Andrew and Stephen, in an un-transcribed asynchronous Q&A podcast, observed that although catechesis ideally should be more about how to live an Orthodox life, less about what the Orthodox Church believes (90% of that can be gotten from Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Church), nonetheless people come to Orthodoxy thinking, for instance, “St. Paul taught X, Y and Z in Romans” when in fact he did not so teach. Leaving that Protestant artifact unaddressed will lead some people to a place where they feel that the Church is contradicting St. Paul. So we’ve got to do some doctrine in catechesis.

My comment: One of the doctrines we need to emphasize with converts coming from a left-brain culture is that praxis may be more important than doctrine.

Caveat Zeitgeist

These passions are worth careful examination, particularly as they have long been married to America’s many denominational Christianities. I think it is noteworthy that one of the most prominent 19th century American inventions was Mormonism. There, we have the case of a religious inventor (Joseph Smith) literally writing America into the Scriptures and creating an alternative, specifically American, account of Christ and salvation. It was not an accident. He was, in fact, drawing on the spirit of the Age, only more blatantly and heretically. But there are many Christians whose Christianity is no less suffused with the same sentiments.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Golden Rule, misapplied

“Why do you defame us?” asks the former president. “Why concentrate on the negative? We give you the Alumnus of the Year award, and you turn around and lambaste us in your writing every chance you get.” Blindsided, I don’t reply right away. Finally, I say, “I don’t intend to demean anyone. I guess I’m still trying to sort through the mixed messages I got here.” He doesn’t back off. “I know all sorts of juicy stories about people in Christian ministry,” he says. “But I would never write about them because of the pain it would cause. I go by the Golden Rule: Do unto others as I would have them do to me.” Later, as his comment sinks in, I realize that is the very reason I probe my past, even though it may cause others pain. My brother’s question plagues me still: What is real, and what is fake? I know of no more real or honest book than the Bible, which hides none of its characters’ flaws. If I’ve distorted reality or misrepresented myself, I would hope someone would call me out.

Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell.

Yancey’s interlocutor wants to be left alone, and thinks that’s the meaning of the “Golden Rule.” Yancey won’t leave him alone because he wouldn’t want to be left alone if he strayed.

I’m with Yancey, but it seems like the world around me, including purported Christians, is almost unanimously with his interlocutor.

A most kingly Reformation

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

That God-shaped hole

“There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” [Jonathan Haidt] said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.

“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.

Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”

“It’s fine for a small group of people to say, ‘We’re atheist, we’re opting out,’ ” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart. “The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.”

Peter Savodnik again.

The emergent culture

In the emergent culture, a wider range of people will have “spiritual” concerns and engage in “spiritual” pursuits. There will be more singing and more listening. People will continue to genuflect and read the Bible, which has long achieved the status of great literature; but no prophet will denounce the rich attire or stop the dancing. There will be more theater, not less, and no Puritan will denounce the stage and draw its curtains. On the contrary, I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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

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 before Nativity, 2024

David Brooks

I have long admired David Brooks, and a few years ago I heard fairly detailed rumors about his embrace of Christian faith — without ceasing to identify as Jewish.

This week, he wrote at some length about his pilgrimage (unlocked article). So far as I know, this is his public “coming out”:

When I was an agnostic, I thought faith was primarily about belief. Being religious was about having a settled conviction that God existed and knowing that the stories in the Bible were true. I looked for books and arguments that would convince me that God was either real or not real.

Some people are spiritual but not religious; during that time, you could say I was religious but not spiritual.

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When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences …

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Sometimes people hear about my religious journey and ask me about my “conversion,” but that word is a relic from the rationalist mentality — as if I traded one belief system for another. The process felt more like an inspiration, like someone had breathed life into those old biblical stories so that they now appeared true.

Today, I feel more Jewish than ever, but as I once told some friends, I can’t unread Matthew. For me, the Beatitudes are the part of the Bible where the celestial grandeur most dazzlingly shines through. So these days I’m enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang. My Jewish friends, who have been universally generous and forbearing, point out that when you believe in both the Old and New Testaments, you’ve crossed over to Team Christian, which is a fair point.

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We religious people talk about virtue so much you’d think we’d behave better than nonreligious people. But that’s not been my experience. Over the past decade, especially in the American church, I’ve seen religious people behaving more viciously, more dishonestly and, in some ways, more tolerant of sexual abuse. I sometimes joke that entering the church in 2013 was like investing in the stock market in 1929. My timing could have been better.

Still, I’ve been grateful to live in an enchanted world, to live toward someone I can seek and serve. I’ve been grateful to have to learn and relearn yet another startling truth, that faith is about yearning but it’s not about striving. You can’t earn God’s love with good behavior and lofty thoughts, because he’s already given it to you as the lavish gift that you don’t deserve. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness, Lord,” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “and you gave them to me.”

Three decades ago, I might have snorted and said “this guy is no Christian!” Or maybe I wouldn’t have. It’s hard to remember all of my past attitudes, and tempting to caricature them. But I’m confident that I would at least have felt that this account was alien and challenging to my then-understanding of Christian faith. Today, I find his account quite sympathetic, as, I think, the late Bishop Kallistos Ware would have as well:

Faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there.

And I have it on reasonably good authority that most uses of “faith” in English-language Bibles would better be rendered as “faithfulness,” which is especially salient this morning as the gospel reading (on the Orthodox “new calendar”) is much of Hebrews chapter 11.

Chistianities: thin, sharp, thick

Jonathan Rauch, in conversation with David French (unlocked), divides Christianity in the US into thin, sharp, and thick versions. It’s of concern to him — gay, atheist and Jewish — because he has come to see that Christianity is congruent with liberal democracy and our liberal democracy may need it for survival.

I’ve rejected untold times the idea that Christianity is only important in publicly instrumental ways, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important in those ways. And I thought Rauch’s descriptions of thin and sharp Christianities are pretty well on target.

It seems to me, though, that Rauch’s example of what constitutes thick (i.e., useful) Christianity is off-base:

This is what’s been missing. Christians have a teaching about how individuals should relate to the world around them. If there’s a hurricane in Asheville, the stories of what the church is doing are fantastic. But they don’t have a teaching about how to engage politics as Christians. And that leads me to realize what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is actually modeling is a whole civic theology, and that’s what Christianity needs more of: teachings about how would Jesus approach politics.

I think my concern arises because Rauch is seeing Christianity largely in instrumental terms. Or maybe it’s because I’m having trouble figuring out how a Church stays thick while diverting attention to thinning civics (“teaching about how to engage politics as Christians”). Or maybe I recoil at the thought that anything good could come out of Salt Lake City.

The inevitability of ritual

In England, the two kinds of churches I do still see filling appear rather different. In a local baptist church the pews are crammed with young families having powerful, intimate encounters with their faith. Something immediate is being accommodated. I remember seeing a guy fresh from a building site, dusty with a high viz jacket. Family with him, arms outstretched, tears on his cheeks. It would bring a lump to your throat.

Then I see my own parish, hushed and seemingly antique, but with more young people than ever before. In both I see people who look spiritually fed. Then out there in the wider audit of emptying churches there seems often to be a sense of weariness, or simple lack of oomph. There will be exceptions to this last sentence, I have no sneer in writing it. I sometimes go sit in those congregations simply out of love for the yards they’ve put in as parishioners. Solidarity, a hand held across the fence to a fellow worker bee.

It seems, from a distance, the two churches are very different, and I am well aware of the theological wrestles that create distance. What I don’t go along with is the notion that one is completely improvisational and unencumbered by tradition, and the other set-and-only-set in a kind of endless, ancient theatre or lifeless ceremony. Dame Mary Douglas, a cultural anthropologist, encapsulates something she calls the ‘anti-ritualist’ approach:

The confirmed anti-ritualist mistrusts external expression. He values a man’s inner convictions. Spontaneous speech that flows from the heart, unpremeditated, irregular in form, even somewhat incoherent, is good because it bears witness to the speaker’s real intentions.

I think actually, ritual is inevitable, even when tacit. We are ceremony people, no matter how spontaneous we think we may be. There will be a loved formula, a linguistic groove long established, a shared initiatory language in common for any community that lasts. It’s about the dynamic counterpoints of tradition and innovation. We may have done away with the candles, offerings and holy smoke, but simply to feel safe repetition will always have value.

Martin Shaw.

Don’t forget the Christian East

It is noteworthy that no institutional form of religious persecution was ever introduced in the Christian East. Because of Western historiographical ignorance of the Orthodox Church, however, the inquisition would come to represent, for secular intellectuals in modern times, the illegitimacy of any civilization grounded in Christianity, whether Western or Eastern.

John Strickland, The Age of Division

Fully God, fully man

And from this we draw a refutation of Eutyches: since Christ is declared to be the fruit of the womb. And all fruit is of the same nature as the parent plant: so it follows that the Virgin also was of the same nature as the Second Adam, Who takes away the sins of the world. And let those be ashamed at the true child-bearing of the Mother of God, who have invented some fantastic notion concerning Christ’s Body; for the fruit proceeds from the very substance of the tree. And what of those who say that Christ passed through Mary as water through a channel? Let them hearken to the words of Elizabeth, who was filled with the Holy Ghost; saying that Christ was the fruit of the womb.

Severus (of Antioch) via Jonah (of micro.blog). Emphasis added because I heard somebody on WMBI say exactly that (actually, she said “pipe” rather than “channel”).

If Christ passed through Mary as water through a pipe, where did He get His humanity, which all Christians now confess? How do you get to “fully God and fully man” if Mary was just a pipe?

Denying Christ’s humanity is a pretty high price to pay for dodging her whose “fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum” is a crucial element in the story of our salvation.

A terrible choice

Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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.

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.

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.

Choose your own Jesus

Ross Douthat takes a detour and frolic from politics to diss the interminable “search for the historic Jesus.” The proximate cause of his ire is a religion professor reportedly much smitten with the “well attested” notion of Jesus ben Pantera, the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier:

Now of course what Gopnik means by “well attested” is “well attested and non-miraculous,” which is fair enough so far as it goes. But this no-miracles criterion is why the historical Jesus project is such a spectacular dead end — because what would ordinarily be the most historically-credible sources for the life and times of Jesus Christ are absolutely soaked in supernaturalism, and if you throw them out you’re left with essentially idle speculations about Jesus ben Pantera and other phantoms that have no real historical grounding whatsoever.

Think about it this way: If the letters of Saint Paul (the earliest surviving Christian texts, by general consensus) and the synoptic gospels (the second-earliest) didn’t make such extraordinary claims about Jesus’s resurrection, his divinity, and so forth, no credible historian would waste much time parsing second-century apocrypha for clues about the “real” Jesus.

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[T]he synoptic gospels and Saint Paul’s epistles do make absolutely extraordinary claims, and so modern scholars have every right to read them with a skeptical eye, and question their factual reliability. But if you downgrade the earliest Christian documents or try to bracket them entirely, the documentary evidence that’s left is so intensely unreliable (dated, fragmentary, obviously mythological, etc.) that scholars can scavenge through it to build whatever Jesus they prefer — and then say, with Gopnik, that their interpretation of the life of Christ is “as well attested” as any other. Was Jesus a wandering sage? Maybe so. A failed revolutionary? Sure, why not. A lunatic who fancied himself divine? Perhaps. An apocalyptic prophet? There’s an app for that …But this isn’t history: It’s “choose your own Jesus,” and it’s become an enormous waste of time. Again, there’s nothing wrong with saying that the supernaturalism of the Christian canon makes it an unreliable guide to who Jesus really was. But if we’re honest with ourselves, then we need to acknowledge what this means: Not the beginning of a fruitful quest for the Jesus of history, but the end of it.

Ross is good when he’s carrying forward the New York Times’ mission, but this is better than good. Bullseye! All thumbs up!