Sunday, 10/4/26

An oddly busy last week leaves me a little short-handed today: just two items.

No room for racism

I didn’t know or didn’t remember this statement:

The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America stands with all people of good will in condemning the hateful violence and lamenting the loss of life that resulted from the ⁠⁠shameful efforts to promote racial bigotry and white supremacist ideology in Charlottesville, Virginia.⁠⁠

⁠⁠The Orthodox Church emphatically declares that it does not promote, protect or sanction participation in such reprehensible acts of hatred, racism, and discrimination, and proclaims that such beliefs and behaviors have no place in any community based in respect for the law and faith in a loving God.⁠⁠

The essence of the Christian Gospel and the spirit of the Orthodox Tradition are entirely and self-evidently incompatible with ideologies that declare the superiority of any race over another. Our God shows no partiality or favoritism (Deuteronomy 10:17, Romans 2:11). Our Lord Jesus Christ broke down the dividing wall of hostility that had separated God from humans and humans from each other (Ephesians 2:14). In Christ Jesus, the Church proclaims, there can be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female, but all are one (Galatians 3:28). Furthermore, we call on one another to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather to expose them (Ephesians 5:11). And what is darkness if not hatred? The one who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness (1 John 2:11)!

Furthermore, in 1872, Hierarchs from around the world assembled in Constantinople and denounced all forms of xenophobia and chauvinism (phyletism). They agreed that the promotion of racial or national supremacy and ethnic bias or dissension in the Church of Christ is to be censured as contrary to the sacred teachings of the Christian Gospel and the holy canons of the Church. It is formally condemned as heresy, the strongest category of false teaching.

Finally, such actions as we have witnessed in recent days, by self-proclaimed white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and various racists and fascists, betray the core human values of love and solidarity. In this, we pray wholeheartedly for the families of those who lost their lives or suffered in these tragic events. In like manner, we cannot condone any form of revenge or retaliation by any group or individual. Therefore, we fervently appeal to every person of good will, and especially the leaders of our great nation, to consider and adopt ways of reconciling differences in order to rise above any and all discrimination in our history, our present, and our future.

My point in quoting this is that unrepentant racists do not have a natural home in the Orthodox Church. No Orthodox country was involved in the kidnapping of Africans, the slave trade, or the building of an American slave economy.

I’m old, firmly attached by clerical responsibilities to a single healthy parish, and out of first-hand touch with what’s happening elsewhere. But I read suggestions that some mostly-young mostly-men are flirting with or entering the Orthodox Church under the impression that its Holy Tradition is congruent with their unholy racial obsessions and with white nationalism.

I doubt that this is any true trend. But Orthodoxy is exploding in the U.S. (along with Roman Catholicism, I’m told), and I knew that when that happened, when Orthodoxy finally “got on America’s radar,” the calumnies would begin. Orthodoxy’s resistance to novelties (“stagnant” is what critics who knew about us tended to say) is a nice, big target for misrepresentation.

Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven.

There is no room for racism in Orthodoxy; there is always room for repentant sinners of all sorts, including repentant racists.

Transgressive Art

I’ve come to think of art that requires a willingness to transgress, not (to be clear) morality, or convention per se, but the limits of our understanding. And I think that one of the ways that art can bring us closer to ultimate Reality, or even to God, is by helping us see where our narratives of ourselves and of the world around us have become stale and rote … I think that engaging with art in this way requires a leap of faith. For things that break me open not to break me totally, I have to believe that not everything is broken.

Tara Isabella Burton

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.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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Sunday, 9/27/26

Beauty and truth

I would never have set out upon the journey that led me to the The Ethics of Beauty had I not read Jonathan Shay’s observation in his Achilles in Vietnam that contemporary analytical psychotherapy has been largely unable to heal the suffering of the soldiers afflicted most severely with post-traumatic stress disorder. I have slowly come to see that another way to read Shay would be to say that the initial focus of soul-healing must be on Beauty rather than on truth, on a living vision of a loving and crucified God, rather than on an autopsy of the broken self. … The fatal flaw of soul-therapy since Freud, by contrast, has been its insistence that truth and not beauty be our first concern; the repellant aspect of today’s political ideologies is rooted in a similar insistence.

Timothy G. Patitsas

Is “mere Christianity” Protestant?

It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in “mere Christianity” from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople. To imagine that there is a set of cardinal doctrines that transcends ecclesial divisions and unites all people as “Christian” is inherently to speak and think as a Protestant.

So in that sense the best way to read what Scrivener calls the era of “mere christianity” is probably to regard it as a period of deficient Protestantism in which people presupposed Protestant conceptions of the church without understanding that they were doing that. They mistook their implicitly Protestant commitments for a kind of broadly Christian and ecclesially indifferent set of commitments. That is never what Lewis was trying to do in his own work, but it is how his work was received by highly democratic and anti-institutional American readers.

Jake Meador, a Protestant.

This reflects my own experience going from lower Protestant traditions to fully ecclesial Christianity. The late Richard John Neuhaus puts it this way:

An ecclesial Christian is one who understands with mind and heart, and even feels with his fingertips, that Christ and his Church, head and body, are inseparable. For the ecclesial Christian, the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church are not two acts of faith but one. In the words of the third-century St. Cyprian, martyr bishop of Carthage, “He who would have God as his Father must have the Church as his mother.”

In defense of Origen (and against spurious interpolations)

After Paul, there is no single Christian figure to whom the whole tradition is more indebted. It was Origen who taught the church how to read scripture as a living mirror of Christ, who evolved the principles of later Trinitarian theology and Christology, who majestically set the standard for Christian apologetics, who produced the first and richest expositions of contemplative spirituality, and who—simply said—laid the foundation of the whole edifice of developed Christian thought. Moreover, he was not only a man of extraordinary personal holiness, piety, and charity, but a martyr as well: Brutally tortured during the Decian persecution at the age of 69, he never recovered, but slowly withered away over a period of three years. He was, in short, among the greatest of the church fathers and the most illustrious of the saints and yet, disgracefully, official church tradition—East and West—commemorates him as neither.⁠

David Bentley Hart, putting more flesh on the bones of a story I’ve known for quite some time: somewhere along the line, after he was dead and gone, Origen got a bum rap.

What I didn’t know was that it wasn’t a Church Council that did it:

⁠I cannot really say what irks me more, though: that it happened or that, in fact, it really never did. The oldest records of the council (which was convened to deal solely with certain Antiochian theologians) make it clear that those fifteen anathemas were never even discussed by the assembled bishops, let alone ratified, published, or promulgated.⁠⁠ And ⁠⁠since the late nineteenth century various scholars have convincingly established that neither Origen nor “Origenism” was ever the subject of any condemnation pronounced by the “holy fathers” in 553. The best modern critical edition of the Seven Councils—Norman Tanner’s—simply omits the anathemas as spurious interpolations.

Compare and Contrast

American Religion

The result is a religious landscape dominated by popular Christian ideas that have “gone mad,” as G.K. Chesterton once put it, “because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” This America has a church of self-love, with prophets like Oprah Winfrey preaching a gospel of the divine self, a “God Within” spirituality that risks making selfishness a virtue. It has a church of prosperity, with figures like Joel Osteen as its bishops, that insists that God desires nothing more for his elect than American prosperity, capitalist success. And it has churches of politics, preaching redemption through political activism — a Christian nationalism on the right, by turns messianic and apocalyptic, and a progressive utopianism on the left, convinced that history’s arc bends always in its favor.

These heresies, I argued, are more important to understanding the true influence of religion in America than anything that comes out of the Roman Catholic Church or the Southern Baptist Convention. You can understand our spiritual situation more completely by reading “The Da Vinci Code,” “Eat, Pray, Love” and “Your Best Life Now” than by browsing a papal encyclical (or for that matter an atheist polemic). And you can see more of Christianity’s enduring but now deformed influence in will.i.am’s celebrity hymns to Barack Obama in 2008, or Glenn Beck’s right-wing revivals a couple of years later, than in whatever cultural authority still attaches to the New Testament or the Nicene Creed.

Ross Douthat, The Americanization of Religion

Christianity

Father Maximos then went on to say how surprised he was to learn that there were so many people today that become victims of … charlatans. The most troublesome development, he mentioned, was the fact that many people considered him to be some kind of magician. “They come here at the monastery to find out whether someone has cast a spell on them, why they were abandoned by their lover or their husband and so on. At first I couldn’t figure out why they would come to me with such problems. Then I realize that they thought of me as some kind of sorcerer capable of undoing spells.“ Father Maximos shook his head and chuckled in his characteristic way.

“What do you tell them in such cases?“ I asked.

“What do you think? I tell them that there is no magic to resolve their problems, that they need to do spiritual work. I tell them that if they have a problem with demonic energies then they can follow the prescriptions the Ecclesia to heal themselves: confession, participation in the mysteries, fasting, charity, prayer, and askesis in general. That’s the way to do it.”

“So, there you are. You offer them a recipe on how to cast out the spell,” I pointed out in a light tone. “But are they receptive?”

“Hardly. Most people crave a quick fix. They are too lazy or unwilling to invest any effort of their own. They assume that if I read some magic formula over their heads, their problems will disappear. No need for them to change their ways. No need for them to engage in systematic prayer and askesis. Of course, some to follow the therapeutic guidelines of the Ecclesia and see results.”

Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence

The unity of the Church

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once commented that it had been granted to America, less than to any nation on earth, to realize the visible unity of the church of God.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion

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.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

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Thoughts on American religion and Orthodoxy

[John Williamson] Nevin and [Philip] Schaff also discerned certain common intellectual patterns and reflexes beneath the rampant pluralism of American Protestantism. They attributed the breakdown of theological coherence to attitudes that American Christians had assumed. These two felt that a radical Bible-centeredness was the reigning theory among Protestant sects. After surveying the statements of belief of fifty-three American denominations, Nevin surmised that the principle “no creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion.

…

Despite the variety of Christian idioms that flowered in the early republic, most seemed to spring from the common conception that Christian tradition since the time of the apostles was a tale of sordid corruption in which kingcraft and priestcraft wielded orthodoxy to enslave the minds of the people. Ties with Catholic and Protestant traditions were severed, with a heady sense that a restoration of the primitive church was at hand. Men such as Benjamin Randal, founder of the Freewill Baptists, called for a new dispensation of gospel liberty. According to Francis Asbury, the apostolic order of things was lost in the first century, and the Reformers had beat off only part of the rubbish of intervening centuries. Methodism claimed emphatically to reinstate the apostolic form of the church in doctrine, discipline, conversion, and sanctification. In John W. Nevin’s view, the American republic had given free reign to an “abstract supernaturalism” empowering believers to transcend the corruptions of eighteen hundred years and return to the simplicity, authority, and power of the age of the apostles. “Every congregation has power to originate a new Christianity for its own use,” Nevin concluded, “and so may well afford to let that of all other ages pass for a grand apostasy.”

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Kindle Edition pp. 166-167, italics added.)

So what are we to make of these new “Christianities”?

If you find yourself in bars, as I sometimes rarely do, and if you find yourself in heated conversation therein with people hostile to religion, as I often do, you may have a strong desire, as I always do, to establish a widely agreed-on way of distinguishing between what you believe and what Colorado Springs believes. Well at long last I’ve done it:

If someone were to shorten the field by forty yards, widen it by twenty, give you thirteen downs to advance twelve yards for a first down, and award you six points for doing so, you’d rightly object to his calling this new game “football.” You’d say to him, “that one’s taken. Find another name.”

I think the same applies to that fairly old, solid, and stately religion known as “Christianity.” Those who have altered the faith beyond recognition should come up with a new name for what it is they’re practicing. I suggest “Krustianity.”

Jason Peters, sometime in September of 2009 at Front Porch Republic, at a link that’s now dead. I used “Krustianity” and “Krustian” a lot in my blogging back then, but the usage never got any traction and I pretty much gave it up. But the impulse remains, and I sometimes feel guilty using the term “Christian” to refer to the “new Christianit(ies)” concocted by those who think they know better than the Church that gave them their beloved Bible.

So what’s the alternative?

Orthodox Christianity reads the account of Christ on the road to Emmaus more often than I ever encountered in the Protestant world. I mused on that narrative thirteen years ago.

Excerpt:

How do you suppose Christ expounded the Old Testament that day? It turned these disciples from disconsolate to rejoicing, so it must not have been what they were used to hearing. It made simultaneous sense of His sufferings and his Messiahship. It removed the scandal of His being numbered among sinners, and crucified — a particularly scandalous way to die.

Some of His interpretation has come down even into Protestantism, or else Protestants would be unevangelized as they learned Old Testament. For instance, we Christians all understand Isaiah 53 as referring to Christ — contrary to typical Jewish understanding.

I suggest that He interpreted the Scriptures in a way that’s preserved not only in subsequent Apostolic writings called the Gospels and Epistles, but in the interpretive tradition of the Orthodox Church, including its hymns, prayers and service texts. I can’t prove it, but I … can prove that the New Testament writers didn’t write down everything that was important.

Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.

That’s why we call it “the fullness of the Christian faith.”

And you can only get the fulness of the faith in an Orthodox Church. You can’t get it by reading about it or watching YouTube videos from Orthobros, because we’re not disembodied brains. You need to get your body to Church — again and again and again.

Those who sell you shortcuts are ravening wolves.

⁠⁠Those of us in Western Culture have been reared with what I believe is an entirely incorrect framework; we’ve been taught that knowledge is somehow related to holiness.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the throngs of young people who have been flooding into Orthodox Churches the past few years, many of them coming from various Protestant and Evangelical traditions, where “knowing the Bible” and “knowing theology” are often considered very central to their faith.

Amongst the converts to Orthodoxy, especially among the young men, though not limited to them, there is this thirst for knowledge and all things related to the mind⁠⁠ …

…

⁠⁠A few years ago, a number of young men were received into our parish, in what was really the first small wave of converts that I began noticing in recent years.

All of them were obsessed with Orthodoxy.

A couple of them would stay after the Liturgy with me and talk for hours on end about Orthodox Christianity.

They kept obtaining icons the way young people obtain Pokemon cards, and they would rush to show me their newest acquisitions, proud of how many images of saints they could display on their wall and how many stories about saints they could retell.⁠⁠

⁠⁠Yet not all of these young men wanted to meet regularly with our spiritual father.

They didn’t like that he spent precious little time teaching them theology or teaching them church history. What they wanted was for him to teach them the kind of Orthodox Christianity they were familiar with seeing online; as though that was truly representative of the faith.

My spiritual father is positively a saint. Nobody will ever be able to convince me otherwise, and he could see what these young men needed was not to be educated in the mind about Orthodox Christianity, but rather they needed to learn;

how to be calm
how to meditate on Jesus
how to quit focusing on the external and how to learn to be more aware of the internal

They needed to learn how to be present. Both present before God and present with others. Because at the core of their place in life was an obsession with the external; on knowing things, on material knowledge, as opposed to building a deeper personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Church.⁠⁠

Kenneth B

The Orthodox Church is not a denomination serving an ethnic niche, nor is it one of many Christian communions that happens to have certain emphases, oddities, or decorative extras; rather, it is simply and merely the historical Christian Church.

Michael Shanbour, Know the Faith

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

Meandering through “Mere Christianity,” denominations, missions, and extra Ecclesiam nulla salus

I spent some time this week mulling over a blog that talked about some YouTube video dialogs across the lines of Christian traditions. The result seems kind of half-baked, but it’s what I’ve got this Sunday.

The point of “mere Christianity” for Lewis was not to minimize ecclesial distinctives, but rather to help people make useful distinctions as they think about their relationship to faith. Yet, and Scrivener himself develops this point in his own way in the video, to even conceive of such a project as being legitimate is itself to be committed in some limited way to Protestantism. It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in “mere Christianity” from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople. To imagine that there is a set of cardinal doctrines that transcends ecclesial divisions and unites all people as “Christian” is inherently to speak and think as a Protestant.

So in that sense the best way to read what Scrivener calls the era of “mere christianity” is probably to regard it as a period of deficient Protestantism in which people presupposed Protestant conceptions of the church without understanding that they were doing that. They mistook their implicitly Protestant commitments for a kind of broadly Christian and ecclesially indifferent set of commitments. That is never what Lewis was trying to do in his own work, but it is how his work was received by highly democratic and anti-institutional American readers.

Jake Meador, Is the Era of Mere Christianity Over?.

Youngish Calvinist Jake Meador is too young to feel in his bones the weight of implicit “common-core Protestantism” in America. I felt it to a degree in the 50s as a fundamentalist/evangelical oddball in a public school that didn’t share our taboos but somehow was Christianish. Observant Catholics felt it to the extent that they really supported their parochial schools. I lived across the street from an empty field on which we watched a Catholic high school arise in the late 50s.

Meador rightly observes that “It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in “mere Christianity” from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople.” To Protestants, that may be baffling, but Christ promised to build his church and, as I have noted before, there are Christians for whom belief in Christ and His Church is one act of faith, not two. I’m now one of them.

On the question of whether denominationalism is coming back, though, Meador is wise to distinguish the return of doctrinal particularity from the return of the denominations, each one instantiating those particularities, and to ask “how’s that going to work when most of the Christian action is taking place in non-denominational assemblies that have fancied that they were avoiding particularities?” (Spoiler alert: they weren’t avoiding partiuclarity. Try getting an infant baptized in one of these non-particular churches. They’re crypto-baptists.) Sociologist of Religion Ryan Burge has documented lavishly the decline of denominations relative to independent churches (religiopreneurs).

The video Meador is discussing features snippets of conversation between Protestant Gavin Ortlund and Orthodox Jonathan Pageau. Ortlund is kind of hurt that Pageau seemingly cannot univocally call him a brother in Christ. Pageau responds in part at the oddity of that hurt, inasmuch as Protestants have long sent missionaries to traditionally Orthodox lands, where they try to persuade Orthodox Christians that they’re not really Christians until they embrace some Protestant tradition or another.

Protestant prickliness about Orthodox Christians hesitating to greet them with unguarded bonhomie reminds me of Mormon complaints about Evangelicals (and others) not accepting them; why then, have the Mormons been sending pairs of young “Elders” throughout the land all my life to evangelize for their church? They’re asking for acceptance they don’t reciprocate.

I’m obviously on Team Pageau when it comes to repudiating “salvation by faith alone” and other aspects of Protestantism. I think it’s worth noting, too, that the Orthodox position that there’s no salvation outside the ark of the Church shouldn’t be taken anachronistically or out of context.

“Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. All the categorical strength and point of this aphorism lies in its tautology. Outside the Church there is no salvation, because salvation is the Church” (G. Florovsky, “Sobornost: the Catholicity of the Church”, in The Church of God, p. 53). Does it therefore follow that anyone who is not visibly within the Church is necessarily damned? Of course not; still less does it follow that everyone who is visibly within the Church is necessarily saved. As Augustine wisely remarked: “How many sheep there are without, how many wolves within!” (Homilies on John, 45, 12) While there is no division between a “visible” and an “invisible Church”, yet there may be members of the Church who are not visibly such, but whose membership is known to God alone. If anyone is saved, he must in some sense be a member of the Church; in what sense, we cannot always say.

Bp. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church.

Catholics find it impossible to theologize without deductive reasoning—a characteristic shared by virtually all Western Christians

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox. I almost made this a separate item in my typical multipart collation, but it feels rather like an epilogue.

Are there any Jews in this house?

A difference between East and West

It has been a while since I did much more than curate some quotes here for Sunday. But the juices got going yesterday.

J Budziszewski, a Roman Catholic academic who has an avocation of studying and teaching Natural Law, fields a reader question about whether it’s always wrong to lie, and whether people aren’t sometimes forced into lying.

Budziszewski’s reply (I hesitate to call it an answer) includes the suggestion that one of the three questions the reader collapsed into one is:

What is the proper understanding of a lie? Is the classical definition right, so that a lie is saying what one knows to be false with the intention of deceiving? Or is a lie only speaking in such a way to someone who has a right to the truth? Or does anything which conceals the truth count as a lie, so that, for example, silences, disguises, ambushes, and polite equivocations are kinds of lie?

A test of one’s theory about lying is this fairly classic question, now mercifully hypothetical but not at all hypothetical 85 or so years ago in great swaths of Europe: “Are there any Jews in this house?”

I have tended to think that the right response to that is to look the Nazi in the eye and answer “No,”, even if you’re sheltering three families of Jews, and that doing so is not a lie because the Nazi has no right to the truth about whether you’re sheltering Jews (or perhaps are married to one).

But I’ve been leaning very recently toward a subtly different answer, one that I suspect would be relatively favored in the Christian East. Paradoxically, the right response is still “No” — but I’m inclined to think that so answering is a sin.

Let me explain. In the Christian East, sin is viewed consistently with the literal meaning of the Greek word for it: amartia or hamartia, literally “missing the mark.” It is not viewed primarily as rebellion against God.

I’ll elaborate. In a prayer all Orthodox Christians know, we ask “Lord, cleanse us of our sins. Master, pardon our iniquities. Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Your Name’s sake.” This three-fold distinction of ways in which humans miss the mark (and what they need in each case) startled me when I first encountered it because it gave voice and vocabulary to an intuition I’d had for years but didn’t know how to articulate (it was a factor in my becoming Orthodox that they nicely articulated my intuition). And it implied that we need repentance even for our mere “infirmities” (see below).

Just this week, I heard a very erudite Orthodox Priest addressing an arguably analogous situation. In the Canons of the Church, the penance for murder is three years of excommunication. (Temporary excommunication in Orthodoxy can be a treatment, not a death sentence.) There’s not exactly an exception for killing in war, because that typically carries a penance of one year of excommunication. That is, there’s no ban on military service that might require killing in war, but if that befalls an Orthodox Christian, it is treated as a sin and given a penance — for the healing of the trauma of the soldier who killed if nothing else.

So we don’t say a soldier killing in war doesn’t sin thereby. We don’t say that he shouldn’t have done it, either.^* It seems to me that the Church is treating some sins, some times, as necessary but still sin. And that seems consistent with the whole creation groaning for redemption. We live in a fallen world and cannot rise entirely above it. So maybe circumstances in this sorry world sometimes leave us spattered with the merde of doing the best we can when the best we can is bad.

So back to the Nazi jew-hunter at the door. I’m unequivocal that the right answer is ”No” and inclined to think that the right answer is still a sin. Treating it that way opens the door to confession, repentant, possibly a bit of penance (which I’ll bet wouldn’t include any period of excommunication these days), and thus the effectuation of healing the soul of the trauma of having been through that.

On a related note,

Orthodox often feel that Latin scholastic theology makes too much use of legal concepts, and relies too heavily on rational categories and syllogistic argumentation, while the Latins for their part have frequently found the more mystical approach of Orthodoxy too vague and ill-defined.

Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church.

After some 29 years as Orthodox, I feel as if the rational and syllogistic arguments are ways of keeping God at arms-length. In the context of the hypothetical I’ve been writing about, I feel that any approach that excludes the “No” as “sin” deters the person forced to utter it from an opportunity for needed spiritual healing.

Bear in mind that I’m not an expert on the Canons. That asterisk above is a reminder:

that St. Basil the Great and St. John Chrysostom differed on war: Chrysostom essentially forbidding killing even in war; Basil allowing that violence may be required for the “defense of the weak and innocent,” that “it is never justifiable,” but that killings in war should not be “classifiable as murders.”
that Chrysostom seemingly held that beneficial deception isn’t really a lie at all, which is pretty close to Budziszewski’s second proferred definition of a lie.
that the Orthodox Church treats no single Church Father as the final word on things.

So if I were in a situation like the householder with the Nazi Jew-hunter at the door, you’d be right to think (a) I’m answering “No” but (b) I’m taking that “No” to the sacrament of confession next time, letting my Confessor sort it.

Repentance

Repentance is everything you do to get sin, those inborn passions, out of you. It’s reading, thinking, praying, weeding out disruptive influences in your life, sharing time with fellow Christians, following the guidance of the saints. Repentance is the renunciation of what harms us and the acquisition of what is beneficial to us, writes a holy counselor.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

Properly ordering things

Church leaders of a later age might have said, “Let’s admit them as they do their current jobs and eventually, when they have ‘heard the word,’ they will think their way into a new life.” The church of the Apostolic Tradition says in effect, “No, our approach is the opposite. We believe that people live their way into a new kind of thinking.

Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church.

It came as a surprise to me that Catechesis in the Early Church consisted more of breaking the behavioral habits of life in a pagan setting than of imparting question-and-answer doctrinal orthodoxy, but Kreider isn’t the only one to allude to that.

Between the Revolution and the Civil War

American evangelicals never doubted that Christianity was the truth. They never doubted that Christian principles should illuminate every part of life. What they did do, however, in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, was to make most questions of truth into questions of practicality. What message would be most effective? What do people most want to hear? What can we say that will both convert the people and draw them to our particular church? The heavy pressure for results meant that very little time or energy was available to think about God and nature, God and society, God and beauty, or God and the shape of the human mind.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

In my mind, after considerable reading over decades, this period, and particularly the early 19th Century revivalism, is the birth of what we call evangelicalism today. The evangelical tendency of earlier times (starting particularly around the first “Great Awakening”) was closer to historic Christianity.

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

Sunday, 1/26/25

Musings from a funeral

I went to a funeral on MLK Day (when there were unrelated festivities going on in Washington DC as well). I hadn’t seen the deceased probably in more than a quarter century, but I always liked him.

Apart from being dead, Tom looked good. Apart from her hair haven’t gone white, his wife looked great. It was good to see them again, though it does eventually get tiresome when you only see your old friends at funerals, especially when one is the guest of honor.

His daughter’s Remembrance dwelt at some lengths on Tom’s piety, and deservedly so in my experience. We got acquainted at our former Reformed church. When our church ~~split~~ planted a sister church with guitars and drums and plexiglass and repetitive praise songs and such, I think he went with the sister church instead of staying with us stick-in-the-muds. Eventually, he moved out of state, to a warmer and trendier place, to start his own business in a field he knew from 30 or so years’ experience. He remained firmly in the Reformed tradition, though he switched in his new home to the Presbyterian side rather than the continental.

And soon enough, the Orthodox Christian faith caught my serious attention and I, too, left — in an opposite direction from Tom.

Which brings me to my topic. Why me? Why did I get lucky? Why don’t more people like me find the Orthodox Christian faith?

I don’t really have an answer, but I have largely gotten over my convert-itis, my urge to harangue people about looking into Orthodoxy. I’m just not prepared to say that the world would be a better place if every pious Protestant was forever wringing his hands and anxiously poring over books to see if maybe he hadn’t picked (or been born into, or married into, or whatever) the true/best Church. There’s something to be said for settling down and practicing your faith, especially since the alternative of searching, searching, searching just might be unhealthier than settling down in the wrong place.

Or so it seems to me. I don’t mean to be cavalier about extra Ecclesiam nulla salus or to fudge the borders of Ecclesiam, but if I can hope for the salvation of all, and can get out of my left brain about distinctions, surely I can hope for the salvation of heterodox Christians.

Settling is what I had done 30-plus years ago. As I can attest, God knows how to unsettle you when you need it. So if you are feeling unsettled in your Church, come and see what’s up in your nearest Orthodox Church. Otherwise, stay put and be the best [fill in the blank] you can be.

And may God have mercy on me if this is the advice of a squish.

Before we forget the stunt …

Of Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s National Cathedral sermon (which turned to direct admonition of Donald Trump):

I must be one of the only people other than those actually in the cathedral to have listened to the entire thing. It was dry, high-minded, and Christ-light, and it built on a theme of “unity” in which all people drop their political differences and embrace a generalized, feel-good, Esperanto-like uni-faith, with everyone directing their prayers to Whom It May Concern.

Caitlin Flanagan

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). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

America’s Puritan-Lockean synthesis

A few months back, I decided once again to subscribe to Touchstone magazine, a subscription I had allowed to lapse for many years.

The first issue to arrive I found disappointing,, but the second included Carlo Lancelotti’s America verus Europe, which advances the idea that the:

notion of a “delayed” American secularization stands in contrast to the views of many prominent European thinkers of the last century. Curiously, they also thought that America was “special” but in the opposite sense. They deemed the United States to be far more advanced than Europe in terms of a scientistic, utilitarian, individualistic, and materialistic worldview. For example, as early as 1943, when Simone Weil returned from New York to London a few months before dying, she wrote that the great danger threatening European Christianity was “Americanization,” by which she meant detachment from the past, which was slowly killing people’s ability to perceive the supernatural. The “Western” spirit of the Enlightenment “is found in America in its pure state and to the second power, and we are in danger of being devoured by it. . . . the Americanization of Europe would lead to the Americanization of the whole world.”

This view rings true to me, as does the idea that this outcome was baked into our founding by a “Puritan-Lockean synthesis.” But I’m still chewing on it, especially the thought of that founding synthesis, which I’m unprepared to expound. The whole constellation of critique is likely to reappear here in the future. Meanwhile, it appears to me that the article already is unlocked for the curious.

Something to chew on

It is a strange yet incontrovertible fact that, when God did take flesh, He in many ways (though certainly not all) revealed himself to be closer in spirit to the Tao of Lao Tzu then to God as conceived by the Hebrews at that time, even though the Hebrews had the revelation of Moses. This might be difficult to accept by those who are accustomed to thinking of Christ as the fulfillment of the expectation specifically of the Hebrews. Ancient Christian tradition, however, holds that Christ satisfied the longing of all the nations.

Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao

American Pharisaism

I have wondered much that Christianity is not practiced by the very people who vouch for that wonderful conception of exemplary living. It appears that they are anxious to pass on their religion to all other races, but keep little of it for themselves …

…

It is my personal belief, after thirty-five years experience of it, that there is no such thing as “Christian civilization.” I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable, and the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same.

Charles Alexander Eastman, whose American Indian name was Ohiyesa. Quoted by Paul Kingsnorth in his 2024 Erasmus Lecture.

More of Kingsnorth’s Lecture:

What, actually, is spiritually beneficial about this “Western civilization”—or any civilization? After all, Babylon and Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, were as civilized as the ancient world got.

To find out, we might hold up the stated values of our civilization against the famous list of seven deadly sins. The list was compiled in the sixth century by Pope Gregory I. He based it on an earlier list of eight passions, compiled by the fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus, which is still current in the Eastern Church. How is Western civilization doing today at fending off these sins?

Pride is celebrated everywhere—pride in nation, status, wealth, ethnic group, identity, religion. We have a month-long festival named for it. Greed is the basis of our economy. Along with envy, it is the cornerstone of the idol of our time, the universally worshiped god known as “economic growth.” If we were neither greedy nor envious, the economy would collapse in five minutes. Wrath is the fuel beneath the culture wars and all of our political factions. As for lust—find me a billboard or a film or a song or a brand of shoes that doesn’t piggyback on this most primal human passion. It is perhaps behind only gluttony in its ubiquity. Even sloth has been monetized. How else could something as oxymoronic as a “leisure industry” even exist?

Macho-Man Orthodoxy

There seems to be a surge of interest in the secular and the heterodox press, blogosphere and podcast worlds in the distinctly masculine flavor of Orthodox Christianity’s growth in the USA.

I’m happy that my parish has seen a surge in attendance and people joining. Our growth does skew toward young men, but I have a God-daughter who came on her own, and we recently added a single mom with two kids. A godson, older than me, came with his wife at first from dissatisfaction with his United Methodist church coupled with the ethnic tag on our diocese, which matched his ancestry!

But one particular recent article, in “secular” press, about the male-skewed growth of Orthodox Christianity, rang false more often than it rang true.

False notes:

tougher form of Christianity (a Priest lamentably said that, so I can’t blame the author)
They must fast, too … (fast from many foods, but not from all food)
puts emphasis on denial and pushing yourself physically (superficial and misleading; a good priest likely would tell someone going to extremes to lighten up because they’re missing the point)
the strict church (nobody’s monitoring compliance)
pushes them physically and mentally
masculine

These snippets are not so much false factually as false to my experience of Orthodoxy.

It has been notable since I entered Orthodoxy (or earlier), long before the present growth surge, that converts skewed male, and that if a whole family came in, it likely was the dad who instigated and led the conversion. People puzzled over the reason for that, but the idea of men consciously motivated by “more masculine” wasn’t front and center.

I doubt that it should be so today, but I’m not positive about that. My experience of the Orthodoxy faith is largely confined to one parish, which I’ve served as a tonsured Reader and de facto Cantor/Psaltis from my earliest days in the Church. In other words, I don’t get out much, but I wouldn’t agree that I need to get out more. Sampling other parishes is likely to prove superficial, and as they say “the plural of anecdote is not data.”

In that vein, these are the only two paragraphs that didn’t feel a bit “cringe”:

Father Timothy Pavlatos, who leads St Katherine Greek Orthodox Church in Chandler, Arizona, agrees that the “challenge” of the Orthodox church appeals to many young men.

“Orthodoxy is challenging in the physical sense too, and it requires a lot… they live in a world where it’s instant gratification and just take what you want, what you feel you want, what you think you need, Orthodoxy is the opposite of that, it’s denying yourself.”

The article emphasizes the sentiments of recent male converts, but Orthodoxy is capacious and somewhat disorienting for someone new to it. We (thinking back to myself 27 years ago) ask dumb questions and utter dumber opinions. To the degree that men are interested in Orthodoxy as a kind of spiritual testosterone, promoting distinctly masculine growth, I foresee them dropping out when the reality dawns on them.

We all, converts from other Christianities or not, bring baggage into the Church, and the doors shouldn’t be closed to those kinds of baggage but open to my kind. The important thing is whether a convert wants to conform his (or her) life to Christ through the life of the Church, and is prepared to renounce and repent of un-Christlike opinions along the way.

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, 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

The PCA and The Nashville Statement

[The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)] endorsing the Nashville Statement was an odd move. The Statement itself is a jumble. It purports to be a broad account of Christian teachings on sexuality, but has nothing to say about divorce, contraception, or biomedical tech, and says very little about procreation as an essential good in Christian marriage. This makes the statement lopsided in its teachings about sexuality in ways that are evangelistically disastrous where the [Tim Keller and Reformed University Fellowship] wing of the PCA tends to be most active.

… The right … needs to recognize that what they confuse for progressive drift is usually the more banal work of finding ways to present the faith to people with minimal knowledge of Christianity, or with some deep hostility to orthodoxy …

Contrary to some hyperbolic claims, there is no serious movement in the PCA to reject historic teachings about sexuality. Those who dissented on Nashville did not do so because they are progressive on sexual ethics, but because of the procedural and pastoral issues cited above—as well as the lopsidedness of the statement itself.

Jake Meador

Apart from garbling a little denominational history (the PCA did not exist in the late 60s when the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy was issued — but then neither did Jake), Jake nails this.

I read the Nashville Statement and many reactions to it when it was issued (I clipped 20 items on the topic), and it was both sloppy (e.g., what’s the “homosexual self-conception” Christians should not adopt?) and lopsided (what about the sexual sins and dubious practices of heterosexuals? [Crickets.])

I often object to “whataboutism” as a rhetorical ploy to defend the indefensible, but the Preamble of the Nashville Statement does indeed promise “a broad account of Christian teachings on sexuality,” whereas the Statement is negative only on homosexuality, with flaws both rhetorical and pastoral, and without coming anywhere near stepping on any heterosexual toes about un-natural practices that have been adopted wholesale and uncritically.

People should not feel compelled to endorse sloppy and lopsided statements to prove their orthodoxy.

[This post is not categorized “lifework” or “deathwork,” just to prove that I maintain some sense of proportion. But had I waded in on the topics about which the Nashville Statement is silent, the “deathwork” category probably would have been invoked.]

* * * * *

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Cultural Marxism?

When I was a conservative Protestant 20+ years ago, I and others developed the bad rhetorical habit of labeling any liberalizing trend we disliked as “Secular Humanism” at work. That term was used every bit as imprecisely as the journalistic “fundamentalist” so often applied to us.

Today, many conservatives, both religious and secular, have developed a verbal tic of calling everything they dislike “cultural Marxism.” I rise to my own defense to note that (a) “cultural Marxism” has no home in my mental framework and (b) at least secular humanism was something that actually existed (and still exists, as does religious humanism of which I’m an adherent), whereas I’m not sure that there exists anything corresponding to the epithet “Cultural Marxism.”

My skepticism was reinforced last evening as I listened to an Orthodox Christian giving a talk at a symposium held at a Russian Orthodox monastery recently. His overall thesis (don’t essentialize the sexual passions) was attractive, and probably could have been stated in just a few minutes. But he was allocated 20 minutes, so he recounted his version of how sexual passions came to be essentialized, and Cultural Marxism kept popping up.

At one point, he said this:

The idea of individual customized sexual identities and rights to the same paradoxically grew from western legalistic tendencies, originating in the emphasis on Original Sin in the west, and the desire to replace in the Church the laws of the fallen western empire.

The type of disembodiment we see in current secular sexual ideology, based on a twisted version of that earlier western sense of natural law, oddly reflects the materialism of both Cultural Marxism and capitalism. Their common ethos encourages us to be what we will, what we conceptualize, to break down boundaries of organic physical form and mortal limitation by technology.

In this lies a utopianism ….

Immediately, the coin dropped. There’s nothing “odd” about materialism producing similar idiocy in Marxist bogeymen and our beloved-but-straying capitalist bretheren and sisteren: Indeed, one could as well describe all the baneful developments attributed to a conspiratorial-sounding “cultural Marxism” to the late-stage eventuality of consumer capitalism — with neither so much as one tin hat nor one hypothesis about smoke-filled rooms (in the Frankfurt School, presumably).

I’m going to be reading and listening critically hereafter to see if my new hypothesis fits the facts, as I don’t think the Cultural Marxism trope has fully run its course yet.

* * * * *

You can read my more impromptu stuff at Micro.blog (mirrored at microblog.intellectualoid.com) and, as of February 20, 2019, at blot.im. Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.