Genus and Species
The central and absolutely essential premise of Ross Douthat’s new book Believe, the point from which the whole argument begins, is this: There is a genus of human belief and practice called “religion,” of which Christianity is one of the species. My problem with regard to Ross’s book is that I have come quite seriously to doubt this premise. My larger problem is that I don’t know quite how to do without this premise, since it is so deeply embedded in almost all discourse on … well, I guess I have to say on religion.
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Emile Durkheim’s definition is a useful one: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions — beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in single moral community called a church”
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I am not at all convinced that a move from, say, atheism to Wicca is necessarily “a step in the right direction” — i.e., once you’ve entered the genus-town of “religion,” you’re closer to the species-house of Christianity than you were before. Indeed, I wonder whether many people might be less interested in Christianity as a result of such a move, since they might plausibly think that as long as they’re operating within the genus, does it really matter what species they prefer? (The “We all get to God in our own way” line has had a very long run and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.)
Alan Jacobs, Douthat on Belief, quoting himself.
Thoughts about Greek Festival
Yesterday was the first day of our Greek Festival, and thus begins four straight days of talking with thousands upon thousands of people.
In the past, when people came for a tour of the inside of our Orthodox church, I could be sure that nearly 100% of the questions were related to the painting process regarding our church iconography:
“What kind of paint did they use to make all these pictures?” or “How long did it take the iconographer to finish this church?”
Yet, with this recent surge in Orthodoxy, our Greek Festival now brings in droves of people who are inquiring into the Orthodox Church, and the questions I got yesterday were a kaleidoscope of theological and historical inquiries:
“Does the Orthodox Church believe in penal substitutionary atonement?”
“Does the Orthodox Church believe in assurance of salvation?”
“Is the Orthodox Church Patriarchal?”
“Is the Orthodox Church anti-women?”
“Does the Orthodox Church believe in the Book of Jasher?”
One couple who came to my tour had been raised in a King James Version-only Baptist Church, and somewhere along their spiritual journey, they learned that Protestants had removed books from their Old Testament in the 1820s. He and his wife obtained a copy of the 1611 KJV, which predates the long-kept-quiet changing of the Protestant Bible.
Though the couple hadn’t yet read all of the books in their newly discovered Bible, they were very curious if the Orthodox Church was familiar with these books and what we believed about them.
Kenneth B, The Orthodox Church Is Growing in America. Two Holy Elders Predicted It Decades Ago.
If I may be permitted to quote a reasonably wise Evangelical apologist, that “kaleidoscope of theological and historical inquiries” requires a combination of “answering the question-behind-the-question” (e.g., “penal substitutionary atonement” presumes that the wages of sin is eternal torment) and asking for clarification of terms (e.g., what do you mean by “Patriarchal”?).
Ultimately, the inquirer needs a new frame, an altered paradigm, and I have no idea how to effectuate that with nothing more than words. It happened to me; I’ve never been able to induce it in anyone else.
That is why the all-purpose Orthodox answer is “Come and see.”
A Confessing Church today
Christians who vote for Republicans are called to be salt and light within the Republican Party. That means being a voice calling the Republican Party to obey the rule of law. Yours should be the loudest voice condemning Trump’s pardon for January 6 rioters and pushing against his challenge to the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the executive . You should speak up in favor of the poor and powerless and against the culture of cruelty, spite, and vengefulness Trump cultivates. It corrodes our public square and demeans our shared citizenship even as it poses more specific dangers to those targeted by Trump’s weaponization of federal law enforcement. If you do not speak up, you are both credulous and culpable, complicit with the party’s sins—including those yet to come.
If you vote for Democrats, you are called to be salt and light within the Democratic Party. That means calling on the Democratic Party to heed “Nature and Nature’s God.” The secular left sometimes gives off an odor of being godless, rootless, power-hungry moral relativists. They deny transcendent truth one day; the next, they announce a new truth, and their online mob will bully and harass us for failing to jump on their latest cause de jour. Their lack of moral foundation is exactly why they turn into moral authoritarians, certain of their own newfound truths—about race, class, and gender—and impatient for their fellow citizens to catch up. Open, tolerant, classically liberal government cannot survive without foundations, and Thomas Jefferson was right to point to nature and nature’s God as the right ones when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Natural law is transcendent, but not sectarian; it is a shared foundation on which believers in any religion or none can stand together.
These are the sorts of lessons a Confessing Church today would preach from its pulpits and podcasts. American Christians need a robust theology of civic engagement that teaches the moral good of republican government, the rule of law, and constitutionalism. It would teach respect for pluralism, anti-utopianism, and the wisdom that comes from learning from the history of totalizing political religions and their fruit. It would teach critical detachment from parties coupled with selective and narrow cooperation with them.
Paul D. Miller: A Confessing Church for America’s Weimar Moment
Just in case you don’t understand that “Confessing Church” alludes to something in history, Wikipedia can help.
Truth vs. Practicality
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
Christian Tradition and Slavery
- The general course of the Christian church has been against slavery. This was undeniably true in the early history of the church. I know not that it has ever been alleged that any of the prominent defenders of the Christian faith among the “fathers” were advocates of slavery, or that any decree of synods or councils can be adduced in favour of the system.
- Because abolitionists and antislavery theologians were forced to offer more complicated exegetical arguments, they were necessarily less persuasive. In other words, it appears that an untraditioned approach to theology was at least partially responsible for the failure of otherwise like-minded Christians to resolve the sectional crisis by any means other than war.
Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation
Fundamentalism is not ancient Christianity
… the same historical representatives of the Christian faith that Maher chose to ignore (or has never heard of) are the Church Fathers that evangelical/fundamentalists also ignore for their own ideological reasons. They ignore them (or even denounce them) because the very existence of the early representatives of a more enlightened thread of Christianity undermines the evangelical/fundamentalist claim that somehow only fundamentalism represents the original ancient Christian faith. It does not.
Frank Schaeffer, Patience With God. I don’t consider Frank Schaeffer a reliable source, but I agree with him fully here.
So Walker Percy wrote a dystopia
The parallels to today become even more acute when Percy turns to religion. Political divides in Love in the Ruins have penetrated the churches, mainline Protestants aligning with the left and evangelicals with the right. Meanwhile, orthodox Catholics are but a remnant, most believers having joined either the American Catholic Church––which only prays the Latin Mass and plays the national anthem during the elevation of the Eucharist––or a coalition of Germanic schismatics, who have done away with the vow of celibacy as a prerequisite for priesthood.
Collin Slowey, Walker Percy’s Prescient Dystopia
Insipid and Slightly Insane
At a street corner, I happened to look up and caught sight of an electric sign, on top of a two-storey building. It read: “Clown Cigarettes.” I turned and fled from the alien and lunatic street, and found my way into the nearby cathedral, and knelt, and prayed, and did the Stations of the Cross. Afraid of the spiritual pressure in that monastery? Was that what I had said the other day? How I longed to be back there now: everything here, in the world outside, was insipid and slightly insane. There was only one place I knew of where there was any true order.
Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
