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.

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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.